A GIRL IN BLACK (To koritsi me ta mavra)

The Village Voice [Joshua Land]

Film-Forward.com Deborah Lynn Blumberg

User reviews from imdb Author: Bruce Coughran from Santa Monica, CA

Critical Culture [Pacze Moj]

BBC Talking Movies [Scott Andrews]

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]

The New York Times (Dana Stevens) review

Cabrera Infante, Guillermo – film writer

A Scattered Homage to Guillermo Cabrera Infante Victor Fowler Calzada from Rouge

Cacoyannis, Michael

Cacoyannis, Michael from World Cinema

Greek Cypriot film director, also theatre director, editor and producer. After law studies in Britain, Cacoyannis became a producer for the BBC's wartime Greek-language broadcasts, simultaneously attending drama school and acting on stage. He went to Greece in 1952, where he directed his first feature, Kiriakatiko xipnima / Windfall in Athens (1954). He worked with facility in both the theatre and the cinema, directing critically acclaimed films such as Stella (1955) and To koritsi me ta mavra / The Girl in Black (1956). These films were distinguished by their sensitive treatment of contemporary Greek issues, use of authentic locations and promising new actors (Elli Lambeti, Giorgos Foundas, and Melina Mercouri, who made her screen debut in Stella). With those of Nikos Koundouros, Cacoyannis' films were the first independent Greek productions to attract international attention. In 1962 he directed Ilektra / Electra, the first of a trilogy of adaptations of Euripides tragedies, and in 1964 he achieved international fame with the US production of Zorba the Greek, starring Anthony Quinn and based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. Zorba the Greek remains his biggest success. His next film, The Day the Fish Came Out (1967), an international production, was by comparison an anti-climax. Cacoyannis returned to Greek productions without the results his early career had seemed to promise.

— Thomas Nedelkos, Encylopedia of European Cinema

STELLA

Greece (110 mi) 1955

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)

Based on the play Stella with the Red Gloves by Iakovos Kambanellis, and noted as the first Greek film to gain international attention, Michael Cacoyannis' (Zorba The Greek) 1955 feature Stella follows the passions of a popular young bouzouki café performer who refuses her traditional role as a woman in Greek society.

We are introduced to the main character, Stella (Melina Mercouri), as a woman who enjoys the effect she has on men. Her opening scene displays a performance at the club where she works, as she prances about while singing a seductive song to the backing of a bouzouki ensemble. Her current boyfriend Aleko (Alekos Alexandrakis) is seen getting a warning from a young girl who objects to Stella's treatment of men—discarding them as she moves on to newer territories. Aleko will do anything for Stella, including buying her the piano she wants. When Aleko tries to get Stella to commit to him, she instead sets her sights on a soccer star name Milto (George Foundas—Never On Sunday, Zorba The Greek), spurning her lover's affections, and driving him to illness with tragic consequences.

As her heated relationship with Milto progresses, Stella eventually falls in love, but when faced with the ultimatum of a marriage proposal, she must decide between her love for Milto, the freedom she loves so much and the imprisonment she fears in marriage. Her decision ultimately seals the fate of both herself and her new lover, as the consequences of love, pride and freedom fall into place.

The film itself is frequented by high energy musical pieces, fueled by the frantic bouzouki music (written by Manos Hatzidakis) that provides much of the soundtrack. Shot in and around Athens, the Greek culture is infused in the film. It won a Golden Globe® for Best Foreign Picture in 1956.

This was Mercouri's (Never On Sunday) first feature film in an emotionally charged role written expressly for her. Following Oscar® and BAFTA nominations and the Cannes prize for Best Actress for her role in Pote tin Kyriaki (1960), Mercouri would go on to become the Greek Minister of Culture responsible for the return of artifacts to her homeland. Here we have her first screen appearance, that featured realistic and passionate love scenes that would have been highly controversial for their time.

A GIRL IN BLACK (To koritsi me ta mavra)

Greece (94 mi) 1956

Wade Major from Boxoffice magazine (link lost):

Best known for 1964's "Zorba The Greek," director Michael Cacoyannis stands tall among the many great European auteurs to emerge in wake of such seminal 1950s movements as the French New Wave and Italian Neo-realism. Clearly influenced by the likes of Truffaut and Rossellini, Cacoyannis' pastoral, character-driven glimpses into the lives and loves of average Greeks remain striking examples of a poetically realistic national cinema that sadly never failed to spark beyond the contributions of its most famous practitioner. Four of Cacoyannis' most renowned works comprise Winstar's "Michael Cacoyannis Collection" on DVD, beginning with 1955's strikingly realistic "Stella," the story of a fiercely independent singer and the two lovers who cannot live without her. In 1956, Cacoyannis' international reputation grew with "A Girl In Black," in which a hard-luck writer finds the small-town atmosphere on a small island to be markedly less than idyllic after he becomes involved with a scorned family. The myth of the wealthy Greek bourgeois is attacked in 1958's "A Matter of Dignity," in which the daughter of a wealthy industrialist finds herself forced to choose between status and love. Having made many of his films on a shoestring budget and with limited resources, Cacoyannis was well-suited to the demands of guerilla documentary filmmaking when, in 1974, he and a crew of two arrived on the island of Cyprus to document the Turkish invasion which resulted in the division that continues to this day. Many consider the resulting film, "Attilla '74: The Rape of Cyprus," to be Cacoyannis' most heartfelt and heart-breaking work. As a set, the four DVDs represent an important piece of post-war European cinema's complex tapestry of styles and subjects, all the more compelling in view of how few films from the period deal with Greek culture and politics in any way at all. In fact, choosing any single one of them for distinction is virtually impossible. Considering the age and condition of many of the original elements, all four films feature impressive sound and video, and should really be purchased and viewed as a set.

WINDFALL IN ATHENS (Kyriakatiko xypnima)

Greece (95 mi) 1955

from the New York Times (link lost):

If Saturday's new import at the Cameo is any criterion, Greek films have taken a decided turn for the better. At any rate, the pleasant, if trifling, little romantic comedy called "Windfall in Athens" deserves a polite welcome after a series of ragged eyesores.

The distributors, Arista Films, announce it as the first Greek entry ever accepted in a European screen festival. Even more interesting is the fact that a 29-year-old stripling named Michael Cacoyanis, who bears watching, both wrote and directed it.

Equipped with rather tentative English titles, the result is pretty reasonable lightweight fun. In a head-on dispute over a winning lottery ticket, a nice young girl and a young musician meet, square off and, to nobody's surprise, we hope, fall in love.

As the warring but smitten protagonists, Elli Lambetti and Dimitri Horn are natural and all too human. But it is the suave charm of Georges Pappas, as a lonely, middleaged lawyer infatuated with Miss Lambetti, that steadies the picture, and redeems some coy, dawdling stretches.

Even so, it's nice to have a good-natured Greek picture with a little technical finesse. Judging by the opening and closing scenes, Athenian sleepers certainly take their time about hitting the floor in the morning. But they do get up.

ELECTRA (Ilektra)

Greece USA (110 mi) 1962

At long last, a worthy screen rendering of a classic Greek drama has been achieved in the film of Euripides' "Electra," which opened at the Beekman yesterday.

Indeed, this pictorial translation of one of the greatest Greek tragedies, produced and directed by Michael Cacoyannis in ancient dress and on locations in Greece, amounts to a brilliant utilization of the cinematic device to transmute the gold of verbal poetry from one to another art form.

Where previous attempts to make movies from the Greek classics have generally mired in the heavy going of too much declamation of the original poetic dialogue, this film avoids that dangerous pitfall by going to the other extreme and swinging wide of a form of presentation that is physically hitched to the structure of the stage.

Clearly, Mr. Cacoyannis knows you can't photograph words, that a medium as visual as motion pictures must not put too much dependence on the ear. Also, he sees that the contours of the drama in the Greek tragedies are so massive and elemental that they may be suggested and impressed upon the eye with a proper and tasteful presentation of graphic images.

Thus, he has made this "Electra" a powerful address to the eyes. He has taken his company outdoors and set it against the countryside, against great sweeping vistas of rugged landscape and eloquent stretches of sky.

The episode of Agamemnon's murder, engineered by his faithless wife in league with her lover, Aegisthus, is played beneath the great empty vault of heaven, so that base immensity of it is awesomely implied. And the torments of their daughter, Electra as she lives with the horror of this deed and her inevitable passion for vengeance, are graphically communicated in the harsh and barren aspects of her home in exile in a peasant's hut.

The inner fires of Electra are also made eloquent by the heroic appearance and performance of Irene Papas in this role. Seldom has a face or conveyance of the human figure so beautifully depicted the nature and the passion of a character as do Miss Papas here. Her eyes and the gestures say quite as much as the few words—the comparatively few words—she has to utter in expressing her grief and pain.

Aleka Catselli as Clytemnestra, the faithless mother, is a graphic figure of poetic contours, too—a glittering, soulless creature, who, in her confrontation scene with Electra, is a strong sense of frigid majesty. And Yannis Fertis, as Orestes, and others complete the superlative performance of the classic role.

A brilliant musical score by Mikis Catodorakis and the camera work of Walter Lassally contributes to what undoubtedly is to be a screen classic.

ZORBA THE GREEK (Alexis Zorbas)

Greece Great Britain USA (142 mi) 1964

Chicago Reader (capsule) Dave Kehr

Michael Cacoyannis's remake of Auntie Mame, played in Greek drag with Anthony Quinn as a peasant packed with Life Force and Alan Bates as the dried-up British intellectual who learns how to dance and drink ouzo. It's false art of the most deplorable kind, but it has a few fresh moments amid its fuzzy pretensions. Mikis Theodorakis's buzzy score is still a Muzak favorite. With Irene Papas and Lila Kedrova (1964).

Reel.com DVD review [Kim Morgan]

How is it possible that Anthony Quinn is not really Greek? His performance in the title role here is iconic, and not just in movie terms—Zorba has become an emblem for all things Hellenic in many respects, the very personification of the modern Greek nation. That's quite a mantle for an actor of even Quinn's charisma to carry, and if Michael Cacoyannis's film of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel occasionally seems a little fleshy and overblown, at its heart is Quinn, in a career-defining role as a character who transcends the very movie in which he appears.

In many respects, Zorba the Greek is structured as a classic coming-of-age story, focusing on Basil, a young Englishman, a bookish sort, returning to his father's land in Crete, to set right the family business. On his journey from the mother country Basil meets up with Zorba, who lives hard and plays hard; Zorba convinces Basil to hire him on, and together they will undertake the business project of resurrecting the fallow logging business. You can probably figure out exactly where the relationship between these two is headed for the next two hours after just a couple of minutes—the buttoned-down younger man with literary aspirations and the earthy, slightly vulgar ethnic older man, close to the land, the free spirit, who will teach his protégé grand lessons about women, about work, about life. There's a certain amount of what Nabokov would summarily dismiss as poshlost, and you've got to have some tolerance for more than a little sentimentality to enjoy the movie.

But if you do, it's a fine old time, and not just because of Quinn. A young Alan Bates plays Basil, an underwritten part that's almost more type than human being; Bates invests him with a gentle soul. And let us not give short shrift to the women of the picture, either. Lila Kedrova is probably the most notable, as Madame Hortense, the patently absurd widow who has buried four husbands; she still holds out hope for love, for Zorba, and can preen a giggle like a coquette when overcome with emotion. Her clothes are ratty in a Blanche Du Bois sort of way and she's severely overrouged; it's easy to make fun of Madame Hortense, and many do. But there's something genuinely moving here, toward the end of the picture especially, and the character's last scenes may put you in mind of Falstaff, or Don Quixote, the comic figure confronting the great mystery of life.

Equally compelling, in a more understated and downright smoldering performance, is Irene Papas as the unnamed local widow, dangerously alluring to the men of the village, with a special energy between her and the young Englishman. With not many words or scenes, Papas conveys the emotional wounds of the character, in a performance in the manner of Anna Magnani. Zorba wants to school Basil in the lessons of courtship, and knows in his heart that the widow is the proper object of his student's amorous advances; no good comes of this, however, and we soon realize that we don't know very much about the ways of the village; neither does Basil; and, apparently, neither does Cacoyannis, which is a major deficiency in the filmmaking.

The man-as-force-of-nature thing is a favorite motif here (Zorba rails at the topography: "You bastard mountain!"), but it's forgivable if only for the spectacle of Zorba dancing. He's not graceful, exactly, but his dance is some sort of primal expression, combining athleticism, power, drive, sexuality, clumsiness. Zorba admits himself that there's nothing delicate about him, and there isn't much delicate about his movie, either—but when Quinn dances with ferocity, and even teaches the buttoned-down Bates some of his steps, the scenes can be transporting.

Turner Classic Movies Jeremy Arnold

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also seen here: Turner Classic Movies

eFilmCritic Reviews Slyder

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

DVD Verdict Bill Treadway

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Scott C

ATTILA ’74: THE RAPE OF CYPRUS (Attilas '74)

Greece (103 mi) 1975

Mini Reviews (July 2011) - Reviews by David Nusair - Reel Film Reviews

Director Michael Cacoyannis' documentary Attila '74: The Rape of Cyprus chronicles the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, facilitated in part by the military junta that came to power in the 1960's by exploiting many Cypriots' desire to unite with neighboring Greece. The film consists largely of interviews, oral history hot off the press—Cacoyannis rushed to Cyprus with a small crew (himself, a cameraman and a sound engineer) to record the immediate aftermath of the invasion. The film is in English and Greek with "burned-in" English subtitles (subject to occasional typographical errors) that can't be turned off.

Cacoyannis gained an impressive level of access to political figures for his film, who share their recollections of and theories about the invasion. Archbishop Makarios, onetime President of Cyprus, tells of the junta's efforts to reduce his influence by falsely announcing his death, and an interview with a member of the junta government poses some pointed questions. Political background is discussed—the junta apparently planned to split Cyprus with Turkey, and references are made to collusion by US CIA forces and Henry Kissinger, though these theories aren't explored deeply.

But the political aspects of the situation do not dominate Attila '74. This is an intensely personal documentary—native Cypriot Cacoyannis made it his mission to document the human cost of the brief war in his homeland. Unflinching interviews describe families destroyed and homes lost, and the camera records refugees' grief and desperate searches for lost and missing family members. Cyprus' cultural museum is shown with its glass cases empty, centuries of history lost or destroyed by the conflict that lost significant parts of Cyprus to Turkey. In one difficult-to-watch scene, a young boy recounts the fates of his siblings and parents, gradually losing his emotional composure as he relives an extremely traumatic experience.

As a documentary, Attila '74 provides enough historical background to set the stage, but its chief strength is its "you are there" quality. Shot while the tragedy was still unfolding, the film is free of academic distance, diagrams, and "expert" overanalysis. Instead, Cacoyannis provides a disturbing, vivid look at how one nation's politics nearly destroyed its own population and culture.

Tall Armenian Tale

Cadigan, John

PEOPLE SAY I’M CRAZY B 85

USA (84 mi) 2003

At the urging of his film-oriented sister, the director uses film as therapy to document his own attempts to recover from schizophrenia, including acute catatonic episodes where he is frozen and can’t move, too fearful of the paranoia which envelops him, rarely able to leave his own home. After several institutionalizations and unsuccessful electro-shock treatments, the realization that he may never recover and may have to spend the rest of his life in a dreary group home leaves him hopeless and emotionally devastated. We see sessions with his therapist, interactions with his brother and two sisters, as well as his mother, all of whom try to be supportive, but they can’t penetrate his wall of delusions where he constantly feels people are out to get him and do him harm. Despite moments of clarity where he happily works in an art studio, we see his horrible daily struggle of always believing the worst, filled with violent mental images that continuously haunt him, especially during his morning dread, where he feels he may lose the battle and may actually cause others harm, then tries to convince himself that what he’s thinking is not true, yet he feels exasperated and suicidal at what continually passes through his mind, worn down from the futility of trying to control these thoughts. His life improves somewhat with new medicine, which offers him small hopes, but he gains 100 pounds as a side effect. While the film is raw, amateurish, and cinematically uneven, sometimes feeling overly clinical, it does present an ultimately frank and honest portrait of living with schizophrenia, sharing views and experiences we don’t normally see, capturing some extraordinarily personal moments, where bleakness is balanced with upbeat, almost tribal music written by Evelyn Glennie that matches the imagery in some of his artwork.

Caetano, Israel Adrián

CHRONICLE OF AN ESCAPE (Crónica de una fuga) B+ 90

aka: Buenos Aires, 1977

Argentina (103 mi) 2006

Using oblique camera angles, bleached out colors, and extreme close ups to heighten the sense of disorientation, there is a documentary style gritty realism to this adaptation of the autobiographical novel, Pase Libre, which tells the real life story of the 1977-78 kidnapping and torture of Argentinean professional soccer goalie Claudio Tamburinni (played by Rodrigo De la Serna) by ultra-right Argentinean para-military troops that rounded up suspected leftist citizens, blindfolded and secretly shackled them in captivity for months at a time in urban detention centers, basically abandoned homes in out of the way locations, interrogating and torturing them in a brutal attempt to gain access to any opposition network.

Though not a political activist, Tamburinni was suspected and held captive anyway. The film is a searing depiction of the daily psychological trauma inflicted on these young lives, attempting to break them down into compliant confessors, promising if they cooperate they will be freed quickly, yet they are held for months at a time, then one by one, individuals are “transferred” to unspecified locations, and a new round of prisoners are brought in. Told they will be freed, we see lines of prisoners tied together who are given injections before they are led away to waiting cars never to be seen again. Some 30,000 citizens went missing during this time period, and most if not all were presumably killed.

We come to realize one house is filled with rooms of captives, each isolated and alone, until eventually all have been disposed of but four remaining prisoners. This film closely follows those four prisoners who were blindfolded, beaten, stripped naked and chained to beds, yet somehow managed to escape through a locked window, which, once opened, changes the entire texture of the film, creating an extreme degree of tautly constructed tension. To its credit, the film never shows acts of physical mutilation, but we see the cuts, burned scars and black marks that riddle their bodies, leaving them looking like near corpses when they finally run naked into the streets, where strangers peer at them like they’re the problem. The final images of the film are hauntingly beautiful, adding a poetic release to this pressurized, tightly constricted work, cinematography by Julián Apezteguia and music by Iván Wyszogrod. Three of these prisoners eventually testified in the 1985 National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, which led to the sentencing of five retired generals and admirals to prison terms for human rights abuses committed during the so-called "Dirty War."

Chronicle of an Escape Nick Pinkerton from the Village Voice

A Soccer Player’s Ordeal in an Argentine Prison Stephen Holden from The New York Times

Cahill, Mike

ANOTHER EARTH B- 82

USA (92 mi) 2011

This is another example of once you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen too much, as nearly the entire story is revealed in a highly condensed two minutes, leaving little suspense left in the theater, as you already know what to expect. From the outset, however, it should be said that the high definition look leaves something to be desired, as the colors and focus aren’t there, while the jiggling camera movement suggests unsteady hands, all contributing to a grainy, somewhat washed out look of video, making it look very much like it was made on a shoestring budget of $150,000. However, it does try to make the most with the least, using a minimum of plot development, continually using the power of suggestion to keep the appetites whetted. Basically it’s a one note effort, as the entire film is about the initial premise, the mysterious arrival of an identical mirror planet Earth right next to our own, called Earth 2, where duplicate versions of ourselves live their lives exactly as we’ve lived our own, where they have the exact same thoughts and lives as we’ve had. While the story is slow getting started, and is a bit preposterous to buy into, knowing the gravitational effect that the moon has on our planet, so imagine the effects of a planet as large as our own staring back at us in the sky? Instead, the filmmaker shows multiple shots of people walking down the streets, or on the sidewalks in front of their homes, or next to the ocean, projecting Earth 2 in the sky as our constant companion. Often people stop and literally stare into the sky to express their newly discovered interest. Years after this happens, yes, one must repeat, as it takes literally years for the two planets to make contact and realize they are mirror planets, where another version of ourselves lives up there. One wonders if their lives are any better than our own?

There is a secondary story that is told simultaneously, one that involves actors instead of planets, where Brit Marling plays 17-year old Rhoda, a high school senior who has just been accepted into the M.I.T astrophysics program on the night the new planet is discovered, staring into the sky while driving, causing a horrific accident, killing a pregnant wife and her children, leaving the husband in a lengthy coma. Rather than go to college, Rhoda is sent to prison for 4 years, where our earth is just making contact with the new planet by the time she gets out. Instead of filling a position designed to utilize her attributes, Rhoda wants little social contact, where she is still burying her head in the sand after the accident, and decides to get a job working as the high school janitor. Again, where there would likely be close to a dozen janitors or more, this school only has two, where she can be seen hiding her face under her hood and wearing a wool cap, where one imagines she may be too attractive to fit the role, but she’s also a co-writer along with the director, so she can do what she wants with the part. She googles articles about the accident and learns the address of the surviving father, now out of his coma, and decides to confront him, expressing her sympathy for his loss, but instead offers herself as available maid service, showing up weekly to clean his house which is mostly filled with empty liquor bottles. What she expects to accomplish from this can’t lead to anything good, but that issue is set aside for nearly the entire film, just waiting to appear again at some point. So there is something of a cringe factor involved at seeing her return to the scene of the crime week after week and lie about her presence, becoming something of a stalker, taking advantage of a man she doesn’t even know.

Of course, the movie sees it somewhat differently, overlooking all of the previous history, including the jail time, where there are no therapists, no parole officers, no help offered from any source except a single corporation that is offering one lucky winner the chance to fly free to the other planet based on an essay contest. Rhoda, of course, sends in an essay before she ever meets John (William Mapither), who slowly takes an interest in his new maid, eventually sobering up and realizing she even has a name. Quite surprised at her intelligence, he immediately falls for her, no surprise there, yet she’s still the stalker woman lying about her reasons for being there, even after they enter into a sexual liaison, where for many in the audience, this has really gone on too far. The film seems to take pleasure in overlooking the credibility factor, thinking Marling can sell the story, which for the most part she does, as she’s excellent in the role, especially in the way she never comes to terms with this single event in her life, something perhaps many can relate to. She gets a lot of mileage with her hangdog, sheepish expression, using little dialogue, just solitary images of her with Earth 2 hovering just overhead. But it all has to come to a head some way, some day. There’s no way anyone could predict the outcome, as the multitude of possibilities coming in contact with a duplicate of everything that exists on Earth is simply mind boggling, so there’s a lot to play with. The film offers a series of radio and TV broadcasts announcing the latest developments with this new planet, where one wonders if Rhoda being offered the chance at a new life there would do her any good, as that’s a long way to go to run away from the problems that exist here, suggesting there’s a duality that exists in all our feelings, good and bad, where every impulse generates a little bit of both. All these questions and more are asked by the film which does a good job keeping the audience guessing. Perhaps the most positive effect is the upbeat electronic music from the electro-rock band Fall On Your Sword, which brings the end credits down in style.

It's certainly not difficult to envision certain viewers walking away from Another Earth frustrated and annoyed, as the movie, which is essentially being marketed as a sci-fi fantasy, primarily comes off as a low-key drama revolving around two thoroughly damaged characters. Brit Marling, in a revelatory performance, stars as Rhoda Williams, an aspiring scientist whose life changes drastically after she's sent to prison for vehicular manslaughter - with the film subsequently detailing Rhoda's efforts at atoning for the deaths by helping William Mapother's John Burroughs, who lost his wife and child in the crash, get his life back together. (There is, of course, also a subplot revolving around the discovery of a second, seemingly identical Earth in our atmosphere.) It's clear right from the outset that director Mike Cahill, working from a script co-written with Marling, has virtually no interest in exploring the narrative's science-fiction-oriented elements, as the filmmaker places a predominant (and continuous) emphasis on Rhoda's almost extraordinarily subdued exploits - from her day job as a high-school janitor to her ongoing visits with Mapother's unbalanced character. There's little doubt, then, that Another Earth owes its mild success primarily to the riveting performances from its two leads, as both Marling and Mapother manage to transform their admittedly familiar characters into fully-developed and consistently-compelling figures. The sporadic inclusion of otherworldly elements - eg an engrossing, goosebump-inducing sequence involving first contact with the title locale - goes a long way towards compensating for the screenplay's pervasively uneventful sensibilities, and though the payoff for the Earth 2 subplot is, to put it mildly, far from spectacular (ie what does that final shot mean, exactly?), Another Earth ultimately establishes itself as a perfectly watchable indie that benefits from the stellar efforts of its stars.

Hollywood Jesus [Darrel Manson]

Another Earth poses a hypothetical with philosophical overtones. Suppose in the variety of universes that are theorized, there is one that has an Earth just like ours. Would things play out there the same way they have played out here? Would all things have evolved the same? Would all the decisions be made exactly the same? Basically, would the causes always bring the same effect? Is everything determined?

In the film Rhoda Williams has just finished high school and will be headed to MIT since she has always been fascinated with the heavens. While driving home after a night of partying she hears a report on the radio about the discovery of a new planet very close by. As she tries to locate it, she causes a terrible accident. In a moment her dreams are gone, and she has destroyed the life of John Burroughs, who survived the crash but lost his son and pregnant wife.

A few years later when Rhoda gets out of jail, she seeks out a life of solitude, taking a job as a school janitor. She lives joylessly, as if she had vowed to never let happiness into her life again. She seeks John out to apologize, but loses her courage and creates a story of providing a trial housecleaning. Soon she is cleaning his house each week, forming a relationship with him, but one that is built on a lie that she cannot reveal. There is a sense of penance in her work cleaning the mess of his house, even though she cannot clean up the mess she has made of his life.

In the meantime, it has become clear that this new planets—getting closer and closers—is another earth. When radio contact is made, the people who talk to each other have the same name and same life storys—down to minute details. So here is a world that is a mirror of our own. What would it be like to meet your counterpart on Earth 2? Would he/she be the same as you? Would they have made the same mistakes? Might Rhoda find some redemption if she could go to Earth 2? When a billionaire runs a contest for someone to be included on the first commercial trip to Earth 2, Rhoda enters.

While the film falls under the category of science fiction, it is much more about the relationship that develops between John and Rhoda. We know it is doomed because of the lie it is based on, but is there a way that these two broken lives can find healing? Will the possibility of a mirror world provide the deliverance they both so badly need?

This film is dark and brooding, reflecting what Rhoda's life has become. She is burdened by the weight of her mistake. She yearns for forgiveness, but may not believe it is really possible. Certainly she is unwilling to forgive herself, which may be one reason she is unwilling to tell John the truth. Maybe Earth 2 offers her a chance to run from the guilt, but if it is a mirror, will she discover that her Earth 2 self is just as broken as she is?

We are asked to consider some of the repercussions of having a mirror world. What happens when the two intersect? Does knowing there is a mirror world affect the two worlds the same? Plato's parable of the cave is referenced in the film as a warning, but is knowing the truth ever wrong? Is that the issue with Earth 2 or with John and Rhoda? The film works itself to a conclusion that creates more questions than answers. We are left with the freedom to consider what that conclusion means.

Another Earth | Captain America | Sarah's Key | Another Earth ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal

If you want to be literal-minded about it—I don't—here's the most obvious problem with "Another Earth": The planet of the title, an apparent duplicate of our own, has suddenly appeared in the sky and just floats there serenely at a safe remove, as if the law of gravity had been repealed. Other far-fetched notions turn up regularly; this small-scale film has more outsize ideas than it could possibly manage. Yet Mike Cahill's debut feature exerts a gravitational pull out of proportion to its size through powerful performances, a lyrical spirit, a succession of arresting images and a depth of conviction that sweeps logic aside.

Exactly what that extraterrestrial Terra represents is hard to pin down—a way of looking at ourselves, a chance to rerun our lives with different outcomes. String theory suggests the existence of infinite numbers of movies inspired by the notion of alternate universes, and this is one of them. Still, the presence of what comes to be called Earth 2 is incidental to a human story that plays out on Earth 1, and the cosmic overtones are less impressive than the emergence of a startlingly fine young actress named Brit Marling.

Ms. Marling, who wrote the script with Mr. Cahill and served as one of the producers, has not been widely known on this planet until now, but that's about to change. She plays Rhoda Williams, a former student of great intelligence and boundless promise who buries herself in menial labor to atone for having done something dreadful and presumably irreversible. William Mapother—he made a relatively small role memorable in "In the Bedroom"—is John Burroughs, a composer whose life has been devastated by something dreadful and presumably irreversible. Does this sound dreadfully formulaic? It is, but it also isn't, because the actors and their director invest almost every moment with spellbinding urgency, even when Rhoda and John are having spontaneous fun—a lively interlude turns on video boxing—or starting to light up each others' lives.

Until now Mr. Cahill has been mainly a cinematographer on nature films and a director of documentaries. Like Ms. Marling, who has co-directed documentaries with him, he studied economics at Georgetown. (She was also an investment-banking analyst at Goldman Sachs, which proves the infinite unpredictability of career paths.) I don't know where either of them learned their spare, specific approach to drama, but it's a pleasure to see how the acting anchors a tale that might otherwise have spun off, weightless, into realms celebrated by Carl Sagan.

Take the scene in which Ms. Marling tells a story, in her musical voice, about a Russian cosmonaut. It's only a story, and a slender one at that, but it becomes a demonstration of the storyteller's art that starts slowly and intimately, pulls you in, picks up speed and ends in a blaze of elation. In one of Mr. Mapother's surprising turns, he plays a soul-filling solo on a musical saw. The tones may have been electronically enhanced, but the scene, like so many others, keeps you watching intently.

I don't want to oversell "Another Earth." A few passages, like one involving a venerable janitor, feel downright pretentious, while the mysterious apparition of Earth 2 promises a profundity that doesn't pay off. (And when Rhoda and John peer at the nearby planet through an amateur telescope, why in this world don't they open the window to see it more clearly?) All the same, a small, smart movie that keeps you watching intently is a big deal.

Bitchin' Film Reviews [Blake Griffin]

Can Brit Marling Shine Bright Enough to Carry ... - Village Voice Karina Longworth

REVIEW: Another Earth Isn't One You'd Want to Visit | Movieline S.T. VanAirsdale from Movieline

FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [Kathryn Schroeder]

Another Earth Review | The Recipe to Getting Sundance to ... - Pajiba Seth Freilich at Sundance

Movie Review: Another Earth: Sister from Another ... - Time Magazine Mary Pols

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

GordonandtheWhale.com [Kate Erbland]

Fantasia 2011: ANOTHER EARTH Review Kurt Halfyard

The MacGuffin [Brandi Sperry]

Another Earth : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Tyler Foster from DVD Talk

Film-Forward.com [Adam Schartoff]

Movie Smackdown! [Eric Volkman]

exclaim! [Scott A. Gray]

notcoming.com | Another Earth - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Katherine Follett

Another Earth : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Brian Orndorf from DVD Talk

FlickDirect [Marco Chacon]

Cinema Verdict [Marco Duran] also seen here: The Critical Movie Critics [M. Duran]

Movie Review - Another Earth - eFilmCritic Jay Seaver

Spout [Christopher Campbell]

Quiet Earth

MovieBuzzers [Melissa Hanson]

Another Earth | Review | Screen John Hazelton from Screendaily

Another Earth — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Box Office Magazine Ray Greene

Twitch [Aaron Krasnov]

'Another Earth': A Thoughtful Sci-Fi Romance -- Without Aliens Leah Rozen from The Wrap

www.ology.com [Benny Gammerman]

A Short Synopsis of Film [Ron Shaker]

Variety Reviews - Another Earth - Film Reviews - - Review by ... Justin Chang

'Another Earth' review: Quiet film, big questions Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle

Another Earth Review | 'Another Earth': Review - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

Another Earth - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

Another Earth - Movies - New York Times Manohla Dargis

How to Succeed in Hollywood Despite Being Really Beautiful Emma Rosemblum on actress Brit Marling from The New York Times, June 24, 2011

Callahan, Peter

AGAINST THE CURRENT B 87

USA Netherlands (99 mi) 2009 click here

A small little American indie film that’s a bit off the beaten track, that thrives in its own eccentricities, and that is ultimately a road journey with potentially exasperating consequences. With a notable cast that continually finds humor and something altogether refreshing in the poignancy of small moments, this might be described as the anti-Huck Finn adventure, as much of it is spent with two friends trailing in a boat behind a swimmer who is attempting to swim the length of the Hudson River from Troy to the New York City harbor. While his rationale eventually unfolds, initially Paul (Joseph Fiennes) convinces two friends in a bar that it would make a nice, picturesque vacation, from his bartender best friend Jeff, the phenomenal Justin Kirk, who sees it as an excuse to get away from his nagging wife, and Liz, Elizabeth Reaser, who simply happened to be sitting at the bar at the time, thinking it would be a good opportunity for all to visit her family for one evening along the way. Unlike David Lynch’s STRAIGHT STORY (1999) which taps into the unusual rhythms and patterns of ordinary life, offering wisdom through a myriad of diverse characters, for most of the way this film pretty much sticks with the three people, where over time we come to know them intimately.

Downbeat Joseph Fiennes couldn’t be more different than the enlivened and invigorated character he played in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998) where he was, well…in love and in the flush of life. Here he’s still immersed in the grief of losing his wife and child in an accident that occurred five years ago, where after indulging in shrinks and therapy and after the passage of time, he still feels mortified at the thought of losing them (Of note – the director lost the mother of his child the day after giving birth). Swimming the Hudson is a goal he always had in the back of his mind, but he approaches this as if it will be the major accomplishment of his life. Still, with little or no preparation, and a guy who continues to chain smoke throughout the ordeal, one might find some of this questionable. But their methods might surprise, as they spend the evenings on shore and occasionally take breaks, so it’s not a true marathon, extending the 150 miles to several weeks. The true hero of this trio appears to be Jeff, the wise-cracking friend who is just shockingly good in the role, a self-deprecating failed actor whose deep-seeded sarcasm offers up some of the best quips in the movie, a highly entertaining role that continually keeps the audience off guard. Liz on the other hand is quieter and more comforting, playing the nurturing female role in a much more indirect manner, but it’s her dysfunctional family that they eventually visit.

In her most exhilarating performance in decades, probably since her dour appearance in ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980), Mary Tyler Moore is off-the-wall hilarious in this film as Liz’s prying mother, who offers motherly advice to everyone while pointing out the scandalous gossip about all the people who live in the grand mansions they are passing on the drive to her home. Their dinner together is atypically brief, not a long drawn out affair, but what happens after dinner is when things start to get interesting. Michelle Trachtenberg’s little sister role is memorable, as her sardonically dry sense of humor seems to blend well with Jeff’s increasingly morose mood, a perfect compliment to Moore’s incredibly bubbly mood, where she’s like a wind up doll that’s continually wound up, cocktail in hand, always in such good spirits, even in the morning as she drives them back to the water. There’s a bit of goofball comedy here, but also a few quiet intimate moments that register with the audience, opening up a few doors of possibilities. Using a nice mixture of pathos and humor, the film dances around the big questions about friendship and love through evasion and dark humor, where the spaces between people (and the audience) can be a good thing or a weight crushing down, where sometimes it’s hard to gauge. This film seems to have found the right note.

Special Note – supporting actor Justin Kirk, supporting actress Mary Tyler Moore

User comments from indb Author: nhpbob from Kew Gardens, NY

This under-the-radar film about a guy who swims a good length of the Hudson River in NY State down to NYC, is one of those warm indie films that deftly balances drama with some humor. No surprise that it snagged actors like Joseph Fiennes, Elizabeth Reaser (adding another fine performance to her growing career since her debut in the great "SWEET LAND"), Justin Kirk, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Mary Tyler Moore in a notable supporting role.

The reason behind his swim I won't divulge here, but it makes for some powerful moments. As he swims, his 2 friends go along with him in a guide boat, and they come to shore for breaks, which leads to some great moments in the film. It's not all on the water. But when it is, it's riveting. As a viewer, I felt like I was swimming right there with him at times.

And the swimming scenes show off the wonderful Hudson Valley, and Joseph Fiennes looks like he really...um...took the plunge. That's really him in the water. Kudos to the filmmakers who must've been on the river an awful lot. (And to the camera people!) Hopefully this film finds its audience in other film festivals and in a future release.

Zoom-In Online [Jim Rohner] at Sundance

Everyone deals with grief differently. Responses are relative to the people who experience it: some people push through it, some people repress it, some people let it consume them, and some people, well, some people honor it. We may all have different views on which way is right and which ways are wrong and that's all well and good when it comes to how we respond when the grief hits us. But, what happens when we're just spectators? How are we supposed to respond when grief hits those closest to us and we find ourselves at odds with those we care about? Suddenly, that which we held to be true and immovable is shaken by the love and dedication we feel towards a friend who is in turn immovable. This is the dilemma that arises in Peter Callahan's Against the Current, the writer/director's second-time feature, which asks us how far our loyalties to our friends will go. Though the film deals with some dark subject matter, Callahan ensures that it never gets bogged down in melancholy or insensitivity. Instead, his luscious cinematography and the gallows humor enacted through leads Joseph Fiennes and Justin Kirk add an unexpected light-heartedness and tranquility to a film that would otherwise be irrevocably bleak and morally black and white.

Paul Thompson (Fiennes) has been struggling with the death of his wife and child for years, overcome with a grief he can't shake. Apathetic about his job and unable to feel anything but numb in relationships, he decides it's time to come to terms with his loss the only way he knows how. To honor and remember the five year anniversary of his wife's death, he decides to swim the length of the Hudson River, all 315 miles of it from Troy, New York to the New York Harbor, planning to reach his goal exactly five years to the day. To accomplish this task he enlists the help of his best friend Jeff Kane (Kirk), a bartender who'll take any excuse to get away from his crumbling marriage, and new friend Liz Clarke (Elizabeth Reaser), a school teacher looking to waste some time before the new semester starts. Purchasing a rickety boat, the three coast down the Hudson one day at a time, sleeping on the river's banks and trying to avoid the rain. Everything is going swimmingly, literally and figuratively, until Jeff suddenly remembers why Paul has chosen now to honor the death of his wife and Liz gradually begins to realize her feelings for him. As the journey commences, Jeff and Liz both attempt to re-convince Paul of the decision he has made, struggling to reconcile the idea that to love Paul is to both try and protect him and also to respect his decisions and appreciate his situation.

What kind of sacrifices would friends make for other friends? Would or should friends forego their own moral convictions to respect the wishes of someone they love so much? These are the questions that Against the Current poses and allows the audience to answer. Though the film presents one possible answer, Callahan avoids pretentious preachiness in favor of one viewpoint or another and this allows healthy discussion to flourish. Part of what makes the exploration of grief and tragedy a worthwhile one is the gallows humor within the script. Though the tone of the film is markedly mellow and often morose, the comedy neither detracts from nor interrupts the solemn meditation. Instead, it helps create a healthy rapport between the main characters, played to a dry perfection by both Fiennes and Kirk. Beneath the sarcastic banter and straight-faced quips is a rational dialogue about life and death that asks for nothing but an open and understanding ear from all listeners.

Tying the film and the cast together is the character that goes mostly unnamed, but cannot be ignored: the Hudson River. As diverse in landscape, scope, and aesthetics as the country in which it flows, the views from the river are breath-takingly beautiful. Whether at golden hour, brightest noon, or rainy morning, the cinematography of Sean Kirby is tranquil like the water and is celebratory of the beauty of the life that surrounds the characters, whether that beauty opens the eyes of those who have never noticed it before or acts as a welcome end note for those who have forgotten it.

Screen International review Tim Grierson

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Variety (Justin Chang) review

Camerini, Michael and Shari Robertson

LAST BEST CHANCE C 74

aka: The Senator’s Bargain

USA (100 mi) 2010 Official site

Part of a 12 segment piece of television journalism called How Democracy Works Now, this is a film largely for history buffs only, people who are interested in seeing the legislative process develop through a series of closed door, offscreen, backroom Senate sessions of supposedly bipartisan horse trading from the perspective of those who are just outside the legislative chambers, who spend all their time analyzing and evaluating discussions of which they were not a part, and then having to devise various national strategies on what to do next. As seen through the eyes of a group of lobbyists working to provide justice reforms for immigrants, who work closely with Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, this material is entirely outdated and consists exclusively of 4-year old news, following the proceedings of an attempt at Immigration reform in 2006 during the Bush Administration, where initially Arizona Republican Senator John McCain and Kennedy worked out a bipartisan outline of a restructuring of the Immigration Act, which was Senator Kennedy’s first piece of legislation that he helped pass during his initial year in the Senate in 1965, a reform that opened up the doors and allowed a much more diverse population to enter the country legally, mostly consisting of lower wage scale workers and their families. Since 9/11, however, the Bush Administration was pushing to shift the priorities to border enforcement, where more money would be spent to prevent immigrants from coming in and on deportation proceedings, while Kennedy was recognizing the worth of those 12 million working families who were undocumented, attempting to offer them a path to legalization, where they would not have to hide in the shadows any more subject to the wrenching family divisions where U.S. born children are separated from their undocumented parents, who could at any moment be whisked away on a plane out of the country. Many of these kinds of cases were making headlines as the Bush Administration was stepping up more raids both at places of employment and in the family homes, where getting tough on immigration was the latest Republican strategy.

Since all of this takes place four years before the film was released, there’s an odd sense of time displacement, as the shape of the world has changed considerably since this was filmed, even as it was being filmed, so while the issues being outlined are certainly relevant, the arguments have shifted away from Kennedy’s views, where since his death, there is no one left to champion his position. With a Democrat in the White House, the tone on Federal immigration raids is considerably more low key. However, when McCain chose to run for the White House in 2007, his views on Immigration became more partisan, all but taking the bill off the table. But the White House brought it back along with another Republican co-sponsor, the other Arizona Republican Senator, Jon Kyl, who pushed the border enforcement issue and also a radical change in the point system, where immigrants already speaking English were given as much as 5 times higher priority, basically excluding the African and Latin American populations, where the unspoken word of race creeps back into the picture. While the Latino leaders are eloquently seen attempting to raise the tone of the argument above racial divisions, they got hammered by the Republican right on Talk Radio and Fox News who labeled the path to citizenship amnesty, which they defined as a get out of jail free card. On Bill Reilly’s show, conservative pundit Ann Coulter could be seen leveling her denunciating claim: “Who cares if they’re living in the shadows? They’re illegal!!”

While the film does follow the behind-the-scenes actions of well intentioned people who are staunch admirers of Kennedy, who are visibly moved when he makes one of his great oratories on the floor of the Senate in support of the bill, resorting to his “Now is the time, this is the moment” theme, but even as he spoke, the mood of the nation was shifting farther and farther to the right, where non-English speaking immigrants were being associated with terrorists and derogatory stereotypes became the talking points of the Republican Party. The film all but ignores this changing face of Republicans, where Tea Party advocates don’t even exist yet, but xenophobia is rampant within the foul-mouthed bigots of the nation, heard daily spouting off their venom on Talk Radio, or even at Presidential candidate town hall meetings. Not to be ignored is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party who continue to believe they are being outflanked by the right, and that’s because they are, as they continue to advocate for positions that have dried up long ago and where they simply don’t have the votes anymore even within their own party. When Kennedy attempts to navigate intact a compromise bill to passage by cutting off the debate, where those wishing to kill the bill keep offering amendments that are designed to strip the heart of the provisions, history always seems to have the last word. There’s something terribly sad about seeing Kennedy in such a deteriorating medical state in the latter stages of his life, as his death is not even mentioned. While the film wears its heart on its sleeve, barely ever enunciating opposing views, instead relying exclusively on advocates focusing on a very narrow field of what would today be seen as progressive social issues. The movie is depicted as an ascending picture of one more great climb of the mountain, where instead of reaching the mountain top, these little back door discussions that attempt to shape the social fabric of the nation are mere footnotes of an idealized dream that never happened.

The 9th Annual HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL Facets Multi Media

Last Best Chance brilliantly presents a political legend, Senator Edward Kennedy, in his final battle for comprehensive immigration reform in the US. Seeking legislation that he believes would best serve US interests and provide greater security and dignity to many of the 20 million people currently living in the shadows, Senator Kennedy joins forces with talented allies on the outside to marshal fellow Senators, including Obama, Clinton, and McCain toward a "Grand Bargain." However, below the level of strategy and protocol, we find a moral tale of modern American politics. Ted Kennedy, one of a handful of people who through his personal efforts truly changed the face of America, is forced to decide how much he wants this deal and what he is willing to trade for his greatest legacy.

Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2010: Last Best Chance Elise Nakhnikian from The House Next Door, also seen here at Girls Can Play, June 21, 2010: A Movie a Day, day 36: Last Best Chance

Another documentary about the foiled fight for U.S. immigration reform from How Democracy Works Now, Last Best Chance delivers the message that was missing from the other film from this series that's playing at the Human Rights Watch festival. Mountains and Clouds zooms in so tightly on the macro view of the fight to pass or derail a relatively small piece of legislation that we never learn what motivates the fighters, but Last Best Chance takes the wide-angle view.

Directors Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini and editor Jane Rizzo lay out the stakes this time with admirable clarity and impact, starting with a prologue that explains the need for immigration reform. The filmmakers aren't above using PowerPoint-style lists or that honeyed, voice-of-reason voiceover that I found so annoying in both films, but they don't resort to those often. For the most part, they stitch together powerful snippets of conversation, speeches, and lectures by eloquent and impassioned people.

The bill being debated this time around is the mother of them all: comprehensive immigration reform. The film starts with the debate over the film introduced by senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain in May 2007, then follows the fight as it gets really down and dirty after the right-wing Republican talk-radio and TV talking-points machine shreds its basic premises. (Sneering at the bill's effort to bring undocumented immigrants "out of the shadows" on Bill O'Reilly's show, Ann Coulter says: "Who cares if they're living in the shadows? They're illegal!")

We also hear from political heavy-hitters like then-Senator Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Lou Dobbs, and a kinder, gentler McCain, who reads from a newspaper account about the terrible deaths suffered by undocumented workers in the Arizona desert. But the star of this show is Kennedy. Visibly weakening as shooting progresses, though no mention is made of his illness, he's the white-haired knight credited with having "made us a multi-ethnic, multicultural society" with the immigration bill he championed in 1965, an effort he is determined to build on now.

Kennedy is everywhere, cajoling and praising his staff, telling them war stories, and explaining the art of riding the Senate's ever-changing political tides. He also makes some of the most stirring and eloquent speeches in a film that brims with heartfelt and moving oratory. The best is the one he reads on the Senate floor just before the bill goes up for a vote. Framing the fight for immigration reform as the latest great civil-rights issue, he reminds the Senate that this is about "the family values of people who want to work hard, men and women of faith, people that care about this country and want to be a part of the American dream...Now is the time, this is the place," he thunders. "Are we going to vote for our hopes or are we going to vote for our fears? Are we going to vote for our future or are we going to vote for our past?"

As in Mountains and Clouds, the filmmakers are good at detailing the politics involved, making even wonky stuff like cloture and "killer amendments" easy to understand. And once again, they get excellent access to key people, though only on the pro-immigration side. I got a little backstage thrill from listening to one of the activists, whose constituency gives him some clout, though he has no official role in the debate, telling Karl Rove "you have kicked our ass from one side of the room to the other" before trying to win back some of the ground the outnumbered Republicans have stolen out from under the Democrats. I'd say that's a pretty vivid lesson in how democracy works now.

They also capture a few small-scale moments that hint at the toll the fight takes on the people involved, like when one of the activists puts her very young-sounding daughter on speaker phone to talk about when she'll get home. "Um, well, there's another big vote at 7:30 tonight," says the mom. "Okay. Well, do you think you can maybe watch it from home?" asks the daughter, who's clearly an old hand at this negotiation. By this point in Last Best Chance, there's no question why a mother would sacrifice dinners with her daughters for the fight over immigration reform, which the filmmakers and their subjects see as nothing less than a fight for the soul and the future of our nation. The directors couldn't resist ending with one of their pious voiceover comments, but I think they could have ended with New York Senator Chuck Schumer. Speaking to the press after the bill was defeated, he says: "When you study why great countries fail, it's because they're unable to deal with the problems facing them. They devolve into petty little disputes and appeals to the lowest common denominator, and those prevail."

Cameron, James

The 'Amazing' James Cameron Page official website

All-Movie Guide bio from Nathan Southern

TCMDB bio from Turner Classic Movies

Film Reference profile by Chris Routledge

Academy of Achievement another brief profile

Optimus Films Profile yet another

Terminator's real daddy | Features | Guardian Unlimited Film a tribute to Stan Winston by James Cameron in the Guardian, November 17, 2006

Sigourney In 3-D | The New York Observer Sigourney in 3-D, by Sara Vilkomerson from The New York Observer, April 8, 2007

Cameron, James They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

New York Film Academy's 20 Great Movie Directors

Premiere's 10 Directors Who Changed Cinema

James Cameron Adrian Wootton interviews Cameron for the Guardian, April 13, 2003

James Cameron: part II Adrian Wootton interviews Cameron for the Guardian, April 13, 2003

Newsweek Interview (2007) by Sean Smith from Newsweek, January 12, 2007

THE TERMINATOR

USA Great Britain (108 mi) 1984

Chicago Reader on Film Dave Kehr (earlier version, now re-edited online)

A resourceful low-budget thriller, this 1984 film recalls the kind of canny exploitation work that came out of the old New World Pictures, and the director, James Cameron, is indeed a Roger Corman graduate (Piranha II). Arnold Schwarzenegger is an automated hit man of the future sent back to present-day Los Angeles to eliminate the future mother (Linda Hamilton) of a rebel leader; her only hope is a bashful guerrilla fighter (Michael Biehn) who has followed Schwarzenegger back through time. Cameron's direction of the ensuing chase owes a lot to George Miller and John Carpenter (not to mention Chuck Jones), yet the characterization of the violence has something agonizingly original about it: Schwarzenegger is presented as a lumbering slab of dumb, destructive strength--the image is more geological than human--and Cameron plays his crushing weightiness against the strangely light, almost graceful violence of the gunplay directed against him. The results have the air of a demented ballet. Unfortunately, Cameron is too eager to cover the holes in the script with camped-up line readings: every easy laugh he gets detracts from the project's overall effectiveness. And he doesn't display the sheer pleasure in plastic film technique that makes Miller's and Carpenter's work something more than bluntly visceral experiences. Still, as a souvenir of a kind of B-grade action cinema that has all but vanished, The Terminator should find a small place in the heart of every movie addict. With Paul Winfield. 108 min.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]

The Terminator takes the old paradox of what would happen if you could travel back in time and murder your own grandparents and gives it a new twist as Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in the title role as a cyborg sent back to kill the mother of an important resistance leader of the man-machine wars being fought in the future. Confused? Well even if you don't follow the plot you can marvel at the bravado of director James Cameron who creates an entirely believable, and yet utterly fantastic, battle for the survival of the human race.

As the mother, Linda Hamilton defines a new female film role model - strong, decisive and yet occasionally vulnerable. She is helped by a human sent back in time by the resistance to aid her (the dishy Michael Biehn) but even together they seem to be no match for the awesome killing machine portrayed by Arnie. He is perfectly suited to this role which requires him to be menacing, flex his muscles and say the occasional syllable.

Based (like Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys) on the short experimental film La Jetée, it is a warning to those in power today not to forget that our children will inherit our mistakes. It's also extremely good, testosterone-toting fun, as Arnie demolishes buildings etc. in his pursuit of Hamilton. More chillingly violent (as opposed to comic book - reflected in the film's rating) than its successor, including one gruesome home surgery tutorial, the film is liberally dashed with Cameron's audacious visual style, mixing a dark neo-gothic atmosphere with the bright lights of city life. Even if you think you've seen it before, not to be missed.

"A blazing, cinematic comic book, full of virtuoso moviemaking, terrific momentum, solid performances, and a compelling story" - Variety

Movie-Vault.com (John Ulmer)

Turner Classic Movies [Sean Axmaker]

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! (Liz Kingsley)

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks)

DVD Journal Alexandra DuPont Special Edition

eFilmCritic.com (David Hollands)

CultureCartel.com (Daniel Briney)

filmcritic.com (Max Messier)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Kamera.co.uk John Atkinson

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) Special Edition

The Digital Bits Todd Doogan Special Edition

Sci-Fi Weekly John Sullivan Special Edition

DVD Verdict Mike Jackson Special Edition

DVDTown [John J. Puccio] Special Edition

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

Classic Horror Nate Yapp

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) Blue-Ray

DVDBeaver - Blu-ray DVD review [Leonard Norwitz]

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

ALIENS

USA Great Britain (137 mi) 1986 director’s cut: (154 mi)

Chicago Reader On Line Dave Kehr

One sequel that surpasses the original. Director James Cameron dumps the decorative effects of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien in favor of some daring narrative strategies and a tight thematic focus (1986). Sigourney Weaver, the sole survivor of the first encounter, returns to the scene as an adviser to a military mission sent to exterminate the alien scourge. The first half of the film is virtually actionless, as Cameron audaciously draws out our anticipation by alluding to past horrors and building the threat of even more extreme developments; the second half is nonstop, driving action, constructed in a maniacal cliff-hanger style in which each apparently hopeless situation feeds immediately into something even wilder. At 137 minutes the film is a bit long, and Cameron does overplay his hand here and there, pushing things just a shade further than he should to maintain audience credibility. But unlike the original, the action is used to develop character, and the central image--the alien spores as a monstrous parody of human birth--finds an effective resonance in the plotline.

Everything a sequel should be, James Cameron took his slam-bang Aliens in an entirely different direction from Ridley Scott's moody 1979 chamber piece, Alien, with an amazingly simple idea: more aliens. Sigourney Weaver returns (and earned an Oscar nomination) as Ripley, who reluctantly agrees to consult on a new mission. This time, she rides with a band of gung-ho military nuts (Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, etc.) and a nerdy pencil pusher (Paul Reiser) with an alternate agenda. Lance Henriksen returns as the android Bishop. Cameron plays with several motherhood themes, showing the mother alien laying her eggs, while Ripley rescues a little girl, Newt (Carrie Henn), and becomes her surrogate mother. Cameron's dialogue has never been better, with plenty of snappy, quotable lines. The film was released in theaters in a 137-minute cut, but Cameron's preferred 154-minute director's cut is even better; he keeps the suspense slowly building until it becomes almost unbearable in the final, tense minutes, with Ripley racing against the clock to rescue Newt from the endless green-blue fortress. Aliens has a strange, mid-80s Rambo-like physicality to it, but it's couched in a reasonable and forgivable context. It's one of the best sequels ever made. Paxton, Goldstein and Henriksen reunited the following year in Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez, also reviewing the Quadrilogy with Jeremiah Kipp here: DVD Review: Alien Quadrilogy

After Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, James Cameron scored a major hit with the nihilist action flick The Terminator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and girl-power queen Linda Hamilton. It made sense then that Cameron was brought on to direct the sequel to Alien. Cruder than the original, Aliens is a distinctly greedy mega-production. There's only so many times you can tell the same story and rewrite the same set pieces. Because the film's human melodramas play second fiddle to the kick-ass action sequences, it's obvious that 20th Century Fox wanted to bank on the success of the original film. Some seven years after its release, Alien had developed a significant following in feminist circles. Back in film school, a professor frequently referenced the set design's phallic and vaginal imagery, but it's Ripley's battle to be heard by the film's alpha males and mother ship that truly resonates today. This mostly subtextual war of the sexes is on whorish display throughout Aliens: the mother alien is referred to as a "badass" by Bill Paxton's insufferable Hudson; Ripley's cigar-chomping sergeant doesn't think she can do anything; and the tough, eager-to-please Latina lesbian who calls Ripley "Snow White" is teased for looking like a man. After floating in space for 57 years, Ripley is picked up by a salvage ship and is treated like a rape victim by a money-minded conglomerate. After her feminine insight gets the better of everyone, she helps spearhead a mission back to the alien planet after the ship loses contact with its colonists. Logic betrays the film from the start (after 20 years on the alien planet, the colonists discover the aliens at the same time Ripley is rescued), as does the occasional plot hole, but more tragic is the sorry lot of archetypical characters a fierce Weaver has to rub shoulders with—you can tell exactly in what order everyone will die depending on how nondescript, polite, hysterical or evil the characterization. Aliens is a "guy movie" through and through, right down to the "get away from her, you bitch" female-on-female violence (Cameron, David Giler and Walter Hill must have been watching "Dynasty" while writing their screenplay). The Director's Cut of the film hauntingly amplifies Ripley's disconnect from her dead daughter and her relationship to the young Newt (essentially a substitute for her creepy pet cat). Otherwise, the film's human interactions are nowhere near as interesting as Cameron's deft direction of action and use of non-alien space (the "Remote Sentry Weapons" killing spree may be Cameron's finest moment).

DVD Times Review [Daniel Stephens]

James Cameron's "Aliens" is, in my humble opinion, the definitive Humans vs. Aliens movie. As far as I'm concern, every film that has come after "Aliens" are inferior clones. Even the animated "Final Fantasy", for all of its cinematic breakthroughs, was nothing more than a rich man's "Aliens." It's no surprise then that "Aliens" is the film by which I measure all Humans vs. Aliens movies.

What makes "Aliens" a classic is how it brilliantly lulls you into its world with a sense of security before assaulting your senses with a barrage of American firepower, acid-spewing aliens, and claustrophobic tension. In fact, the movie doesn't even kick into high gear until well after the 50-minute mark, but as soon as that happens, the film never relents. The way the film manages to sustain its high-octane power, while never compromising on its quiet, personal moments, is just incredible.

"Aliens" is James Cameron's sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 "Alien", a cerebral experience that attempted to scare with atmosphere and paranoia. "Aliens," on the other hand, is content to thrill with firepower. The film brings back Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the only survivor from the first film, who has been frozen in cryo sleep for the last half century or so. Awaken into a new world she is ill-prepared for, Ripley is informed that the alien planet where the alien creature that terrorized her commercial vessel (from the first film) came from has since been colonized by humans. Oh, and it just so happens that said colony has gone off the radar, and the colonists are believed...in trouble.

Ripley is asked to return to the alien planet as a guide to check up on the colonists. She is hesitant at first, but eventually agrees out of a need to resolve unfinished business (of the personal and alien-killing variety, natch). The bulk of the rescue crew consists of Marines, including the easygoing Hicks (Michael Biehn), the loudmouth Hudson (Bill Paxton), and the inexperienced commander, Gorman (William Hope). No sooner does the crew land on the planet that it becomes apparent things have gone terribly wrong. In fact the colonists are either all dead, fed on, or are being used as breeding apparatus by the aliens!

"Aliens" is the perfect title for this movie. Whereas part one was called "Alien", properly denoting the single alien creature in that movie, "Aliens" is literally crawling with the alien creatures. They are everywhere -- on the ceiling, along the walls, and in the shadows. Under Cameron's direction, the aliens are frighteningly real, physical, and in your face. They move with the speed of snakes and kills with the ferocity of tigers, but what really makes them a formidable foe is their cunning. These bastards are smart, has mastered organization, and there are a lot of them.

Once the first mini-gun opens fire, "Aliens" shifts into action mode. At nearly two hours and 20 minutes, the movie lives up to the original film and, in my opinion, surpasses it. This is no cerebral experience, this is full-tilt action at its finest. Best of all, Cameron and his crew has the cast and the budget to pull off everything they wanted. Even more impressive is that this is only Cameron's second movie, the first being "The Terminator". (Cameron actually shot, edited, and released "The Terminator" and "Aliens" back-to-back. He was also the writer of 1986's "First Blood," the first "Rambo" movie. How's that for a banner year?)

Besides making a star out of Sigourney Weaver as one of the first woman in cinematic history to kick ass and take names on an epic scale, the film features perhaps the finest and most memorable character to sci-fi fans everywhere. Bill Paxton ("Frailty") is Hudson, the loudmouth who utters some of the most memorable lines in all of sci-fi, including but not limited to his mantra of, "Game over, man! Game over!" after the alien army has all but destroyed his unit.

"Aliens" is good stuff. No, let me rephrase that. "Aliens" is great stuff.

Turner Classic Movies Pablo Kjolseth

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Aliens Mother and the Teeming Hordes, by Jim Naureckas from Jump Cut

Conspicuous Force and Verminization Mark at K-Punk, August 2, 2006

Aliens: Vermin, always Vermin zunguzungu, October 20, 2008

Salon (Max Garrone)

George Chabot

eFilmCritic.com Slyder

Classicscifi.com [John D'Amico]

Classic-Horror.com Brandt Sponseller

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Jonny Lieberman

eFilmCritic.com ("Dr. Isaksson")

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) Director’s Cut

DVD Verdict - Collector's Edition Adam Arseneau

AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) including Special Edition review

Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley) Special Edition

DVD Times Alien Quadrilogy [Daniel Stephens]

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks reviews the Quadrilogy

Turner Classic Movies The Alien Saga from Scott McGee

DVD Town - Alien Quadrilogy [John J. Puccio]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] reviews the Quadrilogy

filmcritic.com [Blake French] reviews the Quadrilogy

Sci-Fi Weekly Victor Lucas reviews the Quadrilogy

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

THE ABYSS

USA (146 mi) 1989 ‘Scope special edition (171 mi)

The Abyss Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

The third collaboration of writer-director James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd (Aliens, the Terminator movies) is a big-budget action thriller about a group of underwater oil diggers who go looking for a lost nuclear submarine and wind up encountering extraterrestrials. Shot largely underwater and with direct sound, this has a visceral kick to it that enhances Cameron's flair for high-tech special effects and streamlined storytelling, but the attempt to extract the essences of several genres (cold-war submarine thriller, love story, Disney fantasy, pseudomystical SF in the Spielberg mode) and mix them together ultimately leads to giddy incoherence. Before the movie collapses, however, there are several highly effective suspense sequences, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is especially fine as the feisty, volatile heroine. With Ed Harris, Michael Biehn, Todd Graff, and John Bedford Lloyd. 140 min.

Inspired by the 1992 re-release of Blade Runner, which restored excised footage to Ridley Scott's groundbreaking 1982 film while eliminating additions dictated by Warner Bros., the early '90s saw a boom in "director's cut" re-releases, a trend that spotlighted the creative tension in big-budget filmmaking. The term quickly became meaningless—does a few extra seconds of nudity in Basic Instinct make a significant artistic difference?—but raised provocative questions. As revealing in its own way as Blade Runner and Brazil is the case of James Cameron's The Abyss, a strangely personal underwater adventure released in 1989 at 140 minutes, then reissued a few years later expanded by 31 minutes cut at the studio's suggestion for time considerations. What difference does half an hour make? A lot, and not always in ways that might be expected. In both versions, Ed Harris plays a deep-sea expert whose commercially employed drillers come to investigate a nuclear-sub accident. The mission reunites him with estranged wife Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and forces both to put their lives in danger to thwart a deranged nuclear-warhead-toting Navy SEAL (Michael Biehn) who threatens to destroy a recently unearthed species of intelligent extra-terrestrials. Almost every restoration can unreservedly be called an improvement upon the original—making the story more well-rounded, fleshing out the underwater environment, and better setting up the unexpectedly moving relationship between Harris and Mastrantonio—until a conclusion that relies on an audience's tolerance for a New Age by way of The Day The Earth Stood Still message of peace and love. All of which raises interesting questions: Who was right? Cameron's instincts seem dead-on for most of the picture, but they abandon him in the end. The clipped original ending may have been unsatisfying, but it at least seemed to match the rest of the picture. And what to make of the fact that Cameron himself doesn't seem particularly resistant to the changes? This new DVD edition presents both versions of the film, letting viewers judge for themselves and raising questions of its own. An hour-long making- of documentary, an array of behind-the-scenes details, and a running subtitled commentary reveal just how torturous the making of The Abyss—much of it done underwater for up to 12 hours at a time in an abandoned nuclear reactor—was for everyone involved. Which did that work better serve, a presentable commercial compromise or an ultimately wacky work of artistic integrity? Whatever the answer, this version of The Abyss presents an exciting, often beautiful film in the best possible setting, allowing a full examination of the paradox of attempting to make a blockbuster-sized film with vision.

Like the Titanic, "The Abyss" was a deluxe cruise till it went down. Deemed unsinkable, the undersea thriller had a budget that would choke a beluga. Director Jim Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd, creators of "The Terminator" and "Aliens," seemed unstoppable. And then they met their waterlulu.

The movie is a veritable chowder of chills. Like Red Lobster's seafood sampler, it offers a taste of everything from psychotic aquanauts to psychedelic jellyfish. When it comes to calamity, Cameron doesn't discriminate, confronting his heroic divers with marital problems, missile crises, leaky valves, WWIII and hurricanes. And then there are the NTIs (non-terrestrial intelligences), which "The Abyss" needs like a rowboat needs tires.

Nevertheless, it gets off to a quick start with the foundering of a nuclear submarine. Swept off course by some mysterious force, the sub comes to rest on the brink of the Cayman Trough, a four-mile-deep Caribbean canyon. A rowdy-but-lovable team of oil drillers stationed in Deepcore, a nearby underwater habitat, reluctantly joins a rescue mission led by a spit-and-polish team of Navy SEALs. As the clunky Deepcore, a claustrophobic's nightmare, is towed to the wreck, a hurricane cuts off its umbilical line to the mother ship and the roustabouts are as alone as newborn tadpoles.

Ed Harris plays Bud Brigman, the courageous rig foreman whose mellow style grates on Deepcore's project engineer -- Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as his almost ex-wife, Lindsey. Dubbed "the queen bitch of the universe," Lindsey is the terror of the tightly knit nine-person crew. Like Ripley in "Aliens," she is a Fembo, an unfeeling, and therefore unnatural, female.

She rebukes a colleague for calling her Mrs. Brigman. "I didn't like being called that even when it meant something." Like Scotty on the Starship Enterprise, she's always muttering and puttering about her habitat.

"I've got four years invested in this rig. And three in the marriage. You've got to have priorities," she says to the honey-cup Bud, who won't give up on love and still wears his wedding ring. Inevitably, close encounters and shared dangers will bring the couple back together (inevitably because the plot, with its deus ex machina, is laid out like Hansel and Gretel's bread-crumb trail).

The Brigmans must not only shore up the flooding Deepcore but also stave off Lt. Coffey (Michael Biehn), the SEAL leader who succumbs to PIP (pressure-induced psychosis), takes a ballistic missile from the downed sub and starts waving it around like a handgun. Then, mistaking the friendly NTIs for Russians, he decides to nuke 'em.

Torn between fantasy and fear-baiting, "The Abyss" flounders between the creepy corridors inside and the godlike critters -- "Cocoon" fledglings? -- outside in their giant Melmac saucer. (How many times can we be awestruck by Day-Glo Gumbies? And why do these creatures always travel with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir?)

About 40 percent of the movie, persuasively soggy, was shot underwater. But to their credit, Cameron and Hurd (his producer and ex-wife) always focus on the humanity, not the hardware, wedding emotions and effects, tears and brine.

So the neatly designed Deepcore boasts an ingratiating crew, an eclectic platoon of scruffy guys and gal. Standouts are Hippy (Todd Graff), the clowning paranoid; Catfish (Leo Burmester), the countrified welder; and One Night (Kimberly Scott), the best dang submersible pilot in the whole dang ocean. You know them, you love them, they're gonna get killed.

Now for the acting: With cheekbones like oar blades, Harris is the handsomely chiseled hero with a heart of gold. He proves that he still has the right stuff for a romantic lead.

The naturally evocative Mastrantonio at first seems burdened by her cast-iron role but then pets an NTI and is transformed. When Coffey insists the NTI ship is a Russian bogy and Brigman seems persuaded, the former bitch queen coos, "He sees with hate and fear. You have to look with better eyes than that." Next thing you know she is plumb proud to be Mrs. Brigman.

Cameron says he thought the yarn up while attending high school in Niagara Falls. Is there any wonder that it's wet but not deep? "The Abyss" asks us to believe that the drowned return to life, that the comatose come to the rescue, that driven women become doting wives, that Neptune cares about landlubbers. I'd sooner believe that Moby Dick could swim up the drainpipe.

Cinepad (Jim Emerson)

Images Journal A.R. Ferguson

DVD Journal J. Jordan Burke

The Abyss Like a Fish Out of Water, Jody Lyle from Jump Cut, June 1993

The Abyss and Star Trek 4: With Friends Like These zunguzungu, November 3, 2008

Gods of Filmmaking review of The Abyss

Film Freak Central Bill Chambers

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

Movie Vault [Greg C.]

DVD Verdict Harold Gervais

George Chabot's Review of The Abyss

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez) Special Edition

DVDTown [John J. Puccio] Special Edition

The Fresh Films Review [Fredrik Fevang]

Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The New York Times (Lawrence Van Gelder)

TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY

USA (137 mi) 1991 ‘Scope Director’s Cut: (154 mi) Special Edition (156 mi)

Terminator 2: Judgment Day Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

James Cameron's slam-bang 1991 sequel-cum-remake brings back Arnold Schwarzenegger as another killing machine from the future. This time his mission isn't to kill the heroine (Linda Hamilton) but to protect her son (Edward Furlong) from an even more high-tech killing machine (Robert Patrick). To spice things up, Schwarzenegger is dressed as a biker and Patrick as a cop, the latter displaying quicksilver capacities that hark back to the friendly alien force in The Abyss. All the virtues of the original--intelligent postmodernist irony, spiffy special effects, effective action, tons of destruction, and Schwarzenegger in the nonhuman role he was born to play--are present here, though when Cameron tries to milk some sentiment out of the "personality" and fate of his top machine he comes up flat and empty, and the other characters are scarcely more interesting. As a fancy mechanism fueled by the pleasure of watching legions of people and equipment being summarily destroyed, this is pretty hot stuff. Written by Cameron in collaboration with William Wisher. R, 136 min.

BeyondHollywood.com - Ultimate Edition Nix

It really is not possible to over exaggerate the importance of a movie like "Terminator 2" to action filmmaking, and just filmmaking in general. Besides pioneering cinematic morphing technology (the technique that mimics one character "changing" flawlessly into another before our eyes), "T2" remains the film to see for sheer excitement, tension, and suspense 12 years after its initial release. (Director James Cameron's other movie, "Aliens", ranks just slightly behind.) With the recent release of the "Ultimate Edition", "T2" is even more fleshed out than before, adding substance to the style, flash, and roller coaster ride that was the original.

Story-wise, "Terminator 2" picks up some 13 years after the events of the original, with Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) locked away in a mental institution and her son, future rebel leader John Connor (Edward Furlong) living unhappily with foster parents. Like before, the computer intelligence that is trying to exterminate humans in the future sends a Terminator, this one the advance T-1000 (Robert Patrick), back in time to kill young John. And just as before, the resistance is able to send back a protector -- a T-800 Terminator model (Arnold Schwarzenegger), which just happens to be identical to the Terminator originally sent back in time to kill Sarah.

What follows is two hours and 30 minutes of intense action and edge-of-your-seat tension as the seemingly unstoppable T-1000, made of "liquid metal" that allows it to morph into anyone and anything, relentlessly stalk John and his Terminator protector. After breaking Sarah out of the joint, the trio goes into hiding in Mexico; that is, until Sarah decides to take a shot at altering the future and heads off to kill Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the computer genius who will eventually give life to the killer computer intelligence. The film then enters an explosive finale that is really a 40-minute running gunbattle that demolishes everything in sight and sets a new bar for what constitutes ballsy action.

Director James Cameron ("True Lies") shows the uncanny eye for detail and film continuity here that he would eventually use on the mammoth "Titanic." Every background character, every gunshot, and every special effects is where they should be, timed perfectly for the best effect. While then-newcomer Edward Furlong is sometimes spotty as John Connor, Linda Hamilton's buff return as the slightly deranged and completely paranoid Sarah Connor more than makes up for it. The Big S. does his usual thing, which is look cool and throw people around without breaking a sweat. He's got that down to a science.

The DVD includes two versions of the full movie -- the one originally shown in theaters in 1991, and a special edition that features nearly 20 minutes of missing footages. The DVD itself features quite a bit of extras, but the only extra that should matter to fans is how much footage had been cut in 1991. The special edition returns the missing footages seamlessly into the flow of the movie, and if you hadn't seen the original version, you wouldn’t know they had been re-added at all.

Some of the re-added scenes are more important than others. Of note is a dream sequence that reunites Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor with Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), the hero from the first "Terminator." Another scene adds some "family time" for Dyson, but is not all that necessary. Other, more important scenes include a lengthy sequence where, after having escaped the T-1000 and saved Sarah from the mental institution, the Terminator is shut off, and Sarah nearly destroys his CPU after she removes it. The scene adds to the emotional gap between mother and son, and adds to Sarah's continued distrust of the Terminator, which is very justified after the events of the original movie.

Another scene, shorter in length and not completely necessary, shows the T-1000, after having killed John's foster parents, going outside to the family's barking dog and retrieving its collar. Here, the killer Terminator discovers that it had been tricked. (Remember when the Terminator, using John's voice, asked about the family dog using the wrong name, and the T-1000 didn't know any better?) There are also a couple of dream sequences that adds to Sarah's anxiety and helps to convince her that the right thing to do is to kill Dyson.

This Ultimate Edition of "Terminator 2" definitely earns its name and then some. The film has never looked better, and there are enough extras in the DVD to choke a dozen horses. (Extras include a host of commentaries, including one by co-writer/director James Cameron and another by the Big S. himself.) If you love the movie, the DVD is a worthy addition to your collection. It definitely makes a great movie even better, something 95% of the DVDs out there can't even think about saying, much less actually say.

James Cameron on Terminator 2 - Part 1

James Cameron's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" is a lustrous machine, all gleaming steel and burnished gunmetal, with state-of-the-art nuts and bolts. You relate to it the way you might relate to any overpowering machine, a little dispassionately but with a respect bordering on awe.

It's a tank of a movie, big, powerful and hard to resist. But it's a tank with lightning treads and jaguar agility. The stunning special effects show something that's rare these days -- technical stunts that evoke a true sense of wonder; it's real jaw-to-the-floor stuff.

As a sequel, "Terminator 2" is more imposing than its predecessor, and it lacks the B-movie modesty of the original. The original "Terminator" was science fiction with an element of shaggy poetry; this "Terminator" strives more for the mythic. It's heroic pulp.

The circumstances of the two are similar. Once again, two warriors have been beamed from the future back to our time, and once again, one warrior must protect the subject that the other was sent to destroy. In this case, the Terminator's mission is to kill John Connor (Edward Furlong), the young son of Sarah (Linda Hamilton), so that he cannot grow up to become the great leader of the resistance that he would after the world has been blown to bits in a nuclear conflagration. The boy's protector in this second film is another T-800 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), like the cyborg that combined machine and living tissue that was sent to kill his mother 10 years ago.

The T-800's adversary this time out is a more sophisticated version of himself, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), which is made from a kind of liquid metal -- a "mimetic polyalloy," it's called -- that allows it to change shape at will and renders it virtually indestructible. The T-1000 is a sleeker, faster version of the earlier Terminator -- it plays cat to Schwarzenegger's raging bull -- but it has its predecessor's single-mindedness. The movie exists on a very basic level; it's one long chase in which the new Terminator tries to get the boy away from the older one.

The film sets up a monumental battle of the Titans, and it doesn't disappoint. The confrontations between these two unstoppable forces are thrilling death bouts between equally matched gladiators. As they hammer each other, the outcome of the fight seems genuinely uncertain.

But the film's real virtues emerge in its quieter moments when the characters are given a chance to interact. The subtext here is much richer than in the first; it's a movie about family and finding a father. When the Terminator is on the run with Sarah and John, he becomes the strong patriarchal figure at the center of their makeshift nuclear family. The roles in this family-during-wartime, though, are hilariously reversed. It's the kid who teaches the father how to cope in the world, how to use slang like "chill" and "no problemo," how to "give five" and, more important, how to feel.

John also teaches his surrogate dad a grudging respect for human life, which further contributes to the film's new age spirit. It's this element that is most unique and most satisfying -- that and the richness Schwarzenegger brings to his character. It's comical, perhaps, but Schwarzenegger expresses more of his own humanity when playing a machine than he does when playing real people. He's a hopelessly wooden actor, but that artificiality and his "Fun With Phonics" style of delivery is perfect for his character here, and perfect for the film's deadpan sense of humor. For once, he's ideally cast, and he brings the kind of delicacy of feeling that Boris Karloff showed as the Frankenstein monster. As a machine, he has soul.

Unfortunately, the other Terminator doesn't, and that's one of this movie's biggest problems. Unlike in the first film, there's no one to identify with on the other side. The effects for this character, however, are smashing too.

Cameron manages to create a neat balance between the technical and the human here; so much so that this surfaces as one of the movie's themes. Most of the actors make strong statements, including Hamilton, who's Nautilused herself into the form of a modern-day Diana, and Furlong, who gives one of the loosest performances for a child actor ever filmed. As the brain behind SkyNet, the computer that goes out of control and causes the nuclear nightmare, Joe Morton also makes the most of a few minutes on screen.

No one in the movies today can match Cameron's talent for this kind of hyperbolic, big-screen action. Cameron, who directed the first "Terminator" and "Aliens," doesn't just slam us over the head with the action. In staging the movie's gigantic set pieces, he has an eye for both grandeur and beauty; he possesses that rare director's gift for transforming the objects he shoots so that we see, for example, the lyrical muscularity of an 18-wheel truck. Because of Cameron, the movie is the opposite of its Terminator character; it's a machine with a human heart.

James Cameron on Terminator 2 - Part 2

Jeeem's Cinepad [Jim Emerson]

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks attention to detail

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

CultureCartel.com (Daniel Briney)

Apollo Movie Guide [Ryan Cracknell]

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Mike from Hobart

Movie Vault [The Moose]

Salon (Bill Wyman)

filmcritic.com reaches Judgment Day Christopher Null

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Terminator 2: Judgment Day Sean Fitzgibbons from DVD Verdict

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

DVD Review: Terminator 2 - Ultimate Edition

Reel.com DVD review [Marina Chavez] Ultimate Edition

Terminator 2: Judgment Day Ultimate Edition Mike Jackson from DVD Verdict

DVDTown [John J. Puccio] Ultimate Edition

Digital Monkey Box DVD Review Paul, Ultimate Edition

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) Ultimate Edition

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) Ultimate Edition

Movielocity Movie Reviews (Blake Kunisch) Ultimate Edition

Blogcritics - DVD review [Matt Paprocki] DTS ES Remix

DVDTalk - Blu-ray Review [Joshua Zyber]

DVD Talk (Joshua Zyber) HD DVD Edition

DVDTown - HD-DVD Import Edition [John J. Puccio]

DVDTown - Ultimate HD DVD, German Import Edition [John J. Puccio]

Terminator 2: Judgment Day: Extreme Edition Elizabeth Skipper from DVD Verdict

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) Extreme Edition

Washington Post [Joe Brown]

DVDBeaver.com [Kevin Yip]

DVDBeaver - Blu-ray DVD review [Leonard Norwitz]

TITANIC C 75

USA (194 mi) 1997 ‘Scope

Waiting for the $1.50 show at the Davis, where the stench in the urinal was overwhelming, the odor of ammonia and bleach, and when I peed, it sizzled. I’ve never seen that before. There was little to no air-conditioning on a 96 degree day outside and the theater itself revealed a tiny little screen raised way up in the air. I found the only seat with no other seat in front of it, apparently for handicapped accessibility, 9 rows back. All the kids kept moving their parents closer to the front, carrying giant tubs of popcorn and large vats of pop, slurping and chomping continuously, eventually throwing their popcorn across rows, picking it up from the filthy, grimy, already sticky floor, then throwing it in the air and catching it with their mouths, where I heard various comments: “It’s a great love story...a terrific comedy...I’ve seen it six times...I’ve seen it seven times...Harriet had an operation on her left shoulder...Dad, I smell a cigarette...I want more popcorn...Hey bitch, gimme some gum...Have you ever tried cheese-flavored chocolate?” Then they turned on the music, “More Than a Heartache,” sounding like a car radio blasting. My chair was tilted a little to the left, the whole row seemed to be on a downward slant, so I already had the feeling of being on a boat. No one stopped talking when the film began, including parents that incessantly kept talking to their children. People just couldn’t keep still and constantly kept moving forward throughout the entire film.

But I digress, a lone woman’s voice opens the film as underwater cameras go snooping into the deep, searching the depths two and a half miles below the surface, scavenging the Titanic, considered the ship of dreams, until they find a safe, but no diamonds, only a nude drawing of a woman named Rose with the date 4-14-12. A woman watches herself being shown on TV and remarks, “I’ll be damned,” which begins a flashback to an arrogant class of rich who believed they and their ship were invincible. Thus begins the story of Jack and Rose, matinee idol Leonard DiCaprio and the sumptuous Kate Winslet, he won his 3^rd class passage in a poker game from a guy named Sven (“Where’s Sven?”) and is a penniless artist while she is engaged to one of the richest men on earth, but has doubts, feeling her life would be an endless parade of parties and cotillion and polo and yachts, the same mindless chatter, and no one would ever listen to her. Her mother forbids her from seeing Jack, but when did that ever stop anyone? A romance ensues.

Jack whisks her down to the lower decks which resembles an energetic, neverending party, dancing to bagpipe music. Jack tries to convince her that in a world full of stuffed shirts, they’d only be stifling her spirit. Later, in her private boudoir, she disrobes and asks him to draw her wearing only a 56 carat diamond, La Coeur de la Mer, the Heart of the Ocean, once owned by royalty, Louis XVI. As she describes this moment in voiceover 84 years later, she describes it as the most erotic moment of her life. Rose decides when the ship docks, she’ll be getting off with Jack, but of course, that is not to be, as the rest of the film turns into THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972), turning a barely breathing interior chamber drama into an overwrought romantic spectacle of special effects and computer graphics. Wowee Zowee. Well, there went all interest.

After the ship hits an iceberg, in what feels like an eternity, everyone continues to act like nothing happened, as the 5 lower decks slowly fill with water, supposedly building the tension until chaos ensues when it becomes apparent the ship is going down, when the lower decks are locked in order to escort the first class passengers to the lifeboats. There were only enough lifeboats for half the passengers, more would have cluttered the decks, so eventually in the melee that followed, the crew attempts to control the situation with threats and gunfire, eventually murdering several of the passengers. As the water level rises higher and higher, in slow motion, to strobe light effects, event torrents of floods, a string quartet plays a mournful adagio on the deck, while Jack and Rose promise to trust one another and never let go. But they do eventually let go, as the ocean is awash with floating bodies in a sea of ice, most all frozen corpses, where only 6 were captured from the sea. Rose was one of those 6, heard 84 years later to recall, “Jack exists now only in my memory.”

A sappy song plays over the credits, “My Heart Will Go On,” but of course, it is the credits that go on and on. The amount of people listed in the credits was obscene. When the film finally ended, there was a sound scrunch and the Coasters chimed in with “Yakety Yak, Don’t Talk Back,” and from behind a curtain, a garbage can on wheels was rolled down the aisles by one of the ushers. In a film marked by enormous excess and non-existent editing, where the depiction of the upper crust society couldn’t have been more artificial and uninspiring, Kate Winslet’s performance provided at least some level of fresh air in the central role, which held the audience’s attention up until the crash. Afterwards, the film was a repetitive, monotonous bore.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

It's nothing short of a religious paradox that a subculture so morally bereft and artistically exhausted and worshipful of nothing but capital...that Hollywood in the late 20th century could produce such a monumental and poetic testimony to love. The visuals are incredible, the textures and shapes and contrasts, the epic scale of mighty ship and sense of height involved throughout. The blue shading is beyond the potentialities of film; the purples, the rich turqoise, the aquas. Beyond that it must also be one of the greatest films in history for blind people, with the groaning engines and the splintering planks, running of feet along the deck, the rush of the water, the fireworks, the rollicking rhythm of a party in third class. The musical cards are beautiful and diverse, revealed spontaneously with a crazy gypsy genius. There's a fair share of Hollywood manipulation sure, but in circumstances of such grandeur these characteristics can only be considered additional virtues. Leonardo DiCaprio is a red-blooded American artist with an extraordinary sense of situational ethics who lives in the heartland of the garden of catalysis. Kate Winslet is nothing less than an existential heroine for the ages-flapping her butterfly wings with Promethean determination against the gravity of a fate more powerful than ten thousand suns. In a film shot on a boat what could happen when the magnetic poles of two such American characters finally touch and spark? Only one thing is possible: they do it in the backseat of a car. James Cameron gives us way too many memorable shots: Victor Garber as the ship's builder striding through the festive dining room, the only man on board aware that the ship is going down....Winslet's materialistic mother silently watching the Titanic go under from her seat on a lifeboat, she can only be wondering what kind of person she is that her daughter would rather go down with the ship than share her safety. Several of the secondary characters are perfect: Garber, Winslet's fiancee' Billy Zane is one of the biggest assholes in history-I know that I would have killed him; Jonathan Evans-Jones the bandleader. Bewitched's Dr. Bombay (Bernard Fox) may be the most sensible and philosophical of them all. As the boat goes under he refuses a life vest, but says he'll take a brandy.

Titanic (1997) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

From the underwater opening scenes, which are as neon-blue as anything from James Cameron's science fiction opus The Abyss, it's clear that Titanic will be a technophile's delight.

Oh, I suppose it's a historian's delight, too, with its labor-intensive recreations of the state rooms, hallways, dining halls and decks of that doomed ship. But it's the cash-intensive rendering of an impossible image -- the Titanic, full-size, setting sail from its dock with Leonardo DiCaprio the figurehead at its prow -- that makes this one for the history books. Titanic turns the ship itself into a gargantuan fetish object.

Those opening scenes (well, most of them) are deep-sea shots of the real Titanic, which Cameron insisted on photographing if the project were to proceed. Repeatedly throughout the film, Cameron offers match dissolves from Titanic's ghost-ship remains to his own shiny creation, as if the film's verisimillitude is somehow profound in itself. Accordingly, he is loath to simply photograph his actors walking on the deck of his scale recreation of the original boat. Rather, the camera must swoop backward alongside the railing, keeping the performers on one side of the widescreen frame while we see the ship's hull cutting through ocean water on the other. For the first half of the movie, every other shot seems giddy with the understandable satisfaction of depicting the impossible. It's like the Edwardian version of Jurassic Park.

Of course, the ship must be populated with people, and it's here that Cameron's vision falters. He's on solid ground when he envisions Titanic as a big, floating metaphor for the Edwardian class struggle (as the sinking began, the folks in the lower class accomodations were locked inside while the well-to-do boarded their lifeboats), but gets waterlogged as he uses the thinnest of characters and most routine of love stories to make his point and jerk his tears. OK -- point made, tears jerked. But it's fortunate for Cameron that the human story here has the weight of terrible history behind it, since it's lacking in all but the most rudimentary drama.

DiCaprio is Jack Dawson, a lovably scruffy American abroad who wins a steerage-class ticket back to his homeland in a poker game. Across a crowded boat, he spies Kate Winslet's very first-class Rose DeWitt Bukater. Even though Jack and Rose should, by all rights, never come into contact on Titanic (where classes of passengers are kept rigidly segregated), an odd turn of events results in Jack's saving Rose's life and thus being invited to dinner on the upper decks. Jack is revealed as a tasteful vulgarian who shares Rose's predilection for modern art (she brings aboard canvases by Monet and Picasso) and teaches her how to spit. Rose, meanwhile, is reluctantly betrothed to the snarling Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), an unremittingly villainous upper-cruster whose affection for her is based on vanity rather than on love. He's even got a callous henchman named Spicer Lovejoy (David Warner) to teach Jack a lesson in keeping his hands off what doesn't belong to him.

Although there are a wealth of stories on Titanic, it's this cobwebbed melodrama that Cameron has brushed off and made the narrative focus of his film. Ever the jaded critic, I found myself wincing at each mawkish plot twist -- this melodrama is as old as the ship itself. Even so, it would be churlish to claim that it doesn't work -- it works all right, just barely well enough for Cameron to draw his audience into and through the tragedy to come. But it's the easy way out, and the film suffers from a lack of narrative invention to match its visual wizardry. (The cloying score by James Horner, which rummages inexplicably through Enya's sad sack of new age tricks, doesn't help.)

And for a 195-minute film, Titanic seems awfully rushed, as though Cameron sat in the cutting room, jabbing the other film editors with a cattle prod. On those rare occasions when Cameron does finally strike a gold vein of pathos -- I'm thinking of the ship's stoic musicians, refusing to let silence have its way with the ongoing disaster, or the elderly couple who have returned to bed, holding one another as a river of sea water washes the world away beneath them -- he cuts away impatiently, his camera once again searching out the tedious melodrama of Jack, Rose and their tormentors. And lots of rushing water. In every aspect but the special effects, Titanic takes the easy way out. There are so many tales that can be told on this ship, but Cameron opts to concentrate -- almost exclusively -- on his star-crossed lovers.

So I reserve the right to interpret this pedestrian tale as a succession of missed opportunites, at least until Cameron gets the chance to trot out the inevitable "director's cut" on home video (he promised Charlie Rose a copy of the extended version on laserdisc). Such characters as Molly Brown (Kathie Bates), Captain E.J. Smith (Bernard Hill) and the ship's regretful designer, Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber), drift through the proceedings in what amount to little more than cameos, yet they add some welcome heft to the narrative. Meanwhile, Cameron deploys jokes and cliches like so many helium balloons. (Some of the dustiest lines are given to Gloria Stuart, the 82-year-old actress who gamely portrays the decagenarian Rose in an irritating framing device that pulls the action into the present day and keeps interrupting the movie's primary story with dopey narration.)

The biggest asset to the story, aside from the special effects, is no doubt DiCaprio, who is anachronistic as all get-out, but without whom the romance would be not only creaky but dull. And, miraculously, it's not dull. I never really got DiCaprio -- arguably the most potent young heartthrob in American movies today -- before Titanic. But in this film he rises to the occasion with potent charisma and enough charm to make these lines play leagues better than they must have read on paper. He and Cameron must be some kind of soul mates, because DiCaprio seems to understand instinctively exactly what the director is going for. Winslet, of whom I'm a big fan, fits snugly into her own role but never seems at ease. Inhabiting his character neatly, DiCaprio helps her out.

By the time Leo and Kate have made it in the back of an automobile in storage on the ship, you may be thinking, "Enough already." And sure enough, Cameron fails to disappoint -- how could the consummation of their affection not be a signal that something terrible is literally on the horizon?

Once the ship hits that iceberg, it becomes clear that Cameron is in his element, and not a moment too soon. More, there's our palpable fascination with a disaster in the making, especially one that unfolds at such a measured pace as the slow sinking of the biggest seagoing craft ever built. Cameron tightens the cinematic screws like the expert he is, and builds this disaster to a smashing, grinding climax. As the ship cracks in two and goes perpindicular before sinking below the water's surface, the ensuing apocalypse is one-of-a-kind. And when Cameron cuts away to a lifeboat full of survivors, giving us their vantage on the wreck (complete with roller-coaster-ride screaming and tiny bodies tumbling to their deaths like insects), it's a moment of flamboyant spectacle. It's hard to know whether to be thrilled, appalled, or merely appreciative of such an appropriately Grand Guignol vision. It's almost genius -- Cameron starts with a simplistic portrait of an Edwardian lovers' paradise, and transforms it with feverish, needling strokes into a circle of Hell populated by 1,500 frozen corpses and another 700 lost souls waiting in their half-empty lifeboats for what old Rose calls (gack) "an absolution that would never come." (As usual, Cameron feels the need to spell everything out for us. And for the purposes of this review, I won't tackle the utterly schmaltzy final shots.)

So here's the problem: every potentially stunning moment in Titanic is negated by another that's merely numbing; for every image that comes close to bearing the force of truth, there are a half-dozen more that are trite and self-conscious. Meaning is cluttered by explanation.

It adds up, I found, to a depressingly flat experience. Titanic the ship is exquisitely rendered, but Cameron didn't have such exacting blueprints for the human beings who go down with her, and the result is cardboard characters with bleakly formulaic lives -- certain lines of dialogue and twists of plot are such hokum that it's actually distracting. If only the damned ship weren't obviously so much more important to Titanic the film than were the people on board.

And the ship is inarguably alive and exciting. It pops off the screen. Through the magic of computer graphics, it's realer than real, a modern-day Lazarus roused from the dead by a SFX messiah. And that's at least part of the problem. The film's elaborate concentration on a picture-perfect Titanic can only draw attention to its status as artifice unless there's one hell of a storyline to entrance us. But the bulk of Titanic contains no surprises and few delights. Marooned in the here and now, it's impossible to forget that this is James Cameron's impossibly expansive Titanic, rather than the real thing.

Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell)

Alex Fung

Bright Lights Film Journal T.L. Putterman

AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna)

Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus]

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs)

eFilmCritic.com Slyder

Serdar Yegulalp

Chicago NewCityNet (Ray Pride)

The Onion A.V. Club [Maria Schneider]

Bright Lights Film Journal Robert Keser

Gods of Filmmaking review of Titanic

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) also here: second look at Titanic and here: third look at Titanic, after its Oscar win for Best Picture

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray)

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Eye for Film (Scott Macdonald)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Chris Knox)

The Digital Bits Bill Hunt

Blogcritics - Collector's Edition DVD Review [Matt Paprocki]

Alex Ioshpe

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic] Cameron gives in to almost blinding pomposity

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) 10th Anniversary Edition

PopMatters (Jesse Hassenger) 10th Anniversary Edition

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus] 10th Anniversary Edition

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) Special Collector’s Edition

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) Special Collector’s Edition

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) Special Collector’s Edition

DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) Special Collector’s Edition

Reel.com DVD review [Rod Armstrong]

James Cameron on Titanic interview with the director by Rick Schultz

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) review [4.5/5]

DVDBeaver Henrik Sylow

AVATAR 3D B 86

USA Great Britain (162 mi) 2009 Extended cut: (178 mi)

I didn’t sign up for this shit. —Trudy Chacon (Michelle Rodriguez)

Most of the 3D movies released this year were animated ventures, where at least in my view, CORALINE (2009) stood out above all others, not only because it had a knock out story, including a parallel universe with a monstrous evil villain, but because the use of 3D was clever, humorous, and always added a wonderment factor to an already richly imaginative children’s universe. But AVATAR is something else again, because like George Miller’s post-apocalyptic MAD MAX adventures from the late 70’s and early 80’s, this requires nothing less than the invention of an entirely new futuristic landscape that never existed before, that takes one’s breath away by the stunning originality of the concept. Ridley Scott also comes to mind with his brilliant set designs for futuristic films like ALIEN (1979) and BLADE RUNNER (1982). But none of these classic sci-fi films were shot in 3D, so while they remain etched in our imaginations for memorable visual designs, AVATAR brings to the table a futuristic sci-fi action adventure story shot using the most transforming 3D technology ever invented. That and a $230 million dollar budget, once more the largest for any film in history at the time it was made, suggest this is a film that offers a multitude of possibilities. And it delivers. While the early look of the film is a hi-tech computer universe that resembles Spielberg’s MINORITY REPORT (2002), where in the year 2154, instead of telepathic pre-cogs that remain submerged in a water tank transmitting the future, science has invented floating avatars in water tanks, genetically engineered humanoids that people can inhabit while plugged into think tanks, where their thoughts guide the avatars every move during waking hours, but no connection exists when they sleep. This takes on the idea similar to time traveling into different worlds, as once they step into the time machine, they are instantly transported to another world, in this case, the planet Pandora, where the title says it all, as it’s a planet just waiting for the disasters to be unleashed.

Much like Captain John Smith’s arrival to Terrence Malick’s THE NEW WORLD (2005), Pandora is a kind of planetary Eden, a lush, unspoiled tropical world filled with exotic plants, strange prehistoric looking creatures, and a race of 12-foot tall blue people called the Na’vi that resemble Native American Indians, as they live off the land, take only what they need, and have an intensely close cosmic relationship with the world they inhabit, where they have sacred grounds and refuse to create an imbalance on their planet. Enter the American business interests, where in a mission right out of ALIEN, a fleet of space cargo and military ships target a precious mineral that exists on the planet which they intend to harvest, with or without the Na’vi’s permission, so Stephen Lang is the gun ho ex-Marine military commander, Sigourney Weaver (amusingly, from ALIEN) is the science officer, and John Worthington as former Marine Jake Sulley steps in at the last minute to take the place of his recently deceased twin brother to complete a mission on the planet, using an avatar that was built for his brother, which fortunately matches his own DNA. Despite his lack of preparation or familiarity with the actual conditions on the planet, Sulley’s real motivation is to inhabit an avatar, which offers him full use of his extremities, as his own legs are paralyzed. The exhilaration he feels once he’s transported takes even himself by surprise, as his physical transformation leaves him liberated beyond belief. But being a Marine, he believes he has no limits, that his training allows him to adapt to anything. And immediately, on his first mission, he gets a chance to prove it, as he gets separated from his unit and has to spend a night alone on the planet, a sure death sentence, which turns into one of the better sequences in the film, as it’s impossible to anticipate what he’ll encounter next, where it’s like he was transported back to the island that King Kong inhabited.

At this point, once transported to the world of the planet, the look of the film is nothing less than spectacular. In fact it’s so extraordinary that we barely notice the story development as it takes on a mish-mosh of other familiar stories, where Sulley is saved inexplicably from savage beasts by a Na’vi woman Neytiri (Zoë Saldana), who could just as easily killed him as a foreign invader, a threat to her world, but she decides to bring this outsider home to her People and let them decide. As her parents are the King and Queen, they decide their daughter should train him in the ways of their People, which leads us to our first moral crisis, as the military wants to use Sulley as a spy before they move in for the kill, never for a moment doubting what their first priority of business is, which is to take what they came for. If Sulley can facilitate that mission, so much the better. But like DANCE WITH WOLVES (1990), he develops a romantic relationship with the King’s daughter, where Sulley eventually proves himself to be accepted by the Na’vi People. The flying sequence where he learns to fly on the back of a winged creature is among the most awe-inspiring in the film. But when the military moves in and starts destroying the planet surface in order to excavate what they’re looking for, the Na’vi feel betrayed by their new foreign brother. When the Army reduces a race of people to racist and derogatory insults before firing a single shot - - therein lies the problem. The people on this planet are perceived as backwards savages where a few casualties are within the acceptable guidelines. But when they realize Sulley has taken up their cause, it turns into Miyazaki’s PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997), where humans are waging a battle against the sacred forests, where the creatures of the forest must unite to stand their ground, where a half human, half animal (like an avatar), a human raised by wolves takes up their cause.

When it turns into an all out assault against the people and their planet, there is the spectacle of battle sequences in 3D, but this endless sense of waste and destruction destroys the purpose of the film. At some point, wouldn’t the corporate brass get the idea that perhaps this full blown invasion of the planet was unwise, as even the Star Trek TV series had a better reason for space exploration than planet invasion, which violates every known concept of the word justice? When did our mission in space change from discovering to destroying new worlds? This shift to planet destroyers should make the entire audience uncomfortable, as it doesn’t wash with our concept of Americans as bearers of peace and democracy. While this may have been designed to parallel the Bush invasion in Iraq, this is an entire planet we are destroying. Of course our sensibility is that of horror. But the death and destruction sequences turn into LORD OF THE RINGS (2001 – 2003), overlong and largely purposeless sequences that make the Americans look foolish and evil, as if crushing the enemy is all that matters, and who gives a damn about their primary mission? But by the time it all wraps up, the movie it most resembles is THE LION KING (1994), as young Simba has grown to discover he was lied to and misled by one of his own and eventually fights to save his people after the death of his father Mufasa (or the King of the Na’vi people) and all of the pride returns to their sacred grounds and celebrate the reclaiming of their kingdom in order to complete the Circle of Life. All of this feels much too simplistic, which is unfortunate, as the lame finale overwhelms the superb special effects which are perhaps the most spectacular ever conceived. None of the characters are memorable, but they are acceptable, yet the original concept of avatars and planet exploration in 3D is absolutely gorgeous until Cameron indulges in video game carnage, an extra hour of old-fashioned Army gadgetry and overly predictable violent mayhem that undermines the brilliance of his totally inspired, electrifying opening.

There is not a single frame in Avatar that doesn’t look stunning and authentic: from the heavily militarised human mining colony to the beautiful forest planet Pandora that contains a rare mineral that the humans want, to Pandora’s indigenous Na’vi population who aren’t too happy about the human’s presence. In order to better understand the Na’vi, the humans have developed the means to mentally occupy specially grown avatar bodies that look like the giant, wide-eyed, opaque-skinned Na’vi locals. Sam Worthington (Terminator Salvation) plays Jake Sully, a paraplegic marine who adopts one of the avatar bodies in order to infiltrate and gain the trust of the Na’vi.

Describing Avatar as “Pocahontas in Space” would not be too far off the mark as Jake’s relationship with the Na’vi people follows the white-man-assimilates-into-Native-American-Indian-culture narrative of many post-colonial films. However, Avatar is more in tune with Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990) rather than films such as Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992) or Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005), which both contained a slightly more complex exploration of racial and cultural identity.

Avatar is still a white-man-saves-the-day film and it is occasionally guilty of some rather naff moments when depicting the Na’vi as noble-savage types. However, at the core of Avatar is a very simple yet sincere environmental and anti-colonial message that removes all doubt about the film’s good intentions. Besides, such gripes are just so incredibly minor compared to the sheer beauty and exhilarating visuals at the forefront of Avatar. The scenes depicting the forests and floating mountains of Pandora are truly wondrous, the Na’vi and the avatars look incredibly realistic, and the action is exactly the sort of thing audiences have come to expect from writer/director James Cameron.

Cameron has long been at the forefront of setting new standards for high quality spectacle cinema with films such as The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) rightly regarded as classics of the science-fiction/action genre. With Avatar Cameron not only sets new standards for the use of computer-generated imagery special effects but also the use of 3D photography, which has a full depth-of-field and is integral to the texture and sensory impact of Avatar. Cameron has made no compromises with Avatar from a technical point-of-view and in time it will come to be regarded as a benchmark film.

The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron's mega-3-D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and, like the Hope Diamond waved in front of your nose, the bling is almost blinding. For the first 45 minutes, I'm thinking: Metropolis!—and wondering how to amend ballots already cast in polls of the year's best movies. Then the 3-D wears off, and the long second act kicks in.

Avatar is a technological wonder, 15 years percolating in King Cameron's imagination and inarguably the greatest 3-D cavalry western ever made. Too bad that western is Dances With Wolves. The movie opens brilliantly with an assembly line of weightless mercenaries disembarking at planet Pandora's earthling (that is, American) base—a fantastic military hustle, with the paraplegic volunteer Jake (Australian actor Sam Worthington) wheeling through a sea of Jeeps, trucks, and galumphing robots. Every shot is a fascinating study, thanks to the plethora of depth-complicated transparent monitors, Kindle-like devices, and rearview mirrors that Cameron has positioned throughout the frame.

The Sky People, as the native Pandorans or Na'vis call them, are on a mission to strip-mine this lushly verdant planet to save their own despoiled world. As preparation, the Sky People are attempting to infiltrate the Na'vis by linking human consciousness to Pandoran avatars. Thus, an all-American jarhead like Jake finds himself inside a 12-foot-tall, blue-striped, yellow-eyed, flat-nosed humanoid with an elegant tail and cute little goat ears—and he can walk!

Beside himself with joy, Jake bursts out of the hospital and, before too long, finds himself alone in a mad jungle surrounded by six-armed neon tetra lemurs, flying purple people eaters, hammer-headed triceratopses, and nasty leather demon dogs. Jake is saved by the jungle girl Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), known in pidgin English as Pocahontas, and brought back to the Na'vi village to meet her father, the king (full-blooded Cherokee Wes Studi, here playing a good Indian). The Na'vis think that investigating Jake will allow them to understand the Sky People. (Little do they know . . . heh, heh, heh.)

The Sky People are divided into hawks and doves, with Jake as a sort of double double-agent, simultaneously reporting back to the most militant Marine meanie (Stephen Lang) as well as the tough but tender biologist (Sigourney Weaver, in full Ripley mode). The former wants him to find out "what the blue monkeys want." The latter knows that the Na'vi are ultra-green—a New Age matriarchal eco-friendly culture spiritually connected to Every Living Thing. (This capacity is better imagined than demonstrated to judge from the mass swaying transubstantiation ceremony held several times beneath a cosmic weeping willow.)

Avatar seamlessly synthesizes live action, animation, performance-capture, and CGI to create what is essentially a non-participatory computer game: Jurassic Park's menagerie running wild in The Matrix's double eXistenZ. When, waking up back in the lab, Jake realizes that "out there is the true world and in here is the dream," you know that it's time for him to go native, complete with tender blue-monkey sex ("We are mated for life"). As in a Jack Kirby comic book, the muscular, coming-atcha visuals trump the movie's camp dialogue and corny conception, but only up to a point. Jake's initiation rites notwithstanding, Avatar itself doesn't reawaken until the bang-up final battle—aerial cavalry incinerating holy sites and bombing the bejesus out of the blue-monkey redskin slopes, Jake uniting the Na'vi clans with inspirational martial music. (The requisite Celtic keening is withheld until the end credits, accompanied by a Celine Dion clone singing in Na'vish.)

Long before the third act, however, the ideologically sensitive will realize that 20th Century Fox has taken a half-billion-dollar risk (counting PR) that perhaps only Rupert Murdoch's studio could afford to take. The rampaging Sky People are heavy-handedly associated with the Bush administration. They chortle over the failure of diplomacy, wage what is referred to as "some sort of shock-and-awe campaign" against the Na'vis, and goad each other with Cheney one-liners like, "We will blast a crater in their racial memory so deep they won't come within a thousand clicks of here ever again!" Worse, the viewer is encouraged to cheer when uniformed American soldiers are blown out of the sky and instead root for a bunch of naked, tree-hugging aborigines led by a renegade white man on a humongous orange polka-dot bat.

Let no one call so spectacular an instance of political correctness run amok "entertaining." I look forward to the Limbaugh-Hannity take on this grimly engaging development—which will perhaps be roguishly interpreted by Sarah Palin as the last stand of indigenous peoples (like Todd!) and women warriors against Washington bureaucrats. At least Avatar won't win James Cameron a Nobel Peace Prize—but, then again, it just might.

filmcritic.com (Bill Gibron) review [5/5]

James Cameron's "Avatar" takes place on a planet called Pandora, where American corporations and their military mercenaries have set up bases to mine a surpassingly precious mineral called unobtanium. The vein of awe mined by the movie is nothing short of unbelievium. This is a new way of coming to your senses—put those 3-D glasses on your face and you come to a sense of delight that quickly gives way to a sense of astonishment. The planetary high doesn't last. The closer the story comes to a lumbering parable of colonialist aggression in the jungles of an extragalactic Vietnam, the more the enchantment fizzles. Much of the time, though, you're transfixed by the beauty of a spectacle that seems all of a piece. Special effects have been abolished, in effect, since the whole thing is so special.

The word "avatar" wasn't invented by Mr. Cameron, though everything else in the production seems to have been. (With the help, that is, of a few thousand colleagues around our own planet.) In Hindu myth, an avatar is a deity descended to earth in human form. In computer parlance it's an icon that represents a person in virtual reality or cyberspace. In the movie it's a manufactured body that's remotely controlled—not by some hand-held clicker but through brain waves generated by a human being who functions as the body's driver.

If this sounds technobabbly in the description, it's dazzling in the execution. The main driver-to-be—or, rather, animating spirit-to-be—is an ex-Marine, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) whose combat injuries have left him confined to a wheelchair. He's part of a scientific program run by a tough cookie named Grace Augustine; she's played by Sigourney Weaver. The program has begun to explore Pandora, whose atmosphere is toxic to earthlings, using avatars with recombinant DNA—part human, part alien—constructed along the lines of the planet's dominant species; they're very tall, very blue, Giacometti-slender and Superman-agile. The movie offers several lyrical passages, but one of the best belongs to Jake. It's when he inhabits his avatar for the first time and discovers that his new legs can take his lithe new body through some of the most sublime scenery on not-Earth.

No description of that scenery will spoil the experience of the 3-D process (which dispenses with the usual eye-catching tricks) or the seamless integration of live action, motion-capture, animation, computer-generated images and whatever other techniques went into the mix—maybe witchcraft or black magic. (I haven't seen the IMAX version; that's for my next viewing.) Some of the flora suggest an anhydrous Great Barrier Reef (airborne jellyfish, coral-colored conical plants that spiral down to almost-nothingness when touched) or, in the case of Pandora's floating mountains, represent an homage to the Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki. As for the fauna, they're not only prodigiously varied—flamboyant dragons, six-legged steeds, elephantine chargers with heads like battering rams, nature-blue in tooth and claw—but creatures with convincing lives of their own, unlike the cheerfully bizarre creations that filled the Mos Eisley cantina in "Star Wars."

Then there are the indigènes, the French term for natives being appropriate because Pandora evokes the Indochina that existed before France's doomed war against an indigenous insurgency, as well as the Vietnam that became a battleground for American troops. They're called the Na'vi, and to describe them as humanoid may be to defame them, inasmuch as they, unlike most of the film's Americans, revere their planet and live in harmony with their surroundings. The most beautiful of the Na'vis—at least the one with the most obvious star quality—is a female warrior named Neytiri. As most of our planet already knows from the publicity, Jake falls for her in a big but complicated way.

Big because Neytiri, as played by Zoë Saldana, is so alluring—cerulean-skinned, lemon-eyed, wasp-waisted, long-tailed, anvil-nosed, wiggly-eared (trust me, it's all seductive) and given to feral snarls in the heat of battle. But complicated because Jake is secretly working both sides of the jungle. He's in love with Neytiri, and soon embraces her people's values. (Yes, there's circumstantial evidence that Mr. Cameron knows about "Dances With Wolves," along with "Tarzan," "Green Mansions," "Frankenstein," "Princess Mononoke," "South Pacific," "Spartacus" and "Top Gun.") At the same time, Jake is spying for a gimlet-eyed military commander, Col. Miles Quaritch. (Stephen Lang proves that broad, cartoony acting can also be good acting.) The evil colonel has promised the ex-Marine a procedure that will restore the use of his paralyzed legs in exchange for information that will help chase the Na'vi from their sacred land, which happens to be the only place where unobtainium can be obtained.

It's no reflection on Mr. Worthington or Ms. Saldana, both of whom are impressive—though how, exactly, do you judge such high-tech hybrid performances?—that their interspecies love story lacks the heat of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet clinging to each other on the storm-swept decks of "Titanic." Teenage girls will not return to see this film half a dozen times or more unless they possess a rogue gene for wigglable ears. But then "Avatar" revises the relationship between everyone in the audience and the characters on screen. Actors have always been avatars; they've always represented our hopes and fears in the virtual reality of motion pictures. In much of this film, however, they've been transformed by technology into a new and ambiguous breed of entertainment icon—not the quasihuman denizens of "The Wizard of Oz," or the overgrown glove puppets of "The Polar Express," but nearly palpable fantasy figures that inhabit a world just beyond our reach.

The fantasy quotient of "Avatar" takes its first major hit when the Na'vi take their first hit from the American military. Mr. Cameron has devoted a significant chunk of his movie to a dark, didactic and altogether horrific evocation of Vietnam, complete with napalm, Agent Orange and helicopter gunships (one of which is named Valkyrie in a tip of the helmet to "Apocalypse Now.") Whatever one may think of the politics of this antiwar section, two things can be said with certainty: it provokes an adrenalin rush (what that says of our species is another matter), and it feels a lot better when it's over.

Other narrative problems intrude. For all its political correctness about the goodness of the Na'vis, "Avatar" lapses into lurid savage rituals, complete with jungle drums, that would not have seemed out of place in the first "King Kong." While Ms. Weaver's performance is a strong one, it isn't clear what her character is doing as an avatar, or how the Na'vi perceive her. What couldn't be clearer, though, is that Mr. Cameron's singular vision has upped the ante for filmed entertainment, and given us a travelogue unlike any other. I wouldn't want to live on Pandora, mainly because of the bad air, but I'm glad to have paid it a visit.

Going Na'vi: Why Avatar's politics are more revolutionary than its images Sam Adams from The Onion A.V. Club

Avatar and the American Man-child zunguzungu December 23, 2009

Avatar and American Imperialism zunguzungu January 4, 2010

The Auteurs [Glenn Kenny]

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley) review

Avatar - Why all the hype? 2-part essay from Sci-Fi Movie, also from Fantastique: Avatar - To 3D or not to 3D?

Avatar - How They Did It 4-page essay from Fantastique

More photos (photo gallery # 1) from Sci-Fi Movie, and Part 2: Avatar photo gallery

fantastiqueZINE [James O'Ehley] (IMAX)

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B-]

n:zone [D.Kelly]

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [4/5]

Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [4/5]

Pajiba (Steven Lloyd Wilson) review

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]

Slant Magazine review [2/4] Nick Schager

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [2/4]

The Onion A.V. Club review [C] Scott Tobias

About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [A]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [1/5]

Film School Rejects [Neil Miller]

The Cinema Source (Ryan Hamelin) review [A+]

CHUD.com (Nick Nunziata) review

theartsdesk.com [Jasper Rees]

Screen International (Mike Goodridge) review

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [C] also seen here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) - [Andrew L. Urban + Louise Keller]

AVATAR Ken Rudolph’s Movie Page

Screenjabber.com Justin Bateman

IFC.com [Alonso Duralde]

CNN Showbiz (Tom Charity) review

Twitch [Mike Sizemore]

Feo Amante [E.C. McMullen Jr.]

Gizmodo (Mark Wilson) review

Little White Lies [Limara Salt]

CineSnob.net (Kiko Martinez) review [B+]

Conservative backlash against "Avatar" Andrew Leonard from Salon, January 5, 2010

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman

Time Out London (Tom Huddleston) review [2/6]

The Guardian (Andrew Pulver) review

Peter Bradshaw reviews Avatar The Guardian, December 17, 2009

Avatar: review of reviews of James Cameron's 3D space opera Catherine Shoard from The Guardian, December 11, 2009

King of the world? David Thomson from The Guardian, December 17, 2009, also seen here: David Thomson on James Cameron

Avatar shows cinema's weakness, not its strength David Cox from The Guardian, December 21, 2009

The Daily Telegraph (Sukhdev Sandhu) review [3/5]

The Daily Telegraph (Mark Monahan) review [4/5]

James Cameron says Avatar a message to stop damaging environment brief comments from The Daily Telegraph, December 11, 2009

The Independent (Anna Keir) review [4/5]

Cameron sees metaphor for Earth in 'Avatar' a brief chat with the director from The Independent, December 11, 2009

Avatar: James Cameron's rhapsody in blue Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post, also seen here: Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

Sinking in $380 million on 'Titanic's' director Michael White from The Washington Post, December 18, 2009

Austin Chronicle review [4/5] Marc Savlov

San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review December 18, 2009

Fan Fever Is Rising for Debut of ‘Avatar’ Michael Cieply from The New York Times, April 24, 2009

Blockbuster Trailer: The Selling of ‘Avatar’ Michael Cieply and Dave Itzkoff from The New York Times, August 21, 2009

The ‘Avatar’ Trailer: What Did We Just See? Dave Itzkoff from The New York Times, August 21, 2009

A Movie’s Budget Pops From the Screen Michael Cieply from The New York Times, November 8, 2009

Film: Alternate World, Alternate Technology John Anderson interviews the director from The New York Times, December 10, 2009

Video Game Review | 'Avatar: The Game': Fighting an Energy Crisis With Very Little Energy Seth Schiesel from The New York Times, December 17, 2009

David Brooks: The Messiah Complex David Brooks editorial from The New York Times, January 9, 2010

Campanella, Juan José

THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (El secreto de sus ojos) B 88

Argentina Spain (127 mi) 2009 ‘Scope Official Web Site

The Argentina that's coming isn't taught in Harvard. —Inspector Báez (José Luis Gioia)

Hard to fathom how any jury of film-goers would pick this film over the lyrical grace and sinister happenings in Michael Haneke’s chilling THE WHITE RIBBON, or the pulsating energy and ultimately transforming prison drama of Jacques Audiard’s intensely riveting THE PROPHET, or even the generational violence confronting mixed Arab and Jewish neighborhoods from Israel in Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani’s AJAMI, each of which addresses incendiary hot button issues with much more flair than this conventional DR. ZHIVAGO-like love story set against a police procedural murder investigation during the rise of the fascist military dictatorship in Argentina’s Dirty War in the mid 70’s, historical themes that barely scratch the surface and instead relies upon the familiarity of the viewer. It came as a complete surprise to me that the director of the Academy Award winning foreign film category this year had already directed 16 episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on American television, paying his dues, so to speak, in the crime genre before adapting an Eduardo Sacheri novel and then directing, editing and even producing the film. Ricardo Darín plays Benjamín Espósito, a criminal investigator who works out of the office of the court rather than a police station, establishing the evidence needed for the district attorneys, but his position is viewed more like a legal aide or clerk, where there’s a distinctive social divide and pay scale between the two classes. Told through a series of flashbacks, the film moves back and forth in time from the present in 2000, where a retired Espósito is attempting to write a novel about an old murder case, to Buenos Aires in 1974 when it actually happened, filled with a murky backdrop of political corruption. The attorney he works for is Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), an American educated beauty who is part of the wealthy Argentinean aristocracy, and as such is off limits to Espósito, despite his immediate and everpresent fascination with her. The film is as much about exposing their undeclared love as it is about re-examining the implications of a decades-old murder case.

Espósito is at first staggered by the degree of brutality associated with a vicious rape and murder case of Liliana Coloto (Carla Quevedo), a young newlywed whose husband Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago) impresses him with his steadfast devotion, even after her death, as after the police beat the confessions out of a few innocent laborers, immediately exposed as fraudulent by Espósito himself who comes to blows with the judge on the case, the police simply drop their interest leaving the case unsolved and leaving Espósito and Morales alone as the only two in the world who still care. Espósito’s assistant, Pablo Sandoval, colorfully played by Guillermo Francella, spends more time in local bars than at his desk, but he and his drunkard associates have a brilliant breakthrough on the case which comes from understanding the nature of having an obsession. Suddenly the camera is whooshed into a giant soccer stadium, swooping in from on high with the stylish grandiosity of a Brian De Palma-like shot as Espósito is certain he’ll find his killer there, where miraculously, like finding a needle in a haystack, they do while the camera remains hot on his trail, chasing him through the innards of the stadium, all supposedly in the same unbroken shot where there’s admittedly an explosion of energy that is perhaps the highlight of the film. What follows, however, never lives up to that moment, relying instead on a theatrically induced confession, the kind that only happens in the world of television and the kind that would be inadmissable by any judge, but nonetheless Isidoro Gómez (Javier Godino) is sentenced to life imprisonment, an appropriate resolution for a country without the death penalty.

Soon afterwards, however, Gómez is seen free on the streets as part of the Presidential security detail, a stunning turn of events, released by the same judge Espósito fought with earlier in the film who reveals with blunt arrogance the new facts of life to an astonished Espósito, whose life is suddenly turned upside down by a miscarriage of justice on a national scale where sociopathic thugs and murderers are recruited by the secret police to do the nation’s dirty work in tracking down and interrogating suspected rebel terrorists, almost all of whom simply disappear without a trace. In the creepiest scene of the film, one right out of the horror genre, Gómez, brandishing his gun, gets on an elevator with Espósito and the district attorney, a scene that exposes just how vulnerable they are without protection and how impotent justice has become, a fitting metaphor for their extinguished romantic notions that play out like an old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama in a prolonged scene at the train station where parting is such sweet sorrow. People led such different lives then, so much so that now, when they look in the mirror at their reflection, they don’t recognize themselves anymore. It’s as if there was a memory fissure in their past reality that has never been put back into place properly, leaving them still with unanswered questions, wondering how it all could have happened in the first place, tacking on an optimistic ending to what was a particularly well edited, yet also formulaic film, where the romance was always yearned for, reduced to secondary consideration as reading between the lines becomes key, but somehow we’re to believe that it all rises into prominence again at the finish line—only in the movies. Shot on hi-def video, this unfortunately tends to wash out the colors and over-accentuates all the pores and crevices in the facial close-ups, which gives the appearance of wearing a rubber mask, all unintentional I’m sure, but hi-def video gives the picture such a low grade appearance. Since that’s the standard look of Hollywood films today, most viewers don’t give it a second look, but as this was awarded the Best Foreign Film of the year, it’s worth pointing out that the look is unexceptional.

SECRET IN THEIR EYES, THE (El secreto de sus ojos) (d. Juan José Campanella; Argentina) *** 3/4 Ken Rudolph’s Movie Site

A retired prosecutor revisits an unsatisfactorily closed 25 year old rape-murder case by writing a novel. This is the set-up for an intriguing cold case procedural which exposes layers of past Argentinian government corruption through flashbacks to the time of the case itself. This is another in a long series of great roles for star Ricardo Durín, who, with just a little make-up and subtle changes in posture, successfully plays his character at two different ages. It's an altogether fascinating puzzle of a film which kept me on tenterhooks throughout.

Time Out New York review [3/5] Keith Uhlich

Winner of the 2010 Best Foreign Film Oscar, this decade-hopping, tone-shifting mystery-thriller-romance from Argentina is about as deep as a kiddie pool, which isn’t to say it’s an unpleasant frolic. Separated by time and circumstance, retired criminal-court employee Benjamín Esposito (Darín) and his former-superior-cum-unrequited-love, Irene (Villamil), revisit an unresolved case from years before. It’s a lurid little tale of a beautiful woman raped and murdered, a doting husband (Rago) who wanted revenge and a killer (Godino) who went free thanks to the country’s tumultuous political climate.

Director Juan José Campanella—who recently put a butchtastic Kathy Griffin through her paces on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit—does yeoman’s work, save for a faux single-take in a packed sports stadium that’s clearly devised to impress. The camera swoops in from above, settles among the crowd, and switches points of view with “look, Ma, no hands!” effortlessness as Esposito chases down a suspect. But it’s so enamored with its own brilliance that the people get lost in the swirl.

Not that there’s much to these characters to begin with, since they bow to the story mechanics rather than drive them. Everyone is more or less defined by their hair…or lack of it. (There are fake baldpates in this film that would make Telly Savalas sue for defamation.) Darín and Villamil make for an attractive couple, no matter what age-aiding prosthetics the makeup department throws at them. And the resolution of the murder plot—part O. Henry, part EC Comics—is an ironic lip-smacker that concludes the mostly rote proceedings on a giddy high note.

The Onion A.V. Club review [B-] Scott Tobias

It was considered surprising when this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film went to the Argentinean thriller The Secret In Their Eyes, which bested the higher-profile likes of A Prophet and The White Ribbon. But Secret turns out to be exactly the type of film the Academy traditionally honors: intelligent but conventional, an actor’s showcase with glossy production values, and a little too polite. To be fair, The Secret In Their Eyes lands higher than most on the prestige-o-meter; it turns the mysteries surrounding a graphic rape and murder into an ambitious, gratifyingly adult puzzle about love and loss, the perversions of the justice system, and how memory can illuminate and distort the truth. What it lacks is the passion and vision to bring all those ideas across. The film sprawls across two decades and 127 minutes, but there isn’t a memorable image in it.

Based on the novel by Eduardo Sacheri, The Secret In Their Eyes opens with Ricardo Darín, a retired criminal-court employee, struck by a sudden compulsion to write a novel about an unsolved rape and murder from 20 years earlier. He enlists the help of former colleague (and now judge) Soledad Villamil, for whom he still harbors romantic feelings, though she isn’t entirely enthusiastic about the project. Flashing back to the late ’70s, when the crime was committed, the film details how Darín and co-worker Guillermo Francella were originally involved in the case, and how sweeping political changes at the time fatally corrupted the investigation.

Writer-director Juan José Campanella (Son Of The Bride) has a lot of experience helming American TV procedurals like House and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and The Secret In Their Eyes wends smoothly through the complexities of the case and the political and romantic histories that inform it. Though unimpeachably intelligent and sophisticated, the film nonetheless has no grit under its fingernails: Here’s a story about a crime of passion, unrequited love, and political upheaval, yet Campanella keeps it all at arm’s length. Like his haunted lead character, he tries to tell a personal tale from a novelist’s distanced perspective, and in that, he’s successful to a fault.

An old Olivetti typewriter provides a running joke in "The Secret in Their Eyes," the Argentine drama that won a foreign-language Oscar last month—the machine can't type the letter 'A.' And the letter 'A' makes all the difference in the world when the hero inserts it in the middle of a one-word note, 'temo,' that he has written to himself. Then 'I fear' becomes 'I love you.' These are clever details in a drama that transcends cleverness. This beautiful film, directed with subtlety and grace by Juan José Campanella, really is about moving from fear to love.

The story begins in contemporary Buenos Aires, when Benjamin Espósito, a retired criminal investigator played by Ricardo Darín, decides to revisit a cold case—the brutal murder of a young woman—by writing a novel about it. In doing so he revisits his still-warm case of love for Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), a Cornell-educated lawyer, now a judge with a husband and children, who was a beautiful young prosecutor when they worked together a quarter of a century ago.

If you were diagramming the script, which the director and Eduardo Sacheri adapted from Mr. Sacheri's novel, you might divide it between these two elements, an unsolved murder and unresolved love. No movie in memory, though, is less schematic. Elements intertwine. Feelings emerge, recede, resurface. Wit and humor—and remnants of hope—sustain lives burdened with regret. The movie is very much a murder mystery, and very much a love story—in fact a pair of stories about obsessive love lived out by two men with ostensibly different attitudes toward the past, and very different outcomes. It's also a meditation on the passage of time and the uses of memory, an argument for never looking back—"You'll have a thousand pasts and no future," the murder victim's husband tells Benjamin (with what turns out to be startling irony)—and, in a romantic vein, an advertisement for acting on love at whatever time of life.

Exceptional movies are often about many things, and that's certainly the case with this one. I can't recall a more dramatic interrogation than the scene in which a suddenly ferocious Irene tries, to Benjamin's astonishment, to break an implacable suspect. Or a more engagingly odd couple than Benjamin and his colleague Sandoval, an investigator with a fondness for wry jokes and booze. Or a more poignant leave-taking, when Irene and Benjamin embrace but don't kiss, and fear trumps love. (All of it is enhanced by Félix Monti's burnished, sometimes brooding cinematography.)

Of the two previous films I've seen starring Ricardo Darín, "Son of the Bride," which was also directed by Mr. Campanella, is out of print on DVD—please, Sony Pictures Classics, reissue it—but "Nine Queens" remains available, and I've discussed it in more detail elsewhere on this page. A formidable actor with commanding star quality, Mr. Darín, who is in his sixties, plays Benjamin in his thirties persuasively—the actor's vitality is more important than his young-age makeup. In the present-day passages he makes the hero an aging sophisticate whose urbane demeanor conceals suppressed but far from extinguished passion. Ms. Villamil's Irene is quick-witted and alluring in the past and present alike. In a film of impeccable performances, three other standouts are Guillermo Francella, who plays Sandoval; Pablo Rago as Morales, the bereaved husband whose love was almost unfathomably pure; and Javier Godino as the prime suspect, Isidoro Gómez, a figure of pure malevolence at a time in the 1970s when Argentina's military dictatorship was bringing evil back into style.

In Buenos Aires in 1974, a criminal-court investigator, Benjamin Espósito (Ricardo Darín), arrives at a crime scene bantering and cursing with a colleague, and sees the naked corpse of a beautiful young woman. A conventional Argentine male with a passionate reverence for female splendor, he’s stunned into silence; he appears to take the woman’s violation (she has been raped, beaten, and murdered) as an affront to his personal sense of order. Not only does he relentlessly pursue the killer; he draws close to the woman’s husband, a bank employee named Morales (Pablo Rago), who remains obsessed with his dead wife for the rest of his life. “The Secret in Their Eyes,” which won the Oscar this year for best foreign-language film, is, I suppose, a legal thriller, but it’s powerfully and richly imagined: a genre-busting movie that successfully combines the utmost in romanticism with the utmost in realism—Espósito, it turns out, has a love of his own, which he’s too abashed to act on. A few scenes approach the melodramatic kitsch of a telenovela, but the writer-director, Juan José Campanella, working with the screenwriter and novelist Eduardo Sacheri, sends us deeper into mystery and passion; the movie presses forward with a rhapsodic urgency and with flashes of violence and pungent humor. “The Secret in Their Eyes” is a finely wrought, labyrinthine entertainment whose corners and passageways will be discussed by moviegoers for hours afterward as they exit into the cool night air.

The movie opens in 2000, and Espósito, gray-bearded, is at his desk, writing. It is twenty-five years after the murder, and the investigator, retired yet still fascinated by the case, is assembling his recollections of it. What he writes is played out by the actors, but he angrily throws away each recollection as an inadequate first draft, and that scene disappears from the screen. Campanella is seriously teasing us: Espósito may be dissatisfied with his prose, but what he depicts in these first-draft attempts actually happened (we see the scenes again later, in their proper place in the story). Back in 1974, Espósito chases the killer with the aid of his antic partner, Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), and their cautious superior, Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), a judge’s assistant. (In Argentina, judges act like D.A.s, investigating cases and indicting suspects.) Educated in the United States, Irene (as she’s referred to throughout) is a tall, brilliant upper-class beauty with a big head of black hair—think of a young South American Susan Sontag. She’s clearly on her way to the top (by 2000, she’s a powerful judge). Espósito is an intelligent man with penetrating dark eyes, but he’s not a lawyer, and the difference between them in income and status stops him from openly declaring his love for her, which she keeps hinting that she wants. Instead, he worries about Sandoval, an alcoholic genius who rises from the depths of a midday stupor in a bar and pulls together the clues that lead to the identity and the arrest of the murderer. Sandoval is a lovable mess, who, despite his gifts, can’t survive amid the chaos and the repression of Buenos Aires. The movie is haunted by missed opportunities and the meaningless, unhappy passage of time—the underside of obsession.

The murderer is a furtive creep named Gomez (Javier Godino), and what follows his capture is altogether startling. When Espósito, interrogating him, doesn’t get anywhere, Irene takes over. She turns the questioning into a sexual duel, taunting Gomez’s manhood, her words more wounding and more effective than a beating with brass knuckles. Campanella, who works in both the United States and Argentina, has directed numerous episodes of “Law & Order,” but what happens in this scene is not something you’ll see on American television. Irene understands the loathing of women at the heart of Argentine machismo; she plays a sarcastic bitch in order to provoke Gomez’s rage, and enjoys a triumph that pushes feminism beyond a critique of men—beyond ironic mockery, too—into a kind of legal-world performance art.

From scene to scene, the movie has an enormously vital swing to it. Espósito is a knight-errant of the law who seeks justice, and Sandoval is his Sancho Panza, while the judges (apart from Irene) are profane and corrupt political hacks; the back-and-forth among the court workers is juicy and explicit, sometimes hilarious, sometimes sinister, while the atmosphere outside the courts is savage. The dictator Juan Perón dies in 1974, and is succeeded by his wife, Isabel; it’s the time of the death squads, the disappearances, and legal anarchy. Gomez is freed by one of the judges and becomes a bully boy for the new fascist regime. He’s a serious threat to Espósito (Irene is protected by her wealthy family), and a provocation to Morales, the dead woman’s husband. Years go by, and, for most Argentineans, the time between the rule of the Peróns and the rise of democracy may be lost in a way that goes deeper than the lost love of two colleagues. Yet Campanella does no more than hint at the anguished political background of the story; he mostly sticks to his principal players, who are woven together in an increasingly intricate structure, revealed by an inventive and flexible camera. Campanella moves in for prolonged, emotionally wrenching closeups, as in a Garbo drama from the nineteen-thirties. He also does fluent and muscular sweeps: when Espósito and Sandoval first discover Gomez, in a soccer stadium, the camera, exploding with animal energy, pursues him, loses him as he ducks down a ramp, picks him up again. There may be no “signature” shot here, as in the work of an established auteur, but there’s an effortless mastery, from moment to moment, of whatever the dramatic situation requires.

Slant Magazine [Aaron Cutler]

Twitch [Todd Brown]

ScreenCrave [Tom von Logue Newth]

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3.5/4]

Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner) review [4/4]

Movies Kick Ass [Jose Solís]

The Oscar-Winning Ridiculousness of The Secret in Their Eyes Nicolas Rapold from The Village Voice

HollywoodChicago.com (Patrick McDonald) review [4.0/5]

Cole Smithey [Cole Smithey]

smartcine.com

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Hollywood Reporter review Deborah Young, also seen here: Reuters [Deborah Young]

Variety (Jonathan Holland) review

The Globe and Mail (Rick Groen) review [4/4]

Boston Globe (Wesley Morris) review [1.5/4]

Miami Herald [Rene Rodriguez]

Dirty War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Argentina Dirty War 1976 - 1983 Global Security

The Dirty War in Argentina National Security Archive

Argentina: Secret U.S. Documents Declassified on Dirty War Atrocities National Security Archive

Campbell, Martin

BEYOND BORDERS C- 69

USA (127 mi) 2003

A film that supposedly travels into Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechnya can't be all bad, and there was a relevant story to be told about the difficulties of getting humanitarian aid to those that need it. Unfortunately, it's not told in this film, which is instead filled with too many clichés, sometimes resembling the Christian Missionary Television Network, with a truly bad performance by Angelina Jolie who just seemed too immature and way over her head in this film.

Beyond Borders David Denby from the New Yorker

High-minded romantic drama set against "strife-torn" (there is no other phrase) backgrounds. The sensationally charismatic Clive Owen is Nick Callahan, a fiery London doctor who devotes himself to the mangled poor in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechnya. Angelina Jolie, with a witchy drape of black hair surrounding her face, is Sarah Jordan, a married American who keeps leaving her husband (Linus Roache, in a pathetic role) and traipsing after the doctor, showing up with supplies and keen moral intuitions. They have stormy arguments that are, one supposes, a kind of relief workers' foreplay, and finally get passionate in various uncomfortable climes. The movie is not worthless—some of the backgrounds are vivid and scary—but it can't break free of its old-Hollywood silliness.

EDGE OF DARKNESS B 88

USA Great Britain (117 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

Like the recently released British TV drama, The Red Riding Trilogy (2009), which is a set of 3 movies written by the same man but directed by 3 different directors, all having a common serial killing storyline as well as corruption within the Yorkshire police force, this American film is based on a 6-part 1985 British TV mini-series, each just under an hour in length, where both just happen to be directed by the same man. This gives him particular insight into the material where he transplants British nuclear fears of the 80’s into the American present, using a murky governmental cover up to add special interest. This is like a trip into those 1970’s paranoid thrillers of THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975) or PARALLAX VIEW (1974) where high echelon elected representatives or uniquely specialized CIA agents cozy up to professional contract killers in order to protect the secrecy of their operations, which are usually lucrative defense contracts working on dangerous, top secret missions where there’s plenty of money involved and they don’t wish to disupt the cash pipeline. Closer to home would be SILKWOOD (1983), a fairly accurate accounting based on the true story about Karen Silkwood, a low level employee at a nuclear power plant who becomes aware of the power plant’s practice of exposing employees to dangerously high levels of radiation, who, on her way to spill the beans to a newspaper reporter, is suddenly killed in a car accident under suspicious circumstances that have yet to be solved. Similarly, a murky shadow of doubt hovers over the death of Amma Craven (Bojana Novakovic), the daughter of Boston Police detective Tommy Craven (Mel Gibson), gunned down at their front door. Initially suspecting the bullet was meant for him, his inquiries soon lead to a governmental cover up regarding his daughter, who was a research scientist at a private defense contractor called Northmoor, where she was killed before she could blow the whistle on some of the company’s illegal practices.

Of course, none of this is known right away, but takes extensive investigative visits to various people involved, some who fear for their lives, usually company employees, most of whom believe they are being followed or under surveillance, and the corporate executives (Danny Huston) who prefer lying to his face, hiding behind the ambigious phrase, “That’s classified information.” Risking his own life several times over, but hell bent on solving his daughter’s murder, he soon learns she was placed on a terrorist watch group, probably by the same company she worked for, making her an easy scapegoat in the event they incurred problems they couldn’t publicly explain. Making this even more murky are the Deep Throat visits to Craven by Ray Winstone, the burly, no nonsense professional fixer who was hired by the company (off the books) to sort this mess out. But interestingly, his allegiance is not necessarily with the company, as he’s a strange and mysterious figure who seems to operate under his own rules. The scenes between he and Gibson are among the best in the film due to their undisputed credibility for cutting through the bullshit. They are a pleasure to watch. But meanwhile, he discovers his daughter was poisoned by radioactive milk that’s been sitting in his refrigerator, probably infecting him as well. But since he doesn’t go see anyone about it, it’s an open question that is never really answered, because once the company senses the trouble he could cause them, they have their own way of dealing with it which is much more direct, and includes tasering him into a state of unconsciousness before locking him into a room blasted with toxic radiation. Knowing the limits this places on his life, his sense of urgency and desperation only grows greater, as he’s running out of time.

Mel Gibson in revenge fantasies have been poetry in motion since he broke into the business in MAD MAX (1975), and despite not having acted in a movie in 8 years, preferring instead to direct several controversial films, he hasn’t missed a beat. One of the visually spectacular images in this film is the picture of Northmoor itself, which like a planetarium is a concrete structure that noticeably sits atop a rolling, tree-lined hill overlooking a sleepy river that snakes its way through the Berkshires, where through the floor to ceiling glass windows of the building one can gaze at the pastoral beauty for miles in very direction. It’s curiously ironic that such a conspicuous modern architectural masterpiece would be the site of what are supposedly top secret operations. But those spectacular windows in particular hide the transparency they suggest, as the criminal protection racket they really operate actually takes place behind locked doors and could just as easily be an underground bunker. There’s an odd bit of whimsy in this film as well, as Mel routinely talks to the ghost of his dead daughter, which becomes a pronounced theme, including the use of flashback home movie images, all of which connects the dots between the living and the dead and the precarious position we face from our own impending mortality. In its own way, this movie suggests its our own future that lies in jeopardy unless we open our eyes to the masterful deception that is taking place in the dark corridors of our own government.

Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [2/5]

We may have moved from veiled Cold War to explicit global terror in the 25 years since the excellent, UK-set nuclear conspiracy thriller ‘Edge of Darkness’ first aired on the BBC, directed by Martin Campbell (‘Casino Royale’) and written by Troy Kennedy Martin. It’s also been some eight, traumatic post-9/11 years since Mel Gibson’s last thespian outing in M Night Shyamalan’s ‘Signs’. But time seems to have stood still in Campbell’s drab remake for the big screen. With its nuclear concerns and old-fashioned heroics, it feels like a period piece.

In condensing the original mini-series into a conventional, two-hour package, scriptwriters William Monahan and Andrew Bovell have sadly sacrificed some of the original’s cultural specificity and its slow-burn quality. Moreover, in relocating from northern England to the US’s Eastern Seaboard, they have jettisoned much of the chilling atmospherics. Craven, the widowed police officer whose engineer daughter (Bojana Novakovic) is gunned down on a home visit, is now one of Boston PD’s finest; and if it’s true that Gibson, in the role, recalls the earnest intensity and investigative zeal of Bob Peck’s original performance, he also brings a lot of unwanted ‘Lethal Weapon’-era manic mannerisms to the part.

It’s basically a ‘little guy against the system’ movie, literally so in many of Campbell’s framings – for instance, where he miniaturises Gibson’s now slightly wizened figure against the looming bulk of Danny Huston’s smarmy corporate bad guy. However, Ray Winstone, as a boozy high-level fixer in pointed contrast to Craven’s ginger-ale-drinking sobriety, does offer good value in what is otherwise a surprisingly low-wattage and anonymously directed thriller.

The Onion A.V. Club review [C] Keith Phipps

Mel Gibson has been away from the cameras for a while, and he appears a little scuffed up in Edge Of Darkness, his first starring role since Signs in 2002. He looks greyer and craggier than before, and his stiff movements make it easy to forget his former athletic grace. Whatever the source of that wear and tear, it at least helps him look the part in this revenge thriller, which casts him as a Boston cop looking for answers after seeing his daughter (Bojana Novakovic) gunned down on his own front porch. Director Martin Campbell, adapting a well-regarded BBC miniseries he directed in 1985, goes further than merely failing to hide the ravages of time, trouble, and hard living. He puts his diminutive tough-guy star next to actors who tower over him, in shots that subtly drive home the same point: As often as we’ve seen Gibson get out of scrapes in the past, his odds don’t look so good this time.

Those choices serve the film, too, which compels Gibson—sporting a thick, occasionally believable Boston accent—to unravel a far-reaching conspiracy involving his daughter’s employer, a private industrial concern overseen by a silky, amoral Danny Huston, whose character needs only a mute Korean manservant to qualify him for a supervillain license. With each lead Gibson follows, he discovers he’s taken on not a dragon, but a many-headed hydra.

Edge Of Darkness gathers all the elements of a smart, politically resonant thriller, but leaves them only half-assembled. That might partly be due to the need to compress a sprawling plot into a two-hour frame; a pattern of investigation, interrogation, exposition, fisticuffs, and repetition takes over the movie after a while. But it’s mostly because Gibson crowds out anyone and anything competing with the displays of righteous fury he’s leaned on since Braveheart. In spite of attempts to make him seem vulnerable—which include a bunch of maudlin conversations with his character’s dead daughter—this is really a movie about the power, and grim pleasure, taken by a man building up a static charge of rage as he searches for the right target. Huston, Ray Winstone (playing a puppetmaster of puppetmasters), and other recognizable faces all do fine character work, but Edge Of Darkness quickly devolves into another showcase for Gibson’s snorting-bull act, a routine he could happily have shelved during his time off.

theartsdesk [Adam Sweeting]

If you were looking for a director for the movie version of Edge of Darkness, you'd have thought you couldn't do better than Martin Campbell, who made the original 1985 series for BBC television. He's now a bona fide Hollywood ace, with a string of major TV credits and hit movies like Casino Royale and the Zorro flicks to his name. But not even a Tinseltown budget can bribe lightning to strike twice, and whatever fortuitous combination of timing and subject matter turned the BBC series into an instant historic event, it's difficult to imagine that happening to its big-screen incarnation.

While Campbell and screenwriters William Monahan and Andrew Bovell have transplanted the action from Yorkshire to Boston, Massachusetts, they have at least stuck to the basic outlines of Troy Kennedy Martin's original. When his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) is killed by a shotgun blast on the doorstep of his home, grief-stricken police detective Thomas Craven (a world-weary Mel Gibson) is naturally determined to track down her killer. Early assumptions that Craven himself was the hitman's intended target crumble as he unearths evidence that Emma was involved with an environmental group trying to expose a conspiracy involving illicit nuclear weapons at the Northmoor defence plant, where she was a low-level employee. Shadowy hitmen and intelligence figures start coming out of the woodwork to make sure Craven's discoveries never see the light of day. Craven goes into lone-wolf mode and makes it his mission to find answers and avenge his daughter.

The snag is, where the original Edge... brilliantly captured a mood of fear and dread about the nuclear industry, intensified by the authoritarian mood of the Thatcher-Reagan years, the course of events over the last 25 years mean that we've become woefully inured to the routine scale of corporate and governmental lies and deception (there's a televised inquiry currently in progress along these very lines). Indeed, the somewhat cursory manner in which the movie introduces us to a bent lawyer, a corrupt Senator and a murderous business executive, not to mention a far-from-upstanding Boston police officer, impart the dispiriting sense that the film-makers are suppressing a yawn and going through the motions. It's hardly surprising when, after two hours, you find you've just sat through a creakingly average conspiracy thriller, lacking a single character you could really care tuppence about. Not even Ray Winstone (pictured below) can kick much life into the vaguely-defined security fixer Darius Jedburgh.

The Kennedy Martin original was also distinctive in articulating a resounding ecological warning, setting up a confrontation between mankind's malign, misguided tinkering and the mythic power of Mother Nature. Hence he called his eco-activist group GAIA, referring to a hypothesis in which earth is its own living biosystem. In the movie the activists belong to something called Night Flower, and references to any kind of spiritual dimension have been reduced to Craven's imaginary conversations with his dead daughter.

You'd have to conclude that Campbell and his writers have missed a major trick here. James Cameron's Avatar may be simplistic, but vital to its huge success is surely its timely connection to issues of ecological awareness and protecting the environment. This might have been a major weapon in the Edge of Darkness locker too, but it makes no attempt to reach for anything beyond the literal surface of the action. The story's emotional force supposedly derives from a lonely man trying to deal with the aftermath of his much-loved daughter's murder, but Edge-the-movie settles instead into a routine shoot-'em-up where stone-faced Mel metes out comeuppance to the scumbags. While he's committed to avenging Emma's death, he shows no glimmer of comprehension of the issues that she considered important enough to risk her life for. As remakes go, file this alongside The Italian Job and Get Carter.

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Nick Pinkerton) review

"Did you shoot my daughtah?" is the question posed, in flat-voweled Bostonian, in the trailer for Edge of Darkness. And Mel Gibson, much-bereaved and much-vengeful, from Hamlet to Ransom to Revolutionary America, sets out to settle another score.

Gibson is Thomas Craven: veteran, homicide detective, lonesome widower. His daughter, a post-grad intern at a research and development firm in the Berkshires, is visiting home when somebody fires a gun in front of his house. Craven, left lonelier, wants to find out who did it, the first link in a long chain of whos and whys that leads him up the food chain. As in the film's predecessor—a Yorkshire-set 1985 BBC2 serial, with Bob Peck as Craven—the investigation of what's supposedly an open-and-shut botched payback killing by an old collar opens into something much bigger, revealing a sweaty commingling of private and public sectors.

Director Martin Campbell, most famous for James Bond relaunches, is revisiting old material—as a hot-handed U.K. TV director, he shot the original six-part, six-hour cult-classic miniseries from a Troy Kennedy Martin script. For the film, mysteries unspool more quickly, while peripheral characters and "color" scenes without expository purpose—Peck bawling on the M1, a Brit ballroom competition on TV—have disappeared.

What's left is propulsive and streamlined, with Craven more single-mindedly focused on finding and damning the guilty. When Peck went to question his daughter's boyfriend, it was a psychological duel, the uncomfortably intimate father-daughter relationship a jealous undercurrent. When Gibson makes the same visit, it's for a knife fight (his paternal love now purged of anything unseemly). This change in character may not have been intended—there have been rumors of reshoots to punch up the action at the studio's behest—but this Edge is a vigilante movie. Which isn't to say it's simply a downgrade from Anglo sophistication to Hollywood slam-bang. Given the film's focus on bereavement—it is haunted by the dead—bodies drop with actual weight here. And the culmination is that rare shootout that can truly be called cathartic.

Kennedy Martin's Darkness unfolded in the shadows of Cold War espionage and the arms race of the Reagan-Thatcher era. The 2010 incarnation is still political: Danny Huston's man-behind-the-curtain CEO disguises his rogue dealings in "jihadist dirty bombs" as experiments in clean, green energy. He has pictures of himself shaking hands with Bush II and Nancy Pelosi and, in what would have seemed a sci-fi touch a year ago, one of the implicated parties signing off on his private "security fiefdom" is a Republican senator from Massachusetts.

Some of the off-the-record Corridors of Power stuff is well done, but the scenes feel haphazardly placed, not quite of the same movie as the Gibson revenge flick. Ray Winstone's Jedburgh, a bon viveur government troubleshooter with ambiguous loyalties, who consults on and monitors Craven's investigation, never quite integrates either. The 1985 Jedburgh was a CIA good ol' boy in London—and while it's fun to watch Brit Winstone and Gibson trying to out-heavy one another, the transatlantic role-reversal doesn't quite work. Most Americans in 2010 don't fear the crown in the way the average Briton of '85 was concerned about American influence. At times it seems as if Jedburgh's sole mission is to deliver the script's more portentous lines: "We live awhile, and then we die sooner than we planned."

Gibson has been absent from the American screen since 2004. He's squandered his industry clout with risks both planned (The Passion of the Christ) and, assumedly, not (the passion for conspiracy theory). One wonders—certainly Warner Bros. suits will—if off-screen events have made it impossible for audiences to swallow him as a character. Yet Gibson still knows what he does best, as a star should, and creates tension just from never letting the tears poised in his eyes fall. Onscreen much of the time, thicker and more creased than you remember, he can make this rather unshapely movie seem taut.

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [2/5] also seen here: DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3/4]

Slant Magazine [Ryan Stewart]

filmcritic.com (Bill Gibron) review [3/5]

Screen International (Mike Goodridge) review

Screenjabber review David Franklin

Eye for Film (Donald Munro) review [3/5]

DVD Talk (Tyler Foster) review [1/5]

Film Freak Central review Ian Pugh

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [C] also seen here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

Total Sci-Fi [Matt McAllister]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) - [Andrew L. Urban + Louise Keller]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C]

RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [C-]

Little White Lies [Tom Seymour]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [2/4]

Frank's Reel Reviews review Loron Hays

FromTheBalcony [Bill Clark]

Mel Gibson: back with a vengeance John Hiscock interviews Mel Gibson from The Daily Telegraph, January 21, 2010

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman

The Hollywood Reporter review Michael Rechtshaffen

The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [2/4]

The Daily Telegraph review [2/5] Tim Robey

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [1/5]

Austin Chronicle review [2/5] Marc Savlov

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review also seen here: Los Angeles Times [Michael Phillips]

1949 Living Room in the Berkshires on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

1940s Interiors - a set on Flickr

Grasshopper Chair by Saarinen - The Mid-Century Modernist

Campion, Jane

Campion, Jane Art and Culture

Jane Campion’s lush study of repression, "The Piano," contains an enduring image: high cliffs tower over a deserted beach, waves crashing and rolling upon the cold sand. Deposited in the tide is a black piano, a misplaced presence seemingly dropped from heaven. It is a solitary signifier of humanity in the wild heart of nature.

The film's story focuses on Ada (played by Holly Hunter), who arrives in New Zealand as a mail-order bride. Ada is mute, presumably stripped of her voice by the patriarchal forces of the Victorian era. The piano represents her sole means of expression: a symbol for freedom, sexuality, and the romantic vision of life.

Such are the symbols and characters typically explored by Campion, whose films address social pressures and the prisons of femininity. Her first feature, "Two Friends" (1986), tells the story of a pair of girls whose childhood bond is torn apart as they each adapt differently to imminent womanhood. One retains her prim and proper schoolgirl ways, while the other becomes a full-blown punk. The innocence of their friendship is destroyed by the external demands of gender and sexuality. "Sweetie," Campion's next film, explores similar tensions between two sisters, one of whom is "normal" but deeply insecure, while the other is outrageous, imperious, and mentally ill.

Perhaps Campion's most disturbing look at "abnormal" women comes in 1990's "An Angel at my Table," her film about the autobiographical writing of Janet Frame. Gifted but stigmatized by her impoverished upbringing and odd manners, Frame was diagnosed as schizophrenic and forcibly institutionalized for eight years. The film is terrifying in its portrayal of padded rooms, shock therapy, and the threat of lobotomy. Because she uses her art to retain her unique identity, Frame is the type of subject that attracts Campion.

Campion herself is no stranger to the pressure to conform: she knows the trials of being a female director in a field dominated by men. Yet even her more recent, big-budget projects persist in their focus on women's struggle for self-definition. "The Portrait of a Lady" (1996), adapted from the Henry James novel, asks us to identify with its heroine's efforts to break from a manipulative marriage.

And her efforts have been noticed: Campion was the first female director to receive the prized Palme d’Or at Cannes. She was originally given the award for her early short, "Peel," then won it again for "The Piano." "The Piano" also brought her an Academy Award for best original screenplay.

TCMDB profile from Turner Classic Movies

Along with Australian directors Gillian Armstrong, Jocelyn Moorhouse and Shirley Barrett, Jane Campion has emerged as a major feminist filmmaker. She has been responsible for some of the most acclaimed films to have originated from Down Under since the late 1980s. Her features all have one thing in common: a powerful, courageous woman as a central figure. From Genevieve Lemon's unhinged "Sweetie" (1989) to Kerry Fox's mentally troubled Janet Frame in "An Angel at My Table" (1990) to Holly Hunter's mute Ada in "The Piano" (1993) to Nicole Kidman's manipulated Isabel Archer in "The Portrait of a Lady" (1996), the lead in a Campion film provides a showcase for the actress and advances the director's desire to display private, often erotic, sides of women rarely portrayed in conventional Hollywood fodder. Although some critics have found her work self-conscious, the majority have praised her originality.

The roots of her skill can be traced to her upbringing and education. Born in Wellington, New Zealand to theatrical parents (her father was a director, her mother, an actress), Campion displayed an early interest in art; she was also an accomplished, but idiosyncratic artist, with an eye toward the unusual. (This would later manifest in her use of camera angles and in the set pieces she created in her films.) Although interested in acting, Campion studied anthropology in college and later ventured to Europe where she studied art in Venice. Migrating to London, she found work as an assistant to a director of commercials and documentaries before she moved to Australia. Enrolling in art school, Campion began to experiment with film and shot her first short, "Tissues", about a father who had been arrested for child molestation. Furthering her education at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Campion went on to complete several award-winning shorts, including "Peel" (1982), centering on a power struggle over discipline between a child and his father, and her thesis, "A Girl's Own Story" (1984), which introduced her themes of women, sexuality and rites of passage.

After marking time in the Women's Film Unit, a government-sponsored program for which she directed the short "After Hours" (1984), about sexual harassment, and a detour to TV with the longform "Two Friends" (1986), Campion made her feature debut with the darkly stylish "Sweetie" , a disturbing study of familial tensions brought about by a mentally unstable young woman. Acclaimed for its visual style, strong performances and comic originality, "Sweetie" earned prizes from the Film Critics Circle of Australia and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

Campion's second feature "An Angel at My Table" was originally intended as a TV-movie. Working from a script by Laura Jones, adapted from the autobiography of New Zealand writer Janet Frame, the director fashioned a biopic that detailed an unconventional story. Tracing Frame from her awkward childhood through a nervous breakdown and stay in a mental institutions to her eventual fulfillment as a writer, Campion once again displayed a flair for observant detail and lush visuals. It is an intimate look at an atypical central figure, a shy, plain woman who defines herself through her writing.

In 1984, fresh out of film school, Campion began working on a screenplay about the colonial past of New Zealand. Over nearly a decade, she developed the project into what became her most acclaimed feature to date, "The Piano", an intensely erotic story told from the female perspective. The story is fairly simplistic: a mute woman (Holly Hunter) enters into an arranged marriage and moves halfway around the world with her illegitimate daughter (Anna Paquin) and her piano. Her new husband (Sam Neill) refuses to transport the instrument and sells it to a settler gone native (Harvey Keitel). The purchaser agrees to return the piano if the woman teaches him how to play. Again Campion's hallmarks of gorgeous photography (the landscape almost becomes another character) and strong performances align to produce a remarkably original Gothic drama. "The Piano" earned numerous awards, including the Palme d'Or at Cannes (the first for a woman director). Campion became only the second woman nominated for the Best Director Academy Award. Although she lost in that category, she did win for her screenplay, as did Hunter for Best Actress and Paquin for Best Supporting Actress.

Campion's long awaited follow-up was an adaptation of Henry James' novel "The Portrait of a Lady", written by Laura Jones and starring Nicole Kidman. Critics were divided; some found it static and miscast, while others praised its intelligence and the director's injection of sexual matters hinted at in the original. Next Campion and her sister Anna co-wrote the screenplay for her next directorial effort, "Holy Smoke" (1999), in which an Australian family hire a noted cult deprogrammer (Harvey Keitel) to retrieve and restore their errant daughter (Kate Winslet) from an Indian guru. Their subsequent battle of wills, which as in all Campion efforts also takes on an overpowering sexual component, drives the narrative, but while the film starts out extremely promising and Campion teamed with yet another actress as fearless as she is talented, the ultimate execution was flawed, murky and unsatisfying.

A planned reunion with Kidman was in store for Campion's next effort, "In the Cut" (2003), an adaptation of Susanna Moore's novel, but the ever-in-demand Kidman's schedule required her to cede the role to another actress (though Kidman stayed on a producer). Campion cast a maturing Meg Ryan, looking to break out of her sterotypical adorable parts, as a troubled New York writing professor who, after becoming involved in a crime, becomes embroiled in an erotic and dangerous affair with a police detective. Once again, Campion put the psycho-sexual politics of her characters in sharp relief and had a willing collaborator in Ryan, who agreed to a controversial full frontal nude scene, but again the outcome was uneven, with the director's singular vision bogged down by the conventional thriller elements grafted onto the story.

All-Movie Guide bio from Rebecca Flint Marx

Jane Campion Facts - Biography - YourDictionary

Cinema Nation Identity: Jane Campion. Department of Communication ... a nice, thorough biography

Film Reference profile by Rob Edelman

Jane Campion • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Fincina Hopgood from Senses of Cinema, October 4, 2002

Jane Campion | NZ On Screen biography

Directors: Jane Campion bio and brief film reviews by D.K. Holm from Cinemonkey

OZ CINEMA.com : People : Jane Campion a brief, early bio

Jane Campion | Biography (born 1954) bio and website

Jane Campion's Top 9 - The Criterion Collection

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

FILM / Piano Forte: A few years ago Jane Campion was an eternal ... A few years ago Jane Campion was an eternal student, turning out short films which even her tutors considered too offbeat. Now she is the winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and Harvey Keitel describes her as a goddess, by Quentin Curtis from The Independent, October 16, 1993

Passion in Perspective: The Films of Jane Campion — Filmmakers ... Richard Peña on a Retrospective: February 3–24, 1995

Jane Campion's Shining: Portrait of a Director - Film Comment Kathleen Murphy, November/December 1996

Jane Campion: a complete retrospective Peter Keough from the Boston Phoenix, January 28, 1999

Jane Campion: interviews Harriet Margolis on Virginia Wright Wexman’s book, Jane Campion: interviews, from Screening the Past, November 12, 1999, also seen here: Jane Campion: Interviews

kamera.co.uk - feature item - Jane Campion by Dana Polan Jane Campion, by Dana Polan, a book review by Jason Wood

Where the boys are - Salon.com Jessica Hundley from Salon, March 22, 2000

A Pleasure to Watch: Jane Campion's Narrative Cinema Sue Gillet from Screening the Past, March 2001

Where are the women? Jane Campion is the lone female director in ... Where are the women? Jane Campion is the lone female director in Cannes film project, International Herald Tribune, May 20, 2007

Jane Campion: 'Life isn't a career' | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver, May 12, 2014

Jan Chapman, producer of 'The Daughter' | The Saturday Paper Benjamin Law, March 19, 2016

BIOGRAPHY: Jane Campion - Film Director - The Heroine Collective Miranda Bain, September 2, 2016

Campion, Jane They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

BOMB Magazine — Jane Campion by Lynn Geller interview Winter 1990

New Again: Jane Campion - Page - Interview Magazine Michael Tabb and Katherine Dieckmann interview, January 1992

“We are all Isabel Archers” A “Bonne Femme” Conversation with Jane ... Sophie Menoux talks with the director November 25, 1998

Interview: Jane Campion Scott Tobias from The Onion A.V. Club, September 22, 2009

Jane Campion: 'Life isn't a career' | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver interview, May 12, 2014

Jane Campion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

AN EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE – PEEL B+ 92

Australia (9 mi) 1982

This was my first film. I knew these people who all had red hair and were part of the family. They were also alike in character, extreme and stubborn. Their drive in the country begins an intrigue of awesome belligerence.

—Jane Campion

Recalling a 1984 interview by Mark Stiles, Jane Campion: Interviews - Page 5 - Google Books Result

The people at the AFTS loathed Peel when they saw a first cut of it. They told me not to bother finishing it. I was quite vain so I found that really upsetting, but it was good for me. I cut out everything that was remotely extraneous and made the film a lot better. The AFTS people thought I was arrogant and not particularly talented. There were people there more talented than I was, but my talent wasn't the kind they were ever going to understand, which was one of the luckiest things for me.

Peel, also known as An Exercise in Discipline — Peel, is a 1982 Australian short film directed by Jane Campion, described as an “Abrasive yet meditative study of the usual family road-trip misery.” Working for the first time with her longtime friend and cinematographer, Sally Bongers, a fellow student at the Australian Film and Television School, a father along with his son and sister are taking a road trip in the country, each with bright red hair, during which an orange peel has significance, where teaching a lesson has unforeseen consequences. As the youngest child grows bored, dropping pieces of an orange peel out the window, his father tells him to stop, but he intentionally disobeys, causing his father to stop the car, claiming they’re not going anywhere until he goes back and picks up all the pieces he dropped onto the side of the road. While his sister complains endlessly about how she can’t believe what a waste of time this is, extending an already long drive, claiming she has important things to do, growing more and more vehement, until the father pops out of the car as much to escape her as to find out what’s going on with his son. When they return, the sister has herself peeled an orange and left the peel on the ground next to the car. When both tell her to pick it up, with the kid apparently learning his lesson, she refuses, where once again stubbornness alters the power dynamic, leaving them all in a state of limbo, not going anywhere, where the final image is one of mayhem, with the sister assuming the role of the pouting, incalcitrant child, while the out-of-control kid is seen jumping up and down on top of the car.

The film went on to win the Short Film Palme d’Or at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival making Campion the first ever woman (and New Zealander) to win the award.

User Reviews from imdb Author: postmanwhoalwaysringstwice from usa

Jane Campion's 1982 short film "An Exercise in Discipline: Peel" is an interesting study of character, relationships, and to a degree the way that the camera can capture these elements. It follows three people traveling in a car along a small stretch of a country road. Indicated right away are the relationships of the people involved, who are said to be real people: a father, his son, and the father's sister. The bored son is goofing off by throwing orange peels out the window, and the father gets ticked off, and everything escalates from there. The film examines how inconsequential arguments leave us at a standstill. Ironically the resolution to the argument here is reached by ignoring it. At only nine minutes, Campion's short is to the point, and a near perfect expression.

User Reviews from imdb Author: krorie from Van Buren, Arkansas

This was New Zealand writer/director Jane Campion's first film, showing all the imaginative talent that would later garnish her an Oscar for the magnificent "The Piano" in 1993. Much is revealed in a short nine minute time span about an impatient man with a short fuse, a disenchanted, petulant woman, and a brat of a child. It is obvious that the man and boy are father and son (they even look alike). The woman seems out of place. She is listed in the credits as the man's sister, ergo the boy's aunt, yet she seems emotionally distant from the two.

"Peel" is an appropriate title, applying literally to the peeling of the orange that starts the commotion that leads to confrontation, and figuratively signifying the peeling away of the outer skins of the trio to lay bare the inner turmoil and conflict. The first phrase of the title, "An Exercise in Discipline," is used in a sardonic sense. There is little discipline involved in the battle among the three where emotions run amok and a ripple effect occurs from child to adults. What begins as a tussle between father and son for domination and control ends as a stalemate with father and son teaming up against the sister/aunt. To further emphasize the ignorance and stupidity exhibited, the entire show takes place along a busy public highway in broad daylight.

On a higher plane, Jane Campion indicates that major battles which may destroy individuals, families, and nations often begin over the silliest of occurrences, in this case the peeling of an orange and throwing the husk out a car window. The narrow minded among us can become so stubborn concerning minor infractions of rules and regulations that we forget how mundane and harmless such actions really are. The man decides this after much ado when the boy picks up all the pieces save one that have been strewn along the roadway. He surrenders to the boy's wishes and wistfully places the boy atop his shoulders to return to the parked car only to begin a new war with his sister, who is late for her destination as a result of the orange peels fiasco.

Color adds to the effectiveness of the allegory with the bright shades emphasizing the frayed emotions, lost tempers, and broken dreams. "Peel" is a much underrated short by a gifted artist.

Not Just Movies: Jane Campion's Short Films: Peel, Passionless ... Jake Cole

An Exercise in Discipline: Peel opens Jane Campion's career with a bang. It starts with an echoing tap eventually revealed to be an orange bouncing off a dashboard and proceeding in a series of quick cuts that allow no hint of coherence even as a title card establishes its trio's relation to each other. From there, it only gets stranger, using the vivid color of '80s clothes and the countryside around the stopped car to bring out the dysfunction of the family dynamic exhibited by the father, his son and the boy's aunt. The father chastises the boy for throwing his orange peel out the car window, even stopping to make the kid pick up the pieces along the road. The lad's defiance leads him to run away, but in quiet shame he starts collecting the peel long after getting out of eyesight. The woman, meanwhile, viciously berates the man for making them stop, already peeved that she had to spend the day driving with them when she had other plans.

The only thing clear-cut about this movie is the aforementioned card with its postmodern family tree, but even that triangle is problematic: by folding back in on itself, it lightly suggests incestuous relationship, an theme common to Campion's early work in both literal and psychologically figurative ways. Though one generally refers to the film by its subtitle, it is important to take note of the "Exercise in Discipline" tag. It speaks to the fractured narrative exercise: the man forces discipline upon his son, who then begins to order around the woman having no been conditioned into a harder adult male. But it also hints at the formal rigor of Campion's piece, which features segmenting and fragmenting angles, framing and focal lengths by cinematographer Sally Bongers to deepen the alienation and power dynamics of the family. It's bewildering to think that something so dense and fully formed was a student film, and much less surprising to note that it won the Short Film Palme D'Or at Cannes four years later. This is one of the best modern short films I've seen, and one can see Campion's gift for microcosmic, obsessive yet always playful characterization in its eight short minutes.

Curator's notes An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (1982) on ASO ... Kate Matthews

Peel is joyously experimental, infused with the stubbornness of its characters. Campion allows this shared trait to seep beyond the events of the story and into its very form. She emphasises the repetitive nature of their quarrels with a circular narrative structure and rhythmic editing and sound. She also has fun with the stereotypical connection between short tempers and red hair, making oranges, the fruit, trigger the family’s argument.

At the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, Campion won the short film Palme d’Or for Peel, made when she was a student at AFTRS in 1982. The film was apparently poorly received at the time by her teachers. 1986 was a big year at Cannes for Campion. Along with Peel’s win, her telefeature Two Friends (1986) and two more of her AFTRS shorts, Passionless Moments (1983) and A Girl’s Own Story (1983), screened in Un Certain Regard. Jane Campion’s later, landmark Palme d’Or win for The Piano (1993), remains at the time of writing the only occasion on which a female director has received the award for a feature film.

Campion’s student films tend to sidestep, or experiment with, conventional cinematic narrative categories and Peel toys with both narrative and documentary form. The Pyes, including fashion designer Katie Pye, are a real family and the opening credits announce 'a true story’ – but the action is staged.

These student works are enjoyable both as standalone films and as a retrospective insight into Campion’s early experimentation with the medium. They show the emergence of narrative and stylistic interests that she would develop through many of her later features. Peel shares a dry wit and a surreal visualisation of the ordinary with Sweetie (1989) and Passionless Moments (1983). In addition it shares an interest in the dynamics and powerplays of human relationships, both familial and romantic, seen in many of Campion’s later works, including Sweetie (1989), The Piano (1993) and A Girl’s Own Story (1983).

Campion completed degrees in anthropology and fine arts before attending film school and US Academic Kathleen McHugh has drawn attention to the influence of ethnography and surrealist art on Campion’s work. In Peel we see a direct manifestation of the two. The opening credits lay out the family relationship in an anthropological diagram (see clip one) and the film concerns itself, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, with plotting the nuances of this family dynamic. It does this through an at-times surreal visual and narrative focus on even the most mundane of details and moments, with particular emphasis on similarities and parallels.

Peel’s cinematographer was another AFTRS student, Sally Bongers, who later worked with Campion on A Girl’s Own Story (1983) and Sweetie (1989). These films share a similar visual sensibility. Each makes beautiful the ordinary and the drab through strikingly graphic compositions, visual matching and extremes of focus and framing.

Jane Campion's Breakout Short Film, “Peel" (1982) - Ezra Lunel

"This was my first film. I knew these people who all had red hair and were part of the family. They were also alike in character, extreme and stubborn. Their drive in the country begins an intrigue of awesome belligerence.”

—Jane Campion

In 1982, Jane Campion asked her friend Katie Pye to portray a version of herself in a short family drama she’d written called “Peel.” The screenplay peeled away appearances and showed the Pye family’s angry relationships with each other. Katie and her brother Tim laughed when they read it. “Yes, that’s us,” they told her.

At twenty-eight, Campion was a remarkably self-assured film student in Sydney; she’d already traveled through Europe and earned separate bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and painting. “As a young filmmaker, I was particularly committed to what was nasty, what isn’t spoken about in life,” she said. She admired Luis Buñuel and Australian director Peter Weir (“Picnic at Hanging Rock”) for his “sense of mystique, a depth, another layer. It’s good to work beyond what you know consciously. I do that,” she added.

“Peel” derives much of its power from being unafraid to upset us. Campion throws us into the middle of a particularly unattractive family spat, where the atmosphere is tense and aggressive; but we’re hooked by the prospect of something terrible happening: an accident, perhaps, or the characteristic violence of a dysfunctional family.

Her willingness to look nastiness straight in the eye is partly why “Peel” rankled its viewers. “The people at the AFTS [Australian Film and Television School] loathed ‘Peel’ when they saw a first cut of it. They told me not to bother finishing it.” The criticism hurt, but spurred her to cut the film down to its barest essentials. The result, “An Exercise in Discipline: Peel” ended up winning the Palme d'Or for Best Short Film at Cannes in 1986.

The film starts with an incessant pounding and the words “AN EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE” – a cryptic statement that poses as many questions as it answers. We are propelled forward, into split-second cuts of traffic rushing by and roadside signs registered from a vehicle traveling at dangerous speeds. Pounding, ‘exercise,’ ‘discipline,’ unsafe traffic, the title “Peel,” – jumbled audiovisual elements calculated to put us on edge. A triangular diagram clarifies – or confuses? – the relationships of the people we’re about to meet:

Observed (and not studied) only momentarily in the course of the narrative, the use of two titles for each character creates a sense of incestuous uneasiness, as though the brother and sister were also mother and father.

With the sound of radio stations being searched and the Doppler-effect whizzing of cars rushing by, Tim Pye is at the wheel, his son Ben beside him, pounding an orange against the windshield. Katie, Tim’s sister, is in the back seat, upset, speaking to the back of Tim’s head. The car space feels too small for the Pyes. Point-of-view camera perspectives place us deep in the psyche, and physical space, of each of these family members, as though we too, both issue and absorb the brunt of their psychological domestic abuse.

Violence. Tim grabs Ben’s hair and yanks his head back. The car screeches to a halt; Ben isn’t wearing a seatbelt and nearly smashes his head against the windshield. “Get out!” Tim says directly to the camera. But orange peel is organic waste; why should it matter that Ben throws it out on the country highway? “You throw ice cream out!” Ben tells his father. Doesn’t matter. Orders must be followed; balance of power maintained. Meanwhile, there’s an insurrection in the back seat: Katie blames Tim for their being late to their engagement. “Shit! You said we’d be back by five,” she says. “Jesus, you make me mad. I never would have come if I thought we’d be later than five.”

When Ben stands – Tiananmen Square-style – in front of the car, daring his father to do his worst, and aims and hurls the orange at the windshield, Tim is quick to anger; for a split second we feel his impulse to violence, his unconscious wish to run the boy over. He revs the engine, inches the car forward. “Can’t you just whip him? That’d be quicker,” Katie says. Instead, Tim jumps out of the car and chases Ben down the road.

Why does Campion make a point to show Katie crouched down in the field, swatting flies, rear end exposed as she urinates? What feels like a deliberate provocation of the audience is perhaps Campion reminding us of our own animal state, the primitive origins of the family unit. She may be underlining the sordid nature of the family drama playing out, urine, warts and all; asserting that events will be recounted, that the truth of this family, possibly all families, will be told.

Seated in the passenger seat next to Tim, cars scream loudly past them, mocking their stasis and threatening their safety. Tim checks the rearview mirror; Ben is completely out of sight. “Why the fuck did you send him off!” Katie says. Her vehement use of the word “fuck” is a patent shock to us. Is it because this is a narrative that features a child actor, or because the person hurling the vicious expletive is an adult woman attacking her adult brother for his poor parenting skills? Guilty, Tim exits, but takes the keys with him, thereby turning off the radio and punishing Katie for her reproach. “Well fuck you, can’t you leave the keys! What do you think I’m gonna do!” she shouts after him. As he saunters off, Katie gets out of the car, hands on her hips, and hollers after him, “YOU FUCKING PIG!!!” Everything that is wrong with this family (and by extension, many families) is present in this moment, this line, and this tit-for-tat exchange. Only a family can contain such poisonous rage between its members; even war is a less intensely personal form of conflict. In the fading shadow of the Feminist movement of the late 1970’s, “fucking pig” says a lot about how Katie feels toward her brother and the male/female power dynamic that binds them.

As Tim runs back along the road to find Ben, he looks down: the ground is littered with trash. Ben is crouched over, prostrate, forehead to the highway’s gravelly shoulder as cars continue to speed loudly by; it feels terribly dangerous. (Why he is in this position isn’t clear; it may simply be a psychologically astute conjecture of what a child of around ten might do in the circumstance. It may also signal Ben’s submission to his father’s authority.) Ben reveals to his father that he’s reconstituted nearly the entire orange peel and offers him the hollow shell. Tim lightens ups and walks back to the car carrying Ben on his shoulders, dancing all the way.

They arrive at the car to find Katie has been peeling an orange and dropped the peel on the ground. Now Tim feels obliged to face off with Katie; he orders her to pick up the peel. She ignores him. Campion shoots this is a profiled close up, the ultimate snub. Ben emulates his father and also orders his aunt to pick the peels up. The younger male has teamed up with the pack leader to discipline an errant female, even one considerably older than him.

The story ends with this stalemate. But it’s not the end of the film. After slapping the peeled orange from her hands, Ben invasively inspects Katie; he shunts his head and cocks it in front of her face. We see Katie’s eyes, nose and mouth, all in extreme close ups. It is disquietingly intimate.

Making his way to the Tim who is sitting on car’s back bumper, Ben inspects him as well, in the same series of too-close close ups. The soundtrack hums with a sharp tone. Bens shakes his father, as though to break the spell. It doesn’t work.

Sensing a complete breakdown of authority and the family structure, Ben is free to do as he pleases. The opportunity makes him unruly; he scrambles up to the roof of the car and uses it as a trampoline. Neither adult moves. The final shots of Ben jumping on the car, with Katie in the passenger’s seat and Tim sat on the bumper are shot from the objective view of cars racing past them on the road.

Discipline is an exercise of power; Campion’s “Exercise in Discipline” vividly illustrates Tim’s thwarted effort to exercise his power over his family.

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

Nick-Davis.com: Favorite Films: Peel: An Exercise in Discipline #35 on list of favorite films, from Nick’s Flick Picks

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: BEGINNINGS Timothy Brayton

Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]

Film's Female Powerhouses — Part 3: The International Cineastes ... Saidah Russell

Peel (film) - Wikipedia

Peel | Short Film | NZ On Screen

Peel (Jane Campion) on Vimeo (8:34)

PASSIONLESS MOMENTS B- 80

Australia (13 mi) 1983

Jane Campion: Interviews - Page 30 - Google Books Result Michel Ciment interview from Positif magazine, May 17, 1989

It was the result of a collaboration with one of my friends, Gerard Lee. It was his idea at the beginning and we wrote and directed the film together. Once we had the frame of the film — a series of playlets —, we tried to imagine the maximum number of stories that would be told with a certain ironic distance. We finally wrote ten of them. Gerard and I wanted to show sweet, ordinary people that you rarely see on the screen and who have more charm than better known actors. The film was shot in five days, two episodes per day. I was responsible for the photography and I realized the benefit of film school where in two hours I learned how to light and to exploit the possibilities of the camera.

A voice says, “There are 1,000,000 moments in your neighborhood; each has a fragile presence which fades almost as it forms.” Campion’s graduate diploma student film, co-written and co-directed by Gerald Lee, who had a brief romance with the director during film school, becoming a treatise on boredom, or drifting time, reflected by small innocuous moments that have little if any meaning, including reveries and daydreams that seem to go nowhere, yet comprise so much of our random time on earth, where as the saying goes, we forgot more than we ever knew. Narrated in a dry, emotionless voice, somewhat in the Greenaway tradition, recalling Buñuel’s travelogue-style narration in LAND WITHOUT BREAD (1932), only without the depictions of misery and degradation, shot in Black and White, the film captures ten moments, each titled, offering slight satiric information on each sequence, all happening on the same day, reflecting a kind of wry humor, yet none rise to the level of even being remotely interesting, however, that seems to be the point. We aren’t always our most captivating and wittiest versions of ourselves, as oftentimes we do the most ordinary things, where this film perfectly captures the things that people do when nobody else is in the room, especially out of sight from everyone else, where we are perhaps at our dullest expression when no one else is watching, as what this film amounts to is mental nose picking.

Passionless Moments (1983) - MUBI

Co-written and co-directed by Campion's boyfriend Gerald Lee, Passionless Moments consists of ten vignettes, accompanied by a pompous BBC-style narrator, in which various characters have individual moments of strange epiphany (or non-epiphany) in their mundane lives. Some critics have remarked on the influence of David Lynch on Campion's early work--an influence which she openly acknowledges--and it's especially evident here. The film won an award for Best Experimental Film at the 1984 Australian Film Awards.

User Reviews from imdb Author: postmanwhoalwaysringstwice from usa

Jane Campion's "Passionless Moments" is a short film containing ten short films. More than being simply short, they are tiny. The film deals with nonsense that goes through one's mind that no one dares share when asked "what are you thinking about". It's really a wonderful concept for a short film, and the result is a funny, touching piece of work. It would be impossible to pick a favorite bit, and truthfully it would do a disservice to the film itself to try and express the actual occurrences in each mini-short. It might be worth noting that Gerard Lee was indicated in the credits as ex-director. Perhaps that's why the finished product has far more visible passion than the sketches themselves, which comes straight from the filmmaker's chair.

User Reviews from imdb Author: bfinn from United Kingdom

A remarkable first short film by a student (or fresh out of film school) - as much for the script as anything else. I happened to see it on TV as a teenager and then made various other people watch it too when I spotted it coming round again.

The film simply shows a series of short quirky moments in people's everyday lives. For example, a man stretches his arm as he wanders out of his house, and this gesture is mistaken by a neighbour who thinks he's waving at him.

Quirky moments such as these have since become the stuff of observational comedy, except that the ones depicted here are so small that they would pass quite unnoticed if not isolated and commented on by this film.

Not Just Movies: Jane Campion's Short Films: Peel, Passionless ... Jake Cole

Continuing the splintered framing and behavioral observation of Peel, Passionless Moments shows how our attention focuses in and out constantly. Repetitive sounds, double-take glances and sudden bursts of memory cause people to randomly meditate and fixate on things they do not particularly care about but try to solve anyway. Campion then adds her focal aestheticism to the mix by messing with focal lengths to demonstrate how one's attention is always settling on one thing at the expense of the other, and that the vacillation between foci is random and, as the title lets on, passionless. Though Campion's next short would firmly align with a feminist perspective, it is this film's presentation of her minute detail as merely a series of shots she finds interesting at the moment until something else catches her eye, demystifying her approach even as she only furthers her mastery of the form. Though it's a step down from the fully contained bewilderment of Peel, Passionless Moments is no less vital in understanding Campion as a filmmaker. In fact, given how much more accessible it is, it mght be a better starting point.

Curator's notes Passionless Moments (1983) on ASO - Australia's ... Kate Matthews

Passionless Moments is a lighthearted series of vignettes sharing people’s fleeting thoughts. Jane Campion combines a serious documentary style with a whimsical look at the small moments people experience everyday.

This short film reveals a beautiful oddness in mundane situations. In a 1989 Positif interview with Michael Ciment, Jane Campion explained that she and co-writer Gerard Lee 'wanted to show sweet ordinary people that you rarely see on the screen and who have more charm than better known actors’. The film has a witty, detached ironic tone and a surreal focus on the ordinary detail of lives in suburbia. It plays with narrative point of view, suspending the audience between dispassionate observation and an intimate awareness of the characters’ subjective states.

Campion playfully borrows from the documentary genre. The full opening title reads 'Passionless Moments recorded in Sydney, Australia, Sunday October 2nd’. An authoritative sounding BBC ethnographer-style narrator uses phrases like ‘the filmmakers discovered …’ to suggest that the film is observational. This notion is beautifully absurd, as the narrator coolly reports on the characters’ interior monologues and unspoken, incidental thoughts. Nor is the camera simply observational, doing things like hiding under beds and illustrating what the characters see and think.

Passionless Moments won a 1984 AFI Award for Best Experimental Film. It was part of the group of films that marked Campion’s breakthrough at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986, screening in the Un Certain Regard section alongside A Girl’s Own Story (1983) and her ABC telemovie Two Friends (1986). In the same year An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (1982) won the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film.

Campion’s feature films include Sweetie (1989), The Piano (1993), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke! (1999), In the Cut (2003) and Bright Star (2009).

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: BEGINNINGS Timothy Brayton

"Ex-directed" by co-writer Gerard Lee, Campion's second student short is exactly what it says on the label: a series of tiny film-lets within an already slight 15-minute running time. Each of those tinier films is about one incident happening to one person on a certain day (October 2, 1982, in Melbourne, if my memory serves; but I didn't take notes, and part of the film's purpose is to show that those details which it provides at the start are completely meaningless). Each incident is given its own modestly amusing title, with the action narrated by an uncredited man, who I assume is likely Lee.

If "Passionless Moments" suffers in comparison to "Peel", it is for one predominant reason: the earlier film made a point of giving us nothing to work on besides individual pieces of fact, while the latter presents its theme unambiguously in both the title and the concluding narration (which observes that a million moments like these happen and die unobserved every day). The point is that at some point, hundreds of times, we all have a moment of realisation or speculation, something when our mind drifts out from under our direct control and just works over a problem that we weren't even aware we cared about. These moments of reflection are "passionless" because we really don't care about them enough to commit them to memory or follow these ideas to any conclusion; and yet, life is made up of virtually nothing but such moments.

Two films in, and it becomes clear that one of Campion's chief points of interest as a filmmaker is behavioral minutiae; by which I mean, she observes characters performing unexplained actions that are natural to them, and only "significant" because it is those moments that we in the audience are watching. If that's what connects "Peel" with "Passionless Moments", I think it's worth pointing out that this is the overall theme of "Passionless Moments" itself.

Visually, however, the two films are mostly distinct. Where "Peel" is in full, evocative color, "Passionless Moments" is in high-contrast black and white, full of lingering shots and very few cuts, although for that reason every cut that occurs is given the force of an atomic bomb. The chief relationship between the two, and I do think it's significant, is that she shows in both of them pieces of things, rather than whole things. There's one mini-story in the latter film that showcases this idea: a man sits on the bed, ignoring his lover, while trying to figure out why you can only focus on one plane at a time. The film then cuts to a POV shot of his thumb going out of focus while the back wall comes into focus. This idea that there will always be something you can't notice, at the exclusion of noticing something else - you can't be in more than one place at one time, taken to its ultimate extension - is perhaps the key unifying force between the two films. If you're looking at this, it is necessary that you are not looking at that. "Passionless Moments" serves to memorialise that fact while nothing, with some ironic melancholy, that even this lasts for such a brief duration that it does very little good to look at it in the first place.

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

Numéro Cinq at the Movies: Jane Campion's "Passionless Moments ... September 2011

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Passionless Moments (1983) directed by Jane Campion, Gerard Lee ... Letterboxd

Passionless Moments, a film by Jane Campion - John Coulthart

Passionless Moments - Wikipedia

Passionless Moments | Short Film | NZ On Screen (11:27)

Passionless Moments on Vimeo (11:08)

A GIRL’S OWN STORY A 96

Australia (27 mi) 1984

In this film I put together ideas about girlhood. I wanted to tell a few stories from those years, where family is strange, adulthood lonely, innocence perverse.

—Jane Campion

A gorgeously stark and eerie Black and White film that looks at the complicated lives of a group of girls, the intensity of their feelings, and their growing interest in sex and its consequences. Originally screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, Campion is back with Sally Bonger as her cinematographer, taking an acute interest in subjectivity, accented by extreme angles and framing, where it’s actually shot on 16mm much like a German Expressionist film, providing a refreshing look back at the 60’s and the Beatlemania craze, beautifully capturing the group mentality and quirky mannerisms of teen girls, a depiction of the passions and innocence of three young teenage girls, flooded with hormones and sexual images, yet it also shows how easily young girls are violated.

Opening with close-ups of girl’s faces, to the music box sounds of the love theme from DR. ZHIVAGO (1965), recalling a similar look in Cassavetes’ Faces (1968), the film begins with a medical book diagram of an erect penis, with the curiosity of girls using their fingers exploring the outline of the male anatomy, with the following inscription underneath: THIS SIGHT MAY SHOCK YOUNG GIRLS. With shrieking girls caught up in the hysteria of Beatlemania, three girls in identical school uniforms face the camera, using tennis rackets as guitars, innocently singing the Beatles song “I Should Have Known Better,” A Girl's Own Story (1983) clip 1 on ASO ... - Australian Screen (3:08), showing girls wearing Bobby socks dancing the twist before the nuns at Catholic school run them off. With the central character Pam (Gabrielle Shornegg) narrating her inner thoughts throughout, we enter her bedroom, lined with Barbie dolls, which is a shrine to the Beatles, where she and her school friend Stella (Geraldine Haywood) kiss photos of their heroes pasted to the walls before practicing on each other, with one wearing a Beatles mask, supposedly preparing for kissing boys. Dinner is a surreal experience in her home, as her mother suffers from depression, where Pam curiously tends to side with her father and blame her mother for her illness, even though her father (Paul Chubb) refuses to talk to her, but relays messages to his wife through his daughter, some overly personalized, which tends to erupt in an explosion of frayed nerves, while her father acts like nothing happened.

Elsewhere, another brother and sister are home alone and up to their old antics, Gloria (Marina Knight) and Graeme (John Godden), first seen behaving like dogs, then turning to seductive cats, where it’s easy to see these two are used to venturing into inappropriate territory, playing sex games with each other when their parents are away. But as her brother, all he can offer is sex without love, where she just lies still, like one of the dolls seen in the bedroom, as they don’t even kiss. In one of the strangest dream sequences, accompanied by a vividly provocative soundtrack, a young girl is walking down the street in boots and a raincoat, followed by a car that pulls up next to her, where the girl is transformed into Pam and back to a child again. The man in the car sounds like the voice of her father, holding a young kitten in his hands, drawing her attention, luring her into his car as they drive away. With the same music continuing into the next scene, Stella has turned on Pam, as they’re no longer friends, leaving her isolated and alone, but this time it’s Pam acting like nothing has happened, where in a locker room scene, surrounded by taunting girls, she’s surprised to learn Gloria is no longer in school, but is pregnant, sent away to a Catholic home for wayward girls. In a room with a crucifix looming on the wall, these girls commiserate with each other, while Graeme comes to visit, though this time it’s his turn to pretend like nothing has happened, yet Gloria is clearly showing signs of her pregnancy. Continuing on a theme of inappropriate male behavior, Pam’s Dad takes her out to dinner on her birthday, but brings along a girlfriend of his own, using the lame excuse that it’s a French restaurant and she can translate what’s on the menu. Later on, when his girlfriend calls his home, his wife freaks out, violently attacking her husband, who strangely starts kissing her instead, where the two retreat upstairs where they have sex in plain sight. Pam’s eyes follow their every move, exposed to something she probably shouldn’t see, where their sudden intimacy catches her off-guard.

At the end, over an image of a spinning ice-skater in white superimposed over a girl’s listless face, the three girls break out into song, “Feel the Cold,” expressing the feeling “I feel the cold/I feel the cold is here to stay/I feel the cold/I want to melt away.” (clip three, 3:11) Throughout the film there are images of space heaters, metaphors for the girls’ emotional isolation and a lack of human warmth, suggesting the world is a cold and unwelcoming place, with predatory men hanging around, lurking in the shadows, where the love and affection they crave is realized only in fantasies. The collective characterizations of these young girls reveal fresh insights, offering shades of the female experience rarely seen before, expressing a frank depiction of teenage sexual curiosity, but also the nightmarish places you could end up if you’re not careful, where it’s interesting that the Catholic church is not spared, exposed as the root of chauvinism in the Western world. It’s a non-traditional narrative, where the expressionist quality of the film is jarring to the senses, where the boldness of the film delights with cinematic flair, especially the play-acting of the girls, but on another level delves unsparingly into incest, voyeurism, infidelity, domestic violence, idolatry, and childish same sex experimentation. This is one of Campion’s most autobiographical offerings, as her mother suffered from depression, cleverly emphasizing isolation and awkwardness associated with that age, especially Pam’s inability to empathize with her mother’s illness, yet tends to accept her father’s philandering ways, revealing the anxieties associated with adolescent sex and family relationships. The music composed by fellow film student Alex Proyas is impressive, as it gloriously captures the dark mood of the film, filled with sudden departures into surreal and dreamlike moments, winning the 1984 Rouben Mamoulian Award at the Sydney Film Festival. Nicole Kidman admitted during an interview that at 14 she was cast as the lead in the film and turned it down because of her reluctance to kiss a girl and wear a shower cap.

User Reviews from imdb Author: postmanwhoalwaysringstwice from usa

Jane Campion's 1984 short film "A Girl's Own Story" is an overall stronger film than her previous work. It tells a far more cohesive story, has sharper camera work, and involves a better group of performers. It's tells an engaging story about a growing up a teenage girl in the 1960's with domestic squabbles, hormones and Beatlemania all running high. It is a very relate-able and moving film on many levels, and it impressively handles serious subject matter such as idolatry, infidelity, same sex experimentation, and incest. Unfortunately with a film that has so much going for it, the poor 1980's musical score and rather long ending keep it from being excellent.

A Girl's Own Story (1984) | danielleshortfilm

A Girl's Own Story is the most ambitious and emotionally complex of Campion's short films. Set in the early Sixties, it focuses on Pam, a young adolescent who is caught in the middle of Beatlemania, sexual yearning, and a tense family life. The camerawork often suggests her subjective experience of the world; in particular, one sequence where she floats up the stairs recalls German Expressionist cinema or possibly experimental cinema such as Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). The film is also noteworthy for the frankness with which it handles the emotional consequences of molestation and incest. Already, we can see how Jane Campion's directorial vision will develop into the richly eccentric and disturbing worlds of Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990), and The Piano (1993).

This short by Australian director Jane Campion, part of the Films of Jane Campion, explores the story of three girls through their progression of becoming women in the time when Beatlemania ruled and the sixties were in high gear.

The film follows three friends Pam, Stella, and Gloria as they transition from childhood to teenagedom. Initially the girls were able to bond over their love of a little band (the Beatles!!) but when puberty hit – their friendship took a hit also. Pam is trapped in a household with parents who fight all of the time, Stella matured faster than the others and became one of the “it” girls at school and Gloria finds herself pregnant (with her brothers child) and forced to leave school.

In a way the film accurately shows that akward stage in our lives (we all have them) where in certain aspects we feel grown up, but in many ways we are still children. Campion capitalizes on the mindset that when you are a teenager you realize that your family is sort of strange, adulthood can be really lonely, and innocence is perverse.

Not Just Movies: Jane Campion's Short Films: Peel, Passionless ... Jake Cole

Jane Campion's work may be less openly confrontational than the work of Catherine Breillat, but I find her style to be far more combative and transgressive, particularly in her early work. Her fragmented, synecdochical framing eventually blossomed into full-on paranoia and schizophrenia in Sweetie and An Angel at My Table, respectively, but A Girl's Own Story, the longest and admittedly weakest of Campion's early films, shows that style being used to dive into the female perspective for the first time. A Girl's Own Story opens with girls looking in a medical book at a drawing of an erect penis, their hands curiously brushing along this 2D representation to get a feel for the material. At last their hands move down along the drawn legs to the bottom of the page, revealing a bit of text that warns "This sight may shock young girls."

But if a penis is shocking to these young women, Campion suggests that is only because of its power over these physically changing girls. From Beatles reenactments that have other girls in a Catholic school shrieking in quasi-homosexual frenzy to a boyfriend who convinces one girl to have unprotected sex (leading to pregnancy) without the two even sharing a kiss, men hold power over these confused and suddenly sexually appealing women. One shot, in a clinic where pregnant teens meet, frames these women under one of those garishly graphic crucifixes, tacitly pointing out the religious root of chauvinism in the Western world. For the first time, a slight surrealism enters Campion's frame, a tone she would carry out in fullest extent in Sweetie: one girl's parents have stopped speaking to each other and use their daughter to pass messages between them, only to have rough sex in front of their children. Later, the father joins the ranks of the other men circling around these women like sharks. Campion doesn't force any of these shots, and for the first time Campion demonstrates her ability to completely bewilder and stun with such subtlety that the cognitive disruption always seems to hit just after the tone switches once more, only widening the confusion.

Wellington Film Society - A GIRL'S OWN STORY Jocelyn Robson and Beverley Zalcock

The inimitable decentred visual style that so distinguishes Sweetie (1989) can be seen in the earlier Jane Campion film, A GIRL'S OWN STORY. In both films, the cinematography of Sally Bongers seems to capture visually the very texture of uncertainty and insecurity which is a feature of Campion's narratives, most particularly through the techniques of framing and composition. The lighting, decor and cinematic codes (camera angle, distance and movement) are, in A GIRL'S OWN STORY, perfectly attuned to the subject matter of the film which is about a young girl growing up in a dysfunctional family. This is a family which exudes repression... As a result, each family member inhabits her or his own private world. The domestic space which they occupy becomes a strange and alien place. The mother is virtually mute with depression, the father is in deep denial and the sisters are hostile and prickly...

Areas that Campion explores in Sweetie are touched on almost as a dress rehearsal in A GIRL'S OWN STORY. Subjects such as sibling incest, child abuse, clinical depression and obsessiveness are the staples of Campion's films. The family is represented as a site of moral danger and thwarted emotion; in A GIRL'S OWN STORY, the atmosphere is conveyed through the motif of cold (absence of warmth), with heaters that are never switched on. Characters speak in non-sequiturs and desire is clearly a sin. The convent, to which a girl made pregnant by her brother while they were playing 'cats' retreats, is a cold, bleak and secret place; these are the consequences of a Christian morality based on the 'word-of-the-father' and the admonition "thou shalt not."

The girls' friendships are perhaps the only positive thing about the situation they find themselves in and there are some strange moments which are both moving and amusing. For example, in the opening sequence of the film, four girls (with tennis racquets for guitars) sing the Beatles' song 'I Should Have Known Better', so encapsulating, in one brilliant visual stroke, both the mood and period of the film. Later, two of the friends practise kissing, in a heterosexual role play, one playing the boy and wearing a George or Ringo paper mask, the other lying on the bed passively, playing the girl. The implicit critique here of gender roles and gender positioning within the nexus of the family is a central concern of Campion's and one that returns in her subsequent feature films.

A Girl's Own Story (Jane Campion, 1984) • Senses of Cinema Anton De Ionno, July 2010

Jane Campion has been a dominant force in world cinema for nearly two decades. Shot delicately in black-and-white, A Girl’s Own Story is an early short film that traces the stories of three suburban teenage girls (Pam, Gloria and Stella) in 1960’s Australia. It deals with the difficulties of burgeoning sexuality, incest, friendship and family against the backdrop of Beatlemania and an era that valued the isolating notions of purity and wholesomeness over honesty and acceptance.

The film progresses through a collection of events – some humorous and sweet, others troubling and complex – which culminate in the final sequence, an expressionistic musical number in which our protagonist Pam (Gabrielle Shornegg) is joined by Gloria (Marina Knight) and Stella (Geraldine Haywood) to perform a haunting song entitled “I Feel the Cold”. The motif of “cold” runs through the entire film, with recurring references to heaters as a way for Campion to play gently with the subtext that she explores in this final sequence.

The sequence begins with Pam ascending the staircase in her house, escaping the distressing behaviour of her parents below, who are absorbed in a lustful embrace following a heated argument. When Pam reaches the top of the stairs, she stands in a doorway, dressed in a loose white nightgown that billows in an unheard wind. She begins to sing the refrain “I feel the cold” while images of ice-skating are projected over her body. She is joined by Gloria and Stella, dressed in white singlets, all three girls standing in ominous darkness while they sing. The sequence continues with images of each girl eerily waving her hands in front of an offscreen heater, their eyes sad and lost. At one point, the choral refrain subsides whilst Pam performs (in voice-over) a spoken word interlude. In a hushed voice, she asks “Will I melt away?”. As Pam’s spoken words are uttered, we are presented with shots of a man’s hand running along Pam’s arms and legs inter-cut with tight close-ups of Pam’s face, wary and frightened, as her voice-over continues: “It feels cold, this warmth.” These images, together with Pam’s voice-over, stitch together the conceptual fabric of young female sexuality and Pam’s carnal fears that underpin this haunting moment. The sequence concludes with the girls seated next to small heaters on a tiled floor, while the final lyric (“I want melt away”) is repeated ominously.

In this evocative sequence, Campion explores (so beautifully) new ways in which to express her characters’ fears and isolation. This moment hints towards ideas and styles Campion will later develop and explore, like the graceful femininity of the ice-skating she revisits in In the Cut (2003) or the emotional isolation of women and the historical perspective she utilises in An Angel at My Table (1990), The Piano (1993) and The Portrait of a Lady (1996). In this moment, Campion also finds one of her earliest platforms for experimenting with expressionistic conventions of cinema like the chiaroscuro-style lighting of Ingmar Bergman, the inky suburban subconscious of David Lynch and Peter Weir’s haunting images of lost girls.

Campion’s body of work is characterised by audacious honesty and creative integrity. In the intimate sexuality, recurring motifs and embedded humour, tenderness and pathos of the closing sequence of A Girl’s Own Story, the viewer is touched by an exquisite moment that is the mark of a visually profound auteur.

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

Curator's notes A Girl's Own Story (1983) on ASO - Australia's audio ... Kate Matthews

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: BEGINNINGS Timothy Brayton

Curator's notes A Girl's Own Story (1983) on ASO ... - Australian Screen

A Girl's Own Story - Review - Photos - Ozmovies

A Girl's Own Story - EPFC

A Girl's Own Story (1984) directed by Jane Campion • Reviews, film + ... Letterboxd

Best Short Narrative Films of All Time Gerald Peary

A Girl's Own Story - Wikipedia

A girl's own story on Vimeo (25:28) in English, subtitled in Spanish

TWO FRIENDS – made for TV A- 93

Australia (76 mi) 1986

She’s hardly a person anymore.
—Louise (Emma Coles), describing Kelly, her once inseparable best friend

Hard to believe this was made thirty years ago, yet this is an early, rarely-seen, first feature film by Jane Campion, screening at the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, originally made and broadcasted on Australian television in 1986, the same year CROCODILE DUNDEE rivalled TOP GUN for top grossing films of the year, Spike Lee made his first film SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, Mike Tyson became the youngest world heavyweight champion ever at the age of 20, Philippe Petit audaciously walked a tightrope hastily strung between the two twin towers of the World Trade Center in the early morning hours high above New York City, Cory Aquino was elected President of the Philippines, the first female President in Asia, toppling the 21-year authoritarian rule of Ferdinand Marcos, where Time magazine named her “Woman of the Year,” but it was also the year the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff killing the crew of 7 astronauts, the worst disaster in the history of the American space program. An understated portrait of adolescence with complex and subtly developed relationships, a trademark of Campion’s defining works, the film portrays the decaying relationship between two 15-year old girls, the straight-laced Louise (Emma Coles) and her more rebellious, punk friend Kelly (Kris Bidenko). Focusing on small personal details contrasted against the authoritative influence of their parents, the story reflects the changing nature of their relationship, where the brilliance of the narrative is that it’s inventively told backwards, much like Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (Irréversible) (2002) and François Ozon’s 5 x 2 (2004), so as the film continues, they get younger, happier, and much closer together. The film wasn’t released in the United States until 1996, making critic Amy Taubin’s #6 film of the year, Amy Taubin's Top Ten Lists 1987-2005, yet it certainly exemplifies Campion’s typical fragmented structure, including language, which is often unintelligible at first and hard to follow, where the use of subtitles can be of considerable assistance to American audiences, while also presenting heroines that don’t conform to existing societal norms, often rebelling against male paternalism, where the childhood friends are mismatched, like the siblings in Sweetie (1989), yet the offbeat character of Kelly sets the precedent for the remarkable emotional range of mental disturbance expressed by Sweetie (Genevieve Lemon) in Campion’s next film.

Francois Ozon: Monsieur extreme | The Independent Jonathan Romney on Ozon’s film 5 x 2 from The Independent, March 12, 2005

Ozon was inspired by the realisation that he knew few people whose relationships had lasted more than five years. “I wanted to ask why people find it difficult to maintain a relationship for 10, 15 or 20 years, like our parents did. Because the story was about something ending, I wrote the end first. Then I realised that was the starting point.”

Telling the story in reverse order allowed Ozon to scatter clues to the marriage’s failure for us to collect backwards — like following a trail of pebbles in a forest, as he puts it. We’ve seen the reverse structure applied to the thriller (Memento) and, in Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible, to the po-faced contention that “time destroys everything”; Ozon brings a simpler, though no less caustic touch to the technique. He acknowledges two models in particular: Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal and Jane Campion’s 1986 TV film Two Friends. Otherwise, his key references in diagnosing the conjugal malaise are Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and Maurice Pialat’s Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (We Won’t Grow Old Together); Ozon says he could easily have borrowed either title. “What I love about the Bergman film is that he conducts a sort of autopsy — he goes where it hurts.”

5 x 2 may be classical in tone, but it remains experimental in method. It was shot in reverse chronological order, and neither Ozon nor the actors knew where they were heading. He started by filming the first three sections, then stopped for four months to edit what he had and write the rest.

Written by Helen Garner, one of Australia’s greatest writers, showing enormous range in her work, utilizing what’s described as a savage honesty, where Australian literary critic Peter Craven writes that “Two Friends is arguably the most accomplished piece of screenwriting the country has seen and it is characterised by a total lack of condescension towards the teenage girls at its centre.” With an oblique, puzzling, and often abstract narrative at the outset, with characters that only slowly come into view, where a young girl’s funeral from an overdose draws together disparate forces, where the presence of punks in weird hairdo’s are hanging out alongside conservative establishment figures, each carefully avoiding the other, all contributing to a working class world of detachment and emotional discord. When we first meet the two girls, it’s in the past tense, as they are no longer friends and seem to be living entirely different lives, where Kelly’s name comes up in the form of friendly gossip, a girl that was once a fixture in their home, as suddenly the ears perk up for both Louise and her divorced mom Janet (Kris McQuade) who want to know all the details, which are decidedly slight, though rumors suggest she may be living a drug-addled life with friends in abandoned buildings. The funeral comes to represent the death of a close-knit relationship between two teenage girls, as the dire outcome foreshadows what possibly lies in store for Kelly. While Louise has a more supportive environment, she’s disciplined, conscientious, and self-aware, an obedient child that always makes sure she does her homework, while Kelly is a restless soul, rebellious and irresponsible, who impulsively can’t wait to stray into the world of sex, alcohol and drugs, often distancing herself from Louise in social circles, as she instead gravitates towards the boys. Campion has experiences of teenage girls cropping up throughout her films, as they are the formative years that have such a strong influence on the person they eventually become. Perhaps what draws these girls together initially is the shared experience of puberty, having a friend and ally to help you navigate your way through the social minefields. Unlike Louise, who has a relatively calm and unadventurous middle class life, Kelly’s home is an incendiary picture of working class discontent, with her mother (Debra May) remarrying an unsympathetic jerk named Malcolm (Peter Hehir), likely a former radical who is now disillusioned, whose self-righteous, authoritative manner and domineering presence controls their lives, never bothering to listen, but making judgments all the time, forcing others to live by his rules. As a result, Kelly spends plenty of sleepovers with Louise, where her less combative home is like a shelter from the storm.

As raw and graphic as Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001), Campion has a clever way of revealing the discord in the form of a letter Kelly sends to Louise on her birthday, where Kelly’s already left her home, living on the streets, where we hear Louise reading the contents, with her friend claiming “So far so good. I’m not yet a junkie or a prostitute.” But Louise grows distracted or loses interest and instead starts a mechanically repetitive piano lesson, where we hear Kelly’s voice continue reading the unfinished letter, yet can’t be heard over the clamor of the musical notes. This uncomfortable dissonance shows just how far they’ve grown apart. While much of the material is unveiled in a near documentary manner, it’s filled with ordinary moments where kids are being kids, seen gleefully going shopping or sprinting through the shopping malls, where every moment feels like an inspiration, while parents are always an awkward presence in their lives, where everything slows down and becomes dull to the senses, like something to be endured between the more exhilarating and ecstatic moments when kids simply run free. Each of the teenage girls seems to bring out something from the other, as they’re both obviously smart, where early on they both can’t wait to go to high school together, seen gabbing away in their drab school uniforms, where Kelly is every bit as smart as the more conventional Louise, but you’d never notice as she’s such a wild child. But Kelly’s dreams are obliterated by Malcolm, her stepfather, whose abusive treatment includes his refusal to allow her to go to the school of their choice, which is a school for gifted students that must pass an entrance exam. Claiming the school is reactionary and elitist (and it may be, but it also provides the most challenging student option), he infuriatedly expresses no wiggle room, where this turns out to be the single most drastic event that leads to their separation, as they end up at different schools. Moving backwards in time, the two become more and more alike, sharing the same dreams, as it seems the girls are inseparable, where Kelly is like a member of the family, with Campion shifting from social realism to more colorful fantasy sequences with the girls play acting their hopes and fears, using a variety of techniques, including speeding up the frames, using different film stocks, garish colors, animation, coloring within the frame, stop-motion photography, all of which add a jubilant spirit of childlike innocence and giddy exhilaration, a beautiful expression of childhood’s fleeting moments, yet it’s also a wonderful eruption of abstract cinematic expressionism. The tonal shift exerts its power on the viewers, causing a dizzying rush of euphoria, leaving the two in a freeze frame of unbridled joy, a celebratory moment when both have passed their entrance exams with the families gathered around drinking congratulatory champagne, capturing a remarkable moment where the future never looked brighter.

Two Friends, directed by Jane Campion | Film review - Time Out

The first feature-length film from Jane Campion; made for TV, like An Angel at My Table, and still a little unpolished, it is nevertheless a remarkable picture. It's the story of two inseparable schoolmates, Kelly and Louise (Bidenko and Coles), and how over the course of ten months they become, in fact, separated. Campion's films are acutely personal and absolutely distinctive. They combine an oblique, detached point of view with startling human insight. She has the knack of invading private space by standing back; a sort of estranged intimacy. Here, she tells this very simple story (written by Helen Garner) in reverse. It begins in July, cuts back to February, to January, December, and finally October. The effect is puzzling at first, but stimulating, and it ends appropriately on a note of unforeseen poignancy.

The Onion A.V. Club [John Gustafson]

Before Jane Campion began making lumbering big-budget films about mute pianists and Henry James heroines, she gained a well-deserved critical reputation for her complex character studies of troubled young women (Sweetie, An Angel At My Table). Two Friends, her 1986 debut, finally makes its video premiere, and it's one of the best examples of her early craft. It's the story of two young girls and their friendship's dissolution, told in a reverse chronology, from the last sputtering hope that the girls might reconcile to a dizzyingly happy moment in their lives nine months earlier. That's hardly a novel structure anymore, but Campion and screenwriter Helen Garner put it to surprisingly effective use here. Garner is smart enough to create a series of backwards episodes that focus on psychological continuity instead of plot threads; that's a choice that answers most of the important questions about who the characters are, while still leaving intriguing loose threads between episodes. And Campion is skillful enough to squeeze both realism and poignancy out of almost every scene with her strong ensemble of actors. Two Friends was originally produced for Australian television, presumably inexpensively, and although some restoration work has been conducted for its video release, the soundtrack is still far from ideal. Since this flaw is coupled with subtle dialogue spoken in Australian accents, some viewers may find Two Friends difficult to follow at times. But if you stick with it, it's well worth the effort.

Tucson Weekly [Stacey Richter] also seen here: Cinema Review - Tucson Weekly

THE FIRST FEATURE film by Jane Campion, director of The Piano, is scheduled to play this weekend at The Screening Room, and it's well worth taking a trip downtown to check it out. The 1986 film, Two Friends, has all the hallmarks of Campion's early work--it's subtle, offbeat and surprisingly funny, though the theme as a whole is one of sadness and loss.

Two Friends traces the friendship of two adolescent, Australian girls through several rocky months in their lives and relationship. Instead of progressing, the film follows the pattern of Pinter's Betrayal and tells the story by hopping backwards through time. At the beginning of the film, the friends Kelly (Kris Bidenko) and Louise (Emma Coles) couldn't seem more different. Louise is a rather straight-laced parochial schoolgirl concerned with getting her homework done; Kelly is a fuming punkette drop-out living on the beach with some guy. The two girls don't see each much of each other and their friendship seems to have broken down. Each time the story jumps back in time, we see a little bit of Kelly's dissolution undone until, at the end of the movie, she is as balanced and full of hope as Louise.

By moving back in time, Campion and Helen Garner, who wrote the screenplay, accentuate the sadness of Kelly's incremental loss of innocence. Sharper even than this loss is the sense that Kelly is being somehow broken by the adults around her, who refuse to notice she is clever and talented. Louise, by contrast, has much more supportive parents who worry about buying her a case for her French horn. One of the things that makes this film so good is how complex and layered the relationships between the characters are. Louise, for example, seems to feel guilty that her life is so much easier than Kelly's, and this drives the two even further apart.

Campion shows enormous sensitivity to the problems of girls in this film. Unlike American fantasy versions of female adolescence like Clueless, she takes the problems of girls very seriously, in a wider, social sense and also on a case-by-case basis. In other words, she treats them as whole people, complicated, worth watching, and not always agreeable. You practically have to see Two Friends to realize how rare this is, though Campion achieves a similar feat in Sweetie, and Anna Paquin's role in The Piano had something of this complexity about it too. At one point Kelly has been left alone at her father's house with one of his male friends, and for some reason she wanders into his room and curls up next to him in bed. The man begins making out with her; she responds for a minute, then jumps up and runs out into the street. It's a disturbing but perceptive depiction of a lonely adolescent girl testing out her new power of sexuality.

Campion achieves all this without much cinematic fanfare. In fact, her technique in Two Friends is fairly minimal, with mostly wide, stationary master shots. Campion seems more interested in the variety of human emotions in Two Friends than in telling a story in a conventionally cinematic way. Characters wander in and out of the frame at will, and it's pretty much up to the audience to decide which part of the story is significant. This is not the Jane Campion of The Piano; there's nothing operatic or overwrought about Two Friends. There are few beautiful, sweeping shots. Instead it's more reminiscent of her fabulous short Peel (which is out on videotape), a deadpan, uncannily funny little film about a family battling over a discarded orange rind.

The only problem with this technique is that without the lip-reading help of close-ups, it gets difficult at times to understand the Australian slang and accent of the girls, who nosh on "Vegemite" and describe undesirable boys as "daggy." Despite this, the performances of the young actors in this film are so natural, and Campion's style is so unadorned, that at times Two Friends begins to seem like a series of real-life vignettes, something almost unheard of in Hollywood movies. Bidenko, as the rebellious Kelly, is especially interesting to watch, not only because of her fine, low-key performance, but because she doesn't look like an actress at all. With her big legs, pink skin and unsympathetic face, she looks more like a bad-girl teen guest on Jenny Jones than someone who'd turn up on the silver screen. In such choices, Two Friends is always an unusual film.

Two Friends (1986) | PopMatters Elbert Ventura

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Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: 2 FRIENDS (1986) Tim Brayton

The Auteurs: Jane Campion | Cinema Axis NinVoid99, September 30, 2013

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

Two Friends : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Adam Tyner

dOc DVD Review: Two Friends (1986) - digitallyOBSESSED! Jeff Ulmer

Combustible Celluloid Review - Two Friends (1986), Helen Garner ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

Two Friends - Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com

The 10 Best Movies That Use Reverse Chronology « Taste of Cinema ... #5, Two Friends, Alexandra Gandra, December 26, 2014

Amy Taubin's Top Ten Lists 1987-2005 #6 in the year 1996

Two Friends - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Two Friends - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Alison Macor

Lives Unfold in Campion's Debut Gem, 'Two Friends' - latimes Kevin Thomas

`Two Friends' Marks Turning Point For Girls, Director Campion ... Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune

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Two Friends (1986 film) - Wikipedia

SWEETIE A 96

Australia (97 mi) 1989

We had a tree in our yard with a palace in the branches. It was built for my sister and it had fairy lights that went on and off in a sequence. She was the princess; it was her tree; she wouldn’t let me up it. At night the darkness frightens me. Someone could be watching from behind them—someone who wishes you harm. I used to imagine the roots of that tree crawling, crawling right under the house, right under my bed. Maybe that’s why trees scare me. It’s like they have hidden powers.

— Kay (Karen Colsten), opening narration

It’s interesting to note that Jane Campion’s first feature premiered in competition at Cannes during the same year as the spat between Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Steven Soderbergh’s SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE, where Cannes Jury President Wim Wenders explained his controversial view that Mookie, the lead character in Lee’s film, did not act heroically, believing he did NOT do the right thing, so the film did not deserve to be recognized with an award. It generated all the headlines, as Lee’s film has had a profoundly greater effect on the cinematic and cultural landscape than Soderbergh’s film, the eventual winner of the Palme d’Or (1^st Prize). Lost beneath the glare of the bright lights is this contemporary and curiously challenging film from Jane Campion, one of the more original first features on record, something of a head-spinning experience, a surrealist glimpse into family dysfunction where the sheer oddness of the experience touches a special nerve that will continue to enlighten us well into the future. Strong on visual style, performances, and comic originality, part of the appeal upon its release was the ambiguity associated with the ferociously individualistic character known as Sweetie (Genevieve Lemon), a mentally-challenged, behaviorally stunted character who is so out of control that her family is paralyzed and has no idea how to handle her, so instead her father Gordon (Jon Darling) spoils her, coddles her with compliments, and filling her full of illusions while treating her like a budding rock star, where she’s led to believe she’s talented and uniquely special, though there’s little evidence to support this. But as a result, Sweetie terrorizes her family by doing pretty much whatever she pleases, whenever she pleases, always wanting to be the center of attention, going into violent, emotionally disturbing tantrums when she can’t get her way, all of which has a tantalizing effect on everyone else. While she is the titular character, she’s not introduced until nearly a half-hour into the film, as instead the focus is on her more straight-laced sister Kay (Karen Colsten), an overly repressed woman that feels uncomfortable in her own skin, who seems to have spent her life trying to get out from underneath the shadow of her more domineering sister, but who certainly has her own unique peculiarities, among which includes a petrifying fear of tree roots, imagining them coming up through the concrete or under her bed while she sleeps, where subconsciously she literally appears threatened by the effects of her own family tree. At least initially, without seeing Sweetie, the audience hasn’t a clue what to make of this, but as events proceed, viewers get a much more intimate glimpse of the family dynamic, where Sweetie is so much more than just the black sheep of the family, continually restrained and mistreated, where the sad truth of the matter is that society even today hasn’t found an answer of what to do with emotionally volatile, yet developmentally arrested children who suffer from a wide-ranging condition known as pervasive developmental disorder.

While Campion films are always rich in characterization, which is why performances are always dramatically powerful and memorable, yet the off-putting and oblique angle of every single shot of the film is remarkable, where framing is perhaps the single most defining characteristic of the film, shot by Sally Bongers, a fellow student who became friends with the director at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in the early 80’s, and the first female cinematographer to shoot a 35-millimeter feature in Australia. At the time the film was released, many HATED the look of the film, including some at Cannes who booed the film, while others thought it ruined the movie as they couldn’t put people in the center of the frame, where it was subject to a lot of male aggression responding negatively to women finally expressing themselves differently. To a large extent, much of this happened at film school, where they were competing with guys that were attracted to spectacular shots and hogged all of the equipment, leaving the few female students to fend for themselves, having to discover a witty and more original way to tell the story. What’s perhaps most significant is that Campion and Bongers, like David Lynch, were graduates of prestigious art schools before they became filmmakers, where Campion was a painter, influenced by surrealist painter Frida Kahlo and sculptor Joseph Beuys, but felt limited by the medium, turning instead to cinema as an artform. While they also collaborated on two of Campion’s film shorts that were made during film school, the film is also informed by the writing skills of Gerard Lee, who they also met at film school, with Campion involved in a brief romance, becoming an Australian novelist who co-wrote and co-directed another earlier Campion short, while co-writing this film with Campion as well as one of her later works, 2013 Top Ten List #9 Top of the Lake. Yet it’s the look of the film that viewers must learn to navigate, where there is a complete lack of camera movement, an intentional awkwardness within the frame, always pushing people to the outer extensions of each shot, where the style itself creates an inner tension, beautifully edited, as is the trailer, Sweetie (1989) - Trailer (1:45), with a great sense of rhythm, accentuating the idiosyncracies in us all. Looking back over the years, it was this choice that identifies a cinematic originality, as it was actually an act of liberation to be so wildly different, where there was no one on the set to boss them around or tell them what to do, using a largely female crew, many of them first-timers, which was unheard of at the time, as they were instead free to be very intuitive and create the look they wanted. As a result, objects such as cracked concrete, carpets, curtains, and wallpaper are sometimes as important as the characters, as it keeps the focus within the frame.

It’s interesting that Campion had already written a first draft of THE PIANO (1993), but set it aside as she had the foresight to make this smaller, quirkier film first, feeling it was much more personal, and that a low-budget, more experimental style of filmmaking would be harder to get funding for later on, claiming she was influenced by the more intimate filmmaking styles of David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch, yet also Luis Buñuel and Australian director Peter Weir, especially their ability “to work beyond what you know consciously.” Opening to the sounds of Café of the Gate of Salvation, a white a cappella gospel choir from Sydney that sings in the black gospel tradition, a group that had never been recorded, but can be viewed on YouTube here 25th Anniversary Concert 5.11.11, yet they provide spiritual inspiration before the film even begins. The uniqueness of the sound, however, adds to the flavor of cinematic liberation, as this is a film that took the world by storm. The first sister we are introduced to is Kay, describing her unnatural fear of trees in the opening narration, so she relies upon superstition to help her understand the ways of love, where she visits a psychic that does tea readings, predicting a man with a question mark on his face will make a difference in her life. Soon enough, that man appears in the form of Louis (Tom Lycos, who according to Campion is the spitting image of Gerard Lee), who is already engaged to somebody else. That is no barrier to fate, however, as she meets him clandestinely in an underground parking lot where she seduces him with this strange idea that they were destined to be together, convincing him with the flip of a coin that persistently comes up tails. While he’s a sensitive and moody guy who thought he wanted a normal girlfriend, both of them have their own share of eccentricities, reflected by his love of meditation, and her rising anxiety, where one night she yanks a plant out of the ground by its roots, despite being planted in honor of their relationship, fearing some harm could come. Not knowing what else to do with it, she throws it under the bed, where immediately the couple starts having sex issues, deciding to sleep in separate bedrooms. The film jumps ahead 13 months. Perhaps the most Lynchian moment is when Kay attends a meditation class and continually interrupts, claiming it’s not working, but the instructor calmly and succinctly repeats the exact same instructions each and every time, like a prayer mantra. When they decide to make an appointment for sex, this turns into another absurd moment, beautifully framed with their heads cut off, where the magic just isn’t working, where they feel more like siblings than lovers, so they decide they’re just going through a non-sex phase. One of the fun moments of the film is the kid next door, Clayton (Andre Pataczek), a 5-year old who loves to shout from the back yard into Kay’s kitchen window, where they have to duck down to avoid being induced into playing with him, where he has all his toy cars lined up, ready to go. One of the classic moments of the film, viewed from the kitchen window, comes when he runs out of a tent and jumps into a tiny wading pool, like its all part of a spectacular circus act, where there’s a viewer impulse to break out into applause.

Coming home one night, they find the house broken into and loud music playing, where Sweetie’s entrance is like a bolt of lightning, an unbridled force of nature with no boundaries and no inhibitions, where Kay’s so embarrassed by her half-naked presence she doesn’t know how to describe her, initially telling Louis, “She’s a friend of mine. She’s a bit mental.” By morning, however, he discovers this is her sister, turning up with her boyfriend, Bob (Michael Lake), supposedly her agent, ready to sign her at the first opportunity, but really he’s just some junkie amused by the show she continually puts on. Having to explain herself, Kay indicates, “She was just born — I don’t have anything to do with her.” One of the challenges of the film was finding the right actress to play Sweetie, where they didn’t want her to be perceived as threatening or overly aggressive, but she couldn’t have modesty issues. Campion had previously seen Genevieve Lemon perform onstage without a stitch of clothes on, while in this film her sexually indulgent behavior and constant need for attention reveals a character that is amoral, incredibly inappropriate, and knows no limits, unbounded in every way, given a rebellious Goth and punk look. She’s charming and adorable most of the time, and always interesting, but she’s a wild child who loves playing with Clayton next door, as they are both mentally about the same age. Kay, on the other hand, sulks in her presence, as she’s the sensible sister, tidy and well-organized, where Sweetie is a moving tornado who has a way of breaking things, including Kay’s favorite objects, a set of porcelain figurines of horses set in various poses, where she gives each of them a name, like Thunder, Blaze, and Blaze’s mother, Gypsy. They are like alter-egos of her repressed interior world, suggestive of the Tennessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie, where the brooding sister witnesses them get smashed to pieces, ending up in Sweetie’s mouth when she sheepishly tries to hide the evidence. This incident mirrors a moment when Louis discovers the dead plant under their bed, feeling betrayed by his own, supposedly lucid wife. Sweetie’s innocence (and the film’s) is her greatest appeal, as she’s just a big kid that never grows up. When Gordon, her Dad arrives, having no place left to go, as he’s just been left by his wife Flo (Dorothy Barry), leaving him a week’s worth of prepared dinners on the way out, where they have no life together, as she’s tired of her husband always giving in to Sweetie, where she has him wrapped around her finger, so she disappears for a while, heading into the outlying territory. Having never established boundaries with his daughter, the most inappropriate scene of the film has Sweetie actually bathing her father in the tub, and probably not for the first time, which is suggestive to some of an incestual relationship, a view that surprised Campion, as that was not her intent, though it may rationally explain the family dynamic. Yet the real beauty of the film is that the inappropriate behavior is never explained, remaining ambiguous throughout. Like a kinetic force that never stops, Sweetie grows more and more out of control, testing the limits of everyone’s patience, with the family caught in a state of inertia, where they decide to take a road trip to visit Flo, but cruelly and deceptively leave Sweetie behind.

With music playing in the car as they head for the outback, Schnell Fenster :: Whisper [1988] (3:48), getting out into the open countryside is familiar territory in Jane Campion films, revealing the redemptive power of nature, as Flo is living with the jackaroos (young Australian cowboys), working as their cook, where this entire segment feels utterly surrealistic. Finding his wife surrounded by a multitude of young men at a dude ranch, it’s all too much for Gordon, who storms off in a huff, taking the car to pout alone, yet the others are immediately welcomed, where it’s like being stranded at a Foreign Legion outpost in a Claire Denis film, made a decade before Beau Travail (1999), where the film turns into a fantasia of cowboy paradise and infinite happiness, where there are no problems to be found, with handsome, well-groomed cowboys dancing with one another, or with chairs, as they grab Kay as a likely partner, with Flo breaking out into song, beautifully singing a gorgeous country ballad, There’s a Love that Waits for You, where there’s a feeling of romance wafting in the breeze, away from the stress of the world, that even greets Gordon as he graciously returns, eagerly dancing with his wife, as the jackaroos seem to be having a therapeutic effect on their marriage, with terrific music by Martin Armiger. On the drive back home, Gordon has another spell of regret, torn by their deceitful actions towards Sweetie, where he’s stymied by the idea they can’t all get along, stuck in his own delusion, which seems to be the curse they all have to bear, as Sweetie remains a walking time bomb that at any second can go off. By the time they get back home, with relationships seemingly reconciled, all is not as it seems, as Sweetie goes off the deep end again, this time with tragic consequences, stripped naked in her treehouse along with 5-year old Clayton (who curiously asked in person if she was really a grown-up), in full view of the neighbors, as she refuses to listen to reason and come down, where the dreams and the fantasy collide with reality in an instantaneous thud, a sad and regretful moment, a fall from grace, as they are simply unable to move her out of the spotlight, forever remaining the center of attention, even after she’s gone, with Kay finding her broken figurines meticulously reconstructed, with some obvious parts still missing. But there is no more haunting moment than a memory of Sweetie as a young girl all decked out in a cute little pink sparkle outfit singing a song, "Sweetie"song YouTube (1:17), an innocent plea for love from her father as if summoned from the grave, and a reminder of what she could never obtain, being accepted for who she was. As powerful and unique as this film may be, so much is still left off the screen and out of the film, where there are open spaces that make it sometimes feel more alienating and distant, as if set in a kind of detached coldness, offering a feeling as if characters are continually under a microscope being scientifically observed, where the entire film becomes a lost memory, like a photograph, retaining a quiet innocence that through the passing of the years is hard to find. It’s curious that Campion, who is actually a quite sunny person (displaying a flair for laughter, claiming it is never inappropriate), is drawn to making films of such tragedy, where her mother who suffers from depression attempted suicide near the end of shooting this film, with her sister forced to look after her full-time, allowing Campion time to complete the last ten days of shooting. As a result, the film is dedicated to her sister. But it’s apparent to Campion that illnesses are real, as they have a tragic effect on families, where the open ended, non-judgmental attitude of the film has an enormous impact on families dealing with a similar situation. Despite Campion’s growth as a filmmaker and the accolades she’s received, this daring early work arguably remains her best film.

Sweetie | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Those lucky enough to have seen Jane Campion's eccentric and engaging shorts had reason to expect her first feature to be a breakthrough for the Australian cinema. But nothing prepared one for the freshness and weirdness of this 1989 black comedy about two sisters (Genevieve Lemon and Karen Colston) locked in a deadly struggle. Practically every shot is unorthodox, unexpected, and poetically right, and the swerves of the plot are simultaneously smooth, logical, and so bizarre you'll probably wind up pondering them days later. The mad behavior of both sisters may make you squirm, and there are plenty of other things in this picture—including the other characters—to make you feel unbalanced, but Campion does so many beautiful, funny, and surprising things with our disquiet that you're likely to come out of this movie seeing the world quite differently. In short, this is definitely not to be missed. With Tom Lycos, Jon Darling, Dorothy Barry, and Michael Lake.

Sexual Discourse [THE PIANO] | Jonathan Rosenbaum

Both of Campion’s theatrical features are bold expressionist works about female sexual desire that make free and idiosyncratic use of central metaphors — though here their similarities end, and it will be interesting to see whether Campion’s next feature, an adaptation of Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady, bears any relationship at all to this pattern. In Sweetie, the principal drama is between two antagonistic sisters — one of them sexually repressed and neurotic, the other completely uninhibited and psychotic — and the central metaphor is trees. Though a couple of trees actually figure in the plot, Campion mainly uses trees as a poetic organizing image in the consciousness of Kay, the neurotic sister, who narrates the film: she gets us to think about family trees, planted and uprooted lives, unseen depths and giddy elevations, blooming versus dying, and various forms of encroachments and entanglements.

Sweetie, directed by Jane Campion | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrews

Kay (Colston) fears darkness and the secret, stifling power of plants; her teenage sister Dawn (Lemon) is crazy, throwing tantrums at all and sundry, and dreaming, unrealistically, of stardom. When the latter and her bombed-out boyfriend (Lake) arrive unannounced at the suburban home Kay shares with her equally loopy lover Lou (Lycos), all hell breaks loose. Tragedy looms. And all the aforementioned is played, partly, as comedy. Campion's first theatrical feature is a remarkable, risky exploration of the weird and wonderfully surreal undercurrents that can lie just beneath the surface of everyday suburban life, ordinary folk harbour dark, unfathomable obsessions, phobias and desires, and a familiar world is unsettlingly distorted by grotesque close-ups, harsh overhead angles and narrative ellipses. Amazingly, as she veers without warning from black comedy to bleak melodrama and back again, she manages to make us laugh at and like her confused, barely articulate characters, so that her dénouement is simultaneously ludicrous and deeply affecting. Sweetie confirms Campion as a highly original movie talent.

New Season Opens with Jane Campion’s Sweetie in 35mm Rebecca Hall from Chicago Northwest Film Society

The first feature film by director Jane Campion, Sweetie is the story of a family “falling apart like a wet paper bag.” On the advice of a tea-leaf reading psychic, Kay (Karen Colston) steals her presumed soul mate from the arms of a coworker. Soon Kay and Louis (Tom Lycos) are living the suburban dream outside Sydney, Australia, working nameless jobs and watching their sex life disappear into the candy-colored linoleum. Enter Dawn, a.k.a. Sweetie (Geneviève Lemon), Kay’s feral, sexually charged sister, and let the hair pulling and destruction of all things beloved commence. Perhaps Campion’s funniest film (with the exception of the unfairly maligned Holy Smoke!), Sweetie is a fever dream occupied by needy, selfish children being literally (thanks to cinematographer Sally Bongers) and figuratively backed into corners. Released four years before Campion became the first (and only, as of 2016) female filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes (for The Piano), it contains both the poetry and depravity that can be traced throughout her later work. Always ready and willing to treat seemingly mad and irrational characters with deadly sincerity, Campion makes no exception for neurotic, tree-fearing Kay, as we watch her demons made flesh in the film’s final scenes.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Kelly Steele/Cordelia Stephens]

Jane Campion's feature debut focuses on the lives of a dysfunctional family set against a backdrop of ordinary suburbia. Kay livens up an otherwise dull existence with an unhealthy interest in superstition. She pursues and wins the heart of Louis on the basis of a tea-leaf prediction., and they consequently move in together; sharing the same "spiritual plane".

The spell is broken when Kay tears out Louis' newly planted tree; relations start to rot as Kay changes overnight to an emotional and sexual invalid. Enter Sweetie, Kay's mentally ill sister. Arriving. out of the blue one night Sweetie suffers the deluded conviction that with Bob, her producer-cum-lover, she will "walk through doors" into the world of entertainment. She exults in her new-found freedom away from the family nest, whilst Kay refuses to entertain the notion of letting her stay, convinced that she is a "dark spirit" and thus the scene is set for conflict between two sibling opposites. Into this chaotic spectacle walks Dad, suffering woefully with the separation from his frustated wife who has gone into the bush to find herself amongst the jackaroos.

Sweetie is notable for the use of bizarre wide-angle shots in enclosed spaces, combined with lurid set colours - these contribute to the angst and tension within the family unit. The contrast of incongruous people, situations and events with ostensibly mundane environment hints at something more corrupt and sinister underlying the suburban dream.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs

English Romantic poet John Keats, who's the subject of Jane Campion’s 2009 film BRIGHT STAR, once described a phenomenon he called “Negative Capability” as being “when a man is capable of... uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It’s no wonder, then, that Campion was drawn to Keats’ story, as that very philosophy likewise sums up the appeal and justifies the inscrutability of Campion’s motley oeuvre. Her first true feature, SWEETIE, is perhaps most emblematic of this concept, both as it applies to the subject of the film itself and its place within her output; it’s at once Campion’s most idiosyncratic feature and still a perfect example of her enigmatically alluring style, though it doubtless has more in common with her film school shorts than the more mature features that followed. Filmed in Australia from a script cowritten by Campion, SWEETIE is mostly about Kay, a shy and superstitious woman whose neuroses take the form of a toy horse collection and an elegiac fear of trees. She enters into a relationship with her coworker Louis at the beginning of the film, more or less stealing him from his fiancé after discovering that he fits a description given by a suburban fortune-teller. Thirteen months later, just as their sex life has stalled, Kay’s sister, from whom the film takes its name, comes to visit. Sweetie is everything Kay is not: brash, impulsive, shameless, and impetuously sexual. Their parents are similarly bizarre—their father coddled Sweetie at the expense of his marriage, and their mother, averse to Sweetie as she may be, is more like her wilder daughter than she thinks. This summary, however, is deceptively straightforward; just as it is difficult to describe a Keats poem, or an experimental film, it’s tough—and perhaps pointless—to blithely summarize any of Campion’s work. One might in fact describe SWEETIE as being experimental, it’s rather conventional themes deconstructed by Campion’s auteurist inclinations and cinematographer Sally Bongers’ singular aesthetic. The latter element is best characterized as quirky, a label that’s taken for granted in this era of contrived capriciousness. Similarly to how the motifs that span Campion’s filmography often go unexplained—engagement, for example, factors into several of her films—SWEETIE’s distinct visual style persists without explanation. Her fixation on female psychosexuality is less apparent in the film, however, though what focus there is on it is certainly reflective of Campion’s unique viewpoint on the subject. (Female sexuality is not just a throughline in her career, but also the subject towards which her “negative capability” is most applicable. In other words, it’s the “unknown known,” to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, that drives her art.) SWEETIE might not be her best film, or even her most experimental (IN THE CUT is the frontrunner for that distinction), but it could be her most mysterious in execution as well as intent.

Sweetie (1989) - The Criterion Collection

In "Sweetie," Jane Campion's unsettlingly original, macabrely funny first film, the camera seems to capture its images from never-before-seen angles. Everything in the universe Campion has created is just slightly off-kilter, as if the Earth had positioned itself awkwardly beneath your feet. The film's subject is family life, but voices seem to call down from the flowers on the wallpaper, and every crack in the sidewalk threatens danger. It's about family life as Kafka might have viewed it.

From its opening shots on, the film unfolds a mood of enveloping peculiarity. In essence, "Sweetie" is a horror movie; it's about the horror of having relatives who crowd in, wear your clothes, occupy your guest room and, without the slightest urging, attach their lives to yours.

Deeper down, though, there's another layer, and this is where Campion is happiest. She likes it when family turbulence is repressed and springs out in freaky new shapes. Campion's style isn't articulate; it's based, in fact, on inexpressiveness, on the thoughts that get tangled up and don't quite work themselves to the surface. Her jokes, too, hit you upside the head, like Freudian snowballs zinging in from nowhere.

The movie is slow to bring its own themes to the surface (it never fully does), busying itself instead with laying out its shadowy, suggestive atmosphere. The first section introduces us to a bony Australian named Kay (Karen Colston), who wears her dark hair in bangs that drop like a curtain just above her brow. Peeking out from underneath are a pair of huge, panicky eyes that appear to be on perpetual alert for signs of some invisible menace.

When we first see her, Kay is lounging on her bed above a floral-printed carpet, and the way Campion has shot it, the image might seem idyllic -- a sort of dreamy transcendence on a leafy bank of clouds -- if, on the soundtrack, she weren't talking about the hidden powers of trees and how, as a little girl, she was afraid that the big ones outside her house had sinister designs and were growing their roots out under the house to get her.

Campion, who comes from Australia, develops the film narrative according to its own dark, neurotic logic. After a visit to a fortuneteller who tells her she is to encounter a man "with a question mark on his face," Kay meets Louis (Tom Lycos), whose front forelock curls down to a mole on his forehead. Having decided that fate has played its hand, the couple immediately set up house, where things go along well enough until Louis plants a scraggly baby arbor in the back yard, rekindling Kay's childhood tree terrors.

The sapling, of course, cannot be allowed to survive, and there's an eerie hilarity in the way Kay yanks it out of the ground in the middle of the night and appears, ever so subtly, to strangle the life out of it. This "death" signals the end of the couple's sex life. Claiming that she has a cold, Kay moves into the room across the hall. But even after the cold has vanished she can't bring herself to move back. And though neither of them is particularly happy about it, every night, just before hitting the hay, the couple kiss good night, like brother and sister, and lock the doors to their separate bedrooms.

At this stage, with the arrival of Kay's sister, Dawn (Genevieve Lemon), the movie shifts gears. Nicknamed "Sweetie," Dawn is a well-upholstered nightmare with dyed jet-black hair, black fingernails and cradle-born dreams of a glamorous show-biz life. Materializing out of thin air with her boyfriend-producer, Bob (Michael Lake), an upright slug who's either a junkie or a narcoleptic, Sweetie seems to have only one purpose in life and that is to set Kay's teeth on edge. At first, Kay won't even claim her as family. "I didn't have anything to do with her. She was just ... born."

Like a child star gone to hideous seed, Sweetie is the most wholly unsympathetic screen creation since Dennis Hopper's Frank in "Blue Velvet." And while watching her, we're aware that Campion is intentionally taking us to the edge of revulsion, daring us to push her character away. Still, even after Gordon (Jon Darling), the girls' father, arrives, all forlorn because his wife has left him to work out West for a bunch of cowboys, and we see how sickly manipulative the family relationships are, our disgust becomes more complicated but perhaps even more urgent.

As skilled a creator of otherworldly moods as Campion is, "Sweetie" doesn't have much narrative drive, and I found it vastly more compelling in the beginning, when Kay was center stage, than after the destabilizing arrival of her sister.

Still, I loved the way Campion and cinematographer Sally Bongers make the natural and the unnatural (human) landscapes appear lush and supersaturated with color, but at the same time barren, minimalist. Also, a scene in which the jackaroos dance a dusty sunset waltz in the cowboy camp has an almost serene eccentricity. The images imprint themselves instantly into your memory. In making her first film, Campion has done thrillingly atmospheric work, and in the process, established herself as perhaps the most perversely gifted young filmmaker to rise up in years.

Sweetie: Jane Campion’s Experiment Criterion essay by Dana Polan, October 23, 2006

On the Road With Jane Campion video, September 30, 2009

Three Reasons: Sweetie video, May 24, 2011

12 Great Parting Shots photo gallery, July 16, 2012

More than Meets the Eye: The Mediation of Affects in Jane Campion's ... Sue Gillett from Senses of Cinema, December 5, 1999

Jane Campion • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Fincina Hopgood, October 2002

A Major Talent [on SWEETIE] | Jonathan Rosenbaum March 30, 1990

Sweetie | Foolish Human James Harmon

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: SWEETIE (1989) Tim Brayton

Sweetie | Cinelogue Matthew Mesaros, May 18, 2011

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

'Sweetie' Is Jane Campion's Stunning Freshman Effort | PopMatters W. Scott Poole

Michigan Quarterly Review|First Films: Jane Campion's “Sweetie” Eric McDowell from the Michigan Quarterly Review

Sweetie (Jane Campion) - Film Reviews - No Ripcord Gary Collins

The Auteurs: Jane Campion | Cinema Axis NinVoid99, September 30, 2013

Jane Campion - Director - Films as Director:, Other ... - Film Reference Rob Edelman

Sweetie | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Genn Heath

c/f movie review: Sweetie (1989 - dir. Jane Campion) - Clones / Fashions Matt Schimkowitz

Women's Pictures - Jane Campion's Sweetie - Blog - The Film ... Nathaniel Rogers from The Film Experience

"Sweetie" by Cook, Pam - Metro Magazine, Issue 181, Winter 2014 ...

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson, also here: Turner Classic Movies

DVD Times Gary Couzens

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich]

DVD Verdict [Bill Gibron]

DVD Town [Christopher Long]

The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]

Jane Campion Essay - Critical Essays - eNotes.com

50 Essential Feminist Films – Flavorwire Sweetie #9

Sweetie rewatched – Jane Campion's beautifully strange film debut ... Luke Buckmaster from The Guardian

Sweetie Movie Review & Film Summary (1990) | Roger Ebert

MOVIE REVIEW : Family Unsettlingly Under Siege in 'Sweetie' From Australia Sheila Benson from The LA Times

'Sweetie': A Second Look - latimes Dennis Lim

Movie Review - - Film Festival;; 'Sweetie,' a Wry Comedy By New ... The New York Times

Sweetie Blu-ray - Jane Campion - DVDBeaver.com

Sweetie (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE – made for TV A 96

Australia New Zealand Great Britain USA (157 mi) 1990

Prospero:

My brave spirit!

Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil

Would not infect his reason?

Ariel:

Not a soul

But felt the fever of the mad and play'd

Some tricks of desperation.

—Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1 Scene 2, 1611 The Tempest - Page 397 - Google Books Result

Originally made as a three-part television series, Campion was initially reluctant to let it be released theatrically, eventually winning a handful of awards (seven) at the Venice Film Festival in 1990, yet this is one of the better biopic cinematic experiences, told in three parts, covering all three in a trilogy of autobiographical volumes by New Zealand writer Janet Frame, To the Is-land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985), and a film that defiantly probes underneath the surface of the lead female character. Given a more modernistic context in that the film, a collection of various fragments in her life, leads to a wholistic overall view, as the life of Janet Frame literally materializes before our eyes, filled with literary passages and extraordinarily subjective insight, where the film is a profoundly revelatory work that expresses something close to the depths of the writer’s soul. Reminiscent of an earlier portrayal of Hollywood actress Frances Farmer in Jessica Lange’s brilliant portrayal in FRANCES (1982), both women spent years confined to institutions for perceived mental health issues with a condition that was believed to be incurable, subject to electric shock treatments and targeted for a recommended lobotomy, which, viewed in historical hindsight, is one of the cruelest and most destructive medical procedures mankind ever invented, yet both of these women came frightfully close to having the procedure. It was her intimacy of the psychological terrors inflicted on patients during extensive hospital treatment that led the young artist to examine her life so closely, finding language for the darkest recesses of her imagination, exposing what amounts to hidden secrets to the world through an obsession with the healing power of literature. Arguably New Zealand’s most distinguished author, Campion, a fellow New Zealander, fills the screen with indelible images of her own homeland while scrutinizing Frame’s life with methodical precision. With a screenplay by Laura Jones, who also wrote the adaptation of the Henry James novel in Campion’s later film with Nicole Kidman in THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996), this film also has one of the best uses of music by Don McGlashan which couldn’t be more perfectly integrated throughout, creating a fragile, sensory experience that is unique to films. But first and foremost is the character of Janet Frame, played by three different actresses, Karen Fergusson as a child, Alexia Keogh as an adolescent, and Kerry Fox as an adult, where Fox, so brilliant in Patrice Chéreau’s INTIMACY (2001), offers the performance of her career in her very first role, yet another unique discovery by Campion, criminally overlooked by the Academy Awards, as she was not even nominated, yet unlike the character of Sweetie, whose fierce individuality may have been too toxic for some, Frame’s vulnerability invites the audience in, allowing us to feel her social anxiety, hiding recognizable fears and anxieties with an uncomfortable smile, caught out of sorts, like a deer in the headlights, almost entirely with looks and gestures, barely uttering a word, as she suffers from extreme sensitivity and acute shyness, offering an inner narration as a window to her soul where she becomes socially isolated at college, “Too shy to mix, too scared to enter the Union building, I was more and more alone, and my only romance was in poetry and literature.”

The author of twelve novels, three short story collections, one children’s book, two books of poetry (one published posthumously), and three volumes of autobiography, Frame grew up in the South Island of New Zealand in dire poverty, the second daughter in a family of four girls and a boy, where her father was a railroad engineer, and though he kept his job during the depression years of the 1930’s, the family had little money to spare. In the opening moments viewers are introduced to a young girl with an explosion of red/orange hair, like the Little Orphan Annie comic strip character, where it feels like a satiric reference to Campion’s first film short, AN EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE — PEEL (1982), where all three characters have bright red hair, yet there are none of the skewed angles and experimental shots on display here, instead it’s shot by Stuart Dryburgh in a much more conventional manner, featuring remarkable landscapes, where humans are dwarfed by green fields and the grandiosity of the land, made to resemble smaller creatures. Deprived of material possessions, there are many family songs in Janet’s childhood that recur later in the film as familiar musical motifs, such as “Duncan Gray,” a Scottish folk song heard throughout, an angel at my table YouTube (31 seconds), yet they play a role early on in contributing to family unity, as Janet seems content with her warm and loving family. Perhaps starved for friendship, she steals money to treat her classmates to gum, yet ends up being branded a thief, made to stand in front of the blackboard with her back to the class in utter humiliation, which becomes a personal catastrophe, especially when she’s separated from the rest of the class and placed with several obviously disabled kids. Scorned and humiliated, perhaps this is a hint of what’s to come. With four sisters to a single bed, seen amusingly practicing shifting together, all turning simultaneously, Janet has a close relationship with her sisters, reading vociferously, comparing her family to the Brontë sisters, while her brother developed epileptic seizures and was regularly beaten by her father. Meeting a friend outside the family was a revelation, a neighbor girl named Poppy, where the two playfully re-enacted various abuses they witnessed, violent fathers and puritanically strict teachers, An Angel at my table YouTube (4:02), yet the curious way the children are filmed feels almost magical, holding our spellbound interest with intoxicating musical selections, yet perhaps their closeness aroused fear in their parents, as Janet’s father forbid them from seeing one another again. Often framed in long walks down a lonely highway or through sheep-ridden acres of farmland, her awkwardness increased during puberty, becoming embarrassed by her unruly red hair and her decayed teeth. Things only got worse when her eldest sister Myrtle drowned in a local swimming pool, an event that was preceded by happy events, as the family took photographs on a family holiday, yet when looking at them afterwards, the view of Myrtle was blurred, where she is strangely missing from view, like an ominous omen announcing her fate.

But it wasn’t until Janet went off to college at the University of Dunedin, studying to be a teacher, that she found it painfully shy to interact with the other girls, afraid to enter the student common room, instead taking refuge in spending her time alone in her room, immersing herself in a world of imagination and literature in order to escape from reality, writing poems and short stories, many of which were published in school publications. Her sister Isabel joined her at school, yet they were eventually forced to separate, leading to an existential moment, “So this is how it was, face to face with the future, living apart from Isabel, pretending that I was not alone, and that teaching is what I’d longed to do all my life.” Astoundingly, her sister Isabel drowned shortly thereafter, creating yet another inexplicable personal loss. When the day arrived that she should finally stand before a group of young students as their teacher, with an administrator observing from the back of the classroom, she froze, once again standing with her back to the class, mirroring a childhood incident, where the camera’s focus is suddenly on the piece of chalk in her hand, as if time has stopped, yet the class becomes restless and uneasy, where she’s forced to excuse herself, leading to the most wondrous scene of the film, where the exquisite music of Kathleen Ferrier sings Schubert’s “An die Musik” an angel at my table YouTube (3:38), her favorite composer, as Janet runs away with tears streaming down her face, unable to contain herself, finding herself suddenly outside where she is filled with desperation and anxiety, having what amounts to a nervous breakdown, yet the transcendent voice of Ferrier, so quietly dramatic, registering such clarity, unmatched tonal richness, and emotional warmth, holds the screen. Frame’s interior world was collapsing, “I felt completely isolated. I knew no one to confide in, to get advice from; and there was nowhere I could go. What, in all the world, could I do to earn my living and still live as myself, as I knew myself to be. Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated.” It was her writing talent, however, that brought special attention to her personal life, as she acknowledges in one paper swallowing a handful of pills in what was probably a suicide attempt. It was this autobiographical observation that led one of her college professors to refer her for further psychiatric examinations where it’s revealed that she’s schizophrenic, perhaps the singlemost significant event in her life, as she spent the next eight years drowning in the as yet untold atrocities of the New Zealand mental institutions, including the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. What follows is an immersion into personal nightmares and horrors, as she’s thrown in with more seriously disturbed patients with little to no education, who literally can’t control themselves, where patients were beaten for bedwetting, who scream and cry out all hours of the day and night, yet she’s dumped into their presence for what was described as “a period of rest.” Viewers immediately recognize the shocking indignity of suddenly descending into barbaric conditions, yet she was forced to receive more than 200 electric shock treatments, “each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution.” One of the more ghoulish scenes of the film is a strange dance party taking place in the asylum, an unsettling moment that couldn’t feel more twisted.

Recalling in her autobiography, An Angel at My Table, An Angel at My Table: The Complete Autobiography:

The attitude of those in charge, who unfortunately wrote the reports and influenced the treatment, was that of reprimand and punishment, with certain forms of medical treatment being threatened as punishment for failure to ‘co-operate’ and where ‘not co-operate’ might mean a refusal to obey an order, say, to go to the doorless lavatories with six others and urinate in public while suffering verbal abuse by the nurse for being unwilling. ‘Too fussy are we? Well, Miss Educated, you’ll learn a thing or two here.

After eight years, with no signs of improvement, Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy, as even her mother was persuaded to sign the permission documents, as we see a group of patients wearing head wraps, presumably those that survived the operation, with orderlies helping them walk the grounds, but she was only spared the operation at the last minute when her doctor happened to read in the newspaper that she won a national prize, the Hubert Church Memorial Award, for her book of short stories, The Lagoon and Other Stories. Astonishingly, at the age of 29, Frame emerged from this episode with her sanity intact, writing “It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life.” With the help of Frank Sargeson (Martyn Sanderson), a gay New Zealand writer of some repute and notoriety, he invited Frame to come live in a trailer on his grounds, allowing her to write in solitude, where she immediately set to work on Owls Do Cry, her first published novel in 1957, which surprised them both by being immediately published. Receiving a grant for her artistic work, she travels to London and Spain as a published author, yet her humility is at the heart of her appeal, described by Campion as “an unremarkable heroine who allowed people to experience their own vulnerability.” Through various travails, her reservation gets lost in the mail and she loses her luggage, among other things, yet she remains isolated, spending much of her time in her room, where the tone shifts from absurd comedy, especially in the form of Patrick (David Letch), a bigoted Irish tenant who tries to school her on the ways of the world, repeatedly asking if she’s “fancy-free,” still a virgin, thinking he’s being romantically protective, to the strangeness of the Spanish women who are forever scrubbing the floors and cleaning their building, surrounded by religious icons, while spreading gossip about this hopelessly “fallen” woman, to the inhibitions of free-wheeling 50’s tourists traveling through Europe, where she discovers her first love affair with an American history professor, taking a break from writing, where her passions are beautifully expressed by swimming nude in the open sea, but alas, he must return to America for the fall term once summer is over. While the film accentuates the romantic backdrop of a small, Spanish coastal town, it also addresses her very real fears when she’s left pregnant and alone, without the man ever knowing, where in an excruciatingly sad scene she loses the baby, adding a female dimension on the summer holiday that most films never explore. Elevated feelings of anxiety lead to a voluntary hospitalization in London, where she’s surprised to learn, “Finally it was discovered that I never suffered from schizophrenia. At first the truth seemed more terrifying than the lie. How could I now ask for help when there was nothing wrong with me?” What she was experiencing was the residual effects from the many years of electric shock treatments, as it takes years for the body to calm down afterwards. This stunning revelation of an earlier misdiagnosis seems to clear an open path for the rest of her life, where she was content to simply write. By the end of the film, she’s a notorious artist that the press wants to photograph and write stories about, a local celebrity when she returns to her hometown, and for a very brief moment, even dances the twist, An Angel At My Table End YouTube (2:14). It should be pointed out that Kerry Fox is simply phenomenal, onscreen for nearly every shot in the second half of the film, showing an emotional range that is quite simply breathtaking, where certainly part of Campion’s unique gift comes in her remarkable talent for casting. Sensitive and deeply moving, with only spare use of dialogue, this is a uniquely inventive character study that doubles as a living novel that develops before our eyes, something of a delight all the way through, where the uncredited music of a Schubert sonata, Alfred Brendel Schubert - Piano Sonata in B Flat Major, D. 960 Second Movement ... YouTube (9:38), plays throughout, heightening the gravity, as does that original folk theme played at the outset, An Angel At My Table (OST) by Don McGlashan on Spotify, adding a solemn grace to the outstanding artistry onscreen.

Monica Sullivan from Videohound’s Independent Film Guide:

Jane Campion’s AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE began life as a three-part series on New Zealand television, which (dare we say it?) is the best way to see this 157-minute movie. After all, it is based on three different autobiographical novels by Janet Frame, To the Island, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City. Kerry Fox plays Frame, who was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic and spent eight years in a mental institution receiving electroshock therapy before the error was corrected. Extremely well acted and directed, AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE is nonetheless very heavy going all at once – especially first thing in the morning, which is when most reviewers see new movies. This explains (if not excuses) all the bad tempers and bad manners one is likely to observe at press screenings. AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE won many awards over the world, but then so did BREAKING THE WAVES and any number of worthy candidates which are long, depressing, and make you feel like a heel for wanting to watch SULLIVANS TRAVELS instead.

An Angel at My Table, directed by Jane Campion | Film ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

Though adapted for television from three volumes of autobiography by New Zealand writer Janet Frame, Campion's film is both wholly cinematic and true to her own preoccupations. Her subject is the privations and anxieties of childhood and adolescence, the weird absurdity of ordinary life, and the disconcertingly thin line between normality and madness, all depicted with an unsentimental honesty that veers abruptly (but never jarringly) between naturalism and surrealism, comedy and tragedy. As the introverted Frame - a plain, bubble-haired redhead born into a poor, close-knit family in 1924 - progresses through school, college and erroneously diagnosed schizophrenia towards final liberation as a respected writer, Campion deploys a wealth of economically observed details to explore her heroine's passionate, deceptively placid perceptions of the world. There are none of the usual artist-biopic clichés here. Frame, as embodied by three uncannily-matched actresses, is bright but intensely, awkwardly passive, and inhabits a chaotic, arbitrary universe. Watching her hard, slow struggle for self-respect, happiness and peace becomes a profoundly moving, strangely affirmative experience.

An Angel at My Table Terrence Rafferty from the New Yorker (link lost)

Based on the autobiography of the New Zealand novelist and poet Janet Frame. The film covers the first forty years or so of the writer's life—she was born in 1924—and takes close to three hours to tell the story. When it's all over, you feel that you know far too little about Janet Frame and far too much about the film's director, Jane Campion. The movie (which was made as a three-part miniseries for Australian television) is a succession of odd, mannered tableaux, more or less in the style of Campion's 1990 art-house hit, "Sweetie." The compositions emphasize the peculiarities of Janet's appearance, especially in her childhood and awkward adolescence: she has a stiff, frizzy mop of bright-orange hair, and her teeth are badly decayed. The Janet Frame we see in this film doesn't seem to have an inner life, and without that she has no life at all. Even the most dramatic events in her life are treated so flatly and elliptically that we're unable to respond; time after time, we find that we can't orient ourselves in crucial scenes, because the director hasn't bothered to establish the characters or the setting. Writers' lives are weird enough without being subjected to this sort of willful disruption of their emotional continuity. Campion's perverse exercise in biographical filmmaking deserves a new title: "My Incomprehensible Career." Janet is played by three actresses: as a child, by Alexia Keogh; as a young teen-ager, by Karen Fergusson; and, as an adult, by Kerry Fox. Screenplay by Laura Jones.

An Angel at My Table | Film Review | Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

Director Jane Campion initially conceived of her adaptation of poet/novelist Janet Frame’s series of autobiographies as a TV miniseries. Only into production did the New Zealand Film Commission suggest a theatrical release, apparently because the biopic is the singular genre that looks, feels, and acts like episodic television and still plays nominally well in movie theaters. An Angel at My Table, named from the volume of Frame’s memoirs that recounts her elongated residence in a psychiatric ward, is no doubt a heartfelt tribute to a soft-spoken, melancholic writer from a director who claims to cherish her work as being very important in her own development. And though it’s shackled to that unyielding, difficult narrative structure of most biopics, this quality also works to the film’s benefit as Frame’s life is unspooled with the same sort of scenes-as-brushstrokes impressionism of Im Kwon-taek’s Chihwaseon.

But whereas Chihwaseon becomes increasingly restless and elliptical as it goes on, culminating in one of the most poetic representations of an artist stepping into legend (via a kiln), An Angel at My Table begins at the height of Campion’s mottled isolationist whimsy—showing a baby Janet covering her face trying to deflect her approaching mother’s bosom, and then a credit card commercial panorama of the knobby-kneed pre-teen Forth against the rolling New Zealand landscape—and settles into the mundane chapter-and-book processional as it continues. Janet goes through her early childhood as an outcast at school. She’s from a poor family, has poor hygiene (later in her teens, she let her teeth rot brown), and when she offers her entire class chewing gum bought with money she stole from her father’s woolen pocket, her teacher reveals her thievery to the class who then sneers. To say nothing of the untamable patch of ginger cotton growing from her scalp, which remains a constant in her life as she moves from the university to the asylum to a successful writing career complete with grants to travel to Paris and Spain. Spanning over three decades, Frame is portrayed seamlessly by three different actresses (in order of age: Alexia Keogh, Karen Fergusson, and, playing the adult Frame, Kerry Fox) whose remarkable resemblance to each other extends beyond their appearance and mannerisms. They pass the psychological baton and collectively sculpt a portrait of growth.

Campion’s knack for solitary yet paradoxically epic scope nibbles off Laura Jones’s bite-sized scene-sketches of loneliness and makes entire meals of them, swallowing cast and location up alike in an effort to centralize the three actresses playing Frame to the point that even the most major supporting characters (her older sister Myrtle in the film’s first hour, her American lover in Ibiza in the last) are delegated to the sidelines…which aren’t exactly as prodigious as they might be in a film conceived for the silver screen. In fact, with Frame’s wild crown of fuzz, the preponderance of close-ups turn the rectangular frame into an hourglass, suggesting (however inadvertently) the time she struggles to remember and catalogue in writing her own memoirs as well as the time she lost in a mental institution, the place where she no doubt lost some of those memories enduring no less than 200 odd electroshock treatments. Campion’s film comes up short, however, in never satisfactorily illustrating the importance or character of Frame’s writing, which, while lauded for its selflessness, can’t survive the director’s tightly honed individualist scrutiny without occasionally lapsing into solipsism.

Movie Review - Angel at My Table, An - eFilmCritic Dr. Isaksson

From the moment you set your eyes onto Jane Campion's "An Angel at My Table" you are completely swallowed into the film's overwhelming atmosphere. This is the film adaptation of renown New Zealand writer Janet Frame's own autobiographies. Spanning from Janet's magical childhood to her later, more challenging years, "An Angel at My Table" never softens it's brutal truth and never loses it's focus while depicting Janet Frame's amazing rise from a shy farm girl to a prize winning author.

From the outset of 1990's An Angel At My Table, we are led into the life of Janet Frame, visiting her as a child and seeing the goings on of her large but close knit family. We watch as the young, frizzy haired Janet discovers a life-long love for literature as steps awkwardly through the daily hardships of poverty and family troubles. These early scenes are filmed with such a childish honesty that you almost feel as if you are watching a documentary and not an acted film. As she reaches her teenage years, Janet Frame comes to a crossroad. She must become a teacher to make a living and in doing so, finds trouble in discarding her dreams of being a writer. (That dream being the strongest passion in her life.) As she reaches early adulthood, Janet's (played by the brilliant Kerry Fox) unhappiness and crippling shyness leads her down a path that noone could expect. So eager to trust others, Janet Frame stumbles into a dark realm of misery and hardship almost too horrific to describe. However, her years of suffering and uncertainy are just the beginning of the amazing journey she is set to make. And as that new course of life begins you realize that An Angel At My Table isn't just going to show you a life incomplete, but a life of the most unbelievable occurrences and of great joy and great accomplishment.

The most amazing aspect about An Angel At My Table is the uncompromising and heartfelt lead performance by Kerry Fox. When she is on the screen, she gives you Janet Frame, body, mind, heart and soul. I have rarely seen such impeccable acting in my life and feel all the more richer that I was given the chance to see Kerry Fox in all her glory. She is nothing short of a revelation. The other young women who portray Janet are almost equally great. Through her childhood years, Janet is played by a chubby little wonder named (Alexia Keough). Her face is charmingly captured by Jane Campion in an honest and no frills light that sets the film's truthful and strong beginning. As a teen Janet, the quality of acting continues as (Karen Fergusson) assumes the role. Amazingly, the actresses are so convincing and look so much alike that you can easily believe you are watching the same person.

As far as the look and feel of An Angel At My Table goes, Jane Campion's direction can be just as harsh and unbending as it is soft and beautifully stunning. She has an amazing knack for capturing the most unflinching scenes of human emotion and then can stun you with her jaw dropping shots of the glorious New Zealand landscapes. You KNOW full well that Campion truly loves her work and the subject she has taken the task to portray. The film is just brimming with love. The music score for the film by Don McGlashan is another absolutely gorgeous standout. Full of moody dark atmosphere as well as shining joy, McGlashan's music plays in your ear long after the film has ended. Wonderful!

For me to say that Kerry Fox and Jane Campion deserved Best Actress and Best Director Oscars for this film would be an understatement. They are FAR above the plastic praise Hollywood has to offer. Their work is a testament that truly great films can (and do) come in small, foreign packages.

It is almost impossible to go into elaborate details concerning An Angel At My Table becuase it is simply an all embracing look at a human's incredible life. Most surprising, in all this, as a viewer, you never lose sight of the film's ultimate aim. That even in the darkest hour, no matter what is stacked against you, one of the most glorious of all powers blessed inside the human frame is the unstoppable, unbreakable, spirit.

"An Angel At My Table" is simply a masterpiece. Showcasing one woman's journey through days of childish joy, fragile teenage uncertainty, harsh grown up reality, and ultimately the neverending quest for self-fulfillment.

An Angel at My Table: Alone, Naturally - The Criterion Collection Criterion essay by Amy Taubin, September 19, 2005

Jane Campion's Top 10 - Explore - The Criterion Collection

An Angel at My Table (1990) - The Criterion Collection

Angel from the Mirror City: Jane Campion's Janet Frame • Senses of ... Sue Gillett from Senses of Cinema, November 2000

Re-imag(in)ing the borderland through the work of Janet Frame a Writing in the Margins, Exploring the Borderland in the Work of Janet Frame and Jane Campion, 18-page essay by Anna Ball (University of Manchester) (pdf)

"Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table: As National, as Adaptation, as ... 5-page essay by David Callahan, 2002 (pdf)

Not Just Movies: An Angel at My Table Jake Cole, March 15, 2010

Past Perfect: Criterion Classics - Angel at My Table (1989) | PopMatters Bill Gibron

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (1990) Timothy Brayton

Jane Campion: memory, motif and music Geraldine Bloustien from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2, edited by Adrian Martin (1990)

An Angel At My Table | Foolish Human James Harmon, June 20, 2012

Nick's Flick Picks review of An Angel at My Table Nick Davis, February 1999

An Angel at My Table - Jane Campion - HOME Rachel Hatfield from Rachel Is a Critic

Women Writers on Film: "An Angel At My Table" 1990, Jane Campion Frances Hatherley, July 8. 2012

Bechdel Test Canon: An Angel At My Table | Bitch Media Alyx Vesey, January 25, 2012

Of Love and Other Demons: 'An Angel at My Table' (Jane Campion ... Justine A. Smith from Vague Visages, June 23, 2016

An Angel At My Table - TCM.com Margarita Landazuri

Women's Pictures - Jane Campion's An Angel at my Table - The Film ... Nathaniel Rogers from The Film Experience

An Angel at My Table - TCM.com Glenn Erickson, Criterion Collection, also seen here: An Angel at My Table : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video

An Angel at My Table - Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of the ... Svet Atanasov

dOc DVD Review: An Angel at My Table (1989) - digitallyOBSESSED! Jeff Ullmer, Criterion Collection

Movie Reviews by Edwin Jahiel

Movie House Commentary Tuna

"Let's Not Talk About Movies": An Angel At My Table June 10, 2009

An Angel at My Table | Film | NZ On Screen

Jane Campion recalls her encounters with Janet Frame | Books | The ... Jane Campion from The Guardian, January 19, 2008

Washington Post [Jeanne Cooper]

'An Angel at My Table' - Washington Post

MOVIE REVIEW : A Disturbing but Uplifting 'Angel at My Table' - latimes

An Angel at My Table Movie Review (1991) | Roger Ebert

Siskel & Ebert (video)

Review/Film - 3 Novels Are Adapted For 'Angel at My Table' - NYTimes ... Vincent Canby, also seen here: NYT review - The New York Times

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Donald Brown]

An Angel at My Table - Wikipedia

Janet Frame - Wikipedia

Biography - Janet Frame Literary Trust

An Angel @ My Blog Janet Frame website

"Janet Frame, 79, Writer Who Explored Madness" Obituary by Douglas Martin from The New York Times, January 30, 2004

Obituary: Janet Frame | Books | The Guardian Michael King, January 30, 2004

Janet Frame - Telegraph Janet Frame obituary, January 30, 2004

A survivor against the odds—noted New Zealand writer Janet Frame ... Margaret Rees obituary from The World Socialist Web Site, March 2, 2004

Gavin Highly - The New Yorker Janet Frame short story, April 5, 2010

THE PIANO A- 94

Australia New Zealand France (121 mi) 1993 Official site

There is a silence where hath been no sound,

There is a silence where no sound may be,

In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea.

—first three lines of Silence, poem by Thomas Hood that both opens and closes the film, February, 1823, Silence by Thomas Hood | Poetry Foundation

There’s something to be said for silence. With time, I’m sure she’ll become affectionate.

—Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill)

A shared winner of the Palme d’Or (First prize) at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, with Ken Kaige’s FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE, Holly Hunter also won the Best Actress Award at the festival. The following year the film won three Academy Awards, Best Actress for Hunter, Best Supporting Actress for Anna Paquin, who at the age of 11 was the second youngest to win an Oscar, after Tatum O’Neil, who was ten, and Best Original Screenplay for writer/director Jane Campion. It is the most critically acclaimed of Campion’s films, the one that put her on the international map, as most only saw her earlier films “after” seeing THE PIANO. Campion began writing this film just after film school, setting it aside for her other films, creating a fairy tale for adults, a mythological study that examines how women’s voices were silenced during the Victorian era, where once again, the brilliance of Campion’s casting is nothing less than astonishing. Holly Hunter stunned the world with her muted performance as Ada McGrath, whose inner narrative speaks her thoughts briefly only at the beginning and end, “The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind’s voice,” remaining completely silent in between, where the fierce, individualistic power of her performance is utterly captivating, frantically using sign language or facial expressions to emphatically get her point across. Hunter fought for the role, beating out Isabelle Huppert, of all people, who claims it’s one of the regrets of her life not getting that role. Now it’s hard to imagine anyone else as Ada, as Hunter turned it into the most significant role of her lifetime, and will forever be associated with this remarkable film.

I have not spoken since I was six years old. Lord knows why. Not even me. My father says it is a dark talent, and the day I take it into my head to stop breathing will be my last. Today he married me to a man I’ve not yet met. Soon, my daughter and I shall join him in his own country. My husband says my muteness does not bother him. He writes, and hark this, “God loves dumb creatures, so why not I!” ‘Twere good he had God’s patience, for silence affects everyone in the end. The strange thing is, I don’t think myself silent—that is, because of my piano. I will miss it on the journey.

Honestly, as far as accessibility, this may be one of Campion’s most conventional efforts, but it’s so confoundingly different that it still mesmerizes audiences and critics alike for its sheer originality. Otherworldly, ethereal, with a melancholic musical score by Michael Nyman, the film is guided by a line of dialogue late in the film describing Ada’s improvisatory piano playing (all played by Holly Hunter, by the way), claiming it’s different than what they’re used to hearing, normally utilizing sheet music, no doubt written by men, where Aunt Morag (Kerry Walker) suggests, “Her playing is strange, like a mood that passes through you.” There may be no better explanation for this film. An expression of repressed passion and sexuality, the film is set in the Gothic romanticism of the 1850’s and Emily Brontë, a time when the repression of women was standard, as they simply had no rights to speak of, opening with a blurred shot through Ada’s fingers, where the lines of her fingers resemble prison bars and are emblematic of the imprisoned life she leads, yet with no explanation, she’s shipped off halfway across the world from Scotland to New Zealand to be sold as a mail-order bride in an unknown country to a man she’s never met, bringing along her two most prized possessions, her young daughter Flora (Anna Paquin, utterly remarkable in the role) and her piano. Arriving to the shore from a heaving ocean that swells with volcanic force, their belongings are collected on the shoreline, but there is no one to meet them, as they are dropped off on their own, but we quickly learn this is no damsel in distress story, as the seamen ask if they wish to be transported to the nearest town, with Ada replying with emphatic hand gestures, while Flora accentuates her sarcasm, replying, “She says no. She says she’d rather be boiled alive by natives than get back in your stinkin’ tub!” The seaman looks ready to slap the youngster for indignation, but Ada quickly places herself in front, showing a spirited defiance right from the start. It also establishes Flora as her mother’s mouthpiece, as she’s a highly skilled communicator, including facial expressions, though prone to exaggerations of her own, especially any questions concerning her father, who the viewer learns virtually nothing about from the film, instead she makes up exotic stories that seem to please her instead. With nowhere else to go, the two spend a cold night on the beach, using the wire frame of her hoop skirt as a tent for shelter from the elements. With Victorian artifacts stranded on the beach, along with their elaborately decorative clothing, we see how out of place they are in the wilderness of New Zealand, where the setting is a place where two differing worlds collide.

The next morning, Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill, always clumsy and a bit awkward in his own skin) arrives out of the harshness of the wilds with a team of Māori tribesmen to help transport the young bride and all her belongings, where Stewart is an oddly shy and humorless man that his Māori helpers teasingly refer to as “old dry balls,” but they haven’t enough men to haul the piano, which they leave on the beach, despite the objections from Ada, who would rather they bring the piano than all of their clothes. Despite the fact she brought this all the way from Scotland, so it must have some significance, Stewart dismisses her request, claiming it is unreasonable, which is the first sign he’s an insensitive tyrant. The piano is everything to Ada, who uses it as a means to express herself, while being removed from it leaves her distraught, as one of the most haunting images is a shot of Ada standing high up on a grassy bluff overlooking the brown sand and grey water of the beach where far off in the distance, the piano lies abandoned in the surf, where the one object that defines her entire identity has been left to the elements. As they trek through the forests, their pathway is traversing through endless mud, as there are no roads leading into this new world, where land crossings are strenuously difficult. The dark and bleak weather sets an ominous tone for what follows, as they are pelted by torrents of rain throughout their journey, arriving finally in Stewart’s home, where he lives with his Aunt Morag (Kerry Walker) and her helper Nessie, Genevieve Lemon from Sweetie (1989), along with a few female Māori servants. Before they have time to rest, they jump back out into the downpour of rain to get married, including a wedding photograph, none of which looks remotely like anything resembling wedding bliss. On the contrary, their relationship is difficult at best, with Ada and Flora mostly keeping to themselves, ignoring Stewart, who sleeps in separate quarters, though Stewart is not sure what he’s purchased, observing Ada play the piano on an ordinary table, thinking she might be a bit touched in the head. When he leaves to take care of business, Ada and Flora immediately set out to the home of George Baines (Harvey Keitel, one of the more surprising roles of his career), an uneducated white man who has reportedly “gone native,” a former whaler who now lives among the Māori tribesmen, speaking both languages, with Māori markings on his face, working for Stewart as his work foreman. He initially refuses their request to collect the piano, but they sit silently outside his door until he reconsiders. When he agrees to take them to the beach, he’s surprised by the elation on her face when she plays, conveying emotions that convince him this is her missing voice, as it’s clearly a surreal moment, as this element of Western civilization simply doesn’t exist in the savage wilds, yet he agrees to swap 80 acres of land with Stewart for the rights to the piano, so long as Ada teaches him how to play. Stewart, of course, pounces on the opportunity, as the English colonizers to New Zealand were largely land grabbers. Thinking only of his own interests, he agrees to the deal without even consulting Ada, as after all, it would give her a chance to play. Ada, on the other hand, is insulted by the deal, as without question the piano is rightfully hers, but in this patriarchal society, women have no rights, so the piano goes to Baines, along with agreed upon lessons. This imbalance is at the heart of the film.

Jane Campion: I think that it’s a strange heritage that I have as a pakeha New Zealander, and I wanted to be in a position to touch or explore that. In contrast to the original people in New Zealand, the Māori people, who have such an attachment to history, we seem to have no history, or at least not the same tradition. This makes you start to ask, “Well, who are my ancestors?” My ancestors are English colonizers — the people who came out like Ada and Stewart and Baines.

While it’s a bit like Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), situated in a bleak natural environment where people are used to living in the mud and the rain, struggling to bring some semblance of civilization to the wilderness, in this case the European culture they left behind, there’s a curious example of this in a Christmas pageant staged that brings together the young and old, including Flora who wear’s angel’s wings, yet included in their presentation is a retelling of the French fairy tale Bluebeard, where a frighteningly ugly nobleman marries a series of beautiful women that all mysteriously disappear. When his next young female subject explores his luxurious estate, she’s curious what’s behind a locked door, discovering the missing corpses of his former brides, with their heads hanging from a hook. About to make her the next victim, told in shadows behind an illuminated curtain, he raises an axe to her head, where the Māori men watching this become highly agitated, with one of them leaping from his seat to attack Bluebeard, causing immediate panic in the room. This amusing scene recalls the origins of cinema when The Lumière Brothers in 1895 showed “Arrival of a Train” to similarly panicked audiences who jumped out of the way, thinking they would be run over by the train. It’s interesting how this play within a play comments on the final outcome of the film. What Campion has done is pit opposite forces against one another, as the sexually repressed Victorian era of the Europeans enter the realm of the Māori indigenous peoples, who are much more comfortable with expressing themselves sexually, often seen telling sexually provocative jokes, never covering up their entire bodies with clothing, showing a lack of inhibition, as they don’t shy away from a more healthy attitude about their bodies. While one can see evidence of colonial exploitation in the way Stewart is a white landowner, where Ada is an extension of his property, always accumulating more and more land that used to belong to the natives, using indigenous labor as his hired help, one time attempting to pay them with useless buttons, a sign of his arrogance, yet the film is subject to racist accusations, as the film is about the featured European whites, and doesn’t really explore the Māori culture or native people except to show them as uneducated simpletons, sitting around in their idle time playing games or telling jokes, never once viewed as individuals, though one shows homosexual tendencies, immediately chastised by an older Māori woman, claiming, “Balls were wasted on you,” while another time Flora is playing a sexually suggestive game with other native kids, but is scolded by Stewart and instructed never to do that again, as natives are considered ignorant and amoral, where the film does play into perceived dualities, whites and natives, educated and ignorant, civilized and savage, sexually restrained and sexually promiscuous, moral and amoral. While the blue-green look of the film is beautifully captured by the cinematography of Stuart Dryburgh, who also filmed An Angel at My Table (1990), eschewing artificial light, it accentuates a mythical wildness of the land, cultivating a stereotypical view of treating natives as natural exotics, much like Tarzan of the jungle, or King Kong (1933), where the colonial environment, typically seen in the heat, is also depicted through the scents of spices and exotic flowers, strange animals, and spectacular landscapes, all of which appeal to the senses, like a forbidden fruit. It is not by accident that this is the backdrop to Campion’s film, where the male dominated universe is turned on its axis.

One of the more notorious scenes is a view of the piano, finally situated inside Baines otherwise spare home, where he strips naked, with his backside present, as he touches it gently with his hands and fingers, like an exotic object, waiting for the genie to come out of the bottle and for the magic to appear. Clearly this would not happen in a male directed movie, but it’s an interesting symbol of what the piano represents. When Ada and Flora arrive for Baines first lesson, she intends to shrug him off, claiming the piano is out of tune, but is dumfounded to discover it’s been perfectly tuned, immediately sitting down and playing rapturously, where the piano is the key to unlocking her heart, opening a floodgate of pure emotions, something Baines finds hard to resist, content to listen to her play, as there’s nothing like it in his environment. Baines decides to up the ante, where he’s willing to return her rights of ownership to the piano, one key at a time, so long as she agrees to allow him to do things. Shocked, but also intrigued, her counter position is all the black keys, which are considerably less, to which he readily agrees. Under these conditions, Flora is kept outside, excluded from the privacy of the room, as little by little Baines bargains for more, being allowed to see and touch her arms, or the back of her neck, which are worth more keys, as there is a progression over time, not only to accumulate more keys, growing closer to ownership, but she also sheds more clothing, eventually lying naked beside him, which is worth five keys. The repressive European customs are represented by the tightly wound braiding of her hair, reflecting how bound and confined women are perceived, where Flora is a miniature version of her mother. When Ada unbuttons her dress, it literally releases the moral restrictions placed upon her, changing the rules of the game, at least for her. In short order, Baines chooses to return the piano to Ada with no more strings attached, a position that alarms Stewart, as he has no intention of returning the land, but Baines reassures him the deal is done, he’s simply giving it to her. Nonetheless, he holds his suspicions, as he’s still never consummated his marriage with Ada, who she views as a total stranger, retreating into the bedroom with Flora, where the two giggle and tickle each other, especially in his presence, no doubt a way to avoid contact with him, where he’s visibly annoyed at being so rudely shut out. Surprised that Baines never learned how to play, Flora offers her own bit of insight, “I know why Mr. Baines can’t play the piano. She never gives him a turn. She just plays whatever she pleases and sometimes she doesn’t play at all.” With the piano around, Ada never plays, but instead seems to be avoiding it altogether, instead heading back to Baines, acknowledging her affection, submitting herself to him, yet Stewart, suspecting something is up, walks by and can hear them making love, helplessly watching them through the cracks in the wall, where he can’t look away, pathetically fixed on the sight, seething with anger, yet also filled with self-loathing, incredulously hating the choice she made. Incensed and outraged to the core, he follows her the next day when she attempts to return and confronts her in the forest, attempting to force himself on her despite her violent resistance, but he’s only thwarted by Flora’s presence, eventually boarding her up inside his home, not allowing her any avenue of escape.

Perhaps the only other film with a self-imposed muteness that comes to mind is Bergman’s PERSONA (1966), a much more challenging and experimental film that actually features a psychological tightrope between two female characters, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, where the faces and personalities merge as one. On the other hand, Stewart and Baines are contrasting images of loneliness and masculinity, with a tamed Stewart living under the thumb of his suffocatingly restrictive aunt, abiding by her Puritanical rules and principles, deathly afraid of sex, despite the inappropriateness of his behavior, all wearing tightly buttoned-up clothes, while the more uninhibited Baines reflects his affinity with the Māori people, wearing much more colorful clothing, flamboyantly consorting with natives, unafraid to be seen naked or crude, where he exudes a wilder side. Shockingly, despite his advanced education, only one of them knows how to listen, and it’s not Stewart, who otherwise has all the advantages. Ada feigns affection with her husband for the first time while locked in, caressing him, but not allowing him to reciprocate and touch her, which only frustrates him more as she inevitably pulls away. But a growing trust allows him to remove the barriers, where he’s become a laughing stock to others for actually locking themselves inside, as that’s such a clear indication that something’s amiss in that household. Despite promising she won’t see Baines, she wraps a gift for him, as she’s heard he’s moving, offering him a single piano key with a personalized inscription that reveals her feelings for him, sending Flora. But by now Flora knows better, reminding her mother she’s not supposed to see him, and delivers the package to Stewart instead, who fumes with anger, becoming so enraged that he hacks off one of Ada’s fingers on a tree stump with an axe, a gut-wrenchingly painful scene to watch, mirroring the vicious brutality expressed in Bluebeard, sending Flora to deliver her wrapped finger instead, bellowing that if he ever sees her again, he’ll chop off another finger, and then another. Stewart inverses the civilized role where his savage brutality becomes even more cruel and sadistic when he attempts to rape her while she is lying unconscious. In contrast, one of the most powerful images of the film happens when Flora doesn’t return home, but spends the night with Baines, seen sleeping peacefully next to his side the next morning in an image of familial grace, providing the fatherly affection that Stewart never embraced. The violence inherent in the silencing of women is exposed for what it really is, as the film is notable for the degree of insanity on display at its most violent acts, where Stewart clearly sees himself in the right, believing strength of action is the appropriate and principled thing to do, but instead his actions are pathetic, as he’s viewed as fearful and insecure when he is incapable of having total and complete control over Ada. Oppression is shown to be just as detrimental to his own state of mind, where others view him in mockery for such a repugnant display of his weakness. Ada clearly rejects this imposed oppression, despite the devastating consequences, where we are reminded that it was only after Baines returned her piano and relinquished his power over her that she reciprocates his love. Loosening her ties to the piano, and to her former self, she liberates herself from society’s rules and imagines a different outcome for herself, even as fate is compelling her to be part of yet another existing reality, one that plunges her to the bottom of the sea. The film is a stunning mood piece about a woman's quest to control her own identity or destiny, ultimately providing multiple endings, which even in the eyes of the director have shifted over time, suggesting there will always be diverse outcomes, where each destiny will ambiguously be left open.

Jonathan Rosenbaum from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Sweetie (1989) and An Angel at My Table (1990) taught us to expect startling as well as beautiful things from Jane Campion, and this assured and provocative third feature offers yet another lush parable about the perils and paradoxes of female self-expression.

Set during the 19^th century, this original story by Campion – which evokes at times some of the romantic intensity of Emily Brontë – focuses on a Scottish widow (Holly Hunter) who hasn’t spoken since her childhood, presumably by choice, and whose main form of self-expression is her piano playing. She arrives with her nine-year old daughter (Anna Paquin) in the New Zealand wilds to enter into an arranged marriage, which gets off to an unhappy start when her husband-to-be (Sam Neill) refuses to transport her piano. A local white man living with the Maori natives (Harvey Keitel) buys the piano from him and, fascinated and attracted to the mute woman, agrees to “sell” it back to her a key at a time in exchange for lessons – lessons that have ultimately traumatic consequences.

Setting out to be politically correct, erotic, and romantic at the same time, The Piano inevitably bites off more than it can possibly chew, but winds up stimulating passionate feelings nonetheless.

The Piano, directed by Jane Campion | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew

Nineteenth century Scotland: Ada (Hunter) hasn't spoken since she was six. She communicates with hand signs, and doesn't consider herself silent, thanks to the joy she takes in playing her piano. But when she arrives in New Zealand for an arranged marriage, her husband (Neill) insists the piano is too unwieldy to be carried from the beach. So, when Baines (Keitel), a neighbouring settler turned half-Maori, buys it, Ada agrees to give him piano lessons, unaware that he intends eventually to give her the instrument in return for small but illicit sexual favours. Campion's Gothic romance is notable for its performances and Michael Nyman's score. The writer/director offers something more starkly, strangely beautiful than most costume dramas, and the whole film puts a fresh spin on the traditional love story. The characters are stubborn and inward-looking, and it's the refusal to sentimentalise that makes this harsh tale of obsession so moving. Campion never underestimates the power physical obsession exerts over human souls, and, for once, a modern film treats erotic passion honestly.

NYFF31: Jane Campion's "The Piano" | Film Society of Lincoln Center Clint Holloway

With The Piano, her third appearance at the NYFF, New Zealand auteur Jane Campion was catapulted into the realm of widespread visibility. The film garnered a variety of international acclaim, including Academy Awards for its screenplay and its two stars, Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin (who respectively won Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress), as well as sharing the Palm d'Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival with Farewell My Concubine (which also played at the NYFF31 in 1993), in addition to Hunter winning the Best Actress award there. The Piano will be screening tonight at 6:30pm as part of our 50 Years of the New York Film Festival series, followed by a Skype Q&A with Campion herself!

With a career spanning seven feature films so far, Campion has established herself as one of contemporary cinema’s most unique voices, crafting films that are as impressionistic as they are harshly honest. She has tackled a diverse array of settings and subjects, from the comedic dysnfunction of two Australian sisters in Sweetie to a shy school teacher navigating the psychosexual urban jungle of New York City in In The Cut to the 19th century English romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne in Bright Star, all of which evocatively explore the lives of women on the cusp of emotional discovery.

This thematic concern is at the forefront of The Piano. Set during the 1800s, the film follows a mute Scottish woman named Ada who, on behalf of an arrangement made by her father, travels with her daughter Flora to New Zealand to marry an affluent landowner named Alistair (played by Sam Neill.) Her only means of pleasure seems to come from playing her piano, which Alistair trades for land with Baines (Harvey Keitel), an eccentric fellow landowner. Baines makes a deal with Ada to eventually give the piano back to her in return for sexual favors. Ada’s relationship with Baines grows from purely physical to emotional, igniting a chain of events that jeopardize her marriage to Alistair and her most prized possession.

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Director Jane Campion's model for The Piano was Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. But, one reviewer thought if nonsense poet Edward Lear dreamed of sex, it would have looked like this. Campion aims at a neglected aspect of the Victorian age, its surrealism. What other age was so excessively polite? Bronte had a passionate hatred of polite society and all forms of restraint. The Piano explores the Gothic, that romantic Victorian sensibility that masks passion with fear, mystery and the exotic.

Campion's films center on strong-willed women. Her first feature, Sweetie, is the almost unwatchable story of a family ruled by a self-destructive sister. Angel at my Table is a biography of author Janet Frame, wrongly committed to a mental institution. After The Piano, she directed the adaption of Portrait of a Lady, starring Nicole Kidman. The Piano is about control, not sex... pure will, not flirtatiousness; Ada is no passive doll. She identifies her needs and goes about satisfying them. Holly Hunter plays her without vanity: no dialogue, no make-up and greasy hair.Hunter saw the script and had to have it. Campion had envisioned Ada as tall, as an extraordinary beauty, but Hunter had one enormous advantage: she can really play the piano.

Composer Michael Nyman hesitantly met with her to see how well she could play, and then, relieved, was able to go ahead and write whatever music he wanted to write, confident she could realize it. He felt it had to be "possible" mid-19th century music, written by an amateur composer who had lived in Scotland and then New Zealand in the mid 1850s. He used Scottish folk and popular songs as the basis for the music, something that she had in her head and in her fingers. He felt there had to be a kind of modesty to it, although Holly Hunter played Ada playing the piano with enormous dedication and intensity.

Holly Hunter won an Oscar for best actress and young Anna Paquin's complex portrayal of Flora won for Best Supporting Actress. Jane Campion won for Best Original Screenplay. The film also won the grand prize at Cannes, and Hunter for Best Actress. The photography is by Stuart Dryburgh. His dramatic points of view, and the cool grey sweep of landscape contrasting with the warmth of the interiors contributes to the unforgettable look of the film.

Ada's music is filled with repressed longing. It is a siren song: her husband is deaf, but a more elemental man answers...Heathcliff, or Caliban?

The Past Recapsuled - Film Comment Harlan Jacobson, July/August 1993

Of the good, Campion and Avati were the early standouts. From its first showing, The Piano looked the surest cinch for Golden Palm since Padre Padrone. Indeed, the shimmering primitivism and power to new-mint emotion echo the 1977 Taviani film; and like the Tavianis, the Australian director uses a geohistorical terra incognita—the remote New Zealand bush in the 19th century—as a way to explore the present through a sense-awakening encounter with the past.

Campion’s beat is feminism, but of a thrillingly nonconformist sort. In Sweetie and An Angel at My Table, she gave us disturbed/dysfunctional heroines, women on the verge of a spiritual breakdown. But for them, as for The Piano’s mute, unmarried other from Scotland, Holly Hunter, who’s pushed into an arranged marriage with Antipodean colonist Sam Neill, an alienated vision is also an objectifying, truth-finding one. Hunter’s 19th century Miss, thrown onto what seems another planet, is given a shock education in Nature (jungly vistas), in Sex (gone-native neighbor Harvey Keitel), and in the untouchable sanctity of Art. Her beloved piano is first left abandoned on the seashore, then seized by Keitel and used as an amorous bargaining chip (he sells it back, one key per sexual favor), and finally thrown from the departure boat at Hunter’s wish, the last redundant ballast keeping her old life afloat.

Just as galvanic as the heroine’s clash with alien reality is the audience’s. We cross not just sea but a century. Campion, deconstructing the modern world by reconstructing a bygone one, unsettles all our “eternal verities” about sex, love, female identity by showing they’re not eternal at all. Other times, other truths. (Therefore, guard each advance we make.) In the disrupting process, Campion’s movie releases all the feral stylistics hinted at in her feature début, Sweetie. Early shots set in Scotland, plus literary voiceover, may threaten Masterpiece Theatre. But once our heroine is carried ashore in New Zealand—a black-dressed body borne above a dozen legs like a surf-borne spider—the past becomes more than just a foreign country. It becomes a wilderness, a bestiary, an Unpeaceable Kingdom. The Campion camera invents its own calligraphy. Shots swoop or arc like birds. Shots tell us that the human mind is a gateway to grace or chaos, as in the bizarre moment when the camera tracks in towards the heroine’s spinsterly hairknot and then rises up and onward into the anarchic forest.

The movie finds preposterous aesthetic rhymes, and each one works. The ribs of Hunter’s hoop skirt—portcullis to sex with Keitel—make harmony with the arching forest twigs she later crawls through in dismay and terror. A dog licks Sam Neill’s hand, producing a transferred shudder of disgust, as he spies on Keitel using his profaner tongue on Hunter. And there’s even a special, ancestral rhyme for movie buffs. Which of them, when Neill thwacks down on his wife’s pianistic hand with a nasty instrument, doesn’t see the ghost of James Mason smashing Ann Todd’s digits in The Seventh Veil? Footnote for certifiable film buffs: When Neill left New Zealand for his first Western acting role, it was James Mason who encouraged and recommended him.

The Piano uses past and present in rhyme and counterpoint to create a fugue between the familiar and the far-off or farouche.

The Piano | MostlyFilm Philip Concannon

The first image we see in The Piano is a close-up of Holly Hunter’s fingers as she holds her eyes in front of her face, allowing sunlight to filter through them. We hear her Scottish-accented voice on the soundtrack, but she tells us that “The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind’s voice,” and throughout the film these fingers will be her prime means of communication. Her character, Ada McGrath, has not spoken since she was six years old, having apparently taken it into her head to simply stop doing so. She speaks through sign language, translated by her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin), or by writing short notes on the pad she keeps hanging around her neck, but when Ada wishes to truly express what she is feeling, she does so through music. “The strange thing is, I don’t think myself silent because of my piano,” her voiceover tells us, “I shall miss it on the journey.”

The journey that Ada and Flora are embarking upon will take them to New Zealand, where she is to meet her new husband Mr Stewart (Sam Neill) for the very first time. They disembark in rough seas only to find that Stewart has been delayed, but Ada opts to stay on this cold and windswept beach rather than travel inland, camping overnight with Flora, her luggage and – of course – her beloved piano. Two men are subsequently introduced to Ada, and the manner in which they both react to her prized possession tells us a great deal about them. Her rather stiff and conservative husband Stewart can’t understand Ada’s attachment to this cumbersome instrument, and he insists on leaving it on the beach while they carry the rest of her belongings, causing the first schism in their nascent relationship. The other man is Baines (Harvey Keitel), an acquaintance of Stewart’s now living with the Maori, who is instantly intrigued by Ada and who sees the piano as the key to unlocking this enigmatic woman.

The Piano was Jane Campion’s third feature film, but it marked an audacious leap forward from the already impressive Sweetie and An Angel at My Table. Drawing inspiration from 19^th century romantic literature and New Zealand’s history and culture, Campion fashioned one of those rare films in which every single element just falls into place. The casting brought together a group of actors at exactly the right moment in their respective careers; Michael Nyman (inexplicably not one of the film’s Oscar nominees) came up with an inspired score that became an integral part of the film’s structure; and Campion found locations that gave her film the scale of an epic while simultaneously serving the narrative symbolically.

For example, the marital home that Stewart takes Ada to is situated in the middle of a dark forest, plagued by incessant rain, and with every footstep the characters sink into the thick mud. It’s all shot in dismal grey tones by Stuart Dryburgh and the effect is suffocating, with Ada’s thoughts constantly drifting back to her piano, which still sits on the beach. When she finally persuades Baines to escort her back to the beach so she can play, the film immediately brightens. Against an expansive backdrop of calm seas and bathed in a golden light, Ada plays freely and beautifully with a blissful smile on her face; in fact, it’s the first time in the movie that we see her typically fierce and cautious mask melt away.

The effect that the piano has on Ada is not lost on Baines. He takes possession of it and begins negotiating with Ada – a sexual favour for each key until she has eventually earned it back. Their arrangement begins on a small scale, with Ada removing items of clothing while she plays and exposing her arms or shoulders, but one such seemingly insignificant accession to Baines requests sends a shockwave through the film. While she plays, Baines asks Ada to lift her skirt so he can admire her legs, and when he spots a small hole in her stocking he delicately runs a finger over this tiny glimpse of white. At the point of contact, Ada immediately lifts her head and her expression suggests surprise, curiosity, puzzlement and pleasure all at once. This erotic encounter – perhaps the first she has ever experienced – is the turning point in Ada’s story, the moment in which she begins to explore and take command of her own body and sexual desire, freeing herself from the restrictive role of docile wife that Stewart expects her to be and becoming a person of her own making.

Although The Piano builds inexorably to a dramatic act of violence, there are no villains in Campion’s story, just a group of complicated characters facing emotions and situations that they have no experience of and are ill-prepared for. The director is constantly attuned to the shifting power dynamic and the fluctuating emotional tenor of the film, so much of which is captured in small glances and gestures between the characters, and each of the characters can be prickly, stubborn and unlikeable at various points in the story while also being capable of eliciting our sympathy.

At the time of writing, Jane Campion is heading the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, and her presence is a constant reminder that the Palme d’Or she shared for The Piano in 1993 is the only one that has ever been awarded to a female director. The film went onto gross over $140 million worldwide and took home three of its eight Oscar nominations the following year, but looking back from where we are now it’s hard to imagine how this particular film managed such a feat. Can you imagine a sexually frank drama about female desire making such an impact with mainstream filmgoers today? Instead of opening the floodgates for female directors or encouraging viewers to embrace adult, artistically daring films about love and sex, Campion’s film looks increasingly with every passing year like a strange but precious anomaly. The Piano has always been a film that seemed to exist out of time, and in many ways it feels like we are still trying to catch up to it.

"Like a Mood that Passes Into You": Amphibious Subjectivity in The ... Katrina Mann from Michigan Feminist Studies, 2001

Inhuman Love: Jane Campion's The Piano Academic paper by Samir Dayal, 2002

Romanticizing Colonialism: Power and Pleasure in Jane Campion's ... Reshela DuPuis (pdf)

Jane Campion - Assets - Cambridge - Cambridge University Press Harriet Margolis (pdf)

Boston Review: Jane Campion's The Piano (film review) Alan A. Stone

Sexual Discourse | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, December 9, 1993, also seen here: Sexual Discourse [THE PIANO] | Jonathan Rosenbaum

Campion, The Piano, and the Feminine Perspective as Feminist ... Dr. Cathy Hannabach, May 1, 2013, also seen here: Queer & Feminist Film Studies, Spring 2013

The Piano - Australasian Cinema Rachel Gordon

Film Criticism: The Piano (1993) | Dmitriy D Garanov

Portrait of a Girl: Reflections on the Role of Flora in Jane Campion's ... Rachael Johnson from Bitch Flicks

Antagony & Ecstasy: JANE CAMPION: THE PIANO (1993) Timothy Brayton

Jane Campion's 'The Piano': An Inquisitive Study of Eroticism ... Cinephilia and Beyond

Surrender to the Void: The Piano Stephen Flores

Jane Campion's The Piano: A sensitive touch to a fairly selfish theme ... David Walsh from The World Socialist Web Site

Urban Cinefile MAKING OF: THE PIANO (1993) Andrew L. Urban

Jane Campion's Masterpiece, 'The Piano', Makes its High Definition ... Jose Solís from Pop Matters

The Piano - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Film Reference A. Pillai

The Noodle: Some useful notes on 'The Piano' by Jane Campion Nina Moore

The Piano by Caoimhe Duignan on Prezi December 11, 2012

Jane Campion's The Piano Eleanor Hogan book review of Jane Campion’s The Piano, edited by Harriet Margolis, from Screening the Past, November 1, 2000

Jane Campion website article based on a Campion interview by Helen Barlow

On The Issues Magazine: Summer 1994: Is The Piano A Feminist Film ... Rebecca Shugrue and Carolyn Gage, Summer 1994

Is 'The Piano' a Feminist Manifesto or a Masochistic Love Story ... Allyson Morgan from Outtake, August 29, 2016

The Piano Review by Linda Lopez McAlister.pdf - SCHS Literature (pdf)

Piano, The | Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Film Dunce: The Piano - Spectrum Culture Jake Cole

Review for The Piano (1993) - IMDb Scott Renshaw

Review for The Piano (1993) - IMDb Dragan Antulov

Background | The Piano | Film | NZ On Screen Catherine Bisley, January 3, 2009

Film @ The Digital Fix - The Piano Gary Couzens

DVDTalk.com - Blu-Ray [Jamie S. Rich]

Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

High-Def Digest [M. Enois Duarte]

20 Things You Never Knew About THE PIANO - Miramax

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1993 [Erik Beck]

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Eleni Antonaropoulou]

Women's Pictures - Jane Campion's The Piano - Blog - The Film ... Nathaniel Rogers from The Film Experience

20 Years After 'The Piano,' We've All Failed Holly Hunter - The Atlantic Joe Reid, November 12, 2013

Jane Campion 'The Piano' Screening: Excellent Gothic ... - Alt Film Guide Andre Soares

Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]

Analysis on Jane Campion's — The Piano – Medium Mary Strause, February 22, 2016

The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) The Gaze of Alisdair Stewart ... film discussion forum

Movie House Commentary hold the applause, from Tuna

Essay by bell hooks, Sexism and Misogyny: Who Takes the Rap? Misogyny, Gangsta Rap and The Piano, from Race and Ethnicity, March 9, 1994

Piano, The Movie a film website

Images for The Piano

The Piano | FilmGrab stills from the film

How we made: Michael Nyman and Jane Campion on The Piano ... Anna Tims interview from The Guardian, July 30 2012

The Piano | Variety David Stratton

Jane Campion wanted a bleaker ending for The Piano | Film | The ... Ben Child from The Guardian, July 8, 2013

FILM / Piano Forte: A few years ago Jane Campion was an eternal ... Quentin Curtis from The Independent, October 16, 1993

The Piano Movie Review & Film Summary (1993) | Roger Ebert

The Piano Marjorie Baugartner from The Austin Chonicle

FILM VIEW - Jane Campion Stirs Romance With Mystery - NYTimes.com Vincent Canby

Jane Campion's Lunatic Women - NYTimes.com - The New York Times

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs)

The Piano - Wikipedia

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Great Britain USA (142 mi) 1996 ‘Scope

In Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman), upon coming into a sizable inheritance from her uncle, Mr. Touchett (John Gielgud), finds herself surrounded by men seeking to possess her. But she is, as her aunt (ShelleyWinters) observes, "too fond of [her] own ways," willful and eager to test her limits. Serena Merle (an excellent performance by Barbara Hershey) moves Isabel profoundly by her piano-playing (Schubert), sadness and elegance. And even though the thrust of the narrative is to set up Isabel with Serena's weasely dilettante of a friend, Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich), the deeper, lasting connection is between the women (and hence, the deeper betrayal lies in this relationship as well). Ironically, the film's obvious indictments of a cruelly elitist culture based on costumes and possessions, and of Gilbert, the supremely abusive husband, are less significant than its investigation of the women's relationship. Their mutual understanding — more strained than tender — is based on silence and willful blindness: in the end, Isabel and Serena have very few choices, despite their energy and passion for life.

Henry James' masterpiece has long been deemed impossible to translate successfully into film; Jane Campion and screenwriter Laura Jones have, however, produced an adaptation as cinematically intelligent as it is faithful to the original. Beginning, adventurously but wisely, with Isabel Archer (Kidman) rejecting Lord Warburton's proposal of marriage, the film charts the changes in its young American heroine's fortunes when, after inheriting a fortune put her way by ailing English cousin Ralph Touchett (Donovan), she travels to Italy, where she's introduced by her mentor Madame Merle (Hershey) to widowed aesthete Gilbert Osmond (Malkovich). Though a friend advises her to wed a long-time admirer who's followed her from America, and Ralph would prefer her to remain true to her free-spirited ideals, Isabel is tempted by Osmond's courtship. Besides the uniformly fine performances, what makes the film so rewarding - and challenging - is its refusal to soften or sentimentalise James' study of New World innocence unprotected against Old World experience. With Stuart Dryburgh's stunning 'Scope camerawork, and a number of audaciously imaginative sequences (notably Isabel's erotic fantasy, and a Dali-esque, b/w 'silent' short to evoke her Grand Tour), this is as far from heritage flummery as you can get.

I'm treading dangerous ground here: in the circles in which I travel, admitting that you prefer the populist literary adaptations of Merchant/Ivory to an austere, moody, Artistic-with-a-capital-"A" film like Jane Campion's version of Henry James' novel The Portrait of a Lady is tantamount to treason, if not heresy. I'm willing, however, to risk the righteous indignation of cinéastes everywhere by confessing that I had to struggle to stay awake while watching Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman), James' misguided heroine, stumble into the loveless, degrading web spun by evil aesthete Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich). James Ivory and Ismael Merchant (who have filmed two James adaptations -- neither of which I've seen -- and are reportedly currently working on a third) would undoubtedly have simplified and trivialized the source material, but they would also have found and preserved its pulse, skillfully or no; Campion, on the other hand, opted to chloroform the book and mount it on celluloid, so that the only possible response is a detached, mournful, "My, how beautiful." Soporifically paced and virtually opaque, The Portrait of a Lady comes to life only when Campion attempts to throw off the literary shackles imposed by James' novel (her interest in which seems entirely sociopolitical, judging by how little attention she and screenwriter Laura Jones pay to the characters' interior lives), as in a nifty black-and-white experimental film that anachronistically chronicles her whirlwind tour of the Mediterranean, two decades before Edison and/or the Lumière brothers invented the medium. The rest of the film, unfortunately, is a colossal bore, consisting almost entirely of conversations in monotone (the acclaim and awards allotted to Martin Donovan and Barbara Hershey, both of whom are merely adequate, baffles me; Hershey, in particular, seems to be doing little more than an impressive Genevieve Bujold impression) between people about whom we know virtually nothing and about whom I consequently cared little. Yes, it's a more ambitious approach than one usually sees with regard to film adaptations of great novels, but I'll take any five minutes of Anthony Hopkins' "conventional" performance in The Remains of the Day over this entire tedious specimen. Memo to Ms. Campion and Ms. Jones (An Angel at My Table): Please leave the lit films to people who can't write. You can.

Great and evident artistry shapes this film version of the Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady. Yet the end result perplexes as much as it fascinates. Jane Campion, the much-lauded director of The Piano, and screenwriter Laura Jones (An Angel at My Table) bring their modern sensibilities to bear on this story of James’ 1870s heroine Isabel Archer, a young, sharp-minded, American woman abroad who inherits unexpected wealth and uses it to live as she likes, traveling and rejecting numerous suitors until she falls into an unwise marriage that nearly becomes her ruination. From the opening credits, Campion signals her intention to recontextualize this classic novel for modern times and feminist analysis. The sound and images behind the credits are those of contemporary young women talking of their feelings about love and first kisses. The movie then opens in apparent mid-scene with Isabel (Kidman) rejecting her first suitor, even though he offers her a choice of castles to live in. Campion and Jones add a psychosexual fervor to the story and include several Freudian fantasy sequences as Isabel makes her way through the world as a single woman. Yet, the movie only seems interested in this phase of Isabel’s life as a preliminary background to her unhappy marriage. Her broadening travels are depicted simply (and frugally) as a picture-postcard diorama. The movie focuses primarily on Isabel’s attraction to and near-undoing by the manipulative esthete Gilbert Osmond (Malkovich). Prior to this, we see too little of the searing intelligence that has earned Isabel so many admirers and, likewise, we also see too little of the internal fire that lures Isabel to the viperous Osmond. In a movie marked by outstanding performances, Malkovich is the one weak link. We’ve seen him vamp through these coyly sinister roles a few too many times, and his Osmond comes off like a creature left over from Dangerous Liaisons. Kidman does what she can to bring the movie’s opaque Isabel to life (though I seriously doubt the role will win her the Oscar that, rightly, should have been hers last year for her delicious work in To Die For). As her sickly cousin and biggest admirer, Hal Hartley regular Martin Donovan makes a strong impression, as do John Gielgud (especially in a memorable death scene) and Barbara Hershey. No small contribution to the film’s overall impact is made by the wonderfully rich and atmospheric work of cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh (Lone Star, Once Were Warriors, The Piano). Toward the end of The Portrait of a Lady, sequences and events have a hurried feel that not only contrasts sharply with the steady tone that preceded it but also packs too much subtle information into too little space. However, for all its misfirings The Portrait of a Lady paints a fascinating picture.

Jane Campion's Shining: Portrait of a Director - Film Comment Kathleen Murphy, November/December 1996

Only a filmmaker who possesses the hubris to imagine that art and moral adventure matter could have composed The Portrait of a Lady in the densely telling hues and uncompromising forms Jane Campion has achieved. To start with, the novel’s author has always been rated as a “hard read,” even in the days when reading wasn’t rare. Henry James works every word, every phrase, every description or discourse, so that you must travel his narrative attuned to the minute changes in social/spiritual weather and the moral and psychological reverberations of every bit of small talk. For lack of attention to dangerous undergrowth, a life, or a soul, can be shattered in his “civilized” minefields.

Campion’s Paradise Lost largely manages to recast James’s exquisitely wrought prose, his interior epiphanies and apocalypses, into dialogue, images, and performances that explode in slowest, utterly devastating motion. Like James’s hard reads, this brilliant, difficult film demands close concentration and committed effort on the viewer’s part. The novel’s central metaphors (sun and shadow, house and garden, nature and artifice), resonating dialogue, and actors—aspiring or fallen angels—are authentically animated, without cinematic disguise or distortion, on Campion’s canvas.

Campion chronicles the journeys of women into terra incognita with passionate conviction, making their quests as emblematic of the human condition as any Adam’s. In this, she’s been on the same track as Henry James, who loved to plunge (and vicariously plunge with) his brave Daisy Millers and Isabel Archers into refining—or fatal—“European” experience. Also in the Jamesian tradition, Campion’s heroines may be armed with self-destructive or even killing innocence. In The Piano, Holly Hunter’s silent émigré makes a kind of self-sufficient identity/sexuality of her speaking art. She’s not unaware that her singleminded consecration to her instrument is a come-on, separating the men from the boys, crudely speaking. When she’s brought to earth by Harvey Keitel’s half-Caliban (and symbolically castrated by her jealous husband), she lets her art drown and gets reborn as happy wife and piano-teacher.

An Angel at My Table, Campion’s adaptation of the autobiographies of author Janet Frame, begins by looking down on a fat baby girl lying on her back in the grass. Then we see her toddler’s feet, unsteadily navigating a meadow. Finally we wait—with the camera—for a chubby little girl topped by an explosion of frizzy red hair walking down a long road straight toward us. When Janet Frame arrives, she takes one look into the camera—the world? the future?—and, terrified, runs back the way she came. By the film’s end, when the Australian writer finally makes her way home again, she has bitten deep, often painfully, into life, the imagination, even madness. Campion’s camera puts a period to her journey by rounding the curved side of a very small, snug trailer to look in at Frame at rest and in virtual motion: writing, wombed in warm, golden light.

The hypnotic prelude to Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady begins in darkness, murmurous with the dreaming voices of young girls: “…the best part of a kiss is the moment just before…we become addicted to being intertwined…finding the clearest mirror, the most loyal mirror…when I love, I know he will shine that back to me.” Her camera gazes down into a grove where a sorority of lovely Mirandas lies about in innocent abandon, their bodies curved like silver fish in a sea of grass. Then, in a series of shots in black and white alternating with color, Campion’s hieratic virgins undulate slowly or stand still, always gazing out at us with the provocative serenity of brave new souls. These vestals in modern dress point the way—the film’s title is literally inscribed on the flesh of a woman’s hand—into the film proper, he 19^th century pilgrim’s progress of Isabel Archer, New World Candide.

Campion makes us see—with really stunning support from Nicole Kidman—Isabel Archer as both eligible virgin and the bright, double-faced spirit of idealism that humankind perennially projects. Narcissus as much as Diana, she embarks on a quest for her “most loyal mirror”—for wisdom as much as love—through four very different men of the world. Campion shows her as distaff knight, courageously tracking enlightenment, imagining life into art; as chaste voyeur blind to complexity, willing to be deflowered only by dead men; and as an Eve whose free will is illusory, a temporary luxury provided not by god but money.

Archer’s odyssey ranges from heaven to hell on earth, from a garden rich with summer’s green-gold promise into blighting experience and back again, to a white and frozen homebase, hard ground to cultivate. But, in perhaps the cruelest sense, nothing happens in The Portrait of a Lady. A woman’s world simply ends, winding down to wasteland: dead zero. Not by accident, as Portrait’s innocent abroad launches into her world tour, she pockets an ominous “ticket,” a scarp of paper on which is written NIHILISM.

Our first portrait of Isabel closes in on her fiercely blue eyes brimming with tears as she turns down a proposal from wealthy Lord Warburton (Richard Grant): “When I’m touched, it’s for life,” the young man vows feelingly. (Touch and the prelude to touching, nearness, verbally and visually implode throughout Portrait, tagging the courage of passionate proximity and stone-cold possession.) This eminently desirable young woman is a guest at Gardencourt, the exquisitely appointed and landscaped English estate that houses her aunt (Shelley Winters, surprisingly good) and uncle (John Gielgud), the Touchetts. Seated among lush green leaves and molten sunlight, red-haired Isabel seems herself a bright flower, one that shrinks from plucking. The curving limb hat embraces Isabel, now so much like an Edenic benison, becomes, by Portrait’s wintry end, a black, no-exit barrier.

Campion’s precisely right to open on Isabel’s laser-blue gaze, for this Eve is all eyes—they’re the loci of her appetite, her avid curiosity: “I want to get a general impression of life…there’s a light that has to dawn,” she tells her uncle, her bright face shining out of a frameful of darkness. It does not yet occur to Isabel, in the ruthless purity of her innocence, that epiphanies may cast terrible shadows.

In these early scenes, Isabel’s heartshaped, flyaway red hair recalls Janet Frame’s unbound coiffure, electrified by a passionate, open imagination. Later, as a member of Gilbert Osmund’s (John Malkovich) coven—with his mistress Madame Merle (Barbara Hershey) and Pansy (Valentina Cervic), the exotic Venus-flytrap Osmund and Merle have crossbred—Isabel’s hair, styled in complete coils, darkens, signifying her new grasp of artifice and the occult. In the barely illuminated airlessness of her Roman home, Isabel is expected to move to a puppetmaster’s design or be still, a rich object d’art useful as investment, décor, or sexual lore.

Referring to a feature of one of Lord Warburton’s many homes, Isabel’s “I adore a moat” are the first words we hear from a Miranda so jealous of her virgin zone she refuses every hands-on surveyor. She flees Warburton, through an arch of greenery, across a vast verdant lawn where the family sips ritual tea. As she passes, her consumptive cousin Ralph Touchett (finely expressed by Martin Donovan) takes her in, following her progress with intense interest. A little dog drags at her flying skirts, and as she catches it, the frame slants slightly so that her shadow, holding up the animal, falls on the green.

Much of Isabel’s itinerary and fate are foreshadowed—literally—in this English Eden, where nature as lush topiary art frames the Touchett’s quietly cultivated way of life. Taking flight from potential largesse—emotional and financial—Isabel imagines herself to be perfectly free to choose where and if she will touch down. Campion closes in on Isabel’s skirts again and again in the film, as incremental refrain, measuring the decline of these beating “wings” from strong purposeful motion into aimless, futile flight.

The little dog that nips at the beautiful dreamer’s heels at Gardencourt is animal life, energy from below that demands attention. Less positively, the dog prefigures Gilbert Osmund, Isabel’s “small,” bestial husband-no-to-be—variously hairy faced, braying ass and snouting pig, who makes Merle “how like a wolf” (though in fact her name’s a poetic form of “blackbird”). Osmund later shockingly humiliates the Eve he’s bell-jarred by deliberately tripping her up as she flees him, keeping her down by stepping on her skirts.

Tilting to frame that momentary stain on Gardencourt’s lawn, Campion’s camera signs the beginning of Isabel’s slow descent into an “unfathomable abyss,” inked in the blackness of Madame Merle’s gloved hand spidering obscenely over Pansy’s stomach; the grounded shadow of a parasol; during Osmund’s subterranean “rape” of Isabel; the line of shade that, by her father’s decree, bars Pansy from a a sunlit garden. Campion will later look down on Roman park studded with trees moated by colorful flowerbeds. AS animated aristos stroll the circular paths, shades of Joseph Cotton and Teresa Wright attend Isabel as she insists she hasn’t “the shadow of a doubt” about the probity of the serpent on her arm.

Caspar Goodwood (Viggo Mortenson) the American admirer who has pursued Isabel to Europe, comes from good adamic stock; sunny open ground, he’s physically passionate and singleminded in his affections. Down from the Touchett estate to London, in the first stage of Isabel’s descent from garden to prison, a fleeing glimpse of a corset hanging suggestively on the back door of our adventurer’s little bed-sitting room sets the tone for Goodwood’s visit. Crowding her into a corner, her least talkative lover braces his arms on the walls that hem her, hardly able to resist touching her. “You don’t fit in,” she cries. She thinks she means in some large social scheme, but it’s the plaint of a virgin, afraid of the pain—and pleasure—of penetration.

Every time Goodwood touches her, at almost ritual intervals throughout Portrait, Isabel recoils as if afraid she’ll catch fire. She can’t take this man in through her eyes, her mind alone; he is too large, too lively for her. As he leaves her room, rebuffed once more, he momentarily holds her chin in his palm. Afterwards, she touches herself in the same way and goes under, as though set off by some posthypnotic suggestion. Her eyes soft and unfocused, she rubs her face against the fringed hanging of her four-poster like a cat in heat. Wojiech Kilar’s sensual music pulses as she trances out in carnal pleasure; Warburton, Touchett, and Goodwood snake about her body, caressing her until, suddenly startled, she shakes the men off and they decorporealize. It’s a scene out of Coppola’s Dracula (scored by Kilar), but even in fantasy, Isabel remains in control and intact.

In James, American Adams transplanted into the hothouse of Europe often grow into passive voyeurs; the refined, sexless inertia of a Ralph Touchett or Gilbert Osmond may signal an aesthetic or diabolical bent. The Gardencourt invalid who registered Isabel’s frantic retreat from Warburton soon plays beneficent angel by “making” his young cousin, that is, by arranging for her to be rich enough to follow the “requirement of her imagination.” Ralph Touchett looks forward, he tells her, to “the thrill of seeing what a young lady does who has refused” an English lord.

Ralph might be James, loosing his engaging young heroine into the world, eager to see where she will take him and his novel. Isabel and her ironically named cousin are Portrait’s truest soulmates, Platonic lovers happy to see and imagine, to apprehend and chew over life as if it were a complex masterpiece to be appreciated by earnest digestion. Their Rear Window symbiosis combines stillness and motion, invalid impotence and unfettered action. Pumping a friend of Isabel’s about his cousin’s treatment of Caspar Goodwood, Ralph inquires hungrily, “Was she cruel?” Campion cuts to a chilling shot of this consumer’s nail clicking on a glass that imprisons a buzzing hornet.

Campion divides her Portrait with a superbly visualized scene between Ralph and Isabel, one that conjures up Buñuel’s Tristana and Belle de Jour, along with Hitchock’s Vertigo. Isabel enters, distractedly, at the bottom of the frame. Inclining up frame-left is a wall of arched, molteny yellow stable doors. Two great ebon horses stand against the slant of golden wood. The effect is surreal, a Buñuelian dream-image hot with sensual simile. But this Belle is blind; she does not blaze until she’s inside the dark stables, her red hair thinly haloed by filtered sun, her face and body shaded blue by tinted windowlight. Isabel has just engaged to marry Gilbert Osmond; her vibrant warmth and color is already contracting toward the cool, hard, still “marble” he will make of her. (Stone and porcelain simulacra amark Isabel’s descent into museumed life: lovers sleeping side by side on sarcaphogi; the chubby marble hand of her dead child; Pansy’s Rosier, verboten suitor, diminished to a little doll hidden harmlessly at her breast.)

In the stables, Ralph Touchett grieves for the bright bird, now tethered by a sterile collector, he has ridden with such vicarious pleasure: “You were not to come down so easily, so soon. It hurts me as if I’d fallen myself.” Isabel’s been his Madeleine, an ideal he can cherish and pursue in his imagination; like Hitchock’s Scotty in Vertigo, Ralph doesn’t want to “touchett,” has no taste for a flawed woman of flesh and blood. A vampire of small but fastidious appetite, he has “made” he Eve for something finer than Psmond’s debasement. As Isabel pleads her case against his “false idea,” Ralph and the camera recede from her. She grows smaller in our eyes, as though her image has been released from his focus, to fall away into a void.

Their reunion comes in the penultimate moments of the film, in Portrait’s single scene of something like sexual consummation. The woman we’ve seen only in postures of sexual passivity or flight climbs into bed with the dying Ralph, frantically caressing and kissing a body already going cold. Their climax is his death, signaled by his hand falling uselessly away from her cheek. As he passes, he admonishes her to keep him in her heart—“I’ll be nearer than I’ve ever been.” (In a preceding, twinning scene, Osmond has come at Isabel as she beats her forehead against a door in despair, brutally pinning her with his body and firmly holder her valuable face from harm: “You are nearer to me and I am nearer to you than ever,” gloats her curator.) In death, Ralph Touchett’s spirit finally enters his beloved’s body in perfect Platonic possession.

From the moment at Gardencourt where Madame Merle sirens Isabel down to her with voluptuous Chopin, images of the young woman who puts such arrogant faith in her islanded identity begin to be doubled, distorted, and dissolved. In her Dantean journey, Isabel’s eyes are opened to her own self-delusions, and to the ugly, convoluted reality behind the “vivid images” she has made of Merle and Osmond.

At the start of Campion’s superb concatenation of horror movie, fairly tale, and re-fashioning of Eve’s mythic Fall, Isabel winds down the stairs of an ancient Roman villa to fetch up in a round subterranean chamber—half mausoleum, half-museum. Set an intervals in this strange room’s ceiling are grilled openings; weak light falls through air dense with old debris, so that barred rectangles punctuate Isabel’s path. Osmond materializes out of the shadows, twirling the parasol she’s left behind. It snaps with unpleasant papery sounds, like the rushing of bats, and he uses it like Mesmer’s hypnotic wheel. The two circle each other, like wary animals maneuvering for better ground, but Isabel’s eyes are locked on his. We’ve seen him work Madame Merle with the most expert hand—“Every now and then I’m touched,” he mocks his earlier conquest as he brutally disengages: Isabel hasn’t a prayer against his snaky intensity. Much later, even as he lashes her with hateful verbal contempt, Isabel leans helplessly in toward his mouth, her eyes “stupefied” with longing.¹

As Osmond declares the precise nature of his love—“I offer nothing”—Campion’s camera rushes toward the couple around a curve of wall, past a skull set in old stone. The motion takes your breath away: something like death has passed. The frame tilts to show the shadow of Isabel’s parasol at the lovers’ feet. Osmond seals their unholy bargain with a Judas kiss, swallowing her mouth with a prostitute’s practiced, perfectly timed sensuality—and slides away into the dark. No Miltonic Satan vital with glamour and active evil, Isabel’s ravisher is a lesser devil, a cold collector of fortunes. He has seduced her into a world of pimps and promoters, where manipulation of bodies and souls is his vulgar art.

“I’d give a good deal to be your age again…my dreams were so great…the best part is gone…and for nothing,” confides Madame Merle, the dark sister who has precede Isabel into Gilbert Osmond’s soul-killing embrace. Nothing, out of James by way of Campion, is arrived through the profoundest of passions, an awful violence practiced as perfectly deliberate, often quite public atrocity. In Portrait’s last act, Campion frames Gardencourt in longshot, its beautiful stonework and ivy bleakly rimed in ice, as old Aunt Touchett creaks her way across the snowy lawn, clutching her walker. “Is there really no hope?” Isabel pleads, referring to Ralph’s illness. With grating, indifferent finality, Shelly Winters’s voice speaks a wider epitaph: “None whatsoever. There has never been.”

I haven’t said enough about the character of Madame Merle, played magnificently by that peerless Magdalene, Barbara Hershey. As the dark lady of Portrait, she is a truly tragic figure, because she has far more self-awareness and a larger vision than Isabel may ever attain—she chooses sin with her eyes open. Two images from the film, two sides of Merle: In the first, she and Isabel walk along a series of pedestals displaying classically monumental human parts in marble—a huge hand here, a gigantic foot there. Merle sits down in front of an heroic male torso, its genitalia backing her in the frame—as she unmasks for Isabel, confessing her role as procuress and trying to cozen Osmond’s wife into pandering for Madame Merle’s own daughter.

Later, at the dim convent where Osmond has locked Pansy up for being insufficiently commercial, Campion’s camera passes Isabel’s face in closeup, left of frame, to focus in on Madame Merle, who holds a little doll wrapped in waxed paper. Her glib social spiel, about paying a call on the lonely Pansy, stutters to a halt with her nearly whispered “a little dismal”—apt epigraph for her life and her child. This mater dolorosa is backed by a crucified Christ, painted on the wall ehind her, but Isabel can’t see that. Even in the rain outside, when a bedraggled Merle tries to touch her with “I know you are very unhappy, but I more so,” our unforgiving fundamentalist slides her carriage window shut between them, effectively making nothing of the woman who is perhaps her clearest mirror.

At film’s end, Campion reprises the circling dance in Osmond’s underground chamber, this time with Isabel and Caspar Goodwood, on the very site—now a wintry wasteland—where, as a green girl, she refused Warburton. But as the passionate Goodwood holds his upraised hands to either side of her face—as though afraid to catch hold of her—Isabel literally pants with fear, rounding against his offer of earthly happiness like a trapped animal. “Why go through this ghastly form?” her good angel cries out, referring to her marriage. “To get away from you,” comes her terrible, perverse reply.

Fleeing Goodwood, Isabel follows her earlier route, but now Gardencourt’s grounds are cold and unpromising. The whole weight of Portrait has slanted slowly, inexorably from summer down through seasons of dismal rain into this wintry whiteout, scrawled with the meaningless calligraphy of dead branches. We watch her dark skirts flash over the snow, as though Ralph Touchett’s once high-flying soul knew what significant South she was heading—but her advancement is herky-jerky, slowed by step-printing. Through the manor’s windows, we can see a warm haven of golden candlelight, the color of home in the final shot of An Angel at My Table. In closeup, Isabel’s hand turns on the doorknob. Then, her back to shelter, bleak landscape before her, our bright angel simply runs down, freeze-framed like some lost Galatea. In Portrait’s brave, hard-won ending, Campion’s eve—neither home nor exiled, but pinned in some deadly zone between—gazes out at nothing.

By means of a radical stylistic trope, Campion makes us see that the nature of Isabel’s stupefaction is sexual, moral, and aesthetic. The primitively shot and imagined silent movie—“My Journey”—that follows hard upon Osmond’s seduction is equal, lurid parts Son of the Sheik and Hitchock’s Spellbound, with a little Caligari thrown in for good measure. Jerkily, it segues from the comic, speeded-up motion of Isabel and her friend Henrietta sliding from side to side on the deck of a rocking ship; to Isabel costumed and veiled in Bedouin garb courtesy of a studio wardrobe department, abroad in exotic locales more back-projected than real; through the plateful of Daliesque beans that open like mouth or vaginas to groan Osmond’s “I love you absolutely”; to a climatic plunge down into feverdream and final swoon in sheikland. Flashing on her own eyes and mouth, the bearded orifice of her demon lover and his hand splayed on her naked stomach (as she’s seen Merle’s brand Pansy’s front), Isabel finally falls, naked, into the whirling wheel of a slideshow hypnotist. Is this Osmondian projection the “light that has to dawn” so anticipated by Isabel in the greenhouse of her imagination?

The Lady in the Frame: Two Portraits by Henry James and Jane Campion David Kelly from Senses of Cinema

eFilmCritic Reviews Charles Tatum

New York Magazine (David Denby)

Peter Reiher

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Steve Baker: Barfly Magazine

Film Scouts (Leslie Rigoulot)

ToxicUniverse.com (Laurie Edwards) a surprisingly fixated one-note review

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough, including an interview with: Jane Campion and Nicole Kidman

HOLY SMOKE B 88

USA Australia (114 mi) 1999

BFI | Sight & Sound | Women Directors Special: Soul Survivor Kate Pullinger from Sight and Sound, October 1999 (excerpt)

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but some of the most audacious, controversial and imaginative films to premiere this year were directed by women. In this issue's special focus we highlight three of the best: Jane Campion's Holy Smoke, Catherine Breillat's Romance and newcomer Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher. Here, Kate Pullinger applauds as Campion loosens her period-dress stays and returns to present-day Australia to cast Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel in a war of wits, offering a rich meditation on belief, desire and novel uses for livestock

Philadelphia City Paper review by Sam Adams

Far from her suburban Sydney home, backpacker Ruth Barron (Winslet) is so touched by an Indian guru that even mum turning up with tales of dad's imminent demise can't lure her back. Ironically, mum's own asthmatic reaction to Delhi leads to Ruth escorting her to Oz, where awaits wizard 'cult exiter' PJ Waters (Keitel), hired by the family to rid Ruth of her plans to become one of her mentor's wives. His three-step process takes place in a cabin in the desert, a suitably scorched, remote arena for a blazing battle of wills that takes them beyond conventional power struggles into a heady realm of love, hate, doubt and desire. With its switches in tone, from searing psycho-drama to broad, exuberant comedy, its sometimes purposeful, sometimes meandering narrative and its bright hues, the film initially seems an efficient if uneven entertainment. As it progresses, however, with Ruth and PJ moving into ever murkier territory, it becomes easier to discern a thematic thread: how we're all conditioned, and how we must interrogate traditional assumptions to discover our real selves. It's brave, adventurous, refreshingly frank - qualities also marking the performances, particularly those of the leads.

Departing from her usually airless, overdetermined style, Jane Campion takes Holy Smoke into looser, more organic territory, at least until its disastrous final third. Kate Winslet plays Ruth, a headstrong Australian woman who’s convinced she’s found spiritual enlightenment in an Indian religious sect, only to have her parents trick her into coming home to be deprogrammed by unctuous, oily American "cult exiter" PJ (Harvey Keitel). When Campion (who co-wrote the script with sister Anna, based on the latter’s novel) keeps the focus wide, including Ruth’s deliberately vulgar family (caricatured in typically bigfoot Australian style), Holy Smoke ably balances boisterous humor with a more serious understanding of why Ruth decamped in the first place. (Yvonne Lee is particularly good as an innocently blowsy woman obsessed with bedding Keitel’s sleazeball.) The shot of a sari-clad Ruth belting out Alanis Morissette’s "You Oughta Know" as her car races across the outback is priceless: both expressive and perfectly ironic. But once Keitel and Winslet are cooped up in the "halfway hut" and the deprogramming begins, the movie turns self-serious and implodes almost immediately, instantly reverting to the fumble-fisted symbolism Campion is so fond of indulging. Once Keitel’s in a dress and Winslet has "Be Kind" written on her forehead, the movie has nothing left to do but pummel you with lines that are alternately obvious and opaque, and any prospect of enlightenment has long since passed.

Set to the full-throated, anthemic bombast of Neil Diamond's "Holly, Holy" (the live version), the delirious opening minutes of Jane Campion's Holy Smoke echo the singer's combustible mix of spirituality and kitsch, viewing a young woman's enlightenment as a sort of exotic pop adventure. Campion makes it easy to see how Kate Winslet, wonderful as an impetuous yet headstrong teenager, could fall for the Fruitopian vision of "absolute love" offered by an Indian guru named Baba. But the moment the song ends and her asthmatic mother wheezes through the Delhi streets, the film's peculiar spell is broken, its story splitting into two irreconcilable halves: one a fierce psychosexual melodrama similar to Campion's The Piano, the other a typically grotesque Australian comedy. Buried under all the clutter is a pointed theme about how society works to eradicate any unconventional belief system, no matter how much spiritual bliss it has to offer. Once Winslet makes the transition from rebellious and melancholic to peaceful and meditative, her parents are so alarmed that they force her back to Sydney and hire American "cult exiter" Harvey Keitel to snap her out of it. Their three-day deprogramming sessions, in the cramped space of an outback hut, are by far the most compelling material in Holy Smoke, as each angles for psychological advantage. Though the result of their tête-à-tête is predictable, especially for those familiar with Campion's torrid feminism, Winslet and Keitel attack and recede with almost primal intensity. But their palpable chemistry is continually undercut by her cartoonish extended family, whose flying toupees and distended bodies are meant to represent sickly, unnatural suburban life. It's a cheap point, made more effectively in fellow Aussie Nicolas Roeg's 1971 Walkabout, which deftly balanced natural beauty against the pollutants of urban life. For all its attractions, Holy Smoke is a tonal mess, too incoherent to get back in sync with Diamond's majestically trashy epiphanies.

Holy Smoke is typical Jane Campion - as with The Piano and Portrait of a Lady, there are plenty of ideas here, many of them remarkably good, many remarkably bad. Stitched together to form a feature film, the results are maddeningly uneven, but always worth seeing. Perhaps the problem is length - it may be no coincidence that Campion's most satisfying work to date remains her 1984 short, Passionless Moments.

The best thing about Holy Smoke is probably Kate Winslet. She works wonders with the central role of Ruth, who undergoes a spiritual transformation during a trip to India. Her family back home in Australia fear the worst and trick her into returning, whereupon she is made to undergo 'deprogramming' from a hired American expert, Harvey Keitel.

For most of its length, Holy Smoke is original, witty, skilfully made and extremely well acted. In the final 20 minutes or so, however, things go careering out of control as the claustrophobic battle of wills between Winslet and Keitel heads into bizarre psychological territories which Campion doesn't seem to have fully thought through. Compared with what has gone before, the final scenes simply fail to convince, and the film feels in dire need of at least one rewrite. It doesn't know what it wants to be, and the scenes concentrating on Winslet's boorish Aussie family, though marvellously entertaining, seem to have been spliced in from another movie altogether.

Campion seems determined to go her own way - but the danger is that she doesn't appear willing to learn from her past mistakes. It's impossible to fault the acting (though Pam Grier has zero to do in a curiously minor role) and Campion stages many scenes with terrific visual verve, but Holy Smoke provides proof, once again, that a half-baked script is always an impossible hurdle to overcome.

There's reason for joy among feminists this morning, at least in the top film market citties such as Philadelphia where I am visiting at the moment. What is it? A new Jane Campion film has just opened. It's called " Holy Smoke" and you'll want to put it on your "must see" list when it comes to a theater near you. It is vintage Jane Camption. She has been, among other things, skewering the middle class Australian family since she was a kid (see "A Girl's Own Story" made when she was fifteen). The family in this film who live in a vast look-alike housing development called, with dripping irony, San Souci (the name of Frederick the Great's glorious palace outside Berlin). They could be the nextdoor neighbors to the dysfunctional family Campion created in her earlier film "Sweetie." Next to her siblings, Ruth (Kate Winslet) seems the most sane and reasonable of the lot. She and her sisters go off on a trip to India where Ruth falls under the spell of a holy man, experiences enlightenment, joins the ashram and burns her return ticket home.

When her family finds out, they're worried sick and her mother goes to India armed with lies about her father dying and then freaks out, forcing Ruth to accompany her on a hospital plane back to Sydney. Once she's there, the deprogrammer they have brought from America at great expense, P J Waters (Harvey Keitel), takes over, promising to return her to her family at the end of three days minus her dedication to the cult that has, in their eyes, captured her.

What happens out in "the half way hut" in the shadow of Ayres Rock is unlike anything you've ever seen at the movies before. It's sort of the Main Event in the battle of the sexes, with P J using his physical power, his tried and true deprogramming techniques, and his macho arrogance as his tools and Ruth using her faith, her knowledge that she has had a transforming spiritual experience, and her sexuality as hers. While he's trying to break her, she is slowly turning up the heat on him and eventually he can't control his desire for her. From there on in, she has him where she wants him. In a scene that women who believe that they should be in control of their own sexuality will marvel at, Ruth teaches P J how to make love to her on her terms, not his. Then, in a sequence that's reminiscent of the way Marlene Dietrich cruelly taunted and humiliated Emil Jannings in "The Blue Angel," Ruth puts lipstick and a dress on P J, and has sex with him her way for a change. She's gleeful because she has won the battle of wills, at least she thinks she has.

There's more, including a brief appearance by Pam Grier as Carol, P J's girlfriend from America but that's enough plot, find out yourself how it ends. Beware of young (and not so young) male reviewers writing about this film. They really get upset by it and some totally lose their sense of proportion about it and react hysterically (and I use that word advisedly). It's really the ultimate example of McAlister's Law; in this case it's not just getting kicked in the groin that makes them uncomfortable, it's a woman in controlling the sexual agenda, "emasculating" and humiliating the man and it's a real turn off for a lot of men (see, for example, the comments page on http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144715/usercomments). But women viewers will understand that the deprogramming is going both ways here and Ruth may actually be doing P J a big favor. The epilogue shows that he is a changed man because something happened to him that night. Call it enlightenment if you will.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Holy Smoke (1999) Stella Bruzzi from Sight and Sound, April 2000

Never a Native: Holy Smoke Sue Gillett from Senses of Cinema

village voice > film > Jane and Anna Campion Make a Religious-Cult ... Fear and Desires, by Amy Taubin from The Village Voice

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

Salon.com [Mary Elizabeth Williams]

Nitrate Online (Sean Axmaker)

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Kate Sullivan

PopMatters F.L. Carr

eFilmCritic Jack Sommersby

World Socialist Web Site Jason Nichols and David Walsh

AboutFilm Alison Tweedie-Perry

Raging Bull [Dan McGowan]

Kamera.co.uk Richard James Havis

Chris Dashiell at CineScene (down the page)

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Film Journal International (David Noh)

Filmtracks (Christian Clemmensen) soundtrack review

7:30 Report interview with the participants by Maxine Mckew December 13, 1999

Wholly Jane: Jane Campion on her new movie and other mysteries Judith Lewis interview from LA Weekly, January 18, 2000

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

IN THE CUT A 95

USA Australia Great Britain (120 mi) 2003

Sumptuously photographed by Dion Beebe, filmed 100 % in New York City, this film has an incredibly sensuous and seamy style to it. Sex and violence are beautifully brought together here in a steamy erotic thriller where Jane Campion integrates the urban underbelly of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) with the growing female paranoia from Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941). Since becoming the first and only woman to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes for The Piano (1993), a lush study of repression, Campion has garnered a reputation for making ardently feminist films featuring a powerful and courageous woman as a central figure. But that doesn’t suggest her films are easy to digest, as evidenced by the virile review of the film by New York film critic Armond White Porn Theater and In the Cut | NYPress.com - New York's essential ..., “Feminism has garnered more favor in the mainstream media than has gay rights. This has nothing to do with correct thinking or sensitivity. As Jane Campion’s movies demonstrate, it is the result of privileged insensitivity,” calling the filmmaker a “con-artist” whose film is “the latest example of the way she uses sexual paranoia to appeal to the weak-minded sympathies of feminist critics and audiences.” Lest we remember White also called Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami a “backward third-world esthete.” Part of the resentment seems to derive from women freely adapting noir urban thrillers, territory that has previously been considered an exclusive male domain. Campion’s interest within the genre is redefining the women’s role, taking that same exploitive melodramatic female hysteria of women caught up in trouble, but exploring the fractured, internalized world from a different perspective. All she’s really doing is balancing the playing field, turning the story on edge using instead a female protagonist. The film is an adaptation of the 2003 novel by Susanna Moore, an erotic mystery thriller starring Meg Ryan, who made a career in the late 80’s and 90’s making homogenized mainstream American comedies. Campion originally worked for five years developing the film with Nicole Kidman (who remained a producer), but she got caught up in a messy and heavily publicized divorce with über megastar actor Tom Cruise.

Given that the film’s aesthetic is saturated in a dreamlike, impressionistic allure of color, the realistic aspect of the story may seem a bit improbable, where the now fortyish Meg Ryan is Frannie, a New York high school teacher and amateur linguist with an interest in the origins of slang, who continuously allows herself to be put in harm's way, almost as if she was hypnotized. However, this adds sensuality to the developing suspense, where every male in her mind becomes increasingly suspect as she nearly sleepwalks through this role, such is the dreamlike quality of her performance, while her sister Pauline, stunningly played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, gives one of her best performances as well. Both are world weary, affectionately close, neither passing judgment on the others life. The love between the two is overwhelming, as is their incredible need for love and intimacy. It's that feeling, the need to be needed, that dominates this film, as the two sisters appear to be sadly out of kilter with the world around them, as if it has somehow passed them by and they are settling for the leftovers. Opening strangely with the oddly hypnotic Que Sera Sera -- Pink Martini - YouTube (3:01) as petals fall over the Manhattan skyline, we’re already somehow part of a young girl’s fantasy, where the film revolves around Frannie’s sexual awakening, seen early on witnessing a cop getting a blowjob in the darkened back regions of a seedy bar, where the girl seen ends up murdered, where a piece of her “disarticulated” corpse is discovered near Frannie’s apartment. Frannie is portrayed as a vaguely dissatisfied woman, divorced with few friends, where she’s drawn into the misogynistic, macho world of the police detective investigating the murder, Mark Ruffalo as Detective Malloy, where it makes no sense why Frannie would be attracted to this type of vulgar-mouthed police detective, but attracted she is, and who says desire has to make sense? Her sister Pauline evidently wrote the book on the subject, encouraging her to finally connect with someone.

Some of the more genuinely affecting scenes in the film come between the detective and his partner, Detective Rodriguez (Nick Damici), where the combative language and police jargon perfectly captures the street oriented racism that is etched into their equally sexist dialogue, where both of these guys exhibit a crudeness exclusively associated with the behavior of hardened cops. Frannie grows both attracted and repulsed by Malloy’s boorish sexual aggressiveness, exploring the ambivalent feelings of female desire and passion, where her discovery of sexual pleasure is expressed with an emphasis almost exclusively on the woman’s enjoyment. But this is quickly tempered with her growing suspicions that Malloy may be the murderer, as he has the same distinctive tattoo on his wrist that she observed on the cop last seen with the murder victim, where now there are others killed in the exact same manner, meaning there is a vicious serial killer on the loose. Campion creates an intoxicatingly sensuous atmosphere steeped in sexual paranoia and violence, where every male figure suddenly becomes suspect, including her stalker-like, brain-fried former lover John, creepily played by uncredited Kevin Bacon, and a particularly interested black student Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh), the source of much of her information on slang who also makes a play for her. These competing interests are contrasted against a highly developed internalized portrait of a women continually beaten down by the wretched horrors of the world outside, where Frannie has every reason to be petrified with fear, as the killer appears to be closing in. Using a rich and expressive visual language, including a highly personalized film within a film, the story unfolds from Frannie’s perspective, growing ever more blurry and indefinable around the edges of the frame, matching her deteriorating mental outlook. Meg Ryan succeeds brilliantly here in a more mature and multi-dimensional role, including full frontal nudity, breaking free from her stereotypical adorable parts that defined her career. Claustrophobic, dark and noirish atmospheric, this is an exquisitely constructed impressionistic mood piece that somehow offers its own peculiar elegy to the mournful souls currently trying to reconstruct their lives in a post 9/11 world weary New York City.

Laurie Anderson put it neatly: 'I hate my dreams,' she said. 'They're so infantile.' Campion's film is being sold as an erotic thriller, but the director evidently approached it as a fantasy. Ryan (no longer cute, and more interesting for it) is Frannie, an English teacher at NYU, caught up in a murder case when a 'disarticulated' corpse shows up on her doorstep. Frannie watched the girl giving head to a guy just the day before, a guy with an uncanny resemblance to homicide cop Molloy. Campion and Susanna Moore have sliced and diced the latter's novel, chopping and doubling characters with schizoid abandon. Every male is suspect. As for Molloy, Ruffalo gives him colour and shading; it's not the actor's fault if the character makes no sense. There's a much better film going on at the same time. Frannie's frank, funny relationship with her half-sister Pauline (Leigh) is credible and touching; so too, for that matter, is the fearful desire that pulses through Fran's erotic relationship with Molloy. The film's strong on its blurry, jittery New York rhythms, and the rich, febrile atmospherics are laced with poetry and secret talismans. There's texture and subtext to spare, but when it comes to text, Campion's disinterest in genre is palpable.

Richard Porton from Cinema Scope, posted 09-13-2003 (link lost):

Jane Campion’s early shorts and features, notably Sweetie (1989) and An Angel at my Table (1990), were distinguished by a remarkable visual and narrative dexterity. Although her subsequent films have often seemed strained and schematic in comparison (her breakout hit, 1993’s The Piano is the most egregious example), they all combine a fiercely personal style with an undogmatic feminist sensibility. Some of Campion’s champions are inordinately dogmatic, however, and it is both amusing and disconcerting to observe how her work is frequently celebrated with a blend of misplaced reverence and academic cant. In his BFI monograph on Campion, Dana Polan recounts a conversation with a professor friend who “declared virulently that it was impossible and even malicious to imagine Jane Campion making a film” of Susanna Moore’s novel In the Cut. Polan’s academic confidante views Moore’s heroine as something less than an exemplary independent woman, a curious objection given that Campion’s own female protagonists, who often fuse strength and vulnerability, are much too complex to be reduced to that stale cliché, “the strong woman.”

Unfortunately, Campion’s adaptation of In the Cut proves distressingly tame and, in the final analysis, is probably innocuous enough to please Polan’s censorious friend. (Since this “erotic thriller” opens with “Que Sera Sera” on the soundtrack, it becomes clear early on that subtlety will be in short supply.) Although the film version (co-written by Moore and Campion) almost slavishly reproduces the novel’s account of a hesitant sexual adventurer, other filmmakers – Catherine Breillat comes immediately to mind – have explored this terrain with less prevarication.

A whodunit with literary pretensions, the film revolves around the sexual awakening of Franny (Meg Ryan), a demure English professor. Once our heroine wanders into a New York City bar with a student and unwittingly observes a woman performing oral sex on a man she later encounters under much different circumstances, her life changes irrevocably. The man in question turns out to be Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), a macho New York police investigator who Franny finds simultaneously attractive and repellent. A string of plot contrivances lead to one overriding, yawn-inducing paradox: Franny’s sexual epiphany is inextricably tied to her affair with a man who may be either her redeemer or her potential murderer. Despite the au courant subject matter, Moore and Campion’s resolution of the mystery (suffice to say that Malloy is cleared of all culpability) is almost affirmative enough to fit into the middle-class, faux-feminist agenda of the Lifetime Channel.

Working for the first time in what might be termed genre territory, Campion does her best to imbue In the Cut with a noirish ambiance. She opts for an intriguingly brackish colour scheme, perilously low light levels, and jagged camera movements. In the end, these flourishes (the film benefits enormously from the contributions of the talented cinematographer Dion Beebe) are all more or less perfunctory – as are Campion’s attempts to give the thin material some psychological ballast by inserting flashbacks in which Franny’s emotional paralysis is traced to her mother’s decision to marry an unfaithful man. The locations are disappointingly lackluster as well, although New Yorkers might notice one odd bit of local colour – Franny’s sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), lives above an actual strip club, the Baby Doll Lounge.

Many will assume that the film’s doom was sealed with the casting of Meg Ryan in the part of Franny, a role originally designed for Nicole Kidman. But Ryan gamely assumes the glum demeanor required of her, and it would be unfair to blame her for the film’s anemia. Leigh plays her sister, an entirely superfluous role, as an almost Eve Arden-ish sidekick. Since she portrays this underdeveloped character with such panache, it seems preternaturally cruel to kill her off as the plot reaches its creaky crescendo.

In addition, the film’s by-the-numbers sex scenes are sadly lacking in brio. I couldn’t help but think of Vladimir Nabokov’s withering comments on the wan sexual escapades in Tony Richardson’s adaptation of his Laughter in the Dark (1969): “the blotchy male shoulder, the false howls of bliss, the four or five mingled feet…all of it primitive, commonplace, conventional.” Even the admittedly risible sexual hijinks between Harvey Keitel and Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke (1999) possessed more erotic spark than Ryan and Ruffalo’s passionless writhings.

When a film by a director of unquestionable talent misfires, it seems presumptuous, but unavoidable, to speculate on her intentions. Instead of the cheekily subversive project Campion presumably had in mind, she ended up making a retooled version of a cautionary tale – an odd mixture of a Nancy Drew mystery and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977).

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

The word around the block on Jane Campion's latest, In the Cut, has been dire. Even before its derisive premiere in Toronto, the buzz was centered squarely on star Meg Ryan's much-ballyhooed switcheroo from winsome America's Sweetheart to freaky-deaky troubled chick, going full frontal and miming ecstasy from a cunningulus session.

It's not surprising to see that the shrillest of negative reviews (calling the movie "tawdry," "an ugly mess," "dirty" and, oh the irony, "sexist") have been by male critics. Their tangible resentment derives undoubtedly from the fact that a woman director is taking a male genre (the urban thriller) and using it to explore a female character's psyche, without toning down the genre's "maleness" (its grim violence, its sense of paranoia). Campion's movie has, thus, been taken as a personal affront by a good deal of (male) critics, who use it as excuse to wonder whether she, a highly respected filmmaker (The Piano), isn't respected among the tastemakers just because... well, because she's a woman. Armond White, the NY Press' bellicosely "passionate" critic, epitomizes this foolishness by calling the film "the latest example of the way she uses sexual paranoia to appeal to the weak-minded sympathies of feminist critics and audiences." (The review, calling the director a "con-artist," comes all-too-obviously from the same sensibility that branded the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami a "backward third-world esthete.")

What is Campion's sin? Basically, to refuse to be defined exclusively in terms of gentility and passivity, terms that our society wants viewers to adopt as signifiers of "femininity." The opening credits -- petals gently falling in the Manhattan skyline as "Que Sera, Sera" plays discordantly -- use clichés of femininity to contrast vividly with the reality of a world where their romanticism has become absurdly debased. Frannie (Ryan) is a glum teacher who divides her time between writing a book on urban slang, snatching bits of poetry off subway placards, and visiting her strung-out half-sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh). When a cop named Malloy (Mark Ruffalo, all insinuating menace and That '70s Porn mustache) enters the picture to investigate the gruesome killings of young women around her area, Frannie finds herself falling into an affair with him. However, her attraction is fused with the fear that he may be the murderer himself.

The plot sounds like your slick, garden-variety serial killer thriller, and that's how the movie is being sold in the trailers. Seen from that angle, In the Cut cannot help but be a failure -- Campion has very little affinity for the streamlined clarity necessary for a Hollywood whodunit, and in that area the film comes off as rhythmless and redundant. Yet I doubt that a better-made version of the same plot (the term "better" here meant to mean "efficiently," in the anonymous and impersonal contemporary Hollywood manner) would have necessarily resulted in a better film. The richness of the movie is tied to its messiness, itself an essential part of Campion's thematic dynamics.

Campion has been a singularly restless talent, blessedly hard to pin down. Crudity and delicacy leak continuously into each other, lush Victorian romances and tragedies (The Piano, Portrait of a Lady) mixed with raucously disrespectful comedies (Sweetie, Holy Smoke!). Her films follow female misfits, or, more precisely, women who are labeled misfits by strict patriarchal societies for their "aberrant" behavior -- consequently, they are waist-deep in "madness," the obvious male explanation of their rebelliousness. Frannie in In the Cut isn't mad, but she is likewise against being frozen into established roles (always bearing down on her, like the huge flower arrangement marked "Mom" early in the subway). Her discovery of sexual pleasure with Malloy (and this is one of the only American movies I can think of where the emphasis in the sex scenes is exclusively on the woman's enjoyment) is tempered with anxiety over the violence that seems to be always intertwined with sex in the urban jungle of Manhattan -- here made as ominously mysterious and narcotizing as the dark jungles of Campion's native New Zealand.

The linking of sex and violence has been seen by some as reactionary, as if the director were saying one leads to the other. Far from it -- sex in Campion's films is almost always seen as liberating and expansive, an extension of natural expression for her heroines. What the picture attacks is not sex but its degradation (strip clubs, dark alley blowjobs) in the dank, urban environment. Its movement is less toward the uncovering of the real killer than toward the timid heroine's taking control of her sexuality, from masturbating to enjoying oral sex to actively, aggressively initiating intercourse. This is an unblushing, even invasively provocative look at a sexual odyssey, which critics are trying to palm off as a failed woman-in-peril shocker. In Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Quentin Tarantino radically challenges the conventions of a masculine cinema by empowering his heroine without sacrificing her femininity; in In the Cut, working with a similarly male genre, Campion navigates her heroine through the waters of female-victim ideology. Both are open to a feminist reading, as well as to misunderstanding by lazy, jaded viewers.

Los Angeles Times [Manohla Dargis]

Jane Campion's astonishingly beautiful new film, "In the Cut," may be the most maddening and imperfect great movie of the year. Certainly it's the most difficult to cozy up to with its unnerving fusion of hot sex, icy sentiment and warm-running blood. The movie is being pitched as an erotic thriller, but despite a suspense subplot and the frisson that comes with watching professional cupcake Meg Ryan do the nasty, it plays far closer to an adults-only fairy tale — albeit one in which the happily-ever looks a lot like "Taxi Driver."

Think of it as the ultimate grim fairy tale: the story of a woman who, while wandering the streets of New York and the tangled wilds of her imagination meets not one but several big bad wolves. Hovering around age 40, Frannie (Ryan), a writing teacher and amateur linguist, lives alone in an apartment ornamented with words fixed to the walls. She's doing a study of contemporary slang and sometimes taps one of her students, Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh), for the latest in street patois. She evinces a particular interest in sexual and violent colloquialisms, and indeed the film's title, which is taken from Susanna Moore's controversial 1995 novel, turns out to be an especially vulgar descriptor for intercourse.

Cornelius is one wolf on the prowl; a homicide detective named Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) is another. Malloy comes knocking on Frannie's door after an amputated female hand turns up in the teacher's back yard. A serial killer seems to be running amok in the city, chopping women into mincemeat. Neither surprised nor visibly disturbed by this grisly news (you'd think body parts littered her front door), Frannie agrees to meet Malloy for drinks. But put off by his boorish, epithet-spewing partner, Rodriguez (Nick Damici), she flees the date and runs straight into the arms of a would-be mugger. Eluding her attacker gives her an excuse to contact Malloy, ostensibly for some protective pointers. The detective plays along with this fantasy by roughly putting an arm around Frannie's neck and whispering dirty nothings in her ear.

Has Little Red Riding Hood jumped in bed with the wolf? That question drives "In the Cut," giving it a hum of nervous tension, but like all of Campion's features this is a movie that earns its thrills from two people circling each other and casual camera movements that catch moments of startling beauty. The film is filled with surreal, hothouse flourishes that tell the story as vividly and often more eloquently than either the plot mechanics or dialogue. In one scene, Frannie distractedly watches two women playing pool, one in a red dress, the other in green, a visual warning that she doesn't pick up on. Later, after telling the macabre story of her mother and father's courtship, she stands next to a blood-red wreath of flowers adorned with a banner reading "Mom."

At once dreamy and watchful, Frannie has the wounded mien of someone who's endured too many breakups. There's something disappointed about her but something angry, too. When Frannie and her sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), lounge around listening to love songs, the explicitness of their desire comes as a shock because it's so nakedly hurting. "What you need is a baby," Pauline coos, "and a man," echoing the words that reverberate through many women's heads whether they want them to or not. What Frannie really needs is something else, but when she first meets Malloy she looks at him as if he's stinking up the room. For his part, Ruffalo lets us know the cop doesn't care. "Tell me what you want me to be," Malloy tells Frannie, tracing tattoos of longing on her body.

Steeped in sexual paranoia and violence, Moore's novel is a chilly, self-conscious exercise in genre. It's a cheap shot of a book, but Campion has always enjoyed exploring the darker side of sex and power, so it's easy to see what attracted her to Frannie's strange adventure. The director handles the cop stuff effortlessly, nailing the hard precinct vibe and combative banter between Malloy and his partner, but she never satisfyingly integrates the story's thriller elements with the florid drama inside Frannie's noggin. The film mainly unfolds from Frannie's perspective and the images are often blurred around the edges to show just how little of the world she sees. But unlike the wife in Hitchcock's "Suspicion," the classic paranoid-woman movie, Frannie is also right to be scared.

Campion's visual language is richer, more expressive than Moore's prose, and in adapting the book she's appreciably warmed up the novel's characters, in particular Pauline, who looks as lush as overripe fruit and just as easy to bruise. Malloy gives off waves of heat, while Frannie's former lover, wittily played by Kevin Bacon, provides some humorous relief. But because Campion, unlike Moore's book, is fundamentally hopeful about men and women, there's something cockeyed about how the film ties up its loose genre threads. It's nice to see Ryan play a role without the usual ingratiation (there's always been a sour grimace lurking beneath that smile), but despite her best efforts it's difficult to accept where Frannie lands. Most of the film's last 30 minutes veer between the baffling and numbing, but just when you're ready to throw in the towel, Campion delivers a final grace note.

Although Campion isn't as strongly committed to surrealism as David Lynch, the final image of a slowly closing door in this film affirms that she's never been entirely in the grip of realism. A fever dream and a pitch-dark romance, "In the Cut" takes place as much in the realm of myth as on the downtown streets of New York; in each, women are either the heroines of their own stories or its victims. If nothing else, the film takes it on faith that the old storybook routines no longer apply, which helps explain why "Taxi Driver" — with its frenzied masculine violence and febrile vision of the city as a landscape of fear and desire — hangs over this movie so heavily. Once upon a time, Travis Bickle saved the girl, but then she grew up. Who saves her now?

BFI | Sight & Sound | Sex And Self-danger Graham Fuller from Sight and Sound, November 2003

Engaging Medusa: Competing Myths and Fairytales in In the Cut Sue Gillett from Senses of Cinema

If One Person is Strong, Must the Other Be Weak? Daniel Garrett from Offscreen, December 31, 2003

Sex and Violence as Phantasm: Eros and Thanatos in Campion's In the Cut Catherine Benoit from Offscreen, April 30, 2006

Making the Cut: Joy Press from the Village Voice

Jane Campion's IN THE CUT: Shadows from the Lighthouse M. Tamminga from A Journal of Film

Porn Theater and In the Cut | NYPress.com - New York's essential ... Armond White from NY Press

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

ToxicUniverse.com (Tony Pellum)

In the Cut Leslie Felperin from Sight and Sound

In The Cut – Campion’s under-rated exploration of sexuality Zettel Film Reviews

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt)

Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi)

"In the Cut" - Salon Stephanie Zacharek

About.com Rebecca Murray

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Kamera.co.uk John Atkinson

Nitrate Online (KJ Doughton)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp

Peter Sobczynski

Daniel Fienberg -- Epinions

Film Monthly (Hank Yuloff)

DVD Verdict - Uncut Director's Edition Elizabeth Skipper

Film Journal International (Maria Garcia)

Reel.com [Sarah Chauncey]

channel4.com/film [Jamie Russell]

CineScene.com (Les Phillips)

Movie Vault [Brian Andrews]

Sunday Online, Australia (Peter Thompson) including brief comments from Campion and the two leads

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

PAPERMAG: WORD UP!: Cinemaniac blog ["One of the Year's Best: Jane Campion's ___!"]

Bookslut | In the Cut by Susanna Moore Gena Anderson book review from Bookslut

THE WATER DIARY

Australia (17 mi) (2006)

User reviews from imdb Author: Mozjoukine (Mozjoukine@yahoo.com.au) from Australia

Involving enough short film made as part of a UN Millennium Development Goals project about water and global warming.

In the Australian outback there is a protracted drought. Two young girls find themselves sharing bath water. The horses ("The only two things that I loved" Englert declares) have to go.

The area's alpha female plans playing violin at dusk when the brother says the skies are most likely to respond with rain from the clouds he studies. The kids have to bring and drink jars of water which contain at least one tear drop - no problem.

Not hard to see Campion in this female world, mixing mysticism with an Australian setting.

Get shorty | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks, May 25, 2006

It's usually first-time directors who make a splash at Cannes with their short films. But now, more established names are getting in on the act. Jane Campion tells Xan Brooks why small is beautiful

Cannes is the world of the brief encounter. For 10 days the place runs to a staccato rhythm of snatched conversations, bullet-point pitches, round-table junkets and business lunches. Away from the glare of the Palme d'Or competition, it has increasingly become the world of the brief film, too.

The short has always had its place at the Cannes film festival, with a number of programmes playing both in and out of competition. They provide a crucial platform for novice directors, the chance to show the industry what they are made of and - fingers crossed - drum up the funds for that all-important first feature.

But this year the balance has shifted, with these comparative ghettos of the schedule surprisingly gate-crashed by the rich and famous. The likes of Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries), Alexander Payne (Sideways), Alfonso Cuaron (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and Gaspar Noe (Irréversible) would not look out of place in the main competition line-up. Jane Campion, Gus Van Sant and the Coen brothers are former Palme d'Or winners. All of them have short films in this year's event.

Campion's piece, The Water Diary, is a lyrical, child's-eye view of an Australian township paralysed by drought. It is the director's contribution to 8, a series of movies strung around a weighty brief: the United Nation's development project on millennium goals. "I told them I would do it if I was given complete control," she explains. "I could just imagine what hell it would be if everyone started getting involved and gave me suggestions. This was a good way for us all to be freed. It's my fault if I get it wrong. Blame the film-maker." The Water Diary took just six days to shoot. It was, she says, "a little holiday".

Campion admits that short films are often seen as the poor relations of cinema. "But they are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem. The great thing is that almost everyone ends up doing something creative with them, even those directors who then go on to make quite boring features."

You could say that The Water Diary has carried her full-circle. Campion first came to Cannes back in 1986 when her short piece, Peel, won a major prize at the festival. "I was so naïve back then," she says. "When they said they were putting my work in the programme I said, 'Oh, that's nice'. They said, 'Well, obviously you have to come' and I said, 'Oh no, I don't have that scheduled in my diary and I don't really enjoy that sort of thing anyway'. Fortunately they managed to convince me otherwise." Campion, of course, went on to further glory at Cannes when The Piano won the Palme d'Or at the 1993 festival.

This year she is keeping a lower profile, sheltering in the shade of a bar on the beach. She arrived with her daughter on the train from Rome, and has no particular thing that she needs to do. "It's nice coming here with a short film as opposed to a feature," she says. "It's a very relaxing way to see Cannes." Tonight she is planning catch a showing of Marie Antoinette. One senses that she is here as a tourist first and a film-maker second.

Described as "un film collectif", 8 points to a possible way forward for the short film. Evidence suggests that these bite-sized canapés traditionally struggle to connect with an audience accustomed to the banquet of the bona-fide feature. By grouping their work under a single thematic umbrella, the maker of short films is able to bypass such prejudices.

Playing further up the Croisette, Destricted boasts a rather different brief - a series of "responses to the theme of pornography by seven different artists". So far the tactic seems to be working. The queues go round the block while the mood in the cinema is festive, bordering on the bawdy. The tyro French director Gaspar Noe bounds up and down the aisle to greet the new arrivals. Larry Clark (of Kids and Bully fame) slopes to his seat with a furtive, watchful air. We learn that British artist Sam Taylor-Wood, who was also intending to be here to discuss her contribution, had to cancel because she's pregnant - that pesky consequence of actually having sex as opposed to filming it.

Destricted, inevitably, is a bit of a mixed bag. While some of the segments are genuine "responses to pornography", others are just pornography. Clark's film, Impaled, turns out to be one of the better efforts. The director interviews a gaggle of wannabe male porn stars, makes them strip for the camera and then abruptly introduces the winner to the woman he is supposed to have sex with. Elsewhere, Noe's film is a stroboscopic montage of brutish masturbation fantasies. Anyone who has caught his features (Irréversible, I Stand Alone) will know what to expect.

Like Campion, Noe won a short film prize at Cannes at the start of his career. Like her, he is drawn to the form for the freedom it provides. "With a short you are allowed to do whatever you want," he tells me afterwards. "It's like if you have a girlfriend and she tells you that you can do whatever you want. That's very exciting." He appears to be still stuck in steamy, Destricted mode.

The problem, explains Noe, is that the process of making a feature can be such a long and painful process. "It takes years out of your life. You get the green light and then it turns back to amber and you have to start all over again. Here you get the call and you have to come up with an idea and shoot it straight away. It feels so wonderfully fresh and liberating." For good measure, Noe also has a film about Aids, Sida, playing alongside Campion's in 8.

Finally we have Paris Je t'Aime, playing in the festival's Un Certain Regard section. It offers a sunnier, gentler example of the portmanteau movie: 18 five-minute love-letters to Paris, each one set in a different arrondissement. Its range of directors runs the gamut from Wes Craven to Gus Van Sant, Cuaron to the Coens.

At the Cannes press junket, the film-makers sit at a bank of round tables while the journalists bob between them like bees above a flowerbed. I speak to South African director Oliver Schmitz, who says that he found the format to be deceptively difficult, and that the act of boiling a life story down into one five-minute spell would be a challenge for anyone. Richard Lagravenese (who wrote The Fisher King and directed A Decade Under the Influence) suggests that we are entering a golden age for the short film, and that the internet provides the perfect platform for viewers who want entertainment in small doses.

Paris Je t'Aime is the brainchild of Marseilles-born Frederic Auburtin, who co-directs one segment alongside Gérard Depardieu. Apparently the original intention was to have 20 films in the collection. "Francis Coppola and Woody Allen were both very eager to get involved," Auburtin says. "They said yes straight away and stayed with the project for a long time. But in the end it didn't happen." Why was that? "They couldn't fit it in with their schedules," he says with a sigh. "They went off and made features instead." Amid all the generally positive talk, Auburtin strikes a rare downbeat note. For all its recent success, it seems that the short is not the new long after all - at least not quite yet.

Campion lured back to the lens - Film - Entertainment - smh.com.au Gary Maddox from The Sydney Morning Herald, October 20, 2005

Acclaimed filmmakers Jane Campion and Gaspar Noe focus on the ... United Nations Development Program, May 16, 2006

The Cannes Festival: Jane Campion, on drought and isolation ... Joan Dupont from the International Herald Tribune, May 31, 2006

BRIGHT STAR A- 93

Great Britain Australia (119 mi) 2009

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No, yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast —
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.

—John Keats, from The Last Sonnet, 1819, 637. Last Sonnet. John Keats. The Oxford Book of English Verse

Thank God somebody still shoots on 35 mm and produces a “real” film that in every detail looks the way film is supposed to look, where color, detail, and art matter. A film laced with Campion themes and ideas, all beautifully rendered, where one especially admires the meticulous attention to minor details, this is a tormented love story between a sickly young poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw), unheralded at the time, and his inspiration, the object of his affection, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), who is consumed by his adoration. From start to finish this film is an idealization immersed in Romanticism that freely mixes speech and theatricality into cinema in an attempt to broaden the audience’s understanding of the period, from the composition of each shot, where each frame is a portrait in still life, to the extraordinary use of costumes, where actress Abbie Cornish is decorated throughout in simply outrageous, overly dressed outfits which seem to exist only in the movies, to moments where characters break out in a song or dance, and are encouraged by others to do so, usually met with applause, but most importantly with the reverential use of language, which is after all, what we have left from the writings of English poet John Keats, who died of tuberculosis when he was 25. Jane Campion has done something rarely seen in films without being pretentious (think of Sally Potter’s 2004 film YES which is spoken entirely in iambic pentameter), which is to create a literary language within the film language that interjects itself from time to time, like a film within a film, or a play within a play, where characters break out into lines of poetry, spoken to one another just like ordinary conversation, except the language itself is such a thing of beauty, including the perfectly exquisite way it’s being spoken, that it feels as if we’re being transported into an entirely new Shakespearean play of young lovers. This theatrical device increases the emotional intensity and saturates the screen with yet another layer of sensuousness on top of the luscious and inspired cinematography from Greig Fraser, not to mention the hauntingly lovely musical score from Mark Bradshaw.

Everything in this film points to sensuality, from the eloquent way they speak to one another, to the manner of her dress, to the intimately stylized way they’re being framed in close up, followed by idyllic, painterly long shots of her two younger siblings as portraits of innocence in a luscious, unspoiled landscape, always capturing the natural beauty of the world outdoors reminiscent of the cinematic poetry of Terrence Malick’s DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978). Written by Campion herself, seen through the eyes of Fanny Brawne, we are thrown into a period drama without any introduction or preface, where John Keats has already written his first book of Poems as well as his follow up Endymion, but he remains penniless and not yet a writer of repute, living nearby and supported by a friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), a somewhat rakish, ill-mannered gentleman who spends all of his time in the company of Keats, probably borrowing liberally from his writing methods, supposedly liberated fellows intent on writing poetry. Campion captures the irony of the Romantic era as a period of female acquiescence where Fanny’s quick tongue and self confidence immediately fascinates Keats with her beauty and outspoken candor, not to mention her new interest in his poetry. Interestingly, Fanny has a skill in clothing design and wears her stunning creations as if on parade throughout the film, where she can usually be seen sitting quietly in a chair with needle and thread. Keats is seen as reserved, isolated, and shy, well mannered, with a moral disposition and a keen awareness for language, while Fanny is still a teenager at the time and appears self-centered, a bit conceited in her dress and opinion of others, yet she’s also thoughtfully inquisitive, especially for things beyond her reach, like the world of poetry, which quickly becomes her latest curiosity. She is seen throughout accompanied by her younger brother and sister, as a “proper” lady never goes anywhere unaccompanied.

The initial signs of love are simply a ravenous desire to talk with and be in the company of one another, all of which couldn’t be more natural, even when moving into the theatrical language of the era, stealing moments while trying to elude the net that the possessive Mr. Brown surrounds Keats with, who’s probably of the opinion there’s money to be made from this young protégé. But the flowering of their love couldn’t be more exquisitely realized, especially with walks in the woods and the remarkably inspired butterfly scenes with her little sister Toots (Edie Martin), also a few shots of Fanny in the throes of love, laying on her bed as the curtains flutter in the breeze, or happily playing in a field exploding in the color of violet flowers with her precocious younger sister, actually projecting her love for Keats to her little sister and the rest of the world at the moment. But trouble ensues, as Keats tries to earn a living elsewhere, where the entire world stops during those anguishing absences until the next letter arrives, where his letters are all that matters in the world. But as Fanny’s mother, Kerry Fox from An Angel at My Table (1990) and INTIMACY (2001) points out, Keats does not have the financial means to marry, so Fanny’s family is concerned with this all consuming passion, as it prevents her from meeting more economically prosperous prospects. It is the era of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice where even strong, opinionated women have absolutely no opportunity in life other than to marry a rich husband. Other than that, they were viewed contemptuously by men thinking their opinion as pretty much worthless, which is exactly the way Fanny is viewed by Mr. Brown, so Campion really gets the tone of the era right. This social dilemma haunts the couple like a plague throughout their entire lives.

After Keats’ brother dies of tuberculosis, followed by his sudden fascination with Fanny Brawne, his poetry takes on an increasing complexity, intermingling the subjects of love and death, eventually falling victim to tuberculosis himself, soon having to come to terms with his own mortality, writing in one of his last letters: “How astonishing does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us.” Set in the poverty stricken, pre-industrial, pre-Victorian world of the 1820’s, there was no treatment for tuberculosis other than bed rest and moving to a more temperate climate, so his need to write, like Mozart on his death bed writing his own Requiem, becomes a race with time. When Keats moves to Italy during the winters, their love affair appears doomed, but Fanny’s hopes throughout will not be deterred. The blissful optimism of their budding love affair takes on darker, somber tones by the end, where much of the story is advanced through the reading of letters, as Cornish does an excellent job releasing her pent up anguish at the end where she lets out a ghastly death wail. The finale over the end credits was unnecessarily confusing, as Whishaw reads “Ode to a Nightingale” (Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats | Poetry Foundation) in its entirety while music plays over the credits all the way to the end, but theater patrons are gathering their coats, talking with one another, even starting cellphone conversations, all with noisy, typical end-of-film behavior, which for most patrons happens as soon as the credits roll, so the voice onscreen couldn’t really be heard over the commotion and just sounded like it went on and on endlessly. It’s an unfortunate finale, leaving some customers puzzled, as the rest of the film couldn’t have been more meticulously well-constructed, quiet, restrained, uncompromising, and well acted, always finding the right tone between the two characters, who could never marry or even consummate their love, as Keats was an English gentleman. Certainly the Romantics were fond of suffering, and the initial bliss of love in this relationship is replaced by a tortuous longing for which there is no release, not even after death. Such is the power of being in the everlasting grasp of love.

Opening this week is one of the year's best films, Bright Star. Jane Campion’s (The Piano) newest is an exquisitely constructed, lushly romantic tale of the passionate love between 23-year-old poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and the girl that lived next door to him while he was in London in 1818 -- Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Fanny, slavishly devoted to fashion, wit, and dances, was first put-off by the brooding, handsome, serious poet, but soon grows to adore him. It’s hard to explain to modern audiences this kind of chaste but powerful relationship -- made up of letters, stolen kisses, and lying in beds pining for one another with a wall separating the two. But then again, imagine with sadness a future movie about a love affair constructed from saved text-messages. Campion conjures on film the pleasures, excitements, and extravagant mysteries of words. Fanny is a perfect Campion heroine. Headstrong, secure in her own skin, but leading with her heart.

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

A period piece typified by restraint, delicacy and the romantic spirit of its renowned subject, Jane Campion’s Bright Star details the amorous three-year affair of 19th-century poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Cornish). In keeping with Campion’s career-long interest in investigating and depicting the female perspective, the film sticks closely to Fanny, a young girl with a knack for sewing and, as she confesses to Keats early on, only an amateur knowledge of poetry. Fanny’s gumption, independence and beauty endear her to Keats, a struggling young writer living with poet and benefactor Charles Brown (an adept Paul Schneider), and their feelings blossom despite Keats’ unemployed, penniless condition, which – as Fanny’s mother regularly reminds her – makes him an unsuitable candidate for marriage. Both this obstacle and the jealous interference of Brown, whose fondness for Keats’ writing borders on the possessive, frustrate Keats and Fanny’s attempts to be together, with Campion’s clear-eyed, beautifully composed images (including a recurring one of the couple pressed up against opposite sides of the same wall) evoking the social structures that threaten to keep them apart. Whishaw’s reserved performance and Cornish’s sensitive turn work in tandem to create a poignant portrait of longing and (largely unconsummated) passion. Ultimately more moving, however, is the film’s deft evocation of Keats’ prose through both integrated spoken-word passages that feel both natural and reverent, as well as via seasonal snapshots of the verdant English countryside that (along with numerous images of caressing hands) have a potent tactility.

The Globe and Mail (Rick Groen) review [3/4]

The girl is a mere teenager, and the young man will never grow old. He is fated to die, relatively unheralded, at 25, leaving his poems to endure and grow in stature, and eventually invite praise as the greatest since Shakespeare. She will marry another and, through the rest of her long life, remain secretive about their brief time together. Bright Star is the story of that time, a tale of first love between the belle damsel and the doomed genius. Fanny Brawne, meet John Keats.

In the gentle hands of Jane Campion, what a pure and poignant tale it is. The place is London circa 1820, although Campion takes admirable care not to “mount” the period piece, not to stick the Regency costumes and the attendant manners into a gilded frame. Instead, the modest houses seem lived in, the muddy streets look walked on, and the youthful principals appear refreshingly real. Especially Fanny (Abbie Cornish), who gives the film both its emotional power and its singular point of view. This may be a romance involving the greatest of the Romance poets, but the narrative unfolds not from the perspective of the famous man, but solely through the eyes of the obscure woman.

Immediately, we see those eyes at work, bent over the sewing of a colourful frock. Gaily turned out, Fanny is quite the fashion plate, but don't think any less of her. Keats makes that mistake when they initially meet, only to learn that her wit is as sharp as her needle. Pointing to her spools of thread, she smiles at the poet, who is already published yet still virtually penniless, and retorts, “But I can make money from this.” Bright star, indeed.

The verbal fencing over, her interest in him is sparked by the opening line of his Endymion : “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” (Here, and elsewhere, Campion stitches in the poetry seamlessly – she's no slouch with a needle herself.) Certainly, there's beauty in their budding relationship; however, the joy is restrained on all sides, not just by the proprieties of the time (their every move is chaperoned by Fanny's tagalong siblings), but more specifically by the particularities of Keats himself – by his failing health, by his empty wallet and, not least, by his best friend.

That would be Charles Brown (played with a deliciously rambunctious burr by Paul Schneider), who sort of triangulates the love affair. Revering Keats's work as he does, Brown regards Fanny as unworthy either of the poetry or the poet. That doesn't stop him from flirting openly with the girl, and the ensuing contrast – between Keats's high romance and Brown's lower lust – grounds the picture in an often-comic earthiness, the profane rubbing shoulders with the sacred.

Of course, it's love's sublimity, or at least its simple purity, that wins out and wins us over – all those gestures small and large, like Fanny tossing Keats a folded note through an open window, or his giving her his mother's ring, or the two leaning their heads against opposite sides of the wall that separates their adjoining homes. Yes, the barriers remain. Yet the very restraint that impedes the lovers is embraced by the director. Shooting with a classical reserve, Campion steadies her camera and calms her style, raising the lyrical volume only when the romance heats up over a short-lived summer. Then, she allows her lens to find a Keatsian enchantment in the wildflowers on the sun-dappled heath and the gentle breeze billowing a gossamer curtain.

Campion demands the same quiet restraint of her cast. As Keats, Ben Whishaw positions himself at the still point between sickness and health, sometimes amorously confused (“I'm not sure I have the right feelings towards women”) yet always artistically confident (“Poetry soothes and enables the soul to accept mystery”). Whishaw is just fine, but Cornish is superb. She's obliged to portray one of Campion's typical heroines – a strong and intelligent woman snared in the mores of her time – without recourse to any flamboyant theatrics. So her eyes alone speak eloquent volumes, seeing much, feeling much, even as Fanny is pushed by convention and circumstance to the margins of Keats's waning life – her love unconsummated and her anxieties unheard.

Admittedly, when the script does allow her emotions to surface, they can seem to grow out of rather thin dramatic soil – for instance, if her letters to him aren't quickly or lengthily answered, she weeps real tears. Consequently, on occasion, the film can feel too minimal and reserved, as lightweight as those gossamer curtains. Mainly, though, Cornish's performance and Campion's direction make for a beguiling marriage, never more so than during the tragic divorce of the climax. Then, in that tiny room above Rome's Spanish Steps, a young man meets his “easeful death,” leaving a younger woman hundreds of miles away to bear the news alone, her girlish tears displaced by a piercing howl that few would hear and most would ignore. Until now.

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

And then there’s this madness: Even movies that are about the women who love great men almost always end up being about the men anyway. I suppose that’s the point of telling the story of such women in the first place: they’re only worth talking about because the great men turned their gaze upon them for a time.

But not this movie. Not Bright Star. John Keats is the intruder into the story of Fanny Brawne, and if you didn’t already know that he turned out to be the renowed poet and she turned out to be “merely” the young woman who loved him, and was loved by him, and inspired some of his greatest poetry, you might be forgiven for assuming that she’s the one who surely washed up legendary years later, for how the film defies the convention of lavishing its focus not on him as the de facto presumptive natural center of attention, but on her.

The beautiful thing about that is that -- as with all expressions of honest feminism -- it ends up being as good for him as it does for her. Because screenwriter and director Jane Campion (In the Cut) has made her Fanny a true bright star for her John to orbit, has brought to breathtakingly lovely life not only the facts of their relationship but the spirit of the poetry that it inspired, and that made the poet the towering figure he is in our minds today. (The poem the film is named for is his ode to Fanny.) I’ve never actually been much of a fan of the Romantic poets, but everything I’ve ever been told about why they’re important and what their words say positively radiates off the screen: the impossibility of separating ourselves from nature, the importance of appreciating the experience of living, the pleasure we take in beauty being its own kind of beauty.

It’s there in the knowing dreaminess of Ben Wishaw’s (The International, Brideshead Revisited) John, who is moody and melancholy as he mopes around the rambling Hampstead houses and fields and woods that the film moves through, locations of expansive wistfulness perfectly suited to a poor poet who thinks of little but words and love and nesting in trees of an afternoon. It’s there in the steely certainty of Abbie Cornish’s (Stop-Loss, Elizabeth: The Golden Age) Fanny, as modern a girl as they come even today: 18 years old, consumed with fashion and creative about it (she makes all her own clothes, wonderful inventions that, you might have thought, were the reason she became famous, were you to suppose that she had), and positive that a poor poet is the man for her, even should he not be in a position to marry.

Marriage is the only option for a respectable, well-brought-up girl like Fanny, for it is 1818, and that’s just how things are. But these are not people who are living in a corseted theme-park version of the past: this is their real world, and the way things are is simply the way things are. They are modern people, as all people always are in their own times but as few films set in historical eras manage to capture. (It’s very much like Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice in that regard.) They don’t wear costumes but clothes -- John, especially, is so wonderfully unkempt half the time that he’s entirely the 1818 equivalent of a dude lounging around in old jeans and a torn T-shirt. And their feelings are shown to us by Campion in such a way as to almost make you gasp with recognition for their straightforward authenticity: as Fanny takes to moping over the impossibility of her love for John, she isn’t much unlike teenagers today. When Fanny’s little sister, Toots (the whip-snarky Edie Martin), announces to their mother (Kerry Fox) that “Fanny wants a knife... to kill herself...” well, there’s gentle humor in it -- it’s all lovestruck exaggeration -- but also an almost literally pointed reminder that, you know, heartbreak wasn’t invented by Elvis Presley.

There’s palpable anguish onscreen here, all around. Earlier, it’s in John’s bewilderment at finding himself in love with one such as Fanny, all brash daring and foolish (or so he deems it) frippery: he doesn’t know what to make of women at all, he acknowledges, and doesn’t know why he’s attracted to her. (Ah, that loveliest and most infuriating conundrum: why are we attracted to this person and not to that person?) It’s in Fanny’s wallowing in the wonderful misery of being in love. It’s in John’s best friend and fellow poet Charles Brown, a bulldog presence who resents Fanny’s intrusion into the relationship of two men. (Paul Schneider [Lars and the Real Girl, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford] as Brown is almost terrifyingly aggressive, though often amusingly so, too, as if Brown were as big a mystery to himself as he is to John and Fanny; Schneider is a just-right mirror image to Wishaw’s delicate passion and brooding consideredness.) It’s there later, when Fanny learns that she and John will never be together again, in a grief so powerful it stunned me into sharing it.

All of the zeal of the Romantics and everything that concerned them is here in the cosy domesticity of Fanny’s home and family and in how Campion presents it to us: the cat that’s always underfoot, even when it’s not wanted; the collection of buttleflies gathered by Fanny and Toots that, in perhaps the film’s most simply beautiful sequence, flitter about Fanny’s bedroom. It’s there in the ardor between Fanny and John, which, for all its chasteness, burns burns burns; Wishaw and Cornish smolder together in a way that we don’t often see onscreen because their characters can never quite give in to their desire for each other.

It’s not only the best possible ode to Keats’ work, this lovely gentle poetic film, it’s the best possible ode to Fanny, as well: If she made him feel the way this movie feels, that must have been a powerful love indeed.

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review September 16, 2009

John Keats was a Romantic poet. “Bright Star,” which tells the tale of Keats and Fanny Brawne, the love of his short life, is a romantic movie. The vernacular of popular culture and the somewhat specialized language of literary history assign different meanings to that word, but the achievement of Jane Campion’s learned and ravishing new film is to fuse them, to trace the comminglings and collisions of poetic creation and amatory passion.Skip to next paragraph

This is a risky project, not least because a bog of cliché and fallacy lies between the filmmaker and her goal. In the first decades of the 19th century, some poets may have been like movie stars, but the lives of the poets have been, in general, badly served on film, either neglected altogether or puffed up with sentiment and solemnity. The Regency period, moreover, serves too many lazy, prestige-minded directors as a convenient vintage clothing store. And there are times in “Bright Star” when Keats, played by the pale and skinny British actor Ben Whishaw (“Perfume,” “I’m Not There”), trembles on the edge of caricature. He broods; he coughs (signaling the tuberculosis that will soon kill him); he looks dreamily at flowers and trees and rocks.

But these moments, rather than feeling studied or obvious, arrive with startling keenness and disarming beauty, much in the way that Keats’s own lyrics do. His verses can at first seem ornate and sentimental, but on repeated readings, they have a way of gaining in force and freshness. The music is so intricate and artificial, even as the emotions it carries seem natural and spontaneous. And while no film can hope to take you inside the process by which these poems were made, Ms. Campion allows you to hear them spoken aloud as if for the first time. You will want to stay until the very last bit of the end credits, not necessarily to read the name of each gaffer and grip, but rather to savor every syllable of Mr. Whishaw’s recitation of “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Keats’s genius — underestimated by many of the critics of his time, championed by a loyal coterie of literary friends — is the fixed point around which “Bright Star” orbits. Its animating force, however, is the infatuation that envelops Keats and Brawne in their early meetings and grows, over the subsequent months, into a sustaining and tormenting love. Mr. Keats, as his lover decorously calls him, is diffident and uneasy at times, but also witty, sly and steadfast. The movie really belongs to Brawne, played with mesmerizing vitality and heart-stopping grace by Abbie Cornish.

Ms. Cornish, an Australian actress whose previous films include “Stop-Loss,” “Candy” and “Somersault,” has, at 27, achieved a mixture of unguardedness and self-control matched by few actresses of any age or nationality. She’s as good as Kate Winslet, which is about as good as it’s possible to be.

Fanny, the eldest daughter of a distracted widow (Kerry Fox), has some of the spirited cleverness of a Jane Austen heroine. A gifted seamstress, she prides herself on her forward-looking fashion sense and her independence. She is also vain, insecure and capable of throwing herself headlong into the apparent folly of adoring a dying and penniless poet, something no sensible Austen character would ever do.

If it were just the poet and his beloved, “Bright Star” might collapse in swooning and sighing, or into the static rhythms of a love poem. And while there are passages of extraordinary lyricism — butterflies, fields of flowers, fluttering hands and beseeching glances — these are balanced by a rough, energetic worldliness. Lovers, like poets, may create their own realms of feeling and significance, but they do so in contention with the same reality that the rest of us inhabit.

The film’s designated reality principle is Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), Keats’s friend, patron and collaborator and his main rival for Fanny’s attention. For Brown, Fanny is an irritant and a distraction, though the sarcastic intensity of their banter carries an interesting sexual charge of its own. In an Austen novel this friction would be resolved in matrimony, but “Bright Star,” following the crooked, shadowed path of biographical fact, has a different story to tell.

Brown and Keats are neighbors to the Brawne brood in Hampstead in 1818, when the story begins. In April of the following year the poets are occupying one-half of a house, with Fanny and her mother and siblings on the other side of the wall. After nine months Keats, in declining health, is dispatched to Italy by a committee of concerned friends, but until then he and Fanny consummate their love in every possible way except physically.

Ms. Campion is one of modern cinema’s great explorers of female sexuality, illuminating Sigmund Freud’s “dark continent” with skepticism, sympathy and occasional indignation. “Bright Star” could easily have become a dark, simple fable of repression, since modern audiences like nothing better than to be assured that our social order is freer and more enlightened than any that came before. But Fanny and Keats are modern too, and though the mores of their time constrain them, they nonetheless regard themselves as free.

The film is hardly blind to the sexual hypocrisy that surrounds them. Fanny can’t marry Keats because of his poverty, but Brown blithely crosses class lines to have some fun with (and impregnate) a naïve and illiterate young household servant (Antonia Campbell-Hughes). That Fanny and Keats must sublimate their longings in letters, poems and conversations seems cruel, but they make the best of it. As does Ms. Campion: a sequence in which, fully clothed, the couple trades stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” in a half-darkened bedroom must surely count as one of the hottest sex scenes in recent cinema.

The heat of that moment and others like it deliver “Bright Star” from the tidy prison of period costume drama. Ms. Campion, with her restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, films history in the present tense, and her wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word.

RealTime Arts - Magazine - issue 96 - campion's realm of the senses Kirsten Krauth

PopMatters (Renee Scolaro Mora) review

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review

Screen International (Allan Hunter) review at Cannes

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]

Jane Campion's Conspicuous Heroines Jessica Winter from Moving Image Source

Tim Hayes Critics Notebook

Campion’s Prudish “Star” Needs More Sizzle Eric Kohn from indieWIRE, May 15, 2009

Cannes '09: Day Three Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 15, 2009

Cannes contender Jane Campion gives clarion call to women directors Charlotte Higgins at Cannes from The Guardian, May 15, 2009

Jane Campion, Where Have You Been? Eugene Hernandez at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 15, 2009

Melissa Anderson at Cannes from Artforum, May 15, 2009

Bright Star David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 15, 2009

Campion in Cannes Charles Ealy at Cannes from 360 Austin Movie Blog, May 15, 2009

Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Hollywood Reporter review Ray Bennett at Cannes, May 15, 2009

Todd McCarthy at Cannes from Variety, May 15, 2009

Time Out Online (Dave Calhoun) review [4/6] at Cannes

Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [2/6]

James Christopher Bright Star at the Cannes Film Festival, from The Times Online, May 16, 2009

The Daily Telegraph review [5/5] David Gritten at Cannes from The Telegraph, May 15, 2009

Cannes 2009: film charts John Keats' romance with Fanny Brawne - in Luton Anita Singh at Cannes from The Telegraph, May 15, 2009

Campion: Female directors need to be tough Anita Singh at Cannes from The Telegraph, May 16, 2009

Bright Star (Jane Campion) Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 15, 2009

Blog: Doomed love is in the air at Cannes Catherine Shoard from The Guardian Blog, May 15, 2009

Bright Star: at last a good film about poetry John Patterson from The Guardian, October 31, 2009

Cannes '09 Day 3: Rain, Romanticism Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 15, 2009

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [4/4]

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan] Turan talks with Campion at Cannes, May 18, 2009

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan] September 18, 2009

John Keats - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jane Campion Presents Another Resilient Heroine Joan Dupont at Cannes from The New York Times, May 15, 2009

Christopher Ricks book review on Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, by Stanley Plumly (392 pages), from The New York Review of Books

The Life and Work of John Keats (1795-1821)

John-Keats.com

Keats : Poetry of John Keats, at everypoet.com a selection of poems

John Keats a selection of sonnets

Poet: John Keats - All poems of John Keats

John Keats from Books and Writers

An Introduction to "Bright Star" an analysis of the poem

Romanticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

rom The Romantic Age, 1770 – 1870

TOP OF THE LAKE – made for TV A 95

Australia Great Britain (350 mi – 7 episodes) 2013

You can be very hard. And what I don't like is that you think it’s strength. — Robin’s mother Jude Griffin (Robyn Nevin)

There’s no match for the tremendous intelligence of the body. —GJ (Holly Hunter)

There has been a gradual introduction of movies made for television into film festivals, where the Melbourne and Telluride Film Festivals were among the first to program the three films in the RED RIDING TRILOGY (2009) made for British television, while the full-length, 5-hour French version of the Olivier Assayas film Carlos – made for French TV (2010) premiered at Cannes, and the Venice Festival premiered Todd Haynes’ MILDRED PIERCE (2011), all to critical acclaim. This year Jane Campion’s feminist noir TOP OF THE LAKE became the first television series to ever premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, later screening again at Berlin, a 6-hour jointly produced BBC and Sundance Channel film TV miniseries spread out over 7 episodes, though the pacing and burning intensity are much more effective when compressed into a single viewing, especially without having to undergo commercials and the repeating credit sequence. Since it had been four years since she made a film, Campion reveals her thoughts on finding more freedom working in television from the Hollywood Reporter, “Feature filmmaking is now quite conservative. The lack of restraints, the longer story arc: It's a luxury not there generally in film.” Campion’s An Angel at My Table (1990) was originally produced as a New Zealand television miniseries, but was re-edited and released internationally as a film. Set in Laketop, a small town set on a gorgeous lake in a remote and mountainous area of New Zealand (actually shot by Adam Arkapaw at South Island’s Moke Lake and the cities of Queenstown and Glenorchy, including Lake Wakatipu seen here: 1,280 × 960 pixels), Elisabeth Moss plays Robin Griffin, a big city Australian police detective from Sydney with a specialty in child investigations, who happens to be visiting her mother who is stricken with cancer, but it’s also something of a coming home experience, as she grew up in the region as well. Called in for an emergency, the local police, under the command of Detective Sgt. Al Parker (David Wenham), have a pregnant 12-year old Thai girl named Tui Mitcham (newcomer Jacqueline Joe, supposedly discovered at an Auckland swimming pool), who may have been attempting a miscarriage or drowning herself in the lake. What’s immediately clear is not just the plight of the child, but the antiquated male-dominated police procedures where women continue to be leered at as sexual objects, routinely called sluts (or worse), and crimes against women are not really taken seriously by anyone in town, seen more as the usual sport between a man and a woman, so no one respects Robin’s authority on the case and can be heard making snickering comments on the side. No one, for instance, takes the crime of rape against a 12-year old girl seriously except Detective Griffin, where they all heartily agree to her face that she’s right but then make no effort whatsoever to find the rapist.

It’s no accident that the best episodes are directed by Campion herself, including the first, fourth, and final two episodes, feeling almost mythical, featuring some stunning performances, where the richly detailed pieces of information unraveling in the opening few minutes are nothing less than intoxicating, filled with the beauty of the landscape, local color and plenty of eccentric characters. Echoes of David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS (1990 – 1991) are evident, especially in the exotic setting, the small town mindset, a body washed ashore, the toxic effect of holding onto secrets, strangely offbeat characters, and the presence of an outsider, in each case an abnormally astute police detective. Like Laura Palmer, Tui is at the heart of the film, attractively appealing and the picture of innocence, as no one knows the truth about her, especially after she reveals the name of the father is literally “no one.” Through Tui, Campion seems to be suggesting that women’s behavior in particular is a product of family dynamics, the surrounding community values, and the random events that comprise our lives. What’s perhaps most frightening is the callously disturbing and pathological behavior of her father, Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan at his most sinister), the town’s drug lord whose two sons are equally psychopathic in carrying out his dirty business (where the patriarchal family circle is actually Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). We see evidence of their nonchalant brutality in an opening scene, where they haven’t an ounce of concern for human life, living in a heavily armed fortress compound protected by modern surveillance equipment and intentionally starved pitbulls that run rampant. When Tui quickly disappears, we begin to understand what it might be like as a girl growing up in this town. This exact same subject is then explored through black and white flashback sequences, as Robin suffered her own share of childhood trauma growing up in this town, where the parallel lives of Robin and Tui remain linked throughout the film. Interestingly, Elisabeth Moss was not the first choice for the film, as Campion offered the part to Anna Paquin, who declined due to her pregnancy, and when the part was offered to an American actress, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation pulled out of the project, insisting that it would only fund the film with an Australian or New Zealand lead actress. The choice of Moss is literally perfect in the role, where it’s hard to think of the film without her, largely because she never overacts or displays too much, and though she is deeply scarred, reminiscent of Jodie Foster’s tenuous predicament as Clarice Starling in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), she continues to be defined by her intelligence, constantly guarding her thoughts, where the impact of others can easily be read upon her face, an opaque presence that mirrors the world around her, remaining mysteriously vulnerable and even fragile while standing up to a dominating male presence.

What distinguishes this film is the densely plotted novelesque quality, where even comically drawn secondary characters are significant to the overall portrayal of humans desperately in need, where there’s an untapped ferocity of spirit seen in both Tui and Robin. Adding to this picture of a lone voice in the wilderness is an inspired idea to create a separatist women’s collective, a Greek chorus of damaged women living together in trucked-in shipping containers at a lakeside retreat called Paradise that sits on disputed land, as Matt claims they’re trespassing, a rag tag group of exiled women led by Holly Hunter as the dispassionate GJ, a guru-like presence in pants spouting Zen-like philosophic utterances, as if she can read each person’s future, but possessing the deranged personality of a social misfit herself, often seen pacing the grounds while off in the distance a few naked women are continually seen running free. The lustful nature of the women is part of the untold story, including the sexual promiscuity of several of the women living on the compound, including a memorable scene from Geneviève Lemon (the 7-minute woman) who played the lead role in Sweetie (1989), as the men in town are perceived as testosterone fueled adolescents, especially in the moments Robin spends enduring endlessly abusive taunting by men in bars, yet woman have to find their place in an existing contemporary landscape, including Robin’s own sexual desires, seen developing for Johnno (Thomas M. Wright), a childhood sweetheart and one of Matt’s offspring, a good son that rejects the maniacal nature of his tyrannical crime boss father. The two are a sexual force bonded together by her childhood trauma, where Johnno was her high school prom date and suspiciously absent afterwards on a night she was brutally gang raped by four drunken men. This trauma gives her all the more reason to protect Tui, even if the town has given up looking for her, suspecting she must be dead after the passage of two months. There’s an interesting thematic projection of men’s fears and limitations, expressed through the perceived effects of hostile elements, as no one thinks she could survive out there alone in the cold, while the repeated mention of the lethal quality of the water is always described as so cold that “no one could survive in that water.” Yet somehow, just when Robin is told her mother has terminal cancer, easily one of the key moments in the film, intimately captured with the camera holding completely onto Robin’s face, at that exact moment when all hope is lost, there is also a chance that Tui has somehow survived.

Tui’s absence changes the nature of the film, as her unseen presence, Robin’s own personal trauma, and her mother’s impending death all blend together and continually haunt Robin, who becomes the film’s dominant force, as events are continuously seen through her eyes. The on again and off again relationship with her boss, Al, always seems to be of secondary importance, part of the police procedural component of the film, as their presence together is usually mandatory. But his exclusively male take on events offers a differing viewpoint than her own, but Campion is careful not to make him one-dimensional, where he’s one of the more complexly drawn characters in the film, though never entirely likeable, especially as he’s seen to be in cahoots with Matt’s criminal empire, usually protecting him or tipping him off about upcoming police activities. But Robin doesn’t know this and continually exposes a vulnerable side to him, where her life is an open book while we know almost nothing about him. His extravagant home offers a clue, and is the setting for one of the more controversial events in the film, as he invites her over for dinner where she stupidly drinks too much and eventually passes out, waking up alone in his bedroom the next morning wearing one of his shirts. He reassures her that nothing happened, that she vomited all over her clothes, so he was forced to wash them, all of which sounds like a perfectly acceptable explanation. And that’s the problem with Al’s character, as his answers are too pat, sounding overly detached and too well reasoned ahead of time, never speaking passionately in the moment, where what comes across is an arrogant and pompous man that’s used to getting his way and never having to answer for it. Al typifies the male mentality of the town, even if Matt is the Alpha male, while he sits quietly lurking in the background collecting his cut of the overall operations, running a secret Ecstasy and amphetamine lab underneath Matt’s home. In contrast to Robin and Al, Matt has his own sexual experience with one of the women from the compound, Anita, Robyn Malcolm, who simply craves male companionship. Their hallucinogenic outdoor experience in the woods on Ecstasy is unusual for how it sensitively portrays a ruthless crime boss at his most vulnerable state, used much like the LSD cemetery sequence in Easy Rider (1969), where the dealers are seen under the influence of their own drugs, often haunted by impending thoughts of death and mortality.

At some point, and one barely realizes when it occurs, the focus shifts from the overly destructive and malicious behavior of the adults to the often misunderstood and more innocent motives of kids, where a strange young girl (Georgi Kay) dropped off at the women’s compound is continuously seen playing an electric guitar in various natural outdoor locations, NEW Ipswich- Georgi Kay (live) (4:50), offering voice to a new and different force that hasn’t been seen much or heard from, namely the next generation, Tui’s generation. Robin interrogates a young boy for shoplifting, Jamie (Luke Buchanon), seen crossing the lake in a kayak, suspected of bringing food to a drop site, significant as he’s one of Tui’s best friends, perhaps even the father. Jamie has the unusual habit of not speaking to adults, so Al tries to knock some sense into this kid, using decisively forceful measures until he’s thrown out of the interrogation room by Robin. The kid disappears the next day, along with all the food in the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets, leading to a kind of idyllic Lord of the Flies gathering of kids in the woods without the presence of a bullying leader, where we discover the re-emergence of Tui along with boatloads of friends. But Matt and his gang are soon on to them, forcing a very pregnant Tui and Jamie to escape, only to lead to certain tragedy, which has a horrific effect, especially within the women’s compound. The slowed pacing also reflects a kind of impasse, a turning in the tide, where some of the women are finally willing to stand up to these powerful men, refusing to be scared or intimidated by them. In a memorial sequence for one of the lost kids, Georgi Kay - Joga (Top of the Lake - Jamies memorial scene ... (2:40), featuring Mirrah Foulkes as the distraught mother, some may be shocked or confused at just how unmanly the women are, as they don’t go the Eastwood vigilante route and demand justice through the power of a gun or through brute strength, which is what movies have trained us to expect, but this psychological transformation has been slow in coming and continues to evolve at an excruciatingly slow pace, yet it’s among the more unique scenes in the film, as the women collectively express a quiet desperation without any hint of violence, viewed as an exclusively male domain.

The finale goes even further down that road, where the discovery of a date rape drug figures prominently into the tortured lives of teens, many of whom in the past have ended up dead under mysteriously unexplained circumstances. It’s all a bit alarming, but it also figures into Robin’s own past, where it doesn’t do her any good to dig too deeply into the heart of her own trauma, never wanting to meet the child she gave up for adoption as she never wanted to explain to a child that they were the product of a gang rape, thinking this revelation could induce suicidal thoughts of zero self-worth, deciding it’s better to “Fuck the truth,” where life is so much more complicated than we could ever imagine, where human behavior is simply too despicable. One theme Campion appears to be advocating is that the more attention paid to pain, the worse things often become. The movie can be shocking at times with its spurts of sudden violence, but in this film it’s not about women chasing after vengeance, where the obsession for justice only creates more injustice, as it’s so easy to lose sight of the arc of your own life, but it also shouldn’t be some inhumane evil that we continually answer to. In the end, the film veers into an ambiguously disturbing road movie, like a journey through an existential wasteland, actually discussed at great length in the women’s group talkathons, which are almost a parody of self-help groups, where GJ often berates their whining and moaning, claiming they’re “madder than ever,” saying she needs to “just get away from these crazy bitches,” getting as far away as she can, yet still taking us on an interior journey more self-reflective and psychologically complex than what we’re used to from crime dramas, like say the highly successful THE MILLENNIUM TRILOGY (2009). Actually it’s more like the continuing arduousness of The Odyssey, a prolonged journey filled with epic challenges, where the hero survives only by extraordinary cunning and perseverance, where likewise the collective effect of this film is an assault on the senses, causing a shock to the system and a rewiring of the circuitry, finding oneself at the center of a great human tragedy, offering no societal cure or moral answers, nothing more than the brave choice of learning how to discover our own humanity, often the last one thing we pay any attention to as we’re so busy navigating our way through life. But in the end, eerily enough, someone, perhaps even Robin, is going to be in a position to help raise a child that is the product of gang rape, as the cycle of life continues where we’re continually forced to face our worst fears.

Law of the Father - Film Comment Amy Taubin, March/April 2013

Twin Peaks crossed with The Killing—and that isn’t the half of it: the seven-episode television series Top of the Lake is the toughest, wildest picture Jane Campion has ever made. Campion’s previous foray into television, An Angel at My Table, a four-part biopic about the writer Janet Frame, was focused on a single character, and though dramatically and psychologically compelling, it lacked the expressive visual style of Campion’s features. With the emotional intensity of its performances and the urgency of its drama scaled to match its vast, primal setting and six-hour length, Top of the Lake is something else again: series television as epic poem, the Trojan Wars recast as the gender war. Three women, each on her own journey, connect and bring the patriarchy to its knees. But that’s too bald a description.

Like Twin Peaks, Top of the Lake begins with the body of a woman come to grief. Twelve-year-old Tui (Jacqueline Joe) isn’t dead, merely five months pregnant. we first see her standing up to her chest in an icy lake, completely motionless. does she want to drown herself, or perhaps induce a miscarriage? she’s rescued by a passerby and brought to the police. Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss), a detective who has returned to the bleak rural New Zealand town where she grew up in order to spend time with her dying mother, is recruited by Det. Sgt. Al Parker (David Wenham), who comprises nearly the entirety of the area’s law enforcement, to investigate what is at the least a case of statutory rape. Tui refuses to disclose who got her pregnant, although eventually she writes “no one” on a slip of paper. There is no lack of suspects. Tui’s father, Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan, malign and absurdly attractive), runs a meth and ecstasy factory in his tumbledown fortress of a home and seems to have fathered nearly half a dozen children with various women, making incest as well as violence, past and present, Top of the Lake’s subtext of desire. he also seems to employ half the poverty-stricken town, providing a somewhat plausible explanation for why parker turns a blind eye to his activities. There are also Mitcham’s sullen, gun-toting sons, and a “foreign” teacher with a pedophile past. Tui disappears and Griffin steps up her investigation, determined to find her before the girl’s rapist kills her and the child she’s carrying, thus eliminating the DNA evidence of his paternity.

A stellar embodiment of “the law of the father,” Mitcham goes on the offensive when women challenge his rule. in addition to griffin’s “snooping,” he’s one-upped by GJ (holly hunter), who comes out of nowhere to buy the glorious lakefront property he presumes to be his by right. Rail thin, with gray hair to her waist, given to gnomic utterances and lengthy silences, GJ is guru to a community of women attempting to recover from lifetimes of abuse. Having installed her clan in shipping containers, she furthers the desecration by encouraging the anarchic behavior of her wild bunch, which consists largely of running around naked, showing off their post-menopausal bodies, and laughing loudly—damaged goods empowered by their own sense of comedy. Only Campion could have envisioned the scene in which Mitcham attempts to infiltrate the enemy camp by taking one of the crazy ladies on a date, dropping ecstasy with her and sharing an hour of overwhelming tenderness before things turn ugly.

Top of the Lake is a thrilling example of auteurist episodic television. Campion collaborated on the screenplay with Gerard Lee (the co-writer of her debut feature, Sweetie) and shared the directing duties with Garth Davis, a productive division of labor since he is very good at pushing the plot forward while she makes us aware of the abyss that lies beneath every action. The themes that underscore Campion’s films are all here, particularly the fear that bedevils female agency—of making bad, even deadly choices in matters of sex and love. Shooting with the Arri Alexa, cinematographer Adam Arkapaw turns a wilderness of water, deep forests, and jutting cliffs into a shaping force for narrative and character, while the editing scheme frequently juxtaposes huge landscapes with close-ups of Mullan, moss, and hunter’s faces—landscapes in their own right—the unblinking gaze of each fully alive, fired by thought, perception, and desire. The principal cast—which also includes Thomas M. Wright as Mitcham’s outcast son, whose renewed intimacy with Griffin brings her traumatic past to the fore and justifies her absolute need to rescue Tui—is superb. Despite a few too many plot turns and delays toward the end and a resolution that is a trifle too neat, Top of the Lake leaves one with a sense of uplift that’s close to sublime.

“No One Can Survive In That Water”: Jane Campion and Garth Davis’ Top of the Lake Michael Sicinski from Cinema Scope, also seen here: Cinema Scope [Michael Sicinski]

Although the new miniseries Top of the Lake had its world premiere this past January at the Sundance Film Festival, it is darkly fortuitous that it should have its television run two months later. March has seen the emergence of details from the rape of a young woman in Steubenville, Ohio, material so sickening that it almost—almost—beggars belief. Can a group of young white men truly be so completely at home in their own sense of entitlement that they not only see an unconscious underage girl as their plaything, but whip out a cellphone camera and perform their own prosecuting evidence as if they were doing comedy improv? The answer is a gruesome Yes, largely because these “men” are secure that a power structure exists around them, one that will do whatever it can to insulate them from any culpability or even recognition of wrongdoing. If we hadn’t seen it ourselves, our 2013 minds would refuse to process it; we are living in a jungle of patriarchy.

I fear that bringing this real-world heinousness into a discussion of fictional material may edge toward insensitivity. However, from its very opening episode, Top of the Lake, produced and co-directed by Jane Campion and Australian TV vet Garth Davis, presents an isolated New Zealand backwater that, purely in terms of textual construction and tone, seems almost like an allegory for a war between the sexes, if not one woman’s paranoid projection of all-enveloping male control. The community of Laketop is a universe in which men do as they please, the police look the other way (when they are not openly complicit), criminality and violence simply comprise the public sphere, and women understand that they must either make nice or suffer untold misery and humiliation.

Top of the Lake’s misogynist atmosphere is so flagrant that Campion essentially inscribes it onto the landscape. Not only is the lake itself a cold, deep gaping wound at the heart of the town—a vaguely feminine symbol which strikes fear and awe in most of the characters, who will navigate it with their yachts but insist that “no one can survive in that water”—but, surrounded as it is by high hills and thickets of uncleared Outback, it is also the area’s ultimate proving ground, a place where dominant men assert their will, make lesser men “disappear,” and still others hide away completely. In town, it’s all close-ups and medium shots, evenly lit and carefully organized. But the surrounding nature of Laketop serves as a kind of battery for the unconscious, a womblike Lacanian Real where patriarchs recharge their hatred of women and one another. We frequently see these hills in long shot, tiny cars and dwarfed figures moving through a landscape that will swallow them in time.

The battle lines of the sexes are embodied in characters and the land, far more successfully than in the narrative itself. The seven-part series is driven by the sudden pregnancy and subsequent disappearance of twelve-year-old Tui Mitcham (Jacqueline Joe), daughter of local strongman/drug kingpin Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan). Given the fact that the entire local police force is male, the detective in charge of the case, Al Parker (David Wenham), decides to call in Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss), an investigator who grew up in Laketop and is in town visiting her dying mother (Robyn Nevin). We learn that Robin left town shortly after having been gang-raped on her prom night; she was out with Matt’s son Johnno (Thomas M. Wright), who witnessed the rape but was too weak to stop it. Upon returning to town, Robin tentatively resumes her troubled relationship with Johnno; better him, one supposes, than his macho brothers Luke and Mark. (That’s right: Matt’s sons are Mark, Luke and John, and patriarchy is indeed gospel at Laketop.)

In what is probably Top of the Lake’s boldest narrative and stylistic move, it includes an honest-to-goodness female (if not feminist) separatist community in the form of Paradise, a collection of modified shipping containers on the edge of the lake where a group of women seeking refuge from various troubles have set up camp, seeking guidance from a teacher of sorts called GJ (Holly Hunter, whose long grey hair and severe gaze makes her resemble Campion herself). GJ functions as a kind of New Age Dr. Laura Schlessinger, mostly berating the women seeking her advice, and offering little aside from platitudes regarding “the wisdom of the body.” Of the women in GJ’s camp, one deals with her sexual addiction by going into the bar in town and offering any of the guys there $100 to fuck her. Another of the women takes up with Matt himself, who is very loving until the Ecstasy wears off, at which point he almost runs her down with his truck. Even Robin, our putative heroine, enjoys a liaison with Johnno that could be characterized as at least somewhat destructive. (At mid-series, she wonders just how innocent he was on that fateful night.)

So how “wise” are these bodies, exactly? In light of these women’s questionable choices, we can perhaps discern in Top of the Lake Campion’s rather unusual angle on contemporary feminism. In this pathologically phallocentric universe, the men are undoubtedly bullies and perpetrators, and they enjoy full rein of their privilege. However, the women are shown to be so thoroughly traumatized as to capitulate with their abusers in a kind of master-slave dialectic.

This is where Top of the Lake departs from a real-life example like Steubenville, where the victim has no part to play in her own abuse. As a work of art, the program can and should be able to theorize about human psychology, and how those of us in radically limited circumstances will inevitably identify, at least in part, with those who oppress us. This is one of Campion’s consistent concerns as a feminist artist, something she has explored not only in her most acclaimed film, The Piano (1993), but also in Holy Smoke (1999) and In the Cut (2003), films that I find much more compelling precisely because their exploration of this dialectic is far messier and more emotionally reckless. (In fact—and this is actually something that has never occurred to me before now—the mutually assured destruction of the sexes as an ontological problem is a thematic that Campion shares, from a considerably different angle, with Lars von Trier.)

By comparison with Campion’s film work, however, Top of the Lake brings these issues to the fore only to wrap them up in frustratingly pat ways. One of the reasons I was keen to review Top of the Lake was that I wanted to see how it matched up against other recent auteurist TV/cinema hybrids, such as Olivier Assayas’ Carlos (2010) and Todd Haynes’ Mildred Pierce (2011). As it happens, Top of the Lake has much more in common with last year’s disappointing Kurosawa Kiyoshi miniseries Penance, a TV project through and through. Like Penance, Top of the Lake finds a major artist getting bogged down in genre rules, hurried plotting and clumsy editing.

But even more damagingly, Campion rolls out not only a narrative idea but a worldview—male dominance as a toxic force, strangling the world like kudzu in a garden—and sacrifices that vision to off-the-rails plot twists, character contrivance, and convenient episode-seven mopping up. This is a crying shame, as Top of the Lake’s initial episodes were fascinating precisely because they were tonally awkward and inconsistent. The world of Laketop was so openly hateful to the female sex that it hovered somewhere between documentary and science fiction, and in so doing reflected a fundamental crisis of our times. By the end, the show contents itself with fashionable cynicism, and that’s not enough. There’s way too much on the line.

“Episode One”/“Episode Two” | Top Of The Lake | TV ... - The AV Club Scott Tobias

“You’re a long way from any help,” says a concerned mother to Robin Griffin, a big-city cop who’s investigating a crime in an idyllic New Zealand backwater in Jane Campion’s mini-series Top Of The Lake. “I am the help,” she replies.

That little exchange captures both Robin’s predicament and the essence of who she is. In Campion’s feminist noir, which airs two of seven episodes tonight on the Sundance Channel, there’s a heightened awareness that Robin not only has the responsibility of taking lead on a rape/missing person case, but also has to navigate the world of men. That means getting second-guessed and mocked by local cops below her rank; intimidated and harassed by roughnecks who don’t respect her authority (or even the seriousness of crimes against women); and put under a level of scrutiny from all parties that would be unthinkable for a male detective. The closest cinematic antecedent may be Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence Of The Lambs, and so far, Campion’s point-of-view is similarly expansive, covering Robin, a 12-year-old victim, and an entire makeshift community of women—some fighting abuse, others withstanding it, still more seeking refuge.

Returning to the TV format for the first time since 1990’s An Angel At My Table, her superb autobiography of mental patient turned novelist Janet Frame, Campion and co-writer Gerard Lee borrow the basic framework of David Lynch’s cult classic Twin Peaks (lush setting, outsider detective, small town, big secrets, even a dead body lapped ashore), but makes it unmistakably her own. There’s no shortage of eccentric local color here, but it’s not of the abstracted Lynchian variety, save maybe for a colony of exiled women led by Holly Hunter’s ash-haired guru, who has a tendency to speak in odd philosophical aphorisms. In Queenstown, New Zealand, what passes for quirky passes also for hostile, like the victim’s sinister father, who lives in a surveilled fortress and has two of his three sons trained like famished pitbulls, or a bartender whose cabin is an apocalypse bunker of stockpiled rifles.

The haunting opening image of a young girl walking into the lake recalls Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho The Bailiff—and the connection is likely not a coincidence, given Mizoguchi’s career-long interest in the plight of women. In Sansho The Bailiff, the suicide ends the crushing despair and hopelessness of being sold into slavery; in Top Of The Lake, 12-year-old Tui (Jacqueline Joe) only gets shoulder-deep before turning back, but it’s not hard to imagine her being overcome by despair and hopelessness of another kind. After she’s rescued from the lake and taken back to school for an examination, the nurse discovers that Tui is pregnant, prompting a statutory rape investigation.

In town to care for her cancer-stricken mother, Robin (Elizabeth Moss) succeeds to a limited degree in getting Tui to open up and talk to her about what happened. But before she can follow up on the one literal scrap of information she could extract from the girl—a piece of notebook paper with the words “NO ONE” in response to a paternity question—Tui vanishes without a trace. Her father Matt Mitcham, played with chilling ferocity by Peter Mullan, emerges as the prime suspect, a drug dealer and small-time gangster who seems capable of any crime, given his hair-trigger temper and his casual disregard for human and animal life. In murder mysteries like Top Of The Lake, Matt would be the first one eliminated in the whodunit, because his guilt seems too obvious. The same, however, isn’t true of his two brutish sons, or a third, Johnno (Thomas M. Wright), who has a past with Robin.

Lately, the Mitchams’ ire has been raised mainly by the presence of strange women in “Paradise,” a slice of lakeside heaven that he claims to own. When GJ (Hunter) and a small cadre of middle-aged women set up a hippie shantytown of shipping containers on the property, Matt and sons first blame the local realtor who took Paradise out from under them, then on the women themselves, who are all seeking protection from just this sort of thuggery. In her own way, GJ seems as capable of dealing with the threat as Robin, but she goes about her business with a more Zen-like reserve. She wants to care for and protect her vulnerable charges, but Tui’s presence in her camp the night before her disappearance will certainly make that a challenge.

Wavering Kiwi accent aside, there’s no more ideal choice to play Robin than Elizabeth Moss, who knows well how to play an enterprising woman in a man’s world from her time at Sterling Cooper in Mad Men. Moss exudes more confidence here, in part because Top Of The Lake takes place in present-day and not the early ‘60s, and in part because Robin would be eaten alive if she failed to assert herself. Yet in both shows, Moss remains a fascinating enigma, driven by unseen forces and haunted by mysterious vulnerabilities. It would be easy enough for Campion to make Robin the noble feminine warrior in an arena thick with testosterone, but Moss has a talent for making herself sympathetic and strong while keeping the full scope of her feelings and motives under close guard. In other words, she’s the type of actress who can carry a TV show—be it six hours or six seasons.

Though it’s hard to make any firm statements about the plotting through two-sevenths of the story, Top Of The Lake is succeeding so far where Campion’s other attempt at genre subversion, 2003’s In The Cut, fell drastically short. Campion’s eagerness to attack a common format from a feminist angle—in that case, the sexy thriller made popular by Basic Instinct and its imitators—wasn’t matched by much care in the storytelling. There may be a whiff of conventionality to the central mystery in Top Of The Lake, but it appears much more sure-footed than In The Cut—to say nothing of the ongoing debacle that is AMC’s similar The Killing—and compelling even if Campion had nothing else in mind but an entertaining yarn. After all, in order to plumb the depths, she must first have the lake.

Stray observations:

I studiously avoided mentioning the identity of the body washed ashore. That would be Bob Platt, a realtor everyone in town appears to have hated, which gives the Mitchams some cover, along with the assumption that Platt drowned accidentally. The sequence where Platt drowns on a towline from the Mitchams' boat underlines Matt's reckless disregard for human life, even as later scenes make him seem genuinely incapable of doing his own daughter grievous harm.
Paradise looks to be a solid source of comic relief in a show that could use some. From Hunter's eccentric musings to scenes like the one where a woman offers cash to any barfly willing to have sex for seven minutes, the group's offbeat antics had a funny (or at least tragicomic) bent that holds the show's darker elements in balance.
Campion and Lee are wise to suggest trouble in Robin's past without getting into it too heavily in these early episodes. Such revelations stand to pay off more forcefully later, and they don't threaten to undermine the central mystery while it's being established.
I haven't said a word about David Wenham, despite his second billing in the cast. Despite having deer taxidermy mounted above his desk, Wenham's Al Parker seems more open to being a true partner to Robin and a promising sign that Campion intends to bring nuance to the men, too.
Matt's words about Tui's pregnancy are cold-blooded in the extreme, even before he calls her a “slut” like him. After he vows to take her to a clinic the next day, Robin informs him that the girl is four or five months along. His response: “I'll take her to Sydney.”
Robin's mother delivers my favorite lines of the two episodes: “You can be very hard. And what I don't like is that you think it's strength.”
Incredible scene in the second episode involving Bob Platt's dog. The alpha gesture of shooting the animal in Robin's presence, just to trigger fear and revulsion, is stunning—and an indicator of how Matt and his boys hold such criminal agency in the town.
And yet: “It's good what you're doing, you know? Helping out my daughter, she's in a tough spot. Just understand one thing: No one loves her more than me. No one.”
The need for helicopters on the hunt for Tui leads to some breathtaking overhead shots that emphasize the needle-in-a-haystack futility of a missing-persons search in this area.
“A sheep's vagina is the closest thing to a woman's vagina,” says the roughneck who has just mocked Robin as a feminist lesbian.

“Episode Three” | Top Of The Lake | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

Now that we’re past the two-part première and into the third of seven parts, the question remains: To what extent was Top Of The Lake conceived as seven distinct episodes of television and to what extent is it merely a seven-episode unfolding of one complete story? We can say for sure that casual viewers could not drop in on “Episode Three” and get a satisfying, coherent, standalone nugget of television. In that sense, it’s completely serialized. On the other hand, there are themes specific to tonight’s hour that set it apart from the two we’ve seen before. So while I’m mostly continuing to review the show in medias res, oblivious to how individual parts will fit into the completely whole, the third seventh does have a particular flavor.

The prevailing theme is one of self-loathing and self-abuse, and it makes partners out of our adversaries, Robin and Matt. Until now, Robin has been an intrepid pursuer of justice in a corrupt and hostile place, slashing through a thicket of male authority figures and local roughnecks to get to the bottom of a missing persons case. Sure, there’s a degree of selfishness to what she’s doing: She’s freaked out by having to care for her cancer-stricken mother and the case gives her an excellent reason to get out of it—and puts her on much surer ground to boot. But Robin feels, properly, that she can be an advocate for Tui where none exists and though she has a better feel for the culture than a true outsider, she’s constantly displaying bravery and resolve in moving the investigation forward.

And yet the feeling that she’s cast dangerously adrift comes through forcefully in “Episode Three.” Her flirty texts with “Steve,” her fiancé from Sydney, turn here into a tense phone call where he’s impatient and disbelieving of her rationalizations for continuing to stay there. We also learn her engagement to Steve is now over five years long and counting, which seems entirely due to foot-dragging on her part. But the true extent of her restlessness and self-destructive nature—qualities she shares with Elisabeth Moss’ character on Mad Men, e.g. her dalliance with Vincent Kartheiser’s Pete Campbell—really comes out in her renewed sexual relationship to Johnno, the son of her prime suspect. A session in a bar bathroom leads to a bedroom scene where Johnno asks Robin to keep her engagement ring on during sex—a form of territorial pissing that seems a bit much, frankly.

Meanwhile, Peter Mullan’s Matt continues to be a fascinatingly shifty character, with some moments of tenderness sneaking into a persona defined by anger, paranoia, and violence. Matt has some heat taken off him when Wolfie, the rifle-blasting bartender, is found hanging from a tree outside his cabin, with an apologetic suicide note on the inside table. Robin joins the rest of us in not believing Wolfie has any connection to Tui’s disappearance, particularly after a forest grave reveals a dead dog.

Episode three of Top Of The Lake is a reminder of Matt’s dark charisma, his ability to assert his will and forge relationships through qualities other than instilling fear in people. He and Al (David Wenham), for instance, have an arrangement that gives him the jump on Robin’s investigation, and he wields his charm again when he comes to Paradise bearing flowers. His intent is to ask questions of GJ, but as we see with Robin earlier (“How are your knees? You will go down hard—bang!”), she’s more inclined to ask questions and make prophetic statements than give out information. But he comes away with Anita (Robyn Malcolm), a Paradise resident who finds him alluring enough to look past his psychosis. She can do so no longer when Matt takes her to visit his mother’s grave, freaks out over her treading on it, and proceeds to flagellate himself with a belt.

In terms of the main investigation, Robin and Matt’s behavior suggest different things: Robin’s personal issues will be an obstacle in the investigation and Matt’s upset over his mother indicates that he really does care about his family as much as he says he does, even if his relationship with them is dangerously twisted. Overall, this third episode undermines that assumption that Robin and Matt, powerful as they are, exercise as much control over their lives as they seem to. Their weaknesses make them vulnerable, and each will likely be expert in sussing them out in the other.

Stray observations:

Some serious gallows humor at Paradise over a locked shipping container: “It’s where we keep all the dead children.”
Moss’ reaction to her mother’s news about being taken off chemo is a great piece of acting. Robin should understand right away that it’s bad news—that the treatments aren’t working and the cancer is terminal. But she doesn’t, so the news registers on Moss’ face in a wave of shock and despair.
Robin nearly stumbles onto Matt’s drug operation, tucked in a secret passageway beneath a bathroom shower. The sight of two women leaving the bathroom—and Matt’s hasty, none-too-convincing explanation—bring her back to it, however.
“Can we do a bit more of the wrong thing before we do the right thing?” If I had a problem with this episode, it’s that it could have been less explicit in parts. (See also: Sex with the engagement ring on.)
Tui’s “NO ONE” note appears to be the key piece of evidence. To be continued…

“Episode Four” | Top Of The Lake | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club Brandon Norwalk

“Episode Four” of Top Of The Lake is an unusually focused leg of the marathon, as everyone shines some light on Robin’s attack and rape by four drunk men on her way home after a dance 15 years ago. Al tells Robin how he and some others, including Matt, rounded up the criminals and punished them. Robin tells him about how she gave birth to Sarge’s child. Her mother announces that she wants to meet her grandchild even if Robin doesn’t. And Johnno nearly makes a confession so unbearable to Robin that she cuts him off.

The episode is constantly negotiating between knowledge and ignorance. Al doesn’t really want to know what happened to Bob Platt, Wolfgang Zanic, or a third case a pathologist can’t explain. Simone is afraid to know what’s going on with her son Jamie, who collects bones and doesn’t speak anymore. Most significantly, Robin does and doesn’t want to know what happened to her. In the first scene, she says, “Fuck the truth, Al,” although by the time it’s over, she and Al have filled in the aftermath for both the rapists and the victim. Before Johnno and Robin get too close to the trauma, he asks, “Are you up for it?” and she shakes her head no. At the end she stops him: “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me.”

Top Of The Lake is stylistically emphatic, but not in the comically overcast way of The Killing. And there’s certainly no lurid thrill to the crime. A prom photo takes us back to a faded brown dance, magical at the time maybe, but now only sickening. Some guys interrupt a dance, and Johnno leaves Robin alone and upset without an explanation; inexplicably, black balloons flank her as she stands in the doorway peering into the darkness. A foggy gray outdoor shot is marked by sudden headlights, failed communication, and a chain-link dog cage. It’s a sequence of pure helpless despair as we wait to see how far directors Garth Davis and Jane Campion will take us into the trauma.

An earlier scene is a much subtler window into what Cinemascope’s Michael Sicinski calls a jungle of patriarchy. After a drunken dinner with Al, Robin can barely stand up, so he takes her keys from her. The next morning, she wakes up in a quiet, anxious scene of worrisome details: She’s in Al’s bed; she’s wearing his shirt; he took off her pants; he’s already left for the office. And this isn’t even a Mitcham or one of the barflies. Top Of The Lake successfully if momentarily builds all this suspicion around Robin’s co-worker and boss. When she pushes him on the details of the evening, trying to catch him off-balance by alternating between questions about the night before and new evidence in the Tui disappearance, he answers well. “So why don’t I feel like saying thank you?” She can’t be sure, even with friendly Al.

The gender war really gets obvious with Matt. Anita again violates a sacred space for him, this time by curling up on Tui’s bed the morning after. It’s an unwelcome act of penetration, and if you really want to get symbolic, Matt also lashes out because Anita’s cup handles point inward. Matt always seems impotent when it comes to hands-on physical violence, though, asserting his will through his sons and motor vehicles. This time, he responds to Anita’s transgressions by flinging her to the ground with the force of his car when he rams the Paradise gate as she struggles to unlock it, haranguing the women about their menstrual waste saturating his land, and telling each of the women that she’s unfuckable.

The women in Top Of The Lake are bound by endurance, from Robin to her mother. Every encroachment on the Paradise community is met with a swirling mass of non-violently resisting bodies. The men are bound by power, from Al dragging his feet to Matt intimidating the town. Zanic pulls a gun on her even though he’s done nothing wrong. Even the friendliest faces adhere to the type: Johnno interrupts Robin’s interview of Tui’s mother. But Robin is cracking up. Al suggests she pull Sarge over for an auto violation and book him. “Okay,” she says with steel, “And after that can I kill him?” The line recalls the climax of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, another murder mystery about a sick patriarchy.

Later, on the heels of two other charmers, Sarge approaches Robin at the bar like he’s found his receptacle for the evening. She’s chuckling that he doesn’t remember her. It’s pitch black. “Did we fuck or something?” As soon as the words come out, Elisabeth Moss drops the smirk, darts right to his eyes, and holds. Just as suddenly, she breaks a bottle on the bar and stabs him with it, possibly more than once. He collapses to the ground (chuckling?) as Johnno carries her out the door into the night screaming, “Do you remember me now, asshole?”

From the moment Al tells Robin she’s too close to the case, “Episode Four” is tightly tethered to pulp convention. She goes reckless cop on Sarge. Al demands her badge and gun in a battle of one-shots. She keeps investigating Tui’s disappearance and all the other skeletons in Queenstown’s closet on her own. But the stabbing is also a masculine move, penetration, a claim for power, and it happens in the same episode Johnno is deprived of power, locked in a cage, helplessly forced to watch an assault on his date. In an episode where the female cop is getting so emotional that she gets lost in a cut from a placid golden forest to a windy stone shore, Robin and Johnno violate the show’s rigid gender divide.

So does Ian Fellows, the pathologist who calls Robin at her home, rescues her from the episode-long reminiscence of a horrific night. He’s recommended three cases that Al has refused to pursue: Bob Platt, Wolfgang Zanic, and a girl named April Stephens who was run over on a lake-view road with traces of cocaine in her vagina. “I had a daughter who overdosed, so for me, it’s emotional,” he says. For Robin, too.

Stray observations:

Thanks to Scott for letting me sub this week.

Turns out Zanic couldn’t be Tui’s rapist because he was out of town for dental surgery the month she got pregnant.
Loved the early abstract shot of Moss’ face barely perceptible in the clouds reflected on her car door.
Jamie, the bone collector, is the latest red herring. He runs through the woods, kayaks out to somewhere, and buries a trash bag in the ground. In his interview with Robin, he reveals that he has also completed the barista course. Also of note: Johnno has been tracking the use of the kayak with a string.
In another powerhouse moment between Elisabeth Moss and Robyn Nevin, Robin tells her mother, “I don’t give a shit if Sarge is walking around with a grubby bandage on. I hope he is awake and in fucking pain. Always!” “Me, too. Always.”

“Episode Five” | Top Of The Lake | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club Brandon Nowalk

After last week’s muscular focus, “Episode Five” scatters in the wind, and directors Garth Davis and Jane Campion just sort of watch, the authorial GJ hiding behind blank stares and not-so-cryptic expressions. A lot happens, actually. Johnno comes clean to Robin. Robin gets reinstated. Al proposes to her. Jude visits GJ. Jude dies, even, and Tui lives. It’s all very matter-of-fact, nothing given undue prominence outside of the exploitation cinema flashbacks and the cliffhanger. What stands out most is the accidental surprise that it’s been two months since Tui disappeared. By the end, you’d be forgiven for forgetting the episode even aired.

With so little passion, the episode’s jolts of violence easily become this chunk’s main theme. But first Robin says to Johnno, “I want to know the bad thing you were going to tell me.” A seven-hour marathon might not feel so haphazard, but threads like this and Robin’s work status feel arbitrarily manipulated in episodic form. Why bench Robin if she’s just going to come back to work next week? Johnno takes us back to that night, to the practically black-and-white scene of a brutal rape, scored by a barking dog and a screaming woman and shot with maximum jitter. Johnno’s confession is that he was let out of the dog cage but didn’t do anything to help her.

One of the rapists uses his tie as a leash to walk him like a dog, throws him to the ground, and taunts him into submission. It plays like a humorless rendition of Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac, which is all about gender and power. Immediately after confessing to an eminently reasonable Robin, Johnno exiles Sarge in the same way. He grabs him by the throat, knocks him to the ground, and makes Sarge fear him enough to obey him. Last week, I observed that all the men on Top Of The Lake are united by power. No wonder so much of the violence is about domination and submission. It’s not primarily sadism or vengeance or passion that drives all the violence on Top Of The Lake but a need to control.

The Johnno scene also illustrates the repetition of violence, the learned behavior of patriarchal abuse. It recalls Al’s line about rounding up the rapists and teaching them a lesson their fathers failed to. Instead of legally prosecuting them, Al and Matt and some others physically assaulted the guys explicitly as a means of behavioral modificiation. They were trying to teach them. With that in mind, it’s somewhat less surprising than it would have been to see Al take over Robin’s interrogation of Jamie with a prison experiment. He pulls Jamie’s chair out from under him, forces him to go through the motions of making his mother a cup of tea, and slaps him upside the head repeatedly. He must be really impressed with himself that all it took was a position of maximum authority, a much bigger body, and a lot of physical coercion to get Jamie to sort of respond. It’s like he’s spanking a puppy.

When Robin challenges him, Al denies that things got overheated. “Absolutely not. I nudged him. It’s how men relate to each other. It’s how they work with kids who have got no dads, an older male teaches an arrogant little prick some respect. He’s not gonna steal and hand out this yes/no shit.” There are two other striking instances of violence in “Episode Five”: Al flagellates himself again, and Jamie bangs his head into the wall. One wonders, especially given the Jamie-Tui connection, whether the self-punishment is also a learned behavior. Regardless, the episode recalls Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, which seeks to explain “some things that happened in this country” with a story of domineering fathers who beat and manipulate their children when some mysterious accidents happen in late Weimar Germany. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the “things that happened” were those children growing up to be Nazis. Authoritarianism starts at home.

Robin and Jamie’s mother stand up against that violence. Robin’s credentials and authority and relationship with Matt is enough to call him off, but Jamie’s mother has to physically embrace Jamie to keep him from hurting himself. Eventually, he returns the hug. In a show about details instead of events, that’s huge.

Everything else can probably be summed up as strange bedfellows, two disparate characters meeting, mostly to the good. Jude’s visit to GJ actually brings out some compassion. Not in the advice, although it’s comforting: “You’re not going to experience this death of yours. He will.” She prescribes heroin instead of morphine. “In nature, there is no death, just a reshuffling of atoms.” No, what’s most moving is that GJ volunteers comfort instead of waiting for Jude to ask her questions. She reaches out, interacts, gets down on this earthly plane with the rest of the women in Paradise. Later, Jude meets Johnno and could not be more uncomfortable with her daughter’s social arrangements. She warns Robin to cut ties, and Robin acquiesces. Maybe it’s superstition, maybe it’s lingering GJ, or maybe it’s Robin suggesting that Johnno signaled the rapists in the truck that night, but suddenly Johnno doesn’t seem like such a good match. Lucy Lawless’ Caroline Platt, widow of the realtor in the boating accident, meets Robin and offers Bob’s computer if it will help her investigation. The final surprise encounter is the ending. Jamie ransacks his house, kayaks across the lake, dumps his garbage bags on the ground, and makes bird calls. Suddenly, Tui rushes out, rips open a bag, and starts eating. Presumably he’s been helping her the whole time, but it’s not completely clear. He doesn’t say anything when he sees her, and she doesn’t acknowledge him at all. It’s such a manufactured cliffhanger I wonder if it’s even noticeable in marathon form.

Stray observations:

As Johnno evicts Sarge from his trailer park, one female neighbor applauds.
There’s never an official explanation for why Al reinstates Robin, but the editing suggests it’s because a journalist is making him look bad?
It might be nothing, but part of the reason “Episode Five” feels blank is that men keep changing the subject. While Robin doggedly pursues the subjects of Tui and April and demands Johnno finish his story, the journalist gets distracted by the cafe and Al pivots to Robin’s lack of furniture.
Maybe the accusation is ridiculous on its face, but the fact that Johnno refuses to say that he didn’t signal the truck is troubling. On the other hand, no amount of magical jump cuts can redeem such a fake-seeming fight.
An act of violence that isn’t motivated by domination: The peeping tom who slashes Johnno.
A great scene follows, and not just because Johnno is reduced to a mere towel. Johnno sits naked in a shipping container, restrained out of necessity (he needs medical attention), surrounded by women talking frankly about sex and implicitly about his sexuality.
When Jamie is arrested, he has a bottle of roofies on him. Yikes.

“Episode Six”/“Episode Seven” | Top Of The Lake | TV ... - The AV Club Brandon Nowalk

With just an hour to go in Top Of The Lake, answers are finally, tantalizingly close. So why is it still so disquieting? Robin has some hacker friends investigate Bob Platt’s computer, and inside a ZIP folder are pictures of, well, something nefarious. Robin looks at, like, three pictures in a folder of many before the editing takes us away in typical Top Of The Lake fashion. If Robin gets any clues from Bob’s computer, the audience certainly doesn’t. There’s definitely a deer head in there, though, like the one in Al’s office, like the one in Matt’s dining area, like the one at the dance, the list goes on. That dead animal trophy almost has the connotations of a Lars Von Trier movie.

Speaking of Al, the more he protests his innocence the night Robin passed out at his place, the more suspicious he becomes. It doesn’t help that he brings it up out of the blue in a vulnerable place like the tight space between two cars in a parking garage, and it’s almost irredeemable that he does so as a prelude to another romantic proposition. “I didn’t rape you when I could have, so do you wanna go out this weekend?” Johnno may not say once and for all that he had nothing to do with Robin’s rape, but his actions are repeatedly heroic. He rescues Robin by boat, he races the hunters to Tui, he tries to find the man who shot at Robin. But Al is giving out warning signs, not to mention outright offenses, all over the place. He takes Robin boating and then surprises her in the middle of the lake by bringing out Matt, whom he had been hiding. He refuses to take her to shore—this is where Johnno’s boat rescue comes in—and then he sets her up with a one-on-one interview at Matt’s house. Robin is baffling lately, secretly looking into Al’s finances but totally buying this confession idea even after the boat trip. Even Bob Platt can see that Al and Matt are in some kind of cahoots, and that guy went out on a boat with Matt and his sons after cheating him. But back to that night Robin passed out at Al’s, now that you mention it, what was up with that? That Rohypnol is floating around the edges of the story is very unsettling.

At the very least, Jamie wasn’t using Rohypnol to rape women. Johnno chalks up the roofies to adolescent experimentation in the latest skewed outburst of gender politics. But apparently Jamie is not the father of Tui’s child, which is only discovered after he is hounded to his death by Matt’s hunters. At last there’s a solid answer and it’s too late. There’s no comfort in resolution.

That scene is the standout, and not just because the search for Tui has been driving the heft of the miniseries. The sequence begins when Matt’s hunters find the string that leads to Tui’s alarm bell. Tui and Jamie are in her shelter. Tui makes no bones about warning them off, shooting dangerously close to them. But the kids abandon the shelter, the familiar blue hoodie firing at the hunters as the other scrambles up the hill. Robin and Johnno hear the shots. Johnno races directly up and sends Robin to follow the river around. With the minimalism of just people and landscape and the magical geography that bends to the story, it feels mythic. At its best, the whole series does. A dozen shots of figures and agendas racing each other to the top of a mountain later, and Tui slips and falls, sliding down the side of the mountain and then off a ledge. When Robin sees her in free fall, it knocks the wind out of you. When it turns out that Jamie and Tui switched jackets, that Jamie drew the hunters away from Tui and died to protect her, it’s all the more moving.

There’s another interesting fact about Jamie: Turns out he’s gay. His mother implies that that’s a dangerous word ’round these parts, but Jane Campion and Gerard Lee sure took their sweet time complicating the gender structure of Laketop. (Then again, as we’re reminded again with a cut to credits that even Mad Men would blush at, Top Of The Lake is a one-sitting deal, not episodic television. Viewers aren’t necessarily meant to drink in the dregs of heteronormativity for a whole month.) Jamie and Tui are or rather were just friends. Like Robin and Johnno turning the usual gender associations on their ears, when the kids are under attack, look what happens: Tui picks fight, Jamie picks flight. There’s also a fun, albeit foreboding, scene where some friends come visit Tui for her birthday. No weird power structures or practice violence. These kids aren’t adhering to any cycle of violence yet. Maybe there’s a way forward after all.

Stray observations:

Matt’s “cleaners” and “accountant” are “reading” Blue Velvet for “their book club.” Top Of The Lake functions partly as a catalog of references to gender-war pop culture.
Someone shoots at Robin. Life goes on. Sometimes I really don’t understand this fictional universe.
Matt interrupts one of his sons mid-coitus. The other one also sees. The Mitchams are a tight-knit bunch.
Jamie says the man who knocked up Tui is the dark creator who sucks the heart out of people. Then he tells his friends they know who did it. “Wake up.” Hey, it’s more forthcoming than yes/no hands.
Jamie also mimes childbirth from the kid’s point of view to show Tui how easy it will be. Just when he becomes my favorite character, he’s gone forever.
Jamie’s mother wants to testify against Matt and claims some others will join her. We’ll see.
The word “scene” overstates it, but the final scene sets the stage for the ultimate showdown with admirable concision. Robin says her distress code: “‘That’s unacceptable.’ If I say it twice, it means get reinforcements.”

“Episode Seven”

For a while, the last hour of Top Of The Lake actually feels hopeful, which is saying something for an episode that begins with the protagonist learning she’s sleeping with her half-brother. “There is no match for the tremendous intelligence of the body,” GJ says, but look where that got everyone. Robin and Johnno process this information, but before long, they’re racing Matt to Tui. Matt gets there first and runs off with the baby. At the time I wondered if he says, “Kids don’t have kids,” because he believes Tui is biologically incapable of conception or if he’s just in denial. Anyway, he points his rifle at the baby. Johnno points his gun at Matt. And Tui shoots both of them in succession, fatally in the case of her father. Robin holds her in her arms and tells her everything is going to be okay. And it seems like it actually is. Paradise actually seems tranquil for once.

But as they say, all good things must come to a final-act twist. Apparently Al is involved in some child-molestation ring. The barista-program pizza parties, the roofies, it’s so obvious in the end that Robin figures it out staring at the barista pictures like she’s in Veronica Mars season two right down to the rack zoom. She shows up, Matt’s shirt is inside out, he harasses her, she shoots him. Lotta that going around. Mercifully these particular kids just seem drugged so far, not molested. Robin points her gun and her phone at the crime scene and only has to use one.

Top Of The Lake is obnoxiously deterministic. We should probably be grateful Johnno never revealed himself to be into hostel torture, or maybe that’s the subtext. But that’s because the series is more symbolic, and all the roiling themes actually tie into this coup de grace. Al and his buddies pass on the violence to the next generation. Remember what Jamie said about the dark creator who rips out hearts? There is a gender component, even if one of the kids was male. There’s the institutionalization of patriarchy in Al’s badge and the corrupt juvenile-corrections program. And there’s the upsetting solution: violence. Technically Tui acts in defense of her newborn (and she just clips Johnno, who survives), and Robin can likely claim self-defense, as well. But women on Top Of The Lake have two options—fight or flight—and the big heroes pick the former.

Getting past the blindside, the seventh episode foregrounds familial themes of incest and surrogate family. Robin turns out to be Matt’s biological daughter, but Johnno conveniently turns out not to be. Al claims Matt is the father of Tui’s child, too, but guess who has reason to lie about that! There’s evidence Matt is the father, but there’s also his erectile dysfunction, and now there’s another suspect in Al or one of his pals. (In other slightly open questions, it’s pretty obvious now that Al raped Robin that night. The misery of patriarchy is inescapable.) Before Al shows his second face, though, there’s a pretty funny “Go ask your mom” scene that casts him, Robin, and Tui as a happy, little family. Most of the time, though, Robin and Johnno play mom and dad for Tui. Like Robin picking the man who raised her over Matt, you really can choose family.

In the end Robin tries to scrub Al’s blood off her shirt in the lake. At first I rolled my eyes at the cherry on top of the essentialist sundae. The last we see the hero of the gender war, she’s doing laundry. But it’s a complicated image. For one, it represents yet another traumatic period in Robin’s life that will drive her in the future. But there’s a wider implication. Laketop still doesn’t feel safe. Even GJ is fleeing to the opposite side of the planet, fading into the west like Galadriel. Laketop may have lost some authority figures, but those corrupt institutions have training programs with seconds-in-command waiting to take the reins. This will all be passed on. That blood ain’t coming out.

Stray observation:

After all that, I’m with GJ. I just want to get away from these crazy bitches.

A Scandal In Paradise: On “Top Of The Lake” - Los Angeles Review ... Jen Vafidis from The Los Angeles Review, April 6, 2013

“Top of the Lake”: Like the best crime series, it’s about much more than crime-solving Willa Paskin from Salon, March 18, 2013

“Top of the Lake's” superb finale - Salon.com Willa Paskin from Salon, April 16, 2013

Deep Dive - The New Yorker Emily Nussbaum, March 25, 2013

Sundance: Campion's Seven-Hour Top of the Lake -- Vulture Jada Yuan, January 21, 2013

Giving Credit to Paratexts and Parafeminism in Top of ... - Film Quarterly Kathleen A. McHugh, Spring 2015

Top of the Lake - | Berlinale | Programme | Programme

Top of the Lake Is Myth-Mad, But It Gets Under Your Skin Troy Patterson from Slate, March 18, 2013, also seenhere: Top of the Lake

Your Favorite Show Is Too Long - Slate Magazine David Haglund from Slate, March 18, 2013

Top of the Lake What was up with Mitcham and Anita's awful trip? by Dan Kois and David Haglund from Slate, March 25, 2013, also seen here: Top of the Lake review: Elisabeth Moss in Jane Campion's ...

Top of the Lake Wait, did Detective Sergeant Faramir just roofie Robin? by Dan Kois and June Thomas from Slate, April 1, 2013

Top of the Lake GJ is like Hunter S. Thompson mixed with Sappho, by Dan Kois and Michelle Dean from Slate, April 9, 2013

'Top Of the Lake' TV Review: Mini-Series Depicts Dark Reality Of Ra Morgan Davies from Policy Mic, March 19, 2013

Are Miniseries the Future Of Television? Morgan Davies from Policy Mic, March 26, 2013

'Top of the Lake' is an Engaging Misstep David Thomson from The New Republic, April 1, 2013

'Top of the Lake' Finale on Sundance: Review by David Thomson ... David Thomson from The New Republic, April 18, 2013, also seen here: Paradise Lost

Review: Jane Campion's ' Top of the Lake ' a riveting long-form mystery Alan Sepinwall from Hit Fix, March 18, 2013

Series finale review: Top of the Lake - HitFix Alan Sepinwall from Hit Fix, April 15, 2013

[Review] Top of the Lake: Parts 1-3 - The Film Stage Jared Mobarek

Sundance Curiosities: What is Jane Campion's 'Top of the Lake ... Alison Willmore from indieWIRE

Inside Jane Campion's New Sundance Thriller “Top of the Lake ... Jace Lacob from The Daily Beast

'Top of the Lake,' 'Rectify,' and the evolution of the Sundance ... Andy Greenwald from Grantland, April 24, 2013

'Top of the Lake' will make a splash Robert Bianco from USA Today

User Reviews from imdb Author: toddg33

Elizabeth Moss and Holly Hunter on Top of the Lake - Vanity Fair video interview with Elizabeth Moss and Holly Hunter, January 2013

Top of the Lake: Sundance Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy, also seen here: Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]

Top of the Lake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Top of the Lake - first look review | Film | guardian.co.uk Andrew Pulver, February 9, 2013, also seen here: Guardian [Andrew Pulver]

Jane Campion's 'Top of the Lake' is a multilayered mystery Ellen Gray from The Philly

‘Top of the Lake’: A slow-building mystery, skillfully told Hank Steuver from The Washington Post, also seen here: Sundance Channel's 'Top of the Lake': Out of the gloom, a chilling ...

'Bates' backstory and 'Top of the Lake' South Coast Today

In Top of the Lake, Peggy Olson Goes to Hell - - Movies ... - City Pages Alan Scherstuhl

Get to the Bottom of 'Top of the Lake': New miniseries premieres on ... Aleksander Chan from The Austin Chronicle

'Top of the Lake' review: depths satisfy - SFGate Dave Wiegand

'Top of the Lake' star Elisabeth Moss savors miniseries' nuances ... Jessica Gelt from The LA Times, March 17, 2013

Winter TCA: Elisabeth Moss takes break from ad world to find a missing girl in 'Top of the Lake' Yvonne Villarreal from The LA Times, January 5, 2013

TV picks for March 18-24: 'Top of the Lake,' 'Phil Spector' The Chicago Tribune

Pregnant Girl Vanishes, and Story Lines Fork The New York Times

Campos, Antonio

/ HAMMER TO NAIL » Blog Archive » People We Love: Antonio Campos ... by Antonio Campos from Hammer to Nail, March 17, 2009

'Make-out with Violence' Takes Top Nashville Film Festival Honors ... Jim Ridley from The Nashville Scene, April 20, 2009

ANTONIO CAMPOS ON AFTERSCHOOL - Filmmaker Magazine | The Magazine ... Scott Macaulay interview from Filmmaker magazine, November 22, 2008

Afterschool Director Antonio Campos on Absorbing Internet ... Bilge Ebiri interview from New York magazine, October 2, 2009

'Afterschool''s Antonio Campos: 'Continue to Experiment and Play ... indieWIRE interview, October 2, 2009

BUY IT NOW

USA (58 mi) 2005 US premiere version (34 mi)

User reviews from imdb Author: Roberto Bentivegna from Los Angeles, CA

I saw this film at the Cannes Film Festival. Firstly, I am surprised that the running time here is listed as 60+ minutes. The cut that I saw, and the cut that won the Cinefondation award, was 34 minutes. Perhaps there's an extended version? Anyway. I didn't think the film was great, and I certainly didn't hate it. It was "okay". I usually have a strong opinion about what I watch, but with "Buy It Now" I looked at it more as a technical piece than anything else. Maybe it's because I knew the story that it was based on quite well (UK girl who sells her virginity on Ebay). To me, this adaptation of the real-life incident is joyless and heavy-going. The vertical framing techniques employed are quite good, as is the soft focus used on the mother and the deliberately slow pacing when Chelsea is waiting for "the man". But it all feels a little self-indulgent and pointless. What is the film trying to say? It looks heavy, and it feels heavy, but surprisingly the after-taste is faint and quick to vanish.

Having said that, the performances are excellent, some of the techniques used are interesting and the "direct cinema" photography is inspired. For what it is- a student film- it's strong.

Time Out London (Ben Walters) review [4/5]

Adolescence has always been a period of self-dramatisation, each fledgling adult the hero of his or her own (usually tragic) tale. Thanks to the digital revolution, with its explosion of accessible DV, blogging, YouTube and the rest, these stories can now be articulated, aestheticised and archived as never before. Antonio Campos’ short, bifurcated experimental piece takes a ‘Blair Witch’ approach to this phenomenon, offering a purportedly genuine record of 16-year-old Chelsea Mangan’s sale of her virginity on eBay. The plan, hatched from the bedroom of the comfortable New York apartment Chelsea shares with her divorced mom, leads to a hotel-room encounter that proves less satisfying than the ‘killing two birds with one stone’ situation she hoped for.

The first half-hour, dubbed ‘Documentary’, is supposedly compiled from video material shot by Mangan (played by Chelsea Logan) for her own reasons as the enterprise unfolds; the second half, ‘Narrative’, presents the same chain of events as drama. I took the latter half to be another faux ‘found’ text, a piece of filmic autobiography made by the 16-year-old character, though there’s no particular evidence for this beyond more wooden performances and the wish-fulfilment quality of the john’s paternal qualities. In any case, the situation is presented in the context of parental neglect, self-abusive insecurity, exploitative consumerism and drug use of both the prescribed and proscribed sort. If film’s social commentary can tend towards the preachy and its dialogue towards glib dramatic irony, Campos establishes a complex nexus of contemporary social and aesthetic concerns with impressive economy and Logan’s double performance is strong.

Shadows on the Wall (Rich Cline) capsule review

Antonio Campos's satirical fantasy about a teenage girl putting her virginity for sale on eBay was originally a half-hour short which won the Cinéfondation prize at Cannes in 2005. Now it has been expanded to feature length. This is a ropey 62 minutes, however, making anything other than a DVD rental very poor value for money. And in fact it hasn't really been developed. What we appear to have is the same half-hour piece, preceded by a new 30-minute segment, billed as "documentary" to the "narrative" of the second half, but telling the same story all over again, in a more oblique way, with differences that imply nothing much other than that Campos was unsure how to expand the material. It's almost an object lesson on how enlarging a short film can be messed up.

What a shame it is. Buy It Now has clever and subversive ideas and some shrewd things to say about commercialism, consumerism, alienation and above all the unacknowledged eroticism of peer-to-peer web contact: such as gambling on Betfair, sharing video and music files, and above all buying and selling unwanted stuff on eBay. The fascination of watching the price rise during an auction has an illicit thrill. Downloading pictures of naked people having sex - that's Web Porn 1.0. But buying and selling stuff with anonymous strangers: that's Web Porn 2.0.

Chelsea Logan is a bored teenage girl in New York City, whose parents are separated; her mother is too busy working to make much time for her, and her dad lets her down by not visiting when he says he will. She hangs out with her friends, and does drugs with them in her room, and when she's all alone, indulges in a nasty little vice: Chelsea is a cutter, a self-harmer. But she has a plan to revolutionise her life; sick and tired of having no money to spend on the things she lusts after in magazines, and bored with being a virgin - and furthermore believing her friends' advice that "losing it" is no big deal - Chelsea advertises her virginity on eBay.

Director Antonio Campos appears, mischievously, to have entered this offer on the web for real and filmed the computer screen with its mounting bids from credulous pervs, while his actors improvised around the situation. The actual "delivery" of the goods in a hotel room is filmed very differently in each of the two segments, and the attitude of Chelsea's mother comes out a little differently too.

The grim business of selling sex to a wealthy middle-aged man is in sharp contrast to the prophylaxis of the net, in which transactions can take place quickly and cleanly. It is in this transaction that the true eroticism occurs, an eroticism that relies, paradoxically, on the anonymity and alienation of web contact. A condom is what provides the safety in the case of real sex; in the virtual cyber-world, what is important is a PayPal account, the vital new method of buying and selling with strangers that does not compromise your bank or credit details.

Buy It Now plays elegantly with these contemporary ideas. But what a pity that Antonio Campos could not have found a way to start from scratch and grow and develop his story more satisfyingly.

stylusmagazine.com (Sandro Matosevic) review

eFilmCritic.com (Collin Souter) review [5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [5/5]

Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4/5]

Gaydar Nation [Rachael Scott]

Variety (Robert Koehler) review

BBCi - Films Paul Arendt

Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]

THE LAST 15

USA (16 mi) 2007

User reviews from imdb Author: rasecz from United States

The Kirkland's are a well-to-do middle class family. We are introduced to each member by means of dollar values and costs: salaries, education, food, etc. The numbers are overlaid on the frame for each family member.

Preoccupations with money are voiced as the family prepares for dinner. Meanwhile, the ceiling is coming apart. Bits and pieces, a tail of dirt, dropping from above. More dollar costs are presented, this time to fix the ceiling.

The youngest boy, a teenager, seems fed up with what is going on around him. He sets to do something about it, fifteen minutes from now. Why they are the last fifteen will be clear if you see this so-so short.

"THE LAST 15" by Filmmaker Antonio Campos (borderline film) - BFOC ... seen in its entirety here on YouTube

AFTERSCHOOL B+ 92

USA (122 mi) 2008 ‘Scope

Why did I think this was a variant, though stylewise at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, of IGBY GOES DOWN (2002), where teens are lost in the wasteland of parental dysfunction, subject, away from home, to a meaningless existence of utter superficiality at a well respected boarding school in Connecticut? What could possibly happen here? This is the kind of prep school that parents start thinking about before pre-school, where they have their children’s lives all planned out for them well in advance, so by the time they get to high school it’s only a matter of course before they’re off to college and dad finds them a job afterwards. Success is measured by a student’s ability to follow a course others have set for them. While this may be a common practice on the East coast, this is a stunning abdication of parental responsibilities that at least opens the door, at minimum, for minor catastrophes to occur along the way outside of parental view when kids all alone at such young, tender ages are forced into a sink or swim situation. At what point did these parents think their kids could fend for themselves, as age-wise they are still immature and not yet ready to make decisions on their own, for if left to their own devices they’ll inevitably make all the wrong kinds of decisions. This is an extremely truthful portrayal of a situation where no one tells the truth. And worse, no one takes responsibility, as the absent parents are too rich and/or busy to be bothered with actually being parents and the school institution itself covers up its own dirty laundry so both hide under the pretense of some non-existent adult moral authority, as if they give a damn, while actually ignoring the kids and completely washing their hands in the event things go wrong, blaming the students themselves for any and all wrongdoing, whether it be grades or behavior issues. This is a glum portrait of moody, parentless kids.

Our journey through the classrooms, hallways, lunchrooms, dormitory rooms and the rest is guided by Rob (Ezra Miller), an overly detached, loner kid glued to his Internet screen, whose geek popularity, what little there is, is based on his ability to find cool stuff on the Internet. To this end he’s discovered porn, particularly one website (nastycumholes.com) that veers into blatantly sadistic treatment of women that he finds sexually arousing. But he also scans war images, school fights, or various other stupid stuff he can find on YouTube. His roommate Dave (Jeremy Allen White) sells dope on the side and bullies and ridicules Rob with ease, also doing the same at lunch to some poor sap who sits there and takes it day after day without so much as uttering a word in defense. To our amazement, Dave is considered his best friend at school. Rob calls his mother and wants to come home, telling her he’s miserable, but she tells him to stick it out, rationalizing that this friend Dave could really be helpful to her son, but if things get worse she’ll have some medicine prescribed. At school, we see a line of kids waiting for their meds from the school nurse. To his credit, Rob isn’t one of them. But we see what he sees, which is looking under the girl’s skirts from the bottom of the stairs, or the multitude of bare legs on display, the tight fitting clothes around the butt, and the occasional glimpse down a woman’s cleavage. Rob is a sophomore who dreams about sex night and day.

At this school, students are required to take an afterschool elective, whether it be sports or something else. Rob chooses the Video Club, where he’s given a video camera and urged to film anything around the school grounds, including the hallways. This transition from passive viewer to active filmmaker is a revelatory moment, as the rest of the film has the eerie and amateurish feel as if it’s all part of Rob’s movie, which gives this an otherworldly, almost science fiction feel. As he sets up an empty corridor shot from a stairway, two girls burst through the door, apparently severely injured, as blood is squirting onto the floor. One girl lays inert, apparently already stopped breathing, while Rob curiously investigates and actually cradles the other girl until she dies shortly afterwards in his arms, all caught on tape, including the aftermath of students and teachers as they create a mob scene around the incident. Afterwards, he’s fairly mum about the incident, even less forthcoming than his usual barely audible mumble, where it turns out the girls died from ingesting cocaine mixed with excessive amounts of strychnine, but he does take advantage of the emotional vulnerability of one of the girls, Amy (Addison Timlin), as their open discussion to each other about sex actually leads to their first incident, which you’d think would be a breakthrough. But instead he tells his roommate, who immediately steals his girl, making him even more miserable, especially since he suspects his roommate sold the tainted drugs that killed the girls. While they send him to the school shrink (Gary Wilmes), the school is sympathetic so long as they think he’s distraught from the school deaths, but aren’t at all interested in what’s really eating at him. And therein lies the theme of the film, as the teachers (stand-ins for the parents) couldn’t be more clueless, as they never have a frank or honest discussion with any of the kids, never know what’s really going on, as their discussions are more centered on the school’s liability, and are fooled into believing the most popular kids are the most successful kids, while the unhappy kids who may be the smartest remain borderline in their eyes. It’s the school itself that devises this social hierarchy of turning out kids the way they think breeds success. Yet behind the scenes, kids routinely buy and sell their homework, ingest alcohol and drugs, and engage in unhindered sexual activity, all without ever discussing any of these issues with anyone except other kids.

The school decides to honor the two seniors, which includes making a school video in their memory, a set of twins who were probably the two most popular girls in school, but both were party girls heavily into drug use, which was overlooked for years as their parents were heavy money donors. Rob and Amy were gathering home movie pictures, but Rob, perhaps the person least qualified to make this film, as he has fantasized about them without ever knowing them, ends up completing it on his own, something of an art film about the loneliness and alienation of youth, which the principal (Michael Stuhlbarg) suggests is the worst thing he’s ever seen, immediately ordering it fixed. When we see the sappy version that plays over the school assembly, we realize what an unadulterated pack of lies this re-edited Hallmark card version is, and these videos could stand for the completely opposite threads of reality that exist between the kids and the adults. I love the play on the two memorial tributes, very reminiscent of Bobcat Goldthwait’s mockingly derisive view of the same in his savagely black satire WORLD’S GREATEST DAD (2009). Campos uses a near documentary style for his film which includes frequent long takes where events unfold in real time without ever offering comment on what we’re seeing, which could just as easily be footage Rob watches on YouTube, but his stark choice of material reveals an excellent job writing, directing, and especially editing his film. It’s an extremely provocative work using humorous dark satire which levels to near zero any positive impact from adults, teachers or parents, and also suggests the nefarious influence of cell phone cameras to capture supposedly private, unguarded moments in our lives, immediately placing them on YouTube without proper context, all of which can do irreparable harm, especially to any individual being targeted. It’s a world out of control with no moral center that no one as yet understands, where the YouTube reality is all that matters, and the actual people being depicted onscreen mean absolutely nothing.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Michael King

With its prep school setting and dead-eyed violence, Antonio Campos' AFTERSCHOOL suggests a heavily narcotized take on Lindsay Anderson's IF... Embodying all of Mick Travers's unfocused rage with none of his charisma, Rob's (Ezra Miller) social skills have been blunted by prescription meds and streaming pornography. Already a three-time Cannes veteran at 25, Campos has a better handle on how young people communicate than indie paterfamilias Gus Van Sant (his closest correlate), and his slow-burn takes ensure more awkward silences than actual lines. The camerawork is often as disconnected from the action as the protagonists: characters wander off into the anamorphic margins, and rigidly fixed pans casually lop off actors' heads rather than tilt up. Rob witnesses the overdose of a set of popular twins, allowing Campos to divide his time between the far reaches of adolescent alienation and the frenzied overreaction that isolated traumas often spark in stunned bureaucracies. (2008, 107 min, 35mm)

The Onion A.V. Club review [A-] Scott Tobias

In Afterschool, a disquieting, remarkably controlled first feature by 25-year-old writer-director Antonio Campos, young people live their lives at a shallow focal distance—roughly the foot between their nose and the computer monitor in front of them. From here, Campos’ hero, a baby-faced boarding-school freshman played by Ezra Miller, consumes a steady diet of YouTube clips (from giggling babies and piano-playing cats to bloody brawls and Iraq footage) and live feeds from nastycumholes.com. Campos frequently trains his telephoto lens on Miller in extreme close-up, with the rest of the world out of focus, which puts this confused young man in a profoundly lonely, alienating place. And the dynamics of high school don’t help: Social hierarchies are heavily enforced at his elite East Coast school, and being a shy, insecure first-year student only serves to drive Miller deeper into his murky headspace.

Owing debts to early Atom Egoyan, Frederick Wiseman’s High School (Campos names a character “Mr. Wiseman”), Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and Michael Haneke (especially Benny’s Video), Afterschool wears its many influences on its sleeve, but it’s very much a movie of the moment. The passing of time and the evolution of technology may give it an expiration date, but more likely, Campos’ film stands to be an essential document of what it was like to be a young person in the late ’00s. A frighteningly opaque vessel of teenage amorality, Miller would stay in his dorm-room forever, were he not obligated to participate in an after-school program. Since he isn’t sporting type, he involves himself in a video-production club, and gets assigned to take B-roll footage around campus. While filming a stairwell, Miller catches footage of twin girls’ shocking deaths from tainted drugs.

The aftermath of the tragedy leads Miller to some disturbing places, not least the questionable assignment to make a memorial video for two girls he never really knew—and who almost certainly wouldn’t have given him the time of day. Between the video clips, the overlapping dialogue effects, the odd framing, and the alternating gambits of suffocating close-ups and surveillance-cam pans, Afterschool has been aestheticized within an inch of its life. But it’s also a rigorously thought-through, precocious first effort that finds Campos using every cinematic means at his disposal to suggest the vacant conscience of a kid who experiences the world in bite-sized fragments.

This is quite a week for American enfants terribles, old and new. Falling firmly into the latter category is Antonio Campos, a New Yorker of Brazilian/Italian parentage who single-handedly wrote, directed and edited his debut feature Afterschool at 23 (he's now 25). Auteurs are getting younger these days, of course: Quebecois prodigy Xavier Dolan was 19 when he directed, wrote, produced and starred in I Killed My Mother, a prize-winner at Cannes in May, while Iranian 21-year-old from Hana Makhmalbaf debuted at 15 with Joy of Madness (2003). As Francis Ford Coppola - a sometime precocious wunderkind himself - famously put it, "One day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart."

Indeed, one of America's leading film-critics, Mike D'Angelo, ranks Afterschool his number three film of the decade, ahead of works by Lars Von Trier, Carlos Reygadas, David Mamet and Wong Kar-Wai: "Sorrowfully observing the quest for something real in a terrain of orchestrated lies, Afterschool never once flinches. This is how we live."

While respecting D'Angelo's verdicts, I can't endorse his encomium this time. From my perspective Afterschool - in which Robert (Ezra Miller), a troubled teenager at a fancy prep school, happens to catch on camera the drug-related death of two pupils while working on a video-project - is a classic example of debutant-overreach.

Campos deserves credit for tackling major issues of contemporary American society - most notably the way (also explored by Michael Haneke's Hidden) that technology is producing a de-sensitised generation which experiences life at one or two removes. But the unsettling, bracingly glacial poise of his direction is repeatedly let down by some basic, distracting lapses in storytelling logic and plausibility. In addition, there's something score-settling and lazy - reactionary, even - about the way his script presents the school's teachers ("you're inherently good kids") and pastoral-care counsellors ("we can always do medication") as sanctimonious, well-meaning, hopelessly ineffectual liberal boobs.

It's hard enough to direct a debut film at any age - but Afterschool gives the impression that Campos could have profited from greater outside help during script-development, and it would probably have been a good idea if he'd handed over editing-duties to more experienced set of hands. Interesting that the major area of responsibility which he did delegate to a collaborator is the cinematography - and first-timer Jody Lee Lipes (now 27) emerges as the name to watch from Afterschool.

His limpid widescreen images here balance on the tricky edge between hyper-realism and hallucinatory intensity - and his visually superb follow-up, artworld documentary Brock Enright - Good Times Will Never Be the Same (which Lipes also directed), strengthens the suspicion that he's a truly outstanding "DoP"in the making.

NYFF '08 Mike D’Angelo

[Remember in Mulholland Dr. when that creepy dude points at the headshot and says, flatly, "This is the girl"? Try to imagine me heavier and much more intimidating as I tell you with equally unshakable certitude: This is the film. All of 23 years old at the time of shooting, Campos tackles head-on the key subject of the early 21st century, viz. mediation, and delivers the first movie I've seen that seems to recognize how drastically the (developed) world has changed in just the last several years, and the extent to which we're now both starved for authenticity and dedicated to pretense. What's more, he does so with a formal control and ingenuity that's nothing short of breathtaking, especially for a neophyte. Switching deftly back and forth between panoramic widescreen celluloid and cramped, windowboxed consumer video, Afterschool deliberately blurs the line between the two: Not only are the "objective" shots brilliantly artless, forever trained on the wrong spot or cutting someone in half at the edge of the frame, but much of the video imagery -- most especially Rob's A/V project, which abruptly turns from mundane B-roll into something so horrifying it can barely be processed, much less resolved -- evinces the chilly neutrality of Haneke or the Asian master-shot school. (And then there are shots that are just plain stunning, with D.P. Jody Lee Lipes working expressionist miracles via the tonal contrast between foreground clarity and backgrounds so magnificently blurred they resemble lost Monets.) Within this unique, semi-alienating worldview, Campos constructs a portrait of Generation YouTube (set here in high school, appropriately, but encompassing all ages) that's somehow at once compassionate and merciless -- which is to say, utterly true. The scene of Rob tentatively applying lessons learned from gonzo porn on new girlfriend Amy does in just a handful of seconds what Larry Clark spent half an hour belaboring in his Destricted short, and is beautifully counterweighted by his (Rob's) later act of sweet generosity in giving Amy his shirt to mop up the post-coital blood. Key moments in the characters' lives wind up scrutinized on the net hours later -- or they find "alternate takes" of events they themselves recorded, captured by persons unknown with ethical imperatives unrecognized. Even minor details cut clean: When Rob calls his mother to tell her he's not fitting in, her response is so credibly concerned-yet-destructive that it made me annoyed at the equivalent moment in Wendy and Lucy all over again. And while at first I thought Campos had erred in continuing beyond the re-edited memorial video, his actual ending will haunt me as long as it haunts Rob. Sorrowfully observing the quest for something real in a terrain of orchestrated lies, Afterschool never once flinches. This is how we live.]

[ADDENDUM, THE NEXT DAY: Like most great films, this one appears to be widely misunderstood. That others don't care for it is fine by me, and not wholly unexpected given its outsized formal and thematic ambition. But it does grate a bit when folks don't seem to recognize what Campos is doing, even as they berate him in the same breath for being overly explicit. And I want to address some of this stuff while my memory is still fresh, even though doing so requires a degree of specificity that I'd rather not inflict on those who haven't seen it (i.e., almost everyone). Please, come back to the next paragraph post-viewing.

You too Waz.

Okay. Now, take this gibe from Slant's Ed Gonzalez, which was echoed in a brief conversation I had today with Aaron Hillis: "Robert (Ezra Miller) joins the new-to-the-curriculum AV club, fucks around with his hottie partner, Amy (Addison Timlin), choking her just like that nastycumholes.com chick he likes so much (it's amazing what kids pick up on these days -- and so quickly too!)." That sarcastic parenthetical completely ignores this disturbing moment's actual import, which is nowhere near as facile as Gonzalez suggests...and while Aaron merely felt (if I understood him correctly) that showing Rob choking Amy was overkill, he's equally mistaken. The point here is not (just) that Rob is aping behavior he's seen in a porn video -- though, as I said above, it does beat hell out of the (inexplicably much-admired) Larry Clark short in that tiny respect. For this deeply confused kid, the throttling is not just some random perversion he's eager to assay on anything suitably nubile. It's an attempt to cut through the bullshit. When we initially see her, "Cherry Dee" is clearly hiding behind a persona, like most porn actors; it's almost painfully evident that she's performing for the camera, doing her best to fulfill male-derived stereotypes of female sexuality. It's only when her unseen interrogator grabs her by the throat that she drops the facade and we get a brief glimpse of the actual scared-shitless girl beneath the manufactured pout and salacious come-ons. That is what Rob is responding to and attempting to replicate. He doesn't choke Amy during their (amazingly credible and virtually unseen) first kiss, when both seem to have forgotten the camera -- he does it at a moment when Amy is clearly performing, after he's seen her demeanor abruptly change. It's his painfully awkward attempt to make her more real. That's what the entire film is about, and if I have a serious quibble it's that there's a scene in which Campos explicitly tells us that's what the film is about, having Rob explain to the guidance counselor what he finds so compelling about found video. You'd think that would clear up any possible confusion. Apparently not.]

User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

The 24-year-old Campos has been winning prizes for his short films for the past eight years; started film-making at thirteen and completed his first short film at seventeen; has been a Presidential Scholar; and wrote the script for this film at the Cannes Residence in Paris in fall 2006. It premiered at the 2008 Cannes Un Certain Regard series. Campos, who was a scholarship student at an exclusive international school himself and then went to study film at NYU, has been rejected from many festivals, but Cannes has led him to the NYFF. He has a group of friends and associates from NYU, and has founded Borderline Films. (See the interview "Filmstock: Antonio Campos 'After School'" on PlumTV.)

'Afterschool,' which speaks of a boy and girl in a fancy East Coas prep school video club, of the boy's roommate, and the death of twin Alpha Girl classmates, is a film of and about the YouTube generation. It begins with Rob (Ezra Miller) watching an online porn site called "Nasty Cum Holes" (or something like that) in which a man, unseen, is talking dirty to a young prostitute. Rob is in his dorm room, which he shares with Dave (Jeremy Allen White), who deals drugs. The video club links him with Amy (Addison Timlin), with whom he loses his virginity. While ostensibly making a sort of promotional video for the school he is shooting a hallway and stairway and all of a sudden two twin girls, the most admired in the school as it happens, appear overdosing. Robert rushes down the hall to them and the camera continues to watch as he sits on the floor with them as they die. Links between all this and Michael Haneke's 'Caché' and Van Sant's 'Elephant' are almost too obvious to mention.

In what follows there is a lot that shows the hypocrisy and confusion of the teachers, the headmaster, and the kids. Rob is so full of emotion throughout the entire film that he finds himself almost completely shut down. Mr. Wiseman the therapist or counselor (Lee Wilkof) succeeds in getting him to open up a tiny bit by trading obscene insults with him. (Campos' admiration for Frederick Wiseman's 'High School' led him to pay homage with the character's name.) A lot of 'Afterschool' is seen either as a video camera (or even a cell phone camera) see it, or as Rob sees it. When his lit teacher is talking about 'Hamlet,' he is watching her crotch, legs, and cleavage and that's what the camera sees. At other times the camera is fixed and one speaker is cut out of the picture, or you see only the edge of his head. Campos is not of the shaky, hand-held school of realism. His evocation of the sensibility of his young characters goes deeper than that. When kids today see something like a girlfight (or a boyfight) at school, somebody films it, and when it's filmed it's going to wind up on the Internet. There's a girlfight Rob and his roommate watch on the Web and then they're in a boyfight with each other in which Rob lets out his sudden pent up anger. Maybe his roommate is guilty in the twin girls' death. But as the school headmaster somewhat facilely says, maybe they all are. A wave of repression follows the incident--perhaps evoking the aftermath of 9/11, which Campos interchanged with the girls' death to get kids' reaction shots.

Campos likes moments that make us and himself uncomfortable, starting with the opening porn video, but continuing with Rob's experience and the world seen through his eyes. (Campos made a short film in which a young girl sells her virginity on eBay and loses it for real on camera to an older man.) Rob's safety is continually compromised and his emotions are uncertain. He doesn't know who he is, and neither does the filmmaker. Rob is a cleancut, even beautiful, boy, but he is almost clinically shut down--not an unusual state for a male teenager, maybe even more likely in a privileged setting like a New England prep school.

Rob and Amy are assigned the task of making a 'memorial film' about the dead twins. However the film he makes is too abstract, existential, ironic and just plain crude to be acceptable. When his supervisor sees it he thinks it's meant to be a mean joke. Later a more sweetened up and conventional version of the film is shown to the whole school, which we also see. Altering and re-editing reality is a continual theme of 'Afterschool.' As Deborah Young of 'Hollywood Reporter' writes, 'Afterschool' "is a sophisticated stylistic exercise too rarefied for wide audiences, but earmarked for critical kudos." It may seem in the watching more crude than it is. The cobbled-together vernacular images are clumsy, but the filmmaker is supple, deft, and sophisticated technically and bold intellectually--still-beyond his years. He has also captured a world he himself knows personally with rather stunning accuracy.

(Note: I am not sure of all the characters' names and may have got some identifications wrong here.)

Eye for Film (Jeff Robson) review [4/5]

Afterschool (2009) Directed by Antonio Campos A.A. Dowd from In Review Online

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

filmcritic.com (Alexander Zalben) review [3.5/5]

Afterschool Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

Filmbrain [Andrew Grant] Like Ana Karina’s Sweater

The House Next Door [Vadim Rizov]

IFC.com [Sam Adams]

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

Electric Sheep Magazine Mark Stafford

Hammer to Nail [Brandon Harris]

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Screenjabber review Toby Weidmann

Gone Cinema Poaching: Antonio Campos's Afterschool Glenn Heath Jr.

Fringe Report John Park

not coming to a theater near you review Stephen Snart

Pajiba (Brian Prisco) review

The Village Voice [Anthony Kaufman]

TrustMovies: Antonio Campos' AFTERSCHOOL opens via IFC, after a ... James van Mannen from Trust Movies

Afterschool Howard Feinstein at Cannes from Screendaily

Boxoffice Magazine review Cole Hornaday

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

Cinema de Merde [Scott Telek]

CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | Auteur Fatigue, "Gomorra" Pops and Wayward Youths Anthony Kaufman at Cannes from indieWIRE

Floatation Suite (Nick Seacroft)

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]

CHUD.com (Alex Riviello) review

Offoffoff.com review Stephen Tanzer

Antonio Campos's Afterschool: Gossip Girl For Those Who Don't Know ... Benjamin Strong from The Village Voice, October 3, 2008

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Hollywood Reporter review Deborah Young at Cannes

Channel 4 Film

Variety (Justin Chang) review

Time Out London (David Jenkins) review [4/5]

Time Out New York (Nicolas Rapold) review [1/5]

Afterschool | Film review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, August 20, 2009

The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Tim Robey

Independent.co.uk [Nicholas Barber]

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]

Chicago Tribune (Alexis L. Loinaz) review

Dennis Lim Young and Out to Redefine What’s Real, by Dennis Lim from The New York Times, October 3, 2008

Movie Review - Afterschool - Camera Lingers Near Another Lost Boy ... Neil Genzlinger from The New York Times, October 2, 2009

SIMON KILLER No Rating

USA (105 mi) 2012

An American film set in Paris, the follow up to AFTERSCHOOL (2008), where the print received did *NOT* have French subtitles, due to an error on the part of the filmmaker who sent the wrong copy of his film. As more than half the film is in French, this is a major liability, so much so that the film cannot even be graded or reviewed. While the film has a strong stylistic sense, once more favoring long shots, this time following the lead character walking down the crowded streets of Paris instead of following students in his last film through the interior school hallways, where the victims of his stalking can be seen just out of focus. Lead actor Brady Corbet is excellent as Simon, a professional liar, con man, stalker, and psycho killer, just an all around stand up guy who like Cagney in White Heat (1949), is a psychopath with mother issues. While he continually blends into the surface, finding ways to con his way into people’s lives, his violent meltdowns have a humorous edge.

The look of the film, shot by Joe Anderson who was assistant camera in the last film, is terrific, while the aggressive music is even better, showing an edgy side of this character where females seem drawn to him. As this is a tense and suspenseful psychological thriller, much of what’s left out are the interior thoughts and psychological motivations of the characters, absolutely essential in a film like this. Much of the violent action happens just offscreen, where instead plenty of sex is shown, as this character seems to have a rabid sexual appetite, where most of the film is, in fact, hopping from bed to bed. But there are other threatening gestures, blackmail for instance, that make no sense without clarifying subtitles, also the backstories of several of the characters are missing. One of the film’s highlights, however, is hearing Simon explain on several occasions what he studied in school. Without understanding most of the dialogue, this instead plays out much like Godard’s intentionally left untranslated American version of his latest movie Film Socialisme (2010), as too much of what’s needed is left incomprehensible.

Noel Murray

Antonio Campos’ debut feature Afterschool was one seriously upsetting film, telling the story of an alienated boarding school student with such intimate subjectivity that the audience didn’t realize until it was too late just how messed up this kid was. Campos’ Simon Killer takes a similar approach, subjectivity-wise. The hero, played by Brady Corbet, is a recent college grad who takes a trip to Paris to try and recover from a recent break-up, and as he mopes around the city, failing to meet people and even having trouble masturbating without some difficulty, it’s easy for the audience to identify with this fumbling sad sack. Then Simon befriends a local prostitute, and Campos gradually edges the rug out from under us.

I’ll be frank: there’s nothing all that novel about a movie that asks us to feel compassion for a protagonist who turns out to be batty. In fact, Campos did just that with Afterschool, and in a way that was more visually inventive than Simon Killer. (This movie leans heavy on the back-of-the-head follow-shot, which has become an indie cliché.) But that doesn’t mean the film is devoid of formal interest. Campos makes a big deal about how Simon majored in neuroscience, with an emphasis on the connection between the eye and brain, and Campos throws in the occasional strobe effect or piece of peripheral information to underscore the way Simon sees the world. But he does just as much with the sound design—as Simon seems to make use of loud noises to drive out the distractions in his head—and the characters also take frequent notice of how things smell or taste or feel. What’s most effective about Simon Killer is that like Martha Marcy May Marlene (whose director Sean Durkin co-produced this film), this movie is a sensual experience that asks us to question our senses. It takes the all-too-common feelings of loneliness and disorientation and show in disturbing detail how that can shade into madness.

They Live by Night [Bilge Ebiri]

Antonio Campos’s debut feature Afterschool was one of my favorite films of 2008, so I had very high hopes for his follow-up Simon Killer. And while the style is still distinctly his, the new film plays in part like the opposite of the earlier. Whereas Afterschool was heavily structured, with a downright intricate script, Simon seems deliberately disjointed, almost improvised. Whereas Afterschool’s central character was almost catatonically passive, Simon’s protagonist is intensely there, alive and fierce in his tightly-wound little way. And while actors seemed almost like an afterthought in Afterschool (the camera so often wanted to turn away from them), Simon practically hinges on the grand gestures of performance. It may not be as successful as Afterschool, but it feels rawer, more personal – a quality enhanced by its curiously unformed nature.

In that sense, the central attraction in Simon Killer isn’t so much Campos the budding auteur but rather Brady Corbet’s deceptively complex performance as a young American visiting France after a recent break-up with a long-term girlfriend. Simon meets up with a young, beautiful prostitute (Mati Diop) and enters into a physical, surprisingly emotionally open relationship with her. But he’s a bit of a rattlesnake. He tells little lies, then big lies, and soon enough we realize he’s become something of a monster. Corbet thus has to give a performance that hinges on two almost opposite modes of being: He’s both inward – repressed, closed-off, even scheming – and yet also intensely physical. Simon is both broken boy and desperate, driven animal; by the end, you want to think that the former mode is just an act but the character still believes himself, even if we no longer do.

Corbet is something to behold, even if the movie, packed though it is with lovely moments, isn’t entirely successful. Campos has a very precise style that needs the governing framework of a tight structure (as in Afterschool), and this is where Simon sometimes loses out. The film drifts, perhaps by design but not always to its benefit. Campos’s images have a brittle coolness that makes them feel like pieces of a puzzle; unlike Fassbinder or Denis, they don’t drift well. He’s more in the Kubrick vein, where everything feels deliberate, like it’s pushing towards something greater, like it’s all part of a plan. In Simon Killer, the plan doesn't always feel like it's entirely there.

The House Next Door [Michal Oleszczyk]

Antonio Campos's much-awaited second feature, while less clear-cut than his supremely affectless debut Afterschool, is just about as unsettling. An American-in-Paris story of sorts, it follows a slow but acute mental unraveling of the eponymous character (played by the film's co-screenwriter, Brady Corbet) as he seeks a post-breakup consolation in the "city of love." The Paris of the movie, intermittently respectable and seedy, becomes a scene for Simon's desperate pursuit of affection, which gradually turns more and more insidious and scary.

The opening sections (redolent somehow of Sofia Coppola's much gentler universe) offer some beautifully rendered stretches of epic ennui, with Simon's self-avowed pursuit of "doing absolutely nothing" slowly curdling into a disturbing maze of near-psychotic self-delusion. As Campos coolly multiplies discomfiting narrative ripples that make us question Simon's credibility, then his sanity, Corbet goes from cutely absent-minded to disheveled to plain cuckoo with fearful precision. Given that the whole film plays with the notion of false appearances, it makes perfect, if a tad too symmetrical, sense that Simon's alleged profession has something to do with studying "the relationship between the eye and the brain."

The main character's bipolar personality is literalized by two sexual relationships he develops during his stay—one with a prostitute he first meets as a client and then turns into an accomplice, and another with a perky French literature student (as sweet as she's cultured). The noose of lies Simon weaves in order to keep various strands of his self-made "reality" going slowly tightens to the point of visceral suffocation.

Save for its awfully ominous title, which keeps hovering over the proceedings from the start, Campos doesn't point his story in any generic way that would force us to see every single scene as an indicator of underlying threat. In fact, one of Simon Killer's most admirable achievements lies in the ease with which Campos turns some early scenes of desperate loneliness into nuggets of behavioral comedy, of which a prolonged multitask-masturbation involving a laptop is the most impressive one.

Simon Killer feels both carefully studied and willfully unfocused. Campos opts for showy shock cuts, elaborate wandering-eye pans, and jarring juxtapositions of different kinds of music—much of it courtesy of the main character's iPod, which at times switches from track to track literally mid-scene). Judging by the relatively high number of walkouts I witnessed during the press screening, the film manages to touch a raw nerve and will undoubtedly be deemed "pretentious" by some. I found it stunningly daring, refreshingly adventurous, and impossible to shake off, firmly establishing Campos as the new master of consciously hyper-crafted, dead-serious cine-angst.

Karina Longworth

The most divisive dramatic competition entry yet to screen at Sundance, Simon Killer is the second feature directed by Antonio Campos, director of Afterschool and producer of last year's Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene. Like Martha Marcy, Simon is built around an attractive, enigmatic young person whose ostensible recent trauma -- in this case, the titular recent college grad, played by Brady Corbet, comes to Paris in an effort to recover from a rough break-up -- both muddles their vision, and complicates the film's view of their behavior. They are character studies which willfully obfuscate the truth about their main characters, psychological thrillers only offering misleading glimpses into psyches.

This approach to storytelling, while productively disorienting in Martha Marcy, is given richer formal and thematic complement in Simon Killer. In the first dialogue scene, Simon explains to a family friend that he completed a neuroscience thesis on peripheral vision, and the relationship between the brain and the eye.

"I'm not sure I understand," responds the friend, who is French, and is letting Simon stay in his Paris flat for a week. "That's okay, nobody does," Simon sighs.

What initially seems like pretentious post-grad arrogance twinned with self-pity is slowly revealed to be something closer to an admission of guilt: as long as Simon's modus operandi isn't understood, he can do anything, say anything, be anyone. And over the course of his winter in Paris, he'll create several lives for himself, his pathological lies and manipulations swallowed whole by a couple of very beautiful, very young women unlucky enough to end up in his path, and naive enough to let him into bed.

Simon's early speech about his supposed academic specialty is in some sense a decoder for the whole movie. Joe Anderson's gorgeous cinematography is constantly drawing attention to the way eyes -- and cameras -- work, with widescreen compositions built with Corbet in the absolute center, extreme focal changes amplifying the tension between foreground and background, and pulsing color field abstractions acting as minds-eye transitions.

And whether or not Simon is really an expert in the scientific mechanics of the brain's relationship to the eye, he demonstrates some kind of expertise in the way perception works in his dealings with women, from his coddling mom to the prostitute who takes Simon in when she thinks he's been mugged. These women take what Simon shows them at face value, and lose their ability to focus.

As sensually rich as it is, full of eye-candy color and smartly chosen pop music (one of Simon's seductions is set in a club, to LCD Soundsystem's "Dance Yourself Clean") and flashily ambitious filmmaking, Simon Killer is an embodiment of, and comment on, cinema as a manipulation of the eye and the brain. Plus, it effectively deflates the mechanics of male sexual compulsion without any of the martyr bullshit of Shame.

Simon Killer - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

The Playlist [William Goss]

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

SIMON KILLER Review | Collider Matt Goldberg

SUNDANCE 2012: Simon Killer - Daily Film Dose Alan Bacchus

SUNDANCE: Simon Killer Polarizes, But Maybe That's a Good Thing ... Jen Yamato

Virtual Neon [Damon Wise]

Film.com [Amanda Mae Meyncke]

Sundance 2012. Antonio Campos's "Simon Killer" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson at Mubi

Simon Killer: Sundance Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

Variety [Peter DeBruge]

Sundance 2012: Simon Killer – review | Film | guardian.co.uk Jeremy Kay

CHRISTINE B- 81

Great Britain USA (115 mi) 2016 Official Facebook

Well, if ever you needed a reason “not” to live in Sarasota, Florida, this would be it, set in the vacuousness of a distant time, with occasional references to the Watergate era, where the insipidness of the period musical selections may make you want to pull out your hair instead of reminisce. From the director of the eye-raising AFTERSCHOOL (2008), one of the few films that actually understands the YouTube generation and the prominent influence of the Internet in the lives of high school kids, this is an entirely different exploration of dysfunction at work, largely a character study of a single real-life individual, Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall), a Sarasota news reporter who pulled out a gun and shot herself during a live news broadcast in 1974, perhaps the only known example of a suicide captured live on the air. Rather than react in horror, the film attempts to put the pieces together before it happened, set against the other tragedies that were occurring in the post-Vietnam, Watergate era, where the nation was inundated by a series of catastrophic events, including the continual journalistic exposure of lies and a governmental cover-up from the office of the Presidency, where day by day, new revelations seemed to unravel existing beliefs about the role of government in our lives, eventually leading to a Presidential resignation and an eventual pardon for all crimes committed while in office. While this only plays out as an annoying backdrop, Chubbuck’s suicide may seem like a small indicator of larger societal ills, yet most likely she was suffering from undiagnosed and untreated mental health issues, which is a reflection of our current government posture to close mental health hospitals state by state in cost cutting measures and then deny the significance of mental health issues until “after” the explosions, as there’s been no remedies from the Columbine-like mass shootings that continue to plague our nation, University of Texas, 1966 (18 killings), Luby’s Cafeteria, 1991 (23 killed), Columbine High School, 1999 (13 killed), Virginia Tech University, 2007 (32 killed), Sandy Hook elementary school, 2012 (27 killed), Pulse Nightclub, 2016 (49 killed), for example, as there are more mass shootings in America than any other country, where each event stands out as a stark American tragedy. Yet what, if anything, is being done about it? While this film itself doesn’t ask any of these questions, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum either, where to this day, most urban news reports lead their nightly broadcasts with police blotter information, including the number of deaths that reportedly occurred. Knowing the outcome before the film begins has a chilling overall effect, much like Gus van Sant’s ELEPHANT (2003), where a sense of dread kicks in as the moment approaches.

While the centerpiece of the film is one of the most shocking moments in television history, the film is comprised of small, absurdly amusing moments mixed with pathos in the harrowing life of Christine Lubbock leading up to that moment, where she has a history of depression, is socially awkward, remains a virgin at age 29, and never really fits in anywhere, yet has this ambitious streak where she has delusions of grandeur, seen in front of cameras doing an imaginary interview with a non-existent President Richard Nixon, who is instead just an empty chair, yet the human interest stories that she’s assigned to are lighthearted puff pieces about ordinary people who raise chickens or grow strawberries. Her smothering relationship living with her mother (J. Smith-Cameron) is reminiscent of Ruppert Pupkin in Scorsese’s scathing satire KING OF COMEDY (1982), as both are achingly lonely, creating fantasy worlds that help them cope with the psychological schisms in their fractured view of the world around them, where Christine develops a comedy act between two hand sock puppets that she performs to help educate disabled children, which is easily the most outrageously original aspect of the film, as she recreates moral lessons that she performs alone or in front of preschoolers, offering us insight into her psychological mindset, like a secret passageway into her subconscious that is sensitive and highly aware of how people should treat one another. “How do you know it’s a stranger?” one puppet asks another. “What if you know them, but you don’t really know them?” All right, it can get a bit creepy. Her lesson on how it’s OK to just be quiet with one another is poignant and especially shrewd. While she jots down notes of her personal objectives, like a must do list in the form of a diary, where she’s repeatedly telling herself the things she needs to do to be more effective, yet she’s continually discouraged on the job, butting heads and remaining at odds with her boss Michael (Tracy Letts), who implements the “If it bleeds, it leads” philosophy, as he wants to spice up the broadcasts due to such horrible ratings that he fears the station will be shut down, as the owner of the affiliate, Bob Anderson (John Cullum), announces he intends to visit the station. Despite her insistence on barging into Michael’s office whenever she feels like it, irrespective if he’s in the middle of a meeting, this practice doesn’t win her any favors, as Michael has little patience for her antics, and instead just finds her rude and overbearing. “You know what your problem is, Chubbuck? You’re a feminist. You think that the way to get ahead is by talking louder than the other guy. That’s the whole movement in a nutshell.”

Adapted from an extensive Washington Post article by Sally Quinn in 1974, Sally Quinn's article about Chubbuck for the Washington Post, we learn that George (Michael C. Hall), the news anchor that Christine secretly fantasizes about in the film was actually a stockbroker who came into the studio to read stock reports on the air. While the director Antonio Campos has a history of realistically portraying the psychologically disturbed, his previous works both male portraits, this film has an awkward feel all around, especially from a male director, who puts the female protagonist in a fish bowl and allows her to sink or swim, feeling exploitive from start to finish, as if it’s showcasing her worst instincts, where in some cases we are laughing at her, as her behavior deviates to the weird and bizarre, never really getting inside her head, showing little sympathy, where viewers are never comfortable in her presence, as the film never reveals much insight into why she is this way, or what happened in the past, only that she feels uncomfortable in her own skin. Prone to occasional rants, which scream of self-centered middle class entitlement, where she’s not getting what she thinks she deserves, from her job, her mother, existing relationships, never really feeling loved or appreciated, though objectively speaking, her mother is her biggest supporter and always seems to have her best interests at heart, while her job offers her plenty of opportunities, but she fails to take advantage of them, never establishing her own niche that singles her work out as significant. Her camera operator Jean (Maria Dizzia), probably her best friend, is extremely sympathetic and tries to help her at work, but Christine negates and minimizes the influence of others, thinking exclusively of herself. Part of the reason she’s not very good doing human interest stories is that she expresses so little human interest, continually thinking she’s better than everybody else. What really sets her off is the discovery that news anchor George is being promoted, where he’ll be working in a bigger market, something she felt was rightfully hers, where she’s extremely conflicted by the idea that someone other than herself might be more qualified. In her world that’s simply not possible, feeling there must be some kind of mistake, demanding a recount, of sorts, thinking they must have overlooked what she means to the station. Veering into a downward trajectory, as if to show them just how important she is, she asks for an opportunity to work at the anchor desk, where she devises this plan to shoot herself on the air, complete with typewritten script notes which she utters verbatim, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first: attempted suicide.” While it’s thought that only a few hundred people saw what occurred, the footage quickly disappeared, never to be seen again, but the story made the rounds of all the nightly news reports, and some think this was the origin of Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant satire Network (1976), conceived in a post-Watergate decade that cynically invented happy news broadcasts to boost ratings, while similarly producing a cheerful newsroom comedy sitcom like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970 – 77), which eerily closes the film with a kind of illusory reality.

Cinema Scope: Adam Nayman September 04, 2016

A perfect exemplar of a bad good movie, Antonio Campos’ Christine traps (an excellent) Rebecca Hall in a series of impeccably composed frames as the famously ill-fated Sarasota local news anchor Christine Chubbuck. One good way to gauge your patience for this exercise in high-handed dread is how you react to seeing a protagonist who you know for a fact is going to kill herself at some point before the movie’s end introduced in front of a massive container with “FRAGILE” emblazoned across the front. Imagine Elephant (2003) if the point of Gus Van Sant’s formal gamesmanship was to definitively “explain” Columbine rather than to gesture helplessly at the impossibility of understanding, and you’d have something pretty close to Campos’ dubious achievement here. The movie builds an airtight case: Christine is stifled at work and sexually frustrated; she refuses to go on medication for her depression and suffers terrible personal and professional embarrassments; she becomes fixated on guns and rejects all efforts to penetrate her orbit of paranoid loneliness. Christine presents its namesake’s suicide as the logical end to a mathematical equation, and inflates it into an epitaph for an era (and in case you missed the historical commentary, the script name-checks Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate and mentions the 1974 dateline a half-dozen times). As if that wasn’t enough, Campos even drags in the theme music to The Mary Tyler Moore Show to point up the gulf between sitcom idealism and real-life despair—perhaps the hollowest piece rhetorical point-scoring in recent memory.

Fandor: David Ehrenstein October 13, 2016

Christine, a new film about the sad life and spectacularly awful death of television newscaster Christine Chubbuck, arrives in theaters at a peculiar moment for docu-dramas. Once a staple of made-for-TV movies, and surefire Oscar bait for large-scale Hollywood productions, today’s based-on-a-true-story fare is having a hard time keeping pace with cable television news—for reasons the Chubbuck story illuminates.

Chubbuck hosted a local news digest show at a TV station in Sarasota, Florida, where, on July 15, 1974, a few minute into her regular broadcast, she announced: “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first: attempted suicide.” Then she pulled a revolver out from under her desk, and shot herself behind the ear. Today it’s thought that only a few hundred people saw the act when it occurred. Does a video recording of it exist? If so, its voyeuristic value is considerable. A Vulture article from earlier this year calls Chubbuck’s on-air suicide “the Holy Grail” of an internet subculture focused on gruesome, “hard-to-find” videos of people dying—the most popular of these being the 1978 pseudo-documentary Faces of Death. But the film that most keenly evokes Chubbuck’s death in the popular imagination is David Cronenberg’s sci-fi thriller Scanners (1981), best remembered now for one scene of an exploding head.

Christine contains nothing so gaudy. Solidly directed by Antonio Campos, from a screenplay by Craig Shilowich, it tells the sad tale of a depressed woman whose work environment only serves to stoke her despair. Rebecca Hall is excellent in the title role, and Michael C. Hall and Tracy Letts are equally good as her casually insenstitive co-workers. Morbidly curious voyeurs may be disappointed that Christine doesn’t deliver the “money shot,” à la Scanners. Nor, however, does it replicate the casual indifference of cable news, with its seemingly non-stop footage of police pursuits ending in the deaths of “suspects”—invariably unarmed black men.

Philando Castile in Minnesota.

Dylan Noble in California.

Paul O’Neal in Illinois.

Keith Lamond Scott in North Carolina.

Alton Sterling in Louisiana.

Just to take some recent examples. These are people we’ve met by way of “bodycam” and “dashcam” footage from the officers who took their lives—and also, in some cases, by way of cellphone video from horrified loved ones. The news, in short, has become one big snuff film.

Cinema Scope: Blake Williams March 21, 2016

Two heavily pulled quotes from Sundance 2016’s opening press conference, both spilled from the mouth of the festival’s founder and director Robert Redford—“I’m not into the Oscars,” and later, when asked what he was most looking forward to at this year’s edition, “The wrap party”—were endearingly and unexpectedly clear-eyed enough (considering the source) that, as I trekked over to Park City for the second consecutive January, I felt my guard lowering, strangely moved by these perhaps inadvertently cynical gestures. Considering some of the other arch responses Redford gave to the roomful of journalists, it appeared as though the Sundance Kid himself was running out of fucks to give. And who can blame him? The man turns 80 this year—he couldn’t have more than five of these left in him—and the weather was colder than hell, each morning and night’s venture from ski lodge to theatre, theatre to ski lodge a life-threatening operation, what with many of the city’s hazardously slanted sidewalks lying directly beneath some of the longest, pointiest icicles I have ever seen.

Was the risk worth it? Probably not, but for the second year in a row, and despite my visit being limited to a mere four days, Sundance surprised me. The festival’s programmers may be reluctant to put the most promising and inevitably best films at their disposal into the festival’s main slate, the US Dramatic Competition—a section that, from what I can tell, is exclusively reserved for under-40s and those with fewer than ten years of filmmaking experience, which is fair so long as we agree that a Competition without competition is useless, or at the very least boring—but good, even great films were indeed at Sundance, and they were mostly, once again, in the Premieres and NEXT sections.

Call it a product of the zeitgeist, an expression of my current tastes, or simply a coincidence, but the movies I caught in Park City were predominantly engaged with the experience and representational politics of grieving. In their surplus, these movies, which bask in the plangent aftermath of some great or forgotten loss, inevitably recalled and reinforced for me cinema’s original ties to mourning, arriving as the medium did amidst late-19th-century clashes between science and faith, allaying crippling fears of death and oblivion with its so-called Frankensteinian ability to resurrect the lost and embalm the to-be-lost. Perhaps these are, indeed, sorrowful times we live in. If these films compelled me to spend some time imagining this early spiritualist status of cinema—its uncanny ability to re-present its subjects and allow spectators to, once again, see them moving, visibly alive in spite of whether or not they’ve passed on—I was provoked to spend just as much time, if not more, contemplating the present status and function of a cinema of grief, of mourning, of poetic cine-dirges and dramatized mortality, and the moral stakes of manufacturing an image of a death when no authentic documentation is known to exist.

Such are the primary concerns of Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine and, to a lesser extent, Antonio Campos’ Christine, which together made for the kind of serendipitous dual premiere that one would think could only be either purposely coordinated or mathematically impossible were it not for the evidence suggesting their corresponding productions were, in fact, a matter of chance. For both projects, the filmmakers tasked themselves with representing the life and death of Christine Chubbuck, a Florida news reporter who killed herself on live television in 1974. With this incident taking place well before the advent of DVR, the only known tape to have been printed of Chubbuck’s suicide either no longer exists or is in the hands of someone who will apparently only part with it over his or her dead body, making the document something of a holy grail for snuff aficionados. It was only a matter of time, then, until someone decided to re-enact her death for the silver screen, which would, regardless of artistic intent or approach, result in some abstract appeasement of our collective desire for an image we’ve so far been left to conjure with our imaginations. So the decision to finally go through with it clearly carried an immense degree of moral responsibility and risk, and the miracle here is not so much that we got two Chubbuck films at once, but rather that both films wound up implicitly arguing against the other.

Per happenstance, I ended up seeing Campos’ first. His is the more straightforward dramatic work—not unlike, in some sense, Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), a film alleged to have been inspired by Chubbuck’s death—and was thus crafted with artful camerawork and lighting, and is reliant on the world-class thespian talents of, among others, Rebecca Hall (as Christine) and J. Smith-Cameron (her mother) to deliver credible performances while they inhabit, with utmost verisimilitude, the fractured psychologies of their characters. Having seen and liked Greene’s Actress (2014), I watched Christine with his potential counterarguments in mind, and to my surprise found very little there to be objectionable or egregious. The Borderline team—Campos in particular—have in their 13 years of operation established their brand as America’s realist purveyors of the psychologically disturbed, yet Christine manages to do something very tricky: it utilizes Chubbuck’s milieu and our awareness of her fate to develop a thesis about the artifice and the performance of happiness in late-Vietnam America, and it does so in a way that never undermines the singularity of Chubbuck’s psychological experience. This is in many ways the same cluster of themes Campos built into Afterschool (2008), albeit for a different moment in history; but however irksome it is that he would use Chubbuck’s story as a backdrop for forwarding his own auteurist project, I was ultimately impressed, if a bit conflicted, by the subdued force provided in his film’s restraint and its final grace notes.

Conversely, Greene’s take in Kate Plays Christine is all about the denial of grace notes; or rather, about the “problematics” of following through on the promise of its premise. Just as he did in Actress, Greene here aims to demolish the arbitrary delineations separating fiction and documentary, and does so by once again following an actress—this time, the great New York-based Kate Lyn Sheil—who begins to question the degree to which she and her moral standards can be removed from the obligations of her craft. We see footage of Sheil researching the role of Chubbuck—interviewing those she knew, who worked with her at the station, or who now work at places she used to visit—and taking on her likeness via tanning sessions (ultraviolet and spray-on), wig and costume fittings, and viewing broadcast tapings to study her behaviour. The extent to which Sheil’s visits and encounters were staged is always at least somewhat ambiguous, no doubt per Greene’s wont; this imbues the project’s making-of facade with an effective degree of mystery, introducing a palpable tension that is as unnerving as it may be ultimately pointless. But that potential pointlessness, that moral uncertainty, is part of what keeps the viewing experience active, so it was with great disappointment that Greene and/or Sheil opted to blanket the project’s complexities with a contrived, off-puttingly sententious climax that may or may not be a direct attack on the existence of Campos’ project.

Kate Plays Christine’s final moments, while not really working within its own context, do open up when placed next to Christine, and the two together end up mapping out something towards a politics of commemoration. As an interviewee in Greene’s film suggests, the re-utterance of history, and therefore loss, is a means for precluding death—“You die two times; you die when you pass away and you die again the last time somebody mentions your name”—and when it comes to representation, and this is especially true with cinema, there are right and wrong ways of re-uttering, of resurrecting what we’ve lost: good mourning and bad mourning; good grief, bad grief. Over in NEXT, Tim Sutton’s well-intentioned but ill-conceived Dark Night, a tone elegy about the 2012 Aurora shooting at a The Dark Knight Rises screening, is an example of bad grief. Dramatizing—or is it documenting? “evoking? —the Colorado tragedy in languid vignettes set to Maica Armata’s treacly indie rock, Dark Night often feels tasteless. For much of the film’s running time, Sutton snatches at our sympathies with plaintive images of the America that lax gun laws hath wrought, and a soundscape that always threatens to unleash a boo scare, including occasions such as when a group of offscreen teens start screaming bloody murder, drawing our adrenaline until we realize that, false alarm, they were just kidding around.

Film Comment: Michael Sragow October 14, 2016

The anti-heroine of Antonio Campos’s Christine, Christine Chubbuck, is a driven, idealistic reporter at a tiny Sarasota, Florida UHF station in the mid-1970s, who’s striving to perfect her craft and advance her career while serving her adopted community for her signature public-affairs show, Suncoast Digest. Christine (Rebecca Hall) lives with her divorced mother Peg (J. Smith-Cameron), volunteers as a puppeteer to entertain and educate disabled children, and hopes that a handsome coworker, George Peter Ryan (Michael C. Hall), a savvy fellow with a twinkle in his eye, might have a gleam just for her.

She’s been at the station for a year when, as screenwriter Craig Shilowich tells it, the fabric of her life comes apart, just before she turns 30. Her boss (Tracy Letts) takes up the brand-new guideline “If it bleeds, it leads” and devalues the careful, constructive work she’s been doing on zoning regulations and the environment. While Peg readily strikes up a relationship with a new man, Christine has yet to have a single date. She feels piercing abdominal pain, experiences spotting, and worries about her ability to have children. Even her work friend Jean Reed (Maria Dizzia), a segment producer and camerawoman, commits what Chris regards as a professional betrayal. On top of that, the station’s owner (John Cullum) comes looking for talent to move up to his station in Baltimore (a top 30 market). While all this is happening, George finally asks her out for dinner and promises to take her someplace where they “can talk.” By the time she buys a gun, you know she’s going to use it, and not on anybody else.

With its lightning-round rendering of the precipitous dips in a pathos-riddled life, Christine operates like a socially conscious docudrama on steroids. It limns the pressures a Seventies woman would put on herself “to have it all” while it assembles a critique of the sensationalism that local TV stations fell into with the rise of “eyewitness news teams.” But the movie neither gels nor clarifies its points as it goes along. Compelling moment by moment, it ends up a blood-streaked blur.

Christine Chubbuck is, of course, the broadcaster who sat at the WXLT anchor desk in Sarasota on July 15, 1974, and announced, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in ‘blood and guts’, and in living color, you are going to see another first—attempted suicide.” Then she shot herself behind her right ear. The movie banks that our mixture of fascination and dread will keep us pinned to our seats. Even viewers ignorant of the outcome will recognize that Christine is in a death spiral. The film isn’t exploitative. Hall’s all-in performance projects Chubbuck’s weaknesses as well as her strengths without any editorial underlining. With steely ambition and rampaging insecurity, Hall’s Christine combines professionalism, intelligence, and even some artistic intuition. She pushes Jean to add a final bit of film to a segment seconds before airtime. But she isn’t a broadcast natural. She reads copy expertly but rigidly. Her enunciation is impeccable; her emphases and little jokes perfectly calibrated. Her posture is rigid and her demeanor inexpressive.

Campos and Shilowich whip up narrative momentum without relying on our rooting interest for Christine, who is alternately sympathetic and excruciating. The movie compresses events to achieve pressure-cooker intensity. It alters details for the same reason—for example, according to Sally Quinn’s exhaustive report in the August 4, 1974 Washington Post, George was not a star news anchor but a stockbroker who came in to read stock reports on the station’s news shows. But the film is hardly manipulative, meretricious, or clinical. It lets us discover Christine’s psychological history along the way. She confesses to her doctor that she took—and disliked—antidepressants. During a rant against her mother—heartbreaking for both women—she refers to a psychological meltdown she had at her a previous home base, Boston, suggesting bipolar disorder and/or suicidal depression.

In a vanity-free performance, the tall, lissome Hall creates a woman who seems to be fighting to breathe free as she lurches forward with her life—when she isn’t fighting for airtime. Hall pulls us into the vortex of a very divided character. Christine desperately tries to adapt herself to a hyped-up TV-news environment. She plants a police scanner in her girly pink bedroom and glues her ear to it at night for reports of crimes and calamities. But when she races with Jean to a fire, she ignores the roaring blaze and focuses solely on the victim, a man who has repeatedly fallen asleep holding cigarettes and now fears the loss of his insurance. In that instance she turns out unappreciated art when her employer would prefer trash. At other times she merely seems desperate or delusional. Hypersensitive about herself, insensitive to everyone else, she’s a magnet for micro-aggressions. Every real or perceived slight from her mother, her coworkers, and her bosses wounds her disproportionately.

Campos tunes his direction to micro-nuance. He enables us to enjoy newsroom banter yet pick up on how it goes sour, or to judge how strange it must be for a couple of young lovers when Christine intrudes on them at a restaurant, then introduces herself as a reporter on the lookout for positive stories (she’s actually being embarrassingly wistful about her own lack of a love life). With his cameraman, Joe Anderson, Campos doesn’t shoot the action from predictable angles, or, with his editor, Sofia Subercaseaux, cut it according to familiar rhythms. The technical team and the ensemble work together seamlessly to convey how Christine feels when she’s moving in and out of synch with her colleagues, at the station and, even more stunningly, when the group gathers for a party at the owner’s house. She glides through like a workaholic wraith.

When it had its premiere at Sundance, Christine was immediately compared to Nightcrawler and, especially, Broadcast News: Hall’s Christine Chubbuck, like Holly Hunter’s Jane Craig, is the smartest person in the room and a bundle of insecurities. But Nightcrawler is a great nightmare satire about tabloid media breeding hollow men and women, while Broadcast News is an intelligent, charming light comedy about love and ambition among newsroom elites. When I was considering why Christine left me unsatisfied, and why Hall’s performance never quite reached greatness, the most useful comparison was to a very different movie—Jack Clayton’s masterpiece The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), based on Brian Moore’s 1955 novel about “spinsterhood,” featuring Maggie Smith’s triumphant performance, as Judith Hearne, a single Dublin piano teacher who misperceives the attentions of her landlady’s brother (Bob Hoskins) much as Christine does George’s. Her circumstances are entirely different, but her personal frustration is identical. Being a virgin at 29 or 30 in sun-kissed Sarasota is as mortifying for Christine as being one at roughly 50 is for Judith in lace-curtain Dublin. (“She was a spinster at 29 and it bothered her,” her mother summarized for a TV reporter.) Yet Hall and Campos don’t make us feel the sensual frustration beneath Christine’s surface, the way Smith and Clayton do with Judith’s. Christine does give us one lovely moment when Chubbuck, anticipating a date, relaxes while conducting an interview and for an instant seems warm and sexy—perhaps star material. But the movie and the performance fail to illuminate what’s holding her back. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is an outcry against the rigidity of Ireland’s Roman Catholic Church and the manipulations of Judith’s tyrannical aunt (Wendy Hiller). In Christine, the protagonist wails about her mother’s “hippie baloney,” which supposedly leaves her baffled by life. To the audience, though, her mother is a well-meaning woman stumbling forward on her own path to happiness.

Disappointingly, Christine coheres mostly as a put-down of the bad clothes, banal pop songs, and self-help therapies of the 1970s, the decade that gave rise to the workplace comedy of sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and WKRP in Cincinnati. Campos has assembled a crackerjack cast for Christine’s work-mates. Early on, as George, Michael C. Hall is wonderfully funny and appealing. He suggests that he’s more than just a news hunk; he connects to Christine’s conflicts. So it’s crushing for her, and for us, when George’s secret wisdom turns out to be the Me Decade’s favorite pop psychology, Transactional Analysis; at moments of crisis, he’s reduced to repeating, “I’m OK, You’re OK.” Maria Dizzia gives an even more engaging performance as Christine’s friend Jean. Empathy streaks across her face as she registers her pal’s fluctuations. She’s touching when she urges Christine to “play hooky”—join her on an ice cream run and sing along with tunes on the AM hit parade, as Jean does when she gets the blues. Sure enough, she reacts to Christine’s suicide by scarfing down three scoops of ice cream and humming the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song (aka “Love is All Around”).

Is the movie blaming the culture at large for Christine’s floundering and for her colleagues’ inability to offer any meaningful help? For the audience, the problem seems to lie more with Christine herself—who she is, under that pressure, in that culture. According to the Post story following her death, R. Thomas Beason, a Presbyterian minister, said at her funeral: “We suffer at our sense of loss, we are frightened by her rage, we are guilty in the face of her rejection, we are hurt by her choice of isolation and we are confused by her message.” The movie conveys her rage, rejection, and isolation, but unfortunately doubles down on the confusion.

Christine Stays in the Picture | New Republic Miriam Bale, October 12, 2016

The New Yorker: Richard Brody October 19, 2016

Why a Reporter's 1974 Televised Suicide Resonates Now More Than ... Elle Shechet from Jezebel, October 13, 2016

How Chubbuck's Suicide Video Is a 'Holy Grail' -- Vulture Abraham Riesman, January 29, 2016

Director Antonio Campos on Christine's Ending -- Vulture Kevin Lincoln

Vulture: Bilge Ebiri January 31, 2016

Rolling Stone: Sam Adams October 13, 2016

Filmmaker: Vadim Rizov January 25, 2016

Sundance Review: Antonio Campos' 'Christine' Starring A ... - IndieWire Noel Murray

Christine :: Movies :: Reviews :: CHRISTINE - Paste Magazine Kenji Fujishima

Tragedy on screen: Two films grapple with the short life of Christine ... F.S from The Economist

NPR: Scott Tobias October 13, 2016

Review: CHRISTINE, An Essential Report on the Art ... - ScreenAnarchy Ben Umstead

Brooklyn Magazine: Benjamin Mercer October 13, 2016

The A.V. Club: Mike D'Angelo October 13, 2016

Slant: Matt Brennan

Spectrum Culture [Jesse Cataldo]

The Village Voice: Melissa Anderson October 12, 2016

Time: Stephanie Zacharek October 14, 2016

Indiewire: Eric Kohn January 24, 2016

Grolsch Canvas [Nick Chen]

theartsdesk.com [Tom Birchenough]

The Kim Newman Website (Kim Newman)

Film Racket [Norm Schrager]

PopOptiq [Dylan Griffin]

Film School Rejects [Eric D. Snider]

Ozus' World [Dennis Schwartz]

Westender Vancouver [Thor Diakow]

Senses of Cinema: Bérénice Reynaud March 19, 2016

Brooklyn Magazine: John Oursler February 01, 2016

Letterboxd: Preston Wilder October 10, 2016

Daily | Sundance 2016 | Antonio Campos's CHRISTINE - Fandor Daily David Hudson

Rebecca Hall on starring in Christine: 'It's about her life ... - The Guardian Nigel M. Smith interviews actress Rebecca Hall, October 14, 2016

Rebecca Hall in 'Christine': Sundance Review | Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

'Christine' Review: Rebecca Hall Wows In Strong Christine Chubbuck ... Guy Lodge from Variety

Christine review: Rebecca Hall astonishes in real-life horror story ... Nigel M. Smith from The Guardian

Christine Chubbuck: True story of televised suicide behind two of this ... Christopher Hooton from The Independent, January 26, 2016

Christine Chubbuck suicide video 'has been located' | The Independent Christopher Hooton, June 9, 2016

Death by television: why did Christine Chubbuck commit suicide live ... Horatia Harrod from The Telegraph, October 2, 2016

Sally Quinn's article about Chubbuck for the Washington Post August 4, 1974

Dallas Film Now [Joe Baker]

The Los Angeles Times: Justin Chang

San Diego CityBeat: Glenn Heath Jr. November 01, 2016

Christine Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Sheila O’Malley

Review: In 'Christine,' Why Did She Pull the Trigger? We Don't Know ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, October 13, 2016, also seen here: The New York Times: Manohla Dargis and at The Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Movie Review: 'Christine'

Christine (2016 film) - Wikipedia

Christine Chubbuck - Wikipedia

Christine Chubbuck Suicide Video (Recorded in 1974) | Lost Media ...

Camus, Marcel

Marcel Camus Sight and Sound (link lost), also seen here: The Encyclopedia of Film - Page 93 - Google Books Result (pdf)

Camus was a professor of painting and sculpture before breaking into film as an assistant to Alexandre Astruc, 'Georges Rouquier' and Jacques Becker, among others. During this period he made his first film, a short documentary called Renaissance Du Havre (1950). Like many French film-makers whose first chance to direct a feature came in the postwar era, Camus chose to deal explicitly with the issue of personal sacrifice in the context of war. But unlike most of his colleagues who quite naturally dealt with WWII, Camus took as his subject the war in Indochina. Camus then embarked on three films in collaboration with writer Jacques Viot.

Marcel Camus' work is often characterised by its lyricism, which was central to his films of the 1950s and 60s - Mort en fraude (1957) (aka Fugitive in Saigon), Orfeu Negro (1959) (aka Black Orpheus) and Vivre la nuit (1967). Black Orpheus brought him international acclaim. Winner of the 1959 Palme d'Or at Cannes and an Academy Award as best foreign language film, this exotic modern adaptation of the Greek legend portrays its Orpheus (Breno Mello) as a streetcar conductor who meets his Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) and lives out his legendary destiny during the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.

The next two Camus-Viot collaborations, Bandeirantes, Os (1960) and L'Oiseau de paradis (1962), were generally well received, but neither lived up to the expectations created by Black Orpheus. Vivre la nuit (1967), an affecting portrait of nocturnal Paris, proved successful, but Un été sauvage (1970) was generally recognised as an inauthentic and superficial evocation of young people on vacation in Saint-Tropez.

Camus then returned to the subject of war, this time with a gentle comedy about a Normandy restaurant owner who becomes a hero of the Resistance in spite of himself. Le Mur de l'Atlantique (1970) offered a rich role for comic actor Bourvil, but was essentially a routine commercial product. This unfortunate trend continued with Os Pastores da Noite (1975), and some less notable work for French TV.

BLACK ORPHEUS (Orfeu Negro)

France Italy Brazil (107 mi) 1959

Time Out London review

Winner of the 1959 Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, this retelling of the Orpheus story in carnival-thronged Rio hasn’t altogether escaped the ravages of time. Although Marcel Camus’ film sprang from contemporary currents in Brazil (based on a theatre piece by Vinicius de Moraes, and gaining immeasurably from its classic samba score by fresh talents Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim), it’s still hard to escape the suspicion that the French director is exploiting the abundant local colour for his own purposes. That said, his largely non-professional cast acquit themselves with an appealing sincerity as handsome trolleybus conductor Orfeu (Breno Mello) falls for visiting innocent Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn), despite the fact he’s engaged to the brazen Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira). Romantic intrigue soon gives way to an altogether darker mood though, as Orfeu finds himself unable to protect his new love from the unwelcome attentions of a dark stranger, who makes his fatal strike while the carnival’s at its height and his skeleton outfit blends right in.It’s a film that improves as it goes along, the clunky comedy of the happy favelas eclipsed by an imaginative transposition of the Orphic legend, cleverly using locations such as the city’s missing-persons bureau and a Macumba ceremony seemingly halfway between revivalist meeting and voodoo frenzy. Presumably, this ethnographic aspect impressed at the time, but nowadays it’s the incredibly rich whirl of colour and movement captured by Jean Bourgoin’s gorgeous cinematography and the timelessly appealing soundtrack (inspiration for a subsequent generation of jazzmen) that continue to cast a spell. A mixed bag then, but the highlights are memorable.

Black Orpheus BFI Screen Online (link lost)

In 1959 Black Orpheus introduced the world to the music, sensuality and colour of Rio de Janeiro's Carnival and gave jazz hipsters a new, infectious style - the bossa nova. The film is based on a Brazilian play inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Described as "one of the year's best 10 best films", Marcel Camus' dazzling feature won both the Palme d'Or and the Oscar for best foreign language film.

The hillside slums of Rio de Janeiro, populated by an all-black cast, are alive with anticipation. Everyone is preparing for Carnival, not least Orpheus, a seductive guitar player with an exquisite voice, who's far more interested in getting his guitar out of hock than in buying an engagement ring for his fiancée Mira. He falls in love with Eurydice who's just arrived in town, escaping her village where she's being pursued by a sinister stranger. The drums are beating and the frenzy of Carnival is irresistible...

The impressive cast is led by Breno Mello, the handsome Brazilian football player who plays Orpheus, and Marpessa Dawn as Eurydice, whilst the cast of four thousand extras came free when word got out that a mock carnival had hit the streets of Rio! But the real star of Black Orpheus is samba. Long outlawed as a subversive expression of black slave culture, samba was banned from the Rio Carnival by the Brazilian authorities until the 1930s. By the late 1950s it had been revitalised as bossa nova, and it was Black Orpheus - with its legendary soundtrack by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa - that introduced the world to a sound and spirit which still sets pulses racing today.

Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review

The Orpheus legend is transposed to Rio at the time of Carnival, in this international success which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. Orpheus (Breno Mello) is a tram driver who is also an inspired musician. Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) is a naive country girl who comes to the city to stay with her sister. The acting tends to be crude - some of the supporting cast shout their lines in an annoying manner. And Camus and his writers don't know how to go very deeply into the mythical elements. (Death as a guy in a black leotard may inspire more laughter than dread.) Despite all this, the picture has a vibrantly colorful look, and the carnival atmosphere, with marvelous music and dancing, is seductive indeed. Perhaps because of the film's very naivete, it also succeeds in creating a feeling of youthful passion and romance. And Dawn, the director's wife, is as lovely a Eurydice as one could ask for. Not a great film by any means, Black Orpheus is still a luscious entertainment.

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]

James Bowman review

Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris

Music samples from Black Orpheus soundtrack

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

Canby, Vincent – film critic

Movie Reviews - Movies - New York Times There are over 1000 film reviews listed written by Vincent Canby for The New York Times

Review Listings - Theater - New York Times There are 42 theater reviews listed written by Vincent Canby for The New York Times

Canby, Vincent essay by Gerald Peary

Bob Hope, Comedic Master and Entertainer of Troops, Dies at 100 Bob Hope obituary written by Vincent Canby for the New York Times

village voice > film > Vincent Canby, 1924-2000 by Amy Taubin Canby’s obituary written by Amy Taubin from the Village Voice, October 25 – 31, 2000

Four Hairdressers in Heat; Remembering Vincent Canby | The New ... reflections on Canby by Andrew Sarris from the New York Observer, October 29, 2000

Romancing the Screen memorial reflections by Stuart Klawans from the Nation, November 9, 2000

Andy Warhol 23: Andrea Feldman R.I.P. Warholian reflections on Canby by Candy Darling

Filmmakers Call Vincent Canby's Life Overlong, Poorly Paced | The ... The Onion takes a stab at criticizing Canby’s demise

Columbia College Today Film Criticism Comes of Age, an excerpt from Philip Lopate’s Introduction to his book, American Movie Critics

The Evening Class: FILM CRITICISM BLOGATHON—Phillip Lopate: PFA ... Michael Guillen covers the same Lopate speech on his blog

Vincent Canby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Canet, Guillaume

TELL NO ONE (Ne le dis à personne) B+ 92

France (125 mi) 2006 ‘Scope

A thoroughly enjoyable yet somewhat improbable suspense thriller that keeps the audience on their toes throughout with a constantly shifting storyline and well developed characters all of whom are somehow squeezed into the action of this lurid murder mystery. Opening with Otis Redding singing the Impressions song “For Your Precious Love,” a happily married couple appears consumed with that smiley face kind of happiness whenever they look in each another’s eyes, a sure sign that something soon will wipe that smile right off their faces. But first, we are treated to the idyllic lives of François Cluzet as Alex Beck (a case study of a young Dustin Hoffman, think “Is it safe?” from MARATHON MAN in 1976) and Marie-José Crozée as his attractive wife Margot as they retreat to a secluded summer home on a lake where flashbacks remind us that they were secret admirers here on this same spot even as kids. Now, it’s skinny dipping under the moonlight, but the romance is still kindling. When Margot swims ashore, a short scream reminds as that all is not right. When Alex runs to the rescue, he’s coldcocked before he has a chance to intercede. Without any more information, the innercard then reads, “Eight years later.” Adapted by the director and a co-writer from a Harlan Coben novel, this is film with an attitude that offers plots and subplots, first class performances from zany characters to relish, unexpected situations that add multiple layers of suspense, not to mention plenty of police procedural details. We soon learn that two dead bodies were recently unearthed at the same site, that Alex was originally a prime suspect in his wife’s murder and that bad blood remains with the police. We see flashback images of the coffin being cremated, so a body was found, identified by her father in a bruised, slashed, and deteriorated state, one of many suspected victims of a local serial killer who was tried and convicted. Case closed, only to be reopened again now due to new details coming to light where Alex is once more the prime suspect.

Alex is a successful family pediatrician with a skill for relating to children, who shows exemplary tolerance for his sister, Marina Hands, whose marriage to another woman is none other than Kristin Scott Thomas who’s never looked better, the shrill, overwrought Jill Clayburgh of her generation who is surprisingly toned down here and is one of the best things in the film, perhaps Alex’s best friend since his wife’s death, always offering a lucid thought to go along with a sympathetic ear while apparently keeping her eyes on the ladies. Alex continues to mourn Margot’s loss and keeps in close touch with her parents. A subplot soon develops making sure the viewer is constantly fed new clues, this one involving a certain rich lord, Senator Nueville (Jean Rochefort) who has a fascination for all things equestrian, as does Alex’s sister, who is a champion rider, but Nueville’s son, played by the director himself, has a fascination for young boys, so of course he also turns up dead. With the addition of a few more sordid details, provided by a hangdog police investigator François Berléand, we learn Margot was severely beaten shortly before she died, that photos were kept in a safety deposit box lying in the pocket of one of the unearthed deceased bodies, and that she may have lied to protect someone before she died. In another subplot unbeknown to anyone, we see a man and woman team of thugs, including the ultimate villain, the sadistically slender Mikaela Fisher, known only as Zak, who is the heavy with a propensity to hurt people. These two have apparently tapped into Alex’s computer, where he is receiving strange YouTube images indicating Margot may be alive with specific instructions to tell no one, that it isn’t safe, which increases his paranoia that the police may be covering up something, such as the missing autopsy photos of his dead wife and the continued collection of planted clues that point to him as the prime suspect. When Margot’s best friend turns up dead, one of Zak’s victims, Alex is framed for the murder, which leads his sister to call the country’s most notorious defense attorney, Nathalie Baye who is scintillating in the role, multi-tasking by doing 5 things at once all while talking on her cell phone, alerting Alex of his impending arrest. While all of these stories and possibilities are swirling around onscreen, Alex does the only thing left for him to do, jump out the window and run when the police are about to arrest him.

Alex’s escape is classic, beautifully captured by cinematographer Christophe Offenstein, giving the audience a visceral feel for his situation by initially shooting in close range as he’s chased down by apprehending officers, but after a dozen or so quick turns, he’s gained little ground, so he jettisons himself over a fence and risks his life crossing a busy freeway circling Paris with cars traveling 80 miles per hour. Reaching the other side, it’s as if he’s entered a new world of a North African street bazaar. Suddenly we’re in the housing projects where police are heckled and despised. He jumps into a rat-filled dumpster where Alex fends them off while calling his secret weapon on his cell phone, Bruno, played by Gilles Lillouche, the father of one of his patients known for working in black market contraband. Bruno is without a doubt the best thing going for this movie (I checked: he’s made 11 movies since this one, with two others currently under production), stealing every scene he’s in as if he’s a character from another film, like Vincent Cassel from LA HAINE or HATE (1995), a super edgy, ultra realistic drama portraying life in the hood. Bruno knows how to work the housing projects, followed wherever he goes by his gigantic bodyguard called Mouss (François Bredon), a three hundred pound monster of a man who would intimidate anybody. The two driving around in their black SUV are a force to be reckoned with and their presence gives this film a shot of adrenaline and well needed humor. Bruno figures in some of the more significant scenes of the film and he gets the biggest laugh. But the film is not about Bruno, it’s about bringing all these intangible subplots together through the ingenious use of multiple flashbacks, actually embedding multiple stories within other stories and somehow making them work. In the end, it feels all too easy, perhaps spelled out in too much detail as the thrill ride is exhilarating but also exhausting, but well worth it making exquisite use of music, including a fabulous extended sequence with U2’s “With or Without You,” where the film is brilliantly enhanced by the composer, guitarist Mathieu Chedid as M, who wrote the moody, original score.

Tell No One J.R. Jones from the Reader

"Wait, there's more," cautions a character in this French mystery (2006) after peeling away numerous layers of intrigue--and he's not kidding. After a family gathering, a pediatrician (Francois Cluzet) and his wife (Marie-Josee Croze) stop by their favorite lake for some nocturnal skinny-dipping, but their idyll ends with the wife murdered and the husband beaten and baffled about what transpired in the darkness. Eight years later the cops have pinned the crime on a serial killer but still suspect the husband, who's pulled back into the past by a cryptic e-mail indicating his wife is still alive. Cluzet's brooding performance propels the movie, and writer-director Guillaume Canet, best known here for his own acting work in Joyeux Noel and Love Me if You Dare, skillfully orchestrates the cascading revelations. With Andre Dussollier, Nathalie Baye, and Kristin Scott Thomas. In French with subtitles. 125 min.

François Cluzet, who looks like Daniel Auteuil and runs like Dustin Hoffman, simmers beautifully as a Paris pediatrician who, eight years after the brutal murder of his beloved wife (Marie-Josée Croze), receives an e-mailed video purporting to show her alive. His search for her or her captors is, to understate the situation, complicated by their search for him and the growing suspicions of the police—who reopen the case after two more corpses pop up—that the doc is his wife's killer. That I can't parse the plot of Tell No One without recourse to multiple subordinate clauses gives you some idea of the labyrinthine twists in Guillaume Canet's soignée adaptation of Harlan Coben's rather less elegant crime thriller. Among the movie's many delights are the fluctuating rhythms of its pacing, an atmospheric volatility that sets off the doctor's blooming paranoia against his sunlit, leafy surroundings, and a terrific cast that includes Kristin Scott Thomas as a bitchy lesbian with heart and a quietly funny François Berléand as an obsessive-compulsive detective. Canet's grasp of the way institutional and personal corruption feed on each other is sure, though his excursion into France's racial wars gilds the lily of a plot that already creaks with complication. Crucially, though, the love story at the movie's heart is flat, cliché, and much less engaging than the satisfying mixed motives of its lively supporting characters.

cinemattraction (Sarah Manvel)

Hitchcock's "Wrong Man" scenario gets an invigorating French update in Tell No One, a long-winded but gripping thriller based on American author Harlan Coben's bestseller. Writer-director Guillaume Canet has a preference for awkwardly shoehorned-in pop songs and self-conscious slow-mo pans around characters. Fortunately, such attributes do little to hinder the mounting tension of his tale (co-written by Philippe Lefebvre), which involves a pediatrician named Alex Beck (François Cluzet) who, eight years after his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) was apparently slain by a serial killer, receives an email with a link to a recent video clip of an alive-and-well Margot and a message to "Tell no one. We're being watched." Such a shock is compounded by the cops' discovery of two bodies at the lake where Margot was murdered, one of them in possession of the key to a safety deposit box containing Alex's rifle and photos of a badly beaten Margot. Suffice to say, revelations soon begin piling on top of one another, with Canet giddily orchestrating the harassed plight of Alex, who's suspected of foul play (twice-over) by the cops, and followed by a group of thugs that includes a scary woman who likes to abuse bodily pressure points. Factoring into the overcrowded narrative is a raft of French notables, from Marina Hands as Alex's equestrian sister, to François Berléand as the detective who comes to believe in Alex's innocence (a fact that, in one of many debts to the Hitch template, is a given from the outset), to Jean Rochefort as a senator still grieving over the death of his beloved son. Because too many stars is never enough for a crackling suspense yarn, Kristin Scott Thomas also shows up as Hands's loyal lesbian wife, speaking (as in The Valet) impeccable French that's far more convincing than the story's escalating zigzags. Questions of believability, however, are in the end irrelevant to Tell No One, a film whose entertainingly fleet (and sometimes downright harried) pace—highlighted by Alex's on-foot flight from cops through city streets and across a teeming highway—and enticing central mysteries deliver the tangy kicks one craves from juicy pulp.

Alexandre Beck (François Cluzet) is a quiet pediatrician in Paris, known for his good judgment and excellent rapport with his patients. But his life is not so simple; eight years ago, his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) was murdered at their country house by a notorious serial killer. When a policeman arrives at Beck’s clinic with news that two more bodies have been found on the property, all the old nightmares come back with a vengeance – even more so when he opens an e-mail from his dead wife.

This cracking premise leads us into a mostly satisfying thriller through the parts of Paris (street markets, squalid housing projects, and busy parks) mostly unknown to movie fans. Guillaume Canet’s film, shot almost entirely in dazzling sunshine, shows this most cinematic of cities with new eyes. And yet Tell No One, which won four Césars, relies on many genre clichés which are as stale as old Camembert.

Fortunately, the pace moves along so fast and so assuredly there’s no time to dwell on everything we’ve seen before. Adapted from the best-selling American novel by Harlan Coben, the film’s translation to a French setting works extremely well, although Canet and co-writer Philippe Lefebvre chose to change the names of the characters (and calling the heroine Margot is a clue to people who know their French history). However, in getting through so many plot twists into 125 minutes, Canet forgets to linger on the remarkable performances, most notably that of Kristin Scott Thomas. As Hélène, Alex’s sister-in-law, Scott Thomas holds your focus every time she is on screen. Famous for her “English roses”, she has lived in Paris for 20 years, but this is the first time most Anglophone audiences will have seen this side of her.

Indeed most of the cast are vaguely recognizable as solid supporting players to fans of French movies. Consummate professionals all of them, there’s not a duff performance in the film. Unfortunately they are let down by a plot which offers some very familiar thrills, without the creepiness in Crimson Rivers or the odd-couple protagonists of Read My Lips.

The trouble with most thrillers is their disposability; once you know the ending you don’t need to see it again. What is new in Tell No One is Canet’s attitude towards violence involving women, a necessarily essential component to a thriller. The fights where women are injured are filmed without the titillation or puerile enjoyment which makes so many action films quasi-pornographic. In Jean Goudier’s sound design, where slaps echo like gunshots, and Christophe Offenstein’s dispassionate cinematography, the violence is treated clinically, similarly to the CSI franchise’s autopsies. The occasional nudity is handled in the same unfussy fashion, an attitude hard to imagine in an American film.

The women in Tell No One can be so strong and fearless that their occasional moments of vulnerability are the most shocking in the film. At one point, a woman is shot in the back of a van (to reveal more would spoil it). She actually gets out, shuts the door, and starts walking normally down a busy street. The man who shot her has to follow her, gun drawn, until she collapses; then he’s the one who turns away and runs. This is only Canet’s second film as director, although he’s a huge star in France (and even had a supporting role in The Beach). If he continues to direct women with similar panache, he will really be on to something.

Tony Medley

Here’s another gem of a film that lots of people will avoid because it’s in French with subtitles. Too bad for them.

Alexandre Beck (François Cluzet) is a baby doctor whose wife, Margot (Marie-Josee Croze), was murdered eight years previously. He starts getting mysterious email messages with a picture of a woman who looks like his wife. Then the police want to reopen the investigation, accusing him of killing her. Compounding things is his relationship with his father in law, Jacques Larentin (Andre Dusollier), who was the policeman who identified his own daughter.

Directed and written (with Phillippe Lefebvre) by Guillaume Canet (who also appears in the film as Phillippe Neuville), the film is based on Harlan Coben’s bestselling novel of the same name, which has been translated into 27 languages, and has sold over 6 million copies worldwide.

It’s always difficult to write a review of a good thriller because anything a critic writes can spoil the enjoyment of a fresh viewing without knowing what’s going on and what’s going to happen. I’ve already told too much, but the way Canet sets the ambience of the film at the start, you’d have to be dull, indeed, not to know that something pretty bad is about to happen.

Cluzet, who is a dead ringer for a young Dustin Hoffman, gives a remarkably compelling performance of a man who has lost the love of his life. The film flashes back to Alex and Margot as prepubescent children, already so much in love with each other that they exchange a sweet kiss.

Music plays a big part in most thrillers, and this is no exception. What’s unusual is that the music came from one single screening for guitarist Matthieu Chedid. Canet wanted him to play live over the movie and improvise while he was watching the film. So they had one single screening and Matthieu played along. Says Canet, “The amazing thing is that the music is an integral part of the movie. You hardly notice it but it’s the most vital element. It builds raw emotion without being omnipresent. That was one of the best artistic encounters of my life.”

Although the announced running time is 125 minutes, Canet says that the editing was extremely difficult, “One evening, I was talking with Matthieu Cheded, who said that the reason why Beatles songs are so short and so good is that they are so condensed. All that’s left is the best. That really meant something for me. The next day, in editing, I took out quarter of an hour of the film. (Film editor) Hervé de Luze found a rhythm that I really liked.”

The film was shot with two cameras with Canet operating the hand held camera himself. “That offers huge freedom to express yourself,” he says. “By going right where you want to go, it allows you to be very fluid in your handling of the actors.”

Even though there was a lot of improvisation on this film, the opening scene is the only one that wasn’t scripted. Says Canet, “The night we shot it, we had a drink and I told them it was up to them to improvise. I had a Steadycam moving round the table and told them to talk among themselves. They were free to say what they wanted. I wanted it to be alive, and for people to cut into each other’s conversations. At the beginning they panicked, but they wound up having a lot of fun.”

Only one scene was storyboarded, when Alex runs across the Paris Beltway. Says Canet, “We had one day with eight cameras to get it in the can. We were incredibly lucky. No one was hurt and we got exactly what we wanted.”

This is, by far, the best film I’ve seen this year. In French.

Enough talk; enough flashbacks. Sometimes the best thing a mystery can do is give its protagonist a reason to run like hell.

The example of the year arrives midway through the French thriller “Tell No One.” A pediatrician wrongly accused of murder is being chased by the police. The doctor zigzags across the Paris beltway, narrowly avoiding traffic. The way the sequence is shot and edited, you believe every second; it unfolds, nervously, the way something like this would actually happen. It’s on the money, this brief, memorable scene: tense and sharp but not overblown.

These qualities apply to the acting as well. Under the direction of Guillaume Canet, who adapted Harlan Coben’s English-language best seller with Philippe Lefebvre, this is a splendid ensemble doing its level best to keep the audience guessing all the way through an increasingly knotty narrative. Francois Cluzet, who resembles an elongated Dustin Hoffman, plays the doctor, and the performance is a marvel of containment. He reveals a great deal non-verbally. The man’s grief and cunning come through subtly in each new chapter.

Coben’s story owes debts to Alfred Hitchcock’s wrong-man scenarios, “The Fugitive” and the morally grimy landscape of novelist Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone”). The milieu is as American as apple pie and serial killers. Yet its Gallic transformation works. The story hook remains the same, and it’s pretty irresistible. Eight years after the vicious murder of his wife, whom he had known since they were childhood sweethearts, Dr. Beck receives an e-mail containing a surveillance video of a woman who may be the woman in question, mysteriously alive. She’s played by the superb French-Canadian actress Marie-Josee Croze, last seen as the speech therapist in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

The cryptic e-mail instructs the doctor to keep mum and wait for another message. The police, meantime, have circumstantial evidence implicating the doctor in another murder. The events of the fateful night eight years ago haunt the doctor because they do not add up, and a daisy chain of secrets links that murky past to the increasingly bloody present.

“Tell No One” came out in France in 2006 to enormous success. Subsequently Chicago’s own Music Box Films took a chance on the picture, its third release, following the excellent “Tuya’s Marriage” and the more recent “OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies.” The gamble is paying off, with impressive box office tallies for “Tell No One” in New York and Los Angeles. The film is opening up into a wider American release this week. It’s worth seeing.

The recommendation comes with a caveat. When the resolution arrives, it arrives like a particularly crowded game of Twister. As the truth of the wife’s disappearance emerges, flashback wrestles with flashback, and those of us who tend to get lost in these sorts of explanatory pile-ups, even if the character explaining it all to us is brandishing a loaded gun, may feel that they’ll never get out of “Tell No One” alive.

The actors come to the rescue. Cluzet’s watchful intensity holds you throughout. Andre Dussollier portrays the policeman father of the doctor’s wife, and it’s fascinating to see such a naturally ebullient actor (he sparkled in Alain Resnais’ “Private Fears in Public Places”) trade it all in for a gruff, stern glower. Everyone’s ideally cast: Kristin Scott-Thomas as a lesbian restaurateur; Nathalie Baye as an icy whirlwind of an attorney; and director Canet as the son of a wealthy power broker played by the elegantly sinister Jean Rochefort .

As in the world of Lehane, the circles of corruption widen outward, until those swimming in it can barely see the shore. What I like about this picture—a French policier dropped inside Hollywood pulp fiction—has less to do with its grandiose, dirty-town vision of the evil that men do. I like the opportunities it affords its actors, who elevate every little insinuation and double-cross to a higher level.

The New Yorker (David Denby)

indieWIRE Leo Goldsmith from Reverse Shot

The New York Sun (Darrell Hartman)

Reel.com [Chris Barsanti] also seen here: Filmcritic.com

stylusmagazine.com (Paolo Cabrelli)

Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson

Time Out London (Wally Hammond)

Hollywood Jesus Darrel Manson

Variety.com [Lisa Nesselson]

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

BLOOD TIES

France (144 mi) 2013

Cannes 2013 Review: BLOOD TIES Knots Up 1970s New York Ryland Aldrich at Cannes from Twitch

To call Guillaume Canet's Blood Ties a love letter to the 1970s is a bit of an understatement. The Clive Owen, Billy Crudup brothers-on-opposite-sides-of-the-law drama absolutely oozes with 1970s nostalgia from its impeccable costume and production design to its almost fetishistic use of 1970s music. Even the story is a throwback to the some of the great crime films of the era (not to mention the choice to cast James Caan). While it doesn't quite get every beat right, strong performances and a satisfying plot make it a memory trip worth taking.

Frank (Crudup) has always had a contentious relationship with his older brother Chris (Owen), though as much as he hates to admit it, his decision to become a cop wasn't enough to stop him from looking up to his criminal brother. We catch up with Chris on his release from a lengthy prison sentence as a reluctant Frank succumbs to his sister's (Lili Taylor) pressure to help Chris get back on his feet. Canet (and co-writers James Gray and Jacques Maillot) don't spend a lot of time on exposition, but things move slowly through the rather lengthy first act as we get to know the family, as well as Frank's prostitute ex Monica (Marion Cotillard) and new love interest Natalie (Mila Kunis). We also meet local thug Scarfo (Matthias Schoenaerts) and his girl Vanessa (Zoe Saldana), who just happens to be the former love of Frank's life.

A plotline involving Chris's return to his former profession slowly develops, though far more time is spent throughout the film on family and relationship melodrama. This tends to wear on a bit but the strong performances all around keep it from ever becoming outright painful. When the action does pop off, it comes furiously and is shot with skill. Thankfully, as the runtime increases, the story develops towards an exceptionally satisfying final act.

A European production, some of the cast of Canet's first English language film tends towards atypical. Both Owen's and Cotillard's accents have awkward moments. Though his screen time is on the short side, Schoenaerts's English is flawless and it's great to see the Bullhead star begin to make inroads with American audiences. Zoe Saldana gives a particularly strong performance, and the oft-overlooked leading man Crudup also does well.

What will surely be remembered most about Blood Ties is its strong period production value. From the wonderfully decorated exteriors loaded with the cars of the era to the record players spinning classic hits, 1970s New York absolutely comes alive. While he takes his time getting there, Canet tells an enjoyable story -- and if nothing else, it's clear the director can execute a complex vision.

Blood Ties Fionnuala Halligan at Cannes from Screendaily

There’s ‘70s design porn and there’s Blood Ties, director Guillame Canet’s ambitious foray into hard-boiled Brooklyn crime drama which boasts impeccable costume and production design credits.

At 144 minutes, however, Blood Ties is too sprawling, its fractured narrative cut far too many ways for the film to succeed. A [longer] remake of Les Liens Du Sang written by Canet with Brooklyn’s finest James Gray, it’s an extravagant, bumpy ride - Heat meets Mesrine via Cain and Abel - which hits more than its fair share of potholes on the way.

Overweight cops sweat through polyester and cheap wool, oozing authenticity over the beaten-up locations of Canet’s English-language debut, while the film is anchored by a typically understated performance from Billy Crudup and a more extravagant turn from Clive Owen as good cop brother/bad criminal brother.

For all its flaws, however, there’s something oddly compelling about the scale of Canet’s (Tell No One) vision. The impeccable technical credits, the leached lensing of Christophe Offenstein, a supporting cast that includes James Caan as the patriarch, Marion Cotillard as a druggie hooker, and the brooding Mathias Schoenaerts as a hulking thug: that’s a film with appeal for the Denis Lehane crowd. (Mila Kunis and Zoe Saldana provide further support in girlfriend roles).

James Gray himself is another benchmark – his own Little Odessa worked over very similar ground back in 1994 (not that good/bad brother films are thin on the ground]. Chris (Owen), just released from a 12-year-stint in prison for murder, is a troublesome character, his snarling second-half completely at odds with his earlier attempts to go straight. His younger brother Frank (Crudup) is a respected cop who no longer wants any dealings with his sibling but is persuaded against his better judgment into taking him in and fixing him up with a job.

According to the film’s synopsis, Chris is 50 (although Owen has the boot-black hair of a 20-year-old), and clearly too old to change, embarking on contract jobs to set himself up in a new life and compromising his brother’s integrity. He has two children he couldn’t be less interested in from a relationship with hooker Monica (Cotillard) and embarks on an affair with the much younger Natalie (Mila Kunis).

Frank, meanwhile, can’t keep away from ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Saldana), putting her scary boyfriend Scarfo (Schoenaerts) behind bars on a spurious charge so he can rekindle his relationship with her. And at home, there’s a dying father Leon (Caan), cared for by sister Marie (Taylor).

If that all sounds plot-heavy, it is. Canet the director hasn’t been able to shave Canet the writer’s work, and Canet the husband of Cotillard couldn’t pare back her role either, even though Monica adds little past colour to the piece. She, like most of the secondary characters in Blood Ties, weaves around Brooklyn, arbitrarily zipping in and out of the plot as the film tries out several tones for size. Performances are strong across the board, though, with Owen taking a while to hit the right pitch, and Crudup lending it quiet authority.

When Blood Ties lifts, such as during a bank heist sequence on the streets, it positively soars. Most of the time it paces around, however, threatening to come together but leaving the viewer to attempt to connect the multiple narrative dots (if they even do connect). The ‘70s redolent soundtrack ranges from the unexpected to the cliché. And in a film where the costumes are universally delightful, a pink suit worn by Chris for his wedding positively steals the show.

Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes from The Playlist

Daily | Cannes 2013 | Guillaume Canet’s BLOOD TIES David Hudson at Fandor

Owen Gleiberman at Cannes from Entertainment Weekly

Blood Ties: Cannes Review Todd McCarthy at The Hollywood Reporter

Scott Foundas at Cannes from Variety

Cannes 2013: Blood Ties - first look review Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian

Cantet, Laurent

Review of Cantet's work on DinaView Dina Iordanova

8 July 2006[Arts]: Film-makers on film: Laurent Cantet Sheila Johnston discusses Abdel Kechiche's L'Esquive (2003) with Cantet from The Telegraph

BFI | Sight & Sound | The London Film Festival: The Class - Interview Ginette Vincendeau interviews the director from Sight and Sound, November 2008

Laurent Cantet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LES SANGUINAIRES

France (67 mi) 1997

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

A group of slacker French people decide the upcoming millennium is going to be too plastic and annoying, so they head to a small island off the coast of the country. Soon they're annoying each other, and a donkey ends up dead. In 68 minutes, we're treated to a crude digest of L'Avventura as seen through the eyes of a bunch of hopeless Francs. Part of the "2000 Seen By" series of films about the eve of the millennium, none of which anyone seems to have seen.

User comments from imdb Author: edwartell (edwartell@hotmail.com) from Austin, Texas

This movie finally clawed its way to U.S. distribution as part of the "2000 Seen By" series, six movies from different countries containing the (almost instantly outdated) visions of different filmmakers of what the end of the 20th century (not the real one, but you know what I mean). No doubt someone was sleeping with someone. Les Sanguinaires is a very boring movie about a group of people (French, obviously) who decide to avoid all the hype of the new millennium and spend that time on an isolated, rustic island. Like any good Lord Of The Flies type movie, the predictable sexual tensions and jealousies emerge, along with some semi-mystic events. The problem is that not only is this kind of thing a tired concept, but that it's played at the slowest pace possible, that the characters are none-too-interesting, and that the dialogue is all too realistic. Watch Hal Hartley's Book Of Life instead.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Ressources humaines)

France Great Britain (100 mi) 1999

Business student Franck (Lespert) returns home as a management trainee in the same factory as his father, a tool operator. Like Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité, this rousing and moving drama grandly (and ironically) invokes our peculiar species in its title, even as it's marked by an understated directorial style that minimises visual flourish and favours non-professional actors. But where Dumont applies a mysterious and distanced gaze, Cantet, for all his formal restraint, fashions a film of communicative intimacy, offering a fresh, relevant and challenging view of work, class and family. If the choice of milieu, a concrete industrial satellite of Paris which we first see through Franck's eyes as he journeys home by train, recalls '60s political Godard, so does the film's evolving class-consciousness. But whatever Cantet's political stance, his methods are dramatic, not didactic. His realism is based on acute, telling observation. The film has its faults. Franck's discovery of secret management plans lacks credibility; the skullduggery of the bosses is overdone; and the father is a little too bovine. But these are quibbles.

The Village Voice [Amy Taubin]

On one level, Human Resources is a simple "problem picture" about Franck (Jalil Lespert), a management trainee who gets a job in the same factory where his father (Jean-Claude Vallod) has worked on the assembly line for 30 years, then finds his loyalties tested when his father is among a group of proposed layoffs. But the level on which it’s resonant is as a story about a young man getting his first taste of power and class mobility, and how powerful a deranging force that whiff of self-improvement can be. When he slips into a suit or goes out with friends he feels ever-so-slightly better than, we can see how Franck’s been transformed by the simple promise of a bourgeois life, and it’s frightening to us, if not to him. Directed by Laurent Cantet (Les Sanguinaires), the film’s politics aren’t particularly complicated — you know the ball-busting communist who calls Franck a management pawn will eventually turn out to be right — but it’s not a polemic; like the Dardenne brothers’ La Promesse (and unlike their Rosetta) you feel that the politics emerge from the situation, and not the other way around.

Restrained, tough, and subtle enough to be as engrossing on the second viewing as it was on the first, Laurent Cantet's Human Resources is a film that both Godard and Ken Loach might envy. It combines an eternally alluring subject—the father-son relationship—with one that's a more difficult sell: blue-collar work and the conflict between labor and management.

Human Resources is set in a French factory town where the changeover to the 35-hour week (the real-life current event to which the film is hitched) has the kind of life-or-death urgency that Hollywood screenwriters are paid millions to invent. Frank (Jalil Lespert), an eager-beaver business school student majoring in "human resources," returns home for a management internship at the factory where his father has worked on the assembly line all his adult life. Frank sees himself as the embodiment of enlightened capitalism. He believes that workers and bosses can cooperate toward their mutual benefit, and that, as a worker's son, he's an ideal mediator. But when his pet project—a questionnaire about the 35-hour week—is used as a justification for laying off the oldest workers, his father among them, he burns his bridges with his boss by providing the feisty, unflappable union rep (Danielle Mélador) with enough evidence of management's duplicity to fuel a strike.

Caught between his ambition and his desire to save his father, Frank discovers a working-class consciousness he didn't know he possessed. His father, however, is far from pleased at his son's transformation. Totally identified with his job (he boasts with Stakhanovist pride that he can turn out 700 parts in an hour) and with the working-man ethos, the father nevertheless wants his son to have a better life. Seeing him lunching with the managers is both revenge and a vindication for a lifetime of swallowing shit—although he'd never admit as much to himself. And his own loss of livelihood troubles him less than the possibility that Frank has thrown away his career.

The father is played with remarkable nuance and vulnerability by Jean-Claude Vallod, a bulky but worn middle-aged man with stubborn eyes and a slightly pouting lower lip just discernible beneath his bushy mustache. Like all the actors in the film, with the exception of Lespert, he's a nonprofessional. Cantet filled his cast with workers whom he found in the unemployment office. Using a method similar to Mike Leigh's, he rehearsed with them for about a year before writing a final script based on the characters they developed through improvisation. Across the board, the actors perform with an intelligence and conviction that grows out of their real-life experience. It's an adage that acting is reacting; the most difficult thing for an actor is to react with mixed emotions and contrary desires. Cantet bases his editing scheme on reaction shots, and they draw us into the film by conveying much of what is left unsaid about the power structure that defines life in the factory and in the family.

Just as compelling and tangled as the connection between father and son is the friendship Frank forms with a black worker, Alain (Didier Emile-Woldemard), who's equally alienated but has more insight into the situation. Alain's able to make the case for Frank's father and the pride he takes in his job, so we're able to see him as more than a toady. And it's through him also that Frank comes to an understanding of his own outsider position.

Human Resources was shot on location in a Renault factory, and the actors operate the heavy machinery as only those who've done it for a living can. Like the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta and La Promesse (which also couples oedipal with class struggle) and Olivier Assayas's recent Cannes entry Les Destinées Sentimentales, Human Resources is part of a growing trend in French-language films to make work and the workplace a central concern.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Human Resources (1999) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, December 2000

Louis Proyect

Nitrate Online (Dan Lybarger)

Political Film Review Michael Haas

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara

Chris Dashiell at CineScene

Ressources humaines (1999) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

indieWIRE Stan Schwartz

filmcritic.com Matt Langdon, also seen here: DVD Talk (Matt Langdon)

Review by K. C. Howell

MovieFreak [Howard Schumann]

DVD Talk (Chris Neilson)

Flak Magazine (Eric Wittmershaus)

click here for Human Resources review MaryAnn Johanson from the FlickFilosopher

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Virtual militancy: a conversation with Human Resources filmmaker ... Prarie Miller from the World Socialist Web Site, May 5, 2000

BBC [Michael Thomson]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

TIME OUT (L'emploi du temps) B+ 92

France (134 mi) 2001

Like Cantet's first film, Human Resources, this sober, measured and terribly sad movie explores that most subtle of distinctions: what it is that separates who we are from what we do. Middle-aged executive Vincent (Recoing) has been 'let go', although his redundancy seems self-inflicted, an existential torpor he does everything to conceal from his family. He's transferred his expertise to the UN, he claims, working as a business consultant and persuading old friends to invest in a hush-hush get rich quick scheme. It's insane, yet Vincent's pretence is virtually sufficient to his needs, his assumption of propriety and well-being as good as the real thing. Or put another way, a proper job is scarcely more meaningful than this hollow charade. In Cantet's own words, 'Vincent is the sincerest of liars, an actor of his own life.' It's a profound, measured portrait of a man driven - and driving - with no end in sight.

The Boston Phoenix Chris Fujiwara

In this brooding and chilling film, director Laurent Cantet (Human Resources) has come up with an excellent parable for the new Western economy, with its mobile workers, bland interpersonal style, ideology of personal growth, and addiction to jargon. Rather than break it to his family that he's been laid off, businessman Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) pretends to have started a new job that requires him to spend most of the week away from home. He passes the time driving, haunting the lobbies of hotels and office parks, communicating with his wife by cell phone, and spinning a web of detailed lies about his activities.

The film’s black mood owes much to Cantet’s psychological insight. The more obsessively Vincent strives to keep up the appearance of being okay, the more his existence becomes vacuous and unreal. With his family and friends, he masters the art of avoiding situations where he would have to talk too clearly about himself; alone on the fringes of the corporate universe, he seems in danger of disappearing altogether. With sleek precision, Time Out describes a scary emptiness at the heart of the familiar.

Time Out Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Laurent Cantet's Time Out is an intense look at one man's professional angst and its rollover effects, a terrifying study of bourgeois desperation worthy of Claude Chabrol. Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) loses his job and, rather than tell his relatives, invents a new one. He studies a company's media kits and manages to convince friends and family to invest in his fantasy corporation. Vincent's journey is an affront to the dehumanization of economic slavery. By lying to himself and the world around him and freeing himself from responsibility, he achieves the kind of freedom where the only person he has to answer to is himself. Though clearly in turmoil, Vincent seems to take a kind of silent pleasure in his deceit. Like Dirk Bogarde's delusional protagonist in Fassbinder's Despair, the oppressed Vincent may be deranged if only because it appears as if he's really convinced of the authenticity of his fabricated existenz. Most fascinating, though, is the way Vincent's wife Muriel (Karin Viard) becomes an unwitting participant in the lie she believes is destroying their lives. Cantet implies that Vincent is noble at heart by chooseing a job where he gets to live the illusion of helping all of humanity: The man comes to imagine that he works for the United Nations. Cantet's snowy landscapes compliment Vincent's human disconnection. An abandoned cottage by the Swiss Alps is the man's makeshift office and the snowy trek to the cottage comes to symbolize a nervous wire-walk between stringent societal demands and personal freedom. Joceyln Pook's operatic score matches Cantet's unflagging gaze (the film's compositions are as rigorous as the judgment Vincent receives from his peers). As a bona fide thriller, though, Time Out is all tease; the film's many ruses and ominous tonality is patently misleading. (Interestingly, the film is based on a true story with a not-so-happy ending.) Though partially compromised by its horror façade, Time Out is a riveting account of a curious, self-made man, a lone warrior carving out a personal niche for himself in an otherwise onerous landscape.

The real-life basis for Time Out, Laurent Cantet's masterful study of a white-collar businessman in decline, is the infamous case of Jean-Claude Romand, a wealthy Frenchman who claimed he was a doctor for the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. But Romand was actually leading a double life: He had never graduated from medical school, hadn't held a job in two decades, and was living off the savings he'd bilked from his parents, his in-laws, and his mistress. On the verge of being found out, he killed his wife, his two children, and his parents, then burned his house to the ground, rather than simply confessing the truth. Many filmmakers would have heightened the tabloid horrors of this story, but Cantet removes them entirely, focusing on an ordinary guy so overcome with feelings of shame and inadequacy after losing his job that he chooses to bury himself in an avalanche of lies. Beautifully played by Aurélien Recoing, who looks uncannily like middle-management material, Cantet's protagonist isn't a scoundrel or a killer, but a man whose entire sense of identity and worth is bound tragically to the workplace. In many ways, Recoing mirrors William H. Macy's character in Fargo, another low-level suit who hatches an impossible scheme and scrambles desperately to keep it afloat. Both films derive extraordinary tension and dread from the inevitable moment when their protagonists' plans fall to pieces, but Time Out burns more slowly and methodically, achieving its effects through a greater fidelity to the everyday. Cantet follows the rough outlines of Romand's story—the nature of his deception, his commute from northern France to Geneva, his survival on other people's savings—but changes the details to bring it down to earth. Three months after getting fired from a post he'd held for 11 years, Recoing is still traveling on "business trips," driving aimlessly to get away from his family and sleeping in parking lots on the passenger side of his car. To buy himself time, he claims to have a job with the U.N. in Geneva, and he scams his former business associates into phony investments in emerging markets around the world. For extra cash, he gets mixed up with a crooked bootlegger (Serge Livrozet) who smuggles knock-off merchandise from Eastern Europe. Recoing can only go so long before his wife (Karen Viard) and investors begin asking questions, yet it's remarkable how patiently Cantet raises the stakes until he reaches the breaking point. Aside from Recoing's outrageous deception and denial, Time Out could be the sad story of any businessman who loses his job and stares down the resulting humiliation, insecurity, and despair. By pruning the sensational aspects of Romand's story, Cantet makes his hero's psychosis all too recognizable.

Time Out Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian

In his last film, Human Resources, director Laurent Cantet addressed a deeply unfashionable subject: unionised labour in the modern workplace. Now he takes a devastating look at the officer class: the affluent types in the hi-tech business of consultancy and financial services, with their families, pleasant suburban homes and sports utility vehicles. In the simple world of work Cantet has hit a rich seam, and in the story he now has to tell - co-written by Cantet himself and his editor Robin Campillo - he delivers a mesmerising, horrifying parable about the way work provides a nourishing delusion of existence to fill up the hours, days and years of our lives.

Aurélien Recoing plays Vincent, a comfortably-off professional man in a French suburb, married to Muriel (Karin Viard), with three bright children and his own mother and father - devoted, supportive grandparents - living nearby. He is away on business for long periods, and drops tantalising hints about getting a new job in Switzerland, working for the UN, helping to assist the developing economies of Africa. But this is all a lie. Vincent was fired months ago, and is too ashamed to tell his family. So he drives around in his car, calls his wife on the cellphone from service stations and hotel forecourts, and pretends to have just come out of meetings.

Stories about redundant executives waving goodbye to their wives and pretending to go off to work have become media folk-myths and get treated as quirky, tragicomic tales. Cantet finds in this one something more disturbing and more pertinent. Vincent has become a ghost in the machine of work. With his smart suit and plausible manner, he strolls into office buildings where he knows no one, breezily hails secretaries he has never seen before, idles his time away in plush lobbies, pretending to be an important salaryman, until he is gently moved on by a polite but baffled security guard. Finally, simply from eavesdropping on a meeting about African development, he gets the idea for a phoney development scheme in Switzerland and uses this to swindle old school chums. Inexorably, Vincent gets further and further out of his depth.

What we are watching is a slow-motion car-crash. As his big lie gets bigger and bigger, Vincent undergoes a kind of monumental breakdown, all the more terrifying because of the fluency with which he is able to deceive his wife, his parents and indeed himself. What scares him is not the prospect of being caught, but how appallingly easy it is not to be caught, and how the pretence and delusion of his current lifestyle is not so very different from when he was genuinely in work, with its empty ritual theatre of executive suits, meetings, conferences, etc. Vincent broods on the people he would see around the conference tables: they were "unknown faces - moments of absence..."

Cantet has based his movie on the more dramatic real-life story of Jean-Claude Romand, a phoney doctor who lived a similar life of deception and in 1993 murdered his wife, children and parents when the lies and the money ran out. Cantet cuts out the murder from his story, but leaves the existential horror intact. His hero, Vincent, has seen for himself how work is a rope bridge which gets us through the day. He has looked down through the slats, and seen the abyss beneath.

Time Out is a film which asks powerful questions about how and why men think of themselves as inseparable from their careers, that without a job they lose not merely money and status but also their identities. In not merely being unemployed, but in flouting convention in this determined and criminal way, Vincent terrifyingly exposes the world of work as a busy diversion from a bottomless void of our own making.

Even with the real-life murder removed, Cantet's film reminded me of Cédric Kahn's movie Roberto Succo (shown in Cannes last year and due to be released in the UK in June) about the real-life desperado who for years outwitted French police. Succo, like Vincent, is a wrongdoer whose crimes are almost gratuitous acts; carried out with sufficient effrontery and persistent disregard for personal consequence, they can be awe-inspiringly successful. Like Succo, Vincent is a fugitive figure as he drives through the French and Swiss countryside, hunted, alone in this heedless landscape, with a dizzying sense of both freedom and fear. Vincent confesses that the only thing he enjoyed about the job he was fired from was the experience of driving hundreds of kilometres to pointless meetings, and was finally dismissed because he was literally reluctant to leave his car.

Recently, David Puttnam complained that modern cinema was failing to reflect real life. Well, that might be true of Hollywood, but outstanding film-makers like Cantet show that elsewhere in the world, real life is proving to be compelling source material. Recoing gives an outstanding performance as Vincent, the white-collar everyman, and Viard gives sterling support as the wife who slowly senses the poison of his lies, without knowing what they are or why he is telling them. It is a brilliant essay on the tragic, secret drama of desperate lives.

PopMatters Elbert Ventura

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Gary Mairs

Images (David Gurevich)

Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet)

filmcritic.com calls Time Out Pete Croatto

hybridmagazine.com Ellen Whittier

Reel.com [Rod Armstrong]

L’Emploi du temps (2001) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg)

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann)

Xiibaro Reviews: Lilo & Stitch, Time Out, Nine Queens, and The ... David Perry

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman)

Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine)

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit)

eFilmCritic Reviews Thom

DVD Verdict Michael Rankins

DVD Verdict Barrie Maxwell

indieWIRE Anthony Kaufman, voted # 1 Film of the Year

Austin Chronicle ((L'emploi Du Temps)) Marritt Ingman

Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]

DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

Good work - the director of time out, Laurent Cantet Manohla Dargis feature and interview from the LA Times, April 19, 2002

HEADING SOUTH A- 94

aka: Vers Le Sud

France Canada (108 mi) 2005

It's hard to tell the good masks from the bad, but everyone wears one.

Based on "La Chair du Maitre," a book of connected stories by Haitian writer Dany Laferrière, this is an exquisitely beautiful film with an extremely difficult and intricately complex subject matter, sex tourism and the lingering influence of colonialism. Continuing Cantet’s themes on worker displacement and the dehumanization of the work force, witnessing the horrid effects of child labor, this film clearly shows that capitalism has winners, but at the expense of large segments of the rest of the world who, as a consequence of the lavish lifestyle of a few, live in abject poverty with absolutely no hope of any change in their lifetime. As a result, the poor are manipulated into unspeakable actions, enhanced by their need to survive, where from their position of powerlessness they overcompensate by becoming tradable commodities in human flesh.

Aided by powerful performances which bring to life the vacation habits of 3 older rich, middle-aged white women who travel to a seaside resort in Port-au-Prince, Haiti during the 1970’s, the era of the Duvalier regime, where cops were little more than street thugs terrorizing anyone who so much as looked at them funny, yet these American women live a completely luxurious lifestyle where they are waited on hand and foot by young, scantily clad, subservient black men, sometimes even boys, completely oblivious to the world just a few blocks away. The film examines a world within a world, which has an established hierarchy that is brilliantly realized by a series of offhand looks, grimaces, glances, women noticing other women, particularly what men they are with, somewhat jealous when the man is someone who has also paid them attention. Ménothy César as Legba is one such 18-year old man who passes himself off between several women, giving each a good time, but is something of a handsome, well-paid gigolo who is usually clad only in a swimsuit. They lavish him with praise, special gifts, and even desperately promise him a passport out of the country to return home with them to America. What do they really know about this striking young man?

There’s a stunning opening scene where a woman attempts to give her own 15-year old daughter away to a well-to-do man at the airport, as she knows what the future holds for a poor black girl in Haiti, desperate to offer her a chance that she otherwise could not provide. Into this scenario walks Brenda (Karen Young), a shy, sensitive middle fortyish woman from Savannah, Georgia, very much reminiscent of the fragility of Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie, or Joanne Woodward’s wonderful portrayal of a middle aged woman’s first love in her husband’s 1968 film, RACHEL RACHEL. Three years earlier, she met this same young man, Legba, on the same beaches in Haiti, and it was the most remarkable sexual moment of her life, which she recalls in graphic detail. She has never gotten it out of her mind and returns, hoping to rediscover the same romantic magic. But he is already part of an existing social structure led by a domineering queen bee, Ellen, the perfectly cast Charlotte Rampling, a mid fiftyish French literature professor at Wellesley, who for the past 5 or 6 years has been spending her summers at this same resort. Legba is in her company, and is at her beck and call. Brenda, to say the least, is stunned, yet all eyes are glued to one another’s every move. Add to this mix Sue, Louise Portal, a warehouse manager who works in Montreal, who has her own Haitian boyfriend, but is quite aware that this relationship works here and here alone in an idyllic paradise, as back home, they would probably never even speak to one another.

The few moments when the camera moves to the streets of Haiti are riveting, resembling the visceral, hand-held camera style of Michael Winterbottom, revealing hordes of people everywhere, kids begging for coins, street vendors plying their trade asking for next to nothing, but it’s alive with a kinetic energy that jolts us to attention. Almost immediately, the police make their presence, bullying a young kid, needlessly threatening him. The entire population cowers in response, backing off, saying nothing, daring not to interfere. Meanwhile, back on the beach, Ellen remains in control with her acid tongue, laying down the law of the land, entitlement, suggesting the young boys are there for the picking, all they have to do is ask and their carnal desires will be satisfied. Eventually Brenda gets a few moments alone with Legba, but she is constantly humiliated and ridiculed by Ellen, who then calls him over, as if he is her prized possession. Much of this plays out in typical colonialist imagery, the difference being Brenda has a special affection that goes beyond racist depictions.

Each of the major players has a personal soliloquy in front of the camera, the most striking is Albert (Lys Ambroise), a native Haitian who works the bar and restaurant at the resort, the same man from the opening scene where a woman attempted to give him her child, a cautious and restrained man, extremely well mannered, impeccably dressed, explaining how whites were depicted as savages in his grandfather’s day, literally lower than animals after their invasion of Haiti in 1915, describing his position today: "If he knew I was a waiter for Americans, he would die of shame. Today, whites wield an even more dangerous weapon than cannons — their dollars: Everything they touch turns to garbage." Prophetic words.

Pierre Milon's ravishingly beautiful cinematography, along with the perfectly chosen locations and sensuous native music, all add a layer of detailed precision, best expressed in a startling dance sequence where the hotel bar is throwing a party filled with dancers, among which include Brenda and Legba, after both have been thoroughly denounced by Ellen, so there is a feeling of literally letting go, where the music takes on an especially improvisational percussive tone. Brenda becomes oblivious to everyone else, ignoring her partner, dancing completely alone, whirling around as if under the influence of a voodoo chant, literally cast under a spell where all the other dancers stop and stare until Legba urges the musicians to change to a slower musical number. What transpires after that can only be described as strange and off-setting, as events deteriorate rapidly where Brenda’s whole demeanor is somehow transformed from a sensitive romantic into a capitalist blood-sucker, into that of Ellen, another rich, cynical, self-centered American who thinks the world is theirs for the taking, blind and completely oblivious of the consequences.

Dany Laferrière:

Physical desire and sex, as a political metaphor, seemed to me to be the fundamental element, something extraordinary, because, in a society where the relationships between the social classes are so terrifying, where the gap between the rich and the poor is so huge, where humiliation, disdain, contempt for others is so intense, the only thing that can bring one particular person closer to another is physical desire. I’m not describing an innocent form of sexuality, but sexuality as an instrument of political, social or economic power.

Film Freak Central Does the 30th Annual Toronto International Film ... Bill Chambers

Heading South (Vers le sud) represents such a departure from the milieu of Laurent Cantet's previous film (2001's brilliant psychological thriller Time Out (L'Emploi du temps)) that you can't really say it rounds out a trilogy he started with Human Resources. Nevertheless, it resumes his fascination with people in transience, people who've erected complex façades to avoid the repercussions of personal or professional failure; Cantet's pictures are screwball comedies played straight, and we see ourselves reflected in them like Athene saw herself in the water. Thanks to a chilling, if red herring-laden, prologue wherein a Haitian mother tries to "give" her endangered teenage daughter to a respectable-looking islander, a black cloud looms over the piece--and it's just one of the many ways in which Cantet shrewdly exploits Haiti's mystique without falling back on Serpent and the Rainbow-isms, paving a road to doom down which three middle-aged spinsters defiantly walk. Wellesley professor Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), willowy Midwesterner Brenda (Karen Young, who gets to deliver the screen's finest erotic monologue since Persona), and earthy Montréaler Sue (Louise Portal) are returning guests at a kind of sex resort where they take turns patronizing Legba (Ménothy Cesar), a young gigolo who makes them feel not only beautiful but, critically, maternal, too. (When we first meet Legba, he's curled up in a foetal position on the beach, only to be 'awakened' by Brenda's touch.) Unfolding towards the end of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's reign of terror, the 1978-set film relies a little too much on a working knowledge of Haiti's political history to sort out its narrative ambiguities, but by the same token, this seems to stave off noble-savage syndrome--of which the characters are guilty but the filmmaker, for a change, is not.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce from Cinepassion

When Charlotte Rampling in Heading South complains about how difficult it is for older women to get laid in Boston, the comment could just as well apply to middle-aged actresses cruising for roles in Hollywood -- American cinema likes its silver foxes in unthreatening, motherly positions, so the grand Lioness of Kink, in full bloom at 60, heads over to European screens to be properly challenged and appreciated. Rampling's character in Laurent Cantet's sharp, subtle analysis of sexual tourism travels to overseas shores for not dissimilar motives, though this tropical sojourn is fraught with unsettling politics, trenchantly desiccated. The setting is Haiti, 1979: Papa Doc Duvalier's brutal dictatorship and the nation's many miseries are just a distant whiff at the swanky Port-au-Prince hotel where Rampling's Wellesley professor presides luxuriantly in sexual holiday. Good times are what she's after, and she finds them with Ménothy Cesar, the beach gigolo who lavishes her with virile attention; their romping seems like a mutually pleasurable encounter, but because this is the filmmaker of Time Out, it's also an example of degrading capitalist-imperialist commodification, a transaction surreptitiously yet insidiously carried out. Augustly aware of how money puts her in a privileged position in this "dung heap," Rampling just wishes to be left with her illusions; Karen Young, a fellow menopausal traveler, arrives at the hotel desperate to revive her passion for Cesar, and the Caribbean jaunt soon darkens with jealous manipulation.

Louise Portal plays the third vacationer, but the crux of Heading South remains with the tug-of-war between Rampling and Young for nubile, young Cesar, and the racialized, politicized implications the relationships set off. Sunbathing with promptly available locals, the women are part of a meretricious global paradise willfully ignorant of the very conditions driving these men to their beds; when Young asks why poor Haitians put up with the corrupt government's lavish squandering, the well-meaning blindness of the remark momentarily pricks the idyllic bubble. Michel Houellebecq's original stories align tourism with predatory economics, yet because Cantet displays an almost Fassbinder-like sensitivity to emotional shifts in power, every character swells beyond the puppetry of condescending dreck like The Constant Gardener. Aesthetically and emotionally, the work is far closer to Claire Denis' Chocolat, down to a complex femininity of gaze (Cesar posing his ass in bed for Rampling's camera, Young savoring the memory of the way he would look at her) that is gradually and disturbingly revealed to be entrapping, boiling Cesar down to only a luscious physique up for rental, a body denied even the voice of the foreigners' personal monologues. Emotion throws off the neo-colonist equation -- Cesar's ride with an old girlfriend seals his fate, corpses invade the complacent utopia, Rampling chastises Young's "goddamn syrupy love." The hotel manager (Lys Ambroise) understands a tourist's dollar as more damaging than weapons; it attests to the film's multi-layered inquiries that Young's Caribbean journey ultimately emerges as both spiritually liberating and culturally polluting, romance and horror under the sun.

Laurent Cantet's 'Heading South' Shows the Ache of Blinding Lust in a Sexual Paradise Lost Stephen Holden from The New York Times, July 7, 2006

"I'm crazy about love — sex and love, I'm not really sure anymore," declares Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), the haughty, brutally forthright queen bee in the gaggle of sex tourists frolicking through Laurent Cantet's devastating film "Heading South."

Skip to next paragraph "I always told myself that when I'm old I'd pay young men to love me," she continues in her best blasé manner. "I just didn't think it would happen so fast." A beautiful, unmarried 55-year-old teacher of French literature at Wellesley, Ellen has spent the last six summers vacationing at the Petite Anse, a seaside Haitian hotel frequented by poor black boys eager to provide sex to middle-age female guests who lavish them with money and gifts. Ellen, the resident philosopher among a group who picnic with their boyfriends on the beach, is a bossy know-it-all who is not quite as hard-boiled as she would like to imagine.

As "Heading South" narrows its focus to concentrate on Ellen; her favorite young lover, the handsome, sly 18-year-old Legba (Ménothy Cesar); and two of the women in her circle, it becomes one of the most truthful examinations ever filmed of desire, age and youth, and how easy it is to confuse erotic rapture with love.

"If you're over 40 and not as dumb as a fashion model, the only guys who are interested are natural born losers or husbands whose wives are cheating on them," Ellen tartly observes of the mating game as it applies to single women of a certain age.

But "Heading South" is much more than a dispassionate examination of middle-age desire. Adapted from three short stories by Dany Laferrière and set in the late 1970's, when Haiti was ruled by Jean-Claude Duvalier (nicknamed Baby Doc) and a cadre of thugs, this politically pointed film contemplates the darker social undercurrents beneath a seemingly benign example of sexual tourism.

In a dirt-poor country where life is cheap, there is a local saying that those who grow too tall in Haiti are cut down; the exceptions, of course, are tourists.

Observing the tourism with profound distaste is the hotel's courtly, discreet headwaiter, Albert (Lys Ambroise). In a film constructed around four shattering monologues addressed to the camera, Albert's is the only Haitian voice to speak from the heart and what he says is chilling. Descended from a family of patriots who fought the Americans in the 1915 occupation, he harbors an implacable loathing of the white visitors. His grandfather, he says, believed "the white man was an animal." Albert adds, "If he knew I was a waiter for Americans, he would die of shame." Today, he declares, whites wield an even more dangerous weapon than cannons — their dollars: "Everything they touch turns to garbage."

How perilous life is for ordinary Haitians under Mr. Duvalier is suggested in the movie's opening scene, in which Albert, waiting to pick up a tourist at the airport, is approached by a Haitian woman who points to her beautiful 15-year-old daughter and pleads with him to take her because "being beautiful and poor in this country, she doesn't stand a chance; they won't think twice of killing me to grab her."

The other three characters who bare their souls are Ellen and two fellow sex tourists, Brenda (Karen Young) and Sue (Louise Portal). Brenda, 48, is a high-strung, Valium-popping woman from Savannah, Ga.; she is returning to the resort three years after she visited with her now-ex-husband and had sex with the 15-year-old Legba, who gave her her first orgasm. She has been obsessed with him ever since. Sue, a levelheaded, good-hearted French Canadian who runs a warehouse in Montreal, has a Haitian boyfriend she adores, but she knows full well that in any other place the relationship would be laughable.

With a screenplay in French, English and a smattering of Creole by Mr. Cantet and Robin Campillo, "Heading South" is a beautifully written, seamlessly directed film with award-worthy performances by Ms. Rampling and Ms. Young. As Ellen and Brenda compete for Legba's love, both imagine that they play a larger role in his life than they actually do. The little we see of Legba away from the resort suggests a complicated past. When a gunman goes after him, the women imagine they are the immediate cause of his troubles. They are, but only to the extent that Legba conspicuously stands out in the flashy clothes Brenda buys him. As much as Ellen and Brenda think they understand him and the state of fear that grips Haiti, they are ultimately clueless.

At first glance, "Heading South" seems to be a departure for the director of "Human Resources" and "Time Out," two of the more critically acclaimed French films in recent years. But it continues Mr. Cantet's incisive examination of money and class in modern society. In "Human Resources," a French blue-collar family is torn apart when the son of an assembly-line worker joins the same company's white-collar management team, and father and son find themselves on opposite sides of a picket line.

The desperate protagonist of "Time Out" loses the high-paying job on which his self-esteem depends and convinces his family he has landed even better work, while drifting around in his car and living on money borrowed from friends that he pretends to invest. In "Heading South," money also rules. The romantic spell that Legba exerts over Ellen and Brenda is bought and paid for.

Mr. Cantet's film is too sophisticated to demonize these women, whose relationships with their young lovers are more tender and nourishing than overtly crass. For all its political acuity, this great film recognizes and respects the complexity of its memorable, fully realized characters.

Heading South: An Interview with Laurent Cantet — Cineaste Magazine Emilie Bickerton interview, 2006

Laurent Cantet’s feature films to date have been modest, thoughtful, and somewhat varied. There have been three. His two earlier works, analytical in character, are focused on contemporary life in the French workplace. His latest film is a melodrama about women’s experience, and more literary and emotive in its genesis than intellectual.

Ressources Humaines (1999) explored the consequences of the newly introduced thirty-five-hour week for a factory manager and his (employee) father. In Cantet’s next film, the quietly tragic L’Emploi du temps (Time Out, 2001), we were given some insight into the protagonist’s secretive existence as he pretended to his family in France that he had a job at the UN offices in Geneva. A study of modern alienation, L’Emploi de temps depicts the desperation of a man who cannot be sustained by a work to live ethic, yet who is obsessed by an awareness of what society thinks he ought to do. As a result, he forces himself into a cycle of pointless car journeys to fill up his days and give his lies to his loved ones a semblance of veracity.

Cantet’s most recent film, Vers le sud (Heading South), is quite different, exploring a set of concerns not unrelated to his previous work, but articulated in a new style and in a radically altered context. The film is set in 1970’s Haiti, where we follow a group of fifty-something Western women on holiday, searching for romance and physical relations with local boys. Charlotte Rampling leads the pack in yet another appearance in Francophone cinema, continuing her renaissance as a mature actress.

Cantet’s first two films were anything but showy esthetically. Spare in their visual style, they depended on actor-driven, linear narratives. The first features were born of an intellectual desire to engage with the labour–alienation relationship as manifested in contemporary French society. By contrast, Vers le sud grew out of Cantet’s emotional response to his trip to Haiti in 2002 and his reading of Dany Laferrière’s short stories. Struck by the simplistic polarity of colonizer and colonized in Laferrière, Cantet seeks in Vers le sud to reconceptualize the crude ‘sex tourism’ of the stories as ‘love tourism.’ The desire exists, he argues, on both sides. His film portrays women in pursuit of more than forgettable, faceless sex.

Whilst Ressources Humaines and L’Emploi du temps were underwhelming visual affairs, Vers le sud is esthetically innovative, full of striking images, particularly those of racially contrasting bodies. Cantet provocatively provocatively presents young boys in the ways they are seen by the women, thus making his camera a substitute for their eyes and implicating the audience in their desire. As viewers we rationally reject and condemn their actions, but Cantet forces us to have a discomforting intimacy with those we criticize.

Haiti, also, is well captured. The monotony of the French and Swiss landscapes in L’Emploi du temps flying by the car window of protagonist Vincent (Aurelien Lecoing) without a second thought or cinematic relevance, is replaced in Vers le sud by a historically potent setting. Haiti in the Seventies and the brutal division between its white visitors and the burgeoning but disaffected native population is clear. The violent encounter between these two worlds is palpable, whether the women venture into markets, or dance with locals. Cantet’s camera is attuned to picking up on the underlying animosity and resentment as well as the brief, genuine emotions and attachments.

Disappointingly however, Cantet conveys Haitian social politics through a film noir structure. There is a background story in Vers le sud providing a glimpse into events occurring independently of the women’s pursuits. This is initially salutary; it encourages insight into Haiti beyond its Western tourists. Yet Cantet leaves the larger social story-thread hanging and eventually, disappointingly makes it into an inconsequential red herring.

Laurent Cantet’s comparative conservativism makes him a maverick in today’s French film scene. Unlike his peers, for example, Noé, Breillat, Dumont, and Denis, the route of extreme cinema has not tempted him. He inclines toward films that make sense of human relations and psychology. Vers le sud is a little more dreamy, more personally motivated than his typical projects, and eventually it is also less successful as a critical engagement with the issues it touches on. His next project is based on a ‘classe unique’ in a French village school, and although it is likely to be hyped as a ‘fictional Etre et avoir,’ it should primarily signal Cantet’s return to the more localized focus of previous works, setting him apart as a lucid critic of contemporary France.—Emilie Bickerton

****

Cineaste: If I were to pin down a particular subject or concern in your films it would be malaise—for example, the older American women in Ver Le Sud, who travel to Haiti looking for young lovers are full of an inner malaise derived from a sense of not quite belonging to society, or not fulfilling the roles society requires. Is this a fair assessment?

Laurent Cantet: To an extent—the women in Vers le Sud are searching for a place in the world, and a way of accepting themselves, a little like Vincent in L’Emploi du Temps. I feel I’m looking at people who do not have an appropriate place to themselves. As a result they accept to wear a mask, a social mask that allows them to play the game, to be acceptable to themselves and to others.

Cineaste: So partly you’re making a critique of contemporary society?

Cantet: Yes, but at the same time I think there are also existential problems involved. Of course I believe these problems arise from the material conditions of life, society, the current political situation, and so on. But also, the situations I present are universal: what is it to get old, to no longer feel physical desire? What is it to be the only white face in a black environment? I am asking where the problems lie and where they are played out and how people experiment with their difficulties. Really, I’m looking at that very intimate relationship one has with the world, and other people.

Cineaste: It’s striking in Vers le Sud how this intimacy comes through, and the reaction it has on the spectator. I would say that one feels even more disgust for Brenda (Karen Young) after her monologue. Was condemnation what you were after, or did you want to invite greater sympathy with this particular narrative device?

Cantet: Well, first of all, I try hard not to judge my characters. I think I always need to like them a little to then want to develop them, to make them exist or animate them. I try to show the complexity of a person’s psychology, as well as the world in which we struggle to exist, with all the questions that are posed in each one of us. However, I don’t want to carry any moral judgement.

For me Brenda’s monlogue in Vers le Sud is the great moment of sincerity in the film. Through it she also expresses things I can share: feelings of desire, the sensuality she is forbidden in her ordinary life and that now exists because she has been able to create this little, rather utopian, world for herself.

Cineaste: Yes, but it’s difficult to see the film only in this way because there is a darker side, namely the colonial basis on which these relationships exist, the political foundations of the story.

Cantet: Yes, but I don’t want to bring the film down to only that. It’s there, it’s clearly one of the questions in the film but it’s not as simple as: there we are, the evil exploiters and the poor exploited. I think on the contrary there is a far more complex relationship being played out and, as a result, something more enduring might exist. I don’t believe this question of desire works just one way, I think of what Dany Laferrière [who wrote the novella, La Chair du Maître, 1997 that inspired the film] told me at the very beginning of our collaboration: be careful not to make of the boys poor victims. He told me about his youth, living in Port-au-Prince when he would fantasize about the white women passing in the streets. He was quite capable of following a woman for a whole half-day just because her hair was blowing in the wind and the perfume she wore promised all the voluptuousness of the earth to him.

And here I think the relationship is reciprocal, there isn’t on the one side the woman dictating to the young boys, or (to make an even greater generalization) the colonizers and the oppressed. There is something far more complex being played out, and that’s really what the film is trying to show, by accessing the issue from multiple entry points.

Cineaste: There is a very striking scene in the film, in regards to this two-way power relationship: Brenda dances on her own, loses herself completely in the music and Legba (Menothy Cesar) can’t stand this…

Cantet: No he can’t, I think because precisely he feels she is mimicking—or aping—the native dance and in this investment, this integration, sees something indecent.

Cineaste: You could take it another way: Legba resented it when Brenda lost herself in the music, because she was moving away from him, taking no notice, asserting momentarily her independence.

Cantet: I saw it more as a gaze on this white woman who tries to dance like a Haitian, as though she were in a trance, like the kind you experience in voodoo ceremonies for example. And for Legba he felt there was something false in all of this.

Cineaste: One can quickly give Vers le Sud the label of “sex tourism.” In this regard why did you decide to base your film in the Seventies in Haiti, and not in Thailand say, today?

Cantet: Well, for many reasons. The desire to make the film came from my own trip to Haiti and the encounter I had with the country. Partly I felt revulsion, it really is so poor in parts that we can’t see it without feeling revolted, and we also feel the violence around—it exists and it’s very shocking. Yet at the same time, it’s an incredibly engaging country, for the people and how they are; you want to talk with them. I really wanted to work there and the idea for the film was born in the country and from that desire. Then there was the novella by Laferrière, which was for me like a second encounter, a literary one, of the kind that I have rarely experienced in my life. But having decided on making the movie in Haiti, it was impossible to set it in the present day because there is no more tourism in the country.

Cineaste: Is this very recent?

Cantet: For about fifteen years, the country has been in ruins, one has to realize this. The only foreigners there are those who work in the embassies, or NGO’s. So, I preferred to just mention at the start of the film that it was based in the seventies, without then going on to make a painstakingly historically accurate film.

Cineaste: And yet you do manage to make it very historically specific; we do recognise it’s the Seventies.

Cantet: Setting the film in the past did mean I could explore far more. After all, tourism has become industrialized today, and the relationships tourists have with locals are totally different. Mass tourism means the rules of the game are very clear: people go out in search of something very specific.

Cineaste: Yes, things have become much cruder, brutalized, without any emotional investment.

Cantet: Yes, that’s right, whereas in the Seventies we’re closer to the origin of this kind of tourism, that first-sought love, not just sex. What also allows Vers le Sud to be rather different is that we’re dealing with women going abroad, and not men. And they are, we could say, also oppressed. In Haiti they arrive with all their accumulated frustrations from the United States where they are in shackles: a woman over forty is no longer desirable, or she can’t talk of desire at that age. If we had done the opposite, filmed men going abroad, I think they would inevitably have arrived with the arrogance of male dominance. And thus, by virtue of having women as my subjects, the film is more nuanced.

Cineaste: In this sense it is better to understand the film as a particular case, rather than trying to attach broader themes to it.

Cantet: Yes, but at the same time it is a mass phenomenon! All you have to do is go to the Dominican Republic to realize that there are many single women who go over, no longer wanting to accept their solitude and proving instead to themselves that they can still be desirable; they can still live a love story. That seems to me something far more essential, integral, than just travelling so that you can have sex. That’s where I think there is a far more existential search that drives the journey, precisely because it’s not driven only by the aspiration to satisfy a purely sexual and immediate desire.

Cineaste: Yes, as you say, it’s not about a one-sided power relationship.

LC: Power circulates between the two involved.

Cineaste: You spoke about the Dany Laferrière novella that inspired the film. Why exactly—and this is a more philosophical question about your own idea of what film is—did you want to put his words into images? What is it that you feel film can bring to the story?

Cantet: To begin with, I think it’s a film that plays a lot on incarnations; we’re not faced with ideas or words, but really bodies; and in Vers le Sud the presence of bodies is essential. All you need do is put in the same frame Charlotte Rampling and Mênothy Cesar so that all the otherness of their bodies strikes us, embarrasses us even, or interrogates us at least. The other reason, at least what I like in cinema is that it’s not always conceptual, that we can approach such general questions as North-South relations, colonialism, exploitation of women, misery, etc., without having to add to this some categorical questions or chop things up completely into black-and-white distinctions. The more the subject lays itself open to grand themes, the stronger cinema is in bringing nuance to this, by allowing us to avoid crude distinctions.

Cineaste: And so, in this regard, how do you place yourself within French cinema’s tradition? I don’t see you as having very much in common with many young filmmakers in the country today, you differ from the sort of cinema du look they’re producing.

Cantet: If there were a name I should cite in my personal heritage, then it would be Rossellini. His cinema is one of revelation, the ‘real’ imposes itself on the characters, and things never arrive in a discursive fashion, but, little by little, they emerge at the surface. This is what touches me the most in Rossellini, in cinema in general—when I don’t have the impression that the film knows what it has to tell me, but rather, this arrives, emerges… And so, there is Rossellini, but afterwards there have been others. Pialat of course… But I think there are lots of directors who place themselves within this affiliation.

Cineaste: I was struck by the difference between L’Emploi du Temps and Vers le Sud. In the former the development of the story and the way you tell it visually was more traditional, let’s say, than in your latest film. I suppose for reasons that you’ve outlined, it was crucial to impose the images in Vers le Sud…

Cantet: Yes, or especially, replace discussion with things that are communicated through impressions instead.

Cineaste: To come back to the location, has the film been screened in Haiti?

Cantet: Not yet. I may have the chance this summer to present it at a festival in a small town in the country as some Haitians who have seen it reacted very well. Haitians based in Paris and elsewhere in France have also responded well, saying it was the first time they had seen a film based in Haiti, shot by a foreigner, that nevertheless captured accurately the country. They liked that I spoke of it without compassion or a sense of culpability, embarrassed by my obviously shameful colonial heritage. Nor did I allow myself to be too burdened by the fact that Haiti is a country that the international community is effectively allowing to suffocate. To hear all this from the mouths of Haitians really made me very happy.

Cineaste: Apart from the forced delay with the coup in 2003, did you have problems when you eventually filmed in the country?

Cantet: Yes, for sure, in somewhat anecdotal ways perhaps. We would decide on a good location, and fifteen days before it would be impossible to go, deemed too dangerous. We had to constantly adapt to the local environment. I actually really liked this uncertainty, having to be reactive. There were also shoot-outs twice during filming, near where we worked. We all asked ourselves, should we stay or go? But then we saw those around us who lived in the country, who had experienced this their whole lives, and after ten minutes just got on with things. We felt a kind of decency in them and respect for them. We felt that if they could just pick themselves up like that, then we should follow suit, honor that kind of resilience.

The Bitter Critic: April 2006 Martin Tsai from Cinema Scope, April 2, 2006

Tativille: New Film: Vers le sud (Heading South) Michael J. Anderson

indieWIRE: Sand Trap: Laurent Cantet's "Heading South" By Sarah Silver with responses by Nick Pinkerton and James Crawford from Reverse Shot

CineScene [Chris Knipp]

Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Culture Wars [Philip Cunliffe]

Vers le sud - Heading South - Laurent Cantet - 2005 ... - Films de France James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

stylusmagazine.com (Nancy Keefe Rhodes)

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Phil Hall

Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]

filmcritic.com Don Willmott

european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Plume Noire [Fred Thom]

Political Film Review Michael Haas

PopMatters (Jon Frosch) guilty of both sloppy filmmaking and muddled politics

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Ljubljana Film Festival calls it a very annoying viewing experience

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) falls short as character study or serious drama

Laurent Cantet • Director interview by Fabien Lamercier from Cineuropa, August 9, 2005

Heading South - Interview: Laurent Cantet • Director - Cineuropa Fabien Lamercier interview from January 22, 2006

BBC - collective - heading south interview and laurent cantet ... Leigh Singer from the BBC June 29, 2006, including audio interviews

Worldview - Laurent Cantet’s Heading South Milos Stehlik from NPR Worldview, August 18, 2006

The first French film in decades to have won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, this involving drama by Laurent Cantet (Heading South, Time Out) turns an inner-city classroom into a cultural battleground. Francois Begaudeau, who drew on his own teaching experiences for the source novel, Entre les Murs ("Between the Walls"), stars as the teacher, and Cantet has assembled a crew of real kids to insult and challenge him; among the most aggressive are the sneering Esmerelda and Khoumba, who succeed in turning the class against him. The teacher's lounge is another gallery of fine performances, as Begaudeau's colleagues vent their despair and desperation. Most impressive, Cantet tracks the racial and ethnic resentments that simmer beneath the classroom discussions but become harder to quell when the parents get involved. In French with subtitles. R, 128 min.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Los Angeles Times [Carina Chocano]

Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]

A Dose of French Film, Civil and Sane Stephen Holden from The New York Times, March 10, 2006

A Summer Idyll (Never Mind the Tonton Macoutes) Leslie Camhi from The New York Times, May 7, 2006

THE CLASS (Entre Les Murs) A- 94

aka: Between the Walls

France (128 mi) 2008 ‘Scope

Hardly sugar coated, but definitely troubling, as many viewers will be aghast that the “system” doesn’t work any better, this is a self-portrait of a flawed inner city school system inside Paris, France, given a healthy dose of authenticity when one of the co-writers, François Bégaudeau, wrote the book on which the film is based and is also the featured junior high school teacher in the film, giving it a near documentary portrait of the goings on inside his classroom as well as a look behind the scenes at his school. Outside of an opening shot where the teacher (François) grabs a cup of coffee, the entire film takes place “between the walls” (translated French title) on the school grounds. In general, most of the students are dark-skinned with African or Arabic roots with ethnic backgrounds from former French colonies, specifically North and West Africa as well as French-speaking Caribbean countries, while nearly the entire teaching and administrative staff, who introduce themselves in an opening orientation meeting, are white. So just looking at this scenario, one sees we’re on a collision course just waiting for accidents to happen. While François is a committed white educator with four years of experience teaching French, his class remains a cry of rebellion, as students are free to interrupt or interject their thoughts whenever they please, as if it is a democracy. Initially he sets a standard of raising one’s hand but then never follows this criteria for the rest of the film. What’s curiously unique about this classroom is that it’s as much about the students as it is the teacher, where in a somewhat provocative gesture, he calls upon students to voice their views, even if they express a disinterest, which results in open rebellion and arguments, occasionally insults, where the time spent is hurling personal insults and challenges to one another, sometimes with name-calling and disruptive classroom laughter. What begins as an attempt to utilize teaching methods turns into something different altogether, as few students do the homework assignments or express any interest in what he’s teaching, as evidenced here: Multiculturalism in France: short video clip from "The Class" YouTube (2:36)

Unfortunately, part of the problem is the teaching method itself, as a classroom of 13 or 14-year old kids is not a democracy where every student openly engages one another using the Socratic method of open dialogue, instead each seeks their own way to attain attention, breaking down any system of authority through disruption. François pleads his case, but usually makes challenging, personal remarks to each student that only lead to defensive personal responses, where they go back and forth attacking one another, basically throwing any lesson plan, and these kid’s futures, out the window. François is very good at exposing problems, but his interrogation techniques rarely solve any of them. For instance, when there are classroom breakdowns, it’s simply a free for all instead of an accompanying follow up on what went wrong, where the teacher establishes guidelines for what is appropriate and what is not, where he actually takes the time to implement a classroom structure. Instead he gives up on this almost immediately, as he’s overwhelmed by the student’s negativity, believing nothing he’s teaching them is relevant in their lives. Well his challenge is to make it relevant. There are African writers, or Caribbean Pulitzer prize winners they could study, also each of these students has extended families that could be encouraged to bring in personalized information like food, clothing, stories, cultural dances or customs, sports figures, photographs, where they could place colorful pictures on the wall, making everyone all part of a true learning experience. But rather than incorporate what’s actually meaningful to this group of students, their needs are all but ignored, exacerbated by the blatantly racist French policy to ignore all cultural ethnicities in the name of one supposedly united France, a policy that in a classroom like this makes little sense, as their birthplaces themselves could serve as a geography lesson.

François fails to get through to two of his strongest classroom personalities, Khoumba (Rachel Regulier) and Souleymane (Franck Keita), both black, each of whom commands the respect of their fellow classmates. Khoumba, a bright, opinionated girl refuses to read out loud when called upon, believing she’s being picked on, which obviously irks the teacher who tries to find out what’s wrong after class, seen here: The Class - Clip YouTube (3:21), but she’s unable to say what the matter is and sarcastically makes things difficult for him, creating a dramatic scene in front of others. But then she writes a terrific essay on “Respect,” saying she doesn’t feel respected by him, claiming she will no longer even look him in the eye, as she doesn’t wish to give him the wrong impression. More importantly, she doesn’t place it on his desk, but in his locker, which couldn’t be more personal. This is a student crying out for a humane response, for guidance, but he never gives her what she is obviously looking for and what she deserves. Even worse, Souleymane is a well-liked, good looking but undereducated kid from Mali, where French is obviously his second language, as he has problems reading, writing, and acting out, as he has difficulties communicating with many of the teachers, so he remains sullen much of the time, or he overreacts, getting into some of the worst and most offensive arguments with his fellow students. But this is the Alpha male, the kid who’s obviously smart, but his brazen outspokenness is wasted on street cred hailing insults and shouting others down. Again, this is a student crying out for a personal tutor and a different set of priorities. At the parent/teacher conferences, we never see the father and we learn that the mother can’t speak French, so all they know is what Souleymane tells them—that everything is just fine. Rather than attempt to resolve this conflict of communication, as the family deserves to know early on that there are problems in the classroom, the teacher, and the institution itself, is remarkably silent. So it comes as a surprise to his mother when a short time later Souleymane is facing charges of expulsion, where her impassioned pleas in Arabic (with no translator present except Souleymane) fall on deaf ears.

The teachers themselves have group discussions about how to respond to individual behavior problems, like Souleymane, even as they are about to discuss his possible expulsion, but the views are usually washing their hands of any responsibility, all but disregarding his side of the story, implementing punishment whenever possible. The group also discusses the merits of each student in the presence of student reps, where they all share their views before deciding upon grades and what they mutually decide are the appropriate educational remarks, a system that is ultimately undermined by the student reps who tell all the students what grades they’re going to get ahead of time and what the teachers had to say about them. Apparently the subject of confidentiality was never raised before, as this systematic approach is guaranteed to align the students against the teachers, mostly through old fashioned concepts like rumor and heresay, all taken out of context, but highly effective. In fact, this seems to be the metaphor for failure, that spreading rumors behind people’s backs is a much more effective means of communicating than anything the educational system offers. Speaking personally, that would make my lesson plan the very next school day, how rumors spread like a disease, not based on facts or any answerable truth, but based on the quickest and deadliest means of bringing harm to someone. What’s clear here is that the school isn’t budging an inch to learn how to help anyone other than those that already have the tools to help themselves, as the system instead is designed to blame and punish those students who express difficulties. Not one of these kids was lost to the system prior to the school year, as they’re still young and impressionable, but by the end, that’s another story. Unlike American films that would spend a great deal of effort searching for answers, the provocative nature of this film is instead asking all the right questions.

The Class JR Jones from The Reader

Time Out (Geoff Andrew) review

Cantet’s Palme d’Or winner is a marvel, its authenticity deriving both from the superb performances of its non-professional cast and from a screenplay co-written by Bégaudeau, the teacher and novelist who plays François, a teacher of French to 13-year-olds in one of Paris’s multicultural suburbs. Relaxed, young and firm, he generally wins respect. Still, kids can fall by the wayside, and even after he encourages Souleymane’s photographic talents, the young Malian seems somehow unreachable. Such a synopsis may be misleading, however. The teacher’s dealings with Souleymane constitute just one strand of a hugely rich tapestry and for the first hour this partly improvised film feels more like fly-on-the-wall documentary than fiction. Race, religion, age, sex, family and personality are all crucial to the dynamics of the classroom where most of the movie takes place, but Cantet wisely never preaches. Indeed, an allusion to Plato’s Republic is spot on: in a spirit of urgent enquiry, the film raises many pressing questions about education, communication and contemporary culture, knowing there are no easy answers, except that compassion and tolerance are paramount.

Day 11 George Christensen, our resident cyclist on the scene at Cannes, May 25, 2008:

There were shouts of "Bravo" and sustained applause after the morning screening in the Palais of “The Class,” a most moving and impeccably realistic depiction of a classroom of 14 and 15 year old students in a Paris school. If there weren't an unwritten tradition of limiting films in Competition to just one award this could sweep best pitcture, actor, director and script honors.

First-time actor, Francois Begaudeau, who is the author of the book the movie is based on, can't be denied the best acting award for his extraordinary performance playing himself, a teacher who is part master-of-ceremonies, part stand-up comic, part lion-timer and above all a committed educator. He fully engages his classroom of semi-rebellious students, mostly children of immigrants. He challenges them and treats them with respect, while maintaining his authority and his distance. There wasn't a speck of phoniness or cheap dramatic devices that most such films are prone too in this film by Laurent Cantet, whose prevous film, "Heading South," starring Charlotte Rampling, made the Top Ten list of Robert Kennedy of cranesareflying.com.

One of the highlights of this year's festival had to be the promenade up the red carpet later in the evening of the 25 students, amateur actors all, for its formal gala presentation. This was a 130 minute movie that wasn't too long by any shot. The French system of education is astonishly farsightedly. One of the teacher's points is that the students must behave in a manner to "make society run smoothly." A few days ago a young French woman tried to butt in line ahead of me, pretending she was friends of a couple of young women. An older French woman behind me immediately reprimanded her. They exchanged a few words, the young woman holding her ground, but when the older woman used the word "morality," she shamed her into going to the back of the line. "The Class" gives a glimpse of the training that the French receive in schools in such matters. I have seen countless examples of the French concern for the greater good in my travels here the past four years. It is one reason that I have returned year after year. It takes extreme talent and commitment for a teacher to be as good as the one in this movie, but the glimpses of the other teachers in the school show that they have a similar regard, though not necessarily possessing the talent of the featured teacher.

Boston Globe review [4/4] Wesley Morris

The center doesn't hold at Francoise Dolto Junior High. It can't. Not anymore. Trouble roils this Paris public school. Not in the way Hollywood has conditioned us to recognize chaos: gangbangers ruling the hallways, dance-offs that erupt in the cafeteria, proms that become blood-drenched nightmares. Laurent Cantet's drama "The Class" brings us back to earth, unalloyed.

The problems at Dolto are more internal and less sensational. Its student-teacher debates are philosophical and political, off-topic but very much on-topic. The school's chaos resides in the shifting nature of how students perceive their roles, and the idea that teachers misunderstand the needs and sensitivities of their students.

It takes a patient filmmaker to draw out the conflict. Cantet sticks his camera for long stretches in the teachers lounge, in the library, in a single classroom (the subject is French) to allow for the impression of fly-on-the-wall transparency. Over the course of a fictitious school year (whittled down to two hours), we can study the faces of the mostly white adults and the mostly nonwhite 14-year-old students from working-class families, and perceive wonder, exasperation, confusion, anger, cool. Some kids' faces don't give anything away, lest that cool be spotted for the pose it is.

The scenes are like photographs left in developer fluid until some kind of truth is overexposed. Here the truth is that there is no good answer for what plagues a troubled school. The institution of education is in disarray: In an inexorably multinational world, the old systems of harvesting knowledge in young minds need to change. The very question of why we learn what we learn and from whom we learn it is under siege.

When young Francois Marin (Francois Begaudeau) tries to teach a language exercise, the kids stop him after he scribbles an example sentence on the blackboard: Bill had a succulent cheeseburger. Why pick a cheeseburger, they ask? And what kind of name is "Bill"? How about Aissata or Rachid? Enough with these white, French names. Marin's elegance hits a snag: You're French, he says. But Khoumba (Rachel Regulier) and Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani), his most vocal opponents, don't see it that way. Esmeralda is French but, as ethnic minority, she doesn't feel French in any traditional, white way, and I imagine she thinks it'd be nice to learn from a teacher sensitive to such matters. She and her classmates are hung up on details, but in this case, those details, the details of identity, actually matter.

Every detail matters to them. Marin says they waste an hour's class time with distractions. But class, they correct, is only 55 minutes. And what is this imperfect subjunctive? Who speaks that way? Nobody, they say. So why learn it? Ah, the empired strike back at the empire.

After one class, Marin makes Khoumba, who's retreated from the progress she made with him a year ago, apologize for being disruptive, and her half-hearted contrition frustrates him even more. After several tries, she delivers one he likes and he dismisses her. The minute she's out the door, she rudely rescinds it.

The amazingly direct letter Khoumba writes him a few scenes later (she titles it "Respect") chastises him for insensitivity and explains that she won't be actively participating during class. Her letter underscores the central tension between the teachers and these politically savvy students. They've been conditioned (probably by each other and by what they know of French history) to expect a kind of parity with adults. They've grown suspicious of the institutional power dynamic in the student-teacher relationship, seeing it, in part, as an unmitigated extension of government. (When the principal shows up to deliver a new student, he has to remind them, rather comically, that standing up when a grown-up enters the room doesn't signify subjugation. It's just polite.) The kids' defense mechanisms encourage them to miss the broader goals of education, but their racial grievances also have merit that seems lost, I think, on Marin, who responds to these challenges with a kind of condescension that the kids always sense.

"The Class" is based on a book Begaudeau wrote about his years teaching in the Paris school system. He drafted the script with Robin Campillo and Cantet, who's encouraged the fine young actors to improvise their way through some scenarios. The version Begaudeau plays of himself makes the author's mistakes, but his sincerity and devotion to education are hardly in doubt. Still, he's not the saintly savior the movies like to parade like propaganda: We don't need another hero.

This man is a much more useful guide to the realities of Western education than the sterling examples of pedagogy we normally get in film. Goodbye, Mr. Chips, indeed. Toward the film's back half, Marin crosses the line with a slur that the appalled kids run with. I've been in that classroom and seen the wildfires that fan out across a school when a teacher's tongue slips. I'm not sure I believe Marin would really have said what he says. But his blunder allows the movie to present the idea that he's more powerless in a way than his students.

Marin is another of Cantet's characters who are basically frustrated laborers; the movie, another intelligent example of his films that show how work doesn't always work out. In 1998's "Human Resources," a son is forced to lay his father off. In 2002's superb "Time Out," a family man pretends to go to his job after losing it. In 2005's half-fascinating, half-regrettable "Heading South," it was poor, underemployed Haitians exploiting horny lady tourists.

"The Class," which is a foreign-language Oscar nominee and was the big winner at the Cannes Film Festival last year, pulls back enough on this school so that it functions as an emblem of a system that both disserves education and greatly enables it. I was much more disheartened leaving the movie the first time I saw it than I was the second. Its richness resides in its apparent objectivity. Without sacrificing a sense of hope, Cantet suggests that the school system is just like a certain vexing grammatical tense: imperfect but still fighting against irrelevance.

CBC.ca Arts review Katrina Onstad

In the opening of the French film The Class, kids enter and fill a classroom. They are loud and abrasive, zipping between offensive and defensive, smart and stupid and highly sensitive. In other words, they could be 13-year-olds in any urban school anywhere. And yet, they are entirely of their time and place: 21st-century Paris — the new Old World — in the heavily immigrant 20th Arrondissement, the kind of neighbourhood that comes to the attention of most North Americans only when a riot breaks out.

The Class won the top prize, the Palme d’Or, at Cannes last year for its unromantic probing of the modern teacher-student relationship. The film is a formal experiment of sorts, a collaboration between director Laurent Cantet and a sloe-eyed literature teacher named François Bégaudeau.

In 2006, Bégaudeau published a novel called Between the Walls, which tells the story of a year in a Parisian classroom. After 10 years as a teacher — and gigs as a punk musician and a film critic for French Playboy — Bégaudeau added actor to his resume. In the film, he plays a junior high teacher named Francois, a variation on himself. Over several months, Bégaudeau interacted with a group of Parisian students — none of them actors — for three hours every Wednesday afternoon while Cantet recorded the proceedings on a cheap video camera. From those sessions a loose script emerged; The Class was shot over seven weeks during the summer of 2007.

Months in a small room filled with teens may be a nightmare to some, but Cantet describes the process of making the film as “funny.”

“We were all laughing all the time,” he tells me recently in a Toronto hotel room. Cantet is a composed, slightly distant man who speaks in an unwittingly poetic French accent. “Usually when I’m shooting, I’m really anxious. I always think I’m making the worst film in the history of cinema. But with this film, everything seemed obvious, easy. I wasn’t sure if it was a good film, but I knew the process was working.”

Cantet is the son of two schoolteachers, but he says that his motivation for making the film had less to do with his parents than with his kids. He has two teenagers in a public school in suburban Paris very similar to the one in the film, and he’s witnessed first hand the effect a group of boisterous teenagers has on those around them.

“You are stigmatized when you’re young, especially when you are not white. People are afraid of you, afraid of this energy. But if you manage to harness that energy, you can make great things. We were able to work for six hours a day with these kids; they could really concentrate. We had great trust. The teachers [who appeared] in the film were very jealous that I could handle these kids,” says Cantet, smiling.

Just before shooting the Charlotte Rampling film Heading South (2005), Cantet conceived a script about a troubled African boy who may be expelled from school and sent back to Mali. When he later read Between the Walls, the director decided to meld the two projects, working with professionals and non-professionals in the same improvised, workshop style that he used on critically acclaimed films like Human Resources (1999) and Time Out(2002).

As in Bégaudeau’s book, The Class never ventures outside the school’s property lines. Rather than following a conventional story arc, Cantet captures a string of incidents, both miniscule (like teachers debating a new coffee machine) and metaphoric. French kids from central and north Africa butt heads over what soccer team to back in the Africa Cup of Nations. A new student reads aloud his personal essay, listing his likes (video games, music) and dislikes (“I hate visiting my brother in prison”). A Chinese-French boy risks deportation when his mother is arrested for being in the country illegally.

These small moments speak loudly to larger issues of integration and belonging, which are already the central struggles of adolescence. I ask Cantet if he was inspired to write the film after the civil unrest of 2005, when young Parisians, many of whom came from immigrant families, set fire to cars and rioted in some suburbs. Cantet bristles.

“The press is always speaking of what’s going wrong, but these are often exceptional cases,” he says. “I wanted to look at children more precisely, to show that if you really listen to what they say, you can understand all the problems society is facing. When [one of the students] says she is not proud to be French, she’s saying something we need to understand. These kids desire to be part of our community and they feel that the community doesn’t desire them.”

With its intensely focused, documentary feel, The Class is no noble teacher fantasy in the mode of Dead Poets Society or To Sir, with Love. When Francois rescues his students, the rescues are small and unnoted. He often has the respect of the kids, but he is not always adored, and the film’s climax hinges on the moment when he loses his cool in class and uses the word “skanks” to describe two girls.

“Francois and I did not want to create a perfect teacher. I often asked him to appear more out at sea as he teaches. Lots of teachers told me that being a teacher is like acting: You are always improvising. You can’t hesitate when someone is asking you a question. We all make mistakes. It was important to me to show this weakness, to feel the solitude and loneliness of a teacher in front of a class.”

Cantet finished the film two weeks before Cannes in May, and then watched with relief as the audience embraced it with cheers at the red carpet premiere. It is now on the shortlist for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, a testament to Cantet’s conviction that the film is not only relevant to France. (That said, I can’t imagine a teacher’s lounge in Canada where staff meet for a midday drink to celebrate the new school year.) It is, he hopes, a glimpse of a world as relevant in Vancouver as Paris.

“School is not a sanctuary. It is always crossed by all the issues of the psyche. The kids who arrive have their own problems. The teachers have their own problems. You can’t take school out of society. If you look at a school, you look at society in its whole.”

At the Movies Michael Wood from The London Review of Books

Reverse Shot (Michael Joshua Rowin) review

Ruthless Reviews (potentially offensive) Matt Cale

The Class [Entre les murs] Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

Chicago Reader (J.R. Jones ) review

Cinescene [Chris Knipp]

DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Stephen Snart]

Christian Science Monitor review [A] Peter Rainer

review: Entre les murs (The Class) (Cannes 2008: Palme d'Or) Boyd van Hoeij at Cannes from European-films

Reel.com [Chris Cabin] also seen here: filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5]

Movie Shark Deblore [debbie lynn elias]

Moving Pictures Magazine [Ali Naderzad]

Eye for Film (Val Kermode) review [4/5]

The Class (Entre Les Murs) Mike Goodridge at Cannes from Screendaily

Continue reading Cannes Review: The Class (Entre les Murs) James Rocchi at Cannes from Cinematical

Plume Noire [Fred Thom]

The House Next Door [Vadim Rizov]

Slant Magazine [David Phelps] a surprisingly insipid Slant review – rare

Review of Cantet's work on DinaView Dina Iordanova

Between the Walls: Taking “The Class” with director Laurent Cantet Ray Pride from New City

Variety (Justin Chang) review

Engineering Simplicity: “The Class” Director Laurent Cantet Erica Abeel interviews the director for indieWIRE, January 30, 2009

Cineuropa - Interviews - Laurent Cantet • Director by Fabien Lemercier from Cineuropa, May 24, 2008

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Interview: Laurent Cantet • Director - Cineuropa Fabien Lemercier interview, September 16, 2008

BFI | Sight & Sound | The London Film Festival: The Class - Interview Ginette Vincendeau interviews the director from Sight and Sound, November 2008

Interview: François Bégaudeau Interview by Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, February 20, 2009

Peter Bradshaw on The Class The Guardian, February 27, 2009

Blog: The Class teaches us a lesson in despair David Cox from The Guardian Blog, March 2, 2009

Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London

Time Out New York (David Fear) review [4/6]

Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [4/6]

Boston Herald (James Verniere) review [A-]

The Republic (Plato) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Ethics and Politics in The Republic

History of Western Philosophy a guide to Western philosophy from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the early 20th century, by Bertrand Russell

The Internet Classics Archive | The Republic by Plato the entire work on-line, written 360 BC

YouTube - Entre les murs by Laurent Cantet - Cannes 2008 - Golden Palm (1:59)

Caouette, Jonathan

TARNATION A 95

USA (105 mi) 2003

What─documentaries never looked like this before? Perhaps, for some, this style is not sufficiently underground, and for others, too stylistically exaggerated, as the film just doesn’t fit into the accepted genre of today’s films. As a result, it’s not getting the kind of public response it deserves, as it’s being relegated to small, unattended theaters. At least that’s the response here in Chicago, playing only in the small theater at the Music Box, it may as well have been given the kiss of death, which is a shame, as this is a radically different work that breaks the mold on what a documentary film should look like, which deserves be seen on large screens. Instead it’s getting labeled as a gay film by some, ridiculed by others for being too self-indulgent, too much about one guy and his family, using home movies for Christ’s sake, so why is it relevant to me? But the boldness of style here takes one’s breath away. Despite its avant-garde reputation, this is one of the most tender, unapologetically unique films about love and self-affirmation that you’ll ever see.

What seems to be overlooked in evaluating this film is that it is, ultimately, a transforming love story through art. And it is an opening for the viewers to question our own abilities to accept, as one of us, the mentally challenged. The mentally ill are all too often relegated to the back rooms somewhere, out of sight, out of mind. Here, Caouette has the courage to place his mother Renee LeBlanc front and center, showing us the woman he loves, Tarnation - Naked As We Came by Iron And Wine YouTube (2:37). And brain damaged as she is, if he’s not ashamed of her, then why should we be of anyone who is similarly afflicted? If we’re ever to bridge the gaps of intolerance, doesn’t it begin within our own dysfunctional families? That is the ultimate challenge of the film.

What immediately stands out is what a beautifully structured, heartfelt, and eye-opening film this is, using a highly confessional, experimental, style that is punctuated by neverending streams of light, making incredible use of color, narration, editing, and very soft, intimate music that offers the viewer a glimpse of how Caouette feels about the various stages of his life, becoming an excruciatingly personal, autobiographical coming-of-age film, where he is credited as actor/writer/editor/producer/and director. Initially put together for $218 using iMovie, Apple’s DV editing program, Caouette combines hyper-expressive film elements from his own family history, particularly his mother, who lost the use of her legs after a fall from the roof of her house, later diagnosed with a dead nerve, regaining her ability to walk, but at the time she received electric shock treatment, twice a week for two years, emerging with bipolar and schizo-affective disorders, where for the next 35 years Renee would be institutionalized more than 100 times, Diviner Sequence from Tarnation - Music by HEX, Steve Kilbey and Donnette Thayer YouTube (3:47). During a distressing bus ride across the country, she suffered a psychotic episode in Chicago where Jonathan witnessed his mother’s rape at the age of 5. One of the more traumatic moments at the center of the film is awaiting her recovery from a lithium overdose. Nonetheless, the brutal harshness of these memories is contrasted by early photographs when she worked as a model, using a recurring theme of beauty and joy, which is how he continues to think of her even now.

Caouette blends parallel images of his own adolescent development, including his experience with abusive foster parents mixed with attention grabbing drug use and suicide attempts, acting out imaginary characters of his own creation, seen here at age 11 tarnation YouTube in English with French subtitles (2:53), his discovery that he is gay growing up in Houston, masquerading as an older goth girl to get into gay clubs, set to the music of the Cocteau Twins "Ice Pulse" TARNATION -clip de la vida de jonathan caouette YouTube in English with Spanish subtitles (3:20), much of which has the feel of low-grade horror films, his first boyfriend, also unusually creative spurts, such as starring in his own horror films or directing his own high school musical production of David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET (1986), lip-synching to the music of Marianne Faithfull. There is an especially moving sequence of meeting and discovering his true love in New York, which is accentuated by the Magnetic Fields song “Strange Powers,” Strange Powers - YouTube (2:37), which feels so hopeful and optimistic, not in a dreamy sense, but realistically. With much of the film shot in his own apartment, we see film posters of Fassbinder’s QUERELLE (1982), or Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), along with other artworks hanging on the wall. Of noticeable interest is how effortlessly the filmmaker expresses the fact that he’s gay, so matter of factly. It is the one aspect of his life that has not been tarnished, where he feels comfortable and relaxed about himself. This is easily the healthiest aspect of his life. What’s more unsettling is the front and center staging of some of the more incoherent and unglamorous sides of his mother, turning so much of the spotlight on her that many viewers come unhinged and start calling it exploitive. However, as this film is largely a valentine “to” his mother, then showing us who she is, in totality, is showing us who he loves.

Again, every color has been overly saturated, images stretched and reformulated to create new art forms, all blended together with an intensely personal 3^rd person narration that is unspoken, but is instead read like subtitles on the screen, using such eloquently simplistic methods to allow a distance, a detachment in describing tortuous realities that have an inner life of their own, eating and gnawing at him, even entering his dreams, but which drives him to create a stunningly unique work, a transforming artistic experience. While Caouette’s experimental style is not completely new, certainly underground filmmakers from Andy Warhol to Stan Brakhage have devised similar looking films, but his use of such a gorgeously compelling experimental style as a cathartic means of excoriating such intensely personal and very real demons from his life in order to create a sense of being normal does seem revelatory.

The Music of Tarnation

There was also original music composed and recorded by Max Avery Lichtenstein and an original score composed and recorded by John Califra

Laserbeam - Low
Naked As We Came - Iron and Wine
Wichita Lineman - Glen Campbell
Reptile - Lisa Germano
Ice Pulse - Cocteau Twins
Frank Mills - From HAIR
Walking In Space - From HAIR
The Ballad of Lucy Jordan - Marianne Faithful
Diviner - HEX
Embrace - Low
Mysteries of Love - Blue Velvet
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue - Chocolate Watch Band
Strange Powers - Magnetic Fields
After Loving You - Jean Wells
A Little Bitty Pissant Country Place - Dolly Parton
Around and Round - The Red House Painters
Back Home Again - Low
How Many Times - Mavis Staples
Around and Round (end credits) - The Red House Painters

to which one IMDb listener responded:

I LOVE feeling sorry for myself! Low rules, so does Red House Painters and all the other totally emasculated Slow-core/Sad-core bands out there. Repeating the same dissonant chord structure at 30 beats-per-minute over and over and over again while droning on lyrically in a whiny voice is the future of rock n' roll! ...One Star...

Tarnation an ardent disbeliever, Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

"The film we deserve," opined cstults after the screening. I don't mean to get all Armond White here, but it's hard for me to understand why people are falling for this hapless piece of charlatanry. Caouette has no feel for the medium, basically putting iMovie through its paces and performing every faux-cool trick in the book. What's more, these "experimental" elements are tied to an autobiographical narrative, the sad tale of a fragmented subjectivity, so apparently that makes it all okay for viewers who would never be caught dead seeing a real avant-garde film. (It's like those idiotic claims that Van Gogh had an optical disorder, that if you can normalize formal experimentation or at least categorize it as a comprehensible pathology, you can then, and only then, admire it for its "diversity.") And in case you have trouble following this story, Caouette emblazons baldly descriptive, third-person captions across the screen, helpfully changing the font point for emphasis. While watching Tarnation, which has been feted far and wide across the festival circuit, I thought of all those folks lambasting Vincent Gallo for his narcissism, then nodding with eggheaded approval as Caouette turns the legacies of Kenneth Anger, Tom Chomont, Jack Smith, and even the Maysles brothers into the ultimate visual expression of Oprahfied navel-gazing. "Jonathan," our tragic hero, occupies nearly every frame. Yet there's no critical distance, no working through the images from an adult, aesthetic perspective. This doesn't make Tarnation "raw;" it leaves it pitifully half-baked. (Not to mention creepily auto-pornographic. Caouette cannot get enough of his own shirtless, eye-linered underage image.) In the end, Caouette's "healing process" takes us from luxurious wallowing to petulant rage, wherein he exacts revenge on his brain-addled mother (a cruel freak show) and his grandfather. (Charges of abuse and neglect are notoriously difficult to prove, and as a result it's almost always the most responsible thing to give the victim the benefit of the doubt. And yet, Caouette does nothing in Tarnation to demonstrate that his grandparents willfully abused his mother Renee. In fact, quite the opposite -- they seem only to have made the mistake of trusting the mental health establishment, which is demonstrably more culpable for destroying Renee's life.) What we see, finally, on both the emotional and the creative level, is an un-reflexive portrait of arrested development. In a society that uses its vast social, political, and interpersonal resources to infantilize its citizens, and more importantly to coach us on how to infantilize ourselves, Tarnation is a stark symptom, but little else.

Tarnation Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

One of the hottest tickets at Sundance '04, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation made headlines when it was announced that it was produced for $218.32 and edited entirely on Apple's free iMovie editing software. Soon, filmmakers Gus Van Sant and James Cameron Mitchell came calling. Using photographs, old home movies, short films, and pop cultural artifacts from the '80s and '90s, Caouette splices together the images of his life using split-screen and recoloring effects, creating a kaleidoscopic found-art project that looks to redefine the nature of documentary filmmaking. Caouette plumbs the depths of his mother Renee's life, revealing a young girl who was forever scarred at an early age when doctors unnecessarily subjected her to electroshock treatment. Years later, when it's revealed that a drug dealer friend of Renee's once gave a young Jonathan two joints laced with PCP, you get a sense that the boy never recovered from the intense trip. Like many gay boys, Jonathan is hell-bent on survival, and he uses his relationship to his camera to exorcize his demons. He naturally responds to camp—from Wonder Woman and The Stepford Wives to Liquid Sky and the films of David Lynch and Paul Morrissey (not surprisingly, his crazed mother suggests a grown-up Andrea Feldman)—as a means of displacing, understanding, and finally subverting human pain. The highlight of the film may be an 11-year-old Caouette's remarkable performance in front of the camera as a pregnant and abused junkie (this is a kid who's watched too much television, but one who's also seen real-life suffering). A drama queen to the core, Caouette evokes the horrible tragedy of his mother's life with printed text on the screen that suggests lines from a children's storybook. As for the soundtrack of hushed, sometimes distorted whispers, movie one-liners, and answering machine messages, it too points to the man's self-diagnosed "depersonalization disorder." The copious digital effects used throughout this brilliant video installation are self-conscious, for sure, but Caouette's psychedelic montage doesn't exist to pander to short attention spans. Instead, his images evoke the texture of the human mind—how it processes thoughts and sorts through memories, some more painful than others, constantly threatening to erode or, conversely, duplicate themselves until the body can't take the pressure. Like a person who divulges too much information on the first date, Caouette is not only self-pitying but also uncomfortably frank. But when you realize that Tarnation exists first and foremost for the director's benefit, you then realize that we should all be so lucky to so bravely confront and sort through the pieces of our lives.

Tarnation: confessional cinema. - Slate David Edelstein

Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (Wellspring) is a memoir composed on film—composed, you might say, over a 20-year span and then rubbed and buffed on a Macintosh computer with the program iMovie. My press kit heralds it as a revolution in the "audio-visual confessional"—which gives me, as a film critic, the heebie-jeebies. I mean, that's all we need: more exhibitionists with ready access to cameras and editing software. Probably after the 5,000^th arty home-movie montage purporting to tell the story of someone's lousy childhood, I'll rue the day I called Tarnation a masterpiece.

But a masterpiece it is, of a mind-bending modern sort: This story of a 31-year-old man and his mentally-ill mother is right on the border between what shrinks call immature "acting out" and mature artistic sublimation. Caouette, the filmmaker and protagonist, weaves psychodrama shot in the middle of the madness together with revelatory stills, surreal montages of the Texas landscape, found footage, clips from such disparate but fetishistic entertainments as Rosemary's Baby and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, fantasy monologues, and stark interviews that inexorably lapse back into psychodrama.

This isn't a journalistic work—a Peeping Tom brief—like last year's squirmy Capturing the Friedmans. The home movies are heavily filtered, transformed into art objects, their subjects encouraged to turn themselves into characters in the great drama of the hero's life. But that doesn't distance them. Tarnation is a collage of pain that breaks over you like a wave. Every second you can feel the cost to Caouette of what he's showing: The sounds and the images are like a pipeline from his unconscious to the screen.

After an opening in which he shows himself and his lover, David, reacting to the news that his mother, Renee, has been rushed to the hospital after an overdose of lithium, he tells the story of his immediate family. He begins with his grandparents, Adolph and Rosemary LeBlanc, and their daughter—a lovely girl, a child model, relatively normal until she fell off a roof and was partially paralyzed for no clear physiological reason. She had shock treatments every three weeks for two years, and she was still beautiful but beginning to unravel even before her brief marriage to Jonathan's dad. Then the penniless Renee impulsively took Jonathan from Houston to Chicago, where right off the bus she was raped in front of her young son by someone who stopped to give them a ride. On the bus back to Houston, she and the boy were thrown off for disturbing the passengers. Renee was institutionalized, while Jonathan ended up in a foster home, physically and emotionally abused (he alleges) until his grandparents managed to adopt him.

Oddly, Caouette narrates Tarnation in the third-person, referring to himself throughout as "Jonathan." He also speaks of becoming more and more detached from his feelings, so that third-person storytelling feels apt. Then he shows us something uncanny: A film of himself as an 11-year-old, in makeup and a female wig, reciting a monologue by a Southern rape victim with a young son. On one level he's appalling: He's mannered, he's overacting, he keeps touching his face compulsively. But he's not overacting as 11-year-old boy, he's overacting as a 30-year-old woman and weeping and losing control as a 30-year-old woman. It's clear—to me, and obviously to him, now—that he overidentified with his mother from an early age and has always longed to live out some fantasy version of her hell. Renee didn't actually raise Jonathan—his grandparents did—and so she's never the oppressive gorgon of other monster-mother sagas. She was lost to him and is therefore an object of longing. He adores her—she's Dolly Parton, she's Mia Farrow, she's Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet—even as he hungrily documents her dissolution.

Exploitation? Debatable. Caouette sees Renee as a casualty of the mental health system—as someone who didn't start out schizoid but ended up that way after all those shock treatments and years of hospitalization. As a non-psychiatrist without a time machine, I can't verify his diagnosis (she seems pretty conventionally schizzy to me), but his empathy for her struggle is a counterweight to his vampiric urge to get her delusions on camera. We always see her through Caouette's eyes, watching helplessly as she metamorphoses from slender, doe-eyed angel to puffy, aging child-woman in pigtails and oversized glasses. It's hard to know what to feel when she moves in with Jonathan and his lover in Brooklyn. She can be such a likable mouthy broad. And then she can suddenly, without warning, begin to rail against those who've conspired to destroy her life.

On a more positive note, we see the roots of Caouette's artistic impulses: how it began with self-dramatization (he's a real drama queen); how self-dramatization runs in the family (his mother and grandmother are both a howl, the latter, especially, in her cups); and how the boy discovers underground filmmaking and gropes to find a way to act out in a strange new medium. His debt to gutbucket horror movies and musicals and David Lynch (he turned BlueVelvet into a musical in high school) and Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho is obvious: Van Sant even became an executive producer, as did John Cameron Mitchell of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. But Tarnation is all by itself in its volcanic—and cathartic—blend of biography and hallucination.

I don't know where that title comes from—it's never explained—but as I watched I did think, in breathless admiration, "What in tarnation???"

BFI | Sight & Sound | Tell It To The Camera B. Ruby Rich from Sight and Sound, April 2005

Interview: Jonathan Caouette | Film | The Guardian Gareth McLean from The Guardian, April 15, 2005

Jim's Reviews - Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette / 2004) Jim Clark

In-depth Analysis of TARNATION (Caouette, 2003 ... L. from Previews, Reviews, and Everything in Between

I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR - Filmmaker Magazine - Spring 2004 Andy Bailey

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [5/5]

Tarnation - Reviews - Reverse Shot Matthew Plouffe

A Tale of Sound and Fury: Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation ... Virginia Bonner (pdf format)

Tarnation Reviews & Links - Jonathan Caouette The director’s own website

See for yourself #1 on John Waters list from Artforum magazine’s Top Ten Films of 2004

TARNATION| An Open Letter To Jonathan Caouette | THE ... Tom Hall from indieWIRE

Tarnation - Cinescene Chris Knipp

DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [5/5]

Kinocite Beth Gilligan

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B] also seen here: Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film

stylusmagazine.com (Kevin Worrall) review

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

sneersnipe (David Perilli) review

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review

Reverse Shot review Elbert Ventura

Eye for Film (Nick Jones) review [5/5]

Reel.com review [3.5/4] Pam Grady

DVD Times Noel Megahey

outrate.net (Mark Adnum) review

hybridmagazine.com review Roxanne Bogucka

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review Special Edition

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival report

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

Bright Lights Film Journal (Robert Keser) review

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review

Reviews Tarnation Jonathan Caouette - Exclaim! James Luscombe

Talking Pictures (UK) review Patrick Bliss

The Village Voice [Ed Halter]

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

indieWIRE review a series of Top Ten Lists

BOMB Magazine — Jonathan Caouette by Christopher Wilcha Cristopher Wilcha interview from Bomb magazine, Fall 2004

Man with a Movie Camera: Visiting Jonathan Caouette ... Felix von Boehm interview from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2008

Time Out London review

Boston Globe review [4/4] Wesley Morris

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]

Picking Up the Pieces Of a Troubled Family - Washington Post Stephen Hunter

San Francisco Chronicle [Walter Addiego]

Tarnation (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow DVDBeaver dvd review

WALK AWAY RENEE

USA France (90 mi) 2011

Walk Away Renee Howard Feinstein at Cannes from Screendaily

Artful fragmentation of old footage from his own and his unusual family’s lives in the 2004 Tarnation, assembled for next to nothing with free Imovie software on a Mac, put Caouette on connoisseurs’ talent radar, but pigeonholed him as a festival darling. Walk Away Renee is a gigantic leap forward: a real crew and more refined footage, but with enough of an accessible, more linear structure - a quasi-road movie with many more naturalistic scenes than Tarnation in which he takes his mentally ill mother by U-Haul truck from an assisted living facility in his hometown of Houston, Texas to his current residence in New York City - that it will still play festivals but will cross over into the alternative and arthouse circuit.

Once again, it took the French designer agnes b., who has supported the wildly unusual forays of Harmony Korine, to finance the work of an edgy young American filmmaker. This is patronage, and the financial payoff will be small by commercial movie standards. The film is guaranteed to be critic-driven at first, then word-of-mouth among those attracted to edgy works will guarantee it relatively fruitful release in larger, more cosmopolitan cities in many territories territories.

Caouette’s mother, 58-year-old Renee Leblanc, suffers from acute bipolar and schizoaffective disorder. Diagnosed with depression at the age of 12, she received the first of hundreds of electroshock treatments. The life of this once beautiful, animated woman has been a downhill slide ever since: institutionalization at hundreds of facilities, a huge daily regimen of psychopharmalogic medications, especially lithium, to quiet her demons, and a manic, passive-aggressive demeanour when she is off them.

In a role reversal, son has taken on the role of parent to his now brain-damaged mother. Through time shifts in which he shows Leblanc at various ages and in assorted states, as well as footage of their interaction at different phases of their lives, we come to understand the strong bond that attaches him to her so closely that he puts his own needs aside to make sure she is not mistreated by the medical establishment.

On top of the sequences documenting the trying ride through the South from Texas to New York (she loses her pills), gorgeous shots of moving clouds help structure the film. According to a cult called Cloudbusters, which aims to legitimise a fourth dimension, and for which Caouette is commissioned to direct an outreach video, clouds are a reservoir of energy. He has made no secret of his interest in parallel universes, but he treats the cult and his own video with a welcome sense of humour.

Few filmmakers working today can meld the formal wizardry on display here with a relatively straightforward account of a serious personal subject. With a soundtrack of quiet standards (Under the Boardwalk and the nostalgic title song made popular by the Left Bank in the 1960s, among many others) accompanying some extremely imaginative apocalyptic abstractions, Caouette has achieved a balancing act bordering on genius.

Walk Away Renee: Cannes Review David Rooney at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 15, 2011

"Tarnation" filmmaker Jonathan Caouette takes a cross-country trip with his mother, who suffers from acute bipolar and schizoaffective disorder, in this inconsistent film.

In his innovative 2004 debut feature, Tarnation, made on an iMac mostly out of years' worth of home movies and photographic material, Jonathan Caouette forged a new kind of pop-poetic memoir. The film was a cathartic exploration of his emergence as a gay man, and of his determined struggle to remain the one constant in the life of his mentally and emotionally unstable mother. That struggle clearly is ongoing, but revisiting the subject in Walk Away Renee yields far less consistent rewards.

Given the unconventional personalities around which the films are woven, it's tempting to compare Caouette's companion piece to what AlbertMaysles did in 2006 with The Beales of Grey Gardens. That belated afterthought to Grey Gardens, the landmark cinema verite documentary he made 31 years earlier with his late brother David Maysles, unearthed a wealth of unseen footage.

There was no shortage of fascinating material, and there are doubtless enough Edith/Edie cultists to ensure a DVD life for the second installment. But returning to a private world that has already been so beguilingly accessed can be deflating, even banal. As different as they are in style, superior personal documentary portraits like Grey Gardens or Tarnation provide a sense of intimate discovery that inevitably is missing on second acquaintance.

The primary reason for Caouette's new chapter is a cross-country trip he took with his 58-year-old mother, Renee Leblanc, who suffers from acute bipolar and schizoaffective disorder. In and out of psychiatric facilities for most of her life, she endured a prolonged period of shock treatments as a teenager. When her condition deteriorated in 2010, Caouette packed her up in a U-Haul truck to move her from Houston to an assisted living facility in Rhinebeck, N.Y., closer to his home. But the loss en route of Renee's 30-day medication supply causes major problems, sparking a frustrating odyssey of calls to medical professionals.

Where Tarnation careened off on crazy pop-cultural tangents to show the influences that helped shape Caouette as a gay adolescent, Walk Away Renee delves into rudimentary sci-fi territory.

There's a silly bit early on in which Caouette has supposedly been contacted by a crackpot group called Cloudbusters to shoot an outreach video (tacked onto the end credits) spreading the word about their theories concerning the fourth dimension. There's also talk of the universal healing energy carried in cloud movement. Later, a TV report on alternate universes unleashes a blast of psychedelic digital effects to convey mind-warping escape.

Caouette certainly knows how to manipulate images and sound, painting on a vibrantly textured, semi-experimental canvas. But aside from visual stimulation set to some cool music, none of the fictional stuff adds much.

There are many disarming, unguarded moments between mother and son, and the film is most affecting when Renee's increasingly off-the-rails behavior causes Caouette to turn back the clock to earlier episodes in their lives. These experiences will no doubt always remain raw for him, and continuing to process them through his films may be his means of growing as an artist. It also may be necessary for him in order to stay sane, anchored and committed to loving someone so difficult to handle.

It's problematic, however, that we learn very little here that wasn't more stirringly conveyed in the earlier film. In its mesmerizing, propulsive drive, Tarnation was a heartfelt scramble to make sense of messy lives. Walk Away Renee is an occasionally illuminating patchwork.

CANNES REVIEW | Jonathan Caouette Returns With Flawed But Fascinating “Walk Away Renée” Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 15, 2011

Cannes 2011: Jonathan Caouette's road trip through mental illness Charlotte Higgins interviews the director at Cannes from The Guardian, May 17, 2011

Capone, Alessandro

HIDDEN LOVE (L'amour caché) D+ 65

Belgium Italy Luxembourg (90 mi) 2007

This is as gloomy a film as you’re ever likely to see, filled with hatred and self-loathing, as Isabelle Huppert as Danielle narrates her experiences as a mother who from the outset never connects to her child, Sophie, as she watches others hover around her baby expressing delight, but she is genuinely disinterested. While one can imagine what it must have been like to be raised by an indifferent mother, that’s not where this film is going. Instead it connects with Huppert after her third suicide attempt, where she’s wracked with guilt to the point where she hates herself, but also expresses nothing but contempt for her now grown 23-year old child (Mélanie Laurent), who she insists is plotting against her, convinced that her daughter cleverly changes and manipulates memories as it suits her in order to place her in a better position. Much of the time is spent in therapy sessions with her psychiatrist, Greta Scacchi, who initially does all the talking, urging Danielle to write down her thoughts, as she refuses to utter a word. However, by the time the smallest bit of progress has been made, Sophie arrives on the scene, storming into the doctor’s office claiming her mother is up to her theatrics again, that she may fool the doctor into believing she’s sick, but really she’s just a cold-hearted mother who has no love to give. As it turns out, both are right, as they genuinely hate one another, and both exude contemptible behavior towards one another that is not how they act or behave with any other living soul. The two are simply joined at the hip in a life cycle of hatred.

Sophie’s only concern is that the hospital is too expensive, insisting she be moved to another that is more affordable. Danielle, of course, sees this as spite, and their fixated view of continually holding each other in contempt is leaving the psychiatrist baffled, as despite every attempt at finding a middle ground, there is no end to the demonstrative accusations. Adding to this one-dimensional picture of dispassion is an original piano soundtrack that morbidly repeats itself endlessly throughout the entire picture, where there is rarely any use of natural sound, instead it is that same monotonous music that drones on and undercuts any emotional connection to what’s happening onscreen. But since we’re given such a clinical perspective from the outset, occasionally showing a few brief flashbacks, the overall tone of the film is one of utter detachment, where the audience could really care less about either one of them. Despite the first rate cast, this is a seriously unengaging effort, where the director has no sense of how to use the performances, allowing them to perform for nothing, as their talents are wasted in a movie that never goes anywhere. By the time the storyline plays out, we’ve had enough of this dysfunctional family, whose fixation on death and morbid gloom is not exactly satisfying. Where are the vampires, one might ask? These are such bloodsuckers, you’d think somewhere in this picture the mood would change, or someone might try a different direction, and occasionally there’s evidence of some surreal visual flair, but then it insists on returning to the exact same grim tone, becoming so relentlessly downbeat that what we’re left with registers as a false note, drown out by the cold gloom in the air.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

(L’amour cache) Another variation on Isabelle Huppert’s burgeoning bestiary of female variations, Alessandro Capone’s 2009 “Hidden Love” finds her playing Danielle, a pointedly perverse mother in her late forties, not hiding her age, who doesn’t care about her daughter Sophie, and a wan Greta Scacchi as the doctor who tries to help her with her anger and suicidal urges. In the shifts from present to past, from black-and-white to color, the ever-luminous Mélanie Laurent (“Inglourious Basterds”) plays the grown Sophie, and brings admirable fire to one memorable confrontation with her mother, yet a grandiloquent mutual hatred is more indicated than demonstrated. Visually, a motif of fearful stairways, corridors and escalators is suggestive but elusive in meaning. Even at its most banal, it’s lovingly lit by veteran cinematographer Luciano Tovoli (“The Passenger,” “Single White Female,” “Suspiria,” “Reversal of Fortune”). With Olivier Gourmet (“Mesrine,” “L’enfant,” “Read My Lips”), underused as the doctor’s husband. A co-production from Belgium, Italy and Luxembourg. 90m. 35mm.

HIDDEN LOVE (L'amour caché) Facets Multi Media

Based on the novel by Danielle Girard, Hidden Love is a moving drama between mother and daughter featuring French star Isabelle Huppert (La Cérémonie, The Piano Teacher) who provides one of her best performances. After a third suicide attempt, Danielle (Huppert) is placed under psychiatric observation in a private clinic in Paris. Her fractured relationship with her daughter Sophie (Mélanie Laurent) troubles her deeply, and she cannot recuperate from her self inflicted wounds, until she is able to speak about her past. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Nielsen (Greta Scacchi, The Coca Cola Kid), is not ready to give up on her and convinces Danielle to put down her thoughts on paper. Under Dr. Nielsen's vigilant supervision, Danielle slowly manages to find the words to articulate and understand the roots of her distress and despair. However, when Sophie unexpectedly reappears, Danielle suffers a devastating relapse, and finds herself wandering through the streets of Paris. She eventually returns to the clinic where she receives unexpected news, which will forever change her life and create for the first time, a future of promise and self fulfillment.

User reviews from imdb Author: simona gianotti (yris2002) from Italy

It is impossible not to be shocked by this movie, focused on a very delicate theme, and on three female characters. An over the top (and very courageous) Isabelle Huppert plays the main role of Danielle, a mother who hates her daughter in a visceral way, and has spent her whole life between indifference and sense of guilt, but incapable of elaborating her suffering condition. Her interpretation is devastating, her face is completely blank and the camera focused on it underlines the void of her inner world, still more underlined by the aseptic, white, impersonal environment surrounding her. Her troubled relationship with motherhood is probably part of a mental disorder, since also the relation with her good husband has always been difficult, as she has often felt disgusted by him, and she feels in general incapable of experiencing any human feelings. Mélanie Laurent plays Sophie, the hated daughter, she shifts from total inexpressiveness when she is with Danielle (although she feels some kind of love for her), to tender maternal love when she is with her own daughter. Greta Scacchi plays the analyst and is the only soothing and positive human female figure, trying to elaborate some sense and to assert the value of human sympathy.

The atmosphere throughout the movie never ceases to be tense, sometimes too tense, the moments of "dialogue" between Danielle and Sophie convey such anger, rage, hate that they are almost unbearable. The final outcome tries to offer some relief, although not too convincing, as if a backwards step seemed to be necessary in order to bring all the hate we have perceived to a more humanly-acceptable dimension, as if some kind of rescue were to be found, but it seems too a hasty ending, which leaves many unsolved, but probably unsolvable questions (above all, the only hinted reference by Danielle to the possibility that every mother could have negative feelings for a child, that you cannot enforce yourself to love someone, not even your own child). Undoubtedly, a very well interpreted movie, but, obviously, very sad and depressing, you need to be prepared and be in the right mood to see it.

Variety.com [Robert Koehler]

Even an actor with the Olympian powers of Isabelle Huppert can’t make “Hidden Love” the scalding psychodrama it was intended to be. Though Huppert is ideally cast as an emotionally entombed mother haunted by memories of her only daughter, director Alessandro Capone’s conception (working in his non-native French) is studied, with a gummy pace and an inability to reach emotional catharsis that leaves just a hint of what the movie could have been. Huppert’s presence alone will assure fest invites, but buyers will mostly lock in deals for small screen sessions.

Weight of entire pic is on Huppert’s shoulders -- or, more specifically, on her face, which is shown as more nglamorous and riddled with age, stress and despair than any other international star has allowed herself to be shown of late.

The image of suicidal Danielle (Huppert), seated in the office of caring shrink Dr. Nielsen (Greta Scacchi), is that of a woman who has stared down the dark, deep hole of her own demise and psychic defeat. It is yet another reminder that there is arguably no other thesp in world cinema who dares push her characters to such radical limits while remaining resolutely human.

After her third suicide attempt, Danielle is in a mental hospital and won’t utter a word. Some brief written notes begin to prompt doctor-patient dialogue, which predictably opens a rush of flashbacks involving a younger Danielle, her bitter upbringing, dubious marriage and a baby she had absolutely no desire to have.

“Hidden Love” never gets creepier than when Danielle, having just birthed daughter Sophie, watches the infant as if it were some odd potted plant she finds repellant.

Capone and co-writer Luca D’Alisera’s adaptation of Danielle Girard’s novel isn’t as interesting as most of the cast, and the film visually struggles against standard TV reference points to get inside Danielle’s head, recalling many of Ingmar Bergman’s more routine projects. Particularly near the end, after a stunning and visceral head-on confrontation between the grown Sophie (a fiery Melanie Laurent) and the mother she profoundly despises, pic plays perceptual games, leaving viewers with a rather pointless set of varying dramatic conclusions.

Frank Capra at Reel Classics

Capra, Frank

Film Reference Charles Affron

The critical stock of Frank Capra has fluctuated perhaps more wildly than that of any other major director. During his peak years, the 1930s, he was adored by the press, by the industry and, of course, by audiences. In 1934 It Happened One Night won nearly all the Oscars, and through the rest of the decade a film of Frank Capra was either the winner or the strong contender for that honor. Long before the formulation of the auteur theory, the Capra signature on a film was recognized. But after World War II his career went into serious decline. His first post-war film, It's a Wonderful Life, was not received with the enthusiasm he thought it deserved (although it has gone on to become one of his most-revered films). Of his last five films, two are remakes of material he treated in the thirties. Many contemporary critics are repelled by what they deem indigestible "Capracorn" and have even less tolerance for an ideology characterized as dangerously simplistic in its populism, its patriotism, its celebration of all-American values.

Indeed, many of Capra's most famous films can be read as excessively sentimental and politically naive. These readings, however, tend to neglect the bases for Capra's success—his skill as a director of actors, the complexity of his staging configurations, his narrative economy and energy, and most of all, his understanding of the importance of the spoken word in sound film. Capra captured the American voice in cinematic space. The words often serve the cause of apple pie, mom, the little man and other greeting card clichés (indeed, the hero of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town writes verse for greeting cards). But often in the sound of the voice we hear uncertainties about those very clichés.

Capra's career began in the pre-talkie era, when he directed silent comic Harry Langdon in two successful films. His action films of the early thirties are not characteristic of his later work, yet already, in the films he made with Barbara Stanwyck, his individual gift can be discerned. The narrative pretext of The Miracle Woman is the urgency of Stanwyck's voice, its ability to move an audience, to persuade listeners of its sincerity. Capra exploited the raw energy of Stanwyck in this and other roles, where her qualities of fervor and near-hysterical conviction are just as essential to her persona as her hard-as-nails implacability would be in the forties. Stanwyck's voice is theatricalized, spatialized in her revivalist circus-tent in The Miracle Woman and on the hero's suicide tower in Meet John Doe, where her feverish pleadings are the only possible tenor for the film's unresolved ambiguities about society and the individual.

John Doe is portrayed by Gary Cooper, another American voice with particular resonance in the films of Capra. A star who seems to have invented the "strong, silent" type, Cooper first plays Mr. Deeds, whose platitudinous doggerel comes from a simple, do-gooder heart, but who enacts a crisis of communication in his long silence at the film's climax, a sanity hearing. When Mr. Deeds finally speaks it is a sign that the community (if not sanity) is restored—the usual resolution of a Capra film. As John Doe, Cooper is given words to voice by reporter Stanwyck, and he delivers them with such conviction that the whole nation listens. The vocal/dramatic center of the film is located in a rain-drenched ball park filled with John Doe's "people." The hero's effort to speak the truth, to reveal his own imposture and expose the fascistic intentions of his sponsor, is stymied when the lines of communication are literally cut between microphone and loudspeaker. The Capra narrative so often hinges on the protagonist's ability to speak and be heard, on the drama of sound and audition.

The bank run in American Madness is initiated by a montage of telephone voices and images, of mouths spreading a rumor. The panic is quelled by the speech of the bank president (Walter Huston), a situation repeated in more modest physical surroundings in It's a Wonderful Life. The most extended speech in the films of Capra occurs in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The whole film is a test of the hero's voice, and it culminates in a filibuster, a speech that, by definition, cannot be interrupted. The climax of State of the Union involves a different kind of audience and audition. There, the hero confesses his political dishonesty and his love for his wife on television.

The visual contexts, both simple and complex, never detract from the sound of Capra's films. They enhance it. The director's most elaborately designed film, The Bitter Tea of General Yen (recalling the style of Josef von Sternberg in its chiaroscuro lighting and its exoticism) expresses the opposition of cultural values in its visual elements, to be sure, but also in the voices of Stanwyck and Nils Asther, a Swedish actor who impersonates a Chinese war lord. Less unusual but not less significant harmonies are sounded in It Happened One Night, where a society girl (Claudette Colbert) learns "real" American speech from a fast-talking reporter (Clark Gable). The love scenes in Mr. Deeds are for Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur, another quintessential Capra heroine, whose vocal personality is at least as memorable as her physical one. In James Stewart Capra finds his most disquieting voice, ranging in Mr. Smith from ingenuousness to hysterical desperation and in It's a Wonderful Life to an even higher pitch of hysteria when the hero loses his identity.

The sounds and sights of Capra's films bear the authority of a director whose autobiography is called The Name above the Title. With that authority comes an unsettling belief in authorial power, the power dramatized in his major films, the persuasiveness exercised in political and social contexts. That persuasion reflects back on the director's own power to engage the viewer in his fiction, to call upon a degree of belief in the fiction—even when we reject the meaning of the fable.

A Capra Site official website

All-Movie Guide bio from Bruce Eder

TCMDB profile from Turner Classic Movies

Classic Film and Television Home Page Michael E. Grost

Frank Capra's America

Bright Lights Film Journal Article Capra’s Corn, by D.J.M. Saunders, November 2004

BFI | Sight & Sound | Capra before he became 'Capraesque' Joseph McBride from Sight and Sound, December 2010

Capra, Frank They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)

THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN B+ 91

USA (88 mi) 1933

Light years away from the homespun, small-town Capracorn for which the director is best known, this exotic, erotic melodrama is by far his finest achievement. Stanwyck, subtly radiant, is the American missionary in Shanghai who is abducted by a highly sophisticated Chinese warlord (Asther); like the film itself, she is both fascinated and repelled by the prospect of miscegenation. Where Capra's other films are largely stolid, prosaic and talky, this is sensuous and profoundly cinematic, perhaps most notably in a sequence in which Stanwyck dreams of her seduction by a forceful Asther. Odd, but oddly moving.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

Frank Capra's very atypical drama about an American missionary (Barbara Stanwyck) taken prisoner by a Chinese warlord (Nils Asther) is not only his masterpiece but also one of the great love stories to come out of Hollywood in the 30s--subtle, delicate, moody, mystical, and passionate. Joseph Walker shot it through filters and with textured shadows that suggest Sternberg; Edward Paramore wrote the script, adapted from a story by Grace Zaring Stone. Oddly enough, this perverse and beautiful film was chosen to open Radio City Music Hall in 1933; it was not one of Capra's commercial successes, but it beats the rest of his oeuvre by miles, and both Stanwyck and Asther are extraordinary. With Walter Connolly and Lucien Littlefield. 89 min.

Senses of Cinema (Kevin Lee)

A missionary's fiancee (Barbara Stanwyck) is abducted by a Chinese warlord (Nils Asther) during the revolution. This intriguing drama is one of Capra's more underrated efforts. While its characterization of the Chinese may occasionally seem backward by present standards, by the standards of 1933 the film is positively daring. The audience is set us up for the usual tale of virtuous womanhood threatened by the brutality of an Oriental villain. Then, in a series of surprising turn-arounds, the picture undercuts all plot expectations while providing some interesting commentary on Western assumptions. Beautifully shot by Joe Walker, the movie has a fine rhythm and a kind of sensuality one doesn't usually associate with Capra. A highlight is a seductive dream sequence which is among the most beautiful examples of the type ever done. The choice of a non-Asian actor to play the title role is not surprising considering the time, but the Swedish Asther turns in a subtle and moving performance. Stanwyck is marvelous too - but then she was great in almost everything she did in those days. Banned in some areas because it crossed the taboo of interracial romance, The Bitter Tea of General Yen was always one of Frank Capra's favorites among his own films.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs

In my write-up of Frank Capra's THE MIRACLE WOMAN from a few weeks ago, I noted that, of the fifteen films he directed in the 1930s, it was one of only two that lost money, a fact later attributed to it having been banned in the UK. The other was THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, which was never banned, but performed poorly in large part because of its seemingly offensive nature. (It also has the distinction of being the first film to screen at Radio City Music Hall, though it was pulled after only eight days.) Despite the criticism it's received over the years--back then for its lurid depiction of miscegenation, nowadays for its flagrant Orientalism--it is arguably Capra's masterpiece. Based on the eponymous novel by Grace Zaring Stone and set in China during the Chinese Civil War, it's about a beautiful American missionary (Megan Davis, played by Barbara Stanwyck in her fourth collaboration with Capra) who's detained by the infamous General Yen (played not by a Chinese actor, but by Swedish actor Nils Asther) after she and her fiancé are incapacitated. The rest of the film is a curious push-pull between Megan's devotion to her faith and her growing desire for the charismatic general. What's noteworthy about the plot is that despite its rather stereotypical portrayal of the "godless" Chinese, it also confronts Megan's own dogmatic convictions. Capra doesn't condemn one or the other; instead, they're portrayed as being comparably stubborn, further highlighting their disparate attraction. Stylistically, this film is more impressive than anything he did before or after. With help from cinematographer and longtime collaborator Joseph Walker, its chiaroscuro lighting and informed framing are reminiscent of Sternberg. The set and costume design are particularly luscious, a far cry from Capra's typically understated aesthetic. A surreal dream sequence can only really be explained as a sort-of Nosferatu rape fantasy, in which Yen, first appearing as a Fu Manchu-style criminal with long, pointy fingernails, turns into Megan's dashing savior. (Ironically, despite the film's racist elements, Capra uses these hyperbolic stereotypes to visually denounce Megan's bigoted projections.) Having emigrated from Sicily in the early 1900s, it's possible Capra saw himself in the "exotic" General Yen, especially in regards to how he was viewed by members of the opposite sex who belonged to different social classes. (Joseph McBride touches upon this in his excellent book Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, a must-read for anyone interested in the director.) Some speculate that he took on such a serious subject matter simply to win an Oscar; however, as McBride recounts in his book, "In the late thirties [Capra] described it...as his favorite of all his films." Even though it was a failure at the box office, it endures as a masterwork born from one of cinema's most misunderstood careers.

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Bright Lights Film Journal Robert B. Ito

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT

USA (105 mi) 1934

It Happened One Night Dave Kehr from the Reader

Reporter Clark Gable chases spoiled heiress Claudette Colbert across most of the eastern seaboard, pausing long enough between wisecracks to set the definitive tone of 30s screwball comedy. Even though Frank Capra's 1934 film won all five of the top Oscars, it's still pretty good. This is Capra at his best, very funny and very light, with a minimum of populist posturing. 105 min.

Senses of Cinema (Martha P. Nochimson)

The film which lifted Columbia Studios into the big league by winning five Academy Awards and putting Capra's future output among the biggest box-office successes of the '30s. Gable plays a ruthless reporter who adopts a fugitive heiress making her way across America by bus. She (Colbert) is spoiled and snobbish, he is poor but honest, and his attempts to convert her to homespun pleasures hit the right emotional chord in Depression-weary audiences. Opinions divide about whether the film's comedy and sententious notions about the miserable rich and happy poor have dated, but some of the set pieces definitely haven't aged. Capra's sense of humour is a little like that of Preston Sturges, though less caustic; and the film shows its stars at their best, Colbert as one of Hollywood's fresher comediennes, Gable as dumb-but-loveable hunk.

Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Julian Antos

During the production of IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, Claudette Colbert purportedly referred to Capra's slapstick opus as the worst picture in the world, a criticism she'd repeat until the film was lauded with all five major Academy Awards. It's a messy work, and it's easy to see how Colbert could have objected, but the intricacies of Capra's earnest patchwork (Thanks, Columbia) give the film its merit. Colbert and Clark Gable seem humbled but lovably obstinate, as their mild trepidations about the script bleed into the film itself (as do various inconsistencies in editing and continuity). But IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT never feels like a film that doesn't want to be made and seen. Capra moves in quick, broad strokes, so that small details get picked up by happenstance and only make themselves apparent on repeated viewings. Stepping back, the film's personality is almost perfectly crafted, and there isn't anything about it that doesn't come across as genuine. The same could be said of nearly all of Capra's work, but his surefooted pacing renders this his most immediately likable.

Turner Classic Movies Margarita Landazuri

A runaway heiress meets a poor but charming newspaper reporter while she's on the lam, antipathy turns to love, and they encounter an assortment of oddball characters. It's the ideal premise for a screwball comedy, and has been the basis for many of them. But none did it better than the original, It Happened One Night (1934), the film that's credited with inventing the genre. Director Frank Capra often said that the making of It Happened One Night would have made a pretty good screwball comedy in itself. Consider the elements: two irascible studio bosses, an impossibly fast schedule, a couple of spoiled stars who didn't want to make the picture and are hostile to the harried director -- yet somehow they manage to produce an enduring classic.

In the early 1930s, Columbia Pictures was considered a "Poverty Row" studio, making cheap B-movies. Luckily, Columbia had a major asset in Capra, who had been nominated for an Academy Award for Lady for a Day (1933). Capra and writer Robert Riskin had adapted and renamed a magazine story called "Night Bus," and producer Harry Cohn had arranged to borrow Robert Montgomery from MGM for the lead in the newly named It Happened One Night. But Montgomery balked, saying there were already "too many bus pictures." Instead, MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer made Cohn an offer he couldn't refuse. "I got an actor here who's being a bad boy," Mayer reportedly told Cohn. "I'd like to spank him." The bad boy was Clark Gable, who was becoming an important star, and flexing his muscles. He told Mayer he wouldn't play any more gigolo roles, and he wanted a raise. Mayer would punish him by exiling him to Siberia on Poverty Row. Gable arrived for his first meeting with Capra drunk, rude, and angry. In spite of this inauspicious beginning, Capra and Gable eventually became friends. Once Gable read the script, he realized the character was a man very like himself, and he enjoyed making It Happened One Night.

Among the stars who had turned down the female lead in It Happened One Night were Myrna Loy, Miriam Hopkins, Constance Bennett and Margaret Sullavan. Claudette Colbert, under contract to Paramount, had four weeks free, but she was also a hard sell. She'd made her first film, For the Love of Mike (1927), with Capra directing, and it had been a disaster, so she was not excited about repeating the experience. What did excite her, however, was the prospect of making $50,000 for four weeks of work, since her Paramount salary was $25,000 per film. So she willingly agreed to do it, but, at the same time, she gave Capra a hard time. Although Colbert had gladly disrobed for De Mille in The Sign of the Cross (1932), she refused to be shown taking off her clothes in the motel room sequence in It Happened One Night. No matter. Draping her unmentionables over the "walls of Jericho" made for a sexier scene anyway. More problematic was the hitchhiking scene. Colbert didn't want to pull up her skirt and flash her legs. So Capra hired a chorus girl, intending to have her legs stand in for Colbert's in close-up. Colbert saw the girl posing, and said, "get her out of here, I'll do it -- that's not my leg!" After shooting wrapped, Colbert told friends, "I've just finished the worst picture in the world!"

Colbert's legs and Gable's chest were the sensations of the film. In the motel room scene, Gable demonstrates how a man undresses. When he took off his shirt, he wore no undershirt. Capra explained that the reason for this was that there was no way Gable could take off his undershirt gracefully, but once audiences saw Gable's naked torso, sales of men's undershirts plummeted. The rest of Gable's simple wardrobe -- Norfolk jacket, V-neck sweater, and trench coat -- also became a men's fashion fad. Thereafter, Gable wore a trench coat in most of his films, considering it his lucky garment.

The reviews for It Happened One Night were excellent, but no one really expected much from the film. After a slow opening, it received great word-of-mouth, and the film picked up steam at the box office. James Harvey, in his book Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, believes that the film succeeded because the couple transcended their stock characters. "There was some kind of new energy in their style: slangy, combative, humorous, unsentimental -- and powerfully romantic. Audiences were bowled over by it."

At Oscar time,It Happened One Night surprised the industry when it was nominated in all five major categories, and stunned everyone when it won them all: Best Actor, Actress, Picture, Director, and Screenplay. It was the first-ever sweep of the awards, a feat that would not be repeated for another 40 years, until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Claudette Colbert was about to depart on a train from New York when she was informed that she'd won. She dashed to the ceremony, dressed in a traveling suit, accepted the award, and dashed back to the train, which had been held for her.

MovieJustice (Dan DeVore)

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN

USA (115 mi) 1936

Reel.com DVD review [Jeffrey Wachs]

The public domain issues surrounding It's A Wonderful Life may have made that movie Frank Capra's best-known picture, and the director said on more than one occasion that it was his favorite. And though the Christmas season isn't complete without a visit from Clarence and company, I'm partial to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, myself. It's a marvelous balance of sheer entertainment and hopeful social commentary; it was an enormous success at the time of its release, and has only improved with age.

This was Capra's first picture after the astoundingly successful It Happened One Night, and in context it's easy to imagine the director's unease about selecting his next project—how do you follow up the first movie to win five major Oscars®, for best picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay? By letting just a dollop of social conscience creep in—that's how. Made at the nadir of the Depression, Mr. Deeds has the finely-crafted screwball elements of the director's previous movie, while providing a heartfelt commentary on the hardships endured by much of his audience.

For the uninitiated: Gary Cooper plays Longfellow Deeds, who has never left the small town of Mandrake Falls, Vermont; he's content playing his tuba in the town band and writing doggerel for postcards. He improbably inherits $20 million when a rich New York relative dies in a car accident, and the country mouse is whisked to the big city.

He's the talk of the town, but he isn't talking. To get to him, the New York Mail dispatches their ace reporter, Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur). She masquerades as a small-town girl, and Longfellow falls for her; they're out on the town at night, and she's ratting him out in the paper during the day. Of course, he's heartbroken when he finds out, and reaches a bigger conclusion: all that money is too much trouble. He sets about giving away his fortune to the indigent, to the many that need a boost more than he does.

That scant summary hardly does justice to the picture, with its splendid screenplay by Robert Riskin. Riskin has an acid tongue when he needs it ("You've been making love to a double dose of cyanide!"), and most of his best barbs go to Lionel Stander, later of Hart to Hart. But the writer is charitable toward the Vermonters, too, and especially toward the unemployed, peppering the streets of New York. It's a script that also demands attention from lexicographers, as the words "doodler" and "pixelated" were coined here.

It's always a little startling to see what a terrifically understated comedic actor Cooper can be—I always think of him first as Lou Gehrig, or as Sheriff Joe Kane in High Noon. But the sheer pleasure he takes in, say, sliding down a banister in his ritzy new house, is just delightful. This was also the movie that put Jean Arthur on the map—it sounds as if she was downright neurotic on the set, and had to be coaxed and cajoled in front of the camera; once she was finally there, she only wanted one side of her face shot. But she's a great foil for Cooper, and of course it's in the world of screwball that actresses of this age found their best roles.

There are some things that you don't want to think about too hard—for instance, what are all these farmers doing in Manhattan? But that's poking holes, that's nitpicking at a classic motion picture. Mr. Deeds does have a significant legacy—for instance, it was a remake in which the Nick Nolte character was to star in the ill-fated I'll Do Anything. And if you haven't, you might want to see the original now, because a genuine remake is coming, starring Adam Sandler and Winona Ryder

Turner Classic Movies Jeremy Arnold

MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN Dan Schneider from Alt Film Guide

ToxicUniverse.com (Dainon Moody)

CineScene.com (Kristen Ashley)

DVD Verdict Norman Short

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

DVD Talk (Chris Hughes)

LOST HORIZON

USA (118 mi) 1937 restored original version (132 mi)

Film Court (Lawrence Russell)

Classic fantasy epic based on James Hilton's novel, with a number of air-passengers hijacked after leaving war-torn China, and ending up in Tibet's Shangri-La, where peace, good health and longevity are the rule. Colman is torn between staying and returning to normal 'civilisation', and the result is a full-blown weepie, complete with kitschy sets, admirable if incredibly naïve sentiments, and fine acting from Colman. Not at all the sort of film one could make in these considerably more jaundiced times, as was evident with the appearance of the atrocious remake in 1973.

filmcritic.com visits Lost Horizon David Bezanson

The weirdest film by Frank Capra, this epic was adapted from James Hilton’s bestselling novel about a plane full of passengers stranded in Tibet who are brought to the imaginary utopia Shangri-la. (Hilton’s sensational fantasy was inspired by mountaineering trips to the Himalayas -- pretty much unknown then -- and it probably still influences how people in the West think about Tibet.)

Lost Horizon is a strange but haunting mixture of drama, long expository passages, and romance, with lavish, Xanadu-like sets set against stock footage of icy mountains -- but the performance of Ronald Colman carries the movie. Colman’s character is a Brit who decides he doesn’t mind hanging with the Buddhists and enjoying the quiet life, but some of his companions are unhappy in the worker’s paradise and debate whether to try to escape. Sensuality is provided by the young Jane Wyatt, later the matron on TV's Father Knows Best (Wyatt’s character is even shown in a distant frontal nude scene, a wink at the Hays Code).

Years after its release, Lost Horizon became slightly controversial because the depiction of Shangri-la had communist overtones (it was also accused of being pro-Chinese, which seems ironic… if anything, it would be pro-Tibetan). Some important scenes were cut out in response to criticism and some have never been found and restored, so available versions now show several minutes of still photographs where there is no surviving print while the audio plays. Bizarre methodology, but strangely, it works (several minutes is not a big chunk of this long film, which originally ran over three hours).

Actually, the subtext of Lost Horizon is not utopian: the stated purpose of Shangri-la is to create an island of civilization amid the social decline and wars to come, and to someday provide the nucleus for a "new renaissance" (a sci-fi trope later borrowed by Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories). This is a pretty serious theme -- chilling when you consider that the film was released only two years before Hitler began marching across Europe, and still relevant today.

Though it’s often slow-paced and the only surviving versions are fragmented, Lost Horizon is a strangely dreamlike, intelligent cinematic vision; more than most classic films, it has stayed with me over time.

Turner Classic Movies Bill Goodman

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

Reel.com DVD review [Bill Schwartz]

DVD Verdict Sean McGinnis

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

Edinburgh U Film Society [Katia Saint-Peron]

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

USA (129 mi) 1939

In order that they can continue with their dodgy deals, Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains) and press magnate Jim Taylor, arrange for naive, idealistic scoutmaster Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), to be appointed to the senate. However, Smith refuses to let himself be corrupted, exposing the shady skullduggery he sees going on around him. As Smith's moralising threatens to expose the deceitful duo, they decide to get rid of him by tarnishing his reputation.

Branded un-American upon its release, because it implied the White House was corrupt, this remains one of Capra's best works. Far from criticising politics, he expresses his unshakeable faith in democracy and its institutions, as well as in the triumph of right against might. Smith is innocent and pure, and in the end, only the voices of the children that support him are able to rescue him from the politicians' snare.

A replica of the Senate chamber was built for the film's most memorable scene - as Smith launches into an exhausting three day filibuster, refusing to yield the floor until he has spoken his mind. Like all Capra, this film could be dismissed as cornball idealism (or `Capra-corn' to give it its official title), but at its heart is a serious message. In an age when the majority of people dismiss anything that comes out of the mouths of politicians, we need reminded of the potential good that can come from politics when it is used as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Smith's fight could be going on in the States today, or anywhere for that matter.

"Both Frank Capra and James Stewart were rarely better than this" - Vox

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara

Though it’s now universally revered as an ode to democratic ideals, Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) was originally denounced by many Washington power-brokers. That may come as a bit of a shock if you haven’t seen this classic picture for several years. Jimmy Stewart’s lead performance made him a star, and is justly remembered as the key component of a beautifully constructed narrative. But Capra, for all his flag-waving and sometimes naive moralizing saved a great deal of bite for the hallowed halls of American government.

If not subversive, the movie is at least driven by a strong distaste for the misuse of power by our elected officials. This was an exceptionally gutsy message at a time when Americans were concerned with the rise of Nazism overseas, and Capra surely knew he would ruffle a few feathers. But he put his foot down and said exactly what he wanted to say, much like the film’s patriotic lead character. This is the kind of movie that makes you want to light up a sparkler.

Stewart plays Jefferson Smith, a young man who takes over after the unexpected death of a junior Senator. Smith is despised by his cynical secretary (Jean Arthur), and is quickly portrayed as an appointed yokel by the D.C. press. Undaunted, he tries to introduce a bill that would build a much needed boys’ camp in his state. When a powerful businessman named James Taylor (Edward Arnold) and the state’s senior Senator, Joseph Paine (Claude Raines), discover that the camp will be built on land that Taylor plans to sell for an enormous profit under the provisions of an impending bill, they try to bribe Smith.

Smith, of course, stands his ground, so the two men set about ruining him. This eventually leads to an unforgettable filibuster scene that solidified Stewart’s persona – the first persona of his multi-dimensional career, anyway - as a common man with bottomless reserves of backbone and dignity. (Stewart, in a move worthy of Robert De Niro, had a doctor administer dichloride of mercury near his vocal chords to give his voice the exhausted rasp he was looking for at the close of Smith’s filibuster.)

Capra nearly cast Gary Cooper, but finally settled on Stewart. “I knew he would make a hell of a Mr. Smith,” he said. “He looked like the country kid, the idealist. It was very close to him.” Stewart knew this was the role of a lifetime, one that could place him near the top of the Hollywood heap. Jean Arthur later remembered his mood at the time: “He was so serious when he was working on that picture, he used to get up at five o’clock in the morning and drive himself to the studio. He was so terrified something was going to happen to him, he wouldn’t go faster.”

Even in the classics-heavy year of 1939, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was a major achievement, arguably the finest picture of Capra’s storied career. It may wrap itself up a bit too easily, but you’d have to have a heart of stone to not be moved by the journey. Or, in lieu of that, you could be a U.S. Senator or Washington newspaper reporter circa 1939.

On October 17, 1939, the picture was previewed at Washington’s Constitution Hall. The preview was a major production featuring searchlights and a National Guard band playing patriotic tunes; The Washington Times-Herald even put out a special edition covering the event. Four thousand guests attended, 45 Senators among them. About two-thirds of the way through the film, the grumbling began, with people walking out. Some politicians were so enraged by how “they” were being portrayed in the movie, they actually shouted at the screen. At a party afterward, a drunken newspaper editor took a wild swing at Capra for including a drunken reporter as one of the characters!

Several politicians angrily spoke out against the film in newspaper editorials, which, in the long run, may have helped its box office. Sen. Alben W. Barkley viewed the picture as “a grotesque distortion” of the Senate, “as grotesque as anything ever seen! Imagine the Vice President of the United States winking at a pretty girl in the gallery in order to encourage a filibuster!” Barkley, who was lucky he didn’t get quoted on the film’s posters, also said, “...it showed the Senate as the biggest aggregation of nincompoops on record!”

Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina suggested that official action be taken against the film’s release...lest we play into the hands of Fascist regimes. And Pete Harrison, the respected editor of Harrison Reports, urged Congress to pass a bill allowing theater owners to refuse to show films – like Mr. Smith - that “were not in the best interest of our country.” And you thought the Dixie Chicks got a raw deal.

Not everyone, especially American moviegoers, saw Capra’s vision as an affront to democracy. Frank S. Nugent, a critic for The New York Times wrote, “(Capra) is operating, of course, under the protection of that unwritten clause in the Bill of Rights entitling every voting citizen to at least one free swing at the Senate. Mr. Capra’s swing is from the floor and in the best of humor; if it fails to rock the august body to its heels – from laughter as much as from injured dignity – it won’t be his fault but the Senate’s, and we should really begin to worry about the upper house.”

Reel.com DVD review [Jeffrey Wachs]

Film as Art Danél Griffin

DVD Verdict Norman Short

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

DVD Talk (Chris Hughes)

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] from the premiere Frank Capra Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] from the premiere Frank Capra Collection

MEET JOHN DOE

USA (122 mi) 1941

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)

Stanwyck causes a sensation with an invented newspaper story about a tramp promising to kill himself to protest at the state of the world - and then she auditions plain-speaking hick Gary Cooper for the part. His goodwill campaign takes the nation by storm, but proves ripe for political manipulation. After a bright start, this hunkers down to serious hand-wringing... Coop's hick (none too convincingly hinted at as the new Messiah) turns out to be a bore, and Capra strains to accommodate political chicanery and his own half-baked idealism.

As an immigrant himself, Frank Capra may seem an unlikely character for building stories of American heroes, the common man who rises against the power of the establishment, and brings the simple folk together to right the injustices of the world. Few movie fans would be unfamiliar with his 1946 holiday classic, It's A Wonderful Life, in which the hero feels his only worth to his family will be in his own death; that is, until he is shown how valuable his life is to other people. Meet John Doe follows the story of a fabricated everyman, who has pledged to end his life as a statement against the increasing hold corporate America has on the people, and the unemployment and hardship it is causing. The script was based on Richard Connell's 1922 short story, A Reputation, which was later the basis for a play entitled The World is an Eightball. Following a similar theme about a character manipulated by a cynical press that Capra used in his earlier, The Miracle Woman, Meet John Doe takes the average guy, and elevates him into the national spotlight, where those behind the scenes use him to their advantage.

The Tribune has a new owner, replacing its motto of "A Free Press for a Free People" with the New Tribune's "A Streamlined Press for a Streamlined Age." Part of this streamlining comes in the form of new editor Henry Connell (James Gleason), who has been sent in to clean out the dead wood. Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), a woman supporting her mother and two children, is a columnist whose job is on the chopping block. In order to save her career, she writes a fictitious letter as her final column, from one John Doe, a man down on his luck and upset at the system, who vows to leap to his death on Christmas Eve from the roof of the town hall. The column causes an uproar, with letters and phone calls coming in by the thousands. Connell deliberates on the story and decides he must kill it immediately, but when the rival paper accuses the New Tribune of fraud, Ann steps in and devises a scheme to drive up circulation by perpetuating the tale, and for hiring a ringer to pose as John Doe. A group of unemployed men creates the perfect opportunity to find such a man, and when Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), an ex-baseball player turned drifter, is offered the job, he reluctantly accepts as he is in a desperate state. Against the advice of his best friend (Walter Brennan as The Colonel), who warns him of the evils of becoming involved, John continues to play along with the ruse, not minding the perks of his position, and the chance to pay for the surgery required to fix his pitching arm. As support for John Doe and increased pleading that he reconsider his suicide come from the public, the newspaper's new owner, D. B. Norton (Edward Arnold) sees the political potential for the cause of the average man, and encourages Ann to write a speech for John Doe's radio debut. Drawing on inspiration from her father, she constructs an impassioned message extolling the virtues of community, and that every John Doe should be counted in society. Norton encourages the formation of a new apolitical John Doe Society to bolster this new found neighborliness, but as the idealism of John Doe reaches the masses, and support snowballs into a national phenomenon, Willoughby's real identity as a sham is something he has to come to terms with.

Unlike earlier Capra films such as Mr. Deeds Goes To Town or Mr. Smith Goes To Washington where the hero was based on old-fashioned American principles, the main characters in Meet John Doe all have decidedly self-serving interests. John Willoughby just wants to have his arm fixed so he can return to baseball, has no family roots and an ambiguous morality. Even as he espouses the many causes he apparently stands for, he has a marked disinterest in all but his own benefits. Ann Mitchell is a conspiring manipulator, bent on moving herself up the social ladder, despite having somewhat honorable reasons behind her motivation. And D. B. Norton has his fascist leanings emphasized with his own private police force.

Most critics agree that the major failing of Meet John Doe is its ending. Capra struggled through 6 different variations (the final of which was not cut until the film was already in theaters), feeling a 1940s audience would in no way accept Gary Cooper committing suicide, which was the original idea. Considering that era from a historical perspective, one might suggest that his swipes at Fascism and the bonding together of the "common man" could be seen as fitting propaganda, as the U.S. was about to be thrust into World War II. The concept of martyrdom also plays an important role in this film, as it did in It's A Wonderful Life, though Meet John Doe's connection with another famous martyr plays a bit heavy-handed. Hailed since its release as a top ten film by the critics, it is interesting to note that some of Capra's earlier work, which he considered his finer films, and which were responsible for putting Columbia Pictures into the major leagues, were often overshadowed by Meet John Doe.

Turner Classic Movies Scott McGee

DVD Verdict Maurice Cobbs

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE

USA (118 mi) 1944

Insanity runs in my family... It practically gallops

Wade Major from Boxoffice magazine (link lost):

One of Frank Capra's most endlessly enjoyable films, "Arsenic and Old Lace" places Cary Grant into Joseph Kesselring's smash play and strikes gold. The hilarious, twisted story of a drama critic and his bride as they endure an endless night-long ordeal with his psychotic, sociopathic family, starting with a pair of joyously homicidal aunts. Adapted brilliantly by Casablanca author Julius Epstein and his brother, "Arsenic and Old Lace" is both Capra and Grant at their level best, a fluid comedy where the laughs never stop, but never seem forced.

DVD Review e-zine Guido Henkel

Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) is a respected drama critic in New York who just got married. Flying off to his honeymoon, he stops by his aunts’ (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair) house to gather a few things when the whole world seems to come down. Mortimer discovers that his innocent, dear little aunts are serial killers. Over the past months they have sent 12 men to Heaven, happily liberating them from their earthly sufferings. With poisoned wine the two charming old ladies are convinced they are doing the right thing and keep piling up bodies in their basement. Teddy (John Alexander), Mortimer’s raving-mad brother who believes he is Teddy Roosevelt, regularly helps in the little "undertaking," leaving Mortimer speechless.

Determined to protect his beloved aunts, Mortimer devises a plan to have his deluded brother sent to a sanitarium and blame him for the murders, when just at that moment, his other brother Jonathan (Raymond Massey), the black sheep of the family, re-appears after a 20 year absence.

Looking like Boris Karloff, Jonathan has turned into a criminal on the run, and with him comes Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre) to supply Jonathan with a new face. When they find out about the skeletons in the family’s closet, they try to turn things to their own advantage, and a seemingly endless night of riotous events and twists takes shape.

It is easy to tell that "Arsenic And Old Lace" is actually based on a stage play, as practically the entire movie is taking place in a single room. You won’t really notice while watching the film however, as the racy story and hilarious antics will keep you enchanted and rolling with laughter. The movie’s cast is phenomenal. It is mostly Cary Grant who is showing off his best rubber faces and exchanges his usual slick mannerisms of the gentleman for flabbergasted double-takes and the elegance of a clown, while the rest of the cast play their parts fairly straight and with a serious face. Most of the humor derives from that clash that no one seems to be actually perturbed in the least by the events, but Mortimer. With the sinister brother appearing, the sadistic looking doctor and an assortment of other eccentric characters, "Arsenic And Old Lace" makes for a great movie experience that will have you smiling, chuckling and smirking even after the movie is over.

Turner Classic Movies Rob Nixon

Reel.com DVD review [Carrie Wheadon]

DVD Verdict Norman Short

Arsenic And Old Lace (1944) Tim Dirks

eFilmCritic.com (Natasha Theobald)

The New York Times P.P. K.

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE A 100

USA (129 mi) 1946

Time Out

'This story is the lousiest cheese...' Capra admitted to his star after making a rotten pitch. Stewart stuck by his favourite director. 'Frank, if you want to do a movie about me committing suicide, with an angel with no wings named Clarence, I'm your boy.' Although the picture has become synonymous with homespun, small town values - values Stewart personified and Capra obviously cherished - it achieves its profound emotional resonance precisely by stressing their limitations, even to the point of suicide. This is the tragedy of a man who dreams of travelling the world, building cities and making love to Gloria Grahame, who never leaves his hometown, works in his dad's office, and marries Donna Reed. The 'unborn' sequence is chilling not because it's morbid fantasy, but because 'Pottersville' was and is so much closer to contemporary society than the nostalgic gentility of Bedford Falls. For both Capra and Stewart, Wonderful Life was their first movie after serving in WWII, and it's riven with their anxieties on coming home. For Stewart, it paved the way for Vertigo and The Naked Spur; for the director it was in effect his testament. That Capra relents and 'saves' his hero is but bitter-sweet consolation. Regardless of whether or not you believe in angels, it's a wonderful movie.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs

Like Steven Spielberg today, Frank Capra was associated more with reassuring, patriotic sentiment than with actually making movies; but just beneath the Americana, his films contain a near-schizophrenic mix of idealism and resentment. In this quality, as well as his tendency to drag charismatic heroes through grueling tests of faith, it wouldn't be a stretch to compare Capra with Lars von Trier. There's plenty to merit the comparison in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE alone: The film is a two-hour tour of an honest man's failure and bottled-up resentment, softened only intermittently by scenes of domestic contentment. Even before the nightmarish Pottersville episode (shot in foreboding shadows more reminiscent of film noir than Americana), Bedford Falls is shown as vulnerable to the plagues of recession, family dysfunction, and alcoholism. All of these weigh heavy on the soul of George Bailey, a small-town Everyman given tragic complexity by James Stewart, who considered the performance his best. Drawing on the unacknowledged rage within ordinary people he would later exploit for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart renders Bailey as complicated as Capra himself--a child and ultimate victim of the American Dream. Ironically, it's because the film's despair feels so authentic that its iconic ending feels as cathartic as it does: After being saved from his suicide attempt (which frames the entire film, it should be noted), Stewart is returned to the simple pleasures of family and friends, made to seem a warm oasis in a great metaphysical void.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Crisis In Happyland David Mamet from Sight and Sound, January 2002

Crisis In Happyland

David Mamet looks at America's unofficial Favourite Film.

In Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1947) the screenwriters warp an old-world vision into a populist myth. The old-world vision is Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843), the story of a miser who is given a chance at redemption. In it Scrooge, watching his own death, is treated to scenes of the Cratchit family, happy-though-poor - to scenes of a better life.

It's a Wonderful Life, essentially the same story, features not Scrooge but the paterfamilias Bob Cratchit. Here Cratchit surrogate George Bailey, played by James Stewart, is unhappy though poor. He, like Cratchit, is beloved of his family and community, but 'things go wrong' and a financial shortfall and looming ruin and disgrace make him wish he had never been born. A vision of his own death (a world in which he was never born) wises him up to his many blessings, he decides to live, and all is made well.

But the populist myth cannot cleanse itself completely: George Bailey is a banker. Like Scrooge he handles money. Unlike Scrooge, he takes none for himself - he is a banker-altruist, dedicated to the community. Now, no doubt and thank God, such people may exist. But why do we discover them in a myth? Bailey and Cratchit are both the working poor, dedicated to a life whose rewards are other than material. But only one is a banker.

Bailey tells Old Man Porter (the film's Bad Banker, in effect Scrooge) that he, Bailey, makes loans based on a man's character. This is, of course, the fantasy of anyone who has ever applied for a loan. But who has ever encountered it other than in the movies?

We find it again in an almost identical scene in a very similar movie: William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). In this - another populist American myth - we have a world returned from war. One of the protagonists, Al Stephenson, played by Fredric March, is a banker come back from combat in the South Pacific. He makes a loan to an ex-serviceman based on his, Stephenson's, assessment of the man's character. Stephenson's boss, played by Ray Collins, chastises him and Stephenson replies that in combat one had to learn to read other men's characters and to base one's whole existence on that reading. The boss suggests that though he will let it go this time, that is not the way to run a bank.

In both films it would seem the collective unconscious is asking, 'Why did we fight the War?' And the larger question, the posing of which Martin Dies and the House Un-American Activities Committee attacked conclusively soon after: 'To whom does the land belong?' Both films assert that the land belongs to the People, 'Who do most of the living and dying around here.' To 'the little man'. We see the fantasy of the anti-capitalist banker again in Capra's American Madness (1932), in which the hero, played by Walter Huston, is running, one might say, a counter-cultural bank, making loans based on his own intuition and sense of fair play - happy, beloved by his workers, abominated by the 'bad' forces of capital.

In all these films the collective unconscious, perhaps, is coming to grips with the notion of capital, of accumulation, and positing the possibility of a capitalist power benevolent to the workers - to the little man, the common folk. This, it seems, is as close as Hollywood can get to the notion of an equitable distribution of wealth - the reliance on a person of character in a position usually occupied by the heartless.

A dispossessed farmer asks in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), 'Isn't there anybody who knows what a shotgun is?' Thorstein Veblen asks the same question in Absentee Ownership: Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (1923) and, in both cases, the question is, sadly, rhetorical. For the American ethos of accumulation, agglomeration, merger, all in the name of freedom of the individual (unrestrained capitalism, individual choice, lack of government intervention, and so on), ensures that labour must be oppressed.

Scrooge, rescued from eternity in Hell, does not divide all he has with Cratchit, he brings him a turkey. The films named above praise un-selfinterested capitalism. But such is of necessity an oxymoron. In their praise of individual conscience they indulge in a peculiarly Conservative ethos: Enlightened (or Compassionate) Conservatism. Such may, indeed does, pass muster as wish-fulfilling entertainment, but as political aim it can be adopted only by the self-deluded. For if the worker has no power to demand (other than as an appeal to conscience), he or she has nothing. George Bailey can't afford to take a vacation, Bob Cratchit gets a turkey. The first farmer in the door after the war gets a loan from Stephenson, but the second is informed that Mr Stephenson is no longer with us.

The memories of World War II and of the Depression waned. America voted for Ronald Reagan, whose administration, in the fulfilment of a Conservative erotic dream, broke the back of labour. The voter was induced to vote for a fantasy: every man a millionaire; no more government intervention. But government intervention, of course, persisted and persists and must persist, for that is the essence of government. The Conservatives, during their sway, merely had it intervene for them. And it was in those Reagan years that It's a Wonderful Life replaced Casablanca (1942) as the unofficial Favourite Film of America - the fantasy of the Compassionate Conservative.

An allied film, the precursor to It's a Wonderful Life, is Irving Pichel's Happy Land (1943), in which the town druggist (Don Ameche) loses a son in the war but discovers - through the intervention of a medium, the ghost of his grandfather (Harry Carey) - that life is still worth living. What wonderful persistence and reiteration of forms do we find in our collective unconscious. Vide: much the same scene - 'what would have been' - in these small-town dramas. And let me name one more: Our Town. In Thornton Wilder's 1938 play Emily dies and is permitted to look back at the life she lived, and she weeps that she did not know how precious even the least and most mundane of it was.

The drugstore plays a pivotal role - in Our Town it's where George proposes to Emily; in It's a Wonderful Life it's where the young George Bailey intervenes with his employer, a drunken druggist, to correct a fatally mismade prescription; in Happy Land it's where the hero is himself a druggist. (In both Happy Land and It's a Wonderful Life the druggist is destroyed as he learns of the death of his son.) In these films and, as I remember, in the American films of the 50s from my youth, the drugstore was the locus of popular wisdom. Like the character of George Bailey, it bridged the gap between the hierarchical (in this case the medical establishment) and the populist ('anecdotal' information, folk remedy, or, if I may, compassion).

Is it stretching the conceit to suggest that these myths feature the pharmaceutical rather than the medical - that their heroes do not (mythologically) contend with life and death, but merely with analgesia? For the films' financial myths deal with analgesia rather than revolution - with the personal (anecdotal) 'There exists a kindly banker' rather than with the societal 'Capitalism so conduces to excess that strong opponent forces must exist.'

One sees the post-war myth of It's a Wonderful Life and smiles warily at the notion that all one needs is a kindly banker. One sees the visions of Italian neorealist Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves/Ladri di biciclette, 1948; The Roof/Il tetto, 1956) and perhaps wonders what one can do to strengthen one's Union. In De Sica's films the poor are not the 'other', as they are in It's a Wonderful Life; they are people like ourselves, but without money.

Bob Cratchit is happy without money and it seems that George Bailey is happy without money, but the punchline of the film (disregarding the short epilogue, in which 'an angel gets his wings') is George's brother's toast. Upon the restoration of order, George is saved, by the intervention of a rich friend. He is apprised of the community's love for him and his brother Harry toasts him: 'To my brother George, the Richest Man in town.' We are, of course, to understand the toast as metaphor, but we should perhaps note our unremarked acceptance of the metaphor of happiness as wealth.

Film as Art Danél Griffin

Reel.com DVD review [James Plath]

DVD Verdict- 60th Anniversary Edition [Daniel MacDonald]

Bright Lights Film Journal [D.J.M. Saunders]

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich)

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE Reel Classics

"It's a Wonderful Life": The most terrifying movie ever Rich Cohen from Salon, December 24, 2010

100 films Lucas

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley)

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

Robin's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE Page Robin Olson

Bedford Falls Christmas

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) in 1999

A Different Perspective on It's A Wonderful Life Wendell Jamieson from The New York Times, December 18, 2008

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

Carax, Léos

Carax, Léos from World Cinema

French director, hailed as a prodigy in the 1980s. With his tortured personality, instant success through his first feature, Boy Meets Girl (1984), and regular use of alter ego actor Denis Lavant, Carax has been seen as the carrier of the New Wave inheritance. Boy Meets Girl, shot in black and white on location in Paris, combined New Wave romanticism with post-modernism (especially in the use of music). Mauvais Sang / The Night is Young (1986) added overt references to Jean-Luc Godard with the use of primary colours and a Juliette Binoche made to look like Anna Karina. The extravagant (in all senses) Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), starring Lavant and Binoche, is a sumptuous and romantic tribute to Paris, amour fou and Binoche. Carax figures controversially in debates over the cinéma du look, his cine-literacy and "neo-baroque" mise-en-scène earning criticism for a beautiful but supposedly "empty" cinema, but also passionate admiration.

— Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema

LA Weekly - Film/TV - Brief Encounters - Manohla Dargis - The ... an overview by Manohla Dargis from LA Weekly

There hasn’t been an American director as wildly out of control as French director Leos Carax, or as passionately in love with film as with his own gifts, since Francis Ford Coppola was working at the height of his violent inspiration. Now 40, Carax has the same talent for jumping off cliffs — he makes art, not necessarily sense. In some measure that’s because his work creates as much meaning through images as words; his films don’t just shuttle forward on the good graces of well-placed verbs and nouns, they soar on images whose mysteries he refuses to fully divulge. The filmmaker has a thrilling visual style, and an infectious optimism about the possibilities of the medium that works a baroque counterpoint to his romantic pessimism — his mad-hatter mistakes are as joyous and swooningly pleasurable as his triumphs. In keeping with his m.o. — first as an enfant terrible, now as an aging, often raging enfant terrible — the artist also has a peculiarly French taste for beautiful losers.

Carax’s first feature, Boy Meets Girl (1984), is a heart-stopping fever dream in black and white inspired by Godard and Vigo, in which a melancholic longing for cinematic things past rustles even the film’s quieter delights — lonely tap dancing, an astronaut sighing at the moon — like the gentlest mistral. Carax was 24 when he made the film, and after it premiered to great success at Cannes he found himself anointed a Next Wave hero, an honor that seemed as much curse as benediction. Three years later, he directed Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood), a lovely romantic ramble with Juliette Binoche, Michel Piccoli, a very young Julie Delpy and Carax’s thugish alter ego, Denis Lavant, that is compromised only, and only slightly, by its unwieldy AIDS metaphor. Since then he’s made two features: Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) and Pola X (1999).

A mad, gorgeous epic about a homeless fire-breather (Lavant) and the near-blind artist (Binoche) with whom he falls in love, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf comes as close to representing the feeling of falling in love, the sheer recklessness, even desperation, of passion, as I’ve ever seen on screen. Given that the love story is finally as much about cinema as two stubbornly imperfect human beings (Carax delights in every scrape and smear of mud defacing his stars), it’s no great surprise that the film was alternately hailed and damned by critics, and took nearly a decade to find an American release. The shabby disregard for the film in this country — where many critics seemed too busy lamenting the death of cinema to notice how furiously Carax was pumping life into it — was complemented by Miramax’s clunky, vengefully un-poetic title, Lovers on the Bridge, a translation as pedestrian as the film is not. Due to open theatrically in several weeks, Pola X will be shown with the rest of the director’s features in a brief retrospective at the American Cinematheque, where the screen is just big enough to hold Carax’s exuberance. The director, who puts on almost as good a show in person, is promised to be in attendance.

Leos Carax Christian Checa Bañuz from Senses of Cinema

BOY MEETS GIRL B 88

France (100 mi) 1984

A sad and overly melancholic film, featuring indulgent and completely self-absorbed characters, yet beautifully shot in Black and White on the streets of Paris by Jean Yves Escoffier, but the film suffers from over-stylization, where the impressive cinematic technique on display completely dwarfs the bleak portrait of humanity, filled with downbeat and excessively brooding characters that drift through the mysterious landscape of their empty lives, characters so alienated from the world around them that suicide is a prevalent theme. Denis Lavant begins his journey in Carax films as the director’s impulsive alter-ego, reappearing in each of his first three films as Alex, excluded for some reason from POLA X (1999), easily the director’s biggest failure, and then resurfacing again in Holy Motors (2012) as Mr. Oscar, assuming the director’s middle name. A nocturnal film taking place almost entirely over the course of one night, the film begins with Alex abandoned by his girlfriend, where his mindset is unstable to say the least, showing a violent tendency that nearly leads to murder, directed towards the friend his girlfriend left him for, but instead he soon becomes infatuated by another girl who has also just broken up with her boyfriend, Mireille (Mireille Perrier, the director’s girlfriend at the time), who is seen more as an illusion than someone real. In fact, it’s hard to tell just how much of this film may actually be the ramblings of an overactive imagination, where it could all be taking place inside Alex’s mind, such as this scene of Mireille, unsubtitled, set to The Dead Kennedys “Holiday in Cambodia,” where the former boyfriend returns for a brief, unintelligible conversation over the intercom, all observed by Alex, where it’s clear this feels more like the mad and incoherent ramblings of two lost souls who are drifting apart in the night, a theme that pervades throughout the film Carax - Boys Meets Girls - 1984 - FRA (Interphone Scene ... - YouTube (4:36).

The film is an expressionist reverie not far removed from Sartre’s first existential novel Nausea, a story concerning a man’s tenuous relationship with the surrounding city, offering glimpses into the anguish of the human soul through stream-of-conscious thoughts, as if reading pages from an intimate diary, where the writer is suffocating from a kind of existential dread where life is meaningless unless a person makes personal connections that give it meaning. While one often feels immersed in a world of personal disgust and despair, these are fleeting and temporary moments in time, soon replaced by others just as ephemeral. In much the same manner, Alex is barely connected to the elusively shifting world around him, estranged from friends and family, living alone in a tiny room, filled with his own enveloping interior sense of alienation and dread, constantly seen taking a drug, like popping liquid amyl nitrate, where he doesn’t so much inhabit the world as float through it in some strange and dream-like voyage through time, remaining disconnected from the world he lives in, as if unable to be a part of it. People don’t converse so much as offer long and rambling monologues, reflective of a dreary and joyless existence where characters remain connected to some longstanding interior pain, unable to separate themselves from this anguish and personal trauma they carry around with them wherever they go. Carax expresses this disconnection through jarring choices of music, or the use of long tracking shots, where the composition throughout is superb, often resorting to expressionist lighting, which has a dramatic effect, such as when one character is seen in sharp focus while another just inches away is slightly out of focus.

Moody and overly detached throughout, there are brief moments that touch a different note entirely, such as Mireille pulling out a board in her apartment in order to practice tap dancing, an homage to the more playful moments of Anna Karina dancing in Godard’s BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964) Bande à part (1964) - Dance scene [HD] YouTube (3:57), yet it’s connected to an extended sequence set to David Bowie’s “When I Live My Dream” where Alex wanders alone through the darkened night, where at one point he stops and stares, remaining infatuated by a couple kissing on the street, eventually tossing them a few coins as if this was a street performance "Boy Meets Girl" Bowie song (When I Live My Dream) - YouTube (3:43). After a lengthy period where she exists only in his mind, Alex finally meets Mireille during an extended party sequence, knowing she’ll be there, so he crashes the party, yet is affectionately greeted with perfect bourgeois manners by the American party hostess (Carroll Brooks), before leaving him to fend for himself sitting between an elderly deaf-mute man (Albert Braun) and his gorgeous sign interpreter (Frédérique Charbonneau), insisting young people have forgotten how to talk Boy Meets Girl - Silent films were better, because... YouTube (3:18), before engaging Alex with tales of the old days of Silent cinema where he worked as a dolly grip, but Alex soon drifts off, following Mireille who’s in the bathroom, as it appears she’s about to commit suicide (we later realize she instead cuts her hair much shorter), leaving her alone as he slips into the kitchen where the hostess finds him alone, strangely confessing a piece of her heart, seen as a small part of an elongated party sequence Boys meets Girls - YouTube (9:52). The party itself is a gloomy gathering honoring a dead soul, the brother of the hostess, the loss reflected in her quietly suppressed despair, which perfectly matches the depressed melancholia of the other characters. Carax frames them beautifully here in an unsubtitled sequence Boy Meets Girl - Imbattable - YouTube (2:10) with Alex suddenly inspired, his soul aflame, interestingly expressed through the use of voiceover, where the film is a thinly disguised reflection of the director’s inner world, continually referencing dreamy thoughts of romantic longings that are ultimately frustrated by the reality of lost love and alienation.

Boy Meets Girl | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

The revelation of the 1984 Cannes festival was this first feature by 23-year-old Leos Carax. In its fervor, film sense, cutting humor, and strong autobiographical slant, it suggests the first films of the French New Wave (there's something in the arrogant iconoclasm that specifically recalls Godard), yet this isn't a derivative film. Carax demonstrates a very personal, subtly disorienting sense of space in his captivating black-and-white images, and the sound track has been constructed with an equally dense expressivity. The hero is a surly young outsider who has just been abandoned by his girlfriend; as he moves through a nocturnal Paris, his adolescent disillusionment is amplified into a cosmic cry of pain. The subject invites charges of narcissism and immaturity, but Carax's formal control and distance keep the confessional element in a state of constant critical tension. With Denis Lavant and Mireille Perrier.

Boy Meets Girl | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

Shy young Alex wanders the dark Parisian streets gazing in confusion at the passers-by. Meanwhile Mireille is being given the brush-off by her live-in lover. Eventually, their paths cross as if by destiny; in the meantime, numerous other loners have wandered in and out of Carax's meandering, moody narrative. Easy but unfair to fault Carax's first feature when he has conjured up a persuasively poetic atmosphere for his meditation on the failings of human intercourse. Credit must go to Jean-Yves Escoffier's astonishing black-and-white camerawork, and to the largely wordless, eloquent performances. Finally, however, the film's greatest coup is its creation of a Parisian purgatory of lost souls, bathed eternally in night. Absurd humour counteracts the morbid philosophising, while the alternately surreal and expressionist imagery is reminiscent of silent cinema at its most elegant.

Great Movie Reviews [Pseudonymous author Ankyuk]

It’s so rare to see films from young French directors exported to this country that the biggest shock in Léos Carax’s 1984 debut isn’t any of the film’s sometimes contrived effects, but simply the sound of the Dead Kennedy’s "Holiday in Cambodia" blaring from a cheap stereo. Boy Meets Girl certainly has the energy — and the unbridled pretension — of a 23-year-old’s first feature. But there’s no pop energy to Carax’s invocation of the DK’s anti-imperialist anthem; his heart’s far more in line with David Bowie, who’s used on Boy Meets Girl’s soundtrack and who bears a striking physical resemblance to the Teutonic maestro whose Bohemian lifestyle seduces the hero in Carax’s POLA X. Luckily, it gives the Prince an opportunity to program Godard’s A Bout de Souffle, an obvious Carax influence. After watching Boy Meets Girl, you have to be grateful Godard patterned himself after the crude Monogram gangster movies of his youth.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Scott Tobias also examines MAUVAIS SANG

The terms "narcissist," "self-indulgent," and "enfant terrible" have often been used to describe French director Leos Carax over his turbulent career, during which he's made only four features: 1984's Boy Meets Girl, 1986's Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood), 1991's The Lovers On The Bridge, and 1999's Pola X. His guilt on all counts not only fails to diminish his status as one of the world's most exciting filmmakers, but also helps explain his idiosyncratic genius. Combining the emotional intensity of Hollywood melodramas, the dazzling artifice of studio musicals, and the stylistic liberation of the French New Wave, Carax's extravagantly personal vision could easily be perceived as egotism run amok. But there's intoxicating magic and melancholy to be found in the emptied streets of his after-hours cityscape, where wandering souls are drawn to each other through some strange cosmic connection. Love strikes quickly and leaves an irrevocable mark in Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang, the first two entries in Carax's l'amour fou trilogy, but it never guarantees reciprocation. In both films, Carax's alter ego Denis Lavant (Beau Travail), whose craggy face evokes a prizefighter on a losing streak, finds love in tiny, seemingly insignificant moments out of time. In Boy Meets Girl, he's entranced by Mireille Perrier's disembodied voice as she breaks up with her boyfriend over an apartment intercom. Still reeling from a disastrous relationship of his own, Lavant becomes obsessed with her well before they first crash into each other at a party. Shot in luminous black and white, Boy Meets Girl moves with the youthful, anarchic spirit of Godard's early work, endlessly detouring through surreal comedy, romantic philosophizing, and spontaneous flights of fancy. A scene in which Perrier snaps her head around to Dead Kennedys' "Holiday In Cambodia" anticipates the emotional release in Carax's famed setpieces, which reached a crescendo with the bicentennial fireworks display in The Lovers On The Bridge. The DVD editions of Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang each include a short interview segment with the director, conducted by film critic and programmer Kent Jones. Fortunately for the painfully reticent Carax, his work speaks for itself.

A debut feature film, and Carax achieves heights of poetic prowess: light and shadow, duty and love, soul and body, smile and destitution, David Bowie’s song and a couple fighting a bitter trivial battle in a neighbouring apartment, yes all the clash is wrapped up, packaged in the story of self-search, of pain, of love that could never be between two people, victims of uptight, unimaginative, orderly people.

The story is simple: boy meets girl. It’s the same old pain with momentary relief, a flash of teeth of Mireille (Mireille Perrier) that Alex (Denis Lavant) can induce with difficulty, and then the inevitable pathway towards love and doom continues. Lovingly shot in crisp black and white, the film opens with absurd: skis out of the windshield of a car. Nay, even before, there’s that voice, that old voice, which almost reminds me of another very uncanny opening of a totally different kind of film, Mackenna’s Gold, another masterpiece. The film deliberates, thinks, stands on its feet too often, and lets you get sucked into it by this simple contrivance. Not hastily, but slowly, yet not in any order, the camera tracks the life-map of Alex behind the painting, and then today’s scrawl. Again, the father’s phone comes the next morning with a theatrical gravity and which strangely does not look uncalled for in this mockery of all ambitions, mannerisms and achievements compared to love – yes that’s what this film does convey. We have the Einstenian and Armstrongish men, obsessed with themselves, or objects, when something far more beautiful is going on: Alex and Mireille. We have the hostess who says at an arm’s length “Je vous laisse” when Alex is nothing in answer to “Vous êtes qui?” And yet the same hostess treasures a loved one’s cup: is she sitting too long over one memory? Should she have moved away? Is Alex any better for moving from girl to girl, a newer stab in his heart and life-map? Or has Alex finally met Mireille, who even if loin is of the same mauvais sang as Alex, the same dysfunctionality? Or are Alex and Mireille only extensions of the deaf and dumb man and his interpreter: the man has much to say but he cannot speak, the girl has voice but words of the old man since she has to interpret him, not herself? How much do we become extensions of the other when we love, how much should we become, and more importantly can we even determine this? Wouldn’t it be better in that case then to play pinball silently, with the electronic circuits doing all the noises? Occasionally the pinball machine will go wrong, and then we will correct the circuitry; occasionally the sex will go wrong and then we will ask how dry or wet we like it, or change our lover. Isn’t that simpler than love?

User reviews from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

Leos Carax made a name for himself in the early-to-mid nineteen-eighties; emerging from the short-lived "cinema du look" movement with a pair of quirky and melancholic romantic fantasy films, Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais Sang (1986), before taking his central themes of unrequited love and alienated Parisian youth to the next conceivable level with the film Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf (1991). That particular film was supposed to be the one that would finally introduce Carax to a wider cinematic audience; finding the filmmaker refining his usual themes and structural preoccupations with a larger budget and much in the way of creative freedom. Sadly, things didn't go quite to plan; the eventual film - a wildly uneven though often quite captivating blend of romantic folly and violent social realism - went massively over-budget and over-schedule before finally limping out with a limited release almost half a decade later.

As with the other filmmakers at the forefront of the cinema du look movement - Luc Besson and Jean Jacques Beineix - Carax's work is high on style and short on plot; often seeming like a collection of random scenes, linked by one or two reoccurring characters, that accumulate over the course of the film's duration to create a kind of whole. His approach to film-making is very much akin to Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, in the sense that the film is created from a brief outline and then improvised in the same way that a sculptor or a painter will work, often impressionistically, until a form begins to take shape. Carax however doesn't quite have the narrative scope or the sense of control of someone like Wong, or indeed, the grand duke of improvisational cinema Mike Leigh; with many of his scenes feeling formless and disconnected while his characters remain vague and curiously unsympathetic throughout. These are the major flaws we encounter with Carax's work, and those who are unable to look past the loose structures and wandering approach to narrative will no doubt find much of the director's first two films completely unwatchable - which is a real shame, as despite this, they're both striking and unconventional examples of the cinema du look movement at its most disarming; mixing elements of the Nouvelle Vague with film noir, silent comedy, existentialism and references to early 80's pop culture.

Boy Meets Girl (1984), Carax's first film, typifies this approach; taking the very essence of Jean-Paul Satre's La Nausée and filtering it through the lens of an early Jean-Luc Godard, to create a film that is both playful and romantic, but also lonely and entirely downbeat. The film was made when Carax was twenty-four years old and is very much the kind of film that a gloomy twenty-something loner would make; with its striking black and white cinematography, stylised performances, continual allusions to lost love and alienation and numerous scenes in which our hero wanders the streets as French pop and David Bowie filter in from near-by windows and onto the soundtrack. The film would announce Carax as the infant-terrible of the new French film scene, with his lead actor Denis Lavant becoming a sort of alter-ego type figure; re-appearing as different characters (but with the same name) in Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang and Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf. He's also aided greatly by cinematographer Jean Yves Escoffier, whose use of long tracking shots, imaginative compositions and expressionistic lighting makes Boy Meets Girl one of the most visually stunning films of the 1980's; probably falling somewhere behind Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime and Coppola's One From the Heart. The problems with the film are mostly in the distance we have from the characters; never really getting the chance to know or care for them in a way that would be more beneficial to that ironically bleak and entirely unexpected climax.

The basic plot of the film is loose and meandering; more a moody tone poem centring on a young man cast adrift, lonely and lost within the dark maze of a shimmering late night Paris. After having just split with his lover, the young man, Alex (Denis Lavant), wanders the streets desperate and depressed, eventually happening upon a party hosted by a rich American socialite that he decides to crash. There he meets a fellow lost soul who has also just left split from her lover, and the two begin a complex relationship that grants them a temporary reprieve from the cruelties of everyday existence. This covers at least 30% of the film's actual running time, with Carax padding things out further with lots of beautifully shot sequences of Alex brooding over his lost love and the emptiness of his young life, as well as additional vignettes seemingly unconnected to the central characters at hand that attempt to visually underpin the ideas of loss and love at the heart of the film itself.

These sequences include an opening prologue in which a young mother parks her car by the side of the river and then, over the phone, tells her boyfriend that she is not only in the process of leaving him, but also plans on throwing his unpublished poems into the water. Another memorable sequence finds Alex wandering the streets, as Bowie's 'When I Live My Dream' plays on the soundtrack, and coldly observing a young couple kissing on the bridge, oblivious to his presence. After watching them for a short while, Alex throws a handful of loose change at their feet as if rewarding a street musician for a competent performance. This sequence is a key moment here, as it underpins both the film and Carax's feelings on love and its importance to everything that fits around it. There's also a charming scene in which Mireille (Mireille Perrier), the girl that Alex will later fall in love with, practices a tap dance routine in her one-room apartment, tapping (no pun!) into Carax's combined love for early silent cinema (specifically Chaplin) and Godard's Bande à part.

Leos Carax | Senses of Cinema Christian Checa Bañuz, November 2006

Energy Unleashed: Leos Carax by Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd ... Tony McKibbon’s book review from Senses of Cinema, April 2004

The Problem with Poetry: Leos Carax - Jonathan Rosenbaum originally written for Film Comment, May-June, 1994

Cine Outsider [Slarek]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Are the hills going to march off?: Boy Meets Girl (1984) A Film by ... Carson Lund

Wellington Film Society - BOY MEETS GIRL

#256: Boy Meets Girl (1984) | THE FRAME LOOP Luke Richardson

'Boy Meets Girl': cinematic young love in Paris | The Same Cinema ... Mark Tompkins

the last lullaby (and) peril: 1984: Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax) Jeffrey Goodman

The Return of Leos Carax - Slate Magazine Elbert Ventura

BOY MEETS GIRL (Leos Carax, 1984) | UCLA Graduate Student ... Tomas Roges

Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen J. Brennan]

Holy Motors + The Films Of Leos Carax! | The Cinefamily

Boy Meets Girl : The New Yorker Richard Brody capsule review

DVD Times Noel Magahey reviewing the Leos Carax Collection, MAUVAIS SANG and POLA X

INTERVIEW: Carax X Three; New Life for "Pola X," "Boy Meets Girl ... Anthony Kaufman interview from indieWIRE, September 13, 2000

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) also seen here: 'BOY MEETS GIRL,' A TALE OF LOVE BY LEOS CARAX - NYTimes ...

Boy Meets Girl (1984 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nausea (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

MAUVAIS SANG (Bad Blood) A 97

aka: The Night Is Young

France (116 mi) 1986

Do you believe in love that comes quickly, that strikes quickly, but which lasts forever? —Alex (Denis Lavant)

A gangster film told using bold primary colors which, like his earlier film Boy Meets Girl (1984), is another modern take on the irrepressibility of romanticism that so often leads to the impossibility of love. Made when Carax was having an affair with Juliette Binoche, this is largely written for her, as it is another dreamlike idealization of forbidden love. While many of the French New Wave films dealt with the anguish of love, where Truffaut’s work in particular is full of pain, loss and unrequited love, more seemed inspired by the existential angst of modern youth, filled with carefree moments of risk taking and rebellion, often leading to heartbreak and senseless tragedy, where Godard’s BREATHLESS (1960), BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964), or PIERROT LE FOU (1965) spring to mind. While Carax was obviously inspired by these early Nouvelle Vague films, his real interest seems to be Silent films, where like Guy Maddin, his central focus is examining the hidden layers under the surface, often revealed through an experimental or surrealist visual style that uncovers darkly contained fantasies or fears. One of the unsung gems of 1980’s cinema, what Carax brings to the screen is an explosion of raw emotion, shot once more by Jean-Yves Escoffier, but rather than the morbid black and white obsession of his earlier effort, he uses color as an extension of emotional discovery, where a seductive thread runs throughout the film, as the story follows the romantic exploits of the director’s alter-ego Alex (Denis Lavant). Initially Alex is smothered by the love of a beautiful young teenage girl Lise, Julie Delpy in one of her earliest film appearances, who remains infatuated with him even as he attempts to abandon her, literally running away at first, hoping to get a new start in life. But in his head, Lise is a constant presence, like the picture of innocence, where she never really goes away, and he continues to address her throughout the film in dreams and voiceovers.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the opening is Alex’s answering machine which plays the bombastic opening theme of Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet Dance of the Knights YouTube (3:17). The film quickly delves into a film noir thriller populated by underworld characters, but only out of reverence to an earlier era of cinema. After receiving word his father has been killed under mysterious circumstances, perhaps by the American, the aging and decrepit looking Carroll Brooks from his previous film, Alex falls in with his father’s old gang, led by Michel Piccoli as Marc, a father figure who remembers him as a child, when he interestingly refused to talk, preferring to remain silent, developing the nickname “Tongue Tied.” The first glimpse of Anna (Binoche) is on a bus, where emotions are elevated through a surge in symphonic music, a complete stranger that catches Alex’s eye, seen through reflected images, while the next time she is all shadows and light expressed through German Expressionist imagery. When they finally meet, she appears like an apparition draped in red, a kind of porcelain doll that suddenly comes to life, where a young Binoche has never looked more innocently fragile or as splendidly beautiful, but she is the girlfriend of Marc, easily twice her age. There is the barest outline of a story with Marc masterminding a criminal heist requiring the services of Alex, a street hustling cardshark whose quick and nimble hands can crack open a safe, actually taking his father’s place, where they amusingly must learn to parachute. At the airport, Marc greets Serge Reggiani, playing a pilot named Charlie in the movie, who is interestingly introduced with Marc by greeting one another in a Silent era vaudeville routine. Marc pushes to the point of browbeating Anna to jump out of the plane, clearly against her wishes, but she does it anyway, where she eventually faints, rescued by Alex in a fascinatingly shot air sequence shown here: Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986) - Parachuting YouTube (3:37).

Rather than follow the crime, Carax instead follows the romantic attraction of Alex and Anna, easily the most compelling aspect of the movie, becoming the emotional center of the picture. This is all set in motion in a masterful sequence with Alex now hopelessly in love, opening with Serge Reggiani (the pilot seen earlier) heard on the radio singing “J'ai pas d'regrets (I regret nothing),” followed almost immediately by David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” Mauvais Sang YouTube (4:10), in what is easily the shot of the film, where Denis Levant, as if shot by Cupid’s arrow, streaks down the street in an endlessly long tracking shot, stumbling, cart-wheeling, eventually breaking out in a full sprint, where the buildings and lampposts go by in a blur of sheer exhilaration, one of those giddy outbursts of spontaneous emotion, running as if trying to take flight and be free. When he returns to her, she reminds him she’s in love with Marc, remaining unattainable, but the two are still infatuated with one another, unable to say goodnight or let go, offering lengthy monologues of dreamlike nocturnal yearnings. In Anna’s world, it grows slowly surreal where the phone rings, but there’s no sound, or she speaks and her mouth moves, but there’s still no sound, yet with Alex his voice sounds so rapturously lyrical. In another romantic surge, to the music from Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952), Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986) - Baby Steps YouTube (5:21), Mireille Perrier, the star of his earlier film, appears in a dreamlike sequence where Alex mimics the wobbly steps of her baby. After a brief kaleidoscope of color, the screen turns silent, reassembling all the various players in the film in a powerfully original Silent era montage, a return to innocence, where Carax has a special fondness for close-ups and gestures, not to mention an underlying melancholy in silence. MAUVAIS SANG is a hauntingly beautiful film, one where we never truly comprehend the depth of the relationships, where Carax equates the love for a woman with the possibilities of cinema itself, where like his first film, mood pervades every shot, often with a lush romanticism pre-dating Wong Kar-wai, who hadn’t really defined himself until his films of the 90’s. But the visual expression and stylized composition in this film often veer toward moments of ecstasy, including the final shot, another lengthy sequence where running continues to suggest the possibilities of flight, freedom, escape, or perhaps even a metamorphosis.

Mauvais Sang : The New Yorker Richard Brody capsule review

A masterpiece of ecstatic cinema, from 1986, by Leos Carax, a shooting star who was only twenty-five when he made it and whose furious arc seems to have been foretold in this self-flagellating, self-revealing melodrama. The neo-noir plot concerns Marc (Michel Piccoli), an older gangster who pulls Alex (Denis Lavant), the son of his slain cohort, into a plot to break into a laboratory and steal an AIDS-like virus, and finds his mistress, Anna (Juliette Binoche), falling for the younger man. Alex’s love life is the motor of the story, which begins with his abandonment of his fair-haired teen-age girlfriend (Julie Delpy) and moves on to the eye-popping, breathtaking rhapsody of his newfound romantic obsession with the mysterious dark-haired gamine. Carax sends Alex and Anna airborne in a parachute-jump sequence that is one of the movie’s many anthology pieces (the feral Lavant’s wild run through the streets, to the strains of David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” is another). With an emotional world akin to that of Godard’s early films, a visual vocabulary that pays tribute to his later ones, and a magical sensibility that owes much to Jean Cocteau, Carax allegorizes the burden of young genius in a world of mighty patriarchs who aren’t budging. In French and English.

The Return of Leos Carax - Slate Magazine Elbert Ventura

As if overcompensating for his debut’s absent plot, Carax abruptly immersed us in a world of intrigue in his next feature. In the terrific Mauvais Sang (1986), a shadowy syndicate seeks to get its hands on a serum, locked away in a lab, that will cure a mysterious AIDS-like disease spreading fast. They hire Alex (Lavant again), a card sharp whose late father was the best operative in the business. He says yes—but only after getting a glimpse of Anna (Juliette Binoche, never lovelier), the gangster’s gal. Carax being Carax, the heist recedes into the background as the movie settles into one long, languorous night of Alex’s wooing of Anna. (Seduction is too strong a word—there’s something beguilingly innocent about Carax’s love stories.) It peaks with one of the most exhilarating pop moments in movies: lovelorn Alex’s mad dash down an empty city street to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.”

One of the underappreciated gems of 1980s cinema, Mauvais Sang elaborates on the hallmarks of Carax’s work introduced in Boy Meets Girl. It is at once a valentine to its leading lady (Carax was then dating Binoche), a master class on the close up, a lilting urban nocturne, and a treatise on the annihilating power of love. With its evocations of Chaplin and Godard’s Alphaville, Mauvais Sang was another tribute to Carax’s forefathers. But seen afresh today, we also glimpse traces of the filmmakers who followed: the pell-mell cinema of Arnaud Desplechin, the stylized compositions of Hal Hartley, the drenched romanticism of Wong Kar-wai.

JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Bad Blood

The distinctive and unusual talents of French filmmaker Leos Carax have relatively little to do with story telling, and it would be a mistake to approach this, his second feature, with expectations of a “dazzling film noir thriller,” which is how it was described for the Chicago Film Festival last year. Dazzling it certainly is in spots, but the film noir, thriller, and SF trappings–hung around a vaguely paranoid plot about a couple of thieves (Michel Piccoli, Hans Meyer) hiring the son (Denis Lavant) of a recently deceased partner to help steal a cure to an AIDS-like virus–are so feeble and perfunctory that they function at best only as a literal framing device, an artificial means for Carax to tighten his canvas. The real meat of this movie is his total absorption in his two wonderful lead actors, Lavant and Juliette Binoche (The Incredible Lightness of Being), which comes to fruition during a lengthy attempt at the seduction of the latter by the former, an extended nocturnal encounter that the various genre elements serve only to hold in place. The true sources of Carax’s style are neither Truffaut nor Godard but the silent cinema–its poetics of close-ups, gestures, and the mysteries of personality, its melancholy, its silence, and its innocence. Bad Blood uses color with a sense of discovery similar to that found in the morbidly beautiful black and white of Boy Meets Girl, and the rawness of naked emotion and romantic feeling is comparably intense. The tendency of critics to link Carax with the much older Beineix (Diva) and the much callower Besson (Subway) seems misguided, because as Carax points out, “Mauvais sang is a film which loves the cinema, but which doesn’t love the cinema of today.” From the standpoint of a Beineix or a Besson, Bad Blood is jerry-built and self-indulgent; from the standpoint of cinema, it blows them both out of the park.

User reviews from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

CAHIERS DU CINÉMA: There are no rules to cinema. No set way of getting from point A to point B, or a general expectation on the part of the filmmaker to include certain themes and conventions for the benefit of the audience. A film should make us think and feel; the rest is purely secondary. At twenty-six years old, Leos Carax understood this notion perfectly; taking inspiration from the early Nouvelle Vague films of director Jean Luc Godard and producing a work that underlined the key themes already established in his bleak and beautiful debut feature, Boy Meets Girl (1984), albeit, with a more clearly-defined and pronounced approach to the conventions of genre and narrative. Like Godard's early work, such as À bout de soufflé (1960), Bande à part (1964) and Pierrot le fou (1965), Mauvais Sang (1986) focuses on a number of weighty, existentialist themes - such as unrequited love and the alienation of Parisian youth - disguised by a series of hard-boiled genre conventions - brazenly lifted from post-war crime cinema and early film noir - and an approach to character that is filled with wit, emotion and searing imagination.

L'ÉNFANT TERRIBLE: As ever with Carax, the results are unconventional and highly unique, as we follow a story that is deliberately trivialised in comparison to the more important hopes and dreams of the central characters, whose collective spirit of defiance, adventure and melancholic yearning spill out into the actual visual presentation of the film itself. Here, the similarities to Boy Meets Girl are clear, with lead actor Denis Lavant once again portraying a misfit character named Alex who here comes to act as a representation for Carax himself. However, unlike Boy Meets Girl, the film is this time presented in bold and vivid colour, with much of the action taking place on purposely built sets that fall somewhere between the traditional Gothic architecture of actual, rural France and the cold, retro-futurist design of Terry Gilliam's masterpiece Brazil (1985). Once again, the design of the film reflects the ideas behind the characters, with the notions of escape and of closing yourself off from the outside world and indulging in romantic folly being central to the underlining spirit of the characters, which are here, more important than the widely recognisable aspects of narrative development.

CINÉMA DU LOOK: By visualising the film in such a manner, Carax is able to create a stark and somewhat surreal nocturnal underworld where his characters hide out - free from the rules of society and the conventions of time - with the production design, cars and costumes all standing as deliberate anachronisms to maintain the idea of a world removed from our own. It also works with the ironic, referential tone, in which elements of Godard give way to Chapin, who gives way to Welles, who gives way to West Side Story (1961), and all wrapped up in a preposterous plot that ties in with other French films of this cinematic period - later dubbed the "cinema du look" - in particular, Diva (1981) by Jean Jacques Beineix and Subway (1985) by Luc Besson. The basic outline of the story behind Mauvais Sang involves Lavant's young street punk running away from responsibility and inadvertently ending up helping two elderly criminals in a plot to steal an AIDS like virus from a futuristic, high-security laboratory, so that they can pay off an out-standing debt to a matriarchal Mafia boss. Along the way he dodges an old adversary and the girlfriend that he left behind and falls head over heels in love with the young fiancé of one of the criminals that he's there to help.

L'AMOUR MODERN: This strand of the narrative is the one that is most clearly defined here, both in the romanticised nature of the film and the world view of its characters, as well as the appropriation of the American crime-film references and pretensions to post-war melodrama. Here, Alex is quite literally a boy playing the part of a gangster, with his self-consciously hard-boiled dialog, swagger and no nonsense attitude as he talks about his time spent in a young offender's institute, and how it has turned his insides into cement. Through his relationship with Anna - herself a cinematic reference to Anna Karina, right down to the Vivre sa Vie (1962) haircut - the weight of Alex's internal angst and macho bravado begins to erode, leading to that near-iconic moment in which our hero, realising his unspoken love for Anna, runs down the street in an exaggerated tracking shot, skipping, jumping and cart-wheeling to the sound Bowie's Modern Love. An astounding and unforgettable sequence that comes out of nowhere and immediately reinforces the film's unique sense of romantic fantasy and pure escapism against a backdrop of would-be gangster theatrics.

STRANGULATION BLUES: The juxtaposition between grit, melodrama, fantasy and genre subversion is characteristic of Carax's work, with the self-consciously artificial world of the film and the playful and yet decidedly romantic nature of Alex and Anna's relationship tying together the themes of Boy Meets Girl with those of the director's third film, the grand cinematic "disaster" Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf (1991). Like those films, Mauvais Sang uses concept and narrative merely to present a reason for the characters to meet and interact, as the rest of the film develops from a collection of random scenes - linked by one or two reoccurring characters - that accumulate over the course of the film's duration to create a kind of whole. With this film, Carax created a fascinating cinematic abstraction of young love and alienation, unfolding in a world in which the representation of the audience is a young voyeur played by the director himself; a keen comment on the nature of film, and yet another fascinating component to this striking, unique and highly imaginative ode to love, escapism, and cinema itself.

Energy Unleashed: Leos Carax by Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd ... Tony McKibbin from Senses of Cinema, April 2004

Wellington Film Society - MAUVAIS SANG Jill Forbes from Sight and Sound, Autumn 1987

Mauvais Sang - The Same Cinema Every Night Mark Tompkins, also seen here: 'Mauvais Sang': a groovy French movie you might never have heard of

Cine Outsider [Slarek]

Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986) «Forrest In Focus: Critical Film ... Forrest Cardamenas from Forrest in Focus

The Lumière Reader » Film » Mauvais Sang (1986) Brannavan Gnanalingam

#257: Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) (1986) | THE FRAME LOOP Luke Richardson

Mauvais sang (1986) / Leos Carax / film review James Travers

film > Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) at Cinema Village ... Dennis Lim from the Village Voice

Sublime Moments | Senses of Cinema Pat Coughlin, December 2000

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Mauvais Sang Richard Scheib from The Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy Film Review

Mauvais Sang Review (1986) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

User reviews from imdb Author: robert-temple-1 from United Kingdom

User reviews from imdb Author: chaos-rampant from Greece

DVD Times Noel Megahey, The Leos Carax Collection, 3-discs

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Scott Tobias also reviews BOY MEETS GIRL

DVD Times Noel Magahey reviewing the Leos Carax Collection, BOY MEETS GIRL and POLA X

Mauvais Sang | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

New York Times (registration req'd) Walter Goodman, also seen here: New York Times

THE LOVERS OF PONT-NEUF A 98

aka: Les Amants du Pont-Neuf

France (125 mi) 1991

Only recently released, seven years in the making, the film has taken on legendary status for a multitude of reasons, long considered one of the best of the decade, yet never seen. The Pont-Neuf bridge crossing over the Seine River is one of the most beloved historical landmarks in Paris, but based on Carax’s passion for certain kinds of shots, and the length of time needed for the production, Carax decided he couldn’t shoot there, and instead erected in the South of France a two-thirds replica of the famous bridge and the neighborhood surrounding it. The production was halted several times, but resumed because of the interest of the star, Juliette Binoche, who was Carax’s lover at the time. The whole thing took three years and ended up costing $28 million, the most expensive French production in history, but a mere pittance by U.S. standards, for which Carax risked his career to realize his vision. Having now seen the film, one would have to say it was well worth the risk, as it blends the authentic with the fantastic, mixing documentary style naturalism with exaggerated film extravagance to create a great urban expressionist fantasy. Yet despite the extraordinary style of the film, much of it realized by the superb camera of Jean-Yves Escoffier, the subject matter matches the visual intensity, using the city’s physical characteristics to poetically reflect the consciousness of its characters.

Opening with a documentary portrait of the homeless in Paris, then centering on two homeless lovers who mentally and physically are a wreck to look at, they live on a dilapidated bridge that is under construction. The woman, Michèle (Juliette Binoche), is going blind and wears a patch over another eye that is already missing, while the man, Alex (Denis Lavant), a former circus performer walks with a limp, as we are witness to a car running over his leg early in the film. Both appear wretched and filthy, like weary decrepit souls living on the outer fringes of the world, so the story delves into what’s inside and cannot be seen, their love story evolving into an incredibly rich fantasy life, culminating in the most unimaginably spectacular fireworks display, the sky ablaze with explosions bursting over the lovers on the bridge, both delirious with joy, unable to keep their bodies from dancing under this deluge of delight, continuing the fireworks fantasia by water skiing down the River Seine, explosions like birthday candles and sparklers bursting all around them, bathing them both in streams of light, a wonderfully powerful and ecstatic vision from such tragically bleak and battered lives.

The film is reminiscent of another French film yet to be made, Olivier Assayas’s COLD WATER (1994), which is sort of a teen version of delinquents on the run searching through unimaginable depths of their souls for love and salvation, featuring a brilliant bonfire scene. There’s a tugging reminder of Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS (1931), and the ending, when both rekindle the love in their hearts in an underwater scene pays homage to Jean Vigo’s underwater love fantasy sequence in L'Atalante (1934), using a similar barge down the river. Unfortunately, the commercial epic TITANIC (1997) also ripped off what otherwise would be one of the more memorable images of the film, the two lovers in each others arms on the bow of the barge. This mental reference to commercialism is an unwelcome reminder to how much imagery is literally stolen in art, a maddening thought that unfortunately comes during the very climax of this film.

Another disturbing thought that continuously haunts the viewer afterwards is the reprehensible behavior of Alex, the manipulating and conniving male lover in the film, certainly a tortured soul in his own right. It is impossible not to be reminded of that, where one realizes these are homeless people who live on the verge of the irrational, a separate universe from our own, but it turns out the coldest, bleakest, most hideous aspect of the film is his purposeful act to keep her blind, to keep her helpless and homeless, to maintain her need for him at all costs, no matter the price. One can’t help but think of the cliché, love is blind, I would do anything for love, but this is such a typical, self-serving act of male misogyny on such a high order that it is impossible not to shiver with disgust. One must ask themselves, what is that doing in this film? And we’re left to believe that urban homelessness on the deteriorating bridge stands for the state of moral decay, the crumbling of what was once the pillars, the foundation of society, signs of a deteriorating moral order that leaves us with the Neanderthal cave man who has always been there, but has now disguised himself in civilization with clean pants and a close shave. Leave it to the French to describe: woe is me, what a weary state is man. Despite the fact the bridge can be rebuilt, the love rekindled, the homelessness and decay remain, even if it’s not seen. It’s almost as if Carax is saying, only in your imaginations can you be free, as the world and the people in it care nothing about you. And we are left with this troublesome thought at the end of this hauntingly intense and beautiful film rather than caught up in the rapture of romance, quite a bleak contrast from the wondrous optimism of the Vigo film.

Following a spell in a hostel for the homeless after he is injured by a hit-and-run driver, fire-eater Alex (Lavant) returns to his open-air home on Paris's oldest bridge. There, besides his drugs supplier Hans (Gruber), he finds a new tenant: Michèle (Binoche), a middle-class art student who has taken to the streets for as long as her failing sight holds. Tentatively, Alex and Michèle embark on a drunken, anarchic, mutually healing affair - but she is haunted both by the prospect of blindness and by a previous, painful romance, while he is increasingly consumed by jealousy. Set against the extravagant backdrop of France's bicentennial shenanigans, Carax's tale of amour fou is even bolder than Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang. It's filled with ecstatic imagery which manages not to jar after the gritty realism of the early scenes, and constitutes a heady anthem to abstracted, mad passion: at once a modern fairy tale and a cinephile's folie de grandeur, frequently exhilarating but never wholly free of pretentiousness.

It took eight years for French critic-turned-director Léos Carax's deliriously romantic Les Amants du Pont Neuf—Miramaxed to translate Lovers On The Bridge—to finally get distribution in America, and in that time, its reputation has ballooned to mythic proportions. Due to runaway production costs, which included building a full-scale replica of Paris' famed Pont Neuf bridge over a Montpellier lake, the film was the most expensive in the country's history and a colossal flop at that, leading financiers to demand too much money for the American rights. Now that the wait is over, watching Carax's uninhibited, gleefully self-indulgent l'amour fou feels like discovering the missing link, a single spark of inspiration that ignited the current (underrated) decade of French cinema. Hovering in its own unique space between dingy, underclass reality and poetic artifice, Lovers On The Bridge is a love story that nearly empties the enchanted Paris streets to make way for its heroes' whims. Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche star as a fire-spitting street performer and a near-blind painter, respectively, who fall in love on the deeply symbolic Pont Neuf, a decaying landmark closed for restoration. The more Binoche's sight diminishes, the stronger Lavant's obsessive hold on her affections—that is, until insane twists of fate lead the couple in unexpected directions. Though no one could accuse him of being a polished storyteller, Carax the impressionist keeps this tenuous affair alive on sheer cinematic gusto. In what should be considered one of the greatest sequences ever committed to film—on par with the 10-minute take of highway carnage in Weekend, the baptism montage in The Godfather, and so on—Lavant and Binoche drunkenly cavort in front of a spectacular recreation of the bicentennial fireworks display, as booming music from Public Enemy to Strauss spills in for their sole benefit. Then it somehow tops itself with something even more extravagant. Lovers On The Bridge doesn't always work, but Carax has a heightened sense of romance that's far too intoxicating to resist.

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf - Kamera.co.uk Adrian Gargett

"The loneliness which wraps the work of art is infinite, and it is nothing which makes it possible less to reach them than criticism. Only the love can apprehend them, to seize them and show accuracy at their place"
(Rilke - letter with a young poet)

"I don't really like writing scripts...For me, it's more like a musical score, with colours and emotions... (Leos Carax)

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) is one of the most visually exhilarating and intelligent films of recent years. A true "cinema of attractions", with music, colour, dazzling camera work, melodramatic coincidences and tour de force performances from Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant.

Leos Carax has all the attributes of the perfect auteur: his work displays not only consistency of theme (amour fou) and cast, but is also cine-literate (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf has many references, from Chaplin's City Lights to Vigo's L'Atalante). His "slight" boy-meets-girl plots are secondary to a mise en scene which is both tightly controlled - particularly in its use of long takes - and deliriously abandoned. Carax's prolonged struggle to complete Les Amants du Pont-Neuf against all odds and resulting in one of the highest French film budgets ever fuels the romantic myth of the artiste maudit.

Paris, Summer 1989. A young vagrant Alex is hit by a car on the boulevard Sebastopol and taken to the Nanterre night refuge for the homeless where he is given a shower and bed among fellow streetlife. Back at the Pont-Neuf which is closed for repairs, he finds that the location he shares with the older Hans (the bridge's unofficial homeless landlord) is also occupied by Michele, a dishevelled young artist who previously drew portraits of Alex as he was lying unconscious on the road the night before.

Michele, who is suffering from a degenerative eye disease and wears an eye patch, has left her middle-class home to keep drawing before she goes blind. Against Hans' wishes, Alex insists she stays and falls completely in love with her. She too is drawn to Alex but in a more ambiguous way.

She stays on the bridge during the summer, with Alex and Hans, the increasingly paternalistic onlooker. There follows a number of separate sequences - Alex and Michele drinking cheap red wine, riding the Metro and stealing money from tourists and eventually "escaping" to the sea. Alex and Michele are the familiar French lovers-on-the-run, nurtured by the maternal city which locates, feeds and entertains them, most spectacularly during the Bastille night celebrations. This is the climax of the film in a cinematic as well as narrative sense, the erotically charged histrionics of the lovers matching the grandiose state display, a bravura parade of sounds and images - filmic fireworks of breathtaking virtuosity.

Despite Alex's efforts to hide the news from her, Michele finally learns that she can be cured and leaves the bridge; Hans slides into the Seine; Alex serves a jail sentence. Some years later they are reunited, but Michele cured by an eye-specialist who has become her lover, is unable to accept Alex. In frustration Alex attacks her and they plunge into the Seine, but they are rescued by a barge en route for La Havre, the same route once covered by Vigo's L'Atalante.

The story of how a film about three people on a bridge became one of the most expensive ever-made in France is extensively documented, and unsurprisingly when Les Amants du Pont-Neuf was finally released in Paris, it suffered greatly from the attendant press coverage (although Cahiers du cinema devoted an entire issue to the film). Perhaps now, the film can be appreciated less as a cause célèbre and more for what it is, a remarkable, if intemperate, hymn to the importance of love.

"For Les Amants my starting point was two strong feelings I have about life and love. One is the "irredeemable"; the other a difficult word to translate - "l'inespere", what you don't dare hope for, it's something you don't really dare dream about, but you do dream about it nonetheless"
(Leos Carax)

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is a hybrid film containing moments of startling realism, especially the opening sequences among the homeless which was short on location "cine-verite" style. But essentially the film is about the romance of existential choice not socio-economic reality, hence the re-location from Nanterre to the staged beauty of the Pont-Neuf, which is spectacularly displayed as both a real location and a set, becoming a metonym for Paris. The vagrant/outsider theme is a metaphor for marginality in the same way that Michele's near-blindness is exploited for its melodramatic potential and is not a statement concerning disability. Michele's condition is only fairy-tale, a device which, when resolved at the end of the film serves only to reveal more forcibly a stunning conclusion.

If Carax's film trilogy - Boy meets Girl (1983), Mauvais Sang (1989), Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) - can be categorized, the first is about loneliness and the second tenderness, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf represents ecstasy. Ultimately Carax has proved that film-making which reflects his own obsessive passions can result in magnificent cinema.

Salon (Charles Taylor)

THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE (LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF) Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]

Boston Phoenix [Peter Keough]

Read the New York Times Review » Vincent Canby’s mixed review

POLA X C- 68

France Germany Japan Switzerland (134 mi) 1999

Carax's long-awaited follow-up to Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is a misguided and narcissistic update of Melville's Pierre, or the Ambiguities. A well-to-do Normandy writer, Depardieu, abandons his carefree life with his adoring mother and girlfriend after meeting a ghostly refugee from the Balkans, who may or may not be his sister. Taking off for Paris and a life of frenzied, impoverished creativity (in a grim commune peopled by artistic types who wouldn't look out of place as the Nihilists in The Big Lebowski), he retreats further and further from society. The first part is merely dull and vacuous; thereafter the film slides into absurdly pretentious bluster (or a 'raging morass, full of plagiarism', as the hero's publishers would put it) which, it seems, has far less to do with modern realities than with Carax's nonsensically romanticised vision of himself. Woeful. (In the end, perhaps, it is most notable for securing an increasingly rare Scott Walker recording for its soundtrack.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Given the muted restraint we usually see out of France these days, Léos Carax stands out like an escaped convict at a debutante ball. Adapted from Herman Melville’s Pierre, Or the Ambiguities, POLA X tells the story of a wealthy scion (Guillaume Depardieu) who throws it all away to live with (and eventually bed down with) his long-lost sister (Yekaterina Golubyova). Stories of wealthy folks plunging themselves into degradation in search of enlightenment are tricky territory, and Carax shows little self-consciousness as to the offensive pitfalls of his chosen interpretation. What’s more, he indulges an awfully obvious choice of symbolism, dressing Pierre’s sister all in black and his increasingly-ignored fiancée in white. Hmmm, what could that mean? But even if it’s just a bravura stunt at times, POLA X is more vividly cinematic than the vast majority of movies in release. It’s the kind of movie you want to have an opinion on, even if most people don’t know what you’re talking about.

(See Sam Adams’ interview with writer-director Léos Carax.)

Pola X Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

I haven't read Herman Melville's Pierre, or the Ambiguities, but it's reportedly director Leos Carax's favorite novel. What there is of a plot to this 1999 modern-dress adaptation, which Carax wrote with Lauren Sedofsky and Jean-Pol Fargeau, concerns a wealthy author (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard) living in Normandy in semi-incestuous contentment with his mother (Catherine Deneuve). Upon encountering a soulful eastern European war refugee (Katerina Golubeva) who claims to be his half sister, he runs out on his wealthy fiancee (Delphine Chuillot) and retreats to a funky part of Paris to write another novel. There's clearly some sort of self-portraiture going on here. A 19th-century romantic inhabiting a universe as mythological as Jean Cocteau's, Carax (Boy Meets Girl, Bad Blood, The Lovers on the Bridge) has a wonderful cinematic eye and a personal feeling for editing rhythms, and his sense of overripeness and excess virtually defines him. He's as self-indulgent as they come, and we'd all be much the poorer if he weren't. Characteristic of his private sense of poetics is this film's dedication, near the end of the closing credits, "to my three sisters"--it appears on-screen for less than a second. Pola, incidentally, is the acronym of the French title of Melville's novel; X alludes to the fact that Carax used the tenth draft of the script. 134 min.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Pola X (1999) Gavin Smith from Sight and Sound, June 2000

France, the present. Wealthy young Pierre Valombreuse lives in Normandy with his mother Marie on the family's estate. He is the author of the best-selling novel In the Light. Pierre divides his time between visiting his fiancée Lucie and writing his second novel. When Lucie's brother Thibault returns after a long absence, he and Pierre have an uneasy encounter. Pierre becomes aware of a mysterious homeless woman who seems to be following him.

One night, he comes across the woman, Isabelle, wandering down a country road. Isabelle describes the atrocities she has witnessed in an unspecified Eastern European country and explains she is the illegitimate daughter of his late father, a celebrated diplomat, long kept a secret by Marie. Stunned, Pierre renounces his former life and leaves for Paris with Isabelle and her companions, refugee Razerka and her young daughter. But after the death of Razerka's daughter, he and Isabelle move in with a commune in a warehouse where he is left alone to concentrate on his writing. Marie dies in a motorcycle accident. Lucie finds Pierre, but gradually realises he and Isabelle are now lovers. Pierre finishes his manuscript but it is rejected by his publisher. At wit's end, Pierre steals a gun from the cult's leader, tracks down Thibault and kills him. As he is being led away by the police, Isabelle throws herself in front of an emergency vehicle and is killed.

Review

Whether one regards Pola X as a preposterous self-indulgent folly or as an improbable triumph of romantic audacity - in fact it's a bit of both - there's no denying Léos Carax's intense imagination and commitment. His act of hubris and commercial perversity in updating and transposing to contemporary France Herman Melville's critically savaged 1852 novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities may be freighted in more ways than one. As a not-so-distant scion of the Dupont dynasty, Carax himself hails from a background similar to Pierre's. Carax has indicated that the book has been an important one to him for many years and it's not such a great leap to discern some degree of over-identification with Melville's critical and commercial misfortunes. The film's very title, an acronym of the book's French title (Pierre, où les Ambiguitiés), foregrounds the act of adaptation, bringing us back to authorial will. On one level the film is an unmistakable if masochistic act of self-parody comparable to Melville's. Even without the comedy of Pierre's metamorphosis from graceful novelist of leisure into caricatured starving artist, there's little doubt the publisher's evaluation of his manuscript ("A raving morass that reeks of plagiarism,") is a just one. On another level, the film, in all its deranged grandeur, represents a defiant refusal to capitulate to the dictates of commerce after the failure of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf and nearly ten years in the wilderness.

At the same time, more than in any of his previous films, Carax invests the narrative with highly charged subtext. Pierre's relationships with his mother and Thibault are visibly fraught with intimations of prior or latent sexual interest. Pierre and Marie address one another as "brother" and "sister" and enjoy an unusual level of intimacy. Pierre's blonde cipher-fiancée Lucie and the dark waif Isabelle seem equally passive manifestations of Pierre's implicit psychosexual crisis. Lucie is little more than a projection of Pierre's own self-absorbed aristocratic entitlement, but as his cousin and a mirror image of his mother, she represents the next best thing to Marie herself.

Isabelle by contrast is a projection of Pierre's guilt and self-loathing, a return of the repressed in both personal and historical terms. As his half-sister, she represents an opportunity to succumb to his desire for an "unnatural" (incestuous) relationship. At the same time she is a reproachful spectre, an incarnation of the unspeakable suffering that has underwritten a century of European genocide in which his father and his class are implicated. This is made manifest in the film's stunning prologue montage: an image of the earth from space accompanied by a voiceover quotation from Hamlet ("The time is out of joint..."), smash-cuts to dropping bombs. From this Carax cuts to the paradise of the Valombreuse estate, making an explicit connection between Pierre's privilege and the horrors of 20th-century war.

Carax doesn't idealise Pierre or the world he falls from any more than the cold industrial urban hell he descends into. In fact, the film's most remarkable formal aspect is its bold use of visuals to balance the two realms. In one of the film's pivotal scenes, Isabelle's audaciously over-extended monologue explains her backstory as she and Pierre make their way through the woods at twilight. Carax tests legibility and exposition to breaking point in this scene, and its visual liminality becomes a metaphor for the contradictions in the director's uniquely self-defeating talent. His narrative and formal risk-taking are indistinguishable from failure.

Images Movie Journal David Ng

Kamera.co.uk Adrian Gargett

DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson

filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp)

POLA X Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

DVD Times Noel Megahey reviewing the Leos Carax Collection, BOY MEETS GIRL and MAUVAIS SANG

DANCING TO FIREWORKS Leslie Camhi interviews the director for LA Weekly

Time Out London [Guy Lodge]

DVDBeaver Per-Olof Strandberg

Tokyo!

France Japan S. Korea Germany (110 mi) 2008 co-directors: Bong Joon-ho and Michel Gondry

Shaking Up the Crowd at Cannes Manohla Dargis at Cannes from the New York Times, May 16, 2008

Far superior is the metaphorically inclined short “Shaking Tokyo,” a story about a shut-in from Bong Joon-ho, last in Cannes in 2006 with “The Host.” Mr. Bong’s short is the final chapter in the triptych “Tokyo!,” which, as you might expect, mostly takes place in that city. The first, “Interior Design,” is a bit of predictable whimsy from Michel Gondry and involves a wallflower who metamorphoses into a chair; the second short, named for a French vulgarity, finds its director, Leos Carax, in an absurdist mood and throwing scat all over the screen. Too bad that the tough female prisoners in the Argentine drama “Leonera” weren’t around to reply in kind.

Tokyo! Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

One out of three ain't bad for this Tokyo-themed directorial three-hander. Whimsical Michel Gondry delivers a thirty-minute segment that resonates, while compatriot Leos Carax spoils an otherwise tasty genre exercise by pressing it into service as a message film. Korea's Bong Joon-ho, meanwhile, delivers an artsy rom-com that is too slight even for its half-hour running time.

Unlike Asian horror omnibus Three Extremes, the directors of Tokyo ! have little in common and the Tokyo cityscape isn't enough to make them bond. Another recent urban-themed portmanteau, Paris Je T'aime, managed the act better – perhaps because its 18 segments were more bite-sized. Tokyo ! is unlikely to repeat that film's relatively wide arthouse outreach, with only the four co-production territories looking like dead certs for theatrical distribution. But all three directors have cult fanbases – so long-tail ancillary prospects should be more upbeat.

An animated title sequence and the final credits are the film's only communal spaces. Gondry is the first up with Interior Design, a tale of a couple of amiable urban drifters, Akira (Kase) and Hiroko (Fujitani). Gondry perfectly captures the fantasy-realist spirit of his source material, the graphic short story 'Cecil and Jordan in New York ' by Gabrielle Bell, even though it has been moved to Tokyo. Though apparently inconsequential until it becomes a partly-animated surreal parable in the last five minutes, the segment has a warm indie fire to it that is stoked by the chemistry between the three leads (the other is Ayumi Ito, who plays the pair's former schoolfriend and reluctant Tokyo host).

No shrinking wallflower, Carax puts his cards on the table with the title of Merde, an odd, angry little curio about a Tokyo sewer-dweller that is at its best during rare moments of tenderness. Denis Lavant is suitably extreme as Merde, a green-suited, red-bearded, flower-eating freak who is vilified by Japanese nationalists and idolised by the country's non-conformists after a bombing spree. There's humour in a series of spoof TV news reports and both humour and pathos in Merde's courtroom and prison exchanges, but Carax's attempts to turn what is basically an enjoyable weirdfest into a parable of intolerance falls flat.

Which leaves Shaking Tokyo – a decidely minor outing for Korean genre auteur Bong Joon-ho. Teruyuki Kagawa plays an unnamed hikikomori, an urban recluse who shuts himself up in his obsessively tidy apartment, refusing even to make eye contact with the bike couriers whose deliveries he survives on. Then a pizza girl (Aoi) faints on his floor during an earthquake. Jun Fukumoto's poetic photography – which recalls Chris Doyle's long-lens work in another film about an urban recluse, Last Life In The Universe – is the best thing about this occasionally charming but dramatically flaccid love story.

Cannes Film Festival, 2008: “Tokyo!” (Gondry/Carax/Bong, Japan) Daniel Kasman from the Auteur’s Notebook

Tucked in the middle of the surprisingly inspired omnibus Tokyo! is the first masterpiece of Cannes, Leos Carax’ short feature Merde.

A sneering dark comedy pastiche combo of Godzilla and Oshima’s Death by Hanging, it captures in wicked digital imagery (by the unbeatable Caroline Champetier) the emergence from the sewers of a hideous Denis Levant to wreck havoc on the unprepared Japanese city. Red-bearded like an ur-gaijin, wearing a leprechaun’s garb and crawling up from the catacombs not unlike some silent serial super villain, he roars down the streets in a gregarious, brilliant verité sequence set to Ifukube Akira’s killer score from Godzilla, stealing cigarettes, licking schoolgirls, and generally strutting with an anarchic frenzy.

Logically, the next step is to grenade nighttime city crowds, and Levant’s madman—who speaks a gibberish language that only an absurd Parisian defense attorney, himself having the same curled, monstrous nails, devilish beard and milky dead-eye, can understand—is soon captured and condemned to death. Living in the underground remains of Japan’s Second World War detritus and eating only cash and imperial chrysanthemums, Levant’s creature—”Merde”—is too insanely, enjoyable kooky to express any kind of simple allegory. (Arbitrary split screen—now three ways, now four!—and an endless, untranslated interrogation scene seem to underline a certain stunt-like quality to the film’s exuberance and concept.) Instead we only see madness, Carax relishing an all-too-rare opportunity to make yet another unqualifiable, indescribable work of pure cinema, an ode to the monsters of the world.

***

Michel Gondry, with Interior Design, proves that rather than be all by his lonesome, with the help of a screenwriter he can reign in his meta-craftsman indulgence and just tell a story. Of course, we have yet to arrive at character—our heroine leaves her filmmaking boyfriend during the upheaval of the couple looking for an apartment and work in Tokyo but without any real reason for breaking the relationship—but the arc, from Fujitani Ayako’s girl on the sidelines to girl turned into a piece of useful furniture, has a touch of tenderness and much energy, despite the lack of human logic.

Gondry, with much cleverness, makes us assume from the get-go that the filmmaking boyfriend is the protagonist, opening with the joke of having him narrate a post-apocalyptic future over images outside of the window of the couple’s car, stuck in traffic on a rainy night. Is Gondry giving up the obsession with dreamer-filmmaker stand-ins? Probably not, but when Fujitani’s frustration turns her into a wooden chair to be found on the streets, for the first time in a while we see not Gondry watching someone craft whimsy, but rather we see someone inadvertently craft themselves. Feeding a creative impulse inside an ordinary character and not a savant creator is the path that will lead Gondry back to the emotional and narrative splendor of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and his segment in Tokyo! is a very promising step in the right direction.

***

Two out of three isn’t bad, but one must admit that Bong Joon-ho’s Shaking Tokyo has none of the vigor of The Host or Memories of Murder. His enjoyable jerky tone in shorter form here turns into a torpid kind of whimsy—symmetrical interior decoration, push-button tattoos, slightly odd and dramatically convenient earthquakes—none of which carries much impact. And his Imamura-like preference for social losers turns downright quirky-cute with our hero being an agoraphobic shut-in.

As the shortest film of the trio, it gets more than a pass though: it’s final image of the girl who brought our recluse out in the open is a doozy. Literally trembling during a quake which vibrates the glaring light, as if all the fear of leaving the house, facing the sun, and entering the crowd was manifesting itself in the on-fire form of this pretty girl, Bong embraces the latent whimsy of the short and for a few seconds goes all out. No explanation, just magic.

Thursday 15 Emmanuel Burdeau at Cannes from Cahiers du Cinéma

Merde.

This word, used as the title for a mid-length feature by Guitry, became yesterday, around 10 p.m. the title for another mid-length feature, this time that of Léos Carax in his Tokyo! triptych.

In Merde, Denis Lavant comes out of the gutter dressed in green and terrorizes Tokyo crowds. He ends up being hanged, after having tossed a number of grenades en route. It is funny, ferocious, and often facile. It connects well with the first and last parts of the triptych, respectively by Michel Gondry and Joon-Ho Bong. We were happy to rediscover Léos Carax, intact, still alive, as he stated himself, speaking to Thierry Frémaux.

There is more. Merde is a chance for us to say what type of cinema it is that we want. Cahiers du Cinéma readers no doubt already know it. But let’s reiterate it.

It is a cinema that goes from the silent film irises to the multiple screens of the 24 series. That jumps from film to digital media without transition or concern for looking pretty. An outrageous cinema, that makes terrorism its subject, its object, its love: that’s what we saw yesterday, and we’ll certainly be talking about it in the days to come. A cinema of anger and furor.

Films that are stolen, as if kidnapped: that’s the impression one gets, seeing Lavant strolling the avenues of Ginza. And it’s the same impression we get from great films like Cloverfield.

Films that are lost, rediscovered, or reaped are the real deal of our time.

False reporting. Unearthed archives. Violations of privacy.

Thief!

Someone has stolen the cinema!

What luck.

Matt Noller at Cannes from The House Next Door

HOLY MOTORS A 95

France Germany (115 mi) 2012

My guess is the more experience you have with cinema, the more you’ll like this film, which defies any narrative construction, yet continually exhilarates in its pure love and devotion to film language, much of it feeling like bits and pieces of old films all strewn together like broken parts to make something completely new. Those with a need for rational explanation need not enter here, as to many this will simply not make sense, but certainly anyone who does give this a try can’t help but be blown away by the sheer originality and mad energy of the movie itself. In other words you don’t even have to like it, but you can appreciate the unbridled joy with which this film was made, almost like a love letter to cinema itself. Carax was once the boy wunderkind of cinema, where at 24 his first film BOY MEETS GIRL (1984), shot in black and white on location in Paris, won the Youth Award at Cannes, while his next MAUVAIS SANG (1986) was a post New Wave primary color extravaganza that won the Alfred Bauer Award at Berlin, an award given to a movie which opens new perspectives in film art. Given a free reign over his next project, the boy wonder’s cost overruns created the most expensive French production in history, where production was halted several times before finally releasing the extravagant THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE (1991), a sumptuous and romantic tribute to both Paris and lead actress Juliette Binoche, which was a colossal flop in Paris, not released internationally until 1999, thirteen years after his previous film. When his next film POLA X (1999) was a huge flop as well, his career was all but finished, where we heard literally nothing about the man throughout the next decade, returning another thirteen years later to Cannes with this mammoth work that literally defies description, but is so ingeniously wacky that parts of the movie are simply off-the-charts hilarious, once again starring Denis Lavant as the director’s alter ego and stand-in for the creative force required to make an art film in the modern era.

This devoutly uninhibited film has such an edgy, stream-of conscious style that it likely summons different thoughts and ideas inside every head that shares this film experience, which plays out more like performance art, where Lavant is an outrageous chameleon-like character who literally takes on various disguises and different theatrical personas as he injects himself into the streets of Paris causing mayhem wherever he goes. What’s intriguing straightaway is the viewer questions whether this character is even real or whether it’s some form of visiting spirit from a world beyond. While this may not make sense to some, but it was reminiscent of The Phantom of the Opera, a scarred or disfigured character hidden from the world due to some deep personal tragedy or loss, living instead in a subterranean or alternate universe, which seems to be a blend of the future mixing with the past, where the connecting thread is the pure unadulterated joy of cinema. Lavant is known by a half a dozen different names, but he’s driven around the streets of Paris in a white stretch limousine, where Edith Scob, the aged star of a French horror film more than 50 years ago, Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), is the driver, also dressed all in white, including the color of her hair. She may as well be the driver of dead souls, as she transports Lavant around town where he sits in the back and receives 8 daily case assignments one at a time, literally transforming himself into character for each assignment, where the limo is largely a dressing room on wheels, where Lavant spends most of his time getting perfectly into disguise, becoming the manifestation of faded roles from cinema history which might die out altogether if he didn’t attempt to resuscitate them back into the modern world. Much like the use of memories in Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienb... (1961), which may die if not remembered, Lavant seems to be the reincarnation of near dead movie roles, literally attempting to breathe new life into them, but taken completely out of context when set on modern streets, where he is literally out of place, out of time, where people on the street are aghast at what they see.

The mix of fabulously designed set pieces and on-site locations are part of the brilliance of the film, as Carax does create an otherworldly impression throughout, where never for a single moment does anyone in the audience have any idea what’s happening next, where the built-up intrigue of these imaginary characters and what they’re doing returning back to earth is befuddling to say the least, where even the actors onscreen seem in complete bewilderment at Lavant. In one assignment, like a creature from the silent era, Lavant turns into a little green Leprechaun with bright orange hair, a hideous creature that never utters a word but instead makes weird animal sounds. When he crawls out of a sewer and leaps into a crowd on the street, people back away in disgust, where a high fashion photographer is taking photos of Eva Mendes as an haute-cuture fashion model, a statuesque figure of beauty, but this beastly creature instantly grabs the photographer’s attention, where he orders one of his underlings to immediately sign the creature up for a photo shoot. When she attempts to communicate with the monster, she ridiculously attempts to relate by asking if he’s ever heard of Diane Arbus, famous for taking pictures of giants, dwarfs, and other freaks of nature. Lavant simply grabs the model and carries her off into his lair in the sewers beneath the city that exists in stillness and in silence. In such a short period of time, the marvel of invention that occurs in front of the camera in this one sequence is wildly imaginative and extremely cinematic, using rousing music in much the same way there are frequent cinema homages, as Carax is simply re-inventing cinema by reconnecting all the unused pieces, much like reassembling all the broken body parts of mannequins that we see strewn around the empty warehouse settings.

Midway through his day, Lavant’s assignment book reads “Entracte,” or intermission, conjuring up quick images on early archival black and white film stock of a shirtless man peforming before a crowd, like a circus act, which quickly cuts to Lavant leading a march of accordion players "Let my Baby Ride" by Doctor L (RL Burnside Cover)- Holy Motors OST YouTube (3:20), an utterly enthralling piece of music that literally comes out of nowhere adding a sense of exhilaration to the film. Who knows where Carax comes up with these ideas, where Lavant enters a Tati-like modern glass designed skyscraper dressed in a glow in the dark outfit where he does outrageous MATRIX-like dances in a darkened room, where he receives instructions from an unseen voice, like Warren Beatty in MICKEY ONE (1965), becoming highly experimental using a dazzling strobe light effect, eventually joined by a shapely woman contortionist who can bend her body like a pretzel, with Lavant somewhere entwined. Using two cinematographers, Yves Cape and Caroline Champetier, the streets of Paris often become hallucinogenic-tinged, or the shapes of buildings literally melt, creating phantasmagoric images of a reality unfolding into itself, where the world is seen in utter transformation. Purely by chance, Lavant runs into an old flame, where he wanted to use Binoche, who apparently would not agree, so director Claire Denis suggested he use Kylie Minogue, where they have an extended sequence together that feels altogether unworldly on the rooftops of Paris, a direct reference to Baz Luhrmann’s MOULIN ROUGE! (2001) that starred Minogue, literally bringing in film segments from every bit of the director’s own imagination. This may be too much for some, who may wonder what in the hell is going on, but this is a quintessential dip into the collective subconscious history of cinema, where the entire movie is a subliminal flash in time, spliced together using bits of broken pieces, where the finale with Lavant finally safe at home, innocently looking out his window at night feels like he’s just a kid waiting for the arrival of Peter Pan.

‘Weird! Weird! It’s so weird!’ That’s not a quote from a punter leaving a screening of French eccentric Leos Carax’s first feature film in 13 years (he’s still best known for 1991’s ‘Les Amants du Pont-Neuf’), though it could be. No, they’re the elated words of an on-screen photographer after encountering perhaps the most alarming of the guises adopted by the film’s shape-shifting anti-hero, Oscar (an astonishing Denis Lavant): this version of Oscar is a Rumpelstiltskin-type grotesque who bites off two of the photographer’s fingers before dragging supermodel Kay-M (good sport Eva Mendes) underground to dine on her hair in the nude.

This is one of many such vignettes in Carax’s hypnotically inscrutable story, a cinematic revolving door constantly entered and exited by Oscar, who may or may not be the subject of an invisibly steered reality show. Or make that a sur-reality show: Oscar inserts himself into a series of role-playing scenarios of escalating outlandishness, his instructions fed to him by a stoic limousine driver (Edith Scob).

A day’s work finds Oscar enacting CGI frottage with an actress in a motion-capture bodysuit; begging on the street dressed as a bent-backed crone; and pursuing an ex-lover (Kylie Minogue, surprisingly affecting) around the ruins of a derelict department store.

Weird, yes. But even at its most absurd (chimps are involved), there’s something tender and truthful about Carax’s hall-of-mirrors irrationality, the sense of an artist so weary of human realities that he has no choice but to twist them into the more beautiful shapes afforded by cinema. By the time Scob references the character she played 62 years ago in the seminal French horror ‘Eyes Without a Face’, you might feel a shiver – it’s hard to say what forces are propelling this ecstatic, idiotic, fizzy, frightening provocation, but we’re moved by them too.

The Lumière Reader [Steve Garden]

If the opening night film (Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild) was difficult to describe, the closing night film is almost impossible. Holy Motors is comprised of a series of set-pieces featuring director Leos Carax’s long-time collaborator, Denis Lavant. Among other things, the film is a wry criticism of, and affectionate ode to, French cinema, social mores, and contemporary culture. Where Carax’s Les Amants des Pont Neuf (1991) was a vivid celebration of Paris and passion, Holy Motors is darker but no less passionate, playful, inventive or energetic. The mood is ultimately melancholic, recognising that all things must not only change, they inevitably pass. Along the way, Carax and Lavant dazzle with one entertaining slight-of-hand after another, offering us plenty to be amused by, wonder at, and ponder over. It’s probably best not to work too hard at trying to figure things out, although cinephiles will find much to keep them entertained as Carax alternately honours and takes swipes at various fads, movements and cine-gods, from Cocteau to Kubrick, the Nouvelle Vague, melodrama, theatre, dance, fashion, celebrity, commercialism, action movies, musicals, sci-fi, Matthew Barney (why not?), French intellectual angst and various socio-political hot potatoes, and finally the uncertain future of cinema. In the penultimate shot, Edith Scob dons the famous mask from Eyes Without a Face (directed by her husband Georges Franju, who, 25 years her senior, died in 1987) then walks out of shot saying, “I’m coming home.”

Holy Motors is dedicated to the late Lithuanian actress Yekaterina Golubeva, once married to the exceptional but little-know director Sharunas Bartas, whose films she appeared in prior to their divorce. Relocating to France, she worked with some of the most important directors of the last decade, notably Claire Denis and Bruno Dumont. For several years she was Carax’s partner, but in August 2011 she committed suicide. It’s likely that the ‘bitterness’ some reviewers sense in the film may stem from Carax’s personal grief. One of the most affecting sequences features Kylie Minogue (in homage to Jean Seberg?) singing a poignant song by Carax called ‘Who Were We?’. The sequence ends with Minogue removing the Seberg costume before jumping from a building to her death. Whatever you make of the film, it’s obvious that Carax made it with his heart. Every frame brims with blood and passion, and a genuine love of cinema.

Cannes 2012: Cinema-chewing: Leos Carax's Holy Motors | BFI Demetrios Matheou at Cannes from the Sight & Sound blog, May 23, 2012, also seen here: Cannes Film Festival 2012: The Sight & Sound blog - BFI

It’s been 13 years since Leos Carax’s last feature-length film, Pola X. When you wait that long for a one-time enfant terrible to show his face, the anticipation is mixed with anxiety. What if the older man is now, simply, terrible?

Imagine the relief, then, when the gleaming Holy Motors was wheeled out of the garage in Cannes, an ambitious, brilliantly bonkers shot-in-the-arm to the Competition. Carax may now be in his fifties, but he’s still making films like a young man desperate to explore and have fun with the medium. Thank God for a Palme d’Or contender who dares to be different.

A prologue features Carax himself navigating a surrealist dreamscape, at the end of which he looks down upon an auditorium, in which an audience sits impassively as Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographed athletes flicker across a screen. The nod to that early pioneer signals the fact that cinema itself is a subject of the film. At the same time these still figures remind one of Last Year in Marienbad; and like the characters in that film, the protagonist of Holy Motors will be on an endless round of role-playing, in search of an identity.

When we first see him, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) is a well-to-do businessman, climbing into his stretch limousine and asking his driver (Edith Scob) about his appointments for the day. We imagine a dreary round of business meetings. But then he takes out a lady’s wig. And when the car parks, an old, decrepit woman climbs out and starts to beg on the streets.

Before we’ve had time to take this in, Oscar has changed costume again, into a motion-capture suit, in which he enters a studio and performs a series of energetic stunts, including a sensual clinch with a woman, their fully-clothed writhing transformed into the naked coupling of reptilian monsters.

Oscar is a role-player, then, a master of disguise, performing for invisible cameras and for audiences who we can only imagine are enjoying an exclusive sort of pay-per-view. His other ‘appointments’ include a green-suited, lurching Leprechaun (Lavant reprising the monster from Carax’s contribution to the three-hander Tokyo!) who kidnaps a model (a seductively aloof Eva Mendes) and takes her into his subterranean lair; a killer whose victim is his splitting image; an angry father berating his daughter; a dying old man; and a man who goes home to his family, which happens to be a pair of monkeys.

That simian domesticity evokes Oshima Nagisa’s Max Mon Amour (1986), one of a number of references that will make this a cinephile’s wet dream. But it’s far from a dry exercise – seconds after Scob has donned her mask from Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), a fleet of limos start speaking to each other, in a totally unexpected homage to Cars.

It’s a hoot, but also mysterious and moving. Oscar is becoming exhausted by his characters, losing sight of his own identity. “Is it you?” asks Eva (Kylie Minogue), a fellow performer when they meet in the street. “I think so,” is all he can answer. Oscar also reminisces about the days when he could see the camera in front of him, at that moment conveying Carax’s own view as to how technology is damaging his art form.

Minogue has an on-screen charisma singularly lacking in fellow singer Pete Doherty, who has appeared here in Confessions of a Child of the Century. As for Lavant, well, he’s so multi-skilled and chameleon-like that he hardly seems human. Carax says, mischievously, that if the actor had refused the film he would have offered the parts to Lon Chaney or Chaplin. It’s a fitting compliment.

The Digital Fix [Gavin Midgley]

Holy moly, what a setup! A plane lands at an airport and, inside what may be a nearby motel, a man with a key for a finger rises groggily from slumber, passing his hands across the room's wallpaper: a forest of trees. Behind the wall is a corridor with a Rosemary's Baby cabinet, behind which lies a Club Silencio, where an audience is held rapt by a movie screen and a dog sprung from a Buñuelian zoo skulks an aisle. The soundtrack is the sound of the ocean. On the screen: a girl, but she isn't adrift at sea; her house simply suggests the hull of a ship, outside which her père walks down a Tatiesque pathway, to a limo that will take him to the first of nine "appointments" that, in toto, constitute a prayer for the death of cinema.

That surreal beginning sets up a funny, anarchic, and self-referential tone that never wavers throughout Léos Carax's whatsit. Played by the irrepressible Denis Lavant, Monsieur Oscar travels by limo from location to location, adopting wildly different personas to create (or is it to cause?) unbelievably elaborate scenes for, it initially seems, the audience's benefit. On a bridge, he plays an old lady who begs for alms and feels death's imminence. In the pitch darkness of a movie stage, he and a female contortionist evoke the mating of grotesque dragon-like creatures through the wizardry of motion-capture. He argues with the daughter he picks up from a party, plays the accordion with a bunch of hipsters, drops trou in front of Eva Mendes inside the sewers beneath the Père Lachaise, and is twice murdered, first inside a warehouse when his attempt at stealing another man's identity goes awry, then as an assassin outside a café. But since this isn't life, only cinema, he lives to act again.

Monsieur Oscar could be a member of the strange band of misfits from Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps, filling with performance all that's lacking in the world, giving the living something to actually live for. Really this odd-job man is a thespian, and a great one, flexing his fearless range throughout short vignettes without conventional starts and ends, though some boast great punchlines and almost all play with the conceits of vastly different genres. There's a sense here that nothing is real, as the people Monsieur Oscar interacts with in all his different guises seem to only exist between the words "action" and "cut"—though neither word is ever uttered. What Carax is articulating throughout is the visceral satisfaction of a handsomely framed image, the heartache of a whispered song of regret, the joy of a cleverly presented red herring, and so on, ad infinitum, amen.

But Holy Motors is also more. So winks the man at the beginning of the film when feeling for trees, and when Monsieur Oscar wonders if he will ever see the forest again. They want us to actually see the forest for the trees, to not get caught up in the details or risk losing sight of the big stuff. In a scene that suggests a much wordier interpretation of 2001: A Space Odyssey's finale, a young girl says goodbye to her dying uncle, and inside an abandoned luxury hotel, Lavant and Kylie Mingoue, playing ex-lovers, act out Hiroshima Mon Amour as a musical. Holy Motors references our history of cinema, much of it the chapter on French film, sometimes Carax's own work and sometimes even its own self, to convey the sponge-like quality of movies, their malleability, their capacity for reinvention, to celebrate not only the joy the cinema gives us, but the joy actors give each other when performing.

But for all its pleasures, Holy Motors is, to quote Jonathan Rosenbaum on Buñuel's The Milky Way, "dangerously close to being all notations and no text"—a maddening, self-satisfied, though never smug, game of spot-the-reference that seems intended only for a particular type of cinephile. "Can't Get You Out of My Head" is a girl's cell phone ringer, not because the song is as earworm-y as cinema is addictive, but because Minogue will be performing for us in a bit. When Oscar's driver, played by Edith Scob, clocks out for the day and dons a green mask, the moment exists only to flatter those who know of Eyes Without a Face. And somewhere in the subterranean bowels of Paris, when Merde from Carax's Tokyo! segment stages a strange pieta, flaunting his crooked boner after transforming Mendes from a supermodel into a burka-clad saint, the scene is so completely unmoored from tangible meaning, even from the film's own heavily coded celebration of the cine-pleasures that the George Lucases of the world threaten to erase with their digital weaponry, it becomes an actor's 116-minute reel, a totem to the crazed Lavant's freakish, almost superheroic range. In such moments, Holy Motors becomes solipsistic, at which point you wish Carax had had the courage to have titled it Being Denis Lavant.

Cannes 2012: Holy Motors Review: Gloriously ... - Pajiba Caspar Salmon

You have never seen a film remotely like Holy Motors. In its gloriously, unapologetically batshit-crazy story and style, it is like a UFO in the competition here at Cannes, flying among normal aeroplanes. Watching it feels like listening to the ramblings of a lunatic and thinking to yourself, “Is he a prophet in our own times, or is he just completely insane?” I cannot overstate how mental this picture is, and will therefore state it several times throughout this review; I am still reeling from the screening, nearly 24 hours ago. It elicited gasps from the audience last night, as well as giggles at its preposterousness. In his refusal to deny himself any extravagance whatsoever, Carax makes Baz Luhrmann look like John Cassavetes.

OK, so this is the bit where I would usually summarise the story. May God himself give me the fortitude to make it through this section. Denis Lavant plays “Monsieur Oscar,” a man who gets driven around Paris in a white limousine for nine ‘appointments’ over the course of one day; this appears to be his job. Phew. That bit went fine. Moving on. In the limousine, Monsieur Oscar has a mirror, costumes and make-up, and a list giving him details on each appointment. His first appointment finds him dragging up to play the part of an old beggar lady on a bridge. For his second appointment, he puts on a black skin-tight latex outfit and is required to go to a studio and do dance moves in front of a performance-capture screen that translates his motions into those of an animated character; he is soon joined by a woman with whom he dances an elaborate contortion dance, which creates a scene of beasts penetrating each other on the screen. For his third appointment, he dresses up as a freak in a green outfit, who runs through a cemetery whose gravestones bear website addresses instead of names, all the while eating flowers he steals from the graves, and arrives at a photo-shoot where he kidnaps Eva Mendes and drags her back to a lair where (amongst other things) he makes her wear a gold hijab. Following this “mission,” he returns to the limousine and continues his other appointments of the day, all more ludicrous and bizarre than the other.

So that’s roughly the gist of the film: man goes around Paris taking various guises, all of which are ridiculous but played seriously, with great conviction. Amongst the other roles he plays throughout the day are a hitman, a father driving his daughter home from her first party, and a dying old man. None of this begins to explain the craziness of this film, which also features a family of monkeys, talking cars and, as all self-respecting films should have, an accordion interlude halfway through. The accordion interlude, set in a church, is introduced with this memorable countdown instead of the usual one-two-one-two-three-four: “Three, Twelve, Shit!”

That isn’t the most preposterous line in the film.

Though the film’s greatness has already been overstated by critics anxious to see in its lunacy the visionary work of a genius — as I say, it really is profoundly ludicrous throughout, and will make you laugh and laugh and laugh — it is true that it does have a kind of crazed brilliance. In his story of a man acting roles in our midst, with apparently no-one watching, Carax appears to be lamenting the death of performance, and of art. The whole film can be seen as a kind of re-statement of the line from Sunset Boulevard: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Carax makes a case for art for art’s sake, for performance delivered for the sheer heck of it; he finds beauty and surprise everywhere.

The film also manages to deliver several poignant moments including, unexpectedly, a wondrous scene where Monsieur Oscar is re-united with his old lover, played by Kylie Minogue, inside a deserted department store. She herself is on a mission, due to play the part of an air hostess later that night. As they walk through the store, Minogue sings a song about loss, featuring the line “What happened to the people we were?”, or something like that; it’s a pretty dumb song and a completely weird moment in a film that is not a musical - but Minogue sings it well, acts her part with belief, and the scene takes on a grandeur and melancholy that are palpable. Throughout the film, in fact, an obsession with death is revisited: with Lavant possibly acting as his alter ego, Carax shows a fidgety fear of death and a sense of love and death’s interconnection. Relationships are fleeting; death settles everything.

I’m dying to reveal so many other insane moments from this film whose twists and turns are not unpredictable so much as brain-melting. I wish you could see how hard I’m holding back from telling you about the final scene, which is so stupid and hilarious, yet also sort of philosophical; what torture it is not to tell you too much about the monkeys and the way Carax uses them; how jumpy I am at the thought of Monsieur Oscar’s limousine driver and the way the film concludes her storyline.

Holy Motors fully deserves to become a cult classic, and I hope that as many people as possible will run out to watch it, be baffled and infuriated and delighted by it, and scream about it on the telephone to friends, with tears of laughter running down their cheeks, revelling in its berserk brilliance.

Film of the week: Holy Motors | BFI Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, June 3, 2014

The House Next Door [Budd Wilkins]

theartsdesk.com [Emma Simmonds]

Holy Motors Review - Fantastic Fest 2012 | Film School Rejects Adam Charles

Digital Spy [Ben Rawson-Jones]

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2012: The Joke, The Silence ... Veronica Ferdman from The House Next Door

Film School Rejects [Simon Gallagher] at Cannes

PlumeNoire.com [Moland Fengkov]

A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]

SBS Film [Lisa Nesselson]

Screen International [Jonathan Romney]

Cannes 2012, Day Seven: Leos Carax's bugfuck masterpiece strikes Cannes like a lightning bolt Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 23, 2012

Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 23, 2012

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 23, 2012

David Jenkins at Cannes from Little White Lies, May 23, 2012

Holy Motors and Leos Carax Q&A at TIFF, August 10th, 2013 ... Troy Bordun from Photogénie, August 10, 2013

Honor Roll 2012: Leos Carax Explains His Beloved 'Holy Motors ... Eric Kohn interview from indieWIRE, December 27, 2012

DAILY | Cannes 2012 | Leos Carax’s HOLY MOTORS » David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 23, 2012

CANNES 2012 DIARY: Carax is Back Eugene Hernandez reports on the post screening Cannes press conference from Film Comment, May 23, 2012, also seen here: Eugene Hernandez

Hollywood Reporter [Megan Lehmann] at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 23, 2012, also seen here: Megan Lehmann

Variety [Rob Nelson] at Cannes, also seen here: Rob Nelson

Holy Motors – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Holy Motors: love it or hate it, Cannes cognoscenti can't stop talking about it Charlotte Higgins at Cannes from The Guardian, May 23, 2012

Carbone, Daniel Patrick

HIDE YOUR SMILING FACES B 84

USA (81 mi) 2013 Official site

While this is an American indie film drawing a lot of praise from a variety of film circles, many claiming it is reminiscent of other coming-of-age films like Ken Loach’s KES (1969), Rob Reiner’s STAND BY ME (1986), Harmony Korine’s GUMMO (1997), David Gordon Green’s George Washington (2000), or Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ THE KINGS OF SUMMER (2013), all of which is pretty hefty acclaim that the film doesn’t really live up to. Perhaps people are starved for a return to that style of American indie filmmaking, or perhaps it’s a welcome shift from the ordinary and mundane commercial filmmaking that critics wish to support. In any course it’s a distinctive style, even austere by indie standards, dark and foreboding throughout, where the undercurrent threat of dread is everpresent, where one might conjure up thoughts of Michael Haneke having had a hand in producing this morbid little film. However, purely in terms of setting a distinctly creepy tone, it doesn’t stand up to the more uniquely original style of edgy Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté in Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013), which is more horrifyingly tragic in an adult sense. Arkansas born Jeff Nichols remains the current American indie standard bearer with films like SHOTGUN STORIES (2007) and Mud (2012), both showing kids at different ages, where all his films express a rare transcendent poetry. While others may attribute those qualities to this film, that’s actually what’s missing in this film, which feels overly predicable even from the opening shot that shows a Darwinian universe in play. Carbone is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he broke into the film business as a cinematographer in various short films, also Matthew Petock’s initial feature A LITTLE CLOSER (2011), a rural Virginia family drama that also drew similarities to David Gordon Green, Paste Magazine [Curtis Woloschuk], “employing similarly lush lensing courtesy of Daniel Patrick Carbone but dispensing with the overt lyricism.” Petock is the script supervisor of Carbone’s directorial debut, where both films, interestingly enough, examine the dynamics between two brothers hanging around on the outer fringes of society.

Caught up in the atmospheric enthrall of its own established rhythm and mood, the film takes place on the outskirts of a seemingly idyllic American town, an undeveloped stretch of woods and open space that for all practical purposes has been deserted, leaving it prime turf for young boys to explore in their daily adventures, where they’re often seen just aimlessly wandering around in the woods. In this way, they have a reclusive habitat of their own to retreat to where no adult supervises or stands watch over them. At ages 14 and 9, brothers Eric (Nathan Varnson) and Tommy (Ryan Jones) have free reign to roam, often seen both on the same bike, occasionally playing with one of Tommy’s friends, Ian (Ivan Tomic), or part of a boy collective in an open field where all the adolescent boys in the region apparently gather to loosely form a circle while two supposed equals pair off and fight one another, with appropriate rabid encouragement. This rite of passage becomes part of the underlying theme of the film, especially when these kids constantly get themselves into endless trouble. What strikes one about these kids is the typical bullying tactics of older brother Eric, but he takes it to another level, escalated by signs of danger everywhere, including the decaying remains of birds, cats, and dogs, where the kid’s fascination with dead things becomes part of their banal existence. After an argument with his Dad (Colm O’Leary), where Ian is caught showing Eric and Tommy his Dad’s gun, his Dad’s irate response sends Ian deep into the forest where his body is discovered shortly afterwards lying at the bottom of a bridge. With an eerie sound design by Chris Foster and Peter Townsend, cinematography by Nicholas Bentgen, and original music by Robert Donne, the established mood is one of menace and horror, where this isn’t the lyrically gorgeous world of David Gordon Green, but one that lingers in dark murky waters.

Neighborly hostilities with Ian’s Dad escalate to near psychotic proportions, where Eric criminalizes his anger, becoming something of a danger to himself and others with his explosive outbursts, initially leaving a dead cat on the doorstep after believing his dog was stolen, eventually breaking into the neighbor’s house and trashing it, where underlying this seething rage are suicidal thoughts of self-loathing, even pointing a rifle in his own brother’s face, often threatening to dangle him off the same bridge where his friend died, where Eric has this idyllic pastoral world at his disposal but hates his existence. While there may be homoerotic undertones built into the internalized anguish and tension, the absence of girls seems a glaring oversight, as one can only imagine how some of this crude, anti-social hostility might play out with the opposite sex. Distrust, lack of communication, alienation, rage, no moral boundaries, and teenage morbidity seem to drive this film deeper into the restless unease of male adolescence. The question is whether a reliance on moodiness can sustain the overall tension without veering into horror territory, where the emotional void leaves the lives of these kids fairly undeveloped, often appearing coldly uninteresting, as they are so self-absorbed, where they could give a crap about others. Carbone, however, never figures out where to go with this kind of bleak, fatalistic view bordering on nihilism, as jail time, for one, certainly comes to mind, but the director is not interested in existing realities. Instead he harbors a kind of mythical innocence bordering on fantasy, believing that behind the hooliganism, suicidal tendencies, and reckless death threats, there’s the potential for goodness in each of these boys. Incredibly, that is the Father Flanagan message in BOYS TOWN (1938), as each boy has their own moral cross to bear, and whether resorting to dreams, mythical reality, or simply an unorthodox turn in the minimalist narrative, the director, who also writes, produces, and edits this film, insists upon a contrived redemption, even if it never for a second feels believable or well-deserved.

Hide Your Smiling Faces - Chicago International Film Festiva

The death of a 9-year-old boy sends ripples through a bucolic town, jarring his friend Tommy and Tommy’s older brother Eric out of their routines and forcing them to stare their own mortality straight in the face. Battling chronic unhappiness and implacable restlessness, the boys look to escape their drab reality by retreating further into their natural surroundings - a lush, densely-wooded expanse that seems to represent both a sought-after freedom and an inexorable mortal peril in this patient and beautifully melancholic film.

Hide Your Smiling Faces : The New Yorker Richard Brody

Testosterone rises like mist on an early-morning lake in Daniel Patrick Carbone’s grimly determined, prettily picturesque first feature. A bunch of boys ranging in age from near-teen to just adolescent, living with their families in a hilly and watery deep-country summer-house community, get together to wrestle, swim, and goof around, which they do moodily and smolderingly. A plot point is set when one of them snatches his father’s gun and, after surrendering it, remains tempted by its proximity—as is his older brother. When a friend is found dead at the base of a high bridge, the stakes of their roughhousing ways become even more serious. The atmosphere grows dense with intimations of homosexual desire; pent-up rage is ready to explode with the slightest spark, and it does so with a blatantly theatrical flourish. The physical tumbles of lean bodies and the emotional fumblings of maturing souls take place in landscapes framed for postcards; the portentous drama, underlined and calculated details, could serve as a travel brochure.

Film Comment Amy Taubin, Fall 2013

A far more talented movie, Daniel Patrick Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces depicts two brothers (ages perhaps 11 and 13) hanging out with their dog and their friends, exploring the deep woods and turgid waters around their house, in some unnamed place in rural America. It’s an ordinary summer that will put knots in the stomachs of overprotective parents. There are dangers everywhere—in guns left lying about, in an angry neighbor who has it in for the boys’ dog, in the predatory creatures that inhabit the wilderness (in an early sequence, the brothers watch a snake slowly swallowing a small animal), in the decaying bodies of cats, dogs, and wildlife that the boys poke and prod and carry about. Every sequence could be the prologue of a horror flick minus the spooky music and other overt signals of the genre. The boys’ fascination with violence and death is all the more horrifying for being perfectly normal. Then one of the group dies in circumstances that are never explained to anyone’s satisfaction, bringing the older brother’s potential suicidal impulses into the open. Potential is the crucial word here. Hide Your Smiling Faces is remarkable for the dread it keeps at a slow simmer from the first shot to the last.

In Review Online [Drew Hunt]

Daniel Patrick Carbone’s stoic drama Hide Your Smiling Faces opens on the truly grotesque image of a garter snake slowly but surely swallowing a slug, its slimy residue splayed among the surrounding rocks and on the snake itself. The camera lingers on this image for at least half a minute, drawing attention to the slow, revolting process by which a snake swallows its prey, encapsulating the film’s disarmingly death-obsessed worldview.

Transpiring in a small country town, Hide Your Smiling Faces focuses on the daily exploits of a group of young boys who wile away the summer days exploring the surrounding woods, taking dips in a (pretty nasty-looking) lake, and generally raising hell around town. The ragtag crew, ranging from pre-teens to early adolescents, exude the exact sort of boundless enthusiasm you’d expect, though an odd attitude toward death is evident from the get-go: While exploring an abandoned barn, a few of them discover a dead bird stiff with rigor mortis and proceed to play with it in what seems like both a sick show of bravery and a desperate defensive ploy to avoid contemplating its demise. The film draws natural comparisons to such recent backwoods coming-of-age dramas as Mud and The Kings of Summer, but where those films have decisively nostalgic view of boyhood, Hide Your Smiling Faces reveals its darker points—specifically, the point at which boyhood vanishes forever.

When death meets the group firsthand—young Ian (Ivan Tomic) is found at the base of a bridge, the victim of an unspecified tragic accident—mortality becomes a looming specter, particularly for brothers Eric and Tommy (Nathan Varson and Ryan Jones), who were the last people to see Ian alive. Their respective reactions speak to the various natural responses people have to death—Eric, the older of the two, reacts aggressively, lashing out at his best friend and family and vandalizing Ian’s father’s home in a misguided act of personal therapy; Tommy facing a more introspective, existential crisis—but Carbone exploits these emotions more for dramatic impact than sympathy or pathos, thus betraying the film’s melancholic aspirations.

As the film’s atmosphere grows suitably denser, the filmmakers begin to lose their grip on nuance. Carbone and cinematographer Nicholas Bentgen use multiple wide shots to better incorporate the scenic environ; early in the film, these shots signify the characters’ bright-eyed view of not only their town but their lives as a whole. But as the story unfolds, the wide shots take on a more ominous air: The trees become more menacing, the skies far grayer, and we’re eventually shown parts of the setting that subvert its beauty, including a makeshift gravesite where dead animals of every sort have been haphazardly piled. Carbone aims to signify the gradual disillusion of his characters, but he takes the “show, don’t tell” rule a little too seriously, forcing hubristic lyricism into his already poetic images, barreling toward an off-puttingly histrionic and cheaply allegorical denouement.

Still, such errant over-stylization inherently stems from a place of ambition, and Hide Your Smiling Faces has plenty of that, for better and for worse. Carbone grew up Newton, N.J., where the film was shot, which explains his deep connection and fascination with the setting; it also explains why he is so intent on revealing its darker sides and illustrating how one’s idyllic surroundings can become tarnished and hostile. Such sentiments are certainly not lost on the audience, but the means by which they’re expressed begs for less vehemence and more subtlety.

Indiewire Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist

Spectrum Culture [Stacia Kissick Jones]

[Review] Hide Your Smiling Faces - The Film Stage Amanda Waltz

Hide Your Smiling Faces / The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo

Slant Magazine [Wes Greene]

Rex Reed Reviews 'Hide Your Smiling Faces' | New York ... New York Observer

In Hide Your Smiling Faces, a Dreamlike Drift Over Narrative . Jonathan Kiefer from The Village Voice

Reel Georgia [Cameron McAllister]

Hide Your Smiling Faces Movie Review : Shockya.com Brent Simon

Film Review: Hide Your Smiling Faces Nick Schager from Film International

Hide Your Smiling Faces - Film School Rejects Caitlin Hughes

Review: HIDE YOUR SMILING FACES, A Daring ... - Twitch Ben Umstead

About.com [Eric D. Snider]

Film-Forward.com [Will McCord]

HIDE YOUR SMILING FACES Facets Multi Media

Filmmaker interview Brandon Harris interview, March 22, 2014

Hollywood Reporter John DeFore

London Film Review: 'Hide Your Smiling Faces' - Variety Guy Lodge

'Hide Your Smiling Faces' review: The lost children of NJ ... Stephen Whitty from The Star-Ledger

Miami Herald [Hans Morgenstern]

Hide Your Smiling Faces Movie Review (2014) | Roger Ebert Brian Tallerico

'Hide Your Smiling Faces' Explores a Grim Childhood - The ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times

Cardinale, Claudia – actress

Claudia Cardinale bio from TV.com

One of the most attractive and talented film actresses ever, Claudia Cardinale has made a name for herself as both a sexpot from the Swinging '60s and a talented, accomplished character actress. Certainly she is several cuts above the average Hollywood actress.

She was born in Tunis, Tunisia, to Italian parents on April 15, 1938. At that time Tunisia was engulfed in bloody political upheaval; however, the Cardinales remained in Tunisia for twenty years.

Cardinale had a number of bit roles in several French films in the mid to late '50s, but it was not until she won the Most Beautiful Italian Girl In Tunis Award of 1957 that she became a major player. Though initially reluctant (she always wanted to be a school teacher), Cardinale eventually signed a contract and entered the Centro Sperimentale, an extremely renowned film school in Rome.

Her first large role was in "Big Deal on Madonna Street", but she began appearing in a growing number of French films, aided by producer Franco Cristaldi, who later married her. Cardinale managed to avoid a potential scandal in 1959 when she gave birth to a child out of wedlock by saying he was her brother.

Cardinale gained international acclaim for her roles in Luchiano Visconti's classics "Rocco and His Brothers" and "The Leopard", along with Federico Fellini's immortal "8 1/2". Shortly thereafter, she took to the road and tried her luck in Hollywood.

Whether fortunate for her or not, Cardinale, in spite of her legendary beauty, did not become the "next big thing" after Sophia Loren and company - most likely because she never mastered the English language. Though she appeared in the comedy classic (and box-office hit) "The Pink Panther", she appeared in a series of relative flops ("Circus World", "The Professionals") and within a few years was out of Hollywood for good.

By 1968, Cardinale, though still young, was growing too old to remain a viable sex symbol for much longer. Thus she began taking on character roles, starting with her role as the put-upon prostitute Jill McBain in Sergio Leone's masterpiece "Once Upon A Time In The West". As the '70s grew on, she remained quite active, appearing in such films as "The Red Tent", "Popsy Pop", "The Immortal Bachelor", and "Escape to Athena". In 1974 she divorced her husband Cristaldi and married film director Pasquale Squittieri, having her second child with him. She appeared in several of his films, notably "Corleone" and "The Gun". During this time period she also worked on Werner Herzog's infamous "Fitzcarraldo", playing Klaus Kinski's girlfriend.

Up until the mid-'90s Cardinale still appeared in a number of films, and often appeared at the US Academy Awards. In 2002 she won the German Gold Bear Award for lifetime achievement. She is also a goodwill ambassador.

Claudia Cardinale - Films as actress: Susan M. Doll from Film Reference

Claudia Cardinale, the Italian actress famous for her husky, almost raspy voice, began her career by winning a contest for "the most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia." As the winner, she was granted a trip to the Venice Film Festival, and eventually attended acting classes at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome. She was promoted by producer Franco Cristaldi, who carefully guided her every move in regard to the cinema, and later married her.

Cardinale was discovered during the era when Brigitte Bardot created one sensation after another both on screen and off. Cardinale could merely have become "the Italian Bardot," and, indeed comparisons have been drawn between the two actresses. But a number of factors helped lead Cardinale's career in a different direction. The publicity surrounding both Cardinale's films and her personal life was not nearly as sensational as that concerning Bardot. More importantly, Cardinale soon began appearing in the films of the major Italian auteurs. Minor, and later more substantial, roles in the films of Mario Monicelli, Mauro Bolognini, Luchino Visconti, and Federico Fellini made her a star in Italy and abroad.

While many of Bardot's films are now known simply because she is in them, Cardinale's films are often important works in the careers of their respective directors. For example, she appeared in Monicelli's best-known comedy (Big Deal on Madonna Street), co-starred in a fine series of films for Bolognini (Il bell'Antonio, La viaccia, and Senilità), and gained critical and popular recognition for her role as the fiancée of the eldest brother in Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers. She appeared in multiple roles in Fellini's 8½, one of her most memorable films.

In these films, Cardinale's characters were, more often than not, portrayed as glamorous sex objects, not unlike Bardot. The variations each director introduced in the presentation of Cardinale in this type of character, however, prove interesting. In 8½ she plays Claudia, herself, as well as the ideal woman of Guido's dreams. Outside the immediate narrative context of the film, her character becomes a symbol for Fellini of unspoiled, yet unattainable, innocence. Though beautiful and sensuous, she is not crassly sexual.

Later, in Leone's Once upon a Time in the West, Cardinale portrays Jill McBain, the new bride of murdered settler Brett McBain. Again, her character could be described as the object desired by the male figures in the film, but Jill McBain signifies much more within the context of the film's complex narrative, and within the genre of the Western itself. She represents the forces of civilization, as female characters often do in Westerns. The final scene depicts Jill providing water to the thirsty workers building the railroad (that other symbol of the taming of the west), implying that Jill will fulfill her husband's dream of running a railroad station. Her past life as a prostitute in New Orleans, however, recalls the less than desirable elements of civilization, which will inevitably follow the settlers. In this film, as in 8½, Cardinale's character carries symbolic, almost mythic connotations.

Cardinale made her American film debut in Blake Edwards's very popular The Pink Panther, securing her international star status. Other American films, such as The Professionals, followed. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, Cardinale made most of her films in Italy and Europe. Many were not distributed in America or suffered from limited distribution, thereby reducing Cardinale's international exposure. Three 1980's roles, in Liliana Cavani's La pelle (well-received at Cannes), in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, and Diane Kurys's A Man in Love, have again focused attention on her as she enters a more mature phase of her life and career.

A Tribute to Claudia Cardinale website

All-Movie Guide - Claudia Cardinale Jason Ankeny

Classic Movies a feature page

CLAUDIA CARDINALE bio from Love Goddess

Claudia Cardinale biography and photo gallery

Claudia Cardinale (I) - Biography from IMDb

Claudia Cardinale Adrian Wootton from BFI interviews Cardinale from The Guardian, May 10, 2003, also Questions from the Floor here: Claudia Cardinale: part two

AlloCiné Blogs - LES DÉESSES DU 7 ÈME ART (in French)

Altavista Image - Claudia Cardinale photo gallery

Google Images - Claudia Cardinale

Fellini's 8½-Claudia Cardinale and Marcelllo Mastroianni (1:03) on YouTube

Les Petroleuses: Brigitte Bardot vs Claudia Cardinale Part 1 (1:44)

Les Petroleuses: Brigitte Bardot vs Claudia Cardinale Part 2 (2:42)

Les Petroleuses: Brigitte Bardot vs Claudia Cardinale Part 3 (3:06)

CLAUDIA CARDINALE (2:36)

Claudia Cardinale sings - catfight - Brigitte Bardot - 1971 (2:40)

Ricordo (Claudia Cardinale) (2:49)

Claudia Cardinale Bellissima (3:00)

Movie Legends - Claudia Cardinale (Reprise) (5:48)

Movie Legends - Claudia Cardinale (6:06)

Claudia Cardinale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cardoso, Patricia

REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES C+ 77

USA (93 mi) 2002

The film is taken from a stage play written by Josefina Lopez. Sometimes the best intentions are not enough, and this film is filled with good intentions, but at best, this is a made for TV movie, and at that, it succeeds fairly well. Everyone, even the minor characters are all well acted, especially the mother, Lupe Ontiveros. In fact, despite her daughter being on screen nearly the entire film, what this film has to say about the mother was much more interesting. I’m sorry, but there’s not any new material here, just some good performances.

Carnahan, Joe

THE GREY B- 81

USA (117 mi) 2011 ‘Scope Official site

An interesting mix of wilderness fable and grim psychological drama that tests the mettle of several hard core men working an oil rig in the remote, far north regions of Alaska, narrated by Liam Neeson as Ottway, a man running away from his own personal secrets. This ragtag group of loners may interest some, described as “ex-cons, fugitives and men unfit for mankind,” but mostly they’re a bunch of drunkards and carousers who think of little other than pleasing themselves. Hired to shoot wolves or other predators that may attack the men at work, Ottway is a trained marksman and outdoorsman. Add this to the movies that make great use of snow, as nearly every image of this film shot in ‘Scope by Masanobu Takayanagi beautifully captures the immensity of the snow-filled landscape. The set up is a plane back to civilization that mysteriously crashes, leaving but a handful of survivors who are immediately overcome by the harsh and brutal elements of the Alaskan wild, also a pack of giant-sized wolves that seem to have them surrounded. John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976) immediately comes to mind, as the men must hunker down into a strategic bunker mentality to save themselves, where big shot heroes on their own are usually the first ones to make themselves easy targets. One might wish Carpenter had the reins of this film, as he’s a master of suspense films. Carnahan doesn’t disappoint, but the script does, adapted by the director along with short story writer Ian Mackenzie Jeffers from the latter’s work Ghost Walker. The dialog never rises above ordinary, even as their circumstances are extraordinary, which is the film’s biggest drawback, as the extravagant landscape always overpowers the bleak interior drama.

Once out in the frozen tundra, just seven men survive, where Ottway fends off an attack by wolves, helped by the intervention of others and wounded on his knee, but one of the others doesn’t make it through the night. On Ottway’s recommendation, they make a break for the distant treeline, where his judgment as leader is immediately questioned, as these are not men used to paying other people’s notions any mind, but are outcasts and social misfits who follow their own instincts. Nonetheless, in the run across the empty plain, the wolves pick off the weakest link, the one with the biggest mouth who lags behind, which leads to a ridiculous display of bravado, useless out there, as the wolves are closing in. One by one, the men are being picked off, where all they have are primitive weapons of sticks to fend them off. If truth be told, the over talkative early portion of the film is the least effective, as these men have little of interest to say, sounding very clichéd, but as their ranks grow thinner, the film takes on a more wordless existential quality which is a huge improvement, growing grimmer and bleaker by the minute. The futility of their efforts begins to resemble André de Toth’s DAY OF THE OUTLAW (1959), where Robert Ryan leads a group of outlaws through a mountain pass impassable by the brutally harsh conditions of snow in winter, where one by one they start to die in the blistering cold where the wind is too ferocious to even light a fire. These men in the Alaskan wilderness need fire to fend off the wolves and to keep from freezing to death.

One must suspend belief to accept the premise of this film, as this does not at all represent the accurate size or look of Alaskan wolves, nor their pack behavior, as if they wanted to attack them all in one flurry, there are more than enough wolves to finish them off at any time, but generally wolves do not attack humans unless provoked. In this film, rather than attack as a pack, which is their nature, they instead send out small scouting parties as the others look on, watching, which is simply a writer’s invention. However, in this manner, the filmmaker is able to build and sustain tension, especially when only a few men are left, as the fatal consequences loom larger. Using terror as the threat of the unknown, the attacks are a blur of indistinct shapes and sizes, where the evidence left behind is dismally gruesome. Flashback sequences and hallucinations help portray the deteriorating state of mind, where the men grow delirious as well as exhausted from trying to walk through the snow to safety, hoping to find a lone hunter’s cabin around the next bend. Always holding out hope, while continually pressed into greater survival mode, the men are fully tested by the ominous void of impending gloom that hangs in the air. The conditions are never anything but unrelenting and merciless, where God is inevitably challenged to show himself, as otherwise all is lost. In the end, each man must face his own interior demons as he’s about to be engulfed by the unyielding indifference of the wild, as this barren landscape has withstood eons of insufferable winds and cold without any sign of man’s footprint. Interestingly, there’s a final shot that comes after the end credits roll.

The Grey Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Tom Huddleston

Liam Neeson’s unexpected but lucrative shift into marquee action-man territory has at best resulted in fun junk like ‘Taken’, at worst in Eurotrash drivel like ‘Unknown’. With ‘The Grey’, he’s officially broken the slump: the film was developed as a vehicle for Bradley Cooper, but it’s hard to imagine his pretty face at the centre of this terse, rock-solid survival thriller. This is a prime example of the right role for the right man at the right time – as Joe Carnahan’s camera lingers over those steel-blue eyes and that expressionless face, as craggy and rugged as the Alaskan landscape, it’s easy to believe that Neeson is, in fact, harder than a pack of wolves.

Neeson is Ottway, a hard-bitten hunter stranded at an oil outpost. When his plane back to civilisation crashes in the frozen wastes, Ottway must lead a ragtag band of survivors to safety. But surviving blizzards and scaling ravines is one thing, dealing with timber wolves quite another.

After the excesses of ‘The A-Team’, this is Carnahan stripping it back to basics – seven men, one wilderness, countless beasts. His directorial hand is firm: the action sequences thrill, the shocks are effective and if the characters are somewhat slight and the dialogue scenes overlong, the film has a streamlined, Hawksian narrative drive which carries it through the rough spots. Best of all, though, is Big Liam: sharp, surly and mean as hell, he’s as close as we’ll get to a modern John Wayne – and who saw that coming?

exclaim! [Scott A. Gray]

Grim and desolate, with a mature honesty seldom seen in survival pictures, The Grey is a moving character drama swaddled in a thrilling adventure. On the surface, the set up references true-cannibalism story Alive and the final third of White Fang: plane crash survivors are hunted by a wolf pack, starving and threatened by the encroachment of outsiders. But The Grey is a contemplative piece on finding the will to fight for life and easing the transition to death by holding fast the loves that make it worth living.

Liam Neeson is at the top of his game as a man haunted by his past, of which we see brief flashes – enough to know it's about his wife, but not the context. Taking an expository shortcut, he lays out the setting – an oil drilling job in Alaska with "ex-cons, fugitives and men unfit for mankind" –and his emotional state (really depressed) in a letter to her in the film's opening.

There may have been a more elegant way to present this scene and information, but after this minor stumble out of the gate, The Grey retains solid footing for the majority of the picture, with an excellent supporting cast of well-developed, flawed personalities.

In what's possibly the most harrowing plane crash sequence I've seen, director Joe Carnahan (Narc, The A-Team) displays excellent editing instincts that put us directly into Neeson's perspective throughout the experience, the abrupt cuts to his unconscious mind making it all the more disorienting.

After gathering survivors and helping a dying man make peace in a very poignant scene that eschews subterfuge or denial for the harsh comfort of truth, Neeson (character names have a small, specific part to play in the drama) emerges as the obvious alpha of the group.

As the small band of battered humans attempt to fend off the wolves aggressively defending the wide "kill radius" around their den, their actions parallel the pack dynamics, with challenges to the alpha nipped as necessary. It's an effective way to depict man's animal nature and call out bullshit posturing tactics rampant in society that amount to nothing in the wild.

The oppressive wind and snow are as much a threat as the wolves, amplified by the smart decision to only have a musical score during emotional conversations or moments of personal reflection. Hearing just the wailing wind, crunching snow underfoot or crackling campfire ratchets up the tension for when a distant howl or snarl in the dark breaks through the subdued din.

Despite minor touches of heavy-handed sentimentality and a forgiving attitude about the realities of hypothermia, The Grey is an uncompromising celebration of relying on one's force of will to find the value of fighting for every moment of life.

Hopeless, violent shades of “Grey” Dominick Meyer from Heave Media

“Live or die on this day.” That’s both the tagline for The Grey and a poem John Ottway (Liam Neeson) used to hear from his father, a poem that becomes his mantra throughout his brutal ordeal. During Joe Carnahan’s film, I was moved to recall Abraham Lincoln as well: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” This is a powerful film, savage and spare and horrifying and profoundly moving in its way. It becomes clear that survival is intangible, with the potential hazards to continued life constantly increasing.

The Grey begins in an unnamed rigger’s town in the Arctic. Here, as Ottway mentions in his opening narration, there is no hope, just a place of last resort for those unfortunate enough to arrive there. Like a hopeless, tragic spin on the Antarctic wanderlust colony in Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, this is a place for convicts, escapees and lonely wanderers to end up when hope is lost. Ottway is just one among them, but he’s been forced there by circumstances well beyond himself. He’s also seemingly the only one uninterested in talking about them; men like Flannery (Joe Anderson) and Diaz (Frank Grillo) are all too happy to espouse their take on the rig’s collective existential situation. By day they work, by night they drink to excess, fighting and fornicating to keep themselves moving. These are men who speak in clipped terms, who only know each other by their last names and don’t have friends so much as fellow worn travelers.

When the plane taking them back to the relatively civilized territory of Anchorage ices over and crashes violently, only a select few survive. Their reward is a tundra where snow perpetually blows in sheets and territorial wolves don’t take too well to the few who made it. Ottway is among them, and he takes the lead, guiding his few in a direction that may vaguely signal safety and only guarantees that they won’t immediately die by the wolves or the cold. Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi embraces the oppressive monochrome of this sparse world to stunning effect, turning the open wilderness into a claustrophobic nightmare. Through an open field of snow and into a forest, the men trudge through, attempting to find a way to overcome the threat of the wolves, those constant, fast-moving specters of death. They’re rarely seen in detail, instead viewed as dark shapes in trees or glowing eyes in the darkness.

Those expecting the standard Liam Neeson badass-fest need not apply. There’s none of the entertaining histrionics of Taken here, but instead a violent contemplation of strength and mortality, and how the two react under duress. Neeson gives a phenomenal performance, and it’s hard not to feel the twinge of truth at its core; his dreams mainly show his wife, gone for reasons that are unclear until late in the game. That Neeson’s real-life wife Miranda Richardson died tragically last year gives The Grey another level of unbearable emotion. When Ottway stares the wolves in the face, and encourages his men to join him, there is more than bravado behind his eyes. There is fear and pain and raw power all at once.

Carnahan has no interest in clean narrative flow, though the film moves at a stunning clip. Though many of the survivors begin as stock “types,” they evolve with their ordeal into fully realized, vulnerable men who crack jokes about things they want to return home to, but mostly just want to avoid death. I mentioned Herzog earlier, who’s acknowledged in a funny early one-liner, but the naturalistic apocalypse of some of his earlier work is felt here. What’s more surprising is Carnahan’s direction, normally style above all but here stripped to its cold, bleak bones. The Grey offers no comforts, but beneath the tension and violence there is a tale of the darkest parts of memory and life. A movie with the courage to explore such places is a rare, beautiful thing.

There's little in Joe Carnahan's previous films, marked by their frenetic, fanboy-friendly overindulgences, to predict the cold blast of The Grey, an old-fashioned, neatly arrayed survival story that almost reads like a reaction to the excesses of his past work. The more likely explanation is that the director is something of a chameleon, adapting his style to suit the demands of whatever genre he's operating within, a malleability that finds him scaling back to tell this story of hard men battling the elements, armed with little more than their wits. Whatever the case, this effort reads as a huge improvement, if not a direct step forward.

With hectic blast-fests like The A-Team and Smokin' Aces, and referential, post-film-school fodder like Narc, Carnahan displayed a taste for elaborate plots, which come to fruition with fascistic, violent precision, a method that prizes process over outcome. It's a hollow, exhausting approach, and these films are failures because they expended all their energy setting up these elaborate scenarios, resulting in movies that ran out of steam by the end of the act two.

These big bad messes are fueled by a mordant dorm-room existentialism, a point of view which insists on a world that is morally bankrupt, emotionally hollow, and inescapably pointless. The Grey is driven by roughly the same ideas, and it's definitely rough in this regard, but there are two important distinctions. The first is the tamping down of the director's style, which progresses from whip pans and self-conscious color filters to a more balanced approach, combining stunning Arctic vistas with a pitiless palette of whites, grays, and blacks.

The second is a shifting of gaze, matching up the view of emptiness with the cold void of nature at its harshest, and the blank stretches of the Alaskan tundra prove to be a much more suitable setting for this type of story. The result is a film where plans still have the utmost importance, but they're finally integrated organically into the fabric of the plot, which charts a continuing back and forth between their formation and collapse.

Liam Neeson takes charge of the action as John Ottway, a professional wolf hunter employed to protect pipeline workers, who starts off the film with an abortive suicide attempt. The rest of it plays out almost as if he succeeded: Ottway's plane home crashes, leaving him injured amid a flaming wreck in the middle of nowhere, menaced by wolves unhappy with intruders so close to their den. It's the kind of airy story which seems ripe for symbolism, something that Carnahan never provides, instead sticking to a basic, no-frills tale of man versus nature.

In keeping with this basic structure, Ottway is less a fully established character than a machine springing into action, his instincts taking charge as he attempts to marshal the survivors and make it back to civilization. Driven by the most basic of motives, he's the same type of action-figure male lead as the ones that fronted Carnahan's previous films, and the director remains over-fascinated with the not terribly interesting mystique of male efficiency. But despite his simplicity, Ottway is riveting, partly due to Neeson's commanding presence. So while the character isn't especially deep, he's relatable, trudging forward with an ever-present grimace, driven not so much by the will to live as to compulsion to strike back hard against the uncaring universe which has forced him into this position.

It feels almost sacrilegious to compare The Grey to Budd Boetticher's minimalist westerns, but Ottway shares a lot with the heroes of those straightforward tales, a character whose nihilism seems more and more valid as the story progresses, remaining grave-faced as the world satisfies his meager expectations. Ottway is the hero here because he's competent, angry, and aware of the odds against him, not because he has any special chance of succeeding against them.

This gritty nihilism braces the movie, providing a tough spine to support the increasingly brutal situations these characters encounter. Things could have benefitted from a little more stripping, and the film's worst qualities are inevitably its most obvious, from the still-gaudy, lens-flare-stricken cinematography to a repetitive series of flashbacks, which lead up to a twist ending that, if not tonally dishonest to what's come before, is still mostly unnecessary.

But The Grey largely works, building toward a great ending, which functions as one of the best, truest action climaxes in recent memory. As a flawed but still highly effective action film it's also valuable as a harder-edged companion piece to Lee Tamahori's The Edge, substituting grizzled oil workers for big-city greenhorns, wolf pack for bear, man's futility against the world's callousness for his futility against his own internal savagery. The two also stand out as action movies which set out on a path and doggedly stick to it, resisting the urge to collapse into action-packed third-act bluster, an especially impressive outcome considering Carnhahan's spotty history.

The Digital Fix [Gavin Midgley]

Essay on death and faith in "The Grey" - Warning: excessive spoilers Omar P.L. Moore

The Grey: Liam Neeson is thrown to the wolves - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens

The Grey,' 'The Innkeepers,' 'Kill List,' - New York Magazine David Edelstein

The Grey Sees Unlikely Brothers Band Together - The New York ... Rex Reed from The NY Observer

Filmcritic.com Sam Kressner

Fangoria.com [Michael Gingold]

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]

The Grey Review: Stalked in the Forest, Too Close to Hide - Pajiba Daniel Carlson

Review: 'The Grey' Pits Stock Characters Against Cartoon Wolves ... Gabe Toro from The indieWIRE Playlist

The Grey Movie Review (2012) review by Eye for Film David Graham

The Grey James Kendrick from QNetwork Entertainment

Grey, The - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Film-Forward.com [Brendon Nafziger]

EFilmCritic [Brett Gallman]

Twitch [Scott Weinberg]

Boxoffice Magazine [Vadim Rizov]

NPR [Ian Buckwalter]

'The Grey' Review | Screen Rant Ben Kendricks

Bloody Disgusting Horror - "The Grey" Movie Info, Review ... Evan Dickson

THE GREY - Analyzing the Last 6 Seconds - Bloody Disgusting John Marrone

The Grey | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

The Grey | Review | Screen - Screen International Mark Adams

cinemonkey [D. K. Holm]

Filmophilia.com [Sverrir Sigfusson]

Battleship Pretension [Kyle Anderson]

Georgia Straight [Mark Harris]

Review: 'The Grey' Is Adventure Done Right ... - Film School Rejects Rob Hunter

themoviesnob [Larry Taylor]

FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [Kathryn Schroeder]

The Grey Jeffrey M. Anderson from Combustible Celluloid

Greg Klymkiw [Klymkiw Film Corner]

The Wrap [Alonso Duralde] also seen here: Reuters [Alonso Duralde]

The Grey - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Brian Miller

The Hollywood Reporter [John DeFore]

Variety [Joe Leydon]

The Grey – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, January 26, 2012

The Grey – review Philip French from The Observer, January 29, 2012

The Grey: A howlingly ordinary survival tale - The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey

The Grey - Boston.com Wesley Morris from The Boston Phoenix

Prey date: Man vs. wolves thriller should just pack it in - Boston Herald James Verniere

Review: The Grey - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Betsy Sherman

Critic Review for The Grey on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday

Los Angeles Times [Michael Phillips]

'The Grey' review: Wolves get their way Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle

The Grey - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

The Grey - Movies - New York Times A.O. Scott

Carné, Marcel

Carné, Marcel from World Cinema

Carné's place in film history is assured as the foremost exponent of Poetic Realism, especially in his collaborations with the poet/scriptwriter Jacques Prévert.

Carné trained as a photographed and started in film as a journalist (for Cinémagazine) and assistant director to René Clair and especially Jacques Feyder. His first film, Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche (1930), was a documentary on working-class leisure, heralding his interest in "ordinary people"; during the Popular Front period he worked briefly with thte left cooperative Ciné-Liberté. With Jenny (1936, starring Françoise Rosay), Carné established his poetic-realist universe: stylized urban decors, a cast of workers and marginals, a dark and pervasive atmosphere of doom shot through with the genuine poetry of the everyday. It was followed by Hôtel du Nord, Quai des brumes (both 1938) and Le Jour se lève (1939). These films showcased the work of Carné's brilliant team: set designer Alexandre Trauner, composers Maurice Jaubert and Joseph Kosma, émigré cameramen Eugen Schüfftan and Curt Courant, actors like Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet, Michel Simon and Michèle Morgan. Last but not least was Prévert, who contributed sardonic humour (as in the surreal-burlesque Drôle de drame, 1937) and romantic fatalism, especially in Quai des brumes and Le Jour se lève, for which he wrote the dialogue.

In the constrained context of the German occupation, Carné, with Prévert, switched to costume dramas. Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) was a medieval fable, and Les Enfants du paradis (1943-45) an exuberant reconstruction of the Parisian theatre of the 1830s, with a remarkable performance by Arletty. While these two films drew on the "poetic" side of poetic realism, Les Portes de la nuit (1946) seemed the swan-song of its dark populism. Carné, with Prévert, switched to natural decors (La Marie du port, 1950) and contemporary subjects, such as the much criticized but highly popular Les Tricheurs (1958), a portrait of the young generation, but he never regained his prewar status. However, Thérèse Raquin (1953, starring Simone Signoret) and L'Air de Paris (1954, with Arletty and Gabin) show that Carné still excelled at evoking, respectively, doomed passion and a nostalgic popular Paris. — Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema

TCMDB bio from Turner Classic Movies

Marcel Carne is best known for his collaborations with screenwriter Jacques Prevert. By the time the team broke up in 1947 they had forever marked French cinema, leaving behind such undisputed masterpieces as "Le Quai des Brumes" (1938), "Le Jour Se Leve" (1939), "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945) and "Les Portes de la nuit" (1946). For ten years their work dominated the industry and their style, termed "poetic realism," had an international influence.

After working as an assistant cameraman for Jacques Feyder on "Les Nouveaux Messieurs" (1928), Carne made a short ("Nogent--Eldorado du dimanche" 1929) which so impressed Rene Clair that he hired Carne as his assistant on "Sous les toits de Paris" (1930). Carne then worked as assistant to Feyder on "Pension Mimosas" (1934) and "La Kermesse Heroique" (1935). During this period he also made publicity shorts and wrote film criticism, sometimes under the pseudonym Albert Cranche. Then, thanks to Feyder's intervention, Carne was allowed to direct his first feature, a routine melodrama called "Jenny" (1936), scripted by Jacques Prevert.

A poet whose broad appeal dervied from a unique combination of humor, sentimentality and social satire, Prevert had been associated with the surrealists as well as the Popular Front. In the best studio tradition, he and Carne gathered together a team of professionals, including set designer Alexandre Trauner and composer Maurice Jaubert (replaced on his death by Joseph Kosma).

The poetic realist style flowered as French society plunged from the euphoria of the Popular Front to the despair of the Occupation. Typically, Carne-Prevert collaborations were marked by a tension between gritty realism and the suggestion of a metaphysical dimension beyond that represented on the screen. They are noted for their lyrical language and pessimistic atmosphere, for their meticulous recreations of concrete social milieux, and for truly remarkable performances by, among others, Jean Gabin, Arletty, Michele Morgan, Michel Simon and Jules Berry.

Though their films were banned during the Occupation, Carne and Prevert were allowed to continue working together, with the clandestine assistance of Trauner and Kosma (both of whom were Jewish). Unable to portray contemporary events, the team turned instead to historical subjects. "Les Visiteurs du soir" (1942), a medieval allegory of love and death, was a considerable success in its time; its wooden performances and heavy-handed treatment, however, have aged badly. Their next film remains one of the most celebrated in cinema history. "Les Enfants du Paradis", shot during the Occupation but not released until after the Liberation, was an ambitious tale of love and theater life set in a dazzlingly recreated 19th-century Paris and featuring outstanding performances by Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault and Maria Casares, among others.

With the war over, Carne and Prevert revived poetic realism in "Les Portes de la nuit", but the film met with a poor reception from the public. When their next feature, "La Fleur de l'age", was cancelled in mid-production, the two ended their working relationship.

Carne's later career, despite his willingness to work with younger actors and new subject matter, was relatively unremarkable. Carne excelled at studio production, where reality could be recreated within the controllable confines of the sound stage, and the trend in France, encouraged by the young turks of the "nouvelle vague", was to take film out of the studio and into the streets. Although he became a symbol of the New Wave filmmakers' scorn for the "tradition of quality" in French cinema, Carne left behind a body of films which have stood the test of time.

All-Movie Guide bio from Sandra Brennan

Biography by Daryl Chin from GLBTQ

Film Reference profile by Roy Armes

Films de France Profile

Out of the Past - Three French Films Geoff Gardner from Senses of Cinema

Carné, Marcel They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Robin Buss' Top 10 Directors

PORT OF SHADOWS (Le Quai des Brunes)

France (90 mi) 1938

Time Out Tony Rayns

One reason the French picked up on American film noir so quickly in the late '40s was that they'd had their own films noirs a decade earlier: romantic crime thrillers in low-life settings, fatalistic in mood and fog-grey in atmosphere. Pépé le Moko launched the cycle in 1937 and made Gabin a star. Quai des Brumes clinched every last detail of the genre the following year. Gabin plays an army deserter who tries to protect Morgan from the criminal intentions of Simon and Brasseur. Shot almost entirely on its main studio set, a waterfront bar, the visuals have the same downbeat poetry as Jacques Prévert's dialogue. Those who know Gabin's glowering silences only from the clips in Mon Oncle d'Amérique have a revelation in store.

filmcritic.com (Jake Euker)

Down a foggy, desolate road to the port city of Le Havre travels Jean (Jean Gabin), an army deserter looking for another chance to make good on life. Fate, however, has a different plan for him, when acts of both revenge and kindness turn him into front-page news. Also starring the blue-eyed phenomenon Michèle Morgan in her first major role, and the menacing Michel Simon, Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes) starkly portrays an underworld of lonely souls wrestling with their own destinies. Based on the novel by Pierre Mac Orlan, the inimitable team of director Marcel Carné and writer Jacques Prévert deliver a quintessential example of poetic realism, one of the classics of the golden age of French cinema.

The opening scene of the 1938 French crime classic Port of Shadows takes place at night on a gorgeously fog-bound stretch of highway 12 miles outside the port city of Le Havre. A truck speeds down this tree-lined road, the only sign of life on a moonless night; in its headlights a hitchhiker in a soldier’s uniform looms up on the wet road suddenly, and our adventure is begun.

The style is poetic realism, but viewers will be forgiven for confusing it with film noir, which followed a few years later in America. The “realism” can be hard to spot amid the clouds of man-made fog, street sets built in forced perspective, and heavily stylized exteriors; the word here refers less to the look of the film than to the fact that its characters were criminals and its “heroes” of dubious moral standing. (Contrast the outsiders of Port of Shadows with screen contemporaries such as, say, Astaire and Rogers, done in up in evening wear, dancing the night away at a glittering Art Deco nightclub, and the difference becomes clear.) The “poetry” figures into both the exquisitely evocative feel of the film and its writer’s and director’s conviction that even ordinary lives – that of their deserter hero, his licentious young love, a suicidal artist – sometimes traffic, however transiently, in the sublime.

The plot unfolds as such: Our army deserter (Jean Gabin), fleeing presumably unfortunate events which are never related, plans to leave France aboard one of the many cargo ships anchored at Le Havre. He is waylaid there by a beautiful 17-year-old (Michèle Morgan) whose godfather (Michel Simon) monitors her romantic life rather too closely, and whose favors are sought by a small-time gangster (Pierre Brasseur, who giggles and sulks with a wonderfully sinister girlishness). Both the gangster and the girl are in pursuit of a certain Maurice as well; a box the girl’s godfather carries may or may not hold a valuable clue.

But the treasure most zealously pursued in Port of Shadows is love, and it’s the one most jealously guarded, too. Gabin, recently having overtaken Charles Boyer as French matinee idol of the day, executes the duties of his office with square-jawed efficiency and a fashionable hint of existential insouciance. Opposite him, Morgan radiates an arresting sensuality; in her then-scandalous morning-after scene with Gabin, she’s frankly, surprisingly sexual. She’s a real beauty with a feline gaze, and in her young Nelly we see a woman in whom an instinct for survival is developing. She’ll pay a lot for love: Morgan shows us that. But you feel that she won’t for long. As her godfather, Simon is a screen original. Even his ostensible virtues – his patience, the way he stands up to the gangsters – grate on you. He, like Brasseur, is a marvelous villain, a character it’s a real joy to hate.

Port of Shadows is a pleasure to watch, and there’s much to recommend it. But, like that other poetic realist stalwart Pépé le Moko, what's best about it is its atmosphere of romance. This fog-enshrouded Le Havre teems with human traffic, the ships in the harbor looming above. It seems built for chance encounters. Only natural that these might change lives.

The new Criterion release of Port of Shadows presents the film in a cleaned-up digital transfer that restores the film’s moody ambience, with accompanying essays that provide enlightening insight and, not least, at last solve the enigma of what’s in the box.

DVD Talk (Bill Gibron)

Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Dan Mancini

Classic Film Guide

The Digital Bits Tim Doogan

HÔTEL DU NORD

France (95 mi) 1938

A very likeable film, but for once denied a Jacques Prévert script, Carné's 'poetic realism' seems a trifle thin and hesitant in this populist yarn about a sleazy Parisian hotel and its inhabitants. While the sad young lovers (Annabella, Aumont) defy their jobless future in a suicide pact, Arletty and Jouvet run cynically away with the film as a pair of hardbitten rogues. But the real star is Trauner, whose studio sets - the mournful canal bank, the little iron bridge, the shabby rooms - are as amazingly evocative as Maurice Jaubert's score.

DVD Times [Noel Megahey]

Marcel Carné’s Hôtel du Nord, made in the years immediately preceding the Nazi invasion of France, is a fine example of the “poetic realism” style that the director would become famous for - often in collaboration with poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert - on films such as Quai des Brumes and Les Enfants du Paradis.

A young man and woman, Pierre and Renée, enter the Hôtel du Nord in a poor working class district of Paris near the St. Martin canal, and take out a room where they plan to commit suicide together. The attempt fails – leaving Renée wounded and Pierre fleeing the room after the intervention of a neighbour, Edmond, who has heard the gunshot. After her recovery in hospital, Renée is drawn back to the Hôtel du Nord, where she is offered a job as a maid. The romance of her near miss with death in the very same hotel means that the young woman holds a strange fascination for all the hotel’s other clients. Renée however still has a deep attraction for the imprisoned boy who tried to kill her, and her presence and temperament begin to upset the balance of affairs and marriages that up to then had been getting along, if not blissfully, at least tolerantly.

With his regular screenwriter Prévert unavailable to script the adaptation of Eugène Dabit’s novel, Hôtel du Nord was adapted by Jean Aurenche and scripted by Henri Jeanson, but retains a curious blend of poetic observance and social realism. Thus we have grandiloquent words and gestures, romantic double suicides and florid declarations of love, all taking place in the decidedly unromantic setting of a rundown hotel in a rough neighbourhood of Paris, where crime, murder, prostitution, infidelity and battery of women takes place. Even homosexuality is alluded to here, as another of those activities that take place after dark that everyone turns a blind eye to. Any sense of a gritty treatment of social and working class issues is dispelled not only by the romanticised dialogue, but by the remarkable recreation of a large section of the Canal St Martin outside the French film studio at Bilancourt, which also adds to the heightened other-worldly quality of the film.

All this lends the film a deeply romantic, fatal fascination, with great performances from an exceptional cast. And it is in the casting that the film really takes shape, with great actors like Arletty as the prostitute Raymonde and Louis Jouvert’s pimp and gangster Edmond greatly playing up secondary roles that would overshadow the romantic leads of Annabella’s Renée and Jean-Pierre Aumont’s Pierre. In doing so, they help restore balance between the poetic theatricality and the social realism and keep Hôtel du Nord from being more than just a romantic curiosity of early French cinema.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Hôtel du Nord (1938) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, March 1999

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016

DVD Times [Mark Boydell]

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov)

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

DAYBREAK (Le Jour se Lève)

France (87 mi) 1939

Time Out Tom Milne

Possibly the best of the Carné-Prévert films, certainly their collaboration at its most classically pure, with Gabin a dead man from the outset as his honest foundry worker, hounded into jealousy and murder by a cynical seducer, holes up with a gun in an attic surrounded by police, remembering in flashback how it all started while he waits for the end. Fritz Lang might have given ineluctable fate a sharper edge (less poetry, more doom), but he couldn't have bettered the performances from Gabin, Berry, Arletty, and (as the subject of Gabin's romantic agony) Laurent. Remade in Hollywood as The Long Night in 1947.

The most celebrated example of the doom-laden, darkly shadowed "poetic realism" that flourished in France in the years leading up to World War II. Jean Gabin is the honest, timid workingman who, hiding from the police in an attic room, spends the night remembering the events that led him to murder. The screenplay is by Jacques Prevert, the most accomplished dialogist of the period, and the famous sets, with their overtones of German expressionism, are by Alexander Trauner. Only the direction, by Marcel Carne, seems less than it could be; there's a lack of imagination and suppleness in the images that pulls the film down. With Jules Berry, Arletty, and Jacqueline Laurent (1939). In French with subtitles. 85 min.

Poetic Realism Criterion essay

Poetic realism was a cinematic style that emerged in France during the 1930s, the peak of that nation’s classic period of filmmaking. With its roots in realist literature, this movement combined working-class milieus and downbeat story lines with moody, proto-noir art direction and lighting to stylishly represent contemporary social conditions. Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko, with the iconic Jean Gabin as the titular antihero, is generally regarded as the start of this melancholic, often fatalistic brand of cinema, which in part reflected the ominous atmosphere of prewar France but also lent itself to the individual sensibilities of a wide range of brilliant directors, such as Jean Renoir (Grand Illusion, La bête humaine) and Marcel Carné (Le jour se lève), and set designers like Alexandre Trauner. Poetic realism is thought to have greatly influenced such later film movements as Italian neorealism, which was equally sympathetic to the proletariat, and the French new wave, which looked to these great masters who had retained their artistic freedom while working in the French film industry.

Factory-worker Francois (iconic Jean Gabin) broods in his one-room attic apartment having just shot dead Valentin (seedy, hissable Claude Berry), As the police close in on all sides, Francois reflects on the events leading up to his fateful act. A month before, he’d embarked on a passionate affair with the young, sweet-natured Francoise (Jacqueline Laurent), only to find she was also apparently involved in some kind of relationship with Valentin – a middle-aged vaudeville artist, very recently split up from on-stage partner Clara (seen-it-all ‘Arletty’). Francois then got together with Clara, only to return to Francoise when informed by Valentin that the girl was actually his daughter. But Valentin was not to be trusted…

Though firmly established in the movie pantheon as, in critic Danny Peary’s words, “the classic fatalistic melodrama”, Le Jour se Leve hasn’t aged particularly well. Several aspects retain interest – the intriguing structure of Jacques Prevert’s script (Gabin’s flash-backs tend to be two-hander scenes featuring the principals), the carefully delinated social context (with unemployment rife, Gabin is already being killed by the hazardous ‘sand’ at his factory) and, most of all, the performances: Gabin, Arletty and Berry are flawless, though Laurent is a little too wet as the relatively inexperienced Francoise. The pacing is too often distractingly slow, however, and the various aspects of the plot aren’t developed particularly well - the film isn’t quite romantic enough to be a romance, never quite dramatic enough to be a thriller, and the ‘ironic’ ending is rather ostentatiously downbeat. Like Francois, the audience must toil through rather a lot of work for relatively little reward.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs

Widely considered a masterpiece of French poetic realism, Marcel Carné's LE JOUR SE LÈVE is noted as much for its narrative structure as it is for its place within the cryptic prewar style. It opens with a bang—literally. From there on out, languid dissolves take the viewer from the tortured protagonist's present to his recent past, revealing the events that led up to (or down from?) the film's first fateful moment. Based on a story thought up by one of his neighbors and adapted to the screen by poet Jacques Prévert (with whom Carné collaborated for more than a decade), the construction is what first attracted Carné; its flashback structure, now taken for granted, was among the first of its kind and has since become a commonly used device. The bang we hear is a gunshot, that of François (played by Jean Gabin) killing an as yet unidentified character. As the police surround his apartment and attempt to either arrest or kill him, François thinks back to the events that led him there. Of course his dilemma involves a woman—two in fact: the sweet, young Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent) and the more experienced, more embittered Clara (Arletty). As romantic tragedy is a defining factor of poetic realism, it suffices to say there's no happy ending in store for François. But romance aside, would there ever have been? François is a foundryman who had been employed in hazardous jobs his entire life. Poetic realism is distinct from straightforward realism (and the movements associated with it) in how the work embodies cinematic verisimilitude. It's suggested that François's unhealthy working conditions would have eventually led to his early demise, but it's not the trappings of his social class that kills him, it's his doomed romance. The ill-fated affair is representative both of his unfortunate lot in life as a member of the petite bourgeoisie and the way in which poetic realist directors conveyed their socio-political leanings. The film was released in 1939, the last year of the poetic realism "movement" before the war handicapped the French film industry altogether. Combined with imagery that evokes German Expressionism and would later inspire film noir, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, the movement and the films born of it combine the atmospheric capabilities inherent to cinema and the lyrical persuasion of poetry. As per the Film Center's website, this new 4K restoration "brings back long-unseen footage censored under the Vichy regime (including a nude glimpse of Arletty, and the expunged credits of Jewish creative personnel)."

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016

Classic Film Guide

DeWitt Bodeen, Les Enfants du Paradis, filmreference.com

LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS

aka: Children of Paradise

France (190 mi) 1945 US version (163 mi)

Pauline Kael

This lushly romantic creation, directed by Marcel Carné and written by Jacques Prévert, is a one-of-a-kind film, a sumptuous epic about the relations between theater and life. At first, it may seem a romance set in the Paris of Balzac; it turns into a comparison of dramatic modes – it includes at least five kinds of theatrical performance. And, encompassing these, it is a film poem on the nature and varieties of love – sacred and profane, selfless and possessive. It was made during the Occupation, and it is said that the starving extras made away with some of the banquets before they could be photographed. With Jean-Louis Barrault as the soulful mime Deburau (the Pierrot – Barrault sucks in his cheeks so much that he sometimes suggests Dietrich); the incomparable Arletty as Garance; Pierre Brasseur as the Shakespearean actor Lemaître (the Harlequin); Louis Salou as the count; Marcel Herrand as the philosophical murderer; Pierre Renoir as the rag-picker-informer; and Maria Casarès, who has the unrewarding role of the theater manager’s daughter, who marries Deburau and becomes the mother of an abominable offspring. (The child is pure Hollywood.) In French.

Time Out Tom Milne

A marvellously witty, ineffably graceful rondo of passions and perversities animating the Boulevard du Crime, home of Parisian popular theatre in the early 19th century, and an astonishing anthill of activity in which mimes and mountebanks rub shoulders with aristocrats and assassins. Animating Jacques Prévert's script is a multi-layered meditation on the nature of performance, ranging from a vivid illustration of contrasting dramatic modes (Barrault's mime needing only gestures, Brasseur's Shakespearean actor relishing the music of words) and a consideration of the interchangeability of theatre and life (as Herrand's frustrated playwright Lacenaire elects to channel his genius into crime), to a wry acknowledgment of the social relevance of performance (all three men are captivated by Arletty's insouciant whore, who acts herselfout of their depth to achieve the protection of a Count, establishing a social barrier which Lacenaire promptly breaches in his elaborate stage management of the Count's murder). Flawlessly executed and with a peerless cast, this is one of the great French movies, so perfectly at home in its period that it never seems like acostume picture, and at over three hours not a moment too long. Amazing to recall that it was produced in difficult circumstances towards the end of the German Occupation during World War II.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Gio MacDonald)

This ravishing tribute to the theatre would today be called 'Children of the Gods'. The 'gods' were the worst seats, furthest from the stage, where the audience responded honestly and boisterously to the actors below - player and public alike being Les Enfants du Paradis.

Set in 1840s Paris and centred around the Funambules Theatre on the Boulevard du Crime, the story follows the fortunes of four men whose lives are interwoven by their love for the same woman, the beautiful actress Garance (Arletty).

Baptiste Debureau (Jean-Louis Barrault), boyish and love-lorn, might become the greatest mime of his day (and Barrault was); ebullient Frederick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur) aspires to be the greatest actor; and fiery Lacenaire (Marcel Hemand) could transcend his criminal past to be a great playwright.

These three really existed, but the story is fictional, as is the fourth character - the icy Count Edward de Monteray (Louis Salou) who requires exclusive patronage of Garance. For her part; she fully loves only one of them.

Filming began in 1943 while France was still occupied. Their own cinema shunned, the Germans thought French filmmaking essential to the Occupation. Of some 350 films made, Les Enfants was the most ambitious, eluding the invaders in its subtle premise that drama could flourish only where men are free.

In Jacques Prévert's script so full of wit and aphorism, farce and tragedy, Garance best embodies this idea; she is the forerunner of emancipated woman, a worldly sophisticate, rejecting those who try to possess her. Prévert's confidence is such that there is even a scene where, through Baptiste gushing his loss (Garance) to the landlady Madame Hermine, he openly refers to the trick of theatrical exposition.

And the artifice of cinema has costs: the theatre and a quarter of a mile of street fronts were built. Trauner, a designer and Kosma, a composer, worked secretly, and many of the 1,800 extras were in the Resistance, using filming as daytime cover. Special permission was needed for a wartime film of such magnitude (its two parts total over three hours) and production was stalled several times, sometimes by director Marcel Carné who was determined it should be premiered after the Liberation.

With its many marvellous characters, its broad sweep and its Free French spirit, Les Enfants represents the collaboration of Carné and Prévert at its best. (Less happy, that of Robert Le Vigan, the original old clothes man, who disappeared when the Nazis did, to be replaced by Pierre Renoir.) Carné's handling of principals and crowds is masterly, and, like Mayo's costumes, the music, acting and photography are exquisite. Voted the best French film even Les Enfants du Paradis was described by Bernard Levin as 'a masterpiece, a work of art of exceptional and universal quality, a voice which speaks directly to the human heart.'

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Marcel Carné's 1945 vox populi masterpiece Children of Paradise has often been called "the French Gone With the Wind." Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert seem to span the full gamut of love's emotional spectrum, most notably in the film's superior first half, "The Boulevard of Crime." Stage queen Garance (Arletty) is the embodiment of elusive desire; she is loved and seduced by no less than four men at once yet she's incapable of being kept. Indeed, she openly discloses her adoration for freedom when she's mistaken for a petty thief and subsequently rescued by the pantomime Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault). Struck, as if by Cupid, the androgynous Baptiste is a kind of fairy tale mime that emotes and renders the truth through his observant gaze. From the beginning, Children of Paradise blurs the line between real life and stage drama, so much so that they become indistinguishable from one another. In the film's opening glide through the Boulevard, Carné seduces the spectator with the allure of the "Naked Truth" circus act, opening its outer curtain only to reveal a bathing woman listlessly staring at her own mirrored reflection.

Just as Carné posits a complex denial of truth and carnal desire, he luxuriantly worships Baptiste's ability to transcend these very mortal restraints. Baptiste may be as timid as the scribe Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand) is violent yet both men could easily double as poets. In the film's stunning bar brawl sequence, Baptiste breaks bread with a blind man who regains his sight whenever he goes indoors. Garance, sporting cartoon heart earrings, is seduced by the heartless Lacenaire ("I'd spill torrents of blood to give you a river of diamonds") only to fall instantaneously in love with Baptiste. In this, the film's most emotionally transcendent sequence, love seems to come so simple. (The emotions divulged here are the complete antithesis of those withheld in a similarly staged sequence from Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love.) Baptiste bemoans his childhood retreat into dreams, where his sadness seemingly had a voice. Still, it was an elusive sanctuary; his abusers would nonetheless beat him while he slept, attempting to wake him and interrupt his dreams. An adult Baptiste occupies a similar pantomime purgatory between dream and reality.

Prévert pays just the right amount of attention to the film's theatre-as-life paradigm, wringing complex emotions from the demands placed on the stage actor. Baptiste's director lives in constant fear of having to incur fines should one of his players speak on stage. Nathalie, the director's daughter, waits and yearns for Baptiste's unrequited love. After seeing Garance speaking to another man, Baptiste is frozen in mid performance. While Nathalie cannot match Baptiste's sightline, she panics and screams. In a film where love becomes the poetry of smiles and motion (witness the spectacular scene where Baptiste's stage clown must glide around stage in patient pursuit of Garance's stone statue), Baptiste's tortured expression is all Nathalie needs to understand what transpires backstage.

Lacenaire prefers the farce to the tragedy and while his opening dialogue should not be taken as an absolute measure of truth and, thus, criticism against Children of Paradise, it's easy to fault the film's second half, "The Man in White," for reverting to tragedy rather than sustaining the film's poetic blitheness. While Lacenaire may call tragedy the inferior genre, Children of Paradise isn't so much burdened by tragedy as it is by a time lapse that's very easy to resent. The film's narrative focus shifts away from Garance and onto her irascible troupe of suitors and their silly obsessions with revenge. Still, Baptiste's relationship to Garance remains achingly and breathlessly felt. She disappears like a ghostly freedom fighter only to return ("embellished by memory") to recapture Baptiste's heart and disappear into the symbolic masses (Prévert calls them the Gods) that populate the Boulevard of Crime. Carné's France, unlike the fiddle-dee-dee of Victor Fleming's cotton pickin' South, is a poetic realist's wonderland, a gateway to a dreamworld where human laws are mere judicial errors and love is so painful to hold onto it can only be savored in the moment.

Tribute to Les Enfants du Paradis a website on the film by Jim Richardson

Essay By Stuart Fernie

Derek Malcolm's Films of the Century from the Guardian

Les Enfants du Paradis Girish Shambu from Senses of Cinema

DVD Journal DK Holm

CultureCartel.com (David Abrams)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Debi Lee Mandel)

Reel.com DVD review [Rod Armstrong]

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Mike Pinsky

Movie Habit (Breck Patty)

Camera Journal: Les Enfants du Paradis Paul Sutton

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

100 films Lucas McNelly

Monsters At Play Lawrence P. Raffel

filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]

The worst best films ever made Tim Lott from The Guardian, July 24, 2009

Boston Globe Mark Feeney

DVDBeaver - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

Children of Paradise - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Carney, John

ONCE A- 94

Ireland (86 mi) 2006 http://www.myspace.com/oncethemovie

a longtime master of sublimely melodramatic sad-bastard music

—a commentator’s description on National Public Radio of Glen Hansard

One of the best double features seen in years, seeing ONCE immediately following Hal Hartley’s deliriously upbeat FAY GRIM (2006), shot in two weeks for under $150,000, this is one of those small films that works, a grassroots hit at Sundance generating such superlative reviews that by the time you get into the theater, you half expect it to fall apart at some point, while the other half, of course, hopes it’s everything it’s cracked up to be. Fortunately, this film doesn’t need to grab you by the throat to pull you in, it does so instantly with the emotional sincerity of the music, which always sounds so heartening, even as it’s describing hearts that are breaking, beautifully shot by Tim Fleming who consistently captures the immediacy of the moment and the freewheeling swagger of the two wonderfully refreshing lead characters, making this one of the more unique twists on an age old love story. Known only as the Guy and the Girl, he’s a thirtyish street singer that repairs Hoover vacuum cleaners at home with his dad, Glen Hansard from the Irish rock group The Frames and Alan Parker’s THE COMMITMENTS (1991), a guy whose songs bear a strange similarity to the optimism and melodic simplicity of Cat Stevens when he was Cat Stevens, while she, Markéta Irglová, is a younger Czech émigré who sells magazines and flowers on the street, living with her mother and small daughter, a girl with classical piano training who bears a strange resemblance to the recently deceased British actress Katrin Cartlidge, as she combines intelligence and a very forward curiosity with an eloquent stage presence, and at only age 17 during the filming, she reminds us of just how glorious it is to be young. Written and directed by John Carney, who was a bass player from The Frames in the early 90’s, this film makes no attempt to overreach, but does an excellent job of living within its small means by creating two well-defined characters living on the fringe of working class Dublin, both with the love of music in common, and with the same loss of an affectionate “other.” The Guy realizes early in the film his mistake at coming on to the Girl, and his face tells all, as he knows he screwed up the instant he violated this fragile trust these two developed on the street when after hearing him sing she was amazed at the profound seriousness of one of his songs, knowing he loved someone, as she could sense an intimate outpouring of personal confession, which he found exasperatingly obtrusive, finding it incredible and somewhat off-putting that this young stranger could see right through to his soul.

Much like the poetic realism of Jacques Demy, who compiled a string of musicals in the decade of the 1960’s that remain at the pinnacle of the art form, this film has more than a passing similarity to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (1964), immersing itself in the energetic spontaneity of the streets from which these characters spring, where their first sparks of love make the audience sense they are made for each other, soul mates, inseparable, perhaps projecting this chemistry onto the troubled relationships of the unseen “others” in their lives, even as they go their separate ways, much like the audience senses the misdirected love in CHERBOURG. But establishing realism within the world they live in is essential, as from within this carefully defined lack of pretentiousness comes the sincerity of the music, which leads us ever further into the lives of these two young lovers, who mesh together so well in one of the opening scenes in the back of a music store where they basically put a song together for the very first time which is nothing less than revelatory, it’s simply movie magic. Her soft piano and vocal harmony are so understated, yet so pure, it’s simply heartbreaking hearing the song “Falling Slowly” Falling Slowly - Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from the movie "Once" (2006) YouTube (6:12) developing onscreen for the very first time: “I don’t know you/but I want you/all the more for that,” as is her response to his request for lyrics to one of his melodies, where she scampers out into the night in her slippers and pajamas to the local music store where she can play his CD of the recorded music, returning later humming this song under her breath, completely oblivious to the outside world, allowing the audience to share in her joy at hearing her lyrics for the very first time accompanied by her pitch perfect harmonies. It would be so easy for scenes like this to disintegrate into artificial grandstanding, but they are charmingly contained entirely within the musical structure. By this time, it’s hard not to sense that we’re experiencing a different kind of film, a tone poem of young love that relishes intricate harmonies and the adrenal rush of waiting for the next chorus.

Much of this film was born as well in Paul Thomas Anderson’s MAGNOLIA (1999), reflective of the exquisite montage use in that film of the Aimee Mann song “Wise Up” Magnolia SoundTrack-Wise Up YouTube (3:38) spread throughout several characters which adds a hyper-realistic quality to the emotional content of the song. In ONCE, this mesmerizing quality extends throughout the entire film, making this one of the most suble musicals of the modern era. Here the Guy’s reborn love is expressed in flashback images from a projected video of his distant love in London, who is actually in real life the girl friend of the director, but it’s a beautiful collage of mixed emotions, where he longs for the love that he’s actually experiencing again, rekindled by the crazy directness of the Girl, who kindly defers all matters of love, as she has a husband of her own living abroad who hasn’t been particularly helpful. Instead, she’s visited each day by three burly guys next door who promptly sit on the sofa and watch her TV, the only one in the building, known in the credits as the men watching TV. Before the Guy leaves for London, he decides to cut a record with the Girl and a few other street musicians, which is basically the end third of the film, watching them pique the interest of the sound engineer who comes to realize he is witnessing a unique recording session filled with undiscovered talent. The strength of the session is the blending of textures and tones, the unabashed joy and genuine passion that comes from Hansard’s vocals, and the gorgeous melodic refrains, always underscored by the Girl’s talent for harmony. The personalized intimacy of the characters is perfectly realized in their joining forces and coming together musically. After immersing themselves in the cramped quarters of a recording session all weekend, there’s a wonderfully sweet release that is simplicity itself, where the music continues over the end credits, but where we know the real story is only getting started, this was just the beginning, a brief moment, once.

Postscript

Like John Waters’ HAIRSPRAY (1988), this film was turned into a hit Tony award-winning musical on Broadway in 2012, winning eight Tony awards including Best Musical.

The Songlist from the movie from the 2007 IMDb Message Board, Bowie718 (link lost):

Did anyone else notice the song he played at the VERY beginning of the film? I was totally blown away that he was crooning one of my all-time favorite Van Morrison songs... "And The Healing Has Begun". That song holds special, sentimental value to me... and for the film to open with that... let's just say, there couldn't have been a better way to usher me into instantly liking it. Too bad that didn't wind up on the soundtrack as well (although, it was interrupted by a thief)

1. Say It To Me Now - The song he sings in the beginning when they meet, from the album Fitzcarraldo by The Frames. - The very emotionally-potent song which the guy is singing, late at night, when the girl first spots him, applauds his music, and then tries to sell him a copy of Issues.

2. All The Way Down - A solo track by Glen Hansard/the guy, a very soft/subdued track from the beginning of the film. It was the scene in his bedroom where he was calling his ex...sitting on his bed playing this song.

3. Falling Slowly - THE song. The song in C that they develop together at the music store, and the one that plays again over the closing credits.

4. If You Want Me - The song (credited, in real life, entirely to Markéta Irglová, which I was surprised by! [she also co-wrote Falling Slowly and Lies with Glen Hansard, and, of course, is the composer of The Hill as well) which the girl is given to write lyrics for, and which she sings while listening to the CD demo while walking home in her sheepy slippers.

5. Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy - 'Nuff said. (The version on disc is precisely the one in the film, replete with 'Well...' introduction, and laughter at the end.)

6. When Your Mind's Made Up - The song in 5/4 which they record in the studio as their 'track 1, take 1', and which later plays, almost entirely again, over the montage in the car and at the beach after the recordings are complete.

7. Lies - The song the guy writes and then sings over the video recordings of his ex-girlfriend.

8. Gold - The song performed by the group (the soundtrack gives their name as Interference) at the evening roundtable sing, with violin and cello accompaniment. (This is the only song on the soundtrack not credited to either Hansard or Irglová, having been composed by Fergus O'Farrell, who sings the track as well.)

9. The Hill - The girl's solo song, which she demoes in the film for the guy on the piano hidden away in the studio. (This is a different version from that in the film, more 'professional' [i.e., containing a complete ending, rather than that of the girl's crying breakoff in the film], with a few extra lyrics and a short instrumental postlude.)

10. Fallen From The Sky - The other main song performed for the recording sessions, with the girl playing a small electronic keyboard while seated cross-legged on the studio floor. (The CD, incidentally, credits this as an old track performed by The Frames, and Markéta, contrary to the film, does not actually appear on it at all [Glen is the one credited for playing the keyboards, with additional keyboard work by a certain Craig Ward].)

11. Leave - You know, I can't remember precisely where this comes from, although I know it's somewhere in the film, because I remember thinking that the guy's voice sounds almost exactly like early-1970's Cat Stevens/Yusef Islam on this solo vocal and guitar track (with a small touch of bass at the end?, although the instrument is not listed in the liner notes). But more than that, I cannot pin down. Suggestions? (The main vocal hook is the repeated line 'You've said what you have to, now leave'. Wrought and dramatic, particularly towards the end.)

12. Trying To Pull Myself Away - Can't recall this from the film, for the life of me. A full band and then some (a synthy string section, for instance) performance. The best I could think of would be the session from the guy's (suddenly rather spacious) bedroom during their preparation for the recording sessions, but it somehow doesn't seem quite right. Perhaps a song recorded specifically for the soundtrack?

13. Once - A softer duet with Markéta, some percussion and a little extra occasional instrumentation. I imagine this must have been especially for the soundtrack, as I seem to imagine I must have noticed a 'title song' being such somewhere in the film. Plus, all the guy/girl songs seem very memorable. But, then again, I can be very, very unobservant at times. Very unobservant.

For George:

from the Frames messageboard: http://www.theframes.ie/v4/faq.shtml

Where does the name "The Frames" come from?

The Frames are called The Frames because when Glen was small he used to fix all the bicycles in his neighbourhood for his friends. His house had bicycle frames lying all around and Glen could be seen up to his eyeballs in oil and grease with that big smile of his fixing bicycles. His house became known as the house with the frames. Hence the name The Frames.

A genuine grassroots hit at this year's Sundance, John Carney's shoestring semi-musical is a modest but utterly winning success. Starring real-life musicians Glen Hansard (The Frames) and Markéta Irglová, the story of not-quite-requited love between a Dublin busker and an unemployed Czech pianist advances the plot through song without falling back on song-and-dance numbers. A haunting duet performed in the back of a piano showroom is a perfect metonym for the process of falling in love; as the two performers fall into sync, wordlessly cueing chord changes and spontaneously harmonizing, you can feel their bond click into place. Carney's sparse theatrics hit a high point as Irglová shuffles back from a convenience store in her slippers, listening to one of Hansard's demos on a portable CD player. As her onscreen voice joins with his offscreen one, the moment is at once tangible and transcendent, magical and utterly real.

Once · Movie Review · The A.V. Club Nathin Rabin

John Carney's sadly beautiful Once is a musical for people who only think they hate musicals, and not just because it boasts virtues seldom associated with the genre, such as realism, intimacy, and low-key verisimilitude. Musical-bashers often complain about the suspension of disbelief required for spectacles in which characters spontaneously break out into song-and-dance routines, but Once's songs are integrated into the story so organically that it'd be unrealistic if the characters weren't largely immersed in them. They are musicians, after all, and the songs they sing say more about their characters than any monologue possibly could.

In a stunning lead performance, Glen Hansard of the Irish pop group The Frames stars as a lovelorn street musician who bares his heart and soul in every wildly emotive song, but keeps people at a wary distance in his personal life. While busking one day, Hansard encounters Markéta Irglová, a lonely immigrant, mother, and gifted singer-pianist. Irglová and Hansard have an instant musical chemistry, but they're too shy and conflicted to let their creative connection lead to bigger things. When Hansard recruits Irglová to work on a demo he's recording, long, productive nights spent realizing Hansard's musical vision and a joyous shared creative alchemy push them together, while equally powerful unseen forces work just as doggedly to keep them apart.

Once's songs are delicate yet shatteringly powerful, and they gain a whole new resonance from the way they express emotions that the film's tragically repressed characters keep bottled up. In a genre full of dreamy escapism and madcap flights of fancy, this ingratiatingly scruffy, slice-of-working-class-life treasure is brave enough to be quiet and restrained, yet littered with moments of transcendence, musical and otherwise. In its own subdued, mellow way, Once is just about perfect. Imagine Belle And Sebastian remaking In The Mood For Love as a heartbreaking low-fi musical, and you have a fair approximation of the film's melancholy, unexpected genius.

The Irish Times (Michael Dwyer) also seen here: The Irish Times film review, 23 March 2007: "Street sweethearts"

SMALL is beautiful, according to the much-borrowed title of a 1973 collection of essays written by an economist. That claim is just as valid when applied to the micro-budget movie that is Once, a deceptively simple love story that proves disarmingly charming. It's not surprising that it collected the audience awards at the recent Sundance and Dublin film festivals.

Written and directed by John Carney, Once is a rarity in that it is a new Irish screen musical. More words are sung than spoken as it charts the tender relationship that forms between two musicians - a Grafton Street busker (Glen Hansard) and a Czech pianist (Markéta Irglová) who sells roses and The Big Issue on the street.

Set over the course of a week, the film observes these two lonely characters - we never learn their names - as they are drawn to each other. He is getting over an affair with a woman who has left him and gone to London; the pianist has parted from her husband and lives with her young daughter and her mother in a Dublin flat where their immigrant friends gather to watch Fair City - to keep up with the storyline and to improve their English.

Carney makes the point - without ever labouring it - that his protagonists are living in a changing city where the economic boom has passed them by. His keen eye for authentic locations is as evident here as it was in Bachelors Walk, on which he was one of the driving creative forces.

The instinctive chemistry between the central couple in Once is beautifully expressed when they make sweet music on an improvised duet, so much so that we are willing them to get closer together. Their plaintive, truthful songs emerge organically from within a narrative of matching honesty, as when she asks him about his ex-girlfriend and he responds with an improvised song.

In her screen debut, Irglová graces the film with a serene, endearing presence, and Hansard, in his first movie since he played Outspan Foster in The Commitments 16 years ago, performs with the passion and intensity he exudes on stage with The Frames.

Carney, a former bass player with that band, captures the sheer joy of performance as they sing, and the evident pleasure and dedication of their backing musicians on a recording. And he treats his characters with affection and respect in this irresistibly appealing movie that is full of heart and packs an emotional punch.

'Once,' a rock musical with an irresistible charm - Boston.com Ty Burr from The Boston Globe

"Once" is a wee slip of a movie, 85 minutes long and notably light on plot. Guy meets girl, guy writes a few songs with girl, guy and girl try to figure out what to do about their mutual attraction. We never learn their names, the movie's that basic.

Yet there are more emotions repressed and then sung out in this transcendent new Irish film than in a year of blockbusters, and in its brief running time, writer-director John Carney does something both profound and unexpected: He reinvents the movie musical as a genre of swooning rock 'n' roll realism.

Say again? OK: "Once" is the first rock musical that actually makes sense. People don't burst into song in this movie because the orchestra's swelling out of nowhere. The guy and the girl are working musicians -- or they'd like to be, if they could make a living at it -- and they're played by working musicians: Glen Hansard of the Dublin-based group The Frames and the Czech singer-songwriter Marketa Irglova .

The performances unfold in well-lit music shops at lunch hour, in recording studios, on double-decker buses, in apartments late at night. Most movies cut away after a few strums, but Carney settles in for the long take and you suddenly realize this is the musical number. This is how these inarticulate people speak.

If you know your movie history, maybe you recall that musicals started this way: as Depression-era backstagers, with Ruby Keeler kicking into a Busby Berkeley dance routine because it was part of the show she and Dick Powell were rehearsing. "Once" actually resurrects that hoariest of old genre cliches, the scene where the couple take a break from performing, sit at a battered piano, and share a tune. It's the only form of courtship the two know, and it underscores that life's already a musical if you're a musician.

The Depression analogy is apt, too, because Carney sets the film in a rough but openhearted Dublin, the sort of city where every junkie knows your name and where even the loan officer's a frustrated musician. The hero works at his father's vacuum cleaner repair shop and busks in the subway in the evenings; we first see him singing Van Morrison's "And the Healing Has Begun " to disinterested commuters.

It has begun, because the girl is listening and wants to compare notes in a literal sense. She brings a broken vacuum cleaner to their next meeting -- it trails after her like a sick puppy -- and he mistakes this for romantic interest, which it's not. Bits of their past leak out: the ex-girlfriend he's working out of his system, the husband she left in the Czech Republic and good riddance.

Eventually, though, he plays her a song he has written and kept to himself -- it has a Damien Rice feel, building from a folky whisper to a glorious scream -- and when she tentatively joins in on harmony, it's like a first kiss. The film's absurd R-rating is for language only; the vocal duets are the closest "Once" comes to sex. Although when the man sings "Take this sinking boat/and point it home/we've still got time," we're already past the carnal and into intimacy.

So the climax of the movie's not a love scene but a recording-studio sequence: the guy and the girl and their hastily assembled band try to cobble the pieces of what they're feeling into something that might convince a stranger hearing it on the radio. "Once" observes the mystery of the creative act -- the false starts, the gathering groove -- and finds within it a larger community.

After working through the night, the band and the producer (Geoff Minogue ) pile exhausted and happy into someone's automobile for the "car test" -- driving around while listening to the finished demo through tinny speakers. Suddenly the movie has become a different sort of love story, a group grope toward the sublime.

Carney shoots "Once" raw, aiming for the aimlessness of captured life. The Irish accents are thick, the lighting 40-watt, the leads dour and unpretty. If you need glamour, this is not your movie. The guy and the girl don't have much use for glamour, anyway. They're doing the best they can with what they have, aware that grace either lands when you least expect it -- in the bridge of a song, say -- or slips through your fingers. They're listening to the musical we each carry inside us and that no one ever hears. "Once" hears it, though, and it rocks the soul.

At First Sight Ray Pride from New City

Just because every movie reviewer in America is calling "Once" something like the greatest music movie of this generation and the best thing since two pints of Guinness on a sleepy Dublin Sunday is no reason not to listen to me as I grab you by the collar and tell you listen, listen to these songs, embrace this movie, because this muss of twigs and straw and strings and pixels and chords can break your heart like a four-minute-fifty-second pop song you will never get out of your head.

"Once" is just a bit more than nothing at all, yet it is one of the rare movies where recollection of the simplest gesture, smile, catch or voice have made me stupid-teary since I first saw it (twice) at Sundance. The grave, tender secret of this tiny picture is, simply, its simplicity, its sketchy but efficient form filled with the grandest of longings.

In John Carney's limber long-player, several songs suggest a life, a small, wonderful world consisting of a few Dublin haunts where an unnamed street-corner performer (Glen Hansard), or "busker," and an unnamed younger woman (Markéta Irglová) with a winsome command of English meet, tease and learn, but mostly, with eyes wide open, develop a mature relationship deepened by the dance of several songs, including the gorgeous "Slowly Falling," which the extremely affable and charming pair convincingly "compose" in front of us in an early scene.

In standard narrative terms, "Once" is the slightest of artifacts, and yet it is filled with a quiet integrity and charm and it offers lessons in how simply a tale can be told. Shot in two weeks in unprepossessingly grungy Mini-DV, "Once" is a grand, effortless Irish musical povera (filmed for 100,000 euro), written and directed by Carney, who was for several years in the fine band The Frames with star-composer Glen Hansard. (An NPR commentator memorably dubbed Hansard "a longtime master of sublimely melodramatic sad-bastard music.") Carney works at some very sophisticated insights about the representation of music on film and also how one walks, talks, lives, breathes, stumbles, fumbles or triumphs while trying to fashion any form of art. Layers peel away, their preconceptions of each other (and ours of them) fall away and Hansard's music, as urgent and lovely as ever, grows in collaboration with someone who turns out not only to be a classical pianist, but a good lyricist and a fine singer. The film's clarity about the happenstance of fruitful collaboration is rare. (In the real world, Hansard and Irglová had already written and performed together.)

There's a whiff of the succinct romance of David Lean's "Brief Encounter," a sing-a-long (in Hansard's own gaff) hints at James Joyce's short story, "The Dead," and the place of the young Czech woman in contemporary Ireland suggests the change in the Irish mindset after the "Celtic Tiger," or vast economic boom that began in the 1990s. But that is not text, those are smart, lovely undercurrents: text in the tale is moments, moments such as the look on The Guy's face when he catches the disappointment on The Girl's face after a clumsy, presumptuous pass.

Like with a song, each listener invests a different measure of heart and hope in this boy-meets-girl perplex. The pair birth a song, they bond beyond romance that's the clothesline for their ample charm. There's nothing oblique, only merely suggestive--like lyrics. Songs are omnipresent in movies and filmmakers are constantly plying the power of music.

But the portrayal of music hardly ever works on screen. Why? Do you have a CD player, an iPod? You swim and surface in a sea of song by day and night. You walk the walk, hope in your head, song in your ears, going slowly deaf perhaps, but the narrative of your waking consciousness is scored, and you would not give that up for the world. You walk through this movie, not once, but every sunny hopeful moment you listen to music, shuffling faster toward the horizon line.

Even essential French film theorist Andre Bazin would likely have embraced this small wonder: he believed the long take and documentary-style elements suggested a greater truth than editing. You, dear reader, could have made this movie. (Carney told me that "Once" should look like anyone's home videos posted on YouTube.)

The music under the final scenes is a reprise of a song called "When Your Mind's Made Up." We've heard it before. We've been there. We're here. It packs an immense wallop: this is how pop works; this is how songs happen in our lives. It is a man's voice, then a woman's voice, in harmony, where the singers (and listeners) can but smile. This is the look (and sound) of love--heartfelt, unabashed and ultimately at farthest remove from the saccharine that is sentimentality.

Kurt Vonnegut famously remarked that music was proof of the existence of God. "Once," to me, is proof of the potential of movies and of love and friendship and creative bonds, of more life in the time that we have in a life that can grow beyond boundaries.

You can hear the songs at http://www.myspace.com/oncethemovie

The Accidental Musical: Once | The House Next Door | Slant ... Todd VanDerWerf

The Village Voice [Robert Wilonsky]

Once (2006) | PopMatters Daynah Burnett

Rude Reviews [Simon Cameron]

New York Sun [Jayanthi Daniel]

National Public Radio [Bob Mondello]

Once Mike D’Angelo

FilmStew.com [Brett Buckalew]

ONCE - Film Journal International Frank Lovece

OhmyNews [Howard Schumann]

Once | PopMatters Rachel Kipp

EyeForFilm.co.uk The Exile

DVD Verdict [Daniel MacDonald]

DVD Talk [Preston Jones]

DVD Talk [Olie Coen]

Blu-rayDefinition.com [Brandon A. DuHamel]

Movie Metropolis - Blu-ray [James Plath]

Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Clark Douglas]

DoBlu.com Blu-ray [Christopher Zabel]

Exclaim! (Radheyan Simonpillai)

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Theo Alexander]

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]

Zero for Conduct [Michael Atkinson]

TV Guide [Ken Fox]

Once | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks

The Japan Times [Kaori Shoji]

Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]

TheClevelandFan [Mitch Cyrus]

Austin Chronicle [Toddy Burton]

Chicago Tribune [Brett Buckalew]

'Once' more, with feeling Michael Phillips from the Chicago Tribune

Once (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New York Times A.O. Scott

ONCE | Listen and Stream Free Music, Albums, New ... - MySpace

BEGIN AGAIN B+ 90

USA (104 mi) 2013 Official site

Oddly enough, the beginning of this film plays out much like the Coen brother’s Inside Llewyn Davis (2012), where a singer performs alone to a relatively disinterested audience in the dark smoky confines of a small club in the East Village of New York, including a clever somewhat literary use of flashback sequences to show what led up to that moment, where the heart of the film draws a line in the sand between studio processed music and a voice of authenticity, where a common theme in both is refusing to sell out to a faceless corporate music industry that for all practical purposes wants to reshape your songs in their image. Despite the fact you’re the artist and creator, they’re the ones that end up lining their pockets, earning nine dollars out of every ten. That tradition is called capitalism, and many an artist has lost their soul trying to make it in the crass and exploitive atmosphere that is the music business. Made by the director of ONCE (2006), which was turned into a hit Tony award-winning musical on Broadway in 2012, winning eight Tony awards including Best Musical, John Carney was a former bass player in the Irish rock group The Frames in the early 90’s, whose lead singer Glen Hansard starred in his earlier film as the writer and singer of most of the songs, where the beauty of the film was paralleling a budding personal relationship with the collaborative artistic process of making music, turning it into a joyful and uplifting experience, much as Craig Brewer did in HUSTLE & FLOW (2005), two films that thrive on authentic atmosphere and inspiring performances, turning into exhilarating musical love fests. Carney again features a similar storyline, where he seems to have his finger on the pulse of the music business, which has undergone drastic changes in the last decade, where the prevalence of artists putting their own music out on YouTube or iTunes has altered the playing field, allowing the artists themselves instead of some record company to determine their own destiny. This individualized shift in marketing has led to more intimate musical releases that are not burdened with a mass-produced sound that makes every song sound the same. While the songs here are not on the same level as those used in ONCE, they are instead far more toned down to reflect a quiet softness of the female character, nonetheless there’s an authentic degree of sweetness and sincerity from Keira Knightley’s performance (that includes singing her own songs) to generate appeal.

Carney, who started out making music videos for The Frames, seems to specialize in creating “moments of intimacy” both in the musical numbers and in the developing personal relationships, where the entire film seems to be a collection of small and often forgotten moments that people have a tendency to overlook, but here they’re magnified into magical realms through a healing power of music that comes to personify Carney’s area of expertise. The film actually starts out rather amateurishly, as the songs are poorly lip-synched, which causes a needless distraction, while Knightley as Greta is forced unwillingly to sing one of her songs onstage, where there’s little to no appeal in her performance. Simultaneously, Mark Ruffalo as Dan the A & R man, a guy responsible for finding and signing new music talent, is a hard corps alcoholic whose life is tailspinning away from him, already separated from his wife Miriam (Catherine Keener), a musical journalist, and their teenage daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld), where in the early scenes he’s little more than a disgrace and an embarrassment, where in no time at all he’s kicked to the curb from the indie record label that he founded, spending the rest of the day drinking his troubles away. If all of this sounds a bit pat and formulaic, it is, even uncomfortably so. But not to worry, as that’s about to change when Carney rewinds the tape back to Greta’s first nightclub performance where Dan is seen sitting at the bar, and in his state of inebriation he hears something altogether different, which suddenly takes shape onscreen even though it’s only playing in his head, where like Disney’s FANTASIA (1940) other instruments suddenly appear onstage and start playing themselves, adding drums, cello, and piano, even a violin, where this sheepishly awkward performance that everyone else hears suddenly develops a sound. Dan blurts out his ideas that he wants to record her, handing out his business card (where he was fired), where he has to admit he’s dead drunk and that his life is in such turmoil that it would be hard for anyone to take him seriously, but he’s emphatically optimistic about her song. The urgency of his intentions are met with appropriate suspicion and disbelief, as who would believe that guy? Fortunately in the modern era we can Google people’s names and Greta discovers he was an influential force in the music industry, actually reading out loud what it says about him when they meet the next day. Dan, however could care less about the past, and is a rush of enthusiasm about the possibilities of their future working together.

The backstory with Greta is far more intriguing, as she was professionally and romantically involved with fledgling rock star Dave Kohl (Adam Levine from Maroon 5) for the past five years, co-writing his songs, where his career took off after one of his songs was featured in a hit movie. As he cashes in on his success, Greta gets left behind and cheated on, and despite coming to New York to be with him, she was on her way out of town until Dan’s proposition stopped her in her tracks, as he wants to record an entire album of her songs, but they’ll have to do it on the fly, as they don’t have access to a recording studio. Out of nothing, things start to materialize, as they decide to record songs in various outdoor New York street locations, hiring a bunch of student nobodies that are thrilled to be working anywhere outside the classroom, borrowing a few seasoned musicians from artists that Dan helped along the way, including rapper CeeLo Green as Troublegum, whose hilarity is only surpassed by a surprising humanity in his character. The street locations elevate the film into rare territory, becoming an impressionistic tribute to New York itself which is impressively rhapsodized in music, much like Woody Allen’s MANHATTAN (1979), saturating the screen in a sumptuous glow of romanticism, wondrously shared through a playlist of their favorite songs from their iPods, heightening the film with a rapturous feeling of love in the air. Most of the music is written by Gregg Alexander of the New Radicals, though Glen Hansard also contributed the first song recorded in an alleyway called “Coming Up Roses,” Keira Knightley - Coming Up Roses (Begin Again ... - YouTub YouTube (3:14), where the sequence of song recordings come together like the mad crescendo of Busby Berkeley numbers in FOOTLIGHT PARADE (1933). This rush of energy is the appeal of the film, as the initially dour and awkwardly uninteresting characters suddenly surge with a newfound belief in themselves, where their electrical connection is felt throughout the entire cast, becoming wonderfully infectious. Carney has a marvelous eye for small, unembellished moments, as Dan tries to reconnect with his family, especially his aloof daughter Violet, where there are poignant, beautifully written scenes of Greta and Violet with Dan tagging along where he doesn’t even have to say a word, which is only magnified later when they all come together in a Beatles rooftop LET IT BE (1970) moment that feels spontaneously alive. The film captures the joyous spirit of personal discovery, and while it’s bathed in musical romanticism, the overriding power is this unique emotional candor that thrives on the revelatory experiences of life itself.

Begin Again | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Cath Clarke

Avoid this film like E coli if your instinctive reaction to all things infectiously sweet and sincere is spontaneous toe curling. The director is John Carney, who made the scruffy-gorgeous musical ‘Once’ for pennies on the streets of Dublin. Here he repeats the formula with proper money and stars. Keira Knightley is Greta, an English songwriter in New York who’s just been dumped by her rock-star boyfriend (we know something’s up when he starts growing twattish facial hair). Greta is singing a wrist-slitty break-up song at an open-mic night when she’s spotted by Dan, a washed-up record producer out on a bender (Mark Ruffalo: arrest that man, he’s too charming). Together they make an album using the sounds of New York as a backdrop.

‘Begin Again’ in no way has the rough-around-the-edges ring of truth of ‘Once’ – or the brilliant songs. And Carney can’t meet a cliché without tippy-toeing very close to it. But what makes it special is that it’s not another romance about finding a man. It’s about finding your people, about being a bit lost in your twenties and not knowing who you are or what you want to be. And it’s got bucketfuls of charm.

Independent Ethos [Hans Morgenstern]

Inebriation and cinema often exist in paradoxical relation to each other: Excepting the broad comedy of The Hangover and its ilk, the tendency among films about drunkenness is to err on the side of sobriety in style and execution. For every Bad Santa there are a dozen films like Leaving Las Vegas and Affliction that view alcoholism from the outside in, observing their subjects with sympathetic but icy reserve, the camera functioning as silent, note-scribbling therapist. Begin Again is the rare film that, in charting the antics of its frequently inebriated protagonist, Dan (Mark Ruffalo), feels drunk itself. Constantly lurching forward at a woozy but rapid rhythm, obsessively revisiting certain scenes while bulldozing through others, the film has a reckless, expressionist energy that offsets the simplicity of its story and characterizations. It lives in the high and not in the comedown, even though its characters are often stalled and wallowing.

Begin Again's true focal point isn't Dan or his demons, but the creative impulse as alchemic entity. This abstract theme finds narrative manifestation in the platonic union between Dan, a struggling music producer when he isn't on the bottle, and Greta (Keira Knightley), a reclusive singer-songwriter healing from a bad breakup. They're united only by their shared passion for music; dissimilar not only in age and experience, but also ideology (she renounces fame while he courts it), they tread around each other with equal parts curiosity and caution. Their sense of interpersonal unease never settles, but rather ebbs and flows as they collaborate on an ambitious project, an album of Greta's songs all live-recorded in various locations around New York City.

The outdoor recording is a romantic but naïve gambit, and indicative of director John Carney's inclination toward fairy-tale storytelling. After a series of initial setbacks, things go a bit too swimmingly for Dan, Greta, and their album, with money suddenly easy to procure and personal reconciliations fueling boons of creativity. The film works better when the exultant power that the duo finds in music is somewhat at odds with their messy, thoroughly unromantic personal lives. The disharmony between their personal dissatisfactions and their artistic passions helps to articulate how the creative impulse can be a drug itself, an escape from the mundane trappings of daily life. Begin Again's ecstatic energy builds out of a place of sorrow and disillusionment, even if Dan and Greta's individual storylines can feel two-dimensional: The former's estranged relationship with his wife, Miriam (Catherine Keener), and teenage daughter, Violet (Hailee Steinfeld), is only presented in brief, broad strokes, while the latter's tumultuous past with sudden superstar Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) takes predictable, flattening turns. Yet these strands adequately function as the banal triggers for Begin Again's quixotic skyward rush.

Dan and Greta's album, seen through from drunken conception to completion and distribution, is the nucleus around which every scene and character orbits, and as such Begin Again lives or dies by the quality of its original music. Written and produced by Gregg Alexander of the New Radicals, Greta's songs are immanently appealing and listenable, but hardly spectacular, which works in the film's favor: Its characters are talented though far from geniuses, finding joy in the making of music rather than in the final product itself, but the album is still absolutely believable as a career-making hit. Original music is also carefully integrated into the fabric of Begin Again's plot: A tender love song penned by Greta for Dave becomes the contested terrain of their fallout, as Dave reinterprets the song and Greta disparages him for it. The song's distortion over time, its multiple incarnations widely varying in quality, affirms the film's greater understanding of music as mutable, transformative organism, different to every person who hears it, but nonetheless a powerful, even sublime facilitator of human connection.

Sometime past the halfway point of Begin Again, ex-record executive and occasional drunk Dan (Mark Ruffalo) tells his new discovery, the British singer-songwriter Gretta (Keira Knightley), something that could very well be the driving force behind director John Carney’s aesthetic. “Music turns everyday banalities into these transcendent pearls of wisdom.” In both this new film and his highly regarded 2006 movie, Once, Carney, a musician himself, leans so heavy on music for narrative, song lyrics mark moments of transformation in his characters’ lives that transcend exposition.

With Once, Carney brought together a self-conscious yet sincere Irish guitarist (Glen Hansard) and an animated yet awkward Czech pianist (Markéta Irglová). Though they get to know each other in conversation, they actually seem to fall in love through song. The film collected one of the better-earned Oscars for original song in many years because the ballad “Falling Slowly” was, unlike most original song nominees, so much more than accompaniment to an end credits sequence or a musical interlude in the film’s action. It resonated through the film on a narrative level while transcending the traditional narrative of a film. Carney granted the songs in Once, which were written by the movie’s leads, space to move the narrative by allowing them to unfold from the musicians for long sequences, like the equivalent of musical numbers. Once stands as one of the most subtle musicals of the post-musical era.

Eight years later, Carney returns with a film built on a similar formula, this time in New York City and presenting two different stories of love, one of loss and another of redemption, which unfold against a slight critique of the music business. It’s not Once, which was set in Dublin and focused solely on the couple, but it still has elements that will charm many fans of Carney’s previous film. Despite a polish far removed from the low-budget intimacy of Once, at its core, Begin Again maintains the essential formula that made the former film beguiling. Many of the film’s turning points happen via song lyrics. Upon first-listen, Gretta’s music gives Dan renewed hope for his role in the music industry. Gretta also learns of the infidelity of her boyfriend and songwriting partner Dave (Adam Levine) a few seconds into hearing a new song he has just recorded.

As much as the film is about this young creative couple in turmoil, Begin Again spends equal time following Dan, a divorcé who has lost faith in contemporary music (an early scene of him talking back to demo CDs and throwing them out his car window is hilarious in its take-down of pop music tropes). More emotionally crippling, however, is how little faith he has in becoming the father his teenage daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld) needs. The gap between his ex-wife Miriam (Catherine Keener) has entered a place of ambivalent malaise, as the parents have resigned themselves to making a go of a sense of family for the sake of Violet, even though the father moved out of the house long ago. Gretta becomes less a love interest for Dan than a comrade in disheartened arms. She also has her own sense of cynicism about the world of music, as she has no interest in sharing her autobiographical songs outside of her former collaboration with Dave, who seems on his merry way to pop stardom without her. However, Dan and Gretta share a similar passion for music that will prove hard to keep them from working together.

It’s an easy relationship to buy, as within the film’s first few minutes, both the director’s and actors’ affection for these characters shines through, making the movie an easy film to ride along with and fall for, scene after scene. At the start of Begin Again, the morose, freshly-heartbroken Gretta hesitantly takes the stage at an open-mic night at the coaxing of a less shameful musician friend Steve (James Corden who frequently lightens the film’s mood as perky comic relief). She sings a song that not so subtly alludes to suicide by subway while most the bar’s patrons talk over it. Dan, however, seems captivated, and when the song, entitled “A Step You Can’t Take Back,” arrives at its quiet end, he’s the only one applauding. Just why is revealed in drawn-out flashback sequences, as we learn of both Gretta and Dan’s personal baggage leading up to their meeting in separate sequences. Though these Groundhog Day-like narrative turns might sound gimmicky, it works to keep the film’s sprightly pace and speaks to how important experiences are to the enchantments of a song that comes along at the right time. Though the song is a dreary affair, Dan is ripe to receive it after a rough day where he forgets Violet’s age, gets beat up in front of her for running out on a bar tab and is fired from his record label by his former business partner Saul (a slick and elegant Mos Def). By the time he arrives at the open-mic performance, Dan is primed to get lost in Gretta’s downer of a ditty. Despite the fact that she is only up there lightly strumming an acoustic guitar, he can hear and— in what may be too precious a fantastical representation— actually see an invisible arrangement, as instruments start playing themselves behind her spare picking and silky voice. Dan eventually convinces her to make a record with him, outdoors with the ambient din of New York City as just another element of her songs. Several songs unfold over the course of the film that show Gretta growing as a confident bachelorette while finding her voice. Meanwhile, Dan regains his personal confidence in both the industry and as a father and provider.

If there’s one thing lacking in Begin Again it lies in the strength of the songs, this time written by pop music songwriter Gregg Alexander, former frontman of the New Radicals and writer of hits for the likes of musicians from Santana to Boyzone. Outside of the film’s narrative context, Alexander’s songs come across as a tad saccharine and lyrically heavy-handed. That they work within the film, however, stands as testament to Carney’s filmmaking talent. There’s heart and humor between the film’s two leads, and the dialogue never feels forced. That their relationship never becomes romantic reveals a strength of their devotion to their music project, and the importance of their own private pasts, once again consistent to the dimension of the presence of baggage and experience that informs the music.

Though Carney is working with recognizable actors and high-profile musicians (including a scene-stealing CeeLo Green) celebrity never overshadows the film’s essential allure. Levine’s character never has to do much to be the unlikable louse who breaks his partner’s heart. After their breakup, he grows facial hair, from awkward mustache to full-on bushy beard. As he grows both more obnoxious and distant, the facial hair becomes a grander barrier. Knightley, who also does her own singing, infuses Gretta with a natural, fragile charisma that never betrays the character’s strength as a confident musician.

The director juggles the characters well for the duration of the film, and the complexity of multiple storylines merging never throws the drama off balance. As befitting the abstraction of music as narrative element, Carney prefers working in montage to move the film’s action along. There must be about 10 montage sequences in the entire movie. Even without musical accompaniment, the film’s editing features cuts pregnant with action left off-screen but still resonant in the characters’ growth and behavior, as if every second of character development matters, even the moments off-screen. As in Once, Carney employs handheld camera that never feels jarring. It brings an earthy quality to the film that brings the audience closer to the characters. In the end, it’s all about intimacy and nothing captures it better than shared musical experiences, even if the songs can sometimes sound silly.

Tasha Robinson "Begin Again" - The Dissolve

Spectrum Culture [Forrest Cardamenis]

The Film Stage [Jared Mobarak]

Sound On Sight JR Kinnard

The Playlist [Kevin Jagernauth]

The Modest Pleasures of Begin Again Christopher Orr from The Atlantic

PopMatters [Jesse Hassenger] also reviewing THEY CAME TOGETHER

Begin Again - Directed by John Carney • Film ... - Exclaim! Matthew Ritchie

Twitch [Peter Martin]

Film.com [Laremy Legel]

Pop Matters [Alex Ramon]

The Evening Standard [David Sexton]

Begin Again (2013) Movie Review from Eye for Film Angus Wolfe Murray

Interview: Once Director John Carney Begins Again ... Edward Douglas interview from Not Coming, July 1, 2014

'Begin Again': Toronto Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

Guardian [Paul MacInnes]

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

'Begin Again' review: Adam Levine and Keira Knightley duet ... Stephen Whitty from The NJ Star-Ledger

'Begin Again': A Keira Knightley musical that misses too ... Ann Hornaday from the Washington Post

Begin Again won't let Mark Ruffalo play a person | City Pages Alan Scherstuhl

Austin Chronicle [William Goss]

'Begin Again's' music more appealing than its story - Los ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

Begin Again - Roger Ebert Susan Wloszczyna

'Begin Again,' From the 'Once' Director, John Carney ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times

SING STREET B 88

Ireland Great Britain USA (106 mi) 2016 ‘Scope

I remember the 1980’s with somewhat of a blush. No man’s hair should be bigger than his girlfriend’s. But that was the time. Dublin in Technicolor. In reality it was monochrome and in the grip of a recession, but on video tape, you could be transported. You could wear what you liked, and the more outrageous the better. Anything to wind up the jackbooted skinheads on Dublin’s north side. Make-up on a boy drove rockers wild, and the teachers wilder. Thank God for Bowie, who made all the black eyes okay. And allowed people to find out who they were. My brother gave me the gift of music through my first guitar. We formed a band. In truth, at the same stage, U2 were not as good as the kids in Sing Street. In truth most films you’ll see this year won’t touch Sing Street…

—Bono, U2 Frontman Bono Gives 'Sing Street' A Ringing Endorsement ...

Another musical fantasia from John Carney, former bass player of the Irish rock band The Frames, while also shooting their music videos, and creator of such optimistically appealing films as Once (2006) and Begin Again (2013), films that express how music inspires and changes people’s lives, resorting to a more formulaic boy meets girl narrative this time, yet it still retains the youthful exuberance of impressionable, coming-of-age kids that dream of a better life. While it has a kind of fairy tale feel throughout, often mixing in wish fulfillment dream imagery, the dire social realist setting at its core grounds the film in Dublin in the 1980’s during an economic recession, where the kids and their parents actually feel stuck in time with no way out. With the feeling that life has passed them by and left them by the wayside, 14-year old Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) and his rebellious older brother Brendan, Jack Reynor, easily the best thing in the film, a Jack Black style character from SCHOOL OF ROCK (2003) where an entire film could be made around his character, have to endure the snide comments and constant bickering of their hapless and loveless parents who only stay together for financial reasons. While Brendan is something of an outcast who stays stoned, holed up in his room with his record collection, his brotherly advice, and exquisite taste in rock music, provides the humor and synergistic push to keep Conor wanting more out of life than anything he ever got. Like an alter-ego, or a Jiminy Cricket voice of conscious, it’s really Brendan’s dream that Conor follows, beautifully expressed here in a moment of brotherly pride and tough love as he carves out a path for someone else to follow, Sing Street Movie CLIP - Older Brother (2016) - Jack Reynor, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo Movie HD (1:05). While Conor is pulled from private school and sent to a nearby public school run by sadistic priests, he is quickly acclimated to the predatory nature of things, where intelligence is ridiculed and bullies prey on the weaknesses of others while priests turn a blind eye. The innocence of the times, however, is reflected in the earliest stages of the music video, where Brendan is euphoric how music is literally transformed through the power of images, SING STREET - Duran Duran Clip - The Weinstein Company YouTube (1:09).

While Conor quickly gets picked on as well, an easy target as he’s a good student, but he can’t help noticing the daily presence of a gorgeous girl standing all alone, where nobody has the nerve to talk to her, though apparently others have tried but gotten shut down. So Conor gives it a go, finding her mysteriously alluring, Raphina (Lucy Boynton), asking if she wants to appear in his video, claiming he’s a singer in a local rock band. Incredulously, she takes an interest, as she turns out to be an aspiring model who could use the exposure. Like an answer to his prayers, Conor is dizzy with delight afterwards, hardly able to contain himself, setting out immediately in search of a group of musicians to form a band. Identifying his best friend, the diminutive Darren (Ben Carolan) as the manager, his first recruit is a sensational multi-talented instrumentalist Eamonn (Mark McKenna), who can apparently play any instrument with ease, but serves primarily as the lead guitarist, choosing a black dude Ngig (Percy Chamuruka) simply for his aloofness and look of cool, but the guy can play keyboards. Before you know it, they rehearse a bunch of 80’s cover songs in Eamonn’s living room and record a demo tape. But when Brendan hears it, he smashes it to pieces, calling cover music nothing more than junk, claiming if they want to have sex with a girl they’ll have to take chances, claiming rock music is all about attitude and risk, Sing Street Exclusive Clip: The Last Thing the World Needs Is Another Cover Band (1:03). With that, Conor and Eamonn turn into a Lennon and McCartney writing team, reeling off several original songs, where they finally have a reason to call Raphina and make that music video. It turns out she knows more than modeling, adding hairstyles and make-up while reshaping the look of the band, even changing Conor’s name to Cosmo, resulting in the raucously hilarious silliness of a song recorded in a back alley somewhere, SING STREET - THE RIDDLE OF THE MODEL Music Video Clip (1:45). With Ferdia Walsh-Peelo singing on all the songs, the playfulness of the fun they’re having overshadows Conor’s original motivation, finding time to be with the enthralling and strangely beguiling girl.

Conor develops a new persona as Cosmo, suddenly familiar with the likes and looks of Robert Smith in The Cure - Inbetween Days on Vimeo (3:00), M - Pop Muzik (Official Video) - YouTube (3:13), and Daryl Hall & John Oates - Maneater - YouTube (4:24), growing his hair longer, bleaching his bangs and wearing make-up to school, which the priests find an abomination and a direct confrontation to their authoritarian rule, using brutally cruel, strong-armed tactics to force him to capitulate. While Conor is a somewhat opaque, sympathetic figure, where it’s hard to find offense with anything he does, the more intriguing figures are Brendan, whose musical mind is tapped into throughout, and the elusive beauty of Raphina, whose inner complexity is surprising, as she is always more than she seems, becoming a darker, more tragic figure over time, the damsel in distress that is always worth fighting for. When Conor reports to his brother that she already has a boyfriend, recalling that they were listening to Genesis in his car, Brendan reminds him, “No girl is ever going to take a guy seriously that listens to Genesis.” The on-again and off-again relationship that develops between Raphina and Conor exists throughout, always dropping off tapes of his new songs at her door, where she becomes the central force driving his every move even as she disappears for long stretches of time. Meanwhile the band keeps popping up in their own music videos, creating a lighthearted world of pop fantasy that is continually challenged by the more searing realism of the times, where the songs represent the only affirmative hope to be found anywhere in the vicinity, SING STREET - BEAUTIFUL SEA Music Video Clip YouTube (1:12). These kids want nothing of the drab world surrounding them, where the romantic inclinations between Conor and Raphina grow more magically surreal, where the delirium of teenage love exists largely in the delusions of the imagination, where some of the more brilliantly conceived scenes are just the two of them alone, where the line between fantasy and reality continually co-mingles. One of the better set pieces in the film shows the band playing at the senior prom, creating a song that is beat-for-beat the same rhythm section as “Maneater” in Drive It Like You Stole It - YouTube (3:37), where what exists in Conor’s head grows to ecstatic dimensions, always infused with a hyper-realistic romanticism that becomes the guiding light of the film, idealizing a kind of world one hopes and dreams for, as opposed to the one they inevitably find themselves stuck in, SING STREET - Adam Levine "Go Now" Music Video - YouTube (3:50). With a belief that brighter days are ahead, the magical realism of the finale is as tragically naïve as it is exhilarating, where one is left in a euphoric haze of youth and unbridled enthusiasm.

Slant Magazine [Kenji Fujishima]

There's no doubting that John Carney is an audience favourite at Sundance. His directorial debut Once took home the festival's Audience Award in 2007 - before going on to more critical acclaim and an Oscar for Best Original Song - and his latest retro school musical Sing Street had an early morning 1200-strong Eccles Theatre crowd literally dancing in the aisles along to the credits.

Certainly those who grew up in the 70s and 80s will find much to enjoy in his nostalgic 1985-set drama, with Carney's first-love will they/won't they romance playing out like a feature episode of school soap Grange Hill against a backdrop of terrific music pastiche, which emphasises some of the sillier, moody elements of 80s pop while celebrating what was best about them. A sort of classroom Commitments that finds charm in naivety. The big question is whether younger audiences less familiar with the original music by Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and the like will find the same enticements - particularly as there are no big names in the younger cast.

Perhaps, I ought to say, no big names yet, because Ferdia Walsh-Peelo and up-and-coming actress Lucy Boynton could well establish themselves courtesy of their roles here. Walsh-Peelo is perfect as 14-year-old Conor, not only because he has a terrific voice, but also because he is only 16 now, so is able to bring a childlike vulnerability to a character on the verge of adulthood. The film is set against the economic woes of mid-80s Ireland, when many people quit the country in search of a better life in London. Conor's family aren't immune to the downturn and he becomes a fish out of water in a new school after his mum (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and dad (Aiden Gillen) decide to save some cash at the same time as realising their marriage may be beyond redemption in a country which still forbids divorce.

Synge Street School - a real Dublin establishment which old boy Carney insists is much changed from its depiction here - is a rough-around-the-edges Catholic, run by the despotic Brother Baxter (Don Wycherley). It is outside the school gates that Conor first claps eyes on Raphina (Boynton), an old-beyond-her-years teen, an aspiring model, whose double-denim, hoop earrings and perm look carefully copied from the pages of Just Seventeen. In a bid to get closer to her, he declares he wants her to be in his band's next video. The only problem being, he doesn't have a band, a situation he soon rectifies with the help of up-and-coming likely lad Darren (Ben Carolan), rabbit-loving musical genius Eammon (Mark McKenna) and the school's token black kid Ngig (Percy Chamburuka) among others. The biggest shame of the plot is that despite initially looking as though it might subvert expectations regarding Ngig, it ultimately uses him as little more than set-dressing - although he is not the only band character who is under-written.

Carney is in his element in these early stages of the band, deftly portraying them as just bad enough but improving, so as to keep the musical numbers coming, while the costume and hair department have great fun showing the fickle nature of 80s fashions, as Conor swaps his Simon Le Bon affectations for Robert Smith and then Tony Hadley under the tutelage of his brother Brendan (Jack Reynor). The music is a perfect match for the era, with Riddle of The Model - and the gang's rough-shot video - marrying the flamboyance of a time when pop promos were considered The Best Thing Ever to some Dublin grit as Raphina stands moodily in an alley while the boys gurn away behind the instruments.

Unlike many band films, the group play second fiddle to the romance plot and while it never breaks the mould, Boynton and Walsh-Peelo have a watchable charm. It is the musical moments when the film is at its best, however, particularly towards the inevitable school disco climax, which sees a grimy rehearsal room transformed into a 1950s style Back To The Future prom night to the accompaniment of the Hall & Oates inspired Drive It Like You Stole It. Carney simply loves the music of the era and adores these kids, and his affection is infectious, helping you to forget the more standard issue elements of the plot in favour of embracing its fairy-tale flourishes.

With Sing Street, writer-director John Carney's cinematic themes—budding musicians and the music they strive to create and perform, with the possibility of romance always hovering in the air—remain the same, but the melodies keep changing, though not for the better. His 2007 debut, Once, may have been a sentimental fantasy at its core, but by applying a handheld vérité style to the material and encouraging a sense of improvisatory looseness from his actors, the film exuded a feeling of lived-in honesty that refreshed the story's clichés. Some of that attention to realism could still be found in his bigger-budget follow-up, Begin Again, but the film ultimately felt more sugary, especially in its simplistic take on the eternal conflict between maintaining artistic integrity and selling out for the sake of a wider audience—and it's no surprise that Carney was for the former.

Now, with Sing Street, all traces of grit have been scrubbed away in favor of relentlessly crowd-pleasing slickness. It hardly matters that Carney's latest is a period piece, set in Dublin in 1985 during a period of economic turmoil that saw many Irish leave the country for better opportunities in London—or that Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) and the rest of his teenage band deal more in Second British Invasion-style synth-pop and new wave than the acoustic balladry at the center of Carney's previous films. There's barely anything new here that Carney didn't dramatize more incisively before.

Conor's own personal circumstances aren't even terribly original. As a result of his ever-bickering parents (Aidan Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy) not having enough money to keep him in a Jesuit school, he's forced to attend Synge Street, a lesser Christian Brothers school where he endures the usual indignities, especially from the bullying Barry (Ian Kenny) and a headmaster, Baxter (Don Wycherley), so bent on uniformity that he punishes Conor for not wearing black shoes like the rest of the students. Naturally, music becomes his outlet for letting off steam—but only when he blurts out to Raphina (Lucy Boynton), a strikingly dressed and styled young woman he notices across the street from school one day, that he's in a band about to shoot a music video that he begins to seriously entertain the notion of becoming a musician. Conor subsequently, and with the help of a wannabe business entrepreneur, Darren (Ben Carolan), recruits fellow school peers like multi-talented instrumentalist Eamon (Mark McKenna) to try to turn that fib into reality.

It's a tribute to how utterly uninterested Carney is in dramatizing genuine struggle that he can's even be bothered to depict the step-by-step development of these young musicians; in his fantasy vision of the world, all it takes is a few records loaned by Conor's brother, Brendan (Jack Reynor), for him to grasp the basics of songwriting, and one long day for Conor's band to learn the finer points of making a music video. Perhaps actual effort would only distract from Conor's real goal out of all this: to get the girl. And whereas said girl in both Once and Begin Again exhibited a sense of agency, Raphina is only as a glorified catalyst for Conor's maturation.

Raphina, who lives in an all-girls home and says she's planning to go to London to kickstart a modeling career, seems to act entirely in relation to the dictates of patriarchal ideology, but it isn't as if any of the other characters are less stereotypically drawn—most egregiously the one black band member, Ngig (Percy Chamburuka), who, after an introduction in which he punctures Conor, Darren, and Eamon's racist assumptions about him, fades into the background, framed only in the context of Conor's coming of age and given less of a personality than Raphina, Eamon, and much of the rest of the cast.

Sing Street sadly reveals the limits of a filmmaker coasting on sincerity and high spirits alone. John Carney may wholeheartedly believe in the power of music to bring people of different walks of life together and even pave the way for a brighter future, but instead of allowing us to reach such a conclusion organically, he's now hectoring us instead.

Sundance Review: 'Once' Director John Carney's Joyously E | The ... Noel Murray from The Playlist

You know the problem with most fictional rock bands? They don’t write good bridges. Whenever a motley group of kids in a movie or TV show come together to make music (and to woo the opposite sex), whoever’s in charge of the original soundtrack usually cooks up decent hooks, yet has a harder time coming up with strong verses or memorable mid-song changes. Pretend pop stars mostly play jingles —they don’t knock out realistic chart hits.

The band in John Carney’s “Sing Street” is an exception. Even the first song they write, a fairly goofy novelty number called “Riddle of the Model,” has an unusually complex structure for something that a bunch of working-class Irish teens would have worked up in an afternoon in 1985. As the story plays out, every couple of days the group’s frontman Conor (played by newcomer Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) pops by the flat of his guitarist Eamon (Mark McKenna), and the two of them write another fully realized pop-rock composition inspired by the Cure, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran or one of the other post-punk groups that appeared routinely in the U.K. in the 1980s. The music in “Sing Street” is so terrific that it strains credulity —it's only a problem if moviegoers would rather watch 105 minutes of sophomoric garage-rock, rather than the marvelously catchy tunes by Carney and veteran folk-pop musician Gary Clark.

Carney’s best-known for writing and directing “Once,” a low-budget film about a talented Dublin street musician (played by The Frames’ Glen Hansard) that came out of nowhere back in 2007 and bowled over Sundance audiences, made a lot money at the box office, won an Academy Award, and inspired a hit Broadway musical. The director followed that up with “Begin Again” (originally known as “Can a Song Save Your Life?” when it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013), starring Keira Knightley as a singer-songwriter who gets dumped by her rock star boyfriend and responds by recording her own brilliant album in the streets of New York City. What Carney’s first two musicals have in common is that their songs emerge naturally from the situation and were performed with the spontaneity and immediacy of a impromptu concert.

“Sing Street” is a little different, in that both the songs and the movie are more polished. The premise fictionalizes some of Carney’s own experiences as a teenager in Dublin, where he attended a tough Catholic school during an era when a depressed labor market was driving a lot of Irish folk to move to England. At the start of the film, Conor’s constantly bickering, underemployed parents (played by Aiden Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy) pull him out of his posh secondary school to save the family some money. At the new school, in between getting beaten up by skinheads and yelled at by priests, Conor forms a band called Sing Street, mainly to impress an older girl named Raphina (Lucy Boynton), who says she’s days away from shipping off to London to become a fashion model. He asks her to be in one of Sing Street’s videos before she goes, and then keeps coming up with more music so that he can spend more time with her. After several months, the band has enough of a repertoire to headline a school dance, and, truth be told, a set strong enough to get them booked into almost any rock club in Dublin.

This movie though isn’t really about the rise of a hot new band. Aside from Raphina, no one pays much attention to Sing Street: not club owners, not booking agents, and not label executives. Instead, the story is about Conor pulling himself up out bleak circumstances with the help of his hash-smoking guru of an older brother Brendan (wonderfully played by Jack Reynor). Brendan hands Conor stacks of albums as “homework” —everything from Hall & Oates to The Jam— and teaches him that the key to greatness in any endeavor is to risk being ridiculed. Carney has a lot of fun playing with mid-1980s pop fashion, with the band changing its look from week to week and song to song. But he’s ultimately making a movie that uses the real social problems of his home country as the backdrop for uplift.

Frankly, the film's plot is a little pat. It’s “boy meets girl” crossed with “underdog makes good,” and both its love interest and its oppressive Catholic school milieu are fairly pro forma. Still, as with “Once” and “Begin Again,” Carney makes great use of real locations, showing these boys singing their songs in cramped rooms, school auditoriums, back alleys and by the sea. And those songs are pretty great… maybe a little too great.

But then, the mark of a top-shelf rock ’n’ roll movie is how well it can capture the element of wish fulfillment. It’s entirely possible to hear the meticulously arranged and performed versions of Sing Street’s tunes as just figments of Conor’s imagination. In one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, Conor plans out a video shoot that goes horribly awry, and Carney quickly cuts away from the dire reality to what Conor had in his head, because the latter is also “real” in its way. What makes “Sing Street” such a joyously entertaining film (besides the songs) is that it thinks the best of its characters, and it presents them the way they’d like to think of themselves. When a kid in Dublin in 1985 picked up a guitar, he wanted to be The Edge. Carney, god bless him, lets it be so. [B+]

Flavorwire [Jason Bailey] The Last Musical Filmmaker: How John Carney Revived a Dying Movie Genre

John Carney rewrites his past as the bouncy pop musical Sing Street ... Tasha Robinson from The Verge

Movie Review: 'Once' Director John Carney's 'Sing Street' Is a Giddy ... Christopher Orr from The Atlantic

Vague Visages [Josh Slater-Williams]

Sing Street (2016) Movie Review - MovieQuotesandMore Ryan Grace

TwitchFilm [Jim Tudor]

Sing Street :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Andy Crump

Sing Street is a return to form for the director of Once | The Verge Chris Plante

Film Review: Sing Street Is My Favorite Film of the Year (So Far) | We ... Kelly Konda from We Minored in Film

Sing Street Review: A Fantastic, Rockin' Coming of Age 80s ... - Film Ethan Anderton from Slash Film

'Sing Street': Sundance Review | Reviews | Screen - ScreenDaily Fionnuala Halligan

'Sing Street' Review: A Boy-Meets-Girl Band - WSJ Joe Morgenstern

'Sing Street' Review: The Next Great Musical From the ... - ScreenCrush Mike Sampson

The Film Stage [Jordan Raup]

Collider [Matt Goldberg]

Sing Street from Ireland, A Bigger Splash from Italy: Neglected realities Joanne Laurier from World Socialist Web Site

FilmFracture [James Jay Edwards]

theartsdesk.com [Matthew Wright]

Review: Sing Street Honors the DIY Spirit | TIME Stephanie Zacharek

Sundance Swoons for 'Once' Director's 'Sing Street' | Criticwire Vikram Murthi

John Carney On His Autobiographical Musical 'Sing Street' Erin Whitney interview from Screencrush, January 29, 2016

Irish filmmaker John Carney gives the modern ... - Los Angeles Times Mark Olsen interview, April 20, 2016

Why Sing Street director John Carney regrets the film's ... - The Verge Tasha Robinson interview from The Verge, April 21, 2016

From 'Once' To 'Sing Street': Director John Carney Infuses Movies With ... Ann Marie Baldonado interview from NPR, May 4, 2016

John Carney: 'I'll never make a film with supermodels again' | Features ... Elisa Bray interview from The Independent, May 28, 2016

'Sing Street': Sundance Review - Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

'Sing Street' Review: John Carney Scores Once More With New ... Guy Lodge from Variety

Sing Street, film review: 'A tremendous sing along ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab

Sing Street review - teen zero to hero in three chord wonder from Once ... Jordan Hoffman from The Guardian

Sing Street review – pop goes the playground Mark Kermode from The Observer

Sing Street review: A New Romantic vision of Dublin in the 1980s Tara Brady from The Irish Times

South China Morning Post [James Marsh]

Toronto Film Scene [Andrew Parker]

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

Examiner.com [Michael Adams]

'Sing Street' sets an Irish coming-of-age story to an '80s pop beat - The ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

Young Irish star of 'Sing Street' looks forward, while its director looks ... Michael O’Sullivan from The Washington Post

Oregon Arts Watch [Eric D. Snider]

'Sing Street' cranks up great pop music and one ... - Los Angeles Times Katie Walsh

Sing Street | L.A. Weekly Alan Scherstuhl

Rogerebert.com [Sheila O'Malley]

Review: 'Sing Street' Is an '80s Love Affair, Hair Gel Required - The ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times

Sing Street - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Caro, Niki

WHALE RIDER B 85

New Zealand Germany (101 mi) 2002

Witi Ihimaera is the first published Māori writer and is believed to have been sitting in his New York home one day overlooking the Hudson River when he saw a whale washed ashore. Inspired by stories of ancient tradition that streamed into his mind, over the next three weeks Mr. Ihimaera wrote The Whale Rider, a children’s novel steeped in Māori tradition. On the east coast of New Zealand, the Whangara people believe their presence on that site dates back a thousand years or more to a single ancestor, Paikea, who escaped death when his canoe capsized by riding to shore on the back of a whale. From then on, Whangara chiefs, always the first-born, always male, have been considered Paikea's direct descendants.

In the book, there are dual stream-of-conscience narratives between ancient whales traveling the ocean since time immemorial and the humorous, overweight uncle of a small girl living in the tiny coastal Māori village of Whangara, a girl deemed “not needed” by her devout grandfather, the aging chief of his people who believes only male descendents of Paikea can be chosen as the new leaders. The film version nearly eliminates the book’s mythic literary connection to the whales of the ancient past, which utilized the omnipresent voice of the whales as a transcendent living spirit, and replaces it with the narration of an 11-year old girl, named Paikea, the incandescently irresistible Keisha Castle-Hughes, who was nominated (but did not win) for a youngest ever Best Actress Academy Award. Tatum O’Neal was age 10 when she won in the Supporting Actress category.

Unfortunately the young girl Paikea becomes negatively objectified, diminished in the eyes of her grandfather simply by her sex which he steadfastly insists disqualifies her from being a chief. Part of the success of the film is along those lines, as it heightens this cultural discrepancy, where the hard reality of Māori people is barely touched upon and is instead fictionalized, and except for the harsh opening sequence, even Disneyized into PG proportions, turned into this perfectly innocent yet stubbornly persistent young girl who is inevitably portrayed as a victim. That scene at the school where she chokes up and cries for a few moments all but solidified my general unease with taking this film more seriously, yet for others, this was the high point in the film. My problem is that it resembles the typical Hollywood format of tugging on the heartstrings by manipulating the audience into thinking what the director wants you to think.

It’s very much an uplifting, though somewhat simplistic vision with a natural feel for Māori symbols and artifacts, where gorgeous ancient sounding music written by Lisa Gerrard provides the transcendental voices of the whales. The film, however, turns into a Māori ROCKY movie, as this young girl rises above the mediocrity that surrounds her, despite the undermining prejudice and meanness shown to her by her grandfather, who obviously loves her, but is too obsessed with finding a new male leader of his people and literally can’t be bothered with a girl. Through some kind of mystical, supernatural means, very much resembling the actions of a horse whisperer (only with whales), she reminds us that we are all connected to our pasts, and that all of us working together, not just those singled out by our leaders, can determine our future.

filmcritic.com (Jules Brenner) review [3/5]

In the beginning... actually, we have here two beginnings. Back in the mists, out of the blue, according to Maori tradition, the tribal founder Paikea rode to shore on the back of a whale. For a thousand years, his male heirs have succeeded him as chief. Yet in the here and now, myths are on the retreat. Chief Koro's grandson arrived stillborn, taking his mother with him, and sending his father abroad for good, leaving his twin sister Pai in the care of her grandparents. Pai grows up 'a bossy one'; yet Koro brusquely refuses to countenance the idea of a female heir. It's a film about belief that doesn't ask you to embrace the tribe's indigenous hocus-pocus so much as credit the strength such people might find in respecting their cultural identity. Koro has the strength of a stone; Pai's fluid free spirits are far more propitious. Their begrudged, teetering relationship is the heart of the film, and acted with suitably impassioned magnetism by Rawiri Paratene and Keisha Castle-Hughes. Around them, writer/director Niki Caro roots her characters in a landscape equal parts mundane and boundless, incorporates tantalising sea photography and Lisa's Gerrard's ambient soundtrack, and lifts off into a sublime, Elysian ending. (Based on a book by Witi Ihimaera).

VideoVista review Debbie Moon

The Whangara people of New Zealand cherish the memory of their ancestor Paikea's arrival in the land, riding on the back of a whale - a talent that his descendants, the tribal chiefs, are said to share. But when her twin brother dies at birth, proud, sparky Pai is left as the only heir - and girls are forbidden to serve as chiefs. Her gruff but loving grandfather brings her up, while grappling with the question of the succession. Her father is a successful artist who's turned his back on the old ways to live in Europe, and none of the boys of the tribe seem to have the necessary skills. Pai sets her heart on winning over her grandfather and attaining her birthright, but it's only when a natural catastrophe strikes that she can finally prove her worth...

Summarised, Whale Rider sounds like a Disney film, full of ethnic colour and faintly patronising moral lessons. But Niki Caro's triumphant first feature is far superior to any House of Mouse morality play. Capturing both the vitality and the fragility of the Maori culture, the film never shies from the problems facing an impoverished people caught between the old and the new. A sprinkling of humour, particularly from the down-to-earth women, certainly doesn't hurt, and the performances are excellent. Keisha Castle-Hughes, making her film debut as Pai, gives a superb performance as a vulnerable and determined child, bruised by the emotional chaos of broken families and the slow decay of traditions that she still understands and adores.

But what's most impressive about Whale Rider is the way that Caro mixes gritty realism with a genuine, unashamed spirituality, a feeling for the land and the people and the links between them. The turmoil in the tribe is reflected in the natural world, and it seems entirely right that it should be. A beautiful, haunting film about change and continuity, Whale Rider is one of the best debut films in years, and proof that New Zealand has more to offer world audiences than just hobbits. Not to be missed.

A good selection of DVD extras includes a substantial making-of featurette (27 minutes) with interesting contributions from the cast, an 11-minute documentary on the art of making traditional Maori canoes, and an understated director's commentary. There's also Castle-Hughes' impressive screen test, and a full range of trailers - including radio spots! Now that's thorough...

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak

In Maori legend the whale rider was "a prophet who came on the back of a whale, a man who led the people out of the darkness of the sea to the land."

Young Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes) has long heard the story. It was her twin brother, "who died at birth and took our mother with him," who was destined to wear the mantle of Paikeia the chief and carry forward the legacy of the whale rider.

Without a male heir and with Pai's grieving father (Cliff Curtis) fleeing from the small tribal village of Whangara, New Zealand, to an art career in Europe, and Pai's gruff, patriarchal grandfather, Chief Koro (Rawiri Paratene), aging, the community faces a succession quandary.

Despite tradition, Pai is sure she is destined for the honor. But Koro who, as his son says, "is looking for something that doesn't exist anymore," refuses to see beyond his own narrow vision.

It will take a supreme test for the extraordinary, equally stubborn and loving girl to force him to open his eyes and realize his limitations may hurt more than help a community already suffering from hardship and economic duress.

Director Niki Caro joins a trio of other visuallyinclined female filmmakers from New Zealand -- Alison MacLean, Christine Jeffs and Jane Campion -- who have taken the country's awe-inspiring terrain and seamlessly used it as a dynamic and visceral character in films. Incredibly vibrant, moody slashes of gray, a ceiling over the Whangaral coast, are haunting and forceful backdrops to the dramatic climax of "Whale Rider."

Caro, who adapted a popular book by Witi Ihimaera, overcomes some plot awkwardness and ultimately succeeds because of her cast, including Maori acting veterans Paratene and Vicky Haughton as Pai's tough and tender grandparents and Curtis ("Once Were Warriors") as her sensitive dad.

But the real find in this lovely family film is Castle-Hughes, who makes Pai's confusion, emotional fragility and devotion palpable.

"Whale Rider," which won the audience farvortex award at this year's Seattle International Film Festival -- following similar awards at the Toronto, Sundance, Rotterdam and San Francisco festivals -- is a gorgeous and empowering movie for preteens that not only enchants but tells a moving fable about tragedy, courage and transcendence.

Just because a female director sets out to make a female empowerment film doesn't mean it can't be charming while rousing the troops. Writer-director Niki Caro presents this story of a Maori girl in New Zealand whose ancestor, according to tribal legend, came from a faraway place, riding on the back of a whale. It's a film of reality and fantasy, treating farfetched dreams and mysticism with acceptance, respecting the tribe's dignity and beliefs.

Koro (Rawiri Paratene) is the Chief of the Ngati Kanohi tribe of Whangara which resides in a coastal fishing village. His thought is that his firstborn son, Porourangi (Cliff Curtis), will succeed him as chief. When it's clear that Porourangi has no interest in filling Koro's leadership shoes, Koro looks to his son's children. But tragedy takes over when Porourangi's wife dies in childbirth along with a twin boy, sending Porourangi to seek solace for his loss elsewhere. He leaves daughter Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes, in her film debut), the surviving girl twin, in the care of Koro. "The girl is no use to me", Koro blusters, disappointed that as a girl, she's not a candidate for tribal leadership.

Despite that initial reaction, by the time Pai is eleven, we see grandfather Koro picking her up at school and riding her home on his bicycle, displaying a grandfather's affection. At the same time, he is schooling the firstborn sons of the village in the arts of leadership and "the old ways," demonstrating ritual behavior and martial arts in an effort to find his successor. Pai tries to join in but must settle for a distant observation of the training she wants so much. On such matters, her grandfather is uncompromising, paying no heed to her abilities. Countering his rejections is her indomitable, no-nonsense grandmother Flowers (Vicky Haughton), Pai's harbor of understanding.

Porourangi briefly returns from his home in England where he has become an exhibiting artist. He asks Pai to come back with him and she decides to go but, as they travel along the seacoast, she seems to hear voices from the deep drawing her back. She returns to village and grandparents to pursue her destiny. It's achieved when a pod of whales beach themselves as though in a sacrificial ceremony. The tribal connection to these beasts is vividly emphasized by a community effort to tug them back to sea. Despite their backbreaking labor and ultimate heartbreak, they are not equal to the task... but Pai is.

Eleven year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes was cast for this part from thousands and the selection proves on the mark. This girl's quality of intelligent self-containment leads us through the emotional travails of her character and bodes well for her in an acting career should she pursue one. I rooted for her as I did for Anna Paquin when she emerged in The Piano and for Natalie Portman, introduced to us in The Professional in 1994.

Writer-director Niki Caro's feminist dream-wish also turns on the theme of personal adaptation in the framework of a new world culture. Her screenplay is based on the novel by Witi Ihimaera and was vetted closely by no less than the actual elders of the Maori's Ngati Kanohi. She entered their tribal world with the necessary patience and humility to effectively direct her gender message with documentary acccuracy. "Anybody who says there are things a girl can't do will have to answer to me!", she declares. Messages aside, time with this little girl and her brethren is well spent.

DVD extras include a commentary track, deleted scenes, and a pair of behind the scenes featurettes.

World Socialist Web Site review John Braddock

stylusmagazine.com (Dan Emerson) review

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [4/4]

Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs) review

CultureCartel.com (Dainon Moody) review [4.5/5]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib

Movie-Vault.com (Ertug Tufekcioglu) review

here Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge

The Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review

Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4/5]

3 Black Chicks Review Flicks Cassandra Henry

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

hybridmagazine.com review Mike O’Connor

MovieFreak.com (Dennis Landmann) dvd review [8/10] [Special Edition]

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review also seen here: Talking Pictures (UK) review

eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [5/5]

DVD Verdict (Mark Van Hook) dvd review

FilmStew.com [Todd Gilchrist]

Bright Lights Film Journal review Gary Morris

Kamera.co.uk review Bob Carroll

Harvey S. Karten review [B]

Frank's Reel Reviews review Frank Wilkins

Reel.com review [3.5/4] Timothy Knight

New York Movies - False Grooves - Michael Atkinson from The Village Voice

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The Tech (MIT) (Tao Yue) review

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) Andrew L. Urban and Louise Keller, including: NIKI CARO INTERVIEW

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [1.5/4]

Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Private Joker

Reel.com dvd review [4/4] James Plath

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/4]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [3.5/5] Brad Cook

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Variety (Dennis Harvey) review

Guardian/Observer review

The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Rick Groen

Review at The New Zealand Herald

Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review

The Whale Rider | The Film: The Legend of Paikea

Catch of the day | guardian.co.uk Film Diana Dobson takes a look at Whangara today, a town of 50 people, also Part II: Read the second part of this article, and part III: Read the third part of this article from The Guardian

Witi Ihimaera - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New Zealand Book Council biography

Kahutia/Paikea - The Whale Rider book review

The Whale Rider -- book review Amanda Cuda from Curled Up With a Good Book, 2003

Whale Rider - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Māori - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

maori.info Māori informational website

maori.org.nz Māori website

The Maori - New Zealand in History

Maori Culture Virtual New Zealand

Whangara — The home of Paikea, Porourangi and other progenitors of ...

Whangara Whale Rider Location

Whangara Village Whale Rider East Cape Coastline NZ

Whale Rider - Jasons New Zealand

NORTH COUNTRY D+ 66

USA (123 mi) 2005

This was a real embarrassment, pure torture to sit through, not from the subject matter, which is real enough, but for the wretched way it was presented, pretentiously dancing around real social issues using glamour girls like Charlize Theron and Michelle Monaghan, who have no business in this story, as they are such commercialized Hollywood, idealized conceptions of what sells, women standing up for their rights along the lines of Jennifer Beals in FLASHDANCE, and not representative of poor salt of the earth Minnesota women who actually work in the mines. These roles belonged to someone else, who might have brought some hard-nosed authenticity to the screen. As it is, this is one of the most poorly written, suffocatingly predictable films I’ve seen in quite awhile, where everything is hand-fed to the audience, so overarching, so overwrought, capturing every cliché, where characters are either all bad or all good, where there is no in between, where the men in the mines are such Neanderthals, so repulsive and evil, one wonders why this film is only about sexual harassment? Why isn’t it about criminal assault charges? Since these events are in the recent past, coinciding onscreen with the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill televised hearings, where Anita Hill described in intimate detail events that occurred, which were understood by the United States all male Senate to be female fabrications, delusions of grandeur, obvious mischaracterizations, one would think an ounce of authenticity might be a part of this film. But that is wish fulfillment. We’re stuck with Hollywood delusions.

Based on a book Class Action by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler which documents the landmark 1988 Jenson vs. Eveleth sexual harassment lawsuit, which opened up sexual harassment laws in the nearly all-male Minnesota mining operations, which followed on the footsteps of previous Supreme Court decisions that ordered a stop to the practice of excluding women from working in the mines, we pretty much know the story and the standard treatment the story gets from Theron’s black eye that she receives in the opening five minutes of the film, so why stick around? Well, there are a few performances of note. Frances McDormand provides a lift to this otherwise totally mundane, overly predictable movie-of-the-week story. As always, she is stunning, a combination of wit, humor and realism all wrapped up into one. Her husband, Sean Bean, gives an effortless performance, especially in a gentle scene with Theron’s all too confused son, while Richard Jenkins, as the downtrodden father, makes a nice transformation, particularly in his union hall speech, which was one compelling moment. The rest is beating the same emotional note for over two hours, never once varying from that established norm. This is what American films do worst, throw lots of money on projects that suits in a boardroom think is appealing, an uplifting film with a message, told in what they believe is a realist form, throwing some dirt and grease on Charlize Theron’s pretty face, add a series of Bob Dylan songs, as he was born in the region, as if that gives it an ounce of authenticity, make sure the Soundtrack is hip and liberal-minded, using known marketable stars to create a celluloid atrocity that has nothing to do with capturing any real flavor of life.

Carolina, Ana

SEA OF ROSES (Mar de Rosas)

Brazil (99 mi) 1977

User reviews from imdb Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Sérgio (Hugo Carvana), Felicidade (Norma Bengell) and Betinha (Cristina Pereira) compose a dysfunctional family, and while traveling to Rio de Janeiro, Sérgio and Felicidade have another serious altercation, culminating with the aggression of Felicidade with a razor blade on Sergio's neck in a motel. Felicidade believes she has killed Sérgio and she decides to escape to São Paulo with Betinha in the family's car. In the highway, she notes that a black Volkswagen Beetle is following their car. After an incident in a gas station caused by Betinha, they are introduced to Orlando Barde (Otávio Augusto), the driver of the Beetle, and they decide to travel together in the small car to São Paulo. In a small town, Felicidade tries to get away from Orlando, but a bus hits her and Dona Niobi (Miriam Muniz) and Dr. Dirceu (Ary Fontoura), a pretentious poet and frustrated dentist, help Felicidade. In their house, the deranged Betinha provokes the most weird and surrealistic situations, when each character discloses innermost revelations. Yesterday I saw 'Mar de Rosas' for the first time and honestly I did not like it. Norma Bengell gives an outstanding performance in the role of the frustrated and wounded Felicidade and is the best this movie offers to the viewer, since the screenplay is too much bizarre for my taste. Some surrealistic situations slightly recalled Buñuel style, but I am not daring to compare Ana Carolina with the master of the surrealism. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): 'Mar de Rosas' ('Sea of Roses' (literally); however, 'Mar de Rosas' in Portuguese is an idiomatic expression meaning 'everything is calm')

User reviews from imdb Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Ana Carolina surprised everybody when, after many documentary shorts and a hit documentary feature about Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas, she jumped into anarchist, surrealist crazy drama/black comedy with her first fiction film "Mar de Rosas". A non-sequitur, iconoclast portrait of middle-class family life, her protagonist Betinha (Cristina Pereira, perfectly cast) is a sort of teenage Mafalda (Quino's comic book anti-heroine): rambunctious, naughty, irrepressible, eager to be evil. She's on the run with her mother Felicidade (Norma Bengell, returning to Brazilian films after a long sojourn in European cinema and theater), who has killed husband Sergio (Hugo Carvana) in a hotel bathroom. Betinha and Felicidade are followed by suspicious character Bardi (Otávio Augusto) and, after terrible "accidents" -- Betinha sets fire on her mother at a gas station, Felicidade is hit by a bus while trying to escape from Bardi -- the 3 of them end up being "helped" by wacky couple Dirceu (Ary Fontoura) and Niobi (hilarious, wreck-voiced Myriam Muniz).

"Mar de Rosas" has some major lulls (especially toward the end) and is technically precarious, but the acting is inspired and, despite being ultimately a tragic film, you'll find yourself cracking with the loony dialog which is rather difficult to translate, as Ana Carolina uses a lot of Brazilian jeux de mots, adages and figures of speech in her trademark style of "free association". "Mar de Rosas" is refreshingly anti-cliché, and its critical and commercial success paved the way to Ana Carolina's very individual oeuvre that combines anti- conformism, feminism and social criticism with a delightful touch of surrealistic (black) humor.

Brazil Film Update Robert Stam from Jump Cut

Well-received in both the Paris and Berlin Film Festivals, Ana Carolina's first fiction film (after ten documentaries) is described by its author as a "portrayal of power as it operates within the family — an x-ray of the situation we Brazilians are living today, shown dramatically in the language of the absurd."

MAR DE ROSAS follows a not-very-loving couple (Sergio and Felicity) and their devilishly anarchic daughter (Betinha) through a picaresque series of progressively more surreal misadventures and narrative non-sequiturs. Although Ana Carolina claims to be interested more in making good films than in making feminist films, it is doubtless no accident that the film's opening dialogue consists of a woman's angry demand to be heard, or that one of the first images violates a common taboo by showing a woman urinating.

Using humor as the "best way to talk about serious things," Ana Carolina explores absurd familial situations as a springboard for exposing sexism, repression, and alienation. Implicit throughout is a Reichean analogy between the Family and the State as structures of power: "A photograph of a family," says the director, "is a photograph of the State." The narrative of MAR DE ROSAS is decidedly non-linear; and the dialogue — composed of lonesco-like absurdities, wordplay, proverbs, clichés — dynamites the mystified language of conventional wisdom. All the characters communicate an immense urge to express themselves, as if relearning to speak after a long period of imposed silence. Their will to speak is in itself a critique of the dictatorial regime from which Brazil is just now freeing itself after fourteen long years. But it is the character of the daughter, given to acts of revolt, slipping razor blades into soap, cheerfully puncturing her mother's neck with a pen, setting pools of gasoline on fire, who encapsulates the ambient violence and who, by her refusal to play the game by adult rules, best embodies the spirit of revolt that drives the film.

Carpenter, John

Film Reference profile by Kim Newman, updated by John McCarty

While his career has been neither as erratic as Wes Craven's nor as disaster-littered as that of Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter currently stands as an out-of-time B specialist. His later directorial output has not exactly failed to live up to the promise of his earliest films, but nor has it been able to match their perfect achievements.

Carpenter's first three movies are marvelously economical, deftly exciting, genuinely distinctive, and slyly amusing, and cover a wide range of generic bases. Dark Star, which he made as a student in collaboration with Dan O'Bannon, is one of the miracles of the 1970s, an intelligent and approachable science-fiction film made in the wake of 2001 but fresh and lively, with a satiric bite carried over from the written sf of the 1950s—its surfing punchline is an apt borrowing from Ray Bradbury—and a near-absurdist sense of humour. Its storyline concerns the crew of the spaceship Dark Star and its plunge into isolation-fueled insanity as their twenty-year mission to demolish useless planets with sentient bombs drags on and on. It is a film that repays many repeat viewings. Assault on Precinct 13, an urban Western rooted in Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead, is at once a lean, generic, action machine (its plot centers around a nightmarish street gang as it besieges and lays waste to an isolated police station) and a witty transposition of the certainties of a Hawksian ensemble piece into the racially and sexually tense 1970s. In these films, Carpenter demonstrated that suspense and humour could be combined. He also showed that he was a skilled handler of unfamiliar actors, concentrating unusually on nuances of character in forms where spectacle and effects often take precedence. Finally, he established himself as a talented composer of driving, minimalist, synthesizer-oriented musical themes.

Halloween is every bit as good as the first few films, but seems less fresh because it has been so influential. Itself a psycho suspense horror movie in the vein of The Spiral Staircase or Black Christmas (and Carpenter's lady-stalking 1978 TV movie Someone's Watching Me), Halloween single-handedly revived the drive-in horror movie in the late 1970s, inspiring such nasty pieces of work as Friday the 13th and literally hundreds of blatant imitations. It also inspired a series of sequels, including the intriguing Nigel Kneale-scripted box office failure Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the Carpenter-produced Halloween II, and a couple of Halloween films with which he was not involved in any capacity, except for their re-use of parts of his scores for the original film and its sequel, particularly the title theme.

The original Halloween, which featured Jamie Lee Curtis pursued by an unkillable, masked madman and Donald Pleasence as a hammy shrink on the killer's trail, establishes its own world of horror, as enclosed and unreal as the Transylvanian backlots of the Universal or Hammer series. Carpenter utilizes a mythic American small town teenage milieu, where Halloween is a magical evocation of terror and delight, and where babysitting, trick-or-treating, and blind-dating hold possibilities of joy and/or terror. With its absolute mastery of the hand-through-the-window shock moment, cunning use of the Panavision shape, and a shivery theme tune, Halloween is a slender but masterly confection, and it should not be blamed for the floodgates it opened when it became an unexpected box office bonanza (in fact, one of the most successful independent films in history). Before Halloween took off at the box office, however, Carpenter returned to TV to helm a biopic of Elvis Presley for Dick Clark productions. The telefilm marked the beginning of Carpenter's long association with Kurt Russell, a former Disney child star then trying to break away from his image and land more serious (read adult) roles. Russell was one of many actors who tested for the high profile part, but he got it, and turned in a bravura (at times even uncanny) performance as the legendary King of Rock 'n Roll in what many critics still consider to be Carpenter's best film away from the horror/SF genre.

Although there are pleasures to be found in most of his subsequent works, Carpenter has never quite recaptured the confidence and streamlined form of the early pictures. The Fog, a maritime ghost story, and Escape from New York, a science–fiction action picture, are enjoyable, entertaining movies that straggle through illogical plots, but nevertheless find performers—particularly Carpenter's then-wife Adrienne Barbeau, but also regulars Kurt Russell, Donald Pleasence, Tom Atkins, Nancy Loomis, and Chuck Cyphers—doing nice little things with characters, and individual suspense sequences in these films at times override the general messiness of the stories. The same feel can be found in films made by others from scripts he wrote in this period, such as Stewart Raffill's The Philadelphia Experiment and Harley Cokliss's Black Moon Rising, not to mention the 1990 TV Western El Diabolo. Stepping up into the studio big leagues, Carpenter was then given a chance to remake Hawks's and Nyby's The Thing from Another World (1950). He came through with The Thing, a controversially downbeat but genuinely effective movie in which an Arctic base is undermined by the presence of a shape-changing alien. The film is buoyed by the edgy, paranoid performances of a well-chosen cast of flabby, unreliable types and frequently punctuated by incredible bursts of special effects activity. The Thing handles its setpieces—severed heads sprouting spiderlegs, a stomach opening up into a toothy mouth, a dog exploding into tentacular gloopiness—remarkably well, but Carpenter is also in control of the funny, tense, questioning passages in between. Like so many of his later films, though, he seems unable to bring it to a satisfying conclusion.

It was the commercial failure of The Thing, which having arrived on Earth just as the box office was embracing E.T., a film that rendered evil aliens temporarily unfashionable, appears to have sufficiently disconcerted Carpenter to force him into a succession of blighted big studio movies. Christine is the regulation Stephen King adaptation, loud and watchable but essentially empty and ordinary. Starman is an uncomfortable and impersonal hybrid of It Happened One Night and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Finally, Big Trouble in Little China is a wacky kung fu-monster-comedy-musical-action-adventure-horror-fantasy that features Kurt Russell's funniest Carpenter hero role and some weird and wayward sequences, but it never quite catches the magic of the Hong Kong films upon which it is obviously based.

Subsequently, Carpenter deserted the big studios and handled a pair of smaller projects in an attempt to get back to the basics of his best work. The first of these, Prince of Darkness, is a labyrinthine and diffuse horror movie with a nuclear physics subplot, while They Live is a funny and pointed update of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which the aliens have invaded earth to exploit it economically. These two films display traces of Carpenter's old flair, even if they both open a great deal better than they close; They Live, in particular, is as interesting and offbeat a movie as The Fog or Escape from New York. But neither film arrested the general drift of Carpenter's career. By this time, while he had not yet settled into the rut that Tobe Hooper has dug for himself, he had also not achieved the generic apotheosis of a George Romero or a David Cronenberg, either.

In the early 1990s, Carpenter harkened back to another of his favorite films of yesteryear, James Whale's The Invisible Man. Carpenter's variation on the theme, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, was based on a novel by H. F. Saint. The film presented huge challenges for Carpenter and his FX team in terms of making star Chevy Chase's escapades in invisibility absolutely convincing. Fanciful, funny, and a technical knockout, Memoirs of an Invisible Man was nonetheless not the kind of film that his fans wanted to see from cinema's "titan of trick or treat."

Carpenter's fans wanted Carpenter to return to his traditional landscape of chills and thrills. He did so with a vengeance, creating what many of his fans consider to be the most terrifying film he'd made since the halcyon days of Halloween and The Thing: the Lovecraftian In the Mouth of Madness. Determined to stay the course in the cinema of fear and fright, Carpenter turned again to remaking another classic of his youth, Village of the Damned, originally a 1960 shocker about menacing, otherworldly children, but the results were disjointed and anemic. Escape from L.A. teamed him again with Kurt Russell in a splashier, bigger-budgeted sequel to and rehash of their successful Escape from New York, which did little for the reputations or coffers of either man. With Vampires, Carpenter's name appeared resoundingly above the title. Boasting a superb premise—the Vatican has created a Special Forces team (led by James Woods) to track down and destroy the King of the Vampires and his unholy minions — the film surrendered itself completely to the gore and sleaze that had become endemic to the horror genre by this point. And the opportunity to produce a genre classic was unfortunately missed.

John Carpenter once called his movie Halloween the film equivalent of a haunted house exhibit at an old country fair. The scares are carefully calculated, coming at you at just the right moments between lulls to ensure a thrilling ride. Without apology, he notes that the film sums up the escapist entertainment that his movies are all about. After all, he says, it is the kind of entertainment he enjoys most himself.

The John Carpenter Website

The Official John Carpenter Pages

John Carpenter Forum - Topix

The Unofficial John Carpenter Forum

All-Movie Guide bio info

TCMDB bio from Turner Classic Movies

John Carpenter Marco Lanzagorta from Senses of Cinema

John Carpenter Biography from the John Carpenter website

john carpenter = filmmaker profile at videovista.net a colorful and extensive profile by Octavio Ramos Jr. at Video Vista

John Carpenter @ Filmbug brief bio

John Carpenter - SCIFIPEDIA another brief bio

John Carpenter more bio info from NNDB

John Carpenter | Classic-Horror another profile from Nate Yapp

Director's Profile: John Carpenter Eric Beetner from Emerson College, March 1990

The Carpenticized Side of the Web

Journey Through The Mind of The Great John Carpenter

The Official John Carpenter, Chic Magazine: August 1979, Dr. Terror stalks Hollywood which includes bio info, by JR Young

Killing His Contemporaries: Dissecting The Musical Worlds Of John Carpenter Daniel and Seth Nelson, May 2002

John Carpenter: A Dialogue Kent Conrad and Joe Cormack from Exploding Goat, September 2, 2004

Building a Better Bomb: The Alternatives to Suspense Peter Gelderblom from 24LiesASecond, January 7, 2005

LAZY EYE THEATRE: Let The John Carpenter Blog-A-Thon Commence from Piper, April 9, 2007

John Carpenter - The Amplifier Online .::. South Central Kentucky's ... Mark Griffin from The Amplifier, March 5, 2008

Richard B. Riddick: Escaped convict, Murderer and John Carpenter Anti-Hero John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, March 1, 2010

Carpenter, John They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Boston Globe December 9, 1984. Director John Carpenter talks about the movie biz big budgets and cold burgers Interview by Michael Blowen

The Two Sides of John Carpenter (Interview from the L.A. Weekly) From Paranoia to Providence, by Michael Dare, Januray 4 – 10, 1985

John Carpenter interview by Joshua Klein from the Onion A.V. Club, October 28, 1998

Horror.com Staci Layne Wilson 2-part interview on the set in Vancouver, B.C. with John Carpenter and producer David Foster, May 11, 2005

Interview with The Onion A.V. Club by Noel Murray, October 26, 2005

John Carpenter - film composer

John Carpenter – Music at Last.fm you may listen to several Carpenter musical themes

John Carpenter a compilation of Carpenter’s music

Wallflower Press- the Cinema of John Carpenter brief comments on a book edited by Ian Conrich and David Woods

John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness by Gilles Boulenger book review by James O’Ehley from the Sci-Fi Page, Pt 1 of a 5-part series

Next: "Quite gruesome and gory even by today’s standards; the film was actually banned here in South Africa for a while." Pt 2 of a 5-part series

Next: "You didn’t have to be an adolescent teenage anarchist to notice the appealing antiauthoritarian tendencies in Carpenter’s films." Pt 3 of 5

Next: Exclusive excerpts from John Carpenter - Prince of Darkness Excerpts from the book, Pt 4 of a 5-part series

Next: John Carpenter on They Live, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Village of the Damned, Escape from L.A. and Ghosts of Mars Pt 5 of a 5-part series

YouTube - John Landis, John Carpenter & David Cronenberg (Part 1 of 3) a 26-minute roundtable discussion from 1982 between filmmakers John Landis, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and Mick Garris

John Carpenter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

REVENGE OF THE COLOSSAL BEASTS

USA 1962

from imdb Author: Hell-Burner from Belgium (link lost)

What a lucky chance to fall on one of the first John 'God' Carpenter try! This movie was made when he was 14. We already can see the power of his directing way, and the fact that John Carpenter is an artisan explode at face. When you are 14 and that you create such a thing like that, all that you can do is to put 10 for the effort. The influence of Howard Hawkes is already visible, too.

DARK STAR

USA (83 mi) 1974

Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Cox]

Carpenter's fondly remembered first feature, which the director himself described as 'One big optical - Waiting for Godot in space'. Four bombed-out astronauts journey endlessly through the galaxy, whiling away the time with jokes, sunlamp treatment, personal diaries on videotape, and games with their own pet alien. Arguably the last great hippy movie with its jokey references to drugs, the Absurd and California surfing (one crew member makes it back to earth on an improvised board), it also anticipates the sci-fi vogue of the '70s (Alien and Carpenter's own gem The Fog) as well as taking a healthy sideswipe at the pretensions of 2001. Sheer delight.

Space is boring. Kubrick's 2001 makes a point of exploring the tedium of space travel, as do many other films; but Dark Star remains the only one to exploit this key fact for laughs.

It concerns the attempts by four astronauts, who are hysterical with boredom and hate each other to pieces to relieve the dullness of travelling between their "missions". One's a hippy, one's a slob, one gazes at the stars and the fourth guy came in to check the oxygen tanks and didn't leave quick enough. But things go horribly wrong when the ship is hit by an asteroid shower causing the central (female) computer to fail and bomb no. 19 develops a serious attitude. Described by Carpenter as "one big optical Waiting For Godot in space", Dark Star is not just a satire on pretentious sci-fi films like 2001, but also on American culture in general - one character's penchant for surfing, for example. It's an unusual debut from a director who went on to make thrillers such as They Live and The Thing, but then suspense only comes as a result of long periods when nothing happens (just look at Hitchcock). Writer/actor Dan O'Bannon went on to direct Return Of The Living Dead.

Dark Star was a student film made on a tiny budget (the alien gives it away a bit), so join ESVP and see if you can do better.

Set to the country ditty “Benson, Arizona,” the intro spaceship sequence of Dark Star is an apt career-opening moment for John Carpenter, whose directorial debut – like so much of his underrated genre output – is steeped in classic Western tropes. Nods to Howard Hawks, however, are here married to a tongue-in-cheek spoof of Kubrick’s 2001, whose sentient, emotional HAL is reconfigured by Carpenter and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (future scribe of Alien) into a chatty female motherboard and a stubborn bomb who wants to explode in the loading bay despite being informed that the launch order was an error. Somewhat episodic in nature, the film – made while Carpenter and O’Bannon were completing their postgraduate degrees at USC’s film school – concerns the various misadventures of the titular ship’s three astronauts. Their mission is to destroy unstable stars to facilitate intergalactic colonization, though the filmmakers primarily use the trio’s story as a vehicle for updating the sci-fi genre for the ‘70s hippie-slacker-drug counterculture via goofy gags and a fittingly grungy, ramshackle aesthetic. Dark Star isn’t nearly as funny as it once was (as a kid, its humor seemed considerably more inspired), but it nonetheless has its amusing moments, such as Pinback’s (O’Bannon) cartoony elevator-shaft pursuit of a beach ball-shaped pet alien, or a final, cosmically loony image of a surfboarding spaceman. And more interestingly, it contains glimmers of its director’s future trademarks, from its minimalist synth score and efficient widescreen panoramas to its inventive use of low-fi special effects.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

A satire of 2001: A Space Odyssey, of course, but also a response against Kubrick's inhuman technology -- the machines here, particularly the titular spaceship, are scrapped together, literally handmade guerilla contraptions. A triangular model sails across the bottom of the screen, the camera lies on its side to summon the vertical perspective of an elevator shaft, and the rattle of bottles and cans provides chimes for an ad-libbed piano-xylophone. The fond cheesiness, closer to It! The Terror from Beyond Space than Arthur C. Clarke, has a low-tech grace, to say nothing of dorm-room, stoner vibes anticipating the Mystery Science Theater 3000 wise-asses. Appropriately, it's a USC Master Thesis expanded to semi-feature length by two budding genre artisans, John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon. Much of it comes from O'Bannon, whose treatment is a deadpan sketch for his Alien darlings (the genesis of the chest-busting slime-drippers of that slicker space opera lies, disarmingly, in a red beach ball equipped with flippers); he also plays the least atrophied of the crew members, long vanished underneath manes, beards and ennui in their mission of vaporizing unstable intergalactic orbs. Yet the invaded Hawksian aesthetic, a camera slithering elegantly across cramped spaces, and gloved intimidations of parallel worlds (the body of the ship's commander, cryogenically frozen in the basement, wheezes info from the beyond) are all Carpenter's, no less ingenious a genre comment than his later, more polished evocations. The tone is meditative slapstick, "How do you know you exist" asked to the bomb ready to detonate the ship, then "Let there be light" and a moment of sublimity -- a piece of debris becomes a surfing board and the comic turns cosmic, the vastness of the universe contemplated to country mooning ("Benson Arizona, the same stars in the sky/But they seemed so much kinder when we watched them, you and I"). With Brian Narelle, Carl Kuniholm, and Dre Pahich.

eFilmCritic Reviews Dr. Isaksson

John Carpenter's first feature film Dark Star, a production created during his time in film school, is definitely a small taste of what this amazing director had in store. Years before 'The Great Horror Director' gave us "Assault on Precinct 13" "Halloween," "The Fog," "Christine" etc. Carpenter and his fellow film student and pal Dan O' Bannon wrote, produced and starred in this very very low budget sci fi film which took years to complete and actually saw a theatrical release.

Filmed from 1970 to 1973 and then released in 1974, Dark Star, written by Dan O' Bannon and John Carpenter and directed by John, follows a small group of space travelers who wander throughout the infinant universe blowing up what they consider 'unstable planets'. Their mission being to make space more stable for habitation. At least I THINK that's what the plot was aiming for, (I could be wrong.) The crew on board the ship aptly named the Dark Star consist of four astronauts who are known as the 'space truckers'. There is the thoughtful man in charge Lt.Doolittle (Brian Narelle), the incredibly bored and weary Boiler, (Cal Kuniholm), the thoughtful and still a bit willing Kalby (Andrew Dre Pahich) and of course the goofy scene stealer of the film, Sgt.Pinback (played by writer Dan O'Bannon). The overall focus of the film basically just centers around these four guys who have been floating around for what seems like years. None are all that interested in the mission they have set out to do and they certainly are no longer bothering to interact with one another anymore. The attempts at humor with this kind of bored comedic tone is weaker than it thinks it is but at least the effort is there. This lazy concept can only leave the viewer wondering how does the film expect to be humorous if no one gives a shit about anything? So what would be the logical step? To bring in another character or creature to stir up the bland atmosphere. That they do and that character turns out to be an Alien. A PET Alien that is. Seems that this non hostile creature was a discovery of Pinback who found it during one of the many missions out in space and he decided to bring the little thing on board for a pet. I won't give away what this Alien looks like but it has to be seen to be believed. Trust me it isn't a Giger-esque creation by any means.

The rest of the production on the film is actually quite good and the attempt of trying to tackle the tricky art of a science fiction film way back in the infancy of space travel was really a risky endeavor but Dark Star glows with an amateurish glee that actually enhances it's charm and makes it easier to sit through. It's understandable to wince at the weak acting and crappy sets but take into account that this was made by very young guys who had aspirations to become film directors. The work here by Carpenter and O'Bannon is admirable but when you get down to the actual story, it's quite interesting and well conceived. It all makes sense that these astronauts would be sick of each other and basically have nothing important to say. But this set up isn't going to have the theaters packed with loving audiences. It's just too slow and this problem of long, drawn out scenes was party due to the fact that a film distributor was willing to release the film only if the film was lengthened for theatrical release. So what would probably make a much more fun and easy to watch shorter film ended up becoming an overly long feature film considering the storyline. This being noted, the lack of money and talent doesn't diminish the impact of Dark Star because much of what John Carpenter has become famous for shows up in this film. As always he is in great control of the camera and knows exactly what he wants from his shots. His ability to catch the intriguing but subtle moments of interaction between characters is evident. The terrific mood lighting and gloomy synth music which was always created and performed by Carpenter in all of his films is here in all it's cheesy brilliance.

And it is easy to gather that this film was clearly a prelude to what was to become the best SCI FI horror film of all time, 1979's Alien which was written by Dan O'Bannon. All of the elements that made Alien so wonderful are here in Dark Star.The cold and grimy spaceship, the talking mother computer, the cryogenic sleep, hell, even travelling through the air ducts is part of the plot here. As far as my overall impression of the cast, well it's all you can expect from film school students and O'Bannon's performance sways from horrifically amateurish to slightly endearing. The rest do pretty good work as well considering their lack of expirence and the film really does manage to go along without getting completely flat out dull. But the slow pacing can be death to some viewers and this slow pace probably lead to the film's downfall at the theaters. However, since it's initial release it has become a small cult classic and of course it cannot go without saying that Dark Star, without question, set the stage for what was to become Dan O'Bannon's masterpiece Alien. So how could I diss on this film without a little love because of what came next?

Dark Star is actually a lot like an earlier version of ALIEN, minus the scares, the talent and the budget.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

VideoVista Paul Higson

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Close-Up Film [Dave Smith]

DVD Verdict Erick Harper

SCI-FI Movie Page - DVD Review James O’Ehley

CineScene.com (Ed Owens) also reviewing BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA

The 7th Level also reviewing ASSAULT IN PRECINCT 13, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, and GHOSTS OF MARS

The Official John Carpenter, London Times: March 8, 1978. The slow evolution of Dark Star David Robinson

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13

USA (91 mi) 1976 ‘Scope

Just as Dark Star undercut the solemnity of space movies like 2001 with hilarious astronaut situation comedy, Carpenter's second feature borrows the conventions of protagonists in jeopardy from Night of the Living Dead to produce one of the most effective exploitation movies of the decade. The gimmick is cops and cons besieged in an abandoned LA police station by a group of kamikaze urban guerillas. Carpenter scrupulously avoids any overt socio-political pretensions, playing it instead for laughs and suspense in perfectly balanced proportions. The result is a thriller inspired by a buff's admiration for Ford and Hawks (particularly Rio Bravo), with action sequences comparable to anything in Siegel or Fuller. It's sheer delight from beginning to end.

A Film Odyssey [Robert Humanick]

John Carpenter’s neo-Western Assault on Precinct 13 (loosely based on Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo) is as formally compact and rigorously efficient as anything the genre filmmaker ever made. The story of a police station that, the night before its closing, is besieged by a mysterious gang known as Street Thunder, Carpenter’s early career triumph – his second film, following 1974’s Dark Star – is at once a grittily exhilarating action film and an intelligent, thinly coded allegory for 1970s racial tensions. From a discussion about coffee between just-transferred black cop Bishop (Austin Stoker) and ballsy white officer Julie (Nancy Keyes), to Bishop’s uneasy partnership with sardonic Caucasian criminal Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), Carpenter posits a station under attack from both heavily armed assailants and shifting racial and gender attitudes. Not that such heady stuff interferes with the director’s combat-heavy set pieces, which feature their share of illogicalities – such as the gang members’ mindless attempts to infiltrate the station via broken windows, making them easy targets for Bishop and company’s bullets – but nonetheless exhibit an economical toughness epitomized by the infamous, delirious early scene involving gun-toting Street Thunder members, a little girl, and an ice cream truck.

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

John Carpenter may imagine himself a genre artisan born a generation too late, yet his films can't help being colored by the racial, sexual and political tensions of his turbulent times. Nothing illustrates his seemingly schizoid richness better than his lean update of personal fave Rio Bravo -- a Western in modern urban drag, unapologetically old-school in its straightforward drive, though with the serenity of Howard Hawks' classic cracked under the weight of Vietnam-era anxieties. Thus, the narrative kicks off with the beautiful horizontal lines of L.A. disrupted by the police slaughtering members of a gang of street toughs, whose multiracial leaders, Che beret in place, are then seen ceremoniously dipping blood into a bowl before taking off for vengeance. Against the volatile ghetto topography is Austin Stoker's rock-solid cop, whose babysitting job at the ready-to-close Precinct 13 becomes a test in heroism when in stumbles the gang's target, a schmo gone catatonic after offing a member to avenge his daughter. Off go the lights and the phones, and Stoker and the station's crew (including deadpan policewoman Laurie Zimmer and prisoner Darwin Joston) have to fend off the outside invaders who, by now, have morphed into a rolling, dehumanized force leaking through the venetian blinds. For all the project's B-movie mantle, Carpenter's Panavision formalism, with emphasis on interacting space caught in airtight middle-distances, displays a crystalline rigor to shame pricier, more "respectable" films -- a torrential of abstracting, oddly lyrical effects wrung out of people throwing guns to one other, a bullet sailing through a pigtailed moppet's vanilla ice cream cone and into her chest, a police station cut to ribbons during a noiseless bulletfest. Less remake than reconsideration of Rio Bravo's themes (and a masterpiece on its own right), the film taps into old Hollywood imagery while raising questions of its place and validity in the midst of politically shifting times: When Zimmer's smashing low-budget Bacall places a cigarette in Joston's laconic lips and lights a match in the same gesture, it is a moment of idealized iconography right out of Only Angels Have Wings, yet complicated (and enriched) by the paradoxical subversion of Carpenter's art. With Tony Burton, Nancy Loomis, Martin West, and Charles Chypher.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Kent Jones of Film Comment has referred to horror maven John Carpenter as the last genre filmmaker working in America (indeed, while everyone else seems to move with the digital tide, Carpenter remains a resilient "analog man"). Joseph Kaufman, executive producer of Carpenter's thoroughly-modern western Assault on Precinct 13, wrote in a 1994 essay: "People have noticed that both Rio Bravo and Assault on Precinct 13 take place in besieged and isolated police stations, and that moral codes of behavior are important in the two films." Kaufman is careful to point out that the Assault on Precinct 13 isn't a literal imitation of Howard Hawks's film, but there's no mistaking the modern racial and sexual politics encoded in the distinctly western elements of Carpenter's lean, mean, genre-defying masterpiece.

Less subtle though arguably more successful than Romero's Night of the Living Dead, the film evokes an ever-shifting political pecking order when a cultural cross-section of society trapped inside a Los Angeles police station wages war against a violent street gang named Street Thunder. Blaxploitation star Austin Stoker stars as Bishop, a cop sent to baby-sit Precinct 13 as it closes shop. Tensions mount when cops shoot and kill six members of the gang. (A news reporter notes the interracial mixture of the victims, in essence setting up the film's critical race crisis.) Members of Street Thunder go on a killing spree, senselessly (and fabulously) offing an ice-cream man and the daughter of a man who's obviously distrustful of authority. When the man avenges his daughter's death and seeks refuge inside Precinct 13, Street Thunder descends on the police station with menacing aplomb.

Bishop is none-too-happy that he has to tend shop at a police station his first day on the job. "There are no heroes anymore, Bishop," says his commissioner over the radio to the unsuspecting officer oblivious that he'll have to rid a besieged, god-forsaken town of a violent pestilence. Bishop is welcomed hospitably at Precinct 13 by the sexy Leigh (the great Laurie Zimmer), who shows him the ropes and offers him a friendly cup of coffee as if she were the proprietress at a lone saloon. She asks him if he likes it black. "For over 30 years," he says. She gets the joke, but she's clearly not amused. Compare her to Julie, the whiney chicken-shit played by a hysterical Nancy Kyes, and it's obvious that Leigh is a woman in full control of her sex—certainly she's one to be reckoned with (at least one who'd rather rescue herself than have a man do all the work for her).

Carpenter acknowledges that his protagonists are equally responsible for the choices they make. As a troubled black youth, Bishop walked out of the ghetto on his own, but thanks in part to the guidance of his father. Conversely, white prisoner Napoleon Wilson (the late Darwin Joston) turned to violence on his own, but no thanks to negative encouragement (a priest once told him: "You have something to do with death"). But what is the audience to make of Bishop fearfully observing a white officer as he loads his rifle, or the black prisoner, Wells (Tony Burton), who shoots his silencer at Street Thunder only to realize after one of the film's many mini-battles that his gun wasn't loaded? Carpenter's doesn't allow his characters to play any sort of blame games, and despite any lingering hang-ups they may have with each other's color, the director acknowledges that our problems with race are obscuring larger issues dealing with misguided authority and rampant political deception.

It's easy to dismiss the film's racial morality play as simple, but there's plenty going on beneath the surface of Carpenter's formalist exercise. At Precinct 13, Carpenter envisions a society in moral transition. A crazed and naïve Kathy can't understand why anyone would shoot at a police station (observe the startling defiance of authority when gang members walk stealthily toward the police station with "DO NOT ENTER" street signs to either side of them), and when she realizes that Street Thunder is only after the traumatized man who ran into the Precinct, she suggests that they throw him back into the street. "Don't give me that civilized look!" she screams, feeling the burn of Bishop and Leigh's scorn. With a name like Bishop, it's not surprising that Stoker's hero is a man of God who is not about to forsake his fellow man much-needed sanctuary.

Because Assault on Precinct 13 is among one of the most remarkably composed films of all time, it's easy to look at Carpenter's rigorous framing techniques as their own acts of political resistance. The film's tight medium-shots position the characters in constant defiance of each other: blacks against whites, women against men, prisoners against officers. When Wells announces that he will attempt to escape Precinct 13 (he humorously calls his plan "Save Ass"), Bishop suggests a fairer approach. After a speedy lesson in trust and human decency, Wells and Wilson engage in a quickie game of Potatoes that positions Wells as the group's potential gateway out of the police station. Despite the tragic but inevitable human losses, no one group comes out on top because only their capacity for kindness reigns supreme in Carpenter's democratic kingdom.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

PopMatters David Sanjek

Images Movie Journal James Newman

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

VideoVista Tom Matic

eFilmCritic Dr. Isaksson

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez)

Assault on Precinct 13 Head Cheeze from HorrorView

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

DVD Movie Central Gordon Justesen

The 7th Level also reviewing DARK STAR, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, and GHOSTS OF MARS

HALLOWEEN A 96

USA (91 mi) 1978 ‘Scope

An exercise in precision, as there isn’t an ounce of excess in this film, honed down to its purest essence as a creepy slasher film that uses the maniacal repeating piano note soundtrack to alert the audience to the presence of Michael Myers, a child murderer when he himself was a child, now a young adult escaped psychopath on the loose who comes home again on Halloween night to wreak havoc in the life of a few teenage high school babysitters who seem to have other things on their minds. It’s an interesting balance of the phenomenal persistence of evil against the prevailing complacency in a quiet, small town community which would never suspect anything like this could happen in their town. But that’s precisely what works in this film, as no one suspects anything, and by the time they’re on to him, it’s too late. Beautifully shot in ‘Scope, showing surprisingly little graphic blood and gore, despite being the mother lode of slasher films spawning so many imitators in the 70’s and 80’s that did, Carpenter builds the mood through a series of skillfully made tracking shots where the camera becomes the eyesight of the psychotic stalker, who is usually seen freely roaming the neighborhood wearing a white mask, accompanied by the sounds of his breathing, always contrasted against the banal details of ordinary suburban life.

The AMERICAN GRAFFITI-like dialogue, a superb mixture of playfulness and humor, is an extremely accurate portrayal of teenagers, where adults are altogether missing, leaving the kids to fend for themselves to negotiate their own obstacles or pitfalls. Donald Pleasence plays the psychiatrist who’s been treating Michael since he was a child, who knows him better than anyone else, calling him the most dangerous patient he’s ever treated, but his warnings also fall on deaf ears. Young attractive babysitters prancing around in scanty attire are meant to attract the eye of more than Michael Myers, but what he does with these girls is classically demented, yet strangely evident of a lunatic’s thinking. Jamie Lee Curtis made her debut in this film, and does a wonderful job balancing her suspicions that something is not right against her own intelligence that tells her otherwise, including informing the kids she’s babysitting, for instance, that there’s no such thing as a “bogeyman,” even after Carpenter has provided her, and the viewer, with contrary evidence. It’s interesting also that later in her career she successfully made the transition playing the role of the mom in the hilarious 2003 Disney remake of FREAKY FRIDAY. There’s a wonderful use of television, which is playing horror movies like THE THING (1951), which Carpenter himself remade, also FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956), which establishes a mainstream theme of sci-fi and horror as safe and acceptable material for children to see within a horror film.

Kathryn Bergeron for 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

No director since Alfred Hitchcock has managed to capture the delicious voyeurism of horror as well as John Carpenter in Halloween, a film so entrenched with our primordial anxieties that it continues to define the genre more than 20 years later. Indeed, the comparison between Hitchcock and Carpenter is no stretch; Halloween is saturated with Carpenter’s tribute to Hitchcock, from character names – Sam Loomis and Tom Doyle, from Psycho (1960) and Rear Window (1954), respectively – to the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh, the ill-fated shower victim in Psycho.

Halloween’s plot is simple enough: a masked psychopath, Michael Myers, stabs and strangles his way through a group of teenage friends as they drink beer and pursue sexual encounters, until he finally comes up against the one pure force in the movie, the virginal babysitter Laurie Strode (Curtis). Despite its minimalism, the pronounced social anxieties of Halloween’s good-versus-evil plot are left unresolved, a strategy repeated consistently in slasher films from Friday the 13^th (1980) to Scream (1996). The intensity of Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s screenplay lies in situating the terror in the calm visage of suburbia, where one would (or at least used to) assume children were safe and sound.

Deconstructing notions of the protective homestead, Halloween’s camera work violates the fictitious town of Haddonfield with the roving point of view shot. The film’s opening shot is itself a radiantly executed point-of-view take, peering through the eyes of the then-six-year-old-killer. Carpenter constructs a purely aesthetic fear, separating Halloween from its own drudgingly expository progeny. Throughout the film, someone is always watching, be it predator or prey. The jolts of subjectivity in Halloween are entrancing, and as the film unravels we are left to peek around corners, over shoulders, through windows, and out of closets at what we are sure is impending doom.

The brilliant pacing and excruciatingly long takes manage to keep the adrenaline pumping, as Michael slinks in the shadows, rising from death again and again to chase the clever Laurie. In the end, we are left to wonder uncomfortably about the thread of separation between fact and fiction.

A superb essay in Hitchcockian suspense, which puts all its sleazy Friday the 13th imitators to shame with its dazzling skills and mocking wit. Rarely have the remoter corners of the screen been used to such good effect as shifting volumes of darkness and light reveal the presence of a sinister something. We know, and Carpenter knows we know, that it's all a game as his psycho starts decimating teenagers observed in the sexual act; and he delights in being one step ahead of expectation, revealing nothing when there should be something, and something - as in the subtle reframing of the girl sobbing in the doorway after she finally manages to kill the killer, showing the corpse suddenly sitting up again behind her - long after there should be nothing. Perhaps not quite so resonant as Psycho to which it pays due homage, but it breathes the same air.

Halloween Dave Kehr from the Reader

John Carpenter's 1978 tour de force, perhaps the most widely imitated film of the 70s. As a homicidal maniac stalks the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, Carpenter displays an almost perfect understanding of the mechanics of classical suspense; his style draws equally (and intelligently) from both Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. Though the film seems conscious of no significance beyond its own stylistic dexterity, its buried themes of sexual transgression and punishment appear to have touched something deep in the soul of the American teenager. The film, in its duplicitous way, makes a powerful plea for the comfort and security of puritanism. With Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, and P.J. Soles. 93 min.

John Carpenter scored major points by nailing the essence of middle American terror. Halloween's Michael Myers struck fear in the hearts of moviegoers with an embodied Evil that made short work of suburban serenity. Responsible for jump-starting Jamie Lee Curtis’s career, this one so thoroughly and thoughtfully exploited American angst that it’s no wonder we had to sit through a slew of derivative slasher flicks for the better part of the next decade. Try to see it on Criterion’s laserdisc, where the essential Panavision frame is intact, and you can look at this again with a fresh eye. Director of Photography Dean Cundey helped define the widescreen Carpenter style through the 1980s, but is better known for the miraculous cinematography of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Jurassic Park (1993), and Apollo 13 (1995).

Halloween Pauline Kael from the New Yorker in 1978

John Carpenter, who made the low-budget scare picture Halloween, has a visual sense of menace. He quickly sets up an atmosphere of fear, and his blue night tones have a fine, chilling ambience---the style is reminiscent of the Halloween episode in Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis. But Carpenter isn't very gifted with actors, and he doesn't seem to have any feeling at all for motivation or for plot logic. Halloween has a pitful, amateurish script (by Carpenter and his producer, Debra Hill). An escaped lunatic wielding a kitchen knife stalks people in a small Midwestern town (Haddonfield, Illinois), and that's about it. There's no indication of why he selects any particular target; he's the bogeyman---pure evil---and he wants to kill. The film is largely just a matter of the camera tracking subjectively from the mad killer's point of view, leading you to expect something awful to happen. But the camera also tracks subjectively when he isn't around at all; in fact, there's so much subjective tracking you begin to think everybody in the movie has his own camera.

As a doctor from the lunatic asylum that the killer has escaped from, Donald Pleasence is solid and forceful; enunciating in the impeccable tradition of Lionel Atwill, he delivers idiotic exposition about e-vil. Sometimes you think he's going to have to cross his eyes to keep a straight face. Carpenter doesn't seem to have had any life outside the movies: one can trace almost every idea on the screen to directors such as Hitchcock and Brian De Palma and to the Val Lewton productions. It may even be that Carpenter selected Jamie Lee Curtis to be his pure heroine---the teen-age babysitter, Laurie---because she recalls the serious-faced little blond girl in The Curse of the Cat People. The daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Jamie Lee Curtis has a hoarse, low, rather inexpressive voice and a plaintive Lauren Bacall-ish look and an attractive gaucheness. For no discernible reason, the bogeyman (who is masked) zeroes in on her near the start of the picture, but he keeps being sidetracked. He has no trouble picking off the teen-agers who "fool around;" only Laurie has the virginal strength to put up a fight.

There's one really neat effect: near the beginning, when the madman is driving past, the more brash teen-age girls jeer at him, and the car pauses for an instant, as if the masked figure inside were deciding whether to dispatch the girls right then or bide his time. But Carpenter also wrote the score himself---all four bars--and he's devoted to it. With the seductive tracking shots and the repetitive music, the film stops and starts so many times before anything happens that the bogeyman's turning up just gets to be a nuisance---it means more of the same. Carpenter keeps you tense in an undifferentiated way---nervous and irritated rather than pleasurably excited---and you reach the point of wanting somebody to be killed so the film's rhythms will change. Yet a lot of people seem to be convinced that Halloween is something special---a classic. Maybe when a horror film is stripped of everything but dumb scariness---when it isn't ashamed to revive the stalest device of the genre (the escaped lunatic)---it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic, childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do.

DVD Times- Halloween 25th Anniversary SE Mike Sutton

Building a Better Bomb: The Alternatives to Suspense Peter Gelderblom from 24LiesASecond, January 7, 2005

eFilmCritic.com ("Dr. Isaksson")

Raging Bull [Matt White]

Movie Vault [John Ulmer]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) an extended essay

Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp

DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

DVD Verdict: Halloween: 25th Anniversary Edition Patrick Naugle

filmcritic.com gets spooked on Halloween Norm Schrager

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) a groupthink review

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks with his thoroughly expert analysis

ToxicUniverse.com (Lee Chase IV)

The Horror Review [Horror Bob]

Celluloid Dreams Simon Hill

Best-Horror-Movies.com Don Sumner

DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr

Monsters At Play Lawrence P. Raffel

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez) Extended Edition

DVD Verdict Limited Edition, by Sean Fitzgibbons

Filmtracks soundtrack review

John Carpenter po-mo page! It’s Michael Myers at the top of the stairs

House of Horrors Review: Halloween In Loving Memory of Donald Pleasence (1919-1995)

The Trick Was to Stay Alive: My Road Trip to Michael Myers Mecca The Myers House – North Carolina, website devoted to a replica of the original

02/28 - 03/07 a road trip to the Myer’s House, by John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, March 4, 2010

Scifi.com, Interview: John Carpenter looks back at Halloween on its 25th anniversary interview by Michael McCarty and Mark McLaughlin

31 Flicks That Give You the Willies Ed Hardy Jr from Shoot the Projectionist

Austin Chronicle [Mike Emery] taking a look at the original and 5 sequels

All Movie Guide [Donald Guarisco]

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME! – made for TV

aka: High Rise

USA (98 mi) 1978

This early John Carpenter effort, made before Halloween but telecast afterwards, is a modest but solid example of his developing skills as a filmmaker. Carpenter's script isn't terribly original (the premise and several scenes borrow heavily from Rear Window) but he makes the story his own with his own quirky brand of characterizations: Leigh escapes the usual 'pretty heroine' stereotype thanks to her independent mindset and quirky sense of humor and Paul makes a thoughtful, refreshingly non-macho romantic foil for her character. These intriguing characterizations further benefit from skillful performances by a well-chosen cast: Lauren Hutton brings the right combination of charm and skill to make her characterization believable, David Birney turns in a nicely understated performance as and Adrienne Barbeau brings a likeably feisty cynicism to the role of Leigh's wise-cracking coworker. Behind the camera, John Carpenter shows off his already solid grasp of thriller film mechanics with a combination of slick, gliding camerawork and sharply-timed editing. The limitations of the made-for-t.v. format hold back the film from delivering the full-throttle delights of his later work but he manages to pack a high level of jittery suspense into Someone's Watching Me and keeps things moving at a fast clip. As a result, it isn't top-flight Carpenter but is smart and skillful enough to make a viewing worthwhile for his fans.

John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Film and Television

Television director Lauren Hutton is being stalked, spied on, and crank-called by an anonymous creep. The cops can't do much to help, but Lauren takes matters into her own hands with the help of boyfriend David Birney and lesbian coworker Adrienne Barbeau.

John Carpenter wrote and directed this TV-movie (never released domestically on video, which makes it a hot bootleg item among Carpenter fans) before his hit Halloween, though it was televised a month after Halloween came out. It can therefore be seen as a good dry run for Halloween — Carpenter does a lot with even less onscreen violence — though viewers who happen to stumble upon it on cable and who don't appreciate Carpenter's participation may just consider it a better-than-average "jep" (woman-in-jeopardy) thriller.

There are Carpenter touches throughout — the mystery man popping up in backgrounds, Hutton losing her knife down a grate — but the movie sorely lacks Carpenter's customary ominous score and musical "stings"; Harry Sukman's wannabe-Herrmann score is cheesy at best. Fans of Carpenter and Halloween will certainly want to track this down, though.

Carpenter's teleplay was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award — very likely the only time he'll be in competition with Nora Ephron for an award.

User Reviews from imdb Author: Oliver Lenhardt from Toronto

John Carpenter's SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME! is an undisguised homage to REAR WINDOW, with nods to BLACK CHRISTMAS (an avowed favourite of Carpenter's) and the Italian Giallo genre, specifically Argento's DEEP RED. One elaborate scene, wherein the anxious heroine drops a knife through a grate, and then squeezes laboriously into the crawlspace beneath to hide, is a clear riff on giallo scenography.

The material is stale, but the execution is not. Carpenter's virtuoso use of gliding camera shots, shadow detail, composition, and mise en scene, ratchets up the suspense even during what would otherwise be incidental scenes in another director's hands. On occasion, TV-movie limpness creeps in momentarily, but, in the main, the picture's production is very professionally handled.

One major irritant is Lauren Hutton's protagonist, Leigh. She is endlessly spunky, constantly talking to herself, always rushing headlong into situations. It's grating right from the start, but as events unfold, her happy-go-lucky ebullience morphs (in the viewers' eyes) into a kind of blithe stupidity. Most thinking people would have closed their curtains, locked their doors, taken the prank calls more seriously, or perhaps moved away (pride be damned), much sooner than did she. Certainly most people wouldn't have walked knowingly into the stalker's trap, as Leigh does at the very end. "Someone's Watching Me" is nerve-wracking enough for one to suspend one's incredulity, and good enough to belong in, or just below, the rarefied sphere of Carpenter's two best, HALLOWEEN and THE THING.

Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Aisle Seat [Andre Dursin]

Final Girl Stacie Ponder

Cinema de Merde

Mr. Satanism's Video Picks for Perverts

Examiner.com [Ben Kenber]

DVDBeaver.com [Eric Cotenas]

ELVIS – made for TV

USA (150 mi) 1979 UK release in 1988 (163 mi)

User Reviews from imdb Author: blanche-2 from United States

This magnificently produced biop of Elvis Presley contains an eerie, almost frightening portrayal of Presley by Kurt Russell, who literally seems to be inhabited by Elvis' spirit.

Physically, the movie is perfect in casting and location - you could see a freeze of any frame of this film and know it's about Elvis.

All that being said, die-hard Elvis fans will be left frustrated by the movies' gaping holes and unnecessary inaccuracies, the biggest of which is that the film stops in 1970 when Elvis lived until 1977. One can understand having to leave out parts and truncating others but this film went too far. There is nothing indicating Elvis' drug use, which began in the army; nothing that touches on the other women in his life while he was with Priscilla; he and Priscilla seem to be talking divorce in 1969; Elvis' Vegas opening is combined with his later touring - and the concert opens with "2001: A Space Odyssey" - no way; Elvis rants and raves about the movies he has to make, but it's 1968, he's supposed to be doing his comeback special and he's just about free of the films; and on and on. For dramatic effect, the circumstances of his mother's death were changed so that Elvis is present in the hospital room - yet the true description of Elvis learning of his mother's death in the Peter Guralnick book is much more harrowing.

Interestingly, however, the film does touch on Elvis' lethal enmeshment with his mother and the "twinless twin" syndrome, showing him often talking with Jesse. If they could draw on those elements, the producers certainly could have come up with a more accurate script.

Brian Koller, filmsgraded.com

On its broadcast debut on Feb. 11, 1979, Elvis was one of the highest rated made-for-television movies ever shown. It had stiff competition as well, as CBS was showing Gone With the Wind. It was made not long after the August 1977 death of its subject, rock and roll entertainer Elvis Presley.

For a film that was made for television, Elvis had an impressive cast and crew. The director was John Carpenter, whose Halloween was a big box office hit the year before. Kurt Russell had the lead role, and was a brilliant casting. Not only did he look much like Elvis, but he could mimic Elvis' angst without it appearing as parody. Useless trivia: Russell made his screen debut in the 1963 Elvis vehicle It Happened at the World's Fair, as the boy who kicks Elvis.

Multiple Oscar winner Shelley Winters played Elvis' mother Gladys, capturing her humble, selfless, maternal Southern personality. Bing Russell, the real-life father of Kurt, played Elvis' dad Vernon. While screenwriter Anthony Lawrence was not a great talent, he certainly knew his subject matter. His first three screenplays were for Elvis musicals during the 1960s. Dick Clark of "American Bandstand" served as executive producer.

Elvis is not a great movie. The biggest problem is the pacing, which can be very slow. Sometimes the story can be melodramatic, with Elvis quick to wallow in self-pity whenever a setback occurs. The darker side of Elvis isn't covered: he was already abusing prescription pills by the 1960s, he was not faithful to Priscilla. The story also cuts off in 1969, conveniently bypassing his career and physical decline. As a result, the film is very sympathetic to Elvis, and concentrates on his personality strengths. He was very devoted to his family, he was religious, he was loyal and generous to friends. Their sycophantic relationship to him is well covered.

Another problem is the soundtrack. Although obtaining the rights to original Elvis songs would have been expensive, it would also have been much preferable to hearing vastly inferior soundalikes from Ronnie McDowell.

But on the whole, Elvis is a successful and well-intentioned film that fairly accurately tracks his career through 1969. All the legendary stories are covered; that his first record was made as a gift to his mother, that someone at the Grand Ole Opry told Elvis to go back to driving a truck, that Elvis snubbed his best friend Red West (Robert Gray) by not inviting him to his wedding with Priscilla (Season Hubley), that Elvis had a blow up with a Hollywood director, telling him that he was going to stop making 'these stupid movies'.

An even better film about Elvis is the pseudo-documentary This is Elvis, which benefits from archive footage and actual Elvis recordings. (65/100)

seanax.com [Sean Axmaker]

Slant Magazine (DVD) Eric Henderson

The A.V. Club: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

366 Weird Movies [Alfred Eaker]

Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]

KQEK.com [Mark R. Hasan]

THE FOG B+ 92

USA (89 mi) 1980 ‘Scope

“To the ships at sea who can hear my voice, look across the water into the darkness. Look for the fog.” —Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau)

THE FOG comes at a distinct time in Carpenter’s life, riding on the heels of HALLOWEEN’S success, a film made for $320,000 that eventually grossed over $100 million worldwide, but it also marked a personal crossroads, as he had been cohabitating with longtime producer Debra Hill, who produced only one more film for the next 15 years, as they split up when Carpenter fell in love with his young protégé, Adrienne Barbeau, first appearing in his earlier made-for-TV thriller SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME (1978), one of the stars of this film that he eventually married, who is utilized in a kind of jazzy radio deejay homage to Eastwood’s role in PLAY MISTY FOR ME (1971). So there’s an interesting blend of the past coming to terms with the present, also expressed through the use of Jamie Lee Curtis (from HALLOWEEN) and her mother Janet Leigh (from PSYCHO), all blending together to create a unique thematic unison, as THE FOG is a ghost story about looking back into your own history and discovering things are not what they seem, that incidents from the past can come back to haunt you. Once more, like in HALLOWEEN, the camera feels like it has eyes, that it moves back and forth and peers around corners, fulfilling the curiosity of the viewer.

Using striking California oceanfront locations just north of San Francisco at Inverness and Pt. Reyes, former hang outs of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, another sleepy coastline community comes together to celebrate their 100^th year anniversary, paying tribute to the strength and formidable spirit of those founding fathers whose dark secret that we ultimately discover is that they were cutthroat murderers, led by a priest who had a near biblical hatred towards the thought of allowing a colony of lepers to locate nearby, so after inviting them into the commuity, he orchestrated their shipwreck at sea so that his town could steal their gold and prosper. In the opening sequence, John Houseman plays the Robert Shaw role in JAWS (1975), or Wallace Beery before that in TREASURE ISLAND (1934), personified nowadays by Davey Jones in the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN series, a crusty old warhorse of a sailor layered in the barnacles and brine from the bottom of the sea, telling captivated young children a ghost story a few minutes before midnight about how sailors tell a story about how a dense fog had caused this legendary shipwreck carrying a treasure of gold, a fog never before seen or since, that legend has it will reappear one day and the dead souls will rise from the bottom of the sea and reclaim what is rightfully theirs. This is quickly told in two or three minutes before the opening credit sequence, but it lays the groundwork for the next 85 minutes to come, another well integrated, well edited, bare bones story that leads to a legendary climax in a church where the ominous dead rise out of a fog that has descended over the entire town, where the fog itself takes on a “glowing” characteristic, which becomes so sinister and threatening in nature that one is tempted to yell out “It’s alive!”

Adrienne Barbeau is terrific as Stevie Wayne, the lone owner of a radio station that operates in the tower inside a lighthouse on the edge of town, choosing relaxed, mellow old jazz standards that play through the night while giving the station identification announcements in that coy, reassuredly sexy voice that speaks directly to each listener, like she’s speaking only to you in the comfort of your living room. But one night, just after midnight, weird things start happening, things that make no sense but are reminiscent somewhat of the yet to come movie CHRISTINE (1983), so this is a foreboding precursor for things to come as the town just for the briefest moment goes haywire. Blink and you’ll miss it. Even if you see it, you’ll likely overlook what you saw, believing you were tired, daydreaming and perhaps seeing things. But something strikes in the middle of the night and what appears to be a crewless ship returns to shore the next morning with odd, inexplicable deaths attributed. Only Stevie who saw the “glowing” fog moving in the opposite direction of the wind made a connection that something was not right. When she sees it reappear again the next night, she takes to the radio airwaves to warn everyone, growing more hysterical by the minute when she realizes her son may be in harm’s way. This is beautifully cross cut with the town’s commemoration speeches, led by Janet Leigh, a descendent to one of the founding fathers, but also Jamie Lee Curtis, working side by side with her mom at certain points, who plays a wayward hitchhiker who once again is taunted by the imminent harm of dark menacing creatures of the night, especially a fabulous moment when a dead corpse rises unsuspectingly behind her.

Carpenter’s signature music is brilliant, one of his best scores, always on cue at any sign of danger, but it really ratchets up to near hysteric pitch to match Stevie’s delirious rising fear on the air, using outstanding rhythmic percussive sounds which include crashing gong noises as the action picks up, as a desperate car attempts to outrace the approaching fog which eventually engulfs the entire town. But its target is the church, the origin of the hate crime against them in the first place, where Hal Holbrook is the mumbling, somewhat incoherent and nearly deranged parrish priest once he discovers the town’s dark secret, which flies like a poltergeist out of its hiding place behind a large stone at the church one night in the form of a secret diary which tells the whole story. He’s sure his days are numbered, which takes place in a picture perfect sequence as the dead rise from out of the fog behind the pews inside his church, a wonderful mixture of darkness and light, sin and redemption, even fire and brimstone, as he carries a giant cross molded out of the missing gold, the burden the town has carried for a hundred years, as the Father attempts to atone for the town and the church’s past sins. Mixed in with this sequence is Stevie Wayne crawling up to the roof of the lighthouse where out of the eerie blue light of the fog are ghoulishly dark faceless creatures of the undead bearing giant hooks, where the incessant pounding of Kabuki-like sticks drives the pulsating fury of the moment to a fevered pitch, using close ups, alternating light from the lighthouse and incredibly oblique angles to excellent effect. It has a kind of Michael Haneke FUNNY GAMES (1997) moment, as right when you think all is right with the world, you realize this is a horror film, where horror never allows for a moment’s rest. This is a beautiful rendering of the church’s own implications to our own sordid past which is lined with untold stories of dead bodies, and there are no diaries revealing the secrets of where they are all buried.

The Fog will disappoint those expecting a re-run of the creepy scares from Halloween. Instead, expanding enormously on the fantasy elements of his earlier films, Carpenter has turned in a full-scale thriller of the supernatural, as a sinister fog bank comes rolling in off the sea to take revenge on the smug little town of Antonio Bay, N. Calif. No shotguns pumping; no prowling of dark corners; no tricksy dry-ice chills. Instead you'll find a masterful simplicity of style, a lonely and determined group of characters under siege, and a childlike sense of brooding fear that almost disappeared in the '70s. Carpenter's confidence is outrageous; the range of his models even more so (from Poe to RKO); and the achievement is all his own, despite ragged moments and occasional hesitations.

This is not a review of John Carpenter's The Fog. It's just a "quick note" written in advance of Rupert Wainwright's remake which, despite truly lousy reviews, Wainwright's version has managed to top the US box-office this weekend.

Those hostile US critics haven't contented themselves with rubbishing the remake: several have had a pop at the Carpenter version as well, dismissing it as "not one of his best" or even worse. In the latter camp: Kyle Smith of the New York Post: I was held in suspense throughout The Fog, aching to learn the answer to its central riddle: Why would any one remake such a crummy movie?

I'm afraid I can't let such comments go unchallenged. The Fog is my favourite John Carpenter film, and has often bobbed up into my all-time top ten. The brisk 89-minute running-time is only one reason why it's probably the film I've watched most often over the years - I may well be in imminent danger of wearing out my VHS copy. So please don't be put off digging out the DVD or catching a TV screening if you get the chance: this is one of the great horror movies.

Following up his breakthrough hit Halloween, John Carpenter eschewed slasher flick terror in favor of ghost story eeriness with The Fog, an atmospheric tale of the angry undead in which a small California coastal town becomes literally haunted by its past. An ominous fog rolling into Antonio Bay carries with it the sinister spirits of a ship’s leper colony-bound crew who, 100 years ago to the day, drowned in a shipwreck orchestrated by a committee led by the town’s priest. As the malevolent mist makes its way first through a shipping boat’s drunken swabs and then into the town proper, a motley crew of characters – including a promiscuous hitchhiker (Jamie Lee Curtis), the woman (Janet Leigh) planning the community’s centennial celebration, a drunken priest (Hal Holbrook) who knows why the fog has appeared, and a sultry radio DJ (Adrienne Barbeau) trapped in her lighthouse broadcasting studio – vainly attempt to stop whatever mysterious force is hiding in the neon-glowing vapor. By attempting to insert some hack-and-slash moments into what’s essentially a moody E.C. Comics-style campfire tale – highlighted by a fantastic opening scene featuring John Houseman’s recounting of the shipwreck legend – Carpenter’s spine-tingler occasionally feels awkwardly constructed. Nevertheless, his gorgeous 2.35:1 compositions and menacingly languorous pacing create a sense of near-apocalyptic gloom. And as with his thematically rich Assault on Precinct 13, there’s more than just deadly pirate hooks lurking beneath The Fog’s pulpy surface; from his story’s overriding preoccupation with history’s inescapable influence on the present, to the subtle critique of the way in which the church sustains itself through decidedly un-Christian dastardliness, Carpenter’s slow but satisfyingly sinister spookfest reveals a surprising depth.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

The Fog was John Carpenter's follow-up to his breakthrough hit Halloween and while this underrated gem is often overshadowed by its predecessor, it bears mentioning that it shares much in common with the director's urban western Assault on Precinct 13, still his greatest achievement. Kent Jones of Film Comment called Carpenter "the last genre filmmaker working in America" (indeed, a resilient Carpenter still makes analog films while everyone else is moving with the digital tide). Perhaps that's the key to understanding Carpenter's success in the '70s. When the director remade Howard Hawks' classic western Rio Bravo as Precinct 13, he showcased a style every bit as genre defying as that of his idol's. Though there's no mistaking the noir and western elements at work in Precinct 13, it is first and foremost an urban horror film. It's only natural that Carpenter's popularity waned as soon as audiences demanded more gore. Still, when Romero (Night of the Living Dead) and Cronenberg (Scanners) were giving audiences what they wanted, Carpenter was more successful at scaring the populace with what it couldn't see. In The Fog, a neon-colored mist descends upon the 100-year-old hamlet of Antonio Bay. Carpenter's use of 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen is beyond legendary and his compositions evoke a town that may as well be the last remaining one on the face of the earth. Adrienne Barbeau's radio host makes for a fascinating heroine. Not only does her on-air shtick make for great narration but her allegiance to her community and job is fascinatingly called into question as she watches her home being consumed by the fog. She's "on top of the world," using the airwaves to guide citizens to what should be the only safe place in town: the old church. Carpenter's use of silence is every bit as impressive as his direction of character movement. The slowness with which his characters walk through his frames (across a beach, down stairwells) evokes an existential relationship between nature and man but, more importantly, one between a spiteful past and a misbegotten present.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Reel.com DVD review [Tor Thorsen]

Classic-Horror Chris Justice

The Fog A review of Rupert Wainright's remake of John Carpenter's The Fog (1980), from John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, October 18, 2005

Final Girl Stacie Ponder

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

eFilmCritic Mel Valentin

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

not coming to a theater near you Thomas Scalzo

The Fog Cavett Binion from All Movie Guide

ToxicUniverse.com (Mike Bracken)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton)

DVD Verdict Harold Gervais

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg]

Eat My Brains Zombie Club also reviewing THEY LIVE

Julian Cope Presents Head Heritage | Unsung | Reviews | John ... soundtrack review

The Official John Carpenter, Rolling Stone: June 28, 1979 The Fog, a Spook Ride on Film, by Paul Scanlon

YouTube - The Fog - John Carpenter - Blakes Revenge the last 8 minutes of the film

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK A 95

USA Great Britain (99 mi) 1981 ‘Scope

“I don’t give a fuck about your war… or your president.” —Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell)

All you have to do is hear that familiar synthesizer intro, a slow moving dirge that feels like a funeral procession, Escape From New York Theme (BEST QUALITY) YouTube (3:55), and you’re taken back to the decade of the 80’s, where this is one of the better musical scores, written by Carpenter and Alan Horvath, a perfect fit for the nightmarish dread that is this movie, where a futuristic apocalypse is upon us in the form of a rising crime rate increased by 400%. Crime is so out of contral that security forces have turned the island of Manhattan (think of Woody Allen’s romanticized movie released in 1979, just two years prior to this one) in New York City into a maximum security prison with guards placed only on the outside, building walls completely around it and mining all bridges, making it completely impossible to escape, like Alcatraz, a prison for over 3 million criminals who are expected to savagely survive on their own, receiving only monthly food drops in Central Park, turning this into an exiled land of undesirables. Looking for the worst city in America to shoot the film, they discovered a recent fire destroyed nearly 20% of the downtown area of St. Louis, leaving it a ravaged no man’s land of burned out rubble, where the remaining piles of garbage strewn along the street give this a beautifully desolate landscape of ruin and emptiness, exactly the mood needed for this film, which is intoxicatingly rich in atmosphere. This film has a swagger all it’s own, inventing a unique conception of über cool in the form of the lead character, Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, easily his greatest role, an inmate himself wearing an eye patch over one eye and a sleeveless shirt under a worn leather jacket, a shaggy-haired former war hero who has the uncanny ability to make things happen. The beauty of his character (besides the name) is the explosively charged, badass attitude mixed with his sneering nonchalance, where his defiant bravado makes the film, as he doesn’t trust a single thing about the government, adding a kind of macho anarchistic rebellion the moment he is dropped into the middle of the war zone.

On his way to a world summit conference, Air Force One carrying the President (Donald Pleasance) is hijacked and crashes into the heart of Manhattan (a decade before 9/11), where he quickly disappears into the ruins and is held hostage. Plissken is injected with a deadly chemical designed to kill him instantly after 24 hours if he doesn’t return with the President and the important documents he’s carrying, a little incentive provided by the police commissioner Lee Van Cleef, along with a watch that counts down his remaining time. Plissken is a perfect choice, as he’s a lone warrior trained to fend for himself under the worst circumstances, which is exactly where he soon finds himself. Shot entirely at night, the cover of darkness provides a creepy environment where things have a way of jumping out of unseen cracks and corners, where a one-eyed guy hauling around a giant-sized gun is bound to attract attention. Ernest Borgnine, of all people, whose presence recalls the fatalism of The Wild Bunch (1969), picks him up in his yellow cab, heaving a molotov cocktail to cover his tracks from marauding hooligans chasing after Snake, where the pleasant sounds of the theme song from American Bandstand Les Elgart - Bandstand Boogie YouTube (2:04) can be heard blaring over his stereo. The cabbie takes him to Brain (Harry Dean Stanton) and his girl Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau, aka cleavage), as both work for The Duke (Isaac Hayes), the ganglord who controls the streets and is holding the President. Amusingly, each of the characters, once learning of Plissken’s presence inside the prison, has the exact same reaction: “I heard you were dead.” Part of the fun of this film is the slow introduction of so many familiar faces that the audience quickly identifies with along with the incessant stream of weird characters, especially the kind that work for the Duke, who is seen driving a pimp-mobile with four chandeliers for head and tail lights and a disco ball hanging from the rearview mirror. Hayes relaxed and ultra cool demeanor matches that of Snake, though he cracks him over the head with a tire iron first chance he gets as a kind of welcoming into the hood.

As soon as Snake comes to, just an hour or so before his deadline, he’s forced to fight in front of disapproving fans in a Roman Colosseum style gladiator match, pitted against a much larger human specimen, Ox Baker, a professional wrestler in real life, set in the dilapidated remains of Madison Square Garden. In front of the Duke and a teeming throng of bloodthirsty psychopaths, both are given baseball bats to smash each other to bits in a small enclosed ring, followed by the next round where the bats have nail spikes sticking out the end, a hint of escalating brutality. Somehow, Snake is able to empty the arena in utter chaos and pandemonium, making a quick escape where he improvises a spectacular last minute rescue of the President, against all odds and some unexpected circumstances, eventually high tailing it in the cab across the George Washington Bridge with the Duke on his heels. Defying death at every turn, with landmines and demolished cars and all kinds of debris left as barricades blocking their path, the route appears doomed, but this is their only path left to escape. The filth and grime of the streets are like a silent character, beautifully captured by cinematographer Dean Cundey who is in perfect synch with the director, revealing a sprawling wasteland in every direction, where fires always seem to be burning off in the distance. Certainly this is an abominable and nightmarish pit of miserable existence, where Carpenter has outdone himself in creating such an extraordinarily bleak vision of Hell on earth. The hypnotic synth theme becomes an anthem by the end that is played like a requiem over the living and the dead, as this jailbreak leaves plenty of bodies left behind, all sacrificed for the noble cause of the President, but otherwise quickly forgotten by the government that simply left them there to die. Written by Carpenter and Nick Castle, who played Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN (1978), this kind of post-Watergate cynicism and post-Vietnam anger and disgust with government for all the lies, cover ups, and dead bodies in its wake has never been so poetically rendered as the contemptuous and distrustful nihilism expressed in this film.

Escape from New York Tom Milne from Time Out London

Sporting a black eye-patch and a mutinous sneer, anti-hero Snake Plissken (Russell) prepares to invade the Manhattan of 1997, sealed off as a self-regulating maximum security prison following a 400% rise in the crime rate, and ruled over by a black drug-dealing Prospero (Hayes) attended by his punk Ariel. Victim of a Catch-22 situation and primed to self-destruct if he fails, Snake's task is to rescue the hijacked US president (Pleasence) from this ominous underworld; and for about half the film, Carpenter's narrative economy and explosive visual style (incorporating some marvellous model work of the new Manhattan skyline) promise wonders. The trouble is that his characters neither develop nor interact dynamically, so the plot gradually winds down into predictable though highly enoyable histrionics.

Escape From New York Rob Gonsalves from eFilmCritic

Another John Carpenter cult classic, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK was one of the best entries in the once popular post-apocalyptic genre which included ROAD WARRIOR and THE TERMINATOR. In 1997, the island of Manhattan has been turned into the world's largest maximum security prison, a place where the worst of humanity is sent to rot. The U.S. Government finds itself in a major crisis when the president's plane crash lands in New York only days before a vital peace summit between major warring nations is to take place. The president survives the crash, but is taken hostage by the denizens of Manhattan and held for ransom. Only war hero turned felon Snake Plissken can save the day, and he is offered a simple deal for his work: save the president and live, fail to save him and die. The one-eyed bandit sets to work, cutting a path of destruction to the president that has to be seen to be believed. Kurt Russell creates the indelible character of Snake Plissken as no other actor could have. Wisecracking and cool under the very worst of pressures, Snake is the ultimate bad good guy. Often copied, but never duplicated, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is full of the wit, energy and action that marks a John Carpenter picture.

EFilmCritic [Brett Gallman]

The product of a time when New York seemed more likely to rot from within than suffer attacks from without, John Carpenter's Escape From New York took Taxi Driver's urban hellscape and projected it onto a cartoonishly savage future. The premise was brilliantly simple: By the far-off year of 1997, crime is so out of hand that Manhattan has been abandoned, cordoned off into a maximum-security prison and left to destroy itself. Needing to rescue kidnapped president Donald Pleasence from within Manhattan's confines, special agent Lee Van Cleef hits upon a desperate plan: Send in a criminal tough enough to take on an island. He finds one in the eyepatched Snake Plissken, memorably played by Kurt Russell as a cross between Clint Eastwood and a damaged Vietnam vet. (Sandwiched between the TV biopic Elvis and the John Wayne-inspired Big Trouble In Little China, Escape From New York is the center of a loose Carpenter/Russell trilogy featuring larger-than-life American heroes.) Created on a relatively tiny budget from constructive editing, St. Louis ghettoes, and pounds of detritus, Carpenter's grittily convincing New York-in-decay remains the film's best element. Never particularly suspenseful and hampered by a finale that almost literally steers the plot toward a dead end, Escape only intermittently finds Carpenter flexing his directorial muscles. But it may be his most visionary film: Escape allowed him to build a future out of scraps from the past. Playing a cabbie (named, appropriately enough, "Cabbie"), Ernest Borgnine cheerily drives one of New York's few working cars while blaring the same big-band song over and over again. He works for "The Duke" (Isaac Hayes), a pitiless warlord who rules the city wearing a cowboy's hat and boots and a Napoleonic military commander's jacket while holding gladiatorial contests to feed the bloodlust of the masses. It's history repeating itself as a violent farce, and it allows Carpenter to revel in his most cynical impulses. Reappearing as a double-disc DVD, Escape From New York contains a nice array of expected features and one nifty find: A long-deleted opening reel in which Russell robs a bank, only to be caught while trying to save his partner. On the audio commentary accompanying the scene, both Carpenter and Russell seem to agree that removing it was a good idea. "This actually humanizes him. Now, some people might say that's a good thing," Carpenter says. Russell interrupts: "This movie's not for them."

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez Pt 1, making a rare film critic double bill

Kent Jones described John Carpenter as "an analog man in a digital world" and blamed the auteur's waning popularity (after the one-two punch of Halloween and his masterpiece Assault on Precinct 13) on the way we make allowances for fashion. Jones said in his seminal piece on the director in 1999's Film Comment: "Whether we like it or not, we attune ourselves to norms and paradigms in filmmaking as they shift like tectonic plates, making unconscious adjustments in our heads about how to watch films and see them in relation to one another." In short: John Carpenter is too old-school for most people's tastes. But what does it say about 1981's Escape from New York that it plays so well after 9/11? The oppressive power of Carpenter's Scope framing is matched only by his ability to speak to contemporary affairs. Written in 1974, made in 1980, and set in the future of 1997, Escape from New York is timeless activist cinema. Manhattan is now an island prison surrounded by an impenetrable containment wall. Hijacked by the National Liberation Front terrorist group, Air Force One crashes into a building near the World Trade Center. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell, channeling the mythos of John Wayne) is sent in to rescue the President of the United States and stumbles upon a lawless, hermetic community governed by a pimp named The Duke (Isaac Hayes). If the setup is familiar (an immobile society is penetrated from a paralyzing beyond), so is the windfall (the attack illuminates our reclusive culture's unaddressed evils). Escape from New York is not as enthralling as the metaphor-rich, Reagan-era They Live and the parallel action isn't as pronounced or intoxicating as it was in The Fog, but its politics are no less immediate (the constantly shifting alliances, individualism versus collectivism, the distrust of authority and the overriding public relations fiasco that closes the film). It's difficult to imagine a government in 1997 (let alone 1981) putting this much emphasis on an audio cassette, but that's more or less the point. With Snake's final act of subversion, Carpenter heralds the power of analog (Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" anthem) to bring together sparring nations.

Apollo Movie Guide [Ed Gonzalez] Pt 2

More so than any other director, John Carpenter has learned to predict the cult status of his movies. Watching Escape form New York nearly 20 years after its initial release is like watching a film begging for sci-fi idolization. Everything from the fascinating premise to a cast of actors that includes Ernest Borgnine and Harry Dean Stanton are sure fire ingredients for a post-apocalyptic masterpiece along the lines of other sci-fi oddities from the ‘80s like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

For the opening credit sequence, Carpenter plays with a funky electronic score that bears a striking resemblance to something from a Dario Argento film. This is no surprise, of course, when you consider the influence the Italian giallo director had on his American counterpart and Carpenter does manage to make the movie’s music his own by adding a post-‘70s synth groove that is oddly appropriate to the world he has created. It’s like watching a futuristic blaxploitation film except the only brother in the film is the all-powerful Isaac Hayes.

The opening sequence signals one of the greatest set-ups in the annals of sci-fi: the entire island of Manhattan has been turned into a prison to accommodate the 400 per cent rise in violence between the years 1988 and 1997. The concept is worthy of Orwell, but the execution isn’t as meaty as one would expect from material so ripe with social and political urgency. We get a rather gimmicky plot revolving around a prisoner named Snake Plissken ( Kurt Russell) being offered a pardon if he can enter and leave Manhattan within 24 hours of rescuing the president of the United States. The president, the only survivor of an Air Force One hijack mission, has been left to ward off trouble in the prison city that is unofficially governed by the Duke (Hayes).

This isn’t a brazenly colourful futuristic landscape but a grimy portrait of a city not far from the down-and-dirty real New York of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Comparing Carpenter’s universe to an Orwellian landscape isn’t an overstatement because there is plenty of substance here for a heated exploration of recycled governmental reform.

The inhabitants of the prison are the sort of people who oppose the so-called fascist ideals of the Man, but know they must form some sort of organized governmental system to survive. The creation of gasoline is entirely controlled by underground groups and when food is scarce, criminals resort to cannibalism. These societal explorations are the more interesting aspects of the film, but Carpenter doesn’t give them much play, opting instead to focus on the by-the-numbers rescue mission that is spear-headed by Snake. Still, Carpenter should get some credit for creating a world where criminals spew anti-government rhetoric while hypocritically branding a debonair Black man as their Duke (a less controlling version of a mayor, I suppose) and using a politician as their means to re-enter the world of the Man.

If you know your John Carpenter, then you know he never shied away from his love for Howard Hawks; this admiration obviously revealed itself when he updated “Rio Bravo” and “The Thing From Another World” into “Assault on Precinct 13” and “The Thing.” And while the former technically transplanted Hawks’s story from the dusty frontier to the gravelly streets of Los Angeles, it’s arguable that Carpenter didn’t truly do his Western update until "Escape From New York," a film that actually seems to owe more to John Ford’s “The Searchers” more so than to anything related to Hawks.

The new frontier is the then-future 1997 wasteland, where Manhattan Island has been converted to a maximum security prison (“once you go in, you don’t come out,” Jamie Lee Curtis intones via voiceover narration). When an extremist group (The National Liberation Front of America, representing the insane sector of the 99%) kidnaps the President (Donald Pleasence, still British despite playing the American commanding chief), the military can only turn to one man. Enter Carpenter’s enigmatic gunslinger : Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), a former decorated soldier turned outlaw who is given a chance at amnesty if he can rescue the President within 24 hours.

Despite playing the John Wayne role of “the searcher,” Russell snarls and sneers with the detached contempt and gravelly inflection of Eastwood’s Man With No Name, which seems somehow fitting since he’s taking orders here from one of the all time great black hats from the spaghetti western scene in Lee Van Cleef (whose subordinates here are Tom Atkins and Charles Cyphers, rounding out a badass triumvirate).

Plissken even comes with his own aura--somehow, everyone that he runs into recognizes him immediately, though everyone greets him with the same refrain--“I thought you were dead.” Like any drifter who wanders into a frontier, he feels like a conqueror the moment he steps foot into the ashen, bombed out streets of Manhattan, and he even comes complete with an eye-patch to accentuate his grizzled demeanor. One of cinema’s great mercenaries (“I don’t give a fuck about your war,“ he insists), he’s the lone gunman transported to the cyberpunk 80s, brimming with anti-heroic ambivalence that betrays the nihilism and fuelling “Escape From New York.”

This is a searing, bleak vision of the future and one that’s immediately and strikingly realized when we see America’s most iconic city reduced to a smoky, grim husk, its typically illuminated skyline rendered into a ghastly shade. The film’s politics are broad, yet still relevant even in its exaggerated dystopian view of a “future” that’s now 15 years old. Snake is our entry point--he not only doesn’t give a fuck about America’s war--he doesn’t even care for the President himself, seeing this whole shindig as a chance for freedom.

All of this doesn’t come off as ultra-conservative paranoia of big government, but rather, as general distrust for authority, with Snake being the ultimate thumb-nosing anarchist. In a world gone to hell, he’s one of the few people with an actual conviction, even if it is just to himself; that we’re asked to (and on many levels easily) identify with him speaks to post-Watergate cynicism. If westerns often took the form of odes to the lawlessness and violence of the old frontier, then “Escape From New York” is an elegy for a future defined by social morass and violent upheaval, dominated by absurd individuals with either the best weapons or the best intel (one of the film’s subplots involves a chase for a map of a minefield that’s preventing the criminals’ escape).

In keeping with the Western theme, Snake is still somehow the unwavering white hat here, as he’s pitted against Isaac Hayes’s “A-Number-One” Duke of New York, the baron of the penitentiary that’s carved out a social order that probably thrives like any other prison system. Both stage dramas and gladiatorial displays serve as entertainment in this backwater landscape that Snake finds himself navigating; it’s all a bit absurd, populated by oddballs and degenerates, which makes this such a treacherous predicament for the President.

It’s not so much that he’s in mortal peril--that much is clear--however, when he’s gussied up in a wig and made to look every bit as absurd as his captors, it represents a flipped script that blurs the line between civilized and primitive. That line is further blurred when the usually stately and austere Pleasence is ultimately turned into a raving, gun-toting maniac himself, completely consumed by this deranged world that he’s been plopped into.

“Escape From New York” is not only one of Carpenter’s finest films, it’s one an unquestionable masterpiece in lo-fi filmmaking. It’s a grungy, ramshackle production marked by an impressive design from veteran Joe Alves, who dresses up both soundstage interiors and actual locations to realize a seedy post-apocalyptic “future” that feels even more effective now since it’s been rendered a bit archaic. Even the sleek government sets are oppressively dim neon fortresses where men tinker behind computer screens.

A number of spectacularly shoestring special effects highlight the film, some of which were rendered by James Cameron, who was still a Roger Corman disciple at the time. Snake’s descent into the city via glider is particularly memorable triumph of miniature and model work; there’s gritty craftiness to how this sequence (and the rest of the film) came together despite limited resources. Even the film’s score (co-scored by Carpenter and Alan Howarth) is characteristically electronic and minimalist, feeding into the film’s low-key moodiness; it’s an action film with dynamic sequences, but they’re delivered with such a steady, measured calm that they rarely feel like empty spectacle.

Still, this is also a small-scale film made large due to Carpenter’s Panavision grandeur, especially when it comes to capturing his desolate cityscape; this again feels reminiscent of Ford’s affinity for protagonists defined by their surroundings. Just as Wayne was as rugged as the dusty landscape he walked out into and embraced (even as his companions returned for the warmth of the homestead) at the end of “The Searchers,” so too is Snake Plissken as rough and tumble as the pallid, motley streets of New York. At the end here, he too strolls off from whatever comfort can be afforded him, presumably in search of another untamed, ragged land. Such is life in a world ruled by either inane bureaucrats or crude despots.

The dividing line between civilization and savagery was also an overarching theme in “The Searchers,” with Wayne’s quest being to save the innocence of his niece at all costs. “Escape From New York” assumes that the line is gone, though the desire to maintain it absurdly remains. As usual, Carpenter delivers a dynamite landmine of a film parading around in B-movie clothes--again, not unlike his idols, whose Westerns transcended that genre’s tendency towards the bottom half of a double bill.

Carpenter seems to rarely get credit for his ability to transpose and mash-up genres, and, like most visionaries, he wasn’t always appreciated much in his heyday. In fact, “Escape From New York” represented one of the few major genre hits in his career, perhaps because the Western archetype it riffs on is so universal. Or maybe it’s because “Escape From New York” simply kicks ass and is every bit as cool as any spaghetti western, as gloriously pulpy as any action flick, and as heady as any dystopian sci-fi fable.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Escape from New York (1981) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, October 8, 2010

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

Movie Review - Escape from New York - eFilmCritic Mel Valentin

Edward Copeland on Film (J.D.)

Electric Sheep Magazine [John Berra]

0-5 Star Reviews Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

filmcritic.com Jeremiah Kipp

American Cinematographer: DVD Playback April 2003 Jim Hemphill, American Cinematographer, April 2004

HorrorTalk SuperNova

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

ReelViews [James Berardinelli] also seen here: James Berardinelli

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"A Helluva Town" Newsweek magazine

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Post-Apocalypse Michael Petch

DVD Verdict Harold Gervais

Escape From New York 1981 - digitallyOBSESSED! Dan Lopez

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Mainly Movies: Escape from New York

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I Like Horror Movies [Carl Manes]

Roger Crow

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EyeForFilm.co.uk Max Blinkhorn

Read Keith Dudhnath's DVD Review Eye for Film

"Escape from New York" Dave Kehr from The Reader

Global Comment [Mark Farnsworth] Back to the Apocalypse: the best of the 80′s post-apocalyptic films, December 28, 2009

Escape From New York Read the script from the film from the Sci-Fi Movie Page

Escape from New York (soundtrack) by John Carpenter - Tracksounds Christopher Coleman

Escape From New York (1980/2000) Soundtrack - Soundtrack.Net soundtrack review

film_stills: Escape From New York (John Carpenter 1981)

Escape from New York at Official John Carpenter's Website

"On Location" Robert Osborne from The Hollywood Reporter

NY Times Original Review also seen here: "Escape from New York"

Escape from New York - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE THING C+ 78

USA (109 mi) 1982 ‘Scope

You gotta be fucking kidding. —Palmer (David Clennon)

Not for the faint of heart, as this is an old-fashioned, white knuckles, violently grotesque horror flick that modern day directors like Rob Zombie, who remade Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN in 2007, went to school on, where the pervading sense of dread shifts the focus from the horror “outside” to the horror “inside.” One of the few Carpenter films that is adapted from another source, while also being a remake of a classic sci-fi B-movie from the early 50’s (“Watch the skies!!”), Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks’s THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951), which is also the movie Jamie Curtis is watching on TV while babysitting in HALLOWEEN (1978). Carpenter turns that monster-on-the-loose at the North Pole into a gore fest, changing locations to a science expedition at a remote outpost in Antarctica, which could just as easily be outer space, as this team of about 12 men have lost all radio contact with the outside world, leaving them for all practical purposes stranded and alone should a catastrophe hit. Unlike Hawks’ film which is chatty and dialogue driven, this is a visual exercise about being hunted down from the opening shot, where a malamute dog is being chased and fired upon by a Norwegian helicopter, which inexplicably lands next to the base, yelling and screaming and shooting randomly at anyone that moves, injuring one of the men before being shot and killed, their helicopter destroyed. While Ennio Morricone gets credit for the music, it’s the creepy sounds of a Carpenter synthesizer that holds our attention.

In the icy cold of an endless landscape of snow, Kirk Russell as R.J. MacReady drinking a bottle of J & B Scotch appears in shades, a helicopter pilot sent along with Richard Dysart as Dr. Copper the science officer to investigate the Norwegian camp about an hour away. There they discover a frozen graveyard, a wasteland with bodies frozen with fear still etched on their faces, and something inhuman and half burned appears to be a mutated conglomeration that includes several humans, a scientific phenomenon that they bring back to the base to explore further. While Wilfred Brimley as Dr. Blair conducts a nauseating autopsy, the trademark Carpenter camera moves through empty hallways and peers around corners as if it has eyes. This time it’s the malamute that’s suspicious, as something in the dark attacks the dogs, suddenly mutating into another creature with wretched and grotesque results on full display. A review of the Norwegian tapes reveals they used Thermite charges to unearth a space ship, including a creature frozen under the ice for 100,000 years. Blair’s experiments reveal a total molecular takeover, where the shape shifting alien life form can perfectly imitate the dog or human that it inhabits, making it impossible to detect. The grotesque mutations discovered earlier had not yet finalized their complete imitation. Blair concludes that if unleashed into the world, the entire planet would be infected within 27,000 hours. From this point on, Blair is never again the same.

With the alien unleashed into the camp, suddenly everyone is suspect, as no one is sure who is really human anymore, and the mood changes from the fear of the monster on the loose to the fear of your fellow humans, becoming paranoid and highly suspicious of one another, continually turning on each other with accusations. Soon people are willing to do things they would never dream of doing otherwise, as the laws have changed. Morality is thrown out the window in the interest of self preservation. It is in exactly this kind of lawless environment that Russell excels, fresh from one of his greatest roles, Snake Plissken in Carpenter’s ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), he is a throwback to another era, a lone baddass who roams the countryside with ease, a drifter with commendable instincts, though even he, too, is suspect. All grow leery of one another. Blair goes on a violent rampage, using an axe to destroy all the radio and scientific equipment, shooting at anyone who comes close, eventually subdued and locked in a tool shed where he is effectively banished, but not before they realize he has vandalized all the wires to the helicopter, effectively stranding all of them there until reinforcements with new supplies come sometime in the spring. Meanwhile, they are all alone with The Thing, where a slow sense of doom pervades. On several occasions the monster does reveal itself, where its frightening transition couldn’t be more horrifying, as it literally devours its subjects. Humans are defenseless and some freeze in a state of paralyzed shock at what they see, as the gruesome sight does resemble the creature in Ridley Scott’s ALIEN (1979), and Stan Winston had a hand in the special effects of both movies.

All they can think to do is firebomb The Thing using a flamethrower, which they are continually forced to do, until eventually the weapon itself malfunctions, leaving the alien free to wreak the kind of devastating havoc that only exists in horror movies. This is graphically raw and overly violent, with in-your-face horrors onscreen where we see faces stretched beyond proportion, eyeballs bulging out, and human flesh ripped apart with the tentacles of the creature reaching out from inside before suddenly The Thing rises to giant-sized proportions filling the room, a reptile-like alien oozing with goo that eats humans with ease. This is a frightening monster capable of wiping them all out instantly, as unlike a fully developed monster, this one always appears to be evolving from one state to another, constantly changing and always on the move, as it never stays in just one place except when it’s hidden in an imitation form. But when attacked or exposed, it reacts with lightning-like speed and grows to gargantuan size, attacking humans at will. After doing a few rounds with this shape-changing, flesh eater, where men are slowly picked off one by one, the chances for human survival grows dim, where the audience is teased and tantalized and then overwhelmed by the monstrous nature of man and beast, until by the end, the audience is never sure if people are human or if they are The Thing, as it remains cleverly ambiguous with prospects for the future that are bleak and downbeat.

Adisakdl Tantimedh from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

A group of scientists (including Kurt Russell’s protagonist) at an isolated outpost in Antarctica find themselves under siege by an alien lifeform that can take over their bodies. Cut off from the outside world, the men grow increasingly paranoid as they suspect each other of being taken over by the alien, and realize that they can’t afford to let it venture beyond the outpost, lest it infect the entire world.

Based on the classic science-fiction story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, and having originally been adapted by Howard Hawks in 1951 as The Thing from Another World, this 1982 version by John Carpenter eschews the Boy’s Own Adventure of the Hawks film and goes straight for claustrophobia and existential dread. Carpenter’s The Thing proved to be one of the most influential horror films of the 80’s, much imitated but rarely bettered.

Along with the films of David Cronenberg, The Thing is one of the prime texts to explore the themes of bodily invasion that pervade horror and sci-fi movies of that decade. It is one of the first films to unflinchingly show the rupture and warp of flesh and bone into grotesque tableaus of surreal beauty, forever raising the bar on cinematic horror.

In re-adapting the John W Campbell story (Who Goes There?) already filmed so superbly in 1951 as The Thing from Another World, Carpenter provides a punchy enough action thriller as the men of a lonely Antarctic research team are menaced by a shape-changing alien from outer space. But there comes a time when spectacular special effects - even by the estimable Rob Bottin - are just not enough. Carpenter avoids the subtle suspense of the earlier version - all the guessing and paranoia and wonder - in favour of a mindlessly macho monster mash which looks and feels just like an ineptly plotted remake of Alien, right down to the chest-bursting scene. Russell's sub-Eastwood heroics hardly compensate for the absence of all characterisation, while Bill Lancaster's script boasts the most illogical climax any monster movie ever had. It's only fair to add that, had this been made by anybody else, one might be recommending it for its special effects; but that's the price Carpenter pays for having made so much better movies.

CineScene.com (Sasha Stone) review also reviewing THEY LIVE

The Thing takes you to yet another world. Carpenter seems fascinated by masked worlds, that is, what's behind the one you think you see? What's underneath the snow? What would happen if a team of men was trapped with a killing organism that was about to take them over, one by one? They panic. They accuse each other. It's like Hitchcock's Lifeboat only with great special effects, as good as any I've ever seen even now. Kurt Russell takes over where Cary Grant (for Hitch) left off - a flawed hero with a golden boy past. When The Thing was released in 1982, many people wrote it off because they thought it A) a rip-off of Alien and B) a rip-off of the original horror movie The Thing (1951) and therefore not valid to stand on its own. It remains one of the most perfect horror films ever made, however, having not even one defect, not one wasted scene, a perfect cast of characters capable of holding the story up and then some.

The Thing is not only one of my favorite films of all time, it's gotten me through many an anxious night. Like other Carpenter films, there's something familiar about it - the score, the themes, Kurt Russell. It stands out among the best ever made. It deserves its place in the art of cinema.

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [9/10]

A remake of the Christian Nyby (but really Howard Hawks, most would argue) sci-fi thriller, The Thing is about an isolated Antarctic scientific group whose research base is infiltrated by an alien shape shifter that knocks them down and takes over their identities one by one. (Well, actually their behavior and group dynamic really merit the title "posse" instead of "group," and, in that, the film is truly underrated as a Hawksian homage by those who are too focused in on the carnage.) Clearly intended by John Carpenter to be a far grander film than any he had attempted before (hence his decision to turn over the musical scoring duties to Ennio Morricone rather than write another DIY wonder), The Thing was instead castigated and signaled the beginning of the end of the mainstream critical establishment's love affair with the man who, just a few years prior, had a reputation as being the great white hope for the horror genre (though it's gone through a retroactive renaissance in the last decade or so). The film, which is far more deliberately paced than his other, more slender thrillers, is absolutely stacked with Rob Bottin's popping, ripping, oozing make-up effects, but Carpenter wisely turns his focus on the fissures of his own microcosmic civilization under duress than that of their skin and veins. Instead, what makes the bloody visuals so effective in their context is that, given that this is a hyper-masculine Carpenter universe, they suggest the all-male society's ignorance of (and eventual outrage over) the introduction of reproductive "mess" into their staid, fraternal environment, which is perhaps the one singularly transgressive element of the film. Otherwise, The Thing may be a tad too careful and schematic to stand shoulder with Carpenter's very best films—it lacks Halloween's disorienting velvety-black spatial neutrality, Assault on Precinct 13's gliding sense of encroachment, or The Fog's peerless utilization of environment and atmosphere—but its obsessive insistence on emphasizing the dearth of humans' capacity for simple trust does culminate with one of his most satisfying finales (second probably only to Escape from L.A.'s cool, detatched endorsement of an e-apocalypse), a fulfillment of Jean Paul Sartre's No Exit maxim: "Hell is other people."

Camera Eye Evan Pulgino (link lost)

John Carpenter may be better known for Halloween or Escape from New York, but The Thing is easily the famed horror director’s best film. Recalling Alien and the early horror films of David Cronenberg, Carpenter’s version of the oft-adapted short story “Who Goes There?” is a masterpiece of special effects gore and unhealthy paranoia.

When a team of researchers in the unforgiving Antarctic is attacked by a couple of insane Norwegian scientists the group discovers a strange alien parasite that can shape shift into various lifeforms. The creature slowly invades the compound sowing discord and paranoia amongst the scientists.

The Thing is a measured and masterful horror film that relies on mood and atmosphere more than jumps and quick scare. It is a perfect and riveting horror film. Carpenter exploits his claustrophobic setting and a great script by Bill Lancaster with such grace and skill that I find myself wondering how this same director could have made so many bad films in the time since The Thing was released.

Leading the ensemble cast is Kurt Russell as R.J. MacReady. In a departure from his character in Escape from New York, Russell is introspective and moody as the survivors reluctant leader. Russell plays MacReady with ambiguity and mystery so that the viewer must question his motivations (or species, I suppose).

Like many great monster films, The Thing is equally, if not more, interested in the darkness of human nature than in the scariness of the monster. Luckily this is a film that can equally fulfill both needs. The alien is indeed frightening and created with as much care and craft as in Alien. Like the monsters in Ridley Scott’s genre-defining film, the creature is given biological weight and has a defined life cycle. The special effects used to depict the alien’s various stages are marvels of practical effects. The effects don’t look dated at all and are way more effective than they would have been if they were computer generated.

As scary as the alien can be, what is scarier in The Thing is how the humans treat each other. As soon as paranoia infests the compound the men begin to turn on each other and become accusational, fearful and violent. The Thing is profound in the way that it shows how fear causes people to behave outside of their own morality. Thus, the monster becomes a metaphor for anything that sows discord amongst humanity. By wisely avoiding any discernible political commentary of the time in which the film was made John Carpenter has ensured that The Thing will remain relevant to all generations. What makes people paranoid and afraid will change through the times, but mankind’s reaction to fear and paranoia will never change.

Some brief notes on The Thing…

The DVD of The Thing features a director’s commentary features a boozy get-together between Carpenter (who sounds very close to the microphone) and star Kurt Russell (who sounds very far away) that’s almost as entertaining as the film itself. But The Thing demands to be seen on as large a screen as possible: the icy cinemascope vistas of Antarctica demand nothing less, and Carpenter has always been without parallel in terms of using every single inch of the frame. This is a claustrophobic epic.
It is also a western like all Carpenter movies. He signals as much very early on, when a character hiding inside the base must shoot someone in the open air. He uses his gun to break the glass, Randolph Scott style.
The first hour is a masterful exercise in the build-up and release of suspense: an inexorable progression of taut, economic episodes as a remote US scientific base is infiltrated by a savage, shape-shifting alien creature that picks off the men one by one.
And they are all men (all very well cast), their cloistered celibacy mocked by the grinning females looking down from the forties ad-posters on their walls, by the female voice of the chess-playing computer, by the female faces on the TV programmes they watch on video. Anne Billson, in her BFI Modern Classic book on the film, argues that The Thing itself is female.
The second half is less effective than the first. Scriptwriter Bill Lancaster can’t quite stitch things together and whenever there’s an action sequence he seems to have difficulty regaining his train of thought. Characterisation and story development suffer. Economy goes out of the window. There are more loose ends than in the tattered garments which keep being found around the base – supposedly because being ‘taken over’ by The Thing results in clothes being ripped, though this is never made especially clear.
Despite the flaws, many scenes remain cast-iron classics: anything featuring the monster, especially the ‘defibrillation’ sequence and the ‘blood test’- horrific and hilarious in equal measure.
Ennio Morricone’s music. The Thing is a rare instance of John Carpenter handing over the score to another composer. Morricone delivers a pitch-perfect simulacrum of Carpenter’s established, doomy-synth stylings – entirely appropriate for a film about pitch-perfect simulacra.

John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Film and Television also seen here: The Thing (1982)

CultureCartel.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [5/5]

Take Two #1: The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Thing (1982) John Lingan from The House Next Door, seen here: The House Next Door [John Lingan]

Austin Chronicle [Bud Simons] a look at the film placed in a horror context

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [5/5]

Classic Horror review Eric Miller

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [5/5]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Encyclopedia Of Fantastic Film & TV Kevin Lyons

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [5/5] Richard Scheib

Eye for Film (Jeff Robson) review [4/5]

The Thing Friday and Saturday Night Critic from Movie Vault

The Seven Best Horror Film Remakes So Far? John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, September 25, 2009

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel, Collector’s Edition

Digital Retribution dvd review Mr. Intolerance

DVD Authority.com (Daniel Pulliam) dvd review [Special Edition]

DVDActive (Jeremy Allin) dvd review [8/10] [Collector's Edition]

DVDActive (Chris Gould) dvd review [8/10] [Collector's Edition]

DVDork.com (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Collector's Edition] [3.5/4, 8.5/10]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Collector's Edition] Colin Jacobson

The Sci-Fi Movie Page (DVD Review - Collector's Edition) James O’Ehley

DVD Authority.com (Eric Alan) dvd review [Collector's Edition]

DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [4/5] [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo, HD Version

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Blu-Ray version

DVD Talk (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

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DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Colin Jacobson

dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [5/5]

Best-Horror-Movies.com Don Sumner

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

Bill's Movie Emporium[Bill Thompson]

CultureCartel.com (Mike Bracken) review [5/5] also seen here: Epinions [Mike Bracken]

Mutant Reviewers from Hell review

Horror View a less than impressive view from Red Velvet Kitchen

eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [5/5]

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth and Brian Lindsey

Edinburgh U Film Society (Gavin Inglis) review

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]

Horror Express review Finn Clark

John Carpenter Lives in a BAM Retrospective - Page 1 - Movies ... Scott Foundas from The Village Voice, also seen here: The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]

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CHRISTINE B+ 91

USA (110 mi) 1983 ‘Scope

I hate rock n roll

The only time horror author Stephen King and filmmaker John Carpenter came together on a project, this is a light hearted romp into the world of a possessed car, starring Keith Gordon as Arnie, the nerdy kid who’s picked on in school but develops a love affair with an old beat up car, a ’58 Plymouth Fury that he sees laying around in a junk yard unattended. He’s fascinated by the idea of fixing it up, declaring he’s finally found something uglier than he is, but in the process, it takes possession of him, mind, body, and soul. It’s an amusing look back into an era when adolescent boys became fixated on cars, who spent all their waking hours fixing up cars, getting called greasers, but lived for that moment of freedom that came when riding behind the wheel of a car. Christine represents that freedom, unbridled, with no rules or boundaries, that exists in a state of its own completely outside human comprehension, sort of a wish fulfillment version of high school adolescence.

There’s a terrific supporting cast, a sound track that rivals AMERICAN GRAFFITTI, though it’s utilized in a much more devious manner, always tongue in cheek, a little absurd but hilarious at the same time. It’s a marvel to witness Gordon’s transition into the coolest guy in town, who’s got the cutest girl as well in Alexandra Paul, but mostly, there’s the car, especially memorable when it’s ablaze with fire in the black of night, hellbent on revenge, beautifully captured on ‘Scope film. It’s a novel approach to invent a car that has a mind of its own, expressed through its radio mentality, and the scenes where it stalks the bad guys and later fixes its own damage are simply priceless. By the end, however, poor Arnie is looking more like a character out of Stephen King’s The Shining. After a cage match with a bulldozer, Christine appears down and out. But leave it to a perfect punch line to bring her back to life again. Interestingly, Christine reappears in the Michael Dorris children’s novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, where the lead character is something of a wandering spirit, a teenage Native-American girl named Rayona, whose mother is named Christine, who proudly identifies with the bad-ass nature of the car.

MovieFreak.com (Dylan Grant)

Carpenter and novelist Stephen King share not merely a taste for genre horror but a love of '50s teenage culture; and although set in the present, Christine reflects the second taste far more effectively than the first. It concerns a demonic 1958 Plymouth Fury which not only suffocates its victims to blasts of Larry Williams' 'Boney Moronie', but also reconstitutes itself before the naked eye like some fetishistic amoeba, incidentally transforming its puny owner from a pimply nonentity into one of the baddest boys on the block. All of this works rather well as black comedy. But from the horror perspective, Carpenter is only the latest in a long line of film-makers who've been seduced by King's sheer plausibility as a writer. Off the page, a 1958 Plymouth is no more scary than the St Bernard which romped through Cujo.

Wade Major reviews the Special Edition DVD from Boxoffice magazine (link lost):

"Christine" is one of Stephen King's sillier novels, but it's one of John Carpenter's very best films. Just campy enough to make the premise fly and just scary and creepy enough to still be effective, "Christine" stars Keith Gordon as the unsuspecting teenage auto geek who falls prey to the seductive allure of a 1958 Plymouth Fury that is literally possessed by a mind -- and perhaps evil spirit -- of its own. Indeed, this thing would eat KITT alive and run "The Car" right off the road. As far as sentient, demon-possessed automobiles go, Christine takes the cake.

Wrapping all of this around a routine teenage revenge tale is really what handicaps the film from rising to anything truly remarkable, but Gordon and Carpenter are both in such fine form that it's impossible to resist the high-pitched theatrics, even when one knows precisely what's about to happen.

The film was previously available on DVD, though in a rudimentary edition from the early days of DVD that really needed replacing. Columbia's new disc isn't perfect -- the darker spots still seem a tad chalky in places -- but it's light years ahead of where the film was before. The Dolby Surround audio is a really welcome improvement boasting better range and clarity across the board.

The only real supplement here that anyone need note is the commentary with Carpenter and Gordon who clearly relish revisiting the film after all these years. It could have been more energetic and enthusiastic, but fans won't be disappointed -- there's plenty of juice here just the same. Some will enjoy the featurettes -- all three of them are above average for what's essentially EPK material, though they seem to retread much of the same fare. Finally and most unremarkably, are the deleted and alternate scenes -- twenty in all. Those who know the film inside and out will be able to fill in the blanks and appreciate the importance of why these scenes weren't included... but it's a slog to anyone else.

Even still, for all its offbeat faults and cultish appeal, "Christine" is a great deal of fun and an ideal Halloween treat.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The opening is scored to "Bad to the Bone," the diagonal track locating Malle's auto assembly line from Humain, Trop Humain and making it John Carpenter's as soon as the titular vehicle, a 1958 Plymouth Fury, chomps on a worker's arm, the first of its victims; another flickers a bit of ash on the leather, and expires on the front seat, stogie in mouth. The flash-forward to 1978 is appropriate, for Carpenter's movie is not just a response to shallow '80s teen flicks, but also, more obliquely, to the toxic regurgitation of Grease -- head bully William Ostrander pulls a full Travolta, grabbing Keith Gordon's lunch and running a switchblade through the brown bag until yogurt bleeds out. Fifties fetishism here is not nostalgia but critique, the cultural residue that deforms consciousness. The auto is found, battered, in the backyard of Robert Blossom, who sells her to Gordon after proclaiming new-car smell second only to pussy. "You can't polish a turd," says garage owner Robert Prosky in one of his many uproarious orations, yet Gordon soon has Christine back to her resplendent, scarlet self, in the process undergoing an upgrade of his own -- the high school geek ditches the specs and bags Alexandra Paul, who, with jock bud John Stockwell, becomes increasingly freaked out by his metamorphosis into a zombified Mr. Cool. The car dominating a relationship is a satirical notion out of Tashlin, and Carpenter, fine-tuning Stephen King's source, mates it to the sexual horror of pubescent anxieties -- the love scene is between Gordon and Christine as the car voluptuously unwrecks itself (Kustom Kar Kommandos compressed into ten seconds), with the grille, a metal smirk across the widescreen, becoming a flaming skull chasing Ostrander down the empty highway. Revenge of the nerd? Horror may be the genre, yet the shot of Gordon hugging the steering wheel while "Pledging My Love" emanates out of the radio remains a deeply sad and unsettling image. Paul's "I hate rock 'n' roll" punchline pointedly rejects pop regression, Carpenter caps it with a dolly making an abstract canvas out of twisted metal. With Harry Dean Stanton, Christine Belford, David Spielberg, Malcolm Danare, and Kelly Preston.

She was born in Detroit… on an automobile assembly line. But she is no ordinary automobile. Deep within her chassis lives an unholy presence. She is CHRISTINE – a red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury whose unique standard equipment includes an evil, indestructible vengeance that will destroy anyone in her way.

Before he lost his way with movies like Escape From L.A. and Ghosts of Mars, John Carpenter was making classic contributions to the horror/sci-fi genre. Films like Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape From New York, and The Thing, among others, set the bar pretty high for just what could be achieved within genre conventions. He followed up The Thing with Christine, a twisted love story in the guise of a horror film. Christine is not the violent, gory kind of film for which Carpenter had come to be known at that point, but rather a quiet, more character driven piece, with the main character being the menacing Plymouth.

When we first meet Christine, she is beaten up, abandoned, out of step – just like Arnie Cunningham. Arnie is the biggest dork in school, the kind of social zero that can be found in any high school. He gets picked on, does not have a clue how to dress, and his parents rule his life with an iron fist. When he finds Christine – quite by accident – he finally finds something he can bond with. The classically American love of the automobile is alive and well in Arnie – he literally loves Christine to death. Keith Gordon, who had previously been relegated to minor acting roles (albeit with some notable directors), fully embodies his character here. Through the course of the film Arnie covers quite an emotional range, from hopeless nerd, to regular guy, to deranged psychopath, and Gordon pulls it off wonderfully. Great performances are turned in by the whole cast: worried friend Dennis (John Stockwell), fearful girlfriend Leigh (Alexandra Paul), and even Harry Dean Stanton as the policeman investigating the strange series of murders all come back to Christine.

The car, of course, is the real star of the film. The filmmakers used 17 Plymouth Furys in the making of the film, destroying all but two. Carpenter really gives the car a human feel, particularly in the opening scene, where Christine first roles off the assembly line. A mechanic gives her a final inspection when her enormous hood, like the jaws of death, comes down on him. A trifle obvious perhaps, but the film is full of these interesting touches. Even the golden oldies that pop up from time to time when Christine is in one dire situation or another reflect what is happening in the scene and give the car real personality. The relationship between Arnie and the car is compellingly creepy. The more immersed in Christine he becomes, the more Arnie begins to reflect the 1950’s in style and swagger. When Christine gets jealous, bad things happen.

Christine is a fun horror film, dark and playful at the same time. The film has its intense moments, but they are always undercut with a sense that we are all here to have a good time. Christine never gets too serious, and that is its real strength. The filmmakers obviously took the material seriously, without ever forgetting that it was supposed to be fun at the same time. The acting and direction are both superb, and the film holds up surprisingly well, even 20 years after it first hit theaters.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Best-Horror-Movies.com Lee Roberts

ToxicUniverse.com (Mike Bracken)

DVD Movie Central Gordon Justesen

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

DVD Verdict - Special Edition Mitchell Hattaway

DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) Special Edition

eFilmCritic Scott Weinberg

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth

DVD Verdict Nicholas Sylvain

Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp

Mondo Digital also reviewing THEY LIVE

STARMAN

USA (115 mi) 1984 ‘Scope

Turner Classic Movies Nathaniel Thompson

After presenting the screen’s most gruesome depiction of interstellar visitors in 1982’s The Thing, director John Carpenter took a decidedly more gentle and optimistic look at the skies with his third foray into science fiction, Starman (1984). Developed by producer Michael Douglas at Columbia Pictures, the 1979 script was crafted by future Stand by Me (1986) scribes Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon around the same time as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982, also originally a Columbia project) but took longer to reach the screen due to extensive talent assignments behind and in front of the camera, with filmmakers ranging from John Badham to Mark Rydell considering it before Douglas eventually picked Carpenter because, as he said in the Boston Globe, “John has a great sense of style and deals with action masterfully. I knew he’d get to the emotional core of the story.”

The majority of the film is told through the eyes of fragile young widow Jenny Hayden (Raiders of the Lost Ark’s [1981] Karen Allen), who mourns the loss of her housepainter husband in a remote mountain home. One night a crashed starship brings an alien visitor who, using the DNA from a scrapbook hair trimming, assumes the form (played by Jeff Bridges) of her departed spouse. While the government and scientists (represented by Richard Jaeckel and Charles Martin Smith) hunt the alien down, he persuades the terrified Jenny to take him to a meeting point where he can rejoin others of his race and return home.

One of the most powerful fusions of love story and science fiction, Starman succeeds largely thanks to the clever scripting and portrayals of its two lead characters. Jenny’s fully-developed character is one of the genre’s finest, a wounded but strong human being whose numerous obstacles (grief, infertility, loneliness) are relieved when she finds the unlikeliest of fates, a similarly vulnerable being whose own education is in her hands. Carpenter himself likened the approach to a classic romance in an LA Weekly interview, stating “it’s all the classic stories of star-crossed lovers, the lovers who can’t really make it together but have a bond of love, like in Brief Encounter [1945]. It really works on that level, because it touches a little thing inside of us. It was easy for me to tap into that, real easy. It’s a departure, because people haven’t seen something like this from me before.” Grounding the relationship in reality necessitated scaling down some science fiction aspects of the original script, which was more science-oriented and granted the alien more demonstrative powers like flying and mass telekinetic destruction.

However, enough traditional alien mayhem remains to satisfy genre viewers, including a striking opening sequence with Bridges evolving from a baby to adulthood (pre-CGI, of course). The impressive visuals were the combined work of Dick Smith (the teen-to-adult effect), Rick Baker (the baby), and Stan Winston (the face-stretching), with Industrial Light & Magic handling the hair-cloning.

Ultimately the success of the film’s alien must go to Bridges, who was still considered an upcoming name at the time. Actors ranging from Tom Cruise to Kevin Bacon had been considered, but Bridges proved to have the correct balance of warmth, curiosity, and the willingness to look ridiculous in front of the camera. The gamble paid off in an Academy Award nomination and a considerable career boost, followed by the equally successful Jagged Edge [1985]. Meanwhile the Strasberg Institute-trained Allen, who only had a few non-Raiders credits to her name (including the widely-reviled Cruising, 1980), offered another strong lead performance and seemed destined for stardom, but instead she turned to focus on motherhood, stage work and her own yoga studio, with occasional rare returns to the big screen in films such as The Perfect Storm (2000). Playing Jenny proved a pleasant challenge to her acting abilities, and she had much kinder words for her working experience on Starman than Raiders when talking to Starlog magazine: “The role is a complete study in imagination. I spend the film building and sustaining an emotional state. What happens to Jenny never has – and won’t -- happen to me… [John Carpenter] is a really nice guy. The people working with him have a really nice thing going. They’ve developed this strong support system. He has chosen a good group of people. They stay with him film after film. They can bounce things off of each other in order to get the film made. I had a good time making Starman.”

Unusually for Carpenter, he did not score the film himself (The Thing is another rare exception); instead he turned to the composer Jack Nitzsche, one of the music industry’s more fascinating and volatile behind-the-scenes personalities. Best known in popular music circles as the close arranger and conductor on many of Phil Spector’s most influential recordings, Nitzsche went on to collaborate with many of the industry’s biggest names including Neil Young and the Rolling Stones. He also began dabbling in film scoring in the early 1970s with projects like The Exorcist (1973) and soon turned all of his attentions to that field, winning acclaim with One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest [1975] and his Academy Award-winning theme to An Officer and a Gentleman [1982], “Up Where We Belong.” Much of his Starman score works within the solid electronic idiom established by Carpenter but with a pair of powerfully emotional themes for the main characters, as well as a nod to his Spector days with Bridges and Allen dueting on an upbeat rendition of “All I Have to Do Is Dream” (heard on the soundtrack but played onscreen in a more stripped-down acoustic rendition). Unfortunately, Nitzsche died in August of 2000 from a heart attack.

Buoyed by successful sneak previews and excellent Christmas holiday business, Starman became a surprise hit and opened the door for Carpenter to expand his directorial abilities with the big-budget homage to Hong Kong fantasy films, Big Trouble in Little China [1986], as well as a return to romantic science fiction with the far less successful Memoirs of an Invisible Man [1992]. Meanwhile the story of the Starman was continued in 1986 for a single-season TV series of the same name, with Robert Hays taking over as the lead role in a return to Earth fourteen years later to… well, let’s not ruin the end of the original film, but you can probably figure it out.

Crazy for Cinema Lisa Skrzyniarz

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Reel Film Reviews (David Nusair)

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

Alex in Wonderland Review

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA B 86

USA (99 mi) 1986 ‘Scope

John Carpenter enters the realm of kung fu fighting with this heavily comedic, fantasy, martial arts action flick, something to rival the as yet uninvented CHINESE GHOST STORY (1987, 1990, 1991) featuring plenty of John Wayne swagger from Kurt Russell as Jack Burton, a fearless, tough-talking truck driver that arrives into San Francisco’s Chinatown just as underworld spirits decide to show themselves in a battle of earthly domination. Something of a box office flop that left Carpenter disillusioned with Hollywood, forcing a return to smaller independent films, the movie developed a 1980’s cult following with the video release. Initially envisioned as an 1880’s western by writers Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein, using Russell as a loner cowboy forced to mix it up with Chinese fantasy elements in the Wild West, featuring plenty of Eastern mysticism and weird special effects, but the story was rewritten and modernized by W.D Richter, a script doctor who also directed THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BONZAI ACROSS THE 8^TH DIMENSION (1984). The result is a mixed bag, where Russell resembles a typical American badass who continually finds himself as an uninvited guest, an outsider in the middle of a mysterious underworld gang fight in Little China, where evil godfather Lo Pan, James Hong summoning the dead spirit of Ming the Merciless, along with 3 supernatural protectors, Thunder, Rain, and Lightning, have kidnapped the rarest of Chinese women, the emerald green-eyed girlfriend (Suzee Pai) of Jack’s friend Wang Chi, Dennis Dun in something of a Bruce Lee imitation role, where the two partner up, along with the aid of an old tour bus driver Egg Shin (Victor Wong), who is experienced fighting the dark arts, and Kim Cattrall as Gracie Law, a neighborhood lawyer who witnessed the abduction.

The secret to the movie’s success has to be the continual irreverent wisecracking remarks by Russell, where every quotable line he delivers is so over the top, yet uttered with perfect comic timing in this 1930’s screwball comedy rapid-fire style of relentlessly face-paced dialogue matched by a continuing series of frenetic action sequences. Lo Pan is a wonderful invention and the evil centerpiece of the film, something of an undead magician, a 2000-year old ancient sorcerer who, like Harry Potter’s Voldemort (who also hasn’t been invented yet), wishes to reclaim his human status through evil spells and black magic. Egg Shin is the expert in cracking the power of ancient Chinese spells, while Wang Chi fends off hordes of martial arts fighters single handedly. Jack’s largely along for the ride, inept and often clueless, playing second fiddle to the more stunningly acrobatic Wang Chi, instead offering snide comments and a tone of cynicism, helping add more chaos to an already chaotic supernatural undertaking. There are monsters and demons, not to mention green rays coming out of the eyes and mouth of Lo Pan, who has the power to hypnotize and levitate his kidnapped subject, keeping her locked away in a cavernous dungeon underneath Chinatown, protected by an army of skilled martial arts fighters and various other evil spirits that suddenly appear from time to time. While there are waves of action sequences, the two sides go at each other with a relentless fury, where Russell’s comic wit and his love interest in smart aleck Gracie (a touch added by Carpenter) all add to the continual build up of troublemaking, mayhem, and suspense. Carpenter, of course, composed the musical score along with Alan Howarth.

Certainly one of John Carpenter’s most entertaining films, the film creates an entirely new universe, mostly unexplainable, like a house of pleasures at the circus, and is replete with pop references which are all over the map, while it also plays upon Chinese stereotype, such as Fu Manchu, Flash Gordon, and Chinese-American dialect, much of which had to be excised from the film as too offensive. The Writers Guild of America also excised the name of W.D. Richter as a screenwriter, crediting only the original writers, something Carpenter was unhappy with, but the humorous, nonsensical style more than makes up for the continual sense of over exaggeration, as everything is way over the top, especially the weirdness of the set pieces and special effects, some of which look pretty cheesy, like something left over from a discarded Star Trek TV episode. Kurt Russell’s action figure profile, along with the high flying martial arts style of Dennis Dun, both immersed in the richly adorned and delirious subterranean atmosphere of sorcery and mystical spells, could easily be parodied in comic books, or even video games, much like the as yet unenvisioned Jeff Bridges character The Dude in the Coen Brothers’ THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998), but the popularity of the film flew under the radar. The film precedes the prevalent use of computer graphics in martial arts movies, instead relying upon reverse movements and upside down sets, using actual stunts where martial arts fighters fly through the air on invisible wires or trampolines, conducting swordfights in mid-air, adding a rarely seen touch of elegance in an American martial arts film. Still, the thing is the stuff of legends, one of the better Carpenter films that does not veer into the horror genre, perhaps eclipsed two years later by the equally preposterous, also underappreciated, darkly disturbing comic sci-fi satire of THEY LIVE (1988).

John Carpenter's masterpiece tale of Chinese black magic, demons and warriors, ancient Chinese feuds, and the loud mouthed American trucker, Jack Burton (Kurt Russell), who gets caught up in the middle of a mess he can't understand. All hell breaks loose when some Chinatown punks kidnap Wang Chi's (Dennis Dun) fiancée from the airport. The evil godfather of Little China, David Lo Pan (James Hong) wants the girl for himself because she is the woman who can break the horrible curse he has endured over the last 2000 years. Together, Jack, Wang, tour bus driver Egg Shin (Victor Wong), and lawyer Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall) lead an attack againt Lo Pan to get Wang's fiancée back and get a lot more than they bargained for. Kurt Russell's portrayal of Jack Burton is pure genius and Kim Cattrall has never looked lovlier. Great performances by everyone, awesome fighting, superb special effects, a fascinating story, and fun characters with clever dialog make this film an unforgetable treat.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

A film to embody the Eighties, and justify them. John Carpenter in Spielberg-Lucas turf, he surveys the perils and wholeheartedly forges ahead, the analysis is given in a droll exchange between Kurt Russell and Dennis Dun: "Hollow?" "Hollow." "Fuck it." (Or, more poetically: "The darkest magic, my soul swims in it.") Set in San Francisco, the tale is spun by Victor Wong, who lends it the proper gleam by summoning a miniature lighting bolt to a Doubting Thomas, the rest is pure play. Russell is a truck driver who's taken swagger lessons from John Wayne, Dun is a Chinatown restaurateur searching for his kidnapped fiancée, an emerald-eyed supermodel; an early chase gives a pellucid view of the city and a detour into misty alleys locates the overflowing caldron of genres within it, a street melee rages on until a trio of wire-fu divinities descends from the heavens to dice through the warring factions. The villain (James Hong) appears first as a smirky hobo, then resplendent in Ming the Merciless robes, then a pissy Methusela in a wheelchair, yearning to be made flesh following millenniums as an apparition; the heroes enter a warehouse and end up in the "Hell of Upside Down Souls" ("the Chinese have a lot of hells"), while Kim Cattrall breezes through to buttress Only Angels Have Wings in Carpenter's pop magpie foundations, which also include Year of the Dragon, Blood Alley, The Magic Blade, Hair-Raising Hare, etc. W.D. Richter worked on the screenplay, and Russell lovingly evokes the spirit of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension by firing his gun into the air before a showdown and getting knocked unconscious by falling debris; for the rest, Richter's loopy jokes receive Carpenter's unerring formalist elegance, the villain's lair has a cocktail lounge where the intrepid warriors mix magic potion and neon skulls adorn sinister subterranean ceremonies. Naturally, it took the rise of post-modernism in the next decade for people to notice the greatness in it, but Carpenter at once understood the complex layering of pop imagery, and was off to make We Live. Cinematography by Dean Cundey. With Kate Burton, Donald Li, Carter Wong, and Suzee Pai.

filmcritic.com gets in Big Trouble Christopher Null

Ever wonder what happened to Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League, the Buckaroo Banzai sequel that was promised at the end of that film? In some sense, this is it. When writer/director W.D. Richter's sequel project fell through, his script was radically retooled, handed to John Carpenter, and voila, a classic was born.

A crazy parody of martial arts flicks, supernatural/spirit movies, and old-fashioned westerns, Big Trouble in Little China gives us Kurt Russell as the inimitable Jack Burton, a good-natured truck driver unconsciously obsessed with John Wayne. On one of his trips to San Francisco, poor Jack gets swept up in a universe-bounding plot to kidnap a Chinese girl with green eyes, landing knee-deep amidst warring gangs that dwell in the Chinatown underground and an ancient spirit that emits blinding light from its mouth.

This is not your ordinary kung fu flick, to say the least. Even though Russell's Jack is not the real driver of the plot (he's just along for the ride, helping out his buddy Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) in his quest), he's truly the star of the show. But while Jack tries his hardest, he seems to knock himself out or lose his weapon every time a fight comes around... and ultimately he's almost more harm than good. Jack's one-liners, delivered with a naïve, hillbilly folksiness that Russell does a little too well, come at a blinding pace. After all... "You know what Jack Burton always says: What the hell?" The story's a bit of a throwaway, but hey, what the hell, it's a lot of fun.

Now released on a double-disc DVD edition, this new release of Big Trouble in Little China is a must-own disc for fans of Carpenter or this cult classic. On a full-length commentary track, Russell and Carpenter provide one of the best bantering sessions I've ever heard -- rarely talking about the movie, really, and with Russell in stitches virtually the entire time. One of the choicest bits in the commentary is Russell waxing about how the press kept hounding him about how it felt to star in what would undoubtedly be the biggest grossing movie of 1986. (The picture would eventually earn a paltry $11.1 million, probably because audiences didn't really get that it was a comedy at heart. With Carpenter and Russell involved, who could blame them?)

Needless to say, Big Trouble is a comedy and it's a fine one, as well. The additional extras (including about half an hour of priceless deleted and extended footage) are well worth your time, and as for the movie itself, well, every time you ride in an elevator you'll likely find yourself quoting Jack.

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) also seen here: Movie Review - Big Trouble in Little China - eFilmCritic

John Carpenter’s genre-bending (and genre-blending) action/adventure/fantasy/martial arts/comedy, "Big Trouble in Little China," was released in 1986 to mixed, if overall positive, reviews, but failed to bring in audiences in sufficient numbers to cover the mid-range budget (Carpenter's largest at that point in his career), despite a wry, ironic, subversive lead performance by Kurt Russell as an ineffectual action hero who’s (mostly) all talk and no action. The passage of time, however, has been more than kind to "Big Trouble in Little China." Like 1982's "The Thing," a box-office disappointment turned cult classic, "Big Trouble in Little China" has developed a small, devoted fan base. "Big Trouble in Little China" may just be John Carpenter’s most entertaining film, repaying multiple viewings with an over-abundance of narrative and visual pleasures.

As Big Trouble in Little China opens, Jack Burton (Kurt Russell), an everyman truck-driver (and the ostensible hero/protagonist) arrives in San Francisco to drop off cargo in Chinatown. At the conclusion of a celebratory evening (and morning) of drinking and gambling where Jack wins big, the other men leave, broke and none too happy with their losses, Jack’s stays behind with his longtime friend, Wang Chi (Dennis Dun), a local restaurant owner (as we soon learn, Wang Chi’s a man of many talents). Wang Chi makes Jack an odd wager, a double or nothing bet Wang loses. Jack, eager to collect his winnings and uncomfortable with letting Wang out of his sight, is convinced to accompany Wang to the airport, where Wang's fiancée, Miao Yin (Suzee Pai), is about to arrive from China. Miao Yin is the rarest of Chinese women. She has emerald green eyes.

At the airport, Jack encounters Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall), an immigration attorney (and part-time troublemaker). Gracie rebuffs Jack's one-liner. In the next beat, a Chinese gang, the Lords of Death, brush roughly past the slightly perturbed Jack. Jack confronts them, only to find himself overmatched and in need of Wang's superior martial arts skills. In the mayhem, the Lords of Death grab Miao Yin, sending Jack and Wang back to Chinatown, where the first of many supernatural events upend Jack's worldview. Stuck in a tight alleyway, Jack and Wang watch rival gangs, the Chang Sing and the Wing Kong, engage in a battle. Enter Thunder (Carter Wong), Rain (Peter Kwong), Lightning (James Pax), three mystical warriors with extraordinary powers. Thunder, Rain, and Lightning serve David Lo Pan (James Hong), a godfather-like figure with a double nature. In their hasty retreat, Jack loses his most important possession, his truck, to the Lords of Death.

Jack, of course, wants his truck back and help Wang Chi recover Miao Yin, but his pride also needs mending. To repair his ego, Jack goes into action-hero mode, despite a distinct shortage of martial arts skills, let alone any understanding of the supernatural forces arrayed against him and his friend. Jack's ignorance is to our benefit, as his constant head scratching and incredulous outbursts lead to cleverly delivered exposition by Wang Chi and a rumpled, slightly disheveled sorcerer/tour bus driver, Egg Shen (Victor Wong). Egg Shen delivers more than his share of witticisms, making him, like Jack, Wang Chi, and the peevish, frustrated David Lo Pan, the most memorable characters in Big Trouble in Little China and in Carpenter's oeuvre. Big Trouble in Little China turns on not one, not two, but three search-and-rescue missions, with the expected martial arts battle between warring groups rounding out the action. The performers fly on wires, jump on trampolines, and swordfight in mid-air, adding more than a touch of the absurd and the parodic to the fight scenes, but that's in keeping with Big Trouble in Little China's feather-light tone.

Big Trouble in Little China has much to recommend first and repeat viewings, beginning with the witty, irreverent dialogue, with a great deal of the humor coming at Jack Burton's expense. Jack's pretensions to action-hero machismo are often met with disbelief, laughter, or both. Jack is essentially the "sidekick" to Wang's hero, but he doesn't know it. He stumbles his way through the film, but Russell's blustery, pitch-perfect performance never crosses over into caricature (which would make him a buffoon). In less sure hands, the almost delirious mix of usually disparate genres, action/adventure, martial arts, fantasy, and comedy would almost surely fail, but thanks to a well-crafted script by Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein (with an adaptation by W.D. "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai" Richter) and typically assured, unobtrusive direction by John Carpenter, the end result is a nearly flawless mini-masterpiece that draws the audience into Jack's adventures and misadventures.

Ultimately, even fans of Carpenter’s work in the horror genre are forced to admit that "Big Trouble in Little China" may be Carpenter’s best film (with the possible exceptions of "The Thing" or "Halloween," but both of those films are firmly within the horror genre). After all, how many films in any director's work can sustain effervescent good cheer from the first frame to the last (book-ended by Jack's pontificating over a CB radio as he drives his pride and joy, the Pork Chop Express, out of San Francisco to parts unknown, moments after leaving his potential relationship with Gracie open-ended)? Alas, "Big Trouble in Little China’s" disappointing box-office returns means that Jack's adventures ended in 1986, without the likelihood of a sequel (other media, e.g., comic books or videogame adaptations, are presumably still possibilities).

Summer of '86: Big Trouble in Little China, Take 1 Robert C. Cumbow from The House Next Door, July 11, 2011

Summer of '86: Forget it, Jack, it's Chinatown: Big Trouble in Little China, Take 2 Odienator from The House Next Door, July 13, 2011. also seen here: The House Next Door [Odienator]

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]

Big Trouble In Little China - DVD review for VideoVista monthly web ... Tony Lee from Video Vista

Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second (The Cineastes essay) Adam Batty

PopMatters David Sanjek

DVD Journal Alexandra DuPont, Special Edition

DVD Times Raphael Pour-Hashemi, Special Edition

DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson, Special Edition

Film Gumbo [Graham Gough]

Edward Copeland on Film (VenetianBlond)

0-5 Stars Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Culture Dogs [Sam Hatch]

Combustible Celluloid film review - Big Trouble in Little China (1986 ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

UpcomingDiscs.com » Blog Archive » Big Trouble in Little China David Williams

DVD Verdict Harold Gervais

Cinefantastique Blu-ray Review [Drew Fitzpatrick]

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Dan Heaton, Special Edition

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (DVD) David Grove from Film Threat, Special Edition

Guide To Current DVD: Big Trouble In Little China Special Edition

Attack of the 50 Foot DVD Dr. Freex, Special Edition

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Dan Mancini]

High Def Digest (Blu-ray) [Tom Landy]

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA - Blu-ray review | Movie Metropolis Dean Winkelspecht

DVD Sleuth [Mike Long] Blu-Ray

HighDefDiscNews [Justin Sluss] Blu Ray

FeoAmante.com [E.C.McMullen Jr.]

What a Feeling! [Robert Horton]

Chuck Dowling

The Village Voice [Scott Foundas] August 27, 2008

Filmcritic.com Christopher Null

Guilty Viewing Pleasures

DVD Maniacs Review Michael Elliot

Film Threat's "Footage Fetishes" [Pete Vonder Haar]

She Likes DVDs Review

The Film Asylum Ryan McDonald

Sci Film Review Bear

The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

Mutant Reviewers From Hell Kyle and Justin

Brilliant Observations on 2122 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Cinema de Merde CdM Scott

Past Picks Online [Jimmy Gillman]

Eat My Brains Zombie Club also reviewing PRINCE OF DARKNESS

John Carpenter - Cinescene Ed Owens, also reviewing DARK STAR

Filmtracks: Big Trouble in Little China (John Carpenter/Alan Howarth) Christian Clemmensen soundtrack review

Big Trouble In Little China (1999) Soundtrack - Soundtrack.Net April 25, 2003

Soundtrack: Big Trouble In Little China (1986) - Soundtrack.Net January 20, 2008

Interview - John Carpenter - Soundtrack.Net Dan Goldwasser interview, October 1998

FilmFour.com

Big Trouble in Little China Time Out London

BBCi - Films (DVD review) Almar Haflidason

DVDBeaver Blu-ray review [Gary Tooze]

The New York Times (Walter Goodman) also seen here: Big Trouble in Little China - Movies - New York Times

THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS

USA (101 mi) 1987 ‘Scope

Carpenter's first low-budget horror pic for some time. Summoned to an abandoned church by a frightened priest (Pleasence), Prof Birack (Wong) finds a basement shrine dominated by a canister of green fluid. A manuscript reveals the existence of the Secret Brotherhood of Sleep, worshippers of Satan, who was entombed in the canister by his father, the evil anti-God, millions of years ago. Birack is sceptical until jets of liquid from the canister transform some of his team into malevolent zombies. Meanwhile, the embryonic Satan is struggling to release himself, and his father's power has begun to manifest itself. Refracting the traditional conflict of Good and Evil through quantum mechanics and sub-atomic physics, the sometimes talky script remains engrossing thanks to Carpenter's chilling atmospherics. The claustrophobic terror generated by fluid camerawork and striking angles is reinforced by a narrative which builds slowly but surely towards a heart-racing climax.

Austin Chronicle [Mike Emery]

Long regarded as John Carpenter’s first outright failure, Prince of Darkness is perhaps the greatest satanic horror story-by-way-of-quantum physics ever put to film. Which doesn’t, admittedly, make it all that great. But what’s lacking in Carpenter’s wacked-out thriller – decent make-up for his demonically possessed ghouls, passable performances from his bland cast, a credit sequence that runs under 15 minutes – is made up for by an insidious atmosphere of apocalyptic doom and a unique script (by Carpenter, using the pseudonym Martin Quatermass) that attempts to provide a real-world scientific explanation for supernatural phenomena. The director’s trademark electronic score is eerily effective, and Donald Pleasance, as a priest named (believe it or not) Loomis, is his usual over-the-top campy self. There’s no getting around the fact that this ludicrous saga about the return of Satan – who has been trapped for centuries (by a secret Church organization) in a vat of gooey liquid which he telekinetically shoots into PhD candidates’ mouths as a means of possessing them – is overburdened with near-incomprehensible exposition about tachyon particles and other such mumbo jumbo. Plus, there’s a strange implication that homeless people (including a pasty-faced Alice Cooper) are easily possessed by the Devil because they’re inferior beings on par with red ants. Nonetheless, with his reasonably chilling film’s finale, Carpenter shrewdly complements his gory scares with tantalizing, time travel-tinged paradoxes.

Outside of Halloween and Escape From New York, most film buffs tend to overlook much of John Carpenter's work. While the recent hit Vampires proves that the longtime director's creative vision is well intact, there are an assortment of other Carpenter nuggets that deserve a second look. One of these is Prince of Darkness. Shot on a shoestring budget with no stars (except for Carpenter regular Donald Pleasence and rocker Alice Cooper), the film explores an innovative take on the old Satan theme. The premise here is that the devil was actually an extraterrestrial who has been locked away in an alternate world that mirrors our own. His son, however, has been preserved as a mass of liquid in an ancient container. When a priest (Pleasence) discovers that the deadly broth intends to free his father, he recruits an old physicist professor (Victor Wong) and an assortment of his students to combat this chemical phenomenon. Soon, our heroes find themselves trapped as the sinister fluid has infected a gaggle of homeless people who kill anything that leaves the church. Zombies, Satan, Alice Cooper. This film has some essential elements for a fright fest, but in the end, Carpenter's moody synth-score and taut direction steal the show. The storyline is certainly unlike that of any other devil flick and the Night of the Living Dead-like setting enhances the suspense level. Creepy to say the least (but not without some cheesy schlock value), Prince of Darkness remains one of Carpenter's forgotten works that is worth a closer look.

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

To describe John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness as merely a fine piece of horror cinema is to give this film a huge disservice. Prince of Darkness is more than horror, it's actually a very interesting piece of science fiction, that dabbles in occultism and the age-old mysticism that have always surrounded organized religion. Although the film contains zombies, demons, roaches, worms, beheadings, blood, and a lot of screaming, the main thrust, the oomph that makes Prince of Darkness special is the way Carpenter attacked the tired and almost cliche theme of the devil boss himself taking over the Earth.

Instead of doing the film in the conventional horror way: witches, Satanists or other demoniacs who urge for their master to make his apocalyptic entrance in our world, Carpenter cooks up this whole theory wherein Satan is actually a creature from another dimension, or planet, and the Catholic Church has kept hidden inside a glass structure (which looks like a cheaply made bright green lava lamp) the Prince of Darkness, which awakens just in that moment where a supernova just exploded and some light particles, or quarks, or whatever, lands in Earth to urge the ooze to turn into an actual living creature, which infects everything it touches like a mind-controlling parasite. Carpenter's theory is complex, he uses scientific banter to raise the film's standing much higher. There's talk of telepathy, visual signals from the future, quantum physics, Catholic history that Carpenter struggles to jive and mix into a coherent whole. Surprisingly, it works and despite the cookiness of it all, is actually very entertaining.

Carpenter starts it off wonderfully. A priest mysteriously dies leaving a key to a darkened chamber in a closed-down church. A man, Brian (Jameson Parker) stalks a beautiful girl Catherine (Lisa Blount) who turns out to be his classmate in a philosophy-physics class under Professor Birack (Victor Wong). The key left behind by the dead priest is used by another priest (Donald Pleasance), who troubled by what he discovered, contacts Professor Birack, who in return, instructs his students who are experts in physics and other scientists to spend a weekend in the abandoned church to measure the happenings in scientific terms, and find out what can be done.

The premise is fantastic and Carpenter's filmmaking is quite admirable. His script (using pseudonym Martin Quatermass) maybe heavyhanded but Carpenter's filmmaking makes up for such, using deadpan humor, or expert scare and shock tactics to allow the viewer to swallow the implausibility of everything. It's fine horror, with tinges of Romero zombie-fest (with the homeless schizophrenics surrounding the church in hordes), Italian schlock (there's an abundance of worms, and other creepy crawlers), and American exorcism scares (the near-latter part reminded me a bit of William Friedkin's The Exorcist). The sci-fi angle is more for thrills and chills rather than serious thinking, but Carpenter's insistence on the far-fetched theory may give the film some sudden pauses to its near-perfect pacing, but everything is forgiven when Carpenter turns the last twenty minutes into a hair-raising, mindboggling, exhilerating ride to a conclusion that will leave you scratching your head by how Carpenter came up with an unexpected stroke of genius.

A typically over-ambitious philosophical horror movie with elements of science-fiction and comedy, Prince of Darkness marks the end of John Carpenter’s spell as a truly essential director. While They Live (1988), In the Mouth of Madness (1995), Ghosts of Mars (2001) and even Vampires (1999) have their admirers, Prince of Darkness is the last time a Carpenter movie managed to be both viscerally exciting, thematically intriguing and (relatively speaking) dramatically coherent.

The script is credited to ‘Martin Quatermass’: Carpenter’s choice of pseudonym indicating his debt to Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale - at one point he even has a character wearing a sweater emblazoned with ‘Kneale University’, just in case we’ve missed the gag. The story combines elements of Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and the legendary TV play The Stone Tape (1972), as a group of researchers visit a semi-derelict Los Angeles church (“St. Godard’s”!) to investigate a mysterious canister found in the basement.

Immediately picking up bad vibes (somebody does actually say, “this place gives me the creeps”) they discover that the canister’s churning green goo is in fact the essence of what we’ve come to call the Antichrist: actually, a powerful alien being who last walked the Earth in the Cambrian era. This evil entity starts taking over the bodies of the researchers, and also controlling the LA street-people who congregate menacingly outside. The aim is to liberate its father, a being we know as Satan, who is currently trapped in another dimension. Or something.

Close attention must be paid to Carpenter’s script, which begins with a dizzying array of complex theories discussed by highbrow figures including priest Donald Pleasence, theoretical physicist Victor Wong and the latter’s students – a fairly geeky collection of boffins apart from implausibly photogenic (and sappy) lovebirds Jameson Parker and Lisa Blount. “Say goodbye to classical reality! Because our logic collapses on the sub-atomic level – into ghosts, and shadows!” exclaims Wong, which is Carpenter’s way of ensuring that we’re ready to swallow all manner of bizarre plot happenings once the action adjourns to the creepy downtown LA church.

Even then, it takes a little while for the action to kick in, and pace is uneven until things suddenly pick up for a trademark Carpenter last reel in which he frantically intercuts between various groups of people in deadly peril. By now all the intellectual chat about Schrodinger’s Cat seems a very long way off, as the ‘possessed’ rise from the dead and we’re suddenly plunged into gory zombie/vampire territory.

As usual, it doesn’t all quite come off. Carpenter can’t resist diltuing the tone with some rather heavy-handed comic relief, and it’s slightly jarring to hear the Anti-Christ (speaking through a human conduit) coming out with the absurd line “I’ve got a message for you, and you’re not gonna like it.” Even worse is Carpenter’s unforgivable treatment of the ‘street-people’, led by a cadaverous Alice Cooper. “He controls simple organisms easily,” someone remarks of the Antichrist – and Carpenter blithely seems to place the scruffy, shuffling homeless on the same ‘pawns of Satan’ level as biddable creatures like worms, ants and cockroaches.

The street-people fulfil the same function as the wordless gang-member hordes in Assault on Precinct 13, as once again our ‘heroes’ come under siege from an undifferentiated, faceless mass. In Carpenter’s next movie They Live the homeless are heroic class warriors against ‘corporate’ (actually alien) oppression – perhaps indicating the director felt guilty about his earlier sins. But even in Prince of Darkness, he pointedly includes a shot of the grim, foursquare business block across from the church that feels positively Cronenbergesque in its foreboding modernity, symbol of a rigorously partitioned, anti-human City of Angels.

The street-people issue aside, Carpenter is on something approaching top form here – his distinctive, thuddingly doomy electronic score plays its part, while the cast cope well with the script’s sudden shifts from airy theorising to kick-ass action. If anything, Carpenter’s (blisteringly anti-clerical) screenplay has too many ideas, with the result that none of them are fully worked through – his best conceit features the researchers receiving messages from the future in their dreams in the form of electronic signals sent backwards in time from 1999 on a beam of ‘tachyons’.

This “remote-camera view of the future” sounds surprisingly plausible, and the grainy images we see (a not-quite-human figure emerging from the church) are easily the most spookily disturbing in the whole of Carpenter’s work. The breathless climax, meanwhile - in which Satan’s monstrous paw is briefly glimpsed on the other side of a mirror - ties everything together in a way that just about makes sense, while simultaneously managing to reference not only Cocteau’s Orphee but also Carroll’s Alice.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, July 6, 2009

Classic-Horror.com Kairo

Final Girl Stacie Ponder

DVD Verdict Kevin Lee

Scifilm Review Dr. Mality

VideoVista Christopher Geary

DVD Talk (Ian Jane)

Moda Magazine (Kage Alan)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

CineScene.com (Fausted)

Eat My Brains Zombie Club also reviewing BIG TROUBLE FROM LITLE CHINA

The 7th Level also reviewing DARK STAR, ASSAULT IN PRECINCT 13, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, and GHOSTS OF MARS

Nashville Scene [Jim Ridley]

THEY LIVE B+ 91

USA (93 mi) 1988 ‘Scope

I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum.

—John Nada (Rowdy Roddy Piper)

Considered “the finest Marxist science-fiction film ever to feature a professional wrestler,” we finally have a movie that explains why it’s so difficult getting ahead in this world, that is, unless you *conform* and *obey the rules.* This movie, set in Los Angeles sometime in the future, lays it all out for you, as a drifter, none other than professional wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper, arrives looking for work and hooks up with a construction company, but notices strange goings-on at a church across the street, which really piques his interest when a full-fledged police invasion attacks the church and an entire homeless camp which has been providing free shelter and meals is razed by bulldozers. When Piper checks out what was secretly left behind at the church, he discovers a box of sunglasses that alter the viewer’s perspective, enabling the viewer to see in black and white what’s underneath billboard advertising, which turns into blunt subliminal messages which urge citizens to stay asleep, submit, obey, buy, conform, marry and reproduce, do not question authority, watch TV and have no thoughts. Even more preposterous, it turns out aliens have infiltrated the human race in order to harvest our resources, which they are doing by controlling the TV airwaves and through extravagant business ventures, handsomely rewarding those helpful partners that grease the wheels for them. With the sunglasses, however, one can see the skeletal faces of the aliens, as otherwise they are completely indistinguishable from other humans. Piper goes a little crazed once he sees how humans are being manipulated, but the aliens are everywhere and seem to control the police. When he starts to fight back, he realizes the aliens are all connected by strange wrist watches which immediately connect them to the police and can also help them instantly disappear without a trace.

Defying arrest, television broadcasts are interrupted by hackers who attempt to warn the world about their passivity, where independent thought is discouraged and people are ordered to “watch TV and stay asleep.” Referred to as “free enterprisers” who routinely label their resisters as Communists, this is a brilliant exploration of contemporary 1980’s American culture through an outlandish parody of Republicans in the Reagan era, Big Money subverting Blue Collar interests, suggesting the yuppie revolution of the 80’s was actually an alien invasion, satirically portrayed here as aliens who wish to control the masses through psychological manipulation, hoarding all the money and power for themselves. These broader themes unfortunately continue to plague us today, where not much has changed, as we still struggle with uncontrollable corporate greed and middle class apathy pitting the haves against the have nots, as never before in American history has so much wealth been concentrated in the hands of so few. Piper turns into a somewhat berserk, lone American seeking vigilante justice, as while the world has turned into a totalitarian police state, the dialogue also gets a little campy with some choice one-liners. In fact, the acting is barely acceptable, even for B-movie standards, and Carpenter’s bluesy score is extremely repetitive, creating a near hypnotic mood as the movie takes its time setting up the characters until all hell breaks loose and this turns into an action thriller that never takes itself too seriously, making this delicious fun throughout.

Los Angeles’s darkly corrupt soul is finally revealed for what it is, a vast wasteland of subliminal billboard signs controlled by aliens, where Carpenter, from behind a pair of dark glasses, essential fashion in Southern California, by the way, abruptly alters how the viewer sees the world, often switching from color to black and white. Perhaps the turning point of the film is a vicious fight scene between two friends, Piper and his working class buddy Keith David as Frank, an extended five-minute alley fight, a brutal affair complete with flying suplex wrestling maneuvers, all designed to get Frank to wear the glasses, a legendary scene that may have been the source inspiration for David Fincher’s FIGHT CLUB (1999). Two working class stiffs fighting over what’s left of their stripped down pride and honor gives this film a timeless Us versus Them relevance, also a unique portrait of how the lower class is continually forced to fight over the last scraps at the bottom of the economic food chain. Carpenter’s wit, expressed through a blistering critique of capitalism and the protections provided to an elite upper class, has never been so fully on display as in this paranoid mix of sci-fi and thriller, one of the great unsung satires to truly get the 80’s right. It all plays out like a sci-fi, socio-political horror western, where the individualistic, frontier spirit has to fend off the foreign, outside invaders, which is the key to understanding most John Carpenter movies. What’s unique here is that a professional wrestler is the one chosen to save the world, all given a tongue-in-cheek sensibility that plays out with the cheap fun of an original Twilight Zone or Star Trek TV program.

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] (a fitting excerpt from a review of another Carpenter film)

Mind you, "Ghosts of Mars" is not a good movie by any reasonable standard; it's not one of Carpenter's half-accidental triumphs, like the original "Halloween" or "Escape From New York" or his memorable 1982 remake of "The Thing." It's not even "They Live" -- the finest Marxist science-fiction film ever to feature a professional wrestler -- in which Rowdy Roddy Piper discovers that the yuppie revolution of the '80s is actually an alien invasion (still an unrefuted hypothesis as far as I'm concerned).

John Carpenter completists generally hate this slab of satiric sci-fi, but it's one of my favorite junk movies and a sure-fire Halloween rental. Hideous aliens in human disguise have infiltrated our government and our media; our only hope is drifter Rowdy Roddy Piper, whose sunglasses can see through the aliens' mind-controlling techniques. Sure it's silly, but the laugh's on us when Piper looks at a kiosk full of newsmagazines and sees only covers marked "OBEY" and "CONFORM." (The Scene uses lead-based ink to prevent such exposure.) Classic line: "I'm here to kick ass and to chew bubble gum--and I'm all out of bubble gum."

They Live Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

John Carpenter's 1988 SF action-thriller about aliens taking over the earth through the hypnotic use of TV. The explicit anti-Reagan satire--the aliens are developers who regard human beings as cattle, aided by yuppies who are all too willing to cooperate for business reasons--is strangely undercut and confused by a xenophobic treatment of the aliens that also makes them virtual stand-ins for the Vietcong. Carpenter's wit and storytelling craft make this fun and watchable, although the script takes a number of unfortunate shortcuts, and the possibilities inherent in the movie's central conceit are explored only cursorily. All in all, an entertaining (if ideologically incoherent) response to the valorization of greed in our midst, with lots of Rambo-esque violence thrown in, as well as an unusually protracted slugfest between ex-wrestler Roddy Piper and costar Keith David. R, 97 min.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]

They Live, John Carpenter’s paranoia-drenched 1988 thriller about corrupt capitalist extraterrestrials hoodwinking humans via mind-control, may be the loopiest, and coolest, entry in the director’s canon. A vagabond construction worker (pro wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper) uncovers the real reason behind American economic disparity when he finds a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see that skeletal aliens rule the Earth disguised as WASPs. Piper joins forces with a rebel group to fight the insidious invaders – who use subliminal messages in advertising such as “Obey,” “Consume” and “Sleep” to lull people into zombified submission – but this critique of 1980s materialism is best loved for containing the longest fight scene in movie history between Piper and Keith David (clocking in at over eight minutes!) and the greatest so-bad-it’s-brilliant tough-guy line of the decade, spoken as Piper robs a bank: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass…and I’m all out of bubblegum.”

John Carpenter is a director of absolute economy, his filmography replete with, if not distinguished by, simplistic synthesizer and bass guitar scores, and foolproof, masculinized formulas. His career in genre filmmaking is so archetypal that it is with neither irony nor derision that his most celebrated film is named after a holiday, and with some generosity that two of his early films were remade with sparing variation from their original iterations.

These traits are pronounced in Carpenter’s name, as it regularly prefixes the titles of his films, appending each with a trademark for familiar thrills and fantasies. And each, for the most part, delivers: when women are the subject, they are empowered and durable; the men are quietly hostile but strangely asexual; the conflicts usually escalate in parallel threads between which Carpenter cuts in pedestrian fashion; and there is usually some cinematographic reference to Psycho. These are citations of Carpenter’s reliable assets, which are exalted in They Live, my favorite of his melds of 50s SciFi and horror.

Roddy Piper is cast as the lead, an anonymous drifter (credited as Nada) who comes upon an anonymous city in which little work is to be found. Piper is known predominantly as a professional wrestler (specifically, loser to Hulk Hogan in the original Wrestlemania); here, however, this experience fosters little appropriation other than what is arguably the most indulgent fight sequence in film, in which Piper and Keith David spend some eight minutes throwing (and receiving) wrecking ball punches. Otherwise, Piper is underutilized, for the most part relaying paranoia, sudden anger, or anxiety in a pair of eyes that concentrate on something out of the frame. In other words, he is unnaturally appropriate — Carpenter’s Bruno S. — precisely for his inexperience, his obvious inability to suit the role, or, in this environment, to provide an inability to conform within an extraordinarily homogeneous breed of human beings manipulated by a capitalist alien race.

They Live was released in November of 1988, coinciding with the end of Reagan’s extended tenure as United States President. This coincidence improves the analogy of the film’s critique of capitalism and the shelter afforded by an elite upper-class. Such analogy is not unapparent in Carpenter’s films (The Thing, for one, is a more pessimistic dystopia), but in none is it as lucid as it is here. But if this analogy to Reagan-era elitism is accepted, then the effort to diminish said elitism inherits the interpretation of Communism: Nada discovers a militant collective that loans its members guns and an agenda for mutiny. The members range in age, race, and sex, but these traits are incidental—given this army’s modest number, each participant is an identical asset. They Live is Cold War paranoia at its most lucid, leveraging American capitalism with its most logically abhorrent enemy.

The concept is manifested with equal derision in aliens whose faces resemble skulls that house two bulbous eyes. Their appearance is as repugnant as their practice, but neither is easily discerned. Herein, the realization is afforded via a pair of sunglasses that refract the countenance of conspiracy, revealing the aliens’ horrid faces, and the subliminal commands in billboards, magazines, signage, and even currency. In turn, the film hinges on epiphany: the aforesaid fight sequence is motivated by Nada’s intention for his compatriot to look through a pair of the magic sunglasses (which he does, upon his reception of a back suplex); and it closes in a gesture both hilarious and epic, which finds the rest of the world recognizing — for the first time — the subliminal commands that order its existence.

Movie Cynics The Vocabulariast

They Live is another film from horror master John Carpenter. The film was released in 1988, and didn’t really receive much notice until it came to video where it has become something of a cult classic. Carpenter’s They Live is a deliciously misleading film. On its surface it appears to be a simple sci-fi flick with a professional wrestler as its star, not the height of cinema to be sure. However, upon closer examination, the film is actually pretty intelligent and supplies an answer for many of the problems that we still face today, 20 years after the film’s creation. Look at consumer greed, apathy, pollution, the gap between the economically elite and the economically downtrodden and ask yourself where all these problems come from and why no one is doing anything about them? The answer? Aliens, motherfucker! It would be nice if this was really the source of all our troubles.

They Live is the story of a muscular drifter who appears to have alcohol blooms on his face throughout the movie. It’s no wonder he is homeless, jobless, and pussyless. The man, whose name is never used, finds a job as a worker at a construction site and he wanders along, thinking that his day will come and obviously under the illusion that America is still a meritocracy and that the American dream is a reality. Then he finds some sunglasses that let him see that the world is actually run by some ugly ass aliens and filled with subliminal messages such as “Obey,” “Honor Apathy,” and “Consume.” He loses his fucking mind and starts wasting people. Together, the dude and his construction buddy must find a way to stop the alien signal that has all of the humans blinded to the truth.

Carpenter’s film is an amazing exploration of contemporary 80’s American culture, which sadly hasn’t changed very much. Many of the themes that Carpenter bashes such as consumer greed, apathy, and class-based oppression still exist today. The film is anything but subtle as it crumbles up the illusions of the jaded and thrusts them in the viewer’s face. Carpenter manages to turn the familiar world into a wasteland of subliminal signs where even the traffic signals aren’t what they appear to be. His switches from color to black and white jar the viewer from their comfort zone, allowing them to see the world in a different way just as the characters do. Visually, the film isn’t as exciting as some of Carpenter’s other flicks. The visuals have a cheap quality to them, mainly do to poor set design and a small feel to the film, but these all appear to be side effects of a small budget and not a lack of skill on Carpenter’s part.

The acting in the film is ok. Roddy Piper plays the nameless protagonist, and delivers some of the most memorable one-liners in cinema history. Piper’s bubble-gum line has been appropriated by more people than I can count, and the rest of the lines in the movie are just as quirky and strange. Piper isn’t the best actor, but he is perfect in this movie as it doesn’t really ask him to do much but walk around and deliver some one-liners of dubious quality. Keith David plays Piper’s construction buddy with his typical flare. David’s deep voice and charismatic performance ups the quality of the film significantly and his chemistry with Piper seems genuine and makes the idea of a 5 minute and 20 second fight between the characters something to look forward to rather than something to dread.

They Live is a quality satire of the problems present in contemporary society and the beauty of it is that people from all walks of life can watch the movie. It’s possible to watch the film and enjoy it without buying into any of its philosophy, but the converse is also true. If you want a film to inspire thought in your mind, They Live certainly has enough to get you started. As a document that records the death of the American dream, They Live is beautifully rendered.

Cinematic Reflections (Derek Smith)

CultureCartel.com (Travis Lowell) review [3.5/5]

VideoVista Peter Schilling

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]

Electric Sheep Magazine Lisa Williams

Scifilm Review D. Mality

Shane R. Burridge

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Erich Shulte

The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

The Sci-Fi Movie Page

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ben Sachs from Cine-File

"They Live": Jonathan Lethem explains a cult classic Jonathan Lethem from Salon, November 6, 2010

DVD Maniacs Troy Howarth

Absolute Horror

Mark R. Leeper review [+2 out of -4..+4]

Mutant Reviewers from Hell review

DVDActive (Chris Gould) dvd review [4/10]

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross)

HorrorTalk Harvey Click

Eye for Film (Gator MacReady) review [3/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]

Eye for Film (Daniel Hooper) review [4/5]

Movie-Vault.com (Cyrus Banerjee) review [6/10]

The Digital Bits dvd review Todd Doogan

Noon-Thirty

Movies.InfiniteCoolness.com - John Carpenter's They Live!

Eat My Brains Zombie Club also reviewing THE FOG

Mondo Digital also reviewing CHRISTINE

CineScene.com (Sasha Stone) also reviewing THE THING

DVDTalk DVD Review (John Carpenter: Master of Fear Collection) [Tyler Foster]

DVD Verdict- John Carpenter: Master Of Fear Collection [Michael Rubino]

They Live - John Carpenter Official Movie Site

"The Cult 25: The Essential Left-Field Movie Hits Since '83 Entertainment Weekly, September 3, 2008

MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN

France USA (99 mi) 1992 ‘Scope

The Tech (MIT) (Bill Jackson)

Carpenter's sci-fi comedy is essentially a $40 million B movie, with remarkable special effects compensating for a thin storyline. A noir-ish opening, complete with voice-over and flashback, hints at a darker tone more in keeping with HF Saint's source novel. But once Chase has been rendered invisible, the plot consists of one endless chase scene, punctuated by inventive sight gags and the odd romantic interlude. After a freak accident at a research laboratory, Nick Halloway discovers that being invisible isn't the voyeur's dream he fantasised about as a child. Now 'the most exotic intelligence asset' available, he becomes the subject of a huge manhunt led by cynical CIA man Jenkins (Neill). Aided by anthropologist Alice (Hannah), he tries to evade his pursuers and find time to adjust to his invisibility. When played for laughs, this works well, while the action scenes generate an atmosphere of paranoia and menace; but failing to explore the pathos of Nick's predicament, the film becomes an inflated lightweight comedy whose shortcomings are all too visible.

I want to say that Chevy Chase's new comedy, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, would do well to become invisible itself. But no, that's too easy. Actually, this is Chase's best film in a long time. Memoirs has just as many Chevy-bumping-into-people scenes as any other Chevy Chase movie, but it also has a lot of solid one-liners and -- I don't believe I'm saying this -- it gives its title character a genuine sense of pathos.

Easy-going Nick (Chase) has slipped away from a boring lecture at a laboratory he's visiting. He no sooner falls asleep in an executive's sauna when something goes wrong in a cyclotron and he wakes up to find himself, and parts of the building, invisible. The Bad Guy (Sam Neill, late of Until the End of the World) wants to capture Nick and use him as part of a secret government plot. The rest of the film's plot is taken up by the chase.

Where this movie works amazingly well is in watching the invisible Nick adapt to the world around him. Escaping from the enemy, he returns to his apartment and tries to eat his Chinese food. However, he quickly learns that it's nearly impossible to use chopsticks when you can't see your hands. Finally scooping the food into his mouth with a pair of giant tongs, he passes a mirror and realizes that although he is invisible, the food isn't, and he sees it slowly being digested in his stomach.

In another scene, Nick punches out a drunk, then holds up the man's arm to hail a cab. In a hilarious exchange, Nick moves the man's mouth and provides the words to tell the driver where to go. Nick also gets to have fun being in rooms and hearing people talk about him; "accidents" tend to happen to those who speak badly of him.

In an amusing and interesting bit, Nick is following Alice (Daryl Hannah), the girl he loves but has not yet revealed his invisible self to, when a boorish oaf (Gregory Paul Martin) slimes his way into her room and sheds crocodile tears before throwing himself on top of her. Nick throws him off the bed. The stunned man, thinking Alice must be amazingly strong, gets up and starts to leave. Alice closes the door behind him, but the outraged Nick reaches up and turns her gentle closing into a slam. She has no idea he is in the room, and the subtleties of his actions in protecting her are amazing and lend depth to the character.

While the film does indeed develop Nick, Hannah and Neill are given one-note roles. While Hannah has to spend her time playing cuddly-sexy, Neill at least can (and does) have fun with his ruthlessly evil agent. Both actors show a gift for physical comedy when they have to interact with the invisible character, and they create a very real sense of someone else being on screen.

The special effects deserve mention, being some of the best put on screen since last summer's Terminator 2. Created by (are there any other special effects companies?) George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, they include an amazing scene where Nick smokes, and you see the smoke enter and exit his lungs. Then he leans forward, and you can see the outline of his face shining against the smoke. They manage to take the "liquid" effects of T2 and The Abyss and place them in a comedy-action setting.

Directed by John Carpenter, whose varied resume is a living retribution of the auteur theory of filmmaking, Memoirs of an Invisible Man rises above the level of comedy you might expect from its high-concept plot and delves a bit deeper. Perhaps this is due to the literary source for the story, a book by H. F. Saint. It is a very funny and interesting film which rarely drags; a definite recommendation for an evening's entertainment.

Film Freak Central review [Bill Chambers] which includes a review of the book, John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness, by Gilles Boulenger

DVD Times Gary Couzens

DVD Verdict: Memoirs Of An Invisible Man Patrick Naugle

DVD Talk (Mike Long)

That Cow (Andrew Bradford)

The New York Times (Julie Lew)

BODY BAGS – made for TV

USA (91 mi) 1993

BlackHorrorMovies.com a few photos included at the site

The first segment of this made-for-cable horror anthology from John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, "The Gas Station", stands out not only as the best of the three tales but also the one relevant to this website (fancy that). This 20-minute chiller is one of the very few slashers -- regardless of length -- to feature a black woman as the lead, the so-called "final girl" (the only other one that comes to mind being Devon's Ghost). Maybe this is because black women are perceived as talking too much shit to survive? ("And another thing, Jason, your momma swallows more seamen than the Bermuda Triangle!") Whatever the reason, "The Gas Station" stars Alex Datcher as Anne, a college gal looking to make a little extra money in the pre-Girls Gone Wild days. She ends up taking a job on the graveyard shift at a -- yup, gas station -- and has a first night that has "workman's comp" written all over it. See, there's a crazed killer running around town (In an homage to himself, director Carpenter set this story in Haddonfield; since it's not Halloween, it's safe to assume that the killer is not Michael Myers -- although to Anne's dismay, he apparently needs gas.). What follows is genuinely creepy, giving a realistic sense of the paranoia you'd feel if you were stuck in a gas station attendant's booth late at night in the middle of nowhere...in Haddonfield. Refreshingly, race is never an issue in the story -- at least, until Anne calls her cousins Peanut and Ray-Ray to come mess up the mofo with a machete.

Showtime presented this uneven anthology initiated by John Carpenter (who hosts, in Rick Baker make-up) and directed by him and Tobe Hooper. It may be Carpenter's project, but Hooper steals the show.

The first segment, "The Gas Station," finds Carpenter solidly back in Halloween territory. Alex Detcher stars as a college student spending her first uneasy night working the late shift at the titular joint. Robert Carradine is her boss, who ... Never mind. If you can't figure out what he is within five minutes, you don't know this genre. Carpenter has a ball with the minimalist set-up, though too much of it depends on the woman acting stupid (also a genre standard). Still suspenseful fun.

"Hair," also helmed by JC, is kind of dumb, like an outtake from Creepshow 3. Stacy Keach, though, gives a funny performance as the vain hero, who can't stand the thought of going bald. In desperation, he visits a mysterious hair-restoration clinic run by David Warner. As a rule of thumb, don't go to any clinic run by David Warner, especially if the nurse is Deborah Harry. Some nifty animation involving vicious hairs (!) doesn't compensate for the flat ending. Sheena Easton does okay as Keach's lady love.

The stand-out is Hooper’s piece, “The Eye,” as unsettling as anything he’s directed, though it’s essentially yet another riff on The Hands of Orlac. Mark Hamill is great as an up-and-coming baseball star who loses his right eye in a car accident and submits to an experimental eye transplant — which, as it turns out, comes from a particularly unsavory donor. Hamill is completely convincing as he hallucinates, flips out, quotes obsessively from the Bible, and terrorizes his wife (Twiggy). The climax would’ve been perfect if Hamill had delivered the line allegedly cut from X - The Man with X-Ray Eyes: “I can still see!” Those who dis Hamill as a bland actor with only Luke Skywalker in his range need to see this (and to hear some of his voice work as the Joker on Batman: The Animated Series).

'The Gas Station': Worth a look. 'Hair': Just average. 'The Eye': Awesome. That averages out to four stars.

Popcorn Pictures Review

A trilogy of horror tales is presented to us from inside a morgue. The first is about a serial killer, the second about a hair transplant that goes horribly wrong and the third is about a baseball player who is involved in a car accident and has an eye transplant with serious consequences.

This is a mouth-watering prospect for a true horror fan - a collaboration of two of horror's most infamous directors (Carpenter and Hooper). Here we have a trilogy of horror tales, each approached differently. Considering how Carpenter has gradually got worse as the years progress and Hooper may have directed one of the greatest horror films of all time (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) but his other films haven't been that great, then this is as good as I could have hoped for. Carpenter himself presents the tales and is possibly the best thing about the whole film. He stars as the wacky morgue corpse who cracks jokes and wisecracks about the other dead bodies before introducing us the next tale. So as for the different stories.....

The first story is a standard slasher film about a woman who gets a night job at a gas station in an area that has been suffering from a spate of murders. Since Carpenter directed this one, he brings back some of his old magic with some scenes directly copied from Halloween - the town is even called Haddonfield! It's full of the usual standard slasher elements and includes some wacky cameos from the likes of Wes Craven and Sam Raimi. Overall, this one isn't bad and Carpenter manages to make it more exciting than it should be (complete with another great soundtrack). Some trademark Carpenter in here including the lush distant shots.

The second story is the weakest of the three and is played more for laughs. A bald man gets revolutionary hair therapy in a new clinic only to find out that he is being used for something more devious. Stacy Keach comes off as a pompous git and actually deserves what happens to him for being so worried about his hair. David Warner looks quite wooden during the TV commercials but then improves dramatically in person and gets back to usual reliable self. The ending is quite a surprise and a nice touch though and certainly not how I had envisioned it to end.

The last story is directed by Tobe Hooper and stars Mark Hamill as a baseball player who is involved in car accident and loses his eye. But all is not lost as he gets an eye transplant. Unfortunately for him it is the eye of a killer and he begins to have strange visions. This isn't that bad either but the story has been done before (The Simpsons did one like this, only it was the hair of a killer that was transplanted). Mark Hamill shows how capable an actor he is here and it's a real shame that his career didn't take off like Harrison Ford's did after Star Wars.

Body Bags doesn't give a social commentary or critique anything - it is just a film made by some horror greats who just wanted to give the audience a good time and enjoy making it in the process. And that it does.

Evil Dread

The Video Graveyard (Chris Hartley)

Bloody-Disgusting

Final Girl Stacie Ponder

FearScene

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS

USA (95 mi) 1995 ‘Scope

Tucson Weekly [Zachary Woodruff]

John Carpenter's latest creepfest is a wonderfully playful mind-bender chock full of paranoid fears about mass hysteria and the death of reality. Working from a screenplay by Michael De Luca, the movie gives horror a good name, holding back on blood-'n'-guts in favor of weird, imaginative imagery where white haired beings on bicyles flash through the night, shadows creep up in the cells of insane asylums and figures in paintings turn their heads. Every scene gooses you with a surprise, every dream contains a twist, and Sam Neill, as the skeptical protagonist, makes the journey fun.

In this lightweight but entertaining horror movie, seasoned genre director Carpenter realises the Lovecraftian weirdness hinted at in the eerie atmospherics of The Fog and the monstrous excesses of The Thing: in short, the idea of an order of beings that exists in a parallel dimension, expelled from this world but waiting patiently to cross back and take control again. There are shades of both HP Lovecraft and Stephen King in the central character, Sutter Cane (Prochnow), a popular horror writer whose works allegedly influence his more susceptible readers, transforming them into homicidal harbingers of global chaos. When Cane vanishes just before his new book is due for delivery, his publishers panic and hire sceptical insurance investigator John Trent (Neill) to track him down. Trent suspects an elaborate publicity stunt; but having entered the writer's hometown of Hobb's End, he too experiences a blurring of the line between reality and fiction. The script by New Line's head of production, Michael (Freddy's Dead) de Luca, does not allow Carpenter free range, nevertheless he manages some neat flourishes of his own, handling the narrative twists and unsettling sfx sequences with customary skill.

The American republic is in peril, as usual, and it's going to take a really bad movie to save it. In this uninvolving, abysmally scripted horror picture, insurance investigator Sam Neill (someone please tell me what he is doing in this movie) is sent by publisher Charlton Heston to investigate the disappearance of Jurgen Proch now, a successful Stephen-King-like novelist.

It seems the novelist -- the most successful writer of the century -- turns his readers into psychotic zombies. (Let us emphasize right now, this movie is not about Robert James Waller.) Accompanied almost irrelevantly by publishing editor Julie Carmen, Neill drives to the usual misty, New England location in search of Prochnow. He finds him, of course, as well as a world peopled with rejects from "Children of the Corn" (catatonics with pickup trucks).

The rest is a bewildering, boring assembly of rock-video-surreal nightmare sequences with more repetitive episodes than "Groundhog Day." I said, with more repetitive episodes than -- oh never mind. Just consider yourself warned.

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (R) -- Contains brief nudity, violence and extended passages of incoherence.

Austin Chronicle [Joey O'Bryan]

"Reality isn't what it used to be," warns a creepy-looking old man just seconds before he blows his head off with a double-barreled shotgun, an image which perfectly sums up the bizarre theme and tone of director John Carpenter's latest film, In the Mouth of Madness. The underrated Sam Neill (Jurassic Park) stars as the hard-boiled and cynical John Trent, a claims collector with a special talent for sniffing out a con. Called in by a book publishing firm to track down their deliriously popular, flagship author Sutter Cane, who vanished while completing his most eagerly awaited novel In the Mouth of Madness, Trent teams up with his curiously other-worldly editor (Julie Carmen in a strange, occasionally annoying, trance-like performance) to track him down. Their search eventually sends them into an alternate reality comprised totally of characters and events from Cane's books, where they find the author himself, hastily completing what he refers to as ?the new Bible? -- a book that will turn the world into an army of vicious killers, wiping themselves out to make room for a new order of slimy, toothy monsters (?Every species can smell its own extinction,? Cane remarks thoughtfully.) As much a sly satire on the "movie violence causes real violence" argument as it is a solid piece of horror filmmaking, In the Mouth of Madness is something of a return to form for Carpenter, following his uncharacteristic failure with his last feature Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Clearly having a ball, Carpenter fills the screen with equal amounts of unsettling atmosphere and shameless jolts, while at the same time successfully walking the tightrope that separates the horrific from the hilarious. In this department, Carpenter is aided greatly by Neill, whose witty performance adds resonance to questionable lines of dialogue and believability to every outlandish plot twist. Prochnow, as devilish author Sutter Cane, is wonderfully creepy, saying lines like, "This one will drive you absolutely mad!" with hellish glee. Of course, it's not perfect, with most of the problems lying with Michael DeLuca's script, which has a tendency to dissolve into a series of gory, scattershot "skits" during the second act (Credit goes to Carpenter for working wonders with this section, treating it with a light touch not unlike a fun-filled trip through a haunted-house carnival ride.) However, the film's faults are easily overlooked in view of its strengths: i.e., Neill's performance, Carpenter's sense of mood, his smart use of the widescreen format -- not to mention all the mutations, special effects, and the hilariously self-reflexive finale that diverts your attention. All in all, In the Mouth of Madness is a fun, clever horror picture, full of creepy crawlies, things that go bump in the night, and references to everyone from H.P. Lovecraft to Dario Argento. Welcome back, John Carpenter, and keep up the good work.

Movie Vault [Goatdog]

H. P. Lovecraft was one of those master artists who died penniless and scorned, but passing time built him into a legend. Whether you like horror fiction or not, you have to appreciate his mastery of both the detective story and the horror story. He influenced everyone from Robert Bloch to Stephen King. Unfortunately, his stories don't film very well. Since they dwell on fantastic creatures and indescribable evil, and earn their merit through Lovecraft's evocative prose, they don't translate to film. He describes things as too terrible to describe, so any attempt to picture them is doomed to fail. Actually, the best Lovecraftian films have been ones that borrows elements of the world he created. Clive Barker's "Hellraiser" and Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" and "Evil Dead 2" are the best examples, because they borrow elements that work and abandon those that don't.

That established, this movie is a pretty good attempt to make a "Lovecraftian" movie, in that it wasn't an abject failure. Instead of trying to film a single story, Carpenter and De Luca crafted a synthetic work that deals with most of Lovecraft's major themes in a manner that misses the mark but makes a good effort. Sam Neill plays John Trent, an expert insurance investigator hired by publisher Jackson Harglow (played by Charlton Heston) to track down a missing author. That author, named Sutter Cane (played by Jurgen Prochnow) in a poke at Stephen King, writes nasty little books about lurking demons that are searching for a way into our world (much like Lovecraft's fiction). His rabid fans are prone to fits of violence, prompting some to believe that his words have more truth to them than it would seem. Harglow sends editor Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) along on the trip to find the author. Their search leads them to the middle of nowhere in New Hampshire, the site of a fictional town where Crane bases his stories. After a freaky nighttime drive, they seemingly end up in Hobbs End, that very fictional town. The place is empty, but they quickly learn that every detail in the novels is there in reality, including a demonic church where the demons are supposed to escape from. Trent is convinced the whole thing is a publicity stunt, but ensuing events shake his belief in his opinion and in reality.

So, why doesn't it work? Well, it relies a little too much on shock techniques, including rapid shots of prosthetic monsters to establish a nightmare quality that doesn't really take hold. Carpenter can't establish the kind of welling dread that Lovecraft conjured, so he shifts to makeup and pyrotechnics. That was his problem with "The Thing", too, now that I think of it. The story idea is wonderful, but it, like most of Lovecraft's work, just works better on paper. I know critics claim that the written word is necessarily different than film, and that one shouldn't try to compare them. The problem is, I agree with them. However, I think my knowledge of the source made me enjoy the film more than someone coming to it cold. I could see what they were trying to do, and appreciated the things that worked.

Basically, go read some Lovecraft. Start with "Pickman's Model," one of his best short stories. It's the best short introduction to his world.

Classic-Horror Chris Justice

Best-Horror-Movies.com Lee Roberts

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth

Evil Dread

Scifilm Review Dr. Mality

Bloody-Disgusting

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

eFilmCritic.com (Justin Helmer)

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

Fatally Yours

Tucson Weekly [Zachary Woodruff]

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED

USA (99 mi) 1995 ‘Scope

Based on the British 1960 chiller of the same name, this John Carpenter picture follows what happens when several women in a quaint northern town mysteriously and simultaneously become pregnant. Their offspring: eight white-haired geniuses with telepathic powers and a collective mean streak. Though the material needed to be better updated to justify a remake (as it stands, it looks like a cheesy episode of X-Files), Carpenter directs with his usual immense skill, and the campy selection of players--Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, Mark Hamill--give surprisingly engaging performances.

Movie Vault [Nate Anderson]

This movie has always been a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. It's far from great cinema, and in fact, in many circles it's downright awful, but every now and again a person gets hungry for some cheese, and this is the Kraft Mac and Cheese of Horror flicks.

The story begins in the town of Midwich, which is a somewhat isolated coastal town. A weird phenomena occurs in the town causing everyone to black out for six hours. After that, everyone wakes up and has no idea what happened. This incident has caught the attention of government scientists, led by a chain-smoking Kirstie Alley.

It is revealed that on that day ten women were mysteriously impregnated, and we have no idea how or why. The town doctor, played by Christopher Reeve, assures everyone that there is no reason to automatically panic, and Kirstie Alley, cigarette firmly attached to her mouth, waves money in front of the simpleton residents as an incentive to keep their children. They all decide to keep the children and eventually all the mothers go into labor simultaneously.

Over the course of the years, the nine children (One of them didn't make it though the delivery process alive) have grown up together in their own creepy little collective group, with platinum blond hair and glow in the dark eyes. Oh yeah, and they can read peoples thoughts, and control them too (which is only used to cause them serious physical harm). All the children are completely emotionless, except for the odd child out, David, who manages to actually develop some emotion, which seperates him from the evil children.

I wouldn't recommend this movie to everyone, but if you enjoy either the science fiction genre, or the horror genre, you could do ALOT worse.

Besides, how can you go wrong with a movie that casts Luke Skywalker, I mean Mark Hamill, as a priest?

Imagine a scenario where our next evolutionary successors are emotionless, telepathic, and highly intelligent. Village of the Damned presents such a scenario and details the struggle of this "superior" race against the humans.

John Carpenter has taken the original 1960s screenplay and gorified it in this version, but the ideas in the movie are still captivating. A higher lifeform impregnates the females of the Damned Village one night, resulting in the births of nine platinum-blond(e) children and one stillborn, all of which are siblings. What's more, they are telepathically linked and have the power to control people's minds. According to the movie, they are emotionless, but they do seem to get angry for trivial reasons, they seem to have a great drive for survival, and they are intelligent.

The basic flaw in this story seems to be that you can have intelligence without emotions. I believe this to be a contradiction because any reasonable definition of human-like intelligence (say, the one that requires the passing of the Turing test (i.e., any perfect simulation of a human is intelligent)) requires a drive, a curiousity, and a passion, that goes beyond mere survival. But besides this, the picture the movie paints is rather reasonable. One of the main ideas is the notion of a "collective soul", which I think is indeed a feature of higher intelligence (low level examples include our own brain which is simply a collection of smaller "intelligent" units, neurons). However, rigourous conformity, which is one of the aspects of the children in the movie, is not a necessity and is certainly not a sign of higher intelligence. Without allowing for change within such a collective, there is no room for evolution. A sucessor species to us would have emotions, intelligence, telepathic powers (allowing for complete freedom of information), and individual free will, thus enabling Thomas More's vision of Utopia coming true.

The actual story is about how two doctors, one M.D. (Christopher Reeve), and one Ph.D. (Kirstie Alley), battle with the children. The film's ending suggests that emotions help survival, but in my view, all the alien children possessed emotion.

If you do see Village of the Damned, see it not just for the way Carpenter kills off the cast, but for the lesson it teaches us about what our next evolutionary successors might be like.

Popcorn Pictures Review

A strange mist appears in a small town, causing the population of the town to fall asleep. When everyone awakes, it is discovered that ten women in the town are pregnant. No one knows what happened and soon the women all give birth to the children on the same night. But these aren't ordinary children. They have matching white hair and strange, glowing eyes, and grow at an accelerated rate. These children possess amazing mind control and cause havoc with their thoughts. Trouble begins when the children don't like something and they use their powers to evil use.

It is always hard when you try to remake a classic film and this was no exception. It's not as good as the original as Carpenter has opted to go for more violence and explosions rather than outright atmosphere and scares. I mean this is John Carpenter after all and what would a Carpenter film be without the violence and explosions? Having said that, when he was just starting out he would have gone for the atmosphere and the scares. The children are the creepiest things about the film, mostly because of some weird dyed silver hair and some special eye effects when they start using their powers. But the film doesn't have the same mood as the original and this is where things don't work out as they should. Carpenter knows how to deliver on the atmosphere front (The Thing anyone?) so why he didn't deliver the goods here is beyond me. It's something he has failed to do for a while. On the other fronts, the film fares better. The acting isn't too bad especially from Christopher Reeve who puts in a good performance to save the film. Reeve was a good, solid actor and it's a real shame he was paralysed because I enjoy watching the former Superman act. Kirstie Alley's character is completely pointless and the script could have gone along fine without her. Mark Hamill (yes the one and only) pops up in this somewhere, probably wishing that his post-Star Wars career had taken him along Harrison Ford's path to success instead of carving out a living with small roles. However Hamill is extremely underrated as an actor and although his role is limited, he still plays a decent part.

Sadly this was Christopher Reeve's last film before he was paralysed in a horse riding accident. It isn't a bad send off for him and at least he can hold his head up high. The same can't be said for Carpenter who must rank this up there with his weaker efforts. Even the best directors churn out poorer films.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: John Carpenter's Village of the Damned (1995) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, June 23, 2009

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

The 7th Level also reviewing DARK STAR, ASSAULT IN PRECINCT 13, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, and GHOSTS OF MARS

ESCAPE FROM L.A. B 87

USA (101 mi) 1996 ‘Scope

Not nearly as much fun as the cast of characters in Escape from New York (1981), but of special interest was the performance of Kurt Russell, who was just recently showcased in Tarantino’s GRINDHOUSE (2007), as let’s face it, this film is right out of the grindhouse mold and the guy is such a joy to watch in this kind of over the top role (“You’re Snake Plissken? I thought you’d be taller.”) with oftentimes hilarious and completely subversive political satire. Steve Buscemi was a laugh riot as well, especially the look on his face as he’s driving in that borrowed, souped-up white convertible along the ocean road and sees Russell, who was presumed dead, surfing along the waves with none other than stoner surfer dude Peter Fonda in a raggedy old worn out character called Pipeline. LA and its carnivalesque all day and all night party scene has never been treated with such out and out disdain. The film has its moments.

When Escape from New York was released in 1981, its innovative computer graphics, satirical dystopian vision and tongue-in-cheek humour had a freshness that disguised its ramshackle narrative. Equally enjoyable was Russell's cynical anti-hero Snake Plissken, with his eye-patch and tight-lipped, Eastwood-style one-liners. After 15 years of computer-generated effects, apocalyptic sci-fi and Arnie movies with flippant kiss-off lines, the sequel feels hackneyed and pointless. In the original, Snake was sprung from prison in order to rescue the US President from Manhattan, a lawless maximum-security island populated exclusively by hardened criminals. An explosive device injected into his neck enforced safe and timely delivery. This time, the Snake's injected with a fatal virus, despatched to the earthquake-created prison island of LA, and charged with terminating the President's daughter, Utopia (Langer), a Patti Hearst-style runaway who's stolen the government's 'doomsday device' and shacked up on the island with South American drug dealer turned revolutionary Cuervo Jones (Corraface). Once ashore, he crosses the urban wasteland to Jones' fortified lair, encountering tough transsexual Hershe (Grier), weaselly tour-guide 'Map to the Stars' Eddie (Buscemi), and spaced-out surfer Pipeline (Fonda).

It's been 15 years since Carpenter's futuristic cowboy-noir archetype Snake Plissken (Russell) unpenned the President from the New York City Maximum Security Prison, but then as Snake himself liked to note, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Of course, there have been a few minor revisions to the United States since then: The “Big One” finally hit California, decimating Los Angeles and leaving the city and its environs less than landlocked, Donald Pleasance's position as President has been filled by the bible-thumping histrionics of an apparently de-lobed Cliff Robertson, and the resultant political climate has left the country a theocratic police state. Citizens convicted of moral crimes (pre-marital sex, smoking, eating red meat, voting Democratic, etc.) are packed off to the island of Los Angeles where they are left to fend for themselves against the roving gangs and genuine psychotics that litter the island like so much post-quake detritus. On top of all this, the President's daughter, Utopia, has turned seditious, absconding with a “black box” weapons system and hijacking Air Force One to L.A. where she's joined forces with rebel leader Cuervo Jones (Corraface). Tough break. Enter Snake Plissken, newly captured by the United States Police Force. Given a choice between death in 10 hours via a particularly virulent form of neurotoxin, or going along with the President's plan to recapture the stolen weapon and kill Utopia, the ever-perspicacious Plissken opts for the latter and Escape from L.A. is off like a shot. For those who have seen Carpenter's original film, nothing much has really changed -- different coast, different MacGuffin, but still an almost identical story line. Once in Los Angeles, Snake makes his way through the various ruined tourist attractions toward his rendezvous with Utopia and Cuervo. Along the way, he meets up with a number of the local flora and fauna, among them Steve Buscemi as the conniving “Map to the Stars” Eddie, rival ganglord Hershe (Grier), and the (literally) twisted Surgeon General of Beverly Hills (Sam Raimi regular Campbell). Still, familiarity doesn't necessarily breed contempt, and fans of the New York leg of the Snake saga will slip back into the desperado's world with a comfortable grin. Carpenter keeps the pace moving at roughly the speed of sound, and his dark wry wit is evident throughout. Above it all, though, is Russell's inimitably sexy Snake, so unchanged between films it seems as though it's only been a long Labor-Day weekend since the A-Number-One Duke of New York got his. To be brutally honest, the City of Angels doesn't completely pack the gritty punch that the Big Apple did, but then Green Day aren't the Ramones, either. Suffice to say, Plissken's jaunt westward is true to Carpenter's (and producer/co-writer Debra Hill's) original spirit. Loud, rollicking, alternately ultra-violent and hilarious, Escape from L.A. is Snake redux, and what more do you need, really?

Tucson Weekly [Stacey Richter]

ESCAPE FROM L.A., the latest from John Carpenter (The Thing, Halloween, etc.), is utterly without any redeeming moral values in the conventional sense. True to the title, it's pure escapist schlock in the grand tradition of the B-movie. It's got all the drive-in movie goodies: bizarre characters, over-the-top acting, cheesy special effects, slutty costumes and gallons of blood. The only thing this movie wants is for us to have a good time without guilt, and since the heat has immobilized the intellect of most Tucsonans anyway, why resist? Yes, it's a vapid, cheesy movie with plot holes you could drive a truck through. Yes, it's exciting and funny and sort of great.

Escape From L.A. is a reprise of Carpenter's 1981 Escape from New York: To call it a sequel wouldn't make much sense, since the two are so alike. In Escape from New York, Snake Plisskin (Kurt Russell, all young and buff) is sent into New York in the futuristic hell of 1997. The rotten Big Apple has been converted to a penal colony without keepers or guards; prisoners are dumped there and left to their own wicked devices. Snake, a criminal himself, is sent on a suicide mission to rescue the President, whose plane has crashed there.

Escape From L.A. works with the same elements but shuffles them around: It's the 21st century and the Big One has plunged some of California into the ocean, leaving L.A. an island. Moral degeneracy, rather than crime, qualifies even children for incarceration on the island. (These crimes, never directly specified, seem to include smoking cigarettes, eating beef and being Muslim.) Kurt Russell, grizzled and buff, goes on a suicide mission to retrieve a doomsday device hijacked by the President's flake of a daughter, Utopia (A.J. Langer). Similarities abound. In the first Escape, Snake is injected with timed intravenous explosives. In the second, he's injected with a timed virus. In both, the baddest bad guy drives a funny car with a disco ball, sinful prisoners sport eighties punk rock attire, and portions of dialogue are repeated word for word.

All this leaves Escape From L.A. with a major dilemma: If it's so close to prequel, what's the point? The answer seems to be, there is no point. Escape From L.A. is gloriously pointless. It's completely redundant. There's very little difference between renting Escape From New York and going to the theater to see Escape From L.A. My guess is that John Carpenter figured he could capture a whole new generation of viewers who weren't out of diapers the first time around.

That's not to say there aren't differences between the two versions. The first Escape capitalizes on the Cold War fear of nuclear apocalypse. The second is lighter and more ironic--it capitalizes on the fear of ecological degradation and the dangers of militant non-smokers. The first has gritty sets of a decaying New York. The second has a party atmosphere, with glittery sets of the decaying Santa Monica freeway, half-dead vampiric Californians craving plastic surgery and aging surfers riding tsunamis.

As dumb and enjoyable as Escape From L.A. is, the truth is, Escape From New York is a better movie. It's darker, bleaker, and has the force of originality to propel it. Escape From L.A. lacks tension--it lifts Snake to the level of superhero so we know he'll never get hurt, and the fear of moralistic non-smokers can never, ever equal the shared societal dread of the Cold War era. Carpenter's true talent is his ability to frighten, and he abandons it in Escape From L.A. in favor of shlocky style and humor.

But it almost doesn't matter. Escape From L.A. is so energetic and goofy that only the most die-hard fan of the eighties post-apocalyptic genre is going to get nostalgic for Carpenter's sinister side. All the rest of us have to do is work on enjoying the gratuitous leather bikinis, exploding cars and fountains of fake blood.

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

The best sci-fi film of 1996? While last year saw more sci-fi movies than usual - no doubt because of the financial success of StarGate - it wasn’t such a great year for science fiction on celluloid - even though the biggest earner at the box office was a sci-fi effort (of sorts). Hyped to death, Independence Day wasn’t cinematic sci-fi’s Last Great Hope, but instead the final nail in its coffin. While it showed that there’s money to be made from the genre, it showed that the way to do it is by underestimating audiences’ intelligence, by transposing another genre (in this case, the so-called disaster flick) unto the sci-fi genre. So far, 1997 hasn’t been a good year for celluloid sci-fi either. Two of the biggest sci-fi box office hits weren’t really sci-fi at all: The Fifth Element is an action movie and The Lost World is a horror movie. Maybe Contact can save the day, who knows?

While 1996 wasn’t such a great year for sci-fi at the movies, it did give us a decent Star Trek movie (Star Trek - First Contact), a mildly subversive spoof on 1950s alien invasion movies (Mars Attacks!) and Escape from LA.

Escape from LA? I can hear you ask. Odds are you probably never saw it. It was one of those films that simply slipped right past everybody’s attention - despite its big pre-release publicity campaign. Nobody went to see it - which is sad. Perhaps the film will enjoy a bigger success on home video. Who knows? However, even without hindsight it was clear that Escape from LA wasn’t exactly destined for box office success. A big budget sequel to a film (Escape from New York) made almost sixteen years ago that was only a moderate financial success in any case? Nope, even though it starred Kurt Russell fresh from his StarGate success, pumping a lot of money into Escape from LA probably wasn’t a very wise investment decision. Besides that, the film was just too weird for most audiences: most of the few people who did see it, hated it . . .

Escape from LA is consciously a bad movie. Like Roger Ebert once said: even today’s bad sci-fi movies are good. With today’s technology even the cheaply made exploitation pics can afford passable special effects and sets - so no more Mystery Science Theatre 3000-like spotting the wire keeping the model of the UFO aloft. Yet despite being a big-budgeted film made by one of Hollywood’s major studios, Escape from LA’s special effects are bad. In fact they remind one of some of those 1970s sci-fi flicks when Planet of the Apes represented the state-of-the-art special effects.

All this shows how much film-making has changed throughout the years. Whilst Escape from New York took itself seriously, Escape from LA is infused with a Pulp Fiction-like post modern attitude. It doesn’t take itself seriously and doesn’t expect audiences to take it seriously too - which probably accounts for why so many people hated the film. Audiences just aren’t ready for Gremlins II or Last Action Hero-type postmodernism. In a sense this is sad. When film-makers can’t take their own films seriously, they expect us to do so.

Re-watching Escape from New York a while ago I realised that when I first saw the film when it came out, I thought that it was a fast-paced action movie. However, compared to today's frenetic action blockbusters (like The Rock and Speed) the pace seems almost lethargic. (A fact to which Carpenter admitted in an interview.) Which is why Escape from LA goes for the over-the-top. Audiences today expect more spectacle than before from their movies than before - and Hollywood is only happy to supply with more unbelievable stunts, impressive explosions, deafening soundtracks and implausible events. Escape from LA isn't only symptomatic of that trend, but also a commentary on it.

Escape from LA wasn't only stylistically subversive, its very heart is subversive. It was definitely one of the most subversive movies of 1996 - as anyone who has seen its last fifteen or so minutes will attest. But this will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen any of director John Carpenter's movies like Dark Star, They Live, The Thing, Escape from New York and so forth. Carpenter is fond of infusing the science fiction and horror genre movies he makes with his own political and philosophical concerns. At Escape from LA's centre, an anti-authoritarian and libertarian heart is wildly beating away.

Unfortunately, from the beginning of his career, Carpenter has never delivered on the "promising young director" label critics tagged unto him. His films are like Wagner's music - brilliant moments surrounded by stretches of mediocrity. While Carpenter's films veered from good (Escape from New York) to promising (They Live) to poor (Memoirs of an Invisible Man) to mediocre (Village of the Damned) he never delivered the brilliant masterpiece that was hinted to by early films such as Dark Star, Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13. Ultimately the good bits (like Escape from LA's ending, They Live's premise) redeem the films and one's time doesn't seem spent too badly, his films remain in the "could have been brilliant" category. Like this film.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Nitrate Online Carrie Gorringe

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth

Movie Reviews UK Patrick McCray

Popcorn Pictures Review

Movie Cynics The Vocabulariast

MovieJustice ("10k") offering up a grade of F

DGA Interview Ted Elrick from DGA magazine in 1996

Escape From LA Read the script from the film, from Sci-Fi Movie Page

The New York Times (Anita Gates)

VAMPIRES

USA (107 mi) 1998 ‘Scope

This throwback vampire Western wastes the talent of James Woods, and revels in mean-spirited gore, gratuitous female nudity and repellent violence against women. Derived from John Steakley's novel Vampire$, it pitches Vatican-backed vampire slayer Jack Crow (Woods), his portly sidekick Tony Montoya (Baldwin) and naive young priest Adam Guiteau (Guinee) against Valek (Griffith). The 600-year-old bloodsucker is seeking the legendary Berziers Cross, a religious relic that will allow his nocturnal cohorts to stalk the Earth in broad daylight. Eschewing what Crow characterises as the 'Eurotrash fag' approach to vampire mythology, Carpenter opts for a tough, macho beat-'em-up style. The bloodthirsty creatures get staked, decapitated and torched, the last accomplished by dragging them into the New Mexico sunlight to spontaneously and spectacularly combust. Only one scene, in which Valek and his followers emerge from beneath the desert sand at dawn, hints at the stylish genre film-making with which Carpenter established his reputation.

Village Voice (Amy Taubin) easily the definitive Carpenter review

John Carpenter crosses the vampire genre with the western-according-to-Peckinpah, adds some digital camera moves and hi-tech mutilation effects, and voilà!, a gorefest of epic proportions. More bodies are decapitated, crunched, pierced, gutted, and incinerated than in any movie in memory. Is it scary? Not at all. Is it funny? Occasionally, as when James Woods (playing a vampire slayer trained by the Church and assigned to clean up New Mexico) interrupts his labors to offer such cogent observations as "A master vampire able to walk in the sun! Unstoppable unless we stop him."

Vampires is so over-the-top that Woods's performance seems restrained--except when he's throwing Sheryl Lee across the room or bashing her head against the furniture. Lee plays a prostitute who's bitten by a master vampire. Since Carpenter is nothing if not literal-minded, the vampire attends to Lee's neck for only a second or two before sinking his fangs into her cunt. Poor Sheryl. Having begun her career as a corpse for David Lynch, she's now undead for John Carpenter. She's so mistreated in this film (when she's not being bitten or punched, she's naked and tied to the bedposts) that it's positively uplifting when she becomes a full-fledged vampire. Her first victim is Woods's partner, who's played by Daniel Baldwin. (No, she does not bite his dick.) Baldwin's character feels pretty conflicted about becoming a vampire. But not Lee's. When she struts down the highway, blood dripping from her fangs onto her cleavage, you know she's having the time of her life even though she's undead. And she's earned it. You go, girl!

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

"We kill vampires," says Montoya (Billy Baldwin) to questioning hooker Katrina (Sheryl Lee), and that pretty much sums up this new movie from genre mainstay John Carpenter (Halloween, the remake of The Thing). In the sun-baked New Mexico desert, lifelong vampire hunter Jack Crow (James Woods) and his dwindling band of bad asses pursue Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), a sort of supersucker ("master," in the well-thought-out vernacular adapted from John Steakley's novel) who is on the verge of figuring out how to do his business in the daytime. True to form, Vampires -- we'll shorten Carpenter's traditional, unwieldy possessory title -- highlights the best and worst of the director's uneven career: absorbing, gore-filled action set pieces (not for the squeamish) on annoyingly cheesy sets are sprinkled throughout a wildly implausible and often howlingly stupid story in which the three human leads often seem completely lost. Although Vampires is Carpenter's most accomplished movie in quite some time (at least since 1988's They Live), it once again exhibits a nearly fatal distraction, as if the natural flow of human interaction that is the connective tissue of any halfway decent movie is either too trivial to be bothered with or is maybe beyond his abilities altogether at this point. Worth seeing for the zesty action (even now, nobody does cross-cutting, tracking shots and intuitive coverage quite like John Carpenter), Vampires is yet another frustrating chapter in a career that has promised a great deal more than it has delivered. Also available day-and-date with the VHS tape is a DVD edition, featuring audio commentary from Carpenter and the obligatory theatrical trailers. And of further interest to the director's long-suffering fans, his first feature, the spoofy, low-budget Dark Star (which was made in collaboration with Dan O'Bannon, who went on to write the original Alien), will be coming to DVD on February 23.

Albuquerque Alibi [Devin D. O'Leary]

It's refreshing to see a film about vampires that's actually about vampires. Not vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS, not vampirism as a metaphor for drug addiction, not vampirism as a metaphor for persecuted minority groups, or as a metaphor for anything else -- just blood-suckin', sun-hatin', butt-kickin' vampires. JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES is the kind of slick horror package that's increasingly hard to find: raucous, sanguine and almost utterly devoid of sociological sub-text.

Based on John Steakley's novel _Vampire$_, it incorporates that oh-so-90s-vogue vocation of vampire hunting into the context of an old spaghetti Western. Jack Crow (James Woods) is one of many vampire hunters on a Vatican-funded mission to eradicate the plague of the undead. One night his team is obliterated by Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), the oldest vampire ever to walk the earth. Crow and his one surviving associate Montoya (Daniel Baldwin), accompanied by newly-recruited young priest Father Guiteau (Tim Guinee), have to find Valek and kill him before he can locate a mysterious relic which might give him the power to walk in the daylight. Add plenty of flying body parts, stark Western vistas and Carpenter's own twangy Tex-Mex score, and you have a simple, economical horror yarn.

It all makes for fine gruesome entertainment, but it should have been better. John Carpenter has always been able to incorporate wry, weird humor into his films -- remember the crawling head in THE THING, or practically all of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, for that matter? -- and he manages again to pull of a few nice bits of black comedy. Woods, playing Crow with snarling relish and a serious bad attitude, gets most of the choice lines, all of which are either unprintable or incredibly offensive or both. Carpenter's sense of the horrific usually involves a kind of self-aware outrageousness, turning his displays of blood-spraying special effects into absurdist cinematic goofs too purely escapist to get worked up over.

Unfortunately, VAMPIRES keeps upsetting its delicate balance of humor and horror by taking frequent detours into mean-spiritedness. It's one thing to play with notions of political incorrectness; it's quite another to get off on it. The only human female characters in VAMPIRES are hookers who hang around just long enough to get naked and get turned into lunchmeat; when Woods really wants to insult someone, a bit of gay-baiting always fits the bill. Even if you grant Carpenter and screenwriter Don Jakoby the slack they seem to be searching for -- it's okay that a woman is stripped and smacked around because she's a vampire-in-waiting, and it's okay that a Catholic priest participates in a human sacrifice because another priest is a stand-up guy -- the tone simply gets nastier than it needs to be. Everyone is too unpleasant too often.

The thing about VAMPIRES is that when Carpenter rolls up his sleeves and dives into genre action, it's a lot of fun. In fact, if he had rolled with the tone of the first 25 minutes, he might have had a minor classic on his hands. The opening assault on a New Mexico vampire "nest" is wild, silly and superbly paced; Valek's first attack is a creepy and crafty splatter-fest. From there, VAMPIRES gets progressively more angry and ominous, before it finally rights itself for the climactic confrontation between Crow and Valek. There's not enough interest in characterization here to make the casual brutality of Crow and Montoya somehow psychologically appropriate. Psychology's got virtually nothing to do with JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES, a slice of Halloween mayhem that works wonderfully when it lets the good times roll. For a vampire movie without a "message," it offers some mixed messages it could do without.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Vampires (1997) Kim Newman from Sight and Sound, December 1999

Nitrate Online Sean Axmaker

** The Shrubbery Review -- John Carpenter's Vampires ** Justin Felix

Classic-Horror Dana Gravesen

Cold Fusion Video Reviews (Nathan Shumate)

Images (Crissa-Jean Chappell)

Salon (Laura Miller)

CNN Showbiz (Paul Tatara)

DVD Talk (David Blair) obviously understanding Carpenter better than CNN’s unintentionally amusing piece

Horror Express (Finn Clark)

Sci-Fi Weekly Tamara I. Hladik

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Movie Reviews UK Michael S. Goldberger

HorrorWatch Jareprime

The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]

DVD Verdict Rob Lineberger

DVD Verdict - John Carpenter's Vampires: Superbit Edition Patrick Naugle

Stomp Tokyo review

Film Journal International (Maitland McDonagh)

Popcorn Pictures Review

Soundtrack.net soundtrack review

SoundtrackNet article, "Having a Bite with John Carpenter": October 14, 1998 Interview by Dan Goldwasser

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

The New York Times (Peter M. Nichols)

DVDBeaver.com [Vincent Bouche]

GHOSTS OF MARS C+ 77

USA (98 mi) 2001 ‘Scope

A cheesy, outer space riff on a variation of Carpenter flicks, which plays out like a zombie movie using the cheap production design of the early Star Trek TV series (1966–69), but most closely uses pieces of THE FOG (1980) intermingling with ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976). Set nearly 200 years in the future on the planet Mars, we see little evidence of scientific advancement or modernism. Instead, it’s a world set in primitivism, where Carpenter gets by with a minimum of set design, which consists of a single room used for a governmental investigation hearing, a train, and a series of enclosed prison compounds, each indistinguishable from the next, set in a red bleached, prairie-like emptiness where all signs of life appear absent. Red dust is prevalent, as is a heavy metal sound design from Carpenter that suggests danger looms in every direction. Natasha Henstridge plays Lieutenant Ballard, an action hero, a serious-minded cop sent into a mining region to pick up a prisoner known as Desolation Williams (Ice Cube) and transport him back into the city. Pam Grier plays her Commander, along with the heavily fortified Sergeant Butler, Jason Stratham, and rookie Clea DuVall. Once they arrive at the compound, all armed to the teeth with machine guns, surely the weapon of choice in the future, they are met by an eerie silence with no sign of life. As they explore further, what they discover is harrowing, as bodies are discovered hung upside down, limbs decapitated, with primitive weapons melded together by barbed wire, like some sort of torture device that may suddenly spring into action. An ominous cloud of dread hangs over every step.

Carpenter’s method of advancing the narrative is using two stories-within-the-story. First, Ballard is questioned by the committee hearing and recounts for them what she saw, which is seen in flashback, while they also meet a science officer Whitlock (Joanna Cassidy) whose recollection of what happened are also viewed in yet another flashback. Perhaps most pertinent is the slightly out of focus viewpoint of some alien creature, seen through the lens of the camera, a vapor like substance that invades human bodies through the ear, taking them over, making them go insanely violent, as if possessed by a zombie. Once the body dies, the creature inhabits another physical body nearby, the same method used in another heavy metal alien-inhabiting classic, THE HIDDEN (1987), starring Kyle MacLachlan, the movie he made immediately following BLUE VELVET (1986). Only in that movie, the alien was a slithering creature that entered through the ears, immediately taking possession of the human, who instantly reveals an undying passion for hard-driving, heavy metal music, as opposed to a smoke-like vapor that turns the human into an aggressive, flesh-decapitating monster that continually screams at the top of its lungs.

While the alien force is an exact replica of THE FOG, especially when it is initially unleashed, like the opening of Pandora’s Box, but in order to fight its effects, the small police contingency must align themselves with the prisoner and his pals, arming them in an uneasy alliance, which is the premise of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. Eventually this turns into a full-fledged, hand-to-hand combat movie with zombie-like creatures who love to carry and fling sharp metal objects capable of chopping your limbs off against a police force with a combination of machine guns and side arms, while also carrying hand made grenades. It’s easy to describe the mayhem that follows as all Hell breaks loose. While it is a space western, an unusual genre, it seems like a potpourri of familiar themes that were better explored in the original source version, feeling more like retreaded material here. Nonetheless, there’s some humorous dialogue and an interesting bit of character development, not to mention tense and suspenseful moments, but the overall tone is that of a low grade B-movie that was designed for midnight feature audiences.

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "hilariously hardboiled" (6/10)

Mars, 2176. Shapely cop Ballard (Henstridge) is quizzed by superiors after returning to base, apparently the sole survivor of a mission to retrieve dangerous criminal 'Desolation' Williams (Ice Cube) from a distant mining outpost. Flashbacks reveal Ballard's team arriving at the camp to discover a scene of slaughter, the colonists having been taken over by a mysterious ancient force and turned into cannibal zombie psychopaths. The movie is itself possessed by powerful older spirits: the spectres of Carpenter's back catalogue. Buffs will have a field day ticking off the self-homages, starting with the period setting - exactly 200 years after his breakthrough Assault on Precinct 13. It's easy to knock the hole-ridden plot, the Blake's 7 effects, and the dated racket that is Carpenter's own synth-metal score. But to take it seriously would be to miss the point: the crazily complicated flashback structure and hilarious hardboiled dialogue are all the more amusing for being played dead-on straight.

Carpenter fans should make the most of Ghosts of Mars which stiffed so badly at the US box office it might actually end his once-glorious feature-film career. But while he may not have released anything really exceptional since 1989's terrific Prince of Darkness, neither has Carpenter made a dull movie - even if Vampires admittedly came pretty close. Ghosts may be a ramshackle throwback of a sci-fi western, but if you're in the mood for an entertaining, undemanding slice of undemanding B-movie nonsense, look no further.

Mars, 2176. Shapely cop Ballard (Henstridge) is quizzed by her superiors after she returns to base, apparently the sole survivor of a mission to retrieve dangerous criminal 'Desolation' Williams (Cube) from a distant mining outpost. A series of flashbacks shows Ballard's team arriving at the camp to discover a scene of slaughter, the colonists having been taken over by a mysterious ancient force and turned into cannibal-zombie psychopaths…

The movie is itself possessed by some powerful older spirits - the spectres of Carpenter's own back catalogue. Buffs will have a field day ticking off the self-homages, starting with the film's setting, exactly 200 years after Carpenter's 1976 breakthrough Assault on Precinct 13 which also featured besieged cops, faceless villains, and a bad-ass who finally turns hero. It's easy to knock the hole-ridden plot, the Blakes' 7 FX, and the dated racket that is Carpenter's own synth-metal score. But to take things at all seriously would be to miss the point: the crazily complicated flashback structure and hilarious hardboiled dialogue are all the more amusing for being played so dead-on straight. Movie of the year for teenage Marilyn Manson devotees, a guilty pleasure for the rest of us.

User reviews from imdb Author: TheFerryman

John Carpenter, together with Brian De Palma, are the only active directors who had created a body of work consisting of the representation of a particular, personal world, forged by the mixture of a number of themes and subjects, reinserted on tracks left by classic directors (Hawks and Hitchcock respectively). They make one single movie over and over again, reaching outstanding levels of accomplishment in style and coherence.

Thus `Ghost of Mars' is full of Carpenter's imaginary. The plot, the characters, the tone, everything can be linked to his previous work, most notably `Assault on Precint 13', that was yet a reworking of Hawks' `Rio Bravo'. And that's a significant point regarding this film: despite the zombies, the gore, the futuristic set-up, the red Martian atmosphere, the heavy metal score, `Ghost of Mars' is essentially a western in the most classic way. There is a train, a lawman (played by an actress), a group of deputies, a gang of bandits, a frontier town surrounded by the desert.

As in Hawks, the individuals work as a group, defined by codes of professional skill in a strictly masculine environment. Interestingly, Capenter portrays the Martian society as a matriarchy, but the elements operate the same way: the good guy and the bad guy differentiate from each other just for the fact that they are in opposite sides of the law, but are nevertheless exchangeable. Also, following Hawks' epic, the vulnerability of the hero is determined by a fault or weakness (Melanie's addiction to drugs is a progression of Dean Martin's alcoholism in Rio Bravo).

Told in a peculiar series of flashbacks from different points of view, and as in `Vampires', with the use of long, continual dissolves, the story introduces some original points, like the ghosts taking possession of human through the ears and Desolation's smart device to save Melanie with the aid of drugs. There are some plot holes, yes, some bad acting and gratuitous -though stylized- violence. But it's Carpenter unpretentious as ever, telling us how dark our future appears, not from a pulpit but from his director's chair. And I'm very grateful for his effort.

Wade Major from Boxoffice magazine (link lost):

Unlike many who make effect-laden science fiction films purely for the money or the glory, John Carpenter really, honestly, genuinely loves these kinds of movies. And if there were any doubt about that previously, his commentary -- with Natasha Henstridge -- on "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars" puts an end to it.

Just judge from the commentary alone, Carpenter and Henstridge had a blast of a time making the film, a throwback to old '50s B movies with its tale of awakened Martian spirits seizing the bodies of colonizing humans and wreaking havoc. It's also something of a variation on "Aliens" that works surprisingly well considering how well-worn the scenario is, but Carpenter's obvious enthusiasm carries the day. He's a wonderful commentator, bearing the demeanor of a talk show host that makes any lack of commentaries on such previous DVD releases as "Starman."

The disc, which is loaded with solid extras, is bears first-rate production values marred only by some excess chalkiness in some of the darker scenes (which constitute most of the movie). The featurette material, however, is refreshingly unedited -- two in particular presenting rough, raw footage of the film's making and scoring without the interference of commentary or post-production tinkering. Carpenter's video diary of the movie is the best of these -- some 16 minutes of raw video footage from the shoot at a gypsum mine in the desert. Without the usual featurette interference, one gets a chance to see precisely how the movie was made, complete with the disruption of a sand storm. The scoring session is similarly engaging, as Carpenter's own music is performed by bands Buckethead and Anthrax. This piece is shorter -- only about six minutes -- but gives an equally insightful glimpse into the tedious process of recording a rock film score like this one. Finally, with that same music as a background, a deconstruction montage of the movie's effects shows the elaborate process by which live action model work, CGI and other effects were integrated to create the illusion of a futuristic Martian colony.

Like most Carpenter films, "Ghosts of Mars" is not for everyone -- but fans of this type of material already predisposed to like the movie will not be disappointed by the DVD.

Almost exactly a year ago I reviewed Godzilla 2000, a vintage man-in-a-rubber-suit Japanese monster movie that opened in multiplexes across the country. After a summer of bland, inflated, half-witted "blockbusters," it was just the ticket. A real, honest-to-goodness B-movie.

Now John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars comes along, again at just the right time of year. It has the courage to be a potent little B-movie in an era when most movies take B plots and inflate and dilute them to such an extent that the flavor disappears. Ghosts of Mars provides a full-fledged blast of undiluted B-movie zest.

Ghosts of Mars concerns a group of human colonists on Mars, which has been 85% transformed into an earth-like atmosphere and is run mostly by women. A team of cops consisting of Pam Grier, Natasha Henstridge, Jason Statham, and Clea Duvall travels to an outpost to pick up and transport a dangerous prisoner named "Desolation" Williams (Ice Cube). When they arrive, they find most of the population dead and headless, hanging upside down.

It turns out an alien species of spore has taken over the bodies of many of the colonists and turned them into (get this) pierced, goth, Road Warrior-like soldiers with painted faces and long hair. Unfortunately, when the good guys kill these goons, they set the alien spores loose, free to take over a new human host. So cops and bad guys must set their differences aside and team up to battle the greater evil.

Carpenter douses his story in grimness; many of the characters openly use drugs, including the main character played by Henstridge. The picture of life on Mars is anything but utopian; we're informed that characters gamble, hire prostitutes, and get high. On the plus side though, the film's heroes are all women and African Americans. (The white males are treated as ignorant scum.) It's a fascinating mix.

The plot borrows heavily from Carpenter's second film, the outstanding Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which itself was a remake of Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo. Carpenter often falls back on Hawksian themes like camaraderie between men and women, and different layers of good and evil. Just the fact that he's aware of Howard Hawks and is able to pay tribute to him makes him a highly unusual filmmaker in today's world.

More than that, Carpenter is acutely aware of his position as a B-movie maker and has always proudly stuck to it, come what may. Other "genre" filmmakers have awkwardly tried to squirm out from under their pigeonholes with more mainstream fare, like Wes Craven and Music of the Heart, David Cronenberg and M. Butterfly and Sam Raimi and For Love of the Game, with less-than-favorable results.

But Carpenter proudly stands his ground, even in the face of a new-fangled industry that doesn't really know what to do with him. Indeed, Carpenter belongs to a lost era of filmmakers like Edgar G. Ulmer, Val Lewton, Budd Boetticher, Sam Fuller, and Andre de Toth; filmmakers whose job it was to fill that 65-minute space before the main feature and did so extraordinarily well.

I wish I could say Ghosts of Mars stacks up with Carpetner's best work, but it lacks in a few key areas. Firstly, neither Henstridge nor Cube (who has been extraordinary elsewhere) seems able to suggest the humanity or humor that Kurt Russell, Jeff Bridges, or James Woods brought to earlier Carpenter efforts like Escape from New York, Starman, or Vampires. Secondly, it features an improbable plot twist near the end. After several of the principals finally escape the deadly compound, they decide to go back and risk their lives to blow the place up. Perhaps it's a suggestion of an appropriately Bush-era style ending?

Nevertheless, images of Pam Grier striding around the surface of Mars with a ground-length leather coat, Cube blasting aliens with a semi-automatic in each hand, and Henstridge kung fu-ing baddies will stick with me. And someday -- hopefully sooner than later -- when Carpenter gets his career retrospective at the Castro, I'll be in line to see this one again.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, June 1, 2009

John Carpenter Week is Here! John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, October 4, 2010

Senses of Cinema (Gabe Klinger)

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

DVD Times Mark Davis

AboutFilm [Carlo Cavagna]

Nitrate Online (Joe Barlow)

Reel.com [Mary Kalin-Casey]

Movie Magazine International [Moira Sullivan]

Classic-Horror.com Kairo

Flipside Movie Emporium Rob Vaux

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Fangoria Michael Gingold

The Mag review (*) of "Ghosts of Mars" [Dan Lybarger]

ToxicUniverse.com (David Abrams)

filmcritic.com (Joshua Tyler)

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Scott Von Doviak

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson

CineScene.com (Ed Owens)

MovieWeb (B. Alan Orange)

Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth

The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley

The 7th Level also reviewing DARK STAR, ASSAULT IN PRECINCT 13, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, and VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED

Soundtrack.net soundtrack review

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell)

Carruth, Shane

PRIMER B 86

USA (80 mi) 2004

Not so much a sci-fi time traveling movie, but much more of a really geek experience, having to listen to a couple of egg-heads go on and on endlessly about molecular engineering details, dovetailing themselves into a world inside their garage, where they amazingly construct a time machine, but where they are also carefully tucked away from the world of their own families, who are probably barely 10 to 15 feet away most of the time, separated only by a wall, but they may as well be on another planet. Initially, these two engineering friends spend “all” their time together. No one seems to ask any questions. They just accept a couple of guys spending 24 hours a day together for long stretches of time, usually offering feeble excuses as to their whereabouts.

At any rate, the story is a lot of talk between these two friends in carefully constricted quarters. You get the feeling life has been literally squeezed out of these guys, like they’ve spent all their life living in cubicles. Then we see one of them ask the other to take off work and come meet him, as he wants to show him something. Through long-range binoculars, they stare out at a storage facility where, a sight for sore eyes, one of them already exists and can be seen walking down the street. Bam! The story moves into different time dimensions, where they are able to travel back an immeasurable number of times, and they do make repeated attempts, feeble attempts at first, but by trial and error, they attempt to change, and ultimately exploit the outcome of their lives. We are never able to see multiple dimensions occurring simultaneously, but we understand there are multiple versions of the same person appearing over and over again, and we never know which one is real, and which is the double or the triple, etc.

Eventually, these friends who couldn’t be separated begin to grow suspicious and have little use for one another, and we wonder which mutated version of them we are really looking at. The film asks what they might do if they could have anything they want, as they seem to be able to change the course of events, but they also leave the refuse of their mistakes lying around in multiple dimensions and it’s hard to comprehend that they can really clean up their act. Rather, it seems like they have created one giant toxic hazard zone, filled with the consequences of human error, including all the deadly sins. I understand that for financial reasons, the director, who is a Dallas mathematician-engineer by trade, shot only 82 minutes of film, and used 80 minutes of it, and like Caouette in TARNATION, wrote the screenplay, shot and edited the film, wrote some of the music and also plays one of the leads. That’s pretty close to wasting nothing. Interestingly, this film has nearly no credits at all. Shot for about $7,000, this always felt like a small-time project, as none of the characters actually mean anything to us, and it’s lacking the visual language to really make this “look” interesting. Without any special effects, the film instead relies on succinct writing and audaciously ambiguous, near subliminal editing, especially by the end, relying on the audience’s own imaginations to provide the heavy lifting, and while it gets off to such a slow start, many will overlook the near nauseating initial dialogue for the brilliance in how it all comes together by the end with a near wordless display of picture perfect film editing.

1. PRIMER Amy Taubin from Film Comment (excerpt)

Primer was the most exciting first feature by a U.S. director at the festival since Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko in 2001. Like Kelly's film, Primer is a muted sci-fi time-warp narrative with allegorical underpinnings, but the similarity pretty much ends there. Where Kelly's high-school hero sacrificed himself to save his loved ones from being destroyed by a demonic rabbit, who was also his evil twin (other interpretations welcomed), the protagonists of Primer are bored 30-year-old engineers trying to invent some get-rich gizmo in a garage. In the process, they stumble onto a device that's too valuable to market and that will allow them to have pretty much anything they want. Since the device is a crude form of a time machine, and since film itself is a kind of time machine, one can read Primer as a film that mirrors its own DIY production. Carruth spent three years teaching himself screenwriting and filmmaking from scratch. He wrote, directed, edited, and scored Primer and also played one of the lead roles. The film was shot in Super 16mm for $7,000 (excluding postproduction and the 35mm blow-up). The look is mysterious and elegant, with frames inside frames and overexposed, blown-out areas. Carruth makes Southwest suburbia look mundane but a touch radioactive. Heady is the word for the film, which doesn't yield its narrative in a single viewing. But even more compelling than the time-warped storyline is the way, visually, every shot has the surprise and intensity of a new idea. The film feels like a succession of brainstorms, held together by a nearly subliminal overlay of sound effects and music. Carruth, his co-star David Sullivan, and rest of the inexperienced cast handle the professional jargon as deftly as the veterans on ER. But despite echoes of La Jetée, The Killing, and various prime-time medical/crime shows, the aptly titled Primer is not a pastiche. Rather, it is evidence of a unique and unified vision.

Carruth is 31 years old and lives in Dallas, where he shot Primer. He has a degree in mathematics and worked briefly at three engineering companies before he decided to be a filmmaker. He is soft-spoken and has an understated, even ingenuous, manner. On-screen, he looks a bit like Noah Wylie on ER. Off-screen, you'd have trouble picking him out in a crowd.

This Q & A is excerpted from a February 2004 phone interview: http://filmlinc.com/fcm/artandindustry/primer.htm

(Note: The website for Primer is www.primermovie.com. It has a trailer, some beautiful still frames from the film and production stills taken by Carruth's brother, musician Caleb Carruth.)

Nov 2004 Mike D’Angelo from Esquire

Science-fiction movies set in the present day have a kind of stubborn purity about them. At its core, sci-fi traffics in ideas, implications, ramifications; place these in the context of an imaginary future, with its myriad technological advances, and the average filmmaker—or sometimes even a giant like Spielberg (see Minority Report)—can easily develop gizmo fever, spending more time huddled with the production designer than with the screenwriter. For all its dystopian visual splendor and bullet-time pyrotechnics, The Matrix remains memorable, five years and two crappy sequels later, because of the simple yet complexly unnerving concept of an ordinary dude discovering that everything he's ever known is a pacifying illusion. In fact, that's precisely why Reloaded and Revolutions disappointed and totally blew, respectively: With the action set primarily in the "real world" approaching 2199 and Neo transformed from baffled hacker to omnipotent superhero, the all-important Whoa factor was sadly diminished.

If it's a quick, potent, mind-bending shot of Whoa you seek—and I'm talking about pure Whoa here, the good stuff, undiluted by extraneous gadgets or CGI cityscapes—I give you Primer.

Written and directed by self-taught tyro Shane Carruth, who also served as editor and composer and plays one of the two lead roles, Primer came out of nowhere to win the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival. If you're at all familiar with the movies that generally win prizes at Sundance, you may well have resolved to give Primer a wide berth. Reconsider. This is no angst-ridden marital melodrama or self-congratulatory paean to harmless eccentricity. Despite having been produced on a microbudget of $7,000—about a quarter of what it costs to attend NYU's film school for a year—Primer is the headiest, most original science-fiction movie since Kubrick made 2001, as visually dazzling as it is narratively confounding. I've now seen it three times, yet I'm still struggling to wrap my brain around its labyrinthine permutations, many of which seem all the more unnerving for remaining just the other side of complete comprehensibility. Less a downward spiral than a steadily increasing feedback loop, the film suggests with merciless irrationality that the only thing you have to fear is you yourself.

Appropriately, the opening scenes take place in a suburban garage, calling to mind the legendary low-tech creation of Apple by the Steves, Jobs and Wozniak. Four similarly obsessive wonks, frustrated by the soul-deadening grunt work they perform by day, gather in this makeshift workshop on nights and weekends in the hope of creating something, anything, that might attract venture capital and lead to instant wealth. Two of them, Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan), conspire to ignore the proposal set forth by one of their colleagues, secretly devoting their time and energy to another project. Before long, they're putting in grueling 36-hour days, 12 hours of which theoretically must be spent hiding in a hotel room outside of town, lest they experience the social faux pas of bumping into themselves.

(A little disoriented by the abrupt, matter-of-fact infusion of weirdness in that last sentence? Just trying to acclimate you. The technique is Carruth's stock-in-trade.)

One of the things that makes Primer at once exciting and baffling is that Carruth, who until recently worked as a software engineer, resolutely refuses to dumb things down for an audience of laymen; his dialogue is as rich and poetic in its overlapping nerdspeak jargon as, say, Whit Stillman's is in its carefully articulated snobspeak argot. Unless you have extensive technical knowledge, the characters might as well be speaking Swahili half the time. Don't let it bother you. The details are unimportant, except insofar as they provide a grounding sense of verisimilitude. What matters is the palpable feeling of bewilderment, delirium, and anxiety our heroes evince as they gradually realize that the machine in Aaron's garage permits a rudimentary form of reverse time travel, and then quickly grasp that knowledge of what happens today allows them to make a killing in the stock market yesterday, and then very slowly come to suspect that getting rich quick isn't necessarily what's most important to them—depending upon which version of "them" you're talking about, there frequently being more than one in existence at any given time. When Aaron starts sneaking into Aaron's house in the middle of the night to inject some kind of knockout drug into the container of milk that he knows he, Aaron, will pour on his cereal in the morning, Aaron's worst suspicions are confirmed. Or are they affirmed? Depends on who you mean by Aaron. Either way, it's creepy as hell.

Thematically, Primer's basic scenario fits snugly within the familiar sci-fi rubric of There Are Some Things Mankind Ought Not to Monkey With, Yo. More specifically, and more resonantly, the film warns that utility divorced from understanding inevitably leads to chaos. When Aaron and Abe, having returned to the previous day, work out which trade will be the most profitable, Aaron asks if they know what goods or services the company in question produces—to which Abe replies, sensibly yet worrisomely, that it makes no earthly difference, so long as the price goes up. Any similarity to the mind-set of actual Wall Street brokers or the chairman of the Federal Reserve or our commander in chief is surely coincidental.

Carruth reinforces this ruthless pragmatism with an oblique, fragmentary editing style, frequently cutting from one brief snippet to another without providing any context or indicating how much time has passed. Frankly, anybody who claims he fully understands what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar. Trying to get a fix on the film is like following the path of one blade on a high-speed ceiling fan; give it a shot if you like, but don't be surprised if you wind up very dizzy.

That's hardly a problem, though, since the experience of watching Primer is so intensely pleasurable that you'll want to see it several times, not so much to figure it out (that's a fringe benefit) as to revel in its striking compositions and wry sense of humor. The dialogue is replete with tossed-off one-liners, the best of them predicated on contradictory tenses: "Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." And though Carruth had never made so much as a short before, and relied entirely upon book learnin', he exhibits an astonishingly intuitive grasp of cinematic syntax; there's not an unstriking shot in the entire movie. Time and again, he finds just the right angle or vantage point, unexpected without being showy or distracting. Seven grand didn't allow for special effects—the time machines are strictly functional, suggesting what you might get if Ikea were to develop a line of designer refrigerator boxes for the homeless—but the film's offbeat amalgam of the mundane and the surreal is strangely, vividly beautiful. (Carruth shot on film, not video, God bless him.) When Primer is released on DVD, I intend to buy two copies—one for my library, and another to shove, rebukelike, into the face of any indie filmmaker who hereafter dares to cite his or her minuscule budget as justification for a movie that looks as if it were photographed through Jack Black's lint filter.

Ultimately, though, what continues to haunt me is the absurdist existential crisis of two young men attempting to reconcile an inexplicable event—I'll leave that particular plot twist unspoiled, I think—with the knowledge that one of them must be responsible for it, even though neither one can think of any reason why "he" would have done what logic dictates "he" did. The implication is that we have no real awareness, much less an understanding of our own desires and impulses. As far as I'm aware, there is no greater Whoa.

article on Shane Carruth Dan Sallitt

Primer Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004) Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled

At Last, A Definitive Timeline for Primer | - Unreality Paul Tassi from Unreality

UPSTREAM COLOR C+ 78

USA (96 mi) 2013 ‘Scope

Despite all the hoopla about this film, and more particularly the filmmaker, this is not a marked improvement over his earlier film PRIMER (2004), one of the low budget marvels of the last decade. Waiting 9-years to make his eagerly awaited second film, there is a cult audience clamoring for something implicitly deep and complex from this film, perhaps another sci-fi puzzle film, but they won’t find it. Instead it’s simply an obscure, largely experimental piece that attempts to be more than it is, as whatever narrative there is remains obfuscated by a sketchy design that remains elusive at best. The problem is whatever themes or subject matter he is attempting to explore just never rise to the level of interest, as characters nearly sleepwalk through their roles, never generating any relevant dramatic connection. Before he was a film director, Carruth was a math major, becoming a computer programmer developing flight simulating software. As his two films suggest, guys heavily into science don’t always make the best communicators. In fact, one might think there is a pervading style of filmmaking where at least part of what it’s about is the difficulty in communicating, for instance teen angst films, or Heath Ledger in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005), where he takes the hesitant and inarcticulate nature of a young cowboy to an artform, or the many variations of supposedly naturalistic dialogue from low-budget Duplass brothers or Andrew Bujalski mumblecore movies, a fringe movement about post-college or early adult white people with problems that never really connected with mainstream audiences, as they’re not really about much of anything. Damned if that doesn’t plague this picture as well, where its intentional ambiguity remains a puzzle not worth exploring. Even if there is a coherent story here, the question is what difference does it make? How does a film like this have any relevance in our lives? Wanting this to be about something, like say the enveloping fear and paranoia of THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974), is not the same as making a profoundly affecting film, where the underlying focus sticks with you for days and weeks afterwards, perhaps even a lifetime. Interest in this film fades quickly.

As best as one can determine, there are two opposing wavelengths occurring here, where one is a high degree of sensitivity and thought, where you’re able to sense things others don’t see or hear, almost like an autistic sensory level, where one’s capacity to reflect upon altered states of existence, or a unique “otherness,” may be completely mystifying to some, but certainly early on we see many gathered together, including at various times both Kris (Amy Seimetz) and Jeff (Shane Carruth) drinking what is believed to be a special (parasite infected) purified water, something to help achieve a state of wellness, where one hopes to feel better than at any other point in one’s life. The downside is the sacrifice or price paid to achieve this sense of heightened elevation, real or imagined, where you have no memory of what happened and leave yourself open to unscrupulous operators, achieving a near hypnotic state like a cult brainwashing effect where people can take advantage of your vulnerability and steal all your money, leaving you paranoid and in fear, but also angry and demoralized by the entire process afterwards. But at least initially you want to believe, like the strange Russian sci-fi film Target (Mishen) (2011) that promises everlasting youth, only to ask yourself later, but at what price? Unknown to each other at the outset, Kris and Jeff are mysteriously drawn to one another, perhaps unknowing why, though Kris is so incommunicative and unapproachable that one has to wonder what’s the attraction? She wears an enormous large-sized headset at all times in public, listening to who knows what, but obviously to keep other people away. Nonetheless Jeff persists, as if by supernatural calling, where he believes they are drawn to one another, perhaps to help one another understand what they’ve mutually forgotten, helping each other piece together missing memories, even though they barely talk. This leads to an intimate relationship, as if by osmosis, where it’s certainly not their unbelievably poor communication skills, where they talk over each other’s words and ignore one another with regularity. What changes is Kris gets pregnant, or at least thinks she does, as her conscious existence is seemingly tracked by the parasite she swallowed, which ends up at a pig farm. It’s actually Kris’s pig that gets pregnant, unbeknownst to her, where Kris grows irate when they take the little piglets away.

There is no explanation for this transference of human consciousness, which goes through yet a third life cycle when the pig farmer wraps several chosen pigs in a sack and drowns them in the river, where the parasite passes through their bodies in a bluish fluid that is released upstream causing exotic orchids to grow. From these orchids is extracted the original parasite that begins this strange life cycle all over again. What is certainly bizarre is the state of inexplicable anger mixed with utter indifference by the humans used as guinea pigs, where they do not seem to be in control of their own human faculties, still affected long after the parasites have left their own bodies. Now if aliens had passed through these bodies, like the high powered, heavy metal infused THE HIDDEN (1987), an over the top, sci-fi story that packs a punch, then you’ve got something to generate interest for decades to come. But in this dreamy saga of lost souls, roaming the earth in a state of listless apathy, where the true meaning of their lives is apparently stolen by a series of unscrupulous business transactions which happens to block the ethereal wavelengths. When Kris takes to swimming, spouting gibberish poolside as she dives for stones on the bottom of the pool, Jeff is able to decipher her apparent mad ramblings as quotations from Thoreau’s Walden, of all things, a springboard to freedom if ever there was such a thing. If it wasn’t so goofy, it might actually be entertaining, but it’s not, as the entire film is cast in such a darkly somber mood, as if the whole thing was the invention of rabid conspiracy theorists who see the end of the world near through genetic mutation. Damn the scientists and mega corporations for spreading toxic poisons throughout the world altering the face of humanity. The best thing in the film is easily the atmospheric score written by Carruth, who writes, directs, edits, acts, composes the music, and self produces his own film, an ambitious compilation of responsibilities for what is ultimately a dreadfully impersonal, drearily sad reflection of the human condition in the modern age, where swindlers and snake oil salesmen, aka the capitalist conglomerate enterprises maintain a greedy, monopolistic control over an easily hoodwinked populace looking for a quick and easy fix. The idea of violating the natural order of things is nothing new, hardly revelatory, and never digs deep enough to matter. Not sure what the characters are listening to on their giant headsets, apparently tuning out the rest of the world, and the audience with them.

Upstream Color | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

When Shane Carruth came out of nowhere—nowhere being the suburbs of Dallas, Texas—to win the 2004 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance with his exceptionally frugal brainteaser Primer, the story of its making got ahead of its significant accomplishment. And it was a great story: In the face of a still-nascent digital revolution, well before the technology caught up with the impulse to shoot on video, Carruth rejected the cheaper format and shot Primer on 16mm for $7,000, a near-impossible feat of planning and resourcefulness. Never mind that the time-traveling thriller, taken on its own merits, represented one of the few recent examples of serious, idea-driven science fiction to surface in a sea of pricey space adventures. This was El Mariachi redux, another Texan doing a lot with a little—and Carruth’s subsequent struggles to get another film off the ground seemed to resign him to outsider-artist anomaly.

Now that Carruth has returned nine years later with Upstream Color, an intensely beautiful and enigmatic puzzle picture, it’s clear that Primer wasn’t some bolt from the blue, but the embryonic beginnings of a major filmmaker. Working with a larger budget—though very little all the same—Carruth has the means to expand another dense, sophisticated conceit into quasi-experimental marvel, as visually arresting as Primer was limited by necessity. The two films share in common an absolute faith in audiences to follow their curlicues of logic—Carruth even ends scenes a few seconds before another director would, trusting viewers to get the idea—and an eerie, destabilizing mood, as reality itself gets radically reconfigured.

To describe the plot of Upstream Color is an exercise in comical futility, but here goes: Amy Seimetz stars as an effects artist who’s abducted and implanted with a bioengineered grub that holds her in a hypnotic trance. By the time she recovers—via some sort of pig-related resuscitation process engineered by Andrew Sensenig (see: comical futility)—Seimetz has no memory of what happened, but she’s mysteriously drawn to a young, disgraced trader (Carruth) who seems to have gone through a similar experience. The two share an intimate relationship, spiked by mutual fear and paranoia, and their memories and identities start to muddy and converge inexplicably. (Also: Something something orchids; something something Walden; something something triggering sound effects.)

As with Primer, it’s not important—or even possible—to grasp everything that happens in Upstream Color on first viewing, though in both cases, Carruth clearly has them both fully worked out. It’s a movie that calls on a more intuitive response from the audience—in that sense, it owes a debt to fellow Texan Terrence Malick—and it’s best just to feel the story as it unfolds, to recognize the depth of Seimetz and Carruth’s connection without needing to have it explained. Imagine an entire romantic subplot cut together with the elliptical cool of the hotel scene in Steven Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight, and that’s reasonably close to how it plays out, minus the sci-fi contortions.

Given the lengths that Carruth went to shoot his debut feature on celluloid—the entire budget was burned through the camera, one take at a time—it’s a pleasing irony that Upstream Color is one of the greatest realizations of the digital dream, which was supposed to allow filmmakers to express a full, idiosyncratic vision from outside the system. To the extent that the film could be talked about as a collaboration, it’s Carruth the autodidact collaborating with himself as producer, writer, director, editor, cinematographer, composer, and distributor. It might be fair to argue that the resonances of Upstream Color are too obscure and internal—many viewers have and will be baffled by it—but it’s the type of art that inspires curiosity and obsession, like some beautiful object whose meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach.

David Edelstein on 'Upstream Color' - New York Magazine

Nine years ago, Shane Carruth's ambitious, wilfully oblique Primer (an oblique, tersely constructed assertion of mathematics and time travel as a projection of individual identity) puzzled and intrigued audiences, opening itself to intense scrutiny and analytical interpretation. Various metaphorical and scientific assertions were projected onto the speculative text — something exacerbated by the ascetic, emotionally detached formalism of Carruth's direction — making it an abstract work of cult status, a film used by convergent thinkers to encapsulate their sense of self.

This is why his similarly elliptical, but stylistically antipodal follow-up, Upstream Color, has been met with such a polarized response: dismissed by those that perceive the abstract and confounding as a criticism of self, yet embraced by those intrigued by an expressionistic, lyrical approach to communicating the human experience.

It's a marked, even pointed departure from auteur conceits, concerning itself with the same metaphysical void of Primer while deliberately eschewing the muscular, cold assemblage in favour of a wildly colourful, experiential work of emotional purpose.

Its plot, fragmented into chapters of events that individually mean very little without the context of the bigger picture, follows a woman (Amy Seimetz) who is attacked and infected with a grub, or plant parasite, harvested for its ability to imprison a human within their body. Placing her in a trance-like state, it allows her assailant to exploit her as a puppet, depleting her bank account and giving up her valuable worldly possessions.

But this genre riff is of little importance; Upstream Color infuses these events with a melodic, (mostly) dialogue-free sense of musicality. A soft, pastel palette and abrupt editing style focus on the emotional projection of the sounds and aesthetics, mirroring her plight with the choreographed, instinctual connection of children using the same grub as an experimental drug, fusing their unconscious together in respective anticipation, catching each other's punches and moving together with a natural, anticipatory ease.

This leads the film into its second chapter, which sees this woman unemployed and struggling, finding an unlikely romantic partner in a man (Carruth) with a similar, albeit veiled background. The grubs, which have since been surgically removed by a God-like figure — a farmer with an ear to the ground for the unifying hums and noises of the natural and industrial world — and transplanted into pigs, represent the eerie unspoken connection that people feel when they experience the unexplainable nature of love.

This worldly connectivity and the organic, yet inexplicable nature of entanglements push everything towards its conclusion. Maternal wails emerge from the humans when their host piglet babies suffer, living their brief moments of life in a stream, which flows into, and feeds, other organisms infected by grubs.

In a way, Carruth is constructing a theology, suggesting a simultaneously fatalistic and chaotic nature to the experience of living. But what makes this more than a mere attempt to fashion a pedagogical work of ideological propaganda is that he isn't suggesting specificities in beliefs. Rather than forcing a belief in a God or remaining implicitly, rigidly within the vacuum of science, he taps into the spirit of emotional connection, using his filmmaking style as a tool to reiterate the suggestion of unspoken shared cognizance.

As such, Upstream Color is a work that is better felt and sensed than it is deconstructed and forced into an existing category of human beliefs. Every moment is riddled with intense meaning and purpose, but the intentions are grander than mere superficial analysis will allow.

The title of Shane Carruth’s entrancingly beautiful second feature, Upstream Color, comes from a bluish substance that swirls around drowned baby pigs that came from a sow into which a mind-controlling worm that had been implanted in and removed from an abducted woman by a pig farmer–sound designer was transplanted and carried downriver to wild orchids … I’ve lost control of this sentence. But. But. If you could diagram a thing in words, why make a movie about it? I’ve seen Upstream Color twice and liked it enormously while never being certain of anything. This is not precisely an “Emperor’s New Clothes” situation. The clothes are real—or at least surreal. It’s the emperor I’m not sure about. But some movies warrant a leap of faith.

Carruth’s debut, Primer (2004), divided viewers: Was it mystifyingly bad or mystifyingly good? I drifted back and forth before settling in the rushes on the Pro bank, less because I can chart the permutations of its time-travel narrative (an online community after nine years almost can) than because the movie seems a potent distillation of the perils (emotional, intellectual, existential) of second-guessing. According to a profile in Wired, by Brian Raftery, that is both lucid and respectful of its subject’s mystery, Carruth conceived of Primer after waking up in a hospital with a head injury following an auto accident. Perhaps the best critic of his long-gestating sophomore film would be Oliver Sacks.

Barely visible beneath the surface of Upstream Color are the vague outlines of a sci-fi feminist revenge picture. After a prologue in which two boys engage in a ritualistic worm-tea ceremony watched by a man identified in the credits as the Thief (Thiago Martins), the protagonist, Kris (Amy Seimetz), is glimpsed running a race. (There is one shot of her future mate—played by Carruth—running, too, but then he disappears for half an hour. I only caught that shot the second time through.) She works in some sort of special-effects company—significant? Our first sustained look at her is when the Thief drags her out of a restaurant and forces a worm down her throat that makes her instantly pliable. At her home, he gives instructions in a mechanical voice and she executes them earnestly, her mouth scrunched up with a childlike sense of purpose. While he sleeps, she piles up stones and copies by hand the first pages of Walden. Then she starts signing checks.

The syntax is clipped, allusive, sometimes reallyfuckingannoying. Carruth imparts information on a need-to-know basis and clearly thinks we need to know less than we think we do. His self-composed Eno-ambient score suggests that little in Upstream Color is meant to be time-and-space-specific. What happens to Kris might be a coded sexual violation, though I can’t figure out the Thoreau connection. When the Thief leaves, she tries to remove the worms under her skin with a butcher knife—and then wakes up en route to the pig farmer–sound designer, identified in the credits as the Sampler (Andrew Sensenig), who operates on her and a pig side by side. Later, he seems to be a spirit, looking on after a fight between a man and a pleading wife that isn’t referenced before or after. The Sampler does not interact with the Thief, though both engage in worm-related activity.

Upstream Color could also be taken as Carruth’s version of Moonrise Kingdom: a symbolic fairy tale of damaged souls who help each other work through primal injuries. Carruth’s Jeff is drawn to Kris—broke, fired from her job, desolate—on his morning train commute. She shows him all her meds. He opens his own dark closet. All of this is intercut with footage of pigs.

The official synopsis reads, “A man and woman are drawn together, unknowingly entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism.” I don’t know what that means either, but I loved looking at the actors’ faces. Seimetz is more fascinating the more you look, and Carruth is all soft eyes and hard cheekbones—his face is like his syntax.

Perhaps if too much info were added, you wouldn’t be as spellbound. It would be as if Stanley Kubrick had showed a bunch of aliens watching Keir Dullea eat his peas and saying, “I think these Earthlings might be ready for us now.” You probably wouldn’t watch 2001 for the eighth time with the same sense of wonder—and I wouldn’t be readying myself for a third go-round with Upstream Color.

Everything you were afraid to ask about “Upstream Color” - Salon.com Pigs! Mental breakdowns! Nematodes! "Walden"! We answer all your questions about 2013's strangest film, by Daniel D’Addario from Salon, April 12, 2013

Shane Carruth Designed Upstream Color, Now You ... - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek

Atlantic [Ian Buckwalter]

Slant Magazine [Calum Marsh]

Shane Carruth's Beguilingly Enigmatic 'Upstream Color' - Indiewire Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist

White City Cinema [Michael Smith]

The House Next Door [Zeba Blay]

Upstream Color Review: There Are Indeed Companions More - Pajiba Seth Freilich

ScreenDaily [Anthony Kaufman]

Upstream Color FAQ: Analysis and the meaning of Shane Carruth's ... Forrest Wickman from Slate, April 9, 2013

Review: Shane Carruth's 'Upstream Color' is a beautiful ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Letterboxed [Mike D'Angelo]

Day Five at Sundance is all about the perplexing ... - The AV Club Sam Adams

Paste Magazine [Jeremy Mathews]

Twitch [Eric D. Snider]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Linc Leifeste]

The London Film Review [Flossie Topping]

[Sundance Review] Upstream Color - The Film Stage Jordan Raup

Sound On Sight David Tran

Shock Cinema [Steven Puchalski]

Interview: Shane Carruth Joseph Jon Lampier interview from Slant, April 4, 2013

Shane Carruth on self-distributing Upstream Color and - The AV Club Sam Adams interview, April 5, 2013

Interview: Shane Carruth Reveals The Mysteries Of 'Upstream Color ... Jessica Kiang interview from indieWIRE, April 8, 2013

Steven Soderbergh & Shane Carruth Talk 'Upstream Color,' - Indiewire Rodrigo Perez interviews from indieWIRE, April 9, 2013

Shane Carruth, indie purist, on new movies and old regrets - latimes ... Steven Zeitchik interview from The LA Times, April 10, 2013

Review: Shane Carruth's 'Upstream Color' baffles and amazes Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

'Primer's' Shane Carruth in total control with 'Upstream Color' - Los ... Mark Olsen from The LA Times

Upstream Color - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times Simon Abrams

Upstream Color Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Jim Emerson

Upstream Color - Movies - The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Mumblecore: All Talk? | Film Comment | Film Society of Lincoln Center Amy Taubin

Mumblecore: 20 memorably inarticulate movie performances | Film ... Mumblecore: 20 memorably inarticulate movie performances, from The Onion A.V. Club

Carson, L.M. Kit and Lawrence Schiller

THE AMERICAN DREAMER D 58

USA (90 mi) 1971

Art as narcissism—as films go, it doesn’t get much worse than this, shown using the cheapest film stock possible, which has already started to fade, an endlessly monotonous portrait of an uninteresting subject, Dennis Hopper himself in a portrait of his own self-indulgence, shot during the editing process of his film THE LAST MOVIE (1971), where throughout the camera is basically pointed at the subject and the audience is subjected to all the drivel that comes out of his mouth, feeling very much like we walked into personal therapy sessions. The confessional quality of the film lacks any sense of coherent themes other than to subject Hopper to utter adulation. It’s like having to listen to the same song over and over again, where Hopper is on auto repeat, taking all the feeling out of the experience until all that’s left is monotony. That’s not to say it’s worthless, which is something else altogether, just a horrible film. While this only works as an art film, there is no actual artistic technique involved except a point and shoot camera approach, reminiscent of Warhol’s SLEEP (1963), 321 minutes, footage of John Giorno sleeping for five hours, and EMPIRE (1964), 485 minutes, a single shot of the Empire State Building from early evening until nearly 3 am the next day. With the camera constantly pointed in his face, with wall to wall music except when Hopper is speaking, Hopper is then supposed to act natural, where at times he’s a ham, more often, however, he takes himself seriously as he attempts to ponder his existence. Why would anyone be interested in what Dennis Hopper has to say, especially when the truth is he has nothing to say? What’s actually revealed, if anything, is just how insecure he is to believe placing himself in front of a camera would help him deal with his own insecurities. While that may work for him, offering a kind of self-analysis, what interest should that hold to anyone else?

Speaking personally, there were two, and only two things of interest during the entire 90 minutes. One was the opening song, “Easy Rider” heard here:

v/a the american dreamer.. chris sikelianos - easy rider ... - YouTube (4:42), where the filmed version cuts in and out of the song, seen here: [RIP 1936-2010]* Dennis Hopper - The American Dreamer (6:45), with Hopper subjecting us to his various thoughts. At least in this opening section, the loping camera looks out onto the Southwestern desert landscape as he’s approaching Taos, New Mexico. The laid back style of the song is a perfect introduction to the emptiness of the landscape, and ultimately, as it turns out, the existential void of the artist himself. This is also the only section of the film where Hopper narrates offscreen without a camera pointed at him, so it offers a more pre-conceived poetic vision, a rambling inner dialogue written out ahead of time as a script matched against the unchangeable arid desert. What is probably most striking about the film is the way Hopper identifies with Charles Manson, something nearly inconceivable to think about today, which, as it happens, was part of the allure of the recent film MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (2011), as it resurfaced the horrifying psychological damage resulting from blindly following cult leaders, whose sole motivation seems to be to redefine the entire world around their own image, where everyone and everything belongs to them, breaking any concept of free will in his cult followers. Hopper namedrops Manson as a flirtatious device with a woman he obviously finds sexually attractive, as if she’d be turned on by that. Much of Hopper’s behavior emulates that of Manson, including his desert sexual fantasies of having orgies and running naked in the desert, high on whatever he could find.

Hopper spends plenty of time high on drugs, running his mouth endlessly, surrounded by groupies who worship his every move, and even surrounded by a group of naked women who have expressed an interest in having sex, he instead bores them to tears with his endless monologues. One of the other pre-conceived segments includes Hopper undressing as he walks down the street of a Los Alamos suburban subdivision, noted for developing the nuclear bomb, which is not nearly as interesting as his narrative thoughts, where he is defining and labeling the people that would live here as conservative and closed minded, the kind of people who would never be drawn to anything new. This is, of course, Hopper’s biggest fear, that he might turn into one of these people who have no identification with freedom and open expression. Ironically, what’s peculiarly evident to the viewer is that Hopper is just as conservative and closed minded, following the deluded belief that he’s any different, or that he somehow knows what the people inside those houses think, some of whom may be teachers or artists, perhaps more into free expression than he is. As it turns out, the methods of open expression that Hopper copies are mostly the kind of thing prescribed in acting classes or therapy sessions of the era, where people are taught to loosen up and trust themselves. So it’s actually Hopper who is showing a surprising lack of originality, haunted by the inability to break through his own self-imposed personal barriers.

CinematicThreads.com Matthew Lotti

Companion piece to The Last Movie about Dennis Hopper's bizarre "cult" in Taos, New Mexico where he did a lot of drugs, drank excessively, tangoed with flighty female fans and tried to edit his 1971 cult Western. The footage - of Hopper having 'group therapy' with liberated women, taking baths with them, admiring his art collection and shooting rifles - does not, in my view, hurt or aid the ultimate effectiveness The Last Movie in any way - it merely shows what kind of physical and mental condition Hopper was in at the time. However, the shadiness of the filmmakers is evident (Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls claims that Schiller and Carson convinced him to run naked around Los Alamos - home of the Manhattan Project - in exchange for girls) and an hour and a half of an ego-tripping Hopper making verbal love to himself and his inflated "ideas" is like spending time with a stumbling party guest who makes everyone sick and that you want desperately to kick out of the house. It's good to know he recovered, of course, and continues to have a unique and unparalleled career in film.

User reviews from imdb Author: reverendtom from Santa Cruz, CA

“Turgid self-obsession”

This movie is worth seeing only if you have a hankering to watch Dennis Hopper wander around smoking joints and or hand rolled cigarettes and spewing retarded hippie philosophy for two hours. This film is horrible. The only interesting and or funny parts are definitely unintentional. Hopper's rambling, near incoherent and clichéd dissertations on life, God, the mind, sexuality and more are extremely nonsensical and make him sound half mad or whole stupid most of the time. Hopper is trying way too hard to create an outlaw mythos for himself and it shows. On top of the false machismo, his attitude reeks of ego mania, or just plain mania. Definitely worth seeing for Hopper fans so they can see what a dirt-bag he was back then. Hopper has stated numerous times that he is very embarrassed about his shenanigans in the 70s, and I'm embarrassed for him. 1/10.

User reviews from imdb Author: lor_ from New York, New York

This documentary film about Dennis Hopper really impressed me back in 1971, when I saw it at U. of Penn. It was released on college campuses per Hopper's wishes as part of a plan to change film distribution patterns which, alas, failed, and I haven't heard of it being revived since. The premise was to show Hopper at his Taos, New Mexico headquarters editing his epic "The Last Movie". Along the way his pal and documentarist L.M. (Kit) Carson revealed a lot about Dennis, including his fondness for dallying with young groupies, occasionally right-wing views mixed in with a generally liberal philosophy (particularly regarding gun ownership), etc. The most fascinating segments show clips from "The Last Movie" and Hopper in the editing room musing over the filmmaking process. Later, when the finished "The Last Movie" was released and flopped miserably, thereby curtailing Hopper's budding career as a director (see "Easy Rider"), this documentary took on added meaning in revealing those excesses that contributed to his Wellesian implosion.

User reviews from imdb Author: django-1 from south Texas USA

This warts-and-all documentary of Dennis Hopper at home in Taos, New Mexico, in the period after the filming but before the release of his amazing THE LAST MOVIE, provides a fascinating window into a world that is forever gone and probably only lasted for a short time: the period when the sixties were over but we were still running on fumes from the sixties and things had not yet crashed and burned. This was a year when you could go see a film like VANISHING POINT at a mainstream movie theater and when THE LAST MOVIE was released by a major studio. I was an adolescent at that time and can testify that Hopper represented a heroic image to many of us back then. I never got to see this film at the time because it did not get much distribution. How interesting to see it thirty-three years later. Hopper raises so many interesting questions and issues in THE American DREAMER, but rambler and dreamer that he is, he moves on without stopping to analyze or apply any of it. Perhaps Mr. Hopper expected US to make the next move fueled by the ideas he threw us. The film itself shows Hopper at home editing what would become THE LAST MOVIE, pontificating on all kinds of subjects regarding the arts, society, sex, drugs,his own legacy, and life in general. Intercut with this is footage of Hopper taking his clothes off on the street in a residential neighborhood, shooting various guns, talking with representatives from Universal about THE LAST MOVIE, walking around. Voice-overs of Hopper thinking aloud are played during these scenes. The music is an assemblage of vaguely philosophical stoner folk that perfectly reflects the atmosphere. Hopper talks about honesty in film, and he certainly lives by his own ideology as this is one of the least flattering artist-approved film biographies I've ever seen. Bob Dylan's DON'T LOOK BACK and Woody Allen's WILD MAN BLUES are the only other films about well-known celebrities I'd include on the same shelf. If Mr. Hopper owns the rights to this, he should definitely release it on DVD. By the way, I mentioned earlier about the sixties crashing and burning (as symbolized in the final scene of VANISHING POINT). The film that for me documents the final nail in the coffin of the sixties spirit is WONDERLAND.

Watching this twisted Dennis Hopper documentary on a double bill with THE LAST MOVIE at Manhattan's Film Forum was pure bliss. The perfect acidhead double bill. And after cringing through his work in sewage like WATERWORLD, this helped to remind me why I used to think he was one of the coolest filmmakers on the planet. Sure, his recent career choices (and sobriety) might be lucrative, but it's certainly left the cinema world short one half-baked artist. Not many public figures would allow themselves to be presented this way for posterity. So I've got to give Hopper credit for having the guts to greenlight this freeform documentary, which follows him to his Taos, New Mexico pad, soon after returning from his lengthy, nasal-membrane-rotting LAST MOVIE shoot in Peru. Filmmakers L.M. Kit Carson (who went onto script PARIS, TEXAS and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2) and Lawrence Schiller (who co-wrote O.J.'s book, "I Want to Tell You") knock on Hopper's front door, Dennis answers it in only a bath towel, and they simply let the guy ramble, as the camera rolls. Bearded and bleary-eyed, he babbles about his lonely, unhappy childhood; fires off semi-automatic weapons; shares a bathtub with three naked young ladies; and lets loose with some terrifically pretentious insights. The Wit and Wisdom of Dennis Hopper includes such quotables as "I don't believe in reading. By using your eyes and ears you'll find everything there is." Or how about "I'd rather give head to a woman than fuck them...Basically, I think like a lesbian." We also get to watch him strip down in the middle of a suburban street and stroll about, butt naked. Ahh, the man's a fuckin' genius... No surprise, Hopper looks very perplexed while piecing together his footage for THE LAST MOVIE, explaining that editing a movie is like "having a child and cutting its arms off -- putting its eyes out." Meanwhile, he's hitting on any pretty young woman within camera range, and suckering a bevy of groupies into a self-declared "sensitivity encounter", with all of them crammed onto his bed and groping Hopper's bare ass. All the while, he puts out these Manson-esque vibes; except instead of killing people, all Dennis did was kill off his own braincells. In a creepy admission, he even boasts of visiting Manson in jail. There's also a terrible, folksy-ballad soundtrack which captures the era at its most irritating -- including lame, Greek Chorus-type tunes about Dennis (complete with rhymes like "Here's to Mr. Hopper / Who traded in his chopper."). Far from your orthodox celebrity profile, Hopper opens wide for the camera and proudly lets loose with a juicy one. I just wonder what he thinks of this pic nowadays.

eFilmCritic Reviews The Ultimate Dancing Machine

There was a brief time circa 1970 where Dennis Hopper was The Man. With overall box office receipts at a historic low, Hopper was one of the few guys around who seemed to have figured out the game; his EASY RIDER (1969; director, co-writer, star) was a massive hit, and he was effectively given the keys to Hollywood. Hopper utilized his new-found star-power to get his dream project made, THE LAST MOVIE (1971), a truly flipped-out experimental western that, alas, turned out to be a bomb of nuclear proportions. But just before his career went to hell, he appeared in this unintentionally revealing behind-the-scenes documentary, filmed during post-production for THE LAST MOVIE, which shows that the emperor had no clothes and quite possibly never did.

For eighty minutes, a camera crew follows Mr. Hopper around his home as he rolls joints, frolics with groupies, plays with his guns, shows off his photography portfolio, wanders around the neighborhood buck naked for no discernable reason, and--above all else--pontificates tediously on anything that comes to mind. Hopper comes off as a harmlessly self-absorbed ass, the sort of fellow who can without a trace of irony utter words like, "It's very difficult at times to, if you believe in evolution, not to believe in revolution." But it's hard to say if it's altogether Hopper's fault that he sounds like a drugged-out gasbag, or the fault of a film crew that hangs on the Great Man's every word like he's Carlos Castaneda. We're treated to too many shots of lovely rural scenery as Hopper rambles on and on in voice-over.

There's little here to indicate that Hopper possesses a terribly interesting mind. We hear a lot about what he likes (group sex, cunnilingus) and dislikes (reading books), but he rarely sounds any more intelligent or enlightened than your Uncle Marty, the one who's been living in his mother's basement since that LSD incident back in the '60s. (The film sometimes gets so vapid--e.g., Hopper making stupid jokes about his daschunds humping each other--that it's chilling to comtemplate all the material that must have been left out of the final cut.) The biggest problem is the paucity of insight into the creative process, which one would think was the whole point of following this guy around with a camera as he tinkered with his pet project. Not that the filmmakers don't try to pump some pertinent quotes out of Hopper; at one point in the editing suite they ask him what he finds most difficult about the post-production process, and he curtly answers, "Sitting here." So much for film theory.

What you're left with is an embarrassingly star-struck vanity project--Dennis Hopper flexing his ego for the whole world to see, cheerfully unaware that his career is about to crash into an iceberg.

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark)

The American Dreamer - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Rumsey Taylor

Dennis Hopper’s American Dreamer: Soundtrack Aquarium Drunkard

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Caruso, D. J.

TAKING LIVES B 87

Canada USA (103 mi) 2004

A jolting experience from the opening bell with the sounds of Bono singing U2’s “Bad,” we watch a clever serial killer at work, initially thinking he’s just a sweet and innocent kid before we watch him push some guy changing a tire into an oncoming car, switching identities with the dead, much like a “hermit crab” where he outgrows one life, taking another (thus the title), which we discover is his standard modus operandi. Suspenseful, always interesting, filled with gritty images, this is a lurid serial killer thriller set in Montreal, though the locations on screen are decidedly Quebec. Angelina Jolie plays a sexy American FBI profiler who is asked to provide her expertise, irritating the local police, particularly chaffing the lead officer Olivier Martinez. While there is a terrific cast, including the likes of Gena Rowlands, the killer’s mother, Tcheky Karyo, the police chief, and Kiefer Sutherland and Ethan Hawke, two Americans who become the leading suspects, with Jolie in a brief romantic interlude, which does include a nude scene, the film goes on a little beyond its finale, losing some of the suspense, as by that time, the romance is over and we know who the killer is, so the end is something of an unnecessary letdown. Compared to the tight, frenetic feel of the rest of the film, the end seems like it was a last minute throw in.

Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in contemporary serial killer movies Nicola Rehling from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

DISTURBIA B 85

USA (104 mi) 2007

A surprisingly good looking movie, which opens with another signature car crash, one of the best features of his earlier film TAKING LIVES as well, so the guy knows how to use his stuntmen. David Morse, as usual, is simply brilliant as a menacing neighbor in “Suburbia,” a man who becomes the subject of fascination by Shia LaBeouf, whose stir crazy life is reduced to staring out his windows after he’s placed on house arrest for three months, forced to wear an ankle bracelet that is designed to immediately notify the police if he strays too far from his home, causing him Jimmy Stewart-like spacial limitations. Of course, there’s also a beautiful babe, Sarah Roemer, the Grace Kelly girl who moves in next door with an effervescent personality who likes to parade around in scanty attire, and as it turns out she actually likes the guy, joining him in his obsessive interest in spying on his fascinating neighbor, who may or may not be a creepy killer, the Aaron Burr role in Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW.

The film does a good job in capturing common themes in suburbia, perennial boredom, showing kids sitting around with too much time on their hands with nothing better to do, with expensive electronic gadgetry, like computer games, high end cameras that can produce live Internet video feeds, and the instant access through cell phones, as well as teen frustration with their increasingly powerless lives exacerbated by perceived parental and/or societal overreactions. While there are lulls in interest, as the life of these kids is just not that fascinating, it heats up once Morse gets more involved in their lives. There’s really excellent use of high energy music, a wonderful build up of tension once the film starts veering off into the slasher mode, and some chilling, atmospheric freak out moments that are well conceived. The film has been a box office success, particularly appealing to the teen audience, but it’s an intelligent, well written film that creates a disturbing, paranoid landscape lurking just outside the supposed safety of our own doorsteps.

The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]

So, does Disturbia, a teen-beat remake of Rear Window, imply that Hollywood is finally moving on from its obsession with underage remakes of Shakespeare plays? If so, it's just as well: At least it'll mean some less-played-out stories. Granted, it's harder to avoid comparing a remake with the original when both originated in the same medium. Still, while Disturbia doesn't live up to Rear Window—or credit it, though the parallels are unmissable—and it's often annoyingly fluffy where Rear Window is grim, it eventually evolves into a credible thriller, one pointedly rather than coincidentally embedded in the trivia of its time.

Shia LaBeouf stars as a good kid turned bitter and sullen after his father's death. After slugging a snotty Spanish teacher, LaBeouf is sentenced to three months' house arrest, with an ankle monitor alerting the teacher's vengeful cop cousin whenever LaBeouf steps out of line. When his mom (The Matrix's Carrie-Anne Moss) cuts off his iTunes account and his XBox Live connection, LaBeouf gets so stir-crazy that he has to spy on his neighbors—including hot newcomer Sarah Roemer—to stay entertained. But eventually, he starts to suspect that creepy neighbor David Morse is a serial killer, and he, buddy Aaron Yoo, and Roemer launch their own Spy Kids investigation.

The setup takes far too long, at least for viewers who aren't the exact right age to harmonize with LaBeouf's well-acted yet not terribly compelling "Life's sooo unfair" teen angst. But once the plot finally kicks into gear, director D.J. Caruso (Taking Lives) effectively cranks up the tension, via tricks yanked from the Hitchcock and Blair Witch Project playbooks. The script's cultural specificity is likely to date it—amid all the technology being name-checked or brought into play, all that's missing is LaBeouf whining to his LiveJournal friends about how nobody understands him, OMG—but for now, it seems smartly aware of a time in which kids relate to the world as much through their webcams, laptops, and cell phones as through their own eyes. Perhaps most telling is Roemer's romantic interest in LaBeouf, which comes after she learns he's been spying on her; in the era of MySpace and YouTube video blogs, the film implies, everyone is so open that only an obsessive stalker has enough interest and access to uncover actual intimate truths, whether they're about his crush object or a psycho killer.

Fangoria Michael Gingold

The most shocking and harrowing moment in the teen thriller DISTURBIA actually occurs close to the very beginning of the film. Given that it has been showcased extensively in the movie’s advertising, it’s not really a spoiler to reveal that following a pastoral fishing/bonding episode between teenager Kale (Shia LaBeouf) and his father (Matt Craven)—the kind of sequence that, in a movie like this, you know can’t come to a good end anyway—a violent accident steals Kale’s dad from him. The setpiece truly jolts not only due to director D.J. Caruso’s startling and visceral staging, but because it shatters an honest and realistic camaraderie that LaBeouf and Craven elicit in their brief minutes together. Thus it’s easy to understand how Kale becomes a sullen student who decks his Spanish teacher when the latter brings up the tragedy in class, which gets Kale sentenced to a summer of house arrest that propels DISTURBIA into the meat of its story.

Clearly a modern gloss on REAR WINDOW, DISTURBIA (scripted by Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth) distinguishes itself somewhat by having fun with aspects of current living and technology that never existed in Alfred Hitchcock’s time. For a youth of today, home confinement (effected by an ankle bracelets that alerts the cops if he strays beyond his yard) would hardly mean being cut off from either entertainment or communication—and thus Kale’s mother Julie (Carrie-Ann Moss) also relieves him of his computer and video-game privileges as part of his punishment. Turning to a lower-tech form of amusement, Kale begins checking out his neighbors through binoculars and, amongst assorted miniscandals taking place in the surrounding homes, discovers the promises of both sex (in the person of lovely new girl-next-door Ashley, played by THE GRUDGE 2’s Sarah Roemer) and violence (Mr. Turner, portrayed by David Morse, may be a serial slayer of young women).

Those, of course, are the twin lures of the genre within which DISTURBIA itself squarely resides—though the film, which never pushes either past the boundaries of a target-audience-friendly PG-13 rating, eschews any self-reflexive commentary along those lines. Mostly, it’s content to be a straightforward, slickly made youth suspenser that’s anchored by LaBeouf’s very fine and sympathetic performance, whether he’s enacting Kale’s contentious relationship with his mother, his burgeoning relationship with Ashley or his suspicions about Mr. Turner. For quite some time, DISTURBIA eschews gratuitous shock tactics and actually allows us to get to know its principals—a refreshing change from the usual teen-oriented genre fare. Genuine concern is built up for Kale as he vainly tries to convince the authority figures around him of what’s going on at Mr. Turner’s place, and enlists the help of Ashley and his goofball friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo, as one of the few recent wacky screen sidekicks who’s actually likable) in gathering evidence.

What keeps DISTURBIA from working to its full potential is that there’s never any doubt placed in Kale’s or the audience’s mind that Mr. Turner is in fact a callous murderer. A blood-splattering shot about halfway through confirms for the viewer what Kale is already sure he knows, and without any mystery left to the story, the rest is left to click through the inevitable developments: Mr. Turner realizes that Kale is on to him, Kale realizes that Mr. Turner realizes he’s on to him, Mr. Turner threatens Kale’s friends and then Kale himself, etc. Under the circumstances, Morse doesn’t have to overstate or overplay his role’s villainy, and he uses his physical size and a matter-of-factly menacing tone to suggest a man practiced enough at both murder and covering it up to be certain he’ll be able to do it again. Repeatedly, perhaps.

Caruso whips up a nicely tense setpiece in which a camcorder-toting Ronnie invades Mr. Turner’s house while Kale watches on a home monitor, but things tip a little too far over the top in the final reels. It’s not surprising to find RED EYE scripter Ellsworth’s name in DISTURBIA’s writing credits; as in the Wes Craven film, the climactic action here lurches into overstated mayhem that fudges the veneer of realism created by what has come before. Suddenly, we’re in movie-land as the characters’ actions veer well outside the bounds of plausibility, and (SPOILER ALERT) Mr. Turner’s modest home is revealed to contain at least a pair of complete serial-killer habitats, including a watery pit of corpses in the basement (a setpiece suggested, Fango was told, by DreamWorks topper Steven Spielberg himself, apparently recalling how well it worked a generation ago in POLTERGEIST). The cast and the craftsmanship—most notably Rogier Stoffers’ sharp cinematography—insure that the movie never completely loses dramatic interest, but had it gone deeper, darker and/or smarter in the home stretch, DISTURBIA might have truly lived up to its title.

PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review

The Village Voice [Robert Wilonsky]

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Cinematical [Scott Weinberg]

BeyondHollywood.com Richard Lewis

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott

Cassavetes, John

It's always a good sign when critics write about Cassavetes, because he deserves it, and because his influence should be discussed in the same breath as Altman or Kubrick, who lived to be admired in their lifetimes, or Welles, who like Brando, became a derogatory caricature, something of a comical antithesis to who and what they really stood for in the eyes of the public by the time they died. Cassavetes died relatively young, where he showed no signs of slowing down or becoming more mainstream, continually inventing relevant characters whose personal crises became our own. With his unique style, as no one else was making films like Cassavetes, or taking the critical abuse for making films no one at the time understood, who did he have to draw inspiration from or compare films with? Critics always said he was so off the beaten track that there was no audience for his films, condemning what we now know is his sheer originality in his examination of the human condition. Cassavetes' influence was through the intense creation of his characters, the kind never shown on movie screens, the kind whose troubles and flaws matched their wit and humor, the kind who gave everyone an excuse not to love them, but then finds a way as the director to embrace them all the same. His commitment to his own ideas and to his craft is unlike any other filmmaker, as he was largely self-funded, self-promoting, and only worked when the money was there, which wasn't very often, so he left us only 9 films that are indisputably original works, something along the ranks of Dreyer or Tarkovsky. Most critics don’t go that far in praise of Cassavetes, but at least they’re still paying attention.

Cassavetes is all about finding something human and believable in the characters, where what he's filming onscreen may as well be a theatrical representation of our own screwed up lives. In my view, that's something Cassavetes does better than all the so-called greats, as his films are not filled with grandiose moments or perfect sequences, but in the everyday ordinary moments in our lives, not at all like Ozu, who captures a rhythm and a fixed viewpoint, but in the way he assembles small, uncomfortable moments that have a way of escalating into something more intense, because people have a way of not letting things go, so it germinates into something altogether different and is no longer even recognizable even to that individual. Cassavetes is extremely good at shining a light on what's wrong with us, and then we the viewers have to decide whether or not it's real and if it matters, and if it does, whether we can transcend the material onscreen.

As Shadows (1959) was made at the same time as the French New Wave, his groundbreaking filmmaking style is oftentimes unfairly compared, as Cassavetes’ strengths are not something the French New Wave did very well. No one else except post New Wave director Jean Eustache comes to mind when trying to recollect filmmakers who dwell on human interaction (or lack of it) in such a fiercely documentary manner as Cassavetes. Human interaction is a common theme in cinema, where the screen is constantly lit with subtitled conversations, but they don't *dwell* on it where it becomes larger than life, the focus of the film, an entity unto itself. Cassavetes simply has a different way of exploring humanity, and what some people find crude and ugly is exactly what is most fascinating, as it's probably the most revealing aspect of his filmmaking, and something very few others even attempt to do. Those that do tend to be crude masquerades. In Cassavetes movies, his characters are always caught up in the miracle that is the present, where they may not know what to do with it, but they're sure as fuck in the moment.

"WHAT'S WRONG WITH HOLLYWOOD" by John Cassavetes

Hollywood is not failing. It has failed. The desperation, the criticisms, the foolish solutions, the wholesale cutting of studio staffs and salaries, the various new technical improvements, the "bigger picture", and the "ultra-low-budget picture" have failed to put a stop to the decline.

The fact is that film making, although unquestionably predicated on profit and loss like any other industry, cannot survive without individual expression. Motion pictures can not be made to please solely the producer's image of the public. For, as has been proved, this pleasure results neither in economic or artistic success.

On the other hand, the audience itself, other-directed and mass-minded as it is, may condemn pictures such as Twelve Angry Men or The Goddess. These pictures may lose money, but they have inspired applause from those who still think freely and for themselves. These pictures have gone beyond Hollywood "formula" and "ingredients", and will affect strongly the future of American motion pictures.

More often than not, the mass audience will not accept a new idea, an unfamiliar notion, or a different point of view if it is presented in one or two films only, just as it will not immediately accept new ideas in life. However, the new thoughts must eventually lead to change.

This is not to say that individual expression need only be so called point-of-view films or films that stimulate thought. Certainly the standard of the musical can and must be improved too; the treatment of comedy should reach in other directions; the "epic" and "Western" pictures and the "love story"must also search for more imaginative approaches and fresher ideas.

However the probability of a resurrection of the industry through individual expression is slim, for the men of new ideas will not compromise themselves to Hollywood's departmental heads. These artists have come to realize that to compromise an idea is to soften it; to make an excuse for it, to betray it.

In Hollywood the producer intimidates the artist's new thought with great sums of money and with his own ego that clings to the past of references of box office triumphs and valueless experience. The average artist, therefore, is forced to compromise. And the cost of the compromise is the betrayal of his basic beliefs. And so the artist is thrown out of motion pictures, and the businessman makes his entrance.

However, in no other activity can a man express himself as fully as in art. And, in all times, the artist has been honored and paid for revealing his opinion of life. The artist is an irreplaceable figure in our society too: A man who can speak his own mind, who can reveal and educate, who can stimulate or appease and in every sense communicate with fellow human beings. To have this privilege of world-wide communication in a world so incapable of understanding, and ignore its possibilities, and accept a compromise--most certainly will and should lead the artist and his films to oblivion.

Without individual creative expression, we are left with a medium of irrelevant fantasies that can add nothing but slim diversion to an already diversified world. The answer cannot be left in the hands of the money men, for their desire to accumulate material success is probably the reason they entered into film-making in the first place. The answer must come from the artist himself. He must become aware that the fault is his own: that art and the respect due to his vocation as an artist is his own responsibility. He must, therefore, make the producer realize, by whatever means at his disposal, that only by allowing the artist full and free creative expression will the art and the business of motion pictures survive.

—John Cassavetes, Film Culture Magazine (1959)

MoMA.org | Film Exhibitions | 2003 | John Cassavetes

John Cassavetes was America’s midcentury pioneer of independent filmmaking. More than any other artist, he demonstrated that an American cinema made outside of Hollywood was not only possible, but, given his ferocious and generous spirit, could be exceptional. His cinema, at once spontaneous, intimate, and direct, established both the rough aesthetic and the psychological themes for a generation of filmmakers to follow, from Martin Scorsese to the proponents of the film movement Dogma 95.

from DVDBeaver’s Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/reviews.htm

Regarded as the pioneer of American cinema verité, John Cassavetes experienced success as both an accomplished actor and an innovative filmmaker. He demonstrated courage as a director in his trail-blazing path of experimental, inexpensive features that were regarded as the American counterparts to the Nouvelle Vague. It has been stated that his cinema expressed themes of a previously unrecognized vein of strident American modernism that went against the bleak and hollow forms of many artistic contemporaries. Cassavetes' films have kinship to the philosophical literature penned by Emerson, most emphatically as examples of the consequences of embracing a lifestyle of extreme pragmatism. Cassavetes' work is celebrated with its ability to imbue both the metaphysical and existential revelations of communication through life experience. Much of his early work is considered a watershed in the birth of American independent cinema.

Introduction Geoff Andrew from the British Film Institute

Emotional authenticity was everything for Cassavetes, and performance was not only the main tool he used in exploring the human condition; it was also his favourite metaphor for life. He was endlessly fascinated by the fraught relationship between the private self and the public facade presented to the world. He wanted to see the reality that exists behind the various masks we wear in our quest for love, happiness and a sense of belonging.

The five films in this brief tribute to one of American cinema's greatest mavericks see him at the peak of his powers. It's also possible to see him refining and maturing his style over the years. Though the later films may feel a little less raw than the earlier work, their insights into the human psyche are even more penetrating and powerful. The sheer brilliance of all five movies remains undimmed to this day.

Portrait of an Artist: John Cassavetes Harvard Film Archive

In the ten years since his death, recognition of John Cassavetes’s significance has grown steadily—a recognition that often eluded him in life. Time has made apparent the unique figure he cut across the American cinematic landscape, both through his methods and his brilliantly iconoclastic works. Cassavetes’s dedication to the pursuit of his highly individualistic brand of filmmaking opened new roads of possibility for filmmakers disenchanted with the Hollywood Dream Factory. His debut feature, Shadows, is credited with nearly single-handedly sparking the American independent film movement, and his pioneering example of self-financing and self-distribution have become standard practice for many. The roster of filmmakers who have overtly acknowledged a debt to Cassavetes includes Martin Scorsese, Sean Penn, Tom Noonan, Rob Nilsson, and many others. Most significantly, Cassavetes left behind a staggeringly rich body of work. Devoted to the "small feelings" society at large so frequently attempts to suppress, the films continue to startle, surprise, and move us, challenging not only our assumptions about what a movie is but our deepest understanding of ourselves.

Cassavetes, John Art and Culture

"My characters are not violent or vile. They’re everyday people. They have some money, but find themselves discontented with their own loneliness, their own mortality, the sameness of life." Championing a gritty, unencumbered approach to filmmaking, John Cassavetes directed his art toward a new frontier, one removed from Hollywood’s rules. Introduced to cinema as an actor, Cassavetes spent much of the 1950s portraying tough, gangster-type characters. His detour to directing occurred in 1957 when he formed an actors' troupe in New York and began to play with the improvisational techniques that would become such a unique and essential part of his subsequent films. "Shadows" (1960), Cassavetes’ first film, emerged from his work with the actors' studio and gave him the authority in Hollywood to create larger, more expensive productions. However, Cassavetes soon learned that his approach to filmmaking was directly at odds with the studios’.

After the release of a couple of unenchanting studio pictures, Cassavetes "went independent" and developed a personal style that was decidedly anti-studio. Returning to his improv roots, Cassavetes released "Faces" (1968) and "A Woman Under the Influence" (1974), two films that relied on the actors’ personalities and abilities to ad-lib. Avoiding the controlling influence of Hollywood, Cassavetes worked with close friends and family members on both projects. "A Woman Under the Influence," a dark look at a disturbed woman played by Cassavetes’s wife Gena Rowlands, was entirely financed and promoted by Cassavetes and his friend, actor Peter Falk.

Although Cassavetes enjoyed commercial success in 1980 with the release of "Gloria," the film itself is the least characteristic of his work. Cassavetes gravitated toward unpolished film techniques, including jarring hand-held camera shots that highlighted his representation of suffering, flawed characters.

Facets Multi Media - FACETS FEATURES -> DIRECTORS -> John Cassavetes

Born December 9, 1929 in New York City, John Cassavetes was the younger of two sons of Greek immigrants, Nicholas and Katherine Cassavetes. Cassavetes grew up and attended public schools in the Long Island towns of Sands Point and Port Washington. He attended Mohawk College and Colgate University (both in New York State) before enrolling at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. He graduated in 1950.

After playing for a time in a Rhode Island stock company while trying to get parts on Broadway, his career got underway when he played a small part in a film, Taxi (Gregory Ratoff, 1953). A year later he began acting in short teleplays, beginning with Paso Double (for the Omnibus series). Cassavetes became typecast as a "troubled youth" in these programs and the motion pictures that were based on these plays. Among these films were Edge of the City (Martin Ritt, 1956) and Crime in the Streets (Don Siegel, 1957).

In 1956 Cassavetes began teaching method acting at a drama workshop in Manhattan. One of the group's improvisations had the makings of a film, Cassavetes thought, and he mentioned the project on Jean Shepherd's Night People radio show. While on the air, Cassavetes suggested that listeners interested in seeing an alternative to Hollywood cinema should send in money to fund his project. Shepherd's audience sent in donations totaling around $20,000; Cassavetes raised a similar amount from his show-business friends and from his own savings. With these funds he embarked (with his acting workshop and a volunteer crew) on his first film, Shadows.

Made intermittently over two years, Shadows changed the landscape of American cinema. Actors improvised within loosely defined situations and the story evolved as the shooting progressed. Everything was filmed with a hand-held 16mm camera. The score composed by jazz great Charles Mingus further added to the improvisational, cinema veritè feeling.

Unable to interest American distributors, Cassavetes screened Shadows to enthusiastic audiences in Europe (including the 1960 Venice Film Festival, where it received the Critics Award). In 1961 Shadows was released in America under the auspices of a British distributor.

Impressed by the success of Shadows, Paramount hired Cassavetes to make a series of films but released him after the financial and critical failure of Too Late Blues, his first film for them. He then directed A Child Is Waiting for Stanley Kramer (and United Artists). After a falling out with Kramer, Cassavetes was given just two weeks to edit the film. Kramer re-cut the film (making it overly sentimental, according to Cassavetes). Cassavetes, infuriated, spoke out against Kramer and the film, washing his hands of the project.

Unwilling to have his vision compromised by studio heads and producers, Cassavetes acted in several films - most notably Rosemary's Baby (Polanski, 1967) and The Dirty Dozen (Aldrich, 1967), for which he was nominated for an Oscar - so that he could finance his own films and thereby retain artistic control.

Faces, shot and edited in 16mm over three years, was the first product of this strategy. Though not improvised on-camera as was Shadows, the film marked a return to that film's improvisational, cinema veritè style. It premiered in 1968 and was a financial and critical success, being nominated of two Academy Awards and winning five awards at the Venice Film Festival.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Cassavetes worked independently or with modest studio backing when it was offered with complete artistic control. In the latter category are Husbands (Columbia, 1970), Minnie and Moskowitz (Universal, 1971), Gloria (Columbia, 1980), and Love Streams (Cannon, 1984). Of the self-financed are The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976/78), Opening Night (1978), and what many consider Cassavetes' finest film, A Woman Under the Influence (1974). All feature remarkable performances by one or more actors from his regular stable of players including Peter Falk, Ben Gazzarra, and most notably, his wife (since 1954) Gena Rowlands.

Sadly, Cassavetes' final film was, as Cassavetes put it, the "aptly titled" Big Trouble (1985). Cassavetes reluctantly stepped in to direct in mid-production after Andrew Bergman, the film's writer and director, quit the project. Cassavetes considered it a disaster and was embarrassed to have his name attached to the film. Raymond Carney has persuasively argued (Film Comment: May-June 1989, p. 49) that because of the nature of the project and the final product (it hardly shows the stamp of a Cassavetes film) Love Streams rightly deserves to be considered Cassavetes' final cinematic statement.

After a three-and-a-half year illness, John Cassavetes died February 3, 1989. Cassavetes is survived by his wife Gena Rowlands, and their children Nicholas, Alexandra, and Xan. His spirit continues to inspire countless independent and maverick filmmakers around the world.

-Ray Carney (The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies)

Film Reference Bill Wine

As perhaps the most influential of the independently produced feature films of its era (1958–1967), Shadows came to be seen as a virtual breakthrough for American alternative cinema. The film and its fledgling writer-director had put a group of young, independent filmmakers on the movie map, together with their more intellectual, less technically polished, decidedly less commercial, low-budget alternatives to Hollywood features.

Begun as an improvisational exercise in the method-acting workshop that actor John Cassavetes was teaching, and partly financed by his earnings from the Johnny Staccato television series, Shadows was a loosely plotted, heavily improvised work of cinema verité immediacy that explored human relationships and racial identity against the background of the beat atmosphere of the late 1950s, given coherence by the jazz score of Charles Mingus.

The origins and style of Shadows were to characterize John Cassavetes's work throughout his directorial career, once he got the studio-financed production bug out of his system—and his system out of theirs.

The five prizes garnered by Shadows, including the prestigious Critics Award at the 1960 Venice Film Festival, led to Cassavetes's unhappy and resentful experience directing two studio-molded productions (Too Late Blues, A Child Is Waiting), both of which failed critically and commercially. Thereafter, he returned to independent filmmaking, although he continued to act in mainstream movies such as The Dirty Dozen, Rosemary's Baby, and Two Minute Warning. He continued directing feature films, however, in his characteristic, controversial style.

That style centers around a freedom afforded his actors to share in the creative process. Cassavetes's scripts serve as sketchy blueprints for the performers' introspective explorations and emotional embellishments. Consequently, camera movements, at the command of the actors' intuitive behavior, are of necessity spontaneous.

The amalgam of improvisational acting, hand-held camera work, grainy stock, loose editing, and threadbare plot give his films a texture of recreated rather than heightened reality, often imbuing them with a feeling of astonishing psychodramatic intensity as characters confront each other and lay bare their souls. Detractors, however, see Cassavetes as too dedicated to the performers' art and too trusting of the actor's self-discipline. They charge that the result is too often a mild form of aesthetic anarchy.

At worst Cassavetes's films are admittedly formless and self-indulgent. Scenes are stretched excruciatingly far beyond their climactic moments, lines are delivered falteringly, dialogue is repetitious. But, paradoxically, these same blemishes seem to make possible the several lucid, provocative, and moving moments of transcendent human revelation that a Cassavetes film almost inevitably delivers.

As his career progressed, Cassavetes changed his thematic concerns, upgraded his technical production values, and, not surprisingly, attracted a wider audience—but without overhauling his actor-asauteur approach.

Faces represented Cassavetes's return to his favored semi-documentary style, complete with the seemingly obligatory excesses and gaffes. But the film also contained moments of truth and exemplary acting. Not only did this highly charged drama about the disintegration of a middle-class marriage in affluent Southern California find favor with the critical and filmmaking communities, it broke through as one of the first independent films to find a sizable audience among the general moviegoing public.

In Husbands, Cassavetes continued his exploration of marital manners, morals, and sexual identity by focusing on a trio of middle-class husbands—played by Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk—who confront their own mortality when a friend dies. Director Cassavetes's doubled-edged trademark—brilliant moments of intense acting amid the banal debris of over-indulgence—had never been in bolder relief.

Minnie and Moskowitz was Cassavetes's demonstration of a lighter touch, an amusing and touching interlude prior to his most ambitious and commercially successful film. The film starred Gena Rowlands (Cassavetes's wife) and Seymour Cassel as a pair of dissimilar but similarly lonely people ensnared in a manic romance. Cassavetes again examined miscommunication in Minnie and Moskowitz, but in a much more playful vein.

A Woman under the Influence was by far Cassavetes's most polished, accessible, gripping, and technically proficient film. For this effort, Cassavetes departed from his accustomed style of working by writing a fully detailed script during pre-production. Starring Gena Rowlands in a magnificent performance as a lower-middle class housewife coming apart at the seams, and the reliable Peter Falk as the hardhat husband who is ill-equipped to deal with his wife's mental breakdown, Woman offered a more palatable balance of Cassavetes's strengths and weaknesses. The over-long scenes and overindulgent acting jags are there, but in lesser doses, while the privileged moments and bursts of virtuoso screen acting seem more abundant than usual.

Financed by Falk and Cassavetes, the film's crew and cast (including many family members) worked on deferred salaries. Promoted via a tour undertaken by the nucleus of the virtual repertory company (Cassavetes, Rowland, Falk) and booked without a major distributor, Woman collected generally ecstatic reviews, Academy Award nominations for Cassavetes and Rowlands, and impressive box office returns.

Cassavetes's next two films (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night) feature a return to his earlier structure (or lack thereof)—inaccessible, interminable, and insufferable for all but diehard buffs. However, Gloria, which showcased Rowlands as a former gangster's moll, while uneven in tone and erratic in pace, represented a concession by Cassavetes to filmgoers seeking heightened cinematic energy and narrative momentum.

"People who are making films today are too concerned with mechanics—technical things instead of feeling," Cassavetes told an interviewer in 1980. "Execution is about eight percent to me. The technical quality of a film doesn't have much to do with whether it's a good film."

| The John Cassavetes Pages | The Independent Film Pages | Film ... Ray Carney’s Cassavetes pages

The John Cassavetes Pages (Ray Carney) one section of the Ray Carney site

The Films of John Cassavetes - Table of Contents another entry point to Ray Carney’s site

Welcome to Tirana International Film Festival 2004 an interesting opening (via films) to sections of Ray Carney’s site

All-Movie Guide bio information by Jason Ankeny

John Cassavetes from Baseline’s Encyclopedia of Films

American Masters . John Cassavetes | PBS bio information

John Cassavetes Profile Bret Wood essay from Turner Classic Movies, also seen here: John Cassavetes Profile - Turner Classic Movies

In Loving Memory of John Cassavetes a tribute to Cassavetes website

Classic Movies on John Cassavetes

John Cassavetes - Search.com Reference encyclopedia entry

John Cassavetes - Explore - The Criterion Collection Criterion brief biography

John Cassavetes News regular updates

John Cassavetes press archive

John Cassavetes @ Filmbug more bio information

John Cassavetes - Yahoo! Movies more bio material

John Cassavetes - Starpulse still more bio material

Cassavetes An Inspired Collection Honors a Founder of the Indie Movement, by David Sterritt (Undated)

kamera.co.uk - feature item - John Cassavetes by Jason Wood (Undated)

Love Films: A Cassavetes Retrospective - JonathanRosenbaum.com September 20, 1991

Film & TV: On the Edge of the Edge (Austin Chronicle . 01-26-98) On the Edge of the Edge, by Michael Ventura from the Austin Chronicle

The Cinematic Life of Emotions: John Cassavetes George Kouvaros interviewed by Needeya Islam (1999), from Senses of Cinema

Some older or lesser known films David Walsh from the World Socialist Web Site, May 17, 1999

Impromptu Entertainment: Performance Modes in Cassavetes' Films Pamela Robertson Wojcik (2000) from Senses of Cinema

"Open Letter to John Cassavetes" Jim Jarmusch letter from John Cassavetes: Lifeworks, Tom Charity (ed), September 2000

Identity in the Films of Cassavetes Maximiliam Le Cain from Senses of Cinema (2001)

Senses of Cinema – Meet John Cassavetes Christos Tsiolkas reviews three books on Cassavetes from Senses of Cinema, September 2001

John Cassavetes Retrospective - freedomrightsfilms.com - Tripod What’s Wrong with Hollywood essay by John Cassavetes (1959), The Laemmle Theatres in Santa Monica and West Hollywood from Sept. 1 – Nov. 18, 2001

Reviews of Five Books about John Cassavetes Jonathan Rosenbaum from Cineaste, December 2001

The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an ... Retrospective: John Cassavetes, by Tim Applegate from the Film Journal (2002)

MAGAZINE | INDIES | Cassvetes | VOL 27-5: JAN 2003 John Cassavetes: an Icon of Independence, by Charles Champlin from DGA Monthly

kamera.co.uk - feature item - John Cassavetes by Jason Wood feature article in 2004

Places in the Heart: Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point by George Kouvaros Brad Stevens from Senses of Cinema, October 2004

John Cassavetes UXL Newsmakers (2005)

Fallen Creatures in a Fallen World, Sojourners Magazine/March 2005 Darren Hughes on Cassavetes from Sojourner’s magazine

Beat Street: Johnny Staccato - Film Comment J. Hoberman looks back at Johnny Staccato, March 2005

Like Anna Karina's Sweater: October 2006 John Cassavetes and the Shoes of Pauline Kael, from FilmBrain

Film International Article (2006) Cavell, Altman, Cassavetes, by Charles Warren

Message in a bottle | Features | Guardian Unlimited Film John Sutherland from the Guardian, June 8, 2007

The Cassavetes Letters, #1 Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity, February 19, 2007

The Cassavetes Letters #2 Matthew Clayfied from the Esoteric Rabbit, February 20, 2007

The Cassavetes Letters, #3 Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity, August 9, 2007

Bright Lights Film Journal | John Cassavetes: The First Dogme ... Angelos Koutsourakis, February 2009

How John Cassavetes' Shadows changed American movies forever. Elbert Ventura from Slate, November 11, 2009

John Cassavetes Series at Cinefamily - Page 1 - Film+TV - Los ... Karina Longworth from LA Weekly, March 3, 2011

john cassavetes | silver velvet sky October 11, 2011

Hidden In Plain Sight: Cassavetes The Reluctant ... - The Quietus Anthony Nield, April 18, 2012

Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes: Equal Stars of A Woman Under the Influence Jennifer Sin from Offscreen, February 2013

John + Gena: dynamite on screen and off | British Film Institute Matthew Thrift from BFI, May 30, 2013

Essential John Cassavetes at BAM : The New Yorker Richard Brody from The New Yorker, October 3, 2013

Cinematic Jazz: The Myth of John Cassavetes - Roger Ebert Steve Erickson, November 3, 2014

Introduction John Cassavetes: Anti-Melodrama, a lengthy academic paper by Yamashina Yumi (language conversion not needed)

Online Features | FilmPrint The Original Independent: Cassavetes, by Dannis Koromilas from FilmPrint

The Roles of Gena Rowlands from the Gena Rowlands website

Cassavetes, John They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Interview with Gena Rowlands September 1999 interview with Rowlands from Premiere magazine on Al Weisel’s website

John Cassavetes: Genius, Patriot, Freemason Playboy interview with Cassavetes in 1971 from the Filbert website

markromanek.faq excerpts of a Cassavetes interview

Independent Film Quarterly Film Magazine Stuart Alson interviews Phedon Papamichael, who worked on costumes, art design, and helped produce Cassavetes films

Ben Gazzara: 1930-2012 and Remembering Cassavetes Alex Simon interviews Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, and Gena Rowlands in 2004 from The Hollywood Interview, February 3, 2012

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Cassavetes on DVD Matthew Kennedy on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection, February 2005, also seen here: Images [Matthew Kennedy]

PopMatters [Ian Chant] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] - Criterion box set 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: John Cassavetes Five Films - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Shadows | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jeff Economy reviews the Criterion 5 from The Chicago Reader

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central [Ed Nguyen] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray

Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection

GreenCine | product main - John Cassavetes - Five Films (1959-2000) capsule reflections on the Criterion 5 from GreenCine

The Austin Chronicle: Screens: Review - John Cassavetes: Five Films Taylor Holland reviews the Criterion 5

John Cassavetes - Five Films : Filmcritic.com Doug Hennessy

John Cassavetes brief comments on the French documentary (Cinema, de Notre Temps) Cinema, of Our Time: John Cassavetes (1968), a film by André Labarthe, made for French TV that is included as supplemental material on the Criterion 5 DVD

American Dreaming John Cassavetes Marc Couroux interviews Ray Carney on his new book, American Dreaming: John Cassavetes in August 1999

Cassavetes on Cassavetes Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes from Cineaste (2001)

John Cassavettes a brief excerpt from Carney’s Cassavetes on Cassavetes on the Jean Shepard website

Cassavetes on Cassavetes essay from Gerald Peary

Interview with Ray Carney Film Critic who Sheds Light on Filmmaker ... by Cynthia Rockwell from New England Film, November 2001

John Cassavetes: Lifeworks - Tom Charity a book review by David Fear of Tom Charity’s John Cassavetes: Lifeworks (2001)

Combustible Celluloid: Great Film Books - John Cassavetes ... a review of Charity’s book, by Jeffrey M. Anderson (2001)

Places in the Heart: Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and ... Brad Steven reviews the book Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point, by George Kouvaros, from Senses of Cinema (2004)

ACCIDENTAL GENIUS How John Cassavetes Invented the American ... ACCIDENTAL GENIUS How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film, by Marshall Fine, a book review by David Thompson from The New York Times, January 18, 2006

'Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented American ... Phillip Lopate’s book review from The New York Times, January 29, 2006

Cassavetes, Volatile Contrarian, Mulish Master of Improvisation Scott Eyman reviews Marshall Fine’s book for the New York Observer, February 5, 2006

Foreword by Michael Ferris a former Cassavetes cameraman (A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Mikey and Nicky, and Opening Night), Mike Ferris writes a foreword to Dan Selakovich’s book, To Killer Camera Rigs That You Can Build

YouTube - Ronald Reagan John Cassavetes Duel
A quick scene from the 1964 movie THE KILLERS where Ronald Reagan, playing the sole bad guy role of his career, gets punched out by John Cassavetes

KAMERA.CO.UK | BLOG: Watch: John Cassavetes more YouTube film moments

Edge of Outside - John Cassavetes - Television - Spike Powered by ... trailer for a Cassavetes documentary

MySpace.com - John Cassavetes - 60 - Male - New York, NEW YORK ...

Various Quotes by Cassavetes

The religion of director John Cassavetes a glimpse of Cassavetes’s religious affiliation

The 14th Most Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker Poll)

Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)

Kent Jones' Top 10 Directors

David Sterritt's Top 10 Directors

John Cassavetes (1929 - 1989) - Find A Grave Memorial

John Cassavetes from Wikipedia

SHADOWS A 97

USA (87 mi) 1959

Shadows was an experiment. It predominantly came out of a workshop. We were improvising on a story, one that was in my mind. It was my secret. Every scene in Shadows was very simple; they were predicated on people having problems that were overcome with other problems…There was a struggle because firstly I had never done a film before, and secondly the actors had to find the confidence to have quiet at times, and not just constantly talk. This took about the first three weeks of the schedule. Eventually all this material was thrown away, and then everyone became cool and easy and relaxed and they had their own things to say, which was the point.

As you go along in life sometimes your innermost thoughts become less and less a part of you, and once you lose them you don’t have anything else. I don’t think anyone does it purposefully. It’s just that a lot of people are not aware of losing those things. I found myself losing them too, and then suddenly I woke up by accident, by sheer accident of not getting along with something, with something inside.

—John Cassavetes, 1968

While Cassavetes often receives credit with this film for being the father of American independent filmmaking, he was heavily influenced by Italian Realism films, especially screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, who Cassavetes claims “is surely the greatest screenwriter that ever lived,” along with American studio directors Frank Capra and Robert Rossen, also independent directors Shirley Clarke, Lionel Rogosin, and Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive (1953), where cinéma vérité was an American artform long before the French adopted it. This is a landmark Black and White film, originally shot by Erich Kollmar on 16 mm, later transferred to 35 mm, a contemporary of French New Wave works like Godard’s BREATHLESS (1960) and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), or perhaps more significantly, Rivette’s PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961), as this has a New York Belongs To Us feel about it, as the streets of Manhattan and the music of Charles Mingus mix with a free-form jazz improvisational style expressed in quick, jerky, handheld camera movements attuned to Beat movement music and rhythms, producing a grittier realism along with the feel of unscripted dialogue and humor, a wonderful glimpse at a spirit and energy of American youth yearning for freedom. From Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Rarely has so much warmth, delicacy, subtlety, and raw feeling emerged so naturally and beautifully from performances in an American film.” Written, directed, and co-edited by Cassavetes, this is an exuberant film about love, race, changing identity, and searching for meaning in relationships, where each character has a hard time just being themselves, as they’re continually caught off guard, where you catch a glimpse of “I love you truly, truly dear...,” a song that reappears later in all its glory in MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ (1971). The opening sequence of three young guys with three girls, without a clue in the world what to do, yet covering it up with forced laughter and comic showboating, is exactly what the grown men do a decade later in Husbands (1970).

Made for $40,000 using a nonprofessional cast and crew, using borrowed and rented equipment, the texture of the film comes from the grainy film stock, the constantly roving camera, and restless characters that refuse to sit still, as even when standing or sitting their minds are constantly on high alert, sending out streams of energy that are the signpost of this breakout film, where perhaps the underlying theme is coming out of the late 50’s, an era of suffocating conformity, where learning to eschew the conventional pathways and follow your own path was essential, as it was especially important to believe in yourself and trust your own instincts. With astonishing raw intensity, the film rushes ahead at breakneck speed while also probing into the psychological interiors of the characters who each lay bare their souls. All using their own first names, two brothers and a sister live together, but only the oldest is dark skinned black, while the two youngest are light skinned enough to pass for white, a matter of consequence as the film progresses. Lelia Goldoni is stunning as the sensual, yet often opinionated young 20-year old sister who is delightfully confused with the attention of two white guys and one black guy, where we follow her friendships, arguments, sexual encounters, parties and dances, as she tries to blend in and pretend that race doesn’t matter and that “casual” sex has no consequences. Abandoned by Tony (Anthony Ray), one of the white lovers when he discovers her race, her world turns upside down, Shadows by John Cassavetes YouTube (4:46). The other younger brother (Ben Carruthers) is an unemployed trumpet player caught up in the bohemian Greenwich Village scene where he’s always trying to find the elusive mood of hipster cool and spends most of his time unsuccessfully chasing girls while out with his friends. The older brother (Hugh Heard) is the only one working, responsible enough to continue chasing after third-rate singing jobs to pay the bills, but he’s tired of being passed over for lesser talents and for the way he’s continually mistreated in the business, yet he tries to be the strong, protecting older brother. Each seems to be fooling themselves in a film that captures the immediacy of the moment, the importance of now, leaving one to wonder what to do in the next moment.

SHADOWS, like Cassavetes’ later work GLORIA (1980), are two of the best films ever made showcasing the streets of New York, where even a freewheeling discussion about art (“You don’t have to understand it! If you feel it, you feel it, that’s it man.”), which may as well provide an underlying context of the film, makes beautiful use of the Museum of Modern Art, Shadows (Dir: John Cassavetes) - YouTube (2:07). Two years after the original shoot, however, in February 1959, Cassavetes spent two weeks reshooting several scenes, such as Lelia’s unflinchingly honest love scene where the director shows an inordinate amount of concern for the confusion in her character about what happens next, Shadows (John Cassavetes) YouTube (3:42), or her prolonged walk down 42^nd Street alone where she gets accosted by a guy and none other than Cassavetes himself as a complete stranger comes to her aid, Shadows [Dir: John Cassavetes] - Leia y el jazz YouTube (1:21), or her quarrelsome dance scene at a club with her black partner, all of which round out her character, adding greater depth without altering her initial identity — interesting that with this version, Goldoni provides one of the more memorable and underrated performances in film. Seen today, one might marvel at the particularly effective use of close ups, but one of the most startling aspects is the use of sound, how there are so many street scenes with no natural sound, something very prevalent in filmmaking today, instead there are eloquent jazz passages to fill the silence or sufficient quiet to “hear” what they are saying to each other, while at other times conversations struggle to be heard over the noise of the room, which is one of the key elements of the film, as these characters are continually striving for a level of understanding they haven’t reached yet. Amusingly, by the time Cassavetes made Husbands, his characters would fly to the other end of the earth in search of finding something to say. The film won the Critics Award at the 1960 Venice Film Festival and drew the attention of major studios, offering Cassavetes opportunities to make Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child Is Waiting (1963), both of which failed both critically and financially, where in the latter, Cassavetes was fired before completing the film, eventually placed in the hands of Stanley Kramer to reshoot and recut the film. But like Hugh, those films brought in paychecks, as did his continuing acting work in mainstream films, all so he could make the kind of films he wanted to make in his own characteristic style.

What can you say about Cassavetes? He’s a director that evolved out of a love of actors and what they could bring to the screen. To Cassavetes the actor’s performances were more important even than the director himself, as a film is a composite of multiple forces and ideas, all moving in different directions, each with different responsibilities. But onscreen, the director has an opportunity to create something meaningful by having actors come to life in front of the camera, where their lives can connect with the audience if they are believable and feel like real life. This means no phony performances, no method acting in front of the camera, simply characters naturally being themselves onscreen, where the job of the actors is to find and honestly identify with the character they’re playing. What this likely means is that actors have to live with their roles for awhile in real life, where they don’t break character, where they explore what possibilities unfold in differing situations, usually rehearsing for months with other actors in workshops until certain characters and scenes develop. In this manner Cassavetes scripted his films, as they evolved out of rehearsals. The jazz soundtrack by Charles Mingus and his saxophonist Shafi Hadi is immensely significant, as this film grew out of the postwar 40’s and 50’s, a golden age in hard driving Bebop jazz, characterized by uptempo virtuoso performances of recognizable melodies followed by improvisations on the original theme. It was an energetic style of music that brought together people of all races, including Beats, where many of the most celebrated jazz artists of the era were black, though certainly not exclusively, and the audiences that adored them were an eclectic group that came from all walks of life, all drawn to that special feeling discovered in a more liberating and spacious style of music. Much has been made of the film’s closing title sequence, “The film you have just seen is an improvisation,” where many get the idea that the film was unscripted and simply improvised on the spot. Cassavetes, however, was a stickler for writing meticulously composed scripts, where like the jazz performances the film emulates, there are stated ideas and themes, followed by spontaneous emotional eruptions which may as well be the improvisations.

The idea for SHADOWS grew out of Cassavetes’ acting workshops in New York, where in the mid 50’s he and theater director Burt Lane (actress Diane Lane’s father) founded the Cassavetes-Lane Drama Workshop. From the Short Stack: Ray Carney on John ... - Slant Magazine Matt Zoller Seitz on Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, from Slant magazine, March 5, 2006:

To an interviewer who visited the workshop, Cassavetes somewhat vaguely tried to describe the classes as being designed to teach students to 'act naturally,' so that their work didn't look 'staged' or 'artificial.' He said his goal was to bring 'realism' back to acting, and that the highest compliment that could possibly be paid to one of his actors was to say that he or she didn't appear to be 'acting,' but simply 'living' his character. The journalist regarded the explanation as fairly trite until Cassavetes added that the 'artificiality' of the expression of emotion was more than a dramatic problem. It was a problem in life. The young actor argued that most lived experiences were as 'staged' and 'artificial' as most dramatic experiences, and that the real problem 'for modern man' (as Cassavetes inflatedly put it) was 'breaking free from conventions and learning how to really feel again.' It was a daring leap: lived experience could be as much a product of convention as dramatic experience, and in fact one sort of convention could be the subject of the other. it was the first and most succinct statement of the subject of Shadows and of all Cassavetes' later work.

In particular, Cassavetes was displeased with Method actors, especially Actor’s Studio founder Lee Strasberg, whose students included Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Jack Nicholson, where actors were encouraged to draw upon their own personal experiences. Cassavetes believed Strasberg’s protégée’s accumulated too much power with the studio casting directors, and while they were initially seen as something of a revolutionary breakthrough, they also became factory generated products. From the Short Stack: Ray Carney on John ... - Slant Magazine Matt Zoller Seitz on Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, from Slant magazine, March 5, 2006:

By the mid-'50’s the Method had hardened into a received style that was as rigid, unimaginative and boring as the styles it had replaced ten years earlier. The slouch, shuffle, furrow and stammer had been turned into recipes for profundity. The actor filled the character up with his own self-indulgent emotions and narcissistic fantasies…Normal, healthy, extroverted social and sexual expression between men and women dropped out of drama. Inward-turning neuroticism became equated with truth. The result was lazy, sentimental acting.

Using money he had earned from the Johnny Staccato (1959-60) television series, Cassavetes enlisted the actors from his workshop along with more lightweight and mobile 16 mm cameras and took to the streets of New York, where the initial shoot, “entirely spontaneous and improvised,” took ten weeks, from February to May in 1957. Cassavetes also decided to plug his movie idea on the radio, which produced surprising results, from Cassavetes on Cassavetes: The Making of Shadows by Ray Carney:

I was going on Jean Shepherd's Night People radio show, because he had plugged Edge of the City, and I wanted to thank him for it. I told Jean about the piece we had done, and how it could be a good film. I said, "Wouldn't it be terrific if [ordinary] people could make movies, instead of all these Hollywood big-wigs who are only interested in business and how much the picture was going to gross and everything?" And he asked if I thought I'd be able to raise the money for it." If people really want to see a movie about people," I answered, "they should just contribute money." For a week afterwards, money came in. At the end it totaled $2,500. And we were committed to start a film. One soldier showed up with five dollars after hitchhiking 300 miles to give it to us. And some really weird girl came in off the street; she had a mustache and hair on her legs and the hair on her head was matted with dirt and she wore a filthy polka-dot dress; she was really bad. After walking into the workshop, this girl got down on her knees, grabbed my pants and said, "I listened to your program last night. You are the Messiah." Anyway, she became our sound editor and straightened out her life. In fact, a lot of people who worked on the film were people who were screwed up – and got straightened out working with the rest of us. We wouldn't take anything bigger than a five dollar bill – though once, when things looked real rough, we did cash a $100 check from Josh Logan.

But we recorded most of Shadows in a dance studio with Bob Fosse and his group dancing above our heads, and we were shooting this movie. So I never considered the sound. We didn't even have enough money to print it, to hear how bad it was. So when we came out, we had Sinatra singing upstairs, and all kinds of boom, dancing feet above us. And that was the sound of the picture. So we spent hours, days, weeks, months, years trying to straighten out this sound. Finally, it was impossible and we just went with it. Well, when the picture opened in London they said, "This is an innovation!" You know? Innovation! We killed ourselves to try to ruin that innovation!

Shooting without permits, running cables and wires down the street, all designed to make quick getaways from the police if needed, Cassavetes invented a kind of guerrilla shooting inside restaurants, looking out their windows onto the street, or capturing the street activity in various parts of New York City. SHADOWS was initially screened in November 1958, when the film had three free midnight screenings, catching the eye of Village Voice film critic Jonas Mekas, one of the leading advocates of American avant-garde cinema, who immediately championed the film, calling it a “spontaneous cinema” masterpiece, “the most frontier-breaking American feature film in at least a decade…More than any other recent American film, (it) presents contemporary reality in a fresh and unconventional manner. The improvisation, spontaneity, and free inspiration that are almost entirely lost in most films from an excess of professionalism are fully used in this film.” From Cassavetes on Cassavetes: The Making of Shadows by Ray Carney:

I went to a theater-owner friend of mine and I said, "Look, we want to show our film and we can fill this theater." It was the Paris Theater in New York and 600 people filled that theater and we turned away another 400 people at the door. About 15 minutes into the film the people started to leave. And they left. And they left! And I began perspiring and the cast was getting angry. We all sat closer and closer together and pretty soon there wasn't anyone in the theater! I think there was one critic in the theater, one critic who was a friend of ours, who walked over to us and said, "This is the most marvelous film I've ever seen in my life!" And I said, "I don't want to hit you right now. I'm a little uptight, not feeling too hot and none of us are, so" And he said, "No. This is really a very good film." So, like all failures, you get a sense of humor about it and you go out and spend the night – when it's bad enough, and this was so bad that it couldn't be repaired.

I could see the flaws in Shadows myself: It was a totally intellectual film – and therefore less than human. I had fallen in love with the camera, with technique, with beautiful shots, with experimentation for its own sake. All I did was exploiting film technique, shooting rhythms, using large lenses – shooting through trees, and windows. It had a nice rhythm to it, but it had absolutely nothing to do with people. Whereas you have to create interest in your characters because this is what audiences go to see. The film was filled with what you might call "cinematic virtuosity" – for its own sake; with angles and fancy cutting and a lot of jazz going on in the background. But the one thing that came at all alive to me after I had laid it aside a few weeks was that just now and again the actors had survived all my tricks. But this did not often happen! They barely came to life.

Cassavetes, however, was not interested in making an overly intellectual, avant-garde film, but wanted to connect with the audience, so he made an adjustment and recalled the actors, reshooting much of the movie again in 1959, this time adhering to a script while still capturing the feel of spontaneity. However, while he kept about half of the original footage in the revised film, the earlier version has remained a source of controversy. When SHADOWS opened commercially in New York in March 1961, a month after BREATHLESS, Mekas was appalled, calling this new effort “a bad commercial film with everything that I was praising completely destroyed.” Cassavetes countered, however, claiming his final cut was in “no way a concession and…a film far superior to the first.” While all prints of the original version were believed lost, in 2004 Boston University professor Ray Carney, author of Cassavetes On Cassavetes and leading Cassavetes scholar, announced the discovery of the original print, which consisted of two reels of 16mm black and white film with optical sound, apparently spending years with the daughter of a downtown Manhattan junk dealer who discovered it abandoned in the New York subway. The 78-minute film played at the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival, some 45 years after the original midnight screenings, having developed the reputation of the ‘holy grail’ of independent cinema, but hasn’t been seen since. Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes’ leading lady and surviving spouse, the executor of his estate, claims the film is stolen property and threatened legal action to prevent the first version from being screened, contending that the SHADOWS film her husband released to the public is the only one that should ever be seen. SHADOWS remains today a seminal work, the most influential independently produced film of its era, a “virtual breakthrough” for American alternative cinema, giving rise to a group of independent filmmakers that still thrive today making often less technically polished, less commercial, low-budget alternatives to bigger budgeted Hollywood studio releases.

Jonathan Rosenbaum from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

John Cassavetes’ exquisite and poignant first feature, shot in 16mm and subsequently blown up to 35mm, centers on two brothers and a sister living together in Manhattan. The oldest, a third-rate nightclub singer (Hugh Hurd), is visibly black, whereas the other two (Ben Carruthers and Leila Goldoni) are sufficiently light-skinned to pass for white. This is the only Cassavetes film made without a script in the usual sense of the term, although Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney has demonstrated at length how the closing title, announcing that the film you have just seen was an “improvisation,” is closer to being a sales pitch than an objective description. In fact Cassavetes and Robert Alan Aurthur wrote most of SHADOWS, basing their work on a workshop improvisation that was carried out under Cassavetes’s supervision. An earlier and shorter version of the film, reportedly less bound by narrative, is apparently lost. [edit – subsequently found in the New York City subway lost and found by Ray Carney, see two articles comparing the two film versions below]

SHADOWS is also the only one of Cassavetes’ films that focuses mainly on young people, with actors using their own first names to increase the feeling of intimacy. Rarely has so much warmth, delicacy, subtlety, and raw feeling emerged so naturally and beautifully from performances in an American film. The movie is contemporaneous with early masterpieces of the French New Wave such as BREATHLESS and 400 BLOWS, and it deserves to be ranked alongside them for the freshness and freedom of its vision. In its portrait of a now-vanished Manhattan during the beat period, it also serves as a poignant time capsule. Tony Ray (the son of director Nicholas Ray), Rupert Crosse, Dennis Sallas, Tom Allen, Davey Jones, and cameos by subsequent Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel and Cassavetes himself round out the cast.

A wonderful jazz score by Charles Mingus featuring alto saxophonist Shafi Hadi plays as essential a role in the film’s emotional pitch. It’s conceivable that Cassavetes made greater films, but along with his final masterpiece, the 1984 film LOVE STREAMS – another picture focusing on the warmth and empathy between siblings – this is the one to cherish.

The long lost original version of Cassavetes' seminal independent film resurfaced late in 2003, when it was discovered in an antique dealer's attic, and was shown at the Rotterdam film festival 2004 - the first time it had been screened in 45 years. This version's reputation derives largely from the accolades bestowed on it by critic and film-maker Jonas Mekas. Although the running time is similar, only about a third of the material here survived in the second cut, which expanded Lelia's character, clarified relationships and is generally more focused. What you get in the first version is more Mingus music, a couple of Sinatra songs, and a very modern, impressionistic snapshot of New York bohemia with scenes linked not by dramatic line but by place, time and mood. Alas, copyright issues may preclude it being seen more widely.

Shadows (1959), directed by John Cassavetes (VIDEO) - Time Out Stephen Garrett from Time Out New York

Watch the trailer for Shadows, directed by John Cassavetes; No. 8 on our list of the 100 best New York movies.

Raw, intimate and spontaneous in a way that’s authentic to the city’s unpredictable rhythms, John Cassavetes’s jazz-steeped portrait of human relationships is a time capsule of Beat Generation urbanites, as well as the epitome of New York’s scrappy ethos—the template for modern independent filmmaking. This interracial drama was conceived, performed and directed in a studied but freestyle manner that grew out of the Method workshop the rogue Cassavetes had founded in his midtwenties. Bankrolled by family, friends and donations, and lensed largely in the auteur’s own apartment (as well as Times Square, Central Park and downtown), the project was a run-and-gun affair shot on weekends and without permits. It exudes a vitality and candor that still inspire. You don’t have Mean Streets without it, let alone the careers of Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and Lena Dunham.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Gabe Klinger

Independent filmmaking, warts and all: the first available film by Cassavetes (an earlier version of SHADOWS has only screened once since it was made, and has been withheld from view by Gena Rowlands) contains every error and every virtue of a non-studio creation. It's still an unprecedented experience, filled with a bursting energy that makes every cut, every line of dialogue a world unto itself. The episodic, loosely developed story details three black siblings in jazzy, beat-era Manhattan going through racial and romantic tensions, professional disappointments, and trying to overcome an overall ennui about being set apart from one another in the big city. Benny (Ben Carruthers) might have easily been a Kerouac character ("What the hell's a literary party?" he smirks to his friends in a coffee shop conversation), while Lelia (Lelia Goldoni) plants the seeds for what would evolve as the free-thinking Cassavetes female (which Lynn Carlin would embody so well in his next feature, FACES). Here is the creation of the modern American cinema virtually overnight.

Shadows (1959) - The Criterion Collection

Arguably the founding work of the American independent cinema, John Cassavetes's 1959 Shadows is the prototype for Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, and all their progeny. Cassavetes's first feature, which is receiving a 10-day run at Anthology Film Archives in a newly restored print, was a one-film American new wave; with his aggressive sincerity and swaggering integrity, Cassavetes became the prototype for the American independent director—the Method actor turned filmmaker.

Shadows can be bracketed with Breathless, completed the same year, as a low-budget, post-neorealist, pre-cinema-verité Something New. Both are predicated on handheld camera, stolen locations, elliptical editing, and extended bedroom scenes featuring self-conscious performances by 20-year-old actresses acting like they are characters in a movie. But Shadows is more episodic and performer-driven. Using the members of a drama workshop he directed, Cassavetes shot 30 hours of footage based on their improvisations. The Charles Mingus score later added makes the jazz analogue explicit. Indeed, as the movie's principals are black, white, and mulatto, race is crucial to the movie. So is authenticity. Anticipating life in a Warhol movie, Cassavetes's performers struggle to remain in character (in the now) despite miscues, blown lines, and unforeseen improvisations; much of Shadows' naturalism derives from applying a workshop sense of invented personalities to everyday life and a corresponding failure of the characters—or is it the actors?—to successfully live up to their images.

Opening commercially in New York in March 1961 (a month after Breathless), Shadows impressed The New York Times as a near documentary "shot without benefit of a screenplay, without a word of dialogue written down, without a commanding director to tell the actors precisely what to do." In fact, the movie had been substantially reshot and re-edited since its first public screening in late 1958. It's appropriate that the restored print is having its premiere at Anthology's Jonas Mekas Theater. Then writing for the Voice, Mekas was Shadows' greatest critical champion, at least until Cassavetes revised the movie for narrative coherence a year later. Ray Carney has published a framework for the original version in his BFI Shadows monograph. It would be an amazing event if the ur-Shadows were ever to re-emerge.

Alexa Brighton from Cinema Scope (link lost):

“Shadows was an experiment. It predominantly came out of a workshop. We were improvising on a story, one that was in my mind. It was my secret. Every scene in Shadows was very simple; they were predicated on people having problems that were overcome with other problems…There was a struggle because firstly I had never done a film before, and secondly the actors had to find the confidence to have quiet at times, and not just constantly talk. This took about the first three weeks of the schedule. Eventually all this material was thrown away, and then everyone became cool and easy and relaxed and they had their own things to say, which was the point.” -- John Cassavetes, 1968

All innovation comes from experimentation: some “works” and some doesn’t. What does it mean to have an innovation “work”? The question of whether the arts evolve or go through a multitude of revolutions which change the face of that art is tricky. Did Picasso’s venture into cubism irreversibly alter the nature of painting, or was it a diversion from representational art? Should we even try to tie work of artists together in -- perhaps falsely -- cohesive ways, or should we should acknowledge that artists don’t create to be compared? With film, the questions are even more compounded, because it took a staggeringly brief period for the craftsmen to realize that the camera did not have to remain motionless, simulating the experience of the theatre, but they could, through editing and camerawork, create worlds on celluloid.

Where does John Cassavetes fit into all of this, and why is his first film, Shadows, is such a landmark in the history of cinema? Because he created a film that defied immediate characterization: it was a fiction film in that the events portrayed were not “real,” yet Cassavetes didn’t borrow from any of the techniques that make Hollywood narrative film so identifiable. Films before his had deviated from glossy, “standard” film editing and lighting techniques, but Cassavetes’ approach to acting method and camera technique was unprecedented. That is, within the realm of “fiction.”

Two men argue in a studio filled with talentless chorus girls rehearsing a musical number. The obscenely catchy “A real mad chick” tune drones on and on, drifting back with its refrain just as you’ve managed to let it go and pay attention to the argument at the front of the room. The men’s faces are right up at the camera, and you can hardly even see the girls, but the sound is so powerful that you’re both dreading and anticipating the part of the song you already feel you’ve known -- and wish you hadn’t -- forever. And then you remember -- “There’s a conversation going on. I probably have to know what they’re talking about.”

Around 1960, when Shadows was made, cinema verité was emerging as a new approach to documentary filmmaking. Canadian documentary filmmakers were among the early pioneers of the movement, with Michel Brault’s Les Racquetteurs (1958) widely recognized as spearheading the popularization of the new, modern approach to filming real events made possible by equipment invented for easy transportation during the Second World War.

The characteristics of cinema verite -- synchronized sound, hand-held cameras and an immediate, spontaneous and unobtrusive approach to filming -- were radical changes from the tightly-packaged, voiceover narrated documentaries of the thirties that presented its profilmic events in a didactic manner, leaving little room for multiple interpretations. The idea was that the new documentary could best ‘represent reality’ by allowing the camera ‘passively’ to record and observe, and that this would attain the highest possible level of objectivity.

Whether this is true is a debate that has been ardently fought over the years, but the cinema verite movement practiced in Canada (the Faces of Canada series of the early sixties, 1963’s Pour la suite du monde), the United States (Robert Drew’s Primary, the films of Frederick Wiseman) and France (Jean Rouch’s Une chronique d’un ete) had a very short life span. It was soon thought that it was not possible to delve seriously into an issue if the camera was observing without the accompaniment of verbal explanation by a third party. The documentary with narration and “expert” interviews was born -- and survived.

What of fiction film? We have the neatly tied together narrative film with motivation-driven characters, conflict-mounting plots and cathartic resolutions. We had the Italian neorealists and the French New Wave, giving birth to a grittier realism and the European art film respectively. But what was it about Shadows that makes it so unique, and why weren’t its techniques adopted by later filmmakers?

There is no pretension to Cassavetes’ film, nor a self-consciousness of cinema as an art form. It has the stunning raw power of a film that uses a crude approach to turn a group of unknown actors into people we could conceivably meet on the street. The ‘reality-feel’ of what is presented is achieved in several ways, using cinema verite techniques.

Firstly, there is the use of sound. Unlike standard Hollywood films, sound has not been manipulated to drown out background noise and emphasize dialogue. With scenes such as the chorus girl rehearsal, Cassavetes’ aim is not to tell us what to listen to, but to simulate our actual encounters with sound in the world. The camera is recording this event -- two men conversing in a music-filled room - and we’re free to mix in with the chaos and choose what catches our attention; or, at the very least, to struggle to listen to the conversation as we would in life, say, at a bar.

The second technique used to powerful effect is the close-up. Cassavetes did away with the standard shot-reverse-shot that typically has the actors framed from the shoulders up (usually done to catch the make-up-aided, radiation of the star). Instead, the camera relentlessly lingers on often-cropped faces, so we catch intimate glimpses of faces without eyes or mouths. These almost disturbing shots allow us into a personal space rarely experienced in cinema. Cassavetes’ roving, shaky camera takes us into their lives without mercy – it’s no wonder they rehearsed for months to virtually become the characters on screen.

Our group of hoodlums decide to cultivate their more serious side, and head off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They stand, small, in leather and sunglasses, wandering amid statues from centuries past. A couple of them just don’t get it, and don’t want to. For the sake of argument, one spews out the thrills of art appreciation. The camera cuts to the last man, standing awed in front of an African mask. He is the only one that is speechless. As they’re about to leave, the camera pulls back, and the conversation continues as before - quick, heated, overlapping chatter. The key phrase is almost missed, said by someone who’s given no evidence of understanding the import of his own words: “You don’t have to understand it! If you feel it, you feel it, that’s it man.”

This is exactly what Cassavetes was saying. We live everyday without an inkling of the bigger picture, and all we can ask for is to feel, to receive energy from the people and things around. The understanding comes later. Nothing much happens in Shadows. Nothing much happens when you get together with a few friends for an evening, either, except for the million little things -- a changed expression, a glimmer of empathy, a meaning-laden rebuke -- that somehow reflect everything there is to know about everything you care about. Cassavetes gives us a work of fiction, but with exhilirating immediacy and clarity, and very real emotion. He makes us forget we’re watching a movie: instead, we’re living with these people. He defied his viewers to forget film and re-engage with life, and what image-maker could endorse such a self-defeating approach?

Shadows: Eternal Times Square Criterion essay by Gary Giddins, also seen here: Criterion Collection film essay [Gary Giddins]

Shadows Ray Carney’s discussion of SHADOWS from his website

Ray Carney talks about researching his Shadows and Cassavetes on Cassavetes books Ray Carney website

Cassavetes on Cassavetes: The Making of Shadows Ray Carney website

John Cassavetes' Shadows: Two Versions by Ray Carney

John Cassavetes' Shadows: Press Release Ray Carney website

Shadows and Pull My Daisy Ray Carney website

BFI | Sight & Sound | Open Ear Open Eye Tom Charity compares the long missing version with the 1959 theatrical release from Sight and Sound, March 2004

click here Ray Carney’s discovery of the original version of SHADOWS, also appearing here: The searcher February 21, 2004 from the Guardian

click here press reaction to the discovery, Ray Carney website

click here Gena Rowlands reaction to the discovery, Ray Carney website

Interviews with Carney about Rowlands Ray Carney website

The searcher Ryan Gilbey’s follow-up article March 17, 2004 from the Guardian

The two versions Ray Carney’s look at the two versions of SHADOWS

Page 60 Ray Carney offers short scenes from the original version and offers links to tell the SHADOWS story

Filmmaker Magazine | Spring 2004: SHADOWING SHADOWS Jason Guerrasio on Carney’s discovery of the original film from Filmmaker magazine, Spring 2004

Senses of Cinema – Imperfection Gilberto Perez from Senses of Cinema, September 2001

Identity in the Films of Cassavetes Maximilian Le Cain from Senses of Cinema, September 2001

From the Short Stack: Ray Carney on John ... - Slant Magazine Matt Zoller Seitz on Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, from Slant magazine, March 5, 2006

John Cassavetes’s Shadows: Deconstruction or Evolution John Shaw

Shadows - The Dark Stuff // Jazzwise Magazine

Criterion Reflections [David Blakeslee] also seen here: Shadows (1959) - #251

Storybook Characters: John Cassavetes's ... - Slant Magazine Jason Fitzgerald, May 20, 2013

How John Cassavetes' Shadows changed American movies forever. Elbert Ventura from Slate, November 11, 2009

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Cassavetes on DVD Matthew Kennedy on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection, February 2005, also seen here: Images [Matthew Kennedy]

PopMatters [Ian Chant] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] - Criterion box set 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: John Cassavetes Five Films - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Shadows | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jeff Economy reviews the Criterion 5 from The Chicago Reader

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central [Ed Nguyen] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray

Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection

'The John Cassavetes Collection: Shadows & Faces' Angelos Koutsourakis also reviews FACES from the BFI Blu-Ray release from Pop Matters

Chris Dashiell at CineScene

Shadows (1959) - Amateur Movie Reviews Nuggie Nuggerton

One Movie a Day David Wester

Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages [Matthew Wilder]

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Chasing Cassavetes' Shadows | Film | The Guardian Ray Carney from The Guardian, February 21, 2004

Shadows: No 19 best arthouse film of all time Steve Rose from The Guardian, October 19, 2010

New York Times [Bosley Crowther] March 22, 1961, also seen here: Movie Review - Shadows - Film Improvised Under Cassavetes ...

PopMatters [Michael Barrett]

JOHNNY STACCATO – TV series

USA 27 thirty-minute episodes from September 1959 to March 1960

Film Comment J. Hoberman looks back at Johnny Staccato, March 2005 issue (excerpt)

"A smooth man on the ivories, hot on the trigger, and cool in a jam," so the paperback tie-in for the 1959-60 television series Johnny Staccato describes its protagonist. "He's the toughest private eye to hit America in a decade." That might be one way to describe John Cassavetes.

DVD Verdict [Paul Corupe] one episode included in a Crime Dramas DVD

Undoubtedly the highlight of this release is an episode of Johnny Staccato, a cool noirish series about a jazz musician P.I. played by John Cassavetes in the same year that he directed Shadows. Though only half-an-hour long and obviously shot on the cheap, the show packs quite a punch, with tough-guy dialogue, wild twists and turns, and evocative black and white cinematography. "Tempted" sees Johnny protecting a diamond necklace owned by the amorous ex-wife of a former friend, and getting robbed for his trouble. Was it all a set-up by the femme fatale after the insurance money? Johnny thinks it is, and gets an insurance investigator to help lay a trap. The episode may not be the best the series had to offer, but it should tip audiences to this no-frills, bare-knuckle mystery drama that nicely showcased Cassavetes' acting skill. Johnny Staccato is long overdue on DVD—it's too bad that we don't get everything released as a season set rather than this teaser. The show looks great, too, easily comparable to the digital transfers of other recent Universal shows from the same era.

The Rewind Forums DVD Review

This series lasted only one season, 27 episodes aired between September 1959 to March 1960 and featured actor/director John Cassavetes as the title character, a Jazz pianist who moonlights as a private detective. Set in New York, this noir-influenced series paid tribute to the likes of Robert Bresson and Samuel Fuller. Every episode had Johnny faced with a new crime to solve and nothing is ever quite as it seems. In this episode featured on this disc “Tempted” (which was the 10th episode aired) guest starred Elizabeth Montgomery of "Bewitched" (1964-1972) fame. An old friend crashes back into Johnny’s life with a valuable necklace, convinced she’s being followed for the loot, Johnny agrees to help her until the necklace can be returned to the Jewelry shop in which she works. Shadowy figures and a double-cross all make their faces shown by the end.

This is a good example of formulaic television, taking the noir genre and toning it down for TV, the story is also condensed and fells that way as an ending is quickly gotten to. The show works only for its casting and cool music, Cassavetes is perfectly cast in the lead and commands the screen. Overall it’s an enjoyable show that salutes the best of noir in a limited capacity. Perhaps one day this entire series can be released on DVD.

User reviews from imdb Author: raysond from Chapel Hill, North Carolina

JOHNNY STACCATO: Produced by Revue Productions/Universal Television and ran for just one season on NBC-TV from 1959-1960. In all 27 episodes were produced all in black and white. Starring John Cassavetes with Bert Freed and Eduardo Ciannelli. Filmed on location in New York City.

This was in fact one of the coolest, hippest detective shows that I ever had the pleasure of watching and believe me this was just one "cool" incredible show that centered around the mixture of intrigue,suspense and mystery and all with a truly remarkable jazz score! However the censors canned this show for being too violent or too explicit, but who cares! This short-lived series showcased John Cassavetes' terrific acting ability which would propel him to the next level as one of the most influential American artists in American cimema. In other words, this would be the only TV-series that Cassavetes would star in. He plays Johnny Staccato, a jazz musician who moonlights as a private investigator who is surrounded by mobsters, beatniks, hop-heads crooked musicians, and femme fatales. It's was such a treat that certain guest stars would make their appearances on this show: stars like Martin Landau, Micheal Landon, Yvonne Craig, Tina Louise, Norman Fell, Jack Klugman, and the musical stylings of Shelly Mann and his band. If you should ever catch this show, you'll be glad you did since cable channel TRIO shows this short-lived series every so often. Worth viewing.

User reviews from imdb Author: Dewey1960 from United States

This short-lived (one season, 1959/60) television detective series is without a doubt, the definitive example of what can now be termed TV Noir, riding high atop a list including such programs as Peter Gunn and 77 Sunset Strip. But JOHNNY STACCATO had much more going for it than those other shows, mainly the presence of the mighty John Cassavetes who starred as the jazz pianist turned Greenwich Village private detective. He also directed a handful of the 27 total episodes. The only other regular character was Waldo (veteran character actor Eduardo Ciannelli), the crusty old proprietor of Waldo's, the jazz club where Staccato hung out. On any given show the "house band" might include Johnny Williams (before he became Academy Award-winning composer JOHN Williams), Red Mitchell, Ray Brown, Barney Kessel and Shelly Manne. In addition to Cassavetes, other directors who stepped in were Joe Pevney, John Brahm, Boris Sagal and Paul Henreid. Among the crack cinematographers on the show were Ben Kline ("Detour") and Lionel Lindon ("The Manchurian Candidate"). Each of the 27 episodes are fantastic in their way, but among the stand-outs are: MURDER FOR CREDIT with Charles McGraw as an egocentric jazz musician; THE NATURE OF THE NIGHT with Dean Stockwell as a psychotic slasher; EVIL with Alexander Scourby as a corrupt religious leader; FLY BABY FLY with Gena Rowlands as the target of a bomb planted on an airplane that Staccato's also on; TEMPTED with Elizabeth Montgomery as an old flame of Johnny's; DOUBLE FEATURE with Cassavetes in a dual role; THE LIST OF DEATH with the great Paul Stewart, SOLOMON with Elisha Cook Jr as a megalomaniac attorney and Cloris Leachman as a mysterious vixen; THE MASK OF JASON with a pre- Dick Van Dyke Mary Tyler Moore; A NICE LITTLE TOWN, a Twilight-Zonish episode and THE WILD REED with Harry Guardino as a heroin addicted jazz musician. Lots of VHS tapes and now DVDs are floating around offering up most of the episodes with varying quality, depending on the original source material. Many are taken directly from 16mm television prints. It's truly criminal that MCA doesn't release a full DVD collection of this show, given its incredible credentials and consistently excellent quality. I CANNOT RECOMMEND THESE EPISODES MORE HIGHLY, they are simply superb in every respect. 10 out of 10.

User reviews from imdb Author: Bill Milosz from Chicago

One of the best TV detective shows. Cool, if improbable. The gritty NYC location shots compare favorably with other great programs of the era like NAKED CITY, but are somewhat more moody. The beatnik characters are less goofy than the patronizing look at the Beats that Peter Gunn features. It's just an altogether hip show.

EPISODE LIST http://epguides.com/JohnnyStaccato/ Season 1

1. 1- 1 12901 10 Sep 59 The Naked Truth

2. 1- 2 12906 17 Sep 59 Murder for Credit [Murder for Credit – directed by Cassavetes]

3. 1- 3 12912 24 Sep 59 Parents

4. 1- 4 12904 8 Oct 59 Shop of the Four Winds

5. 1- 5 12914 15 Oct 59 The Nature of the Night

6. 1- 6 12916 22 Oct 59 Viva, Paco!

7. 1- 7 12918 29 Oct 59 Evil     [Evil – directed by Cassavetes]

8. 1- 8 12902 5 Nov 59 Murder in Hi-fi

9. 1- 9 12915 12 Nov 59 Fly, Baby, Fly

10. 1-10 12913 19 Nov 59 Tempted

11. 1-11 12911 26 Nov 59 The Poet's Touch

12. 1-12 12926 10 Dec 59 A Piece of Paradise     [A Piece of Paradise – directed by Cassavetes]

13. 1-13 12923 17 Dec 59 The Return

14. 1-14 12922 24 Dec 59 The Unwise Men

15. 1-15 12921 31 Dec 59 Collector's Item

16. 1-16 12907 7 Jan 60 Man in the Pit

17. 1-17 12930 14 Jan 60 The Only Witness

18. 1-18 12927 21 Jan 60 Night of Jeopardy                [Night of Jeopardy – directed by Cassavetes]

19. 1-19 12931 28 Jan 60 Double Feature

20. 1-20 12929 4 Feb 60 List of Death

21. 1-21 12925 11 Feb 60 Solomon     [Solomon – directed by Cassavetes]

22. 1-22 12920 18 Feb 60 An Act of Terror

23. 1-23 12903 25 Feb 60 An Angry Young Man

24. 1-24 12939 3 Mar 60 The Mask of Jason

25. 1-25 12935 10 Mar 60 A Nice Little Town

26. 1-26 12919 17 Mar 60 Swinging Long Hair

27. 1-27 12905 24 Mar 60 The Wild Reed

Beat Street: Johnny Staccato - Film Comment J. Hoberman looks back at Johnny Staccato, March 2005

“A smooth man on the ivories, hot on the trigger, and cool in a jam,” so the paperback tie-in for the 1959-60 television series Johnny Staccato describes its protagonist. “He’s the toughest private eye to hit America in a decade.” That might be one way to describe John Cassavetes.

Cassavetes was just 30 when he took the gig as a Greenwich Village shamus with a penchant for jazz piano. Staccato (the softening “Johnny” was later added, over Cassavetes’ objections) may have been a one-season wonder, but it enabled its leading man to underwrite Shadows, throw work to his pals, and hone his directing chops, while providing the closest thing he would ever have to a glamorous star vehicle. Cassavetes heralded himself in each episode with a jangling five-second montage. Scampering down a back-alley fire escape, he dodged and vogued, ran like a duck, broke a window and squeezed off a shot, peering through the shattered glass with a look of pure angst.

The half-hour show was one of 30 telefilm series to debut during the 1959-60 season (others included The Untouchables and The Twilight Zone). NBC scheduled Staccato opposite ABC’s hit hillbilly sitcom The Real McCoys: “From West Vir-gi-nee they came to stay in sunny Cal-i-for-ni-ay!!!” Pure counter-programming, Staccato was set almost entirely in a nocturnal Manhattan populated mainly by creeps, junkies, and show-biz bottom feeders. Most episodes open with Johnny jamming at Waldo’s, a MacDougal Street jazz cellar presided over by venerable character actor Eduardo Ciannelli. The (always white) sidemen sitting in with Pete Candolini’s combo include guitarist Barney Kessel, vibraphonist Red Norvo, and drummer Shelley Manne, but, nearly always in a suit, Staccato has the stingiest lapels and narrowest tie in the room.

One of four private-eye shows to premiere that season (an event Time deemed cover-worthy), Staccato was inspired by Blake Edwards’s Peter Gunn, a hit for NBC the previous year. Both shows signified sophistication with their intrusive fake jazz—the disciplined wah-wah of Henry Mancini’s cocktail tinkle versus the strident horns of Elmer Bernstein’s agitated big-city blooze. But rather than a cool L.A. bon vivant, Staccato was an edgy Little Italy street kid with a tense smirk and a barking laugh. Cassavetes had played many a juvenile delinquent during the golden age of live TV, and he brought that recent past to his detective persona. Johnny clearly loved grabbing a big slob by the lapels, and he managed to kill someone in virtually every episode, albeit with remorse: “That’s why I need Waldo’s.”

Staccato’s show tolerated a higher degree of moral ambiguity than Gunn’s. And his world was sleazier. Although produced in Los Angeles, Staccato regularly complicated its back-lot geography with an assortment of Manhattan locations—sometimes annotated by Johnny. (Jumping on the IRT, he notes that “the quickest way to get uptown in the middle of the day is underground.”) Always available for second-unit work in Manhattan, Cassavetes can be seen darting beneath the West Side Highway or pacing the Bowery, cruising the Deuce before ducking into Sardi’s, attending the fights at the St. Nicholas arena and confronting a killer in the empty Polo Grounds. One episode introduces Spanish Harlem as New York’s newest immigrant barrio; in another, Chinatown stands in for the city’s nonexistent “Little Tokyo.” But the show’s spiritual home is its imaginary Greenwich Village.

Staccato materialized during the season of the TV private eye and the year of the beatnik and managed to combine them both. The sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, another new show, featured a comic beatnik named Maynard G. Krebs. A beat musical, The Nervous Set, had opened (and closed) on Broadway just before Staccato began shooting during the summer of 1959. Time ran four pieces on the beats that year, and the week after Life‘s multi-page spread “Squaresville USA vs. Beatsville,” Staccato aired a mad, bongo-driven episode about a pair of crazy kids, shacked up in a cold-water pad, who try to sell their unborn baby. “Parents” reeks of a keyed-up intensity that, thanks in part to its leading man’s jittery affect, was the show’s stock in trade.

As Staccato (a name he stretches out with unmistakable irony in the show’s introductory episode), Cassavetes sprinkles his discourse with offhanded jive—”Man, I thought you’d flip. You bend me, baby!”—delivered between drags on his dangling cigarette. Hardly shy about dismissing fellow musicians (or indeed anyone) as “square,” Johnny is himself something of a moldy fig. He disdains bebop and is driven crazy when, in the gloriously demented “Wild Reed” episode, an obnoxious hophead sax player (Harry Guardino) attempts to make like Ornette Coleman. Nor is this hipster above petit bourgeois moralizing. More than once, he cautions some lissome guest star against “the pitfalls of beatnik living.” But, like, who exactly is the sellout?

Cassavetes was editing his second “commercial” version of Shadows while moonlighting as a private eye, and the movie cast its own shadow on Staccato. Times Square’s neon wilderness was a frequent backdrop, and Shadows cast members put in fleeting appearances: star Lelia Goldoni turns up as a sedately petulant Village chick and producer-editor-extra Maurice McEndree as a crazed ventriloquist. A smooth manager in Shadows, Rupert Crosse played a more literal killer in Staccato. Ben Carruthers never made the scene, but both of his buddies did: Big Tom Allen turned up as a scarily violent Korean War vet, and little Dennis Sallas had a regular job tending Waldo’s bar. (He’s relieved in one episode by Dean Stockwell’s psycho slasher.) A number of later Cassavetes associates can also be found, notably John Marley, Paul Stewart, and Nick Dennis—and there’s one episode that allows the star to riff and flirt with his missus, Gena Rowlands.

It was November 11, 1959, the night before that particular show was telecast, that the second Shadows had its epochal premiere on a bill with Pull My Daisy at Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16. A New American Cinema was born! According to biographer Ray Carney, Cassavetes immediately tried to break his Staccato contract. Among other strategies, he publicly attacked the show’s sponsors when “The Wild Reed” was bumped—as inappropriate—from Thanksgiving night. (The show ultimately aired as Staccato‘s season swan song on March 24, 1960.) Another ploy involved getting his picture taken with recently busted Jake LaMotta. Still, sponsor Salem cigarettes could scarcely have been displeased with their chain-smoking shamus.

“I want to not solve some crimes too,” Cassavetes protested. While that existential prospect would never come to pass, Cassavetes did manage to direct five Staccato episodes and co-wrote another. Their visual style varies—”Solomon” comes on like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “A Piece of Paradise” is filled with moody close-ups, “Night of Jeopardy” is blatantly Wellesian in its expressionism—but, in every case, hysteria is a given. In “Murder for Credit” and “A Piece of Paradise,” the obligatory Waldo’s jam has the fingerpoppin’ frenzy that opens Shadows. “Night of Jeopardy” transposes a similarly frantic scene to the local informer’s pad. (Whatever happened to Frank London, who was a Staccato semi-regular as Shad the quacking stool pigeon?)

As a freelance wise guy and two-fisted yenta, the Staccato character functions as a de facto director. He knows more than anybody else, and, for their own good, he’s forever telling people what to do. It’s even possible that the grim glare Cassavetes fixed on his fellow actors, particularly those who had been his students, provoked some sort of behavioral response. But it is in the episodes he signed that the performers get to wail. Carney notes, with some understatement, that these are all “character studies.” Indeed, invariably, Cassavetes stops the action—sometimes more than once—to let a chosen actor take a solo.

“Maybe the critics won’t like it, but I kinda think maybe you cats will,” an overbearing musician hectors the Waldo’s regulars in the first of the Cassavetes episodes, “Murder for Credit.” He could be speaking for the director. Dependable ham Elisha Cook Jr. gets to rant in two shows, first as a skid-row drunk and then as the world’s greatest criminal lawyer. Cassavetes delivers his own righteous diatribe in the former and treats himself to a bravura scene in the latter, browbeating Cook’s beautiful, witchy client (Cloris Leachman), a professional peacenik, during the course of a highly irregular prison visit. The director’s cross-examination takes on a distinct acting-exercise quality, perhaps accentuated by Leachman’s being a member of that Cassavetes bte noire, the Actors Studio. “It was pitiful—a woman revealed right to her core,” he gloats after goading the pacifist to murderous violence.

Watch two-score Johnny Staccato episodes and you have to wonder if American television had ever seen a more impatient, impulsive, hyperactive, twitchy protagonist? As a presence, Cassavetes is less a flashback to James Dean than a preview of jumpy ethnic live-wires like De Niro and Pacino. What’s more, he’s a scold. In “A Nice Little Town,” which Cassavetes co-wrote, Staccato leaves the Big Apple’s mean streets to deliver a snarling denunciation of small-town hypocrisy. The locals have not only allowed a meek little Communist to be lynched in his own living room but enabled the subsequent murder of his patriotic pretty sister. Staccato has reason to be mad, although, even when things end well, he’s liable to be supremely pissed.

Given the forced enthusiasm that frequently shades into exasperation and even disgust, Cassavetes’ Staccato is one swaggering step away from being a crank or perhaps stalking off the set. It’s a pleasure to see him knock back shots at Waldo’s bar—not that they help much. Cassavetes projects so much nervous energy that virtually every show has his character divided against himself. In “Double Feature,” he plays his own evil doppelgänger. A hit man mean enough to squash a kid’s ping-pong ball, his killer stare, obsessive work attitude, and monumental sense of irritation are only a few degrees from Johnny’s. The episode ends with a Cassavetes-on-Cassavetes shootout-the bad self enjoying a wildly baroque death collapse on a handy pinball machine.

Johnny Staccato has many curiosities and a few near-classic episodes—the quasi Pop Front boxing saga “Viva Paco!,” the sub-Subterraneans “Poet’s Touch,” the Twilight Zone creepy “Act of Terror”—but the most authentic thing is Cassavetes’s anxiety. Again and again, he signals that Staccato has just too friggin’ much on his mind—and do ya mind? Communicating a rage barely contained by his cashmere threads and the show’s claustrophobic 24-minute format, the volatile star often seems to be wondering why he should be doing this at all.

Between Action and Cut - March brief reference to Cassavetes in Johnny Staccato by John Gallagher from the National Board of Review

Home Theater Info (Doug MacLean)

TOO LATE BLUES C+ 79

USA (103 mi) 1961

When TOO LATE BLUES was over I thought I would be over too. And then Paramount asked me if I’d like to sign a long-term contract. At that point I realized that success and failure weren’t necessarily success and failure. I had heard so much about people who fail and then get enormous contracts. I never could quite believe it, until it happened to me. Paramount upped my salary to $125,000 a picture. I subsequently learned that [Paramount’s Marty Racklin] had to go to his stockholders and tell them I was a bright guy. He’d built me up, taken a gamble on a guy who wasn’t turning out very well, and he had no real option but to go with me and hope I was smart enough to learn. And I did learn. I learned all the tricks: to get a big office and to ask for anything and everything and insist on it. I told them I wouldn’t do another film unless I wanted to do it and unless I could do it my own way.

—John Cassavetes, from the book ‘Cassavetes on Cassavetes’ by Ray Carney

After the success in Europe of Shadows (1959) and a short-lived TV show Johnny Staccato where Cassavetes plays a private eye who sides as a jazz pianist in Greenwich Village (though shot entirely in Los Angeles), Cassavetes was offered a chance to direct his first studio film at Paramount, which the producers (specifically Marty Racklin) felt could target the youth market. While he signed a contract to develop his own script, it was originally conceived by Richard Carr who he met on the TV show, asking if he wouldn’t come up with something, choosing to rework the third of three stories submitted, where Cassavetes wrote the first half with Richard Carr writing the second half. He was unable to make any changes within a month of the shoot, and certainly no revisions on the set, as everything had to be worked out ahead of time for a 6-week shooting schedule. Additionally, Cassavetes wanted Montgomery Clift and Gena Rowlands for the two leads, while the studio insisted upon pop singer Bobby Darin (somewhat stiff in his first dramatic role) and Stella Stevens, a Playmate of the Year just the year before in January 1960, also considered at the time one of the ten most photographed women in the world. Cassavetes also lost the battle to shoot the scenes entirely in New York City’s Greenwich Village jazz scene, with the Studio opting for a nearly entirely interior studio shot film. These little differences of opinion led to a more reserved and suffocating film, as the Hollywood system itself took all the living and breathing life out of the original conception. What remains is a downbeat story of a jazz pianist selling out his friends for his own chance at success, one that mimics Cassavetes own career move from New York to Los Angeles to star in a TV show, with hopes of breaking into the movie industry. While Cassavetes felt the movie got away from him, unable to do any significant rewrites to correct what he felt were script flaws, he was stuck with meeting the 6-week shoot, which meant handing in a movie he wasn’t at all happy with.

Nonetheless, from a Studio’s point of view, even though the film was a critical and box office flop, the fact that the movie was competently completed on time led to their offering him a contract and a raise, which led to his second feature, A Child Is Waiting (1963), where Cassavetes had a meltdown with producer Stanley Kramer, again over the direction of the film, disowning the film when Kramer basically fired him to finish and recut the movie himself. Despite these run-ins, they gave Cassavetes invaluable experience in shooting a motion picture which eventually led to Faces (1968), written and shot in his own way, using his own timetable, starring his wife Gena Rowlands, and is still considered one of the more groundbreaking works in American independent film. TOO LATE BLUES, on the other hand, is purely a product of the Studio system. Ironically released the same year as Martin Ritt’s Paris Blues (1961), starring two American jazz musicians in Paris, Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman, also the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington who both make appearances in the film, Cassavetes was originally up for the Paul Newman role, so he was familiar with the script, which bears a few casting and nightclub similarities. Like that film which was all about music, where the lurid romance was secondary, Cassavetes wanted to throw in 17 new jazz pieces into his film, all featured during the nightclub sequences using the musicians that he met on the Johnny Staccato TV show, some of whom are musicians used here, but this was not to be. The opening two and a half minutes of the film may be the most inventive in the entire film, seen here: Bobby Darin in Too Late Blues Part 1 of 12 - YouTube (7:57), similar to his realistic use of children in his next movie, and is one of the few natural scenes in the movie that literally feels unstaged and uninhibited.

Bobby Darin plays a character named Ghost, who leads an undiscovered jazz quintet seen playing in the opening, which includes Seymour Cassel (in only his second picture) on bass, guys who have been working together for years but are still forced into taking whatever gigs come their way. Hanging out in a neighborhood bar afterwards, much of the film is set after hours when the guys are drinking, dancing, playing cards, or goofing off, unfortunately featuring the loud overacting of the Greek bar owner Nick Dennis, who, like many of the cast, were brought over from the TV show, including the sleazy agent (Everett Chambers, a producer on the show), the owner of the recording studio (Val Avery), and the Countess (Marilyn Clark). Ghost’s agent is quickly seen undermining the fragile esteem of the group’s female singer Jess (Stella Stevens), Ghost’s girlfriend, where he’s something of an oily double crosser throughout, always using underhanded tactics to either backstab or showcase his represented talent, who never seem to get a fair shake, but he’s the shady representative of the exclusively financial interests of the music industry, the kind of snake that seems to thrive in the sewer. After a volatile trial number in a recording studio leads to a follow up recording the next day, the guys (and girl) are out celebrating, where a drunk customer (Vince Edwards) gets into a drunken brawl with the boys, challenging and humiliating Ghost in front of his girl, which sends him plunging into self pity, wanting nothing more to do with any of them. In Cassavetes original script, there is a ten-minute dreamlike sequence where Ghost goes out and picks up a girl, spending the night together, but this sequence was cut by the Studio in favor of Jess going home with one of the other members of the band and sleeping with him, effectively ending their relationship.

Devastated by the change of events, Ghost shows up at the studio but walks out on the band, calling them a bunch of amateurs he picked up off the street, making a deal with his agent to find gigs showcasing his talent, where he is sponsored by an older women of means, the Countess, who receives sexual favors in return. This sleazy road to stardom never materializes, sending Ghost back to his roots years later searching for his original band, playing in a dive somewhere in Los Angeles. Also searching for Jess, where Stella Stevens downward spiral is one of the few superbly realized scenes, but one can easily imagine Rowlands and similar drinking scenes with men at the beginning of Faces, he finds her sadly working the customers at the bar of a flophouse, an intensely sad portrait of dreams gone awry, where she doesn’t wish to be reminded of her former life, creating a sense of hopeless melodrama and despair before Ghost hauls her off to confront the band. One by one they reject him, rebuffing his attempts to reconcile their differences, until Jess, off to the side of the stage, starts singing the melody of a song they shared together, bringing them back together again with a reunified sense of optimism and hope as the curtain falls. Once again, this is the Studio imposed upbeat ending, as originally Ghost rejoins the band and starts playing the piano, where the music immediately comes alive as Jess walks out of the club, as he had walked out on her years earlier, where the drive for success has a deep-seeded personal price. One problem with the use of music in this film is the audience can’t tell the difference between the more creative, supposedly original, avant-garde jazz music and the more sell-out, commercial music that audiences tend to prefer listening to. Much of it written by David Raskin, it tends to fall in the middle somewhere of “pseudo-jazz” where there is little distinction drawn between the various styles, which diminishes the theme of an artist selling out for commercial success, as we never really hear what real art sounds like. This is a stark contrast with Paris Blues, for instance, which features Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, where the feverish intensity of live music in jammed nightclubs couldn’t be more exhilarating.

Cassavetes' Works: Too Late Blues Ray Carney

Too Late Blues, Cassavetes’ first studio film, portrays the life of John "Ghost" Wakefield, a talented jazz musician who must pit his artistic ideals against the manipulations of his agent and studio executives, and against his own self doubt. Ghost’s struggle to choose between the hot jazz that he loves and the easy listening music that will bring him an audience and financial reward parallels Cassavetes’ indecision between Hollywood and independent filmmaking. 1962 (133m. B+W) Stars Bobby Darin

MoMA | Too Late Blues

Directed by John Cassavetes. Screenplay by Cassavetes, Richard Carr. Music by David Raksin. With Bobby Darin, Stella Stevens. Hoping to capitalize on the success and style of Shadows, Paramount hired Cassavetes to make this brilliantly scored, low-budget drama about a hotheaded, idealistic jazz pianist-composer who alienates his band and his lover. Many of Cassavetes's themes and devices are in evidence: male bonding, self-destructiveness, the fear of selling out, and the "authenticity" of jazz and improvisational acting. The score by Hollywood composer David Raksin (Laura) features such first-rate musicians as Shelley Manne, Red Mitchell, and Benny Carter. 103 min.

Too Late Blues | tiff.net

Invited to make his major studio directorial debut after Shadows became a critical cause célèbre, Cassavetes returned to the world of jazz music with this story about John “Ghost” Wakefield (heartthrob Bobby Darin), the idealistic leader of a jazz combo that prefers to play “hot” jazz in the park rather than sell out to the establishment. When his agent introduces him to Jess (Stella Stevens), a gorgeous yet mediocre singer, he falls hopelessly in love and abandons his integrity for a shot at fame. Despite its glossy Hollywood facade, Too Late Blues is as intensely personal as any of Cassavetes’ films, an “exploration of Cassavetes’ own mixed feelings about commercial compromise: of the emotional and social problems of working within the system and the perhaps greater problems of trying to stand entirely outside it” (Ray Carney).

Drifters and Dreamers: Cassavetes’s Too Late Blues Julian Anton from Northwest Chicago Film Society

Bobby Darin is straight-laced blues musician John “Ghost” Wakefield; Stella Stevens is the singer who convinces Ghost to leave his band in search of fame (and breaks his heart). This was the first film John Cassavetes directed for a major studio (and his first in 35mm), and his relationship with Paramount was tumultuous (an article in the New York Times suggests that Cassavetes was slated to direct a string of low-budget pictures for the studio that were shelved after the film’s release). The result is a picture about the dangers of selling out that ends up as naïve and sincere as Cassavetes’s appeal in the trailer: “This is a film about people I know,” he says, “the night people, the jazz musicians, the drifters and dreamers, the floaters, the chicks, the smilers, the hangers-on, the phonies, too much sex, not enough love—and they live in a world of too late blues.” (JA) 103 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from the Radio Cinema Film Archive

Too Late Blues | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The success of John Cassavetes's independent Shadows led to a contract with Paramount that yielded only this feature, Cassavetes's second--a gauche but sincere drama with a highly relevant subject: the self-laceration and other forms of emotional havoc brought about when a footloose jazz musician (Bobby Darin) decides to sell out and go commercial. A lot could be (and was) said about what's wrong with this picture: it's pretentious, lugu-brious, mawkish, and full of both naivete and macho bluster. It also has moments that are indelible and heartbreaking, at least one unforgettable performance (Everett Chambers as the hero's manager), and many very touching ones (by Darin, Stella Stevens, Rupert Crosse, Vince Edwards, Cliff Carnell, and Seymour Cassel, among others), not to mention a highly affecting jazz score featuring Benny Carter and a haunting theme by David Raksin. If you care a lot about Cassavetes, you should definitely see this--otherwise keep your distance (1960).

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Pure hepcat pulp, John Cassavetes' second feature uses the story of a jazz pianist (hairpiece-wearing crooner Bobby Darin) to jam on a pretty familiar theme: the principled dude growing progressively less and less principled under the influence of comfort, money, and two-timing dames. Produced as part of a disastrous directing contract with Paramount, it's slicker, more studio-bound, and—in terms of narrative—clunkier, nastier, and more formulaic than the work Cassavetes is best known for—but also sincere, emotionally raw, and impeccably acted, with the dialogue's rich macho chatter more than making up for the bare TV-style sets in terms of atmosphere and flavor. Pretty much the definition of a compromised picture—a movie about New York and the dangers of selling out shot on a major studio's Hollywood backlot—this isn't without its flaws, but it still warrants rediscovery, at the very least for a supporting performance from veteran TV producer Everett Chambers (who produced Johnny Staccato and would later work on Cassavetes regular Peter Falk's Columbo; also, uh, Airwolf) that stands as one of the all-time great one-off acting turns.

Too Late Blues 1961 Film Streams (pdf)

In TOO LATES BLUES, John Cassavetes’ second feature film, Bobby Darin plays a jazz musician who finds his artistic integrity compromised by the slick lure of mainstream success. Without coincidence, it’s a situation the director himself wrestled with at that very moment in time. Following the acclaim of SHADOWS (1959) and a relatively brief run on the TV show Johnny Staccato, Cassavetes signed a contract with Paramount to develop his own script for TOO LATE BLUES. While a more disastrous situation still lay ahead—that being A CHILD IS WAITING (1963), a film Cassavetes disowned after a nasty fight with famed Hollywood filmmaker Stanley Kramer—the experience of making TOO LATE BLUES within the studio system proved deflating enough. When it opened to bad reviews and low box office numbers, Cassavetes thought his career might be sunk (see the reverse side for his thoughts). In hindsight, it was a pivotal experience, one that indirectly led Cassavetes back to the fiercely independent filmmaking that now defines his career. And, looking back, the initial reaction toward TOO LATE BLUES, including Cassavetes’ own opinion, appears more than a little harsh. In the decades since its release, the film has been given a fresh

look by many observers and provides an interesting snapshot of Cassavetes’ filmmaking voice as delivered in a more plot-oriented, studio-approved package. In addition to Darin (incidentally, a replacement for Montgomery Clift), TOO LATE BLUES also features a number of contemporary jazz musicians, as well as an early on-screen performance (just his second film credit) by Seymour Cassel.

User reviews from imdb Author: jzappa from Cincinnati, OH, United States

John Cassavetes creates an eternally unique drama with his chronicle of an idealistic jazz musician played by crooner Bobby Darin, and his relationship among his fellow band members and his object of affection, a beautiful would-be singer who comes between him and his band members, played by Stella Stevens in an honest, humanly extreme performance clearly directed by Cassavetes and cementing an argument that she could have held her own as a star.

Darin, as Cassavetes surely intended, brings a realistic contribution to his character from his life in the world of the era's music scene, as a dogmatically philosophical band leader who takes tremendous pride in seeing a profound, transcendental beauty in a mellow, instrumental school of jazz that he, with the exasperated tolerance of his fellow players, finds ideal to play to empty parks to communicate with nature and birds when he isn't playing gigs at old people's homes and orphanages. What is irrelevant in this film is how we feel about the music he feels most personally in tune with (no pun intended) in comparison to the commercially accessible music that would welcome him into a successful career. Like all Cassavetes films, Too Late Blues is about a character whose proclivities are beyond us, and what keeps it from being subjective or affected is that the rest of the characters share our feelings.

The key to our understanding and relating ardently to Darin's character is his unrelenting obstinacy, which becomes Bobby Darin uncannily, borne by the pride that absorbs all of his perceptions into what is of use only to him. As this dooming characteristic rears its head, an internal conflict between his true passions and what will gain him the recognition that deep down he wants more than anything else, we come to dislike him and find ourselves on the side of his band members and his girl Stevens.

Full of far-seeing insight and relentless individuality, it is not well-recognized film, which in itself is a testament to the artistic truth it presents. This is in some sense a shame though, because it is really a moving film in spite of all the expectations accompanied by an audience's perception of a music film. There are many great scenes where we simply hang out with the band in their regular hang-out spot with an entertaining bar owner, or we indulge in their impulsive diversions, or we react in unusual ways and we must step out of our regiments and make an endeavor out of looking further.

"TOO LATE BLUES": DEAN BRIERLY REVISITS A LOST GEM ... Dean Brierly from Cinema Retro, also including a July 24, 2007 interview wuth actress Stella Stevens: CLICK HERE TO READ DEAN BRIERLY'S EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH STELLA STEVENS ABOUT TOO LATE BLUES

Too Late Blues - The Eclectic Screening Room

TOO LATE BLUES (John Cassavetes, 1961) « Dennis Grunes

Too Early, Too Late Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Sounds, Images, September 15, 2009

Cassavetes' Works: A chronology and list of early events in ... Ray Carney

TOO LATE BLUES 1961 - Movie on DVD! - Bobby Darin Jazz - TOO ... Video Beat

Cool World: Jazz and the Movies Steve Seid from Pacific Film Archive

Too Late Blues Mark Deming at All Movie Guide from Rovi

John Cassavetes Indie Pix bio

New York Times (registration req'd)

Time Out Geoff Andrew

THE LLOYD BRIDGES SHOW – TV series 1962 – 63

USA (22 mi) 1962 Cassavetes directed two episodes, “A Pair of Boots” and “My Daddy Can Lick Your Daddy”

User reviews from imdb Author: Cheyenne-Bodie

Lloyd Bridges became a big star as skin diver Mike Nelson on "Sea Hunt" (1958-61). Bridges returned to television a year later in this ambitious 30-minute series, designed to showcase his range and depth as an actor. Bridges was 49 years old.

Aaron Spelling was the creator and executive producer. The production company was Four Star ("The Dick Powell Show", "Burke's Law"). Bridges played journalist Adam Shepherd. When Shepherd was researching a story, he would imagine himself as the protagonist. Thus each week Bridges was playing a new character in a new situation.

The line producer was Everett Chambers who had produced "Johnny Staccato" with John Cassavetes (and would later produce "Peyton Place" and "Columbo"). Chambers also had an acting role in the Cassavetes film "Too Late Blues". Bosley Crowther of the New York Times said Everett Chambers gave that film's best performance. Chambers got his pal Cassavetes to direct two episodes of the Bridges series and to guest star in another. Gena Rowlands also appeared in an episode, and later worked for Chambers on "Peyton Place".

The first "Lloyd Bridges Show" episode directed by Cassavetes was "A Pair of Boots". While doing a story on the 100th anniversary of the Civil War, Adam Shepherd imagines he is a Union soldier in a stand-off skirmish with Confederates. Beau Bridges, John Marley, Seymour Cassell, Lawrence Tierney and Royal Dano were featured in the futility of war drama. Marley and Cassel would appear in Cassavetes' "Faces" (1968).

The second episode directed by Cassavetes was "My Daddy Can Lick Your Daddy". Bridges played an aging middle-weight boxing champion in the 1920's. He is put in a fight with his son (Gary Lockwood), who he has pretty much ignored his whole life. The self-hating son plans to kill his father in the ring. Robert Towne ("Chinatown") wrote the episode.

In "Mr. Pennington's Machine", Bridges played a somewhat crude, noisy business man, apparently an "Ugly American". But he is touched by the starvation he sees while on vacation in the orient. He tries to help a destitute Chinese village with the aid of his timid wife (Betty Garrett) and a cynical American adventurer (Lee Philips).

Jeff Bridges appeared in three episodes, and Beau was in two. Lloyd's daughter Cindy was also in an episode.

When the series got unimpressive ratings, the Adam Shepherd character was dropped and the series became a straight anthology series hosted by and starring Bridges.

I remember seeing Bridges on the daytime game show "Your First Impression" at the time of this series. When host Bill Leyden asked Bridges the title of his new show, Bridges was embarrassed to tell him. He said the show really should have been called "The Aaron Spelling Show". Bridges said Spelling was a genius.

“My Daddy Can Lick Your Daddy” – TV episode from the Lloyd Bridges Show (22 mi) 1962

User reviews from imdb Author: BentCrewStreak from The Bent Crew

"Well, considering your daddy is Rip Taylor, I'm not surprised, but my daddy doesn't swing that way"

Well, at least that was my initial reaction to the title of this movie, but I soon found out that it was not an expose about washed up comedic "actors" and their propensity for attempting male tongue sports. Which, as it turns out, is a very good thing, as I tend to stay away from such exotic movies.

But, this film is an exotic film of sorts, as it is a remake of a French film called "La langue de mon père a plaisir à lécher d'autres pères" or literally, "My Father's Tongue Enjoys Licking Other Fathers".

Directed by John Cassavetes, who is one of those kinda famous directors that I've heard of, but have no idea what they've directed, "My Daddy Can Lick Your Daddy" is actually the story of a young boy named "Hucklebee" and his tumultuous childhood.

Powerful performances by such heavy hitters as Lloyd Bridges, who most audiences will know of in his role of Vincenzo Cortino in the epic 1998 comedy "Jane Austen's Mafia!". Bridges' role as the vain boxing champ is simply a marvel to behold.

Of course, one would be remiss to neglect supporting players. Namely, newcomer Frederick Draper who also teamed with Bridges in the war drama "A Pair of Boots". After this movie, however he starred in only a handful of other roles. And then, much like Kaiser Soze, he was gone.

This movie is a good way to spend a lazy afternoon, and is recommended for everyone. Even the little ones, that is if you can drag them away from their violently bloody video games.

A CHILD IS WAITING B 87

USA 1963 (102 mi)

I've always had a sweet spot for this 1963 film, made 5 years before the release of Faces (1968), a more conventional film using footage of handicapped children from the Pacific State Hospital in Pomona, California, one of the first State facilities for mentally impaired children. This is a remarkable attempt at realism, using moments of documentary style in a fictional film about mental retardation that refuses to look at the children in a group home as victims, but rather as human beings, each needing the help of others. The film attempts to give the children as much screen time as the so-called stars, which caused something of a scandal on the set. Apparently, Cassavetes’ message was too radical at the time, as he was fired from the film by producer Stanley Kramer, who then recut the film, ordering more close-ups, making it more sentimental. Apparently both Lancaster and Garland appealed to him for help from Cassavetes' direction, both openly defying him on the set. In Ray Carney's book, it is described as follows: "Cassavetes' treatment of his stars was a textbook lesson in how to alienate everyone possible." However, in Cassavetes' view, the children were more important in this film than the stars. Despite some overglossed musical strings on occasion, it’s still a surprisingly unflinching look at a largely ignored problem—one might say a follow up to Frank Perry’s 1962 film, DAVID AND LISA.

Burt Lancaster is appointed by the State to run the home, and at first he appears hard and ignoble with the children, especially one problem child, Reuben (played by actor Bruce Ritchey), who he believes the system has failed, but his somewhat radical intention is to treat the children as responsible individuals. Enter Judy Garland, of all people, as a troubled, down and out spirit who is looking to find a place where she might be needed. Having no real qualifications, other than being a Julliard Music School drop out, and having no real professional objectivity, she immediately pities the children and assumes the role of Reuben’s missing mother, so he follows her wherever she goes. Then on false pretenses, she summons Reuben’s real mother, Gena Rowlands, as every Wednesday, Reuben gets dressed up and waits for his parents that never show up on visiting day. This calls into question everyone’s views in an extraordinarily dramatic confrontation. Lancaster’s unbending system is challenged by Garland, whose histrionics are challenged by Rowlands, all are challenged by Reuben, enter the State bureaucrats who really want to wash their hands of the whole problem, threatening to cut finding as it’s not a feel good issue with the public. Who wants to raise children no one wants to see?

Largely disowned by Cassavetes for changing the entire tone of the film, the theater of the uncomfortable is really evident here with broken families, love gone awry, disturbingly flawed characters, big emotional moments, Gena Rowlands nervously smoking a cigarette while wearing gloves, as it’s hard to witness mentally impaired children being themselves, but Cassavetes raises important issues, mostly through the peppering questions of Lancaster, who refuses to let the bureaucrats decide their worth through potential employability. The film does a good job examining society’s response to “damaged” children, where parents immediately alter their expectations, becoming disappointed, embarrassed, eventually hiding their children from public view, supposedly for their own good. And if they allow them to interact with normal children, they’re bound to be teased and humiliated, as children can be relentlessly judgmental. Rowlands, of course, is excellent as the disappointed parent who’s too consumed with personal anguish and shame to be able to relate with her son anymore. Cassavetes wraps up the entire issue in a manner unique to his own particular vision, in a grand, sweeping finale that features the children in a Settlers and Indians Thanksgiving theatrical revue where they are all, at least for a moment, shining stars, continually perplexed with remembering their lines, but singing happily anyway. In Cassavetes' view, it's the adults that label them retarded, when really, they're just children.

Chicago Reader Capsule Review Dave Kehr

John Cassavetes takes a shot at straight commercial filmmaking (1963), and the results are a little wide of the mark. Burt Lancaster is the director of a school for the mentally retarded, Judy Garland is a teacher who disputes his methods. Earnest but uneven. Subjects like this seem to bring out the sanctimony in most directors, and Cassavetes, fine anarchic talent that he is, is no exception. With Gena Rowlands and Steven Hill. 102 min.

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Disowned by Cassavetes after producer Stanley Kramer edited it against his wishes and made it more sentimental than intended, this is none the less a very affecting study of the plight of mentally retarded children. Shot in semi-documentary style and using (with the exception of Ritchey, the film's central 'case history') actual retarded children, the movie concerns a new teacher (Garland) whose excessive concern with Ritchey's predicament brings her into conflict with her boss (Lancaster). As ever, Cassavetes elicits magnificent performances from his cast, making especially fine use of Garland's tremulous emotionalism, although the occasional drifts into didacticism (the script was by Abby Mann, who wrote Judgment at Nuremberg and Ship of Fools) entail the sort of special pleading Cassavetes was keen to avoid. Flawed but fascinating.

A Child is Waiting - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Steve Seid

The location for John Cassavetes’s second dalliance with studio production is the Pacific State Hospital, here dubbed the Crowthorn Training School, an institute for challenged children. The wards of the real institute are everywhere to be seen, not just as set decoration, but as poignant bit players in a hard-hitting drama about the social reforms needed to care for adolescents with special needs. Burt Lancaster plays Dr. Clark, a headstrong psychologist who has initiated a progressive program to redeem his charges. With an unnerved presence, Judy Garland takes the role of Jean, a music instructor who has come to Crowthorn hoping to redeem her own aimless life. Once there, she develops an intense affection for Reuben (remarkably played by Bruce Ritchey, the film’s only child actor), a twelve-year-old abandoned by his parents (Gena Rowland and Steven Hill). A Child is Waiting is pure Cassavetes: he has embedded two polished performers in a context that strips them of their grandiosity. The kids steal the show, because the pro actors have relinquished their own special needs.

Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]

John Cassavetes ("Too Late Blues") second feature as director is a straightforward solid social service drama, without his usual avant-garde twists, that is told in a cinema verite semi-documentary style. It's based on the intelligent but not that impactful script by Abby Mann ("Judgment of Nuremberg"). Burt Lancaster is excellent playing the psychologist Dr. Matthew Clark who is the director of Crawthorne State Mental Hospital (modeled the film's school on the highly regarded Vineland Training School in New Jersey). One of Lancaster's own children is such a troubled child and he had a strong personal interest in the subject matter. Judy Garland gives a sincere performance as the do-gooder inexperienced teacher who believes love is all that matters, and even though she was going through a difficult period of her life and was drinking heavily her performance was powerful. Except for Bruce Ritchey (Reuben Widdicombe), the children in the film were all patients at the Pacific State Hospital in Pomona, California.

The film ran into trouble with Cassavetes's attempt to bring his unconventional improvisational style to the shoot, which were at odds with Kramer's beliefs and didn't go over with either Garland or Lancaster who weren't comfortable with his unconventional approach to the film. Things came to a head during the final editing when an argument over what to include in the film resulted in Kramer firing Cassavetes. The film was finished by Kramer and the film's editor Gene Fowler, Jr., which prompted Cassavetes to disown it. Watching the film when released, Cassavetes commented "I didn't think his film - and that's what I consider it to be, his film - was so bad, just a lot more sentimental than mine."

The film picks up with the arrival to the institute of the reluctant retarded child Reuben. Two years later the newly hired thirtysomething unattached teacher, Jean Hansen (Judy Garland), who is an ex-pianist searching for meaning in her life, becomes touched by the 12-year-old Reuben's craving for affection and becomes obsessively attached to the child when learning his mom Sophie Widdicombe (Gena Rowlands), recently remarried to a lawyer (Lawrence Tierney), never visits him. Clark is disturbed that Hansen's excessive attention to Reuben will upset the other children and challenges her behavior. Hansen frets that Clark's methods are too stern. So it goes, as the drama is only flawed by the occasional uninviting didactic tone it takes.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Jean Hansen (Judy Garland), a recently hired employee at the Crawthorne State Mental Hospital, finds a new purpose in her life when she begins working with problem children at the facility. Lacking a medical degree, her approach to therapy is constantly challenged by the resident psychiatrist, Dr. Matthew Clark (Burt Lancaster), who feels her interaction with one child in particular, Reuben Widdicombe (Bruce Ritchey), could result in more problems instead of a cure.

Combining a cinema verite approach popular with emerging independent filmmakers of the early sixties and the production values of a major studio film complete with name stars, A Child is Waiting (1963) was a unique attempt by producer Stanley Kramer to create an impacting social drama about the plight of mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed children. His good intentions, however, were complicated by his choice of director, John Cassavetes, and his lead actors, Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland, all of whom had their own creative approach to the material.

Kramer modeled the film's school on the Vineland Training School in New Jersey, an internationally renown institution for their treatment of mentally retarded children, though the movie was actually shot on location at the Pacific State Hospital in Pomona, California. In Against Type: The Biography of Burt Lancaster by Gary Fishgall, Kramer stated that one of the reasons he wanted to make A Child is Waiting was "to throw a spotlight on a dark-ages type of social thinking which has tried to relegate the subject of retardation to a place under the rocks." As for soliciting Lancaster's involvement in the film, the producer had an ulterior motive. He knew Lancaster had a troubled child of his own and a personal interest in the subject matter. Lancaster had also worked well with Judy Garland in Kramer's previous film, Judgment at Nuremberg [1961] and the actress, who was going through a difficult period in her life, needed a supportive work environment. Unfortunately, "Judy was drinking a great deal," Lancaster recalled, "and it was a big effort to get herself together and get in shape to work...I had to kind of nurse her along with it. And because of her mental condition at the time, she wasn't terribly involved with the part."

Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor had all been considered for the part of Jean Hansen before Garland was cast. Likewise, the original choice for director had been Jack Clayton who had to drop out of the project due to scheduling conflicts; his replacement, John Cassavetes, was suggested to Kramer by screenwriter Abby Mann, a friend to both men. But Cassavetes's improvisational style turned out to be completely at odds with Kramer's working methods and didn't endear him to Garland and Lancaster who weren't comfortable with his often unconventional approach either.

One of the big gambles in the film was the casting of real mentally retarded children throughout the picture which some critics took issue with when the film was released. Kramer, however, felt their involvement was crucial to the film, adding, "it was exciting. They surprised us every day in reaction and what they did." Lancaster voiced a similar opinion in an off-the-set interview at the time, saying, "We have to ad-lib around the periphery of a scene and I have to attune and adjust myself to the unexpected things they do. But they are much better than child actors for the parts. They have certain gestures that are characteristic, very difficult for even an experienced actor."

In the end, the tense relationship between Kramer and Cassavetes came to a head during the final editing of A Child is Waiting. According to the picture's editor, Gene Fowler, Jr., in the aforementioned Gary Fishgall biography, "It was a fight of technique. Stanley is a more traditional picture-maker, and Cassavetes was, I guess, called Nouvelle Vague. He was trying some things, which frankly I disagreed with, and I thought he was hurting the picture by blunting the so-called message with technique." Fowler cited one instance where a scene was jumpy because the camera ran over a cable during filming so he replaced it with a smoother take, only to have Cassavetes complain, "My God, you damn Hollywood people. All you can think of is smoothness of camera. What we want is to get some rough edges in here." Subsequently, Kramer fired Cassavetes and finished the editing himself with Fowler's assistance, prompting the director to disown it. After the film's release, however, Cassavetes remarked, "I didn't think his film - and that's what I consider it to be, his film - was so bad, just a lot more sentimental than mine." For his own part, Kramer admitted, "My dream was to jump the barrier of ordinary objection to the subject matter into an area in which the treatment of it and the performance of it would be so exquisite that it would transcend all that. Somewhere we failed." Yet, many critics found things to praise in A Child is Waiting, such as Time magazine's assessment that "Lancaster has never been better" and Time Out's opinion that "Cassavetes elicits magnificent performances from his cast, making especially fine use of Garland's tremulous emotionalism."

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Brian Koller, filmsgraded.com

Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - A Child is Waiting Gary Couzens

John cassavettes A Child is waiting and Too Late Blues Shaun Katz from JDM Film Reviews

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: theowinthrop from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: lugonian from Kissimmee, Florida

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Ed Uyeshima from San Francisco, CA, USA

A Child Is Waiting | Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center

Cassavetes' Works: A Child is Waiting Ray Carney (capsule review)

Abby Mann Interview | Archive of American Television 3-hour Video interview with Writer/Producer Abby Mann by Gary Rutkowski, August 18, 2004

"A Child Is Waiting review" Variety, December 31, 1962

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) also seen here: NY Times Original Review

A Child Is Waiting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER – TV series 1963 – 67

USA (60 mi) 114 episodes, Cassavetes wrote and directed one episode, “In Pursuit of Excellence” that aired June 22, 1966

In Pursuit of Excellence

FACES A 97

USA (130 mi) 1968

He wanted to get as close as it was possible, because he felt these characters, in this middle America scenario, that you had to actually get inside, and you had to feel as though you were that person. You had to experience what they were going through as an audience, so we shot a lot of close ups.

—Al Ruban, cinematographer, producer, and editor

And really I think, at least at that time, John was one of the very few directors who paid any attention to women of a certain age. There’s just so much that they revealed in their lives and their loneliness and their desire to be young again, and if not young at least to be able to have some of the same good times and it just shouldn’t stop at a certain point.

—Gena Rowlands

Art films are not necessarily photography. It’s feeling, and if we can capture a feeling of a people, of a way of life, then we’ve made a good picture. That’s all we want to do. We want to capture a feeling. Our films, per se, the way they (Hollywood) make films are terrible. They say it’s European photography, which is a dirty word, and art is a very bad word in this country. Art is a very bad word.

People get all upset over things that don’t really matter, like politics, and religion, and things like that. They take offense to such a great degree that they miss the good times. But the good times are probably more important than any bad times that ever happened, and yet we spend so much time on bad times, and so little time on the human behavior.

—John Cassavetes

I get a lump in my throat every time I see her. She tries everything and she doesn’t care how ridiculous and pathetic it is. The point is that she tried. She fought for it, tied herself in knots. She wouldn’t give up. And isn’t it better to fight and realize your fantasies, to fight and to lose, than to gripe and pine away in silence? —John Cassavetes on Florence (Dorothy Gulliver)

In the early 60’s, after Shadows (1959), it was his wife Gena Rowlands whose acting career took off, working regularly in television while Cassavetes made two studio pictures, Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child Is Waiting (1963), experiences that revealed the shortcomings of working within the Hollywood system, as most of his working requests were refused, and more importantly, he lost control of both pictures. He also made a few television appearances and wrote a ton of incomplete scripts, but his phone did not exactly ring off the hook, so he took a job working at Screen Gems when it was offered. Allegedly hired to develop new concepts for television shows, all twenty concepts submitted by Cassavetes were rejected, so he quickly lost whatever initial interest he had. Instead he decided to develop one of his incomplete manuscripts about marriage upon reaching middle age, writing over 200 new pages in October 1964, thinking at the time the story was only half finished. Producer Maurice McEndree, who produced both FACES and Shadows, has an altogether different version, suggesting he and Cassavetes were on a flight from New York to Los Angeles, and during a marathon gin-rummy game, Cassavetes asks him “Did you ever think about what a guy would say to a hooker when he wakes up in her bed the next morning?” At that moment, Cassavetes jotted down a few notes, and this was the birth of the morning-after scene. Thus FACES was born. Once he figured out that initially he only had about $10,000 to play around with, knowing full well that money received from Hollywood studios meant losing control of the project, Cassavetes embarked on a longterm journey which may as well be the definition of an independent film, as Cassavetes wrote his own script, spent his own money, used a cast of friends, family, and non-professionals, starring his own wife Gena Rowlands, where lifelong friend Al Ruban produced the film while also shooting and editing the film, which included actor Seymour Cassel, one of the Cassavetes regulars who has been there with Cassavetes since the beginning, and it was shot in his own home (with set decoration by Lady Rowlands) over a four-year period on week-ends and whenever funds became available, where none other than king of the blockbusters Steven Spielberg is listed as an uncredited production assistant. There’s enough singing and dancing in this film that it could almost be called a musical, where it feels like more is improvised in FACES than any other Cassavetes film.

Actress Lynn Carlin was discovered as Robert Altman’s secretary at Screen Gems where Altman had an office across the hall from Cassavetes. Altman eventually fired her for spending so much time across the hall, but she signed her contract with Cassavetes on a cocktail napkin, which was more a concept of an expanded shoot that might take place anytime instead of a salary listing any monetary figures, and both Gena Rowlands (3 months) and Lynn Carlin (5 months) were pregnant at the time of the shoot. After weeks of rehearsals, Cassavetes always shoots his films in sequence, which allows the actors to develop their characters as the film progresses, where his method of directing was to offer no instructions, as once the film was written and the parts cast, he felt the roles belonged to the actors, believing no one knew more about the characters than they did, but they were restricted from talking to other actors between shoots, where they could not compare notes, so that in the actor’s minds, at least, the other actors remained in character at all times. But when Rowlands was getting dizzy from shooting the same scene about twenty times, claiming that was enough, reminding him she was pregnant, rather than console her and offer her a break, Cassavetes told her they had to get this scene finished, where she reveals “He turned into a director on me.” According to Cassel, he felt Cassavetes always got great performances because he knew the actors as personal friends, so he knew what to say to them if he felt they weren’t being honest on camera, where he’d approach everyone differently. Both Peter Falk in Husbands (1970) and Gena Rowlands in perhaps her greatest role in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), were both bewildered in trying to figure out the complexity of their characters, where they each desperately appealed to Cassavetes for help, asking what he had in mind, but he adamantly refused to tell them anything. According to Cassel, “For John, nothing was more boring than watching an actor act, because you could see them acting.” All he wanted was natural behavior from the actors.

Often credited for being the first independent film to attract a mainstream American audience, the film is groundbreaking, but utterly bleak, perhaps Cassavetes most difficult film, where critical reception was largely mixed in this searing drama about middle-aged dissatisfaction and broken American Dreams, expressed through a disintegrating middle-class marriage in the affluence of Southern California. Now considered a landmark film shot on 16 mm Black and White blown up to 35 mm, the film was shot for $275,000, where the cast and crew worked largely without pay, much of it shot in Cassavetes’ own home (where we learn Frank Zappa lived next door), where people pulled multiple duties, as between takes, actor Seymour Cassel ran cable wires, or painted walls of the set, while the cinematographer, Al Ruban and handheld operator George Sims, both helped edit the film with Cassavetes. Many of the crew appear as extras in the film which has a semi-documentary feel, but the most extraordinary revelations are the blistering performances led by a couple married for fourteen years, Richard (John Marley) and Maria (Lynn Carlin), something of a younger version of George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). An emotional powerhouse of a film begins with a scathing portrait of male corporate America, feeling more like a mockery of the Hollywood studio system, seen as a soulless entity that wields power through a kind of awkward male dominance expressed by drinking, featuring an endless stream of vile and contemptible laughter, using aggressive and assaultive dialogue like sharp knives, all designed to demean the dignity of others, as if these are executive boardroom power tactics playing out in social settings, often filled with misogynistic references, with this IN THE COMPANY OF MEN (1997) smile of insincerity covering up their cruelty, Faces (1968) - Film Clip - "I Dream Of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair" Tango YouTube (5:54). From the outset, it is clear Cassavetes has made a different kind of film, shot in a grainy and unpolished Black and White, a startling contrast to the pristine look of Hollywood films, where outside of Rowlands, who plays prostitute Jeannie Rapp, and first time actress Carlin, who provides the performance of her career, none of the other actors are familiar to American audiences, nor do they provide the glamour of Hollywood stars, as instead they have the appearance of ordinary people we may see everyday on the street. But Cassavetes uses close ups to expose Jeannie Rapp’s vulnerability, a near experimental style of sensuous beauty contrasted against this brutally competitive world of corporate ego and male power. The closeups continue to expose the artificial veneer that hides any signs of the humanity within, when, out of nowhere, a seemingly comfortable middle class marriage begins to unravel.

Like many Cassavetes films, this one started out just over three hours when it premiered at Toronto before being pared down to its current 130-minute length for the American release, where the Criterion DVD lists an earlier cut that interestingly offers an alternative 17-minute opening, most of which precedes where the final cut begins. The film was also nominated for Best Supporting Roles for both Lynn Carlin and Seymour Cassel, also a Best Original Screenplay nomination, while winning five awards at the Venice Film festival, including the Pasinetti Award and Best Actor by John Marley, who plays the corporate CEO who leaves his wife to spend the night with Jeannie Rapp, returning the next morning kicking his heels, smiling triumphantly. Maria tried to have some fun of her own the night before and ended up spending the night with Hollywood playboy Chet, Seymour Cassel, but only after four inebriated wives pick him up in a dance club, which turns out to be the Whiskey a Go Go, featuring camera shots by Haskell Wexler, who was afraid the union would find out he was working on a non-union film. With four women for Chet to entertain, “Honey, it’s absolutely ludicrous how mechanical a person can be,” three remain cautiously restrained behind middle class manners of reserve, but the one who lets it all hang out is Florence (Dorothy Gulliver), the only one of the four wives that actually dances with Chet and touches and kisses him, and is not afraid to tell him she is attracted to him, but she is also the oldest, the least attractive, and the most overweight, becoming one of Cassavetes’ most doomed characters, Faces - To Hell With Louis YouTube (5:43). When Chet wakes up in the morning next to Maria, he has to nurse her back to health after an attempted overdose of sleeping pills, and the film rather uncomfortably begins to explore, with a detached, documentary style, the interior moods of the husband and the wife. Most pronounced are the contrast of opposite moods when the husband and wife meet the next morning, revealing the deep, piercing wounds of emotional devastation, the consequence of covering up their lack of honesty with each other, where a fake comfortable marriage was built upon burying their feelings together for so many married years. FACES is an unsparing and exhausting work, a film with ramifications, but one that perfectly exemplifies Cassavetes cinéma vérité style along with his searching explorations of modern relationships, a film that reveals some rather cruel human behavior on display, consisting almost exclusively of tight, uncomfortable close-ups for which there is no comfortable release, just an emptiness, an overwhelming emptiness. In 2011 the film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

Adrian Martin from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Laughter, because it is so hard to act, often comes across as phony when depicted onscreen. But in FACES, every kind of laughter – lunatic, lusty, nervous, hysterical, defensive – is rendered with absolute authenticity, even when prescripted or postsynchronized.

What was John Cassavetes’s secret? His rapport with actors was so total, his work with them so intensely detailed, that he was able to capture lived reality like no other American director. After the experiment of SHADOWS (1959) and bad experiences within the Hollywood system, FACES confidently marked the beginning of the Cassavetes “signature.” Filmed in his home, it records vivid scenes in the lives of people who are at once hopelessly yearning and furiously alienated – stranded, like all Cassavetes characters, between the difficult responsibilities of daily routine and the reckless intoxications of nightlife.

Cassavetes shows his brilliant ensemble cast – John Marley and Lynn Carlin are especially memorable – always in media res, their bodies off center in the frame, their words and gestures truncated by the editing. Each scene is based on an unpredictable and often terrifying “turn,” a sudden change in a character’s mood or manner toward another. FACES invents a new way of experiencing time in cinema, where sudden pauses register as (in Cassavetes’s words) “like stepping off a fast train.”

Sometimes taken as the condemnation of a soulless, materialist middle class, the film is, rather, a painfully intimate and compassionate account of everyday suffering. Cassavetes stakes out the terrain he would often revisit – marital crisis, casual sex, hedonistic abandon, family ties – within a narrative that constantly shuffles and compares character’s journeys through a long night and its aftermath.

Is FACES the first film in cinema history where characters talk (indeed, laugh themselves stupid) about cunnilingus? Some 35 years later, directors including Neil LaBute and Lars von Trier are still trying to catch up to Cassavetes’s astonishing ability to show the messy complexity of adult relationships.

City Pages [Matthew Wilder]

If, like the music-store geeks in High Fidelity, you play these sorts of taxonomic games (and every film lover I know does), you have your Mount Rushmore of American directors. In my mind, Martin Scorsese is at the summit of the summit, a Shakespeare of film language who draws, Bard-like, on classicism past and originality present to make the strongest style there ever was. But when it comes to the deep moral value of a work of art; when it comes to knowing the human heart in all its recesses, in all its strange veins and valves; when it comes to loving and inhabiting people more deeply than loving and inhabiting movies...well, the heavyweight championship belt has to go to John Cassavetes. An American Chekhov, Cassavetes was mocked in his day as an "Actors Studio director," a self-indulgent maker of improv blabfests, a drunk who indulged the fellow drunkenness of his buddies. Today his work--especially his late masterpieces (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Love Streams)--seems to hold the lyrical yet mordant, fateful quality of something like The Winter's Tale. Faces (1968), which Cassavetes whittled into shape throughout the Sixties, is simply a towering achievement. Without saying a peep about its story or its characters (those are for you to wrestle with), I'll mention just one quality of the filmmaker's work that you may find treacherous or delightful: A Cassavetes scene can start comic, segue into tragic, trip over pathetic, and find five other stops before the word cut is called. If this bugs you, American Beauty is playing right over there.

Faces - Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

There are many who consider John Cassavetes the father of the American independent film movement despite the fact there were many others before him - Morris Engel (Little Fugitive [1953]), Sidney Meyers (The Savage Eye [1960]), and even Stanley Kubrick (Killer's Kiss [1955] to name a few. But Cassavetes's debut feature, Shadows (1959), was the film that made the biggest impact upon its release and proved to be prophetic when it came to defining a new approach to filmmaking outside the Hollywood system.

Cassavetes broke all the rules, inventing his own and then discarding them as he went along, improvising and experimenting with everything from the cinematography to the performances to the actual financing of the film; he mortgaged his own home numerous times to subsidize his movies over the years and took on acting jobs purely for monetary reasons. Yet Shadows, with its jerky, hand-held camerawork, vivid location shooting on New York City streets and edgy subject matter involving an interracial romance and conflicted characters living on the margins of society, was just a warm-up for Cassavetes's next film, Faces (1968). It not only confirmed Cassavetes's early promise as a director but set the tone and style for the rest of his film career, one in which he relentlessly probed the often dissatisfied lives of unglamorous, middle-class Americans. Faces was not the average filmgoer's idea of a good time at the movies but it earned widespread critical acclaim (and three Oscar® nominations) and was an inspiration to future filmmakers such as Martin Scorcese (Who's That Knocking at My Door? [1967]), Henry Jaglom (A Safe Place [1971]) and Sean Penn (The Indian Runner [1991]).

Dispensing with a conventional plot structure, Faces is a cinema verite-like portrait of a marriage in turmoil, rendered in chunks of real time. The film begins at the point where Richard Forst (John Marley) and his wife Maria (Lynn Carlin) are already frustrated and resentful toward each other. Their constant quarreling and angry silences finally lead Richard to ask for a divorce. Then, in the presence of his wife, he calls Jeannie (Gena Rowlands), a prostitute he met recently, and makes a date. He walks out, leaving Maria in shock, but soon her female friends rally to her support and take her out for a night on the town. At a dance club on the Hollywood strip, she meets Chet (Seymour Cassel), a fun-loving, free spirit who ends up spending the night with her. The two different storylines - Richard and Jeannie's tentative romance and Maria and Chet's one-night affair - play out in equally unresolved circumstances but that's less important than Richard and Maria's emotional rollercoaster ride to the film's bleak conclusion.

Faces initially began as ten pages of dialogue Cassavetes had written as a two character sketch about two friends recalling happier times in their lives. Shadows producer Mo McEndree suggested that Cassavetes expand it so he produced a 175 page script that seemed ideal for a stage play. John Marley, who had appeared in Cassavetes's A Child Is Waiting (1963), and Val Avery (who had co-starred with John on the Johnny Staccato TV series) both read it and wanted to appear in it. The play quickly evolved into a film project with Cassavetes juggling finances behind the scenes. "...I went over to Universal [Studios] - my bank - and acted in two lousy TV pilots, which bought me a movie camera and film. I then had enough to start the picture and we shot for six and a half months. We wound up with an awful lot of footage." (From Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film by Marshall Fine).

For the film, Cassavetes recruited his wife, Gena Rowlands, Hollywood friends and associates from his New York days to fill the cast and crew positions and used his own home and his mother-in-law's house as the main sets. With various working titles of "The Dynosaurs," "One Fa and Eight Las," and "The Marriage," Cassavetes's screenplay evolved from its simple beginnings to a more focused concept with John Marley in the central role of Richard Forst. Seymour Cassel, who had followed Cassavetes to Hollywood from New York along with McEndree and associate producer Al Ruban, had a minor part in his friend's previous film, Too Late Blues (1961), but played a much more prominent role this time. In fact, Cassavetes created the part of Chet specifically for Cassel, incorporating aspects of the actor's own personality - his carefree nature, penchant for practical jokes, and habitual womanizing.

Cassavetes also liked the effect he got when he mixed professional actors with non-actors and several minor roles were cast with family members, relatives, and acquaintances. More importantly, the central role of Maria was played by newcomer Lynn Carlin, who had previously been Robert Altman's secretary at Screen Gems. Cassavetes had an office down the hall and had Carlin fill in for an actor during a rehearsal one day; it led to a new career path for Carlin.

The actual filming of Faces was a chaotic affair in the beginning. "John was letting everybody shoot," Ruban recalled. "I would shoot the first shot and then John would say, 'Ok, George [Sims], you shoot the next one, and Seymour, do you want to shoot the next one?' he was giving everyone in the crew a chance to use the camera. John's thought was that everyone should be involved and share the experience. What was happening at that moment was what was important. He gave no thought to the finished product..." Occasionally Haskell Wexler, who was already a renowned industry cinematographer, would occasionally drop by the shoot and even film a few scenes. "It was like working on a film with a living sketch pad," Wexler said, "when the artist has a sense of what the film should be, but he doesn't know whether to use a pen or make this part longer." This communal approach to filmmaking, however, varied wildly in quality and after a month of shooting, most of the footage was unusable, convincing Cassavetes to become more autocratic in his creative process. Still, it was completely unlike any Hollywood film production and was an ongoing learning process for everyone, particularly Gena Rowlands, who at first had terrible arguments with her husband on the film. "My mistake was in thinking that since the director was also my lover, he would think everything I did was perfect. Once I began to regard John as a director, the problems straightened out quickly."

Cassavetes's love for the filmmaking process became an obsession. "Faces became more than a film," he said. "It became a way of life, a film against the authorities and the powers that prevent people from expressing themselves the way they want to, something that can't be done in America, that can't be done without money." Eventually, in between other jobs and working off and on during a four year period, reshooting some scenes to his satisfaction, Cassavetes ended up with approximately 250,000 feet of film - a massive amount totaling almost 115 hours. The most difficult part was editing it down into a final version. The first rough cut ran six hours, the second pass was four hours and a version prepared for preview audiences in Canada clocked in at three hours and forty minutes. After numerous test engagements in Los Angeles, Cassavetes was finally satisfied with his 130 minute cut even though the film wasn't well received by preview audiences in Hollywood. Undeterred, Cassavetes took Faces to the Venice Film Festival where it was nominated for the Golden Lion - the equivalent of a Best Picture Oscar® - and John Marley won the best actor award.

The event that really made the difference for Cassavetes's labor of love, however, was the New York Film Festival, whose importance at the time was crucial for the success of a film as difficult to market and distribute as Faces. It was rejected at first by the festival judges but critic Andrew Sarris, who was on the selection committee, met with the festival founder (Amos Vogel) and programmer (Richard Roud) and stated his case in no uncertain terms: "I feel very strongly about this," he told them. "I'm not a fan of Cassavetes. I don't believe in improvisation and I'm certainly not into naturalism. But if we don't put this film in, I don't see a point in continuing on the committee. There wouldn't be hard feelings but that's how I feel." Faces was voted back into the festival and created a sensation at the festival premiere.

It went on to garner Oscar® nominations for Best Supporting Actor and Actress for Seymour Cassel and Lynn Carlin and a Best Screenplay nomination for Cassavetes. In addition, the Writers Guild of America nominated Faces as the Best Written American original Screenplay and the National Society of Film Critics awarded the film two honors - Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Cassel). Despite the accolades, not everyone liked the film and some critics absolutely hated it. Among them was Pauline Kael who wrote "There are scenes in Faces so dumb, so crudely conceived and so badly performed that the audience practically burns incense...I think embarrassment is not a quality of art but our reaction to failed art." And even today when Cassavetes's work is more revered than during his own lifetime, the debate continues. David Thomson, in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, offered that "The Cassavetes films are far more thoroughly written than was once believed; and they are badly written...as a director, he [Cassavetes] is like a guy who begs us to hang around because these people are fascinating - and not just drunks. What may be most interesting in his work is the sociology of his middle America. He chooses basic, unenlightened, and unhappily successful people. They are a rarity in American film, rigorously shunned by most directors: they are bores."

Regardless of Faces's imperfections as a film or whether one loves it or hates it, its place as a pivotal moment in the American cinema is uncontested. For underneath the film's messy and sometimes meandering turn of events is an undeniable sense of truth, a mirror is held up and the masks are removed. This was clearly the intention of Cassavetes who wrote the following in his introduction to the published screenplay of Faces: "Playboy magazine, tit films, and cocktail party diatribes have not only affected our society, but have shaped it with such discontent regarding men and women that sex is no longer in itself sufficient without violence, death, or neurosis as stimulants. The idea of love as a mysterious, undiscovered world has come to have no place in our innermost imagination. It is this confusing dilemma in which men find themselves trying to relate to a difficult life and their responsibilities in it that Faces attempts to explore."

Criterion Collection film essay [Stuart Klawans] September 20, 2004, also seen here: Masks and Faces

Faces (1968) - The Criterion Collection

Faces Ray Carney’s discussion of FACES

click here Ray Carney’s discovery of a longer version of FACES

click here press reaction to the discovery

click here Gena Rowlands reaction to the discovery

Senses of Cinema – Performing the Everyday: Time and Affect in ... Effie Rassos from Senses of Cinema, September 2001

Senses of Cinema – Impromptu Entertainment: Performance Modes ... Pamela Robertson Wojcik, September 2000

notcoming.com | Faces - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Chet Mellema

Why you should watch John Cassavetes' Faces right now. - Slate Essential Cassavetes, Dana Stevens from Salon

Faces | Film Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley] also seen here: FilmFanatic.org

FACES Review: John Cassavetes - Alt Film Guide Andre Soares, Pt. 1, and also Pt. 2: FACES Review: John Marley, Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel, Lynn Carlin

Epinions.com review by Christopher J. Jarmick co-author of The Glass Cocoon

Jackass Critics [Thomas Blain]

Chuck Aliaga - digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Review, Criterion Collection

Faces - Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Jeremy Mathews, Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Clark Douglas] Criterion Collection

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Cassavetes on DVD Matthew Kennedy on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection, February 2005, also seen here: Images [Matthew Kennedy]

PopMatters [Ian Chant] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] - Criterion box set 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: John Cassavetes Five Films - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Shadows | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jeff Economy reviews the Criterion 5 from The Chicago Reader

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central [Ed Nguyen] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray

Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection

FACES - Ruthless Reviews Plexico Gingrich

Roy C Peterson Movie Reviews

Mondo Digital [Facebook] also reviewing SHADOWS

264 notes - A John Cassavetes Fan site

Faces British Film Institute brief capsule

Variety

Time Out Capsule Review Geoff Andrews

HUSBANDS (John Cassavetes, 1970) | Dennis Grunes

New York Times [Renata Adler] also seen here: NY Times Original Review

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze] also seen here: DVD Beaver Review

40-Minute Documentary on JOHN CASSAVETES: "Cinéastes de Notre Temps: John Cassavetes" (1969) essential viewing on YouTube (38:48)

HUSBANDS A 98

aka: A Comedy about Life, Death, and Freedom

USA (140 mi) 1970

I can understand that certain people would like a more conventional form, so that they can borrow it, much like a gangster picture...You can ‘read’ it, because it’s something that you know already. But if you deal with a scene in an unconventional way, it’s very hard for people to get with the film because of their expectations...Other films depend on a shorthand, a shorthand for living. You recognize certain incidents and you go with them. People prefer that you condense; they find it quite natural for life to be condensed in films...They prefer that because they can catch onto the meanings and keep ahead of the movie. But that’s boring. I won’t make shorthand films. In my films, there’s a competition with the audience to keep ahead of them. I want to break their patterns. I want to shake them up and get them out of those quick, manufactured truths.

—John Cassavetes

Brilliant independent filmmaking at its masterful best, a radical and deeply personal work that exposes the scars of humanity, where a deepening exploration of interpersonal relationships between three men onscreen ultimately led to lifelong friendships afterwards. Using no blocks, allowing the camera to always follow the actors, where the emotional continuity overrides everything else, the beginning feels like a continuation of Shadows (1959), with the boys jumping around on the streets, playing basketball, having a walking contest on the streets of New York. Also, the confusion from Shadows about how to get along with girls continues here into their adult lives. Another wonderful film about friendships, only the boys are grown up now and have lost their innocence and hope. In fact, they have turned into the corporate men in FACES (1968), only instead of hanging out at the Loser’s Bar, they are living unfulfilled and empty lives on Long Island, called the suburban middle class, but carry their same bad habits, smoking and boozing too much, covering up their own brutality with forced laughter, that without the booze just isn’t so funny at all, as it’s often mean and cruel. John Cassavetes as Gus, Peter Falk as Archie, and Ben Gazzara as Harry have trouble going home after the funeral of their best friend, each virile and overly masculine actors all terrorized at the idea of turning 40, suddenly confronted with the idea of mortality. Harry confesses, “Aside from sex, and my wife is very good at it, I’d rather spend time with you guys.” So they end up at an all-night bar boozing and singing until morning, trying to determine the best performance, where the singer is often praised and kissed heavily, but also subjected to group criticism. Cassavetes allows this scene to play on at great length, where the amount of alcohol consumed is beyond excessive and at times brutal to watch. The only other bar scene that paints as intimate a portrait is Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which takes place entirely inside the Last Chance Saloon, another seedy all-night bar filled with a few scruffy regulars, a raw and emotionally bracing play of pain and disillusionment, exactly as one should feel after the funeral of their best friend. In each, the heightened state of realism and despair is painfully evident. Ironically one of Falk’s first roles was the bartender Harry Hope on Broadway with Jason Robards in The Iceman Cometh. In the UCLA mounted restoration of the film, Gena Rowlands, the executor of the Cassavetes estate, removed ten minutes from the film that she found offensive, including the morning aftermath, the infamous vomiting scene, where Gus and Archie end up puking horribly in the bathroom, joined later by Harry, who feels momentarily left out. Many viewers will find this scene excessive and overly indulgent, but Cassavetes was a man that insisted art could be found anywhere, even in a bathroom stall. Of note, female director Anja Breien’s film WIVES (Hustruer, 1975) was the Norwegian comedic feminist response to Husbands.

Unlike normal people that just go home and sleep it off, these guys stick together throughout, taking Harry home in a cab, apparently to resume his normal life, but he explodes in a violent confrontation with his wife after she tells him “I’m just uncomfortable in front of you —that’s it—it’s nothing personal,” ultimately deciding to run away to London, joined by his two pals who agree “to tuck him in, then come back home.” Every outdoor scene in London is a typhoon of rain where somebody gets drenched, but they gamble, play craps, find girls, and eventually end up in adjoining suites, each with their own girl. Again, these are extended scenes, notable for their obvious discomfort, some of which are painfully cringeworthy (especially Archie) when it becomes so evident they’re on the lookout for women, becoming even more difficult once they’ve actually found them. Gus has an aggressive, tall blond, Mary (Jenny Runacre), wrestling uncomfortably with her in bed while they continually bruise each other physically and emotionally, although Gus constantly tries to hide behind his humor. Archie, who confesses he is slow in bed, wants to talk endlessly to a young Vietnamese hooker Julie (Noelle Kao) who doesn’t speak a word of English, singing “Good Morning Mr. Zip Zip Zip” ever so softly, then erupts in verbal abuse when the girl tries to aggressively use her tongue when kissing, ultimately declaring his love for her in the morning where she can be seen walking aimlessly in the rain ranting to herself in some indecipherable language. Harry wants to talk about his wife, and everything Pearl Billingham (Jenny Lee Wright) can do reminds him of his wife (“I feel so goddamned disloyal!), so he ends up with 3 or 4 different women in his room by morning, declaring, “If you go, you’ll be replaced by someone else,” singing “Dancing in the Dark” with them all, joined by Gus, who has found another 6 foot blond, and Archie. Gus confesses to Archie: “We've got two lovely wives - - the only problem is to go home and make love to them,” leaving Harry in London to fend for himself while Gus and Archie head back home (interestingly seen smoking on airplanes, while earlier they’re also seen smoking on the trains, both prohibited actions today), but also buying stuffed animals for their children at the airport, nervously arriving back to their perfect suburban homes. The two friends are next door neighbors, wondering about Harry, “What’s he gonna do without us?” In a quietly affecting moment, Gus’s 4-year old daughter Xan bursts into tears (as Nick allegedly took her toy away) when she sees him while his 11-year old son Nick yells out to him, “Dad! Oh boy, you’re in trouble,” as the children carry the bags of stuffed animals and walk out of sight together and supposedly continue the rest of their lives.

Film critic Pauline Kael, a longtime Cassavetes antagonist, described the film as “infantile and offensive,” Dave Kehr described the Cassavetes’men in HUSBANDS as “pure creatures of emotion,” while Roger Ebert took issue with Time magazine’s rave review, “seldom has Time given a better review to a worse movie.” The very things people find ugly and overcalculated about Cassavetes are exactly what is unique and refreshing in the movies. Cassavetes was never about technical filmmaking, so if that's your criteria, you will need to look elsewhere, but he is one of the great humanists in cinema, not in a broad sense, like Renoir, whose films nearly sing with poetic light, but in redefining what's considered believable onscreen, by including what's wrong alongside what's right, both part and parcel of the human condition. HUSBANDS may be the best at revealing what's so gut-wrenchingly wrong with these three guys, but it's also one of the best character studies and examples of friendship that you’ll ever see onscreen. The word forgiveness isn't spoken, yet it's continually offered. This is what Cassavetes does better than anybody. You may not like it because it's not pretty, and it might make you feel somewhat queasy at times, but being uncomfortable with others as well as ourselves is something we're always striving to overcome. We never actually succeed, as life is filled with uncomfortable moments, but Cassavetes is simply one the best at meticulously detailing how human we are. One of the marvels of the film, especially at the end of a grueling two and a half hour film called HUSBANDS, is that they left out the part about actually being husbands, where one would absolutely love to hear what these guys have to say to their wives at the end, but Cassavetes doesn't include that in the film, instead it shows them as philandering morons who are no more grown up than typical teenage kids with their parents away for the weekend, where there’s nothing dishonest about that. On the contrary, with something close to a 40-50% divorce level, HUSBANDS shows the degree of suffocation and dissatisfaction associated with marriage. Self-contempt and self-loathing are part and parcel of something we all experience at some point or another. At least Cassavetes is a guy who tries to get at the root of how self deluded we are as human beings, who buy into this marriage till death do us part concept, and then don't know what we've gotten ourselves into. These guys are deluded, and at least for the moment, contemptible, especially in the eyes of their wives, where Cassavetes is relentless in showing what little reward they actually get out of this experience, yet in their minds it is magnified to this great trans-Atlantic adventure. You may not like it, but it's raw and intensely honest. This is a real male bravado movie, and their hurt feelings and insecurities and enormous inadequacies are plastered all over the screen some 20 feet high for the whole world to see, bravely hiding nothing, revealing everything, in a brilliant choreography of emotional confusion.

The film was initially a 4-hour print that was edited down to just under 3 hours, which when previewed before a live audience produced howls of laughter, where the audience obviously loved it. But this was not the feeling Cassavetes was looking for, which is more a devastating glimpse of the enveloping sadness, so despite three friends on the cover of Life magazine in May 1969, seen here: RIP: Ben Gazzara (1930-2012) | AwesomeBMovies.com, which was great publicity, he spent another year re-editing the film before it was finally released December 1970. The controversial scene in question was the bar scene, shot over the course of three days where they were drinking real beer on the set, where many of the extras didn’t have a clue what they were in for. Leola Harlow, for instance, a showgirl stripper in real life, was reduced to tears from the male bullying and abuse, evidence of a politically incorrect, misogynist theme that exists throughout the picture, but for Cassavetes, it was all about being challenged to discover new insight into the characters. Of interest, the song she sings is one the actress actually wrote. While another, John “Red” Kullers sings “Brother Can You Spare a Dime,” which quiets the house with a surprisingly effective rendition of a Depression era song, literally wiping away the tears by the end from the harsh reality of its dour essence. Before the term became fashionable, what story there is reflects a midlife crisis taking place during the same time as the completely unseen 60’s counterculture, where these guys are too old to be part of the movement, but too young to be part of the generation that they are rebelling against. They are part of the white middle class and embracing it instead of railing against it, still questioning how to find happiness in life, as the harmony and stability of the world has suddenly shifted on its axis, especially after the death of a friend, and will never be the same. Perhaps what’s most surprising is how they remain defined by their marriages, as it’s how they view themselves, so when you pull them away from their middle class homes, they’re like ships adrift without an anchor, where they each fail to live up to their own expectations of themselves, where they thought they’d be so liberated and free, yet they’re each sexually constrained, still remaining so attached to their missing wives, where at least according to Peter Falk this film is as much a story about the wives, the three women that you don’t see. Watching these men, it’s hard to visualize yourself outside the ingrained social dynamic, which has a way of paralyzing all impulses to break away, as longterm monogamous relationships are held together by old-fashioned concepts of faithfulness and fidelity, felt even subconsciously, and in places you least expect to find it.

Time Out (link lost)

One of the Cassavetes improvisations made before he began profitably subjecting the technique to genre limitations in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night and Gloria, this is a maddening mixture. Cliché is never too far away as three New York commuters, middle-aged, married and disturbed by the death of a friend, embark on a despairing odyssey (partly on a flying visit to London) of drink, sex and self-discovery. Yet for all the rambling repetitions and noisy generalisations, the film does add up to a devastatingly bleak view of the emptiness of suburban life.

City Pages [Noel Murray]

Proving that the personal style he stumbled onto with Faces was no accident, writer-director-actor John Cassavetes goes even deeper into psychodrama with this, his 1970 follow-up feature, in which Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara appear as bitter suburbanites who grieve for a mutual friend by going on a world-class bender and spilling their guts. The situation is raw, and plays out in rambling, tightly shot, improv-quality set pieces that become increasingly submersive. Cassavetes's naturalist aesthetic is sabotaged in a major way by his characters' nonstop heart-on-sleeve discourse, which sounds forced and phony, even coming from a trio of soulsick drunks. But the actors are champs: Even when these husbands are shouting every thought and impulse at one another, body language and inflection tell a different story, one of intense insecurity and self-delusion. (Expensive coats and gloves can't cloak their essential savagery.) Thirty-plus years removed from its original context, Husbands seems as much about a general collapse of civilization as about middle-class America at the dawn of the '70s--and it's precisely the film's social anthropology that saves it from being a presumptuous, overbearing bore. From the photo-album opening to the climactic scene of two men sorting out the souvenirs of their trip to London, Husbands is about freezing moments that may only be understood in retrospect.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Teddy Blanks] also seen here: notcoming.com | Husbands

A wholehearted advocation of John Cassavetes’s films is almost necessarily a defense of them. They don’t look, sound, or feel like movies, but they are as long as them (sometimes longer), and as a result are easy to dismiss as unscripted, amateurish, even boring. Such a dismissal is unfounded: the man worked hard to make his pictures as frustrating to their audiences as they are. And they were frustrating, to audiences and critics alike. Even so, he was angry with his biggest critics. He had a number of choice encounters with Pauline Kael, once famously yanking off her shoes and throwing them out the window of a moving taxicab the two were sharing. Appropriately, he tackled filmmaking with the same socially unacceptable gusto with which he tackled Kael. He would mock, confuse, and torment his actors until their faces settled into an expression he was interested in filming.

In Husbands, Cassavettes takes his own impulsive and lustful behavior and fuses it into three middle-aged Long Island commuters, three buddies—Harry, Archie, and Gus, played by Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, and Cassavetes himself, respectively—who have recently been to the funeral of a fourth. Not ready to go home to their wives and children quite yet, the three friends go on a four day bender, which starts as a relatively innocent night of grieve-drinking and ends with the men in London, picking up chicks at a casino and wrestling with their mortality, unsure of what to do next and on the brink of madness. What comes to light during their escapade is that the square life, the standard path of their day—marriage, kids, picket-fence—is stunting their passion and vigor. This revelation is precisely why it is impossible to think of Husbands being made now: our generation simply has more choices.

The movie resembles real life, but its characters don’t remind you of anybody you’ve ever met: they behave and react in ways that no person, and certainly no other movie character, would ever behave. Cassavetes was interested in emotional truth, and for him, truth and realism were mutually exclusive. It is often difficult to tell whether he scripted his movies or allowed them to be totally improvised, but Cassavetes himself insisted he always had a screenplay, and probably his method was a combination of the two. Whatever this method was, it allowed him to capture some of the most bizarre and confusing moments we have on film. There is a scene in which Gus, the character played by Cassavetes, is in bed with a tall blonde in their London hotel room: they wrestle around exhaustively, and her responses to his come-ons range from wildly kicking him to tenderly kissing him. He tells her how beautiful she is, and then pretends (or does he?) to strangle her.

This scene, like most in Husbands, goes on for way too long, is confusing, cloying, and at times infuriating. Supposedly, Cassavetes really “found” his picture in the editing room, and re-cut it after his audiences’ initial response was positive. He wanted to annoy us, to test our patience. Cassavetes despised entertainment, so when critics call Husbands directionless and overlong, to paraphrase Julian Schnabel (out of context) in the recent Sketches of Frank Gehry, it’s like watching Apocalypse Now and complaining that Robert Duvall’s acting is “over-the-top.”

After two days of drinking, shooting hoops, and swimming laps, the men decide that it might be time to go home, maybe go back to work. When Harry returns to his wife—his is the only wife we see, making him the only one of the three to actively play the role of husband—she announces that she is leaving him, but that “it’s nothing personal.” This sends him into a rage, and — in a moment that is hardly mentioned in most reviews of Husbands and the turning point for the way we view its characters — she pulls a knife on him, and he hits both her and her mother, who happens to also be in the house. This piercing scene of domestic violence ends with Gus and Archie literally dragging Harry out of the house. Gus tells him to take it easy, adding that he’s “not the first guy to beat up on his wife.”

Before this moment, we were able to concentrate on Harry, Gus and Archie as a trio: laughing with them, singing with them, drinking with them, and trying to understand the power dynamic in their relationship. But after this glimpse of home life, the movie’s title looms heavy on its shoulders. These men are husbands— bad husbands. From here, Cassavetes follows them to work and later to London, where their depravity reaches its height.

The three husbands take their anger and regret out on the women around them, but Cassavetes doesn’t once give us a wink or nudge to let us know he doesn’t approve of their behavior. To him, the husbands’ misogyny is institutional, a natural effect of society’s suppression of their individualism. The most disturbing aspect of Husbands is that it is unclear whether the director has any strong feelings about his characters’ abhorrent behavior. Any other director dabbling in moral ambiguity would rationalize his characters’ drinking and wife-beating to the point where we could cautiously sympathize, or at least understand them; Cassavetes just lays it all out in front of us, asking us to merely accept it or stop watching.

Curiously, what redeems Husbands is Cassavetes’ immensely more celebrated film A Woman Under The Influence, made four years later. Whereas the husbands, for the most part, get away with their philandering and slouch home after their long trip, Gena Rowlands’ housewife Mabel is committed to a mental institution when she undergoes a similar mid-life madness. A Woman Under the Influence is the feminist counterpoint to Husbands: it shows us a society that condemns women but lets men off the hook for the same type of irrational behavior. Sympathizing with Mabel is easy: she is the oppressed party in the traditional husband-wife relationship. A Woman Under the Influence is a movie that makes us feel a little more comfortable about watching Husbands. Which, of course, Cassavetes would have hated.

Movie Review - Husbands - Film: Very Middle-Class Friendship ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times, also seen here: New York Times and here: The New York Times

"Husbands," John Cassavetes's first film as a director since "Faces," is a personal, almost private movie that is devoted to the exploration of the mysteries of a very middle-class American friendship. Like "Faces," which was rambling and funny and accurate, and which I admired, the new film demonstrates a concern for panicky, inarticulate squares that is so unpatronizing that it comes close to being reverential in a solemnly religious sense.

"Husbands," however, also puts one's tolerance of simulated cinéma vérité to the test. It is almost unbearably long. It is a narrative film without any real narrative, and although it is a movie about three characters, those characters are seen almost exclusively in terms of their limiting relationship. It's as if someone decided to photograph a tug-of-war and photographed only the rope between the contestants.

Gus (Cassavetes), Harry (Ben Gazzara) and Archie (Peter Falk), commuting cronies from Port Washington, L. I., meet at the funeral of the fourth member of their group, a man taken off before his time by a coronary. They are shaken up, not only by the loss of their friend and the awareness that it could have happened to any one of them, but also by their own survival into imminent middle age, that dreadful time when it is suddenly apparent that what is, probably is the way it's always going to be. Archie would have liked to be a professional athlete "You get sweaty and feel good and you're with guys you like."

In a four-day bender that follows the funeral. Gus and Harry and Archie start drinking and talking in New York and wind up in London, where they drink and talk some more and make out with three unusually attractive pick-ups. They continue to drink and talk and, finally, come to the end of a very expensive weekend. Archie would like to stay on, but Gus points out that among them they have "three garages, five kids and two lovely wives." The only problem, he adds bleakly, "is going home and making love to them."

"Husbands" seems not only to be about friendship, but also a product of friendship—that of the three stars who react to one another with an extraordinary intensity that seldom is as meaningful to us as it is to them. As the movie rolls on, through scenes of epic non-communication, including one extended interlude in a men's room where Gus and Archie take turns vomiting up a night's worth of beer, a kind of frustration settles over the movie, like that experienced by the three friends.

Harry beats up a telephone booth and then turns to his friends and admits that although his wife is good in bed, he loves Gus and Archie more. Archie almost ruins his night out in London when he recoils in horror to the open-mouth kiss offered by his girl. In Port Washington, that sort of thing is frowned upon, at least between strangers. They are frustrated not only by the dim present, but also by attitudes established in the past.

The movie, in turn, becomes frustrated by the form chosen by Mr. Cassavetes. He lets every scene continue long past closing time, as if in hopes of grabbing, perhaps accidently, some found truth. The effect of "Husbands" eventually is like that of being at a party, after the liquor and wit have run out, and when nobody can quite bring himself to leave.

With the exception of Harry, who is seen briefly in very funny, uproarious battle with his Wife ("I'm just not comfortable in front of you," she tells him, adding "it's nothing personal"), Mr. Cassavetes doesn't let us see the men except as a team, as effectively isolated from wives and family as Arctic explorers. This explains, I think, the sudden relief and effectiveness of a closing scene in which Gus returns home, where he is met by his 11-year-old son and his 2-year-old daughter who, for no visible reason, bursts into tears. It may not be the only spontaneous moment in "Husbands," but it is tender and sad, and it affected me more than anything else in the film.

It affected me, I suspect, because like Gus, I was exhausted by the manic horse-play with which the husbands react to one another, and which is the ritual that represents the exchange of their love. Gus and Harry and Archie cuff one another a lot, and, when drunk, they are given to sloppy kisses. When they swim, they dunk one another under the water, and when it's all over, they are tired, but not much wiser—which is pretty much the sum and substance of "Husbands."

The Making of Husbands (1969-1970) Ray Carney’s discussion of HUSBANDS

3:12 PM a Ray Carney post at Allan MacInnis’s Alienated in Vancouver website on the cut footage from HUSBANDS

Click here to hear the audio of twelve minutes that were cut at the end of the singing scene and the beginning of the men's room scene from HUSBANDS

Cassavetes’s Husbands: Death, Funerals, and New York at bavatuesdays Jim Groom from bavatuesdays (YouTube clips were unfortunately removed)

Wellington Film Society - HUSBANDS Nigel Andrew from Sight & Sound, Spring 1971

Sparks In Electric Jelly: John Cassavetes' Husbands Jez Winship

HUSBANDS Review: John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk Dan Schneider from Alt Film Guide, also seen here: Husbands/DVD Review/Dan Schneider - Cosmoetica and here: Dan Schneider - The Spinning Image

The Confusion of Husbands | The House Next Door - Slant Magazine Chris Gisonny

John Cassavetes and the Shoes of Pauline Kael - Like Anna ... Filmbrain from Like Anna Karina’s Sweater

Husbands review | Little White Lies Matt Thrift, also seen here: Cinephile: Review : Husbands

Husbands - Turner Classic Movies Sean Axmaker

Personal Criticism : The New Yorker Richard Brody from The New Yorker, August 3, 2009

EatSleepLiveFilm.com Review: Husbands Luke Richardson

Husbands | PopMatters Stephen Snart

Welcome to Emanuel Levy » Peter Falk Tribute: Husbands

A comment on Peter Falk's finest moments: Husbands and A Woman ... Robert Fowler on Peter Falk from The World Socialist Web Site

Life and nothing but... Cassavetes' Husbands | British Film Institute Geoff Andrew from BFI, September 25, 2012

Eventually, This Will Be a Review of the Movie 'Husbands' - Smug Film Greg DeLiso

The QNetwork [James Kendrick] DVD Review

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson

Husbands | DVD | HomeVideo Review | The A.V. Club Nathan Rabin

Film-Forward Review: Husbands (1970) DVD Review by Scott David Briggs

John Cassavetes' Long-Lost And Freewheelin' 'Husbands' To Hit ... DVD Review by The Playlist

cinemadaily | Cassavetes' "Husbands" On DVD Today | Filmmakers ... Andy Lauer from indieWIRE

IFC.com [Michael Atkinson] DVD Review

John Cassavetes's Husbands on DVD : The New Yorker Richard Brody, August 10, 2009

Honda's Sci-Fi, Cassavetes' Husbands, Tati at Play – DVDs for the ... Sean Axmaker, also seen here: seanax.com » DVDs for 8/18/09 – Runaway Husbands, Undercover ...

DVD Verdict [Roy Hrab]

Jason Bailey Fourth Row Center

Seminal Cinema Outfit: Watch Cassavetes' 'Husbands' – Cassavetes ..

Husbands by John Cassavetes | Ephemeral Digest

Husbands Review - TV Guide

Cassavetes' Works: Husbands critical reactions to the film from Ray Carney’s website

• View topic - Husbands (Cassavetes, 1970) - CriterionForum.org film discussion site

Time Out Dave Calhoun

Husbands – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Husbands – review | Film | The Observer - The Guardian Philip French from The Observer

Husbands, John Cassavetes, 131mins (12A) - Reviews - Films - The ... Anthony Quinn from The Independent

Cleveland Press [Tony Mastroianni] obviously not feeling the love

Baltimore City Paper Bret McCabe

DVD Reviews / Husbands (Extended Cut) - SFGate John Stanley

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1970

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1998

DVDs - Men Carouse; Women Clean - Films by Cassavetes and ... Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 20, 2009

Husbands - Cassavetes Falk Gazzara - DVDBeaver.com Gary W. Tooze

34-Minute Clip of JOHN CASSAVETES, PETER FALK AND BEN GAZZARA TAKE OVER 'THE DICK CAVETT SHOW,' 1970

MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ A 98

USA (115 mi) 1971

It's never as clear as it is in the movies. People don't know what they are doing most of the time, myself included. They don't know what they want or feel. It's only in the movies that they know what their problems are and have game plans for dealing with them. All my life I've fought against clarity – all those stupid definitive answers. Phooey on a formula life, on slick solutions. It's never easy. And I don't think people really want their lives to be easy. It's a United States sickness. In the end it only makes things more difficult. —John Cassavetes

You know, the world is full of silly asses who crave your body. I mean, not just your body, but your heart, your soul, your mind, everything! They can't live until they get it. And you know, once they get it, they don't really want it. —Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands)

I think about you so much, I forget to go to the bathroom! —Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel)

MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ was, oddly enough, Universal Studios response to the youth market, where the success of MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) and EASY RIDER (1969) opened the door for low budget, independent films that were less conventional. Ned Tannen in the youth division of the studio approved the script in record time and appropriated $678,000 to start shooting within two months. According to Cassavetes, most of the “youth” films of the period were not any better than the movies they replaced, where young directors were equally enthralled by the status and power of established Hollywood stars, so even though he pitched his idea as a low-budget youth film, he seethed at the idea that his films had a targeted youth market, countering “I think of youth being life.” Cassavetes hand picked his own production team, including lifelong friend Al Ruban and Paul Donnelly, former head of production at Universal. More significantly, rather than operate in the standard, impersonalized, businesslike way of shooting a studio picture, Cassavetes personalized every aspect of the filmmaking process, making it a family affair, casting his wife Gena Rowlands as Minnie and lifelong friend Seymour Cassel as Moskowitz for the two leads, also his wife’s mother (Lady Rowlands as Georgia Moore) as well as his own (Katherine Cassavetes as Sheba Moskowitz) for their respective parents, using his wife’s real brother David Rowlands as the Minister that, of course, forgets his sister’s name at the altar. Elizabeth Deering, the girl who has a one-night fling with Moskowitz is, in fact, Cassel’s real wife, while Elsie Ames who plays Florence, Minnie’s coworker at the art museum, is his mother-in-law. Five members of producer Paul Donnelly’s family appear, also two of Cassel’s own children and three of Cassavetes’s children appear in the final scene. Cassavetes himself plays Jim, the married man having an affair with Minnie, while Jim’s kitchen is Cassavetes own home kitchen, Minnie’s bedroom is their home bedroom (also seen in Faces), while Florence’s apartment is Cassel’s own apartment.

A wonderful entry point to Cassavetes films, though it’s not available on DVD (likely due to the unauthorized—meaning not paid for—Hollywood film clips used of Bogart), as this is largely a film about films, easily one of Cassavetes funniest, most optimistic, uplifting and happiest, and while no filmmaker had a greater distaste for formula, this is one of the few Cassavetes films with a genuinely happy ending. Yet underneath the frolicking set-ups and madcap humor is an ambitiously honest picture about lonely people trying to discover love, breaking down the stereotypes that set us up to fail in matters of love and relationships, where leading men are required to be handsome, charming, suave and debonair. When we first meet Minnie, she is at a screening of CASABLANCA (1942) with her older friend Florence, where afterwards Minnie confesses she likes Humphrey Bogart while Florence likes Claude Rains, “but not so much the girl (Ingrid Bergman).” Returning to Florence’s apartment afterwards, the two have a few glasses of wine where Minnie opens up about how compared to the movies, her personal life is a disappointment, having no luck with men, as there’s no one out there to sweep you off your feet. “Movies are a conspiracy, they set you up to believe in things. There’s no Charles Boyer in my life. I never even met a Charles Boyer. I never met Clark Gable. I never met Humphrey Bogart. I’ve never met any of them. You know who I meet. I mean, they don’t exist. That’s the truth.” This may as well be the theme of the film, the deconstruction of the Hollywood myth, using a classical screwball comedy genre as a love story that goes haywire, where in addition to the quirky love story, featuring zany characters and the usual slapstick gags and jokes, the story is infused with a painfully evident realism, described as a “screwball comedy where people actually get hurt.” In this film, everywhere they turn, characters are running into trouble, where even Seymour, a man who loves to park cars for a living, has his own truck scraped by an inattentive car lot attendant (played by one of producer Paul Donnelly’s sons), “Sorry about that brick wall, sir.”

An oddball Los Angeles romance about an impulsive, loud-mouthed, long-haired, truck-driving parking lot attendant, Seymour Moskowitz, wearing a giant walrus mustache, and Minnie Moore, a radiantly beautiful but introverted middle-class blond who works at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, always seen hiding behind her sunglasses, who reaches the end of a dead-end relationship with an overly jealous married man, played, appropriately enough, by the director. She finds love and romance in a sequence of connected scenes, jumping from one event, immediately cutting into another, with hilarity, brilliant dialogue, some superlative acting along with gut-wrenching drama holding it all together. The origin of the film may have come from an earlier 1964 television series called Who Killed Annie Foran?, where Seymour Cassel appeared as a parking lot attendant, co-starring John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. Several months after the film's release, Universal Studios apparently decided to shorten the running time by cutting out a scene near the beginning of the film, even though it violated their contract with Cassavetes. All subsequent releases since that time are still missing this scene, while Ray Carney claims the studio cut a “morning after” scene with Irish (Holly Near), a girl Seymour meets in a bar and gets beat up just for talking to her. This follows an earlier scene where Seymour is watching another Bogart movie, THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), where he and Minnie view Bogart pictures differently based upon their own characters, where Seymour sees Bogart as a fiercely independent tough guy that makes his own rules, irrespective of the feelings of others, while Minnie sees him as a self-sacrificing romantic that uses an outer veneer of toughness to hide his real feelings of tenderness and love. The film offers insight into Cassavetes’ own relationship with Rowlands, where they come from completely opposite worlds, one the son of a Greek immigrant, the other the daughter of a Midwest banker and state legislator, where Rowlands actually aspired to become an actress after watching Marlene Dietrich onscreen in THE BLUE ANGEL (1930), where movies are the connecting tissue of their marriage.

The film is built upon the disillusionment of love, where Minnie has grown tired of men, “I don’t like men. They smile too much. You see a lot of teeth,” as she’s continually let down by their lying and deceiving ways, where in the end they’re never romantic enough, and Seymour is continually getting beaten up whenever he exposes his feelings, though the scene with his wife (Deering) is touching for the tenderness it expresses. Nothing exposes this disillusionment quite like two classic scenes that literally bleed into one another. One is the worst date scene ever, a blind date from hell, where Minnie goes out to lunch on a blind date (chosen by Florence) with Zelmo Swift (Val Avery, also seen behaving crudely and reprehensibly in Faces). Zelmo is so loud and overwrought, taking candor to new levels, where he pours out his heart with a continuing stream of over-revealing confessions about his own life’s personal failings that would drive anyone away, making such a scene, “Blondes! What is it with you blondes? You all have some Swedish suicide impulse?” getting louder and more coarse with his language until Minnie gets up to leave, embarrassed to be seen with the man. In the parking lot afterwards, he heaps on still more abuse, where Seymour attempts to intervene and gets clobbered before bloodying Zelmo’s nose, rescuing the fair damsel in distress by whisking her away in his broken down truck, where Seymour has a penchant for making U-turns in the middle of traffic, but in an impromptu moment takes her to Pink’s Hot Dogs afterwards where she’s so distraught she can’t eat a hot dog or even speak, but then he tells her she has a way of looking down on people, which sends her away in a huff, while Seymour winds up chasing her down the sidewalk in his truck, angrily telling her “I gotta’ be a dummy to get myself wrapped up for a Minnie Moore!” before driving her back to work. If that’s not bad enough, Jim is at the museum waiting for her, bringing his oldest son with him to witness that he’s breaking up with her, as his own wife attempted to cut her wrists in front of the kids earlier that morning after he was out all night with her. The tastelessness and cruelty of this moment is written all over her face when she contemptuously utters “Are you kidding me?” in the dignified manner only Gena Rowlands can achieve. In little more than an hour, she’s hit rock bottom.

This is a film that builds romance through emotional destabilization, wildly swerving from toughness to tenderness, where Minnie and Seymour have a volatile relationship that continually seems unlikely, yet before you know it, there’s Minnie, feeling braver, creeping ever closer to Seymour in a wonderful scene where she sadly tells him “Everything used to make me smile. I’ve noticed I don’t smile as much as I used to.” Nothing about these two together makes any sense, as they’ve already been through a train wreck, and when they kiss you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, as every romantic scene is interrupted by immediate concerns that they’re doing the wrong thing. “Seymour, that’s just not the face I’m in love with,” yet fearlessly, she takes her chances anyway, setting up an insta-date in C.C. Brown’s ice-cream parlor, where the two couldn’t be on more opposite wavelengths, yet they obviously feel something for each other. Whenever they go out on conventional dates, there are no perfect moments like we see in other movies, where instead there’s an ironic use of Johann Strauss’s infamous The Blue Danube Waltz from Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), Herbert von Karajan conducts The Blue Danube Waltz YouTube (10:34) as they’re driving through the streets of Los Angeles, where the film is an entertaining roller coaster ride of their ups and downs, where Minnie has her doubts, but Seymour knows this is the real thing, where he gets her halfway up the stairs and is so overcome with emotion that he insists right then and there, “Sing a song, take off your clothes, do something!” where they end up singing softly to one another, occasionally off-key, or one of them can’t remember the lyrics “I love you truly, truly dear. Life with its sorrows, life with its tears...” It’s a beautifully fragile moment where they eventually meet in the bedroom, not to have sex, but to call their respective mothers, with Seymour singing tenderly throughout with that puppy dog look in his eyes. The meeting of the mothers is a hilarious moment of off-kilter humor, with Sheba Moskowitz suspecting Minnie must be pregnant, then railing against her son’s lack of ambitions, “Albert Einstein he’s not. Pretty he’s not. Look at that face. A future he doesn’t have. He parks cars for a living. Look at my son. He’s a bum.” It’s simply more of the emotional terrain they must learn to navigate, where this is a film about perseverance and believing in yourself, trusting your own instincts, and following your heart. The final sequence, though brief, is a purely classic Cassavetes ode to joy.

Time Out Capsule Review Geoff Andrew, also seen here: Time Out

An idiosyncratic romance, and a far lighter movie than is usual from Cassavetes. Detailing the problems that background and character bring to a relationship, he creates a captivatingly witty and sympathetic picture of a pair of misfits deciding to make a go of it together despite numerous incompatibilities and adversities. As always, it is the performances that dominate, with their sensitively-felt, naturalistic speech patterns and gestures; and for all its optimism, the film is still centred around a core of loneliness, while Cassavetes also contrasts the difficulties of real life with the idealised glamour purveyed by Hollywood (an attack on the system that could barely accommodate him?). The result is an understated and intimate view of two unexceptional people that is only sentimental when the characters themselves are sentimental.

not coming to a theater near you Cullen Gallagher

When we first meet Minnie Moore, she is at a repertory screening of Casablanca with one of her museum co-workers, Florence. As the movie ends and the lights come up, the two women are seemingly elated: Minnie likes Humphrey Bogart, and Florence has a yen for Claude Rains. Back at Florence’s apartment, the two indulge in wine (the only thing to eat or drink in the entire place) and open up about their disappointment with both their personal lives and the movie, and the way the two are interconnected. “Movies are a conspiracy,” Minnie says. “I never even met a Charles Boyer. I never met Clark Gable. I never met Humphrey Bogart. I’ve never met any of them. You know who I meet. I mean, they don’t exist. That’s the truth.”

Minnie’s speech becomes the foundational principle for Minnie and Moskowitz, a revising of the classical Hollywood “screwball comedy” that goes decidedly against the grain of the genre’s archetypes. Writer and director John Cassavetes has constructed a narrative that contains many of the elements that characterized the genre—a quirky love story, zany characters, a whimsical plot, slapstick gags, and a romantic bond that trumps any rational explanation—but he has infused them with a sobering, painful realism. I’ve heard the film explained as a “screwball comedy where people actually get hurt.” It’s a spot-on assessment, one that is perfectly in line with the world of Cassavetes where laughter, more often than not, signals pain. Between all the slapping, punching, pushing, and hollering, it is sometimes hard to remember how this movie even qualifies as a comedy. Humor, however, is never fully absent from Minnie and Moskowitz: it is present in Cassavetes’ tender concern for his characters, his affection for their many foibles, and his humanistic embracing of their actions (even when they are less than ideal).

Two of Cassavetes’ regular actors make up the titular duo. Seymour Cassel is the bushy-moustached Seymour Moskowitz, a New York transplant new to Los Angeles who makes his living as a parking lot attendant for restaurants. Gena Rowlands (Cassavetes’ wife) is Minnie Moore, an introverted employee for the county museum who hides behind her oversized dark sunglasses. The two of them meet after one of Minnie’s blind dates goes violently wrong. Seymour comes to her rescue and not only gets beaten up but also loses his job. Seymour and Minnie’s first impromptu date (at LA’s famous Pink’s Hot Dog Stand) doesn’t go over much better: Minnie refuses to eat the hot dog, and Seymour winds up chasing her down the sidewalk in his truck.

“I gotta’ be a dummy to get myself wrapped up for a Minnie Moore!” exclaims Seymour, while Minnie protests, “That’s not the face I dreamed of!” Though they fight it (and each other), the pair can’t deny their attraction for one another—or explain it, for that matter. One of the underlying themes in the movie is the difficulty of expressing love either verbally or physically. When Minnie is around, Seymour can talk about anything, except what he really wants to. Minnie, on the other hand, closes right up and can hardly speak. The two of them try to do the “conventional” things people do on dates – go dancing, look at the stars, eat ice cream – but none of them provide the opportunity for that magical harmony between two lovers, the sort of perfect moment one finds in so many movies.

Minnie and Seymour’s inability to find a way to mutually express their love without causing a black eye or a busted nose leads to one of the film’s philosophical quandaries: how can love exist if it doesn’t show itself somehow? After an accident-less swimming interlude, Seymour is so desperate to prolong their newly found joy that he compels Minnie to “sing a song, take off your clothes, do something!” But when they sing it is out of tune, and neither of them can remember the proper lyrics. In this moment, the two of them realize that the truest sign of their love isn’t in the right notes or the right words, but in the actual process of trying and failing but never giving up. Society may find it more proper to say, “I love you,” but who is to say that Seymour is any less romantic when he tells Minnie, “I think about you so much I forget to go to the bathroom”? Loving relationships outside of the bounds of social propriety have been integral to the screwball doctrine from It Happened One Night to The Lady Eve, and in it John Cassavetes (ever the independent spirit) has found at least one thing he can agree with Hollywood on.

Cinetarium [Jack Gattanella]

Cambridge Book: Minnie and Moskowitz Ray Carney

Cassavetes on Cassavetes - Page 277 - Google Books Result (pdf format)

Minnie and Moskowitz Ray Carnie’s discussion of MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ Minnie and Moskowitz

Alternative Film Guide (Dan Schneider)

DVD Verdict [Nicholas Sylvain]

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley] also seen here: FilmFanatic.org

Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews Harry Knowles, with Seymour Cassel introducing the film

AudioVideoRevolution.com DVD review Bill Warren

Film Freak Central Bill Chambers

The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

CinemaFunk Aaron Weiss

• View topic - Husbands (Cassavetes, 1970) - CriterionForum.org film discussion group, December 7, 2005

Variety

New York Times [Vincent Canby] also seen here: The New York Times

COLUMBO – TV episode

USA all 8 Second Season episodes, one episode released September 17, 1972, “Étude in Black” (120 mi) 1972 d: Nicholas Colasanto (the coach in Cheers), starring John Cassavetes

User Reviews from imdb Author: blanche-2 from United States

This is another of my favorite Columbos. It sports a top-notch cast, including John Cassavetes, who was never handsomer or sexier, Anjanette Comer, Myrna Loy, and Blythe Danner. Now here's something I've always wondered - had Gwenyth Paltrow been born when this episode was shot, or was Danner pregnant at the time? Thanks to IMDb, I have my answer - she was five months' pregnant. Now I can really feel ancient.

Cassavetes plays a brilliant conductor whose marriage to Danner was apparently to use the social connections of her mother (Loy). He has a mistress on the side, Anjanette Comer, a prominent pianist, but she announces she wants more. She's sick of being back street. On the night of their concert, he gets rid of her and makes it look like suicide. Columbo picks up a few problems immediately. One thing he notices: "You have a beautiful woman here - bedroom eyes - she has money, a body, and a career. Where's the man?" It's wonderful to see Falk and good friend Cassavetes together. There's a very funny episode at the vet with Columbo's Bassett. Everyone in the cast is great.

This is one of the episodes that made Columbo the classic series it became.

User Reviews from imdb Author: Vaughan Birbeck from Scarborough, England

The Columbo formula - as everyone knows - requires the great one to wear down his opponent almost to the verge of a nervous breakdown until they make the fatal error that reveals their guilt.

For me the great moment in any Columbo story is the point when he knows who the murderer is, then has to set about proving it. In this film 'the moment' comes when he sees Alex Benedict replacing a flower in his tail coat, revealing he had been at the victim's home earlier that night. From there the pursuit is on.

In 'Etude in Black' Columbo seems almost sadistic in his pursuit of Benedict. He 'turns up' at his home (twice, the first time supposedly just for an autograph), at his garage (actually sitting in Benedict's E-Type and revving the engine to pieces, having told the mechanic he was 'a friend') and at the Hollywood Bowl. He is constantly 'sidetracked' in his questioning and 'forgets' to mention the investigation has been changed from suicide to murder and that he is now in charge of the case.

One blot in the film is Cassavetes 'conducting' of the orchestra. There's more to it than waving your arms about. He could at least have tried to keep time with the music. We're being asked to believe this man is a world-famous musician and on this evidence Alex Benedict couldn't direct traffic. Perhaps the pieces for the soundtrack were only chosen after filming.

This is a classic Columbo episode that pairs Peter Falk with his long-time friend and collaborator John Cassavetes. I actually think the scene where Columbo asks Benedict about the cost of his house, furniture and how much he earns was improvised between them. I can see the set-up: "Columbo has turned up unexpectedly at your house, you know he wants to ask you something but you don't know what it is. You have to avoid giving him any real information."

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

DVD Verdict [Maurice Cobbs]

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

DVD Verdict [Patrick Bromley]

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review, Season 2 Cosette

An Evening Illuminated [Iain Stott]

Boston Phoenix [Matt Ashare]

A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE A 99

USA (147 mi) 1974

I’m very concerned about the depiction of women on the screen. It’s related to their being either high or low class concubines, and the only question is when or where will they go to bed, and with whom or how many. There’s nothing to do with the dreams of women, or of woman as the dream, nothing to do with the quirky part of her, the wonder of her...I’m sure we could have made a more successful film if we had depicted Mabel’s life as rougher, more brutal; if it made statements so that people could definitely take sides. But along the way, I’d have to look at myself and say, ‘Yes, we were successful at creating another horror in the world.’ I don’t know anyone who has had such a terrible time that she doesn’t smile ever, that she doesn’t have time to love, open her eyes, think about the details of life. Something wonderful happens all the time, even at the height of tragedy...I wanted to show that too...It’s never as clear as it is in the movies. People don’t know what they’re doing most of the time, myself included. They don’t know what they want or feel. It’s only in the movies that they know what their problems are and have game plans for dealing with them. All my life I’ve fought against clarity – all those stupid definitive answers. Phooey on the formula life, on slick solutions. It’s never easy. And I don’t think people really want their lives to be easy. It’s a United States sickness. In the end it makes things more difficult.

—John Cassavetes

Along with Faces (1968), these are the two most emotionally exhaustive works in the Cassavetes repertoire, and the most difficult to experience, where afterwards you feel fatigued and emotionally spent, though the uncomfortable structure of the film, continually built around ensemble pieces spiraling out of control, resembles Husbands (1970). While it’s something of a choreography of mood changes, it’s arguably Cassavetes’ most acclaimed film, though the New York critics loathed it when it was released, forcing Cassavetes to distribute the film himself, eventually doubling the box office receipts of Faces (with profits paying for most of the production costs of his next two films), where American Film Institute students working for free comprised most of the crew, including cinematographer Caleb Deschanel who was later fired on the set, taking nearly the entire crew with him, as they all regarded Cassavetes as impossible to work with, as he completely dismissed their working methods. Originally written by the director as a theater piece, designed as three plays, each to be performed over three separate nights for Ben Gazarra and the unparalleled Gena Rowlands, who offers a towering performance, but the Academy Award was given to Ellen Burstyn in the more sweetly conventional Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), where the plays were eventually turned into a film, as Rowlands felt the daily performances of this role would be too demanding, that no one could survive such a harrowing test of endurance. She plays Mabel Longhetti, someone without inhibitions, a funny, seductive and enchanting woman, who, unlike other films like Rolf de Heer’s THE QUIET ROOM (1996) or Alain Berliner’s MA VIE EN ROSE (1997), which feature parents without the imagination to understand their children, Mabel has plenty of imagination to spare, but is caught in a world gone wrong. “She’s not crazy, she’s unusual.” But no one is really listening, no one understands her, in one of Rowland’s greatest and most vulnerable roles, easily her most human, a misfit among misfits, a working class housewife’s descent into a mental breakdown, surrounded by all the so-called “loving” people who drove her there. She wants so much, wants to care so much, driven to despair by her own unrealized expectations. Frustrations, embarrassments, and disappointments just fill the screen in this film, an endless rhythm of giant mood swings, an emotional symphony played out before our eyes, where Maria Callas opens the film with the music of opera, foreshadowing the demonstrative passions to come. Rowlands pleaded with her husband for help in understanding her character, growing more and more irritated when he refused, literally glaring at him, angry at the way he was treating her, but somehow all that anger dissipated offscreen as her onscreen persona was pure innocence and vulnerability.

John Cassavetes is connected to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary's Baby (1968), a film he despised, by the way, playing the lying and deceiving husband that drugs his wife Rosemary to conceive the devil’s child, using a flashback-style of recurring dreams that slowly become Rosemary’s reality, where she is left alone to contend with and ultimately embrace a hellish nightmare that becomes her life, with no possible way out. It’s considered one of the great psychological horror films. Less than a decade later, Cassavetes writes this film, with critic Molly Haskell calling it “The biggest piece of garbage I’ve ever seen,” yet it’s easily one of the most frighteningly cruel films ever made, scarier perhaps even than the Polanski horror epic, yet it’s a love story, but one with brutal interior ramifications. Peter Falk, who partially funded the movie from earnings from the television series Colombo (1968 – 2003) and who plays against type, is Mabel’s overbearing husband Nick, a more introverted, closed-in man, a city sewer worker who brings the entire hard-hat work crew home with him after a midnight shift, where they sit around the kitchen table for a spaghetti breakfast. Mabel wants to like everyone, draw them out of their shells, and appears to be succeeding, as one of the black workers, none other than older brother Hugh Heard from Shadows (1959), is singing Italian opera from Aida, where she literally stares down the guy’s throat to find out where all that dramatic power is coming from, but when she gets too friendly the mood shifts instantly when Nick, embarrassed by her somewhat kooky display of affection, yells at her to “Sit your ass down!” clearing the house instantly in a moment of complete embarrassment. Yet afterwards Nick tells her she did nothing wrong, but she’s overcome by the fear of getting screamed at and humiliated in front of company, where Nick’s abusive habit of trying to control every situation by yelling and inflicting demeaning behavior has a way of sending mixed messages, where often the emotional circuitry gets confused, leaving Mabel a nervous wreck.

Having worked through the night, Nick is trying to get some sleep afterwards, but is interrupted by a visit from Grandma and the kids, with the kids jumping all over his bed wanting to play, but this time, Mabel yells at them to get away, ordering Grandma to take them to school. In an immediate mood shift, after the kids leave, the house is stunningly quiet, with Mabel quickly realizing, “Boy, I can hardly wait for the kids to come home from school. All of a sudden I miss everyone.” In a truly wonderful scene, Mabel can be seen in mismatched clothes jumping up and down in the middle of the street, excitedly waiting after school for her kid’s school bus, where the anticipation is warmhearted and joyful, throwing them a party when they get home with the neighbor’s kids. She plays them the music to Swan Lake, asking the straight-laced neighbor Mr. Jensen (Mario Gallo) if he dances, “Kids, that’s Swan Lake, you know, the dying swan. C’mon and die for Mr. Jensen.” One by one, the kids drop like flies, Dying Swan - YouTube (1:23). But Mr. Jensen can only handle so much of this pure anarchy, so perfectly realized with Mabel’s chubby daughter Maria (Christina Grisanti, real life daughter of one of the hard-hats) running around the house butt naked as the theme quickly changes to a costume party. In utter disbelief at how out of control everything is, Mr. Jensen orders his kids to leave (with Xan Cassavetes, the older daughter playing one of the Jensen kids, while Mabel’s oldest son Tony is actually the son of Seymour Cassel), where the mood swings from innocent happiness to a stunning nightmare, as the party ends in a fight with Nick slugging the neighbor, yelling he’s going to kill him, then slugging Mabel, threatening to kill her. It’s an amazing turnaround.

From utter turmoil, it only get worse, as Nick calls the psychiatrist to have her committed, believing his wife is deliriously out of control, as he simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to understand her, as for him, everything has to be spelled out in black and white terms, where as the man he gets to decide what’s what. The beauty of the entire children sequence is that it was delightfully innocent fun, where the kids were happily playing along with each other, and only the parents got upset. The degree of horror displayed in this scene is utterly chilling, one of the ugliest scenes on film, especially once Nick’s mother shows up (Katherine Cassavetes, the director’s mother), adding fuel to the fire in an emotional roller coaster of shifting emotions, urging the doctor to take her away. While Nick pretends to have a change of heart, as Mabel becomes suddenly afraid they’re all conspiring against her, but the real instigator is his mother pleading with the doctor to give her a sedating shot to shut her up, ranting at the top of her lungs “This woman is crazy!” Of course, the compliant doctor, little more than a weasel of the establishment, willingly obeys, signing the order for a 6-month institutionalization, becoming a socially imposed order that is nothing more than insanity itself imposed upon Mabel. As emotionally traumatized as she is, she is the voice of clarity in this family, but no one listens, ruling with an iron fist, like a totalitarian government imposing their control. Of note, Cassavetes was not aware what direction this scene would take, as he left it up to the actors and was susprised that Nick allowed Mabel to be institutionalized, Peter Falk’s explanation was that Rowlands was so superb that he didn’t want to interrupt her performance, and by the time he realized what was happening it was too late. Cassavetes, of course, never bought that explanation, believing Nick was just being over-controlling, but was happy the scene erupted into a life force of its own.

Perhaps worst of all, the kids watch their mother get sent away for reasons they can’t understand. Without Mabel in the picture, we’re forced to witness Nick’s sorry excuse for fatherhood, where he is more like a drill sergeant, ordering his kids around, dragging them this way and that, feeding them beer as he feebly tries to apologize and justify his actions to them, and is just a pathetic disgrace for a parent. In yet another mood swing, Nick throws a grandiose party for Mabel’s return 6 month’s later, but realizing her potential social awkwardness, convinced by his mother that it would be a bad idea, he throws everyone out at the last minute except for the immediate family, which gathers around Mabel like a witches coven from Rosemary's Baby, all staring at her where she’s literally petrified to move, analyzing her every wince and murmur, repeating like a mantra for her to relax, take it easy, not to over exert herself, basically driving her so crazy she orders them all to go. But no one listens to her until she starts singing to herself, utterly ignoring them all, off into her own little world. When they finally do leave, she makes a terrible attempt to cut herself, saved by Nick with the kids jumping all over her, where she’s subjected to yet another slap from Nick. Then, in a final inexplicable mood shift, with blood still dripping from her cut hand, Mabel tucks her children gently and lovingly into bed, putting the dishes away, and turning out the lights, as life goes on while an original piano improvisation that played at the opening is heard again, this time adding kazoos. The piano music by Bo Harwood is raw and simple, perfectly matching the naturalistic mood, and accordingly adds a timeless simplicity to the original score.

This is a transforming film about what makes us so different from one another, with Nick barking out orders, wanting to control Mabel’s lunacy while at the same time encouraging it, and Mabel, the vulnerable, dying swan who pays the cost for not holding back, who means well and thinks she can charm the world by continuously being motivated by a love for everyone she meets, where neither have malice in their hearts, but both cause each other severe emotional harm. Especially chilling is how the film reveals the emptiness of those in charge, who have the full force of authority to get their way, no matter what price, even if it destroys a loved one. It's a nightmarish story and some feminists may see this as ultimately an abusive one, but the unvarnished truth is the couple does love each other, each continuously trying to do better, and it does show the lengths that people will have to go to find love. While there are only subtle references to Mabel’s medicine cabinet, such as an evening when Mabel goes out drinking alone and gets completely blitzed, this movie was made at a time when diet pills as uppers (amphetamines, speed) and downers (valium, barbiturates) were commonly available and even normal in middle class American homes, usually making matters much worse in combination with alcohol. Mabel’s fragile insecurity is driven by an insatiable need to be needed and appreciated, where she simply loves too much, while her immediate family’s reactionary instincts drive her even further off the edge. This is truly an expression of undying love, as in the end, little has changed for the better, as the conflicts they cause each other remain thoroughly entrenched in their lives, yet you feel somehow this couple is inseparable, that they will find the will to survive and persevere through whatever emotional cost they have to pay if it means staying together. This is an unforgettable film that creates such unimaginable emotional depth, described by many as one of the films of the decade. Of note, in post-release comments, the director interestingly pointed out that in real life, Rowlands plays Nick to Cassavetes’ Mabel.

A Woman Under the Influence | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

John Cassavetes's 1974 masterpiece, and one of the best films of its decade. Cassavetes stretches the limits of his narrative—it's the story of a married couple, with the wife hedging into madness—to the point where it obliterates the narrator: it's one of those extremely rare movies that seem found rather than made, in which the internal dynamics of the drama are completely allowed to dictate the shape and structure of the film. The lurching, probing camera finds the same fascination in moments of high drama and utter triviality alike—and all of those moments are suspended painfully, endlessly. Still, Cassavetes makes the viewer's frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen. With Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974) - The Criterion Collection

One of Cassavetes' best films, with a suitably ambiguous title for a plot that manages to be political in its social implications without succumbing to any crass statements. Rowlands and Falk play a lower middle class couple with three kids, whose combined temperaments produce a potentially explosive emotional energy. He can let off steam in his work; she tries to do it at home, but ends up by turning her household into a cross between an encounter group and an adventure playground, to the fury of neighbours and mother-in-law. The brilliance of the film lies in its sympathetic and humorous exposure of social structure. Rowlands unfortunately overdoes the manic psychosis at times, and lapses into a melodramatic style which is unconvincing and unsympathetic; but Falk is persuasively insane as the husband; and the result is an astonishing, compulsive film, directed with a crackling energy.

City Pages [Jim Ridley]

To see John Cassavetes's 1974 film for the first time is to become one of those sci-fi heroes who gets rudely disconnected from a spoonfed alternate reality. The disruption isn't pretty or pleasant: At times it hurts like hell. The trade-off is that the world seems stripped of its sugarcoating, its delusions of knowability and comfort. Gena Rowlands, her husband's muse and onscreen alter ego, fuses with the role of Mabel Longhetti, a hard-drinking wife and mother who's slipping into flighty madness to the consternation of her hard-hat husband Nick (Peter Falk). Is she a lovable madcap? A threat to her family? An embarrassment to a spouse whose throttled emotions may be even more harmful? On the set, according to Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney, the writer-director withheld the answers (and approval) his actors wanted, infuriating Falk and driving Rowlands in particular to the brink of a breakdown. Instead, he left them to feel their way through agonizing scenes of near-improvisatory awkwardness and indirection--foot-dragging, navel-gazing, emotionally brutal vignettes that trail off into frustrating uncertainty. This unresolved tone led critics to mislabel Cassavetes throughout his career as a naturalist. What's closer to the truth--which, after all, is what he sought--is a brand of theatricality so intense and unrelenting that actor, character, performance, and film become indivisible.

EmanuelLevy.com

Cassavetes created vehicles for himself (Husbands), his wife Gena Rowlands (Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence), and a select group of actors that he liked.

In A Woman Under Influence, an insightful essay on sexual politics, Mabel is a housewife who crosses the line into sanity. With a light feminist touch, she is perceived as a victim of a repressive patriarchal order and imposed social roles. Cassavetes sees Mabel as desperate, yet courageous enough woman not to pull back from madness, but descend into it, confronting every facet of life with her husband Nick (Peter Falk). Cassavetes never considered Mabel insane, just a woman who has her subjective way of perceiving the world, insisting on the validity of her feelings.

Cassavetes allows no distance: Like Mabel's family, the viewers are forced into the troubling experience of her life. As Michael Ventura pointed out, for Cassavetes that was the meaning of family, refusing to compromise the portrayal with comfortable cuts and smooth scene changes. Even in her worst pain, Mabel possesses a transcendent beauty that affects those around her. This was Cassavetes' strong point: Love can exist in the most horrible circumstances, an idea that would be later embraced by David Lynch.

Contrary to popular notion, the film's underlying structure is so rigorous that every aspect of Mabel's conduct receives equal attention. As always, though, Cassavetes' approach depends more on the actors' personalities than on pre-determined scripts and camera technique. He provided the essential key to his philosophy when he said, "I'm more interested in the people who work with me than in film itself." That's why his films go deeper than most in their explorations of the emotional truth of their participants.

Gena Rowlands received a well-deserved Oscar nomination as Best Actress for this movie, which represents the height of her and Cassavetes' careers.

A Woman Under the Influence was innovative in another major way. Dismayed by the poor distribution of his previous films, Cassavetes, Falk and Rowlands traveled from coast to coast to promote and book their movie directly with theaters. This pattern would encourage other indie filmmakers to take control of the distribution of their movies and often release them by themselves.

A Woman Under the Influence - Turner Classic Movies Lorraine LoBianco

The genesis of A Woman Under the Influence (1974) began when director John Cassavetes' wife, actress Gena Rowlands, told him she wanted to do a play about the difficulties women were facing at that time. As Marshall Fine wrote in his biography of John Cassavetes, Accidental Genius, "One day he handed Rowlands a play he had written and said, 'See what you think.' Rowlands recalled, 'I couldn't believe John wrote it. I don't mean to be sexist because I don't really believe that women can't write for men and vice versa. But I really couldn't believe that a man would understand this particular problem.'" What Cassavetes had written was so intense and emotional that Rowlands knew she couldn‘t bear performing in such a play eight times a week and told him that if she did, "I‘d have to be hospitalized." So Cassavetes decided he would make it into a film. "I only knew one thing about Woman when we started: that it was a difficult time for today's woman to be left alone while somebody goes out and lives. I know when I was not working and Gena was working for me - because I was really in trouble in this business - I stayed home and took care of the baby and I was a pretty good housewife and all that. But I didn't have really the same reactions as a woman would have, mainly because I didn't have to think into the future of when I'd get older or when my attractiveness would fade or when the kids would grow up or when the baby would cease to cling to you. All those things are more interesting than what they're making movies out of." No one seemed to agree with him when he approached Hollywood money men with the idea. He was told, "No one wants to see a crazy, middle-aged dame."

Without studio financing, Cassavetes decided to break the fundamental rule in filmmaking, "never use your own money". Instead, he mortgaged his house and approached friends and family to help him. Gena Rowlands remembered, "We didn't have the money to do it, but we had a lot of friends, all actors and interested in the project. So they all helped us. And we just did it." One of these friends was actor Peter Falk, who was starring in his hit television series Columbo. Falk read the script and believed in it so much he turned down a role in Day of the Dolphin (1973) and put up half a million dollars of his own money. The cast included Rowlands' and Cassavetes' mothers, their son Nick, their daughter, Xan, and Matthew Cassel, son of actor Seymour Cassel and Cassavetes' godson. The crew was a hodge-podge of professionals and students from the American Film Institute, where Cassavetes was serving as the AFI‘s first "filmmaker in residence" for their Center for Advanced Film Studies. The AFI was where Cassavetes ended up doing most of his editing as composer Bo Harwood remembered, "John wouldn't leave. He said, 'My movie's not done'. We were there for two years. It was like a bunch of bank robbers had taken over this eighteen-acre estate." Unable to find studio space to shoot, the scenes in Longhetti's home were filmed in a slightly run-down house on Taft Avenue, just off Hollywood Boulevard. As there was no budget for hair and makeup, Rowlands simply did her own, and with only one copy of her costumes (unthinkable in a Hollywood production), the clothes were sent to an overnight dry cleaners after each shoot.

After production and editing wrapped up, Cassavetes couldn't find a distributor for the film so he ended up calling theater owners across the country trying to get them to run the film. "Everyone who makes a movie is at the major distributor's mercy. We're distributing Woman ourselves because the studios have had no interest in it. And if they did come to us, we wouldn't sell it cheaply because we've taken our risks and expect to be paid well for it. After all, who the hell are they? Unless they finance the productions, they're a bunch of agents who go out and book theaters. That's what it really boils down to." As Jeff Lipsky, a college student hired by Cassavetes to help distribute the film, said "It was the first time in the history of motion pictures that an independent film was distributed without the use of a nationwide system of sub-distributors." A Woman Under the Influence was booked into small theaters, even at college campuses where Cassavetes and Falk would appear to talk about the film. It eventually made it to the New York Film Festival where it caught the attention of film critics like Joseph Gelmis of Newsday, who wrote that it was "an emotional blockbuster that should touch a nerve in every family that shelters an adult who's never grown up." Rex Reed called it "shatteringly profound and disturbing in ways movies seldom affect their audiences". As Marshall Fine wrote in his biography of John Cassavetes, "Actor Richard Dreyfuss was appearing on The Mike Douglas Show in Philadelphia, during a week when Peter Falk was Douglas' co-host to promote Woman. As they chatted on camera, Douglas asked Dreyfuss if he had seen A Woman Under the Influence. Rather than simply say, 'Yes and I thought it was great', the voluble actor launched into a description of the film: 'It was the most incredible, disturbing, scary, brilliant, dark, sad, depressing movie. I went crazy. I went home and vomited.' At which point Falk piped up, 'It's also funny. It's a funny movie.' ...When the show went to commercial, Falk picked up a nearby phone and called Cassavetes: 'This kid, he's telling everyone how terribly dark and scary the movie is,' Falk said. And on the other end of the phone, Dreyfuss heard Cassavetes laughing, telling Falk 'He can say what he wants.' In fact, it worked to the film's advantage. Suddenly everyone wanted to see the film that made Richard Dreyfuss sick, to see if it would happen to them, too."

To everyone's astonishment, A Woman Under the Influence, the film Hollywood studio chiefs thought no one would want to see, not only made back its $1 million cost and turned a very respectable profit, it earned Academy Award nominations for Rowlands as Best Actress and Cassavetes as Best Director. They lost out to Ellen Burstyn for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather, Part II, respectively.

A Woman Under the Influence: The War at Home Criterion essay by Kent Jones, September 20, 2004

Press Notes: Portraits of Cassavetes Criterion comments, November 18, 2008

Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes: Equal Stars of A Woman Under the Influence Jennifer Sin from Offscreen, February 2013

A Woman Under the Influence Ray Carney’s discussion of A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE

A Woman Under the Influence by Barbara and Leonard Quart - Jump Cut Cassavetes’ Lunatic-Comic Pathos, by Barbara and Leonard Quart from Jump Cut, 1975, also seen here: Jump Cut [Barbara and Leonard Quart]

Catching the Classics [Clayton L. White]

Alternative Film Guide Review Andre Soares

Reverse Shot [Eric Hynes] Spring, 2006

DVD Times [Anthony Nield]

Artforum What’s Your Take on Cassavetes? by Darrell Hartman from Artforum, November 5, 2008

World Socialist Web Site [Richard Phillips and Ismet Redzovic] July 23, 2010

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Cassavetes on DVD Matthew Kennedy on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection, February 2005, also seen here: Images [Matthew Kennedy]

PopMatters [Ian Chant] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] - Criterion box set 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: John Cassavetes Five Films - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Shadows | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jeff Economy reviews the Criterion 5 from The Chicago Reader

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central [Ed Nguyen] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray

Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection

CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell] (capsule review)

Film makers on film: Lynne Ramsay - Telegraph

Strictly Film School Acquarello

eFilmCritic Reviews Greg Muskewitz, so bad a review it’s hard to believe this made it into print

Film makers on film: Lynne Ramsay - Telegraph Sarah Donaldson discusses Cassavetes 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence with Lynne Ramsay from The Telegraph, November 2, 2002

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1974

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1998

New York Times (registration req'd) Nora Sayre

THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE A 98

USA (135 mi) 1976 revised in 1978 (108 mi)

I won't call [my work] entertainment. It's exploring. It's asking questions of people, constantly: How much do you feel? How much do you know? Are you aware of this? Can you cope with this? A good movie will ask you questions you haven't been asked before, ones that you haven't thought about every day of your life. Or, if you have thought about them, you haven't had the questions posed this way. [Film is an investigation of life.] What we are. What our responsibilities in life are – if any. What we are looking for; what problems do you have that I may have? What part of life are we both interested in knowing more about?

—John Cassavetes

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Sophistication and his Delovlies will be along in a moment. My name is Cosmo Vitelli; I’m the owner of this joint, I choose the numbers, I direct them, I arrange them. You have any complaints you just come to me and I’ll throw you right out on your ass.
—Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara)

Following A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and the sense of friction it caused between the controversial Cassavetes working methods and his wife Gena Rowlands, they took a step back from working with each other. Cassavetes had an affinity for gangster pictures, largely because he had to work in them as an actor in order to support his career as a film director, and he felt the gangster genre could be commercially viable, where he could get out of the film distribution business, a time consuming and all too draining effort. While the idea for the film came in a discussion with Martin Scorsese, Cassavetes often thought of studio heads as men who associated with gangsters, and that they were dealing with mob money, which he felt filtered into many of the most powerful businesses in America. Also, one should not overlook the huge success of THE GODFATHER Pt’s 1 and 2 (1972, 74) in the early 70’s, a genre Cassavetes didn’t find terribly interesting, but he found a way to wield a storyline he was excited about into a gangster picture, imagining a nightclub owner owing a huge amount of debt, where he’s talked into killing someone who turns out to be completely different than what he thought, not a low rung bookie but a West coast mob boss. He got the idea of a strip club from Alain Bernardin’s Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris, recently depicted by documentarian Fred Wiseman in Crazy Horse (2011), largely because it was such a personal vision, where Bernardin founded, owned, and operated it, hired the girls, scripted the shows, and choreographed the acts, bringing all the girls into his extended family operation, much like Cassavetes own concept of making films, which are largely family affairs. In addition, Cassavetes drew upon the knowledge of actor Seymour Cassel and his mother, who was a burlesque dancer, where Cassel spent much of his youth hanging around strippers and old-time Vaudeville acts. One of Cassavetes’ favorite films was Arthur Penn’s surreal and criminally underrated Mickey One (1965), which features Warren Beatty as a night club comic who goes on a drunken gambling binge and ends up owing some astronomical amount to the mob, apparently so large an amount they won’t even tell him how much, where Beatty spends the rest of the film drifting in and out of his own imagination, a dreamlike, Kafkaesque nightmare where the interior landscape is portrayed as an existential wasteland. Both films today feel like modernist works, like a Waiting for Godot theatrical production where there's only one guy left talking to himself, stuck in his own Hellish purgatory.

A film infused with existential angst, first released in 1976 (but recut two years later to a shorter version, which was, for awhile, the only version available), this is an intimate character study of Cosmo Vitelli, a suave and debonair Ben Gazzara, who owns a lurid Los Angeles strip club, the Crazy Horse West, with club singer Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts, an American television and movie screenwriter who collaborated with Tennessee Williams on several plays brought to the screen) and a staple of beautiful girls he calls his Delovlies, and has finally paid off all his debts to a lowlife loan shark, with Cassavetes own lifelong producer Al Ruban playing the role as Marty, then recklessly gambles his way back into debt one night to the tune of $23,000. When faced with the loss of his club, which, in effect, represents his “life,” he settles with the mob, who orders him to kill a Chinese gangster to call it even, where they order a double cross to take him out afterwards. In a departure from the norm, Cassavetes actually shows action shots, chase scenes, and a hellish life and death meeting of the minds in a seedy looking garage. The last hour of the film follows Cosmo with a bullet in his side, slowly bleeding to death, like Johnny Depp in Jim Jarmusch’s revisionist acid western DEAD MAN (1995), as he revisits his girl friend Rachel (Azizi Johari), whose mother Betty (Virginia Carrington) kicks him out, not wanting any of that trouble making its way into her home, then his lovely showgirls, who he adores and who are his real family, as his life and its previous secrets pass before his eyes. This intimate portrait of a man whose world is crumbling, yet never once flinches or misses a day at work, keeping his best face forward so that no one suspects a thing, revolves around his staple of lonely hearts who faithfully get up on stage everyday, talent or not, just to keep the business afloat for Cosmo. This is a wildly idiosyncratic view of the human psyche, with similarities to Cassavetes’s own circumstances, gambling his own money on what were considered his crazy artistic ventures, offering some unusual views about what it takes to stay in business, expressed with a breath of fresh air, with theatricality and song, with a unique warmth and charm, a human face in the crowd, as Mr. Sophistication brings the film to a close singing the movie’s anthem: “I can’t give you anything but love, baby.” There's a lifetime of lost opportunities wrapped into this film, where things could turn out a different way, but people struggle and persevere, and oftentimes redeem themselves, gloriously expressed in a song. Cassavetes finds the poignant moments. It’s hard to imagine, but he finds them.

There is some confusion about the two versions of the film, as the movie bombed at the box office, with critics finding it disorganized and unfathomable, causing Cassavetes to rework the film and release it two years later in a shortened version, but also introducing new footage, which was the only version seen thereafter. Today the film emotes a clarity of vision, with a semi-ragged, offbeat style that generates plenty of suspense, especially as he approaches the killing itself. Due to the rarity of the original longer version, it became the cut to see. After the Criterion label released both versions, there is rising support for the 2^nd version, as this was not at a studio’s urging, but a newly revised vision from the director himself, not exactly a director’s cut, but perhaps an extension of his original vision, with both versions using as little artificial light as possible, creating a noirish mood, where people are often seen creeping through the dark, then in stunning contrast they’d shoot through color filters on the inside of the club. Because the camera stays on Cosmo throughout the entire film, and so much is filtered through his eyes, one would think the more time you get to experience Cosmo onscreen, which is the original version, the better idea you have of the complexity of his character, where he continually has to divide his interests, always trying to please others, where the moments spent alone are particularly devastating, where he expresses a profound loneliness. As Cassavetes sees himself in Cosmo, leading his own rag tag group of fringe characters, the story comes to typify his own experience with Hollywood. A case can be made that this experience is better expressed without the meandering scenes that tend to get easily sidetracked, where Cosmo is in a world of woe, having to be all things to all people. In the 2^nd version, the editing eliminates any hint of excess, and actually changes many of the sequences, adding a different sense of focus to the film. In both versions, what’s central to the film remains intact, particularly the meeting scene with the gangsters, who may as well be the producers, which must resemble the hundreds of meetings Cassavetes attended where his ideas were undermined and he was betrayed, where you have to sit around and wait, as they go through this myriad of meetings with others first, and when it’s finally your turn, you’re outnumbered, as it’s eight against one, where you’re so worn out from waiting that whatever your original intent was has been worn down by the weariness and exhaustion of having to sit around, and the executives end up getting their way. Perhaps where Cosmo differs from the director is in Cosmo’s need to please, where he only felt comfortable as a snappy dresser, always looking sharp, surrounding himself with beautiful girls, and thinking he’s got it made.

In something of a blistering critique of American capitalism, Cassavetes invites the audience to share in Cosmo’s journey to survive in a cesspool of lies and broken promises, not to mention money and plenty of muscle that prevent you from ever succeeding. When Seymour Cassel invites Cosmo to their gambling club, they’re looking for a patsy to do the job. After a bit of gangster rough stuff, believing he has no other choice, Cosmo buckles, as would just about anybody if enough pressure is put on them, and reluctantly agrees to perform the hit, and surprisingly he gets out of it alive, surprising even the mob who figured that would never happen. He’s rewarded by the mob snuffing him out in a double cross, which is Cassavetes version of how artists are treated in Hollywood. Cassavetes sees gangsters as all the hired movie executives that prevent artists from doing what they want to do, as petty people that nag at you with details and restrictions, ordering rewrites and other various changes, all detracting from the artist’s original vision. Even onstage, Mr. Sophistication, a man of elegance and taste sharing a stage with strippers, is forced to deal with booing from the audience, who just want to see the girls, and repeated ridicule and humiliation from his fellow performers, as they can’t believe a guy would take himself so seriously, so they pull various pranks on him, which he doesn’t find so funny. In this environment, it’s impossible to create anything daring or new, as no one would ever come to see it, much less appreciate it, which was the story of Cassavetes’ career, largely misunderstood during his lifetime, disliked by audiences and critics alike, while anointed both critically and publicly after death to one of the founders of the American independent movement, though he remains something of an outsider, stuck as he is in the art world. This was certainly not Cassavetes’ choice, but became the only way to survive in an ocean of sharks to get his films in front of the public. He likely never anticipated the invention of the DVD in the mid 90’s, long after his death in 1989, or the effect of the Criterion label, where more people would view his films after death, and laud his artistry, than they ever would in his lifetime.

Looking at a few scenes from the film, one sees how the opening sequence has been altered in the two versions, as the original opening starts with an extended scene with the loan shark, Marty, Ben Gazzara in Killing of a Chinese Bookie - Opening 15 min: OneMinFilmSchool YouTube (13:48), followed by a bar scene with the cabdriver, who is cut out of the 2^nd version, while this recut 1978 opening starts with Cosmo walking out of his club, “Things’ll pick up,” shortening the scene with Marty, the killing of a chinese bookie: opening YouTube (1:18), before moving directly to scenes at the club where Cosmo introduces himself. One of the more interesting scenes is a waitress who asks to audition for Cosmo, Morning audition YouTube (7:12), set to the song “Rainy Fields of Frost and Magic” by Bo Harwood, where his original music leaves a timeless impression, but ends up in a fight between Rachel and the potential new girl, culminating with the classic line, “I’m a club owner. I deal in girls.” Here’s a hilarious phone call expressing an incredulous state of mind as Cosmo is about to pull off the hit, but calls the club on a payphone while waiting for his cab, Ben Gazzara Phone Booth scene, Killing of a Chinese Bookie YouTube (1:39), which leads here The Killing of a Chinese Bookie - bookie gets whacked YouTube (1:27). Like Henry V, Cosmo gives an encouraging speech to revive his floundering troops, sad about losing Rachel, one of their stars who quits, where this entire rah-rah speech comes with a bullet in his side, Scene from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Ben Gazzara YouTube (4:13). The final moments are given to Mr. Sophistication, The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie - end scene YouTube (1:55), a picture of futility, where an artist can expect to be humiliated and made a complete fool of, dying a slow death onstage, reminiscent of the Charles Mingus song “The Clown,” Charles Mingus - 04 The Clown - YouTube (12:13), narrated by Jean Shepherd, about a clown who in his efforts to please the audience is forced to endure more and more pain, where the greater the pain, the greater the applause, until eventually the clown dies onstage, to thunderous applause, as they all felt it was part of his act, where the public has always had a hard time distinguishing between illusion and reality, while Cosmo himself is too caught up exuding his own personal warmth and charm, ignoring the obvious reality.

Jonathan Rosenbaum from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

John Cassavetes’s first crime thriller, a postnoir masterpiece, failed miserably at the box office when first released, and a recut, shorter version released two years later didn’t fare much better. The first, longer, and in some ways better of the two versions is easier to follow, despite reports that – or maybe because – Cassavetes had less to do with the editing (though he certainly approved it). A personal, deeply felt character study rather than a routine action picture, THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE follows Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara at his best), the charismatic owner of a Los Angeles strip club – simultaneously a jerk and a saint – who recklessly gambles his way into debt and has to bump off a bookie to settle his accounts.

In many respects the film serves as a personal testament. What makes the tragicomic character of Cosmo so moving is its alter-ego relation to the filmmaker – the proud impresario and father figure of a tattered showbiz collective (read Cassavetes’s actors and filmmaking crew) who must compromise his ethics to keep his little family afloat (read Cassavetes’s career as a Hollywood actor). Peter Bogdanovich used Gazzara in a similar part in SAINT JACK (1979), but as good as that film is, it doesn’t catch the exquisite warmth and delicacy of feeling of Cassavetes’s doom-ridden comedy-drama.

Cassavetes doesn't believe in gangsters, as soon becomes clear in this waywardly plotted account of how a bunch of them try to distract Gazzara from his loyalty to his barely solvent but chichi LA strip joint, the Crazy Horse West. Or rather Cassavetes doesn't believe in the kind of demands they make on a film, enforcing clichés of action and behaviour in return for a few cheap thrills. On the other hand, there's something about the ethnicity of the Mob - family closeness and family tyranny - which appeals to him, which is largely what his films are about, and which says something about the way he works with actors. The result is that his two gangster films - this one and the later Gloria - easily rate as his best work crisscrossed as they are by all sorts of contradictory impulses, with the hero/heroine being reluctantly propelled through the plot, trying to stay far enough ahead of the game to prevent his/her own act/movie being closed down. It's rather like a shaggy dog story operating inside a chase movie. Chinese Bookie is the more insouciant, involuted and unfathomable of the two; the curdled charm of Gazzara's lopsided grin has never been more to the point. (After its initial release, Cassavetes re-edited the film, adding sequences previously deleted but reducing the overall running time from 133 minutes.)

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] - review of 1976 (longer) version

Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie had an odd journey to the screen (and beyond). It was originally released in 1976 at a length (135 minutes) that even star Ben Gazarra thought was bloated; it tanked, as did his follow-up the following year, Opening Night. But Cassavetes got reflective in 1978 and went back to the well, re-cutting Chinese Bookie to a leaner 108 minutes. It was reportedly the kind of full-on re-working (he re-edited entire sequences, changed the order of scenes, and even added in some material that wasn’t in the first cut) that became commonplace in the years to follow (starting with Spielberg’s Close Encounters). But, as usual, Cassavetes did it first.

As the 1978 version was reportedly his preferred one, I chose to watch it instead of the earlier cut (both are included in Criterion’s Five Films set). It is, in many ways, a tighter and more audience-friendly film than usual for Cassavetes (making its failure all the more confusing). It is, in its broad strokes, a gangster movie, but it’s got the same rough-edged, down-and-dirty aesthetic as Mean Streets (Scorsese was involved in Bookie’s development). Both films are disconnected from the halls of power that dominated The Godfather; these pictures deal with the grinders, the small-timers, the guys who are humping it out on a daily basis.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is one of his most richly atmospheric films; the scenes in the burlesque club that Gazarra manages are depressing but alive, particularly at the picture’s conclusion. The scene in which the title hit is brought up has an incredible naturalism, as does the sequence where it is carried out; there’s something intrinsically odd about a Cassavetes “action sequence,” but the staging is certainly appropriate to his approach.

Gazarra’s performance is fiery and alive; he’s always an efficient actor, but this may be his best work. Cassavetes doesn’t change his style much for the material, but our inherent interest in crime stories sustains those lulls that he likes to indulge in. It’s certainly his most even film; it holds together in a way that some of his other films don’t, for better or worse.

Los Angeles, the mid-seventies. Originally from New York, Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara) is the proud owner of the Crazy Horse West, a nightclub featuring dancing semi-naked girls "A-Live in the Flesh" as the garish sign outside the premises puts it. Cosmo, seeing himself as a high-roller, spends an evening gambling at a club in Santa Monica - and ends up $23,000 down. A bad move: the club is owned by gangsters who coerce Cosmo into carrying out a 'hit' for them in lieu of payment. Cosmo is told that his target is merely a "Chinese bookie". This is only partly true...

Cassavetes trimmed The Killing of a Chinese Bookie by 26 minutes after its initial release - and box-office failure - in 1976; this review is based on the longer version, and there's clearly plenty of fat that could and should have been excised: several of the nightclub burlesque performances outstay their welcome pretty fast, and during one in particular (a 'Gay Paree' number) the picture's momentum grinds to a complete halt. If nothing else, these Crazy Horse West sequences do showcase the astonishing feature-film acting debut for 45-year-old veteran screenwriter Meade Roberts as the chubby, top-hatted, thoroughly jaded MC known as 'Mr Sophistication' (he's amusingly mis-introduced as 'Mr Fascination' at one point) - as compelling in his own way as the very different Joel Grey in Cabaret.

It's around Gazzara, however, that the film really revolves: as a portrait of a once-cocksure man in crisis and (terminal?) decline, it's a Stateside precursor of The Long Good Friday - from certain angles the balding, flat-faced, round-headed Gazzara even looks like Bob Hoskins' strutting bantam Harold Shand. Performances are, in fact, strong across the board - including a truly wild turn from Timothy Carey as the most menacing of the hoods. Otherwise Cassavetes aims for and achieves his usual documentary-style rough-edged realism - the level of verisimilitude is consistently impressive, and we believe that these people really do inhabit this neon-orange smudge of an anything-goes night-town city.

But despite Cassavetes the director having expended so much attention on the details, performances and atmosphere, Cassavetes the writer doesn't seem sure of how to make them work to his story's advantage. Suffering a serious injury following his blood-spattered visit to the 'Chinaman's' house, Vitelli starts to lose his grip on reality - and the movie goes downhill with him, its swaggering air of self-indulgence fizzling out into a lather of pseudo-philosophical dialogue.

Gazzara apparently reckons that Vitelli at least partially represented Cassavetes' view of himself as show-must-go-on impresario, battling against the odds to bring entertainment and diversion to the public - if so, it's not the most flattering of self-portraits, as the routines Vitelli devises are pretty lousy affairs and his on-stage patter alienates rather than amuses his customers, who are vocally impatient to see his girls in action. Audiences watching the two-hour-plus version of Bookie are likely to feel a similar sense of get-on-with-it exasperation: the outlines of a truly great movie are clearly discernible here, one which presumably came a step or two closer to fruition following Cassavetes' wise rethink.

John Cassavetes: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie | Features ... Derek Malcom from The Guardian

John Cassavetes, the actor, writer and director, was one of the most influential American film-makers of the post-war era - a big claim, since he only had one hit movie and made many which were only shown in art houses. But, at one time, there was scarcely a film-maker who was not inspired by his improvisatory work and his capacity to achieve exceptional performances from actors. He has been called the first American independent.

His hit film was A Woman Under the Influence, in which Gena Rowlands, his wife, was celebrated for her portrait of a family woman pitched into manic psychosis by the pressures upon her. Otherwise, the films of Cassavetes were always more praised than seen and some of the fulsome tributes to him when he died in 1989 were nauseously hypocritical.

Cassavetes acted so that he could make his own films in the way he wanted. Shadows, his first, made well away from Hollywood in 1959, was a huge critical success that prompted Hollywood to sign him up for Too Late Blues and A Child Is Waiting. But both films were compromised and flopped, and he decided to go his own way with funds gathered from taking parts in films such as The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary's Baby.

The result was a collection of films, usually inhabited by Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk and Seymour Cassel. The films were called indulgent and disorganised by those who hated them, but they were adored by his supporters for their passionately truthful depiction of American life.

One of them was The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a film that displays most of the faults of his kind of on-the-hoof film-making - and all the virtues. Cassavetes always used to say that the emotion in his films was improvised but the lines written. There is no doubt, though, that when he let his actors loose on the set, there were considerable surprises in store.

Ben Gazzara is the star of Killing, the story of the owner of The Crazy Horse West, a failing LA strip joint he is determined to keep open because it's the only thing he's built up from scratch in his somewhat tawdry life. In order to remain solvent, he has to kill a Chinese bookie for the mob. The sequence in which he breaks into the old man's luxurious apartment and does the job is as terrifying as anything in The Godfather.

The film is a thriller, but equally it is a treatise on the sleazier side of showbiz, and on the persistence of hope in almost ludicrously unhopeful circumstances. It's about a man hanging on for dear life to dear life. As such, you could call it pretentious, bombastic, indulgent and full of actorly tropes, concocted by Cassavetes and Gazzara as they progress through a waywardly philosophical tale. Why, then, can one simply not forget it?

It's principally because of its accurate summation of one man's American dream in all its absurdity - the girls in the strip-joint are nurtured almost as part of him, and the club itself, which looks like a particularly seedy purgatory to us, is clearly heaven to him. You can see why he will do anything to save it and feel the sincerity of even the most portentous of his monologues.

Above all, Cassavetes orchestrates the whole thing almost as if it is a dream from which we are about to wake up. But even his most eccentric worlds have a point in them which seems to parallel our own lives. Most Cassavetes films were like that. They didn't make you fantasise, like the best of Hollywood. They faced the messiness of life and then turned to you and said: "But it's the truth, isn't it?"

Criterion Collection film essay [Phillip Lopate] October 24, 2013

Cassavetes’s Company Tom Charity offers various photos

Cassavetes at Work photo gallery

John Cassavetes: Five Films - The Criterion Collection

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie Jason Mark Scott compares the two versions from Bright Lights Film Journal, August 2008

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie Ray Carney’s discussion of THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE

PopMatters [Drew C. Miller]

Cassavetes, The Mob and Realism: 'The Killing of a Chinese Bookie' Adrian Warren from Pop Matters, Criterion Blue-Ray

Rescuing the Dream: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie | Goodbye ... Rescuing the Dream, Looking back on John Cassavetes’ masterpiece, by Anthony Moretta

DVD Times [1976 version] Anthony Nield

DVD Times [1978 re-edit] Anthony Nield

Artforum Darrell Hartman from Artforum, November 5, 2008

New Yorker The End of Allegory, Richard Brody from The New Yorker, November 17, 2008 New Yorker

Brains On Film

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

Episode 47: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, John Cassavetes) / Less Than Zero (1987, Marek Kanievska) Andrew Wickliffe on the Alan Smithee Podcast, June 15, 2010

Killing of a Chinese Bookie, The (19 76) Dennis Schwarz from Ozu’s Movie Reviews

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Cassavetes on DVD Matthew Kennedy on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection, February 2005, also seen here: Images [Matthew Kennedy]

PopMatters [Ian Chant] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] - Criterion box set 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: John Cassavetes Five Films - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Shadows | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jeff Economy reviews the Criterion 5 from The Chicago Reader

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central [Ed Nguyen] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray

Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection

Peter Bogdanovich Talks About Ben Gazzara: "I don't ... - Indiewire Dana Harris on the death of Ben Gazzara from indieWIRE, February 3, 2012

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie Paul Brenner from All Movie Guide

DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [ Gary W. Tooze]

New York Times Vincent Canby

OPENING NIGHT A 97

USA (144 mi) 1977

[Opening Night] is the other side of A Woman Under the Influence, about a woman on her own, with no responsibility to anyone but herself, with a need to come together with other women. [Myrtle] is alone and in desperate fear of losing the vulnerability she feels she needs as an actress. [She is] a woman unable any longer to be regarded as young: Sex is no longer a viable weapon. You never see her as a stupendous actress. As a matter of fact, her greatest thrill was comfort, as it is for most actresses. Give me a play I can go into every night and can feel I have some awareness of who I am, what I am. [She didn't] want to expose myself in [certain] areas. So when she faints and screams on the stage, it's because it's so impossible to be told you are this boring character, you are aging and you are just like her. I would be unable to go on to the stage feeling that I'm nothing. I think that most actors would, and that's really what the picture is about. Although she resists [facing them,] Myrtle must finally accept and resolve the dilemmas which lie not only at the core of the play she is doing, but which [reflect] the basic realities of her own existence, from which she has heretofore fled, aided by alcohol, men, professional indulgence – and fantasy! The character is left in conflict, but she fights the terrifying battle to recapture hope. And wins! In and out of life the theme of the play haunts the actress until she kills the young girl in herself.

—John Cassavetes

Perhaps the gutsiest film about theater ever made, right alongside Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952) or Desplechin’s ESTHER KHAN (2000), and though filmed in 1977, it was not released commercially until 1991, two years after Cassavetes’ death, as until then, incredulously enough, no theatrical distributor expressed an interest. A film about the making of a theatrical play, both onscreen and off, with Gena Rowlands starring as Myrtle Gordon in the play A Second Woman written by the 65-year old Joan Blondell as Sarah Goode, which concerns a woman at the moment in her life when she realizes she has lost her youth, and the second woman takes over. The part of the writer was originally conceived with Bettie Davis in mind, both screen legends from the 30’s, where the film was originally about the writer, where the integrity of the story came by showing an actress standing up to her. Davis would have brought a much tougher dimension to the role, adding her own sense of theatricality as well. Rowlands plays a still vibrant middle-aged star in her forties who has difficulty coming to terms with Blondell’s age, so avoids it at all costs, continually haunted by the ghost of a teenage girl (Laura Johnson), one of her fans whose accidental death she tragically witnessed one night, fantasizing a younger version of herself. Perhaps inspired by ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), purportedly one of Cassavetes’ favorite films, a movie that might be called a woman’s picture, as it delves into different phases of a woman’s life and career, examining the various motivations, where Cassavetes turns the adoring fan of the Hollywood picture into a disturbing hallucination that haunts the actress, while also similarly staging out of town, tryout rehearsals of the play in New Haven, Connecticut as it nears its premiere in New York on Broadway. One of her onstage actors is Cassavetes himself as Maurice Aarons, who interestingly plays a version of himself had he not married Gena Rowlands, a charming actor onstage who is something if a cynical womanizer offstage, largely making his way on his own, much as he did before he met Ms. Rowlands. A word about the giant photographs of aging women on the set, a similar device was used by Woody Allen in Stardust Memories (1980), who used a giant, wall-sized photograph in his apartment that continually kept changing pictures, depending on his changing moods. Also, the introductory still photos shown in the opening credits are used to brilliant effect, opening credits montage Opening Night YouTube (1:11), where Cassavetes, as he did in Faces (1968), uses close ups of blown-up photographs to exude sensuality to the character, while also using a cavernous penthouse apartment to reflect the immensity of Myrtle’s isolation and loneliness.

Using the theatrical device of a play within a play, what’s curiously interesting about the film is there’s more time spent together onscreen between Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands than anything previously seen in a Cassavetes film, where they appear to relish each moment shared with the audience, becoming a sheer, unadulterated joy to watch, where through various rehearsals there’s a continuous stream of looks at scenes within the play, and each time it’s played just a bit differently, where their performances are not so much acted as captured in a time capsule retaining all its original vibrancy, where their characters are so effortlessly and absolutely real. Rowlands gives an enthralling performance, perhaps especially significant because she absolutely defies the part she’s been given, even though it’s been written especially for her. Part of it appears like a melodramatic soap opera as she wanders into an earlier part of her life, almost like a ghost, but the scenes onstage playing ex-lovers with Myrtle and Maurice are unmistakably more significant, as it appears they’re talking about their own lives, where the film continuously blurs the line between performance and real life. Part of the genius of the film is this rare glimpse of intimacy into their real lives, yet it’s always shown with a flair for theatricality, where the underlying emotions grow more abstract by negotiating this strange and somewhat illusory boundary world that exists between reality and the imagination. Art impacts life, where Cassavetes and his real life wife have achieved a work of astonishing emotional depth that may be unique in all of cinema. Cassavetes has indicated “I won’t make shorthand films, because I don’t want to manipulate audiences into assuming quick, manufactured truths,” where the beauty of this film is creating a work of art that explores the mystery of the personality and the often unfathomably complex motivations of artists.

Myrtle, however, has found herself in the midst of a full-blown identity crisis, where an early tragic encounter with a young fan continues to haunt her for the rest of the film, as she’s literally visited by the young woman’s ghost who’s not at all happy with the outcome, yet Myrtle attempts to channel some of her own character through her youth, but her warmth and affection for the young woman is received with anger and disgust, turning brutally ugly on occasion, where the two are literally fighting spirits, creating a whirlwind of emotions that continually swirl around the theatrical production. Countering this maelstrom of dramatic force is the play’s director, none other than Ben Gazarra as Manny, as suave and debonair as ever, who continually coddles his actress, believing she is one of the great actresses of our time, and perhaps an ex-lover as well, but he constantly pushes her to accept Sarah’s play, which he feels offers brilliant insights into a woman aging. Manny, Sarah, and a kindly producer David, Paul Stewart, the butler in CITIZEN KANE (1941), form a kind of troika of theatrical convention, like the drama police, as they continually urge Myrtle to accept the provisions of the play, while she continually experiments with the role, often changing the lines altogether, telling Sarah “age is depressing, age is dull,” claiming “I’m looking for a way to play this part where age doesn’t make any difference,” which deeply offends the author by changing the intent of her play, who believes all the emotions are clearly evident on the written pages, where “all you need to do is say the lines clearly and with a degree of feeling.” But therein lies the problem for Myrtle, because if she’s accepted as an “older woman,” she’ll never receive any other lead casting roles for the rest of her career, relegated to the world of older secondary character performers. For men, like Maurice or Manny, they typically deal with the questions of aging in full denial by having an affair, but Myrtle has to reach inside herself to find something else.

More than anything, the film is about personal transformation, where theater simply offers an artistic vehicle for personal expression. Myrtle’s defiance to accept a role as written because she feels it’s constrictive and suffocating leads to major disagreements and confrontations with the consistently inflexible theater management, continually altering the format of the play, inventing new lines, literally fighting for her life by turning to the audience in live dress rehearsals and exclaiming, “We must never forget this is only a play.” Exacerbating the fears is heavy alcohol use, where in the middle of the night before the play opens, Myrtle desperately turns to Maurice, her co-star and ex-lover for comfort, exactly as Judy Garland used to call Cassavetes in the middle of the night looking for reassurance during the filming of A Child Is Waiting (1963), where Myrtle encourages him to try a radically new approach to the play, “Let’s dump it upside down and see if we can’t find something human in it,” an approach the real life Cassavetes would find inspired, but Maurice rejects her, telling her “You’re not a woman to me anymore. You’re a professional,” telling her “I have a small part. It’s unsympathetic. The audience doesn’t like me. I can’t afford to be in love with you.” By morning, however, she becomes traumatized, where her inner demons take over, and she mutilates herself viciously in front of the playwright, who by this point she despises, believing this may put her own demons to rest, telling her, “I will do anything, anything, to give my character authenticity on stage.” Myrtle is late for the opening, then arrives dead drunk, yet she is cruelly pushed by Manny to perform anyway, refusing to allow anyone to help her, forcing her to literally crawl her way to her dressing room. Unbelievably, still careening off walls, she stumbles to her backstage position, receiving the encouraging words from Cassavetes stalwart John Finnegan, “I’ve seen a lot of drunks in my day, but I’ve never seen anybody as drunk as you and still be able to walk. You’re fantastic!”

Leaning against walls, and with the help from everyone involved who often carry her from one location to the next, she goes onstage, where she then proceeds to change all the lines of the play, totally improvising with co-star Maurice, leaving characters alone onstage as she disappears unexpectedly, then completely reinvents the dialogue when she returns. Despite her state of extreme inebriation, she remains a sympathetic figure, actually reversing the roles, with Maurice playing her aging character while she flirts with everyone in sight, showing signs of Buster Keaton, Lucille Ball, even the Marx Brothers, some of which is brilliant, other times failing miserably. Breathing life into an otherwise failed literary misadventure (despite those giant feathers in Joan Blondell’s lavishly ostentatious hats!), this is a film that is not afraid to fail, and is about the fear and pain of performing, heightening the anxiety and the insecurity of the star to the limit, somewhat similar to the exaggerated theatricality of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), but stretched and expanded here, juggling on stage and off stage actions, becoming a free-wheeling comedic improvisational farce, Opening Night (1977) - Stage play with the leg trick YouTube (4:28), like something out of a hilariously inventive vaudeville routine with actors addressing the audience directly with personal asides, “I am not me!...There’s someone posing here as us!” While it’s always important to recall that Rowlands is really channeling her husband, becoming his alter-ego for both his methods and his madness, OPENING NIGHT shows what happens both on the stage and behind the scenes, capturing the persona of all persons involved in the theater, large and small, where this is a brilliant, in-depth look at the world of performance, art, and the extraordinarily fragile connections between the performers and the audience. Of interest, the ending was allegedly recut as the preview audience stood up and cheered at what they saw on stage, not the bewildered effect Cassavetes was looking for.

In this outtake from a 1978 television interview (which was never broadcast), Cassavetes discusses his film Opening Night for a while, and builds into a terrific rant on movies and movie audiences. This is a great example of Cassavetes' way with words, his dislike of people who live only for the approval of others, and his anger at the low popularity of his later films (especially Opening Night and Killing of a Chinese Bookie): John Cassavetes - "Television Sucks!" YouTube (8:08).

Opening Night British Film Institute (link lost)

"one of the unsung masterpieces of the 70s"

Opening Night is less famous than the other movies in our mini-retro, but it may be Cassavetes' finest film. Certainly it feels incredibly modern. Directed, shot and acted with exhilarating energy and sensitivity to detail, this is one of the unsung masterpieces of the 70s.

Cassavetes' abiding interest in how performance - in art or in relationships - relates to inner reality is dealt with more deeply and directly here. Actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) is troubled by her role in a new play and by thoughts of a young fan killed while pursuing the star's car. She begins to behave so erratically that her co-star (Cassavetes), director (Ben Gazzara), playwright (Joan Blondell) and producer (Paul Stewart) wonder how she'll fare on opening night. An acutely insightful study of an actress anxious about ageing, Cassavetes' 1977 film may be seen as his own response to All About Eve and, in turn, an influence on Almodóvar's All About My Mother.

Opening Night Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London David Jenkins

If Bergman had ever been asked to make an MGM musical, one imagines that ‘Opening Night’ wouldn’t have been far off the result. It stands as Cassavetes’ least self-consciously organic piece of work, with an improvisational tone that doesn’t just quietly fold itself around the narrative but ricochets off the film’s main themes. As in 1974’s ‘A Woman Under the Influence’, Gena Rowlands offers a devastatingly tactile performance in the lead role, this time as Myrtle Gordon, a grande dame of American theatre whose total immersion methodology backfires when she unwittingly accepts the part of an aging inamorata in the suggestively titled ‘The Second Woman’. Dogged by an instinctive fear of playing ‘the older woman’, she is loathe to acknowledge publicly an emotional overlap between herself and her character, but when the ghost of a young autograph collector begins to haunt her private life, her body becomes the battleground for a conflict between youth and maturity. Self-reflexive to an almost infinite degree, Myrtle is regularly forced to re-position her emotions from the context of her life, her sub-conscious and her role within the play.

And if that isn’t enough, Cassavetes builds upon the illusion by rarely indicating whether the actors are acting, improvising, on the stage, behind the stage, rehearsing, relaxing or, in one extremely painful and protracted late scene, totally drunk. At once a lament to the ravages of age and an examination of those tiny foibles which separate reality from dramatic artifice, it’s a baffling and intricate film which, although light on conventional pleasures, still manages to provoke and beguile.

Opening Night | BFI Distribution (link lost)

An overlooked masterpiece of the 1970s, Opening Night was the ninth film of writer-director John Cassavetes, the pioneer and patron saint of American independent film-making who from the late 1950s until his death in 1989 steered a courageous course beyond the confines of the Hollywood studio system.

Gena Rowlands (Cassavetes' wife and muse) plays Myrtle Gordon, a Broadway star cast in a new play as a middle-aged woman of declining sexual power. Reluctant to accept her age and fearful that she will be typecast as an older woman, Myrtle is also haunted by visions of a dead girl - an adoring young fan killed in a car accident - whom she sees as a figment of her younger self. Rebelling against the pessimism of the script, Myrtle questions the part she is playing both onstage and off. In the words of Cassavetes: 'she fights a terrifying battle to recapture hope.'

Rowlands' characteristically vital, risk-taking performance is brilliantly supported by a charismatic Ben Gazzara (one of Cassavetes' regular ensemble) as Manny Victor, the play's long-suffering director, and by Cassavetes himself as Maurice, Myrtle's co-star and former lover. The part of ageing playwright Sarah Goode was originally envisaged for Bette Davis - Opening Night has been seen as a variation on All About Eve - but went in the end to Joan Blondell, another still-active star of 1930s Hollywood, who despite her bewilderment at Cassavetes' methods ('I can't tell when the actors are acting and when they're talking about their home life.') turned in a superb performance.

Today, thirty years after it was made, it's a film that feels incredibly modern, insightful and intriguing - ripe for discovery by a whole new generation of film-goers.

Culture Wars [Sarah Snider]

From the start of Opening Night, director John Cassavetes situates us firmly both as the audience of a film and in the real-life audience of a play. Myrtle Gordon, played compellingly by Gena Rowlands, is the star of the film and the play. When she witnesses a young fan of hers run over in the street, Myrtle breaks down. The girl’s death invokes feelings of guilt, but also a dizzying journey into time, highlighting what it means to live in only one direction in time.

Myrtle is no longer young, and being cast as an older woman in the play traps her in a dilemma in which she sees no way back: if she plays the role well, her career will be catapulted into the geriatric ward; if she accepts the implications of the role for women in general, women will be forever delegated to life without hope. Instead of accepting and assuming her role as an older woman, both in the play and in her own life, Myrtle decides not to compromise. She chooses to inhabit differential identities, at once reframing characters and her audiences’ opinions of them. This brings her into conflict with others, each of whom has decided upon and assumed a fixed identity, for better or for worse. She wants to keep all of her possibilities open, even though time and circumstance have already shut many doors. This openness leads to much emotional turmoil, augmented by heavy bouts of drinking.

Cassavetes shows that in order to be someone fully, we need to recognise, through pain, loss and grief, what we are not or can be no longer. Paradoxically, struggling with these questions and limitations provides a way to personal growth: recognising the boundary of the self is the first step to pushing it back. Myrtle refuses to exorcise her demons except through the work of her own hands, making the transformative process a dialectic within herself rather than an imposition by external forces.

This exploration of the self in a state of becoming is a continuation of themes present in Cassavetes’ earlier works. Cassavetes tends to shoot his arrows via his actresses. Rather than this being based on Romantic notions of women as fleeting and inconstant, perhaps Cassavetes is subverting these assumptions in order to urge everyone to embrace a more mercurial approach to the possibilities life has to offer. Contrary to A Woman Under the Influence (1974), this film is about a woman on her own, with no responsibility to anyone but herself and her work. However, both films portray characters moving out of positions of power and control into spaces that are exploratory and dangerously underdetermined. The characters are quite literally taken out of their roles, stripped of their scripts, left to wade through the possibilities of what the stage, qua stage, and actors, as other human beings, will offer.

The script and the role are basic abstractions of actual human experience. Cassavetes’ work, itself heavily scripted, drags us into what Ron Carney calls ‘non-contemplative art’. This is thought that occurs in ‘time, space and the body’. Cassavetes throws off the fetters of the platonic valuation placed on reflection, and sees thought as something dynamic, not restful, something that happens in the body in real time. The non-scription of Cassavetes’ work is perhaps the reason it is so hard to watch his films. Not only are we unaware of the character’s next move, we actually have to watch it being formulated through thought and action over time. For Cassavetes, this is film: just as a real life scene presents traces – dialogue, action, etc. – of the process of a character in becoming, so too the film presents traces – image, sound, etc. – of the experience of the director creating. Both document and bear witness to a dynamic set of decisions and choices. Cassavetes’ films are a temple to this negotiation.

Opening Night | Peter Bogdanovich - Blogs - Indiewire

Early in 1977, John Cassavetes called me, both of us living in Los Angeles. He was shooting a picture in some legitimate theater down on Wilshire; it was supposed to be a Broadway opening night, and he needed a few celebrity faces, so Peter Falk was going to come down as an extra—-could I? “Anything for you, John,” I said and meant it, because in a town of artists of all sorts, Cassavetes was the rare real thing. The picture, he said, was about theater people bringing a new play to New York, and was called Opening Night (available on DVD). John financed it entirely from his own pocket, starring his brilliant wife and partner, Gena Rowlands, as the play’s star on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and Ben Gazzara as the director, Joan Blondell as the playwright, Paul Stewart as the producer, Zohra Lampert as the director’s wife, and Cassavetes himself as a totally self-absorbed actor.

A Broadway opening meant probably winter in New York, so I brought an overcoat. When Peter Falk spotted it, he said, “Where’d you get the coat?” I told him my thinking. Peter immediately called John over to say that I had a coat, and so he needed one. John whirled away, calling to an assistant to get Peter a coat. For my big shot backstage behind the curtain, John told me to go over to Gena, give her a kiss and tell her how great she was in the play. Then he did a little yelling to get everyone on their toes, pointing out that all screw ups were costing him personally. There was no rehearsal. Once he called out, “Action!” everything went quickly, in a kind of blur, a lot of people moving and talking at once. While I was having my intimate moment of praise for Gena, suddenly—-without anyone having prepared me—-Gazzara’s character was introducing Ms. Lampert’s character to me. “You know Peter Bogdanovich...?” The joke is that Ms. Lampert is so stoked by Ms. Rowlands' opening-night performance that she is totally uninterested in meeting me; essentially she ignores the introduction and turns to gush at Gena. And that’s how the picture ends.

Cassavetes has said, “I won’t make shorthand films, because I don’t want to manipulate audiences into assuming quick, manufactured truths.” Opening Night, one of the filmmaker’s least known pictures—-made between the financial failure of The Killing of A Chinese Bookie and before the box-office success of Gloria—-is a perfect example of this credo. There are certainly neither quick nor manipulated truths, and what dominates is the mystery of personality, and the often unfathomably complex motivations of artists. The struggle to open the play depends on these intangibles.

This could be called Cassavetes’ anti-All About Eve. The adoring fan who becomes a threat in that picture, shrewdly calculating her way to stardom, here turns into a weirdly disturbing, clearly disturbed fanatic accidentally killed in an auto accident on a rainy night while trying to maintain contact with Ms. Rowlands. This tragic encounter haunts the actress throughout the rest of the movie, the young woman’s troubled ghost appearing to her, fighting with her. Yet this is only one of numerous obstacles Gena’s star has to overcome to make it through opening night. Others include her fear of aging, discomfort with the role, even active dislike of the playwright’s creation, conflicts with the director and her co-star. The terrible whirlpool of emotions that swirl around a theatrical production are superbly evoked. The main obstacle, of course, is fear, and Opening Night eloquently dramatizes Cassavetes’ comment: “You can defeat fear through humor, through pain, through honesty, bravery, intuition, and through love in the truest sense.”

All of the performances are not so much acted as caught. Everyone feels absolutely real, but Gena Rowlands is magnificent in an extremely challenging role, her characterization as naked and memorable as her amazing work in such other Cassavetes’ masterworks as Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, and Love Streams. If any other picture maker and actress have together repeatedly achieved such emotional depths, I don’t know about them. That John cast himself as the least understanding or sensitive character in the picture—-and that he plays it so convincingly—-is probably the biggest inside joke in this singular, distinctive look at show business people by a transcendent artist who single- handedly began the modern independent film movement, and was the most uncompromising and poetic American filmmaker of our time.

Criterion Collection film essay [Dennis Lim] Criterion essay, October 25, 2013, also seen here: Opening Night: The Play’s the Thing

Cassavetes’s Company Photo Gallery by Tom Charity at Criterion Collection, October 30, 2013

Opening Night (1977) - The Criterion Collection

Opening Night - John Cassavetes Scene by scene analysis by John Deforest from John Cassavetes.net

Excerpts from a Discussion on Opening Night Ray Carney’s discussion of OPENING NIGHT

All the World's a Stage: John Cassavetes' Opening Night - Senses of . Matthew Clayfield from Senses of Cinema, May 2007

Senses of Cinema – Performing Aging/Performance Crisis (for ... Jodi Brooks from Senses of Cinema, September 2001

Dan Schneider on Opening Night, by John Cassavetes Dan Schneider from Cosmoetica

John Cassavetes' 'Opening Night' reviewed on the official website ... Dan Schneider’s edited review on the Laura Hird website

Ecstatic [Jason Hedrick & Nathaniel Drake Carlson]

John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands | anna helme. portfolio. blog. Anna Helme, September 4, 2009

notcoming.com | Opening Night Victoria Large

Retrospective: John Cassavetes - The Film Journal...Passionate and ... Tim Applegate from The Film Journal

Electric Sheep Magazine Caroline Blinder

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Notes on the Work of John Cassavetes | Jonathan Rosenbaum July 18, 1980

Both Sides of John Cassavetes - JonathanRosenbaum.com June 28, 1981

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Cassavetes on DVD Matthew Kennedy on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection, February 2005, also seen here: Images [Matthew Kennedy]

PopMatters [Ian Chant] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] - Criterion box set 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: John Cassavetes Five Films - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Shadows | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp on the 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jeff Economy reviews the Criterion 5 from The Chicago Reader

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central [Ed Nguyen] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Collection

John Cassavetes: Five Films (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu ... Neil Lumbard from DVD Talk, BFI Blu-Ray

Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] 5-film, 8 DVD Criterion Blu-Ray Collection

Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977) | So Noted Grant Phipps

The King Bulletin [Danny King]

epinions Criterion DVD [Stephen O.Murray]

Epinions [David MacDonald]

CineVue [Craig Williams]

Bo Harwood Music

Bina007 Movie Reviews sadly lacking in insight or appreciation

Opening Night on Wikipedia

BBCi - Films Stella Papamichael

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] October 18, 1991

GLORIA B 88

USA (121 mi) 1980

Look, I’m not very bright. I wrote a very fast-moving, thoughtless piece about gangsters. And I don't even know any gangsters.

—Cassavetes on Gloria

Hard to believe this is a Cassavetes picture, as there is an exaggerated musical soundtrack with swelling music to heighten the action, just like a regular Hollywood picture, and plenty of action and guns, and a beautiful, perfectly dressed blond with a pistol who blows anybody away who stands in her way. In her second Oscar nominated role, after A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, Gena Rowlands plays an ex-gun moll, dressed in purples and pinks and wearing heels, running through the seedy tenement districts of New York and New Jersey, trying to protect the life of an orphaned Puerto Rican 6-year old whose family was blown away by the mob on day one of the picture. This is a rather conventional melodrama that plays out in a strange and unusual visual style, with undercurrents of naturalism, including some guitar and sax solos, which add a humanist element, particularly to the child, as their difficulties in relating to one another mirrors the physical world around them. The finale, however, is pure gold, as the film resolves in a poetic, dark ambiguity.

Notwithstanding Cassavetes' own dismissal of this crime thriller fantasy as a commercial chore he made for Disney so that his wife could act opposite a kid, it's clear from the opening montage that we're in the hands of a master. The film moves gracefully from painted credits through an exhilarating aerial survey of Manhattan by night to a vexed woman struggling to leave a crowded bus, all to the soulful strains of Bill Conti's lovely jazz/orchestral score. Rowlands is typically superb as the tough talking New York moll - half-whore, half-mother - reluctantly lumbered with a prematurely macho Latino boy (Adames) whose family have been killed by the Mob. As they go on the run, antagonism inevitably turns into affection, but Cassavetes and the two leads keep maudlin sentimentality at bay until the very bitter end, when the film basically 'fesses up that movie-style happy endings are the stuff of pipe dreams. Terrific.

Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

Indie godfather John Cassavetes transforms Gena Rowlands into his own little Pam Grier in this oddly sweet-and-sour, PG-rated mob melodrama with, naturally, a cute orphan kid. The ingredients ensure that the overall mixture is far from colloidal, but Gloria's most salient feature is Rowlands' extraordinarily well-rounded embodiment of the titular role: an extremely classy ex-mob dame with a hair-trigger temper and a tongue of fire. When Mafia accountant Jack Dawn (Buck Henry) accidentally lets it slip to his bosses that he's been jotting all their dirty little secrets in a little black book, they come by and waste him and his surrogate family, but not before he drops off the little moppet Phil with Gloria Swenson. Whether she's lackadaisically serving Phil milk or fending off his incessant (and creepy) suggestions that she's both his mother as well as his girlfriend, Rowlands fills her somewhat sketchy role with blowsy good humor and an honest sense of hollowed-out emotional vacancy that the film around her doesn't quite merit. It's no surprise that her supporting cast pales in comparison to her, with the possible exception of a string of NYC taxi cab driver archetypes (one looks and sounds eerily like Pat Ast of Paul Morrissey's Heat). John Adames, who plays little Phil, had the dubious distinction of splitting the first Razzie award for Worst Supporting Actor with Laurence Olivier (in The Jazz Singer), and one has to assume most of the blame rested on his unique vocal delivery. He manages to perfectly capture what Paddy Chayefsky would sound like impersonating Alvin Chipmunk.

Gloria's obvious reason for being is to give the marvelous Gena Rowlands (a national resource if there ever was one) an excuse to play James Cagney. Snarling and glaring her way through the ranks of Mafia crooks, Rowlands carries the entire picture. The majority of her scenes are played with a child actor who unfortunately isn't up to the job; and the awkwardness bogs the picture down somewhat.

Ex mob moll Gloria Swenson (Gena Rowlands) takes charge of young Phil Dawn (John Adames) when his family is wiped out in a mob hit. The problem is that the mob knows who both of them are, and they want the kid dead. At first wishing only to steer clear of the responsibility, Gloria builds a relationship with the kid, and together they defy and evade the gangsters.

Gena Rowlands, an actress with definite strengths, is beyond excellent as a self-pronounced overweight woman, up to her neck in organized crime trouble. Husband John Cassavetes took a break from his personal improvisation films to do this much more centrist gangster chase film; and he has a fine eye for the streets of New York City as they might be travelled by people on the run. Remember, a Cabbie can be your best friend, and keep your money in your sock.

There's a socko opening, involving the panic that shakes the Dawn family as the father (Buck Henry) tries unsuccessfully to get his wife (Julie Carmen) and kids evacuated before the hit men arrive. But as the picture unspools, there are a couple of factors (beyond its slight overlength) that bog it down.

He's cute and well-meaning and for some people may be just the ticket, but young John Adames is by any reasonable measure, simply terrible as the orphan who falls under Gloria's protective wing. Every line he says rings false, and his coached smiles and attempts to 'act' all look as if Cassavetes is off camera trying to manipulate his face from afar. Improvisatory genius don't mean diddly without accomplished talent, and most kid actors simply aren't up to it (an exception, the little fellow stealing Ice Cream in Kramer vs. Kramer). With this ] particular kid actor having to be led through everything, it falls upon Gena to make scenes work, and to the extent she succeeds, the show is impressive. But even she ends up talking to the kid one syllable at a time, as if near the end of her wits.

Secondly, a lot of Cassavetes' dialog for the kid doesn't cut it either. Too many of his lines just don't sound as if a child would say them, not even a precocious one. The adult dialog is just fine, so this must simply be a weakness that Cassavetes didn't count on.

The big thrill is watching Gloria cut loose in standard gangster confrontations. She's always more than credible when drawing pistols and blasting away at the baddies; we actually believe she could intimidate a table-ful of hoods. When the picture opts for standard sentimentality, it's a bit less successful; we get the idea that Cassavetes and Rowlands were doing their best for a mainstream boxoffice hit, and second-guessing themselves.

Columbia TriStar's DVD of Gloria is very handsome, and far, far better-looking than the smeary green prints I've been seeing on cable television for 20 years. The enhanced widescreen image focuses the action better. There are a few shots early on that look unusually grainy, but most of the show's visuals have a snap to them, and the color is far richer than anything I've seen. Neal Hefti's music is a big plus, especially the strange song heard under the titles.

PopMatters (Chris Robé)

John Cassavetes was at his artistic height by the late 1970s. He directed Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and Opening Night (1977), and gave his best performance as lower-class narcissist Nicky in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976). Although largely ignored or even denigrated by some contemporary film critics, Cassavetes’ work grew increasingly sophisticated over the decade.

And then came Gloria, in 1980. The film exemplifies the conflict between Cassavetes’ character-based, “guerrilla” filmmaking and Hollywood’s predilection for action-packed plots. Financed by Columbia Studios, Gloria often submerges Cassavetes’ focus on offbeat, difficult characters within a mainstream production style.

Cassavetes himself was not happy with his script. He claims he wanted to earn some fast cash, but have nothing to do with its filming. Columbia, however, insisted that he direct the film and that his wife, Gena Rowlands, star in it. Cassavetes later claimed, “I was bored because I knew the answer to that picture the minute we began… Whereas Husbands is not simple, whereas A Woman Under the Influence is not simple, Opening Night is not simple. You have to think about those pictures” (Ray Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes, 454).

The film tracks the adventures of Gloria Swenson (Rowlands) with six-year-old Phil Dawn (John Adames), after the boy’s family is murdered by the mafia. Phil retains his father’s ledger of the mob’s illegal activities, which might earn him FBI protection. But, because Gloria has a criminal past, she cannot go to the authorities, and instead attempts to make a deal with the mob to hand over the ledger in exchange for Phil’s life.

As familiar as this set up may sound, Gloria doesn’t represent the relationship between Gloria and Phil in clichéd terms. Her ambivalent feelings toward this boy, so suddenly imposed on her life, emerge when they’re in a tight spot, and she instructs him, “Run as fast as you can.” She accompanies him for a few steps, then turns, telling him to go on by himself. “I’m not taking care of you any more,” she says. “I’ve been in jail.” We get a sense here of her frustration with this impossible situation.

Phil’s feelings for Gloria are similarly messy; he sees her as a substitute mother, a tough broad, and a potential sexual interest. His efforts to perform as “the man” in their relationship expose the absurdities of standard hetero-masculine assumptions and behaviors. When, early on, Gloria tries to convince him to leave the murder scene, he resists, repeating while pounding his chest, “I am the man. I am the man. Do you hear me? Not you. I am the man. I do anything I can.” Gloria wipes the blood trickling from his nose and says, “You are not the man. You don’t listen. You don’t know anything.”

Moments such as these between Gloria and Phil expose both Cassavetes and Rowlands’ mutual interests in the nuances of character. He inserts pauses in the narrative, occasional details that draw attention to the struggle within the film—between Hollywood conventions and the filmmaker’s resistance to same.

Sometimes, the struggle is lost: even as Gloria and Phil develop a mutual and complex fondness for one another, the narrative eventually pushes Gloria to play the standard role of mother. One of her old mob-connected boyfriends tells her, “I understand. You are a woman. He’s a little boy. Every woman is a mother. You love him.” Gloria is confused: “I love Phil?”

We are not so confused, however, as the formula seems unavoidable. Worse, emotional interactions between Gloria and Phil are usually underscored by swelling soundtrack music. Or they are just forgotten in the wake of multiple chase scenes through a stunningly filmed Manhattan; these dominate the film, creating excitement and suspense that have little to do with tender moments between fully developed characters.

Still, Gloria intermittently reveals some of the director’s subversive inclinations, not to mention Rowlands’ subtleties. These are visible often enough to make Gloria more intriguing than a standard Hollywood gangster movie.

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Rosado)

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

LOVE STREAMS A 99

USA (141 mi) 1984

I’ve never seen an exploding helicopter. I’ve never seen anyone go and blow somebody’s head off. So why should I make films about them? But I have seen people destroy themselves in the smallest way, I’ve seen people withdraw, I’ve seen people hide behind political ideas, behind dope, behind the sexual revolution, behind fascism, behind hypocrisy, and I’ve myself done all these things. So I can understand them...What we are saying is so gentle. It’s gentleness. We have problems, terrible problems, but our problems are human problems.

—John Cassavetes

Very few great artists, other than those named Mozart or Beethoven, save what is arguably their greatest creation for their last and final work, where a gaunt Cassavetes makes his last great film, written immediately after playing in Paul Mazursky’s film, TEMPEST (1982), filmed after he had already begun to be ill with liver damage. LOVE STREAMS is Cassavetes’ Prospero, a farewell to his art, using dozens of references from his earlier films. Like Faces (1968), all the interiors are filmed in the actual Cassavetes household, adding a documentary element of family photos and portraits lining the walls, interestingly containing no hand-held camera work, a staple in nearly all his earlier films, yet this may be his most intimate film. Unlike most married couples that strive for a sense of balance and security, Cassavetes and Rowlands continued to struggle and evolve creatively directly in front of the camera during the course of their lives, an outrageously courageous and highly original form of personal expression, with Cassavetes waving goodbye to Gena Rowlands, and goodbye to the audience in the final shot. With it, a career of risk taking comes to a climax in this rich, original, emotionally immense film about a brother who cannot love and a sister who loves too much. The film is adapted from a play written by Ted Allan, while both he and Cassavetes collaborated on the screenplay. Cassavetes characters insist upon their relevance, they demand to be heard, even when they don't have a clue what they're about to say, like the befuddled Rowlands who loses her daughter in the opening divorce proceedings, something inconceivable to her, as no one could love her more. But she can't find the words and her loss is immeasurable, so she spends the rest of the film trying to fill the empty void from that missing love.

Initially the film follows the separate lives of Robert and Sarah, Cassavetes and Rowlands, parallel lives of loneliness and loss, where Sarah loses her 13-year old daughter in a divorce, losing her companionship and love, trying to introduce love into the legal proceedings, but there’s simply no place for it. Looking largely disheveled for the first half of the picture, Sarah is a natural extension of Mabel from A Woman Under the Influence (1974), a hyper-emotive woman who tends to get carried away with herself, growing deliriously happy or utterly despondent. Referred to a psychiatrist, she attempts to explain to him, “Love is a stream. It’s continuous. It does not stop,” to which he replies, “It does stop,” but she insists otherwise, which is the heart of her personality, driven to be liked and appreciated, refusing to accept the middle ground of mediocrity. Recommending that she take a trip to Europe and meet people, the film turns comically hilarious when we see the mountainous pile of luggage she drags behind. Robert lives in a dream house on top of a Hollywood hill reachable only by a steep, winding incline making a successful living writing sex books about women. We see him visit a gay nightclub picking up Diahnne Abbott after hearing the club’s singer doing a sultry rendition of “Kinky Reggae” Love streams - kinky reggae - YouTube (2:10). Robert never sleeps alone, filling his house with beautiful young bimbos, where sex is all that is real. Life is one long champagne party of women and sex, where there are literally several carfuls of call girls who spend the weekend, most of the time amusing themselves however they wish, as only one or two are with Robert, who occasionally takes the time to get to know them, actually asking probing questions which are beyond their years.

In something of a surprise, mixing up the drunken revelry is an 8-year old kid Albie (Jakob Shaw) arriving on his doorstep, who turns out to be a son he never knew existed, whose mother says she’ll come back for him the next day. Needless to say, Albie is terrified at the drinking and lewd behavior going on, so Robert clears the house of everyone else while the two get acquainted, ridiculously plying him with beer, offering him the fatherly advice that by the time he’s 14 he should hitchhike across the country and discover “real” people, “not these guys out here with their suits and ties, but real men.” What distinguishes this film is the heavy mix of humor along with the depth of realism and warmth of the characters. What do you do when you’re finally alone with a newly discovered son? Take him to Vegas, obviously, where you go out partying all night leaving him alone in a hotel room, basically quivering in fright. But before they leave, Sarah is greeted affectionately on Robert’s doorstep with her boatload of luggage that arrives in two cabs. There’s a wonderfully extended ambiguity about their relationship, as we don’t discover the truth until about 90 minutes into the film. Needless to say, the Vegas trip is a disaster, culminating in what could almost be described as spectacle, which is so bizarre in its own uncompromising way that Robert’s most embarrassing moment turns into something poignant and perversely comedic at the same time.

One of the more beautiful sequences involves Robert’s date with Diahnne Abbott’s mother, repaying earlier kindness, where they dance and drink champagne in her living room, where she’s treated like a queen to the music of Jack Sheldon - Almost In Love With You - YouTube (2:51), a scene reminiscent of the suave and debonair Ben Gazarra as Cosmo Vittelli in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) who similarly flirts with his girl friend Rachel’s (Azizi Johari) mother, where in each instance the mother used is the real life mother. Returning home to a quieter, darker house, Cassavetes gently tells Rowlands, “Life is a series of suicides, divorces, broken promises, children smashed, whatever,” which is not in any way meant to be downbeat or maudlin, but simply an acceptance of reality. From that, Sarah gets the idea to go bowling dressed in a classy black sequined dress and heels, where her response to the desk clerk’s “How are you?” is simply classic, as she’s bound and determined to give the man an honest answer, most of which is simply contorted facial expressions searching for the truth. Of course, she’s a sensation wearing no shoes on lane 13, meeting Ken (John Roselius), returning home with renewed exuberance, where the two of them sit down and discuss the idea of love as art. Sarah, however, refuses to abandon her romantic dreams about love, and in a brilliant conversational climax, defends her ex-husband, who no longer loves her and is giving her nothing but grief, telling Robert, “We’re talking about a man who put food on the table, who held my hand in the hospital, who cried when his baby was born. Where were you?”

Sarah’s way of providing balance to their lives is returning in a cab one afternoon with two miniature horses, a goat, a parrot, chickens, a duck, and a dog named Jim, but swoons in a spell when Robert doesn’t seem to appreciate the gesture. Feeling miserable and disconsolate, barely able to move, Sarah has two extraordinary dream sequences while a storm rages outside and Robert, the Ancient Mariner, lovingly gathers up all the animals, providing them a shelter from the storm. The first dream is one of Rowlands’ greatest scenes, tragically obsessed with the idea of making her daughter and ex-husband happy, she performs a burlesque comedy routine, trying every cheap vaudeville gag, fake mustard and ketchup, water spurting out of flowers and pens, fake eyeballs on springs, funny glasses, but gets nothing, despite the fact she is simply sensational, she gets no reaction from either one of them. Her second dream is more surreal, like something out of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), a small autobiographical operetta where her daughter’s feelings are being tugged back and forth between the mother and father, with Sarah on one side of the stage and her husband on the other, the spotlight shines on Sarah in a haunting, classical image of beauty and motherly love, where her daughter is seen as one of the dancing Degas ballet girls.

Meanwhile, Cassavetes comically gathering all the animals is a bit like Rowlands’ earlier luggage scenes, where they are carrying their emotional baggage like an added weight on their shoulders. Cassavetes, however, has the presence of mind to use the back door for comedy, so reminiscent of WC Fields’ “Not a fit night out for man or beast” in 1933 The Fatal Glass Of Beer (W. C. Fields) - YouTube (18:32), as each time they open it to the raging storm outside, Robert stumbles in out of the deluge with another animal. Despite the howling storm, Sarah resolves to make something of her life right then and there, claiming sudden family clarity, not waiting another moment, while Robert urges her to never go back to any man that doesn’t love her and to stay and live with him. But to the music of Harold Adamson and Jimmy McHugh’s “Where Are You” MILDRED BAILEY - Where Are You (1937) - YouTube (3:15), “Must I go on pretending, where is that happy ending, where are you?” Rowlands is whisked away in a cab as Robert waves goodbye to his sister, framed in a windowsill, his image distorted by the rain. Of interest, there is no trace of a play in this film, arguably Cassavetes’ best and most accessible film, no dialog driven moments, instead the occasional improvisational bursts offer needed energy to Cassavetes’ free-wheeling style, briskly moving between sequences where both Cassavetes and Rowlands offer such rare emotional authenticity, creating a cinematic farewell that will forever be beautiful and heartbreaking.

girish: 2006: Ten Favorite Older Films December 19, 2006

In a just world, it’s performances like these—by Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands in Love Streams—that would win Oscars; no Academy Award-winning performances I’ve ever seen can match their emotional truth and power. The physical presence of these characters and the complexity of their desires make you think—this is what human beings are really like! In the wake of Cassavetes films, other movies can feel a bit fake and cartoony in their human depictions….

Time Out Geoff Andrew

As so often in Cassavetes' work, there's little plot: desperate attempts at a sexual life from a boozy, middle-aged writer staving off loneliness; a divorced woman's struggles to hang on to her husband, daughter and sanity. Halfway through, when the woman takes refuge in the writer's chaotic household, the nature of their relationship (they're brother and sister) gradually unfolds. Very little else happens; but sparks fly throughout as the characters, guided firmly by the director's customary emphasis on spontaneous, naturalistic performance, search for closeness, warmth and self-definition. It's a long and wayward path, but humour, aching sadness, and sensitivity to the inner lives of people deemed eccentric, mingle to produce a rich, impressionistic tapestry. The oblique treatment occasionally leads to infuriating obscurity, but the movie's sense of 'real life', dynamic performances, and admirable lack of moralising make it compulsive. (From a play by Ted Allan.)

Minneapolis : Love Streams - City Pages Matthew Wilder

"Doin' okay in there?" "Yeah, fine--just washing up!" "Good. Because love is dead." The first of these speakers is Robert Harmon (John Cassavetes), a macho fiction writer who fills his ratty Mulholland Drive house with hookers he seems more interested in interviewing than screwing; the second is Robert's sister (Gena Rowlands), who shows up at his door with a menagerie of goats, dogs, cats, chicken, and geese. His problem is a pseudo-wised-up demeanor that seals off any possibility of human connection. (He locks up his seven-year-old kid in a suite in Vegas while he spends a night on the town; the consequences are horrific in a manner only found in real life--or in a John Cassavetes movie.) Her problem is a surfeit of love: She loves her husband, daughter, and any needy thing around her in a way that exceeds social limits. Her displays of emotion--her "love streams"--embarrass and terrify the movie's "normal" characters. In this, his last film, writer-director Cassavetes goes deep. Where his earlier works explore previously unfilmed emotions and modes of behavior, Love Streams aims for higher mysteries. Like the late-period Shakespeare (think The Winter's Tale), Cassavetes interests himself in bonds of affinity between unlike characters--bonds that go beyond words, beyond explanation. What on earth is happening in the climactic musical number? Who's the satyrlike bearded man who shows up half-naked in Robert's living room? Cassavetes makes us sit in the not-knowing. For me, there's just about no more beautiful place in the movies to be.

LOVE STREAMS Cinematheque Ontario (link lost)

Underrated and impossible to see (except on a French import DVD), John Cassavetes’ LOVE STREAMS, based on a play by Canadian Ted Allan, reappears in this deluxe new print from Sony Entertainment. Cassavetes, who ushered in the American independent movement with his staggering debut SHADOWS, confirms in this, his penultimate film, the unflagging auteurism that made his body of work one of the most unique and unified of post-Fifties cinema. A thematic summation of his twenty-five-year career, LOVE STREAMS is a rough and raw examination of love: its limits and falsities, its teetering into delusion, its power to destroy and to set free. Robert Harman, played with remarkable strength by Cassavetes (when Jon Voigt pulled out of the project mere weeks before shooting he was forced into the role, though suffering from the cancer that was to take his life) is a high-rolling, perpetually inebriated romance novelist with wildly unorthodox research methods living up in the Hollywood Hills in a house filled with a bevy of babes and a cross-section of Noah’s Ark. Gena Rowlands, preternaturally enthralling, is Sarah Lawson, Robert’s loopy sister whose recent divorce (from Seymour Cassel, in a re-casting of MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ) results in her estrangement from her daughter, and a lunacy that is equally tragic and absurd (note the GREED-like epic expansion of her hair). The depths of desperation are mined and contrasted through Robert’s ambivalence towards love and Sarah’s embarrassingly juvenile surfeit of affection. The performances are so naked that their fragility cuts through the film’s fiction, making LOVE STREAMS “a movie that gets better with every viewing” (Dennis Lim, The Village Voice). Not to be missed. – Andréa Picard

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror) Gary Morris, August 2006

"Independent" cinema, like "alternative" music, is increasingly difficult to recognize these days. The indie movement has its own set of conventions that make it as much a copy of as a challenge to its alleged nemesis, the mainstream. It's only a few mental steps from the Hollywood star to his or her slacker variant. Raging egos, star fits, ruthless self-promotion, and unabashed greed are as omnipresent in the alleged underground as in the mainstream.

Nowadays, cinematic innovation is easier to find by looking backward. A fine case in point is John Cassavetes' last film, Love Streams, made five years before he died. Cassavetes wore his reputation for intransigence like a crown; he simply refused to bow to the endless reshaping and recutting of his films that would have made him a beloved and successful hack. Instead, starting in 1960 with Shadows, he turned out a wrenching series of closely observed melodramas — critiques of romantic and sexual relations in modern American life — that still seem fresh today. The rarely screened Love Streams is among his longest, least compromised, and most demanding works. It's also one of the most rewarding.

The film is a series of extended vignettes, some of them improvised to varying degrees, centering on the disintegrating lives of two people — the driven, abusive novelist Robert Harmon (played by Cassavetes himself), and his sister Sarah (a brilliant Gena Rowlands), who's in the midst of a bitter divorce and a nervous breakdown. Harmon spends his days gathering "material" for his fiction — in reality, desperately indulging himself with hookers and booze, while misusing a string of ex-wives and a pitiful abandoned son he meets briefly for the first time. Sarah's life has become a series of hysterical interludes — collapsing at the divorce lawyer's or at a bowling alley, and in a memorably comic-pathetic scene, bringing several taxis full of miniature horses, goats, chickens, and other fauna to her brother to give him "something to love." Not every director could make such melodramatics ring true — and there are even more over-the-top dream sequences — but the film offers such a richness of emotional detail in its pictures of Robert and Sarah and those around them that we eventually uncover the humor and humanity behind these damaged lives.

John Cassavetes went into Love Streams knowing he was dying, and while it's as difficult and as disturbing as the rest of his body of work, it also comes to light as an oddly tender film, and open-hearted work.

Cassavetes stars as Robert Harmon, a writer of trashy novels about sex and women. As "research," he hangs out -- and often sleeps with -- all manner of women, but mainly prostitutes. To him, love exists only in a fleeting moment and not much more.

His sister, Sarah, has a much stronger view. Her smothering, all-encompassing brand of love has led to a divorce from her husband (Seymour Cassel); her daughter (Margaret Abbott) has chosen to live with him. She tries a trip to Europe but mostly winds up lugging a mountain of suitcases around, so she visits her brother.

Meanwhile, he has been assigned to baby-sit a son (probably a "mistake" from a long-forgotten sexual experience) for the weekend; he drives to Vegas, leaves the kid in a hotel room and goes out boozing and whoring for the night. Later, Sarah brings home a menagerie of new pets to teach Robert how to love something.

As if that weren't enough, Love Streams wraps up with a truly memorable, frightening, dazzling series of dreams and hallucinations, taking place during a vicious rainstorm.

Though Cassavetes has a reputation for looseness and improvisation, he is at his most and deliciously visual here, using the huge home, the circular driveway, windows and dark corners for extreme emotional impact. Characters slip in and out of shadows, or around doorways, just as often as their characters slip from emotional accessibility to emotional obscurity.

This is a great film, and worthy of the effort it takes to sit through it. Cassavetes and playwright Ted Allan adapted a play by Allan. Peter Bogdanovich reportedly directed one scene, without credit.

The Parallax Review [D. B. Bates]

There's no other American director who can do what John Cassavetes does on the screen. There may not be many who would want to. Mr. Cassavetes's work, in ''Love Streams,'' as in his earlier films, is as overflowing with emotional constructs as it is barren of other forms of thought. It's excessive and idiosyncratic all the way. Yet Mr. Cassavetes, as both actor and director, is never without his own peculiar magnetism and authority. Once again, he is able to galvanize a long, rambling, quirky psychodrama through sheer force of personality.

''Love Streams,'' which opens today at the Coronet, has the style, cast and concerns with which Mr. Cassavetes' devotees are familiar. The director stars as Robert, a famous author who is ''writing a book on night life,'' which means that he's a kind of den father to a household full of clean-cut young prostitutes and that his nights on the town often leave him drunk, bruised and bloody. Gena Rowlands plays Sarah, a self-proclaimed ''very happy person'' who likes to visit sick relatives - anyone's relatives - and is fragile enough to have lately been institutionalized. Their stories remain parallel for the film's first hour, but they run together when Sarah comes to stay at Robert's house. It is gradually revealed that she is his sister.

The second half of the film, in which this new closeness between Robert and Sarah accentuates their neuroses, has a different tone from the first half, which is all exposition. It takes a while for Mr. Cassavetes (who wrote the screenplay with Ted Allan, based on Mr. Allan's play) to introduce a number of subsidiary characters. Among them are the sultry nightclub singer (Diahnne Abbott) whom Robert pursues desperately and just as desperately abandons; the 8-year-old son (Jakob Shaw) who pays Robert an unexpected visit (''I haven't seen him since he was born; we were just going over old times,'' the father casually explains), and Sarah's husband (Seymour Cassel), whom she calls to tell brightly: ''Jack? I'm almost not crazy now.'' The real drama barely involves these people at all. It centers on Robert and Sarah, who are meant to be seen as two sides of the same coin.

Because Mr. Cassavetes is so much better equipped to consider his characters individually than in tandem, because his speciality is the long close-up monologue rather than the dialogue or the reaction, ''Love Streams'' is more successful in sketching Robert and Sarah separately than in bringing them together. Once they meet, the film gives itself over to outlandish devices, like an operetta fantasy in which Sarah sings to her husband and daughter about the breakup of their family, and to outlandish humor. There is the moment, for instance, when Sarah decides Robert needs something to love and brings him home two miniature horses, a goat, a parrot, a duck, some chickens and a very large dog. The spectacle of Sarah arriving at Robert's place with most of these creatures in a single taxi is funny enough. But the joke goes on too long.

It is repeated several times in ''Love Streams'' that ''love is a stream - it's continuous, it doesn't stop,'' and that ''a beautiful woman has to offer a man her secrets.'' So ''Love Streams'' is of less interest for its verbal insights than for the offbeat energy of its best scenes. In one of these, Sarah goes alone to a bowling alley in an evening dress, bowling alone to show how cheerful she can be. Miss Rowlands is vibrant enough to make this scene appealing, rather than bizarre.

Mr. Cassavetes has a fine long sequence in which he introduces his newly discovered son to a life of casual flamboyance, whisking him off to Las Vegas and teaching him how to drink beer. The outstanding moment in Miss Rowland's performance - and in the film itself - comes when she takes a spur-of-the-moment trip to France, arriving there with fur coats, several steamer trunks, lots of shopping bags and at least a dozen other pieces of luggage. She needs a porter, but the only one available speaks no English. She tries to tell him about the bags in fractured French, but he blinks uncomprehendingly. ''You can understand me if you want to,'' Sarah tells him then, with a definiteness that very nearly makes it true - and with the authority that much of Mr. Cassavetes's film possesses.

Love Streams Ray Carney’s discussion of LOVE STREAMS

John Cassavetes's Love Streams Charles Leary, from Screening the Past, June 17, 2007, also seen here: The Return Home: John Cassavetes's Love Streams

GreenCine N.P. Thompson, May 24, 2006

Procrast-Nation

ReFramed No. 6: John Cassavetes Love Streams - PopMatters Jordan Cronk and Calum Marsh converse on the film

John Cassavetes - The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film ... Tim Applegate from Film Journal

Cinematic Jazz: The Myth of John Cassavetes - Roger Ebert Steve Erickson, November 3, 2014

Jason Bailey Fourth Row Center

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Siffblog [Kathy Fennessy]

Cassavetes in the Provinces Allan MacInnin from Alienated in Vancouver, February 24, 2006

John Cassavetes' Love Streams at the Vancity Theat... Allan MacInnin from Alienated in Vancouver, March 9, 2006

Love Streams (1984) - Overview - TCM.com

Love Streams - Torrents d'amour Image 1 sur 14 - Toutlecine film photos

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] January 1, 1984, original review is better

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] January 7, 1998

Love Streams - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BIG TROUBLE

USA (93 mi) 1986 ‘Scope

Presumably directed as a favour to old buddy Falk, Cassavetes' last film is a far cry from the glories of Gloria, Husbands, Shadows and the rest. Indeed, it's absolutely unrecognisable as his work, being a conventionally glossy spoof thriller in which insurance salesman Arkin, desperate for finance to send his musical triplets through Yale, agrees to forge a double indemnity policy on Falk's life for his third wife D'Angelo. Sounds familiar? For the first third, this is a comic reshuffle of moments from Wilder and Chandler's classic Double Indemnity, but then out come the wacky surprises in a chaotically inventive mish-mash of black neurotic humour. Never hysterically funny but scattered with pleasingly OTT moments and throwaway lines, it looks as if Cassavetes merely wanted a) to prove he could make a blandly stylish commercial piece, and b) the cash.

PopMatters Chris Robé

Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
— Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

John Cassavetes struggled long and hard against mainstream movies' predilection for action-packed, slickly produced plots. And so, it's distressing that his last film, Big Trouble, appears to capitulate to just that sort of formula.

At first glance, Big Trouble seems to be an uneven ode to Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944). As in Wilder's film, a femme fatale, Blanche Rickey (Beverly D'Angelo), convinces an insurance salesman, Leonard Hoffman (Alan Arkin), to murder her husband, Steve (Peter Falk), in order to collect a $5 million insurance policy. But a sharp insurance fraud investigator, O'Mara (Charles Durning), thwarts their plans, while Hoffman learns that Steve was never actually killed. And in this plot turn, Big Trouble initiates a theme that runs through all of Cassavetes' work, that is, his interest in ruinous deceptions and failed relationships.

Typically, Cassavetes provides complex characters, whom we never entirely like, and refuses to explain fully their motivations. Big Trouble, however, is only concerned with investigating the basic deception. The intimate reality that lies beneath this scheming remains unseen.

Much of the film's humor comes from its parodies of stereotypes. Devious Blanche is surely out of place in the 1980s 'burbs, and as such, she embodies male anxieties about female fidelity and love. Both Leonard and Steve fall prey to her, unable to tell whether her seductions are genuine, or if there is anything genuine about her at all. Steve, in turn, is a parody of conventional masculinity. Dressed in jungle fatigues and hat, posed in pictures with rifles and slain animals, he is a Hemingway character come to life 50 years too late. In one of the film's most hilarious scenes, Steve offers hen-pecked Leonard a potent Norwegian liqueur, calling it "really a man's drink." Leonard takes a large sip, then, unwilling to admit that he can't handle it, nods approval as his gag reflex forces him to rid his mouth. Steve offers him another drink that might suit him more. But Leonard insists, in a gruff voice, "This was fine. This was plenty."

But, despite such moments of humor and insight, the film is flat, even when referencing Cassavetes' previous films. In a scene borrowing from A Woman Under The Influence (1974), Steve unloads a group of illegal Chinese workers at his house, then asks Blanche to cook them a quick meal. This recalls Nick Longhetti (Peter Falk) similarly forcing his wife Mabel (Gena Rowlands) to cook for his lower-class sewer buddies. But unlike the earlier film that used the scene to examine the intricate dynamics between husband, wife, and co-workers, Big Trouble only makes a weak stab at humor, when Blanche says she will do anything for Steve and then delegates such work to her maid.

At its worst, the film seems less the work of a seasoned director than a pretentious film student overdosed on post-structural theory. Debord once wrote, "In a society of the spectacle, everything is image, even reality. All we seem to have left are references to other references."

But for all his criticisms of the culture, Debord considered reality worth fighting for, a means to maintain a sense of human complexity and thoughtfulness. Cassavetes also explored the danger of the spectacle, exposing how individuals compromise their emotions and beliefs by adhering to mediated notions of "humanity." Flimsy and frustrating, Big Trouble suggests that he finally gave up on reality; it's a vague representation of a Cassavetes film. Unlike his other work, it only questions stereotypical, socially constructed roles to find out that, ultimately, there is nothing beneath them

Film Freak Central review [Travis Hoover]

From the depths of the files marked "for completists only" comes John Cassavetes' Big Trouble, a film that defies all but the most determined attempts to fit it into the master's canon. Not only is the director's raw emotionality nowhere in evidence here, but the unforced aesthetics that are his hallmark are totally unsuited to the broad and dialogue-dependant farce screenplay by Andrew Bergman (writing under the pseudonym Warren Bogle). It's hard to think of a bigger mismatch of director and material--unless it's Robert Altman doing a teen comedy called O.C. and Stiggs (which, regrettably, happened the following year). I'd suggest a double bill for the diehard auteurists among us, but the disillusionment would be so shattering that I doubt that any of them would survive the experience.

In all fairness, Big Trouble is much better than that ill-fated Altman venture, and can be seen as an interesting example of a helmsman subverting assigned material: parachuted in to replace another director, Cassavetes appears to have pretended that it's another movie, and hoped that it would all work out in the end. On paper, the picture involves uptight Leonard Hoffman (Alan Arkin), an insurance salesman whose triplet sons have been accepted to Yale; Leonard is, alas, scrambling to secure financing for their tuition. Enter Blanche Rickey (Beverly D'Angelo), the wealthy Tennessee Williams wife whose husband Steve (Peter Falk) has been given six weeks to live. The two hatch a plot to make $5M off a policy that only pays when the victim dies on a train, à la Double Indemnity. It's not until the phoney accident takes place that the truth is revealed: Steve is a con artist planning the ultimate score. His scheme has dragged Leonard's future--and his sons'--into serious jeopardy.

Is this really a Cassavetes picture? I suppose that Big Trouble could seem vaguely related to his concerns--the transformation of a repressed family man at the hands of free-spirit criminal veers dangerously close to the director's insistence on the primacy of emotion. (Essentially, it's like the wake scene in Husbands with Falk trying to bully some catharsis out of Arkin's fusty old lady.) But this only goes so far, and most of the time you're aware of the disparity of styles between director and screenwriter. The script is quite deliberately mild--one never believes for a moment that any lasting damage can be incurred, even as the plot trades up from fraud to kidnapping to terrorism. In classic Cassavetes, the slightest tic is of earth-shattering importance, meaning that he's got one strike against him going into this wisp of a screenplay.

The director tries to fight the deliberate nature of the script by short-circuiting the dialogue and letting the action ebb and flow. But while this blows off the fake snappiness of the genre, it results in something amorphous and weird. A typical scene involves the co-conspirators, having kidnapped the insurance investigator (Charles Durning) who is hip to their plot, meandering roadside considering their options: a regular director would have made a sharp distinction between the horrified Arkin and no-worries Falk, but Cassavetes renders the scene with little crosscutting, and as a result the laughs dissolve into a feeling of what-the-hell-is-going-on-here. Cassavetes doesn't have the insane focus of classical pop, and while that's why we love him, there's no denying that his attempts to colour interestingly inside the lines end in failure.

The problem isn't so much that Big Trouble is neither a classic farce nor typical Cassavetes, it's that it isn't really much of anything else. The film is a freak of nature without home or purpose, and while it isn't especially painful, it leaves you with nothing but chaos. Moreover, it's completely convictionless--and if there's one thing we expect from Cassavetes, it's strong convictions. All said, this bizarre anomaly makes a depressing capper to a brilliant career, and will have you longing for the excesses of the great one's least compromised work.

The platter is of surprising quality when you consider the low priority it must have been for distributor Columbia Tri-Star. The 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen image is reasonably good: while blacks are somewhat bleached-out and darkened scenes have a hint of grain, the colours are otherwise as vibrant as they can be given the hideous mid-'80s pastels being rendered. The 1.0 mono soundtrack is similarly satisfactory, with no bars to intelligibility, though the clarity of Bill Conti's (awful) score is often much better than the diegetic sound itself, and consequently rather jarring. Poorly-transferred trailers for the Falk vehicles The Cheap Detective and Murder by Death, as well as a rather fresher one for I Spy, round out the disc.

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Dindrane

The Onion A.V. Club [Stephen Thompson]

Cassavetes, Nick

UNHOOK THE STARS

USA France (103 mi) 1996

In this gentle drama, screen legend Gena Rowlands plays a widowed mom who learns to live again, thanks to the influence of a lovable small boy, and befriends locals like hellcat neighbor Marisa Tomei and affable trucker Gerard Depardieu. As you'd expect, Rowlands' performance is expertly understated, while the movie has a sweetness that's magnified by the fact that Rowlands is first-time director Nick Cassavetes' mom. But there's really not an awful lot going on in Unhook The Stars: The sympathetically drawn characters evolve through the course of the movie, but the ambiguous, choose-your-own-ending conclusion feels more like a copout than the profound moment it's supposed to be. It's a nice little dramatic diversion—not at all the uproarious comedy promised on the video box—but it's too slack and marginal to warrant recommendation.

Unhook the Stars | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

Though her husband died leaving her financially secure, life isn't exactly great for Mildred (Rowlands). Her teenage daughter Ann Mary Margaret (Kelly) is an argumentative ungrateful sort who only visits when she wants something; her beloved son Ethan (Thornton) is supportive and solicitous, but he's keen to take her with his family to San Francisco and install her in a granny flat, and Mildred's not sure she wants to move. Mildred's a little bored and lonely - not that she'd complain - so when a new neighbour, foul-mouthed, frequently drunk Monica (Tomei), asks her to babysit for six-year-old JJ (Lloyd), Mildred's happy to oblige. Little does she know the encounter will change her life. Nick Cassavetes' debut as writer/director is a sensitive, honest, touching study of the seemingly limited options faced by a woman whose age belies her energy, enthusiasm and ability to enjoy herself whenever the opportunity presents itself. If it lacks the raw intensity and brilliant insights of his father John's work, Cassavetes Jr still provides enough subtly observed moments to suggest he's a talent to watch. The film features a clutch of terrific performances, headed by the director's mother - sweet, strong, vulnerable and iron-willed, Rowlands is entirely credible and affecting throughout. The film's only misjudgment is the inclusion of Depardieu in a minor but important role: while there's nothing wrong with his performance, we're just too aware of who he really is to be properly convinced that he's a French-Canadian trucker.

Rolling Stone [Peter Travers]

Nick Cassavetes, the son of acclaimed international director John Cassavetes, makes his directorial debut with Unhook the Stars, a pleasantly unsentimental character study of one woman who has difficulty letting go. Although Cassavetes may want independence from his father's name and memory, this film won't earn it, for, although the style bears only a passing resemblance to the late film maker's, Nick not only uses several members of John's crew (notably Phedon Papamichael), but has cast his mother, Gena Rowlands, in the lead role. In addition, the script has a heavy autobiographical tinge -- Cassavetes is using cinema to work out his ambiguous feelings towards his famous father.

For Mildred (Rowlands), a single mother (she was widowed many years ago), her last chick is about to fly the coup. Her oldest, a son (David Sherrill), has already left home. Now, her daughter, Annie (Moira Kelly), is on her way out. Their parting is less-than-amicable. Annie finds her mother to be a controlling and interfering influence, and wants to get away as soon as possible. Mildred watches her go sadly, wondering what happened to all the aspirations she harbored for her only female offspring. But Mildred isn't destined to be alone for long. Her new neighbor across the street, Monica Warren (Marisa Tomei), has thrown her husband (David Thornton) out following a particularly nasty quarrel. Now, she's alone with her young son, J.J. (Jake Lloyd), and doesn't have the money to pay a sitter when she goes to work. Mildred offers to help, gratis, and soon becomes J.J.'s surrogate mother.

Looking back on Unhook the Stars, the first thing that strikes me is the script's openness and honesty. It doesn't try to trick and manipulate us with melodrama. Every action has a natural consequence -- nothing ever feels forced or scripted. When Monica's husband returns to town, wanting to see his son, there's no shouting match or violence. When Annie eventually comes home, there's no big, tearful reunion. And, when Mildred begins to realize that her time with J.J. is coming to a close, we're spared an emotional scene. Unhook the Stars is consistently low- key, and, in the context of an intelligent script and strong acting, this represents a welcome change- of-pace from most American films.

Gena Rowlands is excellent, but that shouldn't come as a surprise. She becomes Mildred, subtly and effectively bringing the woman's every emotion to the surface. This is the kind of role that could easily be overacted, but Rowlands strikes the perfect balance between restraint and abandon. From the first scene, where she's delivering newspapers, to the last, where she turns her back on the past and strides purposely towards the future, Rowlands makes us care about Mildred.

Marisa Tomei, who has always had screen presence, gives the best performance of a relatively short career. Tomei makes Monica a swirling, contradictory font of pure emotion -- she's always nervous, agitated, elated, furious, or a combination of the above. Monica may not be the best- developed character, but Tomei invests her with such passion and energy that it's impossible not to see her as a lot more than the person on the pages of Cassavetes' screenplay.

It doesn't demand much of a stretch for Gerard Depardieu to play the likable French Canadian truck driver who becomes infatuated with Mildred. Depardieu is a pleasant addition to the cast (and got involved for the chance to work with Rowlands), but isn't a revelation. However, Moira Kelly is. The young actress, the best thing about the recent Entertaining Angels, gives a powerhouse performance in limited screen exposure. Annie's pain and rage are palpable, going far beyond the norms of youthful rebellion, and Kelly realistically and effectively portrays them.

Unhook the Stars is an engaging motion picture, mixing various flavors of comedy and drama into a satisfying whole. Admittedly, there are times when Cassavetes skims lightly over subject matter that is deserving of a fuller exploration, but the quality of the finished product allows us to overlook most of these incidents. Unhook the Stars is a movie of many special, small moments, that, combined together, make for a shining cinematic experience.

Review for Unhook the Stars (1996) - IMDb Scott Renshaw

Women's Studies, University of Maryland (by McAlister) Linda Lopez McAlister

That Cow - Review of Unhook the Stars (1996) Andrew Bradford

DVDFile Jim M. Howard

Movie Magazine International [Mary Weems]

Unhook the Stars - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Unhook the Stars - Philadelphia City Paper Cindy Fuchs

A Widow Alone, Loving And Full of Longing - New York Times Stephen Holden

SHE’S SO LOVELY

USA France (100 mi) 1997 ‘Scope

She's So Lovely | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule review)

A streamlined, sometimes affecting Hollywood studio version of a maverick independent script by the late John Cassavetes, this 1997 film offers a fascinating glimpse at what Cassavetes was from the vantage point of what he wasn't. Sean Penn (his choice for the lead ten years ago) stars as a crazy low-life city brawler deeply in love with his pregnant wife (Robin Wright Penn). One of his jealous rages gets him committed to a mental asylum for ten years, and by the time he gets out his wife has married John Travolta (who's the best reason for seeing this movie), had a couple more kids, and moved to the suburbs. Nick Cassavetes (John's son) is the director, though without the luxury of final cut enjoyed by his father on all his own features, and the brassy in-your-face music and 'Scope framing both seem antithetical to the father's style. Most of the characters (also including Harry Dean Stanton, Debi Mazar, and James Gandolfini), irrational and ineffable, are recognizable denizens of John Cassavetes's world, though the way they're sometimes pressed into sitcom routines robs them of some of their potential density. Not really a Cassavetes movie, but worth seeing anyway.

Working from a screenplay by his late father, legendary filmmaker John Cassavetes, Nick Cassavetes' second film as a director stars Sean Penn and Robin Wright Penn as a down-and-out white-trash couple as hopelessly in love with each other as they are irresponsible and self-destructive. After Wright Penn is raped and beaten by a neighbor, Penn has a psychotic episode, shoots an EMR worker, and ends up spending 10 years in a mental hospital. In the interim, Wright Penn cleans up and marries responsible, wealthy, somewhat shady businessman John Travolta and settles into a comfortable life as an upper-middle-class wife and mother. But when Penn is released and comes looking for her, Wright Penn is faced with a choice: to leave the soothing, predictable life she leads or voyage once again to the edge of sanity with the man she never stopped loving. At once grittily realistic and hopelessly romantic, She's So Lovely walks a fine line between artiness and pretension, and to its credit, it seldom falters. Anchored by a brilliant performance by Penn—and a powerful one by Wright Penn, as well as stalwart supporting turns by the ever-reliable Harry Dean Stanton and Travolta—She's So Lovely is consistently strong, subversive, and unpredictable. Cassavetes' grip on the material is surprisingly sure-handed for such an inexperienced director, but he's been blessed by a screenplay that proves a wonderfully fitting swan song to his father's career as one of Hollywood's most uncompromising, enduring visionaries.

The Man Who Viewed Too Much [Mike D'Angelo]

She's So Lovely, at least, has the virtue of novelty. Its meaning, however, must have died with its scenarist, John Cassavetes, whose script has finally been made by his son, Nick (and, if the rumors are correct, by star and co-executive producer Sean Penn, who is said to have given Junior the heave-ho in post-production). The film is a romantic ode to craziness that's at the same time disconcertingly cleareyed, so that the barfly couple at its center, Eddie (Penn) and Maureen (Robin Wright Penn), are clinically loco. Gone, it seems, is the R.D. Laing-ish gloss that holds madness to be the ultimate sanity. But nothing has replaced it save a dopey misogyny, in which women remain the unknowable Other. "What an interesting thing a woman is," muses Penn, in an appallingly moist turn that carries echoes of Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man. "Tits, ass, hair. Where the fuck did hair come from? What is hair?" Regressing further, he asserts that he's in trouble: "The world is controlled by a computer and seven different women." Wrapped in a straitjacket after shooting a mental health worker, he spouts infantile Beckettisms: "You just suck on your mother's tit and then you die."

Ten years later, Maureen is ensconced in the suburban manse of Joey--John Travolta--who, in a Danny Aiello role, just can't suppress his hipness. He's a construction honcho with whom she's raising three little daughters, one of them Eddie's. When her ex is set free, she begins to feel his gravitational tug, and flatly explains to her current spouse that she loves Eddie more and owes him big time: "He went right off the bridge for me. I think he went nuts for me." Joey, understandably stricken, wants to take on his rival mano a mano and man to man. But the asylum has left Eddie sweet and passive and beatific. He knows Maureen will come back to him, because she's his and she has to and that's that. In a conventional thriller, Eddie would be the dark monster out of the past who threatens the sanctity of Maureen's new family and sanity. In a Cassavetes script, he's more likely to be saving her from suburban lobotomization.

Robin Wright Penn does amusing tipsy schtick, tottering around, black and blue, on those long, skinny legs. But it's hard to say if she's supposed to be a drunk, a junkie, a moron, a schizophrenic, or all of the above. The actress, pre-Penn, played the title character in The Princess Bride (1987), and has been cast against type with a vengeance. The vengeance rebounds on her. Casting against type doesn't work in a John Cassavetes script, in which the principal interest lies in watching actors plumb their already well-entrenched personas. Wright plumb doesn't have a persona to pen. I mean, Wright Penn doesn't have a persona to plumb. She can't begin to make sense of this character, not even poetic sense. "She doesn't love you, she doesn't love me. She's de-lovely," says Eddie to Joey in what's meant to be the wisdom, by way of Cole Porter, of a simpleton poet.

I'm tempted to applaud the film for its perversity, for the fact that the wife doesn't do the responsible thing, that family values are unsanctimoniously flouted, that the ending is less programmatic and more open-ended than anything I've seen on-screen in years. Having said that, it behooves me to add that Cassavetes' script must have been written in the final throes of delirium tremens. It's impossible to know how to take this woman who up and abandons her three little girls for a man newly sprung from the booby hatch and still demonstrably nuts. Yet the ambiguities aren't rich, because so much has been left out--the meat of both relationships, along with a coherent point of view. Betraying my traditional masculine possessiveness, I found myself dreaming of an alternative ending, in which Travolta puts a bullet in Penn's brain. Then, in the final shot, he lowers his pistol and submits to an interview with Susan Faludi.

JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Packaged Parables ... August 29, 1997

Nitrate Online Eddie Cockrell

“She's So Lovely” - Salon.com Gary Kamiya from Salon

JamesBowman.net | She's So Lovely

Review for She's So Lovely (1997) - IMDb Scott Renshaw

Review for She's So Lovely (1997) - IMDb Dragan Antulov

Blu-ray.com [Michael Reuben]

Movie Magazine International [Andrea Chase]

She's So Lovely | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

Austin Chronicle [Russell Smith]

Washingtonpost.com: Cassavetes' Last Bleak Fling: Love on the Rocks Rita Kempley

WashingtonPost.com: 'She's So Lovely': Wild Thing Desson Howe

San Francisco Examiner [Barbara Shulgasser]

New York Times Janet Maslin

JOHN Q

USA (116 mi) 2002

"I Am Sam Syndrome" might be an appropriate name for the process whereby the best intentions sometimes lead actors and directors to indulge in their worst artistic impulses. John Q's cast is the actorly equivalent of an all-star benefit concert, and director Nick Cassavetes has done interesting work in the past. But even with 10 months left in the year, 2002 will be hard-pressed to outdo John Q in terms of unbearability. Playing a character who practically glows with virtue, Denzel Washington stars as a salt-of-the-earth Chicago-area factory worker already struggling through the hard economic times indicated by George W. Bush speech footage. Then Washington's son (Daniel E. Smith) is rushed to the hospital with a previously undiagnosed heart condition. After learning that Smith needs a heart transplant to live, a smug doctor (James Woods) and a hospital executive (Anne Heche, who might as well have worn a T-shirt with the word "heartless" stenciled on it) inform Washington and wife Kimberly Elise of their options: Either find a way to insure a $250,000 payment, or take Smith home to die. ("You might want to make it a happy time," Heche suggests.) Refusing to take "no" for an answer, Washington takes Woods and his hospital hostage, forcing them at gunpoint to guarantee a place on the transplant list. Much speechifying follows, with Washington's rhetoric growing more impassioned after he's given a foil in the form of hostage negotiator Robert Duvall, who virtually reprises his role from Falling Down. Cassavetes' connection to the subject is apparently personal, but his film exemplifies all the pitfalls of Western Union-style filmmaking, right up to the scene where an ER-full of one-dimensional characters engage in a debate on the dangers of HMOs and contemporary health care. (Sample line from Highway To Heaven vet James Kearns' screenplay: "More like the hypocritical oath.") For all the facts spouted, John Q plays less like an exposé than a piece of exploitation, its clear divide between good and evil allowing no breathing room for real drama. By the time it arrives at a climax involving a race against time, rapidly dropping vital signs, and a noble sacrifice, the word "manipulative" hardly suffices.

In last week's New York Times"Arts and Leisure" section, I scratched the surface of the vigilante genre, focusing mostly on Collateral Damage, which combines two right-wing strains: the "you killed my wife and child and now you must die" motif and the "government won't let us fight so it's back to 'Nam our way" motif. But the vigilante is a malleable figure. He (or she) might use violent, coercive means, but this can easily be for liberal ends. Thus, John Q. (New Line Cinema)—a commercial for universal health care in which a kind, gentle Everyman (Denzel Washington) is forced to take a hospital hostage to secure a heart transplant for his cute, Gary Coleman-esque son. Needless to say, he becomes a populist hero to everyone but the police chief and his SWAT team.

What can a critic say? You'll hate the cold, skinny white bitch (Anne Heche) who tells John and his wife (Kimberly Elise) that the cost of the transplant is "prohibitively expensive" and that they should start thinking about "quality of life." You'll hate the surgeon (James Woods) who won't lift a finger to help even though he clearly knows the difference between right and wrong. You'll want to cheer when John produces a gun and announces that there will be "Free health care for everyone!" You might—although this is the film's most garish twist—choke back tears when John decides that, in the absence of a donor, he'll blow his own brains out on the operating table so that his son can have a heart. Denzel Washington is so powerfully earnest an actor that you never want to laugh at him—even when you ought to be in stitches.

I don't have a problem with John Q.'s depiction of despair in the face of insurance companies' inflexibility. But I do think the fairy-tale benefits of hostage-taking are a tad exaggerated. In the course of our hero's taking over a hospital, no innocent people are killed or injured—no patient even wants for medical treatment. A truly socially responsible movie would not suggest that vigilantism isn't hazardous to your health.

Exclaim! [Erin Oke]

If I have to sit through a mediocre Hollywood hero story, I take some consolation in being manipulated through "John Q.," whose ideas deserve to see the light of day, even if the execution is predictable sometimes to the point of being embarrassing. At least it's not another one of the war movies dominating the multiplexes in a cynical effort to keep the American public in a patriotic stupor. In fact, in a time where all media is pointed at America's "heroic" efforts abroad, "John Q." is somewhat daring in taking a critical look at the country's domestic policies.

The story centres around John Archibald (Denzel Washington), a downsized steel worker struggling to keep his family financially afloat when his son collapses suddenly of an undiagnosed heart condition. John then begins to wade through a bureaucratic nightmare when he's informed that his health insurance (recently changed to an HMO without his knowledge) will not cover the expenses of the lifesaving heart transplant operation the his son requires. He grows increasingly despairing as each appeal for help or leniency is rejected, and finally, in a moment of panic and desperation, takes the hospital's emergency room hostage.

For all it's noble intentions, it's really too bad that this couldn't be a better movie. The performances are all strong enough, given the cliched material and caricatured roles (the impersonal hospital administrator played icily by Anne Heche, the overpaid heart surgeon played sleazily by James Woods, the sympathetic police negotiator played crustily by Robert Duvall, the trigger-happy police chief played idiotically by Ray Liotta, and of course the heroic everyman played nobly by Denzel Washington). The main problem is the script, which clunkily shifts between hokey portraits of family togetherness and didactic diatribes on the sorry state of the United States' health care system. There is nothing in "John Q." that you don't see coming from a mile away. Every single moment is foreshadowed extensively and then played out beyond its natural conclusion, leaving nothing subject to interpretation. The good guys are untarnishably perfect (even during criminal actions, because of course John immediately wins the sympathies of his hostages over to his plight), and the bad guys are unfeeling and petty (until they too are won over by the noble cause). The film, with all the decent issues it raises, would have been so much more effective as a tragedy, but instead cops out with an implausible Hollywood ending that goes a long way to negate any import that the subject matter carried. Still, with all its flaws as a film, it made me darn happy to live in a place with universal health care and if people are going to insist on flocking to heart-warmingly mediocre movies, they may as well go to one that takes place in the real world and has a few important things to say.

“John Q.” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs] also seen here: PopMatters

John Q. | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Review: John Q || ErikLundegaard.com

Film Freak Central - John Q. (2002) Walter Chaw

Why John Q. doesn't make sense. - Slate Magazine Erik Lundegaard from Slate, February 21, 2002

World Socialist Web Site J. Cooper

Decent Films Guide - Faith on film Steven D. Greydanus

Movie Ram-blings Ram Sumudrala

Movie Vault [Movieman]

The Village Voice [Ed Park]

Kevin Clemons - digitallyOBSESSED!

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

eFilmCritic Reviews Eric D. Snider

JOHN Q - DVD review | Movie Metropolis Eddie Feng

DVD Verdict Michael Rankin

Forgettable and hokey 'John Q' - The Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Movie Magazine International [Casey McCabe]

BBCi - Films Neil Smith

John Q | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes, movie ... - Time Out

Washington Post [Michael O'Sullivan]

Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]

Cincinnati Enquirer [ Margaret A. McGurk]

Los Angeles Times [Manohla Dargis]

New York Times Elvis Mitchell

THE NOTEBOOK B+ 90

USA (121 mi) 2004

Yes, this is nothing like his father’s work. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. But he’s got the good sense to use his mother. Using a tearful, melodramatic movie of the week format, where things are, of course, overly idyllic, Cassavetes displays a surprisingly conventional movie format filled with Hallmark card images. Reminding me of the overexaggerated Southern antiquity on display in BIG FISH (2003), which certainly tugged on one’s heartstrings, others have given more obvious comparisons to the film IRIS (2001), which, because of the caliber of the performances, Jim Broadbent and Judi Dench, with Kate Winslet as the Dench character during her youthful war years, where as adults, the sharp-as-a-tack Dench suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease, but that film was a more realistic drama and not so much just an out-and-out, melodramatic tearjerker.

Here the film uses fewer tricks of the trade and relies instead on good, old-fashioned acting performances. While it has the look of the placid ON GOLDEN POND (1981), James Garner and Gena Rowlands play the aging couple, with Rowlands suffering from dementia. Garner reads to her in an attempt to get her to reconnect with some of her own lost memories, from what turns out to be the story of their youth, played by Ryan Gosling and the young, luminous, Judy Garland-esque Rachel McAdams, who just lights up the screen. In my view, despite all the film’s faults, she and Rowlands are worth the price of admission, and every second they are on screen is movie magic. There is even a moment quite reminiscent of Rowland’s performance in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974). This is a film I will always catch whenever it comes out on TV, as it’s easy to get carried away by the beauty of that quirky thing called love. The music featured is Billie Holiday, and later Jimmy Durante, both singing renditions of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” James Garner spoke affectionately on talk shows afterwards about how he had to laugh whenever he heard director Nick Cassavetes calling out “OK Mom” before shooting all of Ms. Rowlands’ scenes.

I defer to Ken Rudolph’s comments: NOTEBOOK, THE

“This is not a film for realism sticklers, cynics, or real men. Me, I had a good cry and left the theater feeling great.”

The Village Voice [Jessica Winter]

Big-lunged lovers Allie (Rachel McAdams) and Noah (Ryan Gosling)—pampered Southern debutante and rough-earth mill worker, respectively—are on a freedom spree: lying down in the middle of the main drag late at night; getting aviary without the aid of hallucinogens ("Say I'm a bird!" Allie shrieks at her stud muffin. "Now say you're a bird too!"); daring their teen romance to conquer time, distance, class, family meddlings, World War II (which the film renders as a brief skirmish played out in somebody's backyard), and some inconvenient significant others picked up like lint along the way. The minutes of Allie and Noah's magical hysteria tour are duly recorded in the titular ledger-cum–framing device, these days in the possession of a kindly codger named Duke (James Garner). He reads from the notebook to the now elderly Allie (the director's mom, Gena Rowlands), who's sadly befogged by an Alzheimer's-like illness. Amid the sticky-sweet swamp of Jeremy Leven's script (adapted from Nicholas Sparks's novel), Rowlands and Garner emerge spotless and beatific, lending a magnanimous credibility to their scenes together. These two old pros slice cleanly through the thicket of sap-weeping dialogue and contrivance, locating the terror and desolation wrought by the cruel betrayals of a failing mind.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Opening shots tend to say a lot about a movie, but they say everything about The Notebook, a glossy adaptation of Nicholas Sparks' four-hanky sudser. Over a twinkling piano, director Nick Cassavetes sets the scene of a thousand paperback romances: A lone boatman paddling against a blazing sunset, a woman staring wistfully from the garret of a lakeside plantation, a flock of seagulls flapping toward her window in slow motion. Subtract the references to Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway, slap on a cover with flowing locks and heaving bosoms, and the film could be a smash at supermarket checkout counters nationwide.

Retooling Love Story for a new generation, with Alzheimer's replacing cancer as the terminal disease du jour, Cassavetes runs headlong into a bitter irony: His father, indie legend John Cassavetes, spent a career depicting relationships as messy, contentious battlegrounds of the heart, light-years removed from Love Story's gloppy notions of crystalline preciousness. There's plenty of tension inherent in The Notebook, which pairs a strapping lumberjack with a wealthy debutante, but none of the elder Cassavetes' passion and grit; instead, the film leaves an oft-told tale to marinate slowly in its own syrup.

The framing device presents the gag reflex with its first and most critical test. As his beloved Gena Rowlands withers away in a nursing home from Alzheimer's, James Garner tries to jog her memory by reading the story of their lives together, prompting a flashback to their youths in 1940. Garner stand-in Ryan Gosling stars as a humble yet free-spirited country boy who falls for rich girl Rachel McAdams, over the objections of her snooty parents, played by Joan Allen and Josef Stalin look-alike David Thornton. When McAdams' family moves to upstate New York and WWII begins, the young lovers are forced apart, as Gosling fights bravely for the Allies in Europe and McAdams volunteers as a nurse, swooning over wounded stud James Marsden. But Gosling's steadfast love, manifested in a beautifully restored Southern plantation house, draws them together in a chance rendezvous.

Periodically, Cassavetes cuts back to Garner and Rowlands, who muses about the "wonderful story" being told. But those not suffering from Alzheimer's may find it a bit too familiar. At one point, Gosling and McAdams even marvel at the improbability of a city girl and a country boy falling in love, as if they'd necked through all the movies in which that happens. Lingering memories of Gosling's turn as a neo-Nazi in The Believer give his character an edge that the film desperately needs, but his hard features melt at all the appropriate beats. In a romance where paradise is a duck-filled pond, it helps to be mild-mannered.

The prose in Nicholas Sparks' romantic potboiler "The Notebook" isn't simply purple — it's a violent purple, as blue-black and slobbery as a chow's tongue. A triumph of kitsch emotion and easy-does-it style, the book vaulted up bestseller lists on its publication in 1996, all but assuring a movie adaptation. The rights were sold to Hollywood and for years directors such as Steven Spielberg and Jim Sheridan toyed with the property, before Nick Cassavetes summoned the courage to go where few filmmakers of taste dare to go — the three-hankie weepie. Ladies and gentlemen, start your sobbing.

Divided between the gauzy past and a somewhat flintier present, the story spans six decades of love between an Emersonian type named Noah Calhoun and a wealthy Southern belle, Allie Nelson. Played in the film by Ryan Gosling and Rachel Mc-Adams in flashback, and more movingly by James Garner and Gena Rowlands in the present, the pair first meet while she's on summer break. A flurry of quick-sketch scenes and puppy-love nuzzling ensue, along with a load of hooey, some awkward filmmaking and two unpersuasive lead performances. McAdams, last seen in "Mean Girls," and Gosling, a talented young actor who ripped the screen to shreds in "The Believer," look good in period skivvies, but their passion is too bridled, their actions too well-behaved. They never blow hot life into their characters.

Trouble with a capital "T" arrives in the form of Allie's parents (played by Joan Allen and, in a waxed mustache, David Thornton), who deem Noah unsuited to the task of cultivating their hothouse flower. The lovers part, tears fall and time marches inexorably on, though Cassavetes does pause, rather inexplicably, for a World War II interlude with exploding bombs and bodies. Years later, Noah has sprouted a beard and Allie has snared a prospect (James Marsden). Haunted by what might have been, Allie visits Noah for what she believes will be one final time. Too many beers and one thunderstorm suggest otherwise, leading to the story's big mystery. If you don't know what happens next you've either never seen a Hollywood movie or dipped into a paperback filled with throbbing passion and endless love.

Adapted by Jan Sardi and written by Jeremy Leven, the film turns out to be a modest improvement on the novel. In place of Sparks' barely there sense of place and psychology, and wall-to-wall platitudes ("He'd learned to enjoy simple things," he writes of Noah), the filmmakers attempt to fashion a backdrop with a little actual bite. The results are generally toothless — the film's honeyed vision of race borders on the obscene — but there's a real attempt to place the characters in context, a material world rather than a greeting-card tableau. Cassavetes isn't much of a director and he never settles on a mood, which he seems intent on ruining with hiccups of goofiness. But there's an underlying humanity to his scenes, a sense that movies are made by people for other people.

That's never truer than in the final scenes with Garner and Rowlands. By then the messiness of the past has been neatly resolved and the story's minimal mystery finally revealed. Alone in a sick room with Allie, Noah — now rheumy-eyed and stooped, his hands trembling and face opened wide with wonder — pours out his heart. It's a breathtaking image of a man clutching at what gave his life meaning and completely heartbreaking, although perhaps not for the reasons the filmmakers intended. An unsettling consequence of growing up with the movies is watching beloved stars decline, seeing these heavenly bodies fade. One of the promises old movies make us is that its stars will remain untouched by age, impervious to the passing of time — it's a promise that new movies like this must inevitably break.

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Kamera.co.uk Beth Gilligan

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

Martin Tsai's Blog

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Matt Peterson)

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

That Cow (Andrew Bradford)

Film Freak Central Bill Chambers

Peter Sobczynski gives it Zero stars

The Village Voice [Rob Nelson]

ALPHA DOG B 84

USA (122 mi) 2006

A high voltage film that is a force to be reckoned with, teens in the wasteland gone wild, MTV on steroids, whose high energy buzz both offends and impresses with its ability to visualize America’s youth, a film that bears a strange stylized resemblance to BRICK (2005), a noirish high school murder mystery also set in LA where kids have the run of the place, pretty much eliminating all adults from their lives, living in their own contaminated underworld of petty violence and crime. Opening to a home movie montage of young children at play, who couldn’t be more harmless and innocent, we hear Eva Cassidy’s haunting rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” What follows is an in-your-face close up look at the goings on of a dysfunctional LA gang that couldn’t shoot straight, guys who are home bred on the mythology of MTV, a glamorized, sexed up, completely artificial depiction of manhood and success, defined by the overtly denigrating sexist and homophobic imagery of gangsta rap, where girls are bitches, and guys who aren’t cool are faggots. Unfortunately, all these features are sublimated into anyone indoctrinated by this vocabulary of pathology, where no one ever tells the truth, and where their commercialized lifestyle becomes the emblem of insincerity, fueled by money and the image of success, expressed through drugs, booze, and sex, which means guys surrounding themselves with a stable of beautiful girls, slavish sirens who are so oversexualized that nothing else in their lives matters except draping themselves all over the alpha dog, the leader of the pack. No one has a voice except the guy picking up the tab, and his bills are so high that his identity dissolves into the criminal underworld, usually involving the distribution of drugs and guns in order to support their neverending, hedonistic pleasuredome of sex, drugs, and fun. The problem with this lifestyle is there are consequences, but the persons living in this playground are always immune to them.

Teenage angst used to be best represented by the social pressures put on James Dean in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), whose clueless parents remained hoplessly out of touch. In time, the criminal element of BADLANDS (1973) was introduced, where killing attracted the eye of the otherwise bored and innocent girls. By now, BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991) is taken for granted as the touchstone for gritty realism, where more money and guns have only accentuated the necessity for senseless violence. White kids from the posh suburbs have discovered the allure of quick easy money, and the intoxication of no one telling them what to do, extending the moral boundaries where anything is possible. That, in a nutshell,is what this film is about. The attraction of elicit sexuality and a drug induced 24/7 gangsta party lifestyle is so strong, it trumps and devours any thoughts about moral limits, so that kids are willing to do the unthinkable, drug and gun running, petty thievery, to actual murders, then covering up their crimes, blaiming anyone else they can, refusing to believe they had anything to do with it.

Scored to a thumping, gangsta rap soundtrack that never stops, the film does a good job exposing the viewer to the adolescent mindset of this lily white criminal underworld of status and special privilege filled with the sons and daughters of the rich and famous, kids who just want to have fun, who are lured into this mythology of glamor and the good life, but underneath it all, it’s a network of thugs and broken promises, tough kids raiding the wallets of easy prey, sustaining their lifestyle through shakedowns. Inspired by a real life story, Emile Hirsch as Johnny Truelove leads this gang of thugs by operating a drug ring, which includes Justin Timberlake as Frankie, his reliable yes man, and Shawn Hatosy as Elvis, the runt of the litter, shown the least amount of respect, always left to do the dirty work. We are introduced to this hierarchy by Bruce Willis, Truelove’s father, drug supplier, and alleged mafia ringleader, whose own father is portrayed by none other than Harry Dean Stanton. So this lineage has proven name recognition and balls, and ocasionally we see Willis making snide remarks in front of tabloid TV journalists, obviously basking in the limelight of his own sordid undertakings.

Into this picture walks another dysfunctional family, led by the hysterics of Sharon Stone as the rich bitch mother, David Thornton as the spineless father, young Anton Yelchin as Zack, the dreamy younger brother who idolizes his much more troublesome older brother, Ben Foster as Jake, reminiscent of Edward Norton from AMERICAN HISTORY X (1998), the short fused skinhead pumped up on adrenaline and drugs, whose startling viciousness is nothing less than astonishing, as he’s a one man train wreck with a hairtrigger temper just waiting for anything to set him off. But he can’t afford to pay, leading to his ultimate confrontation with Johnny Truelove. In a brief period of time, Jake’s life veers totally out of control, led by rage and violence, including threats to Truelove: “I will take you down to hell with me!” In an attempt to get back at Jake, who besides owing him money has publicly ridiculed him by challenging his masculinity, so in what seems like a completely random moment, Truelove sees Jake’s brother and kidnaps him. Immediately a string of witnesses to the crime is identified when we see them as they appear in the film, heightening the sense that what we are witnessing is an ongoing crime scene. Yet once Johnny has him, he doesn’t know what to do with him, because Jake still hasn’t got the money, and even if he did, as described perfectly in an infamous phone call with Truelove, he’d rather see Truelove dead for what he’s done. But amazingly, Zack has never been happier, away from the hovering demands of his mother, he’s constantly fed all the dope, booze, and girls that he could ever want, so it’a like his dream vacation. The girls are attracted to him as he’s that “Stolen Boy,” and he actually befriends everyone who’s kidnapped him.

But Johnny is backed into a corner with no escape, as Jake is a man possessed, a man on a mission who has vowed to make him pay, so he orders a hit on the kid, Zack, who represents a threat to no one, and who everyone has grown to like. No one knows what to do, least of all Johnny, but they don’t know what else to do. The entire tone of the film changes at this point, as everything up until now has been an adrenaline-laced party, and the idea of whacking a kid is pretty demented, yet no one can stand up to Johnny either except Jake, easily the best thing in the picture, but he inexplicably fades out of the picture altogether. So we’re left with a couple of knuckleheads who feel forced to get ugly. By the end, Johnny has left the country while his gang of wannabe’s is left holding the bag. As it turns out, all participants have been convicted of something, while Truelove, whose real life name is Jesse James Hollywood, made the FBI’s most wanted list at the age of 20. Eventually he was caught in Brazil, brought back to LA where he is currently awaiting his trial. All this suggests truth is stranger than fiction.

The defense attorney who threatened to seek an injunction against the Sundance screening of the fact- and conjecture-based Alpha Dog may not have been acting on behalf of the festival (or New Line Cinema, still "indie" despite orcs and Oscars). Yet the appearance of controversy around New Line's latest youth-bait gangsta flick hardly hindered the programmers' bid to justify a closing-night slot. Essentially a bigger-budget Bully (whose director, Larry Clark, got enough props in Park City this year to look like a kid again), Dog sniffs around the stinky legend of a twerp Scarface (Emile Hirsch) who compels his weed-dealing crew to kidnap and then whack a delinquent client's 15-year-old brother (Anton Yelchin). Director Nick Cassavetes has a blast with scenes of testosterone-fueled aggression (until it's time to repent), working the subwoofer in a way that'll surely boost DVD sales among boys with bedroom posters of Tony Montana. Sundance needs to recruit the next generation of "indie" enthusiasts, and Alpha Dog, if nothing else, did succeed in bringing Justin Timberlake to Park City High.

FILM REVIEWS Scott Foundas from LA Weekly

Hewing closely to the case of the San Fernando Valley drug dealer and petty thug Jesse James Hollywood (who made the FBI’s most-wanted list at the tender age of 20), Alpha Dog follows Hollywood surrogate Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) as he plots the kidnapping and eventual murder of a baby-faced teen (Anton Yelchin) whose Jewish skinhead half-brother (Ben Foster) owes Truelove an unpaid debt. But the abduction is a botch from the start, with the victim willingly submitting to his captors — happy to be freed from under the thumb of his overprotective mother (Sharon Stone) — and proceeding to spend the next several days getting high and getting laid in the company of his captors, before landing in a shallow grave. Part cruel story of anomic suburban youth, part alarmist parental cautionary tale, Alpha Dog exudes the lurid, stranger-than-fiction appeal of Bully and River’s Edge and all those other ripped-from-the-headlines portraits of seemingly good, privileged kids gone very, very bad. Yet if the trappings sound familiar, the execution is anything but. In his best film to date, Nick Cassavetes (John Q, The Notebook) directs with ferocious energy, taking scenes past their logical stopping points and pushing his actors (particularly Foster, who can be as terrifying as Edward Norton in American History X) to, but never over, the precipice of absurdity.

The Village Voice [Robert Wilonsky]

Nick Cassavetes's Alpha Dog is based on a real-life story that's still waiting for its ending: In 2000, a gang of SoCal kids kidnapped and murdered 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz, a soft-spoken boy from the San Fernando Valley who dreamed of becoming a rabbi and was sacrificed as payment for his older half-brother's drug debt—a measly $1,200. Four teens were convicted of the murder; the ringleader, a teeny Tony Montana with the real-life moniker of Jesse James Hollywood, escaped to Brazil, where he was arrested in 2005.

Hollywood now awaits trial, and his attorney has tried to block the release of Alpha Dog, claiming it convicts his client before he's had the chance to prove his innocence. The movie is getting a negligible release as it is—a shove into the January dumping ground, where nothing survives for long. It deserves better.

Writer-director Cassavetes, who prepped for the movie by poring over off-limits files leaked by the case's prosecutor, smartly stages much of his tragedy as though it were a comedy of errors—the plans of dumbass punks gone awry. Hollywood, here named Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch), is, after all, not a great criminal mastermind, but merely a baby-faced punk who deals weed to spoiled Valley girls and their hip-hopped-up boyfriends. Truelove's posse, as threatening as any hallway gang at your average prep school, includes Elvis Schmidt (Shawn Hatosy), a subservient clown who suffers Johnny's abuse and Frankie Ballenbacher (Justin Timberlake), a swaggering sidekick clad in tank tops to display his tats. No way they could kill a kid (here named Zack and played by Anton Yelchin), not these wake-and-bakers.

( Alpha Dog isn't simply about boys and girls gone wild—that's Larry Clark's milieu, and even he's worn it sheer—but also about the parents who allow it to happen because they're either doped-up imbeciles wearing plasticine grins, absentee assholes waving the occasional iron fist, or both.)

Cassavetes, cut loose after tethering himself to the old-fashioned, ham-handed romance of The Notebook, digs his new role as New Journalist, laying out a horrific tale of suburban indulgence gone wrong. He's so into the movie he put himself in the movie: That's his voice you hear on the soundtrack, interviewing folks about their roles in Johnny's life and Zack's death. Cassavetes gets overly enthusiastic with the docudrama form at times—lots of split-screen, in an attempt to make Alpha Dog play like some seedy '70s crime drama—but I'm tempted to forgive his excesses because the guy knows tension. How better to ram home the horrific consequences than by building up the boys' actions as little more than rough-and-tumble fun?

And, if nothing else, Alpha Dog's worth a look for the performance of Justin Timberlake, the moral center of a movie sorely in need of some conscience. Already a gifted comic actor—his Saturday Night Live appearances are now anticipated events—he proves himself able to go to a pitch-black place. Frankie, covered in tats, is less a gangsta with a heart of gold than a nice guy capable of doing some very bad shit—like every last one of the rabid pups in Alpha Dog.

A true story about drug-addled youths committing crimes of breathtaking stupidity, Nick Cassavetes' Alpha Dog instantly recalls Bully, an underrated black comedy about more or less the same subject, directed by Kids helmer Larry Clark. The crucial difference between the two is perspective: Bully mines uneasy laughs from the immense gulf between its morally vacuous conspirators and those in the audience who understand right from wrong. But Alpha Dog doesn't seem to have any feelings about its characters' misdeeds one way or another—it's intermittently bemused or tragic, but utterly lacking a conscience or a point of view. The characters offer plenty of avenues into this story, from a young drug dealer who tries to summon the moxie to cover up his essential weakness, to a willful victim who treats his abduction like a summer-camp bacchanal. But writer-director Cassavetes never picks a direction, so his look at a pointless tragedy wallows in pointlessness.

Loosely based on the alleged crimes of Jesse James Hollywood, currently awaiting trial for his alleged abduction and murder of a 15-year-old kid, Alpha Dog centers on Emile Hirsch, a wealthy dealer carrying on the business of his father, Bruce Willis. Cassavetes presents Hirsch as a snarling tough-talker perceived as more bark than bite by others, including Ben Foster, a vicious neo-Nazi junkie (and telemarketer!) who refuses to settle his overdue debts. One lazy afternoon in San Fernando Valley, Hirsch and cohort Justin Timberlake spot Foster's kid brother (Anton Yelchin) and rashly decide to kidnap the boy as collateral. This isn't the smartest idea, and things almost immediately turn desperate when the authorities get involved. Meanwhile, Yelchin couldn't be more grateful to his keepers for letting him dine at their generous buffet of pot, booze, and loose women, but the party eventually comes to a dreadful end.

Borrowing the worst tendencies from his father John (A Woman Under The Influence), whose raw melodramas made him the godfather of independent film, Cassavetes tries to amplify the tension by having his actors scream at each other for two hours. Some of them are up for the challenge, especially Foster, whose combustible energy and humor feed off the absurdly ripe conception of his character, but there are embarrassing turns, too, including Sharon Stone sobbing in pancake makeup as Yelchin's mother, and a special appearance by Alan Thicke. For an untrained actor, Timberlake acquits himself reasonably well in quieter moments, but Cassavetes provides precious few of them, and even they can seem as overwrought as the noisy, profane clutter surrounding them. All the bright colors Cassavetes splashes on the canvas don't make Alpha Dog art.

A fictionalized E! True Hollywood Story starring a bevy of hot young actors—and a few aging vets sporting awkward hairpieces (Bruce Willis) or grotesque fat prosthetics (Sharon Stone)—Nick Cassavetes's Alpha Dog arrives in theaters after numerous delays caused by legal wrangling over the procurement of documents relating to its true-life source material. No "inspired by actual events" notation accompanies the film, but Cassavetes's onscreen timestamps and use of text to note the names of witnesses to the central crime makes clear its real-world basis, which involved a group of teens' marijuana and hip-hop-fueled decisions to engage in felony kidnapping and murder.

Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) is a big-time Cali pot pusher in 1999 when a falling out with psychotic neo-Nazi associate Jake (Ben Foster) over an unpaid debt compels him and his boys—including right-hand man Frankie (Justin Timberlake) and demeaned whipping boy Elvis (Shawn Hatosy)—to nab Jake's younger brother Zack (Anton Yelchin) and hold him for ransom. It's a crime that Zack, ironically, treats as a welcome escape from his stultifying middle-class home life with wimpy dad (David Thornton) and smothering mother (Stone), a not altogether surprising reaction given that his captivity is spent getting high and having only-in-the-movies threeways in motel swimming pools.

A crew of racist, sexist, homophobic wannabe Tony Montanas, Johnny and company's proactive irresponsibility complicates a claim made by Johnny's complicit father Sonny (Willis), delivered in one of many lame faux-verité 2003 interviews, that the unfortunate situation was caused by "bad parenting." Yet Cassavetes is less interested in investigating such conduct's origins than in exploiting the crime's particulars for cheap thrills. Essentially one of those hypocritical cautionary tales in which moral lessons—here, that you shouldn't treat life like a "Guns And Bitches" music video, and that constantly calling a guy "faggot" will drive him to homicide—are contradicted by glorification of said appalling behavior, Alpha Dog boasts a menacing drum n' bass score and lots of meaningless split screen effects.

Which doesn't, however, prevent it from being sporadically entertaining, a fact owing to a finger-in-the-socket turn by Foster (in the type of bonkers role usually reserved for Giovanni Ribisi) and Timberlake—attempting to bring tattooback via copious body art—delivering an empathetic, nuanced performance that captures how selfishness and naïveté can inadvertently lead to tragedy. Not to mention that buried deep within the film's compilation of gangsta poses and blustery profanity lies a sage warning for prospective drug users: pot may impair your decision-making, but only speed will drive a man to drop trou and crap on another's living room floor.

Reel.com [Jim Hemphill]

CineScene [Chris Knipp]

filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

New York Sun [S. James Snyder]

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]

stylusmagazine.com (Jeffrey Bloomer)

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

DVD Verdict [Brendan Babish]

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) rated one star, “Come Back, Larry Clark - - All Is Forgiven”

Deep Focus Cinema [Clayton L. White] grade D-, direction is flat and lifeless, and it seems like the only true gift he has is in exploiting his subjects

Nick's Flick Picks (Capsule Review) rates the film an F, a screeching, poorly shot, and flagrantly indulged troupe of young Hollywood aspirants

Los Angeles Times [Kevin Crust]

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

Cassavetes, Zoe

BROKEN ENGLISH B 89

USA France Japan (97 mi) 2007

“Humphrey Bogart reminds me of my father.”

Yet another inexplicably well-made Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban production, men with questionable artistic sense who instead exhibit marketing skills with HDNet enterprises, as the film is simultaneously released to cable, DVD, as well as a theatrical release. Like Hal Hartley’s earlier film FAY GRIM (2007), this one also stars Parker Posey in a lead role, traveling once again to Paris no less, receiving better accolades here than she did for the Hartley film, but don’t believe it. Hartley and Posey are a supremely gifted combo working together with impeccable comic timing, and in FAY GRIM, Posey has put an exclamation point on what in my mind is the performance of the year. Here Parker is charming, vulnerable, impressively off-kilter, and such a pleasure to see in a more mature role, but the script ultimately lets her down. Nonetheless, Parker never disappoints, especially when her character (Nora Wilder) speaks for the director Zoe Cassavetes herself after walking out of a Nicholas Ray film IN A LONELY PLACE (1950) uttering the words “Humphrey Bogart reminds me of my father.” Those are big shoes to fill. Actually, there are quite a few poignant missing father references in the film, as Nora has lost her father at a young age, and they add autobiographical credibility to the film. But her overbearing mother (Gena Rowlands) is there to remind her at every turn that life without a man is unthinkable, so of course, Nora’s glaring deficiency is in the relationship department, always falling for the wrong guys. After all, who can live up to Humphrey Bogart?

Nora sits in a cramped private office dwarfed by her computer and knits at an upscale Manhattan hotel waiting for the inevitable catastrophe to occur, where it’s her job to provide instant resolution for every problem to the customer’s satisfaction, sort of a personal attendant for the VIP’s. She’s quick on her feet, provides service with a smile, and has an air of confidence and poise in her job, while in the privacy of her own home she constantly second guesses herself, doesn’t know who that person is staring back at her in the mirror, and tends to overcompensate by smothering her loneliness and shy insecurities with alcohol. Drea de Matteo is her more up tempo, full-throttle best friend Audrey, married to the guy Nora’s mother wished Nora had married, as she’s heard he has “a terrific trust fund,” but the time the two actresses spend together is a delight, as they both light up the screen. In one of those hotel catastrophe sequences, Justin Theroux plays a manipulative, self-centered actor who throws a tantrum, only to become another personal relationship disaster waiting to happen, which after an evening bar hopping together, she succumbs to only too brilliantly. Theroux is terrific in his bad date from Hell role which he maximizes with a Mohawk haircut and his smooth insincerity that is such a frequent commodity on the Entertainment Tonight airwaves, but Nora is so desperate to please her mother that she actually announces he’s a “boyfriend” the next day just before he declares on national TV that he’s in love with another girl.

All humiliation aside, the first part of the film does a good job demythifying the perfect Hollywood couple stereotype, offering plenty of fresh insight, as Audrey’s so-called perfect relationship is also showing signs of cracks, and Nora is an excellent stand-in for intelligent single girls who have to dumb down their act to be with guys. Nora can be perfectly frank in the company of women, with no airs of pretense, but all that is thrown out the window in the presence of a guy, as if some awkward, hit-me button continually gets pressed into action. Unfortunately, despite a charming performance from French actor Melville Poupard, from Ozon’s TIME TO LEAVE (2005), who seems to really care about her, and despite a wonderful romp through Paris with her friend Audrey, which features an exquisite sequence through an art museum, or delightfully holding her own with perfect strangers in both a corner bar and the upscale jazzy grandeur of a 5 star hotel, or even reintroducing Bernadette Lafont, not seen since Eustache’s THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (1973) as an eccentric Parisian grandmother who mistakenly welcomes Nora back home as her own grandchild, something is strangely amiss in the direction of the story, as it takes a U-turn back into the world of whimsical Hollywood fairytale that the film initially did such a good job deconstructing. Zoe Cassavetes’s first film is layered in a Poseyish natural intimacy that holds a great deal of appeal, as the actors never miss a beat, but there is some uneven pacing, with occasional mistimed or hesitating dialogue, an amateurish fondness for close ups, which at times detracts from the emotional tone, and the film has a surprisingly unoriginal, copy cat ending that mirrors Linklater’s BEFORE SUNSET (2004) and suffers badly in comparison. Still, any evening with an actress as gifted as Parker Posey is an unending delight.

Parker Posey's neurotic, romantically challenged Nora Wilder is a spiritual return to her break-out "Party Girl" persona, a dozen years of single life later. Though prone to late-night clubbing, Nora is more settled and less impulsive -- almost cripplingly so -- and as her dips in the dating pool become more disastrous, she relies on cocktails to break down her inhibitions. It results in more one-night-stands than long-term relationships.

Nora has transformed her comfort zone of work, yoga and dinners in front of the TV into a kind of prison, afraid to step past boundaries of intimacy and commitment. A whirlwind weekend affair with dreamy French drop-in Julien (Melvil Poupaud) is so nerve-wracking that she suffers an anxiety attack. Is such spontaneity too much to handle, or does she simply realize how miserable her plodding, predictable life has become?

"Broken English" is the debut feature of Zoe Cassavetes, daughter of Gena Rowlands (who blesses the film in a small role as Posey's mother) and the late John Cassavetes, and her direction borrows something from her father's focus on character interactions.

There's not a lot of story here and the dialogue lacks the snap one usually gets in New York stories of affluent young adults, but the characters have an authenticity. Posey's scenes with Drea de Matteo (as her married best friend) have a lived-in quality that tells more than their words, and Cassavetes turns a spontaneous trip to Paris into a joyfully uninhibited series of little connections made on the street, in chance meetings, and over brief dinners and drinks with strangers.

Both admirably and frustratingly low-key, "Broken English" doesn't have a lot of answers. Cassavetes and Posey find Nora's journey in asking the right questions and, if only in emotional terms, the sense of possibility is affirming.

The Village Voice [Michelle Orange]

For a time in the '90s, Parker Posey was so ubiquitous that even people who liked her work got a little tired of seeing her impish grin and cocksure pose in seemingly every other indie film. So Posey slowed her pace—two movies a year instead of four—and by the time she started showing up onscreen more again last year, it felt like the return of an old friend. She comes back fully in Broken English, a rare star turn that opens with Posey in a different key, staring at herself in a mirror, melancholy and exposed. She shows a new side, older and more serious, while giving a performance that outpaces its movie.

Posey plays a concierge for VIPs at an upscale Manhattan hotel, where she meets most of the men she dates—mainly actors who are just passing through. She also lives her life under the constant scrutiny of her mother (Gena Rowlands), whose nagging about marriage and children forces Posey to overstate how her life is going, making the reality even more disappointing. Avoiding easy jokes and breezy romance, writer-director Zoe Cassavetes tries to get underneath what it's like to be just past 30, alone and rudderless. Even when Posey meets man-of-her-dreams Melvil Poupaud, a French sound designer in town for a few weeks to work on a movie, Cassavetes focuses more on the fragile emotional state surrounding new love than she does on idyllic walks through New York's hipper neighborhoods.

But Cassavetes' unconventionality only extends so far. Given the gift of Posey at the peak of her powers, Cassavetes squanders her star in low-key, go-nowhere conversations, shot without flair and drained of any improvisatory energy. Broken English's distinct tone, at once naturalistic and flatly scripted, gives it an original feel for a while, but the movie starts petering out when Poupaud arrives. He's a male version of one of those European ingénues who ground so many '60s comedies to a halt with stiff line readings and a syrupy pace. Through no fault of his own, aside from an accident of birth, Poupaud sandbags Posey, and by the time she goes chasing around Paris trying to win him back, the audience may wonder why she even needs a man, when she's so much more interesting on her own, acting beautifully sad.

Nothing has turned out as expected for Nora, the drifting, doleful heroine played by Parker Posey in Broken English, writer/ director Zoe Cassavetes's feature debut. Confront-ed in her mid-30s by a sinkhole of unaddressed expectations—only a few of them her own— we meet Nora as she attempts to slog through a backlog of doubt and uncertainty without going under completely.

The opening sequence—a wry riff on the primping montage so common to this film's spiritual godmother, Sex and the City—features Posey dressing for the fifth-anniversary party of her friend Audrey (Drea de Matteo), whose husband is the man that Nora's mother (Gena Rowlands) insists she should have married. The party girl no more, Posey imbues this silent ritual with a world of resignation and burgeoning resentment, the novelty of pulling on one more party dress long extinguished.

There are key similarities between Nora's foggy neurosis and the characters Posey recently played in Fay Grim and The Oh in Ohio; if urban female confusion is the new suburban male confusion, surely Posey's lost and wary eyes are the face of that angst. Nora lives alone and hates her job coddling the VIP guests of a Manhattan boutique hotel. Before sleeping with a fussy movie star on the premises (a mohawked, smooth-talkin' Justin Theroux), Nora admits that she always thought she'd work in the art world. A beautiful woman with the curious big-city habit of accepting loneliness as her lot, Posey is beguiling for the first third of Broken English; lovely, fragile, and tense, she's the lonely girl who screens her phone calls and winces at compliments with tweaked ambivalence. Combining Posey's performance with lingering pacing and an eye for alienation in a city of millions, Cassavetes's standard material takes on the promise of something fresh.

Alas, we must wait on for a fully realized investigation of what Nora's mother suggests is eating—and paralyzing—young women in the city today: too many choices. When the Man- hattan man shortage threatens to doom the inexhaustibly stylish Nora (this girl has cute tops for days) to a life of closet rearrangement, a charming Frenchman swoops in with some grade-A Euro-lovin'. Julian (Melvil Poupaud) is instantly smitten by Nora's letter-perfect, twitchy New Yorker routine, complete with a public panic attack. Their affair is brief but tender, and Nora's timid practicality prevents her from pursuing it past his stay in New York. . . .

Until, that is, she has an epiphany and takes off to Paris in search of Julian, and the film devolves into stilted-foreigner scenarios and self-help platitudes. Nora's initially existential problems become nothing that a romantic pick- me-up can't fix, and efforts to indicate otherwise feel tacked-on and disingenuous. Posey remains touching as the woman with happiness in sight but bewilderingly out of reach, yet in paraphrasing the final lines of Before Sunrise for Broken English's closing scene, the director only highlights how her film suffers in comparison.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

First shot, a closeup: Parker Posey. Next shots, mostly closeups. She smokes, she regards her face in the mirror, she does her hair and gets ready to go to work. She captures perfectly that way women have of arming themselves against the merciless scrutiny of the world. Does any woman, looking in the mirror, think of herself as beautiful?

What Posey brings to this sequence is something I've often felt while watching her movies, even the incomprehensible ones like "Fay Grim." She stands poised between serene beauty and throwing a shampoo bottle at the mirror. She always looks great, and she always seems dubious and insecure. She can make half her mouth curl into a reluctant smile. But when she fully smiles, she's radiant. She is well cast for "Broken English," because her character, Nora Wilder, needs precisely that in-between quality.

In some seasons, she falls instantly in love. In others, she sinks into depression. The perfect man comes along and hurts her cruelly. The movie, written and directed by Zoe Cassavetes (daughter of director John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands), is about a woman with a knack for trusting untrustworthy men. She dates an actor (Justin Theroux) and a nice normal guy (Josh Hamilton), and both times confides to her closest friend Audrey (Drea de Matteo) that this guy might be the one, and both times she is crushingly wrong.

Then at a party she meets Julien (Melvil Poupaud), a French guy who seems too good to be true. Maybe that's where the story breaks down, if only because he is too good to be true. It's like he went to a feminist training academy, to learn how to treat a woman with gentleness, warmth and perfect sexual tact. He has to return to Paris. Quel dommage. She says she will join him there.

At a party, Nora Wilder (Parkey Posey) meets a cute French guy (Melvil Poupaud) and follows him to Paris in "Broken English."

Meanwhile, there are subplots. Audrey is unhappy after five years of marriage. Nora's mother (Rowlands) has wise but worried advice (most women "at your age," she tells Nora, have been snapped up). Nora, who works as the VIP concierge in a Manhattan boutique hotel, works all day to make others happy, and then drinks and smokes and mourns about her life to Audrey. Is Julien the answer? After all, she doesn't even speak French (unlikely, as the VIP concierge in a boutique hotel, but there you have it).

The question clearly becomes, will she go to Paris and find Julien? If the answer is no, that's a rotten way to treat your audience. If it's yes, your movie is over. So I'm not giving away anything if I point out that, from the point of view of plot dynamics, she must first fail to find Julien and then succeed. As I've pointed out before, some movies give themselves away.

OK. She's in Paris. All she has to do is call Julien. How could there be a problem? Read no further if you can't guess (pause) that she loses his number. And that after moping about Paris and meeting an extraordinary number of nice guys, she has a Meet Cute with Julien, but he is sullen and angry because she is on her way to the airport and has been in Paris and did not even call him. Obviously, it's a perfect Idiot Plot setup, because one word would solve everything. But he glowers between Metro stops, and when he finally discloses what bothers him, she says, "It's really complicated." Which it is not. All together now, as we telepathically chant the four words she needs to say.

So what happens is, "Broken English" establishes a sympathetic character, gets Parker Posey to make her real, and then grinds her in the gears of a plot we cannot believe. Surely these people are complex enough to have their futures settled by more than a Meet Cute and an Idiot Plot that can only hold out for two minutes? When the credits roll, we ask, with Peggy Lee, "Is that all there is?" There is a very good movie named "Before Sunset" that begins more or less where this one ends. Which tells you something right there.

Slant Magazine [Jason Clark]

Parker Posey is one of those rare performers who can elevate a mediocre film into a good one and a good one into a great one simply by the sheer force of her personality. Her latest film, the romantic dramedy “Broken English,” is an example of the former–a not especially unique or distinguished low-budget indie film that she personally infuses with so much quirky energy and spirit that it winds up being worth watching almost in spite of itself.

In the film, Posey plays Nora Wilder, a neurotic thirtysomething New Yorker who is getting to that point in life where all of her friends are married and having families while she is stuck with a nowhere job as a hotel concierge, no social life to speak of and an overbearing mother (Gena Rowlands) who never ceases to remind her about her lack of a fulfilling professional and personal life. After a fling with a vapid actor (Justin Theroux) ends badly, she essentially decides to give up on romance completely. It is at this point, of course, that she meets Julien (Melvil Poupard), a happy-go-lucky Frenchman who is immediately attracted to her. Of course, she tries to brush him off but he is both smitten and persistent and when he doesn’t freak out when Nora has a panic attack in the middle of a sort-of date, she finally gives in to his advances.

After a few days of bliss, however, the hammer falls down and Julien reveals that he has to return to Paris to a crestfallen Nora. However, this doesn’t appear to be a dodge on his part–not only does he seem genuinely regretful over this turn of events, he asks her to come back to France with him. Nora declines–she can’t possibly leave her job and jet off to another country just like that–and he leaves without her. After a few days of moping around that culminate in her quitting her job and a fateful encounter with a psychic, she realizes that she should have taken a chance by going to Paris with him. With nothing more than Julien’s phone number in her hand (for a while, at least) and best friend Audrey (Drea De Matteo), whose own seemingly perfect marriage appears to be crumbling, in tow, Nora leaves her comfort zone and heads for Paris.

“Broken English” was written and directed by Zoe Cassavetes but that doesn’t mean that it is as insufferable as the works of father John (whose films, as heretical as it may be to say, I have always found to mostly be pretentious bores enlivened only by the performances) or brother Nick (whose “Alpha Dog” is still one of the worst films to emerge in 2007 to date). It is low-key, likable without being cloying and filled with a bunch of nice performances (Theroux is quite amusing as the sleazo actor and De Matteo’s work may surprise those who know her only from “The Sopranos”) but while I liked the cheerfully meandering tone of the first half, it starts to drag in the second once the mechanics of the plot (will Nora find Julien or not?) begin to take hold of the proceedings. Cassavetes also begins to clutter her story with needless distractions (such as the circumstances surrounding Nora and Audrey traveling to Paris, a strange encounter Nora has with a woman she may or may not be related to and Audrey’s infidelity with a man she meets in France) that bog down the proceedings at precisely the point when things should be perking up. And while I wouldn’t dare to reveal the ending, I will say that it will seem awfully familiar to anyone who saw another film about the burgeoning romance between a Parisian and an American from a couple of years ago, right down to the virtually identical final lines of dialogue.

And yet, I found myself more or less willing to overlook these flaws and enjoy “Broken English” for the most part and that is almost entirely due to the wonderful and often surprising Parker Posey performance. Granted, the idea of her playing a neurotic and high-strung dame from New York may not sound like the casting people were exactly thinking outside the box but this isn’t the hilariously brittle Posey that we might be expecting to see. She nails the neurotic behavior of Nora for prime comedic effect but she also gives Nora a vulnerability that makes her far more likable and sympathetic than she might seem to be at first glance–even as the story itself grows less and less interesting, she keeps us invested in it enough so that we find ourselves genuinely rooting for her character to finally find happiness. In the end, “Broken English” as a whole may not be worth a full-price admission (but since this is one of those HDNet enterprises that is debuting more-or-less simultaneously in theaters, on cable and on DVD, the multiplex isn’t your only option) but if you are either a confirmed Parker Posey fanatic or are in a more forgiving mood than usual, you may well find yourself succumbing to its modest charms.

Broken English Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Francine | Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center

New York Times (registration req'd) Matt Zoller Seitz

Cassidy, Brian M. and Melanie Shatzky

FRANCINE C 70

USA Canada (74 mi) 2012 Official site

This is a horribly downbeat film evoking stark alienation along with many unpleasantries of rural poverty that some will find shocking in its portrait of tragedy and loss, also in its graphic depiction of animal cruelty, but retains a central focus through the idiosyncratic performance of Melissa Leo, from FROZEN RIVER (2008) and her Best Supporting Actress role in THE FIGHTER (2010), who is seen in the film’s opening being released from incarceration, which could be prison or a locked mental health facility, as the film never makes it clear, nor does it provide any backstory as to how she arrived there in the first place. Instead the near wordless character study simply follows her routine after she returns home alone into an isolated, rural community, as if pointing a camera at someone helps make some sense out of their life. This is the third film seen recently, by the way, featuring scenes with women naked in the shower, including Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011) and Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet (2011), where one common element is a similar vision by female directors. Not sure what to make of this trend other than to suggest these scenes reflect women at their most vulnerable where they have nothing to hide. The collaborative husband and wife team of filmmakers Brian Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky have a history making documentary films, where both are co-writers and directors of this film, while Cassidy also works behind the camera as the cinematographer. Shot in video, the camera offers a highly mobile presence, literally tracking the random daily occurrences, which includes her arrival home to a small house in upstate New York situated on a tranquil lake. The remote calm feels like a surprise, as one could think of worse places to begin anew, but a glimpse of life at her job inside the local Petco store feels a bit hectic, even if some of the products are mysteriously weird, as if the quicker pace of having to interact with co-workers and customers is difficult, as Francine rarely utters a word or changes that sullen look on her face, feeling socially inept, eventually losing her job from sheer social awkwardness. But she makes the rounds and hits the bars or goes to parties, usually drinking too much or having inappropriate sex, picking up stray animals en route, feeding them and taking comfort in their accessibility, as they become her only solace. Over time her house is overrun with animals, as she becomes obsessed with animals at the expense of human interaction.

Along the way we see a glum Francine wander around town, where a death metal band is playing in an open field to about a dozen listeners where she joins a group of others thrashing around, her head shaking to the frenzy of the music, a sort of kick out the jams moment. We also see her at an AA meeting and at a local church service, but from the decrepit look at the inside of her home, completely overrun by her accumulated collection of strays, literally playing with each as if they were helpless babies, we realize life’s gotten the better of her, as she’s lost any sense of order or balance, sliding off the edge, mostly retreating into her squalid trailer trash existence. This may catch some by surprise, as initially one may have missed the clues, but eventually the camera captures the numbness in her disaffected life, where only the animals provide meaning, as in her eyes they are so defenseless, constantly seen hugging and kissing them, but her rising animal count only increases the clutter and disarray inside her home, reflective of her mental state, where she’s incapable of realizing what’s happened even after she starts working as a veterinarian’s assistant, where some of the graphic images seen are deplorable, where the camera never shies away from staring death in the face, where the concept of harm, both to herself and to animals, rises to the surface. The observational style remains too detached and the overall mood ambiguous, often meandering at times or even aimless, where the audience is kept at a distance without ever sensing the intimacy or immediacy of the moment. Not sure this young director team has made the transition between documentary and fiction, as what’s missing is any element of human drama, creating a fictional character with literally no story construction, existing instead in a netherworld of mental torpor. Even as she empathizes with the plight of animals, it’s clear she’s incapable of really managing her own dreary life, where the bleak austerity is all we’re given. Given a spare and unsentimental gaze, it’s little more than a minimalist outline, a sad and empty portrait of mental alienation, not nearly the powerhouse work of Lodge Kerrigan’s more emotionally resonant KEANE (2004).

Academy Award winner Melissa Leo (Frozen River, The Fighter) is unforgettable in the title role of this starkly powerful first fiction feature by documentary filmmakers Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky (The Patron Saints). Newly released from prison, Francine (Leo) tries to start a new life for herself in a small rural town where she takes on a series of jobs--at a pet store, a farm, and a vet’s office--that bring her into close contact with animals. Francine finds herself able to relate to these small creatures with an intimacy that everyday human interactions seem to stifle in her, gradually coming to share her small home with a sizable menagerie of furry creatures. Employing a terse narrative style that recalls the films of the Dardenne brothers, Francine brings us intensely close to the emotional truth of this fragile woman while leaving the specific details of her past intentionally mysterious. On screen in nearly every frame, Leo proves more than up to the challenge, recalling the great stars of the silent screen in her fiercely expressive, largely wordless performance. An official selection of this year’s Berlin and South By Southwest film festivals.

Francine Movie Review : Shockya.com Brent Simon

There’s a familiar saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day, which Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky’s assertively minimalist ”Francine” recalls. An emotionally impressionistic story of a recently paroled woman coping with life on the outside of prison, this character study feels like a less successful riff on Kelly Reichardt’s much more evocative “Wendy and Lucy” — caught up in its own metaphor, its blank canvas and broadly sketched melancholic tones an empty vessel for those who would like to automatically turn the personal into the political.

There isn’t much in the way of plot to “Francine.” Oscar nominee Melissa Leo stars in the title role, as a woman who leaves prison and tries to re-acclimate to life in a downtrodden lakeside town. Though awkward around pretty much all humans (she frequently doesn’t respond at all in conversation), Francine comes to life through animals. She gets a couple odd jobs at a pet store and then a veterinarian, taking in felines and other animals until her house begins to resemble an episode of TLC’s hit new show “Crazy Old Cat Lady.” Boozy interactions with other societal fringe-dwellers then ensue.

It’s not that “Francine” feels phony, necessarily — it just feels tripped up and smitten with the notion that in saying so little it’s actually saying a lot. Francine is fairly realistic emotionally stunted character, and Leo inhabits her with a deadpan commitment and complete lack of vanity – and not just because of a full-frontal nude scene in which she exits the prison shower. There’s just not enough latent intrigue or outside force upon Francine, and the movie’s elliptical psychological explorations feel half-sketched rather than arty.

“Francine”‘s no-frills, somewhat grubby production value and handheld cinematography are in lockstep with its austere narrative inclinations, and give the movie an undeniable intimacy. Laurie Collyer’s “Sherrybaby,” starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, or the aforementioned Reichardt film, starring Michelle Williams, though, are better examples of depressive American marginalia. “Francine” feels like a photocopy.

Review: Francine | Film Comment | Film Society of Lincoln Center Sophie Blum

It’s high time we had a new definition of torture porn: torture not for an imaginary subject, but for the audience. Merely “hard-to-watch” will no longer suffice. If “torture porn” is too divisive, we could call it a “cinema of discomfort.” Somehow Francine, quite intentionally, I imagine, manages to render its brief 74-minute run time interminable, with minimal dialogue and an abundance of excruciatingly awkward social interactions as ex-con Francine (Melissa Leo) struggles to reintegrate into society after prison. Animals, it seems, allow Francine to feel, receive, and bestow a kind of love she cannot muster from people, so she takes up a series of odd jobs involving animals, meanwhile amassing a menagerie to rival the Bouvier-Beales of Grey Gardens.

Writer-director pair Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky present everything you never wanted to know about working at Petco (zip-lock baggies full of frozen fetal rats like cocktail sausages), a back-lot death metal concert that lures spectators into a evangelical trance, and, as a coup de grâce, actual on-screen canine veterinary euthanasia. Of course, this takes place under the supervision of a real veterinarian, but Melissa Leo’s presence eerily blurs the line between documentary and fiction.

What PETA will make of Francine remains to be seen, but if you wait for the expected notice, “no animals were harmed in the making of this movie” in the end credits, no such luck. Instead, you will find a mystifying dedication in the same delicate font as the title, “In memory of Sparky.” It’s unclear if this epitaph is meant to be ironic, heartfelt, or a mix of both.

Francine does the pet lovers of the world no favors by perpetuating the stigma of the crazy cat lady. Francine is infantilized and animalized, craning her head out the car window like an overjoyed Labrador on the way home from prison or gaping, mesmerized, at a tank of goldfish in the pet shop. With her own animals, she recalls Steinbeck’s Lennie Small, literally smothering her objects of desire with naïve and clumsy affection. It is alarming to see Melissa Leo eschew her usual vibrancy—the emotional dynamics that characterize so many of her other performances, swiftly spanning the spectrum from livid to ebullient (as Kay Howard on Homicide: Life on the Street or Toni Bernette in Treme)—in favor of emotional vacancy. According to Francine there is something wrong with the woman who loves animals more than people, she is sexually confused and emotionally stunted. And ultimately the predictable happens—back to prison she goes in a pat little ending. There might be more merit to this film if it concerned itself only with making us uncomfortable, but no, it seems to be telling some sort of story with a questionable moral that does not the justify the torture suffered by spectators just trying to make it from beginning to the end.

Cinemablographer [Patrick Mullen]

There is great comfort in cats. Francine, played by a remarkable Melissa Leo, loves her feline friends. She’s a crazy cat lady of sorts, a Nell-ish ex-convict who struggles with society but finds solace in furry critters. A quiet, episodic character study, Francine proves a difficult film experience that might work quickly through all nine lives of some viewers, but those who stay with it will enjoys its rewards long after.

The film begins with Francine making the transition from one life to another. As she prepares to leave prison, the camera locks on her blank, sullen face as the warden describes to her that the transition to a normal life will be difficult. Francine says little as she leaves, and she keeps mute as she moves into the outside world.

Francine doesn’t adjust to life too easily. She gets a job at a pet shop, which seems like a good fit for her since the only hint at joy she comes across after leaving the slammer is a stray cat she finds at the lake. Francine takes the lakeside feline and embraces it with kisses. She rubs the kitty all over her face and signals a trope that will echo alongside the crickets on the film’s soundtrack. In spite of Francine’s affection for animals, she struggles to fit in at the pet shop. She walks with the animals/talks with the animals with skill, but she seems incompetent at connecting with customers and co-workers. Likewise, Francine is socially inept outside the workplace: her years of living within the small quarters of her cell left her as helpless and directionless as a mouse that has escaped its cage.

Francine slides into trailer-trash odyssey of anti-social behaviour. Francine, a feral child of sorts, spends much of the film exploring her habitat with little sense of purpose. She joins a rave, dabbles in religion, and does it doggy-style with random men. None of these actions sates her creature comforts, though, so Francine mostly retreats into her squalid little house.

Francine’s home is filthy ramshackle sty full of animals. The number of cats and dogs in Francine’s house multiplies at random: whether she steals them from the shop or brings them in off the street, Francine adds to her litter ad nauseam. The cats and dogs give Francine some stability (or instability, depending on how one looks at the situation). Enjoying the sensual pleasure of the kitties’ fur, Francine finds a placebo to human connection with her pets. Her love for the pets goes to the point of putting their paws in her mouth, which is gross, but makes one wonder what kind of help Francine needs to adjust to life outside of prison. She makes some baby steps by getting a new job as a veterinarian’s assistant, but this transition moves Francine into its most emotionally charged segment because Francine becomes far too attached to the sick little animals to which she gives care. Francine takes a notable turn with an ambiguous long take that observes Francine’s point-of-view as watches the vet tranquilize a small cat and prepare it for surgery. As Francine holds the cat’s little paw and watches it go under the knife, she makes a sharp turn into a strange emotional attachment that escalates until it erupts.

Told in a strange, observational style by writers/directors Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky, Francine might be too detached for its own good. The bare bones/cinema verité aesthetic lets the filmmakers make a semi-comfortable transition from documentary to narrative feature, but it puts Francine in an awkward position. Like a dog on a choke chain, Francine rarely travels outside of medium shot—the camera is trained on her face much of the time; moreover, with scant dialogue and an elliptical, episodic structure, Francine always keeps the viewer at a distance. We never learn why Francine went to prison—perhaps it doesn’t matter—but more than a backstory feels absent. Francine therefore scraps to move beyond a mere character study, and it mostly stays as an intriguing, if mildly effective character study.

On the other hand, one hardly needs the film to offer much else when the focus of the handheld camera is trained on a strong actress like Melissa Leo. If anything, Francine shows that Leo can carry a feature length film with the silent expressions of her face. She needs nary a word to create a character, let alone one who is so tangibly downtrodden and destitute. Leo gives a brave performance in Francine: thanks to her, this tale of a crazy cat lady is quietly compelling.

indiewire.com [Jessica Kiang]

NPR Ian Buckwalter

pastemagazine.com [Will McCord]

Francine | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Tasha Robinson

Sound On Sight (Edgar Chaput)

JEsther Entertainment [Don Simpson] also seen here: Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]

The Fan Carpet [Stefan Pape]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Linc Leifeste]

Way Too Indie [Dustin Jansick]

thelmagazine.com [Benjamin Mercer]

Screen International [David D'Arcy]

CineVue [Patrick Gamble]

Filmaluation [Hemanth Kissoon]

FRANCINE Facets Multi Media

Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]

TimeOut NY Keith Uhlich

newyorktimes.com [Denis Lin]

newyorktimes.com [Stephen Holden] also seen here: New York Times

Castel, Catherine

48 HOURS A DAY (48 Heures par Jour) C 76

France (108 mi) 2008 Official site Trailer

A typically breezy, light-hearted romp through the stereotypical roles of a modern marriage that becomes tested through nefarious means as the wife decides the children need more than an absent, self-absorbed, career-minded father and turns the tables on her husband, going out of town on a business trip herself for 6 months, turning into a down and dirty battle of the sexes, the better to ensure love will eventually prevail in the end. The film is overly formulaic about raising a family in the cutthroat era of executive advancement, how it plays havoc with a marriage, but it features terrific performances from the lead couple, Aura Atike and Antoine de Caunes, who are nauseatingly rich, well dressed and charming, like a couple out of the latest fashion magazines, while also featuring an interesting mixture of supporting characters who are much better known in Europe, not the least of which includes Almodóvar stalwart Victoria Abril, a Chabrol and Eustache favorite a quarter of a century ago, Bernadette Lafont, while Aurore Clément started her career in the 70’s working with Louis Malle and Chantal Ackerman. Only Abril as a career hungry power broker, accepted as one of the boys, and Catherine Jacob, who does most of her work on the phone demurely purring to her lackluster boyfriend during working hours, really shine in their roles.

Outside of broad gestures, the film makes no pretense of relevance and is thoroughly in the entertainment camp. It’s just another saga of the rich and the famous doing scant work of any kind bearing little reality to the lives most of us lead, as executive business status is really a façade for a longing for power, as no one wants to give up their privileged status, as being at work is just an excuse to avoid responsibilities at home. While there are comical twists and turns, using fast paced 1930’s screwball dialogue mixed with elements of farce and romantic comedy, much of this is just plain preposterous. Both are amenable to each other’s sexual charms, so it comes as a surprise when they resort to underhanded methods to avoid speaking plainly to one another. But that’s the nature of show business for you, going through the most complicated theatrics to avoid the obvious. It’s pleasant enough and easy to digest, occasionally witty, but most is forgotten by week’s end.

Festival of New French Cinema JR Jones from The Reader

Aure Atika and Antoine de Caunes star as a harried professional couple in Paris who bicker over their household and parenting responsibilities. After Atika loses a prestigious account at her ad agency, she decides to get even with her spouse and announces she’s taken a six-month assignment in Tokyo, secretly moving in with a girlfriend and leaving him to mind their two young kids. Catherine Castel makes her writing and directing debut with this French comedy, whose notable achievement is that it’s stupid enough to be an American comedy. The contrived premise is to blame, though there are some solid laughs along the periphery, particularly in Atika’s paranoid reveries about what her husband is doing while she’s gone. With Victoria Abril. 85 min.

User comments from imdb Author: Iliyana from United Kingdom

This is an imaginative and lively comedy by the French director Catherine Castel who manages to tell us a very familiar story in an unusual way.

The cast is very good with strong performances by both the leading actors (Aura Atike and Antoine de Caunes) and the supporting ones (among them the charming Victoria Abril) and my family and I thoroughly enjoyed the film.

It's very refreshing to see that modern filmmakers can still produce funny and intelligent comedies which can be as gripping as the fast paced actions and thrillers which overflow the cinemas these days.

12th Annual Festival of New French Cinema Facets Multi-Media

The battle between the sexes rages on in this energetic romantic comedy starring Aure Atika (Ill Wind, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies) and Antoine de Caunes as a successful professional couple with diverging opinions about household and parenting responsibilities. As the primary care giver to their two young children, Marianne struggles to remain competitive in her advertising career while managing the many demands of motherhood. While her husband Bruno allows himself to return home late night after night for professional reasons, an important client that should have been assigned to her gets passed on to a male colleague. Frustrated, exhausted and unable to elicit much empathy from her husband, Marianne devises a truly audacious plan: she announces to Bruno that her agency is sending her to Tokyo for six months and that he will need to fend for himself. With the roles now reversed, Bruno finds himself frantically trying to juggle school drop-offs and microwave dinners, nanny auditions and household chores, along with the wrath of a demanding boss with antiquated beliefs about women and work who does not look kindly on Bruno's new schedule. All of this is witnessed with conflicting emotions by Marianne, who is staying in a friend's apartment not far away... Eventually Marianne's plan must collapse on itself, and the narrative leads up to the final confrontation between these two human beings who love each other, their children and their work but got a little lost amidst the demands, expectations, gender roles and responsibilities of modern day life. Supporting roles by Victoria Abril (High Heels, French Twist, Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down) as a tough as nails financial executive who works, lives and earns like a man, and Catherine Jacob as a put-upon assistant with a lazy live-in banana-eating writer boyfriend, are a delight. Directed by Catherine Castel, France, 2008, 35mm, 108 mins. In French with English subtitles.

Reeling Reviews [Robin Clifford, Laura Clifford]

It is still a man’s world in France. Women work just as hard, or harder, at their jobs but the good-old-boy network keeps them from getting the top positions. A woman should take care of the home and children and leave the work to the men folk. Thus is the case for Bruno (Antoine de Caunes) and Marianne (Aura Atike) until she decides to take the bull by the horns and announces that she is leaving for Tokyo for her job. Bruno now has to take care of their two kids and his job, too, and realizes that he, like mothers everywhere, needs “48 Hours a Day.”

Robin:
Nobody does farce like the French and freshman filmmaker Catherine Castel does her country justice with her oh-so-sophisticated comedy above love, work, marriage and family. Bruno, like the rest of his brethren, is used to working late, unpredictable hours and coming home to a hot meal, a loving wife and happy kids. For Marianne, though, it is a balancing act as she, every day, single-handedly care for their two kids and works hard at her mid-level job. She has grown tired of her second-class status, though, and invents the trip to Japan to teach Bruno a lesson in parenting.

As is typical in a comedic farce, things do not go as planned for Marianne. She soon misses Bruno and the kids and begins to wonder if her plan will work, especially when she finds out that her husband has been remiss in his fatherly responsibilities. And, hired a pretty young au pair to take care of the kids while he is at work. But, Bruno is a quick learner and begins to get with the flow of parenthood and the joy of spending quality time with his children. Things heat up, though, when he accidentally sees Marianne going into an apartment building with another man! The farce notches up as their roles reverse and Bruno is the one to question Marianne’s fitness as a spouse and mother.

Director Castel does a solid job in marshalling her large cast friends and family abound around the little family while delving into the real issues of the responsibility of both parents in raising their children. Aure Atika and Antoine de Caunes anchor the festivities as their lives change, for better or worse. The veteran supporting cast Victoria Avril, Catherine Jacob, Aurore Clement and Yves Jacques among them help give the story depth and Mathias Mlekuz is charming as the neighbor and client who falls for Marianne.

I have not found a writing credit for “48 Hours…” but, except for the trite and predictable happily-ever-after ending, the story is imaginative and lively. I give it a B.

Laura:
Catherine Castel's film is often too broad (the caveman credit sequence opening) and too obvious (the 'cute' denouement) and its two lead characters behavior is both reprehensible, yet it is just as often funny - often laugh out loud so. Aure Atika
("OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies") is a harried, working wife who lies to her husband (Antoine de Caunes) about a business trip. Forced to deal with their two children, Bruno's career begins to slip, but in the end, the two learn what is important in life. It's a raucous French 'battle of the sexes' farce that feels dated in its one-sidedness, but a chuckle earned is a chuckle earned. C+

Castle, William

TCMDB bio from Turner Classic Movies

Eccentric director of routine low-budget horror films, with a flair for self-promotion. Castle's standout efforts include the B thriller, "When Strangers Marry" (1944), with Robert Mitchum in his first important role and the camp gem, "House on Haunted Hill" (1958). Like latter day P.T Barnum, upon whom he modeled himself, Castle lured audiences to his chillers by appearing in their trailers and psyching the audience up to be scared. Most of his films included outrageous gimmicks such as an insurance policy against death by fright for "Macabre" (1957), skeletons that whistled over the audience in a process called "Emergo" during critical scenes in "House on Haunted Hill" and his most audacious stunt, "Percepto" which literally shocked the audience by wiring selected seats in the theater with electricity and administering mild jolts during moments in "The Tingler" (1959). Castle is also noted as the producer of the psychological thriller, "Rosemary's Baby" (1968).

All-Movie Guide Bruce Eder

Classic Film and Television Home Page Michael E. Grost

The Tingler The Horror Films of William Castle

Metroactive Article William Castle, the Prince of Paltry Promotions, Returns, by Richard von Busack from October 12 – 18, 1995

The William Castle Blogathon: Mysterious Intruder (1946) Shadows and Satin, July 30, 2013

Castle, William They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

WHEN STRANGERS MARRY

aka: Betrayed

USA (67 mi) 1944

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review

The Monogram B-picture that gave Mitchum his first starring role. Hunter's the innocent one, turning to former boyfriend Mitchum, when husband Jagger disappears after a couple of months of marriage. A trip to the cops reveals that the latter may not be quite the man she thought and thus the plot thickens. Future horror showman Castle keeps it simple, leaving the cast and the cracking dialogue to make the running. Mitchum shows promise.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

It sounds like a Sally Jesse Raphael episode, but this Monogram quickie is actually a pretty okay thriller, if not quite the shoestring classic James Agee once hailed. Ohio gal Kim Hunter comes to New York City to meet the man she’s just married (Dean Jagger), who’s got a penchant for fake IDs, hem haws about his work, and gets jumpy whenever somebody mentions the recent "silk stocking murder." William Castle, later the cheery huckster of such gimmickoid classics as The Tingler and 13 Ghosts, is here young and hungry and, if nowhere near the level of a Joseph H. Lewis, his modest ingenuity blooms within the anecdotes offered by the script (co-written by Philip Yordan). Some of the effects (a maid’s shriek melting into a train’s whistle, guffawing faces clouding up the heroine’s mind) are direct lifts from other movies, but for every thud (a neon sign "visualizing" Hunter’s anxiety) there’s a nifty bit (suspense drummed up around a glass-plated mail chute). Castle’s unjaded eagerness blurs the line between disarming naiveté and outright hackdom. Best of all, the picture offers glimpses of careers at their flowering: Hunter is very touching, and Robert Mitchum, playing her ex-boyfriend in his first major role, is already the man. With Neil Hamilton, Dick Elliott, and Milton Kibbee. In black and white.

User comments from imdb Author FilmFlaneur from London

Castle's third feature is an interesting case of talents in the bud. Previously he had been responsible for a bright Boston Blackie series entry with Chester Morris, and the less successful Klondike Kate (1943) with Tom Neal. When Strangers Marry (also known by the less accurate title of Betrayed) shows the director's increasing confidence as he ventures into the territory of the new film noir genre. He was also lucky in securing the services of a good cast: Kim Hunter, Dean Jagger and, in his first co-starring role, a young Robert Mitchum. One of the greatest noir stars, Mitchum is slimmer and perhaps more tentative here than he would be in later films, but still has enough presence and skill to make an impact, especially in the sweaty closing scenes. Already an experienced hand, Dimitri Tiomkin provided the music, and the result was an above average production from Monogram.

Having said that, there's a certain peremptoriness to the film, making it not entirely satisfactory. The noir style, which thrived on inexpensive sets and the economic use of shadow, cheap location shooting and the like, is evoked by Castle rather than expressed in any thorough fashion. Castle's next film The Whistler (1944), on yet another miniscule budget, was much more effective in evoking a continuous mood of paranoia and doom from the haunted Richard Dix. Some successful scenes apart, (Millie's first night in the hotel, her Lewtonish night walk, her innocent suspicions in Paul's apartment), the present film rather clumsily bolts noir elements on to a standard suspense plot - one vaguely reminiscent of Hitchcock's Suspicion of three years before - rather than to let them arise naturally from situation and character. An example is Millie's night of disturbed rest in the hotel. Husbandless in her neon sign-lit room, drowned in shadows and fear, she is distracted by the repeated blaring of nearby dancehall before taking a fraught phone call from Fred (Mitchum). This scene has no real plot purpose except to show her loneliness and distress, and the expressionist images seem over emphatic. On its own it is startling and dramatic, but nothing more, a pool of hard noir in a more naturalistic film. Even less convincingly, as if it had never happened Millie then makes no move to change her room later the next day, and the music never occurs again (it would have made an excellent punctuation for any later confrontation with Fred, for instance). As an actress, Kim Hunter makes an effective noir victim, even if her trusting fragility needs a willing suspension of disbelief. Powell and Pressburger obviously recognised such sensitivity even in a poverty row product like this, for they shortly cast her in such films as A Canterbury Tale, of the same year, and then in A Matter of Life and Death (1946).

A more serious plot flaw resides in the character of her husband Paul (Jagger). His personality and motives are shrouded in mystery throughout the film and, sadly, are not much clearer by the end. For a while this enigmatic man provides the narrative with a lot of useful suspense. The lack of resolution to his drama, while supplying the necessary twist as the truth is revealed, leaves the viewer with just too many questions to be comfortable. One misses even the rudimentary psycho-analysis which appeared in some noirs from this time, supposedly explaining the aberrant personality. Either elements of helpful exposition were jettisoned in the course of filming on a tight budget, or the writers (who included the excellent Philip Jordan, of Dillinger, Detective Story, Big Combo fame) thought they could get away with such a lacuna. The result is to reduce a happy ending to one where a married couple must still live on unresolved tensions, their determined contentment notwithstanding.

For those interested in trivia there are some private jokes in the film. A 'Mr King' is paged at the hotel (the film was produced by the King brothers). More amusingly, Millie hands over a deliberately misleading picture to the investigating detectives, saying 'This is the man you want'. It is director Castle. Such gallows humour, and self-publicity, would manifest itself in a series of gimmick films for which he is better known, starting in the 50's...

THE MARK OF THE WHISTLER

aka: The Marked Man

USA (60 mi) 1944

User comments from imdb Author goblinhairedguy from Montreal

This entry is the best in this above-average series from Columbia. All the stories had intriguing premises and clever twists, but this one even more so, since it was based on an original by Cornell Woolrich, that master of gloom, fate and paranoia. You definitely won't see the last curveball coming. There's a nice element of "Crime and Punishment"-like guilt infiltrating the protagonist's shady exploits, although it's not directly responsible for his downfall. The material is the essence of noir, but Castle filmed it straightforwardly for the most part. In his early days before churning out his gimmicky horror pics, he knew how to add telling little touches and include fascinatingly offbeat characters on the margins. All the same, one can't help thinking that this might have been a low-budget noir masterpiece along the lines of "Blind Spot" or "Fear in the Night" if the style had been more doom-laden and shadowy.

When a bum discovers that he almost shares the same name with someone with a dormant bank account, he is tempted into engaging in fraud to get the money for himself. Unfortunately, complications arise when he discovers that the man he is impersonating has some enemies...

The genre resource which supplied this title for my hunt list admits that it will include all movies of a series if only some of the movies in the series have fantastic elements. This apparently doesn't apply all across the board; they don't list every Bowery Boys movie, despite the fact that several of them qualify. But it does include the entire Whistler series, and sometimes it's hard to tell if a certain movie is included because of elements of its own or due to its connection to the series. This is one of those ambiguous ones.

Granted, the whole Whistler series could be considered fantastic, since they're all narrated by the unseen, shadowy Whistler, who might be considered a mystical character of sorts. Still, since he serves only as a narrator, this is a fairly weak element. The only other element of this movie that could cause it to even remotely qualify is that the revenge-driven villain of the piece may be mad, but I don't think he goes over the edge to insane-psycho-killer mad, so that's another weak element. At any rate, this movie remains extremely marginal to the genre.

Nonetheless, it's a great little movie about guilt and fate, and it has a good sense of tension and some wonderful plot twists, as well as strong direction from a pre-horror William Castle. Richard Dix is excellent as the bum whose plot to get a fortune backfires on him, and you may want to keep your eyes open for an uncredited cameo by Willie Best. I certainly don't mind covering marginalia when it's as good as this one.

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

THE VOICE OF THE WHISTLER

USA (60 mi) 1945

User comments from imdb Author goblinhairedguy from Montreal

Like the other entries in the Whistler series, this one has an intriguing premise (not far removed from "Indecent Proposal") with a couple of nice twists. Unfortunately, it doesn't make for good cinema due to its static nature -- it's much more suited to the series' original medium, radio. The grungy setting of the first entry in the series (also directed by the fledgling William Castle) is sorely missed, though he does introduce a few oddball characters in passing. Nonetheless, it is worth sitting through the dull parts for the clever climax and the haunting aftermath. And there's one of those nice little walk-across-the-room bits by a sexy waitress to keep the guys alert (reminiscent of Lana Turner's rookie appearance in "They Won't Forget" or Yvette Vickers' eye-catching serveuse in "Hud"). A similar tale of a lighthouse-bound ménage-a-trois occurs in PRC's semi-noir appropriately entitled "Lighthouse".

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review

When a lonely, dying millionaire passes out in a cab, the cabbie takes care of him and urges him to change his suspicious nature and distrustful ways.

One of the books that I use as a reference to choose movies for this series claims that in this movie, hypnotism is used to cause someone to commit murder. If they thought so, it's no surprise they included it; however, there's no hypnotism at work in this movie, though we do have a man who is tempted into a murder by another man's suggestion. In truth, the only fantastic elements in this movie are the existence of the Whistler, that strange, shadowy character who sees all, knows all and tells all (though in a purely passive sense – in other words, he plays no role other than that of narrator) and a certain horror atmosphere towards the end of the movie. In short, this movie is another false lead.

On its own terms, I found it quite engrossing, though not necessarily in terms of its murder story; If considered merely in that aspect, the movie takes far too long to get going (which is why my plot description doesn't touch on it at all). No, it's the human drama and the themes that made it interesting for me; it deals with loneliness and how it is bred by distrust, and how distrust arises from having to cope with fame or riches and consequently not being able to tell a true friend from a false one. It's handled somewhat simplistically, but I found it engaging nonetheless. In fact, I was even a little disappointed when the movie does turn into a murder story in the latter part of the movie, since it is somewhat at odds with the rest of it. Of course, I can't say that I'm surprised; if murder weren't involved, this wouldn't be a Whistler movie. Still, the murder setup is rather clever, and the ending is quite sad. Ultimately, I must admit I really enjoyed the movie, even if I don't think it quite works as a whole.

The Video Vacuum [Mitch Lovell]

UNDERTOW C+ 77

USA (71 mi) 1949

A rarely seen film from schlockmeister William Castle, a B-movie director who spent his career making forgettable features, whose real claim to fame was his Barnum & Bailey flair for self-promotion, often appearing in the trailers revving up the fear factor in his films, psyching up the audience to expect to be scared, where his most audacious stunt was wiring selected seats in the theater with electrical buzzers and administering a mild shock during heightened moments of THE TINGLER (1959). In addition to being an uncredited screenwriter, a second unit director, and an associate producer for Orson Welles’ THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947), perhaps his biggest claim to fame, however, and certainly his most lucrative, was buying the book rights to Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary's Baby (1968), which became a monster hit. But in 1949, little did the director, or anyone else connected with the film, know that 60 years in the future audiences would be sitting quietly and actually paying attention to this film, which was always intended as a second reeler. Opening in Reno, Scott Brady (Lawrence Tierney’s younger brother) as Tony Reagan has just completed his second stint in the Army and is in a celebratory mood, having recently invested his entire Army savings on a Lake Tahoe resort sitting on a pristine location, owned by the father of a fellow soldier who died in the war, but always spoke highly about this property being the most beautiful place on earth. Having seen it and meeting with the father, Tony has to agree, thinking this would be the perfect place to make a new start in his life. Having come from a troubled past where he had extensive trouble with the law, Tony was looking to go straight. But he’s hit with two major coincidences before he can set foot out of town, one is meeting Danny Morgan (John Russell), an old con artist working for the casino’s, and the other is accidentally running into a beautiful woman, Peggy Dow as Ann McKnight, where they coincidentally meet again on an overnight flight to Chicago. By her look, she has more than a passing interest in him, but he rather clumsily announces his plans to meet his future bride in Chicago and bring her back out to live in Lake Tahoe, which takes the sizzle out of their obvious chemistry.

In Chicago, he’s met by the cops and warned to get out of town, as they’ve received news he’s planning to get revenge on Big Jim, a local mob boss, as they had plenty of run-ins together 7 years ago. Using plenty of Chicago location shots, they arrive at Midway Airport before he takes a taxi to the Palmer House, where there’s plenty of street shots down Wabash Avenue as Tony has to shake the cop that’s following him, which he does at the Wabash/Adams el stop which looks exactly the same today as it did 60 years ago. Tony’s in Chicago looking for his girl, Sally (Dorothy Hart), whose uncle is Big Jim, who disapproves of their impending marriage, but Tony thinks he can change his mind, especially if they’re going to be family. But before he gets a chance, Tony is blindsided and coldcocked, where he awakes later with a gunshot wound on his hand placed in a car containing a gun that can be traced to Big Jim’s murder. The radio announces his description as a killer on the loose, where he’s immediately on the run, trying to outrun chasing cops, leading to a shootout scene at a factory warehouse where he climbs up a gigantic storage tank, similar to James Cagney in White Heat (1949), a film released 3 months earlier that same year. You’d think it might be the same set, but this is a Universal picture, while Cagney’s is Warner Brothers. With police canvassing all his known friends, he has no options left and nowhere else to go except to call upon Ann, the friend he met in Reno who was coming to Chicago to be a schoolteacher. Having heard the radio description, where he’s considered armed and dangerous, Ann is a bit suspicious, but once he announces he didn’t do it, that he’s been framed, she immediately breaks into a trusting smile and fixes him breakfast - - only in the movies.

Knowing there is no way out except to clear his name, Tony calls upon an old friend from the neighborhood now working for the police, Bruce Bennett as Detective Reckling, something of a straight shooter, in real life a silver medalist in the shot put for the 1928 Olympics under his actual name Herman Brix, holding both the indoor and outdoor world records at the time. Due to his athleticism, he was being considered for the Tarzan role by MGM pictures, but he broke his shoulder making another film, opening the door for Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller. Nonetheless, Bennett lived to be a hundred and did complete one Tarzan picture, completing all his own stunts, including a fall to rocky cliffs below in THE NEW ADVENTURES OF TARZAN, Pt’s I and II (1935), also TARZAN AND THE GREEN GODDESS (1938), which was largely put together from previously shot footage. Though Reckling is unable to prove Tony’s innocence, where there is a brief first time film appearance by a young Roc Hudson as a fellow detective, he does begin to believe the alleged murderer has been framed. The film packs a punch, cramming a huge amount of story detail into the highly condensed 71 minutes, where Buckingham Fountain is used as a favorite meeting place, showing the Chicago skyline, including what was the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Certainly a crowd pleaser moment for anyone from Chicago has to be when Ann pulls up to the fountain in her slick convertible car and parks directly in front of the fountain on Columbus Drive in what is a notorious tow zone. Another is a secret meet with Sally outside the Adler Planetarium down a few stairs while Ann stands guard at street level, where the two women may as well be at opposite ends of his life, morally speaking, one above and one below. There’s a stellar hallway sequence down a long corridor near the end, an unforgettable scene that is exquisitely filmed, also the interesting presence of unsung black actor Daniel Ferniel, perhaps the most unusual role in the film, a small part with major consequences, where he represents the surviving moral voice of the murdered victim, Big Jim, who interestingly is never seen onscreen.

Noir City Chicago 4 ( 3rd Night) Dan in the MW from The Blackboard, August 19, 2012

Thus far, the audiences have been enthusiastic and the ticket sales have been quite good overall. This is my fourth such festival and I was able to recognize many repeat customers in the audience from prior years. One of the nicest things about Noir City Chicago is that, when time permits, the Film Noir Foundation hosts have been approachable and patient in terms of answering questions and holding conversations with theater patrons. The Music Box, which opened its doors in the late Twenties, has always been a neighborhood theater, but it does have a fairly large lobby area that allows people an opportunity to do a bit of casual socializing. I am not certain that such intimacy would be possible in Los Angeles or San Francisco where the audiences are oftentimes much larger.

User reviews from imdb Author: lorenellroy from United Kingdom

William Castle was always a B movie director .His talent -amounting almost to genius -elevated some of his 50's work to the status of "event movies" but works like "The Tingler" "Homicidal"and "Macabre"were nothing but glorified B pictures wrapped in the razzle -dazzle of showmanship.

"Undertow"makes no pretense at being other than what it is-a brisk programmer for the bottom half of double features-and satisfies on this level Scott Brady is Tony Reagon,an ex-con going straight who is framed for the death of a mob boss,Big Jim,and the movie deals with Reagon's fight to clear his name with the help of a sympathetic cop and a schoolteacher with whom he struck up a friendship while en route to Chicago where the bulk of the movie is set.

Good use of the Chicago locations and a brisk pace compensate for moderate acting.Its predictable but narrative pace stops it getting tiresome

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Today ,William Castle's is known as the man who bought Ira Levin's "Rosemary's baby " rights and produced one of the best horror movies of all time.

"Undertow" has a quite derivative screenplay but the director made the best of it and any film noir buff can give it a chance :it thoroughly deserves it.It features at least one unforgettable scene: the chase in the long corridor which gives you goose flesh.Of the two female leads,I prefer Dorothy Hart to the rather bland Peggy Dow.

In the 1968 movie Castle produced ,there was a corridor which played a prominent part too.

User reviews from imdb Author: GManfred from Ramsey, NJ

"Undertow" is a simplistic example of a good 'B' picture, your basic Film Noir 101 movie. There are no surprises, lots of coincidences and plot contrivances, and the endgame is telegraphed about midway through. Screenwriters could have written this one in their sleep, which may account for the flawed, unsatisfying nature of Undertow.

The cast is attractive; several familiar 'B' actors put this picture over with performances that infuse it with much-needed energy. I thought Scott Brady, John Russell, Bruce Bennett and Peggy Dow were just fine, production values were good, but the movie lacks suspense and tension. Every time a crucial scene would come up you just knew the outcome.

Nevertheless, 'Undertow" succeeds in its own unsophisticated way, and for 40's theater audiences it would have been a good time killer while waiting for the main feature to come on.

User reviews from imdb Author: bmacv from Western New York

There's more to Undertow than the first screen credit of young `Roc' Hudson (in fact his tiny role as a police detective barely registers). It's one of a handful of noirs that William Castle directed before turning his attention to, and making his name in, gimmicky schlock. While none of them is so good as his first – When Strangers Marry, with Robert Mitchum and Kim Hunter – they're more than passable. As is Undertow.

Scott Brady looks like Lawrence Tierney's kid brother (which in fact he was). In Reno after a stint at a mountain lodge he wants to buy and run, he bumps into an old pal from mobbed-up Chicago (John Russell). They compare the diamond rings they've bought for their respective fiancees, though that doesn't stop Brady from flirting with a girl (Peggy Dow) he met in a casino and shares a flight home with. Since the police meet him at the plane, any extracurricular romance comes to naught, so Brady dutifully hooks up with his intended (Dorothy Hart). Next thing, he's taken for a ride and framed for the murder of unseen crime boss Big Jim, who happens to be Hart's uncle. Trying to clear himself while on the lam, he enlists Dow's help; he also happens to stumble onto the fact that his fiancee and Russell's are the same woman....

Undertow is pure story, competently enough executed if devoid of anything particular to lodge in the memory. It preserves evidence of why Brady stayed in his brother's imposing shadow, and leads one to wonder why Hart made so few movies (though, of her handful of credits, roughly half are noirs). While not an essential title in the noir cycle by any means, Undertow was one of the hundreds of titles that went into making it a cycle, and far from the weakest of them.

Noir City Chicago 4 ( 4th Night) Dan in the MW from The Blackboard, August 20, 2012

Tonight's menu featured the Brothers Tierney. Big bad Lawrence Tierney acted in Joseph Pevney's "Shakedown" while his estranged kid brother "Scott Brady" (Kenneth Gerard Tierney) starred in William Castle's "Undertow." The latter film was partly shot on location in Chicago.

Alan K. Rode completed his hosting duties on Sunday and tonight another Director of the Film Noir Foundation, Professor Foster Hirsch of Brooklyn College, introduced the films on the double feature bill. Both men are the authors of valuable film studies books that belong in the library of every film noir student: Hirsch produced the seminal "The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir" and most recently authored a full length biography of Otto Preminger; Rode wrote the biography of the iconic noir tough guy Charles McGraw and is currently engaged in writing the biography of Michael Curtiz, a director who worked in an almost every movie genre imaginable, including several highly regarded film noir pictures ("The Unsuspected" and "The Breaking Point").

Hirsch noted that both of tonight's features were intended to exhibited as "B" films or second features. As such, the two movies were shot economically and were densely plotted -- audience were supposed to being paying attention to plot points. There are no wasted scenes. Every frame of film tells a story. "Shakedown," which was Pevney's movie debut as a director, checked in at eighty minutes. "Undertow" was even briefer. Its running time was a mere seventy-one minutes in length. Nevertheless, both movies did not lack for action. The key difference as compared to modern films was a matter of rapid pacing.

Howard Duff's character was described as "a ruthless opportunist" by one of his newspaper colleagues in "Shakedown." As he hustles to establish his credentials as a big city news photographer, he is appeared to sacrifice his integrity in pursuit of a fast buck and to stage photographs to get ahead. He even goes so far as to try to play both sides against the middle in a war between two rival gangsters played by Brian Donlevy and Lawrence Tierney.

Before William Castle achieved notoriety as an exploitation film maker specializing in low budget horror films that relied upon assorted gimmicks, he was a competent "B" director of crime dramas and mysteries. He worked on some well regarded lesser film titles such as the King Brothers' production of "When Strangers Marry" at Monogram Pictures and he collaborated on "The Whistler" series at Columbia. He even worked with Orson Welles on "The Lady from Shanghai."

One audience member opined that "Undertow" featured some of the best location shooting that he had seen in a film set in Chicago. While several city landmarks were clearly identifiable, I wondered if it was simply a case of other films screened at the previous Noir City Chicago festivals emphasizing the city's slums as opposed to its tourist attractions? Midway Airport, Buckingham Fountain, the Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium and the Palmer House are all on display in "Undertow." It was amusing to see that it was permissible to park automobiles on Lake Shore Drive six years ago.

Both films were produced at Universal-International and some of the same cast and crew members were employed on both productions. One of the habits that I have had to cultivate as a film noir fan is studying the credits. Learning the names of the cinematographers, the directors and writers has proven to be an invaluable tool in terms of seeking out other worthwhile films from the classic period. For example, Martin Goldsmith, who is best known for "Detour," was one of the writers credited with creating "Shakedown."

I don't know if the ill will between Lawrence Tierney and Scott Brady had its origins in a family feud or not. Maybe Larry was jealous that his younger brother occasionally got cast as a heroic figure rather than being typed as a villainous heavy or a bad ass.

Both films were well attended. This was something of an accomplishment for a Monday night.

CONQUEST OF COCHISE

USA (70 mi) 1953

User comments from imdb Author cowboy7642 from Alexandria, VA

The Gadsden Purchase of Southern Arizona is the setting for this underrated western that has fine action sequences, beautiful cinematography and a nice music score. The plot involves the U.S. Government's attempt to forge a peace treaty between ancient enemies, the Apaches and Mexicans, the latter of whom the American troops are duty-bound to protect from Cochise's red raiders. Indian-hating Mexicans and trouble-making Americans from Tucson stand in the way of peace and inflame hostilities on both sides of the border, for profit and revenge. The Comanches, at war with both the Americans and the Mexicans, hope to enlist Cochise and his Apaches as allies in their war of extinction against their enemies. Robert Stack is the best-known name among a good cast of players who were veterans of many western films. John Hodiak is Cochise, and his mannered, somewhat formal bearing as the Apache leader is better than might be expected.

MASTERSON OF KANSAS

USA (73 mi) 1954

User comments from imdb Author louis-king from Watertown, Massachusetts

Even though the title is Masterson of Kansas, It's James Griffiths' Doc Holiday who's the most interesting character. His quiet, cultured manner radiates more deadliness than the generic Western manner of Montgomery's Masterson. Griffith was a good character actor who was worthy of better movies.

The problem with the Masterson of this movie is that the real Masterson was a bit of a dandy (more like Gene Barry's TV version) whereas here he's no different than Wyatt Earp.

Of the three 'good guys' Holiday, Masterson and Earp, Holdiay seems the most intelligent. Masterson knowingly takes on about 8 bad guys who are waiting for him and almost gets killed but for Holiday's intervention. Earp's attempt to face down a lynch mob lasts about 5 seconds when he gets knocked unconscious by a well thrown rock. That would never have happened to Burt Lancaster! Unfortunately for the viewer, the bad guys are not menacing enough and waste time with elaborate plotting. Makes you long for Lee Marvin or Leo Gordon.

Turner Classic Movies review Rob Nixon

Audiences who attended the Columbia Pictures release of Masterson of Kansas (1954) got not one but three legends of the Wild West for their money: Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. The story involves Dodge City Sheriff Masterson's efforts to prove that a group of cattlemen are framing an acquaintance of his, Merrick, for murder because Merrick negotiated a treaty that gave land rights to a Kiowa tribe. He enlists the aid of Earp and Holliday in bringing the true murderer to justice, thereby preventing an Indian war.

In real life, Masterson (born in Illinois in 1855), was initially a deputy marshal under Earp in Dodge City. In 1877 he campaigned for and won the post of county sheriff, where he enforced a curfew and gun restrictions on the often lawless town. In 1879, he was appointed U.S. deputy marshal but lost his bid for re-election primarily because of accusations by a newspaper editor that he was crooked. After that, he made a living as a gambler in such Western boom towns as Leadville, Deadwood, and Tombstone (where he came to know Holliday, a friend of Earp's). Eventually he went East to New York, where he was for a time U.S. deputy marshal (appointed by his friend President Teddy Roosevelt) and editor for the New York Morning Telegraph. His three-times-a-week column was one of the paper's most popular. He lost his law enforcement job when Roosevelt left office but stayed on in New York, continuing his newspaper work. On October 25, 1921, in the middle of writing his column, he died at his desk of a sudden heart attack.

The Western legend has been portrayed on screen a number of times by, among others, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott. Gene Barry played Masterson in a long-running TV series. Here the role is taken on by George Montgomery, a former boxer who, while never a top-rank star, made a string of popular action-packed Westerns in the 1950s. During this time, he was married to singer Dinah Shore, a successful recording and television star. In later life, he turned his self-taught talents to sculpture and created busts of such Western film legends as John Wayne, Gene Autry, Randolph Scott and Clint Eastwood.

Masterson of Kansas was directed by William Castle, better known for his horror movies and the over-the-top gimmicks and marketing devices he used to draw audiences. Among the pictures he directed were such early 60s schlock-horror classics as The Tingler (1959), which used a vibrating device attached to theater seats for shock effect; Thirteen Ghosts (1960), released in "Illusion-O," requiring viewers to use special glasses to see the ghosts; and the late Joan Crawford vehicles Strait-Jacket (1964) and I Saw What You Did (1965). As a producer, he gained a measure of respectability when he produced Rosemary's Baby (1968) for director Roman Polanski and even appeared in a cameo. He also served as associate producer and uncredited second unit director on Orson Welles' film noir The Lady from Shanghai (1947). John Goodman played a character based on Castle in the affectionate spoof of the B-movie industry Matinee (1993).

The chief of the Kiowa in this picture is played by Jay Silverheels, famous as the faithful Indian companion Tonto in the long-running Lone Ranger TV series and subsequent spin-off films. The Canadian-born son of a Mohawk chief, Silverheels entered the movie business in 1937 and worked steadily through 1974, although always typecast as the stereotypical Indian character. In later years, he became a spokesperson for improving the portrayals of Indians. He died in 1980.

Masterson of Kansas Dan DeVore of Movie Justice

THE TINGLER

USA (82 mi) 1959

Turner Classic Movies [Sean Axmaker]

A cultish chiller that acquired some fame on its original US release when Castle wired up the cinema seats with electrical buzzers to give his audiences a little extra shock value. The plot is ingeniously ludicrous: a doctor (Price) discovers that fear breeds a centipede-like organism in the base of the spine. The organism can kill if its grip is not released, and only a scream can do that. So the good doctor experiments on a deaf-mute, the wife of a cinema-owner who only shows silent movies. Castle was a real Hollywood showman, a downmarket Hitchcock whose work shows considerable flair. The scenes in the movie theatre are very striking, and the way the doctor torments his victim - by providing her with visual shocks (a kind of acid trip) and by causing running water from a tap to turn into blood (black-and-white gave way to colour here) - is clearly the work of a sick mind. Castle recalled, 'I was asked by somebody at Yale whether The Tingler was my statement against the establishment and whether it was my plea against war and poverty. I said, Who knows?'

"Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic. But scream – scream for your lives!"

Director William Castle was an ambitious journeyman looking for his breakout film when he hit upon his winning formula with Macabre, a low-budget 1958 thriller that sold its onscreen shock effects with promotional ballyhoo. In a brainstorm of publicity ingenuity, Castle issued an insurance policy (backed by Lloyds of London) to cover all ticket buyers against "death by fright." The campaign was a success, the film was a hit, and Castle found his new persona: a B-movie P.T. Barnum by way of Alfred Hitchcock. He launched a new gimmick with each succeeding horror film and took to personally promoting and introducing his films, just like Hitchcock was doing on television. In fact, for The Tingler (1959), Castle's third feature in this vein, composer Von Dexter's score borrows from the Hitchcock sound with the distinctive harp glissandos of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo (1958) theme.

The Tingler was Castle's second and final film with Vincent Price, whose silky voice and acting grace had brought a little class to Castle's previous film, the gleefully disreputable House on Haunted Hill (1959). Price plays Dr. Warren Chapin, a part-time coroner and full time scientist pursuing a private inquiry into the power of fear in the human body. "There's a force in all of us which science knows nothing about," he explains. "That it's strong enough to shatter the spinal column we know, but what it is – what causes it to appear and disappear – that we don't know." With a few simple scares and some timely X-rays, Chapin proves that the human body hosts a parasite that feeds on fear (quick, rewrite the medical texts!). He theorizes that screaming is the only thing that can stop it (becoming an early champion of primal scream therapy in the process) and names it the "tingler," after the tingles one feels in a state of terror.

It's not long before he extracts one of these things from a victim literally scared to death (too bad she didn't have her Lloyds of London insurance policy), revealing one of the cheapest of any of Castle's special effects. His tingler is a cheap rubber model that looks like a lobster crossbred with a centipede. When it moves through a faux animal skin rug, the fur ruffling past the otherwise stiff extremities creates an illusion of the legs actually moving, but for the rest of the film Castle is content to show the thing wobble across floors and over potential victims, yanked by unconcealed strings at times.

"In a controlled experiment with my own fear, perhaps I can find out all the things we have to know," Chapin muses to his assistant. "Only nothing scares me." That sounds like a challenge, and Chapin faces it with a movie first: he shoots himself up with an experimental chemical called LSD and has the first acid-trip freak-out on American screens. Price hams it up with gusto, but apparently no one on the production had any actual experience to draw from, and his histrionics make the scene endearingly square in retrospect.

"I gotta tell you something, neither Bill nor Vincent nor I took any of this too seriously," recalls co-star Darryl Hickman (brother of Dwayne "Dobie Gillis" Hickman). You can't blame them. Screenwriter Robb White, Castle's loyal partner in high-concept schlock, is more concerned with the gimmicks than with the story or the suspense. There were plenty of complications, to be sure; Chapin hates his socialite wife (Patricia Cutts), a millionaire tramp who doesn't bother to hide her affairs or apologize for blocking her younger sister's marriage to Chapin's handsome young assistant (Hickman). There are even a couple of murder attempts, but the main storyline is not very compelling.

A subplot concerning a deaf-mute woman (Judith Evelyn) who owns a silent movie theater is used to greater effect. At one point she finds herself in a waking nightmare of macabre threats (including a sink and bathtub running with blood-red fluid, the sole shocks of color in the black and white film), unable to scream and thus stop the tingler before it kills her. Castle takes credit for casting Evelyn, though it was actually Price who suggested her for the role, and she adds the right touch of eeriness to her part, a character right out of the silent films she shows in her theater.

Ultimately, however, it's all about the gimmick. In House on Haunted Hill, Castle had theaters rig skeletons to glide over the heads of the audience at a certain point in the film. For the climax of The Tingler, where the creature gets loose in a movie theater, Castle had theater owners hire a plant in the audience to faint on cue and get carried out by doctors (not real ones, of course). But that was just the appetizer. For the main course he unleashed "Percepto," a fancy name for a small, motorized vibrator placed under selected theater seats and wired to the projection booth. It was carefully timed to a key scene where the tingler crawls across the projector lens just before the screen goes black and the booming voice of Vincent Price entreats audiences not to panic, but to "Scream - scream for your lives!" Cue Percepto, which goosed the audience into playing along. "In the final count, I think we must have buzzed 20,000,000 behinds," writes Castle in his biography, a possibly inflated number, but then would you expect any different from a born self-promoter?

There is no doubt that William Castle could mount an effective B-movie thriller with an offbeat sensibility. The Tingler is more gimmick than movie and it lacks the level of tension and terror of other productions, but the showmanship is still a lot of fun.

"Ladies and gentlemen, just a word of warning. If any of you are not convinced that you have a tingler of your own, the next time you're frightened in the dark...don't scream."

B-Movie Central Duane L. Martin

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! Liz Kingsley

The Bad Movie Report Dr. Freex

Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp

Badmovies.org review Andrew Borntreger

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

The New York Times (Howard Thompson)

Cates, Joseph

WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR B 84

USA (94 mi) 1965

Why with everybody else? Why with every slob…and not with me?

—Lawrence Sherman (Sal Mineo)

A sleazy B-movie cult favorite and fetishistic voyeur’s delight from director Joseph Cates, father of actress Phoebe Cates, where you might expect to see flashers in raincoats in attendance, written by Arnold Drake who also wrote and produced THE FLESH EATERS (1964), yet it’s also an absurd cautionary tale dedicated to exposing a rising threat of pornography and all things sexually prurient, literally showcasing the Times Square porn shops, peep shows, and smut magazines in their heyday, where despite some excellent performances from cult stars Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, and Elaine Stritch, the exploitive tone veers so off the rails that the film was banned in the UK for being too luridly explicit, sending mixed messages about recognizing the warning signs, suggesting rock ‘n’ roll music is the devil’s work that may send you into a tailspin where you’ll burn in Hell. What’s mystifyingly different about this film is just how hysterically exaggerated it becomes in misjudging reality, playing it completely straight, without the outrageous wit and sarcastic humor of Luis Buñuel in films like VIRIDIANA (1961) and Simon of the Desert (Simón del Desierto) (1965), both of which poked fun at religious hypocrisy and conventional society’s overreaction to Elvis, rock ‘n’ roll, and the wildly theatrical dance contortions on display in garish discotheques, suggesting one whiff of that and you’ll be drowning in sin. Throughout this film it’s hard to tell just where most characters are coming from, as they all seem to suffer from some sort of character disorder. At the center is Nora Dain (Juliet Prowse, never better, where it’s a shame she didn’t make more films), a confident, independent woman living on her own in Manhattan, who’s got the smarts to match her dazzling beauty, yet here she’s down-on-her-luck, working as a DJ playing dance records at a seedy midtown discotheque while in pursuit of a career as an actress. The nightclub is owned by Marian, tough as nails Broadway legend Elaine Stritch, a lesbian with a special overprotective fondness for her girls, where one of the busboys waiting tables and serving drinks is Sal Mineo as Lawrence, a decade older than his Oscar nominated role as Plato in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), where at 27 his career was on what would be a decade-long, downward spiral, despite winning two Oscar nominations by the time he was 21, now typecast as a sex pervert, where it would be four years before he’d work again in the movies, instead working exclusively in theater and television. Hollywood never knew what to do with Sal Mineo, as he didn’t look the part they envisioned for handsome, leading men in the 50’s and 60’s, and instead was always typecast as a psychologically troubled or disturbed youth, playing demented criminal lowlifes, like “the Switchblade Kid,” or some off-color, outcast character, a Mexican boy, a Sioux Indian, a radical Zionist, and even a chimpanzee, where it’s fair to say his typecasting all but ruined his career.

An acknowledged bisexual during his lifetime, posthumously Sal Mineo has become something of a gay icon, a poster boy for gay beauty, with his exotic Sicilian looks, but in his lifetime, an era when Rock Hudson had to hide his homosexuality until his death bed, his openness about being gay curtailed his career, resulting in roles like this one, a deranged criminal, where he plays a disturbed psychopathic sexual predator, a stalker who anonymously calls Nora on the phone, with a lurid book entitled When She Was Bad sitting on the mantle, crawling into bed, wearing only his tighty-whities (a first in American cinema, as actors were previously required to wear boxer shorts), and masturbates suggestively while whispering sleazy trash to her, like “I just want to touch you…I’ll make you feel like a real woman…You and I will be on fire!” At first she thinks he’s just a drunk who’s got the wrong number, but as calls persist, and she finds a decapitated teddy bear in her apartment, she enlists the aid of police Lieutenant Dave Madden, Jan Murray, an otherwise likable TV game show host who got his start as a Borscht Belt comedian, but here he’s a cynical, hard-nosed vice cop who’s seen it all, becoming an expert on “the sadomasochists, the voyeur masochists, the exhibitionists, the necrophiliacs,” where his mind is so immersed in gutter crime that at one point Nora believes he’s the perpetrator. In fact, part of the strangeness of the film is that Nora feels personally insulted and threatened by the overly personalized acts of both Lt. Madden and Marian, who comforts her a bit too closely, apparently not wanting to let go, which just gives her the creeps, but she’s not the least bit threatened by Lawrence, and never reads the signs until it’s too late. In her haste to make a quick exit, Marian inadvertently leaves Nora’s apartment wearing her fur coat, quickly noticing she’s being tailed. While earlier in the day we watched Nora walk through the crowded city streets outside her apartment, where the city was a bustle of activity, yet Marian, in a bizarre parallel, bolts for the nearest alleyway, where she finds herself cornered, only to be strangled by Lawrence in a case of mistaken identity, suffering a similar demise as Sal Mineo in real life, who at age 37 was fatally stabbed in an alley behind his Sunset Strip, West Hollywood apartment. According to Elaine Stritch, Son of the 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Google Books Result, “I was a lesbian owner of a disco who fell in love with Juliet Prowse and got strangled on Ninety-third Street and East End Avenue with a silk stocking by Sal Mineo. Now who’s not going to play that part?”

All kinds of shenanigans are going on in this film, where Lawrence has an incestually suggestive, overly chummy relationship with his brain-damaged, younger sister Edie, (Margot Bennett), seen falling down the stairs in an opening flashback sequence that rather cryptically leads to the title, startled and then terror-stricken at seeing him naked in bed having sex with an older woman, where in her fright to run away she trips down the stairs, causing permanent brain damage, also decapitating the head of her teddy bear. Lawrence has felt guilty ever since, unable to have healthy relationships with women, instead spending his time on 42^nd Street paging through titillating porn magazines with lurid titles such as Shame Mates and Dance-Hall Dykes, raunchy books featuring salacious material, including Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs, and visiting XXX movie theaters in Times Square, becoming obsessed with Nora, seemingly the perfect woman that Edie will never become, where he can see into Nora’s apartment with binoculars and constantly spies on her. Lt. Madden is overprotective towards his own young daughter named Pam (Diane Moore), hiring a housekeeper to look after her while he’s at work, as his wife was murdered by a sexual psycho who chopped up the body afterwards, yet when he comes home, he plays back tape-recordings of other women who were stalked by predators, studying them for clues, completely oblivious to the fact that his daughter’s in the next room and can hear every word, not to mention he leaves smutty magazines around the house. Shot by cinematographer Joseph C. Brun, who also shot the brilliant Robert Wise film noir Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), with assistant cinematographer Michael Chapman, by the way, who ten years later would help direct Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), resembling the stylistic virtuosity of the John Cassavetes classic Shadows (1959), especially the black and white, cinéma vérité look of the street scenes, offering a time capsule look of New York City. After showing scenes of Lawrence shirtlessly working out in the gym, juxtaposed with Nora in skimpy swimming attire at the pool, WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR (1965) Sal Mineo works out & swims in ... YouTube (4:24), the film does have a serious erotic obsession with the human anatomy, especially Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse, though no explicit nudity. While part of the camp style is watching the disco dancers do their thing, blacks and whites mixed together on the dance floor, gyrating to very cheesy music (they couldn’t afford real music, so they used fake rock ‘n’ roll songs composed by former Four Seasons backup singer Charlie Calello), the scene of the film takes place after hours, with Lawrence alone with Nora, who couldn’t be friendlier, showing him how to dance after he expresses a certain reservation, where the go-go dancing style at the time was representative of Shindig! (1964-66) or Hullabaloo (1965-66), where Nora is an absolute delight doing the Watusi, Who Killed Teddy Bear Dance Scene HQ - YouTube (2:21), so caught up in feeling good for a change that she doesn’t notice the sudden change in mood that comes over Lawrence, creating a lurid climax scene, where the psychological disorientation is vividly expressed in a room full of mirrors that recalls Orson Welles in THE LADY OF SHANGHAI (1947). While it’s not just trashy fun, there are some poignant as well as bewildering moments, with plenty of documentary style realism in the street locations, along with a theme song sung over the opening and closing credits by Rita Dyson that captures the smoky eroticism of the film, WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR (1965) Title song / opening ... - YouTube (2:34).

Who Killed Teddy Bear? - Film Society of Lincoln Center

In a far cry from his signature role as the doe-eyed, crushed-out Plato in Rebel Without a Cause, Sal Mineo is seen to his advantage in Who Killed Teddy Bear? as a brawny busboy working at a New York discotheque. He spends his downtime as a peeping tom with a penchant for making obscene phone calls to his co-worker Norah (Juliet Prowse), who also finds admirers in the club’s tough-talking lesbian manager (Elaine Stritch) and a cop dedicated to the assiduous study of sexual deviancy (Jan Murray). Set amid the smut shops, peep shows, and porno theaters of old Times Square, Joseph Cates’s cult classic anticipates Scorsese’s Taxi Driver with its wonderfully seedy tale of obsessive desire and urban alienation.

Chicago Film Society Julian Antos

When a nightclub DJ (Juliet Prowse) receives threatening phone calls in the middle of the night, she enlists the help of detective Dave Madden (stand-up comedian and game show host Jan Murray, whose small time television personality is perfect for the role), specialist in “the sadomasochists, the voyeur masochists, the exhibitionists, the necrophiliacs,” to find the culprit. Sal Mineo, unable to avoid typecasting, is the brooding, sex-obsessed busboy who makes the calls and lives alone with his sister. A snaggly, nightmarish answer to Rebel Without a Cause, Who Killed Teddy Bear? was ahead of its time in dealing with sexual frankness, more empathetic than exploitative. Beautifully shot on location in New York by the underrated Joseph Brun (Cinerama Holiday, Wind Across the Everglades), Teddy Bear keeps its characters at arm’s length, obscured in flickery shadows and crying out for help. With Elaine Stritch in a heartbreaking turn as the nightclub manager.

CINEFILE.info Kyle Cubr

Norah (Juliet Prowse), a young twenty-something new to the city, is recently hired as a DJ at a New York nightclub. Shortly after beginning her job, she discovers that she has a stalker, who telephones her nightly to say increasingly sexual things. Her stalker is often filmed shirtless and from the neck down and solely in closeups, suggesting a kind of intimacy with Norah that could only be known by someone from her everyday life. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Madden (Jan Murray) is assigned to her case and shows a special interest in her situation due to his wife having been tragically murdered while walking home from the movies years prior. Released at a time when film censorship was loosening and the Hays Code nearly at its end, Joseph Cates’ film is able to tackle heavy subject material including both perversion and misogyny. Voyeurs, sadists, and fetishists are all examined from a lifestyle point of view as part of Madden’s investigation as well as serving as points of social commentary on the male-dominated world of the 1950s and early 60s. Women are not the only ones sexualized here; men receive their fair share of the treatment, especially Norah’s athletic co-worker, Lawrence (Sal Mineo, in a particularly striking role). Sensitive issues like sexual harassment and rape are commonplace talking points in TEDDY BEAR. It is a film unafraid to unearth the darker side of the human condition. A film full of mystery and red-herrings, WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR? is a sobering take on some of the seedier aspects of New York City and a Freudian-like exploration into the human sexual psyche.

sexploitation – Cinema Enthusiast

#12. Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965, Cates) (USA)
Hits all my check boxes for cult curios with a rare kind of verve. When it was recommended (only by one individual who I’m grateful for) while doing my 1965 research, it piqued my interest more than any other film on my to-watch list. It revels in its simple ‘Peeping Tom’ plot and is largely made up of the threat of transgression and threatening-to-boil-over sexual energy. The body is constantly eroticized; male and female alike in the forms of Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse.

The location footage captures Times Square and Manhattan as peep show haven. A place you can stroll to your crotch’s desire. All proto-Taxi Driver comparisons are apt. Mineo seethes with self-hate, both at his unquenchable thirst and an inability to separate himself from what he sees as the gutter. It’s too preoccupied with deviancy to function as an on-the-level release at the time. It’s also too much of a rehash story to be truly outre. So it lies between with its underground renegade spirit and endless streaks of art-sleaze stopping by way of kitsch.

You’ve got Sal Mineo with his chiseled bod, and a perfectly repressed performance, complete with gym workout montage! There’s Juliet Prowse whose is so engaging and gorgeous; I wish her career had steered more towards film. There’s Elaine Stritch as a lesbian discotheque manager! Three guesses what happens to her. There’s a detective obsessed with fetishists whose daughter is stuck overhearing victim’s detailed case interviews and being surrounded by smutty mags lying around the apartment. Outdated in its hilarious blanket definition of ‘perverse’ and yet progressive in its voyeuristic fixation on and acknowledgment of different types of sexuality and urges (both healthy and harmful) that society largely ignored(s).

Comes complete with an almost too-catchy title song and contains quite possibly the greatest scene in the history of film. Oh yes. I’m talking about the Sal Mineo/Juliet Prowse dancing scene. I already have such a lasting fondness for Who Killed Teddy Bear.

StinkyLulu: 5 Stinky Thoughts on Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965) - For ... February 17, 2010

Thought #1: What is Who Killed Teddy Bear?!?

Who Killed Teddy Bear? is an enthralling, often incoherent mix of cinematic high-style (a glop of Sirk, a little bit of Hitchcock, a whole lotta noir) telling a smut-tastic tale and riven with tough-on-crime, pop-Freudian riffs on all the latest perversions circa 1965. To contemporary eyes it looks a lot like an erotic thriller avant la lettre (with just enough Law and Order: SVU to make it really weird). And it's a film I've been intending to sit down with for a good while, ever since a dubiously pedigreed dvd copy came into my possession several years ago. Of course, I've long been intrigued by the film's startling cast/ing: Sal Mineo in one of his first (and most) "mature" roles playing a sweet waiter who happens to also be a sexually-confused stalker; Juliet Prowse in a rare dramatic role as a hot-to-trot deejay; and Elaine Stritch playing a glamorous, predatory lesbian. That's plenty, right? But I was also interested in the independent film's date -- 1965 -- and its being tagged an "exploitation" picture. I suspected (rightly) that Joseph Cates's Who Killed Teddy Bear? might be one of those films that happens to land right at some key boundaries -- of taste, of genre, of style, of its own historical moment -- the kind of little-ish movie that gets lost in the cracks as all those cultural boundaries shift right across it. As I watched the film, I kept thinking how this film is like a "nudist magazine" or a "sleaze novel" (print genres of adult entertainment briefly popular in the mid60s just before things got really explicit). Who Killed Teddy Bear? delivers a sexual frankness that's also curiously coy; like a nudist magazine, Teddy Bear lets it all hang out without really ever showing anything. And just as "sleaze fiction" is the filthier, raunchier but not much more explicit older cousin to "pulp," Teddy Bear is also palpably lurid while somehow avoiding anything that might cross the line into obscenity. It's the kind of film that would have been nearly unthinkable in 1960, but hopelessly old-fashioned by 1970. Yet its also a clear (and clearly American) bridge between -- oh -- Psycho and Taxi Driver. No wonder it nearly got "lost" in the cultural tumult of the cinematic sixties.

Thought #2: Pretty pretty, Sally boy, pretty pretty.

Joseph Cates's camera just loves Sal Mineo. And its clear that Sal doesn't mind being loved by Joe's camera. From the opening credits, and throughout the film, one of the more startling aspects of Who Killed Teddy Bear? emerges from the voyeuristic paradox that the film establishes. The narrative impetus of the film -- that Norah Dain (Prowse) is being stalked by a peeping tom/obscene caller-- is immediately complicated by the camera's chiaroscuro fixation on the refined musculature of the stalker's own body. In these intimately private scenes, the stalker's muscular manhood is softened by the camera's almost dewy gaze, through repeated and abstracted glimpses of this body in glorious, rich black and white. Yes, it's the body of the movie's creepy peeper, but we're the creepy peepers sitting in the movies staring at him as he touches himself in all kinds of pretty pretty ways.

As the actor in these scenes, Mineo actually does a really nice job of investing his many self-touching scenes with -- if you can believe it -- deft characterization. Mineo inhabits the scene's eroticism, but in ways that are not entirely simple, and -- as the twisted narrative unfurls -- it becomes clear that Mineo's Lawrence touches himself as he was once touched, with each self-touch reminding him of his defining trauma. It's subtle, smart, sophisticated work on Mineo's part -- if you feel inclined to look past the utter prettiness of the spectacle itself. And, boy howdy, is it pretty.

Thought #3: How 'bout that sister?

Even without the glorious spectacle of Sal weaving throughout the picture, Margo Bennett's performance as little Edie (didja catch that?) might be reason enough to rediscover this picture. The role's your standard issue "disabled relative" role. You know the one. That secondary character who's there as a device to (a) develop dimensions of the main character's humanity while (b) also anchoring the backstory of his monstrosity. In this one, Bennett's Edie is the brain-injured younger sister of Mineo's Lawrence. He's her only connection to the world, and she's his constant reminder of how damaging illicit sexuality can be. It's not much of a spoiler (see video link above) to note that the opening credits show the child Edie witnessing an adult sexual encounter and then falling down the stairs as a plaintive vocal sings "Who Killed Teddy Bear?" As best as I can figure it, the film's "moral alibi" can be discerned in this hand-wringing about the ways that increasingly overt and perverted sexuality distorts and destroys "today's" youth. Thus, little Edie's chance encounter with adult sexuality while still a child leaves her, literally, brain-damaged -- the Freudian psyche made manifest. Bennett's Edie is also frozen as a child even as her body changes to that of a young woman, a fact which agitates her devoted but ashamed older brother all the more. For her part, Bennett delivers a deliciously feral performance as this brain-injured little girl. Every moment is vivid with urgent, plausible emotion.

And the scene in which she "dresses up as a lady"? Hilarious, grotesque, heartbreaking. There's a tiny moment in which Bennett's Edie stumbles in her high heels that's shocking. Bennett's body seizes for a moment, like the character's been smacked by some unseen hand, before she recovers with a jittery pride. As little Edie, Bennett delivers a thrilling, strange performance -- one steeped in the midcentury American Method, yet rooted in an urgent emotional honesty -- and, in so doing, evinces the movie's bizarre and twisted little heart.

Thought #4: As You've Never Seen Them.

Were it not for its queer cult stars -- Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, Elaine Stritch -- I suspect this movie would have really been lost down the rabbit hole of cultural memory. But, thankfully, the best fans are quite skilled at following the footnotes to unearth the lost gems in their beloved icon's crown. And it is fun to see each of these legends strut their stuff and stretch their range. In those moments when Cates pauses his camera to frame Prowse carefully, her oddly insect-like features develop a stunning beauty. (Unfortunately, Cates's camera is much less interested in Prowse than it is in Mineo and most of her scenes become flat with tv-drama blandness.) Mineo, on the other hand, doesn't wait for the camera to find him before he fills it with his particular bizarre intensity, always pensive and impassioned simultaneously.

Like Prowse, Mineo's distinctive features are capable of shifting almost imperceptibly from the beautiful to the bizarre yet Mineo somehow marshals this in service of the character, shifting from tenderness to terror with a simple shift of his jaw. He's an amazing actor to watch -- not always "good" but always interesting. And then there's Stritch.

In the role of the Lady Lesbian Marian, Stritch delivers perfect Stritch. A hard-working, hard-drinking dame who takes good care of her hunky deaf/dumb bodyguard. All acid tongue and tart timing barely concealing a devastating vulnerability. It's a compassionate, humane performance in a role that could have become easily noxious. (Of course, the fact that Stritch's Marian receives the film's most brutal treatment does legitimately lodge it appropriately on those lists of "smear the queer" films from this era.) Stritch's performance is really quite interesting for its intelligent and even empathetic handling of the character, one which she's talked about recently. Her choices are clean, clear and elevating -- once again demonstrating the woman's chops as an actor (even in the unforgiving close-up of low-budget film).

Thought #5: Who Cares Who Killed Teddy Bear?

I remain entranced by Teddy Bear as a "queer" film. Not only in the sense that it is a film that deals frankly with sexually outré situations and characters, but also as a film that doesn't fit simply within easy categories of genre, period or style. As a document, the film holds historical interest. The captures of 1960s NYC are thrilling (both Prowse and Mineo hold the center of separately exhilarating extended sequences in which the camera follows them verité style as they each do "their thing" -- auditioning and horndogging, respectively -- in Times Square). The film also provides an incredible document of Sal Mineo's curious but haunting screen charisma. But even more than its status as a cultural document, I find the film remarkable on formal and thematic levels as well. Cates's neo-documentary depiction of Mineo's forays into the city's underbelly seems to anticipate (if not inform) similar sequences in subsequent works by Mike Nichols (1968's The Graduate & 1971's Carnal Knowledge), Francis Ford Coppola (1966's You're a Big Boy Now) and Martin Scorsese (1975's Taxi Driver). Likewise, the nearly incoherent blend of noir, Freudianism and Sirkian mise-en-scene in a semi-explicit erotic thriller seems to also anticipate the entire ouevre of Brian DePalma. I'm not saying it's as "good" as any of those other films but seeing this film helped me to understand those other, more established films in a richer, deeper way. Finally, I have to say that -- though I don't have any proof for this -- amidst the film's mix of the highbrow and lowbrow, the swirl of camp pleasures alongside tentatively erotic ones, I'm left wondering if this film was made "for" -- or at least with an alertness to -- a gay urban audience at a moment when "coded" depictions of cinematic queerness were beginning to give way to more overt depictions. That might be part of the reason this flick is routinely classified as "exploitation" but I can't shake the feeling that there's something important in the fact this film seems to have been built to be seen by queer eyes.

who killed teddy bear? 1965 - dreams are what le cinema is for... Ken Anderson

Cinema de Merde [Scott Telek]

Who Killed Teddy Bear? - DVD Compare Paul Lewis

Who Killed Teddy Bear | DVD Review | Film @ The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Cinedelica: DVD Review: Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965)

Who Killed Teddy Bear? 1965 Monster Girl from The Last Drive-In

The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz

'Who Killed Teddy Bear' review by Catherine Stebbins • Letterboxd

Movie Magazine International Monica Sullivan

VideoVista Ian Sales

SAL MINEO ~ LIVE FAST, DIE YOUNG | HOUSE OF RETRO

'Who Killed Teddy Bear' Movie Review: Sal Mineo - Alt Film Guide Danny Fortune

Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965) - Joseph Cates - RoweReviews

Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965) James Marshall from The Hound Blog, October 24, 2009

The Tragically Short Life of Sal Mineo, Hollywood's Mediterranean ... The Tragically Short Life of Sal Mineo, Hollywood’s Mediterranean Teen Demigod, by Rob Blauwhuis from Gay News, December 25, 2016

Brooklyn Magazine: Michael Koresky April 27, 2016, also seen here: BK Mag [Tanner Tafelski]

Who Killed Teddy Bear, A Fascinating Chronicle of Wagner-era Times ... Melisa Anderson interviews actress Elaine Stritch, Village Voice, January 19, 2010

Who Killed Teddy Bear - Film4

Who Killed Teddy Bear - Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide ...

DVD review: Who Killed Teddy Bear? | Film | The Guardian Phelim O’Neill

San Francisco Chronicle Peter Stack

DVDBeaver [Gregory Meshman]

Who Killed Teddy Bear - Wikipedia

Caton-Jones, Michael

ROB ROY

USA (139 mi) 1995 ‘Scope

Time Out review Geoff Andrews

The Scottish Highlands, 1713. Clan-leader Rob Roy MacGregor (Neeson) asks the Marquis of Montrose (Hurt) for a loan. The aloof Machiavellian hesitantly agrees; but Rob hasn't bargained for the laird's house-guest, the foppish wastrel Cunningham (Roth), who together with Montrose's scheming factor (Cox) steals the money, killing Rob's friend Alan (Stoltz) in the process. The scene is set for deadly enmity between Rob and Montrose. As scripted by Alan Sharp and directed by Caton-Jones, this stirring historical drama is less swashbuckler than transposed Western, with a feel for landscape, intrigue, romance and questions of honour reminiscent of Mann's Last of the Mohicans. Neeson makes a less dashing action hero than did Day-Lewis, but he brings enough gravitas to his role to endow his love for his wife Mary (Lange) and his conflict with Cunningham with real emotional punch. Still better are Lange, Hurt, Cox and, notably, Roth, whose final duel with Neeson is a tour de force. While the film's chief virtue is the mythic clarity, Sharp's script, which shifts easily between the fruity innuendo of the aristos and the more demotic colloquialisms of the clansmen, never soft-pedals the historical and political context.

eFilmCritic.com (Natasha Theobald) review [2/5]

"Sudsy enough for Lifetime: Television for Women"

If this film is a book, Fabio is on the cover.

Tim Roth is the only reason to see this movie. He is deliciously malicious as a bad guy you love to loathe. In fact, he brings so much energy to the procedings, you start to wish bad things upon perfectly wonderful, if not a little boring, people just so he'll show up.

The story centers upon honorable man, Rob Roy Macgregor. It is to him that people look for protection and guidance, succor and sustenance. In fact, he feels so responsible for the welfare of others, he puts his land against a note from a nobleman in an effort to start his own business, as it were, buying and selling livestock of some sort. But, the nobleman's money man plots to steal said amount with Tim Roth's wealthy-seeming yet woefully penniless rogue. The nobleman is willing to forgive the debt if Rob will help him to sully the name of another nobleman, but Rob will not oblige. Can a man remain moral in an immoral world? This movie is not to be bothered with such questions.

Because of his choice to stand his ground, Rob and those closest to him suffer great losses, particularly his wife. She, strong and long-suffering, has tried to get him to see the gray of things, but he will not be moved. And, even with all that happens to her, she repeats to him the same words of wisdom he, just by chance, sought to share with his sons before all of this happened, that honor is a gift a man gives himself. As you may suspect, revenge also is something Rob would like to see wrapped with a bow. Murder, I guess, is honorable in his world if it can be justified.

The ins and outs are pretty much as you might expect. There are few surprises, save the aforementioned performance of Tim Roth. He doesn't have an imperfect moment in the whole affair, and I'm glad to have seen him glory in it.

So, this is for Tim Roth fans or those looking for a bodice-ripping, revenge fantasy. The eye-rolling implausibility starts about halfway through the film, but, if you stick with it, you'll get to see Rob gut an animal so that he can hide in the carcass. Good stuff.

Rob MacGregor strides through the laird's ornamental garden, like Gulliver amongst the Lilliputians, with the Marquis of Montrose (John Hurt), his factor Killearn (Brian Cox) and the effete swordslinger Cunningham (Tim Roth). It would be farcical if these little men did not hold sway over MacGregor's fate.

Liam Neeson carries his height with grace. What he gains in stature, he loses in speech. The ruling classes have all the best lines. Montrose is portrayed as an acerbic wit, ruthless with money and tempered by the English court's fashion for foppery.

Cunningham, his hired sword, beds a serving wench - "You think I'm a gentleman because I have linen and can manage a lisp." He's an impoverished aristo, who considers rape an afternoon's sport and murder a pleasurable pastime.

Roth is hardly the ideal choice for such a fearsome enemy, uncomfortably camp besides Cox's superb Killearn, Andrew Kerr's noble Argyll and Jessica Lange's indomitable Mrs MacGregor. If Neeson wasn't such a strong, vulnerable actor, with an inner sense of his own limitations, the dandy would have danced away with the movie.

As it is, Roth's affectation becomes a victim of Neeson's honesty. Rob borrows a thousand pounds from Montrose to buy cows. The money is stolen. Montrose demands retribution, sending Cunningham and the redcoats in pursuit, as Rob heads for the hills.

This could easily have been a romp - Rob Roy: Prince Of Reivers - but is saved by Alan Sharp's bawdy, bramble-scratched script and fine acting from a multinational cast. Michael Caton-Jones, the Scots-born director, is not afraid of tackling a national hero in the Stevenson tradition. Energy, enjoyment and a refusal to be bothered by purist sensibilities make this a rollocking good adventure.

He avoids beauty spots in favour of untrodden glens. No one seems to be wearing enough clothes - the weather is filthy in Scotland - and there isn't a midge in sight. At times, the editing appears crude, not that it affects the fierceness of these wild places. The final scene is breathtakingly banal, which, in anyone else's hands, would have been pastiche.

Lange gives the film class, Neeson gives it passion, Roth gives it flair, Cox gives it body. After a shaky start, in which David Hayman does an impersonation of a caveman and folk band Capercaillie washes the soundtrack in mulled Gaelic balladry, Sharp unsheathes his language and Caton-Jones grasps the nettle. Despite soapbox Rob ("All men with honour are kings, but not all kings have honour") and cutthroat cynicism from Cunningham ("Love is a dunghill and I am but a cock that climbs upon it to crow"), this is exhilarating entertainment.

Scott Renshaw review [8/10]

Liam Neeson cuts quite a swath—aye, and makes a fashion statement, too—in "Rob Roy," a humorless history of the 18th-century swashbuckler's feud with the Marquise of Montrose (John Hurt). As the dour chief of a declining clan, Robert Roy MacGregor has little left but his honor and his noble lineage, which he stubbornly guards, nae matter the cost to his kith and kin.

Writer Alan Sharp gets so caught up in the legend and the lush language that he doesn't seem to know he's written "Death Wish" in kilts. There's also something of "Rambo" in Rob Roy's cheap butch conventions—grabbing the wrong end of a rapier, wearing fetishistic leather garb and sporting a photogenic array of wounds. Even back then, guys in skirts had more to prove than their panted counterparts.

Never mind that they were a bunch of dandified prisspots. RR's nemesis, Cunningham (Tim Roth), is the uber dandy, a limp-wristed fop whose absurd gestures disguise his sociopathic tendencies. Cunningham and the marquise's repellent henchman, Killearn (Brian Cox), are behind all the hero's troubles with Montrose, formerly MacGregor's employer.

The hero's problems begin after Cunningham and Killearn bushwhack his lieutenant, who has been entrusted with fetching a 1,000-pound loan from Montrose and bringing it back to the clan's village. When RR can't repay the loan, Montrose puts Cunningham in charge of hunting him down. To lure the hero out of hiding, Cunningham kills his cows, burns his land and rapes his wife, Mary (Jessica Lange). The last is considered an assault on RR's honor.

Somebody call Monty MacPython!

Skirmishes and swordplay ensue as RR abandons his people to Montrose's troops and sets out to settle the score. Not that he was ever much of a leader or a provider for the poor souls. Maybe the MacGregors were dying out with good reason. Frankly, Rob Roy is about as bright as one of his cows. He doesn't even recognize that his obsession with honor will lead to the destruction of his clan.

Director Michael Caton-Jones and Sharp, both Scotsmen, are so caught up in the legend that they don't seem to notice that RR is about as heroic as a hatful of haggis. Like Charles Bronson, RR has no greater cause than vengeance. Not king, not God, not country. He just doesn't want to be dissed.

Neeson, otherwise relentlessly solemn here, does make convincing love to Lange, who could make a bagpipe play "Love in Bloom." The villains, played with glee, manage to perk up the glacial pace, but they too grow tiresome. It's hard to feel bad when they all get kilt.

ROB ROY Man in the Middle, by Brian Woolland from Jump Cut, July 2000

Tucson Weekly (Zachary Woodruff) review

Edwin Jahiel review

Pedro Sena retrospective [4/5]

Macresarf1's Epinion Review of ROB ROY.

George Chabot's Review of Rob Roy

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A-]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [1.5/5]

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman

Austin Chronicle (Hollis Chacona) review [2/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review

Cinema Crazed [Felix Vasquez Jr.]

Cattet, Hélène and Bruno Forzani

AMER C 70

Belgium France (90 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

This is a style-over-substance horror film, where the focus of attention is on a single character beginning as a young girl, where her hyperactive imagination continues to get the better of her, where much like REPULSION (1965), we see the world as she perceives it, complete with all the built-in anxieties and fears, where for most of the film, which continues through teenage and adulthood, it actually exists in the world of the imagination which blends seamlessly into real life, using camp retro music to add occasional tongue-in-cheek humor. This does give the director team a chance to exhibit their considerable skills behind the camera, as they obviously relish what they’re doing. But most assuredly, despite the artful high-grade, glossy coating, this film is not for everyone, as evidenced by plenty of walkouts throughout the journey. While this is entirely a genre film, exploring the various ways to terrorize and scare the living bejesus out of a living victim, where she seems to be doing a pretty good job of it all on her own, there’s barely any dialogue and not a hint of character development, which makes this more of an exercise than a film with any complexity or depth.

Nonetheless, the film has a visually startling Tarantino-esque quality to it, even if it seems like a cross between the exaggerated, overly serious style of Sergio Leone films and an uninhibited, sexually exploitive perfume commercial. What distinguishes this film is its air of artfulness, as the production design is among the best, but the film falls short in having any emotional connection or meaningful relevance in anyone’s life, deteriorating into a visualized hell that exists for its own sake, as the tension in the early sequences are all but forgotten by the finale, where any evidence of suspense has completely evaporated. However, because it has such a stylishly appealing look, it’s bound to at least initially catch anyone’s eye, that is until they see what the directors are up to, which is instantly obvious. The child torment sequences with actress Cassandra Forêt as Ana have an unsettling PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006) feel to them, as she is constantly besieged by demons both living and dead, among which include her constantly berating mother who would just as soon get rid of her and throw her out of the house, calling her a witch, but most all of this seems to exist in her mind.

Yet with a sound design that accentuates every creaking door, water drip, and eerie unexplained sound that seems to come from the dead, Ana is besieged by what lies under the bed and behind closed doors, constantly suggestive of lurking shadows behind the enormity of empty space to fill in a huge mansion that appears to be haunted. As a sexually provocative teenager (Charlotte Eugène-Guibeaud), Ana is shown in slow mo as she prances in front of a group of bikers, where close ups of the biker’s eyes and Ana’s short hemline are intermixed with near frantic regularity, where the film itself, again very much tongue-in-cheek, exploits the exploitive genre. Perhaps the weakest yet most grotesque element is reserved for Ana in adulthood (Marie Bos), most likely because of how macabre and demented her fears have become, turning into a full-fledged splatter film with the help of the always available switchblade, followed by scenes for the budding necrophiliac. This film panders to the voyeuristic element by providing ever more uncomfortable imagery, but to its credit, it doesn’t hold back and aggressively persists in going full throttle. While this may be a dismal exercise to endure for some, there is ample evidence to suggest others will be more than just a little bit titillated by the highly exaggerated sense of self-indulgence.

Visit our Blog for reviews of individual films Doug McLaren from Cine-File

The psychosexual development of a young female, Ana, is explored with minimal dialogue in three episodes, tracking childhood, adolescence, and womanhood. The first (and best) episode takes its stylistic cues from Dario Argento, complete with a Goblin-esque soundtrack during the movie’s opening credits. Primary-color lighting and extreme close-ups hint at what a children’s horror movie made by Argento would look like, and this episode pins it down quite nicely. A terrified child’s interpretation of the mystical phenomenon of a grandparent’s death and his subsequent viewing are perfect for a kid’s version of giallo. Unfortunately, the rest of the film does not hold up to the first half hour, once it abandons its SUSPIRA aping (It returns at the end to lesser effect.), and is often dragged down by repeated shots of erect nipples under sundresses and panties flashed by a breeze. It’s an unfortunately masculine interpretation of female sexuality, rivaling only BLACK SWAN in its absurdly faux-feminist approach. Still, this first section stands so strongly it is worth sitting through (or, gasp!, walking out on!) the later portions of the movie. (2009, 90 min, DigiBeta)

Amer – review | Film | The Observer Philip French

The lurid Italian horror movies of the 1970s were called giallo (yellow) after the colour of the covers in which the original books appeared in the 1930s, and this Franco-Belgian homage to them invites, indeed compels, the viewer's participation. It unfolds in three chapters over some 30 years at a grand mansion on a cliff overlooking the Côte d'Azur. In the first part, the young Ana is terrified by the family's witch-like housekeeper, is fascinated by the corpse of her grandfather (from whose deathly clutches she wrenches a watch) and sees her parents having sex.

In the second chapter, the adolescent Ana leaves the house to accompany her sexually competitive mother to the hairdresser and is drawn, to her mother's horror, towards a motorcycle gang. In the final, most compelling episode, the grown-up Ana returns to the empty, decaying house where her sexual fantasies merge with reality in a violent, bloody, ambiguous conclusion.

This is basic movie Freud, elegantly mounted. The soundtrack (footsteps, dripping taps, creaking doors, banging shutters) is ominously exaggerated. The close-ups are extreme. Colours change melodramatically to fit the shifting moods. The music is borrowed from old horror films. The dialogue is at first sparse, then non-existent. Luis Buñuel (sliced eyeballs, insects crawling out of bodies), Mario Bava and Dario Argento are affectionately alluded to. Viewers are left to create their own narratives or absorb the events into their own dreams and nightmares. This is art-house horror, a pure cinema for connoisseurs, a return to late-19th-century decadence.

Amer Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London David Jenkins

It’s been argued that this frightening and erotic piece of experimental montage from Belgian directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani is all form and no feeling. It’s easy to see why, since its most easy pleasures derive from a cool juxtaposition and stylisation of sound and imagery. But there’s more to it: the film also functions as a knowing, lightly feminist homage to Hitchcock and the chief exponents of the Giallo genre, Dario Argento and Mario Bava. As such, its ‘meanings’ may not be instantly traceable through a cosy linear storyline or densely wrought characterisations.

In immaculate detail and with barely any dialogue, the film depicts three symbolic events in the life of Ana: the first involves a family death and some mid-coitus voyeurism; another shows her first experience of male attraction; and the final, most impressive chapter (a wholesale updating of a key segment from Argento’s ‘Deep Red’) sees our heroine (played by Marie Bos, pictured above) sneaking around an eerie, European mansion, maybe stalked by a razor-wielding maniac.

Cattet and Forzani sculpt with pure mood. They deliver a vivid sense of Ana’s heightened sensitivity towards her surroundings via an array of bravura camera tricks and fine edits. The best way to describe it would be to imagine the shower scene in ‘Psycho’ played over feature length. A large part is shot in extreme close-up, mostly of Ana’s eyes or the silhouette of her crotch underneath a billowy cotton summer dress.

This technique imbues the film with a rich sense of texture, such as in an early scene where Ana runs her fingers over the cracking, mottled skin of (what appears to be) the corpse of an old man, or later when she’s riding in a taxi and the heat makes the leather trim too hot to touch. Some may find the film a mite academic in its glassy deconstruction of genre convention, and it’s perhaps asking a bit much to read it as anything more than a claustrophobic portrait of sexual danger, but it still fulfils that highly specific brief with blood-splashed gusto.

Visually and viscerally, "Amer" is a film that is a throwback to the classic Giallo thrillers, but deep down it is much more of an academic breakdown of the Giallo sub-genre and not so much a straight forward giallo film. True it has shades of the visual flourishes with uses of color and specific dashes of sharp editing that suck us in to the narrative, all the while invoking memories of "Suspiria" and "Tenebre" upon which both directors call on to create something of an evocative sexual thriller, in the end. "Amer" is admittedly an exhausting film and that counts as a criticism and a recommendation. While I'm never one to pigeon hole a film, "Amer" is strictly for the film buffs who are more prone to de-constructing genres than sitting through a film that is adhering to genre trappings. With only ten percent dialogue, "Amer" is strictly a movie based around sound, and color, and one that keeps audiences motivated through its thick pastels and unforgiving solid representations of moods through bold hues of red and blues expressing emotions and sexuality as a threat and a seduction.

"Amer" is a French born giallo that portrays in three acts the evolution of a young girl through sexual exploration and a looming evil, both of which are connected through periods of her life and constantly threaten to end her existence. Always on the brink of giving in to her unbridled lust, Ana is a girl who has seen evil and sexual thrills in her youth coming face to face with death and a wicked evil embodied in a laced figured and a dead body, both of which inspire her to seek out the darkness and also maintain it within her.

This is shown through her escapades venturing in to the wilderness of the world that is filled with numerous threats including dangerous bikers, stalkers in the woods and enigmatic taxi drivers, all of whom pose a threat and a form of enticement for the young woman who continues narrowly avoiding this evil at every turn. Directors Cattet and Forzani's film is visually amazing and one that will either annoy audiences or enthrall them as it more often revels in being a practice in giallo methodology and sexual symbology than it does in posing as a horror film with a routine killer. Marked with an excellent score hearkening back to Argento and Fulci, the story is kept on a constant tense pacing and framing that will grab audiences and force their emotions to the surface through stunning sweeps of French landscape and riveting close-ups that define this as a notch above a typical horror film. in the end, "Amer" works more as a moving piece of art than a typical horror thriller, and it's a look at a woman fighting sexuality and being faced with giving in to it and its dark trappings.

Anyone looking for a bonafide giallo movie with grue and thrills will find "Amer" to be quite polarizing as it is mostly an experiment in the devices and moods of the classic giallo than an actual one in the surface. Nevertheless, this French erotic thriller is a marvelous work of moving art, and one I suggest for film students and cineastes alike.

BrutalAsHell.com [Kayley Viteo]

First, I’d like to preface this review by noting that I don’t really consider Amer to be a horror film, but more of an erotic thriller/art film. However, what you go into this movie expecting is decidedly not what you get, which only adds to the intriguing and overall captivating nature of the film. The problem is, the film comes off as too experimental and while lovingly crafted, you can’t really love a film where the different parts of it don’t connect seamlessly.

The premise of Amer is simple. It is a detailed look at sensuality and desire at three points in the life of a woman, Ana. It is broken up into three parts, one with Ana as a young girl, another in her teens, and later as a young adult. Amer, the French word for “bitter” (which may tell you a little more about how this film is constructed) is essentially a dark portrait of when moments in your life – especially as a child – can mark you in both positive and negative ways. For Ana, the result is decidedly macabre and not at all clear.

To introduce the film, the two filmmakers had a video play before the screening that asserted how the film was meant to be viewed – with audience members as the eyes and the ears of the lead character. I believe this is probably the most important thing to understand about the film, as Amer is extremely image heavy, with little to no dialogue, and does not present a clear narrative. Much like Ana, we are lost in the seemingly random images and sounds, forcing us to walk her same confusing path.

Amer is every inch an homage to Dario Argento, particularly in the first chapter where the use of color is amazing. What works is the general creepiness that seems to invade every movement of the character. There are some wonderfully simple shots here that are so realistic and definitely play off that theme we can all identify with: what you want when you’re a child is not necessarily the best thing for you. Looking through that keyhole or opening the door you were previously told not to just might force you to realize a world that is harmful in ways you can’t even understand yet.

Still, as much I enjoyed the individual pieces of Amer, it is a challenging film to watch. It feels more like someone stuck inspiration from Bava, Argento, and Italian Giallo films and mixed in a blender than like a feature – you get the sense that it would have worked far better as a long short film or perhaps a series of shorts. The supernatural and horror elements of the first section don’t match what I see in the rest of the film, which makes the ending feel almost tacked on or at the very least, clunky. It is a film that essentially starts out horror, but ends up somewhere else and it is like the bookends do not match when they are supposed to.

Amer is enjoyable on an experimental level and should certainly be viewed in a theater if you get the chance, but it does not work on any sort of visceral level for me. While I enjoyed each separate section of the film for different reasons, overall everything feels too mismatched for me to make a real connection to the lead character. For this type of film, where you are literally supposed to be a part of the character, that connection is a vital piece missing and for that reason, I can’t say I’m a fan of it.

Cult Reviews Vomitron

BeyondHollywood.com James Mudge

REVIEW: Giallo Homage Amer Is a Slice of Cruel Beauty | Movieline Stephanie Zacharek from Movieline

Horrorview.com [Black Gloves] UK Blu-ray

CiNEZiLLA [Jason Meredith]

The Blood Sprayer [Jeff Konopka]

Chuck Norris Ate My Baby [Matt House]

Cinetalk [Katherine McLaughlin]

Bloody Disgusting Horror - "Amer (limited)" Movie Info, Review ... Michael Panduro from Bloody Disgusting

Rich On Film [Richard Haridy]

eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

filmsoundoff [alex roberts]

EatSleepLiveFilm [Jordan McGrath]

Eatsleeplivefilm.com [Ian Loring]

Parallax View [Sean Axmaker]

Movie Talk [Peter Fuller]

Arrow in the Head John Fallon

Little White Lies Magazine [Martyn Conterio]

The Reelists [Cailtin Murphy]

Popdose [Robert Cashill]

Blueprint: Review [David Brook]

Sky.com [Rob Daniel]

Devon & Cornwall Film [Tom Leins]

Film 365 (Blu-ray) David Beckett

Interview: Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, Writer/Directors of Amer Gerard Elson interview from the Celluloid Tongue, June 17, 2010, also seen here: Desktop Magazine

Amer - review | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks

Amer Movie - Movie review: 'Amer' - Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden, also see: Two Sides of 'Amer'

Caumon, Yves

BOYHOOD LOVES (Amour d’enfance) A- 94

France (102 mi) 2001

Another real surprise, a hauntingly beautiful film that features surprisingly little dialogue, but features instead excruciatingly beautiful landscape images matched by some very fragile and intricately developed scenes. A college student returns to his rural home due to the terminal illness of his father, and while at first, he is obviously out of place, almost in a different time dimension, he slowly changes his pace to blend into a world where those living in it seem to have very little use for that style of living any more. There is a clash of cultures.

The film explores the uncomfortable nature of the various relationships with family and friends, past and present, to the rural life they are living, and how the hopes and dreams so easily change from moment to moment, like the changes in light on a hillside, so what appears to be certain at one moment is not at all certain in the next. Lauryl Brossier plays the younger sister of his former girl friend, and she is a delight throughout, her charm and her wonderful ability to adapt to her surroundings invites all of us to take another look here at a world that is all but vanishing before our very eyes. This film is a somber meditation on the immense beauty of nature, and how small and puny man must seem through nature’s eyes, how our inner world is so weak and confused, twisted by our own tension and unease, and how perfect the world around us is, if we could only see. I was reminded by the complex observations of Jean Eustache’s MES PETITES AMOUREUSES or the haunting imagery in HUMANITY, or the inner family complexity of 5 EASY PIECES, also the multiple views through windows that represent the wonderful world outside that was featured so elegantly in RATCATCHER.

Caunes, Antoine de

MONSIEUR N. C 76

France (127 mi) 2003

Just what we need, another long, drawn out historical costume drama speculating on what happened to Napoleon once he was exiled to the Atlantic Ocean island of St Helena while jailed under the British rule. Shot in South Africa, impressively shot in a very sharp, precise focus, the film depicts the color and graphic beauty of the landscapes, especially set against the bright red uniforms of the British soldiers. This film just gives the French another opportunity to tweak the noses of the British, who are, of course, ridiculed for their stiff manner and myopic sensibility, believing Napoleon was always devising ways to escape, so they attempted to make that impossible, but were always outflanked by the eccentric imagination of this military mind. Apparently, Napoleon continued to have supporters worldwide and was previously exiled to the island of Elba off the coast of Italy, but escaped only to lead another uprising and was eventually defeated by the British at Waterloo, losing some 60,000 soldiers, which led to his second, more secluded and geographically isolated confinement, sort of a 19th century version of Guantanamo prison guarded by warships and 3000 British troops. However, his officers and inner circle voluntarily follow him into exile while continuing to maintain military conduct as well as a surprisingly lavish lifestyle. Other than the first rate photography, I found this film unmistakably tedious, as it actually turns into a whodunit, as various theories are offered as to what might have happened, from the British trying to poison him to Napoleon using a body double to feign his own death while he secretly left the island in disguise. The film backtracks between his last few years of confinement and the time shortly after his death, when his body was returned to France with great fanfare, using an English-language, British officer voice over narration to explain it all.

Cavalier, Alain

IRÈNE

France (85 mi) 2009

Irène Jonathan Romney at Cannes

French New Wave cinema was founded on the idea of the camera as a pen, through which film-makers could channel their perceptions directly onto the screen. This concept has rarely been born out so thoroughly as in the recent work of veteran director Alain Cavalier. Using minimal resources, Irène is an example of pure first-person film-making. All we get is one man, his camera, a few places and objects – and Cavalier’s memories and thoughts, brought to the screen with intense but restrained intimacy.

The film – a memorial to the director’s wife, who died after a car accident in 1972 – is a spare but moving work, and while commercial prospects will be limited, Irène will be appreciated by the type of buyers who in recent years might have taken a chance on similar DV minimalist enterprises by Abbas Kiarostami and Agnès Varda.

The film takes the form of a first-person discourse in which Cavalier contemplates his marriage, Irène’s death and its repercussions, both short- and long-term. After the death of Cavalier’s mother, the film-maker unearths his diaries from the early 70s. Reading them, he muses on his former callow self, then starts to unravel the complexities of his marriage – touching on such thorny topics as his late wife’s gynaecological problems, their disputes and their sex life. He visits various places that were important in the couple’s life, and wonders how best to evoke Irene’s presence on screen, briefly contemplating using actress Sophie Marceau, for whom he admits to having a secret passion.

All this is conveyed in near-continuous voice-over that sounds sometimes pre-scripted, more often improvised, and always – so far as one can tell – recorded directly by Cavalier while he films, giving the film a remarkable immediacy, sometimes startlingly so. At one point, the image is interrupted as Cavalier has a sudden fall while filming in the Metro: he then cuts to his own bruised hands and his face, seen in a mirror. Cavalier never seeks to make himself likeable: he is quite simply a thinking, feeling presence, almost at one with his camera. When the 78-year-old director appears, it is to reveal himself in all his vulnerability, even down to shots of his gout-swollen feet.

Ultimately, the film is interested more in conveying thought than in producing pictures: hence the deliberately rough, anti-poetic quality of Cavalier’s images. This director requires remarkably few resources, sometimes just the odd object on a table – a lamp, his diaries, or a watermelon and an egg, which he uses to evoke the circumstances of his own birth.

Such film-making can easily come across as narcissistic. That’s not the case with Cavalier, whose work echoes a French literary tradition of soul-searching that goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As a film-maker, Cavalier’s closest affinities are with the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and latter-day Agnès Varda, as well as some of the spare recent works (eg. Five) of Abbas Kiarostami. Irène doesn’t aim for easy catharsis, and doesn’t have the feelgood payoff of Varda’s recent memoir The Beaches of Agnes, but it makes the viewer feel rather privileged to be so confided in.

Cannes. "Irène" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 24, 2009

Rob Nelson at Cannes from Variety, May 18, 2009

Cannes #8: Oh, the days dwindle down, to a precious few... Roger Ebert at Cannes, May 22, 2009

PATER

France (105 mi) 2011

Bemusement Nick James from Sight and Sound, May 18, 2011

It happens every year: at least one film from France is in competition that the domestic audience seems to adore but which leaves us foreign journalists, almost without exception, utterly nonplussed as to why it was selected.

This year’s puzzle is Pater (France), the latest relaxed, personal, made-at-home film from the usually estimable Alain Cavalier. The director is best known for movingly personal lo-fi work of immense intelligence – for instance Irene, his tribute to his late wife, a moving poetic search for fragments of memory typical of his inventiveness which screened here in Un Certain Regard two years ago.

But what are we to make of Pater? It’s made up from a series of conversations between Cavalier and actor Vincent Lindon in which the director proposes that he is the President of France standing for re-election and that Lindon is the Prime Minister who wants his job. Lindon grabs the attention at first by insisting that the first thing he will do is slash the pay of top bosses.

Laudable stuff, you might think, but in its ‘let’s pretend’ self-reflexive mode the film soon degenerates into mid-scene giggling, and a lot of preening about appearance that’s probably aimed at Sarkozy but isn’t funny (and the cosmetic-surgical removal of Cavalier’s dewlap seems real). Pater is no doubt littered with French political in-jokes, but there could hardly be a more parochial exercise in insider filmmaking. So why put it in the Competition?

Cannes 2011: Pater/Hanezu – review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2011

For me, in the oddest way, Cannes 2011 has made history. In the 13 years I have been coming here, the festival has always been a closed world. No one is interested in anything but the movies. I have never seen any delegate reading the newspapers, just the trade press published here in special festival editions.

This year, that changed. There is one fascinating, appalling non-cinema subject that people have been talking about endlessly. This came home to me when I saw a knot of people gathered saucer-eyed around one of the TVs positioned around the Festival Palais. Generally, these show Cannes press conferences or the rolling chatshow on the festival's dedicated channel. Not this time. The TVs were showing live coverage of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the 62-year-old IMF chief and French socialist presidential candidate who has been charged in New York with the attempted rape of a hotel maid.

The line taken generally is that Strauss-Kahn is innocent until proven guilty, but also an uneasy sense that this sort of legal sensation could never have happened in France, where attitudes to sexual politics and powerful men are quite different.

The case gave an interesting flavour to Alain Cavalier's Pater, which satirises the patriarchal system of political power, and power generally, in France. The film, which is showing in competition, is a stripped-down, low-budget two-hander, shot on high-definition video – the sort of piece that might work as well, or better, as a stage play. Cavalier plays a version of himself, starting work on a movie in which he will play the president of the republic. Rugged French star Vincent Lindon also plays a version of himself, getting ready to play a politician who will be prime minister.

The two men have a close, almost father-son bond: their bantering conversations sketch out both their fictional and actual relationships. The older character is keenly, almost resentfully aware that this man may supplant him, and run for president himself. This conflict runs in parallel with Cavalier's feeling that the younger generation, represented by Lindon, is going to ease him out of the spotlight.

It is a very verbose film – yet with interesting things to say. These men, with their distinguished white or receding hair and their expensive dark suits, are the law in France. Perhaps they and their self-satisfied sort are the law all over the world. They are endlessly tolerant of each other's peccadillos; they are addicted to their own importance; and they adore promoting the spectacle of this importance. Movies and movie celebrity are akin to this.

Pater Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily, May 18, 2011

Pater is arguably the ultimate two-people-in-a room film - and so is only partly as departure for veteran experimentalist Alain Cavalier, who over the last few years has proved himself France’s master of the one-main-in-a-room film. In recent work - including 2009’s superb memoir Irène, about a former partner - Cavalier has used video and strictly restricted resources to create intimate, highly crafted, seemingly off-the-cuff personal essays that are the very definition of the 100% authored cinema dreamed of by the precursors of the Nouvelle Vague.

Cavalier varies his approach in Pater, in which he joins with popular actor Vincent Lindon in a sometimes comic double act that could be described variously as improvised acting exercise, political satire, quasi-documentary experiment and folie à deux. Occasionally droll and engaging, this often opaque venture ultimately disappears up its own meta-cinematic derrière, and is unlikely to appeal outside a hardcore coterie of Francophile lovers of experiment. Commercial prospects are negligible.

The film is shot on DV cameras, sometimes actually wielded on camera by either Lindon or Cavalier, or both simultaneously, at a number of locations, including the homes of both men (Lindon has a large walk-in closet that provides the only concession to spectacle). Pater begins with a lunch of canapés prepared in close-up, and Cavalier and Lindon discussing the video project they’re embarking on.

It will involve the wearing of suits and ties, which - Cavalier points out - will come out of the production budget rather than the men’s own pockets. The first in a series of role-playing exercises reveals the basic scenario: Cavalier will play the President of the Republic and Lindon his newly appointed as Prime Minister. They discuss their plans for several radical new laws, proposing for example that any elected official who steals as much as one euro from any citizen will incur maximum penalties. They then decide to pass a bill stipulating that, if there’s such a thing as a minimum wage, then there should be a maximum one too.

The film follows the two politicians’ relationship, through the rise of Lindon (or ‘Lindon’, if we’re to see him as a fictional character), through the suggestion that he might one day be President himself, through to his eventual sacking. In between, the two politicians, and/or the men who play them, swap improvised banter with a group of other actors and act out scenes from an imaginary political life: Lindon visits a bakery and listens to a barfly dispensing misogynistic repartee, and Cavalier gazes at himself in the mirror after having (genuinely, it appears) undergone cosmetic surgery to reduce his sagging dewlaps.

A seemingly free-associative structure, with Lindon’s political ‘career’ as the coherent thread, yields some lively moments: in particular, Lindon, playing up his rough-diamond charm, fulminates tetchily off the top of his head. The odd moment of outright surrealism - such as the discovery of a car spiked with pickaxes - pushes the project into the realm of video art rather than auteur cinema in the familiar sense.

Beyond the political themes, other preoccupations are (as the title suggests) the quasi-oedipal tension between the elder-statesman ‘father’ and the chosen ‘son’ or successor; and the question of how clothes maketh the man, with the cast’s demeanour and comportment partly determined by the sober formal garb they wear throughout.

Both principal participants are lively, often witty presences: Cavalier is self-mockingly, impishly punctilious, while Lindon shows that his energy can command our attention even when he’s visibly flailing for something to say (at more than one moment, he and other actors simply start corpsing). But ultimately, the film is too hit and miss - and often too slow and vague - to yield many trenchant insights. And, partly because it’s never clear at the outset exactly what kind of project Lindon and Cavalier think they’re pursuing, we can never quite gauge whether it’s successful within its own terms of reference.

Finally, little is revealed either about power politics or about the mirror game of acting and filming. This self-referential terrain has been pretty thoroughly covered in recent years by the likes of Godard, Kiarostami, Catherine Breillat (Sex is Comedy) and von Trier (in his The Five Obstructions), to name a few. Cavalier and Lindon add little of note in this dressing-up game for adults.

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 17, 2011

Cannes Film Festival 2011: Day Seven – Le Havre, Hors Satan, and Pater Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from The House Next Door, May 17, 2011

Cannes 2011. Alain Cavalier's "Pater" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 19, 2011

Rob Nelson at Cannes from Variety

Cavalcanti, Alberto

Alberto Cavalcanti Linda Wood, Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors, from BFI Screen Online

DEAD OF NIGHT

Great Britain (104 mi) 1945 co-directors: Robert Hamer, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden

Dead of Night Sight and Sound

"Tales of horror and mounting fear ... prepare to be genuinely frightened" —Alex Cox, Moviedrome

Dead of Night, Ealing's first post-war film, was also the studio's first omnibus film - five separate stories set in a framing story, handled by four different directors. Also Ealing's first ghost movie, it still strikes a potent chill sixty years on.

Starting light-heartedly, in a vein of drawing-room comedy, the tone steadily darkens into nightmare. A man arrives at an old country house that he's never seen before - yet the house itself and all the people there are instantly familiar to him, and he realises to his horror that he's dreamt this occasion and everything that's about to happen. Repeatedly he tries to escape, but each time events conspire to thwart him. Meanwhile the other people present tell stories of their own...

Robert Hamer's segment (his first official directing credit), 'The Haunted Mirror', is the standout, with a young couple being taken over by murderous events from the past. But Cavalcanti's segment - a ventriloquist possessed by his own malevolent dummy - runs Hamer close, with Michael Redgrave getting scarily inside his role as the ventriloquist. Dead of Night climaxes with the different stories blending into a fantastic nightmare - a stylish feast of chills.

"One of the best films made about the supernatural" —George Perry, Forever Ealing

Cavani, Liliana

Liliana Cavani interview with Gerald Peary from the Boston Phoenix, December 2003

THE NIGHT PORTER (Il portiere di notte)

Italy (118 mi) 1974

Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen Townsend) review

Like Last Tango in Paris, an operatic celebration of sexual disgust, set in 1957 in a Viennese hotel where Bogarde (maintaining a low profile as a porter) and Rampling (a guest while her conductor husband embarks on a concert tour) meet and recreate their former relationship as sadistic SS officer and child concentration camp inmate; a sexuality that can only end in degradation and self-destruction. Somewhere along the way, the film's handling of serious themes, and its attempts to examine the Nazi legacy in terms of repression and guilt, both sexual and political, get lost amid all the self-conscious decadence. The English language version is terrible.

Liliana Cavani, Italy's most famous female filmmaker, wrote and directed The Night Porter, one of the most controversial films of the 1970s. The time is 1957, the setting is Vienna. Max (Dirk Bogarde) is a respectable night porter at a luxury hotel. A former Nazi officer, he relieves his guilt by devoting himself obsessively to his work. One day, however, his dark past catches up with him when he glimpses Lucia Atherton (Charlotte Rampling) in the hotel lobby. She was a former concentration camp inmate and also his lover. Uncontrollably drawn to each other, it's not long before they revert back to the sado-masochistic relationship they enjoyed during the war. Lucia abandons her husband and Max gives up his job. Their future is uncertain, surrounded as they are by Max's bloodthirsty Nazi friends.

This is an imprortant film that cannot be easily dismissed. Psychologically complex, it focuses on a side of human nature and an aspect of history that many would prefer to ignore. One thing is for certain - once you've seen this film you'll not forget it in a hurry.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Though less a hot-button item than Last Tango in Paris, Lila Cavani's clammy danse macabre gave way to nearly as much porn-versus-art yakking, even if the offending baggage here is mostly ideological. Much of the disgust centered on the movie's use of the Holocaust as background for the sleazy theatrics of a former SS officer and the young prisoner he used to violate, reunited years later for a reprise of their affair. Cavani virtually gives the game away by casting with the kinky iconography from another Nazi carnival, Visconti's The Damned -- thus, Dirk Bogarde attempts to hide his past behind the managing desk of a Vienna hotel until he bumps into Charlotte Rampling, his anorexic concentration-camp Lolita, now the respectable wife of an opera maestro. It's 1957, and Bogard arranges meetings for his monocled German pals, all Nuremberg escapees bumping off potential witnesses. Rampling is next on the list, but Bogarde has fallen for his former jailbait plaything -- the two hole up in his apartment, bring out the chains and the broken glass, and let the good times roll. Made one year before Susan Sontag's essay, the film is awash in Fascinating Fascism, and all its troubling intimations: pushing the audience's buttons, Cavani cuts from a Mozart aria to green-tinged barracks rape (both "spectacles" rendered, problematically, by her camera and the viewer's gaze), and imagines Salomé as a Dietrichian Swastika dirge, decapitation-capper included. Questions about the irresponsibility of the project remain utterly valid, yet it is by no means Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS -- Cavani's far subtler cruelty locks the characters within a grid of guilt, memory and disgusted passion played out in the fallout of unspeakable horrors, where ignoring the past compulsively leads to repeating it. With Philippe Leroy, Gabrielle Ferzetti, and Isa Miranda.

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

Sensuous elegantly mounted melodrama (in the true sense of the word) exploring the long-term psychological trauma suffered by both victim and captor. Alfio Contini's cinematography and Daniele Paris' score, incorporating Mozart, couldn't be much better. Franco Arcali's editing approaches the level of Sam Peckinpah's best films, regularly crosscutting to grainy flashbacks in a manner that makes them seem more like a parallel universe. Liliana Cavani has been criticized for exploiting the holocaust, but her film is anything but the conventional black and white look at unredeemable nazis and their saintly victims. Nazi abuser Dirk Bogarde is both tormentor and tormented, as all the survivors must repeatedly justify their actions to themselves. Bogarde had his way with Charlotte Rampling during WWII when he pretended to be a doctor so he could do various photographic experiments on his "patients" - gender and style of performance were meaningless to him. From the outset their obsessive-compulsive, sadomasochistic relationship had both as victims, and it only grew more self-destructive as a way of dealing with the pain of the holocaust. They restart it twelve years later because they are prisoners of their past; it never really stopped in their minds. Each relinquish the one thing that provided a slight distraction in the interim, Bogarde's job as night porter and Rampling's marriage to a conductor. What's so uncomfortable is not so much their sexual practices, which sometimes involve broken glass, but the fact everything is spectacle to the people in this film. The spectacles simply change with the times, so people look at Rampling (forced to) sing topless the same way they look at opera. If you are a guy and in the mood to be honest, you most likely prefer the former, which is part of the way Cavani shows that opportunity supercedes morality. The story is a bit silly and sketchy as Cavani was never much of a writer. In this case, the film isn't overwhelmed by her lurid and incoherent tendencies like the disaster Beyond Obsession, largely because she chooses to tell it through looks and gestures. Night Porter isn't a film for those who need to have every tidbit explained to them, and it's often rejected because Cavani goes places the audience may not be willing to. I may not believe in the premise that Rampling is the special specimen and Bogarde is the only nazi with a conscience, giving his life to protect her from elimination by them. However, the performances and filmmaking style are excellent, saying it all with nary a word. Bogarde has never been better, his compulsions second nature to the point we wonder if he even notices them.

The Night Porter Criterion essay by Annette Insdorf

The Night Porter (1974) - The Criterion Collection

Images Movie Journal Shane M. Dallmann

Mondo Digital also reviewing other Caviani films FRANCESCO and RIPLEY’S GAME

DVD Verdict Sean McGinnis, Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central Michael Jacobson, Criterion Collection

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

Beardy Freak Reviews

The Night Porter The Auteurs

Francois Ozon + Charlotte Rampling + Marc Jacobs El Bosquejo, August 15, 2008

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4]

The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review

Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]

Cedar, Joseph

BEAUFORT

Israel (125 mi) 2007

Beaufort Wally Hammond from Time Out London

The title of Joseph Cedar’s foreign-language Oscar-nominee refers to the ancient, symbolic Crusader fort in Lebanon, stormed, at great cost, by Israeli elite troops at the beginning of the ‘first’ Lebanon War in 1982. By 1999 – when Cedar’s autobiographical movie re-visits its now God-forsaken, missile-holed, prefab concrete corridors – that symbolism has been all-but fogged-over by seven years of conflict.

The desultory members of the Israeli Defence Force company charged with manning the post, too, wonder where their idealism has gone – ‘I wanted to be here, that’s my mistake’, says one – and even the morale of their fiercely professional, if militarily unorthodox, young commander, Liraz (the charismatic Oshri Cohen) is fatefully tested as the series of pointless deaths of his troops continue even as he and they await the orders for the hilltop to be finally abandoned.

Making effective, subjective, use of hand-held camera, well-mounted action sequences and perfectly-pitched heightened-naturalist-style acting, tempered with clever surrealist touches – not least the creepy deployment of ‘dummy’ decoy soldiers – and a judicious use of framing and sound design more familiar from the horror-movie lexicon, ‘Beaufort’ mounts an impressively credible ‘expressionist’ reconstruction of the futility and contradictions of war as experienced by these men. Its limitation comes from a fundamental failure of vision, not inherent, as Wolfgang Petersen’s ‘Das Boot’ proved, in its microcosmic view or any failure to spread its ‘humanist’ vision to its unseen, putative ‘enemy’, but everything to do with Cedar and his co-writer Ron Leshem’s inability to properly universalise its poor subjects’ true predicament.

War film strikes chord in Israel Joel Greenberg from the Chicago Tribune

TEL AVIV -- In the opening scene of the new Israeli movie "Beaufort," mortar rounds crash into a mountaintop outpost in southern Lebanon as Israeli soldiers dash to a helicopter to hustle an arriving comrade to the safety of their bunker.

"Incoming, incoming," a soldier intones monotonously over a loudspeaker as explosions rip through the post.

The troops hunker down in their isolated fortress, a bleak, dimly lit netherworld of steel and concrete. The mood, punctuated by an eerie soundtrack of electronic music, is one of profound dread.

"It's awful," said Sharon Shahabaz, 37, as she and her mother watched transfixed by the film, which opened Thursday in theaters across Israel.

The movie follows a group of soldiers in their last weeks at the outpost on Beaufort, an ancient Crusader stronghold, up through the Israeli army's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000 after an 18-year occupation.

The scenes of soldiers struggling with fear, suffering casualties and finally retreating from a mission that had lost its purpose are resonating powerfully with Israeli audiences after last summer's inconclusive war against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

"It looks like it was taken right out of the second Lebanon war," said Helen Shahabaz, 60, Sharon's mother. "The truth is out. There's nothing more to hide."

An official panel investigating last summer's war is expected to issue interim findings by the end of this month, a report likely to fuel further public debate about the way the campaign was conducted, its aims and cost in human lives.

"Beaufort" examines similar questions through the prism of Israel's withdrawal from its long entanglement in Lebanon in the 1980s and '90s, a time in which political and military goals that defined a generation were abandoned under public pressure to bring the troops home.

Joseph Cedar, 38, the movie's director, served in Lebanon as an infantry soldier and said he was intrigued by the "moment in every war when the mission, or purpose, for which soldiers gave their lives . . . ceases to exist."

He wrote the screenplay with Ron Leshem, an Israeli writer whose novel about soldiers in Lebanon served as the basis for the film, which was completed before the second Lebanon war erupted.

Cedar was chosen best director at the Berlin International Film Festival last month, giving his movie important international exposure, and the film is expected to be shown this year in the U.S.

At home, the film has raised troubling questions sharpened by last summer's conflict, and early screenings have drawn large audiences.

In the movie, soldiers confront the futility of their mission as withdrawal nears and comrades are felled, one after the other, by rockets and mortars fired by an invisible enemy.

In the end the strategic fortress, captured by the Israelis in 1982 in what was celebrated as a heroic battle, is blown up, and the soldiers head home.

After watching the film, Sharon Shahabaz said it was about a different hierarchy of values than the culture of sacrifice fostered in Israel through decades of war and conflict.

"We don't have to be ashamed to be human," she said. "The more we are afraid to die, the stronger we will be. We've forgotten that human life has value. Life is more sacred than an outpost, than land."

Cedar, the filmmaker, said that contrary to many war movies in which the protagonists conquer the high ground and raise a flag, his film is about coming down from the mountain and folding the flag, about how wars end.

"The message is the opposite of the army's ethos, which is based on Masada, where Jews were ready to die, even to commit suicide, rather than surrender," Cedar said in an interview, referring to the ancient fortress where Jewish zealots took their lives rather than submit to a Roman assault. "In the withdrawal we were ready to swallow our pride and surrender in order to come back alive."

In general, Cedar added, Israel after the wars in Lebanon and the withdrawal two years ago from the Gaza Strip is in a time of retrenchment. "There's a feeling that we are no longer in an era of raising flags, but in an era of lowering them," he said.

There is also a deep crisis of confidence in the government, widely perceived to have mishandled last summer's campaign against Hezbollah, which also tarnished faith in the army.

"We feel that there's no one we can depend on," said Helen Shahabaz.

The Lebanon withdrawal in 2000 was "an attempt to take our fate into our own hands, contrary to all military tactics," Cedar said. "The thought that this is possible, that we live in a moral, humane society that sanctifies human life and that this can be translated into pressure on the leaders, is an optimistic thought."

Last summer's return to Lebanon with broad popular support was a depressing regression, Cedar said.

"The film can't change reality," Cedar said, "but maybe it will contribute something that will filter down into people's memories, contribute to the next wave of protest and chip away at the consensus leaders need before they go to war."

FOOTNOTE (Hearat Shulayim) B 84

Israel (105 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

This is a lightheartedly complex and wryly satiric look at the textual analysis of the Hebrew Talmud, a belly slapper of a subject if ever there was one, turned into an exposé of a dysfunctional patriarchal Jewish family. Using a somewhat mocking tone, especially the exaggerated, oompah pah circus music of Amit Poznansky, and title cards as subject headers, like “The Worst Day of Professor Schkolnik’s Life,” the film quickly delves into a scholarly subject, where Professor Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba) is seen as a painstakingly fastidious scholar of Hebrew text, examining history word by word, looking for patterns of variance at odds with current understandings. Making this his life’s work, he spends 30 years trying to piece together missing pieces of an ancient Talmudic text, sacrificing time with his family and spending every waking minute in the dank basements of historical libraries, painting a portrait of a joyless and compulsive man with obsessive routines, something of a perfectionist with a superiority complex whose glory is stolen right out from under him by a fellow academic colleague, Professor Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewensohn), who finds a copy of the actual missing text and publishes it a month before Eliezer, all but making his efforts outdated and unnecessary. But this is not his worst day, instead it is the day his son Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), also a professor of Talmudic studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is honored by being invited to join the Academy, an honor the father has never received, creating an intense rivalry between the two. The father belittles his son’s accomplishments, despite publishing several books, believing he’s not a real scholar, as Uriel is much more popularly accepted in the world of academia than his father, who is seen as something of an outdated dinosaur.

Nonetheless, Uriel is an ardent defender of his father, something that is put to the test in the titled sequence “The Happiest Day of Professor Schkolnik’s Life.” After being bypassed for twenty years, Eliezer receives notification that he’s won a prestigious award, the Israel Prize, for his lifelong dedication to scholarly integrity. However it is Uriel that is called into an emergency meeting at the Ministry of Education, a faceless yet formidable building that could just as easily be Stasi headquarters, protected by ridiculously excessive security measures, where Uriel meets with distinguished officials in a tiny committee room that resembles the Marx Brothers cramming an absurd number of guests into a tiny ship stateroom from A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935), Ordering Dinner and Crowded Cabin Scenes - YouTube (4:03). This comical farce reveals the heart of the matter, as Professor Grossman heads the selection committee, but he informs the son of an egregious committee error, as they wrongly notified the father instead of the son, who the award is meant for, mixing up their names as both are professors at the same institution. The committee intends to set matters straight, with the help of the son, but Uriel believes this could ruin the already stressed relationship with his father. More misadventures ensue, as this is a scathing indictment of what passes for historical accuracy, placing the entire Jewish history in question if interpretation hangs on the literal meaning of certain words or phrases from ancient texts that have remained unquestioned truths for centuries.

The whole picture of authority here is a fragile house of cards that come tumbling down with the slightest bit of ill wind. Cedar mocks the arrogance of self-righteous authority on every level, including police, academic, political, governmental, religious, and even family, where the handed down patriarchal authority has a troubling history, one that does not openly accept criticism or changing opinion. This hypocritical narrow-mindedness is the centerpiece of the film, and a challenge to the Israeli culture, but the director refuses to take real aim at seriously influential targets, leaving this instead vague and allegorical. While the film is intelligent, occasionally veering towards farce, and is competently made, there’s nothing of cinematic note and is a story largely advanced through a dialog-driven narrative, giving this the feel of a meticulously detailed short story. While this may remind viewers of the Coen Brothers’ irreverent take on American Judaism in A SERIOUS MAN (2009), this film doesn’t just poke fun, but points out possible historical inconsistencies with the development surrounding a possibly misogynist Jewish state, as humans are fallible in their interpretation of Jewish law, which may have grown more militarily aggressive as a matter of convenience due to recent political realities. While the film points out inconsistencies in analyzing and ultimately rendering judgment in morally complicated issues, it also suggests a flawed and inherent sadness within the patriarchal system itself, where resentments, grudges, and human fallibility may be passed down from generation to generation, where it’s unlikely what passes for elderly wisdom will be challenged any day soon. Of note, Cedar's own father is a biochemist who also studied the Talmud and received the Israel Prize in biology.

Kept expecting to become annoyed by the style, which is bouncy and a little bit precious, with intertitles and cute little graphical illustrations and the like. But these visual flourishes turned out to be in keeping with the theme of this unexpectedly sharp, purposeful drama, which is essentially truth vs. truthiness, and the notion that in a world that’s human and imperfect, truthiness wins out. Also helps that the film, directed by Joseph Cedar (Time of Favor), has a wicked, wonderfully dry sense of humor — what might be the key scene in the film takes place in a crammed conference room, causing a laborious cascade of rising and chair-shuffling every time someone comes in and leaves. (Not sure why I found this so funny –maybe it’s a Jewish thing — but I basically lost it.) Some may find the ending a little too nifty, but I liked the grandiosity of its presentation, and found it monumentally sad in its implications. Certainly this is the most thrilling movie you are ever likely to see about dueling father-son Talmudic scholars.

The House Next Door [Oscar Moralde]

The conflict in Israeli director Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a bit more lighthearted, where the world of Talmudic scholarship at Hebrew University becomes a battleground in which longstanding simmering father-son resentment comes to the fore. The story itself hews to classic types: Eliezer (Shlomo Bar Aba) is a Talmudic philologist whose scientific rigor and obsessive dedication to his work has received little approbation, while his son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) is a superstar in the field. Uriel is showered with acclaim and awards for scholarship, which Eliezer, with barely hidden disdain, dismisses as the pandering of a mere "folklorist." So when Eliezer is mistakenly informed that's he'll be receiving the prestigious Israel Prize, one actually intended for his son, Uriel knows that if his father discovered the truth, it would utterly devastate him.

This tension of uncovering hidden knowledge comes through in the way Cedar enlivens the material with a manic energy by transmuting the qualities of footnotes into the film. Here, we witness the "text" of the father-and-son history and then dash through a web of illuminating and explanatory background information that deepens our understanding of the situation at the same time that it complicates it. Such a strategy draws out not only the chasm between ignorance and understanding, but between past and present; an early anecdote Uriel recounts about his father in a glowing and almost hagiographic way is later revealed to be the shell around a darker truth. But most importantly, Cedar's direction is able to balance the gentle humor of genial pokes at the academic establishment with the recognition that for those who have spent their whole lives in that establishment, who've constructed their whole identities around it, even the smallest things, like a tiny footnote, become imbued with grave importance.

John Carter | Footnote | Friends With Kids | A ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The subtext of "Footnote" is savagery—not that of Martian Tharks but of rival Talmudic scholars in Israel's Hebrew University. The text, not so simply, is text—the Talmud in its manifold historical versions. Joseph Cedar's wise and playful comedy of intellectual manners, in subtitled Hebrew, could be called "Almost All in the Family," since it focuses on a rivalry between father and son. Eliezer Shkolnik, played with wonderfully grave demeanor by Shlomo Bar Aba, is a senior lecturer with a reputation for meticulous research, but the fruits of his lifelong labors are bitter; instead of receiving the Israel Prize, his nation's top honor for scholarship, he has become a mere footnote in other scholars' books. Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), Eliezer's middle-aging son, may be a glib popularizer by comparison to his pop, but he doesn't lack for the adulation that Eliezer craves. Instead of a chip off the old block, he's the most proximate reason for a permanent chip on the old man's shoulder.

All of this might have been no more than the basis of a rich character study, but the writer-director, Mr. Cedar, has devised an intricate, ironic plot that's set in motion by a thunderclap call to Eliezer's cellphone: The Israel Prize has finally come his way. I won't reveal any of the delicious complications that ensue, or discuss the slightly surreal climax, but one of the best scenes, intensely serious yet delicately flavored with Marx Brothers lunacy, involves a hurriedly arranged convocation of six men and one nervous woman in a Ministry of Education office big enough for three. And "Footnote" does function as a character study, an exceptionally rich one. The more we learn about Eliezer, who walks with a forbidding forward tilt and dispenses approval to no one, the more we understand Uriel's anxious need for acclaim. A mere footnote the father may be, but he's written a life script for the son.

Cinescene [Chris Knipp]

The US-born Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar's last effort, which won the Silver Bear at Berlin, was Beatufort, a tense, excellent war film about a few members of the Israeli army making a dangerous last stand in south Lebanon in 2000. Footnote deals with a rather different topic -- textual analysis of the Hebrew Talmud. Now there's a change of pace, you will say. But not so much as might seem, because there is excitement here. Footnote is not an action movie but a tragicomedy -- about scholarly integrity; or is it futility? -- with enormous conflict, both repressed and open. It too, like Beaufort, centers compellingly on figures who wander a kind of half-abandoned but still dangerous battleground. It's also a deeply fascinating character study, and would warrant unhesitating recommendation were it not for a weak ending.

Footnote is full of the ironies that arise out of family and occupational rivalry. There is rich intentional ambivalence about the ways in which the film views each of its two main characters, father and son, both, -- this itself ironic -- Talmudic scholars. First is the father, Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba), who has waited vainly for twenty years to receive the Israel Prize in his field. Cedar's own father, by the way, a biochemist, has received the Israel Prize in biology; he himself has studied the Talmud, so he knows whereof he speaks in more ways than one. Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), Eliezer's son, is more popular among students and his peers, and receives an award as the film begins. At the awards ceremony he gives an ambiguous speech, mostly about his father, who sits stony-faced in the front row listening, not, it would seem, with any approval. The speech is entertaining, light, modest, a tribute to the father. But it also seems to mock him a little. Elieser already emerges from the speech and the way he listens to it as stubborn, dogmatic, and difficult. And if he is admirable, he is equally off-putting.

Elieser is a pure philologist, who approaches the text as a text. His son's work, which speaks more of manners and customs at the time of the texts, he disdainfully refers to as "folkloric." The father turns out to have examined one version of the linguistically problematic Talmud for decades, seeking to suss out inconsistencies. And then another scholar found the other text that caused them, and published his finding before Elieser could, rendering Elieser's decades of work irrelevant. Elieser is a monumentally dedicated scholar. But what has he accomplished? It seems his highest honor is being mentioned as a footnote in the work of another distinguished Talmudic scholar.

The whole film uses a sliding-back-and-forth visual format (with appropriate accompanying sound effect) in presenting its sections and images, to suggest what it's like to examine a manuscript on microfilm in a library. At first Footnote seems to be examining the career of Elieser Shkulnik as if it were itself a footnote or a small detail in a manuscript. But then come the bombshells. First, Elieser is walking, as he does every day, to the national library, to pursue his research, when his cellphone rings and he gets a call telling him he has won the Israel Prize. Then, a little later, Uriel is summoned to an urgent, secret meeting of the Israel Prize committee in a tiny cramped room, to be told that this has been a terrible mistake: he, Uriel, won the prize, not his father. (This is clearly the best scene, tense and confined like much of Beaufort. Some brief sequences showing Uriel to be a cutthroat squash player help to expand our sense of the undercurrent of violence in the events.)

We cannot reveal what happens after that, but it's suspenseful and thought-provoking, and leaves us perhaps forever in doubt as to who is the better man. Is one indeed less fatuous than the other? There probably hasn't been a much better or deeper or more telling on screen look at the jealousies and passions that surround certain kinds of academic work and the ways certain scholars (or brilliant, egocentric men) construct a fortress (a key word in the film) around themselves, the ivory tower protection from the real world. And the immense uncertainty of achievement in narrow fields that few understand or really know about. And then of course there is the question, held suspensefully in the balance almost to the very end: which will win out, professional ambition or family loyalty?

Cedar turns the finale into a meaningless extravaganza in which both the bitter and the comic sides of the story fade into mere spectacle. The film winds up feeling like a memorable little short story that, unfortunately, its author didn't know how to end. But even without an ending this is a strong and original film.

Other characters are also important, such as the chief back-stabber, Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewesohn, whose brow looks like an exposed brain). Alma Zak and Alisa Rosen are good too as the wives of Urial and Elieser, respectively. And then there is also Uriel's young son (whose name I can't find), a beautiful young man, who is also ambiguous. Is he a useless time-waster, as Uriel suspects, or a free spirit about to choose a different, perhaps more interesting, path?

Footnote was in Competition in May 2011 at Cannes, where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or and won the Best Screenplay award, and also shown at Toronto and New York; at the latter it was screened for this review. Sony Classics has bought the film for US distribution. French release is slated for November 30, 2011.

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anton Bitel]

Joseph Cedar's previous feature Beaufort used the true story of an Israel Defence Forces-occupied fortress in Lebanon to allegorise the bunker mentality of the beleaguered Israeli state and this follow-up both expands and domesticates that film's themes. As in Beaufort, a fortress will play a pivotal role in the plot – and even if this time round the fortress is merely metaphorical, it proves as capable as any concrete structure of entrapping and destroying its blinkered occupants. As, however, might be expected in a film entitled Footnote and set within an academic milieu, Cedar's weapons of choice are not shells nor roadside bombs but words – including one particular word which will come to be subjected to close philological scrutiny, exploding all the protagonist's illusions about himself, his family and his legacy.

Described by his daughter-in-law as 'autistic', elderly Professor Eliezer Schkolnik (Schlomo Bar Abe) has devoted his life to words, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. A joyless man of near obsessive-compulsive routine, this grumpy Talmudic scholar spends his days buried in the basement of his university's library and his evenings locked away in his study at home, wearing earmuffs to block out any noise that might intrude upon his research and sleeping on the study's sofa bed rather than beside his long-suffering wife Yehudit (Aliza Rosen).

Eliezer had invested 30 whole years of his youth into meticulously piecing together a lost medieval version of the Talmud, only for his academic colleague and rival Professor Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewensohn) to discover a copy of the actual lost text just one month before Eliezer was due to publish his monumental reconstruction. His work both validated and rendered utterly irrelevant in one fell swoop, Eliezer has for decades since been sidelined and ostracised within the academic community.

His only measurable achievement is that he was long ago acknowledged by name in a footnote of his late mentor's great scholarly tome on Talmudic studies – and he remains a footnote on today's campus too, with few writings to his name, an outmoded approach to scholarship, research too abstruse for his 'idiot' colleagues to understand, and with a lecture course attended by just one student. The only thing still sustaining him is an unyielding, though perhaps not well founded, sense of superiority.

Yet even as Eliezer has been passed over for 20 successive years by the board (headed by Grossman) that awards the coveted Israel Prize, Eliezer's middle-aged son Professor Uriel Schkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), who has followed his father into Talmudic studies and works in the same department, has received one plaudit after another for his more populist work, and so become the convenient focus of all Eliezer's deep-seated resentments.

Then one morning (dubbed "The Happiest Day In The Life Of Professor Schkolnik" in one of several arch intertitles), Eliezer gets an unexpected phone call from the Ministry of Education informing him that this year's Prize is his - and so he hubristically sets out on a path of cold-hearted revenge that will turn out to be both tragically misguided and irreparably damaging.

Cedar's film may boast a playfully melodramatic string score (by Amit Poznansky), occasional scenes of low-key farce, and some keen satire of Academia's institutionalised pettiness (not to mention Israel's officious application of security measures), but the initially breezy tone of the comedy gives way to a depiction of calculated cruelty monstrously vicious enough almost to qualify as horror, human enough to count as tragedy and nuanced enough to face viewers with a most unusual kind of dilemma, part intellectual and part moral.

Trapped in the very 'fortress of culture' that he has constructed around himself and his family, Eliezer must eventually resort to his much-vaunted philological skills to analyse and uncover the errors, deceits and self-immolations that he has, in his egotistical blindness, helped promote, and so is confronted with the vanity for which he is at last being (wrongly) celebrated. His empty triumph is also his son's ruin, creating a tradition of indignation, recrimination and bitterness that will no doubt be passed on down to Uriel's own feckless son Josh.

Footnote ends as it begins, with Yaron Scharf's camera remaining rooted on Elezier's facial expression which, though fixed, is all too readable for those with the right interpretative tools. The film, too, offers an unflinching portrait of a deeply unlikable man, while suggesting that, as much as he – and no doubt we – might like to deny it, Eliezer is, in all his vindictiveness, his narcissism, his inflated sense of entitlement, and his capacity for delusion, quite a bit like the rest of us (and certainly like his son).

That his final charade will unfold not just in the presence of his family and colleagues, but also in the presence of members of the Knesset (including the Prime Minister), makes Cedar's drama of infidelity and falsehood extend beyond the confines of the domestic sphere to the realm of national politics. As for what such accusatory allegory might suggest about the state of Israel, Cedar trusts his viewers to observe the fine print and read between the lines.

Subtly drawn and perfectly performed, Footnote was a deserved winner of the 2011 screenplay award at Cannes, as well as taking awards across the board from the Israeli Film Academy. And while the very substance of the film's plot might lead you to question the validity of such awards and ceremonial recognition, Footnote really is a refreshing original, expanding its apparently small-scale, pedantic concerns into an examination of truth itself, and of the aggression and violence which we will commit to defend our place within truth's walled façade.

REVIEW: Israeli Comedy-Drama Footnote Makes Talmudic - Movieline Stephanie Zacharek

Father and Son Scholars Grapple with Each Other ... - Village Voice Karina Longworth, also seen here: Footnote is Israel's Best Foreign Language Oscar ... - City Pages

Boxoffice Magazine [David Ehrlich]

CANNES REVIEW | “Footnote” Finds the Comedy in a Talmudic Feud Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 14, 2011

Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

Popdose [Robert Cashill]

exclaim! [Manori Ravindran]

FILM REVIEW: Footnote - Things That Go Pop! - CBC.ca Eli Glasner

Footnote | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Alison Willmore

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

celluloid Heroes Radio [Charlotte Skeoch]

Footnote Dan Fainaru at Cannes from Screendaily

Reeling Reviews [Laura Clifford]

The Film Pilgrim [Frances Taylor]

Battleship Pretension [David Bax]

Daily Film Dose [Blair Stewart]

MovieBuzzers [Melissa Hanson]

Quickflix [Simon Miraudo]

HeyUGuys [Craig Skinner]

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Angeliki Coconi]

Cannes '11, day three: Dizzying highs and staggering lows from the Festival's sidebars Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 14, 2011

Of popes and poissons and Kim Ki-duk Barbara Scharres at Cannes from the Ebert blog, May 13, 2011

CineVue [Patrick Gamble]

Bonjour Tristesse (English)

Cannes 2011. Joseph Cedar's "Footnote" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 14, 2011

Joseph Cedar Discusses 'Footnote' - ArtsBeat Blog - New York Times Mekado Murphy interview, October 11, 2011

An Interview with Joseph Cedar Dr. Eric Goldman interview from Yeshiva University News, February 10, 2012

Boston Phoenix [Ann Lewinson]

Variety [Jay Weissberg]

Footnote Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London, May 14, 2011

Footnote: A delicate tale of father-son rivalry - The Globe and Mail Rick Groen

Footnote movie review -- Footnote showtimes - The Boston Globe Wesley Morris

'Footnote' marked as fair tale - BostonHerald.com James Verniere

Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]

'Footnote' review: Being passionate about Talmud Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle

Joseph Cedar's 'Footnote' is brainy and effective: Movie review ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times, March 15, 2012

'Footnote' director Joseph Cedar and the new Israeli cinema ... Patrick Goldstein from The LA Times, March 18, 2012

Footnote movie review by Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips ... Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

‘Footnote,’ a Satire and Family Drama by Joseph Cedar A.O. Scott from The New York Times, March 9, 2012

Ceylon, Nuri Bilge

THE SMALL TOWN (Kasaba) B+ 90

aka: The Town

Turkey (85 mi) 1998

A small, intimate black and white film about a remote village in Turkey, adapted from a story, “The Corn Field,” written by the director’s sister, Emine Ceylan, where family members play most of the roles in the film. The director did his own cinematography, shot on a shoestring budget in a remote part of Turkey. Two children, a boy and a girl, discover the mysteries of nature over the four seasons, revealed in beautifully told personal impressionistic vignettes that tell us much about the villagers’ concerns and their dreams for the future.

The film opens in winter under constant snowfall, where children playfully ridicule another young boy who slips and falls in the snow, who initially smiles back, but then expresses a horrible look of despair. In school, the kids pledge their love to the homeland, “I surrender my happy being to Turkey.” The children read aloud lessons about the rules of community and family in society, but are obviously bored with the proceedings, where even the teacher stares out the window at the falling snow. There is a hissing sound of socks dripping wet on a burning pot-bellied stove. The students blow a feather around, like a beach ball, until it lands on the teacher. A cat arrives at a window and meows, as a voice drones on in a monotone, “What we call national unity is loyalty to one another.” A sequence of small town images, the snow changes to rain, old men finger holy beads around their necks, children throw rocks at them, a truck drives by with bleating goats which are slaughtered out back, their throats slashed, then cooked on sticks by people living in tents, their laundry hanging on a line.

In spring, kids are swinging in the air on a Ferris wheel, a man underneath smokes, while a boy and a girl explore the woods. The girl stares at her reflection in a pond, the wind blows wildflowers in a field, an egret nests on top of a telephone pole. The two kids pick fruit from a tree, eating plums in a cemetery where a mule grazes. A boy stares at the flies, birds are singing, distorted music fades in and out, suggesting something less than harmonious. They play with turtles, turning them upside down, then right side up, slapping it with sticks trying to make it move. We hear a rifle shot. The boy and girl leave the woods. There is a close up of the turtle sticking it’s head out of the shell, but the boy runs back and turns it upside down, it’s legs flailing in the air trying to turn over, but it can’t. The boy watches but does nothing, the turtle will die. The shot was from a man shooting birds in the woods, the wind picks up, the grasses wave in the wind, the kids run away.

A grandfather recounts how a barber used to come from town and cut hair for a few tomatoes, as we hear a constant sound of birds and crickets chattering as the sun goes down on a summer night. The family gathers around a blazing fire and eat roast corn while the grandmother cuts apples. The children listen as the adults talk about change, “Pesticides drove the cranes away,” or about their families, who left, who remained, who came back, or about a noble victory, “Our soldiers got into a skirmish with the British, even defeated them. The British officer was so ashamed he committed suicide. Then their reinforcements arrived and defeated us.” Howling hyenas can be heard in the distant forest, while the grandmother remarks to several kids, “Homesickness is a suffering like any other,” but the kids don’t seem to care. She reminds them, “You are young and far from death, that’s why you think that way. We remain part of the world even after we die,” a dead tree sways in the wind, “Alexander conquered the world from end to end. No ordinary man could do that.” The leaves rustle in the wind, an image is shown of that turtle still struggling on its back, a boy sleeps with a pigeon in his room and dreams it was his mother, not about the turtle, that eventually dies. The grandmother continues, “Forget about other people’s troubles, what about our own?” She grieves over the death of one son that went away and never returned. “He wasn’t here when we needed him, he only visited once or twice a year,” telling another son, “You are a rebellious boy, always out of work, you quit every job, you just walk away or you’ll join the army. You still don’t know what you want.”

In a beautifully constructed image, reminding me of Sokurov’s wide-angled imagery in his 1997 film MOTHER AND SON, the rebellious son stands by the side of the road carrying a bag, a close up of his face reveals a tear. Ascending clouds rise over a field in the background, bare trees rustle in the autumn wind, he reveals his thoughts, “I’ve got no home, no friends, no life. In the morning, only stray dogs wander, I feel like them. This is an unhappy place, there is nothing for me here,” and he walks down an empty road.

The grandfather speaks, “Nature has an answer to our questions.” “So what?” the son responds, “You have to live in this God forsaken place which is like a prison.” The uncle blames it on his education, that he never went to college, lecturing him, “I went to college and I made something of myself,” to which the son replies, “What good is knowledge if you have no one to share it with?” The wind rustles, close ups reveal tears, a family torn by different visions, different natures. The grandfather scolds his wife, “Stop crying woman.” She continues to cut apples next to a burning fire. The uncle tells his nephew, “You have the same trouble as your father, no job, out of the army, what do you do? You came back here. Didn’t you study to get away from the fields?” The nephew murmurs, “That’s where we’re all destined, nature’s fields,” grieving over the loss of his own son. “Why a child? He was only two years old. What sin could a two year old commit? Why God? We lost our son, but it was the will of God.” Ants crawl up and down a tree trunk. There is another Sokurov wide-angled morning mist on the fields, one hears dogs barking, the sounds of birds, and goats with bells, as the young girl inquires “Where is India?” “Over the mountains,” a voice is heard answering. After a long silence in the rain, the grandmother asks “Are the children in bed?” The young girl dreams of a dead boy in the cornfields, she stares at him, then reaches her hand into a stream, a freeze frame that ends the film.

DISTANT (Uzak) B+ 92

Turkey (110 mi) 2003

An emotionally challenging film about the difficulty men have connecting emotionally, one more likely enjoyed by the critics than the viewing public, as the film is more successful in a wordless format, for when the two lead characters speak, their attempts to communicate are so futile that they resemble a “cinema of annoyance.” More to the point, perhaps, is their communicative inability to ever get through to anyone, which is the root cause of their individual isolation and dissatisfaction, which, at least for me, speaks volumes for the entire region. It is as if the two guys are taking stabs in the dark in a hit or miss format and they continually miss. Shared winners of the Best Acting prize at Cannes, these are two lonely guys on different wavelengths that never seem to say what they need to say, so it’s frustrating throughout the film to witness their futility. I found the wordless scenes much more satisfying, strictly from an enjoyment standpoint, as artistically the canvas is saying it all. And that seems to be the point of the film, how “distant” we are emotionally, how disconnected we have become from one another, especially those that we love. Winner of the Best Director award at Cannes and filmed by the director himself, this is a serious, slow moving, very detached film, not particularly pleasant to watch, as there isn't a moment of hope in the entire film (Bela Tarr, are you in the house?) but it becomes more memorable when seen in context with other Festival films, as it's a style and subject matter just not seen anywhere else. Winner of the Chicago Film Festival 2nd place Silver Hugo Award.

As for me, I can’t say it worked totally, as it’s hard to enjoy a film with such unlikable characters, not that they are bad guys, but they’re a couple of nincompoops that seem to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Still, this is the kind of film that continues to evolve in your head for days afterwards. It reminded me of a film I truly did enjoy, Antonioni’s RED DESERT, where in that film, the characters are overwhelmed by the noise and aggravations of industrialization, where they are overcome by an anxiety they cannot see or understand, where their attempts to find love in their personal relations are constantly interrupted by work and routine, so much so that these disruptions become their reality. It’s as if their hearts stop working from disuse. But while the very Italian Antonioni in 1964 uses the extraordinarily appealing and vulnerable Monica Vitti, who fights non-stop to keep from giving in to this interior wasteland, and her efforts succeed in touching the hearts of the audience, this film, by contrast, features a couple of Turkish guys in 2003 who really don’t try very hard at all, who couldn’t care less it seems, who refuse, seemingly culturally, to show any emotion, as if in Eastern Europe this is seen as a weakness and is a characteristic never shown by men. Yet they are just as affected by the personal failures and inadequacies in their lives as is Monica Vitti, but are not nearly as appealing when they suffer emotional meltdowns before our eyes, showing little remorse, showing little to no feelings at all. In my view, that’s how far their spirits have fallen. I found the depths of their disconnection in this film to be a little creepy, however, the interior wasteland that they find themselves living in, to be surprisingly real.

Distant Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

It's often tough to see films late in their release, since by that time I already have a sense of what to expect from them from other people's reviews. Plus, a lot of the fresh insights are already taken. For instance, most of what I could say about Distant by way of praise is nicely encapsulated by Mike D'Angelo here, right down to the disclaimer about its formal elegance in no way blunting its comedic value. It's frequently very funny, more so than you might expect. But I do part company from Mike's viewpoint when I say that the final shot is not overwhelming. In fact, I found it precious and arch in a way that nearly recoded the entire film for me. But not exactly. You see, I mostly felt, well, distant from Distant, all the while marveling at its obvious mastery. In fact, its mastery is painfully obvious. The film offers frequent pleasures and perceptual disruptions and is never less that achingly beautiful. (The film oscillates between cramped interiors and stunning, wide-angle panoramic shots of the cityscape and waterfront of Istanbul which in themselves are worth the price of admission. This film must be seen in 35mm on the big screen.) And yet, its plant-and-payoff spatial humor, its emotional growth in the form of subtly switched identities, its numerous riffs on the concept of distance -- it all felt too neat, like an airless essay on modern loneliness, City Mouse vs. Country Mouse in the Existential Wasteland. I've gotten a reputation among my friends for being a sucker for formal rigor in cinema. It's a fair rap to an extent -- I tend to prefer clean minimalism to sprawling, anal-expulsive punk emotionalism. But it has to be said: there's rigor, and there's rigor mortis. Distant, don't get me wrong, is far too alive to be dead. It is frequently fleet of foot (the car-alarm and Tarkovsky jokes are amusing and deftly deployed), and its characters do emerge as complex, well-rounded human beings. (The two leads are responsible for this to no small degree. Muzaffer Özdemir's Mahmut, the urbanite photographer with failed high-art ambitions, is hangdog-to-slowburn, and looks like a meld of Ron Silver with Amitabh Bachchan. The late Emin Toprak, as drifting Yusuf, beautifully conveys the struggle to embody ambition when hapless shambling -- cigarette dangling from the lips and held in place by random spittle alone -- constitutes the true core of your being. The actor resembles a Mediterranean John Cusack with an errant lump of flesh colonizing his left temple.) As much as I enjoyed Ceylan's film, I also felt that I was watching a work of art whose fussed-over meticulousness had driven it just a smidgen over the edge into dry demonstration, the illustration of a watertight thesis. In this regard, the final shot was an all-too-logical conclusion to a film that in some ways is hobbled by its logic. Distant works very carefully with the balance between near and far, between stillness and motion, but too often, motion comes to feel like a necessary evil and a niggling irritation. For better and worse, a film written, directed, shot and conceived by a photographer.

Climates (Iklimler) B 85

Turkey France (101 mi) 2006

I believe I’ve heard that same dog barking now in every one of Ceylan’s films, usually echoing off in the distance of an otherwise quiet, wordless shot. The opening has the feel of Egoyan’s CALENDAR, only without the interpreter, as a couple is visiting the site of an ancient ruin, barely able to speak to one another, as their relationship crumbles before our eyes, though we have little idea what precipitated their disinterest, but initially he asks her “Are you bored?” And immediately we understand we’re in a relationship that’s not really going anywhere. Due to our experience with Ceylon’s numbingly slow pace, some among us actually time when the first viewers will get up and leave the theater in disgust. I believe it was around the 50 minute mark, just after the controversial sex scene, so people were willing to stick around and give this a chance, but as usual, it’s not really about much of anything. And that’s the problem with Ceylan films, as they’re quiet, well acted, slowly paced, yet beautifully made, featuring some extraordinary poetic shots, but there’s no connection to the people onscreen.

Ceylan himself plays Isu, an Istanbul university professor who is taking photos of historic ruins for his thesis, while his real life wife, Ebru Ceylan, plays Bahar, a television art director. The camera silently sits and stares at her for awhile before he raises the idea of splitting up. She needs no convincing and expresses her hard feelings in a painfully wrathful manner, while he just silently sulks. He takes the break up as an opportunity to hit on another friend’s girl friend, Isu’s former mistress, Serap (Nazan Kesal), waiting for her outside her home one night. Their sex resembles a violently grotesque rape sequence, where he demonstrates his need for a peculiar amount of control, which makes him something of a domineering creep in the eyes of the audience. Later, he devises a plan to do the same thing with Bahar, somehow showing up out of the blue at a remote shooting location in the middle of nowhere, tracking her down like a stalker, pretending he was just in the neighborhood. She tells him she has no time for him and appears to have moved on with her life, but he insists on seeing her one more time, which is one of the best scenes in the film where he speaks to her in a van where he finds her in tears, for a reason left unexplained, but he assumes it’s over him and starts pleading with her that he’s a changed man, asking if she’ll quit her job and come back to Istanbul with him. This serious talk is amusingly interrupted a dozen times by guys opening and closing the doors as they’re loading the van. She has nothing to do with him.

The next day he visits another historical site, a gorgeous church set in the middle of a near perfect landscape, an immense valley situated between mountains on each side. As far as I was concerned, that could and should have been the final shot, as that elusive, inescapable something that we’re all looking for, a balance between the spiritual and the natural world was wordlessly depicted in perfect harmony. Instead, in a reunion that feels unnecessary, she knocks on his door in the middle of the night the day before he leaves and collapses in exhaustion on the bed while he sits in a chair and smokes and pretty much leaves her be. In the morning, he asks when she has to be at work, which startles her. Her look says it all, as it never occurred to him that she was taking him up on his offer. Instead he’s got it all figured out, as is his customary style, and he’ll drop her off at work before he flies back home, everything exactly as he understands it and directs it, without any thought whatsoever for what was in her head. This mixture of domineering control and emotional neglect is suffocating the very life out of them. In the end, as the plane flies out of sight overhead, there is only falling snow, the soft sleep of forgetting.

Climates (Iklimler) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

In 2002, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan made his mark on the Cannes competition with Distant (Uzak). That, his third feature, struck many audiences as a resounding blow in favour of the great art-cinema tradition of films as contemplative, thematically rich personal essays. Ceylan’s growing reputation as a contemporary classic is confirmed by the immensely satisfying Climates, which is certainly as personal as anything we’re likely to see in Cannes, or anywhere else, this year.

The director stars opposite his wife, Ebru Ceylan, as a couple undergoing a painful break-up. But far from raising suspicions of therapeutic self-indulgence, Ceylan’s complex, subtle film will repay multiple viewings – especially given his rich, precise use of high-definition digital video. Climates should achieve healthy exports, and reinforce Ceylan as a festival presence to reckon with.

The Ceylans play an Istanbul couple, Bahar (Ebru Ceylan) and Isa (Nuri Bilge Ceylan), first seen on a summer holiday, during which something is evidently going wrong between them. A pricelessly taut dinner with friends shows their relationship start to unravel; things come startlingly to a head during a motorbike ride.

After the couple go their separate ways, university teacher Isa bumps into Serap (Kesal), an old flame with whom, it’s implied, he cheated on Bahar. Although she’s seeing a friend of his, Isa follows the glamorous Bahar home, and in a troubling extended shot, forces his attentions on her. Later, Isa follows Bahar to a remote, snowbound province where she is working on a film shoot. A rapprochement appears to be in the air, but it’s clear that Isa is not nearly as capable of change as he insists.

Like its predecessor, Climates tells a complex, understated story about the emotional distance between people, and about the psychic repressions and unshakable habits that hamper men (undeniably, this is rather more Isa’s story than Bahar’s, as she is out of the picture much of the time). The maturity of Ceylan’s storytelling is evident from his refusal to tell us too much: he prefers silences and finely-tuned facial expressions provide the nuances we need to fill in the blanks for ourselves. In terms of what faces can express, without ever doing too much, Climates puts Ceylan on a par with Ingmar Bergman.

In this respect, Ceylan benefits greatly from the use of high-definition, for its extreme precision in capturing shifts and uncertainties on faces, but also for its clarity in registering other aspects of people’s physical presence: moments of the film almost come across as a tenderly painted portrait of Ebru Ceylan’s hair.

At once the film’s most moving and most disturbing aspect is Ceylan’s casting of himself and his wife as the troubled couple. This should not necessarily suggest that Climates is in any way an autobiographical portrait of marriage difficulties, yet Ceylan clearly wants us to be aware of, and to speculate on, the unusually close-to-home nature of his drama. It has often been apparent, however, that Ceylan is playing with aspects of his own life – the hero of Distant inhabited the director’s Istanbul flat, and here Ceylan’s own parents have affecting cameos as Isa’s mother and father.

If Isa really does resemble Ceylan, then Climates surely offers one of the most merciless self-portraits ever seen in cinema: Isa is insecure, faithless and selfish, excessively needy and with a violent streak which emerges in his assault on Serap. He’s far from unlikeable, though, which bears witness to Ceylan’s warm if sometimes doleful screen presence. By virtue of her role, Ebru Ceylan is by necessity a more distant figure, but especially in those scenes where Bahar’s feeling suddenly become wordlessly apparent, she’s immensely affecting.

Overall, Climates is more of a chamber drama than Ceylan’s earlier films, although the imagery gradually opens out to take in more of the poetically-shot landscapes that are a Ceylan trademark. It’s futile to argue about whether or not Climates tops Distant, but either way, Ceylan’s latest hints at a richness, complexity and subtlety of feeling that are rare even among today’s most revered blue-chip directors. In his pensive, undemonstrative way, Ceylan is making films as rewarding, and as adult, as any director alive.

Facets Multi Media - FACETS FRONT PAGE -> Film Festival Diaries Milos Stehlik on Day 6 at Cannes 2006 from Facets

The screening was predictably packed, but strangely there was no buzz afterward. You heard no one talking about the film.

A major disappointment: CLIMATES, the new film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish director of the wonderful film, DISTANT. The lead characters are played by Ceylan as Isa, a teacher of archeology at a university. Isa's wife Bahar, an art director for TV, is played by Ceylan's own second wife, Ebru Ceylan. At the beginning of the film they are on vacation, as their relationship falls apart. They go back to Istanbul separately and begin to live separate lives. Isa takes up with an ex-girlfriend Serap, then has a change of heart and goes to eastern Turkey where Bahar is now working on a new TV series. He asks her to take him back, quit her job and come back to Istanbul with him. He is a guy who can't get anything right in relationships. But all of this is not only transparent but kind of cloyingly self-indulgent because none of the characters are particularly interesting. We leave the film not caring whether they get together or not. Ceylan says in the press book that "Isa and Bahar are two lonely figures dragged through the ever-changing climate of their inner selves in pursuit of a happiness that no longer belongs to them." But even this statement is generic - they are empty people, but the film is empty, too. Antonioni knew a lot can be said about empty lives and empty people. In CLIMATES, it's obvious that Ceylan is no Antonioni.

Time Out Chicago: The TOC Blog The French Connection: TOC</em ... Helen Gramates on Day 4 at Cannes from Time Out Chicago

Another competition film that had its world premiere tonight was the Turkish film Climates by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a director whose previous three films we’ve screened at the Chicago Film Festival. Being a fan of his previous films (including his most recent, Distant, which screened in 2003) I was eager to see the film and even made sure to quickly down a cup of coffee prior to the screening in order to be extra alert.

Anyone who’s familiar with Ceylan’s work knows that his framing is gorgeous and images are meditative, so while you don’t have to fear a dense plotline, you might be tempted to nod off during a scene if you’re not properly prepared to focus in on his quiet style. The director himself acts as the main character of the film, which deals with his unsuccessful romantic relationship. While the director’s talent is still ever-present with clever framing and sly humor, the film was more disappointing than impressive. Perhaps one of the reasons is that expectations were so high. Coming out of the screening, the critics I encountered echoed that sentiment.

I spoke with two Turkish critics whose first reaction to the film was to comment on a lengthy sex scene which starts off violently and then turns slightly absurd. They felt it was going to be difficult to get Turkish audiences to respond well to it. I got the feeling that they, too, were a bit disappointed that their country’s most celebrated film export didn’t deliver more. Anyone who doesn’t want to be reminded of ambivalent times with a paramour will probably want to skip this one—but on the other hand, if you want to see unsuccessful romantic relationships of not-too-likeable characters portrayed very truthfully, then this one’s for you.

Climates Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Recent world cinema (not to mention your average American sitcom) is chock-full of inept, ineffectual men. (Hong Sang-soo is the reigning champion of this domain.) So it comes as something of a shock to find Ceylan delving into the problem of male over-effectuality in the form of unbridled patriarchal prerogative. Utterly blistering in its (self-?) excoriation of a cruel, even violent asshole, Climates harks back to an earlier moment in art cinema, especially the Italians -- the Rossellini of Voyage to Italy, the Antonioni of L'Avventura. In the midst of an architectural ruin, we begin to observe the dissolution not only of a relationship, but of a man's capability to relate to the human race as anything more than standing-reserve, as Heidegger put it. But what's even more frightening, to the very last, is the manner in which the women in his life seem to have internalized his abuse, as if being emotionally and even physically battered is somehow what one deserves for letting him in in the first place. I confess to being deeply moved by Climates in part because I saw reflected a familiar portrait, sides of myself in my worst, weakest moments that I would prefer to disavow. Ceylan's film -- a considerable step forward from the overly-mannered Distant -- refused to let me look away. Also, the film's use of deep space represents a giant leap for digital video. The shallow space of the final tryst, on the other hand, is ravishing, and could easily be excerpted as an avant-garde film in itself.

Long Pauses: TIFF 1: Three for Three Darren Hughes from Long Pauses

After spending two weeks meticulously filling in my TIFF spreadsheet, I was surprised to find Climates, the latest film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, at the top of the heap -- surprised, mostly, because I'd never seen any of his previous work. I rented Distant (2002) last week and was completely captivated by it. Even before reaching the scenes that make explicit reference to Tarkovsky, I was smiling at the more subtle allusions -- the clanging wind chimes, the mothers and sons, the struggling, alienated artists. How could I not love a film that was so obviously an homage to my all-time favorite, Mirror?

Climates didn't move me quite so powerfully, but it's a very good film nonetheless. Ceylan and his wife (Ebru Ceylan) play the starring roles, a couple in the final throes of a failing relationship. He is older, a university professor struggling to finish his thesis; she is an art designer working to establish a career in television and film production. The film opens as they're breaking up and then follows him over the next few months, as he attempts to begin the next -- and hopefully more satisfying -- phase of his life.

Climates includes three or four key scenes -- a daydream at the beach, a night in a hotel, and a brilliant sex scene -- that will certainly be among my favorite moments of any film I see this year. Often employing incredibly shallow focus, Ceylan taps into that transcendent Tarkovsky "magic" by shattering his images into abstraction and, in doing so, offering shards of subjective emotion. At times, I was reminded of Denis's sex scenes in Friday Night, but I haven't decided yet if she and Ceylan are working toward similar ends. After I get home, I hope to give more thought and time to Climates, which, like Atom Egoyan's Calendar, also uses photography and ancient religious architecture to raise questions about memory and national identity. (That last phrase is such an art film cliche [or maybe an art film criticism cliche], but I'm confident it's true in this case, and it will make this film fun to write about and discuss.)

Slant Magazine Keith Uhlich

If Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant is Andrei Tarkovsky directing a sham-spiritual Odd Couple, then his high-definition follow-up Climates is Neil LaBute directing an apolitical rendering of Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Reverse Shot critic Nick Pinkerton is onto something when he observes in his review of Distant that "[the film is] just the sterile flipside of those old, haywire Turk cheapies…where it's nothing unusual for a Machiavellian Spiderman to tangle with Mexican über-wrestler Santo." He goes on to give cautious praise to Distant and it's easy to understand why. Ceylan makes some of the best-looking bad movies around, all off-kilter compositions and vivid landscape photography, populated by characters who aimlessly wander the magical land of ennui in search of the next interminably pregnant conversational pause. You're half-convinced by the end of Distant that something meaningful has occurred, but it's all film-fest friendly smoke and mirrors. Ceylan is too much a secular prisoner of his influences, a fact he cops to in Distant's best scene where the sell-out photographer Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir) toggles his television between Tarkovsky's Stalker and lesbian porn.

But let's give credit where it's due: By casting himself in the lead role of Climates, it's clear that Ceylan is more than willing to lay down his head on the proverbial chopping block. There's a huff n' puff sex scene herein that must be seen to be believed, all revolving around Ceylan's self-centered professor character Isa, his stiletto-heel clad mistress Serap (Nazan Kesal), and a stray nut (of the completely edible type) evasively rolling along the floor. Would that such conceptual bravery balanced out Ceylan's When in Doubt…Exhale! style of acting or the film-school pretentiousness of his visual/aural interplay (Roaring wind! Falling snow! Glistening tears! And, do my ears deceive me, is that the rusted windmill creak from Once Upon a Time in the West?). Yet in spite of all its critic-bait window dressing, Climates remains consistently watchable, if for no other reason than its dogged self-seriousness, which helps it attain an—I'm guessing—unintentionally high level of camp hilarity. "Are you bored?" Isa asks his girlfriend Bahar (Ebru Ceylan) at the film's start. I can only speak for myself, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from this Euro-art train wreck.

A terrific movie in the Antonioni tradition, Climates confirms 47-year-old Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan as one of the world's most accomplished filmmakers—handling the end of a relationship and the cloud of human confusion rising from its wreckage as if the subject had never before been attempted.

Urban professionals on vacation: Bahar is a sullen twentysomething TV art director; Isa, 20 years older, is an overbearing university instructor. The opening sequence alternates between mega close-ups of bored Bahar in the summer sun and long shots of Isa, glimpsed between the pillars of the Roman ruins that he's photographing for his still unfinished dissertation. What is she looking at and what is he looking for?

The imperfect not-quite-disengagement of these two isolated figures makes for a more emotionally complex tale than Ceylan's 2003 Distant, in which a country bumpkin moves in with his massively indifferent city cousin. The tone is pensive and the narrative fluid. (Sitting on the beach, Isa wants to end the affair; he rehearses a line that segues into his actual conversation with Bahar.) A symbolic motorbike mishap notwithstanding, the couple's breakup is more mediocre than bad. The situation is rendered extraordinary through Ceylan's use of landscape as objective correlative—the action, such as it is, moving from Black Sea resort to Istanbul to wintry province in eastern Turkey.

Superbly crafted on high-definition video, Climates is a movie of intimate, unbalanced compositions. Ceylan specializes in human microbehavior. Were it not for the studied sound mix (so crisp you can hear the cigarettes sizzle), he might be directing a silent movie. Climates' best moments chart the reactions of one character to another when the second unexpectedly appears. The default mode is a watchful look at once sheepish and challenging. Alienation is palpable and ambivalence universal. (The sense of the human condition is that expressed by Marilyn Monroe in There's No Business Like Show Business: "After you get what you want you don't want it.") When the newly single Isa drops in on his ex, she can't decide whether to be hostile or hysterical. After a few preliminaries, he pins her on the floor.

Climates is filled with unforced metaphors— the tacky music box Isa gives Bahar, the televised earthquake he watches—many of them meteorological. Isa tells a colleague that he's going south for his vacation: "I need some decent weather." He next appears in a snowy dump where he's heard Bahar has gone on location. (In one of the movie's several extraordinary one-on-ones, Isa corners her as she waits in a van, the film crew loading equipment behind them, and proposes.)

Knowledge that Isa is played by the director and Bahar by his wife, Ebru Ceylan, inflects Climates less toward confessional psychodrama than ultra-professional acting exercise. Ceylan wants to make certain that his character is understood as a mildly odious, self-pitying passive-aggressive type; his wife's character has the monopoly on inner life, expressed not only by her mood-flickering close-ups but two dreams. The wonderful ending ponders her face once more. The falling snow substitutes for unshed tears.

indieWire [Nick Pinkerton]

The beauty of the Turkish film "Climates," a small but indelible masterpiece, is more than skin-deep. I saw Nuri Bilge Ceylan's fourth feature on the festival circuit last year, which qualified it for inclusion on the year-end lists. No 2006 film meant more to me. It's as sharp and lovely as the best Chekhov short stories.

It is also a paradox: a cool, exacting but soulful work about a man of limited soul, set at the end of a longstanding relationship between an art history professor (played by the director, who also wrote the script) and a television art director (Ebru Ceylan, the director's wife). Ceylan focuses on the end and what happens after the end, in the emotional twilight before either half of a couple has made a new beginning.

The writer-director works also as a photographer. You can tell; his eye for both landscapes and faces is exquisite. The film begins in the heat of summer, on an extended vacation to the Mediterranean coastal region. Camera in hand, professor Isa, whose rumpled charm masks a steely core of passive-aggression, takes pictures of ancient ruins for his endlessly delayed dissertation. His lover Bahar climbs a nearby hill and observes him. In a daringly lengthy close-up of her face, which says everything that needs saying, "Climates" reveals what lesser filmmakers use reams of dialogue to convey when someone stands on the brink of a precipice.

Months later, the relationship has dissolved. Isa, back in Istanbul, has a chance bookstore meeting with a colleague and the colleague's Cheshire Cat-grinning girlfriend Serap (Naz Kesal). The name rings a bell: Earlier in the film Isa mentions something to Bahar about his "meaningless Serap incident." Months later, in the bookstore, we detect a distinct sensual meaning in that meaninglessness, and the Serap incident of old becomes new again, in an audacious sex scene verging perilously on rape.

Serap is a memorable Other Woman, and the superb Kesal's knowing laugh is like something from one of Dante's rings of hell. She wields her cigarette like a devil's pitchfork. Yet she is not a caricature--no one is in "Climates"--and even as she sees right through the hopelessly weaselly Isa, you are never sure what she's thinking. It is she who updates Isa on his ex-lover's whereabouts. After telling a teaching colleague that he needs a vacation in a warm climate, Isa does the opposite: He contrives a plan to drop in on Bahar unannounced in the snowy eastern Turkish region, where she is filming. What happens there brings "Climates" to its rueful but brilliantly inevitable ending.

Many admiring critics have likened Ceylan's camera eye and thematic interests to those of early Michaelangelo Antonioni. The shared aesthetic is there, especially comparing "Climates" to works such as Antonioni's "Il Grido." The directors' respective uses of space--vast, beautifully desolate, carefully framed--define the characters' emotional lives. But Ceylan, whose previous picture, "Distant," was very fine but not nearly this full and fully realized, doesn't go in for Antonioni's chic, occasionally platitudinous despair. In "Climates" we're seeing ordinary people examined with merciless novelistic perception, yet without a single wasted word. As Gabriele Ferzetti says to Lea Massari in Antonioni's "L'Avventura": You know it's a bad sign when "words are becoming less and less necessary."

In Isa, Ceylan creates a forbidding character, an academic better with artifacts than with people. He is not so much a hopeless romantic as a man hooked on romantic nostalgia, living in a languid state of unfinished business. I love the way Ceylan refuses to ennoble Isa, just as I love the way Ceylan uses the familiar notion of a character regarding herself or himself in a mirror, to such different ends. Just before she lets him into her apartment, Serap looks in a mirror and what we see in her face is a little of everything: regret, lust, doubt, resignation. When Isa looks in the mirror, it's to see how he looks when he sucks in his gut a little.

Everything about "Climates" is extraordinary, from the sound mix (buzzing flies in summer, the crunch and hush of snow in winter) to Gokhan Tiryaki's crystalline cinematography. Tiryaki and Ceylan shot it on high-definition digital video, and I've never seen high-def look so rich. The colors sing, and the faces become landscapes unto themselves, none more plaintive than Ebru Ceylan's. Late in the film, Bahar sits at a hotel room table in the early morning light. Looking across the table at Isa, newly dropped back into her unsteady life, she is hoping for one resolution. A single, casually callous remark makes Bahar realize she's in for the opposite. The way Ceylan's camera holds steady on his actress-wife's face, as it undergoes a series of fleeting climate shifts, you're getting what you get in a great Chekhov tale: an entire life story in a glance.

Antonioni once told an interviewer that his task wasn't to worry about the audience. His task was to delve into "our psychology, our morals, our feelings." Few contemporary films try; fewer succeed. "Climates" is one of the few.

The Onion A.V. Club Scott Tobias

stylusmagazine.com (Nancy Keefe Rhodes)

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith)

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson)

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin)

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman)

DVD Verdict (Jesse Ataide)

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Tallinn Film Festival report

Climates Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Crust)

RogerEbert.com (Jim Emerson)

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis)

THREE MONKEYS (Uc Maymun)

Turkey France Italy (109 mi) 2008

Jonathan Romney at Cannes from The Independent

But for now, my personal favourite in competition – and a definite Palme d'Or contender – is Three Monkeys, by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish director who made his auteur reputation at Cannes with his features Uzak and Climates. Ceylan vaults into new territory here: Three Monkeys is a noir-flavoured psychological thriller, which starts off close to Georges Simenon, slides more into James M Cain territory, and ends up vaulting into the Dostoyevsky league. A driver is persuaded by his politician boss to take the rap for a hit-and-run accident, in exchange for payment that will ease his family's financial troubles. The driver goes to prison; his son drifts into bad company; his wife gets involved with the politician – and when the driver gets out of jail, things slide toward even darker consequences. It is very much a Ceylan film – there are all the elegant, brooding cityscapes we expect of him – and the elliptical intrigue is typical of his sombre, slow-burning style. But here we find Ceylan having the sort of fun with narrative twists you might expect from the Coen brothers, and the moral resonances leave you feeling you've grappled with not just a teasing enigma but a substantial tragedy too.

Anthony Kaufman at Cannes from indieWIRE

The haunting center of "A Christmas Tale" - the death of a first sibling at the age of six - also lingers over another strong competition entry, Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest "Three Monkeys." While not as satisfying as his previous Cannes stunners "Distant" and "Climates," the film confirms Ceylan's photographic mastery, of landscape-as-psychological vista, and his incisive excavation of a certain type of male, unwilling to face the consequences of his actions. The story concerns a wealthy businessman who persuades his driver to take the fall for a hit-and-run committed in the dead of night: nine months in jail with a healthy pay-day when he gets out. In the meantime, we meet the other monkeys, presumably a reference to these Ceylan-drawn human species who act on basic instincts rather than reason: the driver's wife and his mature son. The film's hi-definition video images are blanched and grainy, lending a vaguely surreal air to the film's hot summer coastal setting along with the secrets, lies and barely repressed recent tragedies that hover over the characters' psyches. That phantom past reemerges in two spectacular moments in the film; jarring and disturbing, the scenes create an unnerving effect that lasts longer than just about anything else yet seen on screen here.

Cannes Dispatch: Day Two: Patrick McGavin from Stop Smiling magazine (excerpt)

The best film of the second day was Three Monkeys, the fifth feature of the exceptionally talented Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. His previous work, Climates, was my favorite film of year in 2006. Climates brilliantly navigated the emotional and personal contours of a couple’s relationship that Ceylan imbued with a lyrical, sharp register of pain and regret. The new film is grungier and shadowy, detailing a different kind of guilt concerning the fallout of an unusual business transaction between an ambitious politician and the personal driver who agrees to take the blame for his boss’ crime.

The drama pivots on the emotional wreckage of the unorthodox arrangement that expands to the driver’s wife and son. Thematically the film is a sharply drawn noir about behavior and consequence — it binds a malicious dark humor to a trenchant exploration of circumstance and fate. Visually, Three Monkeys is frequently astonishing. Like Climates, the movie is shot in high-definition digital video. Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips has written perceptively about the influence of Chekov in Ceylan's work — that influence is especially evident here. Ceylan is also especially adept at creating an environment and a mood: The bleached-out colors and crystalline images attain a level of photorealism that gathers a tremendous immediacy and vitality.

Cannes: "Un Conte de Noel," "Three Monkeys" Glenn Kenny at Cannes from Then Came Running

...that said, you might not be surprised at my expressing disappointment over the latest from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose alienated omantic drama Climates blew me away here in 2006. Three Monkeys (the title refers to the ones who don't speak, see, or hear any evil; thankfully, the film itself never explicitly evokes that image) is also a family drama, also haunted by a dead son, and while it's compellingly performed and often beautifully shot (in the same digital video format Ceylan used for Climates), it's largely commonplace, drear, and claustrophobic. One finds oneself frustrated by the stories Ceylan chooses not to tell—the would-be politician who sets the film's plot into motion seems a more interesting character than anybody in the family whose lives he effects—and by his too-insistent emphases, e.g., a bit involving an idiosyncratic ring tone that's funny and wrenching the first time, still effective the second, and stale the third. The movie's not bad, but it's not terribly special, either.

And in any case, Ceylan's reluctance to explore Turkish politics after bringing them up in the first place may cost him big with this year's Cannes jury. At the jury press conference the other day, its president Sean Penn, no doubt relishing his new-found power, said something along the lines of (I don't have the exact words in front of me, damnit) "We have to teach directors they need to be conscious of the world that we live in." Whatever you say, Kommisar. Although that'll be tough in this case, as all the movies you're judging have, you know, already been made and all.

Is this guy a dick, or what?

Cannes 2008 diary: ‘Lion’s Den’ and 'Three Monkeys' Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London

On the surface, the best film here so far for me – Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ‘Three Monkeys’ – is only very superficially about incarceration, in that the story is quickly kick-started when a local politician facing elections persuades his driver to take the rap for him after the former knocks over a man with his car; in return he’ll pay his employee’s salary to his teenage son, and hand over a large lump sum when he emerges from prison after six months or so.

But if we actually see only a couple of prison-set scenes, when the son visits his father, that doesn’t mean that imprisonment isn’t a central, almost Dostoievskian metaphor for what happens to the driver, his wife and son, and the the politician. For that lie told to the cops is merely the first – and indeed the fount – of many more deceits that shape the increasingly twisted and dangerous interactions between the four protagonists, all of whom soon find themselves trapped like rats by their own fears, desires, doubts and suspicions.

This fifth feature is arguably the most ambitious film yet from the maker of ‘Uzak’ and ‘Climates’. It has the dry humour, assured pacing, astute psychological insights and sharp sense of moral and dramatic irony that has been conspicuous in all his work, but in many respects the film feels like an expansion upon ‘Climates’, not only in extending that film’s clear-eyed, unsentimental assessment of male-female relationships from a couple to a whole family and its acquaintances, but in exploring the rich potential afforded by digital technology; if you thought Ceylan’s photographer’s eye produced stunning images in ‘Climates’, ‘Three Monkeys’ pushes the envelope still further. It’s been bought for the UK, so when it turns up, see it – and marvel!

Three Monkeys (Uc Maymun) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

An ostensibly routine noir-style psychological thriller vaults into the realms of high art in competition contender Three Monkeys. Cannes has been kind to Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan in the past, with Uzak and Climates establishing his auteur credentials here in 2003 and 2006. His new film represents a bold departure from his past style: it's best described as introspective melodrama, yet both visually and tonally, it's still quintessential Ceylan.

For the first time, Ceylan really involves himself in narrative complexity, spinning a subtly-twisty yarn with echoes of such crime writers as Simenon and James M. Cain. Three Monkeys will consolidate Ceylan's reputation among art-house cognoscenti, but should win him new fans too. Its genre bent should give it a niche crossover appeal for export, in ways that Uzak and Climates never quite reached.

The film's theme, as with so much prime noir, is guilt, and the people who either accept it or try to slough it off: the title allusion is to the proverbial apes of 'see/hear/speak no evil' fame. The story starts in moody, night-soaked fashion, with a middle-aged man dozing at the wheel of his car before causing a hit-and-run accident (it's typical of the film's elliptical approach that the victim remains unknown).

The perpetrator is Servet (Kesal), a politician who fears that the accident will affect his election chances. He therefore persuades his driver Eyüp (Bingöl, best known in Turkey as a folk singer) to take the rap, in exchange for a payoff that will keep his family financially secure. Eyüp goes to prison, while his teenage son Ismael (Sungar) strays into undefined bad company - presumably the reason for him coming home bloodied one night.

Hoping to help out her son, Eyüp's wife Hacer (Aslan) approaches Servet for a handout, and ends up getting more involved with him than she, or we, expected.

Some standard pulp-thriller tropes are tantalisingly spun out for the first hour, but the slyness of the narrative approach only becomes fully apparent after that. It's only then, for example, that Eyüp, newly released, fully enters the action as a player, the emphasis of the drama shifting disorientingly to him. And it's only after an hour that we discover that the couple have had another son, long dead, who haunts the story in a couple of enigmatic images, one a dream with vaguely Tarkovskian overtones.

Throughout, Ceylan and his co-writers - his wife Ebru Ceylan and actor Kesal - systematically withhold key information, keeping us as much out of the loop as his characters often are. Much of the film, crucially, revolves round the suspicions and anxieties of both father and son. Like previous Ceylan films, this one looks long and hard into the mysteries and self-destructive contradictions of the human heart, but the film's sombre, arguably pessimistic bent also finds room for Ceylan's blackly sardonic humour, embodied here by a running gag about an unintentionally eloquent cellphone ringtone.

Using HD video in steely, washed-out hues, Ceylan and DoP Tiryaki provide the beautifully composed cityscapes that have become the director's trademark, as well as facial studies that speak more eloquently about characters' conflicting emotions than the common run of close-ups. A gorgeous, digitally-manipulated final shot gives the film a troubling open ending that can only stir debate and send intrigued viewers back for a second viewing.

The only cavil is that the pacing gets a little slack in the final stretches, and - while it's the nature of a Ceylan film to be slow-burning - the smallest amount of trimming could well turn an exceptional film into a near-perfect one.

'Three Monkeys' at present is toast of Cannes Michael Phillips at Cannes from The Chicago Tribune

CANNES, France—The Cannes Film Festival is an international bazaar, and no single aspect of this cinematic kaleidoscope by the Mediterranean exemplifies its globalism better than the pavilions lining the beach behind the Palais. The Irish pavilion sits at one end, Portugal’s a few steps down. The Icelandic commission has its own releases and locations to promote, as does Brazil.

On Friday, under the sort of threatening skies the director himself favors on screen, I’m sitting in the Turkish Pavilion, drinking Turkish coffee with the Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. His fifth feature, the stunning “Three Monkeys,” is one of the widely acknowledged favorites in the opening days of the 61st Cannes.

The title chosen by Ceylan (pronounced JEY-lahn) refers to evils about which his characters choose not to hear, see or speak. Late one night, a politician falls asleep behind the wheel of his car on a country road. He strikes and kills a pedestrian and then coolly coerces one of his employers to take the rap for him and serve a nine-month prison sentence.

This arrangement initiates a string of deceptions, including a tryst between the politico (Ercan Kesal) and the wife, Hacer, (Hatice Aslan) of the fall guy (Yavuz Bingol). Their son (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) learns of the affair. When the son’s father comes home from prison, the turmoil so long buried in his family—another son has drowned years earlier—rises to the surface.

Growing up, Ceylan says, “my family life was really complicated. Fights, things like that. I lived for a long time, for instance, several families together. Very complicated, and many tragic and very painful memories.” Making films, he says, has its “consoling” side. It is a way of “trying to understand the dark side of my soul. I use all my memories; that’s my primary material. They make life more…standable? Tolerable, I think you say.”

Ceylan’s previous film, “Climates,” traced the dissolution of a relationship. Ceylan and his wife, Ebru, played the central couple, and Ceylan shot it on high-definition digital video. When “Climates” premiered two years ago at Cannes, the film’s astounding vibrancy struck many in attendance as the medium’s first masterwork shot in that format.

“Three Monkeys” clearly comes from the same director’s eye, but its palette—virtually denuded of color, except for splashes and blotches of dark red—is very different, placing the characters in what Ceylan calls “a specific, separate world of their own.”

“‘Climates’ was my first film in digital, so I was a bit afraid of trying certain things,” he says. “I was interested in protecting the values of the digital resolution and things like that. Which is nonsense. I don’t care about resolution anymore…I know now that after you shoot you can change your lighting completely, and in a very cheap studio, with the cinematographer, I modified colors and the lighting in the post-production. [When filming] I only want to concentrate on the actors and the story.”
There are moments in his latest picture where you sense Ceylan’s inability to let go of a particularly rich image, in which the characters, placed just so in an exquisitely realized frame, are dwarfed or suffocated by storm clouds, or an interior darkness. The director acknowledges he shot several different endings toying with different fates of the major characters.

Narrative lurches notwithstanding, “Three Monkeys” offers the kind of artistry rare in contemporary cinema. Little details linger in the mind, such as a knife on a cutting board, tipping slightly in the breeze. Ceylan gets wonderful suspense out of everyday things, such as a telltale cell phone ring-tone that wails to the tune of a vengeful Turkish pop ballad.

Most indelibly, the film’s brief but brilliant depictions of the dead son grip the audience like nothing else so far in this year’s Cannes festival.

Ceylan’s web site showcases his photography along with his filmmaking. Despite courting far-flung comparisons to director Michelangelo Antonioni, “Three Monkeys” suggests that a more apt comparison regarding Ceylan’s compositional leanings involves another photographer turned director, Stanley Kubrick. Ceylan, says actress Hatice Aslan, a fierce marvel as Hacer, “is like his photos; he’s very calm.” But there is a great deal roiling underneath the surface.

This quality distinguishes the texture of Anton Chekhov, Ceylan’s favorite writer. For his next project he may adapt Chekhov’s “My Wife” to a Turkish setting and, if so, the film will star his wife, Ebru.

That’s a maybe, mind. “I’m not the kind of director who has lots of projects waiting,” Ceylan says, with a laugh. “Making a film changes you, and after struggling with a film, I just…wait. I go through hating cinema for some time. And then, under the load of the images and ideas, I slowly begin to work.”

BFI | Sight & Sound | Three Monkeys (2008) Jonathan Romney from Sight and Sound, March 2009

Matt Noller at Cannes from The House Next Door

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (Bir zamanlar Anadolu'da) B- 82

Turkey Bosnia Herzegovina (157 mi) 2011

Anatolia is the rest of Turkey other than Istanbul, so this is basically a police procedural taking place in the backwoods rural regions of Turkey, reminiscent of IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967) or Bong Joon-ho’s MEMORIES OF A MURDER (2003), where the local cops and their country bumpkin methods are at odds with the latest scientific police procedures, as represented by a doctor from the city, who digs a little deeper in determining the causes of death. The result is a cultural clash, often comical, but once again an examination of a male dominated society which has a notoriously low regard for women. Shot in ‘Scope and on HD film, it opens with what is immediately recognizable as a Kiarostami shot, a long static take of a distant horizon of rolling hills in the dark, where after awhile car headlights can be seen from 3 cars moving in the camera’s direction, a police team eventually stopping nearby where two alleged killers are attempting to locate where they buried the body, where many of the distinguishing landmarks of the hilly region are similar. Much of this feels like a wild goose chase, made even more difficult by a search in the dead of night, led by an outraged Police Chief Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan) dragging the handcuffed lead suspect Kenan (Firsat Tanis), with Prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel) and Doctor Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner) tagging along as part of the team, all awkwardly bumping into one another throughout the night, where slowly the audience develops a feel for the characters. Most of the time the group just stands around smoking or chatting in small groups as the perpetrators are led through various locations, trying to ascertain clues that are more recognizable, trying to pinpoint an exact spot, as the suspects are vague in their recollections, which makes one wonder why they assembled such a large team when they didn’t even know where they were going. The endless search builds to a slow monotony, broken only by moments of absurd humor.

There is a running dialogue between the Prosecutor and the Doctor, a battle of modernist moral wills that plays out like existentialist banter, as each approaches their work quite differently, though both believe they utilize rational methods. Being from the region, the Prosecutor seems more willing to accept without question many of the local habits and customs, where his understanding of the lay of the land helps him identify motives for criminal acts, as he believes he understands how people react when things go wrong, believing he is an excellent student of human behavior. The Doctor on the other hand discounts much of the local lore while balancing the personal side of a physician’s treatment of a patient with the professional side of determining the forensics evidence in criminal cases, believing science explains itself rather than simply accepting the word of alleged criminals. This gets into a Dostoevskian Crime and Punishment exposé where the Prosecutor sees no reason to doubt the word, once motive has been established, and finds the Doctor extremely cynical not to accept what amounts to rational explanations for human behavior. All of this sounds like back and forth theoretical legalese, and to a large degree it is, not particularly involving with any of the characters, where instead the information revealed is used to update and advance the state of the case, where some of the particulars have an eerily incestuous feel to them, where family spats have spilled over into generational blood feuds, where few in the region are educated enough to change the continuing cycles of violence that are inflicted on each other.

The most interesting aspect is the entire group takes shelter in a local village due to a coming storm, where the local mayor greets them and has his family serve food, where he updates everyone on the latest developments within his own family, proud of his two sons and their budding professional careers, also a daughter who has married into a good family, calling his remaining daughter still living at home an “afterthought.” When she serves the tea, however, in the middle of a power outage, her angelic face is illuminated by candlelight, where each man is taken aback by her breathtaking beauty, including the suspects, where it seems such a waste for someone that beautiful to end up in such a distant, God forsaken place, where there is little hope her life will ever amount to anything. But these thoughts and ruminations reflect the continuing frustrations this group faces throughout the night. By daylight, however, they discover the body and the particulars of the crime are revealed. Much of the local flavor is lost in the professional vernacular of documenting the case, a slow and meticulous process that is mostly read out loud which simply elongates the film well beyond the director’s ability to sustain the audience’s interest. There are ambiguous tidbits added to the case, throwing doubt into whether or not they’ve actually captured the real murderer, or whether any of this will have any impact in the lives of the local citizens whose hopes disappear at such an early age.

Cannes 2011 Diary #8: 'Once Upon a Time in Anatolia', 'Poliss', 'The ... Eduardo Lucatero at Cannes from Sound on Sight

Murder. Suicide. Pedophilia. Prostitution. Just another day at Cannes. The murder came from the very last competition film, Once Upon a time in Anatolia, the longest, most demanding film of the official selection. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous movie was the very accessible, entertaining drama Three Monkeys, but this time around, he returned to his previous style: quiet, bleak, without giving much information. A group of men are driving through the country, looking for a corpse after the murderer has confessed the crime. They can’t find the body and while searching, they engage in what appears to be random chatter. They find the body after 90 minutes, and by this point the audience realizes that most of that apparently pointless talk has major significance, not in the crime itself, but in the different lives of all the men involved in the procedure. This is not an easy film, but if watched in the right frame of mind, it is an extraordinary meditation of being a man and a fascinating (if ultra slow) police procedural.

Once upon a time in Cannes... - News, Films - The Independent Jonathan Romney

The Cannes Film Festival closes tonight, and it has been an especially strong year. Even so, it's taken till this final weekend for critics to start muttering the M-word – "masterpiece". The longest, and arguably the slowest, film in the competition, the Turkish entry Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, is also the most substantial offering here, and a definite front-runner for the Palme d'Or.

The latest from Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the film recounts a shambling police investigation, with the first hour cloaked in darkness and the crime scene reached only 90mins in – raising some sarcastic cheers. But this complex, beautifully crafted film has it all – laced with black humour, it's a character piece, a landscape study, a police procedural thriller and a philosophical contemplation.

This lengthy crime drama is the definite slow-burner of the competition, with its share of head-scratching moments. But Ceylan's austerely no-frills work is also the most serious and intellectually stimulating entry in contention, and shows why the Turkish director is increasingly talked about in the same breath as Bergman and Tarkovsky.

User reviews from imdb Author: nowtheworldisgone from Turkey

Anatolia, simply the rest of Turkey other than Istanbul. It is a place where the hospitality is served as the only gift with respect and honor. The fascinating thing is to see such sort of story which takes place in this land of world where hundreds of nations have existed and vanished throughout the history, by a magnificent director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. I can understand people who have harsh criticism about these kind of arts so called as ''film-noir''. It may seem too slow or simply lack of action or someone can even question how other people can enjoy by watching so called cliché ' a man looking beyond the horizons all along the movie'. The point is no body has to like this sort of art. For instance it is like reading a book. Consider some pages of a book when there is no action but the author speaks instead of the hero of the book. So by watching ' a man looking beyond the horizons' makes me question what he could think or makes me put myself in the middle of the situation. And I really feel like I am that guy in the movie. But I really really and really feel like I am that guy, when the movie is so perfectly directed and so perfectly portrayed.

We can call this movie as a bridge or as a milestone in Ceylan's career. It is as simple as that, there is a very obvious change in Ceylan's directing and writing after seeing that movie. Having seen that, we can make this comparison like Before or After Once upon a Time in Anatolia. It is not 'three monkeys' or 'the climates' or 'the distant', it is obviously another one that carries Nuri Bilge Ceylan's way of directing to the next level.

Another must see...

The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become a name synonymous with the more traditional type of auteur that the Cannes film festival reveres. In his sixth film and also his longest to date (also the longest film playing in competition) Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a morality tale that reflects the state of mind of the Turkish people. Known for long, steady shots that reveal mystery and beauty similar to the styles of Abbas Kiarostami, even Andrei Tarkovsky, Ceylan has mastered his unique style of Turkish cinema that evokes philosophical questions about life. And while he seemed to have perfected his method with his previous films Uzak and Climates, Ceylan takes a different turn with his latest film. Combining the mystery of a dead body buried in the hills of Anatolia with the spark of an existential journey for its protagonist, the drama mirrors issues the country faces today.

Opening with an extremely slow investigation into the night of Anatolia by a group of policemen bringing a supposed killer Kenan (Firat Tanis) to find the dead body of his victim, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia begins unlike any of Ceylan’s previous films. The darkness of the first hour of the film is punctuated with bursts of light from the head-beams of cars, painting the dark night canvas like a painter. The group of men include a prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel), police officer Naci (Yilmax Erdogan) and Dr. Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner) who eventually will become the films protagonist, though its not immediately apparent. After searching for what seems like hours, the group stops at a local farmers home to rest, which brings into focus the differences in their lifestyles and highlights the kind of themes Ceylan wants his audience to ponder.

As dawn breaks for the party, so does the evidence, and the group finally discovers the body they’ve been looking for buried deep in the ground. Nurset the prosecutor dictates the facts of the crime scene, peppered with an odd sense of humor, while the absent-minded policemen have forgotten to bring a body bag. The only one who remains serious with solidarity is Dr. Cemal, who notices that the accomplice of the murderer seems to have confessed before being shut up by Kenan, an odd ambiguity that the police do not notice. In fact ambiguity is a central theme that Celyan plays with that reoccurs throughout the film. He shows a brief apparition of the man who might’ve been murdered and in the final autopsy, when the Dr. bizarrely ignores an incriminating piece of disturbing evidence.

Ceylan has a clear and direct message he hopes to send with the film, despite the mysterious and ambivalent nature of his characters. Throughout the journey of the search for the dead body, the prosecutor shares a story with the doctor about a woman who had predicted her own death after the birth of her child, and then abruptly died as foreseen. This story continues to come back into the fray as the doctor doubts anyone can drop dead randomly, and we soon learn that the woman was the wife of the prosecutor. It’s this kind of emotional detachment hidden in subtle glances and minimalist dialogue that highlights the strength of Ceylan’s filmmaking.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Dave Calhoun from Time Out London

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceyan is unlikely to attract heaving crowds to his sixth film, ‘Once Upon A Time in Anatolia’, but since when was the 51-year-old director of ‘Uzak’, ‘Climates’ and ‘Three Monkeys’ in it for the multiplex? Ceylan is a sly and daring screen artist of the highest order and should draw wild praise with this new film for challenging both himself and us, the audience, with this lengthy, rigorous and masterly portrait of a night and day in the life of a murder investigation on his country’s Anatolian steppes.

‘Once Upon A Time In Anatolia’ is a crime movie, but not as you know it, and as well as asking us to puzzle together fragments of a murder case, it also offers rich, and sometimes comic, ruminations on city, small-town and village attitudes, on cynical versus more feeling attitudes to life, on our ability to separate the personal and the professional and on the banalities that arises even in extreme, unusual situations. It might be about a murder, but it’s also about the passing of time (and, in a subtly different way, passing the time), and to stress both, Ceylan asks that we share nearly three hours with him and his film.

We follow a group of 12 men in three vehicles – policemen, soldiers, two suspects, a doctor, a prosecutor and two men with shovels – as they trawl the countryside at night looking for a buried body, trying and failing several times before they make some progress. One minute they’re looking for freshly dug earth, the next they’re discussing the merits of cheese or the tell-tale signs of prostate cancer. With two prisoners in tow, they make a pit-stop at a village where we get a naturalistic portrait of everyday relations and where small, endearing differences emerge between the town folk of the investigation and their rural hosts. Back on the road, Ceylan moves around characters, and sometimes leaves them behind altogether for some staggering landscape shots. Night becomes dawn, and only when it’s morning do they return to town and the final chapter of the film unfolds in a police station and doctor’s surgery.

There are many eccentric, intriguing touches. Lightning flashes on a rock and illuminates an ancient carving. An apple falls of a tree, rolls down a hill and passes through a stream. Ceylan sometimes locks his camera on individual faces, although he also steps back and lets things unfold in attractive, compellingly lit wide shots. In many ways, it’s an ensemble piece in which the main event has happened and the lead character is dead. But, gradually, our interest focuses on the doctor (originally from Istanbul, and a proxy for the director, perhaps) and there are several conversations between him and the prosecutor as they discuss various emotional and pragmatic approaches to life in relation to someone close to the prosecutor who has recently died.

Displaying a new interest in words and story (albeit of the most elusive kind), ‘Once Upon A Time in Anatolia’ feels like a change of direction for Ceylan and may disappoint those who were especially attracted to the urbane melancholia of ‘Uzak’ and ‘Climates’. Ceylan set his last three films in Istanbul and they were all quiet, psychological portraits of individuals or families, even if his last, ‘Three Monkeys’, the tale of a corrupt politician and a wronged man, also flirted with the crime genre. The new film is also about crime, but its final word on genre is to reject it. Beyond being chronological, the film follows no obvious storytelling pattern. Things happen when they do and at a natural rhythm. There are stretches of silence, followed by bursts of chat; there are plot details revealed slyly, almost imperceptibly; there are shifts of tone and repetition. The film is also a test in patience: only by paying close attention and thinking hard on the spot will you gain all there is to gain from the film. Ceylan invites us along for the ride – but only if we’re up for it.

There are many silent stretches and Ceylan typically creates endless striking images, especially during the night-time scenes, when rain, thunder and lightning add to a foreboding, even apocalyptic air. But ‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’ is also unusually wordy and Ceylan plays with borders in language between the useless and useful, the banal and significant. It’s a mysterious and demanding work, and it marks a distinct progression in Ceylan’s career as he continues to gnaw at the boundaries of film storytelling with humour, grace, empathy and a dry, wry view of everyday life.

Review: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia - New Statesman Ryan Gilbey

Cannes Film Festival 2011: Day 11 – Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Oslo, 31. August, & Predictions Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from The House Next Door, May 21, 2011

October 2011 Ben Sachs from Cine-File Blog, October 12, 2011

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia Dan Fainaru from Screendaily, May 21, 2011

CANNES REVIEW | “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” is a Mesmerizing Police Procedural Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 22, 2011

NYFF Spotlight: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia | Film Society of Lincoln ... Nicholas Kemp from Film Comment, September 22, 2011

Film review – Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) | Cinema Autopsy Thomas Caldwell

User reviews from imdb Author: DoksanlarSinemasi from Türkiye (The Turkish Republic)

User reviews from imdb Author: sarajevo-2 from Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina

User reviews from imdb Author: MEHMET EMRAH ERKANI from Turkey

Toronto Film Scene [Sarah Gopaul]

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Nick James at Cannes from the Sight & Sound blog, May 21, 2011

Cannes Film Festival: 'Bir zamanlar Anadolu'da' and 'Le Gamin au vélo' Elena Razlogova at Cannes from Pop Matters

Toronto International Film Festival 2011: 'Once Upon a Time in ... Pop Matters

Once upon a time in Anatolia | Screen Comment Ali Naderzad at Cannes

Cannes 2011. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 22, 2011

'Once Upon a Time in Anatolia': Cannes 2011 Review Deborah Young at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 22,

2011

Justin Chang at Cannes from Variety

Inquiry Into a Haunting Land Could Grab Palme d’Or Manohla Dargis at Cannes from The New York Times, May 21, 2011

WINTER SLEEP (Kis uykusu) B 84

Turkey (196 mi) 2014 ‘Scope

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.

—Richard III, Act 5, by William Shakespeare, 1592-3

The film that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the most prestigious award in all of cinema, and it doesn’t come without controversy. In fact, because of the vehement discussions generated afterwards and the various problems people have with the film, it plays into its role as generating interest and enthusiastic film discussion, certainly one of the goals any filmmaker could have before releasing a film. Most likely the worldwide audience will think the pros outweigh the cons, but this is an exhausting experience, and not altogether for good reasons. Filmmakers can always rationalize excessive length in films, finding some artistic basis, but the truth is this doesn’t need to be well over three hours and the length is only part of the problem. This is largely a writer’s film, as every word is about the author writing the words, which he transfers into a story taking place onscreen, where the majority of the film is spent in arguments and personal criticism, but there is little doubt that the subject is the author himself. Because of the overall length of the film, this plays out as a summation of his entire film career, like an opus work, one that is meant to immortalize the author/creator. In CLIMATES (2006), the director places himself in front of the camera and stars with is real life wife Ebu Ceylon, where the male character couldn’t be more self-absorbed and selfish, resorting to psychological harassment and sexual abuse, where he comes across as a domineering creep. While it takes guts to expose oneself like that in front of the camera, this seems to have been the preliminary lead-in to this larger, more extended work, focusing on one man’s overcontrolling demeanor that chokes and suffocates the life out of his marriage, where initially he comes across as cultured, well-mannered and sympathetic, but over time we lose patience with him, as do all the other characters in the film, because the only person he really cares about is himself, where the world must revolve around him, and he always has to get his way, continually bullying those around him until he gets it, where he nags and picks at every little thing to undermine and discredit others while remaining totally immune to his own faults. He is the perfect example of a seemingly innocent male misogynist whose chief overriding flaw is emotional and psychological abuse, who hides behind his occasional moments of kindness and genuine concern with philosophical posturing while remaining clueless and blind to the other times where he simply doesn’t give a damn about others, as he tramples over their fragile emotions with the subtlety of a steamroller.

Because this film dwells so completely on the director himself, where the film is a choreography of disagreements and arguments, filled with lacerating criticisms targeted at the overly bossy husband that have likely been leveled at Ceylon, co-written by his wife who certainly offers authentic critiques of her own, it comes across as self-indulgent and egotistic, where the length only aggravates this obsessional need to dwell on himself. Viewed in this manner, this is not a very good film, as the narrow focus is equally suffocating for the viewers in the audience, most of it expressed with the lecturing tone of superiority. Thankfully, Ceylon’s greatest strength is shooting outdoor landscape shots in Turkey that are breathtakingly beautiful, taking us to historical sites of natural splendor in CLIMATES, virtually unknown rural geographical beauty in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), where this film, shot by Gökhan Tiryaki in Cappadocia and Nevşehir in Central Anatolia, may be the most astonishingly beautiful natural locations of all. Unfortunately, only about 20% of the film is shot outdoors, while the rest takes place in the claustrophobic confinement of their home, where Mr. Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), an extremely wealthy former actor now runs a small hotel in one of the more unusually impressive locations on earth, where the building itself feels like a cave dwelling built into the natural rock formations of the region. Aydin lives with his much younger wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen) and recently divorced sister Necla (Demet Akbag). Initially the story concerns the turbulent relationship with various men in the region where Mr. Aydin inherited wealth from his deceased father, including the role of landlord, inheriting tenants who are not in a position at the moment to make their rent payments, as the drunken older brother in the home, Ismail (Nejat Isler), was recently imprisoned for six months and no one afterwards will hire him. Aydin’s hotel clerk and driver, Hidayet (Ayberk Pekcan), nearly comes to blows with Ismail after his young son throws a rock breaking the truck window of Aydin’s vehicle, apparently mad that he’s possessed many of the household items like furniture and the television in exchange for rent. Ismail’s brother Hamdi (Serhat Mustafa Kiliç) is an imam that tries to teach his brother’s son to apologize, but this obviously causes great humiliation, especially when the dirt poor family has to walk miles across a muddy landscape to seek the pleasure of the master of the house (Aydin), who on some occasions arrogantly refuses to see them at all.

“A king in his own little kingdom,” as he calls it, Mr. Aydin is an imperious man full of mockery and scorn for others with different moral values than his own. Behind the scenes, he writes an Internet column that serves as a platform that allows him to become a moral voice for the region, often expressing religious views, though he never sets foot in a mosque, but that doesn’t stop him from preaching about the behavior of others, often criticizing their lack of ethical conduct. While Aydin sits at his desk, his sister Necla often stretches out on the couch behind him, like a back seat driver, where she also has a way of expressing her own contempt for the hypocrisy of these columns, wondering who her brother thinks he is that he can become a moral spokesperson when he doesn’t know the first thing about religion or the affairs of impoverished people. This, of course, leads to long, drawn out discussions that begin politely enough but slowly turn into more pointed attacks on each other’s character, eventually feeling like all-out personal assaults. Initially the audience may sympathize with Aydin, as there’s been little evidence onscreen to support such sharp attacks, but by the end of the film we feel Necla never went far enough, as his shifty character, especially the way he manhandles and mistreats his wife, is far worse than imagined. Nihal is seen as one of the few with a moral conscience, mostly unseen initially, where we hear from others that she spends her time working with various charities. Her husband seems to support these activities, proud of her honorable intentions, but grows suspicious when they start to have clandestine meetings at his house without his knowledge. When he awkwardly sits down to see for himself what’s going on, Nihal takes him aside and politely asks him to leave. Aydin, however, is outraged that she’s intentionally concealing her work from him, suspecting something is going on under his roof. Aydin won’t leave this issue alone, but begins a series of patronizing discussions about his wife’s naiveté, claiming she doesn’t know the first thing about running a business, that he wants to protect her from being discredited and taken advantage of by others, but what he’s really doing is stepping on the one thing that truly belongs to her, that provides her sole source of independence and freedom, yet he begins a series of arguments where he literally squashes what’s left of her pride. Despite her tears and protestations and her obvious discomfort, Aydin continues his domineering practices where he literally must have his way at all costs, no matter the consequences, which the viewer can see is having devastating consequences, but Aydin refuses to relent, insisting he is right, where he is literally full of himself and his holier-than-thou self-righteousness. Nihal grows tired of being bullied in this monstrous fashion, where her husband couldn’t be more condescending, displaying a kind of male arrogance that isn’t just hurtful, but is mean and suffocating, draining every last ounce of energy just to put up with it. While the film is an extended character study of overbearing male behavior wrapped in the erudite politeness of social class, supposedly adapting ideas from Chekhov, it’s really an ugly exposé of human contempt and maliciousness, a punishing existential journey where “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” By the end, however, growing ever more tedious and monotonous, the audience may feel more imprisoned than enlightened.

Which movies to see—and which to skip—at the 50th Chicago International Film Festival Ben Sachs from The Reader

This compelling psychodrama by Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan contains relatively few of the landscape shots that have become his artistic signature, but this may be his most epic film in terms of narrative design. It charts the slow emotional breakdown of an arrogant actor who has retired to a small mountain town with his divorced sister and his much younger wife. He regards himself as a bastion of high culture, but his noble self-image is hardly borne out by his callous behavior toward the poor family who live on his property. Ceylan presents psychology much as he presented exteriors in his earlier films—as intricate, monumental, and mysterious—and the lengthy, confessional dialogue scenes generate an uncanny vibe. That dissipates in the last hour when Ceylan starts dictating exactly how one should feel about the characters; but until then this is masterfully staged and performed. In Turkish with subtitles.

The Lumière Reader [Brannavan Gnanalingam]

Winter Sleep, the latest from Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, stylistically, at least, picks up from where his last film, the police procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, left off: The landscapes are vast, the pace portentously deliberate, the human dramas slow-burningly subtle. This time, though, he applies his meditative style to a relationship drama: the splintering marriage between Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), a controlling former actor/current hotel owner and writer; and his long-suffering wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen), who desires to break from her husband's clutches and establish an existence of her own.

With its panoramic landscapes that engulf the human figures contained in them, the opening shots of Winter Sleep are bound to put some viewers in an Andrei Tarkovsky-like frame of mind…but whereas Tarkovsky tended to deemphasize character and dialogue in favor of a broader spiritualism, Ceylan aims for the novelistic in his contemplation of these people and the underlying belief systems that drive them. Aydin, for instance, has apparently, over the years, become so defensively cynical about humanity that he has essentially argued himself into his current state of deadening professional and personal stasis; Nihal, meanwhile, has latched onto a particular fundraising project in a last-ditch attempt to hold onto her own idealistic belief in the essential goodness of people. Instead of coming off as mere thesis-paper tentpoles, however, Ceylan, by virtue of his leisurely pace and close attention to nuances of behavior, brings these people to vivid-enough life that Winter Sleep gradually acquires the weight of a classic Greek tragedy. By the end of the film, both characters will find their tightly held world-views challenged in ways both constructive and destructive.

Cannes Film Festival 2014: Part One - Reverse Shot Jordon Cronk

The clear main competition highlight of the first wave of titles, however, is Winter Sleep, from Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan. An even denser, more philosophically and emotionally draining experience than his masterpiece Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan’s latest, a 196-minute dissection of familial and matrimonial bonds, moves from the dirt-shrouded expanses of the former to a simultaneously vast and suffocating vertical fortress carved into the mountainous Turkish topography. It’s here where we meet Aydin (Haluk Bilgner) and Nihal (Melisa Sözen), a May-December married couple who run the Hotel Othello, which is wedged into the cliffs above the crest of the Anatolian steppes. Aydin’s sister Necla (Demet Akbag) lives with the couple, and in early scenes we watch the three attending to work-related duties when not otherwise mulling about the grounds. Tension mounts and cracks begin to show in the family facade as the winter snow slowly starts to blanket the hovel. Soon buried resentments surface as the two women take turns confronting Aydin about his professional and personal indiscretions.

Ceylan shoots these sequences and, in particular, a pair of extended argument scenes, in his typically patient style. His mastery of editing and crosscutting are on full display here as well, a stark contrast to the generally removed and drifting compositions of Anatolia. Dialogue, which has become an increasingly essential component of Ceylan’s cinema, is likewise utilized to a plentiful degree, eclipsing even his prior film in expository detail. Thus, to the list of influences, including Antonioni and Kiarostami, we can add the always verbal Bergman, who took a similar interest in aging and the disintegration of passion. In the wake of these verbal duels, Aydin considers and eventually takes steps toward leaving for Istanbul, while Nihal begins a journey of her own, away from the strictures of marriage and to a moral reconsideration of her autonomy, which she just as quickly finds is insufficient in the face of male insolence and egoism. One final, seemingly heartfelt gesture on the part of Aydin (and by extension, Ceylan) stings the most: an apparently heartfelt attempt at reconciliation reflected in the expression of a traumatized Nihal as simply further evidence that the psychological storms in this household are far from over.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep went into Cannes as the frontrunner for the Palme d’Or, and the positive, yet slightly muted reaction that followed its win was perhaps due to such gargantuan expectations. It had all of the hallmarks of an ‘important’ film: big length, big themes, and big landscapes. Despite the obvious grandness on show, Ceylan’s film is minute in its interactions. Chekhov has been a common comparison (made by Ceylan himself and by critics in the aftermath of its screening), and there is certainly a short story feel to the piece, all symbolism and small events. It’s a chamber piece made to be seen on the big screen, with the stunning Cappadocia landscapes lending the film a peculiar otherworldly feel.

Mr. Aydin (a superb Haluk Bilginer) owns a hotel in the Turkish tourist hotspot. It’s winter, the tourists are few, and the snow is about to blow on in. Aydin lives with his divorced sister (Demet Akba?), with whom he verbally spars on regular occasions, and his much younger wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen),who makes up for her boredom by involving herself in charity projects in the nearby towns. Aydin rules over the household like a benevolent dictator, seemingly giving the others enough space to do as they choose, but more than happy to cut them down with a few well-placed words. On the way home, his car window is broken by the son of Aydin’s tenant Ismail. Ismail is struggling to keep with rental payments as he lost his job after being arrested, and his brother, the local imam, tries to plead on Ismail’s behalf.

The central crux of the film is the concept of charity. The concept of giving alms (zakat) is one of the five pillars of Islam, with the idea that it is an obligation that the well-off owe to the needy. Voluntary charity (sadaqah) is also an important obligation for Muslims. Ceylan presents charity in all of its complicated manifestations: Aydin is happy to throw money in certain situations (and arguably gives up a bunch of money without knowing what he giving money too), yet he is uncharitable when required to directly in front of his face. He is also uncharitable in the way he talks to his sister and wife. He captures, then releases a wild horse. Meanwhile, Nihal does charity to help not only the community, but also in part to help herself. Her attempts to do charity come from competing and it seems, mostly altruistic reasons, yet she is completely thrown when things don’t quite go as planned.

Ceylan is interested at looking at how charity operates in contemporary Turkey. Aydin was a presumably successful actor (he is currently attempting to write a potentially ludicrous book on the history of Turkish theatre), but he is also a large-scale landowner. He is able to give charity if he chooses. The poorer characters however, through cruel circumstances, have to rely on charity in order to survive. Ceylan suggests that there’s no guarantee of dignity if one is forced to accept charity nor should there necessarily be an obligation to be grateful. Charity without empathy is perhaps as deadening as deprivation.

This difference has also led to two versions of Turkey, the two kinds that clashed so forcefully with the Turkish protests in 2013-4. One the one hand, there is an urbanised, European direction-looking, nominally Muslim, liberal class—the ones who protested Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. On the other hand, there is a poorer, more conservative class, the ones who vote for Erdogan and who have given him power to carry out autocratic actions. The charity that governs the various classes’ relationship is presented in contrasting ways. For Aydin, charity results in smugness, gives him an ability to rationalise the way things are by appeasing his conscience by giving up some of his money (yet he appears to have inherited his wealth). He is also clueless about actual ways to improve people’s lot, and his focus on other areas is perhaps Ceylan’s criticism of the artistic classes failure to help effect social change. For Ismail’s family, the reliance on charity breeds resentment and contempt, and the natural reaction is to divert one’s energy towards other aspects, such as religion or at its worst, begging. This appears most forcefully in the film in two bravura scenes: when the imam pleads on his brother’s behalf and Aydin gleefully and mock-ashamedly puts out his hand for a kiss, and in the final scene involving Nihal and Ismail.

Ceylan’s focus on conversations and dialogue (his characters for the most part speak past each other releasing suppressed—or hibernating—feelings) results in an almost too literal film. He could have left a few things unsaid, relied a bit on Chekhov’s mastery of understatement, which Ceylan had done so perfectly in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Accordingly, it could have been a bit more enigmatic, but this is a relatively small criticism in a film that looks gorgeous and is superbly acted. While Winter Sleep quite clearly speaks to a conflicted modern-day Turkey, it casts its net wider than its Turkish setting in terms of examining how money and power intertwine, and how intellectuals and artists have the potential to ignore others. It also magnifies its gaze: the relationship breakdown and the power relations touches on some of the great 1970s relationship films—Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and the later French Nouvelle Vague films of Maurice Pialat and Jean Eustache come to mind. Charity isn’t simply something involving money, and Ceylan’s magisterial film expertly weaves this through in examining both personal and societal relationships.

Winter Sleep: Can a Three-Hour-Plus Prize-Winner Be Just ... Richard Corliss from Time magazine, May 24, 2014

Cannes 2014 Review: WINTER SLEEP Asks The ... - Twitch Ben Croll

Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan drifts off in talky, trying Winter Sleep Guy Lodge from HitFix

Screen Comment [Ali Naderzad]

The Film Stage [Peter Labuza]

The Lumière Reader [Jacob Powell]

SBS Movies [Fiona Williams]

The House Next Door [Budd Wilkins]

'Winter Sleep' ('Kis Uykusu') - The Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young

'Winter Sleep' Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Latest ... - Variety Justin Chang

Chabrol, Claude

There is no new wave, only the sea.

I am a Communist, certainly, but that doesn’t mean I have to make films about the wheat harvest. (1971 interview with Roger Ebert)

—Claude Chabrol

from DVDBeaver Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/reviews.htm

One of the most prolific directors to come out of the Cahiers du cinéma stable, Claude Chabrol is considered the founding father of the Nouvelle vague. His first features are recognized by there independent production values, locational shooting, and unrecognizable young stars while the films primarily focused on a youthful, indifferent sub-culture. The first to depart from the New Wave theories and existential themes, Chabrol would eventually define his preferred niche with dark crime/murder thrillers. His work as a cinematic craftsman found comfort bridging to this, more mainstream, genre that dealt with morals, compromise, murder and guilt. Often pigeon-holed as "the French Hitchcock" Chabrol still remains widely overlooked by North American audiences. His films are often characterized as having uncomfortable, startling or improbable twists that define the narrative climax. The best of his work is reminiscent of the classics of both Lang and Hitchcock.

Chabrol, Claude from World Cinema

One of the stable of Cahiers du cinéma critics, Chabrol inaugurated the New Wave with Le Beau Serge (1957), Les Cousins (1958) and Les Bonnes Femmes (1960). Like other early New Wave films, these were characterized by independent production, location shooting, new stars (Jean-Claude Brialy, Stéphane Audran) and a focus on a young, disaffected generation. Chabrol soon departed from this idiom to enter on a prolific and varied career embracing comedies (Marie-Chantal contre le docteur Khâ, 1965), thrillers (A double tour / Web of Passion, 1959), war films (La Ligne de démarcation, 1966), political thrillers (Les Noces rouge / Blood wedding, 1973, Nada, 1974), a "lesbian" drama (Les Biches / The Does, 1968), and more; his filmography runs to over forty features. If there is unity in Chabrol's work, it can be found along two axes. The first is his work with his main star (and for a long time, wife) Stéphane Audran, especially Le Boucher (1970) and their superb "drama of adultery": La femme infidèle / The Unfaithful Wife (1969), La Rupture / The Breakup (1970) and Juste avant la nuit / Just Before Nightfall (1971). The second is Chabrol's dissection of the French bourgeoisie, which ranges from the incisive to the affectionate, usually in the thriller format. At the incisive end are Que la bête meure / Killer! (1969) and Violette Nozière (1978); more affectionate are Poulet au vinaigre / Cop au vin (1984), Masques (1987) and Le Cri du hibou / The Cry of the Owl (1987). With his lush adaptation of Madame Bovary (1991, with Isabelle Huppert), Chabrol made an excursion into the Heritage cinema genre, though Betty (1992) and L'Enfer (1994) signal a return to the bourgeois thrillers. Ironically, given Chabrol's critical beginnings, there is a comfortable "quality" to his films, which is, however, far from unpleasurable.

— Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema

BFI | Sight & Sound | Claude Chabrol obituary Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound BFI Online, September 15, 2010

The film-maker Claude Chabrol, who died on Sunday 12 September, can truly lay claim to being a pioneer of the French New Wave. Last year, several anniversary celebrations of the nouvelle vague took the release of his first feature film Le Beau Serge on 11 February 1959 (closely followed by Les Cousins on 11 March 1959) as the ‘official’ launch of the movement that would transform post-war cinema.

A renowned gourmet and bon vivant, jovial and self-mocking, Chabrol was the sunny face of the Young Turks who emerged from the stables of Cahiers du cinéma – as opposed to bookish Rohmer and Rivette, tortured Truffaut and rebarbative Godard. Yet he pursued, through a hugely prolific career (71 films in 50 years), an incisive and at times vitriolic portrait of the French bourgeoisie. As the French daily Libération put it, with his demise, “France has lost its mirror”. President Sarkozy praised him as a modern Balzac – even if the image that the mirror sent back was not entirely flattering.

The son of a chemist, Chabrol emerged from the very bourgeois milieu he so derided (he notoriously used his first wife’s inheritance to finance Le Beau Serge). He studied law and worked as a press attache for Fox in Paris, but like his Cahiers friends, his cinephilia led him to film-making. As a critic, he was part of that band who railed against the French “cinéma de papa” and loved American films, and was truly one of the first to take Hitchcock seriously in his 1957 book Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, co-written with Eric Rohmer.

The Hitchcockian heritage would prove seminal, as he went on to make a trail of successful thrillers. But he would first make his mark by defining what we understand by the term New Wave with Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins and Les Bonnes Femmes (1960). These were independent, small-budget productions shot in black and white on location with relatively unknown actors – although his preferred players would in turn become central to New Wave stardom: Jean-Claude Brialy, Gérard Blain, Bernadette Lafont and Stéphane Audran, the latter doubling as his leading actress and wife from 1964 to 1980.

While his New Wave peers made films that were intrinsically romantic (Truffaut), classically analytical (Rohmer) or self-consciously modernist (Godard, Rivette, Resnais, Varda), Chabrol’s specificity emerged from these early films as a combination of social derision and black humour; his was an almost ‘scientific’ examination of characters who he was not afraid to make unsympathetic. The critical jury is still out about whether the cynicism of the Parisian cousin (Brialy) in Les Cousins is just the nature of the character or the position of the film-maker, or whether the vacuousness of the women in Les Bonnes Femmes should be seen as sociological observation or misogynist portrayal. What is undeniable in each of these films, though, is the novelty and freshness of Chabrol’s study of his chosen milieux of disaffected youth.

For Chabrol, as for his fellow cineastes, the transition to the post-New Wave period was not untroubled. From the start, accusations of ‘amateurism’ had been leveled at the film-makers by hostile parties (Chabrol’s 1959 parody thriller A double tour was a particular target). Chabrol’s response was to go mainstream and make a rapid variety of films (he managed more than one film a year) in different genres, including comedies, thrillers, war films, political thrillers, dramas, biopics, heritage films and documentaries.

Though the results were uneven, some patterns emerge. First was a series of superb psychological thrillers (as famous as his early New Wave films) set among the Parisian or provincial bourgeoisie, including La Femme infidèle (1969) and Le Boucher (1970), both offering defining roles to Stéphane Audran, and Que la bête meure (1969), a disturbing thriller adapted from a novel by Cecil Day Lewis (under the pseudonym ‘Nicholas Blake’). Chabrol would pursue this vein with some other excellent thrillers in different modes: political (Nada, 1974), light comedy (Poulet au vinaigre, 1985; L'Inspecteur Lavardin, 1989), provincial melodrama (Merci pour le chocolat, 2000; La Fleur du mal, 2002; La Fille coupée en deux, 2006).

Another career thread was Chabrol’s ongoing collaborations with actresses – first Audran, then, starting with Violette Nozière (1978), Isabelle Huppert, stunning as the eponymous heroine (based on a real-life case) who kills her father and tries to kill her mother. The combination of Chabrol’s sardonic gaze and Huppert’s glacial insolence worked wonders, and their subsequent films together include some of each’s best: Une affaire de femmes (1988), Madame Bovary (1991), La Cérémonie (1995, adapted from Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone) and L’Ivresse du pouvoir (2005).

Chabrol was notoriously difficult to pin down politically – as a young law student he was close to Jean-Marie Le Pen, but in interviews he was also prone to calling himself a ‘communist’. His films show delight in mocking both the establishment and those who would undermine it (as in Nada), and several explore the ambiguity and compromise of the German occupation: La Ligne de demarcation (1966), Une affaire de femmes, L’Oeil de Vichy (1993).

Equally, the variety of his films makes it difficult to pinpoint a single Chabrolian style. Yet he showed that it was possible to rejuvenate French cinema while remaining accessible. The Young Turk became one of the papas of French cinema, but always a mischievous one. It was suitable, then, that his last job of film was as an actor (one of his many regular side activities), providing a funny cameo in Gainsbourg as a leering record producer about to release ‘Je t’aime, moi non plus’. Chabrol’s work was as caustic as it was enjoyable. As his contemporary Claude Lelouch observed, “He represented both a revolution and tradition.”

The Claude Chabrol Project

Claude Chabrol: A Career Overview Charles Derry from The Chabrol Project

Welcome to a Tribute to ClaudeChabrol.com

All-Movie Guide biography from Rebecca Flint Marx

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Film Reference Film Reference profile from Charles Derry

Claude Chabrol Richard Armstrong from Senses of Cinema, September 2002

Claude Chabrol: Information from Answers.com biography page

Claude Chabrol: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article bio and filmography from Absolute Astronomy

Claude Chabrol - The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Claude Chabrol - Director Bigraphy brief bio from Madman

The Films of Claude Chabrol - by Michael E. Grost Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

The life of Claude Chabrol biography and multiple film reviews by James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Strictly Film School multiple film reviews by Acquarello

Claude Chabrol Film Biography - Film - Time Out London

Film4 Filmography Claude Chabrol

Kino Press Release - Chabrol Collection The Claude Chabrol Collection

Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - Claude Chabrol Collection: Volume 2 John White reviews The Claude Chabrol Collection: Volume 2, from DVD Times

Claude Chabrol Mubi

"New Wave Film Guide: Nouvelle Vague & International New Wave Cinema - Where to Start"

Paul Gégauff Peter Lev essay on Chabrol screenwriter from Film Reference

GreenCine | French New Wave Craig Phillips Pt. I from GreenCine

Continue to Part Deux and our recommendations... Craig Phillips Pt. II from GreenCine

Marie-Claire Ropars, 'A Cinematic Language', Rouge 11, 2007 originally published in Esprit, June 1960

Celebrating France's Directors Who Rode the New Wave G.S. Bourdain from The New York Times, August 11, 1989

FILM; For Papa Chabrol, It's All in the Family Alan Riding from The New York Times, August 22, 1993

FILM; Grim, Shocking, Didactic, a New New Wave Rolls In Phillip Lopate from The New York Times, November 22, 1998

just before nightfall--claude chabrol Chabrol restrospective with brief reviews at the Lincoln Film Center, July 23 – August 19, 1999

Movie Review - Juste avant la nuit - With Chabrol, the High Tide ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times, July 30, 1999

Fin; The Story Of Why Ginia Bellafante from The New York Times, February 20, 2000

FILM; The View From Inside the Dream Karen Durbin from The New York Times, June 18, 2000

Tony McKibbin, 'Slow Burn Suspense: The Films of Claude Chabrol', Images, Issue 9, December 2000 also seen at EuroScreenwriters: [04]

Gary Morris, 'Chabrol, Losey, Antonioni: Three Classic Eurofilms: Les Bonnes Femmes, Eva, Il Grido', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 31, 2010 originally published January, 2001, also seen here: Images (Gary Morris) and here: Bright Lights Film Journal

Film; In Its Fiery Pages, A French Revolution Dave Kehr from The New York Times, October 7, 2001

Ray Young, 'Stéphane Audran', Cinema and the Female Star - A Symposium Part 1, Senses of Cinema, 2002 profile of Chabrol actress and wife, Stéphane Audran

Tony Williams, 'Relations Between the Sexes in the Cinema of the Nouvelle Vague', WELL Project, February 28, 2002

The French New Wave Revisited / Nouvelle Vogue moviemakers were ... Phillip Williams from Moviemaker magazine, July 2, 2002

FILM; A Face the French Repeatedly Forget Alan Riding on Isabelle Huppert from The New York Times, July 28, 2002

FILM; Straining to Be The Nouveau Hitchcock Terrence Rafferty from The New York Times, September 1, 2002

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005

Christine Evans, 'I Fought the Law and the Law Won: Transgression, the Act, and Narratives of Aphanisis in Claude Chabrol’s Story of Women', Refractory, July 4, 2006

Katja Nicodemus, 'Arming Isabelle', SignandSight, August 7, 2006 originally published in German for Die Zeit, July 7, 2006

Claude Chabrol Is a Master of the Thriller (Hold the Thrills) Terrence Rafferty from The New York Times, July 30, 2006

Claude Chabrol’s 10 Best Films Lists, Cahiers du Cinema 1954-1966 JD Copp from My Gleanings, December 27, 2006

Claude Chabrol article Chabrol retrospective article by Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion, August 17, 2007

• View topic - Claude Chabrol Criterion forum, a film discussion group, October 28, 2007

David Sterritt, 'Hitchcock, Hume, and the Matrix of Modern Cinema', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2007 December, 2007

Kevin B Lee, 'Claude Chabrol: an online dossier', Shooting Down Pictures, March 27, 2008

Serious Pleasures: Season’s Sweet Spots Stephen Holden from The New York Times, August 22, 2008

Plus ça change: French New Wave directors are still tearing up the ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent, August 24, 2008

Claude CHABROL - French Culture Miami Beach Cinematheque, October 16 – 26, 2008

Film Studies For Free: Going the distance with Claude Chabrol Catherine Grant, June 16, 2009

F L I C K H E A D: The Claude Chabrol Blogathon June 21 – 30, 2009

Reading Chabrol Online Ray Young at Flickhead, June 21, 2009

Richard Jameson, 'Claude Chabrol – The Classicist', Parallax View, June 24, 2009

Chabrol Day Eight: Gallery photo gallery by Ray Young from Flickhead, June 28, 2009

Chabrol Day Nine: Fun facts! Ray Young from Flickhead, June 29, 2009

Claude Chabrol Clippings Chris Poggiali and Paul DeCirce from Temple of Schlock, June 30, 2009

Parallax View » Claude Chabrol on DVD Sean Axmaker from Parallax View, July 3, 2009

Isabelle Huppert and Her Daughter Meet on Screen at Cannes Joan Dupont from The New York Times, May 18, 2010

David Hudson, 'Chabrol @ 80', The Daily Notebook, June 24, 2010

Claude Chabrol - Telegraph Obituary, September 12, 2010

French film-maker Claude Chabrol dies Lizzy Davies from The Guardian, September 12, 2010, including a life in photos: Claude Chabrol's life in pictures

Claude Chabrol obituary Ronaled Bergan from The Guardian, September 12, 2010

Claude Chabrol, Pioneer French Filmmaker, Dies at 80 - Obituary ... Dave Kehr from The New York Times, September 12, 2010, also seen here and here: directorsloungeblog

Claude Chabrol, critic and filmmaker, dies at 80 Emma Brown from The Washington Post, September 12, 2010

Claude Chabrol anatomised the French middle class with a twist of the scalpel Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, September 12, 2010

RIP Claude Chabrol Lee Ferguson from CBC News, September 12, 2010, including the 10 minute party sequence from Les Cousins (1959) on YouTube (9:54)

BBC News - French New Wave film-maker Claude Chabrol dies BBC News, September 12, 2010

French New Wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol dies at age 80 - latimes.com Jenny Barchfield from The LA Times, September 12, 2010

French filmmaker Claude Chabrol dies at 80 | The Daily Caller ... Jenny Barchfield from The Daily Cellar, September 12, 2010, also seen here at Austin 360: French filmmaker Claude Chabrol dies at 80, at Yahoo News: French filmmaker Claude Chabrol dies at 80 - Yahoo! News and the Associated Press here

French Maestro Claude Chabrol Dead at 80 - indieWIRE Brian Brooks at indieWIRE, September 12, 2010

Some Came Running: Claude Chabrol, 1920-2010 Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running, September 12, 2010

Filmmaker Claude Chabrol Dies at 80 « Film School Rejects Landon Palmer from Film School Rejects, September 12, 2010

Claude Chabrol 1930-2010 « davekehr.com September 12, 2010

Acclaimed New Wave director Claude Chabrol dies aged 80 France 24 News, September 12, 2010

R.I.P. Claude Chabrol | Film | Newswire | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps, September 12, 2010

Film Studies For Free: Le Génie de la liberté: In Memory of Claude ... Catherine Grant, September 12, 2010

The Playlist: R.I.P. Claude Chabrol 1930-2010 The Playlist, September 12, 2010

Vitro Nasu » Blog Archive » R.I.P Claude Chabrol Vitro Nasu, September 12, 2010

Claude Chabrol, 1930-2010 Alison Willmore from IFC, September 12, 2010

France mourns Claude Chabrol, giant of cinema's New Wave John Lichfield from The Independent, September 13, 2010

Geoffrey MacNab: Avuncular auteur whose depictions of bourgeois society had a morbid undertow The Independent, September 13, 2010

Claude Chabrol Tom Vallance from The Independent, September 13, 2010

Through the French looking glass with Claude Chabrol | Agnès Poirier Agnès Poirer from The Guardian, September 13, 2010

Claude Chabrol: a career in clips Ben Walters from The Guardian, September 13, 2010

Claude Chabrol 1930-2010 - New York News - Runnin' Scared J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, September 13, 2010

The Front Row: In Memoriam Claude Chabrol : The New Yorker Richard Brody from The New Yorker, September 13, 2010

In memory of Claude Chabrol (1930-2010) - scanners Jim Emerson from Scanners, September 13, 2010

Claude Who? Meremu C. from Pop Matters, September 13, 2010

James Mourns The Passing of Claude Chabrol With A Top Ten List James McCormick from The Criterion Cast, September 13, 2010, including YouTube clips from each film

Entertainment News: The Passing of Claude Chabrol and Kevin McCarthy Beth Acomando from KPBS, September 13, 2010

Claude Chabrol1930 - 2010 -- Ain't It Cool News: The best in movie ... Harry Knowles from Ain’t It Cool News, September 13, 2010

Claude Chabrol 1930 – 2010 - www.moviemail-online.co.uk MovieMail, September 13, 2010

Claude Chabrol, French New Wave Director, Dies at 80 - TIME Richard Corliss from Time magazine, September 14, 2010

Au revoir to French director Lizzy Davies from The Sydney Morning Herald, September 14, 2010

Flavorwire » A Claude Chabrol Primer Judy Berman at Flavorwire picks 5 Chabrol scenes on YouTube, including the (9:06) 9-minute swimming pool sequence from Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), September 14, 2010

David Thomson on Claude Chabrol The Guardian, September 16, 2010

Claude Chabrol Knew How to Eat > Todd McCarthy's Deep Focus September 16, 2010

The Unseen Chabrol, Pt 1 Chris Fujiwara from Moving Image Source, October 12, 2010, also here: Part One

The Unseen Chabrol, Pt 2 Chris Fujiwara from Moving Image Source, October 26, 2010, also here: Part Two

The Unseen Chabrol, Pt 3 Chris Fujiwara from Moving Image Source, November 11, 2010, also here: Part Three

Chabrol, Claude They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Claude Chabrol, RIP. The master at midpoint - Roger Ebert's Journal Roger Ebert (September 12, 2010) reprint of his interview from The Chicago Sun-Times, January 24, 1971, also at EuroScreenwriters: [03]

At the Movies Lawrence Van Gelder feature and interview with Chabrol from The New York Times, December 27, 1991

Interview with Chabrol by Pierre Berthomieu, Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, Claire Vassé from Positif magazine in 1995, from EuroScreenwriters

Interview with Chabrol Chris Darke interview from The Independent, June 11, 2001

Interview: Surfer on the New Wave Peter Lennon interview from The Guardian, June 16, 2001, at EuroScreenwriters, also here: CHABROL, Claude [01]

Claude Chabrol - Director by Film Rank Film rankings by Films 101

Claude Chabrol (1930 - 2010) - Find A Grave Memorial

Gerald Peary's Magnificent Seven (2006)

Claude Chabrol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

YouTube - claude chabrol (1930 - 2010) hommage (3:42)

YouTube - Two films by Claude Chabrol - analysis by Dan Sallitt (6:02)

LE BEAU SERGE A- 93

aka: Handsome Serge

France (97 mi) 1958

Sometimes considered the first of the French New Wave films, Chabrol, along with Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, Eric Rohmer, Bertrand Tavernier, Agnes Varda, and Jacques Rivette, who appears briefly as an actor in this film as himself, jump cutted their way to a more spontaneous filmmaking that was more realistic and more rambunctiously stylized than what had come before. Centering on a theme that might be called the aimless lost generation, the films focus on how to find a way out of youthful delusion, sometimes not offering any solution. Produced, written, and directed by Chabrol, the film was produced on a miniscule budget in the natural setting of the French provinces, the village of Sardent, cinematography by Henri Decaë, camera by Jean Rabier.

A naturalistic rural drama, Jean-Claude Brialy plays Francois, a former theology student who returns to convalesce in his hometown after spending years recovering from tuberculosis in Switzerland. What he discovers is “not so much the village, but the people have changed.” Serge, Gerard Blain with a James Dean look, used to be Francois’s friend, but is now a chronic drunk, wallowing in self-pity ever since he and his wife Yvonne lost their first baby, a baby deformed at birth. She’s now pregnant again and suffers from his constant abuse, slapping her around and taunting her about the deformity. Marie, played by Bernadette Lafont from Jean Eustache’s THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, plays the town slut who immediately seduces Francois and gains his trust, getting him to believe she is the victim of the man who claims to be her father, though everyone in town knows he’s not her father, he’s another notorious town drunk. Francois visits the village priest who describes the villagers as having lost faith in themselves, and the film follows Francois’s search for redemption. Many aspects of this very Catholic search for morality in a world with no morality reminds one of Robert Bresson’s spiritual realism, the film features a brilliant flashlight sequence through the otherwise pitch black night, where just little bits of light lead Francois in his journey to find purpose in a town with no purpose, like Xiao S’ir in Edward Yang’s A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY. In the end, it’s questionable whether he actually succeeds.

Dan Harper, 'Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge', Senses of Cinema, March 2001

Technically this 1958 Claude Chabrol film was the first feature of the French New Wave to be released--though it was Chabrol's second film, Les cousins, with the same stars, Gerard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy, that had an international impact. Brialy plays a tubercular theology student who returns to his hometown to convalesce and becomes reacquainted with a childhood friend (Blain), an alcoholic stuck in a bad marriage. Roland Barthes attacked this film for its "right-wing" and "static" image of man, and even Chabrol fan Tom Milne has found its Hitchcockian theme of "transference" expressed too overtly in terms of Christian allegory. I barely remember it, but it has a certain fascination as Chabrol's first practical (as opposed to critical) encounter with mise en scene.

Time Out Tom Milne

Chabrol's first film - one of the first manifestations of the Nouvelle Vague - is about a young student (Brialy) who returns to his native village to convalesce from an illness, finds that his childhood friend and hero (Blain) has become a hopeless drunk, and attempts to reclaim him at the cost of his own health. As mirror images of each other, the two men reflect the interest in Hitchcockian themes of transference later elaborated in Chabrol's work, but here expressed rather too overtly in terms of Christian allegory (a transference not so much of guilt as of redemption). Shot entirely on location in the village of Sardent (where Chabrol spent much of his childhood), it presents a bleak, beautifully observed picture of provincial life, later revisited to even more stunning effect in Le Boucher.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford reviews the 8-disc Claude Chabrol Collection (excerpt)

Like Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol was born in Paris in 1930 and had a typical middle class upbringing. He had originally studied to be a pharmacist and planned to enter the family business after returning from military service. Instead he took a job as a publicist at the Paris branch of 20th-Century-Fox and began writing film articles for Arts and Cahiers du Cinema. After co-authoring a book with Eric Rohmer on Hitchcock in 1957, Chabrol began work on his first film, Le Beau Serge (1958), which focused on the social milieu of a provincial French village and was financed by inheritance money from his first wife. Generally acknowledged as the first film in the Nouvelle Vague movement, Le Beau Serge represented a new direction in commercial filmmaking and eventually led Chabrol to set up AJYM, a production company which helped nurture the work of fellow filmmakers such as Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Philippe de Broca.

FilmFanatic.org (excerpt)

Le Beau Serge (”Handsome Serge”) was arguably the first film to emerge from the French “Nouvelle Vague” movement. Directed by former Cahiers du Cinéma critic Claude Chabrol, it’s a deeply personal, character-driven portrait of the tensions inherent in “returning home” after spending years away. The story centers on Francois’s concern for his childhood friend, Serge, who has descended into drink after the stillborn death of his retarded son; despite the imminent arrival of another child by his loyal wife (Michele Meritz), Serge refuses to sober up and live responsibly. Francois is determined to help his friend “see the light”, and eventually sacrifices his own health for the sake of Serge’s happiness; meanwhile, a local sexpot (Bernadette Lafont) is raped by her stepfather, yet Francois’s noble attempt to intervene once again falls flat.

In characteristic New Wave style, the narrative in Le Beau Serge is rather loose, with more of an emphasis on characters, setting, and philosophical contemplation than straightforward action. While it’s never made clear exactly why Francois is so determined to “save” his friend, it’s hinted that he may be driven by a sentiment of “there but for the grace of God…” — indeed, rural life in the film is depicted as narrow and limited, with sexy Marie (Lafont) channeling all her energy into the pursuit of men, and Serge giving up his dream of an architecture career for life as a husband and truck driver. Does Chabrol intend for us to pity the lives of these “simple” characters? It’s hard to tell, but the film’s baroquely allegorical ending — which posits Francois as a sort of Christian martyr — seems to label the townsfolk as somehow needing salvation. Despite its narrative flaws and ambiguities, however, Le Beau Serge remains an oddly compelling character study, one which clearly demonstrates Chabrol’s passion, talent, and dedication to the craft of filmmaking.

P.S. Chabrol returned to the theme of country-versus-city in his next film, Les Cousins (1959), in which country-boy Blain comes to stay with his more urbane — and infinitely less sympathetic — cousin (Brialy) in Paris.

Turner Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford

Le Beau Serge (1958) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review

LES COUSINS (The Cousins)

France (105 mi) 1959

Chicago Reader (Don Druker)

Charles (Gerard Blain) comes to live with his cousin Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy), falls in love with a fellow student (Juliette Mayniel), but sees her become Paul's mistress in Claude Chabrol's 1958 study of the ill effects of urban sophistication on an uncorrupted country youth. This is Chabrol's second film, and its subtle development of character points toward the dense structures of his later films with their reluctance either to condemn or extol without reservation.

Time Out Tom Milne

The town mouse and his country cousin. Or, the story of two students, one who was very, very good, and one who was very, very bad; but the bad one passed his exams, got the girl (when he wanted her), and survived to live profitably ever after. A fine, richly detailed tableau of student life in Paris, and Chabrol's first statement (in his second film) of his sardonic view of life as a matter of the survival of the fittest. The centrepiece, as so often in the early days of the nouvelle vague, is an orgiastic party climaxed, as the guest sleeps it off next morning, by a sublimely cruel and characteristic 'joke' by the bad cousin (Brialy) when he performs an eerie Wagnerian charade with candelabra and Gestapo cap to wake a Jewish student into nightmare.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Although it's Chabrol's second effort (the first one being "le beau serge" featuring the same actors), this one is closer to Chabrol-as-we -know-him. The detective ending and the first steps in the bourgeois world of Brialy character herald Chabrol 's heyday (which begins with "les biches," encompasses such works as "la femme infidèle,""que la bête meure" "le boucher" "la rupture" "juste avant la nuit " and ends with" les noces rouges"; that's not to say all the movies were great during that period: "doctor Popaul" and "la decade prodigieuse" can be forgotten"; that does not mean there were no great works after "wedding in blood" (les noces) either as testify such memorable works as "Violette NOzières," "Une affaire de femmes" or "l'enfer." But in France the 1967-1973 era is generally regarded as Chabrol's peak, with "le boucher," his towering achievement. So we enter the bourgeois world with Brialy's character, a bon vivant as we say in France, with parents (whom we never see) who provide him money and a comfortable flat. He is a student, but we never see him studying, girls and pleasures taking the best of him. In direct contrast with him, enters Blain, his provincial cousin. He comes from a much more modest background, his parents (whom we never see either) had certainly to struggle hard to send him to the Latin Quarter. So from the beginning ,the incommunicability is total. Blain is a grind,and if sometimes he accepts to follow his life-lover cousin in not-so-intellectual places in Paris, he knows he shall not disappoint his old parents. Brialy's kind of life is bewildering for a young lad like Blain: a scene is particularly strange, baroque, and even threatening: some fascination for Nazism from Brialy and his clique during a strange party (it's 1959,and German occupation is not that much far behind after all). Chabrol has ready begun his bourgeoisie wholesale massacre: Brialy is the prototype of the bourgeois student,selfish and smug, self-confident and apolitical (And however,1959, it's Algerian war! Young French are sent to do the dirty job). Apolitical, such is also Blain's case, but with more excuses: after all, when you're poor. In his autobiography "le ruisseau des singes," Brialy told that Chabrol(and the producer) had planned an happy end with the two cousins running across the fields, reconciled. Both endings were filmed,and finally the two actors urged Chabrol to renounce this silly conclusion. Hence an almost Hitchcockian ending, Hitchcock whose influence will grow over the years in Chabrol's work.

The Film Sufi MKP, November 28, 2009

John Conomos, 'Les Cousins', Senses of Cinema, Issue 37, 2005

Les Cousins (1959) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

The Films of Claude Chabrol [Michael E. Grost]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

PopMatters (David Sanjek) dvd review

LEDA (À DOUBLE TOUR)

aka: Web of Passion

France Italy (110 mi) 1959

Chicago Reader (capsule) Jonathan Rosenbaum

Claude Chabrol's first color feature (1959), also known as À double tour and Web of Passion, adapts a Stanley Ellin thriller in which a bourgeois family's oedipal conflicts lead to murder. The beautiful color cinematography of Aix-en-Provence is by Henri Decae, and the film is plotted with a mise en scene that suggests Alfred Hitchcock. The lively if uneven cast includes Jean-Paul Belmondo, the creepy Andre Jocelyn, Madeleine Robinson, Bernadette Lafont, and nouvelle vague axiom Laszlo Szabo. It's not a total success, but it was one of the first pictures to translate the French New Wave's genre interests into mainstream terms, and it's full of sexy and irreverent details.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

An interesting transitional work, Chabrol's third film, in color, with Madeleine Robinson (Best Actress at Venice for this), about an adulterous husband who's a rich vineyard owner with problems. He's fighting with his wife (Robinson), he's out of touch with his son Richard (André Jocelyn) and daughter Elizabeth (Jeanne Valérie), and he has a young artistic girlfriend Leda (the voluptuous Antonella Lualdi) who gets murdered. Bernadette Lafont is Julie, the maid. Full of Sirkian and Hitchcockian elements, this is Chabrol's bridge from the New Wave to his own brand of bourgeois crime story. This was also a film featuring the young Jean-Paul Belmondo (as "Lazlo Kovacs," an alias he uses in Breathless; he's Elizabeth's disreputable, freeloading boyfriend) just before he became famous, and he's got all the rude grace he put into Godard's debut. Some sequences play too long, but the murder scene is amazing. Not altogether successful, but unquestionably worth seeing--indeed essential viewing for any Chabrol fan. Somewhat under the radar in its 1961 first US release, this was not available on DVD till recently.

Time Out Tom Milne

Chabrol's third film, greeted at the time as a Hitchcock pastiche, now looks like pure Chabrol: his first demolition job on the bourgeois family as internal tensions - father (Dacqmine) is indulging a clandestine affair, mother (Robinson) worries what the neighbours will think, daughter (Valérie) struggles with her inhibitions, and son (Jocelyn) quietly strangles on his mother's apron-strings - finally succumb to spontaneous combustion. Belmondo is fun as the uncouth, outrageously déclassé interloper who serves as a catalyst, goading both father and daughter into an open acknowledgment of their sexual needs, but he seems to have come from another, more overt movie, at odds with the subtly detailed (and beautifully acted) portrait of social repressions and malaises. Seen in the light of Chabrol's later work, the film has gained considerably in stature. Best of several stunning scenes is the climactic murder of the mistress (Lualdi), a fragile china doll who comes gift-wrapped in a Japanese-style house. Glacial, almost serene in its inevitability, this chilling sequence reveals the first glimpses of the Fritz Lang influence later to flower in Chabrol's work.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Claude Chabrol's dissection of the living-dead bourgeoisie, though to ruling-class tastemakers his major affront was dynamiting Le Beau Serge's promise of French neorealism in favor of expressive artifice -- the colors pop, the lenses glide and circle, there are scrims, aquariums, and mirrors, mirrors, mirrors. A slow lateral pan surveys the remains of a Frank Tashlin set to end on a mesmerist's wheel, on which the opening credits roll; a window slams open and the camera glances out (the Renoir connection), Bernadette Lafont leans out in her bra and panties to tease the gardener with the huge shears, the camera then dollies back through a keyhole for a jolt of subjective peeping (the Clouzot connection). The setting is a vineyard cottage, the timeline is kept rigorously from morning to night: the pallid paterfamilias (Jacques Dacqmine) is wed lovelessly to matriarch Madeleine Robinson, the son (André Jocelyn) conducts Berlioz in his room and feels up lil sis Jeanne Valérie, who loves wild 'n' crazy Jean-Paul Belmondo. Belmondo arrives in a raucous Nouvelle Vague flurry, prole handheld shots unsettling the languid aristocratic tracking around the mansion; his gusto at the breakfast table disgusts Robinson, to whom manners matter (she can stomach her husband's affair with Antonella Lualdi, the puffy-mouthed ingénue next door, as long as the scandal is avoided). Belmondo may own up to "a bit of nasty character," yet at least he never keeps it leashed, unlike the moneyed ghouls who feign order while tending to unsavory tensions like fields of poppies -- "Behold, my wife," Dacqmire snaps while grabbing Robinson by the hair (Chabrol shock-cuts to the peacock cackling outside) while Jocelyn tracks down Lualdi to showcase reservoirs of Oedipal hysteria, which accumulates until a fist smashes a mirror. A pair of severe flashbacks folds the plot onto itself, although Chabrol recognizes a lush architecture already crumbling from within: his "sordid insects" feel the pull of exposure that can illuminate and destroy them, the film closes as a lamp is turned on. With László Szabó, and Mario David.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

Ah, this is more like it, the truly Chabrolian world taking shape, liberated into the constraints of genre. As if to signal the shift from the new wave naturalism of his earlier works to the glorious artifice of what would become his mature mid-period, he offers us two films, two worlds, one giving on to the other, appropriately divided by a murder, figuring the death of one style and the birth of another.

The film opens with almost parody New Wave-ness, a loud, gaudy riot of blaring American jazz, broad character comedy, and larger-than-life performances. The film begins with a nearly naked housemaid lounging from her window in a huge country house, like a heroine locked in a fairy-tale tower, driving to erotic madness an aging gardener and a camp milkman, the gardener with his shears signalling his lascivious intent matched by the rose she rubs over mouth, squalls of jazz adding to comic overheatedness - it's like some sort of Gallic 'Carry On' movie, especially as the strait-laced mistress looks on with prudish distaste.

Then we're introduced to Jean-Paul Belmondo, still milling around Paris in fast cars and jump cuts, an escapee from his fate in 'A Bout De Souffle' (his character's name, Laszlo Kovacs, is one of Michel's pseudonyms in that film), although Chabrol's true intent is revealed when he follows the Godardian frenzy with a cool long shot which imprisons Laszlo down a snake-like alley, hemmed in by a street, houses, roofs, Chabrol's ironic camera. Laszlo IS a snake, the city boy who infects the rural Eden, by bringing transgressive lust into the bourgeois family, as well as the baser attitudes (food and sex outrageously linked) airbrushed by the middle-classes; an early flipside to Terrence Stamp in 'Theorem'.

The film continues in this hyperactive vein, with Laszlo and his drunken buddy clowning about at a parade to the astonishment of the real-life bystanders who stare uncomprehendingly at Chabrol's camera. But even here, there is another Chabrol waiting to get out, as he sets in motion the country-house murder plot, the family tension, the psycho-sexual power games, the incestuous/Oedipal frisson. It's remarkable how he takes a genuine, 'real' location e.g. the cafe where Laszlo and his buddy drink, and turns it into a set for an MGM musical.

It is no accident that the first truly Chabrolian film should also be his first in colour - his skill in artifice is given free reign, the restricted camerawork already developed in COUSINS bolstered here by the bursts of pure primary colours and the rigid tableaux, as he traps his characters in more than a country estate.

The two halves are joined by simultaneous flashbacks, that seem to free the film from its oppressive present tense, but only cancel each other out, the promise of spiritual rebirth through love in one destroyed by madness and death in the other. The first flashback begins a common motif in Chabrol, the transgressive relationship conceived in a setting of nature, in woods - this subjective memory of the father's is coloured with Chabrol's irony - the Oz-like poppy fields hinting ominously at danger; the move from 'natural' secrecy to a social openness finally sealing the relationship's fate.

The second half is truly magnificent - the murder taking place completely in mirrors, mirroring (sorry) the cruel humiliation of Therese earlier. The eerily peaceful track over the dead woman's artefacts, stopping at the bed that caused all the trouble, wiping her out in more ways than one, but also reminding us of the real source of all the trouble, prefiguring Chabrol's hero's 'Psycho' by a year (although Laszlo's tacit Oedipal tension with his surrogate father adds a Chabrolian twist). The silent mastery of the interrogation sequence and the closing shots hint at Chabrol pleasures to come, pleasures we have to wait eight years and 'Les Biches' to fulfil.

A Double Tour John White from 10kbullets

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]

À double tour (1959) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) capsule review

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review

Catherine Grant, 'Unsentimental Education: On Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes - a video essay', Film Studies For Free, June 30, 2009

LES BONNES FEMMES (The Good Time Girls) A 96

France Italy (100 mi) 1960

Before Chabrol started mocking the complacency of the bourgeoisie with artificially stylized whodunits, he made at least two stabs at a social realist film, BEAU SERGE (1958), a naturalistic rural drama, and this deceptively complex work that on the surface appears to be a free wheeling, light-hearted drama about the social patterns of young Parisian girls, shot in a near documentary style following events as they occur over the course of several days. Balancing their time at work in an appliance store with no customers to speak of, where the highlight of the day is a hopeful visit from a delivery man, the film examines the lives of four young girls who work there, each more bored than the next where their low-end wages offer little hope for a better future. While they tease one another at work all day and continue socializing at night, it is clear they exhibit an artificial cheerfulness to hide their otherwise empty lives, very much in the manner of John Cassavetes, particularly in FACES (1968). In fact outside of Cassavetes, this is one of the best films to capture the emotional authenticity of young women and the difficulty they face enduring men who are exaggerated caricatures of themselves, all promising to be more than they are. While the men are uncomfortably obnoxious, this is all part of the mating ritual where the social art of persuasion is a double-edged sword, where if you allow yourself to get lured in, you may suffer the consequences. On the other hand, if you take no chances at all, you’re back where you started from, which is a neverending routine of endless monotony. Chabrol, with help from cinematographer Henri Decaë, does an excellent job finding the rhythms of the streets of Paris which exude a wonderful sense of energy and hopeful possibilities while the oddly dissonant score by Pierre Jansen and Paul Misraki may give some the creeps.

Bernadette Lafont plays Jane, perhaps the most liberated and sexually audacious of the group, who through acts of exuberant spontaneity hopes to find happiness, while Stéphane Audran, soon to be the director’s wife, working in dozens of films together for some twenty years, plays her roommate Ginette, living a secret life as a singer in a variety revue. Lucile Saint-Simon plays Rita, an attractive blond who is incessantly schooled by her fiancé how to please his snooty, overbearing parents, demanding that she change to become the girl of his dreams, while newcomer Clothilde Joano plays Jacqueline, a recent hire late on her first day on the job, a shy, quiet girl lost in her thoughts about a young motorcyclist (Mario David) who shows up regularly without so much as a word, staring at her through the storefront window, following her on his bike, always keeping his eye on her. From an early sequence where a couple of the girls are followed by two guys in a white Cadillac, the audience has an idea what’s in store for them and can see these men are little more than goons, but the girls have a zest for living that typifies the sudden influx of boldly energized New Wave films. What follows is a wild strip club sequence with a bon vivant Bridgitte Bardot look-alike that gets the guys pinching and grabbing, followed by an extended party sequence that plays out like New Years, where it’s all Jane can do to fend them off, which she does brilliantly until a night of champagne finally wears down her defenses. Jane can be seen in the same clothes spraying perfume under her arms the next morning as she joins her roommate for another day at work, interrupted by a frantic run to the zoo at lunchtime where they interact with the caged monkeys, rare birds, and a stalking leopard before returning back to work where Jane ends up asleep. One by one each of the girls is called into the boss’s office to be fondled and pinched, a day where time literally stops, counting the minutes until the work day is done.

Interesting that the guys surrounding these girls are typically crude, boorish and ill-mannered, more interested in dominating any female desire to express themselves, like hunters caging wild animals or rare birds (“They don’t look rare to me.”), while the girls themselves couldn’t be more vividly gorgeous and appealing in their feminine charm, spending their days in dead end jobs filled with hopes and dreams that someday it might all be different. There’s a strange swimming pool sequence where the original louts that picked up Jane decide to bully the girls, thinking it’s fun to throw them in the water and continually dunk them, like rude water polo, until they are rescued by the motorcycle guy who runs off the imbeciles. In perhaps the strangest scene in the film, the motorcyclist takes Jacqueline for a ride into the country, where they walk deeper and deeper into the woods. It is clear Jacqueline has never been happier, that she is finally, at this moment, herself, in a scene highly reminiscent of similar scenes with the happy and dreamy-eyed Giulietta Masina on her wedding day in Fellini’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957), a walk in the woods sequence borrowed again by Fassbinder in BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980) featuring Barbara Sukowa as Mieze in the beautifully choreographed Part XII “The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent.” These are scenes of utter heartbreak and despair, shown without a hint of excess, probably the turning point in each film. The ramifications are beyond description, the audience is in a state of disbelief, as this was thought to be a dizzyingly absurd New Wave comedy of sorts, was it not? The final sequence is just as exasperating, as the tone has completely shifted to a stunned audience that can’t quite comprehend what just happened. This brilliant change of gears offers a completely new appraisal of the film, adding a profound layer of depth to these girl’s lives, where Chabrol expresses a surprising level of sympathy for their stark vulnerability in such a harsh world that barely notices they exist.

User comments from imdb Author: Nin Chan from Canada (excerpt from review on L’ENFER)

Throughout his career, Chabrol has been especially critical of the life-denying entropy and suffocating claustrophobia of bourgeois marriage, a plight where the insatiably voracious woman feels her haplessness and subordination most acutely. This, in some respects, might be his finest evaluation of marriage and erotic love in general. The tensions explored throughout the film are far from novel, again we bear witness to the irresolvable Romantic preoccupation, the desire to possess and identify with a subjective other. Again, as with "Les Bonnes Femmes," we see the carnivorous, destructive male principle, eager to subdue, asphyxiate, smother and ultimately devour irrepressible femininity.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Guilt, complicity, bourgeois aspirations and murder: Chabrol's fourth feature clearly illuminates his abiding interests, even as it achieves a dazzling formal complexity in its arrangement of a series of events charting the dreams of a better life entertained by four Parisian shopgirls desperate to escape the daily monotony of their existence. One longs for success in the music halls, one the staid security of marriage, another a good time and little else; and the last, seeking romance, is the most vulnerable... At once a detailed portrait of Parisian life and an ironic, witty study of human foibles, the film remains emotionally affecting thanks to Chabrol's unsentimental compassion for his subjects.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford reviews the 8-disc Claude Chabrol Collection (excerpt)

Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) marked a turning point in Chabrol's career. This masterful synthesis of neorealism, psychological detail and the mystery thriller genre revealed his debt to artists like Roberto Rossellini and Alfred Hitchcock but was poorly received by the French film community. For the next eight years, Chabrol took on a variety of independent and commercial film projects; everything from Ophelia (1962), a contemporary variation on Hamlet, to La Route de Corinthe (1968), a spy-thriller parody. It wasn't until Les Biches in 1968 that he enjoyed a critical resurgence and began to specialize in stylish suspense thrillers which served as critiques of the bourgeoise (La Femme Infidele, aka The Unfaithful Wife) or explored personal obsessions (This Man Must Die (1969) and complex relationships (Le Boucher).

User comments from imdb Author: ieaun from dudley, england

The film shows a weekend in the lives of four Parisian shop girls, from their Friday night out in the nightclubs of Paris through to a Sunday outing into the countryside. All four dream of escaping their humdrum existence: Ginette (Stephane Audran) is trying to start an alternative career as a music hall singer, Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon) is engaged to a shop owner, Jane (Bernadette Lafont) is wined and dined by two married businessmen, and Jacqueline (Clothilde Joano) falls in love with a biker who is stalking her. The monotony of the girls' lives is shown as they spend Saturday in the shop just waiting for the moment when they can go home. At the same time Chabrol shows a fascinating portrait of the city at work and at play. The storyline holds the viewer's interest, the acting is excellent (especially Lafont, and despite some terrible overacting from the girl's boss), and the director hints at some of the gruesome shocks of his later films.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

Chabrol's career is often seen as moving from the naturalism of his early films to the extreme stylisation of his great mid-period. It's not as simple as that, but in 'Les Bonnes Femmes', Chabrol achieves a balance between the two that he has rarely equalled. The story of four shopgirls, their work and social lives, has all the plotless and poignant banality of realism, while the closing third, with its move from Paris to the country, its seducer-cum-motorbike-riding-devil (reg. no.: 666) talking about the Creator, as little schoolboys called Balthasar pass by; and its closing vision of Hell/Purgatory bespeak a more Cocteau-like world of mythology and religion. But there is Cocteau too in the framing of Jacqueline in the shop window, while Chabrol's filming of treacherous nature later on is uncommonly vivid. Although 'Bonnes' is his least typical film, it is also his most lovable, and seems to get richer with the years.

User comments from imdb Author: snucker

i liked this film. it has an ambigious quality about it, almost paradoxical. it has a feel of a documentary and is observational in nature, yet there is a obvious message or view taken by chabrol and the women in this film. they're doomed objects of desire for men. the women have this elusive quality about them, they're beautiful and somewhat misguided about the men in thier lives. they seem unattainable, yet vulnerable to a ominous unspoken danger that awaits them that is denoted by the music. there's this creepy yet mysterious sounding music that runs through the film when the female characters roam through the streets. and for some reason, all the men in this movie are misogynist jerks! they disrespect these women and believe they're entitled to them. yet, these women flirt with them and passively resist them for most of the film. chabrol lovingly shoots these women and has affection for them, but also sadness at their romantic naivety about the men in their lives that will bring them doom.

Village Voice (J. Hoberman)

Shifting mood in the New Wave manner, Les Bonnes Femmes is a crime film that devotes most of its time to the quasi-documentary examination of four young Parisiennes—clownish Bernadette Lafont, elegant Stéphane Audran, dreamy Clotilde Joano, and stoical Lucile Saint-Simon—all of whom work at the same neighborhood appliance store. Les Bonnes Femmes is a New Wave fantasy in that it provided Chabrol the pretext for directing four pretty young actresses but it's also a portrait of thwarted generational aspirations. The women are harassed by their boringly lecherous old boss and most of the film's males are fools.

Les Bonnes Femmes is reminiscent of its better-known peers, Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player, in its location shooting, playful use of music, and intermittent high spirits. But, Audran's unexpected (and literal) star turn notwithstanding, there's little here that's self-reflexive and no cinephilic homages, apart from the incongruous Zero de Conduite quotation that contributes to the shock ending. As a Cahiers du Cinema critic, Chabrol had analyzed Rear Window and polemicized in favor of "little themes." Although Les Bonnes Femmes demonstrates a Hitchcockian knack for implicating the spectator—most obviously in the scene in which the heroines are harassed, at some length, by a pair of obnoxious boors in a public swimming pool—the movie has a surplus of incident and an absence of plot.

In the end, however, every haphazard digression, from the creepy "fetish" kept by the appliance store's middle-aged cashier to the lunch hour the shopgirls spend in the zoo, comes together in a trap as implacable as anything in the thrillers Chabrol admired. Deeply unsettling, Les Bonnes Femmes manages a dialectic between the freewheeling and fatalistic unlike anything else in Chabrol's oeuvre.

culturevulture.net Tom Block

Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes is a valentine written in poisoned ink, and the cinematic equivalent of Tough Love. It sinks its teeth down to the acrid core of its characters, yet chews them with real affection. A critical and popular misfire in France at the time of its release in 1960, Femmes wasn’t even shown in the United States until 1966, by which time it was already overshadowed by the French New Wave’s more famous efforts. It is now being re-released by Kino International, the company responsible for ushering so many long-buried masterpieces back into the light of day.

Les Bonnes Femmes covers three days in the lives of four Parisian shopgirls, following them through a night’s debauch, a long, drab day on the job, another night of celebration, and part of the following day. The women are in no way remarkable, but they’re types we’ve lived beside all our lives: a party girl; a mouse who’s ready to sacrifice what little identity she has in order to secure a husband; an aspiring singer whose insecurity causes her to hide her ambitions from her friends; and a daydreamer yearning for the white knight who will rescue her from her dead-end existence. The women live in a world that mocks them, uses them, heartlessly exposes their hopes as desperate fantasies. Worse yet, they’ve been so pulverized by longing that they don’t even have each other to cling to; they’re all too busy drowning to think of saving one another.

The keynote is struck in the opening title sequence, in which scores of vehicles race through a traffic concourse in a million different directions, all of them somehow managing to avoid a collision. The film’s sequences haven’t been formed to let us know when they’ve reached their climaxes; they start, and then they just go on until they stop. As John Cassavetes’ Faces would do eight years later, Femmes lets its characters act out their lives with a maximum of movement and noise, until we realize that their behavior is a grotesque outgrowth of their brittle emotional lives. Amongst themselves the women are always fretting, laughing, banging on tables; they grow quiet only when fully engaged in their dreams or when their anxieties have deflated them.

Femmes turns the world into a nightmarish expression of what the women suspect is the truth of their own existence. The male characters who pursue them are funhouse-mirror caricatures whose enfeebled notions of masculinity are reflected in their clown disguises and beanie-style bathing caps, in the way they grovel before their mothers or gracelessly press their hands into a woman’s skirt, in their poses as wimps and louts and outsized pranksters. But the men’s very absurdity calls into question the women’s appearance as well. Would four such absurdly beautiful women really work in the same rinky-dink appliance store? (Not enough customers come into it to warrant even two employees.) When we look at the women, we are only seeing their ideal versions of themselves, their collective dream; everything else in the movie is their collective nightmare. Even the climactic act of violence swims into the movie like a daydream that goes inexorably bad.

All four stars – Bernadette Lafont, Clothilde Joano, Stephane Audran, and Lucile Saint-Simon – fill out their roles, but it is Lafont and Joano who linger in the mind afterwards. As Jane, the adolescent caught in a body that’s bursting with sexuality, Lafont (The Mother and the Whore) nails the sensibility that can’t be calmed down. Not even at dawn, when her nocturnal carryings-on have left her just enough time to slap some perfume into her armpits before going to work, does Jane have any inkling of the toll her lifestyle is taking on her. Joano, as the diehard romantic who’s being pursued by a mysterious stranger, shows how Jacqueline’s yearning has put her into a walking coma. Near the end, when her dream lover has miraculously materialized, she lights to earth in bodily form; for the only time in the movie, we see one of the characters as she truly is, undistorted by fear or desire.

Throughout his long career, Chabrol has often squandered his best material by thinking about it too much; too often his ideas, no matter how inspired they sound in the telling, come out overcooked and flattened. (The drop of blood falling out of the sky in Le Boucher is a good example.) But in Femmes Chabrol blazed a shortcut between his brain and what he got onto the screen. Its images are raw and undigested – they haven’t had the chaos polished out of them. The great cinematographer Henri Decae (Bob le Flambeur, Plein Soleil), working in a dingy black and white, turns Paris into a maze of shadowy streets that extend in every direction; it’s a smokier, danker version of the nighttime Manhattan that James Wong Howe captured in Sweet Smell of Success. And more than most movies, Femmes is a vivid reflection of the time in which it was made, giving us time-capsule views of the fashions, decor, and mannerisms of mid-century Paris.

Les Bonnes Femmes has its moments of irritation and excess, but it has bursts of filmmaking as vibrant as anything produced by the New Wave. The strip-club sequence, a freewheeling montage of faces and bodies inflamed by lust and alcohol, appears to have influenced the best scenes in films as different as Lenny and Schindler’s List. A quiet, searching conversation in a restaurant uses as its background music the carefully modulated tinkling of the customers’ silverware. And the film’s final five minutes are a masterful blend of choreographed camera movements and impeccably controlled sound effects, culminating in an image that puts a universal face on these lives of noisy desperation. Les Bonnes Femmes is a vivid, indelible work.

On Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes Catherine Grant from Film Analytical, June 22, 2010, which includes a video essay (13:32)

Les Bonnes femmes (1960) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Les Bonnes Femmes John White from 10kbullets

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review

Baltimore City Paper (Heather Joslyn) review

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

Movie Review - Les Bonnes Femmes - Screen: 'Les Bonnes Femmes ... Robert Alden, May 13, 1966

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review

Bernadette Lafont Obituary by Ronald Bergan from The Guardian, July 26, 2013

Bernadette Lafont, 1938-2013 | British Film Institute Ginette Vincendeau from BFI, July 30, 2013

WISE GUYS (Les Godelureaux)

France (99 mi) 1961

Les Godelureaux (1960) James Travers

Roland, an idler living on the Left Bank in Paris, is determined to inflict a terrible revenge on his friend Arthur, after the latter subjected him to a harmless joke. He engages the services of the seductive Ambroisine, who pretends to fall in love with Arthur. Oblivious to his friend’s scheming, Arthur is certain that Ambroisine’s feelings for him are genuine and looks forward to their wedding day…

After the hugely controversial Les Bonnes femmes, Claude Chabrol’s next film was this distinctively New Wave satire, an uninhibited portrayal of human spite and self-destructive delusion. Although an entertaining film, it appears inconsequential alongside the more notable films which Chabrol made during this period. It is perhaps most memorable for the hugely caricatured performances by Jean-Claude Brialy and Bernadette Laffont. Film critics and film historians are still arguing over what the film really means.

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

....or almost nothing of this old Nouvelle Vague. For these who are still believing that this cinema was uncompromising, revolutionary and saved us from the old drivelers (However, Truffaut once said that he would give his whole filmography in exchange for "Les Enfants Du Paradis";I would too), they will be probably disappointed when they learn that Chabrol didn't have even read the book when he accepted to transfer it to the screen (Cinema D'Auteur, my foot!); he did it just because "Les Bonnes Femmes" had been a flop and his producer urged him to repair the breach by releasing a more accessible effort; it was much better but even so displayed no sign that Chabrol had genuine creativity to offer. Among his already big output -compared to the other directors of his school- ,there's only one good movie ("Les Cousins" ) and a handful of watchable ones ("A Double Tour " "Le Beau Serge " " L'Oeil Du Malin" ). It would take him ten years to produce really great movies in the late sixties /early seventies: but then he had forgotten the precepts of the N.W. and worked on terrific screenplays.

Chabrol himself told "Les Godelureaux " was a futile movie about futility. It bears all the scars of the time: a succession of desultory scenes, some funny, some much less so, cult of youth, young people busy contemplating their navel, exchanging fortune- cookie philosophies, blaming bourgeois charity (the scene when Stephane Audran, later Chabrol's wife and his best actress ever, performs an erotic dance before the ladies' deeply shocked eyes and the gentlemen salivating like Pavlov's dogs is perhaps the highlight of a terrible hodgepodge ) and singing "La Carmagnole," the revolutionary anthem, in their sports car in most of the N.W. works, the characters can always make both ends meet .

Jean -Claude Brialy portrays (even if the story is not very clear on that point for good reasons) a bisexual playing a two- bit Vicomte De Valmont ("Dangerous Liaisons") whose motto is probably "revenge is a dish best eaten cold." Charles Belmont ,an actor who quickly fell into oblivion, is his victim.Bernadette Laffont, an actress either outstanding or exasperating, depending on whom you ask, serves as the instrument of this revenge .

Only the Nouvelle Vague students -and God only knows how many they are here there and everywhere- should pick up this flick among Chabrol's monumental filmography; to people who would like to discover him, I 'd simply say : try "Le Boucher" or "Que La Bête Meure" instead.

Like this? try these.......

"Les Bonnes Femmes," Claude Chabrol

"Les Copains," Yves Robert

"Vacances Portugaises," Pierre Kast

"Et Satan Conduit Le Bal," Dabat

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

The movies Claude Chabrol made in the first ten years of his career are vastly underrated nowadays with the film under review being, arguably, the most obscure of the lot; admittedly, LES GODELUREAUX – an unwieldy single-word title if ever there was one (literally meaning "the popinjays") – could not have endeared it much to audiences. Consequently, it seems rather hard now to believe that Chabrol's more renowned colleague at the "Cahiers Du Cinema", Jean-Luc Godard, once named it among "The Top Six French Films made since the Liberation"(!) alongside Robert Bresson's PICKPOCKET, Jean Cocteau's LE TESTAMENT D'ORPHEE' and Jean Renoir's LE TESTAMENT DU DOCTEUR CORDELIER (all 1959)!!

Thematically, the film is basically Bresson/Cocteau's masterful LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE (1945) reworked for the "New Wave" set – though the revenge this time around is triggered by a petty incident between strangers, making the whole scheme an even more cynical one. Apart from the director himself, the film also finds some choice performers at somewhere near their best, notably the two leads: Jean-Claude Brialy (genuinely Mephistophelean, he displays a remarkable flair for melodrama throughout) and an entrancing Bernadette Lafont (peerlessly epitomizing earthy sensuality)– though some, like the reviewer of the "Films De France" website, actually felt their characters to be caricatures! Equally imperative to the success of the film is Jean Rabier's glossy black-and-white camera-work, a typically fine score by Pierre Jansen and also a clever use of overlapping sound (actually one of the revolutionary cinematic techniques characteristic of the French "Nouvelle Vague" movement).

The plot – oozing with the hedonistic/nihilistic outlook of Chabrol's regular scribe Paul Gegauff – sees the seemingly bisexual bourgeois fop Brialy sending out coquettish seductress Lafont to attract the attention of a young man (well-played by virtual unknown and future director Charles Belmont) who had spited him at the very start of the film. Subsequently, the newly-minted trio becomes virtually inseparable ensuring an invasion of the latter's domestic life (which embarrasses him no end, since he is still in the custody of a strict and wealthy uncle) – as much as they force him into their own private chaos (which involves not only an omnipresent homosexual valet by Brialy's side but a nerdy soon-to-be-wed cousin whom Lafont has no qualms about seducing in front of her current boyfriend, Belmont)!

Although at one point a ménage-a'-trois between the three leads is implied, some of their shenanigans are fairly harmless – such as disrupting an art exhibition with the dissemination of sneezing powder, or an upper-class soiree' by incorporating into the program both a sultry dance (performed by none other than a dark-haired Stephane Audran!) and an eccentric ditty sung by a pathetic ex-vaudevillian lady. However, the bacchanal in the style of Ancient Rome, togas and all – held at Belmont's house, having charged Lafont with its upkeep while he is away on business (in the same vein, Luis Bunuel's contemporaneous VIRIDIANA [1961], would feature a famously blasphemous parody of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper") – has more severe repercussions; this sequence is cleverly, and amusingly, cross-cut by Chabrol with the most formal of restaurant dinners being consumed by the oblivious Belmont and his uncle!

Eventually, the schemer feels vindicated and confesses to having taken the young man 'for a ride' and that Lafont (whom the boy had genuinely fallen for and was even planning to marry) had been his tormentor's mistress all along. However, in keeping with the film's darkly humorous tone (boasting a couple of bona-fide howlers along the way), the coda shows that, though obviously broken-hearted at first, Belmont has picked himself up by the time we next see him a year later and is consoling himself with a plain-looking girl; in fact, running by chance into Lafont on a pier, it is rather the latter who is unable to mature – being seemingly involved in yet another romantic scam (with a high-ranking Naval officer, no less)…

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS (Les Sept péchés capitaux)

Chabrol segment: L’Avarice

France Italy (113 mi) 1962 omnibus film with 9 directors

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

This is a pretty mediocre film made up of sketches. Julien Duvivier did a lot better with "le diable et les dix commandements," and he did all the segments single-handedly .

Only Godard snubs can enjoy the sloth sketch which is a saddening bore, with Eddie Constantine,an actor who made duds by the dozen. The anger sketch recalls the silent movies era, that is to say it's modern! Philippe De Broca's part is vulgarity itself, which is amazing, coming from a director known for his elegance. There's nothing to expect from Roger Vadim, whose movies have not worn well, it's the least we can say.

Edouard Molinaro will be dismissed by the "connoisseurs," just because he's not part of the new wave; however his sketch is not that much bad. But the two best segments are Chabrol's and Demy's .

Demy's "lust," abetted by two peerless thespians, Laurent Terzieff and Jean-Louis Trintignant, blends present and past when the latter, still a young kid, didn't know what "lust" meant. This is the most daring sketch, even featuring furtive nudities.

Chabrol's segment ends up the movie on an unpretentious welcome note .The "polytechniciens" putting their problem -how can we sleep with the de luxe prostitute?- in equation is one of the funniest moment of the whole movie.

Two sketches and a half:you make it on the percentages but lose out on the bonuses.So why don't you try Duvivier's "le diable et les dix commandements" instead? No, Duvivier is not part of the new wave. It's not a crime, is it?

Vern's review

Last time we spoke I found that the best way to forget about the nightmarish USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act - which is designed to protect freedom and democracy by, among other things, allowing police to enter and search your house without probable cause, warning or even notification after the fact - was through the delights of French Cinema.

As you know the french are very romantic, very beautiful, full of whimsy and what not. The French always know how to make you smile, like they did with AMELIE, or MR. HULOT'S HOLIDAY, or those musicals with the umbrellas and etc.

For example they got this movie called SEVEN DEADLY SINS that I just discovered. Anyone who has read my works thoroughly knows of my admiration for the director Roger Vadim, who married Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve. Also, his movies were pretty good.

Vadim is most famous for BARBARELLA, and then for SPIRITS OF THE DEAD, the edgar a. poe anthology picture he did a segment of along with whatsisname, the frenchy, as well as godard, malle, fellini, and etc. etc. SEVEN DEADLY SINS is another one along the lines of SPIRITS but this one is in black and white and has the, you know, the seven deadly sins theme. Seven segments, seven sins, all french.

This one's got Vadim, it's got Godard, it's got Chabrol, it's even got Demy who is the individual who did the young ladies of the umbrellas at the corner of cherbourg and rochefort. No fellini this time but otherwise, you got every individual who ever mattered in europe, except maybe robin hood, I don't know.

So you got Godard in this one, he does the famous sin "sloth". His story is about a movie producer so lazy he doesn't want to take off his clothes when he gets down to the casting couch type business. There is a scene at the gas station where the producer asks a guy hey, wanna make a quick buck? And the guy says no, I'm not interested. So the producer lets out a disappointed sigh and goes ahead and just ties his shoe his damn self.

Vadim's sin is "pride" (maybe that's why his version of Dangerous Liasons says "Un film de VADIM" instead of using his full name) but he goes ahead and makes it about fuckin anyway. His is about a husband who's cheating on his wife with a gal who is cheating on her husband, but he doesn't realize that his wife is actually cheating on him and also there are two mannequins who are in love.

My favorite one though is the first one, "anger", written by - whatsisdick - you know, the theater of the absurd fucker. Ionesco I believe is his name. This one kinda reminds me of ol' Louie Boonuel, with this ridiculous story about how everybody gets a fly in their soup one Sunday and this leads to the destruction of the earth.

I really enjoyed this picture, thanks to the hard work of the French Cinematists of yesteryear. For 113 glorious minutes I was able to forget that Unelected President Bush just one month ago signed an executive order giving presidents, former presidents and former Vice Presidents the power to veto the release of any information from their time in office. So some time in the future, a hypothetical former vice president, let's give him a random name - maybe "George H.W. Billingsley" - he could hide whatever it was he did during his tenure, whether it was picking his nose or, let's say... for years allowing cocaine into the country to finance an army of terrorists in Nicaragua. Or you know, whatever it is.

Anyway, movies though. French movies.

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Bob Taylor (taylor9885@sympatico.ca)

At-A-Glance Film Reviews

The New York Times review A.H. Weiler

THE THIRD LOVER (L’Oeil du Malin)

Italy France (80 mi) 1962

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

To begin with, this is one of the rarest Chabrols as well as a key early effort. For anyone who hastily pinned him down as the French Hitchcock, this shows yet another facet to his 'personality': if THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS (1967) saw the director take a leaf out of Fellini's book, here he seems to be influenced by the work of Antonioni – complete with a faux-thriller plot (evoking in some aspects Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley", actually first brought to the screen in 1960 by the French as PURPLE NOON) which, owing to the protagonist's enigmatic behavior, progresses gradually into semi-abstraction!

Having mentioned that later Chabrol, the movie under review likewise allows Stephane Audran an unprecedented central role which she carries off with aplomb. Incidentally, even at this preliminary stage, her future husband's thrillers were peppered with sudden shocking murders (as both WEB OF PASSION [1959] and LES BONNES FEMMES [1960] will attest) – and the climax of this one is, undeniably, superbly handled.

The hero – played by virtual unknown Jacques Charrier – supplies the right mix of blandness and arrogance the part requires. Similarly, Jean Rabier's gleaming monochrome photography notwithstanding, the picture counters its essentially rough-and-ready quality (in pure "New Wave" style) with a quite remarkable incisiveness (particularly in the noir-ish dialogue).

At a mere 77 minutes, THE THIRD LOVER (better served by the original title L'OEIL DU MALIN, which translates to THE EVIL EYE – a moniker later also attached to two, obviously unrelated, Italian giallos!) does not overstay its welcome. In hindsight, if back then the film's inherent pretentiousness may have alienated critics and audiences alike, it can now be seen as a shining example of Chabrol's burgeoning talent.

L'Oeil du malin (1962) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Albin Mercier, a French journalist, is sent to Bavaria to write an article about life in Germany. He is befriended by a bourgeois couple, the writer Andreas Hartman and his wife Hélène, who live near to him. The Hartmans appear to be perfectly happy together, and they seem to enjoy Mercier’s company. Mercier, however, resents their happiness and determines to take the place of Andreas…

L’Oeil du malin is one of the earliest and best examples of the ironic suspense thriller for which Claude Chabrol is best known. It contains all the ingredients of a Chabrolesque thriller, including a relentless, lurking sense of menace, a fragile bourgeois setting, a mounting drama which builds to an inescapable tragic resolution and, naturally, a creepy musical score. Although the film is definitively Chabrol from start to finish, it pays more than a passing homage to the work of that other master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.

What marks this film out as a particularly noteworthy entry in the enormous Chabrol canon are the quality of the acting performances, particularly the three lead actors. Excellently supported by Stéphane Audran and Walter Reyer, Jacques Charrier is perfect as the malicious young journalist Mercier.

Mercier is a typical Chabrol creation, the menacing predator who intentionally triggers a devastating denouement, yet who is incapable of rationalising his own actions. Through a cleverly constructed series of voice-overs, we are able to eavesdrop on Mercier’s thoughts, allowing us to look into a deeply troubled and dangerous mind. Mercier emerges as the victim of his own wicked machinations, a naive, incomprehending instrument of fate.

The film benefits greatly from Chabrol’s characteristically voyeuristic photography (supplemented with jump cuts, an innovation used extensively by the New Wave directors). This intrusive style of photography reflects Mercier’s obsessive attempts to break into the life of the Hartman couple and then into Hélène’s secret double life. Some of the scenes are troubling, creating a sense of impending disaster which, inevitably, is how the film ends.

Although the film was very badly received on its initial release in France, L’Oeil du malin is regarded today as one of Chabrol’s best thrillers, and also a good example of Nouvelle Vague cinema of the 1960s.

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User comments from imdb Author: mario-rad from wien, austria

LANDRU

aka: Bluebeard

France Italy (115 mi) 1963

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review

Enigmatic, slyly amused, fastidious, swinging from bleak introspection to boisterous knockabout, such is the style of Landru, the character and the film both. Its first half is a series of repetitions: WW1 newsreels to confirm the period, Landru selecting a victim, winning her confidence; then a freeze-frame on a trusting face, followed by a smoking chimney and the English neighbours complaining about nasty smells. The remainder - arrest, trial, execution - is slightly anti-climactic, but carried along by Denner, his mincing movements, booming bass voice and his mesmerising strangeness making for a plausible mass murderer. It's violence-free, though not without visual shocks: bilious purple upholstery intruding into a world of pale pastel, a victim-to-be ominously aligned with a row of brimming coal scuttles.

Landru (1962) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

During World War I, a seemingly respectable middle-aged man Henri Landru has devised an ingenious means of obtaining money to feed his large family. Adopting various assumed names, he lures middle-class women to his villa at Gambais just outside Paris, where he kills them and burns their bodies. He then helps himself to his victim’s bank accounts. Having murdered 10 women and one boy, Landru is finally captured and placed before a court of law. With an eloquent defence, he is optimistic that he will not be found guilty…

One of Claude Chabrol’s most bizarre films, Landru is an extraordinary off-the-wall black comedy which allows the director to combine his flair for comedy and thriller to create something which is both original and surprisingly entertaining.

Compared with Chabrol’s conventional thrillers, the mood of this film is light, with some moments of delicious slapstick comedy (most notably Landru's arrest). In fact, you would hardly think that Landru had committed any crime at all, so banal is the way in which his lifestyle is portrayed. What should be moments of horror are brilliantly transformed into comedy, something which has an unsettling effect on the audience.

The film is most memorable for a remarkable performance from Charles Denner who, barely recognisable under his make-up, plays the creepy Monsieur Landru, in fact almost too convincingly. Denner’s Landru is as seductive and tender as he is frightening, making the casual way in which he disposes of his victims doubly disturbing.

Ultimately, it is the self-righteous and complacent bourgeois milieu in which the murderer lives, not the murderer himself, that is the real villain of the film – a theme which reveals itself in many of Chabrol’s films.

User reviews from imdb Author: guy-bellinger (guy.bellinger@wanadoo.fr) from Montigny-lès-Metz, France

OPHÉLIA

France (105 mi) 1963

The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review

After initial success Chabrol had a string of failures, of which this revamping of Hamlet was one. It led to a string of commercial movies until a return to form with Les Biches. Inspired by Olivier's film of the Shakespeare play, Yvan (Jocelyn) plots revenge on his uncle (Cerval), who has married the young man's mother, Claudia (Valli) with - as he sees it - indecent haste after the death of his father. In Chabrol's hands the original plot is simply a jumping-off point for an indulgent work that shows, perhaps, that he was still as much a critic as a film-maker.

When it takes 12 years for a renowned director's movie to reach our screens, the product is apt to be a jewel or a dog. Claude Chabrol's "Ophelia," made in 1962, has just emerged from the kennel, and although the picture has a bit of historical interest, much of it strays far from the film maker's own talents. "Ophelia" opened yesterday at the Playboy Theater.

A wealthy young provincial suspects his mother (Alida Valli, a study in bitter restraint) and his uncle of having killed his father in order to marry each other. Clutching some clues from "Hamlet," he tries to expose them by shouting accusations at meals, pretending to be crazy, and by making a short movie about an incestuous crime. Obsessed with seeming and being, denouncing humanity at large, he trots about in the woods in a business suit and tie, hugging his divine discontent

Meanwhile, he attempts to force a young woman (Juliette Mayniel) into the role of his Ophelia. Their relationship mainly consists of his murmuring claptrap about the beauties of nature into her ear, while she laughs skittishly and favors him with somber or demure smiles. Eventually, her father — who is of course labeled Polonius — dies in a tree after one of the funniest heart attacks I've seen in years. The quasi-Hamlet remarks that trees bear strange fruit these days.

The movie is equally boring and pretentious, because of the characterization of the tormented hero. Played by André Jocelyn, he comes across as a huffy bundle of affectations, and between the bouts of hollering, his style is stiff and vapid.

However, there are moments that will reward some students of Chabrol, such as the theme of individuals feeling guilty when they're innocent. The elegant camera-work lifts the woodland episodes above the general banality, and the formal meal scenes contain some of Mr. Chabrol's choicer observations of people chewing and swallowing while their pleasure in food is spoiled by the anger in the air. And there are a couple of nice thugs. But "Ophelia" hardly evokes Mr. Chabrol's best films, such as "La Femme Infidèle"; instead, it recalls his creakiest earlier work, like "Les Cousins" and "Landru."

THE BEAUTIFUL SWINDLERS (Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du monde)

Chabrol segment: L'Homme qui vendit la Tour Eiffel

France Italy Japan Netherlands (90 mi) 1964 ‘Scope Omnibus film with 5 directors

Four tepid episodes profile various kinds of cons. In "Amsterdam," the best of the lot, directed by Polanski, a young woman convinces a doddering old man to buy her an expensive necklace, promising sexual favors. Once she has the necklace, she runs away and trades it for a parrot, giving the necklace to an old salt who has no idea how expensive it is. In "Paris," a sucker buys the Eiffel Tower but is arrested when he attempts to charge visitors a toll. In "Naples," prostitutes, to avoid being sent out of the city, marry old men in retirement villages at the urging of their pimp, who believes this will give his girls immunity. The scheme backfires when the men refuse to let their wives work at night. In the most gruesome of this dubious quartet, "Tokyo," a Japanese barmaid serves her elderly escort noodles and then gleefully watches him choke to death on them, later trying to pawn his false teeth which she believes to be platinum. They are worthless, and she is arrested for murder. (In native languages; English subtitles.)

THE TIGER LIKES FRESH MEAT (Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche)

aka: Code Name: Tiger

France Italy (90 mi) 1964

User comments from imdb Author: John Seal from Oakland CA

How's this for confusing? The indispensable Eurospy Guide indicates that this early Claude Chabrol feature originally ran 100 minutes, but was cut to an unbelievable 65 when it was released to the American market. IMDb lists it at 90 minutes. This review, however, is based on the 82 minute version available through Something Weird Video! Whichever running time is definitive, however, Code Name Tiger is a very entertaining entry in the genre, which generated scores of identikit features throughout the 1960s thanks to the success of the James Bond films. Chabrol acknowledges his debt to Bond by prominently featuring a French-language copy of From Russia to Love in one scene, and other fixtures of the meme--ranging from beautiful women (From Russia With Love's absolutely stunning Daniela Bianchi) to oddball villains (a midget in a bird cage)--pop up throughout the film. Chabrol also displays his talent with a camera, especially in the early going, when a chase scene is shot from overhead and an assassin comes to a sticky end in a bizarre flooded mansion. Starring the still active Roger Hanin as the titular secret agent, this is a prime candidate for DVD--assuming someone can find the full length version!

Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche (1964) James Travers

Baskine, the Turkish ambassador, arrives in Paris to sign an important trade agreement, allowing Turkey to buy a sophisticated new war plane from France. Immediately, he is the target of an unknown assassin and special agent Louis Rapière (a.k.a. ‘The Tiger’) is assigned to protect him. During a failed assassination attempt at the opera, the ambassador’s daughter Mehlica is kidnapped. Discovering that the enemy is in truth the ambassador’s own secretary, Koubassi, the Tiger attempts to rescue Mehlica…

Although it is now largely (and justifiably) overlooked by most film enthusiasts, Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche occupies an important place in Claude Chabrol’s film-making career. After a promising debut in the late 1950s, in which he effectively spearheaded the French New Wave, Chabrol soon ran into difficulties when his films failed to attract audiences. With the spectacular failure of L’Oeil du malin and Landru in 1962, he lost the confidence of his producers and his career as a director could well have ended there and then if it were not for an offer from Gaumont to make a spy film.

Chabrol took up the offer willingly and was tasked with making a film in the series of “Gorilla” spy films, following La Valse du gorille (1959) and Le Gorille a mordu l'archevêque (1962), with Roger Hanin reprising his role as the agent known as “The Gorilla”. When the rights to the Gorilla series were suddenly withdrawn, Chabrol was still keen to make a film in the same style – as was Hanin, who decided to write a script under an assumed name (Antoine Flachot). The resulting film, Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche allowed Hanin to continue playing the kind of role he enjoyed most – a sophisticated, slightly masochistic action hero, effectively a Gallic version of James Bond.

Although now appearing very dated and unsophisticated, this film and its sequel Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite were very much in tune with the mood of the time. They proved to be a box office success – allowing Chabrol to win back the confidence of his producers and thereby secure his future as a mainstream filmmaker.

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: gridoon2010

SIX IN PARIS (Paris vu Par…)

Chabrol segment: La Muette

France (95 mi) 1965 Omnibus film with 6 directors

Time Out review Tom Milne

A disappointingly lightweight collection of sketches, filmed in 16mm (blown up to 35mm) in an attempt to encourage experiment by reducing costs. Godard's contribution elaborates a story told in Une Femme est une Femme (about a girl who posts letters to her two lovers, then agonises that she got the envelopes mixed), interestingly but not very successfully shot cinéma-vérité style with Albert Maysles as cameraman. Rohmer and Rouch are desperately cramped for space; Douchet's episode is routine Nouvelle Vague sexual sparring; Pollet's is neatly observed but conventional. By far the best sketch is Chabrol's ruthlessly funny caricature of a bourgeois couple (played by himself and Audran) whose constant nagging, quarrelling and platitudinising drive their young son to resort to ear-plugs, with the result that he is blithely unaware of his mother's desperate cries for help when...

IFC.com [Michael Atkinson]

Also known by the French title Paris vu par . . . , this is probably the best of the French New Wave sketch films (1964). Six directors are assigned separate sections of Paris, and each sketch is shot in 16-millimeter. The most powerful episodes are those by Jean Rouch (one of his few purely fictional works, shot documentary style in only one or two takes and costarring the future director of Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder) and Claude Chabrol (a convulsive bourgeois family melodrama featuring Chabrol himself and his then-wife Stephane Audran). Eric Rohmer contributes a mordant and well-crafted story set around l'Etoile, and the interesting if uneven Jean-Daniel Pollet, whose other films are woefully unavailable in the U.S., is represented by a bittersweet comic short starring the Harry Langdon-like Claude Melki. Jean Douchet (best known as a Cahiers du Cinema critic) offers a fairly undistinguished depiction of a Left Bank seduction, and Jean-Luc Godard presents a more detailed version of a story told in his feature A Woman Is a Woman, shot by Albert Maysles and starring Joanna Shimkus. Like most sketch films, this is patchy, but the Rouch, Chabrol, and Rohmer segments shouldn't be missed.

User comments from imdb Author: Aw-komon from Los Angeles, CA

Except for the idiotic Godard segment which just plain sucks, all the other directors did a hell of a job shooting these 16mm short films. In the best tradition of the French New-Wave, most of the films come as close to documentary as possible. The American girl (Barbara Wilkins) in Jean Douchet's little film about American girls who get taken for a ride by French playboys, is just wonderful in her role and perfectly portrays many nuances that have never been captured on film. Douchet was a critic at Cahiers du Cinema who wrote one of the greatest analyses of Hitchcock ever. Documentary master Jean Rouch, one of the godfathers of the New Wave is represented next in a spectacularly authentic and resonant segment that's one long continuous take for about 15 minutes straight, following its protagonist (another wonderfully authentic young girl, this time French) from the breakfast table argument with her boyfriend (producer/director Barbet Schroeder in an early role) into the street where she meets a mysterious man who wants her to go away with him. A wonderfully hilarious 10 minute segment by Jean Daniel Pollet features Michelline Dax playing the experienced Parisian prostitute to perfection as she affectionately makes fun of her inexperienced john who looks like a French version of Buster Keaton. Rohmer's piece is about a salesman/former runner who gets into an altercation with a drunk man on the street and thinks he might have accidentally killed him; it is very different from anything else Rohmer has ever done and, needless to say, quietly masterful. In Chabrol's interesting and typically Hitchcockish 'horror-under-the-prim-bourgeois-surface' expose piece Chabrol himself acts as the 'bourgeois' father and his then-wife Stephane Audran as the mother of a mischievous boy who starts putting ear-plugs in his ears to keep from hearing their constant arguments. Overall, there's a lot of decent stuff here for attentive viewers and French New Wave fans.

User comments Author: jotix100 from New York

"Paris vu par..." was a surprise that was shown on cable recently. Not having seen the film before, and not having an idea what to expect, proved to be the right choice when everything being shown didn't compare to this excellent account about Paris in the early 1960s, as seen by six distinguished directors, mostly followers of the New Wave movement.

The six segments concentrate in a Paris neighborhood. The first one, "Saint Germain-des-Pres, deals with a young playboy and a young American woman who have a one-night-stand. The girl evidently had romantic hopes that doesn't pan out. Barbet Shroeder, a film director himself, appears as the young playboy.

Another vignette "Rue Saint-Denis" present us a young man who has brought home a prostitute. The woman senses the shyness in Leon, her client, and assumes is his first sexual encounter. She ridicules him, and even shames him into feeding her; she even offers to pay him for her meal. Micheline Dax and Claude Melki are the excellent players.

"Gare du Nord" is a disturbing account of an encounter between a young woman and a stranger as they walk on a stretch of the street that looks down on the train tracks leading to the station. The man, who appears in a car out of nowhere, follows the young woman who has had a quarrel with her boyfriend. He appears to be quite sincere in what he asks her, but we are not prepared for what he will do, in a surprise ending that leaves the viewer quite shocked.

Eric Rohmer, a director still active, shows his hand in "Place de l'Etoile", which follows a man as he rides the metro to his place of work in a men's store near the Arc of Triumph. He is man of habit who follows the same path every day. When he encounters a mad man, intent in harming him, he responds with his umbrella. Later on, Jean Marc will meet again his attacker, but then it's a different encounter altogether.

"Montparnasse-Levallois" by Jean-Luc Godard, presents a young woman who is seen posting two letters in one of the pneumatic devices popular in Paris. The only problem is she has sent letters to two different men with whom she has been having intimate relations. As she tries to get out of her dilemma, expecting forgiveness, she gets instead reactions she didn't expect. A young Joanna Shimkus is seen as the Canadian at the center of the conflict.

The last section of the film is by Claude Chabrol, a master of suspense. "La Muette" shows a young man whose parents seem to be not interested in him. The father has a roving eye for the sexy maid, something the mother doesn't seem to care about. Chabrol plays the father himself and Stephane Audrn, at the height of her beauty, is seen as the careless mother. Giles Chusseau is the young man.

"Paris vu par..." is not seen often these days, yet it offers the viewer an interesting look at the early work of these directors. Paris being the background for the story is captured as it appeared in those days.

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] (excerpt)

Paris vu par... is a portmanteau film from 1965, part of a brief vogue for such multi-director compilations in the 60s. Anyone who's made an attempt to go through the oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard, in particular, will certainly have encountered their fair share of these films, since Godard seemingly contributed to almost all of them. And anyone who's seen a few will know that in general they're a terribly uneven lot, marred by many lackluster efforts, with maybe a gem or two (usually from Godard!) sparkling amidst all the muck. This film, in which six different French directors contribute six shorts about Paris, is no exception to the general rule. Each director focuses his short on a different neighborhood of the city, a conceptually slight idea that allows them pretty much free rein to choose their own stories. The results, though, are largely disappointing.

Claude Chabrol's La Muette is the most visually striking of the films here, dominated by odd camera angles and disorienting setups that turn a simple domestic space into something cold, alien, and even frightening. A young boy (Gilles Chusseau) is traumatized and aggravated by the constant bickering of his parents (Stéphane Audran and Chabrol himself), as well as his father's unsubtle dalliances with the family's sexy maid (Dany Saril). The family is obviously upper class, and their life is presented as a rhythmic and unvarying series of similar events, especially centered around the dinner table, where they all stuff their faces and fight. Chabrol rhythmically returns to the same or similar images again and again, panning around the dinner table to show each member of the family shoving food into their mouths and chewing exaggeratedly. Then a cut, and the pan sequence repeats, maybe with subtle differences, but with the same basic emphasis on eating and mastication. This cycling quality of domestic life is both numbing and painful, and Chabrol expertly draws out the obvious anguish, boredom, and antagonism lurking beneath the surface.

When the boy has had enough, he unleashes a rampage around the house — curiously unpunished and unmentioned afterwards, which makes me wonder if he just fantasized it — and discovers that he can dampen his hearing with some ear plugs he steals from his mother. From then on, the boy walks around his house in a curtain of total silence, not hearing the petty arguments of his parents. Chabrol obliges by shutting off the soundtrack as well, cloaking the viewer in that same eerie stillness and silence. It's an effective (and affecting) portrait of alienation and isolation, whether self-imposed or not. The segment's ending leaves a lot to be desired, resorting to cheap shocks in order to bring the situation to a quick close, but Chabrol redeems the film by inserting a final shot of the boy out on the streets, in the center of a crowd, totally silent, looking confused and lost. It's a haunting final image of desperation and loneliness, as the boy is very much alone even in the center of the crowd of people from whom he's sealed off by a wall of silence.

As a whole, Paris vu par... is a flawed and mediocre collection of shorts, with even some of the more well-known directors here turning in subpar efforts. With the exception of the completely worthless Douchet and Pollet shorts, all of these films have at least moments or aspects of interest, and fans of Godard, Chabrol, or Rohmer would certainly want to fill in their knowledge of those directors' key 60s period with the shorts included here. Otherwise, this is a disappointing collection of utterly average films, and the periodic moments of interest and engagement don't do too much to elevate it above this low level.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Sean Axmaker

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5]

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review

DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review

Twitch (Michael Guillen) review

DinaView [Dina Iordanova]

The Stranger (Charles Mudede) review

Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [C+] Adam Markovitz

Time Out New York (Melissa Anderson) review [3/5]

Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune review Kathie Smith

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review

BLUE PANTHER (Marie-Chantal contre le docteur Kha)

France Spain Italy Morocco (110 mi) 1965

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

If you're looking for something like "le boucher" or "les cousins," please pass by. It's Chabrol's second period, between his promising debut ("le beau Serge" "les cousins" "à double tour" ) and his golden age ("que la bête meure"; le boucher").To set the record straight "Marie -Chantal contre docteur Kha " is commercial stuff. It was obviously intended as a spoof on the James Bond movies which were at their absolute peak at the time, when Sean Connery ruled.Marie Laforêt -who is also a singer but here she does not sing- portrays a false bubble head girl, much smarter than her enemies -and allies - think she is and she's both gorgeous and efficient. A bevy of good actors support her: Bunuelian (!) Francisco Rabal, Serge Reggiani, Roger Hanin -François Mitterrand's brother-in-law-, and as the villain, Akim Tamiroff who hams it up as hell, halfway between Fu -Manchu and a SPECTRE member. But one should also note Stephane Audran's presence: she was Mrs Chabrol at the time, and she would be the star of his best movies ("le boucher" "la femme infidèle" "la rupture" "les noces rouges" "Violette Nozières"...) as well as Bunuel's "le charme discret de la bourgeoisie" and Axel's "Gaestebud".Audran portrays Olga, a false widow. Claude Chabrol, in the grand Hitchcock tradition, appears as a barman.

All these people are searching for a jewel, a panther with ruby eyes; its secret is not very original.

This is a movie for Chabrol completists. If you're not, there's much more interesting in this director's uneven but interesting career.

OUR AGENT TIGER (Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite)

France Italy Spain (122 mi) 1965 ‘Scope

User comments from imdb Author: vjetorix from Seattle

Roger Hanin is Louis Rapiere AKA the Tiger, his reoccurring character in several spy flicks. He beds the babes and gets beat up regularly but manages to overcome in the end and this adventure is no exception. This time he's up against a lunatic ex-Nazi type called Hans Wunchendorf, also known as The Orchid, who wants to rule the world with his master race (of course) via his evil organization.

The score by Jean Wiener is somewhat cheesy in the French music hall style and therefore pretty much forgettable. This is a middle-of-the-road spy adventure, not entirely without interest especially if good fights are one of your enjoyments.

Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite (1966) James Travers

Secret agent Louis Rapière – code name “The Tiger” – is sent to French Guyana to supervise the recovery of a treasure from a sunken ship. The operation is hi-jacked by a group of armed mercenaries who flee with the treasure after a bloody fight. Rapière discovers that the treasure is now in the hands of a group of revolutionaries who intend to sell it to an international terrorist organisation, Orchid, using the money to buy arms they need to overturn the country’s government. The authorities are prevented from intervening, through fear that this would provoke a national strike, and so it is left to Rapière to recover the treasure and thwart Orchid’s ambitions for global domination...

After the success of his first venture into the spy-thriller genre (Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche, 1964), Claude Chabrol was invited to make a follow-on film in the same vein. That film was Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite, a more obvious copy of the British James Bond films which were, at the time, proving to be enormously successful throughout the world. Without the budget available to the Bond films, Chabrol was wise enough not to attempt a direct imitation of those films and instead veered more towards spy parody, similar to Georges Lautner’s Les Barbouzes (1964), which were equally popular at the time.

Admirers of Chabrol’s work – particularly his later films – will be surprised, if not appalled, by this film. Typical of the mid-1960s spy thrillers, it has an unconvincing hero, a rambling plot which stumbles from one improbable situation to another, and is drawn out with a rather pointless series of overly choreographed fight scenes. Although the film is now largely overlooked, and is seldom considered alongside Chabrol’s serious films, its success at the box office did allow Chabrol to win back the confidence of his producers, who were then more inclined to finance his subsequent films.

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

The "Tiger"'s second adventure incorporates a few novelties – namely, color and an exotic setting – but it also downplayed the original's humor (mainly relegated here to the hero's omnipresent gadget-inventing partner – who also appears, albeit less prominently, in the first instalment). In any case, the film upped the ante on the villains' stake, as star Roger Hanin now has to contend with both a South American revolutionary regime and a band of neo-Nazis (named after the titular flower)!

As usual, willing girls come into play too and, in fact, The Tiger is made to be more of a ladies' man here: what seems to be an uncredited bit by Christa Lang (Fuller) once again at the very start, the would-be dictator's guerilla daughter (played by an Italian, Micaela Cendali) and, beguiling as ever, heroine Margaret Lee; the latter, who did several such films during this time – including one I just acquired i.e. O.S.S. 117: DOUBLE AGENT (1967) next to John Gavin – has her entrance actually delayed until the film is almost half over and, besides, she is made out to be a femme fatale, going by the surname of Mitchum no less, until exposed as a double agent {sic}!

The plot this time around concerns a sunken treasure (shades of the contemporaneous Bondian outing THUNDERBALL, peut-etre?), with which the baddies intend to finance the afore-mentioned insurrection and, by extension, help obtain world domination for the 'master race'. Chief among them is Chabrol regular Michel Bouquet (who, though allowing himself to be slapped around by Lee, is the one to finally blow her cover and, in one of the film's most effective sequences, even electrocutes Hanin!) and Assad Bahador (appropriately supercilious as The Orchid).

As with the first film, we get a number of wacky moments in the mix – not least the sight of sharks appended, as a warning sign, to several front doors of a fishing village (later on, one of these is X-rayed by director Chabrol himself, looking disheveled in an amusing and unbilled cameo) and, to keep the tiger connection alive, the two protagonists are caged and whipped as if they were circus animals (with Lee even decked-out in a skimpily fetching leopard-skin loincloth). The climax, in fact, takes place in Bouquet's zoo – where the ensuing shoot-out feels almost like a dry-run for the memorably subtle closing scene of one of Luis Bunuel's latter-day masterpieces i.e. THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY (1974)!

LINE OF DEMARCATION (La Ligne de demarcation)

France (120 mi) 1966

If you believe his autobiography, Chabrol shot this picture in an alcoholic stupor, partly due to physical discomfort (on location in the mid-winter Jura countryside), but mainly because he felt no affinity with the material, a wartime resistance drama with daring escapes, heroic self-sacrifice and little moral complexity. And yet it seems a well-controlled, perfectly respectable piece, directed for its surface values and not undermined by any knowing winks at the audience (except perhaps in the scenes with leather-coated Gestapo agents Maury and Gégauff). It's a rural counterpart of L'Armée des Ombres, and although that comparison is by no means annihilating, it does point up the low intensity of Chabrol's involvement.

User comments Author: dbdumonteil

"La ligne de demarcation" is arguably the most successful Chabrol movie of his transitional period -roughly from "l'oeil du malin" (1963) to "la route de Corinthe (1967).

Although there are many characters, this is a well-constructed script, adapted from the Colonel Remy's book. The film is dedicated to French men and women who became smugglers and helped soldiers and Jews to cross the demarcation line which divided France into two parts: occupied and unoccupied zone during WW2.

Among many characters the couple Maurice Ronet/Jean Seberg stands out: he is a defeated officer, his war is over, and he cannot get over the 1940 debacle. On the contrary her war has only begun. She's involved in resistance and he thinks at the beginning of the movie that finally what happened was fair cause the Germans are the strongest. Seberg's beauty illuminates the movie: her face when she hears the coded message "It's a long way to Gibraltar" is one of the rare moments of happiness in a somber movie. French are not all depicted as heroes. Some are hateful cowards, who pretend they help the Jews and gives them away to the gestapo.

In its way,"la ligne de démarcation" foreshadows several aspects of Chabrol future heyday. Two of his favorite actors, Stephane Audran and Jean Yanne are already here ("le boucher"). The entomological depiction of the villages like in the aforementioned movie is here too. And in some scenes (the attic, the burial, the forest where the patrol is on the prowl) Chabrol displays his skills of master of suspense. Good cast.

User reviews from imdb Author: argus-10 from Germany

Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review

THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS (Le Scandale)

France (105 mi) 1967 ‘Scope

Time Out Tony Rayns

The most striking feature of Chabrol's glossy murder mystery is the totally incomprehensible plot, revolving around rivalry for the rights to a family champagne firm: Perkins has said that he took his part solely in order to figure out whodunit. Rather like a pop Huis Clos, it turns out that all four parties in the bourgeois household are as intolerable as each other, but who strangled whom and why remains opaque. Made by Chabrol's regular team, it's relentlessly stylish. (A separate English-language version runs 98 minutes.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

CONTAINS A BIG SPOILER Chabrol's transitional period was coming to an end. Its golden era was about to begin, and would culminate two years later with "le boucher." But the transitional period is still here in 1967.

"Le scandale" is nothing short of rubbish. The first hour is meandering and dragging on and on and on: you're going to tell me it's Claude Chabrol 's usual disgust for the bourgeoisie. It would work the following year in "la femme infidele" when Chabrol began with a fly on the wall account of the daily life of those wealthy people. It does not here. Anthony Perkins and Maurice Ronet are wasted and Yvonne Furneaux is undistinguished. Stephane Audran is here too and with her, comes my big spoiler: so stop reading now if you have not seen the flick (but haven't you got a better way of spending your time anyway?). Anyone who knows Chabrol's works has thus seen Audran in a lot of films; and you realize that Jacqueline is a Stephane Audran made look ugly, and the German hostess is the real sexy Audran. When the movie was made, Audran was hardly known in France and the audience could be fooled. No longer.

Chabrol, in the second part, tried to create suspense and fear, by suggesting Ronet was going nuts. But it's too late and the ending recalls some of those Joan Crawford extravaganzas, the likes of "straight jacket" except that you had a good laugh in Castle's movie. Not in Chabrol's dud.

Gastronomist Chabrol fills his quota of good food. Here they treat themselves to some delicious kidneys (not hot enough, one of the guests complains.)

Le Scandale (1967) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Paul Wagner has inherited a successful champagne business, but seems to have little interest in either commerce or social etiquette. Some time ago, Paul suffered a severe head injury and, despite extensive treatment, still shows signs of mental disorder. His cousin Christine is determined to sell out to some American buyers, but Paul refuses to hand over his stake in the company. Hearing that Paul will be staying in Hamburg shortly, Christine appeals to her husband, Christopher, to try to win Paul round to her way of thinking. In Hamburg, Paul spends an evening with a prostitute, Paula, who is found dead the following morning. Unable to recall whether he killed Paula or not, Paul returns to France. The same thing happens again, only this time it is Paul’s English lover, Evelyn, who is murdered. Realising that he is going mad, Paul finally agrees to Christine’s terms, provided she keeps her suspicions about the two killings to herself. However, the nightmare is far from over…

After the commercial failure of his early films – notably L’oeil du malin (1963) and Landru (1963) – director Claude Chabrol found himself straitjacketed into making commercial films that would attract a sizeable cinema audience. The period 1964 to 1966 is not Chabrol’s greatest – it included such lowbrow fare as Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche (1964) – but it allowed him to continue making films and refine his technique, thereby cementing his reputation as a serious director. This intellectually fallow period came to an abrupt end when Le Scandale was released in 1967, marking the beginning of Chabrol’s “true” career as a filmmaker. Thereafter, most of the director’s output was in the same vein: creepy, intelligent psychological thrillers with a vicious anti-bourgeois underbelly.

Le Scandale is unlike anything which Chabrol made before (with the possible exception of L’oeil du malin) and serves as a template for a large proportion of his subsequent films. The characteristics that most define a Chabrol thriller are evident in this film, even if the end result is less polished and effective than in later works. First and foremost, we have the familiar upper middleclass setting. It is a seemingly well-ordered, rational world governed by simple status-quo-preserving rules and populated by seemingly civilised, rational people (the much-maligned bourgeoisie, those who acquire status through wealth alone). Yet just beneath this semblance of order we know that chaos, subterfuge and death lurk; when the balloon is pricked, these will break free, and the ordered reality of bourgeois respectability suddenly disintegrates. The world of the bourgeois elite is a fragile one indeed, but worse: it is apparently programmed for self-destruction.

Another typically Chabrolian feature assumes prime importance in Le Scandale – the almost total lack of a reliable objective point of reference. This is what makes the film so baffling – some might say incomprehensible: seeing is most definitely not necessarily believing. As in L’oeil du malin, the viewpoint is primarily that of a single character, but what we are seeing isn’t necessarily reality, but rather his interpretation of that reality. In Le Scandale, this is the obvious thing to do, since we know that the central character suffered a head injury; what we don’t know is whether he is mentally deranged or not, hence the ambiguity, and hence the dramatic tension.

Stylistically, Chabrol is being very daring, since the plot to Le Scandale assumes a far lesser importance than the filter by which it is related to us – that is, through a mind that could be in the process of gradual disintegration. There is a strong resonance with the films of Roman Polanski, although Chabrol somehow manages to sustain the sense of ambiguity for longer, and in a subtly different way. Even at the end of the film, the spectator is left wondering how much of what was seen was real or imaginary, and who, if anyone, was the villain of the piece. The most important thing though about Le Scandale is that Claude Chabrol finally found his voice as a film director. He had become the Alfred Hitchcock of French cinema.

The Champagne Murders Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

THE ROAD TO CORINTH (La route de Corinthe)

aka: The Criminal Story

aka: Who’s Got the Black Box?

France Italy Greece (90 mi) 1967

DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review

One of the most outrageous films from Chabrol's first 'commercial' period, before Les Biches renewed critical interest in the wayward New Wave instigator. Released here cut, dubbed and lacking an essential prologue featuring a mad illusionist, lumbered with the title Who's Got the Black Box? in the States, it's a wonderfully maddening mix of clattering allusions (to Greek tragedy and Hitchcock), characteristic black humour, and stunning visual irrelevancies, all poured into the deliberately banal mould of the spy thriller. 'I do not ask you to believe it, but I suggest that you dream about it' runs the film's opening epigraph. 'The silliness was more important than the spying' runs Chabrol's own retrospective line.

User comments from imdb Author: jim riecken (youroldpaljim)

Enemy agents have been jamming NATO radar signals with mysterious "black boxes" that they have planted around various locations in Greece. American agent Bob Ford (who speaks with a perfect French accent) is killed while hot on the trail of the nefarious enemy agents. His widow Shanny, despite warnings from fellow American agent Dex, vows to avenge his killing and locate the "black boxes."

Claude Chabrol claimed his LA ROUTE DE CORINTHE was homage to Alfred Hitchcock. The film does vaguely resemble Hitchcocks NOTORIOUS with the "black boxes" serving as "the McGuffin." The film is also typical of 60's spy movies in that it features cartoonish bad guys. Jean Seberg is lovely as the brave avenging widow who gets in and out of many scrapes through out the course of the film. The films Greek locations give the film much visual interest. LA ROUTE DE CORINTHE is a competent and fairly enjoyable 60's spy thiller but it is also undistinguished.

VideoVista review Jim Steel

This is a curious film. Claude Chabrol is acknowledged as the founder of the new wave and is generally recognised as a master of the thriller. The Road To Corinth (aka: La Route de Corinthe) however, is not a classic. Indeed, its lightweight approach to the spy thriller genre seems almost contemptuous of the audience. It still entertains, though.

A stage magician, Socrates, arrives at the docks in Greece and drives off the boat in his open-top white car. A customs official searches his car. Birds appear from the engine and Socates produces his papers from behind the ear of the customs official. Then the customs official finds a curious, wire-filled black box, and the magician is hauled in for questioning (which involves a severe beating). He produces a cigar from the air in which he has hidden cyanide (!), which he then uses to kill himself.

It turns out that the black boxes are being used to disrupt NATO missiles. Secret agent Bob Ford (Christian Marquand, with terminal male pattern baldness) is investigating the case and discovers that the Kahlides Marble Works is somehow involved (this is a warning to British viewers that much of the upcoming action will take place in a quarry). Later on, back in his hotel room, Ford decides to celebrate but is murdered while Shanny, his wife, is getting the champagne out of the fridge. With commendable self-composure, Shanny (Jean Seberg, blonde and beautiful) then picks up the baton and sets to work with her late husband's fellow agents. This is, of course, after she's been framed for his murder and sprung from prison. She proceeds to charm her way through the rest of the plot without dishonouring herself.

All the Greek clichés are present: orthodox priests, marble busts, island hopping, and copious amounts of zither music. Add the spy clichés such as Anthony Pass as a dapper, almost camp, hitman, and you can pretty much imagine what you are going to get. Much is made of the visually arresting Corinth Canal, and there is the odd piece of editing and the occasional shot that might signify that a genius is sleepwalking through a film, but don't expect too much and that way you will be able to enjoy it. It might go well with a couple of beers.

Other than the option of turning off the subtitles (although set in Greece, the dialogue is in French), there are no disc extras.

Route de Corinthe, La Alex Lehmann from Reading Cinema, October 13, 2008

The Claude Chabrol blogathon: The Road to Corinth » Peter Nellhaus from Coffee Coffee and More Coffee, June 22,

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [1.5/5]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B]

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

LES BICHES

France Italy (100 mi) 1968

Time Out review Tom Milne

The film with which Chabrol returned to 'serious' film-making after his series of delightful thriller/espionage spoofs, this was also the film in which he began transferring his allegiance from baroque Hitchcockery to the bleak geometry of Lang. A calm, exquisite study, set in an autumnal Riviera, of the permutational affairs of one man and two women which lead to obsession, madness and despair. Each sequence is like a question-mark adding new doubts and hypotheses to the circular (as opposed to triangular) relationship as a rich lady of lesbian leanings (Audran) picks up an impoverished girl (Sassard), and whisks her off to her St Tropez villa. There, much to the distress of her benefactress, the girl embarks on an affair with a handsome young architect (Trintignant), only to find in her turn that architect and lesbian lady are in the throes of a mutual passion. Impeccably performed, often bizarrely funny, the film winds, with brilliant clarity, through a maze of shadowy emotions to a splendidly Grand-Guignolesque ending.

Les Biches (1968) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Frédérique, a wealthy heiress, befriends a young woman, a street artist named Why, and invites her to stay at her villa in the South of France. There, at a dinner party, Why meets a young architect, Paul, whom she is easily seduced by. Jealous, Frédérique in turn seduces Paul, but the two fall in love. Realising that she too is in love with Paul, Why clings to them both, hurt but unable to leave them….

Les Biches is one of Claude Chabrol’s most intense and aesthetically pleasing films, a riveting melange of traditional love triangle and subtly dark thriller. Fans of Chabrol’s work will notice strong similarities with his earlier film, Les Cousins, which mirrors this film in a number of imporant ways.

As in all of Chabrol’s films, nothing is quite what it initially seems. Beneath what appears to be a conventional bourgeois drama, dark undercurrents can be discerned. Three solitary characters are drawn together by forces they cannot control, the tension gradually building to a crescendo as the sexual tensions between them direct them towards the film’s shocking conclusion.

This is first and foremost a film about seduction. The opening sequence, with the mesmerising panoramic views of Paris, drenched in golden sunlight, seduces the audience, and in the first scene, a beautiful woman seduces an impoverished street artist. From then on, these two characters indulge in a game of seduction which starts innocently enough but which quickly acquires a dangerous momentum of its own.

All the time, we, the audience, are seduced by the beautiful cinematography, the captivating, sensual performances, most notably from the Sphinx-like Stéphane Audran, and Chabrol’s masterful direction. This is a deliciously seductive work, but one which is also profoundly disturbing.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford reviews the 8-disc Claude Chabrol Collection (excerpt)

Against the wintry backdrop of Paris and moving on to Saint Tropez, two women - Frederique (Stephane Audran), a predatory socialite and an enigmatic sidewalk artist named WHY? (Jacqueline Sassard) - begin a tense, erotically charged relationship that evolves into a deadly power struggle once a handsome architect (Jean-Louis Trintignant) enters the scene. A chic and often droll black comedy that explores the dynamics of a menage a trois, Les Biches is also a psychological thriller (in the second half) and firmly reestablished Chabrol's reputation internationally after a series of critically panned though commercially successful films (The Line of Demarcation (1966), The Champagne Murders, 1966). Stephane Audran, Chabrol's wife at the time, is fascinating to watch as she shifts gears emotionally from scene to scene; like Anna Karina's presence in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Ms. Audran proves to be the perfect collaborator for her husband's cinematic dissections of the French bourgeoisie. The print quality of Les Biches is quite nice, from the muted, watercolor look of the opening pickup to the crisp, cool tones of Frederique's San Tropez villa. And Pierre Jansen's jangly, discordant score adds a considerable layer of psychological and sexual tension. It's presented in the letterbox format.

DVD extras: a still gallery, a battered-looking trailer, three language options with subtitles and audio commentaries by film critics Wade Major and F.X. Feeney.

The latter are generally informative on Chabrol's work and often quite entertaining. However, both commentators have a tendency to overstate Chabrol's influence from time to time; for instance, despite Major and Feeney's claims, Les Biches wasn't the first mainstream film to feature a lesbian relationship in fairly explicit terms for its time (Sassard's and Audran's shower sequence). American audiences had already experienced The Fox (with a passionate kissing sequence between Sandy Dennis and Anne Heywood and a much discussed doorknob masturbation scene) and The Killing of Sister George (Coral Browne's bedside seduction of Susannah York) the year before.

VideoVista review Andrew Hook

Les Biches (The Does) contains many of the expected elements of the quintessential French film: the smouldering thirtysomething, the enigmatic male, the younger - less assured - female, the suggestion of sexual ambiguity, and examinations of the bourgeoisie set against a noir-ish background, the epitome of cool where nothing happens and everything is intimated. And where Les Biches succeeds is that it handles all these elements impeccably, creating a filmic slipstream that only falters slightly due to an unnecessarily dramatic ending considering the handling of what has gone before.

The movie begins with bored socialite, Frédérique (Stéphane Audran), dropping a ridiculously high payment to pavement artist Jacqueline Sassard, which creates enough conversation for Sassard to follow Frédérique home. Throughout the movie Sassard's character is known as 'Why', in response to an off-the-cuff remark she makes to Frédérique when she is asked for her name. Obviously there are metaphorical echoes to be considered here (and interestingly she is called 'Why' - in English, not 'pourquoi', the French equivalent), which basically stem around the reason for her being selected. Frédérique is probably a bi-sexual bourgeoisie with too much money, who seems to have picked up Why for amusement only. Yet how much of the movie is a pre-arranged game is difficult to tell, because once the action moves to St Tropez and architect Paul (Jean-Louis Trintignant) steps into the picture there is much ambiguity over which events might be planned and which are not. The three main players become enmeshed in a kind of méénage-a-trois (mostly intimated, nothing graphic), which eventually culminates in a death.

Surprisingly for a movie about passion, there is little evidence of it on screen, or even much under the surface. One interpretation could be that Chabrol believes that his characters' wealth assigns them the status of boredom - if they can have anything, nothing is desired. This analysis explains how Why slips so easily into her role, once plucked from the gutter she seems to lose ambition. Just as Frédérique drifts from one party to the next, seemingly not enjoying them, but having little else to do with her time, Why follows her, doe-like (hence the title), content to play out of her social class because once ensconced there her personality becomes superseded by her role. Paul himself is not much more than a stereotypical male, it is as though the characters are unable to think beyond their social constraints. Interestingly, Paul's masculinity is the only clearly defined sexual role, with Frédérique's St Tropez houseguests being a couple of obviously gay males. Exactly what conclusions Chabrol wants us to think are unclear - and some of the movie's edge may well be lost due to the passing of time - but the film doesn't lose power because of that.

The performances are well pitched. Audran, Chabrol's wife at the time (who starred in 24 of his movies), radiates directionless sexuality, and whilst she isn't a fantastic actress, it's often difficult to look away from her. Additionally, Sassard's Why is also incredibly watchable - indeed Paul can barely move never mind keep his eyes off her when they first meet. The similarities between the two women are further accentuated when Why dresses as Frédérique, mimics her voice. For Paul this might seem the perfect multi-relationship, but he is disquieted. Is his masculinity under threat here? Trintignant plays the role in a matter-of-fact manner. It's impossible to know what he is thinking.

Ultimately, Les Biches raises numerous questions about what is actually happening, both in the movie and in society when sexuality blurs. Yet despite its aloofness and a feeling that sometimes it feels staged and a little too cold, there is an inherent fascination created by the three main characters that pulls the viewer through. For that alone it's definitely worth watching, and for me ranks high amongst Chabrol's work of that period.

Biches, Les Vladislav Mijic at Senses of Cinema, March 2001

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [4/4]

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Biches, Les Justine Smith from House of Mirth and Movies, August 23, 2008

VideoVista review Andrew Hook

not coming to a theater near you review Sammy Wasson

Eye for Film ("Hotcow") review [3/5]

Les Biches (Claude Chabrol, 1968) Alex Lehmann from Reading Cinema, October 23, 2008

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]

Chabrol Day Seven: Coffee break Ray Young from Flickhead, June 27, 2009

image series: Les Biches (Chabrol, France, 1968) Daniel Kasman from D+ Kaz, January 29, 2007

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

The New York Times (Renata Adler) review

Fin; The Story Of Why Ginia Bellafante from The New York Times, February 20, 2000

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gregory Meshman]

LA FEMME INFIDÈLE (THE UNFAITHFUL WIFE)

France Italy (98 mi) 1969

The Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Claude Chabrol's richly ironic 1968 melodrama, in which it is shown that nothing revitalizes a dried-up marriage quite like murder. Not the least of the ironies is that the point is made sincerely and responsibly: when the film's smug, tubby hero kills his wife's lover, he genuinely becomes a richer, worthier individual. The observation of bourgeois life (as practiced in France, where it was perfected) is so sharp and funny that the film often feels like satire, yet its fundamental seriousness emerges in a magnificent last act, and an unforgettable last shot. With Michel Bouquet, Stephane Audran, and Maurice Ronet.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford reviews the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection (excerpt)

When a happily married family man learns his wife is having an affair, he is devastated. Outwardly calm, he pretends to accept the awful truth, even going so far as to arrange a secret meeting with his wife's lover so they can discuss the situation calmly and intelligently as two adults. But during a seemingly cordial meeting between the two men, the cuckolded husband is consumed by a sudden moment of pure rage that has drastic repercussions. If the plot seems familiar, that's because it was recently remade as Unfaithful (2002) starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane (she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar®), but the Chabrol version (original title, La Femme Infidèle) is a much more disturbing portrayal of man's bestial nature, despite his civilized facade. Like Les Biches, The Unfaithful Wife was universally praised by most critics upon its release; Paul Taylor, critic for Time Out called it "a brilliantly ambivalent scrutiny of bourgeois marriage and murder that juggles compassion and cynicism in a way that makes Hitchcock look obvious." And Dave Kehr in The Chicago Reader wrote that The Unfaithful Wife "so sharp and funny that the film often feels like satire, yet its fundamental seriousness emerges in a magnificent last act, and an unforgettable last shot."
DVD extras: filmographies, a trailer, and one language option, French with English subtitles

* The print quality of this disc is merely fair (the image is soft with faded colors and occasional scratches). But Chabrol's command of the narrative and the central performances by Stephane Audran, Michel Bouquet and Maurice Ronet are so riveting that you'll hardly notice these minor flaws once the movie begins.

La Femme infidèle (1969) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

When Charles Desvallées suspects that his wife Hélène is having an affair with another man, he hires a private detective to follow her and find the name of her lover. Having obtained the information he was after, the jealous husband confronts Hélène’s secret lover and, having gained his confidence, kills him…

Few films exemplify Chabrol’s cinema better and more fully than La Femme infidèle . The bourgeois setting, the dangerously repressed characters, the mildly disturbing voyeuristic photography, the discordant music… all the familiar motifs which conspire to conjure up an unsettling world of seemingly middle-class respectability in which deadly passions are struggling to break free. This is the world of Claude Chabrol.

On the surface, La Femme infidèle is a simple tale of marital infidelity and revenge. However, look close and you will see much more than that. Hélène, like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, is driven into having an affair because she can no longer endure the passionless sham that her marriage has become. Her husband is content to watch pictures of wine classes on an eight inch screen television. She needs much more than he can offer. It is only when he kills his wife’s lover that Charles shows any passion for his wife – a stupid, ill-conceived spur of the moment act of madness, so he can keep his wife for himself. Of course, when Hélène realises what her husband has done, she rediscovers her love for him and she has no further need of her surrogate lover. Of course, by that stage, the edifice of respectability has been completely destroyed and their lives will never be the same again.

The beauty of this film lies in both its subtlety and its charming playfulness. The film has an almost existentialist minimalism in its plot; all of the detail – the drama, the suspense, the comedy – stems from the reactions of the characters to their predicaments. To this end, Chabrol is well served by his leading actors, Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran.

The film is far lighter than some of Chabrol’s more complex thrillers, such as Le Boucher and Que la bête meure, with some pleasing comic touches (such as the tweedle dum, tweedle dee police double act), which both help to relieve the tension and emphasise the artificial nature of Charles and Hélène's cosy middle-class life.

Despite its apparent simplicity, La Femme infidèle is a film of great merit, visually enticing and subtly disturbing. Beneath the polished veneer of staid middle-class respectability their lurk dark and dangerous passions…

Adrian Lyne directed an American remake of the film, Unfaithful (2002) starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane.

Claude Chabrol: La Femme Infidele Derek Malcolm from the Guardian

Nowadays you never know what you are going to get from Claude Chabrol. But there was a short spell in the late 60s and early 70s when you knew exactly. From 1968's Les Biches to 1971's Juste Avant La Nuit, he made half a dozen psychological thrillers that have never been equalled, at least by a European director in Europe.

Even Hitchcock, who has often been named as Chabrol's inspiration, would be hard pressed to beat the cool certainty of Chabrol's technique and the emotional heat he generated while examining the underbelly of the always well-fed French bourgeoisie.

Most of these films starred the fine-boned and striking Stephane Audran, who was then his wife, and all were shot by the great Jean Rabier. The trio perfectly complemented each other; together they produced some of the most civilised depictions of highly uncivilised behaviour ever to reach the screen.

My favourite is one of the simplest - La Femme Infidele, in which Chabrol displays an irrestistible logic and an ironic humour that never gets in the way of the horrific implications of the story. Michel Bouquet is the husband who suspects his wife of having a lover, gradually discovers that he is right, and - not entirely on purpose - kills the man (Maurice Ronet). He then has to get rid of the body without telling his wife (Audran). But she discovers, and so eventually do the police.

Instead of giving him away, the femme infidele, realising how much he loves her, keeps mum. They are, after all, both culpable. Finally, however, the evidence against him is too great and he has to give himself up. He leaves her with the words "I love you madly" and we believe she loves him too. This is a very emotional film, but the way Chabrol depicts that emotion is cumulative rather than baldly stated. The control is absolute throughout, and makes the finale all the more moving.

One of the best sequences, which manages to be very funny as well as heart-stopping, is when the husband decides to introduce himself to the lover. At first he is polite and matter-of-fact. But as the unsuspecting boyfriend expounds on the extraordinary nature of the woman with whom he is infatuated, nerves snap and the murder results. We see that the husband never really knew his wife, and that's where his anger comes from.

Another amazing section of the film concerns this urbane man's efforts to cover up all traces of his crime - cleaning the flat, dragging the body to his car in a weighted sack and finally heaving it into a nearby lake. This has been done so often before and since in film, but seldom with a greater sense of what such an awful process must be like.

But, all the way through, what could have been just another thriller becomes much more than that. It is also a passionate love story, with its share of intense irony and a pervading sense of the quirkiness of fate.

Perhaps the most famous of Chabrol's six golden thrillers is Le Boucher (the Butcher), in which a psychotic village butcher is driven to murder by his unrequited passion for the local schoolteacher (Audran again). This may be an even better film than La Femme Infidele. But then, this was a period when Chabrol seemed to be at the height of his powers.

Hitchcock, whom Chabrol greatly admired, was a considerable influence on his best work, particularly as Chabrol examines the nature of guilt and more often than not decides that the victim is as culpable as the so-called criminal.

But Chabrol was a different kind of stylist, equally cynical but basically more of a humourist - and thus more humane. I once had lunch with him in Paris, which was an amusing affair at which murder was nearly committed when the time came to pay the bill. "Oh, and by the way,' he said, as the talk turned to a studious British critic who always praised his work in very intellectual terms, "Give my regards to -. He invents my films so beautifully."

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Paul Tatara, a comparison of Chabrol’s version (1969) and the Adrian Lyne remake (2002)

Femme infidèle, La Charles Derry essay from Film Reference

Femme infidèle, La Jim Emerson from Scanners, July 30, 2006

909. La femme infidele / The Unfaithful Wife (1969, Claude Chabrol) Kevin Lee from Shooting Down Pictures, March 27, 2008, also including: Video Essays (three of them!) for 909. La femme infidele and 910. Le boucher

La Femme infidèle Richard T. Jameson from Parallax View, June 25, 2009, originally written for the University of Washington Office of Lectures & Concerts Film Series, May 22, 1973

La Femme Infidele (1969) Claude Chabrol « Twenty Four Frames John Greco from Twenty Four Frames, May 29, 2010

La Femme infidèle (Claude Chabrol, 1969) Alex Lehmann from Reading Cinema, October 24, 2008

Tony McKibbin, 'Slow Burn Suspense: The Films of Claude Chabrol', Images, Issue 9, December 2000

DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [3/5]

VideoVista review Andrew Hook

Eye for Film ("Skyline") review [3.5/5]

A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam Lippe

Chabrol Day Ten: Le charme discret de la bourgeois... Ray Young from Flickhead, June 20, 2009, scene from YouTube (2:08)

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

The New York Times (Roger Greenspun)

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gregory Meshman]

THIS MAN MUST DIE (Que la bête meure)

aka: The Beast Must Die

France Italy (110 mi) 1969

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

Possibly Claude Chabrol's finest work, a dark, moody, and endlessly compelling look at a hit and run that takes the life of a young boy. His father (Michel Duchaussoy), a writer of children's books, embarks on a crusade to find and murder the driver. Midway through the film, he finally does find his man, only to discover his family hates him just as much as our hero does! Capturing his violent thoughts in a diary, it becomes the only evidence against him when the deed is finally done -- but who really did the crime? It happens off camera, and the answer is vague. Two people end up confessing. We never quite found out who's telling the truth. Wrestling over it in your mind will give you a headache, but it's a pain that hurts good.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford reviews the 8-disc Claude Chabrol Collection (excerpt)

A fascinating study of revenge and its consequences, This Man Must Die has often been compared to Hitchcock's best work but, unlike the latter director, Chabrol chooses to concentrate on the main protagonist's constantly evolving psychological state instead of constructing a breathlessly paced suspense thriller. It opens with a beautifully edited credit sequence that culminates in tragedy - a young boy returning from the beach is killed by a speeding driver while crossing the quiet square of a coastal village. The driver (Jean Yanne) and his distraught female companion (Caroline Cellier) flee the scene of the crime and the father of the boy (Michel Duchaussoy) vows to hunt them down like animals. Although it takes time and patience, the revenge-obsessed father eventually learns the identity of the girl in the car. Creating a false identify for himself, he meets her, initiating a romance which is merely a cover for his true motives - to lay a trap for the hit-and-run driver, the girl's much-feared brother-in-law. This Man Must Die is full of astonishing moments which toy with the viewer's perception of Duchaussoy's character which goes from sympathy to disgust. The scene in the upscale restaurant where Cellier realizes the true nature of Duchaussoy's interest in her is devastating; she breaks down in tears while he calmly lays out his motives; all of this unfolding while their waiter meticulously debones and carves up a succulent oven-baked chicken for their plates. Another unforgettable sequence occurs when Yanne's hateful character almost falls to his death from a seaside cliff. As he clings to a rock ledge, the father rushes to smash Yanne's fingers with a large stone, an act which is interrupted - and unseen - by others hurrying to pull the man to safety. The DVD is presented in the letterboxed format. DVD extras include biographies, a trailer, three language options with English subtitles, and a still gallery.

Que la bête meure (1969) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

When his young son is killed in a hit and run accident, Charles Thenier resolves to hunt down and murder the killer. By chance, Thenier makes the acquaintance of an actress, Helène Lanson, who was in the car at the time of the accident. Initially suspecting that she is the target of his revenge, Therier pretends to be in love with her, savouring his moment of triumph. Then his view changes when Helène confesses to having had a nervous breakdown at about the time of the car accident. Therier discovers that the real culprit of his son’s death was Helène’s brother-in-law, Paul Decourt, a truly horrible individual. Therier persuades Helène to introduce her to her family and they go to spend a few days at the family home in Brittany. Paul Decourt proves to be every bit as wicked as Therier suspects, and Therier has no qualms about carrying out his plan of revenge. However, he is not the only one to wish Decourt’s death...

This compelling study of revenge and hate is easily one of Chabrol’s better films. Throughout, Chabrol is in perfect control of the drama and suspense, and the result is one of his darkest and most absorbing works.

A film that is so firmly built around the viewpoint of its central character relies for its success on the performance of its lead actor. Michel Duchaussoy fits the bill admirably, with a performance that is more moving than menacing. He is perfectly convincing as the young father who loses his son and then dedicates himself to one aim: revenge.

By contrast, the character of the film’s villain, Paul Decourt, is a much more ambiguous figure. Even before he appears on screen, he is painted as a brutal monstrosity, and our first view of him only confirms that impression. But then, as he gains Therier's confidence, a softer, more complex, character begins to emerge, and he takes on the character of a victim. This change of perspective is not original in cinema, but it seems to work very well in this film, and is achieved through a fine performance from Jean Yanne. There is also a memorable performance from Caroline Cellier as the vulnerable and beautiful Helène.

Pierre Jansen’s very atmospheric music adds a great deal to the mood of the film. His score heightens the drama that is already there rather than trying to create the impression of drama which is absent (a fault which is noticeable in many of Chabrol’s less successful films).

However, it is probably Jean Rabier’s masterful photography that is the film’s main strength. His work gives the film great energy and depth, perfectly fashioned for a dark psychological drama such as this. The scenes on the Breton coast are truly haunting and add a sense of suppressed horror and conflict, strangely capturing the essence of Thenier’s uncontrollable lust for revenge.

Like Thenier's gruesome obsession, this is a film to be savoured and enjoyed.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

This is one of the best Chabrol films I have seen. It's interesting to note that it's based upon a novel by Nicolas Blake, pen name of C. Day Lewis, at one time Poet Laureate of England and father of Daniel Day Lewis. From the movie, it seems Blake/Lewis was writing very much in the spirit of the great, and very cinematic, mistress of psychological crime writing, Patricia Highsmith. Though she never wrote anything exactly like this, the similarity is in the first-person narrative of a potential murderer, and in the way the story approaches an utterly evil person in an everyday upper-bourgeois setting; even the account of a man having an 'affair' with a woman he isn't necessarily attracted to is typically Highsmith; and there's attempted murder on a sailboat, and a man is almost bludgeoned on the head with a rock – Highsmith devices. The journal of the man contemplating murder, which is then found out, is something Highsmith might have liked.

Though as some have noted the narrator finds his way to the hit and run killer of his son a little too easily, the movie by allowing that is able to take us headlong into an astonishing, almost shocking situation. To get so close to evil -- this man who everybody hates, who would kill and cover it up and make his sister collaborate, who is abusive to everybody and everything, yet lives in bourgeois splendor, is so unusual it takes a while to realize how hair-raising it is.

Events move quickly after that. This is more understated than most of Chabrol and the greatest violence consists of a few slaps on the face of a lover or a boy, and words of abuse hurled by a boorish man and his nasty mother, but those moments are all the more disturbing for coming in such a buttoned-up world, and the action is very fast and economical compared to some of Chabrol's films. The scenes between the narrator and the boy Philippe where the boy says he wants his father dead and wishes Mark/Charles were his father, are very touching. The references to the rich variety of death descriptions in the Iliad are particularly resonant, as is the one at the end to Brahms quoting Hebrew scriptures, with the Brahms song sung by the great Kathleen Ferrier. The style may be neutral but the film is elegant and its look has not dated. The repugnant family scenes and the nightmarish dinners are typically Chabrol. The simplicity of the style is the more impressive seen in terms of possible followers like Ozon. They don't make them like this any more; they can't.

Michel Duchaussoy makes a good contrast to Yanne because he is so bland. He's an intentionally neutral figure whose moral status is meant to be ambiguous. Is he a hero out of Greek tragedy or is he just an escaping villain? Has he brought about justice -- has he even done it, since the son claims responsibility -- or has he merely been sucked into a whirlpool of evil? In the detective's office he finally begins to look for the first time like a sensitive writer. Before that he looked like a bland actor, but his opacity is just what Chabrol wants. Maybe he's one of Chabrol's most appealing heroes, but in the end what are we admiring?

Quentin Turnour, 'Que la bête meure', Senses of Cinema, March 2001

Que la bête meure Ed Howard from Only the Cinema

Eye for Film (Richard Mellor) review [4/5]

Que la bête meure Jeff Duncanson from Filmscreed, June 22, 2009

Que la bête meure (Claude Chabrol, 1969) Alex Lehmann from Reading Cinema, November 12, 2008

User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

User reviews from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, Ireland

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: ametaphysicalshark from prejudicemadeplausible.wordpress.com

User reviews from imdb Author: doctorlightning from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni) review

The New York Times (Roger Greenspun) review

The Vagrant Café - Christian Cinema [Seth Studer]

LE BOUCHER

France Italy (93 mi) 1970

Time Out review Tom Milne

Classically simple but relentlessly probing thriller, set in a French village shadowed by the presence of a compulsive killer. Some lovely Hitchcockian games, like the strange ketchup that drips onto a picnic hamburger from a clifftop where the latest victim has been claimed. But also more secretive pointers to social circumstance and the 'exchange of guilt' as Audran's starchy schoolmistress finds herself irresistibly drawn to the ex-army butcher she suspects of being the killer: the fact, for instance, that alongside the killer as he keeps vigil outside the schoolhouse, a war memorial stands sentinel with its reminder of society's dead and maimed. With this film Chabrol came full circle back to his first, echoing not only the minutely detailed provincial landscape of Le Beau Serge but its theme of redemption. The impasse here, a strangely moving tragedy, is that there is no way for the terrified teacher, bred to civilised restraints, to understand that her primeval butcher may have been reclaimed by his love for her.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Chabrol's triumph and also Stephane Audran's finest performance; only "le festin de Babette" will give her a part as strong as this one. She plays a luminous radiant beaming schoolteacher, teaching her pupils spelling with a little help from Honore de Balzac and dance with "le menuet du Bourgeois Gentilhomme,"a Molière-Lully collaboration. She epitomizes honesty, loyalty, innocence and devotion to her work. In direct contrast to her, we have Popaul, the butcher, masterfully played by Jean Yanne (He's never been as good as with Chabrol: please, please,do see "que la bête meure" (The beast must die)): He's obviously in love with Hélène /Audran but he realizes the gap between them. He's a crude uneducated brute, but his clumsiness is so touching you side with him. But we know from the start that won't be a happy story:the first scene, dealing with Cro-Magnon in dark caves heralds a story of blood and bestiality. Popaul is Cro-Magnon ,but he's also a victim of the war they waged with his blood. Chabrol 's camera insists on the war memorial, this inhuman piece of stone surrounded by four shells. LOOKS are more important than words between Popaul and Hélène, and as she begins to comprehend the horror of the situation, we know, that in spite of what Popaul has done, she feels for him. Chabrol excels in depicting a small village, French critics often compare him to an entomologist."Le boucher" remains his finest work to date.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford reviews the 8-disc Claude Chabrol Collection (excerpt)

For many Le Boucher is considered Chabrol's mid-career masterpiece and it's unlike any other suspense thriller you're likely to see. In a provincial French village, a celibate schoolteacher (Stephane Audran) finds herself attracted to the local butcher (Jean Yanne), an affable but somewhat melancholy man who's a veteran of the Indochina conflict. Meanwhile, a serial killer is on the loose in the province, killing and mutilating young women. Subtle and non-exploitative in its treatment of this subplot, Le Boucher is more disturbing for what it doesn't show and for the occasional macabre image such as the scene where blood from a fresh corpse drips down onto a little girl's sandwich from a rock ledge above. At the core of the film, though, is a tender romance set against a beautiful pastoral setting; it gives this thriller a poetic, lyrical quality that is in direct contrast to the horrific murders taking place just off-screen. The image quality on Pathfinder's DVD is excellent and the credit sequences, incorporating prehistoric cave paintings from the region, are particularly striking.

DVD extras: three language options with subtitles, biographies, a trailer, a still gallery and audio commentaries by screenwriters Howard Rodman (chair of the screenwriting division at USC and chairman of the screenwriting lab at Sundance) and Terry Curtis Fox (screenwriter & USC film department faculty member).

The commentaries, though loose and informal, are full of fascinating insights about Chabrol's working methods, thematic concerns and specific obsessions such as how food plays a crucial part in his selection of each film location as well as the narrative; in fact, Le Boucher opens with a wedding cake being carried down the street by several chefs on their way to a large reception with regional specialties and local wine being served.

VideoVista review Andrew Hook

During some local wedding celebrations in a small rural French village, much-loved schoolteacher Helene (Stéphane Audran), strikes up a conversation with butcher Popaul (Jean Yanne). Whilst they do not appear to have much in common, the foundations are laid for a tentative relationship which blossoms into love. In this regard, both Audran and Yanne are superb in their roles, which is essential as the believability of this relationship lies at the crux of the movie.

Where Helene's background in terms of love has not previously been happy - due to a bad relationship ten years in the past she has remained single - Popaul's background has largely been one of violence, fighting in the French army in Algeria and Indochina. Her character is wholesome, yet not twee; his is brutish, yet not apparently barbaric. However, as they allow their feelings for each other to develop something startling begins to happen around them. Young girls are found murdered and the finger of suspicion points heavily to Popaul. But will Helene betray him when she finds out what she knows?

Le Boucher (The Butcher) is a superb piece of quiet filmmaking that is both subtle and compelling. Despite the simplicity of the rural setting - which Chabrol pinpoints with his usual accuracy - the main characters have deep, complex emotions that are not easily directed by the moral code under which they know they must live. Helene's feelings towards Popaul become at odds with what she discovers about him - to admit the truth would undo her fantasy - to deny it simply perpetuates a lie. Desire for normality also runs through Popaul, who seems tortured by his compulsions but whose relief, through Helene, cannot control him. Chabrol marvellously balances their emotions: they both fear each other and yet fear losing each other. Whilst the ending is hardly revelatory, it feels honest. Chabrol cuts to the bone of their humanity without us losing an inch of our respect for them. Deservedly, the movie is a classic.

Like the other films in Arrow's Chabrol collection there are no extras on the DVD.

Le Boucher (1969) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

At the marriage of a colleague in a rural French village, the school teacher Helène meets the local butcher, Popaul. The two become friends, but Helène is reluctant to have a love affair because she was badly hurt by her last boyfriend. Popaul is also scarred by his past – he used to serve in the army and is haunted by memories of the atrocities he witnessed. The tranquillity of village life is abruptly shattered when a girl’s mutilated body is found in the woods. A few days later, the wife of Helène’s recently married colleague is discovered, with similar wounds. At the scene of this latest murder, Helène discovers a lighter which is identical to the one she gave Popaul as a birthday present...

Le boucher is an early and splendid example of the kind of gentle but engrossing thriller which would become the mainstay of Claude Chabrol’s film work. The director’s skills are very much in evidence in this film. The film begins with a charming and perceptive portrayal of provincial life, reminiscent of scenes from Chabrol’s earlier film, Le beau Serge. But then, as in many of Chabrol’s thrillers, the darker side of human nature begins to intrude, first very gradually, before making a spectacular and gripping entrance in the last twenty or so minutes of the film. The shift in mood from the normality of everyday life to the horror of an unfolding nightmare is brilliantly achieved in this film. The tension gradually increases, following Helène’s growing suspicions about Popaul, towards an unbearably suspense-filled climax.

This film boasts some excellent photography – the idyllic beauty of the French countryside contrasting with the claustrophobic horror of the night scenes. The opening title sequence involving pictures of primitive cave paintings, accompanied by some eerie music, sets the mood of the film very well. This adds to the feeling of suspense, because it causes us to question the apparent normality of the first part of the film and prepares us for what is to follow.

Chabrol is well-served by his two lead actors, Stéphane Audran and Jean Yanne. Yanne is particularly memorable as the butcher Popaul who behaves with apparent normality whilst always giving the impression of a darker, more sinister character – perfect material for Chabrol.

User comments from imdb Author: jono-73 from United Kingdom

Claude Chabrol's international reputation was cemented by a sequence of enduring films dating from the late sixties and early seventies, of which "Le Boucher" is one of the most famous. The influence of Henri-Georges Clouzot is apparent here, the provincial school setting recalling "Les Diaboliques". "Le Boucher" though, is first and foremost quintessential Chabrol, and as such it's less concerned with plotting than either Clouzot or Hitchcock, another cinematic forebear, the focus more specifically being the interior psychological states of his protagonists.

Helene (Stéphane Audran) and Popaul (Jean Yanne) meet at a wedding and strike up an instant friendship. She's the local schoolmistress and he's the village butcher, recently returned from 15 years in the army having served in Algeria and Indochina. He's evidently scarred by the violence he's seen and also by his relationship with a cold, unloving father who seemed to be the reason he left France in the first place. Helene too bears scars from the past, apparently dating back to a relationship ten years previously which ended badly, the trauma forestalling any further emotional entanglements. Thus, Helene and Popaul become tentatively attached without any subsequent physical consummation of their relationship. Against the backdrop of this, a series of killings of young women is taking place in the vicinity, and Helene has reason to believe that Popaul may be responsible. Yet curiously, she doesn't inform the police of her suspicions, nor does she confront Popaul. While she may be in some danger, therefore, a deeper suspicion lurks that she has undisclosed, perhaps unconscious, reasons of her own for continuing the friendship.

Typically, Chabrol isn't terribly interested in providing explicit explanations for the choices that his characters make, or the actions they carry out. Nor does he seem too concerned with the mechanics of suspense, preferring to conjure an omnipresent atmosphere of unease through subtle use of camera placement and a pared down script in which what remains unsaid hangs pregnantly over proceedings. The extensive use of locations in the Dordogne region provides a naturalistic feel, into which Audran and Yanne blend effortlessly. Each convincingly inhabits the bodies of these introverted characters whose amiable, worldly personae mask troubled interior lives that one can really only guess at. This obscurity is less frustrating than it is fascinating, however, because Chabrol is a master of pacing and mood, and he knows not only how to keep an audience gripped right to the end, but also how to haunt them afterwards.

Le Boucher - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications R.F. Cousins from Film Reference

910. Le Boucher (1970, Claude Chabrol) Kevin Lee from Shooting Down Pictures, March 27, 2008, also including: Video Essays (three of them!) for 909. La femme infidele and 910. Le boucher

Le Boucher Ed Howard from Only the Cinema, June 25, 2009

Boucher, Le Seth Studer from The Vagrant Café, January 5, 2004

Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol, 1970) Alex Lehmann from Reading Cinema, January 24, 2009

Epinions [metalluk]

Le Boucher John White from 10kbullets

Strictly Film School Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

Doug Pratt's Laserdisc Review

Boucher, Le Glenn Heath from Match Cuts, February 19, 2009

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Norwegianheretic from Los Angeles, California

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Turfseer from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: doctorlightning from United States

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gregory Meshman]

LA RUPTURE

aka: The Breakup

France Italy Belgium (124 mi) 1970

One of the key films of the 70s, La rupture is Claude Chabrol's most audacious experiment with narrative form--a modernist reworking of the melodrama (1970). Stephane Audran is innocence unprotected, a wife and mother whose husband has gone mad under LSD, and who now has to suffer a bizarre plot spun by her father-in-law to recover custody of her child. The "rupture" of the title belongs to the narrative, which begins with clear black/white, good/evil distinctions and then gradually self-destructs, breaking down into increasingly elliptical and imponderable fragments. Highly recommended.

Another characteristic Chabrol onslaught on the bourgeois family, which falls chronologically between the warmth of Le Boucher and the aridity of Ten Days' Wonder, and comprises the usual scrupulous mix of elements chosen to shock with the kind of cinematic references critics feel happy about only in quality movies. The plot comes from a Charlotte Armstrong thriller (The Balloon Man), and is loaded with the true stuff of pulp. Sex and dope, for instance, meet in a scene where a subnormal girl is drugged and forced to watch porn movies; earlier, Audran's husband, escalating to schizophrenia with help from interfering in-laws, tries to murder wife and child; while countering these, along with references to Balzac, is a wonderful echo of Murnau's Sunrise. What does it all add up to? Essentially, the Chabrol puppet threesome again, but in a different combination this time: a crazy construction that is magical and magnificent, although you may have to look twice to make sure it isn't just crazy.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

"La rupture" might be the best Chabrol. I've recently seen it and I think it has improved a lot with time,more than any other movie of the Chabrol 1967-1973 heyday, even more, in several respects, than "le boucher" or "que la bête meure." Completely unrecognized, there are a lot of Chabrol fans that don't even know the existence of "la rupture,"and the critic-when they know it - has always been condescending.

Why is it the best Chabrol? Because it has almost everything that we find in the director's other works: love, suspense, bourgeoisie contempt, mystery, humor-mostly black-, and even surrealism. Two influences are glaring as far as"la rupture" is concerned: Alfred Hitchcock 's (the actor, telling the heroine that the world is a dirty place recalls Uncle Charlie in "shadow of a doubt") and Henri-George Clouzot's (the boarding house recalls "l'assassin habite au 21")

The main topic is the power of money; never Chabrol has been as convincing as here. Michel Bouquet, the accurate prototype of a French bourgeois circa 1970 is terrifying. He's got a wallet by way of heart and he stalks her daughter-in-law as a spider on its web, to get the custody of his grandson.When Audran , desperate, comes back from the airport, two scenes pack a real wallop :the first one shows the reunited couple, desperately trying to pick up the pieces, whereas they know they are bound to fail. Audran and Drouot are harrowing and the spectator wish they could get out of this money pigpen. A second scene, just following this one, shows Audran telling her contempt to the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. Chabrol is actually speaking out here, and his voice has never been so devastating.

There 's a lot of subplots and never a Chabrol supporting cast has been so important. He achieves a real tour de force: every character is interesting, be it the owner of the boarding-house, her alcoholic husband, her retarded daughter, the three old ladies, the villain (Machiavellian Jean Pierre Cassel), his nymphomaniac accomplice, the good doctor....

Money allows very bad things, the right to pervert an innocent child is not the least. The scenes between the villains and Elise, the poor idiot have a contemporary feel. Money allows the over-possessive mother (an Hitchcockian influence again) to pick up her beloved child (in his thirties!), to read him "the knights of the round table,"and to poison him with protection. Money allows to tarnish a brave mother's reputation when she makes her best to cope with her plight.

The movie eventually drags down the whole cast for an astounding finale, complete with drugs, deaths, hallucinations (a bit dated, admittedly) and the balloon release comes as a relief.

Stephane Audran, more than 15 years before "babette's feast" is wonderfully cast as a mother who 's got to fight for her child and her honor. Her beauty radiates in this filthy world. Once again,"la rupture " contains whole everything that Chabrol had done before and heralds the best that he has done since. It deserves to be restored to favor.

NB:It's superior to Charlotte Armstrong's "balloon man" which provided the story.

User comments Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The plot: Charles (Jean-Claude Drouot) is a tentative writer with a drug problem who goes berserk and attacks his own wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran) and their baby boy in a rage fit (oh those amazing Chabrol's opening sequences!!). Hélène files for divorce and custody of their child, but Charles' wealthy father Régnier (Michel Bouquet) is ready to fight dirty for the boy's custody: Régnier promises money and a job to shady Paul Thomas (Jean-Pierre Cassel) if he can find out nasty things about Hélène. As Paul tries hard but fails to find skeletons in Hélène's closet, he begins to scheme foul plans to do her in. But things go terribly wrong.

"La Rupture" (1970) is a study about misleading appearances and the destructive power of money and of social conventions. In the film, conventions play a very important part: Hélène used to be a stripper so people assume she's something of a whore, which she wasn't and isn't. Régnier is a rich and respectable bourgeois, but ready to play dirty to have things his own way. Paul is seductive, funny and good-looking, so everybody likes him -- even Hélène -- though he is rotten to the core.

The film belongs to a very rich period in Claude Chabrol's career, including "Les Biches" (1968), "Une Femme Infidèle" (1969) and "Le Boucher" (1970), all of them Hitchcockian in style but much darker, more violent, critical and tragic. These four films portray Chabrol's perennial (self)-criticism on the French bourgeoisie, while dealing with apparently "normal" characters going berserk (Jean-Claude Drouot here, Jacqueline Sassard in "Les Biches", Jean Yanne in "Le Boucher", Michel Bouquet in "Une Femme Infidèle"). They all star his then-wife, beautiful, fascinating Stéphane Audran, here in a terrific performance, whose acting style, world-weary eyes, fabulous legs, high cheekbones and cool sexiness is only comparable to Marlene Dietrich's.

In "La Rupture", not everything in the plot strives to be "believable" - this is not the standard Hollywood thriller! It's rather a tragedy with surrealistic overtones and a very black sense of humor. To fully enjoy it, one must forget about "plot logic" and marvel at the rich character study, particularly of the main trio (Hélène, Régnier, Paul) but also the supporting ones (Régnier's wife, the three MacBethian "witches" who live at the pension, the understanding lawyer, the pension owner and her alcoholic husband played by the great Jean Carmet, Paul's nymphomaniac girlfriend etc) depicting the "evil ways" of human nature. What is refreshing with "La Rupture", as in Chabrol's best movies, is that things never happen the way we expect them to - there's always an offbeat element coming along.

Don't watch this film if you only like thrillers with Cartesian logic, lots of action and gunshots; but do watch this if you like to see an experienced, talented filmmaker in full power of his craft who, though dealing with a below par material (the novel on which the film is based), manages to make a virulent attack on social conventions while thoroughly entertaining you. PS: The final scene may be too symbolic and "loose" for some tastes.

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3/5]

La Rupture (1970) – The Tragic Demise of a Picaroon Jonathan McCalmont from Ruthless Culture

Rupture, La Will Laughlin

Claude Chabrol's LA RUPTURE (1970) Robert Monell from I’m in a Jess Franco State of Mind, February 28, 2008

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

VideoVista review Ian R. Faulkner

User reviews from imdb Author: jcappy from ny-vt

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: au_bonheur_des_dames from United Kingdom

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL (Juste Avant la Nuit)

France Italy (106 mi) 1971

A fascinating Claude Chabrol film, much more subtle in its effects than most of his work of this period (1971). Michel Bouquet is a model middle-class family man who kills his mistress--the wife of his best friend--in a fit of perverse sexual excitement. But neither Bouquet's wife (Stephane Audran, of course) nor his friend (Francois Perier) will allow him the self-indulgence of punishment. Chabrol adds another layer of irony through his careful use of consciously artificial tracking shots, which break the narrative at precisely determined points. Recommended.

ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont]

Chabrol's tortuous, entertaining study of murder and the expiation of guilt in a small suburban town, a low-key thriller about a husband who murders his mistress (his best friend's wife), tries to confess and accept punishment, but finds a bland bourgeois unwillingness to recognise guilt from his own wife and friends. Organised in Chabrol's lurid, witty and elegant manner, this was his last productive mining of the themes of La Femme Infidèle before they were transmuted through repetition into the farcical intrigues of Les Noces Rouges. Direction, acting and script are all meticulous, and the use of subplot (the meek accountant who robs the hero's safe) is especially fine.

Juste avant la nuit (1971) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Charles Masson, an advertising executive, is having an affair with Laura, the wife of his best friend, François. During a violent love making session, Charles kills Laura. He flees the scene of the crime and returns to his loving wife Hélène as if nothing had happened. Although he appears to have got away with the murder, his guilt soon becomes too much to bear…

Juste avant la nuit is another meticulously crafted psychological drama from Claude Chabrol. It is one of his darkest, most introspective works, one which explores a recurring theme in his cinema: the all-consuming need for a criminal to expunge his guilt once he has committed a crime. The irony of this film is that a perfect crime has been committed and the perpetrator would have got way with it if his only his conscience would let him. As in Chabrol's later film, Les Noces rouges, a murderer will remain a prisoner of his guilt until the day he is unmasked and judged for his crime. Only then, can he taste freedom again.

In many ways, this is the mirror image of Chabrol’s earlier suspense thriller La Femme infidèle : the two films appear to tell the same story from a totally different perspective. The similarities are reinforced by Chabrol casting the same lead actors Michel Bouquet and Stéphane in effectively the same roles (again named Charles and Hélène). As in La Femme infidèle, the plot revolves around a murder which results from marital infidelity. But from thereon, the two films differ markedly.

In La Femme infidèle, the murder was deliberate and the murderer goes to extreme lengths to avoid capture. In Juste avant la nuit, the murder is entirely accidental yet it provokes an intense guilt response in the murderer. The irony is that in both cases the murderer, Charles, is tortured by his crime – in the first by fear of being found out, in the second by a guilt which no one can understand.

Whilst Juste avant la nuit allows Chabrol ample scope for exploring some of his favourite themes (such as bourgeois complacency and the darker side of human nature), it is less accesible than La Femme infidèle. It is, all the same, a compelling and stylishly filmed work, featuring some great acting performances (Michel Bouquet is extraordinary here) and the usual blend of Chabrolesque intrigue, drama and suspense.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

...Et regardait Cain (Victor Hugo, La Légende des Siècles) (trad: The eye was in the grave watching Cain...)

The follow-up to "la Rupture," with the same actors (Bouquet and Audran), "Juste Avant la Nuit" is its exact contrary. In the light of the chilly -and with hindsight , totally unfair-reviews "la Rupture" had received, Chabrol came back to the simple bald style of "la Femme Infidèle." "La Rupture" had a lot of subplots, characters and action whereas "Juste Avant la Nuit" is not even a thriller: it's pure psychological drama; and there are only three characters: the husband (who sleeps with his best friend's wife), the wife and the friend.

Charles (Bouquet) accidentally killed his lover as they were playing S/M games. No one suspects him, not even the victim's friend who saw him once there in the room where they used to meet. Life could go on. Like Michel Duchaussoy in "Que la Bete Meure" (1969), he could get away with it. He isn't even a suspect. The Police investigate, but they do not ask him any questions.

The main originality of "Juste Avant la Nuit" is that Charles is his own worst enemy. He is literally eaten with remorse, he wants to be punished! After all, in his advertising agency, his accountant who has embezzled is arrested and will be tried. So why not him? Little by little, he confesses the whole thing to his wife who thinks that" it's only an accident." Audran's character possesses ambiguity: in several respects, she's still some kind of child; we see her make chocolate cake and play with her children; we never see her have sex with her husband and they do not share the same bed (an element which was already present in "la Femme Infidèle" ) The scene where Bouquet describes his crime and his -obscure- motives is frighteningly intense, Chabrol makes us attend the scene in lavish details without using any flashbacks (the prologue was also very restrained ). The looks and smiles which were a true sign language in "la Femme Infidele" have been replaced by low voices ,almost whispering. (Half of the lines are whispered) When he tells the victim's husband the whole truth, the man seems impassible, a Buddah's face. "I could have done the same,should Helene have been Laura" "I do not like revenge."

"You want to be punished cause you want to suffer " his wife screams out of despair."You used to see that girl for the same reasons."

Bouquet gives a tormented complex portrayal of a bourgeois - Bouquet says he is afraid of becoming a bourgeois, that's perhaps why Chabrol takes pity on him in the last sequences - who thinks that any crime must be punished : he is in direct contrast to his character in "la Rupture."

"Juste Avant la Nuit" belongs to that short period (4 or 5 years ) during which Chabrol was arguably the best director in France and was making the most brilliant films of his career.

All those works end in quietness and peace: on the sea ("Que la bête meure,"where Michel Duchaussoy sails away), in a luminous green landscape in "la Femme Infidèle," near a lake ("le Boucher" ), with a balloon release ("la Rupture") or here in front of the sea where children are playing. "They're beginning to forget" Grannie says ....

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Juste avant le nuit Ed Howard from Only the Cinema, June 26, 2009

Eye for Film (Caro Ness) review [4/5]

VideoVista review Andrew Hook

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review July 30, 1999. also here: Movie Review - Juste avant la nuit - With Chabrol, the High Tide ...

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C+]

TEN DAYS WONDER (La Décade prodigieuse)

France Italy (110 mi) 1971

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Here Chabrol inaugurates a new genre, the theological thriller. Charles (Perkins at his most charismatically unstable) wakes from a dream of Creation to find himself with blood on his hands. He turns for help to his erstwhile professor of philosophy (Piccoli), and persuades him back to the Van Horn country estate to use his 'Logic of Science' in sorting out the family mess. The estate is a 1925 dream engineered by Charles' adoptive father Theo Van Horn (Welles), who is worshipped by his child-bride (Jobert), and sculpted as Jupiter by the awed Charles. Chabrol's movies, echoing Fritz Lang's, have long been edging towards a confrontation with the theme of Fate. This is it. Theo Van Horn chooses to play God, creating his own world, dictating the behaviour of those he places in it, taking care to add flaws to his creation to keep it breathing. But God hasn't reckoned with his own capacity for imperfection, for such shining qualities as jealousy, hatred, revenge; so he comes to his own grief, faced with the lonely fact that his creation is a nine-day wonder... Chabrol's movies grow less and less like anyone else's; this is one worth seeing again and again.

La Décade prodigieuse (1971) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

A young man, Charles, wakes up one morning in a hotel room, his hands stained with blood. He has no recollection of the events of the past few days. Half convinced he is going mad, he appeals to his former university professor, Paul Régis, to stay with him at his father’s country house and analyse his behaviour. Charles’ father, Théo, is a domineering eccentric who insists that all his family dress in 1920s garb. He is married to a young woman, Hélène, whom he adopted when she was a small girl. Since childhood, Charles and Hélène have been close, but recently they have started to have an affair. Disaster threatens when Charles’ love letters to Hélène are stolen and someone begins to blackmail the adulterous wife. With no income of his own, Charles is compelled to steal money from his father to pay off the mysterious blackmailer. When Paul finds himself implicated in the staged theft of Hélène’s jewels, he has no recourse but to betray Charles. It is only after he has left this strange menagerie that Paul realises the truth. Someone is about to be killed...

La Decade prodigieuse is not the most well-oiled of Claude Chabrol’s thrillers, and coming after such excellent examples of the genre as Le Boucher (1969) et Que la bête meure (1969), it is something of a let down. Whilst the director succeeds in sustaining an aura of grim menace - for which the often weird cinematography is largely responsible - inept plotting, poor editing and weak dialogue make this a painfully stilted work. Even the combined talents of four great actors cannot breach the stifling envelope of complacency that shrouds this film, although casting Anthony Perkins (a.k.a. Norman Bates) in the role of yet another (presumed) psychopath and Awesome Welles as an all-knowing patriarch is hardly likely to have won Chabrol many awards for original thinking.

The denouement to the story is rather ingenious, but the pay off is greatly diminished by the faltering narrative that precedes it and a shameless lack of depth in the characterisation (Marlène Joberts’ character is so two dimensional that the actress could have been replaced by a full-size cardboard cut-out without anyone noticing). Chabrol was himself dissatisfied with this film, citing as one of the reasons for its failure the fact that, for commercial reasons, the film had to be made in English. This would account for the ropey dialogue - which is even worse in the badly dubbed French version. Mr Welles’ insistence on wearing a fake green nose doesn’t help matters either...

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

All comments bar one are very negative, no one mentions writer Ellery Queen, those two cousins who gave some of the best murder mysteries of the twentieth century. Theirs is the metaphysical detective story (Borges admired Ellery Queen), theirs is the unexpected final clue, theirs is the "nursery chryme" dear to Agatha Christie. Some of their novels are on a level with "And then there were none."

All Ellery Queen novels feature Ellery Queen himself as the detective. Here he is replaced by Michel Piccoli's character, Paul Régis, which is not a big problem.

But the problem lies in the fact that most of the viewers did not recognize "their "Claude Chabrol. If they knew his numerous works, they'd realize that only a dozen (roughly, the 1959-1961, the 1967-73 golden era and some scattered later films (l'enfer, la ceremonie) are really Chabrolesque, that is to say detective plot-with- bourgeois background-and ominous atmosphere. There are plenty of bizarre oeuvres in such a huge filmography (a lot of movies should never have been made; Clouzot, who easily artistically surpasses him only made 11 movies, only one of which is mediocre).

Actually " decade " took the eerie elements of "la rupture" (1970) and tightened them up. But whereas "La rupture" had a chabrolesque atmosphere and the usual suspects (Stephane Audran, Michel Bouquet), "Decade" features actors Chabrol had not used before (and to my knowledge never would). Coming after "juste avant la Nuit," "decade" could only be slagged off when it was released. Today, I must confess that it's not that much bad and compared with recent fiascos such as "la Fleur du Mal" or "au Coeur du Mensonge " or "rien ne va plus" or.... (the list is endless) it retains some originality. I can easily comprehend that people who do not know E.Queen 's world could be infuriated by this Punch and Judy style, but Chabrol faithfully transferred the writer's atmosphere to the screen :the gigantic metaphysical metaphor, a nervous Anthony Perkins -a good choice- , a enough is enough Orson Welles-who else?- , God himself. Do not get me wrong: "decade " is no masterpiece but it is a curious offbeat work, sometimes clumsy (Chabrol felt compelled to "explain" the last scenes for fear his audience may not have understood), sometimes brilliant (the little girl in the train reciting the ten commandments).

"Decade" verges on fantastic and predates another non-Chabrolesque intriguing flick "Alice ou la dernière fugue." I have a warm spot in my heart for these two despised films .

"Decade": a failed success or a successful failure? And if you hate it (such is the case with many users) it's better than to be unconcerned about it.

User comments from imdb Author: berthe bovy (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from paris, france

One of the great anti-detective films of the 60s and 70s (such as THE SPIDER'S STRATEGEM, BLOW-UP, THE PARALLAX VIEW) in which the traditional, detached, problem-solving power of the detective is removed and he finds himself lost in a labyrinth. The detective here, Paul Regis, is so much the embodiment of reason that he is a professor of philosophy. He observes, analyses, seeks patterns in a bewildering maze - his genius results in the suicidal death of the wrongfully suspected hero.

The film opens as a young sculptor, Charles Van Horn (Anthony Perkins), wakes up, hands bloodied, mind disoriented, thinking of ocean-deep life, in a hotel. He has no idea how he got there, and Chabrol visualises his disturbed mind with extreme tilted angles and harrowing electronic music. He calls the only person he knows in the area, an old lecturer of his, Paul Regis (Michel Piccoli), and asks him to visit his home, a vast provincial mansion presided over by his bulky, Americanised father Theo, played with a lovely mixture of melancholy and play by Orson Welles, and his pretty young wife, Helene (Marlene Jobert).

Beneath the bourgeois facade, Paul finds an almost Gothic seething of adultery, power games, mad old ladies, blackmail, theft, Oedipal trauma. Charles and Helene have begun an illicit relationship, and are being blackmailed. Charles steals the money from Theo, and both parties enlist Paul to spy on the other. Paul finds his detachment, however, increasingly compromised, and in the climactic 'revelation' scene, all fingers point at him.

This film is based on an Ellery Queen novel, exemplar of all that is lucid and simplistic about the detective genre, in which complex plotting is always framed in such a way as to be accessible to the reader, so he can have a go at playing detective himself. They follow the usual formulae: crime-investigation-solution; disruption-reassertion of order.

Chabrol's film is Ellery Queen written by Borges. It subverts every tenet of the genre in a myriad of ways. Although the traditional crime film is deliberately artificial, it depends on a surface realism (plausible settings and outwardly recognisable characters) to succeed. Chabrol foregrounds his material's gleeful playfulness at every turn. The viewer is never allowed to lose himself in the plot; the elaborate, disruptive camera movements; the intrusion of decor into the plot; the wild playing with time and point of view; the 'amateurish', unrealistic acting and stilted dialogue; the wayward plotting all point up the artifice and unbelievability of the film, the sense of a godlike puppetmaster pulling strings. This sense is crucial to the story, when the narrative puppetmaster (Theo) is linked directly to the camera, i.e. the director (Theo's wife bears a remarkable resemblance to Chabrol's wife, Stephane Audran).

This foregrounding of artifice reverberates throughout the film, which creates an opposition between creators (Theo, Charles) and interpreters (Paul). This is linked to the traditional crime story - someone 'creates' a crime that must be interpreted by the detective. This kind of pattern, however, suggests a social order in which reality can be known, ordered and controlled. Chabrol suggests that this is not the case.

He shows the unknowability in many ways. The film is set in a rarefied space away from the 'real' world, which is also a fantasy set where Theo plays out his dreams of 20s grandeur. Much of the plot is related by characters whose reliability is seriously in doubt from the start. WONDER starts with Charles emerging from a dream, and the film never loses this sense of the oneiric. Scenes repeat themselves as characters are lost in a maze, literally so, with all the repeated corridors and stairs in the film, the profusion of mirrors and windows that reflect back or multiply meanings, the decor that constantly dwarfs the characters.

WONDER is about play, but also quotes from a famous play, Oedipus Rex, which is among other things the first detective story. Charles sleeps with his mother, Helene, and tries to destroy his father. This founding human myth is countered by the father with Christian patterning (in a way that foreshadows SEVEN); both cancel each other out, one is left with neither catharsis nor redemption. But Oedipus was both detective and criminal, and

so is Paul (Theo says he is guiltier than him). Images of sight and blindness pervade the film (linked in a very real way to the cinema), and the final 'revelation' is lit by a lamp half Atlas, half eye. But the detective is truly blind, trying like Holmes to fix patterns in the abyss, revealing that abyss as he fails to do so, carelessly costing lives. There is, ironically, no death, UNTIL the detective makes his judgement, rather than the other way round.

The film is also a brilliant family saga, the country house a site for all manner of generational psychodramas (the paedophiliac implications of Theo's and Helene's marriage are chilling). But there are Oedipal struggles too, and the apparent artifice masks a very personal Chabrol film. His casting is very deliberate, with Welles playing a self-destructive KANE figure, playing God through kindness; Perkins invoking both PSYCHO (and the Hitch suggestions are both brilliantly misleading (we're all looking at the mother!) and enriching (the 'innocent' wrongfully accused; the Catholic depths; the famed concept of transferring guilt), and the (Welles-directed) THE TRIAL; Piccoli (veteran of bourgeois bashers Bunuel and Godard, as well as a link, through LE MEPRIS, to Chabrol hero Lang).

The film is remarkably perspicacious about class and money (the 'God' figure is a poor Frenchman who made his fortune in America) - and the country house is used in its double metaphor for both the state at large and the mind. Amid all the sterile, despairing , destructive, man-made constructs, Chabrol has never lost his beautiful sympathy with the French countryside. This is one of a series of stunning thrillers made by Chabrol in the late 60s/early 70s that blow apart the conservatism of the genre.

La Décade Prodigieuse – Ten Days' Wonder (Claude Chabrol 1971) C. Jerry Kutner from Bright Lights After Dark, June 26, 2009

Cinepassion.org Francisco F. Croce

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Ten Days Wonder Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gregory Meshman]

HIGH HEELS (Docteur Popaul)

France Italy (95 mi) 1972

The project on which Chabrol first gave his cynicism full rein and took his mordant playfulness to outrageous lengths. This coarse farce, hardly worth the vitriol poured on its apparent misogyny, always looked more like the director's revenge on the French mass audience, who had consistently ignored his good movies, but would accept anything with Belmondo, and in this case did. Ironic inversions of the star's image, charming ugly women for their 'moral beauty', or 'unmanned' as his schemes rebound, ring pretty hollow.

DVDBeaver.com [Per-olaf Strandberg]

Belmondo is an obsessive medic who has an ugliness fetish and falls in love with the homely Farrow. They wed, but before long her vivacious sister Antonelli pays a visit. Belmondo forgets his desire for the blemished and discovers the meaning of beauty. He drugs Farrow each night and ritualistically kills off his sister-in-law's three husbands. Farrow, however, is not blind to his ways and devises a plan that convinces Belmondo he has become paralyzed. He is driven to kill again, with himself as the victim. A fine black-humor comedy from Chabrol, one of the leading directors of the New Wave. In a statement that applies to this film, Chabrol has said that he likes "to lead the audience along, to set them chasing off in one direction, and then to turn things inside out."

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

At the time, Chabrol was producing movies at an alarming speed. And that period is still looked upon his very best: "la femme infidèle" "le boucher" "que la bête meure" "la rupture" and "les noces rouges" are unqualified musts for any Chabrol fan. Two works took a divergent road in this golden era: "la decade prodigieuse " was a failed (but not completely wretched) attempt at transferring one of Ellery Queen's absorbing books to the screen . And then "Docteur Popaul" which is from Hubert Monteilhet's "meurtres à loisirs." Monteilhet writes thrillers which sometimes recall Boileau-Narcejac ("Diabolique" "Vertigo" ) but he introduces a sense of humor and a certain bad taste not present in the works of the writers I mention above. Chabrol has given a totally true rendering of Monteilhet atmosphere: the set up, the grotesque characters (particularly a made look ugly Mia Farrow: why her anyway? The director had to dub her in French ). The conclusion, like in any Monteilhet's book, is immoral to a fault. But deliciously immoral.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

User reviews from imdb Author: Benjamin Gauss from Salzburg, Austria

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

WEDDING IN BLOOD (Les Noces Rouges)

France Italy (95 mi) 1973

ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont]

Coinciding with the French elections, Les Noces Rouges was banned ostensibly because it was about a real murder case, but obviously also for the broad portrayal of its Gaullist villain - a man with a sly plan for purchasing property and developing it as factory-workers' high-rise dwellings plus plastics factory which, while benefiting the town, will end up pouring a small fortune into his own pocket. Sadly, although there is more positive vulgarity around than ever, Chabrol doesn't seem to know how to take his errant couple. As more or less critically approached figures of fun, they're great; it's when he falls in love with them that the film goes awry. Should have been sly and funny, or dark and tragic; ends up neither one nor the other.

Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review

Yet another facet of Claude Chabrol's view of the bourgeois life as a facade behind which lurk extravagant, destructive, and often totally ridiculous passions (1973). Like his idol Alfred Hitchcock, Chabrol loves to work variations on the disintegration of an ordered world; but unlike Hitchcock, who keeps his order and his chaos neatly separated, Chabrol concentrates more on character, so that when the bottom drops out, it does so precisely and inevitably. Stephane Audran and Michel Piccoli star as adulterous lovers who never manage to realize that there's an easier way out of their predicament than murder. A smashing work from a master craftsman.

Les Noces rouges (1973) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Pierre Maury and Lucienne Delamare are conducting a frenzied extra-marital affair. The intensity of their clandestine meetings is a reflection of their otherwise empty lives. Both are trapped in loveless marriages with partners they despise. Pierre’s wife Clotilde is perpetually ill and has no desire for physical contact. Lucienne’s husband, Paul, is a self-important businessman who is also deputy mayor of the local community. By killing his wife, Pierre believes he will be free to spend more time with Lucienne. However, to avoid arousing suspicion, Pierre and Lucienne are compelled to meet only during the night. Then Paul discovers his wife’s infidelity. He intends to blackmail Pierre, whom he has roped in as his mayoral assistant, to participate in a dubious land development scheme. Disgusted, Pierre and Lucienne decide to dispose of Paul…

Once again, director Claude Chabrol sets about exploring the not so discrete charm of the bourgeoisie in another well-honed psychological thriller. Here the central theme is how the endless pursuit of freedom can rebound and result in ever-growing imprisonment. The characters Pierre and Lucienne find release from the shackles of their barren marriages by defying the standards of middle class respectability and acting out love making trysts in the manner of a cheap porno movie. When the obstacles to their perceived lack of freedom are removed one by one, they each find it more difficult to get together – either because they genuinely believe there is a risk of their seedy affair being discovered or, equally probably, because the excitement has begun to wane. There is a resonance with classic film noir, where the pursuit of freedom almost invariably ends with failure or disillusionment.

Whilst less intense and artistically striking than Chabrol’s earlier great thrillers of this period – Le Boucher (1969), La Femme infidèle (1969), Que la bête meure (1969), to name just three – Les Noces rouges is nonetheless just as effective as a satire of bourgeois double standards and an exploration of the darker side of human behaviour. It is possible to regard the film as a black comedy rather than a conventional thriller, and indeed the trio Pierre-Lucienne-Paul makes a far more amusing triangle than in most of Chabrol’s other films (where the triangle is a recurring motif). Part of the reason for this is Claude Piéplu’s delightfully parodied portrayal of a pompous businessman with grand political ambitions. But there are other comical elements which Chabrol uses to cleverly darken the mood (note that most other directors use comedy to lighten the mood). For one, there’s a slight comic veneer to Michel Piccoli and Stephane Audran’s performances. Their love scenes look as if they were written for a debauched sex comedy, and the scenes where they meet in public “as near strangers” to keep up appearances are irresistibly funny.

One intriguing aspect of the film is Hélène, Lucienne's daughter. In three of Chabrol’s previous films, the character of Hélène was played by Stephane Audran and was central to the story, to a greater or lesser extent a victim of the bourgeois milieu she inhabits. In Les noces rouges, Hélène is a minor character who provides a crucial part in closing the narrative – a kind of self-appointed judge who acts with supreme innocence to restore order and harmony to a broken universe. Here, Hélène is the epitome of the bourgeois system, smug and content in her comfy middle class bubble. But she is also an angel of virtue, motivated solely by the desire to bring happiness to those around her – just like the self-righteous little politician she will inevitably become…

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Claude Chabrol started as part of the nouvelle vague, as contemporary of Truffaut and -yuk!- Godard, but his roots are in the old cinema, that of Clouzot and Duvivier. That's why his best movies hold up very well today.

A first golden era included such works as "à double tour" "le beau Serge" and "les cousins." Then came a period of barren inspiration which ended with "les biches" (1967) with which Chabrol entered his most fruitful period the 1967-1973 era: at least five of the works of this time are first-rate works: "la femme infidel" (1968; dubious American remake); "the beast must die" (1969); "the butcher" (1969) his towering achievement; "la rupture"(1970) his most underrated; "juste avant la nuit" (1971) and finally "les noces rouges" which seems today as the last hurrah, a farewell to a golden era.

Unlike the four other films I mention "les noces rouges" is based on a true story which was widely talked about in France of the early seventies. But, true or not, Chabrol's touch is strong and he makes the story a chabrolesque plot to the core. The bourgeois whom Chabrol depicted in "la femme infidel" or "la rupture," and who was played by Michel Bouquet has turned into a caricature. Enter Claude Piéplu, and with his high-pitched voice, he almost overshadows the excellent Stephane Audran and Michel Piccoli. An impotent self-satisfied mean bourgeois with political ambitions, he accepts his wife's(Audran) affair with his deputy mayor (Piccoli), more, it's fine with him because it will be useful for his shady business. The scene when he tells the lovers so is incredible; lines such as "I want everybody to be happy around me!" he delivers to a stunned Piccoli and a bewildered Audran give goose pimples.

You will notice the omnipresence of water: in "que la Bete meure" and "le boucher," it symbolized a return from hell, not necessarily a happy end but a world with some peace of mind. In "les noces rouges" it appears during the love scenes (played by the two actors with more gusto than usual: never in a Chabrol movie the carnal act had been -and will be-so much to the fore) as a symbol of innocence (after all, the two people have no sex with their legal partners) in the sin. But it's the heroine's daughter, called Helene, who epitomizes innocence and some kind of deus ex machina.

What's more puzzling is that Stephane Audran's characters were all called Hélène in the four other movies I mention: in "la femme infidel' Helene had a lover but with some excuse: her husband appeared like a washout sexually; in "le boucher" she was a brave schoolteacher, purity flesh on the bone; in "la rupture" her character had to fight against a hostile bourgeois world. In "les noces rouges" Audran, called Lucienne, is on the other side of the mirror: she really becomes a criminal, almost in a dream. When her daughter, Hélène, who took the place she occupied in former movies asks her "I want you to be happy, mom, please tell me the truth" Audran does not seem to realize all that means. And when she does, it will be too late.

Les noces rouges" is also a movie which depicts political life circa 1970 in a small town where gossips run rampant. And as usual, Chabrol is marvelous when it comes to paint vignettes of ordinary life -see the scene in the library-

It would take Chabrol five years to muster this sort of command ("Violette Nozieres" (1978)),and although he has occasionally made great works ("l'enfer" " la cérémonie" ), he will be remembered in fifty years or so for those gems of the late sixties/early seventies era. "Les noces rouges" is a must.

User comments from imdb Author: timothy tangs (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from little hintock, england

The films of Claude Chabrol are probably most famous for their artifice, their heightened use of colour, stylised plots and action, elaborate, distancing camerawork, intrusive decor and music, especially their turning domestic melodrama into murder mysteries. But Chabrol first made his name with LE BEAU SERGE, a scrupulously naturalistic rural drama, and mined this vein throughout his career, co-existing in compelling tension with the artifice.

LES NOCES ROUGES is on one level Chabrol's most accessible film, with a straightforward plot and realistic filming. The thriller elements are for the most part sublimated, and instead we have a moving tale of adultery and political skullduggery in provincial France. Michel Piccoli is Pierre Maury, deputy vice-mayor, whose wife is permenantly incapacitated by asthma. In the extraordinary opening sequence, his unreciprocated loving gesture to his wife seems like a strangling; as she mopes off to bed, he, in real time, walks through the street, to his car, drives into the forest and there meets a beautiful red-head, Lucienne Delamare, wife of the mayor. They make love on the river bank.

It is here the film becomes formally interesting, and questions its very picturesque realism. Like a relay-race, we follow Lucienne now, driving in her car home. There is an edit in her journey though, and because the symmetry doesn't add up, we ask what's missing. When she arrives home it's night, making us wonder how far she lives from the forest, or what she's been doing in the meantime.

After dinner with her husband and daughter by another man, she goes to bed, and thinks/dreams about how she and Paul met, how he became a political partner of her husband, how they made love anywhere and everywhere like teenagers on heat - this is the slyly funny film's most comic section, as they sneak into the local chateau, or are nearly caught fornicating behind a bush.

The thing is, Lucienne's going into dream/thought mode is signalled by a conventional fading, and by the outside noises of a local celebration. Not only does she visualise things she cannot know - Paul's glum dinner with his wife, for example - but the sequence breaks off not with her, but Pierre, when the image fades 'back', and the outside noise intrudes. What's going on here? How do we reconcile these formal breaches within the film's surface realism?

Is it enough to suggest that the film's 'narrative' is actually the projection of Lucienne's desires? Why does Paul come out of Lucienne's dream? Chabrol was one of the first to take Hitchcock's artistry seriously - do the REAR WINDOW-like similarity of initials link Paul and Pierre closer than they seem?

This seeming fantasy serves at least two purposes. Firstly it shows that a bond that transcends social rules and probable social ostracism is not all that real - the scene in the chateau, beginning in excitable joy, role play and daring, ending in alienation and disillusion, hinted as much. Alternatively, this realm of fantasy, escape, transcendence, can be seen as a riposte to the very real world of corrupt politics and paralysing marriages. What seemed a rather old-hat investigation into bourgeois transgression becomes something far richer, a psychological dramatisation of a woman's desires.

But Chabrol is an ironist, and he would never go too far with any one character. We might regard, for example, the husband and daughter as marginal figures in the main love story if they weren't called Paul and Helene, and therefore linked to Chabrol's other 70s films of love triangles featuring these characters. We expect some kind of intrusion from these, and we do, powerfully so. Indeed, Helen's effacing observing becomes almost supernatural as it comes to wreak passive havoc, as do her constant paralleling with paintings. The Hitchcockian use of a church (and the VERTIGOesque music) also suggest a spiritual dimension seemingly minimal, but possibly devastating.

Whatever. This is a Chabrol masterpiece. His recreation of provincial France is beautiful, but always corresponds to emotional states. The acting is extraordinary. Piccoli is one of the great actors, and his burly-eyed charm, decency and humour suggest a man ready to murder, whose embraces are like frenzied maulings, whose civility is undermined by his slurping of soup.

Claude Pieplu as the husband is a wonderful comic character who initially suggests a repellent but laughable Charles Bovary (who was once called a monster because he snored on his wedding night), and becomes something much more dangerous. The representation of politics in the film got it banned, and it does reveal corruption in very high places, but Chabrol seems more interested in its dehumanising processes contrasted with the redemption of imaginative power. What is most disturbing about Paul is that we think it perfectly reasonable he be killed.

Stephane Audran, Chabrol's wife, is a revelation, though. Normally icily elegant, she is enrapturing here as a woman in love, unafraid to be vulgarly happy, the sense of freedom allowing her to - horrors - smile, laugh, even lounge on chairs.

Les Noces rouges Ed Howard from Only the Cinema, June 27, 2009

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Wedding in Blood John White from 10kbullets

Eye for Film ("Themroc") review [2.5/5]

VideoVista review Andrew Hook

The New York Times (Lawrence Van Gelder) review

ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont]

NADA

France Italy (110 mi) 1974

Time Out review Tom Milne

A chillingly cool political thriller, all the better for its non-partisan stance. No attempt is made to whitewash the activist group in Paris, calling themselves Nada in memory of the Spanish anarchists, who kidnap the American ambassador (at an exclusive brothel) in a welter of functional violence. A motley collection of malcontents and seasoned professionals, driven by absurd ideological confusions, they are for that reason a doubly dangerous time bomb likely to explode at any random moment. But against them Chabrol sets the cold calculation of the forces of order, wheeling, dealing, finally engineering a politic holocaust, and emerging as even less concerned with human life than the terrorists they are hunting down as a threat to society. Right is on their side, but it is the members of Nada, groping desperately to build little burrows of viable living in a world of expediency and corruption, who become the heroes in spite of everything. Powerful, pure film noir in mood, it's one of Chabrol's best films.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

For nearly a decade, in the late 60s and early 70s, Claude Chabrol was arguably the greatest director in the world, in Europe at any rate. 'Nada' comes from this period, and yet is an exception in the oeuvre. Instead of a claustrophobic thriller in a domestic setting, 'Nada' is about international terrorists running amok through France (in a way, the film is a parody of the previous year's 'Day of the Jackal'). Instead of intricate psychological depth, Chabrol offers pure cartoon. The police are a hangover from the Vichy era, murderously cyncial, while the terrorists are organised by someone who no longer believes in revolution.

As a sophisticated analysis of pressing contemporary events, the whole thing seems rather silly, until you start spotting Chabrol's wicked, misanthropic irony, and you wonder if the old boy hasn't done it after all. Never take Chabrol's glittering surfaces at face value. The massacre scene is deeply cynical, shocking, brilliant cinema.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

"Nada" was the most inadequate follow-up to "Les Noces Rouges" which,with hindsight, appears now as the last good movie of Chabrol's golden era (1967-1973) "Nada" is Chabrol's first real attempt at a wholly political movie; its previous work "les Noces Rouges" had also political elements but it was more a psychological thriller with the usual look at society in French provinces. "Nada" includes terrorists, ambassador, hostage-taking, a lot of blood, not really Chabrol's field. A heterogeneous cast gives the movie the coup de grâce: only Duchaussoy, who had already played with the director, and Maurice Garrel are up to scratch. Viviane Romance, one of Duvivier's actresses ("la Belle Equipe" "Panique"), is wasted as a madam (Gabrielle). Italian actors (Fabio Testi, Lou Castel) are awful.

With "Nada" this a second period of barren inspiration for Chabrol. It would be "Violette Nozières" before he was again at the top of his game.

User comments from imdb Author: Camera Obscura from Leiden, The Dutch Mountains

THE NADA GANG (Claude Chabrol - France/Italy 1974).

With this excellent political thriller Claude Chabrol charted into more familiar genre territory. This time he made this cynical account about a small Franch group of post '68 terrorists kidnapping the American ambassador from a luxury Parisian brothel, secreting him away in an isolated farmhouse while they wait for an answer to their demands. But the police chief they're dealing with is even more violent than they are and doesn't care about getting back the hostage alive.

In hindsight this film has become a typical exponent of the - mostly left wing - underground activities in the '70s and 80's. In these modern times, when terrorism is almost exclusively associated with Islamic religiously motivated terrorists, this kind of political activism comes across as refreshingly modern.

Above all, exciting and tense film-making. Cool, stylish and superbly filmed. And what about Fabio Testi in his black leather overcoat? Is he the coolest looking criminal you've ever seen, or what?

Camera Obscura --- 8/10

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Politics in Claude Chabrol's work are, like his fallen Catholicism, filtered through an ambivalent eye that's less agit-prop than moral-sardonic. Though it played a cameo in the skewered Gaullist aspirations of Wedding in Blood, his sense of political irony is central to this hot-button thriller, huddling would-be revolutionaries and their establishment nemesis under an umbrella of devastating cynicism. Revving up for their Paris upheaval, the eponymous medley of activists (which include Fabio Testi's bearded firebrand, Maurice Garrel's impotent intellectual, Michel Duchaussoy's malcontent teacher and Michelangela Melato's Uzi-toting frau) shanghais the American ambassador from his weekly brothel stop. Waiting for the ransom up in their pastoral hideout, they too late realize that the authorities, acting through sadistic police stooge Michel Aumont, are using the kidnapping as excuse to conduct an anti-terrorist massacre. Virtually a lampoon of Costa-Gravas' halo-wearing rebels, the film's ragtag freedom-fighters are a bumbling lot, their plans constantly poked through by alcoholism, disillusionment, myopic zeal and other assorted troubles. Is the director guilty, as one character accuses Garrel, of "no longer believing in revolution but acting out of despair"? Actually, Chabrol is as much of a radical as his more militant May '68 chums, only his anti-bourgeois fervor is leveled by an inquiring skepticism that refuses to write blank checks to either side. If the Nada folks emerge with more humanity once the dust has settled it is because their attempts, no matter how flawed, reveal a genuine impetus for change, while the ruthless machinations of the government, manipulating both their enemies and each other, are retro-Vichy. Far from nihilistic, Chabrol's cynicism bellies an impassioned, even anguished engagement, chillingly illustrated by the final, carnage-surveying high-angle panning shot. From Jean-Patrick Manchette's novel. With Lou Castel, André Falcon, and Viviane Romance.

Nada (1974) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Nada is a small leftwing terrorist group made up of six people from very different backgrounds. Diaz, the most militant of the group, plans to kidnap the American ambassador Richard Poindexter, in a bid to draw attention to their cause. One of the group, Treuffais, a timid philosophy teacher, will have no part in this and walks away. His five comrades succeed in spiriting Poindexter away to a remote farmhouse. Unfortunately for them, the police chief who is assigned to the case sees the elimination of the terrorists as having much greater priority than rescuing the ambassador...

Coming towards the end of Claude Chabrol’s second gold run of films, which ran from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s, Nada stands out as something of an oddity - a mix of political thriller and black comedy which has a far darker, far more ironic edge than anything Chabrol directed in this, arguably his best, era. Based on a popular série noire novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, the film reflects both the public’s growing appetite for grimly realistic action thrillers and the perceived threat from increasingly militant leftwing activists.

Whereas Chabrol's previous populist thrillers - Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche (1964) and its equally bland sequel - stuck to a tried and tested formula to maximise audience size and consequently had virtually no intellectual merit, Nada looks like a conventional thriller but is one with an underlying political subtext, and a potent one at that. In fact, this is possibly Chabrol's most overtly political film, and certainly one of his most scathing satires on contemporary society. One of the concerns shared by many people at the time was the extent to which the State would go to maintain an ordered society. As was reflected in the neo-polar novels and films of the period, there was a belief that the police would transcend moral boundaries, with the complicity of wealthy businessmen and legislators, to safeguard the interests of those who most benefited from maintaining the status quo (coincidentally, wealthy businessmen and legislators).

In Nada, the ragtag band of fair weather terrorists find themselves pitted against an insuperable enemy, professional State-sponsored terrorists in the guise of the police. The outcome is certain - the Nada group is obliterated with ruthless efficiency, their message and threat totally neutralised (well, almost). Those that perform this necessary clean-up operation are themselves revealed to be pawns in a wider political game and end up no better off. The true villains are not the police, but the mandarins sitting at the apex of our supposedly benign democratic system, the unseen guardians whose job it is to protect us - from ourselves. Watching the film today, when the threat of terrorism is omnipresent, the film is as relevant as when it was first released (perhaps more so). Who should we fear most - homicidal extremists made of clay or those god-like protectors in palaces of state who sit in judgement over us all? The answer is self-evident. We should fear both.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Chabrol Day Three: Nada Ray Young from Flickhead, June 23, 2009

Eye for Film (David Stanners) review [2.5/5]

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: HEFILM from French Polynesia

User reviews from imdb Author: jcappy from ny-vt

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review

PLEASURE PARTY (Une Partie de Plaisir)

France Italy (100 mi) 1975

Time Out review Tom Milne

One of Chabrol's most maligned films. A cool and elegiac study of the canker destroying a family from within, it is given bizarre overtones - part confession, part game - as well as a peculiar poignancy by the fact that the script is modelled by Chabrol's regular scriptwriter Paul Gégauff, who plays the lead opposite his former wife Danièle, on his own marital troubles. Accusations galore of chauvinism were levelled at the film, of course, as the man, having fashioned the woman in his image of perfection, then simultaneously encourages and resents her independence to the point of brutality and even murder. But what emerges from the heart of the film, undercutting the Pavlovian response, is the sense of bitter despair underlying the man's full awareness that he had found paradise, but because of his own intransigently idealistic nature, was unable to find peace and harmony there.

UpcomingDiscs.com (David Annandale) dvd review [2.5/5]

This is one of Claude Chabrol's most unpleasant films, but it can't be denied that it's also one of his most fascinating and provocative. It was written by his longtime collaborator, the late Paul Gegauff, who stars with his own ex-wife Daniele Gegauff, and the subject is the brutal breakup of their apparently idyllic marriage. Things start to crumble when the chauvinistic and unbalanced Gegauff perversely suggests that his wife consider taking on a lover, and then becomes increasingly abusive when she follows his suggestion. As often happens in Chabrol films, it is their child (played by their actual daughter, Clemence Gegauff) who winds up bearing, mainly silently, the brunt of the ensuing carnage. You may be enraged by this film, and you won't find it easy to shake off; the self-exposure of the leads and Chabrol's unswerving control of the direction combine to make it corrosive (1976).

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Claude Chabrol exposed his own complicity in the bourgeois world he skewers via withering self-caricature (alongside wife Stéphane Audran) in the La Muette episode of Paris Vu Par..., then filmed Paul Gégauff, screenwriter and fellow misanthrope, pushing even further. A family affair -- Gégauff based the storyline on his own marital breakup and plays abusive male ego to wife Danièle through an implacable erosion of upper-class bliss. The plot opens on the couple's happiness on a fishing trip with a young daughter (Clemence Gégauff) in tow, making love by the shore then returning to their luxurious country home, though not before a crab is cracked open in close-up (later, a spider devours a trapped bug -- "C'est la vie"). Paul, fit and graying and frequently shirtless, nevertheless feels menopausal pangs, casually tells his wife of his several affairs and encourages her to feel free to sleep around, as well. Libertine intent quickly hits its head on the ceiling of selfish possessiveness, and he publicly turns contemptuous of Danièle's increasing autonomy, paranoid less about her body than about her mind. "Freedom is a pain," Gégauff intones at a party, though this is Chabrol's Scenes from a Marriage, with both sides allowed emotional complexities while a visit to the wax museum (complete with a Landru dummy) assures us that the violence fecund within this relationship will erupt, sooner than later. People drift apart, yet the husband insists on the idealized stability of his family (or at least his dream of one), blind to how egotistical brutality laces his longing, Gégauff the writer dramatizing his own male-entitlement anxiety while exposing it up on the screen. "I believe in transcendence" over a pan across a graveyard, yet the bars waiting by the end are Lang's, not Bresson's, thus a final clank in Chabrol's grinding machine of chauvinist excoriation. With Paula Moore, Michel Valette, and Giancarlo Sisti.

User comments from imdb Author: jcappy from ny-vt

This may or may not be Chabrol's best, but it must be his bravest. For what else can "The Pleasure Party" (1976) be but an open protest of patriarchy and battery. Think Ibsen's "A Doll House," and you cannot be far off. I think it's the final scenes that erase any minute doubt about the film's intent. First there is the belated rescue attempt of four men and a woman: the adult men's physical prowess seems suspended as if, as men, their hands are tied, while the woman casts a blinding black veil over Philip's head, halting the action, and condemning the actor. And then the prison scene in which Elsie (his new llama or lamb) tells her father that she is unable to learn under the harassment of a male student, to which his non-response includes the same transcendent jargon he used in the cemetery prior to his vicious assault. Chabrol and the Leguaffs have indeed taken their stand with this shattering portrait of male terror--one that explodes out of a convincingly two-faced man, and is thus all the more effective.

Yes this is a movie about male power. It is not about sexual impotence, philosophies, or a mid-life crisis , but about Philip's hard-wired connection to masculine identity. If he feels inadequate and helpless in the face of what he can only understand as female weakness, it is because he has bought into women's difference--from men. In other words, Esther is so other to him that anything other than ownership is threatening. The turning point of the film is when he advises Esther --"you should do it."--to sleep with other men. This moment must be as pointedly misogynist as his later acts of violence; for here he equates his lover with sex, temptation, and whoredom --ostensibly to test his purity and his ideas of freedom, but, in effect, he is using her to provoke her own demise. It's very instructive that although he manages the first test--even offering his satiated wife breakfast in bed the next morning, it is sex in bed--with him (to reclaim ownership) must come first. And during a party scene, he argues for the comparison of Gandhi and Hitler--unaware that Gandhi similarly used women to test his own purity, and that the latter's sadistic, eruptive violence would soon adhere to him.

What Philip becomes is a full fledged Magus: "the man who tells you everything and what to do" as he explains to Elsie, in his characterizing Habib. Toward Esther, he grows increasingly resentful, suspicious, tense, judgmental, menacing--and possessive. He shows the brawn to break down doors, and a mentality which can accept and enact cruelty. He becomes more withdrawn and, as Esther points out, racist. In the bathroom mirror scene his face, viewed through her tears, is as perverse as the Landru he introduced to his daughter in his House of Wax. The "freedom" he has granted his wife has boomeranged on him. He hates it and everyone and everything connected to it. "Liberty makes me sh_t," he says. When Sylvia simply asks "Why do you yell at Esther?" he answers that she talks too much of freedom and hangs out with guitar players. And his "profound" need for his ex-wife doesn't occur till Sylvia displays her independence in the fishing scene--here he longs for Esther's dependency symbolized for him in her fear of crabs.

Esther grasps the picture, but does not have the social power to act sufficiently on it, so finds herself ultimately trapped. However, her defiance is quiet, lucid, and courageous. Her "you, you, it's all about you" refrain, and lines like: "You make the decisions, I only say amen" and "I was great as your reflection" are equal to Ibsen's Nora. But she is more psychologically isolated than Nora, and must suffer from far more abuse, verbal, and, of course, physical. Esther is a battered woman and must endure that syndrome--she cannot fully grasp what Philip says to his buddies: "her weak point move me," and how many times is she willing to forego the depth of her own words: "since when do you care what I say." She can never finally disbelieve her husband--even the forced foot-licking is not proof-- and so, in the end turns to him in a moment of personal crisis because "she is too scared" to visit alone the tomb of the dear deceased aunt, the woman who raised her. The irony here is as devastating as her words are convincing. And her final "NO, NO" has come too late and is heard too late.

I understand that the Phillip role was turned down by several leading French actors. If one can relive some of his lines just previous to the assault, one can understand why? But his words serve to finally and totally expose the man behind the mask. His self-assurance, disarming directness, and engaging and almost defenseless smile belong now to a slave-holder, rather than a man who in his words, was "born to be joyful." When he say to Esther that all his sufferings (since their breakup--ha, ha, ha) "must be compensation for what I've been through," the viewer can only say bring on the executioner. It's so extremely tragic that he is the executioner.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Nathaniel Thompson

Following a streak of astonishing thrillers in the 1960s mostly starring his wife, Stephane Audran, director Claude Chabrol took a strange turn in the next decade with a number of bizarre international co-productions often far removed from his usual studies of domestic nightmares. Closest in spirit to his previous work but far more disturbing is Une partie de plaisir, issued on DVD under the misleadingly prurient title of The Pleasure Party. (The title more closely translates as "A Piece of Pleasure.")

The film begins on a rocky beach as a seemingly happy couple, gray-haired and muscular Philippe (Paul Gégauff) and lithe brunette Esther (Danièle Gegauff), casually mutilate crabs as bait while their child cavorts near the waves. Back home at the dinner table Philippe casually indicates to Esther that he'd like to test a pet theory that married people who sleep with others aren't cheating; they're simply enhancing their marriage. Esther doesn't seem too wild about the idea but decides to pick a partner from an upcoming dinner party; fortunately Philippe has been less than faithful himself, which makes the adjustment easier. Esther opts for Habib (giallo staple Giancarlo Sisti), whom neither spouse seems to particularly like. However, she soon finds herself responding to her new lover, igniting a nasty jealous streak that results in Philippe trying to control every aspect of her life. Not surprisingly, things do not turn out well.

While this film might seem on the surface like another Chabrol excursion into the hell of modern marriage, the proceedings are given sickly, fascinating extra layers of meaning when one considers the project's history. The script was written by Gégauff, who penned such landmark Chabrol titles as This Man Must Die and Les Biches; however, this particular work was based entirely on the disintegration of his own marriage, painting himself in a most unflattering light. Yves Montand was cast in the lead role but walked shortly before production; next up was Jean-Louis Trintignant, who similarly balked at the character's extreme behavior. Finally Gégauff offered to play the role himself, but Chabrol insisted in that case that the role of Esther could only be played by its real-life inspiration, Gégauff's ex-wife Danièle. As a result, the viewer is left with the surreal experience of watching a real divorced couple reenacting the brutal circumstances of their separation with a fictitious, murderous turn near the end. As if that weren't enough, Gégauff went on to remarry and write a number of other films, only to be stabbed to death by his second spouse in 1983. If this confessional on film is any indication, she might have had just cause.

Aesthetically the film also feels like something of a hybrid, mixing Chabrol's patented visual fixation with architecture and landscape with cinematic techniques he usually avoided like frequent and rapid zoom shots and even an atypical slow motion passage at the end. The result is a darker and more claustrophobic film than one might expect, foreshadowing his later, more oppressive films like La ceremonie and the similarly plotted L'enfer. Gone is the traditional minimalist underscore common in his other thrillers; here we have the soothing strains of Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert, sparingly used to add an elegant counterpoint to the increasingly barbaric behavior in the film.

As an entry in Pathfinder's ongoing series of important Chabrol releases, The Pleasure Party falls in line with the quality standard one might expect, i.e., fine but not great. The letterboxed image (not 16x9 enhanced) is a significant improvement over the dupey-looking VHS releases but still looks on the dull side; the deliberately desaturated cinematography may also be to blame. Print flaws are obvious in a few scenes, but overall it's a watchable presentation and at least free of the distracting PAL-conversion glitches found in a handful of other titles like This Man Must Die. The optional English subtitles are well-rendered and easy to read, also an improvement over the bleached-out, illegible ones from past releases.

The extras are more substantial than one might expect for a lesser-known Chabrol film, beginning with a thorough and often interesting audio commentary by screenwriter/critics Dan Yakir and Ric Menello. The former's thick accent notwithstanding, it's an easy track to digest and is largely textual in nature, pointing out symbolic and technical aspects of the film while offering an occasional tidbit of historical info. Unlike most directors there isn't anything terribly salacious or invigorating about Chabrol's behind-the-scenes behavior, so analyses of his films tend to be oriented to readings like this. For some reason the discussion kicks off well into the film after the opening titles and doesn't seem in synch with the film, but fortunately the discussion is mostly not scene specific.

Also included is a theatrical trailer (in French, no subtitles), a stills gallery, talent bios, and a very long (47 minutes!) audio interview with Chabrol, recorded in 1977 during the production of Blood Relatives. The chat only briefly touches on the film at hand when discussing the director's working relationship with Gégauff; otherwise it's a handy career overview, focusing on Chabrol's fascinations and preferences as a filmmaker and how he sees society. Luckily his view is usually a bit more optimistic than this, one of his darkest and most challenging films to date.

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] June 29, 2009

DVD Verdict Bill Gibron

Une Partie de plaisir Dennis Grunes

Une Partie de plaisir Chris Poggiali and Paul DeCirce from Temple of Schlock, June 25, 2009

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]

User reviews from imdb Author: gridoon2010

User reviews from imdb Author: hasosch from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Darragh O' Donoghue (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from dublin, ireland

Channel 4 Film capsule review Fran Hortop

DIRTY HANDS

aka: Innocents with Dirty Hands (Les Innocents aux Mains Sales)

France Italy Germany (121 mi) 1975

One of Claude Chabrol's periodic attempts to break into the English-language market, this time with Romy Schneider and Rod Steiger as a vacuous upper-class couple involved in a murderous love triangle. Although the American version lacks a half hour of Chabrol's original footage, the film seems unforgivably weak and overwrought for the usually meticulous Chabrol, who perhaps suspected that the English-speaking world wasn't quite ready for his subtle brand of irony.

A superbly stylish and baroque crime thriller which marks a return for Chabrol to the bravura incorporation of pulp conventions that distinguished some of his earlier work. But here the convoluted plot draws us inexorably through a minefield of kaleidoscopically changing relationships at the kind of measured pace that allows the film to accumulate all sorts of tragic resonances. There are innumerable bold strokes as Chabrol treads from irony to irony, ambiguity to ambiguity. Romy Schneider is fascinating as the icy wife plotting to rid herself of her boorish husband (doubts about Steiger fade as the film progresses), and the minor characters - including a characteristically histrionic lawyer and two policemen given to discussing the case over meals of various dimensions - are drawn with absolute precision.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The title of this Claude Chabrol thriller is terrifically emblematic -- when in his movies (or in Hitchcock's, or Lang's) are there hands unsullied by sanguine evidence? Culpability permeates the plot's Double Indemnity Revisited trio, with luscious trophy wife Romy Schneider's bare-assed sunbathing session interrupted by hunky Paolo Giusti's descending kite; no sooner has she introduced him to her impotent, boozy, self-pitying hubby (Rod Steiger) than she's fucking him on the lush living room rug, and the two are hatching a plot to dispatch weak-hearted Steiger out of the equation. Schneider dutifully bludgeons the figure under the bedcovers, though Giusti gets the shakes and splits for Italy, leaving her to deal alone with the prodding of a duo of police snoops and, less explicably, with news of the supposedly-killed husband draining the bank account and putting their St. Tropez home for sale. The pricey setting is La Femme Infidèle territory and, again, murder serves as both decadent outgrowth and transforming catalyst for a spiritually bankrupt relationship. "Believe it or not, I'm trying to forgive you," says a newly rejuvenated Steiger after humiliating his duplicitous vixen of a wife. Normally filed under Misogynist, Chabrol has actually always displayed unusual sensitivity for the travails of the female psyche, and underneath the character's cultivated chill lies La Passion de Romy Schneider -- her gorgeousness both a cross to bear and a weapon to wield, she sails from languid femme fatale to penalized victim to redemptive soul. Since there is little hope of help from justice ("the truth is whatever people want to hear," according to quicksilver attorney Jean Rochefort, who should know), her deliverance is inevitably spiritual, following a light that could stand for salvation or death or, knowing Chabrol, a combination of both. From Richard Neely's novel.

User comments from imdb Author: miss douce (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from dublin, ireland

The films of Claude Chabrol are, more than those of any other director, highly unnerving. I don't just mean in subject matter, which are generally taken from pulp fiction. This plot is Double Indemnity as if written by Nabokov. The beautiful Julie, is married to overweight, rich, impotent, drunk, self-loathing Louis Wormser, and plots with her young hack writer lover, Jeff Marle, to kill her husband. Things generally go to plan, but Jeff panics and lies low in Italy, sending Julie letters, while she has to face the insinuating investigations of two detectives.

For a director of his intellectual reach, Chabrol shows a strange affinity for Golden-Age style mystery stories. Unlike the fiction of Pynchon and Borges, or the films of Bertolucci and Antonioni, he has no interest in formally deconstructing the mystery story, subverting its narratives, ironising its principle characters, obviously undermining its tenets (although his double act of Epicurean detectives, teasing out the crime like cross word puzzles over dinner, making lecherous jokes and misogynistic comments, unbelievably hitting on solutions, yet completely missing the point, are a comic, disturbing joy, as are the upturned faces of the Law searing Julie at the climax). It is perfectly possible to watch INNOCENTS as a straight thriller with a recognisable crime, investigation and solution, and plenty of excellent twists and turns.

Even on this conventional level, the film is unnerving. The abruptness of the decision to murder. The shocking, callous act of murder itself. The brutal, climactic rape. But Chabrol's real nagging is in his whole-hearted artifice. Many directors, from Chabrol heroes Lang, Welles and Hitchcock to Von Sternberg, Sirk and Ophuls are artificial, but they create convincingly hermetic worlds, which are totally artificial and plausible on their own terms. Chabrol's is different.

Although not as breathtakingly formal as LA DECADE PRODIGEUSE, INNOCENTS is highly artificial, from the stylised acting, the unrealistic dialogue, dissonant score and stunningly contrived plot, to the breathtakingly intrusive camera movements and alienating shifts in point of view, and, especially, the setting, the futuristic/modernist architecture which swallows up its characters; the decor that moves and closes in on them.

With Chabrol, however, this artifice is not self-sufficient. It co-exists, jarringly, with a sublime feeling for nature, for the French countryside, the shadows cast by wind-blown trees, the wide green fields, the parched roads. The two realms refuse to merge, and this disjunction of registers moves the film away from mystery to something much more metaphysical.

An interesting question that arises from this film is whether it is a film about misogyny, or a misogynistic film. We are shown quite clearly how a female protagonist who is in almost every frame of the film, who seems to be in control and driving the plot, is completely betrayed by men - husbands, lovers the law - an object of contempt, whose desires are made seem guilty, whose grasping for love in a chilling, loveless evnironment and marriage are reduced to petty motives.

Maybe they are - she does collude in murder and theft. She is often featured in scenes, present but silent, as men decide her fate. The director, further, is obviously a man, colluding in this too, filming her pain and humiliation, witholding from her all the information. Yet, despite this, the film is very sympathetic to Julie, its visuals often seeming to arise from her emotions.

However, I don't think the film is really a post-feminist 70s comment on the still marginal and oppressed role of women in French society. Before Chabrol became a filmmaking genius, he was one of the brilliant critics of Cahiers du Cinema, co-writing a book on the religious underpinnings of Hitchcock's thrillers. In one sense INNOCENTS (a religiously loaded title) can be seen as an allegory in the Bresson tradition of the spiritual progress of a woman, a three part processo of Sin, Suffering and Redemption.

The final image, when Julie rises in the darkness, stripped of material wealth, defining environment and human companionship, and walks towards a flickering light is compellingly enigmatic, possibly indicating suicide, but, such is the theorematic godlike structure of the film, the sly, allusive imagery, I prefer to think of it as Julie existentially completing her spiritual journey. In any case, an endlessly rich masterpiece.

Innocents with Dirty Hands Ed Howard from Only the Cinema, June 12, 2008

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B+]

VideoVista review Paul Higson

Les Innocents aux mains sales (1975) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: eva25at from Vienna, Austria

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: taylor9885 (taylor9885@sympatico.ca) from Ottawa, Canada

User reviews from imdb Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: gridoon2010

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Alexander Otth from Feldmeilen, Switzerland

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: writers_reign

DVD Times Anthony Nield from the 8-Film Claude Chabrol Collection

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeff Stafford on The Claude Chabrol Collection

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C-]

DEATH RITE (Les Magiciens)

France Germany Italy (94 mi) 1976

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

After "les noces rouges" (1973), began Chabrol's second period of barren inspiration. Although adapted from a Frederic Dard novel (Robert Hossein's best film was a Dard novel: "Toi le Venin" ), "Les Magiciens " is a mediocre movie, which was probably made to combine business with pleasure (holidays in Tunisia in a luxury hotel).

The plot: a conjurer explains to an idle dandy, Edouard, that he can predict a murder. Edouard will help make his prediction come true. The cast includes Jean Rochefort -a non chabrolesque actor- ,Gert "Goldfinger " Froebe, one of the few foreign actors which Chabrol did not have to dub in French, and one of Bertolucci's favorites, Stefania Sandrelli. That does not make a film for all that.

User reviews from imdb uthor: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

This is yet another fine unsung (because obscure) gem from Chabrol, which shows him once again in rather experimental vein (particularly the elliptical editing) though sticking close in this case to his fortuitous genre i.e. the thriller. That said, I was alerted of its quality beforehand by the analogous rating given it by the "Cult Filmz" website, whereas the same reviewer had awarded the equally superb ALICE OR THE LAST ESCAPADE (1977) a measly **!

DEATH RITE really shows off the director's affinity with the cinema of Fritz Lang: not only are balloons a key motif here a' la M (1931), but he even utilizes for one of the various protagonists in the film an actor (Gert Frobe) from Lang's swan-song – THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE (1960; actually one of a long-running series to which Chabrol himself would contribute an entry in 1990), with which this also shares a narrative concern in parapsychology!

As ever, the French master does very well by his actors – particularly the afore-mentioned Frobe as a magician/clairvoyant (the original French title of this one was in fact LES MAGICIENS) and Jean Rochefort as a self-confessed member of the idle rich who becomes involved with his stage act (which includes a sawing-in-half routine the director would re-use 30 years later in the aptly-named A GIRL CUT IN TWO [2007]) and even 'helps', albeit behind Frobe's back, in the realization of a vision that is obsessing the latter! With this in mind, as indeed it is stated in the brief didactic prologue, the film attempts (via a fiendishly clever script) to rationalize the gift of second sight: could the alleged perception of future events somehow make one predisposed towards their ultimate accomplishment? The role-reversal twist at the end, then, recalls the shocking climax of DON'T LOOK NOW (1973); similarly, the Tunisian setting draws parallels with the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet (though largely eschewing its trademark obliqueness).

Anyway, the rest of the principal cast features a typically intense Franco Nero, married to luscious Stefania Sandrelli (whose character began as atypically ditsy but gradually acquired maturity and scope), as well as Gila von Weitershausen (a former companion of French director Louis Malle here playing an ex-lover of Nero, a relationship that is eventually rekindled – following his estrangement from the belligerent Sandrelli who, in turn, is herself seduced by the Macchiavellian Rochefort!). Incidentally, in what appears to be a deliberate decision on the film-makers' part (though no allusion is ever made to this end), the latter quartet of actors bear strikingly similar physical features – with Nero and Rochefort both sporting a moustache, while Sandrelli and von Weitershausen are each given a frizzy hair-do!

Finally, in view of the lackluster quality of the copy I acquired (marked by unsatisfactory English dubbing, fuzzy picture and hard-coded Greek subtitles), I regret not checking that of the film's recent broadcast on late-night Italian TV.

THE TWIST (Folies Bourgeoises)

France Italy Germany (107 mi) 1976

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

That was Chabrol's seventies nadir by such a wide margin it's difficult to find which would be the second :"nada" perhaps,and nevertheless ,that film seems to tell a story,and the director seemed still to know where he was going.

It did not seem that way after "les folies bourgeoises" a disastrous collaboration between Chabrol's usual suspects (Audran,Cassel),German earnest thespian Schell (who was never as bad as here,as an user aptly points out ,as the swiss maid ) and American stars (Bruce Dern who walks across a theater completely naked :it's only a fantasy ,we are told,but Luis Bunuel,Claude Chabrol is definitely not.

After this disaster,which got unanimous thumbs down in his native country,Chabrol occasionally came up with good films ("Alice Ou la dernière fugue" "L enfer" )but he was never to recapture the magic of the 1968-1973 productions.

ALICE (Alice ou la dernière fugue)

aka: Alice or the Last Escapade

France (93 mi) 1977

Stefan Gullatz, 'Exquisite Ex-timacy: Jacques Lacan vis-à-vis Contemporary Horror', Offscreen Journal, March 31, 2001

Haunting nightmarelike tale of a pretty young wife who leaves her overbearing husband, drives off, and stops at an old house when her windshield cracks. She spends the night in the house after being tended to by an old man who seems to expect her, and she prepares to drive off in a newly fixed car. Finding no way out, she is told to "accept" her situation by a young man and realizes that she is in limbo. After she walks down a dark cellar, the woman's body is seen hanging out of her demolished car. She has finally met Death. College philosophy-course idea is given a lush photographic treatment by the Hitchcock-influenced Frenchman Chabrol.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Few people know this Chabrol movie and I agree with the precedent users: it's a work that deserves to be restored to favor. Almost unique in the director's canon, it deals with the fantastic genre: only the final sequences of "la rupture" (1970) verge on it. Its less-than-critically-acclaimed reception led Chabrol to ditch that new direction, which was perhaps too bad, considering the big amount of mediocre films he made afterward.

Probably influenced by American B movie "carnival of souls"(1962) and Louis Malle's "black moon" (1975),"Alice" walks a fine line that directly leads to works such as "Jacob's ladder" (1990) "a pure formality" (1994) and "the sixth sense " (1999). Sylvia "Emmanuelle -Krystel is not much of an actress, but it does not matter here because it's the atmosphere which counts: a green green landscape, where Chabrol achieves the incredible feat of exuding anguish in the daylight, a gloomy mansion where, when you talk on the phone, your own voice echoes you; a strange library where the heroine finds a Borges book-and it's no coincidence- Jorge Luis Borges's "ficciones"(one of his short stories is called "El jardin de Sanderos que se bifurcan": the garden with paths which fork), Borges whose spirit literally haunts the movie. The party where the guests celebrate "my sister's death" displays Luis Bunuel's influence, notably " the phantom of liberty" (1974)

A very strange supporting cast "plays" with the heroine, and their behavior predates David Fincher's "the game" by more than twenty years: Charles Vanel and Fernand Ledoux, whose careers began during the silent era, Jean Carmet, Andre Dussolier, playing two parts, dressed in white then in black and showing one more time Hitchcock's stranglehold on Chabrol's cinema when he says "the world is a pigpen,isn't it?" as Uncle Charlie in "shadow of a doubt"(1942).

What will you find on the other side of the mirror? Sorry... of the wall?And when there's no wall anymore?"Alice ou la dernière fugue" should appeal to Chabrol's fans even if it's not really chabrolesque.

Overlooked Classics: Claude Chabrol's Alice (1977) Jeremy Richey at Moon in the Gutter, March 13, 2008

Go Ask Alice « shadowplay David Cairns from Shadowplay, August 8, 2008

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

BLOOD RELATIVES (Les liens du sang)

Canada France (100 mi) 1978

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Uneasy and only partly successful thriller, taken from one of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, with Sutherland overshadowing the rest of the cast as the detective investigating the assault and murder of a young girl in Montreal. The result is pretty much par for the Chabrol course, with the girl's family - a hive of incest that provides the chief suspects - pictured as a typically degenerate example of the bourgeoisie. But it's mainly rather wooden, and shot in a flat television style; only towards the end do suspense and the director's full talent really take hold.

User comments from imdb Author: christopher-underwood from Greenwich - London

Considered by many to be a strangely overlooked Chabrol it seems to me the reason it has been cold shouldered is its sleaze factor. Not as overtly sexy, violent or gory as many films of this period it nevertheless starts rather startlingly and although becoming more measured continues to ooze a rather unpleasant odour. Ms Audran, not here the ice maiden but a drunken mother, Donald Pleasence does a cameo as a child molester, David Hemmings has his eyes on underage sex and the central theme involves the relationship between a brother, sister and niece. No not very nice at all and Chabrol treats it all as if it is very normal (like it might be in some small French village!) instead of Ed McBain's New York City. Had this been treated in a more sensational manner then it would have been a more acceptable but lesser film. Here we really have to choose between the likelihood of various unpleasant options before the final denouement. Very watchable

Canuxploitation: Sharing the Blame

Incest, murder and child-molesting. What do these words have in common besides assuring this page more hits? Why, they're the plot of Les Liens du Sang (Blood Relatives), a Canada-France co-production made by seasoned French genre film director Claude Chabrol. Detective Steve Carella (Donald Sutherland, minus the giant mustache he sported in Bob Clark's Murder by Decree) is investigating the murder of 16-year old Muriel Stark (Lisa Langolis). Muriel's cousin Patricia explains that they were both attacked on the way home from a party, only she got away. Carella rounds up all of Montreal's pedophiles for no other reason than to feature a cameo by Donald Pleasence in perhaps his greatest role, Sweaty Sex Offender #4. After a few more red herrings, Patricia reveals that it was her brother Andrew. The last half of the film is told in flashback as Carella recovers and reads Muriel's diary. Turns out that she and Andrew were kissin' cousins until just a few days before her murder when a pregnancy scare ended their fun. Having Muriel fall in love with her much-older boss at work sets up at least one additional suspect, but there's not enough characters with motives to provide a real surprise ending. Despite a few problems, including horrendous English language dubbing, Les Liens du Sang is not a bad little crime film which clips along nicely despite a lack of anything really substantial or interesting going on in the plot. As a special bonus, the film's flashback of Muriel's murder is perhaps the most uninspired killing in the history of cinema.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

"Les Liens De Sang" got chilly reviews in Chabrol's native France and the movie has sunk into oblivion. Made at a time when Chabrol was really good again (it was made between "Alice Ou La Dernière Fugue" and "Violette Nozière" ), after a period of barren inspiration (1974 /1975), you can enjoy this movie provided that you forget all that you know about Claude Chabrol. It's a pleasantly-anonymous thriller which could have been made by any director at all. Which does not mean it's bad. But if you know the fifty + Chabrol movies, you cannot hail it as his masterpiece. What you can say, though, is that it's neatly superior to his recent movies (the last ten years were full of mediocrities). Donald Sutherland and Pierre Mallet are very convincing. Aude Landry's playing, on the other hand, displays nothing disturbing, nothing irrational in her behavior, which makes the ending, although praised for its "unexpected twist," a bit artificial. Remember the characters in such works as "Le Boucher" "La Rupture" "Que la bete Meure" or even "Les Biches" Of Chabrol's world, only Stephane Audran remains: but her part is underwritten, and she is probably dubbed for I cannot recognize her voice, so it's not worth talking about it.

The social background ( the director's trademark) has completely disappeared here. As Chabrol works in a foreign country, he is incapable to depict the Canadian society whereas his métier was the ruthless portrait of French bourgeoisie.

That said, you can enjoy the film: It is a good thriller if you do not think it over too much. Donald Sutherland portrays an endearing human cop.

Les Liens du sang (1978) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

One night, a teenage girl, Patricia, rushes into a police station, bloodstained and panic-stricken, claiming that her cousin, Muriel, has just been raped and killed. Inspector Carella takes charge of the investigation and begins by rounding up the known sex offenders in the area that match Patricia’s description of the killer – a man with dark hair and blue eyes. Just when Carella discovers that Muriel’s middle-aged employer fits this description, Patricia reveals that the murderer was in fact her brother Patrick. Carella isn’t convinced but then he comes across the dead girl’s diary, which contains the key to the mystery. From what he reads in the secret journal, Carella discovers that Patrick and Muriel were far more than just cousins…

For anyone who is familiar with the work of French director Claude Chabrol, Blood Relatives will come as something of a surprise, as it is quite unlike the films for which he is best known. Although the film’s subject is recognisably Chabrol-esque – a crime drama which cynically subverts the norms of comfortable middleclass life – stylistically, it’s altogether the work of a different director. For one thing, there’s a cold realism which gives parts of the film a striking documentary feel, something which the Canada setting (a one-off for Chabrol) reinforces. Also, the film’s treatment of sex and eroticism is unrecognisably the work of this director. In contrast to the subtle, sophisticated sexual references of Chabrol’s other thrillers, what we see here is a graphic portrayal of sex that is twisted, sleazy and brutal – a sickening concoction of incest, paedophilia and rape. With its gruesome knife slash sequence and dark Freudian undertones, the film is as close as Chabrol got to making a psychosexual thriller. Whilst the film may nor be the best example of its kind, it is strangely compelling (in spite of the pretty wooden acting from most of the supporting cast) and it stands as one of Claude Chabrol’s most disturbing films.

10kbullets John White

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review

Canuxploitation: Sharing the Blame 4th from the end

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

VIOLETTE (Violette Nozière)

France Canada (124 mi) 1978

Huppert landed a clutch of awards for her performance in this inspired-by-fact Gallic murder thriller, based on the story of a mixed-up teen who was convicted in the 1930s of conspiring to murder her parents. It's a slow-moving but fascinating account of what drives a person, especially one so young, to such lengths (especially given that Violette came from a comparatively privileged background and simply fell for the wrong man), while Huppert is mesmerizing in the lead.

Time Out review Tom Milne

The Chabrol film for people who don't really like Chabrol films. Based, like the infinitely superior but much maligned Les Noces Rouges, on a real-life murder case - the 18-year-old Violette poisoned her parents in 1933 - it begins brilliantly with a characteristic demolition job on the dreary, furtive squalors of petit bourgeois life that drive Violette to murder. But the political and social implications thus raised are never really confronted. Instead, leaving all sorts of questions unanswered and avenues unexplored, Chabrol ('I fell in love with Violette Nozière he roundly declared) settles down latterly to canonise her for no very apparent reason as a patient and saintly Grizelda. The period evocation is gorgeous, but ultimately it's an empty slice of sleight-of-hand.

Claude Chabrol in his restrained and responsible mood, which is not my favorite. The very fine Isabelle Huppert has the title role as the French schoolgirl who, in the 1930s, murdered her parents and became the center of a national scandal. Chabrol suggests many motives--sexual repression, social ambition, sheer boredom--all of which finally seem inadequate in the face of Violette's personal impenetrability. The film shows great craft and integrity, but that's part, I think, of what's wrong with it: Chabrol is at his best when he loses control, running away with his characters' passions. Here, he's distanced, aloof, and finally a little dull. With Stephane Audran, Jean Carmet, and Bernadette Lafont (1978).

Violette Nozière (1978) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

The daughter of a respectable middle-class couple, Violette Nozière leads a disreputable double life. Far from being the innocent young girl her parents mistake her for, she spends her nights with dissolute young men in the less salubrious areas of Paris. To acquire money for her latest lover, Violette resolves to murder her parents so that she can inherit their wealth...

Based on a true story, Violette Nozière provides its director Claude Chabrol with substantial material to explore his pet themes of bourgeois repression and the psychology of a murderer. At just over two hours, the film feels somewhat overly long and unevenly paced, lacking the sustained intensity of Chabrol’s other dramas. However, the film boasts some exceptional camera work, which gives the film an epic feel, and it features some remarkable acting performances, notably from Isabelle Huppert and Bernadette Lafont. Huppert won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her role in this film, which marked the first of her many collaborations with Claude Chabrol.

Violette Nozière gave Cinema: A Critical Dictionary editor Richard Roud the rare occasion to editorialize that a once-great French filmmaker had returned to form—which, at the time, put director Claude Chabrol in the thin company of Alain Resnais (with Providence), Chris Marker (with A Grin Without a Cat), and pretty much no one else. Violette is, if not much else, some kind of throwback. Two scenes in, and the titular femme noir (played by Isabelle Huppert with what turned out to be an inexhaustible willingness to tackle fiercely slappable characters) is clutching her jet-black fur collar to her jawbone while her freshly-bobbed girlfriend scoffs at the bespectacled bookworms fighting over socialism at the local bar. "Such bores with their politics," giggles said friend, while Violette smirks and breaks off half of some temperamental student's panini and asks him, "Do you want to sleep with me?" In the next scene, she's shown wiping the slut lipstick off her mouth, hiding her stockings and walking up to meet her frumpy mother (a bravely against-type Stéphane Audran). We've all been here before, and so has syphilis. But Violette doesn't so much rejuvenate the "sex = death" equation that had been in place since Louise Brooks opened Pandora's Box as it does struggle to remember why women want sex in the first place. If the true-life case of Miss Nozière is accurately reflected in Chabrol's plodding, obvious melodrama, it's not sex that women are even after but the desire to out-whore their mothers. As it turns out, Mrs. Nozière berates, shames, and eventually presses charges against her daughter not over Violette's attempt to kill both parents with poison (and successfully bumping off her father) but because, years ago, Mr. Nozière bounced the budding girl in his lap a little too vigorously. Hence, sex has very little to do with anything resembling attraction to the entire race of political bores and STD-carrying gigolos and a whole lot more to do with the sudden disgust a mother can feel toward a daughter reaching sexual maturity…or maybe the resentment a daughter can feel toward her mother once she realizes her parental stability was likely founded on the classic bartering system of faking orgasms…or maybe there is no lesson to be learned from Violette's example. Maybe one hardly needs a film to see that mankind is incapable of having good sex without it revealing their other various ineptitudes.

Violette Skilled, delicate, pernicious, by Claudette Charbonneau and Lucy Winer from Jump Cut, November 1979

PopMatters (Meremu C.) review

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Nathaniel Thompson

User reviews from imdb Author: Jiri Severa from Canada

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

New York Times (registration req'd) Hilton Kramer, October 7, 1978

THE HORSE OF PRIDE (Le Cheval d'orgueil)

France (120 mi) 1980

Time Out review Tom Milne

This impressionistic account of peasant life in Brittany around the time of World War I is a reminder that Chabrol began his career with a bleak portrayal of the provinces in Le Beau Serge. This is a much rosier picture, attractively - perhaps too attractively - shot by Jean Rabier. Stressing the poverty, it caresses the eye with picturesque interiors worthy of any model village, while the peasants decked out in their national costumes look like delegates to a folk-lore congress. Hardly another Tree of Wooden Clogs, but it does have charm, sparks of Chabrol clownery, and plenty of intriguing information about superstitions and customs. One problem is that the autobiographical book by Pierre Jakez Hélias on which it is based has obviously been too severely truncated. In the latter half, particularly, attempts to get to grips with the social and cultural implications of being Breton emerge with curious muddlement.

User comments from imdb Author: netwallah from The New Intangible College

Based on a novel by Pierre-Jakez Hélias. A small Breton community before and during the First World War – mostly very idyllic, despite periods of hard luck, poverty and despair (la chienne de monde). The young couple (both blessed with lovely smiles) and their child, the narrator. Many sweet and funny scenes, as well as a few sad ones. The soft-hearted postman cannot bear to read letters bringing bad news. The title comes from a family saying; they're too poor to own a horse, but they have the horse of pride – the child rides on his father's shoulders. Better than any horse, the boy says at the end. There is tension in the schools about speaking French, not Breton. The family are reds, proud and liberty-loving. Beautiful pace, photography, costumes...

La Cheval d'orgueil Jeremy Nyhuis from Cinematorics, June 28, 2009

Based on Pierre-Jakez Hélias’s 1975 autobiographical novel of peasant life in early 20th-century Brittany, Claude Chabrol’s very uncharacteristic feature forgoes his usual preoccupation with the contemporary French bourgeoisie for a calm, serene portraiture of a culture now faded in the nation’s memory. Possessing no plot in the traditional sense, the film primarily centers on the childhood of a son (played at different ages by Ronan and Armel Hubert) born to a poor couple (Bernadette Le Saché and a young François Cluzet), occasionally diverging from its casual depiction of Breton communal life into folkloric interludes and tall tales. Chabrol’s controlled and distant aesthetic, previously and subsequently utilized to provide sharp commentary on characters’ relationships in films like La femme infidèle (1969) and La cérémonie (1995), here functions more as a respectful reverence for Breton customs, as if Chabrol is cautious to not contaminate the culture’s singular traditions with his own commentary. In this sense Chabrol’s remoteness differs from that of a period film like Barry Lyndon (1975), where Kubrick’s detached sensibility turns all of his characters into bizarre curiosities rather than the human, if still slightly eccentric, populace observed in Chabrol’s film (Jacques Dufilho, playing the protagonist’s grandfather, is especially memorable).

Of course, the irony is that by shooting the entire film in French language rather than Hélias’s original Breton, Chabrol automatically contaminates the production with his own culture anyway. Perhaps due to this linguistic anachronism, Chabrol understandably skips over the majority of Hélias’s extensive and fascinating discussion of learning French in his novel—an omission that perhaps is for the best anyway, given the topic’s relation to the literary form over the cinematic. Indeed, Chabrol’s use of French language in his adaptation adds a significant thematic layer to the film, anticipating the manner in which French laws and the economy would eventually force Brittany to discontinue its national language. Chabrol explicitly illustrates the country’s cultural assimilation, both into France and into the world as a whole, near the end of his film, when cinema is introduced to the Breton community in the form a silent gangster serial (causing one woman to pull down the projection blanket out of fright). On a more formal level, Chabrol at one instance evokes Brittany’s gradual global awareness by cutting to black-and-white stock footage of World War I—a startling, interruptive explication of modern technology that contrasts to the antiquary age referenced by Chabrol’s cutaway to Georges de La Tour’s Le Nouveau-né at a much earlier point in the film. Anticipating Jia Zhangke’s similar documentation of cultural shift in Platform (2000), Chabrol’s film humbly admits France’s gradual absorption of Brittany, an act essentially compounded in Chabrol’s literal attempt to capture the reality of a bypassed period through the artificially modern process of filmmaking.

In spite of the national tensions that Le Cheval d’orgueil inevitably alludes to and even intentionally references (catalyzing in an encounter between the protagonist’s grandfather and his employer, which is one of the few scenes that is recognizably Chabrolian in its absurd actorly mannerisms, sparse interior location, and biting critique of class), one shouldn’t dismiss the tranquil, pastoral beauty that Chabrol achieves for the majority of the film. Heightened by Jean Rabier’s lush photography, the film’s painterly mise en scène often resembles the landscape works of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. More than a series of pretty pictures, however, Chabrol also does wonderful things with movement, both within the frame (such as the complementary rhythms of washing and hoeing, not to mention the effects of the wind on fields and strung wooden shoes) as well as through the frame (some of the tracking shots, particularly in the film’s opening wedding ceremony, are marvelously composed). Perhaps most significant of all is Chabrol’s ability to depict the Breton people in a way that does not sentimentalize (and thus condescends) them, thereby steering clear from the bourgeois tendency, as commented on by Hélias in his novel, to view the lives of the lower class as “bad melodrama.” This may not only be Chabrol’s greatest film in terms of visual and aural composition, but it’s also one that reveals, in its deference for an older culture and its Truffaut-like playfulness, a compassionate and tender sensibility beneath the director’s normally cold exterior.

User reviews from imdb Author: (richard@berrong.fr) from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

THE HATTER’S GHOST (Les Fantômes du chapelier)

France (120 m) 1982

The hatter (Serrault) is a mass strangler who allows his secret to be discovered by hangdog Cachoudas (Aznavour), the tubercular Armenian tailor opposite. The ensuing relationship seems unbelievably reckless, even with a mad hatter involved, and manifestly it's the Hitchcocko-Jesuitical theology about shared guilt which animates the picture. If it's all a bit exclusive, it's redeemed by Serrault's baroque performance - shaking with secret mirth, letting slip snippets of the mysterious conversations running on in his head. Though based on a 1956 Simenon novel (The Judge and the Hatter) Chabrol locates his adaptation in an off-kilter time zone - little bit '30s, little bit '50s - that some may find the most intriguing aspect of the movie.

User comments from imdb Author: ieaun from dudley, england

A hatter in a provincial town (Michel Serrault) leads the life of a respectable citizen but is in fact a serial murderer. The only person to suspect this is his neighbour the tailor (Charles Asnavour). It is difficult to believe that this film was made in the eighties as not only is the film set in the fifties but it has a totally fifties style production. It seems to be exactly the kind of film that Chabrol and the other members of the nouvelle vague were rebelling against. The story is very straightforward, the characters are stereotypes, the female characters are two dimensional and treated as objects. "Le Boucher" made years earlier is far more modern and superior in every way. The story is well told if you suspend your disbelief and the acting on the whole is good. The town in which it is set is very photogenic, with narrow cobbled streets and no traffic. Not only does it compare badly to other Chabrol films but also to other Simenon adaptations. "Monsieur Hire" has a similarly paced and straightforward story line but is more adventurous in visual style and tells a more modern story with two more believable characters. "Le Horloger de Saint-Paul" has almost a documentary style and requires a lot of thought as the development is to do with the main character rather than the storyline, and is far superior.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

"Les fantômes du chapelier," very well received at the time of release, still stands as Chabrol's best movie in the eighties, though certain aspects of its premise have undergone some reassessment.

Seen today, the movie displays flaws that were hardly noticeable 20 years ago. First of all, Michel Serrault overplays: his over-the -top performance, once lauded, seems now exasperating and throws the movie off balance. (I wonder what Chabrol's other favorite,Michel Bouquet, would have done in this part). This imbalance is increased by the fact that Charles Aznavour's character is not present enough on the screen. Aznavour gives a wonderful portrayal of an Armenian émigré, whom bourgeois Serrault enjoys humiliating and demeaning. With hindsight Aznavour beats Serrault hands down.

The problem with "les fantômes du chapelier" is that it recalls other superior movies: bourgeois impunity had always been treated by Chabrol himself during his 1967-1973 heyday (notably:"la femme infidèle,""la rupture" "juste avant la nuit""docteur Popaul"), but also long before him: Henri Decoin's "non coupable" (1946) and "la verite sur Bebe Donge" (1952): in the 1946 film, the intention is much clearier and scarier than in Chabrol's 1982 effort ,and,anyway, Serrault is no match for Michel Simon. We can also mention George Lautner's "le septième juré." "Les fantômes du chapelier" has an eerie side, verging on fantastic, but again,there's the rub: let's face it, .it looks like some kind of "psycho" of which the secret would have been be revealed sooner.

Something intriguing the camera often shows a "Ben Hur" poster in the neighborhood. A tribute to William Wyler is dubious from a "nouvelle vague " family director, but who knows?

See it anyways. Its several incredible moments will make it worth your while.For Charles Aznavour and for Chabrol's always absorbing depiction of a small town.

Les Fantômes du chapelier (1982) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Léon Labbé owns a hatter’s shop in a small provincial town in northern France. To the outside world, he is a respectable tradesman, dutifully caring for his disabled wife. In fact, he has killed his wife and goes through an elaborate charade to give the impression that she is still alive. The town is shaken by the discovery that a serial killer is at work, murdering women apparently without any motive. Only Labbé’s neighbour, the quiet tailor Kachoudas, knows the identity of the killer...

In this exemplary adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel, director Claude Chabrol creates possibly his darkest and most introspective work, in which he explores some of his favourite themes - most notably the idea of a deadly threat hiding beneath a mask of bourgeois respectability. The film is set in a small Breton village where it appears to rain continually and where the hours of night appear to outnumber those of daylight quite substantially. This claustrophobic location lends the film an oppressive, suffocating atmosphere, which is strikingly evocative of the mood of Simenon’s novels. A streak of the driest black comedy permeates the film, making it both oddly amusing and intensely disturbing, a quite different tone to most of Chabrol’s other thrillers.

The drama revolves around two men - a hat-maker and a tailor - who live opposite each other but who appear to inhabit totally different worlds. Each man is, in his own way, a prisoner of his own making - the hat-maker is forced to live alone in order to conceal the fact that he killed his wife; the tailor is stifled by the large family who lives with him in his confined house. Each man secretly envies the other, and so a sinister attraction begins to draw them together - with ultimately tragic consequences for both of them. Chabrol’s mastery of the psychological thriller genre enables him to tell this story effectively, using deceptively simple cinematography and surprisingly very little dialogue. Towards that end, he is admirably served by his lead actors, Michel Serrault and Charles Aznavour.

In a career spanning fifty years, Michel Serrault has acquired a reputation as one of France’s most versatile and talented character actors. In Les Fantômes du chapelier, he gives one of his most distinctive and memorable performances - indeed it could be said that it his portrayal of the hat-maker Labbé which carries the film and contributes most to it its poignancy and quirky comic slant. Serrault shows an extraordinary ability when it comes to playing characters who are either mad or bad: whilst he manages to frighten, he is also able to arouse sympathy. This is readily apparent in his performance of the hat-maker in this film - even when he is murdering his victims, you cannot help having more sympathy for him than for the women he is disposing of (with an ease which is more comical than shocking). As the film develops, we are drawn further and further into the hat-maker’s troubled world - rather like the tailor who observes him from across the street - and what we are most struck by his not so much his dangerous insanity but rather his tortured humanity. Without an actor of Serrault’s calibre, it is unlikely that Chabrol could have achieved this level of sophistication and depth.

Whilst the film is mostly focused on the hat-maker, the tailor also plays an important part in the film, and Charles Aznavour (in another fine performance) allows the character to function brilliantly alongside Serrault’s hat-maker. Perhaps the most important role of the tailor is to provide a kind of psychological bridge which enables the spectator to cross over into the hat-maker’s world. The idea of a voyeur spying on another world is a device Chabrol has used a number of times previously (most effectively in his 1962 film L'Oeil du malin ), but here it is crucial to the film’s development. The tailor also serves as a contrast with the hat-maker - one is well-mannered yet a perpetual outsider; the other is irritable yet an accepted member of the community. Although one man lives alone and the other in a large family, both experience a terrible solitude which leads them inexorably towards self-destruction. There are perhaps as many similarities as differences, which leads us to make some interesting speculations. Could the tailor and the hat-maker be two facets of the same individual? Or could the tailor merely be a projection of the hat-maker’s own conscience? One of the most beautiful aspects of Chabrol’s cinema is its subtle sense of ambiguity, which implies - possibly - that nothing is quite what it seems. What you see depends on who you are and where you happen to be standing - much as it does in real life. Can there ever be such a thing as an objective reality in Claude Chabrol’s universe?

Compared with some of Chabrol’s other thrillers, Les Fantômes du chapelier must appear strangely minimalist. It is certainly sparse on dialogue and the film’s dramatic moments are heavily downplayed. Chabrol’s intention is not to create a suspense thriller - that much is evident. Instead, what he offers is a palpably chilling study of a man who is driven - perhaps by the noblest of motives - to murder his crippled wife and who - alone, afraid and guilt-stricken - is drawn further and further into insanity. By keeping the traditional thriller elements to the minimum and by leaving it to the camera and setting to say far more than his actors, Chabrol manages to construct one of his most tragically poignant portraits of human fallibility.

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

THE BLOOD OF OTHERS (Le sang des autres)

Canada France USA (135 mi) 1984

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C-]

Chabrol was an unlikely choice to film Simone de Beauvoir's 1945 novel about moral growth and sacrifice during the Occupation - he being more your man for moral decay, egotism and such. His response to the heroine's progress from frivolity to engagement wavers between disinterested and uninterested. And considering the Mills & Boon trimmings one sort of sympathises, what with a lovelorn Nazi (Neill), a lovelorn resistance fighter (Ontkean) and Foster - patently modern American - at the centre. An occasional scene catches fire, but mostly it's an uninspired plod through very routine material. This is the theatrical version of a three-hour TV mini-series.

User comments from imdb Author: José Alexandre Lima Gazineo from Brasilia, Brazil

This movie has some points that invites a viewer: first of all, the story is based upon a novel written by the great Simone de Beauvoir; second, the movie has a fine director, Monsieur Claude Chabrol and last but not least, a good cast where we can find some great names, like Jodie Foster and Sam Neill (in a great performance, as a sick and deeply in love nazist). The important is that all these points are not a deception. The movie has a witty and elegant screenplay, the direction of Monsieur Chabrol, if it's not a overwhelming work of art, is good and convincing and the cast is really a standout. A good love and war story that goes on in a pleasant way. Watch out: the very last scene is a really knockout! Cotation (7 of 10).

User comments Author: nbott from Washington DC

Jodie Foster and Michael Ontkean playing French war resistors is a stretch of the imagination I could not entertain. This story should have been in French with French actors and actresses. I really do not like films that have English lines but songs that are in French etc. At least they did not attempt to have phony French accents. I hope Mr. Chabrol was paid well for this lapse in his usual brilliant film career. This is truly the worst film I have seen directed by this classic filmmaker. Towards the end of the film there is a bit of script writing involving a love-obsessed Nazi and Jodie Foster that is one of the silliest things I have ever seen. This film, as so many others do, seems to enjoy depicting Germans during World War II as somehow not intelligent. Storytellers seem to forget that they almost conquered all of Europe. This VHS will definitely be donated to the next charity yard sale in my neighborhood. Skip this film.

User reviews from imdb Author: jonathan-577 from Canada

User reviews from imdb Author: Kupotek from United States

COP AU VIN (Poulet au vinaigre)

France (110 mi) 1985

Grotesque murders in a small provincial town; huge meals; a scourging of the bourgeoisie. Where could this be but Chabrol country? The young postboy is investigating the local cartel's murderous business schemes, with the help of his crippled mother (an increasingly uglified Audran) and his girl-friend. But he is no match for the out-of-town cop (poulet) wonderfully played by Poiret as an omniscient, genial fellow who transforms into a roughhouse two-fister when occasion demands. And it is all done with the skittishness which Chabrol brings to this kind of policier, but given edge by his very mocking eye.

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

One of the more flagrant injustices of foreign-film distribution has been the near total eclipse of Claude Chabrol in this country. This delightful, acidic 1984 mystery--set in a corrupt small town rife with land speculation, murder, and diverse other intrigues--was a big enough hit in France to prompt a sequel the following year (Inspecteur Lavardin), but American audiences weren't allowed so much as a peek at it. Adapted by Dominique Roulet and Chabrol from Roulet's novel Une mort en trop, this sexy and adroit intrigue starring Jean Poiret, Stephane Audran, and Michel Bouquet is one of Chabrol's best efforts in his lighter vein, and proves that the classic French cinema has never been quite as dead as U.S. release policies have suggested.

The first of Chabrol's many collaborations with producer Marin Karmitz marks a return to form after the impersonal, terribly uninspired and unconvincing Jodie Foster dreck The Blood of Others. Chabrol is working more toward Henri-Georges Clouzot territory, creating a morally corrupt province full of spies controlled by an inspector with dubious methods. That said, like most solid Chabrol this is a much lighter and calmer work, working more on the level of irony. As usual the film starts slowly, introducing us to several silly unlikable bourgeois characters who have their little secrets to hide. The lower class Cuno family consists of a shy mamma's boy postman (Lucas Belvaux) typically suffocated by his possessive (wheel chair bound) mother's (Stephane Audran) overbearing influence. The more powerful elements are trying to force them out of their house, and they are up to much more as well due to their ability to sneak peaks at everyone's mail. There are no heroes here, but Chabrol somewhat sides with the Cuno's because they are out to shatter the bourgeois veneer of respectability. It's a typically minimalist work from Chabrol relying heavily on the setting, but the story continually folds in after the connections are established. However, with a surprising second murder Chabrol slowly switches the focus of this mystery to a newly introduced character Inspecteur Jean Lavardin. Jean Poiret delivers a sinisterly brilliant steely-eyed performance as this motiveless, seemingly roaming dick. Lavardin is something of a new breed of cop, crossing ruthlessly efficient brutal fascism with ironic detachment and utter cynicism. In a way, he's a Dirty Harry who doesn't enjoy it or believe in anything (he has no allusions that his goon tactics are for the good of the public). Poiret's portrayal went over so well that Chabrol immediately followed up with the sequel titled after his character. Then they made it into a TV series, which spawned a TV movie (directed by Christain de Chalonge, who did the series episodes Chabrol didn't direct) and probably would have led to more had Poiret not succumbed to a heart attack.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

It is true that Chabrol loosened his grip after 'Les Innocents Aux Mains Sales', possibly horrified by his own insights. This is probably a shame; but the light, comic mysteries and thrillers he has largely produced since are by no means negligible, always entertaining and full of Chabrolian irony and motifs. In this film, believe it or not, he seems to believe in the God of marriage. Normally that venerable institution is the site in Chabrol of repression, a (usually literal) stifling of humanity, a closed, rigid world not too far from hell. With the relaxing of his style comes a relaxing of his world view.

As ever with Chabrol, a young man is being emotionally strangled by his mother's dependence, her emotional paralysis somewhat unsubtly figured in her being crippled. Although the title punningly refers to the detective, and the film is nominally a mystery story, Chabrol seems more interested in his rites-of-passage narrative - the detective doesn't make his first appearance for forty minutes, and doesn't dominate the movie until the last third.

It would be wrong to claim that this is Chabrol in 'realistic' mode, but he certainly gets a sense of a rural town community, its unexpected connections, the malicious schemes of its most respectable citizens; pure soap opera, maybe, but the idea of a society turning in on itself, almost incestuously, is convincing. Louis Cuno is the unexpected centre of the town's secrets, a sullen, gangly, lovestruck teenager, but as postman he connects as no-one else can, betraying his civic trust as he takes home to his mother incriminating letters to peruse, as a defence against plans to demolish their property, destroy their home.

Chabrol usually deals with the threat to the home from within; the extending of focus here, leads to a more relaxed film. Because the film focuses of Louis, whose not always legal actions are treated indulgently by director and detective alike, the other characters are more shadowy, more like caricatures, minimising the mystery, making its potentially horrifying conclusions somewhat perfunctory. Chabrol doesn't let his hero off too easily, as we suspect Louis is exchanging one mother for another; his initiation into the delights of sex is in the grounds of a country house, a typically Chabrolian green space blighted by the surveilling eyes of the detective.

Spying is one of the main themes of the film, from the camera taking pictures at the beginning, to Louis' nocturnal amateur detective work. In such a community, private and public space are not so clearly marked, and one's identity is as much defined by one's public role (doctor, butcher etc.) as by any personal merit, so there is something creepy as well as comic about this police (the Law) spying on the sexual act.

There is something creepy about this policeman, anyway. Unlike the rooted, defined villagers, he is a rootless stranger, without motive, personality, role, except to solve the crime (he keeps insisting that he is the 'flic'), in order to do which he resorts to alarming thuggery, even more objectionable than Harry Callahan, whose heart at least was in the right place. Don't be fooled by Chabrol's autumnal cheerfulness - this is a vinaigre with a very bitter aftertaste.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

I have sometimes written in some reviews about some Claude Chabrol's flicks that I didn't find "Poulet Au Vinaigre" a memorable work. However I watched it recently and it's not that bad after all. Of course, it is several notches below such incomparable works as "La Femme Infidèle" (1969) or "Le Boucher" (1970) but it remains thoroughly watchable. Congratulations to the English film distributors who found an equivalent for the translation of the French title into English. It is perfectly well translated.

When in 1984, Chabrol starts the preparation of this "Poulet Au Vinaigre", he endured three fiasco in a row. The eighties didn't look a fruitful decade for him. "Le Cheval D'Orgeuil" (1980) got bogged down in a spate of clichés about Brittany and betrayed Pierre-Jakey Hélias' book. "Les Fantômes Du Chapelier" (1982), his first venture in Georges Simenon's universe was well received by French critics but hardly anybody went to see it. "Le Sang Des Autres" (1984) was a turgid and impersonal film in his spotty but riveting career.

So, what could Chabrol do to get things back on an even keel and to be reconciled with both critics and his public? Very simply, to cook them a typical Chabrolesque dish to the core with a minimum of money (the filmmaker wanted to show that it was possible to shoot good films with a modest budget in times of inflation) and time (a few weeks of shooting were sufficient for him to shoot his film). Thus, he kept turning over the staple ingredients which made his hallmark recognizable. He needed the apparently peaceful scenery of a small provincial town. Here, he chose Forges-Les Eaux in Normandy which isn't very far from I live in Rouen! The perfect backdrop for his story. Then, precisely a solidly structured story with several functions. First, to grab and entertain the audience and his fans with a certainly derivative but catchy storytelling. Louis Cuno is a timid postman who lives under her mother's thumb (Stéphane Audran). They refuse to sell their house to a trio of perfidious, perverse bourgeois, the doctor Morasseau, the butcher Filiol and the notary Lavoisier (Michel Bouquet) who want to set up a momentous and shady estate business. As he is a postman, Louis gets information about this trio of upper-class people At night, Louis spies them and one night, he kills the butcher by pouring sugar in the essence of his car and the maverick inspector Lavardin (Jean Poiret) keeps on harassing him... Then, Delphine Morasseau, the doctor's wife seems to have absconded while Anna Foscarie (Caroline Cellier) a prostitute is found dead in a car crash. With his unconventional methods, Lavardin will find the truth...

It is at this reading that we fully understand Chabrol's mainspring for the last function of his scenario and perhaps the most essential ingredient: to unearth skeletons in the closet of his trio of bourgeois and to shatter the respectability of the provincial bourgeoisie which has usually been Chabrol's trademark. He tapped it again with gusto here. But his scenario also encompasses a dash of psychology to better construe the persona of his characters and it gives more substance to his work.

Chabrol served his film (and his recipe) with ingenious camera work too. It encompasses neat camera angles and fluid camera movements which can only rejoice the gourmets. To enable them to fully savor the film, Chabrol shot his story on an unhurried pace. There was also effort on the lighting and framing which are up to scratch to the aura the film conveys according to the circumstances. And the director didn't put aside his pronounced taste for gastronomy. The inspector Lavardin is nutty about paprika eggs. He has eaten 30,000 of them in his life! At last, the chef Chabrol spiced up his work with a soupçon of deadpan humor essentially provided by the apparently nice Lavardin. By the way, is it innocuous humor? One has to admit that Lavardin's methods to make the suspects speak aren't really reassuring.

Maybe the cast contains a few little drawbacks. Lucas Belvaux is not bad but often bland. Pauline Laffont's acting is sometimes annoying. Jean Claude Bouillaud acts a caricatured character. But Stéphane Audran (once Mrs Chabrol) is excellent as usual. Like in "la Rupture" (1970), she was Michel Bouquet's enemy. This is precisely Bouquet who dominates the cast at the level of the quality of the acting with of course Jean Poiret.

In the end, the chef Chabrol concocted the audience and his fans an eatable even tasty "Poulet Au Vinaigre" which pleased a lot to the chef's connoisseurs. It was succulent enough to prompt Chabrol to do it again with a sequel which opened the next year: "Inspecteur Lavardin" (1986). That said, Chabrol's "pièce De resistance" in the eighties came with the contemporary "Masques" (1987) which stood the test of time quite well.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review [3/4] also seen here: Poulet au vinaigre May 26, 1989

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [3/5]

VideoVista review Paul Higson

Poulet au vinaigre (1985) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005

INSPECTEUR LAVARDIN

France Switzerland (100 mi) 1986

Time Out review Tom Milne

Shortly after investigating the banning as blasphemous of a play entitled 'Our Father Which Farts in Heaven', a high-minded paterfamilias is found dead on the beach, PIG scrawled insultingly on his naked backside. With the widow offering a regal display of indifference, a teenage stepdaughter skulking furtively in drug-pushing circles, and a gay uncle gloating madly over his collection of glass eyes, this is Chabrol at odds with the bourgeoisie again. But there is a difference as Poiret's police inspector arrives for his second murder investigation following Cop au Vin, this time trailing memories of his former love for the widow, a fallen angel who has innocently sinned in her emotional affairs. Discovering what amounts to a paradise lost, Lavardin elects to play God in order to rout the otherwise unassailable forces of evil. Strangely tender, bizarrely funny, with gorgeous performances from Lafont (the widow) and Brialy (the uncle), this is Chabrol back to the mood of eccentric metaphysical mystery he mined in the marvellous Ten Days' Wonder.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

In the middle of the eighties, it would be interesting to see what the survivors of the New Wavelet have become. Well, François Truffaut passed away in 1984 and Eric Rohmer persists in signing empty, sloppy films to show his "skills" at film-making. Her majesty Jean-Luc "God Ard" only keeps his small handful of faithful intellectual ones happy with his hermetic products like "Détective" (1985) or "je Vous Salue Marie" (1985). Same judgment for Jacques Rivette who drive many movie-goers indifferent with his version of "les Hauts De Hurlevents" (1985) (Wuthering Heights).

Fortunately, there's still Claude Chabrol to deliver us a worthy, understandable film even if his production as a whole is patchy. In 1985, "Poulet Au Vinaigre" boosted his career again and so the temptation to give it a sequel was inevitable. "Inspecteur Lavardin" is the heir of the 1985 film and features again the same main character plunged in the same bourgeois universe, in a different provincial town this time in Dinand in Brittany. He's still acted by Jean Poiret who seemed irreplaceable in this role.

The writer Raoul Mons was found murdered on the beach and Lavardin has to find the culprit. His investigation is the opportunity for Chabrol to break the respectable appearance of the upper-class milieu but also to include unexpected twists about the plot, notably when Lavardin found who the murderer is. Like in "Poulet Au Vinaigre," humor is the main motor of the film, notably with the way Lavardin employs to make his suspects talk. More than in the 1985 film, the witty personality of this maverick cop is more precise and deepened for the audience.

"Inspectur Lavardin" isn't as intense as "la Femme Infidèle" (1969) or "le Boucher" (1970) but with a palatable story and good acting in the bargain, it would be a shame to skip it. In 1988, a TV series entitled "les dossiers secrets De l'inspector Lavardin" will be launched and four installments will be shot.

NB: video and TV play an important role in the film. It must have given an idea to Chabrol about the direction his next film would take: "Masques" (1987).

User comments Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

The great thing about Inspecteur Lavardin is that he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He is, as an old friend remarks, 'an ex-thug, now a cop'. He has none of the wit, eccentricity or flair we expect from our fictional detectives, none of the artistic mathematics of Holmes, the dandy comedy of Poirot, the dogged integrity of Marlowe, or even the warped moral fervour of Harry Callahan. He is a grim authoritarian, illiberal, homophobic, who counters wit with a threat, menaces the vulnerable and weak; utterly humorless, any wit merely self-satisfaction at someone else's discomfort.

He is the perfect vehicle for Chabrol's art, a moral force whose godlike powers of detection and final rewarding of spoils subvert his social, rational role. In Chabrol's world, the innocent are always guilty, but sometimes he sounds a grace note, and the guilty can be truly innocent. Lavardin doesn't solve a crime, he exposes hypocrisy, corruption, evil. Chabrol's later (post-1975) films are less vice-like than his mid-period masterpieces, and in some there is hope for trapped characters to escape, as does the shadowy Peter Manguin, who in a previous Chabrol film would have been driven to inexorable, elaborate murder.

It's not all that rosy though - the final image of the 'restored' bourgeois household, mother and daughter staring out zombie-like at the departing detective, has some of the ironic force of 'La Femme Infidele''s ending, a bitter image of withdrawn, probably mad maternity, and an innocence that has seen too much.

As with the first Lavardin film, 'Poulet et Vinaigre', surveillance is the main theme. In Chabrol's earlier films, spying was a form of control by one person on another; here his net casts longer. Chabrol is famous for his switches in point of view, in spending much of the film with one character, before abruptly turning to another, complicating, even casting doubt, on the preceding narrative.

Although most of of this film is seen from Lavardin's commanding point of view, there are moments when the film seems to escape it (e.g. Francis' first appearance, or Veronique's final blackmailing pay-off), but Lavardin is soon revealed to be gathering knowledge unobserved, a virtual panopticon from which no-one is free (not even the paparazzi who seem to catch him with Helene unobserved on the beach).

Much is made of new media of surveillance - the case is solved by a hidden camera, a point of view significantly taken up by Chabrol's camera before it is revealed - but these are simply extensions of Lavardin's gaze: in one brilliant scene, the 'real' world of the film and that at a remove through CCTV cameras meet, when the inspector talks to a man in the same room we see on screen. To reinforce the point, a key figure in the plot has as a hobby the exquisite sculpting of marble eyeballs, in a scene which virtually gives away the plot early on.

The big difference between this film and its predecessor is the figure of Lavardin. In 'Poulet', he is a shadowy figure who only dominates in the last quarter. Here, he is on screen from nearly the beginning, and has profound personal links with the case, the murdered man's wife having been a lover who abandoned him. He claims his amateur searching for her led him to the force. The closing, bitter joke, however, involving the photo of his family, casts doubt even on this intriguing psychologising.

As ever with Chabrol, there is a strong comic element in the film, strangely disrupting the film's earnestness - the murder scene, with its threat of rape, is made ridiculous by the victim's porcine squealing. The bourgeois-baiting comedy is so entrenched in Chabrol as to have lost most of its sting, although the rigid framing of the family dinners, despite all the criminal goings on, is priceless.

The characteristic Chabrolian 'metaphysical' implications are at first rendered absurd with the blasphemous play, but when Lavardin replaces the crucifix after he's solved the case, and his general sense of a haunted house (this is one film where the present is fractured by the past in a startling way, not least in its references to Chabrol's previous oeuvre) that you're not quite sure. It's a shock to see Bernadette Lafont, that sexually voracious force of early Chabrol so prim, distant and bourgeois, although there's the odd glint in that huge come-hither mouth that suggests otherwise.

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [2/5]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B+]

Inspecteur Lavardin (1986) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Claude Chabrol and Inspector Lavardin Gareth’s Movie Diary, June 24, 2009

User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: whist from United States

The New York Times (Caryn James) review December 26, 1991, also seen here: Review/Film; On Buffing and Polishing Even the Stereotypes

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005

MASQUES

France (100 mi) 1987

'I'd kill my sister for a good pun,' says the hero of Chabrol's murder mystery; but it looks as if smarmy TV show host Christian Legagneur (Noiret) may already have knocked his chances, and his sister, on the head. Dressed in the sheep's clothing of biographer Roland Wolf, the hero insinuates himself into Legagneur's country house, where the latter's goddaughter (Brochet) languishes in a state of narcolepsy. Everyone in the house has a double identity, from the allegedly mute chauffeur/chef to the amorous masseuse/fortune-teller (Lafont). But it is what lies behind his host's polite mask that interests the snooping Roland. Noiret's slobbish screen persona is ill-suited to his role as a bourgeois manipulator with a gift for cerebral word games, and it is only when the facade cracks at the end that his more corporeal style of nastiness seems appropriate. Chabrol frames the verbal sparring with characteristic precision, but the subtle plot suffers from a surfeit of politesse and a dearth of red-blooded passion.

Masques (1987) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Christian Legagneur is the host of a popular television talent show and engages a young reporter, Roland Wolf, to write his biography. Unbeknown to Legagneur, Wolf’s motivation to take on the job was to allow him to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his younger sister, who was once a close friend of Legagneur’s daughter. Whilst staying at his employer’s country house, Wolf discovers that Legagneur has a sinister secret and that he may not be the genial, chivalrous individual that he appears to be on the television...

This film asks a pertinent question: what lies beneath the mask of an apparently pleasant and sugar-sweet public figure? Can such a person be utterly wicked, capable of fraud, deceit - even murder - and get away with all that unnoticed? How far can the public image and the private reality differ?

For the subject of his analysis, Chabrol could not have chosen a better actor than Philippe Noiret. In his role, Noiret is so successful that it is virtually impossible to believe that his character could harm a fly - until the truly disturbing scene when his daughter shows him a bird in a cage, triggering a phobic reaction that causes the mask to slip - albeit for just a moment. After that, the mask stays firmly in place, until the last possible moment. Of course, by this stage we already know the worst and far from being a nice, amiable individual, Noiret's character has an air of genuine menace, even though the mask is back in place. This shows great subtlety in Noiret's performance which Chabrol uses to great effect.

When the mask finally does fall, as it has to, and Legagneur turns on his television viewers, we see the truth in an instant and ask ourselves: how could we have been so blind? More disturbingly, we begin to question - as Chabrol intended we should - whether any real-life TV presenters have similar dark secrets.

Whilst not quite in the league of some of Chabrol’s other thrillers (most notably the superb La Cérémonie), Masques is a film which does have some gripping moments and some sparkling dialogue. The ending is as funny as it is tragic, and, as a thought-provoker, it achieves its objective a little too successfully.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

The eighties were not that much a great time for Claude Chabrol. Most of the works of this era, either have not worn very well (les fantômes du chapelier, poulet au vinaigre) or were not themes for him anyway (le cheval d'orgueil, Patricia Highsmith's "le cri du hibou")

"Masques " is probably his best since "Violette Nozières" (1978) and nearly matches the brilliance of the late sixties/early seventies heyday.

Completely unpretentious, it's full of humor, suspense and of course gastronomy (is there a Chabrol movie where they do not eat?). A marvelous spoof on these numerous TV shows which take dumbness to new limits, a detective story, this movie is much fun to watch.

Philippe Noiret, overplaying as hell -and he's thoroughly enjoyable-, plays the emcee of a broadcast for old people who sing songs of long ago, ("les roses blanches," the most maudlin song of the whole French repertoire, crooned by an old man, can be heard on the cast and credits). By no means a caricature, because, we've seen worse on French TV.

And to crown it all, he host uses "Hitchcock presents " music to enhance his horrible show. And that's not all! Philippe Noiret's character is Mister LEGAGNEUR (GO-GETTER)

The emcee is so full of himself he asks a young novelist (Renucci) to write his biography. They are to work in the country in Legagneur's desirable property, complete with court and chef. A delightful gallery of weirdoes hangs around: A couple, Roger Dumas, a wine connaisseur, and Bernadette Laffont, who enjoys reading someone's cards and less commendable things -to think that Lafont was featured in Chabrol's very first,"le beau Serge" in 1958!-; a deaf and dumb chauffeur; two strange servants, one of them relishes with Charlotte Armstrong's detective stories-like Chabrol ,who adapted this writer twice: "la rupture" (1970) and "merci pour le chocolat" (2000)-; and, last but not least, a strange girl (Brochet), Legagneur's goddaughter(sic). She seems very sick, or maybe someone helps her to be sick?

Actually nothing is what it seems. Everybody hides himself behind his mask, including the director ,who puts on his Chabrol mask this time.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Nathaniel Thompson

DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [3/5]

Masques Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B-]

User reviews from imdb Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: robert-temple-1 from United Kingdom

Images Journal James Newman, reviewing the 3-film DVD of MASQUES, THE STORY OF WOMEN, and LA CÉRÉMONIE

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Reviewing the 3-film DVD of MASQUES, THE STORY OF WOMEN, and LA CÉRÉMONIE

THE CRY OF THE OWL (Le Cri du hibou)

France Italy (102 mi) 1987

A young woman moves around her isolated house. Outside in the dark, among the trees, a man watches her - is he smiling? From this equivocal opening there unfolds a tale, unpredictable but of rather precarious credibility, that takes in rage, persecution and several violent deaths. Actually the plot is unpredictable only if you haven't read the Patricia Highsmith novel of which this is a doggedly faithful adaptation. Since Highsmith and Chabrol have so much in common, both as regards tone and preoccupations, it's surprising it took so long for their paths to cross. But maybe it's precisely this lack of reciprocity which explains why the movie is somewhat disappointing. Author and director in this case are not complementary so much as tautological.

User comments from imdb Author: Thorsten_B (thb8@hotmail.com) from Frankfurt, Germany

This Chabrol movie seems to be almost forgotten - given the few comments printed here and given the fact that it's unlikely to be mentioned among the maestros masterpieces. Even though it is based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, and has some degree of tension in it, "Le Cri du Hibou" doesn't really draw the viewer inside the small world of it's handful of characters. Everyone in this film seems to have his private neurosis, and when fate bonds them all together, an explosive mixture is the result. Unfortunately (and unusually for Chabrol) the narration is not clever enough to tantalize the viewer. Instead, quite a bunch of implausible elements make it hard to enjoy the unfolding of the story. Then again, since it is the story of a man regarded as threat by his surrounding without ever wanting to threat anyone, a man seen as guilty without guilt (or is there guilt at his hands?), Chabrol had to avoid all too much realism. An ultra-realistic view at the same story would stop at 40 minutes; it would not be able to display the ideas driving the characters to their deeds like Chabrol does. Seen through this perspective, the film is quite an interesting statement.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Patricia Highsmith's "cry of the owl" was not her best or even among her best; we are far from triumphs such as "the talented Mister Ripley" "Ripley's game " or "strangers on a train." But it was an interesting psychological study, focusing on a man who thought that, whatever he might do, he was bound to fall and he would even bring bad luck to his human pals. Like a lot of Highsmith 's characters, he was a neurotic, who could not fit in the "normal world," with a heavy guilt feeling and a touch of masochism. Chabrol's screenplay is very faithful to the novel, keeping even the last line, but it's a good example of how accuracy leads to failure.

The choice of Christophe Malavoy was excellent because the actor is subtle enough to convey such a despair. But Chabrol put him against a gallery of weirdos who would drive any man insane: a brunette whose behavior is completely implausible, played an unconvincing actress, Mathilda May; a vulgar unattractive wife -Ah Stephane Audran where are you ?- ; a brute of a fiancé who seems even more irrational than the hero, it's the last straw! On the paper the hero's thoughts and frames of mind made up for the implausibilities of the plot and built an atmosphere of ambiguity, an ambiguity which is almost totally absent in the film, in spite of Malavoy's commendable efforts. To top it all, there's an irritating part of a cop (Kalfon), a la Colombo, gobbling up madeleines, and hinting at Marcel Proust as he tries to remind his unusual suspect of what he may have done.

Because, like in a lot of Chabrol movies, people eat in in "le cri du hibou." The hero and his lady friend treat themselves to some delicious crêpes suzette (flambées) and cassolettes of langoustines: the neurotic is also a gourmet! And he does love the girl's home-made cookies!

Doing two movies a year, Chabrol makes frequently spotty works: such was the case of "le cri du hibou," deservedly forgotten work, whereas the contemporary "masques " - released at the beginning of the same year- was a brilliant film noir turned almost farce.

Veteran French filmmaker Claude Chabrol observes exurban existentialism in "The Cry of the Owl," an icily ironic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's mystery. Relocated from the American Midwest to Vichy, this cerebrally directed, deadpan thriller meditates, a la "Blue Velvet," on the malaise underlying a seemingly wholesome bourgeois neighborhood.

Christophe Malavoy plays Robert, a debonair depressive who has moved to peaceful Vichy to wait out a messy divorce and a vitriolic wife. An admitted emotional cripple, Robert starts to feel better when he becomes by avocation a dedicated voyeur. For three months he peeps in on the happily unaware Juliette (Mathilda May), tantalized by what he imagines is the perfect order of her pretty young life. Then one night he becomes careless and Juliette discovers him in the dark edge of her yard. We expect the worst when she invites him in for tea, but Robert is no ax murderer. He's the man who knows too little.

Of course, Juliette turns out to be about as normal as Son of Sam. Right off, she confides a lifelong preoccupation with morbidity and soon becomes obsessed with Robert, who she believes is the harbinger of death. And who can blame her? Indeed he must have born with an albatross around his neck, affirms his estranged wife (Virginie Thevenet), a poisonous vamp who relishes her husband's increasingly miserable life. "It always rains on his birthday," she explains to a police officer who suspects Robert of murdering Juliette's fiance (Jacques Penot) as well as assorted other victims that have begun piling up in the foyer.

The only characters who survive knowing the hero, in fact, are a co-worker and his wife, who insist on keeping Robert at a distance. Chabrol seems to be following their example with his clinically detached direction. He approaches "The Cry of the Owl" as if it were not a film but an autopsy.

Le Cri du hibou (1987) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

An artist, Robert, moves to Vichy after having separated from his wife, Véronique. He relieves his depression by spying on a young woman, Juliette, who lives in a house in the countryside with her fiancé Patrick. One day, Juliette discovers Robert in her garden and invites him into her house. Although Robert is not looking for an affair, Juliette is drawn to him and contrives to meet him whenever she can. When he finds out, Patrick goes into a rage and threatens to kill Robert. One night, the two men get into a fight and Robert knocks his opponent unconscious. The next day, Patrick has disappeared and the police suspect Robert of killing him. This news drives Juliette to suicide, but for Robert the nightmare has just begun, as he becomes the target of a mysterious sniper...

After the comparatively bland Lavardin crime thrillers of the mid-1980s and the wryly comical Masques, director Claude Chabrol returned in 1987 to the dark psychological thriller genre with which he is probably most closely associated. That film, Le Cri du hibou, reminds us of the director’s earlier successes of the late 1960s, like Le Boucher and Que la bête meure, whilst giving us a foretaste of the gems which were to come (La Cérémonie , Merci pour le chocolat , etc.)

Adapted from a novel by thriller writer Patricia Highsmith, Le Cri du hibou is undoubtedly one of Chabrol’s darkest films, and also one of his most compelling and chillingly ambiguous. Although it received some lousy reviews when it was first released, and has subsequently dipped into comparative obscurity, it really deserves to be ranked as one of the director’s better films.

Like his New Wave contemporaries François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol was a great admirer of the English film director Alfred Hitckcock, and this is clearly reflected in many of his films. The Hitchcock influence is noticeable in virtually every shot of Le Cri du hibou, but Chabrol, to his credit, uses Hitchcockian techniques to embellish rather than drive the film’s content.

The voyeuristic camerawork is distinctive Chabrol, in evidence in most of his films, but here it is an essential component of the film, emphasising the distance between the protagonist, Robert, a kind of latter day Great Reaper, and his hapless victims (who have an awkward habit of dropping dead thanks to his unwitting influence).

Impressive acting performances, particularly from Christophe Malavoy and Mathilda May, supplemented by the atmospheric, stylish cinematography, sustain an almost unbearable tension throughout the film, culminating in one of the most horrific and bizarre endings in a Chabrol thriller. As is the case with many of Chabrol’s better works, the film combines the mundane experiences of everyday life with a shockingly surreal streak of the macabre, yet it does this with great subtlety and ambiguity so that we never question what we see. It is only in the last fifteen seconds of the film that the film departs from the real world and propels us into fantasy, causing us to question our assumptions about everything we have just seen.

The best psychological thrillers tend to leave you with the impression that you have just woken from a bad nightmare. Le Cri du hibou certainly has that affect – and will probably induce in its spectator many subsequent nightmares, all with a recognisably Chabrolesque thrill...

The Tech (MIT) (Manavendra K. Thakur) review

10kbullets John White

Cry of the Owl Peter Nellhaus from Coffee Coffee and More Coffee, June 6, 2006

Karate Party Finger of Doom

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

User reviews from imdb Author: heliotropetwo from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

Mondo Digital also reviewing LA CÉRÉMONIE and MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman]

THE STORY OF WOMEN (Une Affaire de Femmes)

France (108 mi) 1988

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

True crime: Marie-Louise Giraud, here renamed Latour (Huppert), was guillotined in Paris in 1943 for carrying out abortions. Perhaps fearing that his characters might emerge as facile symbols (of oppressed womanhood, defeated France) Chabrol plays it very cool indeed. The background of the Occupation is only lightly touched on, feminist themes remain merely implicit, and the director amuses himself with ghoulish intimations of the catastrophe to come: the decapitation of a goose, the ambition of Marie's son to become an executioner. The body of the film is an engrossing account of Marie's almost inadvertent assumption of the role of neighbourhood abortionist, her amused involvement with the demi-monde (Trintignant as a no-nonsense hooker) and her husband's slow burning resentment of the situation. Chabrol dedicates the film to his actors - with reason, since they serve him so well.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

This is a true story and the heroine is not unlike Louis Malle's hero "Lacombe Lucien." They are too coarse, too immature to realize what they are doing. Lucien could have opted for the Resistance, but he's deemed too stupid by the schoolteacher and he winds up in Collaboration. Chabrol's heroine only wants to "help" her neighbors before she realizes she can earn a lot of dough with abortion. Chabrol watches his character as an entomologist, as she makes her way through those troubled times: the world has gone mad, and anyway is abortion worse than what the authorities are doing with the Jews? Maréchal Petain's France was so humiliated that it tried to make up with it by focusing on "morality."

The heroine could make also think of Violette Nozières, another Chabrol movie which also featured Huppert. And she's also akin to Sandrine Bonnaire's character in "la cérémonie." All are women overtaken by events, all are victims of a well-meaning society, Chabrol's trademark. "Une affaire de femmes" is certainly a good work although it lacks the sweep and the directing innovations of his late sixties/early seventies classics.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Copeland Brown (alicecbrown@yahoo.com) from Boston

If you're a citizen of the U.S.A. you will feel some 'deja vu of the moment' when you see this movie. Like the Nazis killed the Jews, we are killing brown-skinned people in Iraq and Afghanistan- about 13,000 of them todate --while our puppet-in-chief moralizes about gay marriage, abortion and 'family values'. The saddest part of it is, like Petain's flunkies, the American people are going along with it. It helped assuage the feelings of guilt the French people had at sending their fellow Frenchmen to the concentration camps; just as it assuages the wilful blindness of my fellow Americans to focus instead on 'those wicked gays and pro-abortionists'. Read WHAT HAPPENED TO KANSAS? to understand this political ploy even better.

Since I am all for the right of a woman to control her own body and find no scientific proof for the statements these rabid anti-life misogynists make, I reacted strongly to this movie. On the other hand, her adultery-- her cuckolding of her husband in his own bed-- made me a little sick.

Yet this was 'fair and balanced' treatment: she was not a saint, but you still have to answer the question, "Was it right that she should be guillotined?" No, it was not, and perhaps her death hastened the will of the French to put aside capital punishment as a fitting way to punish law-breakers. To kill her because she provided a room for a prostitute to do her business, because she helped many a family preserve it's 'family values' by having the adulterous women unpregnant when their husbands returned from war....no, not right.

Cabrol's use of the lover killing the trussed-up goose with the sword--decapitating it-- not 2 feet from her face with the approval of the Nazi officer at the 'festival' echoed later with her representing the silly goose who has her own head whacked off by the guillotine. Excellent movie and fantastic acting by a brilliant woman who acts dumb. "Can I send a postcard of the Eiffel Tower to my children?" she asks the guard on her way to her death.

Might be good for teen-agers to see, as it emphasizes the price you may pay for unprotected sex.

CLAUDE CHABROL's "Story of Women" is not only about the extraordinary, it is extraordinary; an unflinching treatment of a volatile issue, it refuses to simplify or close its eyes. Undoubtedly -- assuming this movie is seen, and it ought to be seen -- such an unblinking approach, given the abortion hysteria currently enveloping the Supreme Court, will shock, divide and maybe -- and let us pray for such civic enthusiasm -- bring out the magic markers and placards.

But the only banner "Women" unfurls is an artistic one. Chabrol, in fact, dedicates his film, with impishly outstretched arms, to "all its interpreters" and, at the close of this rigorous, stirring work, asks us (in a rare flash of grandiosity) to "have pity for the children of those who are condemned."

Pity for children is better underlined when a woman, whose sister-in-law has died from a shoddy backroom abortion, visits the illegal "clinic" with two of the children of the dead woman in tow. She hasn't come to scream or accuse. She has come to show the woman who performed the abortion some living children -- the ones lucky enough to escape her booming "service."

"Women" isn't merely watching from the aggrieved woman's point of view. Chabrol, one of France's finest film directors who, like his idol Alfred Hitchcock, finds sympathies on the shadowy side of conventional morality, makes us feel equally for Marie Latour (Isabelle Huppert), the one who did the dirty deed, who receives the news of this grim death with genuine surprise and whose story, based on the real-life doings of Marie-Louise Giraud, this is.

Chabrol doesn't allow "evil" and "immorality" to remain abstract, which has already outraged the appropriate Europeans. Rather than morally justify Marie's change from poor wife and mother to abortion-meister, Chabrol follows her evolution human-detail by detail, with a compassion broad and un-hysterical enough to understand someone who can love her two children, have an extramarital affair, perform more than 20 abortions (upping the price too), rent out a room to a whore-friend (Marie Trintignant) and, after the Vichy authorities throw the book at her, utter a blasphemous (and unprintable) anti-prayer to the Virgin Mary.

Huppert (star of Claude Goretta's "The Lacemaker" and title murderess in Chabrol's "Violette"), gives that evolution robust dimension. By the time she reaches the depths of abject despair (hence the malignant prayer), she has felt the elation of new-found love, a childlike ambition to be a stage singer and the initial satisfaction that this profitable thing is right because, after all, the war against women knows no armistice.

User comments from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

Claude Charbrol's stark and unsentimental masterpiece about the last woman to be executed in France--she was guillotined for performing abortions in Nazi-occupied France during World War II--forces us to see a side of war not often depicted. What does a woman with two little children do when her country is occupied by the brute forces of the enemy? How is she to find enough to eat, to buy the increasingly scarce and costly necessities of life? How is she to find joy in life? Women often turn to prostitution during such times, but Maire Latour does not. Instead she aborts the foetuses of the prostitutes and of other women impregnated, often by the Nazis. In a sense this is her "resistence." However she prospers and takes up with a Nazi collaborator. In the process she reduces her husband to frustration and humiliation.

Isabelle Huppert as Marie Latour is mesmerizing in a role that allows her talent full latitude. She is clear-headed and sly as a business woman, warm and ordinary as a mother, cold and brutal as a wife, childish and careless as an adulteress, resourceful and fearless as an abortionist, and unrepentant as she awaits the executioner (foreshadowed, by the way, by her son, who wants to be an executioner when he grows up). Francois Cluzet plays her husband Paul, and he is also very good, especially at rousing our pity. Charbrol makes it clear that both Marie and Paul are victims, not only of war, but of their divergent natures. Paul wants the love of Marie, but she wants only a man that represents success and power, a man who is clean-shaven, not the menial worker that he is. Marie Trintignant is interesting and convincing as a prostitute who becomes Marie Latour's friend and business associate.

While abortion is indeed "Une affaire de femmes" this film is about much more than that. No doubt the title is there to emphasize Charbrol's point that men really do not (did not then, and do not now) really understand abortion and why it is sometimes a horrible and abject necessity. When Marie is taken to Paris for a show trial she exclaims to a woman in jail with her, referring to the court that will pass judgment on her, "It's all men...how could men understand?" We can see that men really can't, and that precisely is what this movie is all about: showing us just how horrible pregnancy can be under the circumstances of enemy occupation.

A secondary story here, not quite a subplot, is Paul's story. What does a man do when he and his children are dependent on a woman who doesn't love him, a woman who rejects him and even goes so far as to arrange for the cleaning woman to sleep with him? It is not only Marie who humiliates him, but it is the defeat of his country, the easy surrender to the Nazis that has so reduced him. This is made clear in a scene late in the film between two lawyers who voice their shame as Frenchmen in a time of defeat.

What Paul does is not pretty (and I won't reveal it here), but so great is the provocation that one understands his behavior and can forgive him.

User comments from imdb Author: desperateliving from Canada compares the film to Mike Leigh’s VERA DRAKE

Having seen "Vera Drake," I don't think it's possible to address the film without comparison. The stories are remarkably similar (this one is based on fact), to the point that the plot goes along the same road -- there are a few successful abortions, then one goes bad, we see her reaction to hearing that her abortion has resulted in tragedy, and the abortionist gets found out (and both have husbands who exist in the sidelines). The differences between the material are two: the approach taken in terms of inflating the work (and how), and the manner of the abortionist.

Here, the actual story is deceptively simple, but the targets are obvious -- it's a very obvious indictment of anyone who dared question the right of this abortionist; that's why Chabrol makes her so easily unlikeable -- she ignores her son, doesn't satisfy her husband, pals around with a prostitute, cheats on her husband, takes money for her abortions (this is a primary difference) and lets her "assistant" (read: the housekeeper she hires from the extra money she's bringing in) take over an abortion when she wants to go fool around sexually. So you can look at it two ways: this is Chabrol pushing OUR boundaries to ask just how much we're willing to take if we consider ourselves pro-abortion, or this is him setting up the party line, making sure everyone's on one side or the other. (He's obviously on her side -- with her hair being chopped, he invokes Joan of Arc -- but he makes her so emotionally distant and so superficially ugly that it's easy for anyone opposing abortion to see her as a villain.)

Even though both films are period pieces, I don't think, despite the stress on this, that Chabrol has the talent for rendering a lower-class life with much emotion. Everything here seems geared toward the political injustice of this (though it doesn't feel angry), whereas Mike Leigh's film swarms around the tragedy of the personal, first, fills it with a crushing sense of moral weight, and *then* the socio-politic injustice comes into play. (It's clear that Huppert's family does need the money, but the daily life and struggle that shows that isn't really felt; Chabrol is more interested in just telling the story. We don't feel their pain, and I think Leigh's personal interest is better for this material than Chabrol's political and historical outrage. Leigh's cinema understands that the personal is larger than any social structure.)

When Huppert asks a friend if she thinks babies in their mother's bellies have souls, and she gets a smart response and smiles fatly -- and while this is a very obvious choice on the director's part, not ineptitude -- you don't feel as if the serious subject matter is being treated with much reverence. That's fine, it's a choice (and some would argue that Chabrol is being more subtle and Leigh more portentous -- I would argue that Chabrol is being frivolous and that Leigh's endless caring gives his film weight, not heaviness), but I object to that choice, just as I object to the way the film plays at times like a mystery (perhaps solely out of rote), as if something of this richness needs to be fitted into a genre.

That said, Chabrol has one scene that is brilliant: after an abortion goes bad, the girl's sister comes by to see Huppert, tells her what's happened, and places two bills on her table as payment. It's a moment worthy of Bob Dylan at his most insulting -- think of the last lines in "John Brown": "As he turned to go, he called his mother close / And he dropped his medals down into her hand." 7/10

Christine Evans, 'I Fought the Law and the Law Won: Transgression, the Act, and Narratives of Aphanisis in Claude Chabrol’s Story of Women', Refractory, July 4, 2006

Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]

DVD Verdict (Neal Solon) dvd review

10kbullets John White

Une affaire de femmes (1988) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

User reviews from imdb Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: allisonalmodovar from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Rents (RentyMissesStKildan) from London, England

Images (James Newman) review James Newman, reviewing the 3-film DVD of MASQUES, THE STORY OF WOMEN, and LA CÉRÉMONIE

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Reviewing the 3-film DVD of MASQUES, THE STORY OF WOMEN, and LA CÉRÉMONIE

Siskel & Ebert (audio)

FILM; Chabrol Offers A Cool-Eyed Look At a Stormy Issue Celestine Bohlen from The New York Times, October 15, 1989

QUIET DAYS IN CLICHY (Jours tranquilles à Clichy)

France Italy Germany (116 mi) 1990

Any Chabrol character who washes his oysters down with a pint of beer is probably in directorial disfavour, and indeed the director does seem to find Joey - Henry Miller's alter ego - a bit of a creep. The film opens with Joey shrivelled and impotent, living in desolation. The flashbacks to '30s Paris are a fantasia of florid decor, nudity and uncomplicated pleasure. Left and right clash in the streets but at the fabulous Club Melody the fun goes on. 'I want to stay here forever,' cries Joey, fastening onto a symbolic nipple, even as the image fades to dry, embittered old age. It's hardly profound and the Jules et Jim references are misplaced. But as a subversion of its source material the film is on a par with Kiss Me Deadly.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Henry Miller, the famous nefarious American writer in the twilight years remembers his youth spent in Paris at the dawn of the thirties. A life of debauchery guided by the search for rapture and intense pleasure of the senses through sex, food and literature (he was a profound admirer of Marcel Proust).

Amid a bushy and patchy filmography, Claude Chabrol admits liking this movie very much. That this movie makes him feel good is a mystery to me for it showcases none interest. His lack of input in his film, even his absence in the directing are blatant. He shot in a glib way an amorphous biopic to which one doesn't succeed in getting interested beyond the first ten minutes. The characters (Henry "Joey" Miller, Alfred "Carl" Perlès, Colette Ducarouge) have little depth and thickness and their acting mainly consist in wandering from brothel to brothel, from restaurant to restaurant (as Chabrol's inclination for gastronomy has it) and from flat to apartment. Probably to obey to the famous Latin expression "Carpe Diem". The action is sluggish and it's nearly a feat that the filmmaker could stretch his film for two hours with such a thin, stale, repetitive screenplay. It's all the more infuriating as the scenario doesn't live up to some heaven-sent opportunities. The ones through which one could have remembered Chabrol's trademark like unearth the hateful flaws of a posh bourgeoisie. But alas, Chabrol contented himself to skim over this point. Bereft of this asset which might have justify the vision of this film and of rigor, Chabrol installs the audience in a deep torpor and one stays out of this derivative picture of the Paris during the Roaring Twenties.

The cast is totally undistinguished, a far cry from Chabrol's great family like Jean-Claude Brialy, Michel Bouquet, Jean Poiret or Isabelle Huppert. Yes, the luminary Stéphane Audran is part of the cast but she's completely wasted in a role unworthy of her skills. Anna Galiena is also included in the cast but she will be given the chance to shine the same year with Patrice Leconte's dreamy "Mari De La Coiffeuse".

Chabrol beat his dead horse with this mediocre commissioned film which is now in limbo. Anyway, 1990 was a dreadful vintage for him with these "quiet days in Clichy" and also with another fiasco the same year: "Dr. M".

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

This one is, by far, the most surprising project to be tackled by Claude Chabrol and one that seems to be greatly despised by devotees of Henry Miller (author of the autobiographical source). Being an aficionado of the French director myself (especially after going through the current comprehensive tribute and even if I omitted several of his best-regarded work, with which I was already familiar), I give no weight to such criticisms and, frankly, having preceded this with the vulgar 1970 Danish version, Chabrol's stylish treatment of the same material grew that much more in my estimation (despite this being a rather choppy edition, since it loses some 20 minutes from the original running-time)! If anything, the film under review is far closer in look and approach to Philip Kaufman's biopic HENRY & JUNE (1990), a portrait of the life and times of the taboo-breaking novelist himself, than the earlier cinematic rendition!

Whenever he chose to make period pieces, Chabrol always managed a detailed evocation of time and place: here, he seems to be particularly inspired by the ornate production design (not least a flashback/fantasy structure set in a desert limbo that recalls the "Angel Of Death" sequences in Bob Fosse's autobiographical ALL THAT JAZZ [1979]), which provide a striking visual backdrop to the necessarily candid narrative. That said, the ample nudity (in this case, all the women are gorgeous) and potential tastelessness (the two protagonists simultaneously marry an underage girl, who is also not the retard depicted in the earlier version) are handled with sensitivity, eschewing sensationalism to the point of them appearing quite natural!

Incidentally, the loosely-related events of the original (and, presumably, the book) are presented here in a fairly organized manner and, while the whole may still feel insufficiently interesting (as per the "Cult Filmz" website), they certainly hold one's attention much more than before. One of the thorns in the side of Miller fans here is the central casting, which I admit Chabrol could have improved upon, and also the way that their constant penury is basically ignored in this version (while adding a political subtext in its latter stages). That said, Andrew McCarthy (looking quite a bit like Johnny Depp!) is better than one could have anticipated in the role of Miller's alter-ego Joey, while Nigel Havers is appropriately urbane as his more experienced pal Carl. By the way, one of the venues where McCarthy goes for a pick-up is a cinema which is screening Fritz Lang's THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1933) – this is not only in keeping with Chabrol's renowned admiration for the Austrian master film-maker but also foreshadows his very next effort, DR. M (1990), in which McCarthy himself appears in a bit part!

As I said earlier, the gallery of attractive females is given its due here: Barbara De Rossi (as McCarthy/Miller's true love Nys, though she finally opts for security with mild-mannered Dominique Zardi, a Chabrol fixture), Stephanie Cotta (as the teenage temptress Colette – even lustfully ogled by middle-aged aristocrat Mario Adorf), Eva Grimaldi, Anna Galiena (perhaps coming off best as the client who demands payment for her services at gunpoint – a scene which turns up towards the end here whereas it opened the 1970 version!) and, of course, the ubiquitous Stephane Audran – the former Mrs. Chabrol and whom he apparently still could not do without, at least in his films – as a sprightly Madame. Ultimately, therefore, while I was all prepared to hate this going in - after having bumpily made it through the 1970 original - and denounce it as a huge mistake for Chabrol, I have to say that I was sufficiently entertained and titillated by the (pardon the pun) heady cocktail of sex and death.

Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company: A Henry Miller Blog: Quiet Days In ... RC, May 17, 2009

User reviews from imdb Author: Oreste (oreste.sl@sympatico.ca) from Montréal, Québec

User reviews from imdb Author: offenes_meer from Germany

Henry Miller - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chabrol Films a Henry Miller Tale Clyde Haberman from The New York Times, August 9, 1989

Miller's interview with The Paris Review September 1961

Kenneth Rexroth on Miller

DR. M

aka: Club Extinction

Germany France Italy (112 mi) 1990

Doug Pratt's Laserdisc Review

Chabrol's futuristic thriller, set in a still divided Berlin, turns out to be something of a folie de grandeur, flawed but fascinating. Dr Marsfeldt (Bates, playing like a Bond villain) is head of the omnipotent Mater Media corporation, and has his headquarters in a technology-filled back room of the 'Death' nightclub, where youngsters dance while mushroom clouds blossom on screens. Screens also fill the streets, the thousand faces of Sonja Vogler (Beals) inviting an increasingly suicidal populace to get away from it all at Theratos holiday camp. Detective Hartmann (Niklas) pads the mean polluted streets to fathom the rash of self-destruction. Chabrol's film, intended as a loose homage/reworking of Fritz Lang's proto-fascist master criminal Dr Mabuse, is at heart a sombre, timely meditation on our millenial, self-destructive instincts. Retained from Lang is the use of overawing architectural compositions, and his mix of silent serial, comic strip melodrama and expressionism. Less rewarding are a hopelessly difficult exposition, and the dial-a-country casting exigencies of the new Euro-productions.

User comments from imdb Author: Rosabel from Ottawa, Canada

I quite liked this movie, and intend to watch it a few more times in order to peel off a few more of the layers of meaning Chabrol has woven together. I think most people would find the movie incomprehensible if they didn't know that this is a quasi-remake of Fritz Lang's 1922 masterpiece, "Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler". The "Dr. M" of the title is Chabrol's way of indicating that we are once again in the presence of the bad doctor - not just *a* villain, but THE villain, the ultimate bad guy, genius and madman. Marsfeldt/Mabuse is a pure nihilist in this outing; he's not trying to conquer the world, but to destroy it. His total contempt for humanity drives him to eradicate life wherever he can; he doesn't even bother with Hitler's excuse that he's clearing away the deadwood to make way for a master race. Marsfeldt wants nothing but death and destruction for their own sake. As usual, the plans of the criminal mastermind are disrupted by emotion - in this case, Marsfeldt's weakness for his adopted daughter, Sonja, which prevents him from eliminating her when she becomes a danger to his plans. Alan Bates plays the avuncular father-figure with a compelling creepiness; on the surface he's kind and concerned, but you can't help noticing that every time he touches her, his fingers seem to sink into her flesh like claws, and he kisses her with far too much intensity, leading Sonja to slightly shrink away every time he approaches her. His performance is the best, but Benoît Régent is also good as the high-strung Stieglitz, trapped in a job that's killing his soul, yet unable to disappoint his friend and partner Hartman by leaving. In the end, everyone is guilty to some extent, and only by acting and refusing to yield to despair are Sonja and Claus able to thwart Marsfeldt's plan.

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

To begin with, I vividly recall reading the mixed newspaper review of this one when it was surprisingly released locally; needless to say, I missed it at the time and, until earlier this year, never again did I have the opportunity to check it out. In fact, it turned up – alas, dubbed – on late-night Italian TV and, though I did record it, I recently opted to acquire the English-language version…which is just as well, since two deleted scenes were included in the package! Anyway, knowing the flak the film has received (which was practically universal), I really did not know what to expect from it. However, I must say that I liked it quite a bit, while acknowledging it cannot hold a candle to any of Fritz Lang's movies revolving around the influential figure of criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse (here, the name has even been changed to Marsfeldt!). Incidentally, the actor most identified with the role (in a revival series of 1960s low-budget efforts) i.e. Wolfgang Preiss appears here as the Chief Of Police!

Perhaps the film does at times feel like one of the many German TV cop shows which have flooded the market from the 1970s and still continue to this day, but there is no denying the grip of the narrative (which tried, but unfortunately failed, to be prophetic when the Berlin Wall got torn down only months before the picture debuted!). Equally striking is the imagery pertaining to mass suicide (the most disturbing being a child waiter in full view of the patrons at a swank and busy restaurant), media manipulation and wasted disco-crazy youth (appropriately bleak though, I concede, not all that original).

The intense performances are also a plus: particularly Alan Bates as the outwardly charming but obviously sinister Dr. M and Jan Niklas as the disenchanted yet dogged cop on his trail of terror, though heroine Jennifer Beals proves no mere purveyor of eye candy either. Indeed, Bates' occasional resort to hamminess (especially when he passes himself off as a psychedelic guru at a desert holiday resort and spouting his nihilistic credo to an incredulous, disgusted Beals and Niklas during the climax – set in the Doctor's obligatory 'control room' – all the while connected to a life-support system!) are perfectly in keeping with the fanciful goings-on. The eclectic cast also includes the likes of Euro-Cult regular William Berger, future Italian TV presenter Daniela Poggi and former "Brat Pack"-er Andrew McCarthy in small roles.

In the end, while it may fall short of Chabrol's best work, the film nonetheless makes for a thought-provoking, stylized and yet entertaining parable on our less-than-reassuring times (incidentally, its suggestion/fear of the millennium as the 'end of days' is pretty amusing at this juncture).

A Wasted Life Bryin in Berlin, September 21, 2007

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [1/5] Richard Scheib

User reviews from imdb Author: ofumalow from United States

DVDBeaver.com [Per-olaf Strandberg]

MADAME BOVARY

France (143 mi) 1991

Chabrol's long-delayed adaptation of Flaubert's novel is as suffocating as its heroine's predicament. Emma, the ambitious farmer's daughter taken for a wife by arch-mediocrity Dr Bovary (Jean-François Balmer in a perfectly controlled performance), has been the subject of see-sawing literary interpretations since the 1860s. Chabrol sticking to the letter of the text avoided the temptation to cast her in a modernised feminist role and stressed instead her stifling limitation of choices in provincial 19th century France. Isabelle Huppert, often a blood-drained, internalised actress, outdoes herself here, playing Emma in a distracted, half-comatose state, resuscitated briefly by the odd gowned ball or the lifeline to passion proffered by heart-breaker Rodolphe (Malavoy). The birth of a child fails to bring light into her eyes. A classical art movie saturated with Chabrol's dark romantic pessimism.

VideoVista review Gary Couzens

France, the 19th Century. Emma Rouault (Isabelle Huppert), the romantically inclined daughter of a country squire, marries the local doctor, Charles Bovary (Jean François Balmer). Unfortunately, marriage soon loses its charm for Emma, and she finds living with Bovary is stupefyingly dull. She enters into love affairs with a landowner, Rodolphe Boulanger (Christophe Malavoy), and a law student, Leon Dupuis (Lucas Belvaux), and soon her debts mount up...

Scandalous to the point of being tried for obscenity when first published, Gustave Flaubert's tragic novel is now recognized as one of the great works of French literature. The story has had an obvious attraction for filmmakers, with so far at least eight adaptations for the big screen, not to mention other versions for TV. Claude Chabrol's film is something of a departure from his usual genre of suspense thrillers among the bourgeoisie, and it's only a partial success. Although she was too old to play the younger Emma, you can't fault Isabelle Huppert's command of acting technique, with the smallest of expressions conveying great emotions. However, she may ultimately be a victim of miscasting, as the film simply doesn't have the impact that it should. For two-and-a-quarter hours, we admire the craft of a scrupulously well-made film, and for the fact that it's very faithful to the novel. To the letter, that is: something went awry in this film's chemistry, as the spirit of one of the world's great tragic passionate love stories is missing.

Arrow's DVD has an anamorphic transfer (which is a little too dark in places), and a French soundtrack in Dolby digital 2.0 mono, with optional English subtitles. The extras are extensive, but potential buyers should note that they are all in French without any subtitles. They comprise: cast and crew biographies, the theatrical trailer, an interview with Huppert, 10 trailers for other Chabrol films, an extract from Jean Renoir's 1936 version, an introduction to the present film from Joël Magny, a commentary on five selected scenes by Chabrol, an extract from Bonnes addresses du passé (a French TV programme from 1962 which took a look round Flaubert's house), an extract from The Faces Of Madame Bovary (a TV news report on the location shoot).

Mary Donaldson-Evans, 'A Medium of Exchange: The Madame Bovary film', Dix-Neuf, No. 4, April 2005

During his labor on "Madame Bovary," Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend, "Everything should be done coldly, with poise." And in directing his film adaption of the novel, Claude Chabrol has followed the master's instructions to the letter. The veteran French filmmaker's treatment is precise, deliberate and a peerless example of faithful allegiance to its source.

But Chabrol has taken his countryman's advice far too literally. The movie is coldly done, all right, yet as an exercise in literary transposition it's as joyless as ditch digging. He's managed to reproduce Flaubert's clinical fastidiousness, the diligent spadework done in the service of realism, but none of the tensile passion that gave his prose its shapely muscle.

All this may sound like ragging on the movie for not measuring up to the novel, a long-winded way of saying "I liked the book better." A successful rendition of Emma Bovary's story -- of her petit-bourgeois ambitions, her loveless marriage and her extramarital fiascoes -- could be presented without following literally in its creator's footsteps, one, for example, that used its source only as a springboard for the adapting artist's leap in the same fictional themes. But Chabrol, who has Isabelle Huppert as his adulterous Emma, seems to have worked here without the inspiration of a strong personal vision, or the empathetic ability to enter into its creator's skin.

Nor can he get inside the soul of his heroine. Flaubert's genius was that he could see Emma both from within and from without; we felt her emotions, her claustrophobia and her frustrations with her dullard husband (played here by Jean-Francois Balmer), yet at the same time saw through the cruel amorality of her rationalizations. Chabrol, on the other hand, is careful about his facts -- he's studiously objective -- but he can't invest them with any psychological weight.

A great actress might have rescued him; unfortunately, he has Huppert, who plays Emma as a shallow, pouty brat. And while Flaubert's heroine might have been both, there was a tragic magnitude in her banality that evoked sympathy and identification. Huppert makes us want to shove this creep down a flight of stairs. Her Emma Bovary merely expresses, in microcosm, what is wrong with the movie as a whole. What she and her director have given us is a colorless facsimile that is the opposite of ideal -- that instead of leading us to a great work, turns us away.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

the film Flaubert would have made from his novel

This was Claude Chabrol's intention and it's easier to say than to do. Gustave Flaubert's novel was so rich, undulating that any adaptation in images can only be reducing and simplistic. More than the tragic story of its heroine, Flaubert's novel encompassed a word picture of Normandy (the bulk of the film was shot in the village of Lyons-La-Forêt near Rouen) and a cruel, cynical vision of the world. If the first feature is satisfying on the screen, the second one is hardly perceptible. Hence, this crucial question: is it possible to fully recreate Flaubert's novel? Chabrol's film is faithful to the main plot with the rise and fall of her heroine sometimes told by François Périer's voice-over in spite of accelerated views on certain vital episodes, notably the peasant marriage that disgusted Emma Bovary. On the other hand, the crest of the novel (the ball to the marquis) found a perfect equivalent in Chabrol's film with this shot which goes through the turning dresses creating thus a whirlpool. The glittering life Emma dreams of instead of a dull one with her mediocre husband Charles.

Chabrol is buoyed by topnotch interpretations. Even if Isabelle Huppert is a convincing Emma Bovary, a woman whose messy dreams and follies badly conceal boredom and disgust of her condition, the other main actors steal the show with Jean-François Balmer as the perfect, narrow-minded Charles Bovary, Christophe Malavoy as unfaithful Rodolphe Boulanger and Jean Yanne as the unscrupulous chemist Homais.

"Madame Bovary" is aesthetically a refined work with lush scenery and lavish costumes that recreate rural life in Normandy in the middle of the nineteenth Century. But Chabrol doesn't break new ground with this adaptation that required something else than an elegant directing, a brilliant cast and splendid scenery. That's why his rendering of Flaubert's work is just an honorable reading of the novel in the end. One could also add that Flaubert's book was a solid opportunity for an onslaught at provincial lower middle class. But it's only skimmed over and it's a wasted bonanza.

Chabrol's reading of "Madame Bovary" amounts to the same result as Claude Berri's adaptation of Emile Zola's epic novel "Germinal" in 1993: honorable instead of being unforgettable, a commendable action instead of a ground-breaking creation. The author of "le Boucher" (1970) was rather on the wrong track but fortunately, he'll find his way again the following year with another woman depiction: "Betty" (1992). Georges Simenon's universe suits him much better than Flaubert's one.

DVD Times Noel Megahey

DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [2/5]

DVD Talk (Jeffrey Kauffman) dvd review [4/5]

Brilliant Observations on 2122 Films [Clayton Trapp]

DVD Verdict (Kerry Birmingham) dvd review

EyeForFilm.co.uk Domers

Madame Bovary (1991) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

CHUD.com (Eileen Bolender) dvd review

User reviews from imdb Author: rosscinema (rosscinema@cox.net) from Oceanside, Ca.

User reviews from imdb Author: jeremy-giroux from France

User reviews from imdb Author: gridoon2010

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [3/5]

Siskel & Ebert (video)

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review December 25, 1991, also here: Review/Film; From Claude Chabrol, A 'Madame Bovary' With Isabelle Huppert

FILM; Flaubert Does Hollywood -- Again Alan Riding from The New York Times, January 13, 1991

BETTY

France (103 mi) 1992

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]

Betty (Trintignant), a once well to-do housewife, now a pasty barfly, is taken under the wing of Laure (Audran), conveniently wealthy and herself a borderline alcoholic. Gradually fragments of Betty's story emerge in non-chronological, sometimes misleading, flashbacks, revealing a character simultaneously vulnerable and poisonous, moving haphazardly between her key modes of lassitude and betrayal. Chabrol is the least ingratiating of storytellers and certainly the portrait of Betty we end up with is admirably unsentimental. On the other hand, she's such an aggravating presence that after 103 minutes there will be few viewers who won't rejoice to see the back of her.

Betty was my first Chabrol experience. Having seen more than a dozen of his films since, it's a much richer work than I originally realized. Flashbacks are regularly utilized in Betty, which seems to elevate the past, especially since they make up so much of the film. However, they are always triggered by the present, showing life as a kind of loop. Chabrol likes to show human nature by repeating the same situations, and like his characters most of his films are variations of one another. He builds on his previous work even more than usual, particularly his 1968 masterpiece Les Biches, which involves two women living together and struggling for the same man. Stephane Audran plays off her character in that film, the lonely older woman who uses her fortunate financial state to take in a young stray girl. She seems very helpful, but is also very selfish, needing other people to amuse herself. Marie Trintignant began acting when she was four in a compilation film that involved Chabrol though her mother Nadine directed her segment. Her first work under Chabrol was 1988's Story of Woman where she plays a prostitute. She too somewhat continues her past role, so there are many possibilities, all of which Chabrol refuses to reveal. Chabrol starts the film with Betty in her lowest state having recently given away her children, and will only give us her intrigue over Audran and the bar owner having sex as a clue. But Chabrol's indifference to plot makes this far tenser and much more fascinating than it would otherwise be because we can't figure out where the story is going. Chabrol will not hint as to whether Trintignant's title character is an unfortunate victim of marrying into a bourgeois family who accepted her only as a childbearing object or a diabolical whore. Nor will he tell us if Audran is a good nurse or once again up to no good.

Washington Post (Megan Rosenfeld) review

“Betty,” the Claude Chabrol movie at the Key, is a French film like they used to make: dark, full of chic women and utterly opaque.

Betty (Marie Trintignant), in a white raw silk, two-piece number, is on a binge. Yet because of her expensive clothes, we can tell she is not just any old slut, but a mysterious slut, hiding some terrible pain behind her enormous eyes. She knocks back le whiskey and les cigarettes as though she is seeking oblivion. Aha! Perhaps this is a clue.

This movie, based on a novel by Georges Simenon, is, unfortunately, nothing but clues. It is the mystery of the Bad Woman: Why is she so immoral? Why does she have no feelings? How can she abandon her children and find her pleasure only in drink and seducing men? Perhaps it was her hard-hearted mother, who sent her away to live with an aunt and her lubricious husband in the country. Perhaps it was her father dying when she was 8.

Perhaps it is just that she is a stupid, unfeeling person. Suffocated by her bourgeois in-laws, deprived of caring for her two daughters by the overbearing nanny, she can think of nothing better to do with her life than drink and take lovers. It is not surprising that her husband eventually tosses her out, at which point all she can think of to do is wander from bar to bar, going home with any greasy old guy who asks her. And all this in one evening!

She ends up in Le Trou (The Hole), where she meets Laure, a fashionable widow played by Stephane Audran. Laure takes care of her, in a luxury hotel; they drink more of ze whiskey and Betty tells her story, which we see in flashbacks.

Betty is one of those women whom people, especially men, find intriguing because she is very beautiful and silent. They think there must be something exquisitely existential behind those bangs. It never occurs to them that perhaps this person has nothing to say.

Trintignant brings little to the role beyond her beauty, including a curvaceous figure (fully visible). Even her tears seem painted on. Audran is always a woman of substance, and seems wasted here in the secondary role of a woman intrigued by someone who is essentially vacuous.

"Betty" is unrated but contains some nudity.

Betty (1992) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Alone and drunk, Betty, is led to a Paris restaurant by a stranger. Here, she meets an older woman, Laure, with whom she strikes up an instant rapport. The two women seem to have suffered the same lot in their lives. Laure takes Betty back to her hotel and helps to cure the young woman of her depression and alcoholism. Little by little, Betty pieces together her recent history and realises that perhaps her life is not worth living. The she meets Mario, Laure’s lover...

This is a fascinating portrait of a woman - in fact, two women - who cannot live without love. Director Claude Chabrol was clearly as much motivated by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (which he adapted for the silver screen immediately before this film) as by Georges Simenon’s 1960 novel Betty. What Chabrol’s film Madame Bovary lacked in emotional depth and conviction, his subsequent film Betty has in abundance.

There are two very remarkable things about this film. The first is unmistakably Marie Trintignant’s performance as the central character, Betty. She manages to get completely under the skin of a very complex character, portraying the love-torn alcoholic with considerable conviction. Betty is an enigma, a tragic victim of circumstances - and the power with which Chabrol is able to tell her story is due largely to Marie Trintignant - very capably supported by her co-star Stéphane Audran.

The second remarkable thing is the way in which the film is constructed. Chabrol treats the subject of Betty rather like a puzzle, using all the devices and skill he has perfected over two decades of making thrillers. Betty’s past is unveiled through a series of flashbacks, going progressively back in time as the character Betty manages to recover from her alcoholic binges. It as an approach which creates suspense and adds poignancy to a sad story with great effect. As a result, Chabrol manages to get away with an understated, yet rather moving ending to his film.

This is another in a long series of films which shows Chabrol’s mastery of cinematographic suspense and a surprising depth of understanding of female psychology, whilst taking yet another swipe at the hypocritical brutality of French bourgeois society.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

The nineties didn't start under auspicious skies for Claude Chabrol. "Jours Tranquilles à Clichy" (1990) was a big bore, "Dr.M" (1990) constituted one more fiasco and one could have easily done without a new version of "Madame Bovary" (1991) which strictly brought nothing to Gustave Flaubert's novel.

So, after three failures on the trot, Chabrol turned to one of his favorite novelists, Georges Simenon hoping to find some help to boost his career again and he found it with the novel "Betty." He was so much taken with this novel that he decided to transfer it to the screen. It wasn't one of Simenon's most well-known novels but a commendable one all the same and it's easy to understand why Chabrol liked this novel so much. It assesses the portrait of an immoral woman who got a raw deal. She's like a driftwood in the throes of a river full of undertows and unbalanced by unfortunate events. A heartless mother who sent her to live with her aunt when she was young. The day she discovered her uncle having sex with a teenage girl, a loveless marriage in a bourgeois milieu whose members especially considered her as an object pregnancy so that the Etamble descendants could be assured, a scandal which obliged her to break with her upper-class family and her children. In Chabrol's work all these events are related as flashbacks and at the outset of the film, Betty is a complete drifter, wanders from café to café, is often on booze and fags (she spends a good half of the film with cigarettes and alcohol near her). In a rather sleazy bar, she's rescued by a rich widow, Laure (Stéphane Audran) who befriends with her. She also seems to be a woman with a heavy past behind her and searching for human warmth...

As Marie Trintignant once put it: "Chabrol likes these monstrous women who do terrible things with a total innocence." With this noteworthy opinion and the contents of the film, "Betty" is easy to locate in Chabrol's bushy filmography. One could regard it as the female cousin of "Violette Nozières" (1978), "une Affaire De Femmes" (1988) and "la Cérémonie" (1995). Without losing the thread of the plot, Chabrol unveils to the audience, key-elements in Betty's life which might have been watershed ones in the construction and the solidification of her numb and a little unfathomable persona. Chabrol was right not to give us available, direct solutions or weak possibilities to explain her actions and so his enigmatic heroine keeps all her mystery. To better emphasize her elusive character, the filmmaker bestowed his directing with deft, shrewd ideas. For instance, when Laure begins to speak about Mario her lover or herself, Betty doesn't appear to listen to her, she's completely immersed in her bitter memories and so, during Laure's words, the camera takes us in another time, another place like a dinner in her former bourgeois family. This kind of brainy idea tells a lot about the type of character that is Betty and also gives an inkling to the audience about her mind in disarray. And I particularly relish the very last shot which showcases her behind an aquarium whose water is unclear. It's self-explanatory...

"Betty" also provided to Chabrol another god-sent opportunity to deliver one more scathing attack on the upper-class milieu given that Betty's bourgeois family has a part of responsibility in her fall.

The two central performances command admiration and respect. Marie Trintignant and Stéphane Audran completely mesh together with easiness. For the latter, it would be the very last time she acted in a film made by her ex husband.

A compelling writing of the characters, a painstaking construction and the big efforts Chabrol put in this story of an ambiguous woman make "Betty" a real winner amid his uneven filmography. Unfortunately, his adaptations from Simenon didn't put the critics and the public on the same wavelength since the film had a fleeting life in the French theaters in spite of glowing reviews. The same mishap happened ten years ago with "les Fantômes Du Chapelier" (1982), another Simenon adaptation, inferior to "Betty." But never mind, in 1992 Chabrol found again his high artistic potential and the level will maintain itself with his two following works: the divine "l'Enfer" (1994) and "la Cérémonie" (1995).

User reviews from imdb Author: (jkowski@hotmail.com) from State College, PA

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User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

At the Movies Lawrence Van Gelder feature and interview with Chabrol from The New York Times, December 27, 1991

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review August 20, 1993, also here: Review/Film; Two Women With Secrets Talk and Talk

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)

THE EYE OF VICHY (L’Oeil de Vichy)

France (110 mi) 1993

A fascinating 1993 compilation by Claude Chabrol of material from French newsreels and related ephemera between 1940 and 1944, during the German occupation--mainly propaganda in the form of news items and "public service" features, but also a few movie trailers and one startling animated short. It's all edited by Chabrol with a keen, ironic eye, with a few English voice-overs to help point out the lies and omissions, and adds up to an irreplaceable view of what living in Vichy France was like.

From France, Depardieu as God And Other Joys Caryn James from The New York Times, February 18, 1994 (excerpt – page 2)

Mr. Chabrol's "Eye of Vichy" is an engrossing look at French propaganda films and newsreels made for the collaborationist government of Marshall Petain during World War II. As the narrator notes at the start, the film depicts France "not as it was, but as Petain and the collaborators wanted it to be seen." The film could have used more context. How many French people saw these films? What Allied or Resistance works might have counterbalanced them? But this firsthand evidence of what was put forth as happy news -- unemployed French find jobs in Germany and Petain is beloved by children all over France -- is still chilling.

User comments from imdb Author: Dave Godin from (Sheffield, England)

Film is the closest to a time-machine that we yet know, and this remarkable compilation of authentic newsreels from the Vichy period, (and let's not forget, the Vichy regime was officially recognised as the legitimate government of France by the USA, the USSR and the Vatican), are particularly chilling since so much of what the politicians and official spokesmen of those times said is unsettlingly close to much of today's political rhetoric. We hear of a United States of Europe, "a New World Order" that is "all" Hitler is seeking to achieve, and how `patriotism' is always free of dissent or criticism. That people constantly fall for this jingoistic rubbish is a cause for mourning rather than celebration, and these films clearly illustrate the overlooked historic fact that France was not `occupied' but had reached an armistice with Germany under the terms of which Germans were allowed to operate in the Northern sector of France. It also shows that Vichy needed no prompting from the Nazis to implement anti-Jewish legislation and eventual persecution and relied on good old French anti-Semitism to get away with it. This film also makes one wonder just how France was deemed `qualified' to administer a zone in post-war Germany, and how truly dangerous it was to be heroic enough to be a member of the Resistance. History is always written by the victors, but the uncomfortable gaps in their given version are exposed when you can see these shadows from the frontline experience. A vital and exceptionally important document.

DVD Verdict [David Ryan] - 3 disc set Chabrol film is Disc One in the 3-DVD review of HITLER AND THE NAZI’S (excerpt)

This 1993 documentary comes from an unexpected source: New Wave French director Claude Chabrol (Les Bonnes Femmes, Violette, The Story of Women), often nicknamed "The French Hitchcock." Befitting this impressive pedigree, The Eye of Vichy is a thoroughly unique documentary.

In 1940, after the fall of Paris, many key French governmental officials fled the country before the advancing Wehrmacht could capture them, including future Free French leader Charles de Gaulle. However, there still was a French government, and France had not been completely occupied. The remnants of La Republique turned to Marshal Phillipe Petain, the unquestioned number one hero of the First World War, to lead them. Calling Petain "beloved by the people" would be an understatement—he was worshipped. Unfortunately, he led his country into collaboration with the Nazis, ruling with an increasingly iron fist out of the small central French village of Vichy.

The Eye of Vichy explores this period of collaboration, which lasted from 1940 until the Allied invasion of Normandy and subsequent liberation of France in 1944. It does so exclusively through official newsreels and propaganda of the Vichy administration. This is a fascinating tactic—as time progresses, we see how the Nazi overlords steadily indoctrinated the French people with textbook Nazi ideology. But it's subtle, and devious…most of the time. Sometimes, it's brutally direct. It's chilling to see a newsreel that talks, in very matter-of-fact, almost friendly terms, of how 100 villagers will be shot unless the town turns in a Resistance fighter who murdered three Nazi officers. Equally powerful are scenes from "The Eternal Jew," a "movie" demonstrating how Jews are actually "vermin." As the war progresses—and begins to go poorly for Germany—French workers are de facto forced into moving to Germany to work in war factories. But of course that isn't what the newsreels tell you…

Chabrol assembles this material with a dramatist's eye for narrative. This is the raw reality of the Vichy period; and that reality tells its own story without the need for extensive explanation. Occasionally, Chabrol will have the narrator (Brian Cox, Manhunter, for the dubbed English version here) put things into historical context, or explain the real story behind some manufactured "news," but for the most part he lets history speak for itself. The result is a film that fairly zips through its 110 minutes, playing like a tragic drama instead of a documentary.

On the other hand, if you aren't familiar with the specific history of Vichy France, or of the general progress of the war, you aren't going to learn it here. Obviously, the falsehoods perpetuated by the Vichy propagandists will have no impact on a viewer if that person doesn't know what really happened. Hence, although it's a very high quality piece, The Eye of Vichy isn't for neophytes.

DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [2/5]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

User reviews from imdb Author: r-c-s from Italy

User reviews from imdb Author: dbborroughs from Glen Cove, New York

L’ENFER

aka: Hell

France (100 mi) 1994

Austin Chronicle [Christopher Null]

Paul (Cluzet) is charming, attractive, hard-working; Nelly (Béart) is beautiful and carefree, devoted to her husband and more than happy to help him make a success of his Edenic lakeside hotel. They're madly in love. Nelly has a baby. Paul has trouble sleeping; he can't shake off a nagging inner voice which needs to know what Nelly's up to every minute of the day. Little by little his suspicions take shape, and jealousy plunges him into an unfathomable purgatory of doubt and dementia. Chabrol's film is a relentlessly bleak, gripping study of pathological jealousy which finds the director more thoroughly engaged than he's been for some while. Based on a rediscovered screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot (whose 1964 production was abandoned after six days' shooting), this is a black comedy which evolves into a long dark night of the soul. The nihilistic vision may be Clouzot's, but the economy, concentration and oppressive atmosphere are pure Chabrol, as is the eruption of the suppressed into the public arena. A work of enthralling virtuosity.

This little-seen French number's title translates as "Torment." Or more to the point, "Hell." In other words, not your typical get-cozy-and-snuggle-up-by-the-fire-with-a-loved-one art flick. But as the film opens, everything is as happy as could be. Nelly (Beart) and Paul (Cluzet) are young hoteliers with a gorgeous country estate. Paul is the consummate host and concierge, while Nelly's stunning beauty and playful friendliness are worth the trip alone. But there lies the problem; it starts with a smile that lingers too long, a lost keepsake, or a few unaccounted-for hours... and pretty soon Paul is convinced that his wife is up to no good. By the time the picture ends, Paul has become hysterically possessive, and L'Enfer's cryptically French ending will make you glad you can rewind a few times to catch the nuance. The lead roles could not have been cast better, and Beart does better work here than in anything else I've seen. As a thriller, L'Enfer is a solid film. As a character study of the horrific way jealousy can ravage a man's soul, L'Enfer is not to be missed.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Among all the directors labelled "nouvelle vague," Claude Chabrol was arguably the one who had more affinities with the precedent generation so despised by a lot of his sixties colleagues. And the generation before Chabrol included the genius Henri-George Clouzot. So, to film "les diaboliques"'s director lost screenplay, Chabrol was ideal. Both he and Clouzot mix detective stories, social satire and psychological studies. "L'enfer" might be one of Chabrol's finest achievements. François Cluzet, in a lifetime performance, portrays a jealous man-recalling Bunuel's hero in "El'(1952)-, but his jealousy verges on madness. Little by little, with small touches, we see this maleficent obsession grow like a cancer, destroying everything, his wife's sincere love (well played by Emmanuelle Béart), his personality, his job. And see how Chabrol masters space. At the beginning, the action takes place in a wonderful lake setting. Then we do not get out of the hotel owned by Cluzet, with its dangerous corridors. And in the final sequences, the director confines his two characters to a doctor office or their bedroom. Cluzet's madness and its inexorable progression are masterfully shown too. First, only some gestures, some voice inflexions. Then he begins to follow her everywhere. Then come the hallucinations:the amateur movie projected onto a small screen in the restaurant is the film's apex and should be part of a Chabrol anthology. Interior voices obsess the unfortunate hero, and every time he looks himself in a mirror, he sees an irrational world, this world he lives in, this world he believes in. No longer able to communicate with the normal one, he forces the other ones (his wife being first in line) to enter his. And we are not sure, at the end of the movie, that Béart is not on the other side of the mirror too.

Two private jokes: In the first sequence, Béart puts her hair in braids, and she resembles Vera Clouzot in "les diaboliques." When the young couple comes back to the restaurant after the wedding, the little accordion tune "les couleurs du temps" that you hear was written by Guy Béart, Emmanuelle's father a long time ago.

NB.Clouzot's version, which he began to film circa 1963, featured Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani.(although the film was never completed, it has a page on IMDb)

User comments from imdb Author: jono-73 from United Kingdom

With "L'Enfer", Claude Chabrol has successfully revamped a first draft of Henri-Georges Clouzot's unfilmed 1964 screenplay, to produce a typically elegant and particularly dark psychological drama. On the face of it, the film's central character Paul (François Cluzet) would appear to have it all: he's the owner of a successful hotel in an idyllic rural lakeside setting, he has a beautiful, spirited young wife, Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) and a healthy young son. It's almost as if Paul needs to invent something to upset this picture perfect scenario - although people in the hospitality industry may wryly note that to the extent that they manage to create a surface impression of calm and order for their guests, the stress levels behind closed doors increase exponentially. Thus Paul begins to suspect Nelly of carrying on an affair with hunky car mechanic Martineau (Marc Lavoine). Jealousy takes root in an already neurotic personality, and gradually consumes every fibre of Paul's being. His suspicion becomes an absolute conviction despite the lack of any hard evidence, and eventually becomes non-specific, so that every man in the vicinity is seen as a threat. The hotel becomes, in effect, an asylum, with the resident lunatic in charge. I guffawed when I read Roger Ebert's review which alluded to the guests getting the Basil Fawlty treatment, but Chabrol plays it deadly serious, to good effect. This story of destructive obsession is taken to its logical conclusion. Hell may or may not have any metaphysical reality, but for Chabrol and Clouzot it's most certainly a place on earth, a place of our own making, though not alas somewhere that one can easily escape once one has unwittingly made it one's destination. As a portrayal of the onset and development of mental illness, "L'Enfer" is very effective indeed, made with an economic precision that sustains its ever-narrowing single-pointed focus. Although to begin with Nelly's capricious behaviour indeed suggests that Paul's questions as to her fidelity are justified, the manner in which he attempts to find the answers is increasingly alienating. Our sympathy shifts to Nelly, and with it the film's most pressing mystery, which turns out not to be whether or not she is actually adulterous, but why she stays with Paul and is prepared to be held captive by him. Is it guilt? Unconditional love? A misguided attempt at rescue? Something more mysterious still? Cluzet and Beart both judge their performances well. His is the showier of the two roles, and he does well to express the fragmenting personality and seething rage of Paul without allowing it to spill into farce. Beart, though, interested me more. While Paul becomes just one thing, an embodiment of unadulterated jealousy, Nelly seems to be constantly re-inventing herself in response to events, revealing ever more facets of an enigmatic, sensual, resourceful nature. Paul's ruthless attempt to contain this creative life-force is a genuine tragedy for both of them.

DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [2/5]

Of the filmmakers who emerged from the late '50s French New Wave, Claude Chabrol is one of the most prolific -- and the most curiously uneven. In "L'Enfer," which in French means "Hell," the 64-year-old auteur sets up another of his subtle examinations of human motives -- in this case, a husband's insane jealousy over the alleged infidelities of his wife. Inadvertently, though, Chabrol reveals less about his chosen themes than he does about his own reluctance to bring them fully to life.

The story itself -- which was originally written then abandoned three decades ago by Henri-Georges Clouzot with Belgian novelist Jose-Andre Lacour -- has all the elements of a gripping potboiler. Paul (Francois Cluzet) lives with his ravishing, newlywed wife, Nelly (Emmanuelle Beart), in the small country hotel they run on the bucolic shores of a lake. On the surface, at least, Paul's life seems perfect: His surroundings are idyllic; his work is fulfilling; and his wife is so vivaciously, sensuously alive that all men -- young and old alike -- seem to melt at her feet.

Unfortunately, this last matter is the source of his distress. After catching Nelly in the act of viewing some slides with a local car mechanic, this fidgety squirrel of a man becomes convinced that she is cheating on him with everybody in town. It's true, of course, that with a woman as buoyantly irresistible as Nelly as a partner, jealousy is a simple, unavoidable fact of life. And, initially, Chabrol casts a suspicious light on Nelly's girlish flirtations with other men. She could be making a fool of Paul, using those visits to her sick mother and long days sunning on the beach as a cover for her illicit liaisons.

What's more likely, though, is that Paul is simply bonkers. As the movie progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Nelly is as devoted to him as she is beautiful. But despite his wife's desperate efforts to convince him that she is faithful, Paul will hear nothing of it. Sure that a woman as desirable as his wife couldn't possibly be satisfied with someone so nondescript, Paul plays Iago to his own Othello, torturing himself to the point that his mind begins to unravel.

As the film moves toward its gory climax, Paul slips more and more deeply into delusion. But instead of escalating the tension as the dramatic stakes heighten, Chabrol seems to let up, allowing the story to idle and stall. In both Clouzot's original script and Chabrol's updating, the premise of "L'Enfer" is brazenly melodramatic. But in bringing his version to the screen, Chabrol seems intent on blunting the sensationalistic edge of his material. It's as if he hoped to discover something deeper in the material, something beneath the melodrama that touches on the universal.

If so, he blew it; and not only that, he turns an otherwise juicy story into an enervating exercise in cutting against the grain of the text. Though this is the film's major failing, there are other, smaller ones as well. The most alarming of these is his use of Beart, who without doubt is one of the movies' most dazzling natural wonders, but who, in playing this open, unaffected woman, looks as if she were instructed to prance around like some sort of circus pony in Gypsy drag. In the presence of such beauty, what Chabrol does comes close to defacement.

User comments from imdb Author: Nin Chan from Canada

If this film represents a faithful adherence to Clouzot's original script, one would have to say that the story may be regarded as the absolute apex/exemplar of Clouzot's understanding of psychology. At the same time, L'Enfer is absolutely a Claude Chabrol film, and the fact that it rests comfortably in either canon attests to the lasting parallels between the two masters.

As with all of Chabrol's foremost creations, this is incisive social commentary masquerading under the banal tag of "psychological thriller". Though the film can be enjoyed without any deeper engagement with or meditation on its themes of Othello-esquire obsession/jealousy, I think some thought will reveal it to be a far more rewarding film than a superficial viewing might suggest.

Situating/contextualizing the film in Chabrol's vast corpus of work, one finds in "L'Enfer" another nightmarish journey into the hazards of bourgeois sterility. Though one might say that the work is naturalistic in some respects (the intense violence that simmers beneath the genteel exterior is revealed in his disdainful disparagement of the neighboring competition), that the overreaching, emotionally volatile and profoundly sensitive husband is particularly prone to this type of neurosis, the telling proclamation of "sans fin" that closes the film suggests that the narrative is not one of isolated particulars, but a general affliction, a self-perpetuating tragedy engendered by flawed social mechanisms.

Throughout his career, Chabrol has been especially critical of the life-denying entropy and suffocating claustrophobia of bourgeois marriage, a plight where the insatiably voracious woman feels her haplessness and subordination most acutely. This, in some respects, might be his finest evaluation of marriage and erotic love in general. The tensions explored throughout the film are far from novel, again we bear witness to the irresolvable Romantic preoccupation, the desire to possess and identify with a subjective other. Again, as with "Les Bonnes Femmes," we see the carnivorous, destructive male principle, eager to subdue, asphyxiate, smother and ultimately devour irrepressible femininity.

Yet lest we distance ourselves from Paul's evident psychosis, Chabrol implicates marriage as an institution endorsed by society at large. Note Paul's perverse, masochistic pleasure in fabricating these outlandish fantasies, particularly the wild reverie of Emanuelle Beart entertaining the entire hotel in the attic. Is this the only way to preserve erotic love in the nauseating ennui of marriage, to continually reinvent the Other and, through wild imaginings, make him/her a stranger so as to escape the concreteness of conjugal reality? On another level, the film might be read as an Adlerian representation of modern neurosis, of a nervous man who is inadequately equipped for the rigours of social expectation, whose overreaching demand for absolute order and unity invariably drive him to dementia and a flight from reality. Chimeras of success and masculine authority elude him, undermined by personal insecurities and a willful, independent wife. How then, does he compensate for his lack of control? Refuge in the sadistic alternate reality that he manufactures throughout the movie.

Technically, this movie is almost immaculate, featuring outstanding performances (Emmanuelle Beart is a force of nature) and repeated viewings affirm that it is a movie of great understanding. I'm not sure if this review made any sort of sense at all, but at the end of the day all I can do is urge you to immerse yourself in "L'Enfer".

Westminster Wisdom Gracchi

DVD Times Noel Megahey

L'Enfer Mark Boydell from DVD Times

Raymond Johnston review

L'Enfer (1994) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

WearetheMovies.com AK

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]

L’enfer Jeremy Nyhuis from Cinematorics, June 22, 2009

A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam Lippe

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5] (different review from above)

User reviews from imdb Author: Doctor_Bombay from Lucas Buck, NC

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The New York Times (Caryn James) review October 19, 1994, also here: FILM REVIEW; Chabrol's Study of Conjugal Jealousy

FILM; For Papa Chabrol, It's All in the Family Alan Riding from The New York Times, August 22, 1993

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005

Nashville Scene [Rob Nelson]

LA CÉRÉMONIE A 97

France Germany (112 mi) 1995

LA CÉRÉMONIE (1995) is among Chabrol’s most critically acclaimed films and greeted with such unbridled enthusiasm that Les Cahiers du Cinéma suggested Chabrol may be France’s greatest filmmaker, an extremely ironic observation coming on the heels of Chabrol, at least in America, being the most neglected filmmaker of the French New Wave, where Rivette, Rohmer, Godard, and Truffaut have all been anointed to the head of the class at some point in their careers, but never Chabrol. This assessment is largely based on a lack of innovation in the world or cinema, where Chabrol, often seen in the Hitchcock thriller mold, may be viewed as the most commercial of the bunch. Perhaps as significant, while they all wrote regularly for the film magazine, Chabrol less memorably, as his critical comments were less strident and opinionated, never going as far out on a limb as the others. Chabrol, along with Godard, who has seemingly retreated into the video milieu, have been the most prolific directors, where this is the 46th film of 54 features. Adapted from British suspense writer Ruth Rendel’s 1977 novel A Judgement in Stone, one of the fascinating elements is the title change, which suggests the celebration of a wedding or an awards banquet, but instead it refers to a French nickname for the guillotine, their historical version of the electric chair, as it is the ritual device used to execute prisoners. And true to its title, this is a sharply written comic satire on class divisions and the principles of social order, a domestic thriller standing somewhere between comedy and horror, where it’s impossible not to recall Jean Genet’s One Act play The Maids, loosely based upon the infamous Papin sisters, though both Genet and Chabrol depart from historical realism, where Chabrol resorts to a meticulous recreation of the banal habits and routines of everyday bourgeois life, shown in minimalist detail.

The unique power of this film is the fascinating relationship that develops between two of the finest and most eccentric actresses in French history, the pairing of Isabelle Huppert, nothing short of sensational as Jeanne, a volatile and acid-tongued postal clerk, and the equally enthralling Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie, the reserved and tight-lipped maid of the upscale Lelièvre family living in an immense chateau in Brittany where Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset), a former model turned trophy wife, gives the orders. She dotes on her authoritative, Mozart loving husband (Jean-Pierre Cassel), owner of the family business, while running her own art gallery. The spoiled children are twenty-year old Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen) and teenage Gilles (Valentin Merlet), all basically wrapped up in their own lives, a typically aloof and condescending bourgeois household. When the kids try to get closer to Sophie, claiming their mom treats her like a robot ordering her around, she quickly rebuffs them, showing no social interest, retreating to her room where she prefers watching mindless television shows. Nonetheless, Sophie keeps the house spotless, which puts Catherine at ease, but the rest of the family remain skeptical at her utter indifference, showing no outside interests or social skills. She does hear about Jeanne from the outraged father who believes she is opening their mail and resealing it before delivery, an act that just galls him, as he refuses to allow anyone else to undermine his authority. Sophie fulfills her chores perfectly, but grows ghastly pale when she receives written shopping instructions, deathly afraid the family will find out her closest held secret, the fact that she is illiterate. When she runs across Jeanne for the first time in the supermarket, her verbal reticence is matched by Jeanne’s nonstop chatter, where she is quickly baled out of the jam while Jeanne gives her all kinds of shopping tips. The two lower class women become instant friends, growing even closer when both share dark secrets, as Jeanne may have accidentally killed her own baby, while Sophie implies she might have murdered her own father in an arson incident. In both cases there as insufficient evidence to prosecute.

Once they become friends, they’re inseparable, like long lost sisters, where Jeanne spews cruel gossip with regularity, showing nothing but contempt and disdain for the upper classes, literally mocking Catherine for asking Sophie to work on an off day for a birthday party for Melinda, expecting the hired help to be available at a moment’s notice, even though Sophie informed her ahead of time that she was doing volunteer work at the church with Jeanne. Sophie helps set up the appetizers before leaving for church, to Catherine’s dismay, finding her attitude troubling. At the church, women pick through the donated clothes, separating the usable from the worn out, where Jeanne can’t believe what junk rich people donate, using the church as a garbage disposal, as most of what they find is unusable. Their rude mockery grows so excessive and out of control that eventually the priest has to ask them to leave, as they’re humiliating the donors. To Sophie and Jeanne, they’re just being honest, saying what must be said, where Sophie’s friendship seems to empower Jeanne to be even more wild and outspoken, which in turn opens up Sophie as well, where isolated, they feel powerless and alone, but together they’re an unstoppable force, perfectly expressed when they’re watching television together like sorority sisters, arms around each other, where ironically they’re watching Michel Piccoli and Stéphane Audran in Chabrol’s earlier film WEDDING IN BLOOD (1973). The Lelièvre family finds Sophie’s behavior so alarming they give her a week’s notice, which only further infuriorates Jeanne who bristles with anger, sick of the rich always having their way, always telling others what to do. When they return to the estate to pick up Sophie’s things, the Lelièvre’s are sitting calmly on the sofa recording a televised production of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, where a notorious liar and seducer of women is sent to Hell and damnation. Actually the Mozart opera of choice where the lower class servants sarcastically make fun of the idyll rich is The Marriage of Figaro, literally leading them around like puppets on a string. Nonetheless, Chabrol uses this setting to bring it all to a head, leaving nothing to the imagination, where this strange pair of women exacts justice, a strange word that has a different connotation in the larger cosmos, as the universe exacts its own, seen at work over the end credits, where the ultimate finale doesn’t occur until the final credit has run.

There is a creepy and seductive nature to this strange pair of women, with erotic lesbian undertones to their developing intimacy, where Jeanne gleefully offers plentiful kisses all over Sophie’s cheeks, where implied sex is intertwined with their growing anarchistic liberation, where they defy all moral boundaries. While it begins innocently enough giggling and tickling one another on the bed, it’s telling that it takes both of them together to rise to the level of class revolt, becoming a lethal pair, while individually they are harmless, as neither would have the strength to carry out their fateful rebellion. After the deed is done, Jeanne proudly comments to Sophie, “On a bien fait (We have done well),” as if they’ve finally risen to the occasion and stood up to the higher classes, like some kind of Mother Courage Marxist spectacle. Their friendship, however, is toxic, like a time bomb waiting to go off, where the results can only be disastrous. Together they represent an ultimate horror, driven by Jeanne’s calamitous sense of danger, unease and restlessness, becoming a collective madness.

It was chilling to see this film about this classic murderous pair on the day following the Boston terrorist fiasco, where the Tsarnaev brothers, 26-year old Tamerlan and his 19-year old brother Dzhokhar, seem more like Jeanne and Sophie and the Columbine killers than al Qaida. A pair of brothers is a classic dyad scenario, like Bonnie and Clyde, Leopold and Loeb, and the Washington D.C. snipers, a twisted relationship that plays out very differently than a lone gunman. Mass killers are mostly *not* loners or outcasts, and the Columbine killers were neither. Killer dyads are more consistent with a dominant, charismatic leader and a submissive follower, where the leader is often a sadistic psychopath. Dyads usually contain contrasting personalities, as often there is a significant age difference, where a psychopathic killer generally does not hook up with another psychopath, nor do depressive pairs work well together. Columbine was a perfect illustration of a classic dyad, where a psychopath like Eric Harris craved excitement and had difficulty sustaining it, but needed Dylan Klebold following his every move with adulation. Who knew this film would recall the Columbine massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings?

This brilliant, near-diabolical drama by French director Claude Chabrol stays with you for days. The film follows Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), a sullen, nervous live-in housemaid who takes a job caring for the rich Lelievres family--led by matronly Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) and her inhumane patriarch of a husband, Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel). Sophie can't read, nor does she appear to notice the family's condescending habit of psychoanalyzing her behavior. Evading their inquiries with defensive bursts of "I don't know," she holes up for hours in her attic bedroom. Then she meets Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), a pig-tailed, gum-smacking postal worker who casually advises her new friend to "Stand up to them!"--which, in her own way, she does. The class tension continues to escalate in this perfectly detailed film, calibrated by Chabrol to deliver maximum impact.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

When Catherine (Bisset) takes on Sophie (Bonnaire) as housekeeper, her family's impressed by Sophie's aura of quiet responsibility, even though they're not convinced she knows how to serve dinner correctly. Snobbish but liberal, they nevertheless treat her generously. Only when she starts to consort with postmistress Jeanne (Huppert), a gossip whom husband Georges (Cassel) suspects of opening the family mail, do they find real cause for complaint. But by then the women have a secret bond which excludes them from the safe cosseted world of Sophie's employers. Chabrol's adaptation of Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone benefits from the director's immaculate sense of social and psychological detail. The film's strong points are not mystery, suspense or even surprise, but Chabrol's flair for characterisation, careful pacing and solid evocation of bourgeois complacency and anti-bourgeois hatred creates a palpable sense of unease that fully justifies the shockingly violent finale. Ledoyen, the daughter of the household, is a discovery; Bisset returns to form; and Huppert, unusually vivacious, is terrific.

User comments from imdb (page 4) Author: dbdumonteil

Chabrol's plan was similar in "la ceremonie" to that of "la rupture" (1971). Take a detective story (Charlotte Armstrong for "la rupture" (the balloon man), Ruth Rendell for "la ceremonie" (A judgement in stone), then give it a "social satire" flavor. He did it all right in Armstrong's case which was a pure thriller. Rendell's case is much more different, since she is a much superior writer than her late American colleague. "A judgement in stone" is a captiving novel, very subtile, with interesting characters. The social critic is implicit, but sitting on the fence; the bourgeois are sympathetic people, their daughter's proposal to teach the maid to read is sincere. But Rendell makes us feel the gap between this cosy intellectual life in which you enjoy operas and the illiterate world of the maid where books are enemies. A lot of the psychological side eludes C.Chabrol. First of all, Sandrine Bonnaire was not the character. She's much too beautiful. (A young Shelley Winters would have fit the bill quite well!) In the novel, the heroine was some kind of village idiot with empty eyes who was not realizing her social condition. The same goes for I.Huppert, much too attractive to play her crude friend. Jean-Pierre Cassel and Jacqueline Bisset, on the other hand, are credible bourgeois and make up a bit for the weakness of the casting. Chabrol's work is not bad, by a long shot. But, while explaining what should be implied his wholesale massacre loses some of its strength.

Albuquerque Alibi [Karla Esquivel]

The new film, La Cérémonie, may play with your expectations of what a suspense thriller should be. Forget shock value for the sake of itself. Instead, this Gallic import is filled with a somber tension that carries itself hypnotically throughout the entire film--like the white noise of television after you've fallen half asleep. French new wave director Claude Chabrol, whose career is laden with thrillers that also function as social commentary, is considered France's Alfred Hitchcock. It's obvious he has learned much from Hitchcock as he slowly unravels the suspense of his story ever so carefully.

The film takes place in Brittany, where Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) hires the withdrawn Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) to care for her comfortably numb bourgeois family. The class span is wide between the two women. Catherine basks in her money, perhaps rubbing it in a bit as she gives Sophie an overzealous tour of her immense château. Sophie, on the other hand, is oblivious, almost mechanical, in her behavior. Clearly, it is her main purpose in life to serve like a listless proletariat ... or is it? The family is relieved that Sophie appears content. She doesn't read books; instead she reads the talking heads of television. The children accuse their parents of wanting Sophie to become paralyzed by television. Of course this makes sense. The best workers are always those who are complacent in their world.

Sophie is the best housekeeper the family has ever had. But soon her anti-socialism and gross lack of social skills begin to get her into some trouble. It's not as if she doesn't want to be social. She's just too busy hiding her illiteracy from the family. She wanders about town trying to decipher shopping lists and hangs up the telephone when she can't retrieve information that would require her to read. If she appears mute to the family, it is because they are blind to her obvious problem.

Sophie eventually sparks up a friendship with Jeanne, (Isabelle Huppert of Amateur) a wild child who loathes the upper class and harbors a distinct sense of rebellion. They share the common bond of both having committed crimes in the past that they scarcely got away with. Isabelle Huppert strays away from her usual delicate roles and comes out roaring like a lion; she is hardly recognizable. The friendship between these two women has an inherent quality of danger to it. Jeanne represents the ultimate horror because she is unreasonable and helplessly chaotic. She's a time bomb waiting to explode at the upper middle class, which she loathes. She ignites her sense of rebellion in Sophie, pushing the meek servant to stand up for herself. The family resents Jeanne, and they forbid Sophie to have her in their house. In return, Sophie despises the family, noting all of their trivial problems and says, "If I only had a tenth of what they have, I'd be happy."

La Cérémonie is filled with a vicious psychological tension that admittedly isn't always easy to sit through. You just know that something atrocious is lurking in the corner, waiting to happen. Chabrol utilizes class differences to emphasize the brewing tension. In reality, Chabrol is making social commentary. He brings to light, in a horrific manner, the blatant problems that exist between the classes in modern-day France. Though Communism has recently taken a dive, Marxist ideology is still alive and well.

"You can't get the staff these days" by Quentin Curtis from The London Independent, March 10, 1996

Two of the finest—and strangest—French actresses of our time play a pair of menial workers in Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie, based on Ruth Rendell's novel A Judgement in Stone. As the rapport builds between Isabelle Huppert's volatile postal clerk and Sandrine Bonnaire's tight-lipped maid, Huppert confesses: "I'd really like to be an actress, wouldn't you?" With just about any American or British star, the line would seem bathetic or incredible. But these two astonishing actresses so completely shrug off their glamour—though not their luminous, compulsive watchability—that it rings true. They are humble people dreaming of histrionics. Like everything in Chabrol's perfectly poised film, the line hints at hidden depths while staying rooted in the everyday.

Such as, for instance, the first scene of the film, played out in the bleached white light of a winter's morning in Saint Malo, northern France, in which Mme Lelièvre (Jacqueline Bisset), the elegant wife of a wealthy businessman, picks up Sophie (Bonnaire) from the station, and interviews her in a local restaurant about the job of looking after her house. The meeting is curt and joyless—as fraught as the strings resounding on the soundtrack. Sophie gets the job and makes a satisfactory, self-effacing start. If she is diffident, even defensive, it may be only that she is desperate for her employers not to know that she is illiterate. Or, then again, there may be a darker secret—one that bonds her with Huppert.

Huppert is already known to the family Bonnaire works for—and hated and distrusted by them. But Bonnaire forms an outlaw friendship with her. They collect discarded clothes for the local church, though even their charity hints at something sinister, disturbed. These weird soul sisters are linked by an odd closure of character; the world proceeds unnoticed by their tight, focused minds. They are not unhappy, just detached.

Isabelle Huppert, last Saturday night, won the French César award for best actress. Fine though Huppert is, it should have gone to Bonnaire (also nominated). It is her pale, tense presence that carries the film, whose first section Huppert doesn't appear in. "I would have noticed if she were hideous," Bisset tells her family when she first employs Bonnaire. And it is true there is nothing outwardly alarming about Bonnaire: just a hint of pique in her quietness, maybe, a flutter of neurosis in her efficiency. Her short, trim figure and her trousers make her seem girlish. The only real worry is in the flustered way she clears a tray of glasses, betraying more madness than method.

Huppert's clerk is a much more obviously troubling character: sullen, abusive, atrabilious. Both Bonnaire and Huppert have always had a coldness in their acting, equally well suited to playing the transcendent and the transgressive. Here their peculiar brands of off-centre beauty—Bonnaire all gaunt intensity; Huppert wispy distraction—meet and meld. In one of the most memorable scenes, they watch television, arms around each other's shoulders, joined into one brooding beast.

Some may view the movie as an attack on the bourgeoisie, as represented by the family Bonnaire works for. But Chabrol, though he has described the film as the "last Marxist movie," retains some balance. True, the Lelièvres are rich and live in luxury. At the climax, the family watch Don Giovanni on television, wearing evening dress. However, even here, it is hard to gauge from their high-flown dialogue ("It's very homogenous: nobody stands out," Mme L says of the performance), whether we are supposed to see them as pretentious or cultured. Certainly, they are considerate employers, even if Jacqueline Bisset's superb mistress of the house is too chic-ly busy to notice much that goes on around her. If the movie has a message, it's that the fault lies not in masters or serfs, but in the society that fosters such divisions. The rich's succour only exacerbates the wounds of the poor. Then again, you may think the movie illustrates the problem of getting good staff these days.

For Chabrol, this is a return to the form of his heyday, of films such as Le Boucher (1970). His imagery is subtly unsettling, as when he shoots Bonnaire getting out of a car from around the other side of it. As so often in his work, the feel is Hitchcockian. There is an indefinable but distinct sense of foreboding, and one unbearable suspense sequence. But there is not so much sadism as with Hitch. Chabrol withdraws the knife rather than turning it, allowing us to stop screaming and start thinking. It is probably best that you know as little about the plot as possible. But one word of advice: stay for the credits—this is a movie that stores surprises to the end.

La Cérémonie by Royal S. Brown from Cineaste

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review [4/4] February 14, 1997

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review

Slate [Dave Kehr]

Senses of Cinema – La cérémonie Julien Lapointe from Senses of Cinema, April 2001

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also seen here: Ceremonie, La (1996) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com

DVD Times Anthony Nield

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4] also seen here: ReelViews [James Berardinelli]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards) dvd review

<vergerus@interlog.com>

Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review

La Cérémonie (1995) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]

WearetheMovies.com AK

DVD Verdict Dan Mancini

Froilan Vispo review

Chabrol Day Two: Class status and delusional think... Ray Young from Flickhead, June 22, 2009

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [4/5]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Mark R. Leeper review

Cérémonie, La Glenn Heath from Match Cuts, February 16, 2009

The Ceremony Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Reader (capsule review)

User reviews from imdb Author: Edgar Soberón Torchia (estorchia@gmail.com) from Panama

User reviews from imdb Author: KuRt-33 (kurtaerden@yahoo.com) from Antwerp, Belgium

User reviews from imdb Author: G. Gulati (v@gulati.demon.co.uk) from Preston, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: LCShackley from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: doctorlightning from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: writers_reign from London, England

Mondo Digital also reviewing MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT and CRY OF THE OWL

Images Journal James Newman, reviewing the 3-film DVD of MASQUES, THE STORY OF WOMEN, and LA CÉRÉMONIE

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Reviewing the 3-film DVD of MASQUES, THE STORY OF WOMEN, and LA CÉRÉMONIE

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman

Austin Chronicle (Russell Smith) review [3.5/5]

San Francisco Examiner [Barbara Shulgasser]

Cérémonie, La Kevin Thomas from The South Florida Sun-Sentinal

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] February 7, 1997

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] April 17, 2012

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review December 20, 1996, also here: Maid Is Hired: Danger Is Served

From Chabrol, a French 'Thelma and Louise' Alan Riding from The New York Times, December 15, 1996

NEW VIDEO RELEASES The New York Times, August 15, 1997

DVDBeaver.com Blu-ray [Gary W. Tooze]

La Cérémonie: Information from Answers.com

Were the Tsarnaev Brothers Like Columbine Killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? Dave Cullen from Slate, April 19, 2013

THE SWINDLE (Rien ne va plus)

France Switzerland (101 mi) 1997

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dbdumonteil

This Chabrol's movie begins well with funny characters, Michel Serrault cast as a bogus colonel, Huppert, as a bogus femme fatale, and François Cluzet as a security guard working for shady guys. The scenes in the ski resort and on the plane, with a witty dialog including money, of course, gastronomy,army (Ah! our beautiful French Army! an old and distinguished lady tells the "colonel"), and even Dead Poet Society (watch out for the lines). Then, half-way through, the movie loses steam, the pace becomes too slow, the dialog ponderous. Jean-François Balmer (a great actor though) and his gang of baddies are not convincing, being too stereotyped compared to the three initial characters. At times, it would seem that Chabrol and his actors preferred to enjoy the sea sun and beach of the wonderful setting. Hence this disappointing second part where "rien ne va plus"(nothing works anymore), and with a very trite ending at that! Average.

Village Voice (Amy Taubin) (Page 2)

Claude Chabrol specializes in bleak social comedies and brutal historic melodramas that take a pickax to the economic and power relationships of the bourgeoisie. The Swindle, his 50th film, is a failed attempt at frivolity. Isabelle Huppert and Michel Serrault play a pair of con artists, long-term partners who, despite a 25-year age difference, may have been lovers at some time in the past. In any event, this is a symbiotic relationship. Their most ambitious caper takes them from Paris to the Swiss mountain resort of Sils-Maria (where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra) to the Caribbean. The scenery is fetchingly photographed, as is Huppert, who changes wigs as often as others change their underpants. Even in the most tired situations, Chabrol has a few sophisticated filmmaking tricks up his sleeve. Thus the double-crossing protagonists have a visual correlative in traveling shots where it's impossible to tell if it's the cars or the camera that's changed direction.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

When you're a con artist, how can you really trust your lifepartner if they're also your professional partner - a trickster, like you? And at what point does a small-time scam become dangerously big-time? When is the game no longer a game? How, in fact, after years of living a lie, can you tell what's real any more? These are the questions raised by Chabrol's eccentrically clever concoction, situated in that treacherous territory between sly comedy and something rather nastier. Betty (Huppert) and Victor (Serrault) have been happily conning convention guests for years, until she sets her cap at Maurice (Cluzet) - is she simply out to swindle him, really attracted, or out to make Victor jealous? And is Maurice as innocent as he seems? Chabrol's movie is mostly a slight, elegant jape, enjoyable but undemanding save in the way it asks us to keep pace with the Mamet-style twists. It's all very playful, with an ironic, irreverent take on national stereotypes, and motives kept admirably ambiguous. Then, along comes a killer twist and a climax of authentically operatic cruelty, as baroque, brilliantly unsettling and casually brutal as almost anything he's done; proof that after 50 movies the old magic's still there.

Austin Chronicle (Russell Smith) review [3.5/5]

Even if -- especially if -- your movie tastes run to the aggressively stylish textures and Benzedrine-cranking narratives of young filmmakers such as Doug Liman, Guy Ritchie, and Danny Boyle, I call to your attention this 1997 film by 68-year-old French New Wave pioneer Claude Chabrol. Mind you, I'm not here to argue the intrinsic superiority of understatement over flamboyance. Art's a big tent, after all, and the pipe-bomb flingers deserve their place right alongside the rapier artistes. But Chabrol's uncannily subtle and suggestive movies do serve as powerful reminders of how little main force is actually required to pack a story with mystery, ambient tension, and psychological complexity. As with many of Chabrol's films, The Swindle achieves more of its emotional effect through what is hinted at than what is actually said or shown. The script, by Chabrol, revolves around the relationship between two modestly successful French con-gamers: an attractive fortyish woman named Betty (Huppert) and partner Victor (Serrault), a debonair older gent who, in a typical bit of Chabrolian ambiguity, might be her lover, father, mentor, or some kinky combination thereof. Most of the pair's scams involve Betty putting the femme-fatale moves on some patsy in a hotel bar, drugging his drink, then accompanying him to his room. After the Mickey kicks in, she and Victor rob him. (Invariably, they take only part of the dupe's money, leaving enough behind so that he's unsure whether he's been robbed.) For such a devious pair, Betty and Victor are surprisingly trusting of each other, scrupulously dividing their spoils and sharing all the details of their respective lives. So when Betty unexpectedly starts working a solo scam on a handsome Swiss guy named Maurice (Cluzet), Victor starts losing a bit of his arrogant assurance about where he stands with his sexy, increasingly independent-minded protégé. A fairly standard grifters' cross/doublecross setup drives the plot, but far more interesting is the extreme uncertainty that Chabrol introduces into the characters' intentions and motivations. Like the novelist Patricia Highsmith, whose material he adapted very successfully in The Cry of the Owl, Chabrol concocts intelligent, infinitely complex criminal characters who act out of such unorthodox motivations as slighted pride, insecurity, raging hubris, and simple misunderstanding. The Swindle's story develops slowly and matter-of-factly, but as with Chabrol's previous film, La Ceremonie, it builds up a powerful head of psychological tension toward the end, adding a late twist or two that shed further oblique light on the whole affair. Compared to Chabrol's La Ceremonie, which also featured Huppert, The Swindle has a much lighter, sometimes overtly comic feel, though the delightfully multilayered performances of Huppert and Serrault lend it a perverse, Hitchcockian kind of charm that's anything but sweet and innocuous. It'd be nice if more movies possessed these virtues, but the fact is that Chabrol (once slagged as a Hitchcock knockoff artist) is essentially inimitable -- a sole-source supplier of a refreshing, sui-generis filmmaking style. Appreciate him now, both for what he is and what he stubbornly refuses to be.

not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) review

DVD Times Anthony Nield

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

CNN Showbiz (Paul Tatara) review

Chabrol Day Six: Rien ne va plus Ray Young from Flickhead, June 26, 2009

Harvey S. Karten review

The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

Rien ne va plus (1997) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review

Nitrate Online (Capsule) Eddie Cockrell

DVD Talk (David Cornelius) dvd review [2/5]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C-]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

User reviews from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

User reviews from imdb Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas

User reviews from imdb Author: rosscinema (rosscinema@cox.net) from Oceanside, Ca.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: writers_reign from London, England

Variety (David Rooney) review

San Francisco Examiner (G. Allen Johnson) review

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review

Swindle, The Kevin Thomas from The LA Times

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin, December 23, 1998, also here: FILM REVIEW; Chabrol's 50th Feature: What Are His Enigmatic Scam Artists Doing?

THE COLOR OF LIES (Au coeur du mensonge) A 96

France (113 mi) 1999

This is the kind of deeply complex character study that is nearly absent from films today, though superficially it might recall those Sunday night television episodes of Columbo or Murder She Wrote, as this is ostensively a small town murder mystery. But Chabrol’s artistry turns this into a chilling atmospheric descent into dark interiors, idyllically set by the sea in a small Breton fishing village of St. Malo on the north coast of France where there’s little sunlight, as every scene is bathed in the cool dampness of a frigid Atlantic air, where waves can be heard crashing overnight, literally explosions confronting a collective mindset of the town’s guilty consciences. A superb sociological mystery that is as much an exposé of the sleepy local community, a place where everyone knows everybody else, where the film examines the quiet reverberations of a young 10-year old schoolgirl’s raped and murdered body discovered in the nearby woods. The prime suspect, due to the fact he was likely the last person to see her alive, is her emotionally fragile art teacher, René Sterne (Jacques Gamblin), himself a failed and frustrated artist following an accident that has left him with a limp. His devoted wife Vivianne (Sandrine Bonnaire) refuses to believe he had anything to do with a grotesque murder, but many of the locals withdraw their kids from René’s art classes. The film recalls Chabrol’s earlier films COP AU VIN (1985) and INSPECTEUR LAVARDIN (1986), as both feature an irrepressible detective sniffing around small town homicides, though here Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, with her high pitched voice and constant cigarette in her hand, plays the recently hired chief inspector Frédérique Lesage, much to the regret of veteran inspector Loudun (Bernard Verley), who was next in line for the position until they turned to an outsider, claiming the town leaders didn't want to pay him a higher pension since he plans to retire in a year.

The film is replete with this kind of local charm, adding humor and color to the otherwise somber interior reflections of the anxiously insecure René, who remains interesting largely because of his artistic temperament, as he’s always intensely passionate about his painting, but his continual frustration with his work and his own troubled life leaves him in a perpetual gloomy state, seemingly a broken man who remains overly dour and morose. Vivianne, on the other hand, remains vivaciously alive and couldn’t be more cheerful and upbeat, but she has a restless spirit as well, becoming increasingly introspective as the film progresses. Enter Desmot (Antoine de Caunes), something of a local media celebrity, a charming but overly pretentious cad, a man with an inflated view of himself, but a successful writer and TV commentator. Vivianne is challenged by thoughts of an affair with Desmot, as he continually flatters her with an easy going charm, exactly the opposite of her self-loathing husband, where getting information out of him is like pulling teeth. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film is Chabrol’s choice to turn this into a psychological study camouflaged as a murder mystery, where the police investigation takes a back seat to René’s self absorbed trauma, focusing instead on his reactions to the murder, his public ostracism, and his artistic failures. His deteriorating state of mind is matched by the police frustrations with their own inability to identify a suspect. Perhaps most interesting is the changing relationship between René and his wife, which on the surface remains supportive, but her subconscious yearnings lead her to Desmot, who makes an impulsive suggestion that Vivianne wear the color blue, a color that quickly pervades the entire film, as the town is suddenly immersed in a dark bluish tinge, especially the natural seaside landscape whose special vibrancy continually eludes René.

Neither Vivianne nor the audience know if René is actually guilty, but Chabrol delights in laying a minefield of clues, every one of which alerts the audience to the mysterious realm between suggestion and reality, often indistinguishable, begging the question of what we ever really know about anyone, including those we love and think we know the best, as our perceptions are riddled with superficial implications, such as someone appears to be acting a certain way, or they seem to be telling the truth. What do we ever really know? And in René’s case, what happens when our self confidence and faith in reality is literally shattered? This shifting psychological pattern where everyone is suspect, where guilt inhabits all the principal characters through rumors, accusations, and malicious gossip spread throughout the town (mostly by Bulle Ogier), only adds to the mounting tension, where uncertainty pervades the landscape, like the impenetrable fog that eventually engulfs the community and figures into so much of what eventually happens. While René is choking and literally suffocating on his own uncleansed soul, continually wracking his brain with a kind of self-induced guilt, yet he’s also the only one who seems to care about telling the truth, a fact that should not be overlooked. Nonetheless, in a carefully constructed dinner scene where Desmot is invited to the seaside cottage of René and Vivianne, René plies him with wine, a man he detests, getting him good and drunk, but rather than making a fool of himself, as he hoped, Desmot continues to spout his obnoxiously vain and unflappable sense of superiority, ego and self-importance, usually centered around making callous and belittling judgments of others, including René, who is always perceived as weak, something that infuriorates him. What happens that night in the fog, as René takes him home in a midnight boat trip, adds to the enveloping mystery, as the presence of inspector Lesage the next morning informs us that another murder has been committed, finally becoming the police procedural that we always thought it would be. As a host of characters are paraded before the inspector, each one defending themselves by casting guilt on others, we soon realize that everyone’s lives have been defined by a constant state of dishonesty, creating an inner tension that can only be relieved by a truth that may never come. Ultimately, the fog breaks and people have to live with themselves, but it’s Bonnaire’s strength and undying love for her husband that stands out, becoming novelesque in scope and unique in unraveling the multiple layers of protective lies, perhaps in the long run, a necessary social evil. The film goes out on a poetic grace note, a recognition of how much ambiguity plays a part in our lives, where perhaps the overriding power of love is faith in its existence.

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Chabrol-by-numbers: a female cop (Bruni-Tedeschi) investigates the strangling of a schoolgirl in a Breton village, centring her enquirieson three 'outsiders': an insecure art teacher (Gamblin), his wife/protector (Bonnaire), and a fashionable novelist/TV presenter (de Caunes). All the usual motifs are wheeled out, from guilt-by-thought versus guilt-by-deed to sexual inadequacies and jealousies, but this time the manure lacks nutrients. The denouement comes second to the closing 'meditation' on the deep meaning of lies, as flagged in the title, but most viewers will be too deeply asleep to care.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

One of Claude Chabrol's poorest offerings, this movie is near plagiarism: it sometimes recalls Edouard Molinaro's "La mort de Belle" from George Simenon. The teacher unfairly suspected of a crime who commits another crime: it's all there in Molinaro's 1963 movie featuring the great Jean Desailly. So why bother? Chabrol even copies himself: the ending looks like that of "juste avant la nuit" (1971).

"Juste avant la nuit," though inferior to "la femme infidèle" "que la bête meure" "le boucher" or "la rupture," boasted a wonderful cast: Bouquet and Audran. Here, what have we? Sandrine Bonnaire, totally incredible as a doctor, Bulle Ogier, a grotesque matron, and Antoine de Caunes, an "actor" generally cast in some ponderous French comedies. Fortunately, he dies half an hour before the end, what a relief! The actress playing the cop should enter the Guiness book of Records as the worst performer of a police officer in history: how lucky they are, the ones who see the movie dubbed in English. Her voice and her swagger are comic at best, unbearable in the long run. I really wonder how she passed the audition.

Along with this one, some of Chabrol's films to avoid at any cost: "folies bourgeoises" ,"les magiciens","les innocents aux mains sales,"; and the ones that should be restored to favor: "l'enfer" and "masques".

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [2/5]

From where we sit, Claude Chabrol may seem to be the most ubiquitous of the aging French New Wavers, but only about half of his last quarter-century's output has made it to American theaters. A superb sociological mystery, The Color of Lies (1999) examines what happens to a small Breton village when a schoolgirl's raped body is discovered in the woods. The quiet implosions hit primarily between a moody painter on a career downturn (Jacques Gamblin), his supportive but restless wife (Sandrine Bonnaire), and an intolerably pretentious celebrity-writer (Antoine de Caunes) on the make, but the emotional repercussions spiral out to touch the entire community. In his surest Simenonian mode, Chabrol balances the hidden, the exposed, and the philosophical with little fuss, and the characters are all drawn with a scalpel— including Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's masterfully idiosyncratic portrait of a meek-voiced yet fearlessly confrontational police inspector. (De Caunes's self-pumped litterateur is a triumphant piece of social satire.) Co-written with longtime Chabrol collaborator Odile Barski, the movie is a deft genre étude and provincial interrogation of a kind Chabrol has made his own. Clearing the Chabrol shelf, Kino is also releasing Betty (1992), the deux femmes psychodrama adapted from Simenon and starring Marie Trintignant and Stéphane Audran; L'Enfer (1994), the well-loved Emmanuelle Béart nastiness based on a script by Henri-Georges Clouzot; as well as two policiers that never emerged here, Cop du Vin (1985) and Inspecteur Lavardin (1986), both with mega-suave Jean Poiret as a detective snuffling around small-town homicides. All five films come with trailers and audiovisual appreciations by author and critic Joel Magny.

BBC Films review Michael Thomson, also seen here: BBCi - Films

Director Claude Chabrol, one of the most successful members of the French New Wave, is still (after a hugely busy career) able to breathe life into suspense with subtlety, irony, and humour. Considering he returns time and again to the French bourgeoisie, the freshness of his films is all the more striking. Yet it is the middle classes, the gulf between what they say and what they actually think, and the importance of things left unsaid which stoke the drama of so many of his films.

And so it is with "The Colour of Lies", a gentle but powerful psychological thriller, which targets a failing French painter and his increasingly introspective wife, both of whom live in a Brittany fishing village. One of his art students - a young girl - is found raped and murdered, and he - immersed in nervousness and gloom - is placed under the microscope by the police and the gossipy, judgmental community, with even his own expressions suggesting he might well be guilty. His wife's demeanour, meanwhile, hints at a woman who, though clearly very loving, would quite like to withdraw from her marriage and enjoy an affair with the media celebrity next door, a glib, charming egotist played by Antoine de Caunes. It is this ambiguity in both husband and wife which keeps the other - and us - guessing.

In a film whose theme lies in all their assorted forms and shades, the three actors prove highly skilled in nuance, with Antoine de Caunes banishing all memories of his clownish alter ego in "Eurotrash". Chabrol, forever asking us to spot detail, ensures that every one counts. A work of superior acting and quiet strength.

User comments from imdb Author: darragh o'donoghue (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from dublin, ireland

Although Claude Chabrol has worked predominantly in the crime genre, and adapted much mystery fiction, very few of his films are straight whodunits. Crimes may be the central feature of these films, or the catalyst at least, and investigations may shape these narratives and bring them to their conclusion, if not resolution. But Chabrol is usually more interested in focusing on point-of-view, of the killer, the victims, the suspects, the community, than in any who's-the-killer games. So 'Au coeur du mensonge' belongs to a relatively marginalised (and recent) position in Chabrol's filmography; its most famous predecessors are 'Cop au vin' and 'Inspecteur Lavardin' (although there are important echoes of earlier Chabrol classics like 'Que le bete meure' and 'Le Boucher').

However, just because we don't know who committed the two murders until the end, this doesn't mean Chabrol is only interested in artifical games. The limits of the whodunit paradoxically give Chabrol the freedom from delineating the psychology of the criminal, to something much more interesting to him; in other words, the unknowability of other people, especially those we love, live with and think we know best.

Chabrol's films are so self-contained and remote, that it's rare to find him concentrating on 'topical' issues. Here the subject is the all-too-familiar paedophile rape and murder of a young girl in the woods. She was last seen at a lesson with her art teacher, Rene, and suspicion immediately falls on him, in one of those oppressive small towns where the Internet will never outpace malicious gossip. If we didn't know whodunits, we might think so too - he is lame, shifty looking, whiny, and a failed artist experiencing mental breakdown who thinks his masseuse wife, Vivianne, is having an affair with a slick media personality, G.R.

There are other suspects: G.R. himself, his criminal go-between, and Rene's friend, Regis, even, as the coroner cheerfully suggests, a woman with strong hands and gloves - an exact description of Vivianne earlier. But it is Rene everyone suspects, especially the new Chief Inspector, Lesage, whose personal stake in the case (she has a daughter of the same age as the dead girl) makes her determined to bring him to justice.

'Mensonge' is a psychological study in the guise of a mystery thriller. We are asked to follow Rene's reactions to the murder, social ostracism, artistic failure etc., and yet we're not told whether he's the murderer or not, or any of the other characters, which would surely be a crucial element in anyone's psychology! so these two impulses - towards psychological truth and towards a mystery story which necessarily precludes the audience having any access to the character's psychology, puts it with the same level of knowledge of characters as the other characters, making for an effectively tense film, which, beyond its mystery trappings, asks whether we can ever know anyone, when trust, or self-confidence, or faith in 'reality' is gone.

The film links the idea of lies (characters concealing truths, making realities out of lies), with art (painting - Jacques revels in panoramas and trompes d'oeil; the second murder is 'composed' like a painting). Throughout, various media for the diffusion of truth - painting, TV, books, recitals - as well as the police investigation, with its need for artistic resolution, are highlighted, interrogated and undermined (even a last minute confession is suspect, and the denouement, appropriately, takes place in a deep mist). Chabrol's blithely elliptical narrative style further compounds our uncertainty. As with every Chabrol, the surface every character sees, or creates, is as treacherous as a trompe d'oeil. As the child-murder in the forest, echoing 'Diary of a Chambermaid', suggests, Chabrol is letting out the closet Surrealist in him.

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4] also seen here: Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

Cine Outsider [Timothy E. RAW]

10kbullets John White

Au coeur du mensonge (1999) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

Great Movie Reviews [Pseudonymous author Ankyuk]

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5] also seen here: EyeForFilm.co.uk

User reviews from imdb Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

User comments from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

User comments from imdb Author: robert-temple-1 from United Kingdom

User comments from imdb Author: FilmCriticLalitRao (cpowerccc@yahoo.com) from Paris, France

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) dvd review [2/4]

Guardian/Observer review

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August 2, 2005

MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT B+ 90

France Switzerland (99 mi) 2000

A dark, velvety film which masks the rough with the smooth and coats a bitter pill in a veneer of decadent French polish. This has been Chabrol's way as often as not over the course of more than 50 films, and he's long since got it down to a fine art. Too fine, one suspects, for an audience accustomed to Hollywood overkill. Dutronc stars as the famous pianist André Polonski. Recently remarried to his first wife, Mika (Huppert), Polonski lives in Lausanne, along with Guillaume, a son by his second wife. Enter Jeanne Pollet (Mouglalis), born on the very same day and in the very same hospital as Guillaume, and a prodigy on the piano. Could it be there was some terrible mix-up 18 years ago? Plenty of material there, you'd have thought, for crazy farce or anguished melodrama. But Chabrol prefers a drily understated comedy of manners. These members of the haute bourgeoisie remain serenely implacable - intent on maintaining their own charades even as their dearest relationships unravel. You could call them sophisticated, or emotionally comatose. Either way, it takes a more macabre twist to shock them to their senses. Visually restrained and aurally elaborate, it's an old-fashioned, subtly deceptive film, the sort of thing Chabrol can turn out in his sleep. (From the novel The Chocolate Cobweb by Charlotte Armstrong.)

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Claude Chabrol's camera has a way of gently swaying back and forth as it cradles its characters, veiling tension beneath otherwise tender movements. There are many such motions in the director's 48th feature film, Merci Pour Le Chocolat (also known as Nightcap), the story of an icy chocolate heiress who uses Rohypnol to manage her domestic bliss. Mika (Isabelle Huppert) rules the Muller chocolate company with an iron fist and while Chabrol spends little time with her at the workspace, we come to know her as a fiercely competitive creature less concerned with profits than with keeping up with the times. Her pianist husband Andre (Jacques Dutronc) married her not long after his first wife died in a mysterious car accident. Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis) is the young piano player that could be Andre's biological daughter. Together they make beautiful music (oddly yet appropriately, there are two grand pianos in Andre's living room) and while Jeanne's birthright is ultimately of little consequence, Chabrol loves to tease Mika with the possibilities (see the fabulous graphic match that links Jeanne to Andre's dead wife). As if guided by Andre's favorite Liszt tune, Mika makes her way upstairs and into her stepson's room, staring at the portrait of the woman who has seemingly returned to the present via the precocious Jeanne. Chabrol's attention to detail is every bit as terrifying (watch as Mika recreates the past with a pot of boiling water) as his atmospheric use of sound and close-up. Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly) plays a handheld video game while his father plays a piece by Liszt; the jarring juxtaposition of sounds is not only indicative of the son's dubious heritage but the scene wondrously prefigures Jeanne's domestic infiltration. Once again, Huppert makes it look easy, slithering in and out of rooms like a snake molting its skin. She's no more terrifying in the end than she is at the beginning and while a lesser actress may have made a spectacle of her character's transformation, Huppert welcomes sympathy for Mika just as the character breaks apart. Mika is as deadly as she is genuinely nurturing and Huppert's final pose reinforces the film's obsession with uncertain parentage. Sound and image gloriously converge during the film's final crescendo when Mika metaphorically returns to the fetus.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dbdumonteil

This is the second adaptation of Charlotte Armstrong by Claude Chabrol for the screen: the first was " la rupture" (1970) (from novel "the balloon man" ) and it's really a pity no one cares about it. It's Chabrol's sleeper, and I urge any of his fans to see it.

"The chocolate" cobweb was not that strong a detective story to begin with. I read it 20 years ago and forgot all about it. The movie promises some good things at first, though, then finally disappoints to a fault. This is a confusing Chabrol movie, mixing elements of the heyday (circa 1969), and a lotta tongue-in-chick stuff coming from the eighties, the likes of 'poulet au vinaigre," not one particularly memorable work.

Part of the disappointment comes from the cast:this is a distressingly poor gathering: Jacques Dutronc plays like a zombie, Isabelle Huppert reveals herself a somewhat limited actress, finally rather vulgar. It worked in "une affaire de femme,"it does not here. They are not supported by the young couple: both are bland and unremarkable. Actors from the past,say, Stephane Audran or Michel Bouquet (both in "la rupture") were brilliant and contributed to Chabrol's then unique atmosphere.

The story itself is undistinguished: beginning as some kind of "serious" "la vie est un long fleuve tranquille " (besides, a character hints at Etienne Chatilliez's very funny movie), the movie drags on and on as a laughable psychological drama afterwards. We will not congratulate the young female pianist , who, after all she learned about her wicked hostess, agrees to drive a car along a dangerous road.

Because he makes too many movies, Chabrol frequently releases turkeys. One wonder why people who wants to watch one of his movies should choose this one among all his stuff up for grabs.

It seems that Chabrol's bourgeoise satire has finally given way to leniency. In "la rupture" the first Armstrong adaptation-an average detective story which Chabrol completely transcended-, you should hear Audran say "they have so much money!" Here, Chabrol has lost his bite, his strength.

Claude Chabrol's Merci Pour le Chocolat is a light confection with a tasty Isabelle Huppert performance at its center. Working from a 1948 recipe by a sometime scriptwriter for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Chabrol knocks off a witty psychological thriller—more gothic than noir.

Set by the placid shores of Lake Lausanne, the movie opens with Swiss chocolate factory heiress Mika Muller (Huppert) marrying celebrated concert pianist André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc) for the second time, in a ceremony where family business blends with gossipy intrigue. Without pausing to clarify, Chabrol introduces a second domestic unit whose daughter, Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis), herself an aspiring pianist, learns that she was almost switched at birth with Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly), André's highly unmusical son by his first (or rather, his second) wife, dead some years ago in car accident. The tangled genealogy has intimations of Elizabethan comedy—as does the spirited Jeanne, who, intrigued with the possibility that she might be the biological daughter of the great Polonski, presents herself at his wife's hilltop chateau.

Jeanne is soon examining photos of the late Madame Polonski and striking similar long-necked poses. Although not too distracted to observe the strange household to which she's been welcomed, she returns the following weekend—in an atmosphere made heady by a few more uncorked family secrets—to practice Liszt's most unfunereal "Funeral March" with her new mentor. Merci is filled with peculiar characters and sharply drawn physical types. Dutronc's Polonski would be suspicious for his mop of dyed black hair alone. The ever smiling, bizarrely solicitous Mika is also a philanthropist who subsidizes "anti-pain" centers. "I just want everyone to be happy," she explains, inadvertently spilling a pot of boiling water on hapless Guillaume's foot. Self-contained, enigmatic, illuminated from within, Huppert banks a performance that pays dividends throughout the film.

Chabrol has always enjoyed puncturing the balloon of bourgeois complacency, and as his creatures jump to ever quicker conclusions, the movie's edge of campy self-reflection grows increasingly pronounced. The more one suspects, the funnier Merci becomes. Mika brings her injured stepson a pair of videos—Fritz Lang's Secret Beyond the Door and Jean Renoir's Nuit de Carrefour—which would alert any habitué of the Paris Cinématheque to where Chabrol is going.

User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

'Merci pour la chocolat' combines the two most characteristic tones of late Chabrol - the grim, relentless Langian formalism carried over from his great mid-period to films like 'La Ceremonie'; and the more relaxed, comic works like 'Cop Au Vin' or 'Rien ne va plus'. the seriousness can be found within a plot about individual and family tragedy; the treatment is never flippant, and the ending is numbing. The 'fun', if you want to call it that, arises from Chabrol's winking contract with his audience, offering a magnificently contrived story about parents and children, possible switches of babies, boyfriends who conveniently happen to be trainee forensic scientists, and so can check chocalate stains for poison: adding up to a mystery story whose solution is actually revealed in the first half hour.

The fun lies not in who done it - there are no other suspects, there may not even be a crime - but what is going on in the heroine's head, with Chabrol littering clues and red herrings. He is gloriously helped by Isabelle Huppert's obfuscating performance, her character's fundamental blankness - she is an observer judging others' reactions - is varied by vacuousness; hysteria; somnolence; good humour; tenderness; calculation. Which of these, if any, are the 'real' Mika? In a film characteristically loaded with allusions to Greek mythology, Mika is Arachne, a spider caught in her own web (appropriately the design on her sofa as her defeat sinks in, suggesting it was never her web in the first place, but that of the bourgeoisie to which she, as an orphaned outsider, never truly belonged), every cunning plan never bringng her closer to the object of her desire, the wearyingly narcissistic Polonski.

Of course, Chabrol achieves his effects more subtly than mere plot leg-pulling - as the allusion to Fritz Lang suggests, it is the smoothly unstable playing with point of view that unsettles our attempts at definitive explanations. It might be going too far to suggest that Chabrol's method in the film is Cubist, but he has an unsettling habit of breaking up sequences, cutting between camera positions as if he is starting a new scene, although it's just another angle on the same one. This can happen when he shifts the focus from one group of characters in a scene to another; more distractingly, it can happen within one group itself, breaking up a conversation with camera angles, or colour tones that don't match.

Despite the title and the central McGuffin about poisoned chocolate, the film's governing metaphor is the music that frequently punctuates the narrative (Liszt's 'Funerailles'!). The central structural unit, the preserve of that other Chabrol idol, Hitchcock, is the double or reproduction - the film begins with a once-married couple remarrying, the officiary and 'bride' sharing the same red hair. The main action towards which the narrative leads doubles an action that shadows the entire film (the death of the first wife), right down to the son suffering the same ankle injury.

The plot is full of parents and their children, many of dubious certainty about their relationships. In the piano sequences, the original pieces are doubled by the pianists' interpretations (further reproduced in a recording Polonski and Jeanne listen to), on two pianos reflecting their bourgeois surroundings; they become a weird kind of incestuous sublimation.

All this doubling and reproduction serves to further isolate Mika, a ganging up on her in terms of form and content, increasing a sympathy enlisted enlisted by Huppert's acting, and achieving a kind of empty tragedy.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Merci pour le chocolat (2000) Keith Reader from Sight and Sound, June 2001

DVD Times Gary Couzens

Film Monthly (Parama Chaudhury) review

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10] longer review seen here

Merci pour le chocolat (2000) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Political Film Society review Michael Haas

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [3.5/5]

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3/5]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

Kamera.co.uk review Ben McCann

DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [2/5]

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]

Harvey S. Karten review [3/4]

Jonathan F. Richards review

Reel Movie Critic (Shelley Cameron) review [3.5/4]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

VideoVista review Gary Couzens

Film Intuition Jen Johans

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Mondo Digital also reviewing THE CRY OF THE OWL and LA CÉRÉMONIE

User reviews from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

User reviews from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, Ireland

User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: writers_reign from London, England

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]

BBC Films (George Perry) review George Perry

The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review July 31, 2002, also here: FILM REVIEW; Such Delicious Hot Chocolate, Dear. Whatever Do You Put in It?

FILM; A Face the French Repeatedly Forget Alan Riding on Isabelle Huppert from The New York Times, July 28, 2002

THE FLOWER OF EVIL B- 82

aka: La Fleur du Mal

France (104 mi) 2003

“People have lived like hypocrites since the dawn of time. That's what we call civilization.”

From one of the living legends of film craftsmanship, known for his humorous social criticism, his Hitchcockian control over each shot and every angle, this is a taut, well-acted look at some dark secrets in an upper crust bourgeois family where the family crest motto seems to be "hypocrisy—thy name is civilization." Too many phony smiles, enough for an entire year's worth, and the story really wasn't black enough, not enough sharp edges or surprises, that was the missing ingredient to this otherwise elegant looking but fairly mainstream film. However, Monsieur Chabrol really does love a party and ever since LES COUSINS in 1959 he's always outdone himself in filming party sequences.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: writers_reign

Classical Greek students after a modern take on The House of Atreus need look no further than Chabrol's latest. As ever there is elegance and style to spare and it's really great to know that actresses as old as Suzanne Flon (who scored again this year in Effroyables Jardins) can still not only get meaty roles but also deliver. Unlike other commenters the charm, sex appeal and, most of all, acting ability of Benoit Magimal is lost on me but I would walk a mile for a Nathalie Baye performance and she does not disappoint here. I note that other comments touch on the Frenchness on display but if you choose to see a French film why expect Sauerkraut and halva. Not Chabrol's finest but still out of the right bottle.

Village Voice (Jessica Winter) review

The extraordinary thing about this 2002 Chabrol is how easily it could pass for a 1968 Chabrol. Back then, the politically ambitious wife would have been played by Stéphane Audran rather than Baye, and the creepy husband by Michel Bouquet instead of Le Coq. The juveniles, children of their previous marriages, would have been represented, as here, by the decorative youngsters of the day. Otherwise the spectacle of the bourgeoisie demonstrating their hypocrisy in between lashings of haute cuisine, the sense of violence just under the surface, the deliberate, unshowy staging, the relish for unexpected detail (a fit of giggles during corpse disposal) are evidence of how stationary, for better, or worse, Chabrol's preoccupations and methods have remained. The plot device of having history repeat itself down the generations involves a ferocious amount of exposition, which Chabrol treats with impatience. You may need to take notes.

User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: dbdumonteil

I've seen tons of Chabrol movies, about 95% of his films and all I can see is that the proportion of duds increases with the years. Even directors deserve retirement! The bourgeoisie dolce vita has been told told and TOLD by CC! Enough! I'm fed up! It's all more infuriating as earlier works had bite and guts going for them ("que la bete meure" "la rupture" "la femme infidèle" ) when it wasn't pure genius ("le boucher"). We feel now, and it's the last straw, a discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, he treats his bourgeois indulgently. The actors go from excellent (veteran Suzanne Flon, in a part not worthy of herself) to passable (Baye is good enough in her "paying a visit to the Poor" scenes, a pale reflection of his predecessor Claude Autant-Lara' s "Douce" (1942) to dismal (Bernard LeCoq, generally relegated to mediocre comedies, Benoit Magimel and his girlfriend -who might not or might be his cousin-) Sign of the times: the gastronomy sequence which you can find in everything CC did, for the first time is a fiasco: the oysters, says bourgeois Magimel, are not what they used to be. If it were only the oysters....

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

Claude Chabrol is once again in minimalist mode, exposing the dark side beneath the bourgeoisie's gentile, civilized veneer. Reunited with child psychologist Caroline Eliachef, author of his greatest late work La Ceremonie, I had high hopes but as with their follow up Nightcap, Flower of Evil is another minor work. La Cememonie was class warfare where the uneducated instinctively lashed out, but in ignoring the maid to focus solely on the rich family Chabrol & Eliachef have crafted a toothless satire where the audience looks on perversely as the family's own bourgeois indulgence does them in, leaving the viewer to wish comeuppance was more often right on time. Flower of Evil has some good dry humor about the folly of small time politics due to the ambitious but insincere wife Anne Charpin-Vasseur (Nathalie Baye) running for a office, but lacks the sinister nature the Le Corbeau poison pen letter plot seems to beg for. The author's identity is unimportant, the fact that Gerard Vasseur (Bernard Le Coq) doesn't support his wife's bid and is selfish and dubious enough to possibly have written it to undermine her is. Neither Francois (Benoit Magimel) nor Michele (Melanie Doutey) like his father Gerard, who wishes people wanted to be with him, but despite his jealousy and philandering has no clue why they don't. Politics are largely Anne's escape from Gerard, something to amuse herself with while he scouts for young women to have one afternoon stands with. Chabrol lets the story unfold, not really trying to create a great deal of tension or intrigue, but rather providing a detached observation that sticks to the limitations of the characters. He refuses to milk the gaping gap between audience and character reaction, as the characters think nothing of their history of nazi collaboration and family murder that's dredged up, not to mention the dubious nature of the young lovers Francois and Michele being brother and sister by marriage and probably actually related. They experiencing no guilt and feeling no remorse, so they're bound to fall into the same traps as their predecessors. Chabrol captures the shallowness of the younger characters, but fails to really do or say anything more about them. At best they are as uninteresting as in real life, but much of that is his plan; over time Chabrol has moved away from wit and toward reality, simply showing the ridiculousness of these spoiled brats. Most of Chabrol's films have a big jolt at the end, but this had held back so much that it didn't really pack much of a punch, unlike Ceremonie which led you enough that the surprise(s) were far more credible and impactful. Even without the ending, the characters in Ceremonie were hundreds of times more interesting. That said, Suzanne Flon deserves special mention though for her memorable performance as the spry old enabling Aunt who has been through all kinds of intrigues and may have killed her father.

Where Baudelaire slurred together sex and death, Claude Chabrol blurs genealogy and morbidity in The Flower of Evil and throughout his profuse career, which by now has turned out 50 features. Another tastefully baroque roasting of petty bourgeois rites within suffocating domestic environs, his latest impassive melodrama begins with a prowl up a winding staircase that, as in La Cérémonie and his previous effort, Merci Pour le Chocolat, can only portend corkscrewing revelations of murder and deceit.

Scaling a family tree snarled and ingrown even by Chabrolian standards, The Flower of Evil opts for Bordeaux's upper middle classes over urban flaneurs, centering on a comely twosome who evoke the possibly switched-at-birth sleuthing duo of Merci. Michèle (Mélanie Doutey) and François (Benoît Magimel) are cousins, step-siblings, and covert lovebirds, reunited after François's four-year jaunt practicing law in Chicago. Their father and mother, respectively, died years ago in the same peculiar car crash, leaving the widowed spouses, Anne (Nathalie Baye) and Gérard (Bernard Le Coq), to marry each other. Indeed, the Charpin-Vasseur clan may rival the Kennedys for high mortality rates—not to mention political ambition, since Anne's running in the local mayoral election. After her parents perished in a plane crash, Anne grew up under the care of her now elderly Aunt Line (Suzanne Flon), who probably killed her collaborationist father, who himself probably killed her adored elder brother . . .

According to Chabrol, Aunt Line's father stands for Maurice Papon, the Vichy government official who oversaw the deportation of at least 1,600 French Jews from Bordeaux to Auschwitz in 1942-44. (Papon became prefect of the Paris police under de Gaulle; decades later, he finally served just three years of a war-crimes sentence, and was granted a compassionate release in 2002 after dubious assertions of ill health.) The Nazi-abetting dead patriarch casts the first and longest shadow over the film, which starts with a corpse and works backward. Making much of an inflammatory pamphlet—circulated by an anonymous foe of Anne's campaign—that details her checkered lineage, The Flower of Evil lightly toys with notions of original sin and the heredity of wickedness, though the procedural trips on characterization; Aunt Line, for one, is self-interrogatory, open-minded, and preposterously sweet. Chabrol's interest typically lies less in psychology than in the fastidious architecture of his redoubling family secrets: Every poison blossom begets its own fraternal twin. So, it seems, does every Chabrol film. Not to imply that our Claude's gone native, but here his unabiding fascination with bourgie-style repetition compulsion bears some resemblance to sympathy.

Reverse Shot review Broken Blossom, by Michael Garofalo, November/December, 2003

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

La Fleur du mal (2003) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Plume Noire review Laurence Nicoli

PopMatters (David Sanjek) dvd review

filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [2/5]

La Fleur du mal Bill R. from The Kind of Face You Hate, June 29, 2009

indieWIRE Erica Abeel

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review

10kbullets John White

VideoVista review Gary Couzens

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]

DVD Verdict (Patrick Bromley) dvd review

Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3/5]

CineScene.com (Josh Timmermann) review

Offoffoff.com review Leslie (Hoban) Blake

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [3/5]

Movie Habit (Breck Patty) review [3.5/4]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]

Harvey S. Karten review [C]

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [3/5]

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

User reviews from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

User reviews from imdb Author: lavatch from Twin Cities, Minnesota

User reviews from imdb Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Harry T. Yung (harry_tk_yung@yahoo.com) from Hong Kong

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris

San Francisco Examiner (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review

San Francisco Chronicle (G. Allen Johnson) review

Flower of Evil Kevin Thomas from The LA Times

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review Elvis Mitchell, October 8, 2003, also here: FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Family Whose Flower Might Be a Venus' Flytrap

FILM; In the Country With Chabrol Marcelle Clements from The New York Times, October 5, 2003

THE BRIDESMAID (La Demoiselle d'honneur)

France Germany Italy (111 mi) 2004

Given his doggedly consistent fascination with psychopathic crime intersecting with bourgeois lives, it's a surprise to find that The Bridesmaid is only Claude Chabrol's second adaptation of a Ruth Rendell novel (after La Cérémonie). It is, in any case, a psychodrama of typically brisk efficiency and relaxed gallows humor. The semi-functioning family at the center is sketched in—responsible son (with incestuous lurkings) Benoît Magimel, high-spirited single mom Aurore Clément, bickering sisters—before we meet the titular catalyst at a family wedding: Senta (Laura Smet), a sensuous but off-putting seductress with a mysterious past. Magimel is all pro, deciphering life with his eyes, as the chump who gets vacuumed in by this odd girl's impulsive devotions and Nietzschean delusions, but Smet, all eyelashes and butterscotch skin, is the film's prize; she doesn't act out the character's slowly revealed pathologies so much as keep them barely contained behind her mesmerizing stare, like mad dogs in a cage. Chabrol sets us up, of course, which is half the fun, and the experience is a delight for lack of pomposity (his visual storytelling remains no-nonsense) as well as genre expertise.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Some of Claude Chabrol's most problematic films limit themselves to a circumscribed view of female identity and expression, like the ground-breaking but dated Les Biches, whose "open" ending implies that its main character's lesbianism was only a figment of her imagination. This is why it's tempting to look at the director's remarkable Story of Women, given its strong feminist stance, as a corrective. To that film's company we can add The Bridesmaid, a gripping lark that finds Chabrol lithely sorting through the serpentine snarl of bourgie behavior and gazing at the attic clock's pendulum-sway between fantasy and reality. Senta (Laura Smet), an impulsive creature who claims to be an actress and lives in the cellar of a musty old manse, meets Philippe (Benoît Magimel) at his sister's wedding, quickly seducing him and lavishing him with obsessive declarations of love before proposing a queer-murderous pact to validate their feelings for one another. Her enigmatic she-devilness might be offensive if that were all to the film, which casts a large, mischievously cool shadow of suspense across all its characters. The question here isn't whether Senta is simply passionate or out of her fucking gourd, but whether the gorgeous Philippe is the greater mythomaniac. Don't let the statue of a woman's head Philippe hordes and sensually kisses at night fool you: This is not a symbol of oedipal struggle (Chabrol is too clever for such simple psychoanalysis), but an albatross of his controlling and insecure male nature—a seemingly instinctual urge that he permits to get the better of him. Chabrol's scrutiny of human behavior is remarkable for its laidback intensity and absence of finger-wagging. The less said about the story's plot machinations the better, but this much can be revealed without spoiling the film's pleasure: that Philippe's repeated attempts to appease women (Senta, his mother, two sisters, and an elderly client who complains about a misaligned object in her new bathroom) is a profound consideration of how chaos is born and passed between the sexes.

filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

At first glance, she doesn't seem like much -- maybe it's the dress. When Philippe (Benoit Magimel) -- the slim, self-satisfied, smart-but-stupid chump in Claude Chabrol's psycho-drama The Bridesmaid -- sees Senta (Laura Smet), a bridesmaid at his sister's wedding, he's intrigued by something in her direct stare and later, flirty brush-off. However, when Senta appears unannounced at the door of his mother's home (where Philippe, a mama's boy practically smothered by her constant compliments) a few hours later and then proceeds to strip off the wet dress and have her reckless way with him, he becomes positively interested. When later she starts in with all that talk about how they're fated for each other and, hey, what if they each committed a murder to prove their love, he remains interested because, well, he doesn't have much else going on in his life.

In Smet and Magimel, Chabrol has found willing partners for his bleak little tale -- like the director, they keep things under wraps, playing things close to the vest, which is harder than it may sound, given the high drama plot, taken from a Ruth Rendell novel. Philippe is a cipher straight from a detective story of years past, working as a numbers guy for a contractor in a small French town, he's completely bottled up inside his trim suits and slightly superior demeanor, just aching for something to come along and bust things up. After easing us into Philippe's life with some minor melodrama involving the three women in Philippe's house (mother, two sisters), Chabrol drops Senta in to knock Philippe out of his rut, and she's perfect for the job.

A sloe-eyed vixen who practically radiates crazy, Senta's nevertheless a fantastic storyteller, even if many of her autobiographical tales (moving to Morocco on a lark when she was a teenager, getting that small role in a Woody Allen movie, this guy she may have killed) are most likely made-up. Once her eyes lock onto Philippe's, they never again seem whole without the other; it's obsessive and inexplicable attraction presented to us as fait accompli, without any tiresome backstory or psychological justification -- when they launch themselves at each other after spending a few days apart, it's more mathematical necessity than anything else. And when the question of murder and Senta comes up (Philippe initially laughs it off, but then isn't so sure), tied in with the series of local disappearances, the love affair takes on a darker hue.

This is all noir in a very minor key, featuring a femme fatale without a score to settle, only the clanging needs of her inner voices to satisfy by whichever suitable male happens across her zig-zagging path. Chabrol has a created a placid and creepy work here, with hints of Hitchcock proliferating, from Philippe's controlling mother to the vast and falling-down house Senta inhabits like a subterranean ghost, all of it helping give this occasionally draggy and too-literal story a pleasantly perverse sting.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dbdumonteil

no wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisle, no flowers, no wedding dress...,

About ten years before he decided to venture again in Ruth Rendell universe, Claude Chabrol had transferred to the screen "a Judgment in Stone" entitled "la Cérémonie" (1995). It was his last great masterwork although he somewhat betrayed the novel. The choice of Sandrine Bonnaire for the main role was ill-advised. Afterwards, his career followed a creative downswing with rather mediocre works such as "au Coeur Du Mensonge" (1999) or "Merci pour Le Chocolat" (2000). So, could a new excursion in Ruth Rendell territory boost his career again?

Alas no and the title of my summary should give you an inkling about my thoughts on the Chabrol 2004 vintage. However, there were some good elements to make the film compelling and to grab the attention. The first sequence showcases Benoît Magimel and his family in front of the TV news that reveals a murder. Perfect to weave an eerie climate. The big, imposing, eerie house in which Laura Smet lives seems to shelter dark secrets and the "bridesmaid" lives in the basement. Chabrol was also interested in the games of truth and lie that link his two main actors and real suspense lies in Magimel's personality dangerously attracted to the bridesmaid. The filmmaker's touch is also discernible at the wedding ceremony where he ridicules its crucial steps. See the church sequence and the feast which echoes to the one in "Le Boucher" (1970). While I'm evoking this meal, the gastronomy dear to Chabrol has three sequences devoted to it in the whole film. But let's come back to the bulk of the plot. Like "a Judgement in Stone," "La Demoiselle d'Honneur" was an exciting novel to read and again Chabrol skipped over some important points, notably the reasons which prompt the hero to steal the bust from Gérard Courtois (Bernard Le Coq). In the novel, he stole it because he thought that Courtois was a vulgar man, but here Magimel's motivations to steal the bust remain blurred.

The thrust of the novel and so of the film is a man who gradually loses the control of his everyday life facing a sensual, attractive disturbing young woman. However, things aren't looking good because there's an absence of unnerving climate and the scenario seems to have been sedately written, especially near the end. In another extent, I know what I'm going to write is questionable but I do think that Chabrol contemporary films suffer from the choice of the actors (see bland Jacques Dutronc in "Merci pour Le Chocolat" or Jacques Gamblin in "au Coeur Du Mensonge") and sadly "la Demoisele d'Honneur" isn't an exception to the rule. Magimel's character isn't credible at all. He should get bogged down in madness as he's deeply in love with Smet but it isn't discernible on the screen. Laura Smet (Johnny Hallyday's daughter) has a monotonous acting while Bernard Le Coq's part is underwritten. Michel Duchaussoy who was brilliant in "Que la Bête Meure" (1969) is relegated to a minor tramp role unworthy of his wide acting skills.

So, an absence of interest for this story of manipulation is surely due to its actors and also because like for "la Cérémonie," Chabrol made dull Rendell's novel. Mr Chabrol, let's put it this way: the best of your work is far behind you in time (roughly the dusk of the sixties and the dawn of the seventies) and you will probably never reach this scale again. How about contemplating retirement?

User comments from imdb Author: gradyharp from United States

The films of French Cinema master Claude Chabrol have been some of the quirkier, intelligent, strange, and creative works to come out of France (La Fleur du mal, Merci pour le chocolat, Au coeur du mensonge, Rien ne va plus, La Cérémonie, L'Enfer, Madame Bovary, Dr. M, etc). His works are marked with sinister underpinnings and his technique has been to place his characters in situations that challenge them to behaviors they consider bizarre until they understand the core of their somewhat deranged personalities. LA DEMOISELLE D'HONNEUR (THE BRIDESMAID) succeeds as a art work on so many levels that the viewer is inclined to forgive some of the dangling missing pieces in character and plot development that prevent this film from being Chabrol's finest. The setting, pacing, cast and concept are intriguingly seductive: that is enough to make the film work well.

The Tardieu family is in the midst of preparing for the wedding of one daughter Sophie (Solène Bouton), learning to accept the new love affair of the mother Christine (Aurore Clément) to a wealthy newly divorced man Gérard (Bernard Le Coq), becoming used to the edgy antisocial behavior of daughter Patricia (Anna Mihalcea), and all the while being cared for by the successful contractor son Philippe (Benoît Magimel). On the television is the report of a murdered young woman and the disruption of a television show frustrates the obsessive Philippe in his work to keep the family focused. We jump to Sophie's wedding to nerdy Jacky (Eric Seigne) whose cousin Stéphanie "Senta" Bellange (Laura Smet) is the bridesmaid of the title. The strange but sensuous Senta captures Philippe's eye and a rather torrid love affair begins. Senta is passionate and makes Philippe agree to four demands to prove he loves her: the last two (killing someone/anyone) and having sex with a same sex partner) jolt Philippe but he throws his usual caution to the wind and proceeds with the pairing. A homeless man who lives at Senta's grimy cellar lodging door repulses her, and when a police report that the man has been found dead, Philippe falsely 'confides' to Senta that he is responsible. Senta then promises to kill Gérard as her half of the bargain: Gérard has avoided Philippe's mother and Philippe feels animosity toward anyone who would disturb his beloved mother. The plot thickens, then boils: the 'murders' change from reality to mistaken identity to heinous ends. Philippe has become immersed in Senta's madness, leaving an ending that remains 'in media res'.

Chabrol leaves strange clues scattered about for the astute eye to discover, at times in retrospect, and it is this trait that makes the story so fascinating. The cast is superb, with Benoît Magimel proving that his success in 'The Pianist' was not a fluke. He is a gifted actor and maintains an electrifying screen presence. This may not be Chabrol's best film, but it is twisted enough to keep the viewer tensely focused on the very strange story and on the complexly interesting set of characters in this very French film noir!

Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover

La Demoiselle d'honneur (2004) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [3/5]

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij)

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B-]

10kbullets John White

Watch the Great Illusion Drown Greg at Cinema Styles, June 25, 2009

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart] also seen here: Film School Rejects (H. Stewart)

Close-Up Film [Martyn Bamber]

DVD Verdict (Neal Solon) dvd review

The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3.5/5]

Siffblog Review [Kathy Fennessy]

Martin Tsai's Blog

User reviews from imdb Author: guy-bellinger (guy.bellinger@wanadoo.fr) from Montigny-lès-Metz, France

User reviews from imdb Author: doctorlightning from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: writers_reign

Variety (Deborah Young)

Time Out London

BBCi - Films Tom Dawson

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]

Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review August 4, 2006, also here: In Claude Chabrol’s Film ‘The Bridesmaid,’ a Mama’s Boy Meets a Femme Fatale

cinemattraction (Sheila Cornelius) review

COMEDY OF POWER (L’Ivresse du pouvoir) B 86

France Germany (110 mi) 2006

Any resemblance to actual events is, as they say, entirely coincidental

Chabrol is known for his precision and occasional malicious humor and wit, for deliciously exploring the boundaries of moral implication, making a career of films that highlight themes of guilt, complicity, bourgeois aspirations and murder. Any of his films starring Isabelle Huppert (this is the 7^th), is a must-see treat, why should this film be any different? Using the scandal du jour as his centerpiece, corporate corruption and theft, this is inspired by true events, as a dozen years ago a French oil company was the subject of a government investigation, where the CEO and several of his henchmen were brought to justice by a determined female prosecutor who investigated the trail of their secret bank accounts that supported their upper crust lifestyles, drinking the best champagne, smoking the most expensive cigars, always dining in luxury, including the price tag for the purchase of property and other lavish expenses bestowed on mistresses that were charged to the company, which eventually led to some highly publicized jail terms.

In a hilarious introduction to the viewers, two businessmen are discussing the arrest of one of their own, explaining it’s all over for him as he’s scheduled to appear before a judge known as “The Piranha,” cut to Huppert eating a power business lunch of sushi in front of a giant aquarium, scarfing down the fish in giant gulps, which introduces the subsequent theme of eat or be eaten. This is followed by a series of interviews in her cramped office of the alleged offenders, belittling them with her sinister contempt, making them squirm as she sends them off to the slammer. The men investigated are part of a political elite that have historically lined their pockets as if it was their aristocratic birthright, using high level politicians to provide cover, which certainly catches the eye of the Chief Justice who hobnobs with this same clientele. So after the initial exposure, attempts are made to undermine Huppert’s efforts, which creates a nasty set of circumstances for everyone involved, as spies are everywhere and everyone appears corrupt. With scenes behind the scenes which veer towards the French farce of Molière, everyone is made to look ridiculous, while Huppert, in a surprisingly sympathetic role for a change, is hung out to dry by her superiors.

Unfortunately, in a legal entanglement, there are too many generalities and too few specifics, so all of this is reduced to a cynical exercise of bravado and bluster over evidence. Huppert is seen as a lone female taking on the entire all-male French aristocracy single-handed, while her own marriage disintegrates, and she is subject to intimidation tactics from some highly paid thugs, which leads her to wonder if everyone is against her. The film is something of a Chabrol family affair, as the director is also a co-writer, one son Matthieu Chabrol wrote the original music, another son Thomas Chabrol plays an odd, somewhat subversive nephew who may have romantic designs in his aunt, who turns out to be the only person in the end that she trusts, while Aurore Chabrol was a script supervisor.

User reviews from imdb Author: jfseignol from Paris, France

This new movie by Claude Chabrol is directly inspired by a true story. The "Affaire Elf", named by the french oil-company, was a large financial and political scandal where several top-level french politicians where involved, such as Roland Dumas (ex foreign-affairs minister) or Charles Pasqua (ex minister of interior). As in the true story, a judge is investigating about some corruption in business between a french major company and some African states. Most of the characters in the movie are very similar to real persons involved in the "Affaire Elf".

The movie focuses on two subjects: the first one is how the judge (Isabelle Huppert) becomes more and more addicted to the power she uses by sending powerful businessmen to jail; the second one is the wide-scale cynicalness of people involved in the scandal, used to play with public money and take advantage of this without seeing anything immoral.

A good movie, very funny because, as stated at the beginning "any similarity with real person or event would be, as it is said, fortuitousness".

Claude Chabrol’s seventh outing with Isabelle Huppert plays to the strengths of his leading lady, a collaboration that began in 1978 with the hit film Violette Nozière. Huppert is perhaps better known outside France for her role as a sexually deviant lead in The Piano Teacher (2001).

Credited with starting the French New Wave movement of the 1950s, Chabrol is often compared to Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he shares a penchant for chilly heroines. Chabrol directed a string of classy suspense stories with more than a hint of social satire in the ’60s and ’70s. His wife Stephane Audran’s icy presence graced films which delved into the minds of nondescript killers, as in Le Boucher (1970) and the unsavory habits of the “respectable” bourgeoisie, in Les Biches (1968). A Comedy of Power combines some favorite motifs in a story based on a real-life case, the ELF Aquitaine fraud scandal that rocked France in the ’90s, according to The Guardian “the biggest fraud inquiry in Europe since the Second World War.” The role of the woman who cracked the case seems tailor-made for Huppert’s beautiful yet remote screen persona.

Jeanne Charmant Killman (Huppert), top investigator for the French government, has a killer instinct when it comes to corporate corruption and bringing executives to justice. Her Medusa-like approach to interrogation and instinct for spotting financial irregularities means she’s known as “The Piranha”. Humeau (François Berléand), the multi-allergic CEO of a major oil company, squirms and scratches in her office until Jeanne decides to jail him pending inquiries, knowing prison conditions will “encourage” a confession. Meantime she looks into a lifestyle which includes a couturier-clad mistress (ironic touch, as Killman’s sharp suits, blouses and bags are designed by Balenciaga) as well as a château-style house for his wife. Humeau’s shifty fellow board members fear they too will be implicated. Jeanne’s husband (Robin Renucci), already unhappy with her obsessive thoroughness, is further irritated when her feckless nephew arrives as a guest in their Paris flat. When Jeanne’s life is threatened and bodyguards are posted at the apartment door the strains on the marriage become unbearable. The career-minded sleuth must choose between bringing highly-placed criminals to justice and saving her marriage, possibly her life. More importantly, she must ask herself questions about power and its illusions and whether the challenge of being a woman in a patriarchal system is too great for her.

“Any resemblance to persons living or dead is, as they say, coincidental.” - the on-screen disclaimer is typical of Chabrol’s tongue-in-cheek irony. A quirky piano soundtrack, clever editing cuts, witty one-liners and subtle situation humor is this director’s forte. “Ah yes, the Piranha,” sneers a corrupt bureaucrat on hearing who is assigned to the case, and the camera cuts to a close-up of fish kept in the crusading investigator’s office. The signature lightness of touch is seen when Jeanne drops a red glove at a suspect’s feet, like a symbolic gauntlet, or researches designer clothes on her laptop to estimate how much Humeau’s mistress spends on clothes. Locations like the plush restaurants where the company men conspire and the office where Jeanne conducts her leisurely cat-and-mouse sessions with her subjects breathe an authenticity which makes the sudden raise in stakes more shocking.

Competence is apparent in the supporting roles, especially from Berleand as the shiftily uncomfortable Humeau, and the ensemble playing of his co-conspirators. Jean-Francois Balmer is the oily but doomed charmer Boldi, who hopes to deflect Jeanne with a combination of flattery and – this being France – a case of fine wine, but only increases her determination to bring him down when she realizes his intentions. Thomas Chabrol, the director’s son, as the cynical nephew provides contrast and support to Jeanne’s driven character as well as bringing out her warmer side through their casually humorous exchanges.

The film’s French title L’Ivresse du pouvoir translates more accurately, perhaps, as “Drunk with Power”. Whether it refers to the corporate fat-cats who believe themselves beyond the law or to Jeanne’s misguided belief in her own invulnerability is a question that, typically, Chabrol leaves to his audience to decide.

Swimming with Sharks: Comedy of Power - Film Comment Elisabeth Lequeret from Film Comment, March/April 2006

In 1994, French oil company elf was the subject of an investigation initiated by the country’s Stock Exchange Commission. Conducted by judge Eva Joly, this inquiry wasted no time in bringing to light a network of corruption implicating businessmen and politicians at the highest level. Sometime later Loïk Le Floch-Prigent, Elf’s former CEO, was jailed for using company funds to finance the purchase of a lavish apartment intended for his wife. At that moment, the French delighted in discovering a new expression: banditisme en col blanc—white-collar crime.

The Elf affair made for one of the Nineties’ most popular politico-legal soap operas. Secret commissions, abuse of public property, sinecures, cronyism and corruption at every level—above and beyond the sheer gravity of the facts there was, from start to finish, through all the multiplying revelations, an air of Grand Guignol to which the auteur of Masques (87) could hardly have remained indifferent. Television or international scandal, it doesn’t matter: either way, it’s good to lift the lid on a milieu when things smell a little fishy.

If Joly’s investigation provides Comedy of Power’s basic construction, the film distances itself from the real-life case not only by its title but by its opening caveat (“Any resemblance to actual events is, as they say, entirely coincidental”), a warning that hardly suffices to explain the need for the standard legal disclaimer, tinctured as it is with typical Chabrolian irony. Why immediately distance yourself from a reality from which the film borrows its framework and main characters? The initial explanation lies in the fiction’s structure, which takes as much interest in the personal as in the public life of Jeanne Charmant Killman (Isabelle Huppert), the magistrate in charge of the investigation.

Such a point of view, hardly uncommon in the crowded field of legal thrillers, usually serves to relieve the pace of a plot that otherwise races toward one objective: to uncover the Lie and show the triumph of Truth. You’ll find nothing of the sort in Comedy of Power. If the film seamlessly blends the private with the professional, these private interludes yield neither a contrasting soft side to the protagonist nor a play of opposites: Jeanne is just as much a judge at home as she is in the city. “I hear you. What you’re saying and what you’re not saying. That’s my job,” she tells her husband dryly during an argument one night.

Chabrol’s latest opus is a theoretical fable on power and its abuses. The intoxication of power in question is less a matter of a bunch of corrupt businessmen operating with complete impunity than the hubris of one little judge. Hence the dialogue preceding Jeanne’s on-screen introduction, between two businessmen commenting on a colleague’s arrest: “He’ll suffer. Do you know her nickname? The Piranha.” These words lead into the first appearance of Madame Judge, gobbling down sushi in front of a Japanese aquarium. It’s big fish versus small fry, and we’re invited to observe the latter’s dismantling of the food chain.

Comedy of Power hardly burdens itself with subtleties. We can see here the shadow of an affair whose protagonists aren’t exactly brought down by an excess of nuance—a universe governed by the principle of eat-or-be-eaten, which relentlessly confronts this gang of well-heeled crooks with a Robespierre in skirts whose big mouth conjures troubling echoes of Nazi persecution: “Ah, if I could only flush out those bloodsuckers…” Chabrol’s mise-en-scène never misses an opportunity to make the most of this contrast: the fat cats’ ruddy complexions versus the bags under Killman’s eyes, their fine dinners versus her vodka-chocolate diet, Monte Cristo cigars versus Marlboro, Armagnac versus caramel candy bars.

And so the film constantly plays out within the borders of a perfectly traceable reality, overwhelming it with an absolutely rigorous mise-en-scène. This dialectic opens out onto an infinity of perspectives, and it also facilitates a renewal of the discreet Nietzscheanism that permeated Chabrol’s cinema in the Sixties. Killman isn’t so far from the journalist protagonist of The Third Lover (L’Oeil du malin, 62): both are enclosed in their mental worlds, pulling the strings yet imprisoned in traps of their own making, and in their meager gratification they aren’t far from the heroes of Rohmer’s Moral Tales. They are confronted, all too late, by the hard reality of the actions to which they have been led by their abstract ideals (a certain idea of Justice, of France, of Evil) and which leave them suddenly sobered, on the roadside, contemplating a landscape that’s nothing but ruins and ashes.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review

The literal translation of Claude Chabrol's 55th motion picture in nearly 50 years, L'Ivresse de Pouvoir, is "the intoxication of power" ... but for its brief American theatrical run earlier this year the film was called Comedy of Power. The script by Chabrol and longtime collaborator Odile Barski takes as its jumping off point France's Elf-Aquitaine scandal of a decade ago. The biggest criminal trial in the history of postwar France, "l'affaire Elf" arose from the indictment of three dozen individuals associated with the state-owned oil company Elf Aquitaine (and connected to the government's ruling elite) in the misappropriation of almost two hundred million dollars in company funds. Isabelle Huppert (in her seventh collaboration with Chabrol) stars as Jeanne Charmant-Killman, a government-appointed magistrate assigned to crack the case and nicknamed "the Piranha" for her singular tenaciousness. Although Jeanne is based on the real life judge Eva Joly, Chabrol is far less interested in reliving headlines as he is in revealing the preoccupations and peccadilloes of the bourgeoisie.

Claude Chabrol is a rare storyteller able to reconcile an acidic cynicism with an impish joie de vivre. His films can rail at institutional hypocrisy (1988's Un affaire de femmes, starring Isabelle Huppert) or seem lighthearted to the point of inconsequentiality (1987's Masques) but they are consistently charming, expertly filmed and elegantly acted – and Comedy of Power is no exception. At the outset, the film seems to hew close to a familiar paradigm: the lone female investigator, the guilty male parties protecting one another and conspiring to undermine her, and the glass ceiling against which she ultimately bumps on her doomed quest for justice. Where Comedy of Power distances itself from the Hollywood formula is in the subtlety of its playing, in the maturity and sophistication it expects from its viewing audience, in its eschewing of caricature and its refusal to patly bring down the curtain on either an inspiring positive conclusion or a soul-crushing negative outcome. While American viewers may feel frustrated by its unabashed and oh-so-French anti-climax, Comedy of Power isn't about its ending but about the particulars of the case (and the lives of those involved) as it approaches its inevitable endgame.

Eva Joly, putative model for "le grand menace" Jeanne Charmant-Killman, was a French citizen of Norwegian blood – an immigrant who made good and married well - and surely Joly's/Charmant Killman's devotion to the innately French principles of "liberty, equality, fraternity" fired her desire to bring the conspirators of l'affaire Elf towards an ultimate accounting. (It's worth noting that the national motto Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité is a legacy of the French Revolution.) In scenes filmed for b>Comedy of Power but dropped from the final cut, Chabrol has Jeanne visit her washwoman mother, a commoner whose slave labor provided the down payment for Jeanne's ascendancy toward middle class status (a standing solidified by Jeanne's eventual marriage into a bourgeois family that had hired her as an au pair). As a founder of the French Nouvelle Vague, Chabrol was both a Communist and a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma ; rejecting the auteur theory embraced by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Chabrol was branded déclassé during the 1960s but his craftsman approach bespeaks an essential egalitarianism that is reflected in the majority of his protagonists. Although Jeanne Charmant-Killman (the hyphenate name hints at a dual nature) has risen to a position of prominence, fame and affluence, her fetishistic documentation of the cash amounts paid by the conspirators from company funds for their mistresses' comforts, for personal landscaping and for Caribbean vacations betrays the hard-wired frugality of her peasant stock.

Now in her fifties, Isabelle Huppert has lost none of the sex appeal or the love of risk of her seminal (and career-making) film appearances in such French classics as Les valseuses (Going Places, 1974), La dentellière (The Lacemaker, 1977) and Coup de torchon (Clean Slate, 1981). By turns impenetrable, formidable, coquettish, seductive, indomitable and vulnerable, Huppert's performance is a master class in film acting. Backing her play is an exceptional supporting cast, including Thomas Chabrol (son of the director and actress Stéphane Audran) as Jeanne's slacker nephew (with whom she shares a dangerous rapport), Robin Renucci as her dissatisfied husband and Patrick Bruel, François Berléand (the dogged cop of The Transporter films), Jean-François Balmer, Jean-Philippe Duclos (Queen Margot) and Jacques Boudet as the cabal of conspirators whose code Jeanne must crack before she can bring the guilty to justice. Crisply shot by Portuguese cinematographer Eduardo Serra (Blood Diamond) and sensuously scored by Matthieu Chabrol (son of the director and his first wife, Agnes Goute), Comedy of Power is sly and sexy entertainment from a master storyteller at the top of his game.

For a filmmaker more than a little interested in the physical textures of human life, Claude Chabrol has endured some exceptionally shoddy DVD transfers. Happily (and perhaps due to the film's freshness), this all-region DVD from Koch Lorber Films is an exception to this rule. Letterboxed at an anamorphic 1.85:1, the image is clear and richly colorful. Although a recent French DVD offered the film's soundtrack in a 5.1 remix, only Dolby 2.0 mono is present here; the monaural soundscape is acceptable and yellow English subtitles are optional. A making-of featurette is most welcome (it's always fun seeing Chabrol behind the scenes) but comes off at first as a bit of a Babel-like muddle, with many talking heads popping up in quick succession, their French subtitled and spoken (by a Scottish translator!) – sometimes even at the same time. Unidentified except by name, Christine Deviers-Joncourt, former mistress to implicated French foreign minister Roland Dumas, appears briefly to thank Chabrol for not using her name in the film. The only other extra is a 1m 45s theatrical trailer.

PopMatters (Meremu C.) review

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Reel.com DVD review [Jim Hemphill]

Village Voice (Jim Ridley) review

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij)

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C+]

The Beachwood [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Eye for Film (Paul Griffiths) review [4/5]

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [3/5]

stylusmagazine.com (Dave Micevic) review

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3.5/5]

Reel Movie Critic [Vittorio J. Carli]

MSN Entertainment [Sean Axmaker]

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Roland E. Zwick (magneteach@aol.com) from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas

Entertainment Weekly review [C] Owen Gleiberman

Comedy of Power Lisa Nesselson froom Variety

Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [3/5]

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review

Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris

San Francisco Chronicle review Ruthe Stein

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review January 5, 2007, also here: When a Woman Rattles a Man's World of Fraud

Eva Joly - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Elf king who fell from power BBC News, March 13, 2003

Oil scandal billionaire tells French court of bribes | World news ... Paul Webster and Martin Bright from The Guardian, May 7, 2003

BBC News | EUROPE | French elite hit by sleaze claims BBC News, June 18, 2003

Former Elf oil chiefs jailed | Business | The Guardian Jon Henley from The Guardian, November 13, 2003

Elf Executives Jailed Over Fueling Corruption in Africa - Nations ... Hector Igbikiowubo from The Global Policy Forum, November 18, 2003

France: Elf verdicts reveal state corruption at highest levels Antoine Lerougetel from the World Socialist Web Site, November 25, 2003

euro|topics - Eva Joly The bad screenplay of the Elf affair, a quote from Eva Joly, the lead judge on the Elf scandal in Le Monde, March 17, 2006

Eva Joly: Britain is destroying the anti-corruption struggle ... article written by Eva Joly from the Independent, December 20, 2006

BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Eva Joly and her fight against top ... BBC radio interview with Eva Joly publicizing her book Justice Under Siege, February 7, 2007

Interview of EVA JOLY The France 24 Interview (in English) on YouTube (14:00)

A GIRL CUT IN TWO (La Fille coupée en deux)

Germany France (115 mi) 2007

All you need to know about Claude Chabrol's new film is in its title, though a more apropos one might have been Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things. Chabrol opens the curtains on a one-dimensional world where little boys and girls are reared using handbooks and wine is considered the nectar of the gods, though the director's mounting indifference means that it's hard to tell if he still cares to give the finger to the monstrous upper-crust environs in his films or if he wants to be part of them. Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), a TV weather girl with men raining all around her, is similarly conflicted, though her romantic crisis is not resolved as a prickly foil to bourgeois complacency. To Chabrol, she is something close to an inanimate object, tossed back and forth between Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand), an accomplished novelist twice her age, and Paul Gaudens (Benoît Magimel), a child of fortune whose nail-biting points to personal demons. It's easy to latch on to the rationale Gabrielle's mother gives for her daughter's devotion to Charles—she's looking for a father!—because there appears to be no other. Confusing Charles's sex for love, she becomes enraged when he doesn't come back for more, at which point she marries Paul, whose violence against Charles late in the film isn't so much waged on behalf of Gabrielle as it is in deference to a skeleton that falls out of his closet. One of those Chabrol productions perched awkwardly between thriller and comedy, A Girl Cut in Two is almost documentary-like in its examination of bourgeois rituals of wining and dining and modes of self-preservation, but its intriguing bits of psychological observation are not engineered into a particularly sensible or pulsating whole. Paling next to Raul Ruiz's nutty Chabrolian parody That Day, the film is only as artful, amusing, and thoughtful as the last Woody Allen picture.

World Socialist Web Site (Hiram Lee) review

One in the middle for Claude Chabrol, La Fille Coupee En Deux is nowhere near the heights of his greatest films but is a damn sight better than some of his less notable hack work.

Ludivine Sagnier stars as a TV weatherwoman who falls for famous but married older man Francois Berleand. Unfortunately, after a whirlwind romance and an introduction to kinky sex, he decides that he can’t leave his wife, giving our heroine no choice but to end the relationship. Alas, she foolishly takes up with obnoxious trust fund baby Benoit Magimel, only to find that he’s obsessed with her past love to the point of madness. This naturally sets the scene for a tragedy, one that will leave the protagonist all but destroyed.

At first, the film seems on autopilot, with the Bazinian realism cranked up all the way to banal and the familiar jabs at the bourgeoisie little more than limp bashing. Further, Magimel is a little too obviously creepy (and too comically decked out in bad suits), making him an unlikely choice for the apparently level-headed Sagnier. But once the big event of the script happens, the film is surprisingly affecting as the creep’s family closes ranks and pressures our heroine into making a wrong decision.

Though La Fille Coupee En Deux almost exactly copies Richard Fleischer’s film of the Evelyn Nesbit case, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, it packs a punch that movie doesn’t have, and while I can’t say that I’ll ever think about it ever again it’s still somehow a cut above a mere time killer in terms of how it works on an audience.

You could do a lot worse than this; if only it didn’t seem a dry run for a much better movie.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

Chabrol's latest film (La Fille coupée en deux) is a barbed comedy set in the city of Lyons. A charming young TV weather person, Gabrielle Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier), suddenly finds two men competing for her affections. The successful writer Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand) is appearing on TV when he first runs into Gabrielle; her mother (Marie Bunel) works at the bookstore where he's later signing his new book. Though he's a good thirty years her senior, they feel an instant connection. To her, he's sexy, fascinating, and rich. But not nearly so rich as Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel), the capricious young heir to a vast local pharmaceutical fortune. With his tinted Napoleonic hairdo and flamboyant wardrobe, Magimel spins onto each scene like some spoiled princeling. He's amusing, absurd, and a bit menacing. There are obvious hints that he may be completely wacko. He spots Gabrielle too at the book signing, falls for her, and woos her aggressively henceforth. Saint-Denis lives with professed contentment and serenity in a splendid superbly brittle ultramodern house in the country and has a vivacious and understanding and longstanding wife (Dona, Valeria Cavalli. Gaudens lives in a mansion with his widowed mother (Caroline Sihot) and two grown sisters. Both men have some dark scandals and improprieties hidden in their past, though we don't learn much about them. In this relatively provincial world they are well acquainted with, and have always cordially detested, each other.

It appears that Gabrielle is led into some indecencies by Charles, whose special club and in-town pied-a-terre she visits more than once. Preposterous as it may seem, Paul, who's head-over-heels for Gabrielle, appoints himself Gabrielle's moral savior. Though she's sought after by Canal+ and her current boss wants to make her the emcee of a new show, Gabrielle eschews these opportunities for advancement and instead devotes nearly all her time to pursuing or being pursued by these two men, enjoying the attentions of the curiously endearing Paul, but running off the instant the sophisticated Charles summons her—because he's the one she truly adores. (In the French cinema, older men are quite commonly seen as the more attractive.) Both Berleand, a convincing ladies man, and the visually transformed Magimel, by now a Chabrol regular if not a male muse, are splendid in their roles. Sagnier, whom Americans will probably best remember as Tinker Belle or the naughty young woman in Ozon's Swimming Pool, projects a world of beauty, charm, vivacity, and (relative) innocence.

The Girl Cut in Two is highly amusing. The script by Chabrol's longtime assistant Cecile Maistre sparkles with witty zingers in every scene and has particular fun with the literary world, "intellectual" TV shows, and as always with the director, the gilded squalor of the upper bourgeoisie. This being Lyons, one of France's chief gastronomic capitals, there are lots of good restaurants and there's lots of good wine; many coupes of good champagne are tossed back. Nifty sports cars are driven—and when Paul arrives anywhere in his, he leaves it at the door, and tosses away the ticket afterwards with a disdain any driver would envy. For a good part of the time, each scene is more fun than the last.

The dialogue is smooth and glib, but it's also smart. This isn't a murder mystery, though a pistol does appear and later it is used. It's more a portrait of emotional conflict. And it treats issues of high and low; of love trumping ambition and then turning out to be naïve; about wealth and madness; about men and women; youth and age. At the center of it is Gabrielle's "search for love." But in focusing on Paul and Charles, Gabrielle is, of course, carrying out that search in two quite wrong places. Both men are as deeply tempting as they are flawed, so it's no wonder she wavers hopelessly between them.

Gabrielle marries Paul, but only on the rebound from Charles. This leads to unhappiness, discontent, and finally violence. The film has transposed to contemporary times (without loss of credibility) the story of the 1906 murder, in New York, of the famous American architect and womanizer Stanford White (represented here by the writer) by the husband of his latest mistress. It's a theme dealt with before, notably in Richard Fleischer's 1955 Girl in the Red Velvet Swing and Milos Forman's 1981 screen adaption of E.L. Doctorow's novel, Ragtime. But the Maistre-Chabrol treatment is unique.

The Girl Cut in Two is one of Chabrol's lightest and brightest and most buoyant films. It may not, as few can, rest on the top shelf with his absolute classics, but it is the best thing he's done in years.

The film was shown at the New York Film Festival 2007 in September; it opened in France in early August.

Ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont]

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]

The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [3/5]

Reverse Shot (Michael Koresky) review

Between Productions [Robert Cashill]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Beverly Berning

National Public Radio (Mark Jenkins) review

A Tale of Two Halves James Hansen from Out 1 Film Journal, August 30, 2008

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review (Page 2)

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] which includes an interview with actress Ludivine Sagnier, August 14, 2008

Killer Movie Reviews (Andrea Chase) review [2/5]

Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [3.5/5]

The New York Sun (Darrell Hartman) review

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij) also here: european-films.net

The Auteurs' Notebook

Screen International Jonathan Romney

VideoVista review JC Hartley

Cinema de Merde

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]

Little White Lies magazine Matt Bochensky

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review also seen here: New York Cool [Harvey Karten]

Screenjabber review Robert Hull

Reel Film Reviews (David Nusair) capsule review

Tiscali UK Paul Hurley

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Channel4.com/film

Variety.com [Lisa Nesselson]

Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [4/5]

Time Out New York (David Fear) review [3/5]

The New Wave rolls on in Claude Chabrol John Patterson from The Guardian, May 16, 2009

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [2/5]

The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review

Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [3/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review August 15, 2008, also here: Two Men Wage a War Only to Harm the Spoils

Serious Pleasures: Season’s Sweet Spots Stephen Holden from The New York Times, August 22, 2008

INSPECTOR BELLAMY (Bellamy) B 88

France (110 mi) 2009

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
— W. H. Auden, excerpt from Song VIII of Twelve Songs (1933-1938)

In this his final film, as the director recently passed away at the age of 80, Chabrol finally teams up with French legend Gérard Depardieu who plays a charmingly personable Police Inspector, the kind of guy who would just as soon hear your life story than the specific facts at hand, which more likely bore him, as he’s spent a career investigating police work and it’s other things now that interest him in this latter stage of his life. Depardieu as Inspector Bellamy is something of a settled, but never quite comfortable middle-aged man in a bourgeois marriage with his still sexy wife Françoise (Marie Bunel), who always appears calmer and a step ahead of her husband. But he’s the one on duty, though you’d never know it, as each of his calls are a “personal visit” instead of an official police questioning, where it feels more like Bellamy is simply trying to get a grasp on the lay of the land, offering bits of kindness where he can. Interesting from the opening shot, a real puzzler as the camera curiously pans out of a cemetery out onto a stretch of beach where a demolished burnt-out car lies at the bottom of a cliff, with a charred body and a severed head sitting upright laying right next to it. Need one say more? What’s more interesting is that the Inspector and his wife are on holiday in the south of France at their country home in Nîmes, but like indigestion, the man won’t let it rest, and his curiosity gets the better of him. This husband and wife team is so conventionally close that they’re a toss between the straight-laced yet comical McMillan & Wife (1971–1977) and the suave sophistication of THE THIN MAN (1934).

And did I mention that Depardieu is ginormous, a man who looks like a beached whale when he sits upon the edge of the bed with his wife in little skimpy outfits? It had to have been an in joke on the set, as the man gives Brando a run for his money as the world’s most bloated up human being, but his acting is impeccable. In no way does his size interfere except as an occasional aside joke. Instead, Bellamy visits all the known suspects, never once raising his hand or fist as a threat, or a gun, or a warrant. Instead, he relies on the pleasantries of old-fashioned conversation. This non-threatening manner in investigating a hideous crime also describes the pacing of the film, where age really does enter into it, as this film has no target audience in mind, but ambles along in its own manner, veering here and there, occasionally seeming off course, but all in good time seems to be the director’s aim. This healthy dose of maturity adds to the charm of the picture, as it uses old-fashioned methods to lure the audience into a somewhat unconventional crime, insurance fraud that resurrects the use of a dead body double to steer interested parties away from the real mastermind who’s behind this swindle, where we can imagine this exact same scenario in the 1940’s and Bellamy would be a hard drinking, skirt chasing, and decidedly younger version of himself.

Here, despite his size, he’s still a skirt chaser, and, blasphemous in France, he’s given up drinking altogether, that is, until his wayward and long lost brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac) arrives on the scene, a gambler, a thief, but mostly a drunkard flirting with his wife every chance he gets while drinking every last bottle on the premises, a hard-drinking ex-con who is belittled and constantly criticized by his bullying elder brother throughout the rest of the picture. The only time they have a moment’s peace is when they have a little drink together and share a few laughs, as otherwise they’re at each other’s throats. Bellamy never cuts him a break, which makes Jacques all the more devious, a complete fuck up and damaged soul who seems incapable of doing anything right. In his own way, he’s the perfect side attraction to Bellamy’s continuing conversation with the girl friend of the dead body double (Adrienne Pauly), the friend of a homeless man who ends up dead, while the real mystery man, cleverly maneuvering his way through three roles, one following the alterations of plastic surgery, is Jacques Gamblin, a man who rarely sees his dutiful wife anymore (Marie Matheron), as he wants to abscond with his mistress (Vahina Giocante) and the money. Bellamy, however, unscrambles the clues, which, you’d never know as he’s too busy fuming about his own brother’s various indiscretions, railing against the incompetence of the local police detective (who’s never seen onscreen), while amiably following the drifting thoughts of the town. There’s an uncommon ease about this picture which makes it easy to like, and a final shot that exquisitely offers a poetic transcendence to the director himself, a renowned gourmet and self mocking bon vivant who loved life, and unlike many of the other more tortured New Wavers, wasn’t afraid to show us a good time.

You could almost call this movie Inspector Nick Charles: though it's peppered with minor profundities, it's an airy trifle—a warmly written and acted jumble of character studies. Claude Chabrol reportedly wrote this engaging, popular-appeal potboiler for star Gerard Depardieu who, now thick with age (and a nose like Karl Malden, mon dieu!!), plays a famous-but-retired police detective pulled into a Chandler-esque mystery, filled in with fleshed-out characters—as per usual with Chabrol, the story is far less important than the people in it. (The story includes a lot of fraternal bickering, sibling rivalry with a no-good brother who, in the film's best joke, arrives in the middle of the night with ominous Tchaikovsky music blaring...from the taxi! "Could you turn that down please?")

The mystery unfolds slowly, with Depardieu putting the pieces together as if for sport—as if, what else would he do while on vacation? And they come easily; there are no twists here, and certainly no surprises. Instead, you get a missing-persons case and a cop's life whose small details start to parallel one another slightly, as if the two are bleeding into each other. It suggests something about how art and life share a porous border, strengthened by the fact that the movie opens in a cemetery, with a shot of a decorated grave stone, through which the camera winds before landing upon a corpse. How's that for the opening of the last film you'll make before you die?

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]

Gérard Depardieu looks terrible these days. He’s always packed a few extra pounds, but right now he’s just obese. No doubt, the death of his son Guillaume last October has taken a toll on him, but who knows if that’s a factor in his letting himself go? He has made some lousy choices through the years, as have De Niro, Pacino and other fine, only-last-name-necessary actors of his generation. Even though time really hasn’t been kind to him, Mr. Depardieu can still generate some movie-star wattage and pull off the larger-than-life presence of a leading man. He has done it so expertly in “Bellamy” – a star vehicle made-to-measure by none other than Claude Chabrol – that one sometimes forgets he is lugging around some 200 extra pounds.

Mr. Depardieu plays the eponymous character, a renowned police commissioner vacationing in Nîmes with his wife, Françoise (Marie Bunel). Paul Bellamy lives for his work, and he readily welcomes the distraction when Noël Gentil (Jacques Gamblin) contacts him out of the blue to confess an insurance fraud and the possible foul play involved. Meanwhile, Paul’s black-sheep half brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac) shows up to disrupt the peace and quiet in a bid to settle an old score.

Fans of Mr. Chabrol who expect “Bellamy” to be a policier or whodunit will be disappointed. It isn’t a psychological thriller either, despite the Freudian sibling rivalry and all. In his first collaboration with Mr. Depardieu, Mr. Chabrol sets out to tailor a role that is fit for the preeminent leading man of French cinema. The joy is to watch Mr. Depardieu slipping into it with such effortless charm and charisma even when we fear that seams might burst and buttons might fly at any time. If nothing else, the film proves that, unlike many of his contemporaries who appear to be coasting, Mr. Depardieu is no mere fat-suited caricature of his former self.

The death of Claude Chabrol inevitably saddles Inspector Bellamy, the prolific French New Waver's final feature, with a coda-status heft that the wispy opus cannot possibly shoulder. Paul Bellamy (Gerard Depardieu) is the last of the filmmaker's ambiguous protagonists, a renowned police inspector whose analytical mind can't resist drifting toward riddles even during a holiday in Nimes. As if answering his desire for a bit of sleuthing, a mysterious client shows up at the cottage Bellamy's staying at with his wife, Françoise (Marie Bunel), trampling their garden and dropping hints of psychological anguish. Intrigued, the inspector hears the man's tale, which involves a decapitated charred corpse, the disappearance of a philandering local businessman, and a death-obsessed vagabond. That all three characters are played by the same actor (Jacques Gamblin, slipping in and out of bogus whiskers) is a reminder of Chabrol's decades-long affinity for Hitchcockian doubles and façades (murder is at one point described as a Strangers on a Train-style "exchange of favors"), yet such sporadic thematic spice mostly serves to heighten the well-bred dustiness of the narrative, which meanders between Bellamy's investigation and his own buried family secrets with all the urgency of a crosswords puzzle.

A sardonic humanist in the Balzac mold, Chabrol was always less interested in the mysteries of his plots than in the nets of insinuating relationships that they would invariably open up. Accordingly, the hazy crime at the center of Inspector Bellamy functions primarily as a fractured mirror through which the protagonist ponders his interactions with his wife and his younger, broken-down half-brother, Jacques (Clovis Cornillac). The vehement upstart of Les Cousins and Les Bonnes Femmes would have mined this territory for confrontational studies of human foolishness and desire, while the urbane surgeon of Les Biches and Le Boucher would have taken a scalpel to the crossroads of bourgeois and provincial corruption. Unfortunately, the Chabrol at work here is the cozy craftsman of the previous 10 years, where the occasional gratifying perversity is swamped by somnolent polish and the sense of a missed dinner being the biggest thing at stake.

Merci Pour le Chocolat and The Bridesmaid would have made for more robust swan songs, though Inspector Bellamy does provide the auteur with an affecting final self-portrait in Depardieu's wry, slightly melancholy sleuth, a man grown plump with age and comfort yet to the end continuing to search and inquire.

Chabrol's Magufffin Armond White from The NY Press

After Claude Chabrol’s death Sept. 12, 2010, the French New Wave continues to pass into history even though the best films by Nouvelle Vague directors— Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and others—stay amazingly vital. Chabrol’s final film, Inspector Bellamy, is a good example: Chabrol re-imagines the detective genre in the course of practicing it. Gerard Depardieu plays Inspector Bellamy, whose domestic life with his affectionate wife Francoise (Marie Bunel) is interrupted by a client (Jacques Gamblin) seeking help in a murder case and by Bellamy’s half-brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac), whose unexpected arrival brings unsettling family demands.

It took a year for Bellamy to open in the U.S. following its premiere in Europe, probably because New Wave movies are no longer hot commercial properties.

The nonchalant, almost spontaneous way Bellamy’s life complicates his profession (and vice-versa) challenges the simplistic narratives of current Euro imports. In Bellamy, Chabrol and Depardieu both audaciously reveal their personal approach to the world as opposed to the way films like Carlos, Mesrine and A Prophet—as well as American grindhouse product like Let Me In and The Town—simply concentrate on generic sensationalism.

As the New Wave masters age and their innovations become unfashionable, modern audiences lose connection with the New Wave thrill of rethinking life through the codes of movie narrative. Bellamy’s client’s calls for help have an existential sense that the conscientious inspector cannot avoid. Bellamy sees himself in the client—and in his attraction to the women he meets during his investigation. The film isn’t simply about a case, but about the moral questions of social life, law, marriage, family, sex and privilege.

“Do you think mankind is improving?” Bellamy asks his despairing alcoholic brother. “Did her sexual hunger frighten you?” Bellamy probes his client about a femme fatale. Both questions and answers—posed in Chabrol’s signature style of casual observation—raise the film’s moral inquiry. Bellamy is suffused with humane concern that startlingly enlarges the solid, coherent crime-and-justice plot (co-written by Odile Barski who also co-wrote Techine’s The Girl on the Train). That’s vital art. That’s also Chabrol’s real purpose. Scenes of domestic harmony or friction, flashbacks of criminal activity and human duplicity, have a depth and precision that suggests Chabrol’s masterly summing-up of what he knows about cinema and about human nature. Bellamy’s rivalry with Jacques goes back to the remarkable sibling tension of Chabrol’s 1958 debut Le Beau Serge—Cornillac’s haunted performance even evokes Gerard Blain in that film. Genre is Chabrol’s Maguffin. The New Wave’s favorite icon, Alfred Hitchcock, explained “Maguffin” as: “The thing the hero cares about but the audience doesn’t,” which could also define the difference between profound cinema and trivial, escapist cinema—the stuff Hollywood traditionally emphasizes versus what matters in viewers’ lives. In Bellamy’s various dealings, Chabrol conveys a lyrical sense of the world. (The film is dedicated to “The Two Georges,” saluting the crime novelist Georges Simenon and musician Georges Brassens, whose classic songs articulate several characters’ points of view and even inspire a trial lawyer’s whimsical summation.) All the film’s dramatic tensions get distilled in exchanges that could be either literary apercus or song cues: “You have to forgive the weak. Why? Because they’re weak, that’s how it is,” and “He thought the world was a mess. He was right. Right doesn’t make you happy. No, it’s the opposite.”

It turns out Bellamy was a summing-up for Chabrol after all. Moviemaking this rich is passing from our culture.

User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

Chabrol is 78, and this is his 57th film. He's in fine form here, though this hasn't quite got the delirious malice or the cloying bourgeois atmosphere of his most potent works. The closing dedication is to "the two Georges." They are Georges Brassens, the French singer-songwriter, and Georges Simenon, the prolific Belgian-born maker of novels hard and soft and the creator of the inimitable Commissioner Maigret. This is the first time Chabrol and Gérard Depardieu have worked together. For the occasion, Chabrol has conceived a lead character who's half Maigret, half Depardieu. And he has based his crime plot on a news item. The ingredients blend well and the result is guaranteed to entertain.

There is an actual Maigret novel in which the Paris detective goes on vacation with his wife, but then becomes involved in a case. ('Les Vacances de Maigret'--and it was made into a film!) It's a foregone conclusion that Maigret, and Chabrol's Commissioner Paul Bellamyworki (Depardieu) is no different, is happiest when he's solving a murder mystery. Bellamy spends every summer with his wife Françoise (Marie Bunel) in the region of Nimes, in the south of France, where she maintains a cozy bourgeois family house. She would prefer they join a cruise on the Nile, where Bellamy would be less able to get his nose into French crime, but here they are. And as the film begins and Maigret, I mean Bellamy, is doing a crossword and Françoise is planning dinner and shopping, a suspicious-looking lean sort of fellow called Noël Gentil (Jacques Gamblin) is hovering around in the garden just outside the picture window, and finally gets up his courage and raps on the front door. Bellamy has written a well known memoir and like Maigret is so famous people seek him out.

Mme. Bellamy turns the man away, but there's a phone call, and Bellamy goes to a motel room, and he finds this chap interesting because people interest him. Gentil turns out to have several aliases, and even faces, because he's sought the help of a plastic surgeon. He shows the photo of a man who looks rather like himself and says he "sort of killed him." He declares himself to be in a terrible mess. There are several women, a wife (Marie Matheron) and a beautiful young woman who has a beauty shop (Vahina Giocante) in the town. And, as in the Simenon novel, there is a local police inspector, a certain Leblanc, whom Bellamy doesn't respect, and assiduously avoids, and Chabrol never shows us on screen.

M. Gentil turns out to be a suspect involved in a double life and a devious crime. But he is seeking the Commissioner's help--on a private basis. It has to do with an insurance scam that went awry.

Chabrol is also involved in a double process, because the film takes a complicated family turn with the arrival of Bellamy's ne'er-do-well half-brother Jacques Lebas (Clovis Cornillac), who gambles, drinks too much, and has a habit of going off with things that don't belong to him. Cornillac wears this character's skin so comfortably he never seems to be acting, and with a part like this, that's a neat trick, and he makes Jacques somehow elegant as well.

Part of the charm of this easy-to-watch if unchallenging film is the warm relationship between Françoise and Bellamy, which is romantic and affectionate and physical and cozy all at once. Bunel and Depardieu (who is very large now, a benignly beached whale in a good suit) play very well together. There is a dinner with a gay dentist (Yves Verhoeven) and his partner, which Jacques horns in on; this isn't terribly interesting. Nor is the case extremely resonant. The most memorable moments are those between Bellamy and his wife and his love-hate squabbling with the unpredictable half-brother, which are enhanced by the bright colors and warmth of the southern French setting. There is a young lawyer who shines in court, and lines from a Georges Brassens song are used in a surprising way. Fans of Chabrol and of Depardieu (and the two Georges!) won't want to miss this.

Bellamy opened in Paris February 25, 2009 to decent reviews. Given its north American premiere at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center in March 2009, this seems sure to get a US distributor, but none has been announced yet.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Ian Johnston] August, 2010

filmsoundoff [Alex Roberts]

Claude Chabrol's INSPECTOR BELLAMY - Two DVD Reviews of the ... Michael Atkinson and Sean Axmaker from Turner Classic Movies

Claude Chabrol Andrew Sarris from Film Comment, November/December, 2010

The Front Row: Happy Endings : The New Yorker Richard Brody

Critic Picks [Alex Udvary] October 20, 2009

Slant Magazine DVD [Chuck Bowen]

eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver

DVDTalk.com [Jamie S. Rich]

Parallax View [Sean Axmaker]

Vancouver Voice [D. K. Holm]

Inspector Bellamyl review (2009) Gerard Depardieu - Qwipster's ... Vince Leo from Qwipster Movie Review

DVD Verdict [James A. Stewart]

Bellamy | Review | Screen Mike Goodridge in Berlin from Screendaily, also here: micropsia: Berlinale: "Bellamy", de Claude Chabrol (Screen Daily y ...

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Adam Micklethwaite]

User reviews from imdb Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Jigsaw Lounge [Matthew Tempest] Berlin Film Festival 2009

Film-Forward.com Nora Lee Mandel and Kent Turner

Bina007 Movie Reviews [Caterina Benincasa]

The House Next Door [Veronika Ferdman] January 2, 2010

micropsia: Berlinale: "Bellamy", de Claude Chabrol (Screen Daily y ... Boyd van Hoeij from Variety

Movie review: 'Inspector Bellamy' - Los Angeles Times Gary Goldstein, December 9, 2010

From the Hitchcock of France, a final farewell: 'Inspector Bellamy ... Susan King, December 7, 2010

Georgia Straight [Adrian Mack]

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott, October 28, 2010

Chadha, Gurinder

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM

Germany (112 mi) 2002

Bend It Like Beckham Michael Agger from the New Yorker

A crowd-pleasing British movie devoted to the radical idea that girls can play soccer and sprain their ankles. Jess (Parminder Nagra) is a Sikh who hides her love of the game from her conservative parents, while Jules (Keira Knightley) is a tomboy who defies her English mother. Both of them have a thing for their Irish coach, Joe (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers)—he of the wounded knee and the watery eyes. The movie is a hodgepodge: nicely barbed scenes with Jess's family bump against weird practice montages that play like sports-bra ads. What it all adds up to is multicultural empowerment for the pre-teen shin-guard crowd.

Chadwick, Justin

MANDELA: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM B 84

Great Britain South Africa (139 mi) 2013 Official Site

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

—Nelson Mandela, in a speech before the sentencing court, 1964

This is another Harvey Weinstein project, obtaining the rights to Nelson Mandela’s 700-page memoirs written in 1995, Long Walk to Freedom, then hiring a white British screenwriter, William Nicholson, known for writing GLADIATOR (2000) and LES MISÉRABLES (2012), to adapt it for film, and another white British television director, Justin Chadwick, to direct the movie. Unfortunately, the film only scratches the surface, and despite the overall length, skims over his life without much scrutiny, playing out more like a movie made for the History Channel. What cannot be denied, however, is the enormously appealing story of Mandela himself, played with a great deal of authority by black British actor Idris Elba, where the film benefits from a release coming just weeks after the monumental 95-year old figure died in Johannesburg, South Africa on December 5, 2013. Had the film gone into greater detail and actually explored his life with more depth and complexity, it would have been an invaluable historical portrait. Instead it’s an overly pious film that reveres its subject to such an extent that he becomes a saintly figure. South African producer Anant Singh, who was himself an ardent apartheid activist, has been trying to make this film for over 16 years, but makes the mistake of attempting to cover half a century of his nation’s history through the life of one single man. By the time the film opens, he’s already an established lawyer with a thriving practice in Johannesburg, but next to nothing is known about how he came to assume this esteemed position, quite rare for a black man in a racially segregated society that routinely denies career advancement for blacks. While he lives with his wife Evelyn (Terry Pheto) and small children in a crowded black township, he practices in white courts before white judges where whites providing testimony aren’t used to being questioned or cross-examined by blacks about the accuracy of their testimony, sending some into a shock of racial indignation, where for racial reasons the judge allows these individuals to answer directly to the judge instead of having to speak to the questioning attorney.

Initially Mandela is seen as a large physical presence, one who boxes in his spare time, adores his wife and children, and maintains a close relationship to his community, though he also has a reputation as something of a womanizer. When the leaders of the African National Congress come calling, a non-violent, anti-apartheid movement that aligns themselves with the communist party to address the rights of black South Africans through mass demonstrations, boycotts, and protests, they impress him with their effectiveness in channeling social injustice into a mobilized defiance against the government, as Mandela is a believer that lone actions are largely ineffective, but when groups work together around common principles, this gets the attention of the government. Eventually he joins the party and becomes one of their leading speakers, where he’s especially effective in stirring crowds into action. The government’s response is to send military tanks and police forces into the black townships, effectively turning their neighborhoods into a segregated police state, where in response the international community initiates an arms and trade embargo against the apartheid government, which is seen as increasingly repressive and brutally violent. These sanctions isolate South Africa from the rest of the world, placing them on notice. Perhaps the one single event with the most significance is the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, when thousands of demonstrators burn their identity cards that they are legally required to carry in a sign of protest, demanding they be arrested to fill the jail cells, as police routinely check these “passes” as a means of harassing black citizens, often hauling anyone without their passes off to prison. On this date, however, they open fire on unarmed citizens, killing 69 people, including many children, almost all of them in the back as they attempted to flee the scene.

Mandela loses his wife Evelyn to the cause, as she needs a man who will be at home with his children, not one continually absent who swears his allegiance to the ANC, which alters their political tactics after the incident, turning to violence to achieve their goals, leading a campaign of targeted bombings of police stations, refusing to passively stand by and allow black citizens to be murdered by police without a response. Mandela meets and marries Winnie Mandela (Naomie Harris), who in real life is barely out of her teens, where there is an 18-year age difference, yet it is the romance of his life, as both share the same political dream. Their lives are split when Mandela and the ANC leaders are forced to go underground, where they are eventually arrested and sentenced in 1964 to spend the rest of their lives at hard labor on the Robben Island prison, a lime quarry where inmates spend their days breaking rocks down into gravel, both under a blazing hot sun, but also a constant assault of racial invectives by the white prison guards. Mandela is only allowed one letter every 6 months, with language censored by the guards, and no children visits until they reach age 16. At the time, Mandela’s oldest daughter was only 5. Winnie Mandela attempts to resume the political figurehead of her husband and is the object of repeated arrests, and most likely sexual assaults, including 18 months in solitary confinement, where she only grows more fiercely defiant. Winnie’s story is a bit more complicated, as to fill the void of the ANC leadership’s incarceration, there is tremendous pressure for her to exert leadership, becoming the face of the anti-apartheid movement around the world, and she thrives on the power, becoming intoxicated with the belief she is invincible, that she is the people’s champion, growing more hateful towards the white government, resorting to increasingly violent methods, even ordering the deaths of perceived collaborators, reprehensible actions that eventually separate her from her husband.

Mandela’s vision of leadership evolves during his 27 years in prison, amazingly showing no malice towards his oppressors, becoming one of the great figures of our time, directing his attention not only to his release but to obtaining the democratic goal of one man, one vote, where he eventually becomes the first freely elected black President of South Africa (1994–1999). While the overly conventional film arouses heroic sentiment through a soaring score, one might have appreciated greater examination of historical events, as extraordinary lives do not necessarily equate to extraordinary films, where the unique opportunity to film the memoirs of such a great historical figure deserves better, requiring greater depth and creativity. The international sanctions, for instance, are all but ignored, which helped weaken the nation’s economy, as is the increasing radicalization of young South Africans, failing to mention a split in the anti-apartheid movement that only widens after Mandela is released from prison, when suddenly, without providing context, blacks are killing blacks in the townships. There is little mention of the political challenges he faced to heal this divide, and barely touches upon the complexities of implementing a policy of national reconciliation. Despite all the critical acclaim surrounding the punishing pre-Civil War film 12 Years a Slave (2013), the literary source material for this film is far more appealing, as Mandela is such a uniquely compelling figure in history, where Idris Elba adds a commanding presence to the role, though his ANC associates are almost entirely non-existent, while Naomie Harris becomes little more than a brooding caricature by the end. Much like Harvey Weinstein’s Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013), this film tries to cram too much into a single film, glossing over the historical profundities of the moment, while the definitive works tend to remain more extended versions of Carlos – made for French TV (2010), a film divided into 3-parts, the extended made-for-television cut of THE LAST EMPEROR (1987), or the 2-part MESRINE (2008) or CHE (2008). Better South African films are Gavin Hood’s use of searing realism in his superb TSOTSI (2005), an eloquent voice of protest during the apartheid era, filmed in the shantytowns of Soweto and Johannesburg, or even Australian Phillip Noyce’s CATCH A FIRE (2006), a more mainstream film shot on actual locations and based on real events, following the early years of a budding anti-apartheid activist, where he and his family suffer a relentless series of assaults by the police, which only radicalizes his life in an attempt to finally provide meaning and purpose fighting against the prevailing system of apartheid.

Producer Anant Singh has been trying to make this movie for over 16 years, so no inferring anything about timing.

All the same, if you believe in the cosmic giggle, then there’s more than just convenience to the death of Nelson Mandela as this adaptation of his autobiography begins its long walk to Oscar season. Even with the best intentions, a posthumous surge of interest in the man will translate into bigger box office, making Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom look a lot more like the exploitation flick that it really is. If it were Roger Corman’s name above the credits, would this stodgy biopic come off any worse? (At least the car chases would be better.)

Putting aside Idris Elba’s charismatic performance as the giant known by his clan name, Madiba, this is nakedly manipulative filmmaking. Mandela’s all-too-human complexities are reduced to a simple violence versus nonviolence binary by screenwriter William Nicholson, while the deep politics of apartheid are way beyond the film’s grasp. Instead we see Afrikaner fat cats puffing on cigars in the early scenes of Mandela’s pre-revolutionary work as a lawyer, and a parade of cartoon villains after.

Winnie’s radicalization (portrayed by Naomie Harris, also rising above the material) and Nelson’s 27 years in prison are summarized to equally unsatisfying ends. Once the gnomic future statesman emerges from captivity—with no mention made of the compromised presidency that followed—good liberals will be high-fiving themselves over the film’s rousing finale, leaving the theatre with a brand-new song by those noted black South Africans U2 ringing in their ears, and ongoing global apartheid in all its increasingly pitiless manifestations conveniently forgotten.

World Socialist Web Site [Isaac Finn]

An attempt to cover fifty years in the life of South African President Nelson Mandela in the time span of two and a half hours seems as exhausting to sit through as it was daunting to piece together, even if it is based on Mandela’s own autobiography. To their credit, Justin Chadwick and screenwriter William Nicholson have made a well-paced film, albeit one that gives us a rudimentary glance at Mandela’s development, doggedly comprehensive without taking any opportunities for depth or subtlety. Its rather conservative depiction of apartheid further places the film into a textbook category and seems an appropriate and elementary learning tool for those ignorant of the subject matter. Despite adhering to the trappings of generalization as seen in many genuinely produced biopics that would have been better served by sticking to one particular moment or period, Chadwick’s Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom does sport two notable performances, with leads Idris Elba and Naomie Harris sure to walk away with prestigious awards consideration for laying claim to the most definitive cinematic portrayals of the Mandela family, to date.

Cinematographer Lol Crawley has a rather varied resume, with work on notable indie titles like the excellent Ballast (2008) and On the Ice (2011), to more high profile items like the rather middling Hyde Park on Hudson (2012). Here, he paints a golden hued South Africa that fluctuates between looking repetitive and unremarkable (though he’s DP on Russian filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s long gestating Dau, which will certainly be a sight to behold). We fly over the locales as quickly as we warp through time, beginning with certain touchstones of Mandela’s childhood growing up as part of the Xhosa, to his beginnings as a lawyer, through his first marriage which partially ended due to his adulterous and womanizing ways. Chadwick and Nicholson try valiantly to remain subjective as they portray unlikeable truths, but the more they play it safe, the more Mandela feels like a glossy package.

Nelson Mandela, like Martin Luther King, Jr., is a man whose life’s work has changed history, a daunting task to reenact with any sort of humble grace. He’s a figure that’s been portrayed by Poitier, Terrance Howard, and Morgan Freeman in an Oscar nominated turn in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, which chose to focus on one major event. And despite being fettered by some distracting old age make-up, Elba’s performance will usurp them all, if not for quality, then for scope. As engrossing as Elba is, the real (and perhaps, only) surprise here is Naomie Harris as Winnie, who steals the latter half of the film. Harris is given more expressive leeway since she’s not the main focus, and thus maneuvers through the film more subtlety.

Granted, Chadwick’s tasked with a tall order, so it seems unfair to censure him, and he’s dealing with volatile subject matter. Certainly, he avoids a semblance of ‘torture porn,’ and keeps the graphic violence to a minimum, but to such an extent that discomfort rather than running time seems to have dictated the content. The warped militant that Winnie Mandela becomes after her relentless experiences surely deserves a better due (and no, the 2011 Jennifer Hudson biopic is not it), as does her husband’s prison transformation which would turn them into ideological opponents, which is explained but not depicted. While Elba is in top form when reenacting Mandela’s exciting oratory power more than anywhere else, his long walk is here relayed with a taken-for-grantededness, confusing sincerity with brevity.

Review: 'Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom' - HitFix Guy Lodge

It is a cruel rule of thumb that extraordinary lives rarely make for extraordinary films. The more densely storied the personal narrative of its subject, the harder it is for dutiful screenwriters to resist tackling it whole, checking off every compelling accomplishment in thorough, linear fashion, even if such orderly diligence comes at the expense of more time-consuming character nuance. Critics have taken to calling this approach – not inaccurately – the “Wikipedia biopic,” though of course it dates back to the dustiest days of 1930s studio prestige drama, while Richard Attenborough effectively rebranded the genre in his own name decades later with the nobly dreary likes of “Young Winston” and “Gandhi.”

Attenborough comes frequently to mind while watching Justin Chadwick’s competent but predictably (perhaps inevitably) featureless “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” the latest and largest of several attempts to cinematically totemise the most consecrated of all living politicians: South Africa’s first democratically elected president, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.

That’s not just because the film’s elevated but textbook-solemn tone so closely recalls “Cry Freedom,” Attenborough’s own stab at apartheid-era myth-making – nor because “Mandela”’s screenwriter, the reliably fusty William Nicholson, has twice worked with the British lord. “Cry Freedom” was released in 1987, three years before Mandela emerged a free man from the gates of Victor Verster Prison; Steve Biko may have been its worthy subject, but it was effectively a stand-in for a Mandela biopic that, at that heated point in history, had no satisfactory ending.

Chadwick, then, is making the film that many an august filmmaker has wanted to make for the better part of a quarter-century, and directs it with enough respectful anonymity to honor them all: the first official adaptation of Mandela’s 1994 doorstop memoir, produced by South Africa’s foremost industry mogul Anant Singh, it has the hefty but guarded presence of any authorized biography. It’s also the first film to follow Mandela from cradle to dotage. Recently, Bille August’s “Goodbye Bafana” and Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus” both attempted to capture the man entire by covering a more contained section of his life. That’s generally the approach of the more discerning and insightful biopic – see “Lincoln” or “Capote” for proof – but neither of those drab spirit-lifters felt equal to Mandela’s personal magnetism, and Chadwick’s more substantial film doesn’t come much closer.

To be fair, I’m not sure Mandela’s own sincere but shrewdly self-positioning book – written at the outset of his presidency, a delicate time of national healing when he very much needed to be all things to all men – does either. Mandela is and always has been a conflicted hero, one whose positively miraculous professional accomplishments sit in fascinating balance with the ruthless personal streak by which he achieved them: not just the romantic guerrilla action for which the political right continues to judge him, but his manifold failings as a husband and father. “Mandela” isn’t so hagiographic as to sweep those under the sprawling carpet – indeed, some of its most engaging stretches are those which cover the man’s early incarnation as a shark-suited lawyer and heedless township cocksman. But it does ultimately present those facets as immaterial in the face of his self-sacrificing Goodness, which overrides the filmmaking as much as it more justifiably does his historical standing.

Nicholson’s plainly overworked script scores points for showing us both sides of the man, but is rarely so deft or daring as to show them at once. Mandela is callous in one scene – invariably a domestic one, and most joltingly in those involving his first wife Evelyn (a too-swiftly discarded Terry Pheto) – and pious in the next, with the scales favoring the latter as the stakes of his political crusade escalate.

'Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom' Is An Unsentimental But Flawed Portrait Of Nelson Mandela Alyssa Rosenberg from Think Progress

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom Amplifies Mandela's ... - Village Voice Michelle Orange

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom movie a worthy tribute. - Slate Jessica Winter

Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

In Review Online [Dan Girmus]

Movie Mezzanine [Kristen Sales]

SpiritualPopCulture.com [John A. Zukowski]

'Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom' Review: The ... - Pajiba TK

Twitch [Peter Martin]

AVForums - Blu-ray [Cas Harlow]

Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom | Reviews | Screen Tim Grierson

DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray & DVD with Pictures [Luke Bonanno]

DVD Talk [William Harrison] Blu-Ray

Mandela - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, Blu-Ray

theartsdesk.com [Nick Hasted]

SBS Film [Peter Galvin]

Dork Shelf [Andrew Parker]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]

examiner.com [Christopher Granger]

Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom - Eye For Film Angus Wolfe Murray

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

'Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom' Review: Idris ... - Variety Scott Foundas

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom – review - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom – review - The Guardian Xan Brooks

The Telegraph David Gritten

Review: Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom is too ... - The Independent Kaleem Aftab

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson]

SPL!NG [Stephen 'Spling' Aspeling] (South African)

The South African Movie Database [Andrew Germishuys]

The Sowetan [SAPA]

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Simon Abrams

'Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom' With Idris Elba - The New Stephen Holden from The New York Times

Chahine, Youssef

Chahine, Youssef from World Cinema

The best known and most highly regarded Egyptian filmmaker. The son of a well-to-do lawyer, he was raised as a Christian and educated at Victoria College, an exclusive high school where studies were conducted in English. After a year at Alexandria University, he went to the US, where for two years he trained as an actor at the Pasadena Playhouse. Returning to Egypt in 1948, he entered the film industry and began directing in 1950. From the start he asserted himself as a skilled technician. Although his early films only occasionally veered far from the thematic concerns of commercial cinema, they were frequently distinguished by the director's eclectic personality and bold visual style. He is credited with having discovered Omar Sharif (then Michael Shalboub), who made his debut in Chahine's Struggle in the Valley (1953). Chahine's career was by necessity affected by political events at home. During the heyday of Gamal Abdel Nasser's push for Pan-Arabism, for example, he was assigned to direct the nationalistic epic El Naser Sallah-e-din / Salladin (1963). But he continued handling strictly commercial ventures like Sand of Gold (1966), an Arabic version of the bullring drama Blood and Sand. After Egypt's stunning defeat by Israel in 1967, his films became increasingly political and social. Clues to his personality and state of mind can be found in his autobiographical film Alexandria...Why? (1978), winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 1979 Berlin Festival, and its sequel, An Egyptian Story (1982). — Ephraim Katz, The Film Encylopedia

Youssef Chahine Youssef Chahine: forget the stereotypes, by Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix, December 2 – 9, 1999

CAIRO STATION (Bab el Hadid)

Egypt (95 mi) 1958

Chahine, himself, stars in one of his earliest and best neo-realist films, a dramatic powerhouse which also features his simply amazing comprehension for staging nothing less than incredible musical sequences right in the middle of the most powerful, dramatic scenes.

Jean-Michel Frodon from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

First, there was nothing. This view was wrong and stupid, of course, as there were plenty of films being made in Egypt. In Arab countries, in Africa; plenty of stories being told, images being composed. But none of these stories, images, or films were being seen outside their places of origin – they were hardly known. Then there was an anticolonialist surge, an awakening of the nations of the South, Nasser, Suez, and – at the same moment – the arrival of singing comedies and sugary dramas, with (more or less) veiled and rather carnal beauties, young men with burning eyes and voices. These films were nice, exotic, sometimes quite remarkably made – if you ever got a chance to see on, you could appreciate it with some condescension.

Then came CAIRO STATION. And it was as if cinema having reached adolescence is suddenly thrust back into infancy in a hitherto unknown part of its world. This new cinema had learned from Hollywood and Italian neorealism to build a form of its own. It is filled with humor, wisdom, and anguish; pays attention to the minute details of everyday life in the city; portrays the primal powers of lust and desire; and delves into classical and oriental iconography – all presented in a mix of fantasy and reality. CAIRO STATION is vivid and moving, precise in its portrayals, original both as the creation of a single individual and as the embodiment of a secular culture, one that is so close and yet so different to that of the West.

And who is responsible for it? Youssef Chahine, a “crazy” little guy filled with longing and despair. Bringing disturbing revelations about himself and life to the screen, he plays a crippled newspaper vendor named Kenaoui who bears an unrequited desire for a voluptuous lemonade seller (Hind Rostom). Although the plot components are simple enough, the world depicted here is both dangerous and complex. The way events turn out opens up dark abysses in the city’s life, made the more unexpected by the initial friendly codes the film uses. Panned by Egyptian viewers upon its initial release, CAIRO STATION has justly been hailed as a masterpiece on its rediscovery some two decades later.

The film which put Egyptian writer/director Chahine on the international map plays like a great overlooked masterpiece of Italian neo-realism. In Cairo's busy rail terminus, passions are simmering: hard-working porter Abou Serib (Chawqi) aims to form a union to combat the corruption which divides and rules his fellow workers; his fiancée Hanouma (Rostom) uses her flirtatious charm to sell lemonade to train passengers, much to the chagrin of the official drinks concession; news vendor Kenaoui (Chahine) has designs on her too, but he's a simple-minded soul with little choice but to suffer her teasing and his colleagues' taunts. Fascinated by girlie images in magazines, he's soon yearning for revenge on a world that has excluded him. At first glance, the upfront sexuality startles in a film from an Arab country in 1958, but the bigger picture captures a society experiencing rapid change. Chahine fans out from a sweaty, realist base towards social observation, florid melodrama and dark suspense. It's a strikingly controlled, confident, bitingly effective display, which leaves you wondering where this film has been all our lives.

Chicago Reader (Lisa Alspector)

Reportedly (and understandably) Youssef Chahine's most popular film among Egyptians, this gritty and relatively early (1958) black-and-white masterpiece also features his most impressive acting turn, as a crippled news vendor working at the title railroad station. The adroit interweaving of various miniplots around the station is matched by a heady mix of moods and genres: at various junctures this movie becomes a musical, a slasher film, a neorealist drama, a comedy, and a horror film--come to think of it, it's pretty noir as well.

Guardian/Observer Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian

All human life is here: the phrase really does apply to Chahine's tragicomic masterpiece from 1958, the highlight of the Chahine season at the National Film Theatre in London. Cairo Station is the venue for a blazingly passionate drama about Kenaoui, a lame newspaper vendor, played by Chahine, and his unrequited desire for Hanouma (Hind Rostom), the Bardotesque lemonade seller. Chahine conducts his big cast with uproarious energy, immediacy and freshness; he has tremendous stylised set pieces, including a railway-carriage rock'n'roll number performed by a group gloriously credited as Mike and his Skyrockets. As Kenaoui's love becomes more obsessive, the mood darkens, and elements of Hitchcock and Powell creep in. Finally, Cairo Station virtually attains the air of a tragedy, observing classical unities of time and place.

My favourite moment is the shot that Chahine contrives after Kenaoui is convinced of the need for violent action: we immediately cut to an extraordinary selection of fearsome knives, big and small, hanging up in what appears to be an elaborate and preposterous outdoor knife shop. "Can I help you?" asks an assistant, directly to camera, clearly addressing the seething would-be assassin. It is a beautiful, deadpan, black comic touch - and an unmissable film.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The aftermath of the Suez Crisis, elucidated by Youssef Chahine in a furious sketch gleaned from Lang noir. Steam, machinery, knickknacks, and assorted scramblers fill the Cairo station vortex; when repression lives next to free-geysering sensuality, a body is bound to turn up in the luggage. Each of the three sides of the triangle is laid out with strenuous frankness: Chahine as the limping newspaper seller in his shack papered with saucy cheesecake, Hind Rostom as the flashing femme hawking soft drinks, Farid Shawqi as the muscular porter pushing for a workers' union. The crippled outsider gazes at a couple of young ingénues with envy, then with simmering desire at Rostom's scampering spitfire -- he offers his mother's necklace and dreams of bucolic domesticity but she turns him down, they all "got quite used to trains and noise." When the humid heroine jumps into a rock 'n' roll frenzy and a feminist rally with the same abandon, Chahine establishes his plotline as Sadie Thompson whirling through transitory Egypt. ("Cursed be such modern idiocies," a staid cleric scoffs, just as uncomprehendingly.) Tension accelerates: Chugging trains shift from objects of fate to anxiety signifiers, along with a decapitated magazine cutout, a Coke bottle smashed against a wall, a shiv dangling before Chahine's fervid eyes. It builds to a climax ferociously amalgamated from La Bête Humaine and Buñuel's Susana, where a culture's internal turmoil is exposed only to be carted away in a straitjacket. Egyptian censors saw only the tawdriness and despair of the work, and Chahine's film was banned for years rather than heralded as the excoriating classic it is. With Hassan el Baroudi, and Abdel Aziz Kahlil. In black and white.

A Nutshell Review Stefan S

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

THE LAND (al-Ard)

Egypt (130 mi) 1969

Once acclaimed in a nationwide critic’s poll as Egypt’s greatest film, this epic historical film examines the lives of small peasant villagers against the powerful interests of the landowners. Much like using brush strokes, the director paints a broad canvas in the small, intimate details in the lives of ordinary citizens, powerfully affecting, especially when we come to understand the historical exploitation of workers just such as these.

User comments from imdb Author: Amr Kamal from Egypt

This film can be considered one of the world's best movies, actually it was chosen on top of the best 100 movies in Egypt.

The movie is adopted from a novel written by Abdel Rahman El Sharkawi and was directed by Youssef Shahin.

Abdel Rahman El Sharkawi is a well known novelist and play-writer, in fact he's much more recognized for the plays he wrote. The movie "El-Ard" was produced in 1969, which falls inn a very important period of time in the Egyptian history, at this time the Egyptian ideology was being restructured.

As for the film itself, I would start by the choice of actors, when you think of the actors that were in Egypt at that time, you can't find a replacement for any of the actors in the movie, and you feel that no one else can play in any of the roles.

I would start by the Great actor Mahmoud El-Meliguy. His performance in this movie is like an intense lecture in the art of acting, Mohamed Abu Swelam, that character he played is so nicely written by Abdel Rahman El Sharkawi, it's a character facing so many struggles and at the same time with a history to be proud of, but it reached a point where he feels helpless in the struggle between him and the rich man in his village, who is connected to the Egyptian Royal palace (the time of the story was before Egypt changed from a kingdom to a republic). At the same time he's facing struggles with the English authority, which he has a long history with, and finally a struggle with the people of his village who are facing the same in justice he's facing!! This dilemma reflects to a great extent how the human behavior changed over the years. Back to Mahmoud El-Meliguy's acting, if this movie was translated to other languages I bet he would have been rewarded for his performance. I believe he's one of the best world's actors. He was known for playing the roles of gangsters and bad guy's, although all his friends and colleagues refer to him as the kindest person, in this movie his character was the main character in the film, another actors in this film were, Ezzat El Alaili and Yehia Shahin, they were both performing amazingly in there roles. The movie can be considered as a success story, even the music and the song performed were so distinguished and were so related to the movie. As for the directing, I believe Youssef Shahin did the right choice of actors which got his mission even easier. But this does not mean he wasn't good. In fact this is his masterpiece.

Finally, I would like to recommend this movie for any one who wants to enjoy acting

THE SPARROW (al-Asfour)

Egypt Algeria (105 mi) 1972

The characters in this 1972 allegorical comedy-drama, set in Egypt just before the Six Day War, deliberately invoke movie cliches with their courtship behavior and adroit manipulation of cigarettes. Obsessively composed shots subvert realism by being marvels of technique even as they advance the story of a young policeman, the adopted son of a military official, who learns his biological father is a legendary activist. Written by Lotfi el-Khouly and director Youssef Chahine (Destiny). In Arabic with subtitles. 105 min.

ALEXANDRIA... WHY? (Iskandnerija…lih?)

Egypt Algeria (133 mi) 1978

This 1978 film, the first feature in Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's fascinating and complex autobiographical trilogy about Alexandria, won the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival. It's set during World War II, when Rommel's army is approaching the city and a youth who serves as a stand-in for Chahine (Mohsen Mohiedine) is undergoing crises of national identity, sexuality, and vocation. A terrific movie in many respects, though perhaps less of a revelation than the trilogy's 1990 conclusion, Alexandria, Again and Always.

Loosely based on film-maker Chahine's childhood, Alexandria - Why? explores two different and difficult love affairs - one across religious and the other cross national boundaries - in his usual perceptive and visually convincing style. Showing a heart-felt interest in his characters and their predicaments while refusing to take sides in these complex affairs, this adds up to poignant and intelligent film-making. Using war-torn Alexandria as an effective backdrop, this personal history is an always effective way to cast light on the bigger picture. Like Chahine's later Alexandria Encore, this is a little-seen gem, well worth discovering for yourself.

User comments from imdb Author: Tilly Gokbudak from Roanoke, Va.

I was quite impressed with "Alexandria, Why?" It is just the second film I've seen from Egyptian master Youssef Chahine, but I can already see why many scholars have praised his work tremendously. This film captures both its' time and setting quite eloquently. It is clearly inspired by Italian neo-realism and uses dubbing as many Italian films of the yesteryear have so often done. The film is perhaps an autobiographical one as it depicts a young man in World War II Egypt who wants to immigrate to California and become a filmmaker. I sense the reason this film is so rated so poorly here is because it has a production value which is very minimal in scale. You realize that many shots are shot in a studio and backdrops, particularly ones with the Meditterranean shore, are ones from stock footage. This is something which is more often in B-movies from the '60s here. But, I am sure this was due to inherent financial limitations which Chahine had too work around. If one compares this film with ones from Turkish and Indian films made in this era, it seems as though Chahine effectively utilized what he had. And, if you compare it with films from other African countries, like Senegal, well it seems like an MGM production! I imagine if George Lucas had the film's producer, these things would have been remedied but as it is, very little artistic integrity is compromised here. We are drawn into the characters' lives and we are captivated by their struggles too find love and freedom. In the end, some things are sacrificed too achieve one desire over another and thus we are left with the brutal reality of the immigrant experience. And, the result is one sterling film which suggests that if an artist truly believes in their work, they can achieve the same artistic merits as filmmakers from more developed nations.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Black-and-white stock footage of Rommel's desert advance mixes with Esther Williams' Technicolor pirouettes for a razzmatazz opening montage -- German forces swear "Alexandria, you're mine," but the city is Youssef Chahine's from the start, as fervidly distinctive as Fellini's Rome. Mohsen Mohieddin is the director's teenaged stand-in, avidly daydreaming MGM extravaganzas to block out family drama and wartime trauma; his extended clan hangs on to a façade of elegance while living on top of a rowdy cabaret lounge, curfews and blackouts punctuate the raucous burlesque, no argument is too tiny for garrulous tidal waves. The young hero performs Shakespeare and yearns for Hollywood, stages mock-glamorous musical revues and arranges impudent skit shows. He celebrates and suffers with the same ardor, but Alexandria is a veritable mural of saturated passions: the approaching Nazis are viewed as a welcome change in oppressor ("Hitler will turn you into belly-dancers," a local says to the occupying British), Egyptian nationalists hatch a wacky plot to sink Churchill's submarine, British soldiers become the main article of contraband, trafficked among rebels for assassination potential. Mohieddin's rich uncle buys a young Brit (Gerry Sundquist) and falls in love with him, though "patriotic" bloodlust keeps their forbidden affair from being consummated; a Muslim Communist (Ahmed Zaki) and his Jewish squeeze (Naglaa Fathi) are more successful in bridging the various frantic tensions, even as her aged father prophesizes both Israel and American military interference to "protect the oil." An air raid kills the lights, the handheld shot as the old grandfather shuffles through the darkened living room (illuminated by the bomb blasts outside) follows into a disarming, kitschy panorama of animated search lights -- Chahine's pop diorama of memory. Examining identity both personal and cultural, the filmmaker lends his own early home movies to the writhing fabric, and directs the final laugh at himself, an eager alter-ego crossing the Atlantic to be greeted by a chortling Lady Liberty. With Ezzat El Alaili, Mahmoud El Meligui, Mohsena Tewfik, Abdalla Mahmoud, Seif El Dine, and Youssef Wahby.

User comments from imdb Author: AdnanZ from Canada

For a director who has been making movies for nearly 60 years, Youssef Chahine is still criminally unknown outside of Arabia and Europe, even in critical circles. The widest release outside of Europe for any of his films was a very limited run in the US for 1997's "Destiny", and only five or six of his films are available on Region 1 DVD. Still, dedicated cinephiles who have studied world cinema will inform you that Chahine is considered one of world cinema's great masters. He has been nominated for no less than seven awards at Cannes, five of them either for the Palme D'Or or its predecessor, the Grand Prize. Chahine won a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997 at Cannes, as well. He has been awarded numerous other awards over the course of his illustrious career and has made some of the best regarded works in Arabic (specifically Egyptian) cinema. So why hasn't he achieved recognition across the Atlantic? His films are dense, rich, colorful, articulate, controversial, and endlessly fascinating, but they are also difficult. Few Chahine films can be watched and fully understood in one sitting, and even fewer are fully enjoyed on first viewing. Occasionally Chahine's films fall prey to his complex plots and multiple layering, and though it is still a good film, "Alexandria… Why?" is one of his most difficult and muddled films.

The film, set during World War II tells multiple stories, one being Chahine's own story through the character of Yehia (played excellently by Mohsin Mohieddene), a young man in Egypt with directorial ambitions but the passion to be an actor, who frequently watches the same film repeatedly at his local cinema out of fear that he missed something the first time, performs Shakespeare, struggles with social and familial pressures, falls in love, and pursues his dream of studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. This is the film's main story, but subplots include a Jewish-Muslim romance where the female character is pregnant, a homosexual romance between a gay English soldier and a wealthy Arab, and a wacky, often funny plot featuring a group of communists who plan to kidnap Winston Churchill in hopes of ending the war.

Though certainly not Chahine's first controversial film (his masterpiece "Cairo Station" was banned for twelve years in Egypt after its first run of screenings in 1958, and understandably so, being a film about a sexually frustrated, handicapped fetishist), "Alexandria… Why?" created quite the furor in conservative Islamic Egypt upon first release, it made bold statements on global politics, suggested (truthfully) corruption in Egypt's political structure, supported communism, and featured a homosexual relationship between a British soldier and a wealthy Arab, among other taboos. Chahine designed his script not only to tell the story of himself as a young man, but to tell his story as part of a bigger one, the story of the social and political climate in Alexandria, and the story of what he clearly believes to be incorrectly considered social taboos come to life. This is a brave and challenging film which affected me more than most films I've seen recently, all the more surprising since I thought it was a lacking effort from a director whose films are generally quite brilliant.

The words 'stock footage' have negative connotations in any film fan's mind because it is so often used ineptly, but here the stock footage of WWII used brings the war to life at an appropriate distance and is edited cleverly and realistically into the film, so we never feel that we are watching a cheap production. That said, the overall production design on this fairly low-budget film is minimal, but when the film does look expensive in about three or four scenes, the money is used well. Unfortunately Chahine slips into some unfortunate mistakes like using footage from "An American in Paris" when that film was released several years after the Second World War ended. The photography is on occasion sloppy, but more than often it is precise and adds a lot to the mood of the film. There is not much of an original score used in the film as Chahine prefers to use a variety of music clips from various sources to suit whatever point the film is at. The music works perfectly with the film, but it so varied I cannot imagine it would make good listening as an album.

Ultimately it is the film's occasional sloppiness that lets it down, as well as Chahine's tendency for complex plotting. This would have been perfect as a two hour film about Chahine as portrayed through the character Yehia, but his desire to comment on more than himself brings the film's quality down. Its script is excessive and often incoherent, and although there are some exceptionally shot scenes like that in which Yehia directs his first theatrical performance, the film on a whole is more remarkable for its ambition, scale, viewpoint, and characters than the end product. It is muddled and messy at times, worth watching but certainly not Chahine's best as sometimes named by critics. Chahine's later films in his autobiographical trilogy, "Egyptian Story" and "Alexandria Again and Forever" are better ways to appreciate Chahine's cinema and the character Yehia, as is his very best, most original, and bravest film "Cairo Station", which I honestly consider one of the great masterpieces of cinema.

7/10

AN EGYPTIAN STORY (Hadduta misrija)

Egypt (115 mi) 1982

Boldly blending personal and political histories, intercutting its fast-moving fictional scenes with documentary footage, this sort of sequel to Alexandria - Why? follows the fortunes of Chahine's charismatic film-maker hero and alter ego, forced to review his past and learn to love himself by a critical open-heart operation. The occasionally clumsy central conceit - Yehia/Chahine standing trial for his life during surgery - is amply offset by the energy and style of this indulgent, exuberant, and immensely likeable self-portrait.

On the slab undergoing a vital heart operation, a film-maker confronts his alter ego as it leads him through his own past and the parallel history of his country. As his vanity and weaknesses come to light, so he learns to come to terms with himself. Bravely attempting to blend an intimate personal journey with a broad political one, Chahine only partly succeeds. There is real energy and commitment here and, while the use of documentary footage interwoven with fictional and dream sequences is hardly original, it is surprisingly effective. However, the project is unforgiveably self-indulgent, and this outweighs its good points.

User comments from imdb Author: AdnanZ from Canada

Who designed the set for the trial? Come on, that's one of the most ludicrous things I've seen in a good film and it really doesn't work as a supposedly 'surrealist' set. Come to think of it, all my problems with this film are contained within that set, because the trial scenes are also the only scenes where the writing and/or acting comes across as heavy-handed in a film which is otherwise quite frankly one of the best and most exhilarating films about film-making ever made.

This film is very special and unique. Chahine has been compared to Fellini in the past and here he is making one of his three autobiographical, slightly surrealist dramas, though I think that comparing this to Fellini's "8 1/2" is taking things a bit far and can only be described as having a narrow vision of world cinema.

The concept is certainly interesting, we meet Yehia many years after we saw him in "Alexandria... Why?", and he is undergoing heart surgery and starts to remember his entire life and see it from a detached perspective. If "Alexandria... Why?" barely tried to conceal that fact that it was an autobiographical film, then "Egyptian Story" doesn't even bother, referencing by name and content several of director Chahine's celebrated early films including "Bab El Hadid (Cairo Station)" and "Djamila". These are in my opinion the best scenes in the film. The film starts well enough, but the first hour is less fascinating than the second hour, which from start to finish is quality cinema (outside of the cheapness of the set for the trial, but I've done too much complaining about that already).

This film assumes a level of familiarity with Chahine's earlier work, and of particular interest are the scenes surrounding the making of his masterpiece "Bab El Hadid" (English title: "Cairo Station"), where we see the influences that lead to the writing of the film as well as the filming of one of its most memorable and crucial scenes and a hilarious sales pitch for the film, where Yehia sold the film essentially as pornography, a scene that apparently mirrors actual events, and not surprisingly, as films about sexually frustrated cripples weren't exactly common in Egypt in 1958 (the film was banned for no less than 20 years following its release, as well). The scenes that follow, with Yehia's (really Chahine's) frustration over his near-win for Best Actor at Cannes (which is really saying something, considering the fact that he has only acted in four films to this date), and nervousness over his film's performance at Berlin and at Cannes providing a candid and rare look at an artist's feelings toward his work.

The film is technically excellent, the camera is used beautifully and the film looks splendid outside of its obvious lack of a real budget. The acting is mostly solid, with Nour El-Cherif in the lead role giving one of the best performances of the entire decade as far as I'm concerned.

This is a difficult film, for sure, but despite its often considerable flaws, it's a cinematic tour de force and one of the most fascinating documents of a great director's work there has ever been. It's a perspective we don't see often and hence it always feels fresh and interesting. Well-directed for sure, and mostly quite brilliantly-written, Chahine's second installment in his autobiographical trilogy is well worth your time.

8.5/10

ALEXANDRIA AGAIN AND FOREVER (Iskanderija, Kaman oue Kaman)

Egypt France (100 mi) 1990

User comments from imdb Author: Spuzzlightyear from Vancouver

As much as I don't understand Youssef Chahine's cinema, I will give him credit for creating some of the most beautiful images in the world of cinema. In this, Alexandria Again and Forever, the filmmaker seems to be having a ball with his salute to other genres of film. While the main story, about striking actors and their attempt to force the government into a resolution is terribly boring, the other parts such as the director preparing a movie of 'Hamlet' and his set up of Gene Kelly Musicals, toga pieces and what may appear to be Bollywood musicals are a RIOT to watch. I honestly feel Chahine has it in himself to do a full blown musical, as all of the musical bits are brilliant, while the rest is just blah.

The dazzling 1990 conclusion of Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's autobiographical Alexandria trilogy can be seen independently of the other two features; its writer-director stars as a famous filmmaker very much like himself, happily married but also smitten first with one of his young actors and then with a young actress he meets (Yousra). Yousra played Chahine's wife in the second part of the trilogy, An Egyptian Story (1982), and the young actor in this film is based on Mohsen Mohiedine, who played Chahine as a young man in Alexandria, Why? Filmed in sumptuous color, this is not only one of the most passionate celebrations of bisexuality ever filmed, it's also one of the funniest; Chahine's tap-dance duet with his lead actor on a movie set is priceless.

Alexandria Again and Forever (Iskanderija, kaman oue kaman) is Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's third and final film (to date) about Yehia, a film director whose life bears a striking resemblance to Chahine's own. The plot concerns a hunger strike carried out by the Egyptian film industry, expressing its support for democracy (and greater artistic freedom, presumably) which Yehia joins while he is writing and planning a film about Alexander the Great. Yehia wrestles with his troubled relationship with Amr (Amr Abdel Guelil), a young actor who was Yehia's protégé and onscreen alter-ego in the first Alexandria film, finding himself unable to visualize his next project without Amr in the lead role, a part in which he has no interest. During the strike, he meets Nadia (Yousra), an intelligent, beautiful young actress who inspires Yehia to move in a different artistic direction.

It's a good idea to see Alexandria... Why? and An Egyptian Story first, as the three films are heavily interrelated and many of the returning characters are not explicitly re-introduced. Writer/director Youssef Chahine extends the semi-autobiographical saga of Yehia here, and for the first time assays the role of Yehia himself, lending a second level of self-referential complexity to this entry. Flashbacks cover the real-world events surrounding Alexandria... Why?, including the film's Silver Bear prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and the film is in many ways the most honest of the three, closing the cinematic distance between the director and his subject in an intensely personal way. Few directors who appear in their own films dare to portray their own lives, and Chahine's risk-taking in this regard pays off.

As always, Chahine realizes his ideas with creative sound and visuals, finding a unique style for this film, linked to but not derived directly from the earlier Alexandria films. Most notable are several musical numbers, presented with a refreshing lack of irony as Yehia remembers past events and fantasizes about the future. One evokes vintage Hollywood as Yehia and Amr dance joyfully in the streets of Berlin; another sequence resembles an Egyptian Jesus Christ Superstar as Yehia sings the glories of Amr in the age of Alexander to an amazingly catchy Eastern rock beat. These well-staged elements lend a hyperreal quality to the film, but they consistently enhance the story of Yehia's emotional and creative struggles, never diluting or distracting from them. Chahine's talented cast delivers performances that are naturalistic and credible, allowing for some intentional hyperreality during the fantasy scenes. Alexandria Again and Forever is an emotionally powerful and intellectually satisfying conclusion to the series; Chahine realizes his complex and ambitious themes successfully, and his love for film is evident throughout.

The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]

DESTINY (al-Massir) B+ 92

Egypt France (135 mi) 1997

Interwoven narrative with brilliantly colorful musical song and dance sequences rivalling even Bollywood numbers, that have a lot more raw, Gypsy-like sensuality, an excellent expression of religious fanaticism and terrorism, using a 12^th century story which explains the current wave of religious inspired murders, especially impressive are some of the shooting locations from Syria and Lebanon.

Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's 1997 film Destiny (a.k.a. al-Massir) is dead out of context. The film is a more or less traditional historical epic, punctuated by the occasional song-and-dance number, about the Arab philosopher Averroes, whose works were burned by the Caliph to accommodate the growing factions of religious fundamentalists in 12th-century Andalucia Spain. Because Chahine's last film, The Emigrant (al-Mohager), was banned in Egypt, Destiny's censorship theme seems like a didactic and heavy-handed response to his critics. Yep, fundamentalism sure is dangerous, and book-burning can't halt the progress of thoughts and knowledge. What a revelation! Anyone going into Destiny blind is bound to be lost among the political machinations, while anyone oblivious to Averroes (or Chahine) and his works will likewise find little to latch on to. The film does have odd appeal as a surreal approximation of '50s musicals, and the Syrian and Lebanese locations are often stunning. But taken as it is, minus the generous benefit of the doubt earned by its overtly political intent, Destiny is a muddled and only minimally diverting costume drama, never as exciting as it tries to be and meaningful only in the most obvious of ways.

User comments from imdb Author: Moheb from Egypt

"The Ideas have Wings, you can never stop them from reaching the people".

That was Al Massir, or the Destiny of Youssef Chahine. After his previous movie "El Mohager", Chahine was taken to court by a fundamentalist lawyer who claimed that Chahine presented the prophet Joseph in this movie and this is something forbidden "To show prophets on the screen" by Al Azhar. The lawyer wanted the court to stop showing the movie on the Egyptian screens as well as its distribution outside Egypt.

Regardless of the final conclusion of the court, this case was the major motive behind the script of "Al Massir". Jo (Chahine) wanted to send a clear message to this people "You can never stop ideas from reaching the people, neither by burning the books (last scene of the movie), nor by forbidding movies, etc....' As usual, Averoes in this movie was Chahine himself. Trying to keep a good balance between what the history says about Averoes and what Chahine wanted to reflect on this character, he chose his characters to include all the contradictions he wanted to show. Politics, philosophy, love, integrism, etc.... they are everywhere. This idea of combining Islam with Terrorism bothers Chahine, that is why he started the movie with the french religious authorities burning a man who "Translated the books of this Averoes", so don't you be surprised when Muslims burn "Only" the books of Averoes. This analysis of Chahine is what really makes the movie special. It was expected after what happened to him in his last movie (as I said in the beginning), he could have just make it a good reason for a movie showing Muslims as Terrorists, an easy way to attract a Western spectator. But Jo chose the hard way to do it, showing that among all this terrorism, people are still "Life lovers" as mentioned by the first song. These people who just love their life were those fighting against terrorist - not with weapons - but with love. "We have to know first why they are doing this', said Averoes. Actors were really good specially Nour Elsherif, Mahmoud Hemeida, Khaled Elnabawi and Ahmed Fouad Selim. Mohamed Mounir is as usual the voice of Chahine singing "Sing out loud, we still can sing".

village voice > film > The Haunting by J. Hoberman J. Hoberman from the Village Voice

Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine's Destiny—shown in the 1997 NYFF—is a big, lush, boldly kitsch piece of political pop. The script is scarcely more elevated than a comic book, but its intellectual pedigree rivals Beloved's, concerning as it does the 12th-century Arab Andalusian philosopher Averröes.

Shot largely in Syria and Lebanon, Destiny suggests a form of Oriental orientalism. The scenes are lit like the portico of a Miami Beach hotel and it will sprain no brain to imagine Maria Montez as a player in this swashbuckling tale of rival princelings, gypsy dancers, religious assassins, and court conspiracies. There is, however, another agenda. Beginning with an auto-da-fé in which French clerics burn a fellow Christian for the heresy of translating Averröes, Destiny evokes a multicultural Europe and defends a particular mode of secular humanism—an exuberant alliance of intellectuals, entertainers, and free spirits devoted to tolerance and sexual equality. (The political is certainly personal: the 72-year-old Chahine grew up a Maronite in cosmopolitan Alexandria and studied film at UCLA.)

Although Destiny is filled with spirited production numbers and even the zealots perform a mass prayer dance on the battlements, the movie's most ecstatic scene has Averröes's Christian disciple return north to his chilly homeland, piloting a skiff filled with books. As a philosopher, Averröes did ultimately have a greater impact on Christian than Islamic thought. (Dante generously includes him along with Abraham and Socrates among the virtuous heathens in hell's first circle.) But that is not Chahine's point either.

Destiny ends as it begins, with a huge bonfire. The difference is that the barbaric Europeans burn people while the more civilized Arabs only incinerate ideas. Even more than Beloved, Destiny is a movie that directly addresses its audience. Would the fatwa the fundamentalists declare against Averröes and his friends apply to this film as well? As the distraught philosopher watches his life's work thrown on the pyre, a friend whispers consolation: "I know your books are safe in Egypt." Let's hope so.

User comments from imdb Author: guanche from New York City

This film is an entertaining and thrilling mix of melodrama, music, history, grief and joy, showing the best and worst sides of human nature in an ultimately hopeful manner.

The story is set in medieval Moorish Spain, and concerns the conflict between Averroes; a historical humanistic Muslim philosopher; and a group of reactionary fundamentalists. It is extremely well acted and the characters are sympathetic as well as credible. It is often forgotten that many of the Islamic societies of the Middle Ages (particularly in Spain) were way ahead of Europe in science, mathematics, medicine, religious tolerance and most intellectual pursuits. However, there were those who reacted negatively to all this and severe conflict was sometimes the result.

This is not just an historical epic. The Egyptian director, a very courageous man named Youssef Chanine, deliberately molded the script to show how fanaticism not only undermines a society's intellect, but destroys the very souls of its members. Particularly disturbing, but highly relevant to our times is his portrayal of the subtle manner in which young men are recruited into these movements and about how empty and dishonest they turn out to be.

Although the population of medieval Andalusia was 10-15% Jewish and Averroes had extensive contact with both Jewish and Christian intellectuals, there isn't a Jew in sight and the only Christians depicted are evil, fanatical, external enemies who enter into a secret pact with the fundamentalist cult. While this is not entirely accurate and a gross simplification of the actual situation at the time, I don't fault Mr. Chanine. He has endured extreme legal harassment in the Egyptian courts over this and another film as well as extensive death threats against himself and his family. Merely exploring the themes portrayed in this movie has put his head on the chopping block, and any sympathetic depiction of Jews or Christians would have resulted in the banning of the movie and possibly his head rolling into the basket. He deliberately crafted this film to educate his own society about the moral corruption and debasement of violent fanatical behavior and no doubt wanted to make sure the message got out.

A bold, yet gently provocative film by a very brave man.

Boston Phoenix [Peter Keough]

There’s nothing like a burning heretic to grab your attention at the beginning of a movie. Shekhar Kapur staked us to three in his Elizabeth, and in Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's Destiny, another epic historical drama with contemporary resonance, a 12th-century Frenchman is ceremoniously torched for copying the writings of the Islamic philosopher Averroës.

You may feel less attuned to this saga of the political and philosophical intrigues of medieval Islamic Andalusia, or even be put off by the film's meandering narrative punctuated by melodrama, broad comedy, and musical production numbers. Then again, you may find this film's issues more cogent than the realpolitik of the redoubtable, proto-feminist Virgin Queen. An impassioned plea for tolerance and reason and against fundamentalist fanaticism, Destiny also fares well as a rollicking and intelligent, if sometimes clumsy and heavy-handed, entertainment.

Chahine himself is no stranger to persecution and censorship. His previous film, L'émigré, the story of the Biblical patriarch Joseph, was pulled from release in Egypt after religious groups protested that it was illegal to depict prophets on the screen. Such fanatical small-mindedness is the chief target of Destiny, which is unusual even for a Western film in its espousal of liberal values. A philosopher noted for reviving the teachings of Aristotle and insisting that true religion relies as much on reason as on revelation, Averroës is a voice needed more urgently now than ever.

Unlike his fundamentalist adversaries, however, Chahine doesn't think teaching a lesson needs to be an obstacle to having a good time. So exuberant is he in spinning yarns, indulging colorful characters, breaking into song, and cutting a carpet that at times it seems the film might better be titled Density. He begins with the adventures of the archly named Joseph, son of the unfortunate heretic of the beginning sequence, who flees France for the more open-minded environs of Islamic Spain -- where he bumps into the sons and brother of Al Mansour, the Caliph (Mahmoud Hemeida), hanging out at an inn run by the bibulous bard Marwan (Mohamed Mounir) and his wife. The group embraces the hunky, blue-eyed Joseph as part of the family, and all join in with Marwan in a celebratory, badly lip-synched and jarringly contemporary song-and-dance.

Joseph's destiny, though, gets lost in the shuffle of the family and political wranglings to follow. The worthy if somewhat vain Caliph complains to his adviser Averroës (an earthy and avuncular Nour el-Cherif) about his worthless sons. Crown Prince Nasser (a charismatic Khaled el-Nabaoui) is interested only in horses and women -- particularly Marwan's winsome daughter. And young Abdallah (Hani Salana) just wants to dance. For his part, Averroës is concerned about the growing influence of a growing fundamentalist cult out to stifle free speech, and about the machinations of the Caliph's Machiavellian adviser, Cheikh Riad (a sleekly sinister Ahmed Fouad Selim).

The two sets of problems converge when the green-clad fundamentalists seduce -- almost literally, in an extraordinary bath-house scene that glimpses the sexual pathology of certain religious extremism -- callow Abdallah into their cause. Meanwhile Nasser, Prince Hal-like, puts aside his carousing to join up with Averroës in resisting the burgeoning wave of intolerance. Despite the complexity of alliances, treacheries, romances, and intermittent production numbers that ensue, Chahine keeps his Destiny clear. Sometimes with hoky over-emphasis, as when Joseph resurfaces to smuggle books back to France, a sequence made ludicrous by the crescendo of operatic music on the soundtrack.

Despite such lapses, Destiny pulses with warm-blooded fervor and surges with moments of genuine eloquence. The opening conflagration is mirrored in the end -- this time Averroës's books themselves are set ablaze. Tossing in the last volume is Averroës himself -- triumphantly, perhaps a little too optimistically, because he believes that ideas have wings to surmount all worldly impositions. Perhaps so, but bad ideas -- fanaticism, intolerance -- have wings too, despite the efforts of such films as Destiny to soar above them.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack)

THE OTHER (L’Autre)

France Egypt (105 mi) 1999

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Minor Chanine, perhaps, but still an intelligent, idiosyncratic and enjoyable movie. It's a Romeo and Juliet-style fable about the ill-starred love between the son of a a rich couple happy to deal both with dubious Western business interests and fanatical extremists, and a journalist from a poor family keen to uncover corruption in high places. As it proceeds towards its unexpectedly bleak outcome, Chahine pulls out the stops with his unique blend of melodrama, dance musical, political comment (it begins with two characters going off to an appointment with Edward Said, who cameos with a few brief words on political, national and cultural identity) and forthright sensuality. A pot-pourri held together by the director's bravura style and abiding commitment to the ideal of tolerance, and by Ebeid's extraordinary performance as the hero's scheming, insanely jealous mother, at times eerily reminiscent of Callas in Pasolini's Medea.

User comments from imdb Author: mmolabi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates

This movie is one of the best romantic dramas and examples of political realism in the Middle East region. It discusses what is the meaning of terrorism and who is a terrorist, and who is the real terrorist. The movie shows how power can destroy the most beautiful things in the world. The movie is extremely intelligent and it has many interesting ideas. Every time one watches the movie, it is as if you are seeing it for the first time because you see additional layers of meaning in the movie.

The movie is a love story between Adam, the son of an American woman and an Egyptian man (who are married only for business reasons without love) and Hanan, a female journalist from a poor family. Adam studied human rights and terrorism. Hanan's brother is a member of a terrorist group. The movie explores how their life develops and grows after their marriage. The American woman becomes jealous on her son and doesn't want someone to take her son and wants to destroy their love story. It's a very touching love story and expresses much about the situation faced by poor Egyptians and gives the viewer lots of questions as to how people become terrorist and what leads a young guy to pursue this path.

SILENCE…WE’RE ROLLING (Skoot hansawwar) C 74

Egypt France (102 mi) 2001

We know there’s trouble in Egypt when Chahine turns to Elvis movies as the vehicle to display just how ridiculous and extravagant Hollywood-style musicals can be in this his 40^th film. This is a comedic spoof of a genre, but also revels in plenty of close ups, over the top musical dance routines, Elvis-style water-skiing that in a momentary daydream turns into a flying umbrellas sketch, and while it’s really just another silly love story, it offers an opportunity for Tunisian singer Latifah to charm the audience with what appears to be a concert performance. I found this unbelievably lame, as the film is really just an entertainment spectacle. Chahine has always taken on controversial political issues in his films with musical numbers accentuating the human emotions associated with the very real and tragic consequences. But here, the story is replete with lavish images of over-indulged, pampered, rich people whose self-centered lives are of little consequence to anyone else. It’s just another Elvis movie.

To judge by his reputation, 76-year-old Chahine is Egypt's one-man melting pot, melding influences from the world's four corners in myriad permutations through the course of his 37 films (and counting). Judging by the movies themselves is a harder task, given the rarity of British screenings. Still, even a cursory overview of the director's oeuvre suggests that if there's one thing a Chahine film doesn't resemble it's another Chahine film - compare, for instance,1958's greasy-realist Cairo Station and this knockabout high-society musical melodrama. What they would seem to share, however, is a commitment to secular humanism as a substantial, if volatile and vulnerable way of life, bound up in questions of art, sensuality, love, family, money, freedom, honesty, trust and tolerance. Admittedly that's a lot to read into this particular frolic, a lightly self-reflexive story of Egypt's rich and creative types that recalls Sirk, Demy, Fellini, Bollywood and, lately, A l'Attaque! The story also suggests All About Eve, with a popular actress and singer (played by Tunisian diva Latifa) falling under the sway of a charming snake, while her daughter sets a proper example with the chauffeur's son. It's so sunny a film that it's hard to feel ill-disposed even to the charlatan - and maybe the sheer warmth and exuberance invested in every scene is the point - if there is one.

Guardian/Observer Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian

The beating heart of show business pulses gloriously through this latest film from Youssef Chahine. It's a musical romantic comedy about the movie world, with a dash of Bollywood, Stanley Donen and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The film is set in a westernised, cosmopolitan Alexandria, which with its hotels, musical theatres and beach scenes (some tongue-in-cheek back projections here) looks like bygone Hollywood's imagination of the Cote d'Azur. A super-successful screen actress Malak (Latifa) is being wooed by creepy Lothario and would-be star Lamei (Ahmed Wafik), an unreliable, gold-digging fellow with highlights in his hair. Meanwhile Malak's formidable mother is attempting to match-make her beautiful granddaughter Paula with her chauffeur's son, a radical, bookish intellectual.

It's impossible not to be carried along by the hellzapoppin' high spirits of Chahine's movie, which like all the best comedies is leavened with a touch of sadness as Malak's regular screenwriter, heartbroken by her infatuation with the unsuitable Lamei, reveals his own adoration - and then engineers Lamei's downfall with the aid of a hidden microphone, a device that certainly adds piquancy to the title. The happy ending has all the buoyancy of a Shakespearian comedy. A treat.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Youssef Chahine's Silence...We're Rolling is a rollicking paean to the Hollywood and Bollywood musicals of yesteryear. Recently separated from her husband, singer/actress Malak (Tunisian singer Latifah) falls prey to slimy lothario Lamei (Ahmed Wafik), a psychoanalyst with aspirations of superstardom. Lamei is a threat to family and the purity of song, moving his attentions from mother to daughter once he's tricked into thinking Malak's mother (Magda El Khatib, resembling a Dynasty-era Barbara Stanwyck) left her fortune to the young Paula (Rubi). A screenwriter angered by Malak's naïveté seeks to expose Lamei for the snake he is, but he's blinded by his own genius, confusing the makeshift stairs from a film set for an actual exit. Silence...We're Rolling is an eye-popping celebration of art imitating life (and vice versa)—a movie valentine inundated with famous movie references (the uniformly excellent cast channels Sturges with every comic breath). At this year's New York Film Festival, Silence...We're Rolling was preceded by the animated short Tuesday, directed by Geoff Dunbar and voiced by Dustin Hoffman. On Tuesday nights, frogs float through the air aboard their lily pads, breaking into an old woman's house in order to catch David Letterman and reruns of I Love Lucy. When four o'clock comes around, the frogs return to their lakeside abode, leaving their pads to litter the city streets. Tuesday is a delightful show of quirky happenings which might have made a great pre-show to Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. The film is produced by Paul McCartney and dedicated to his deceased wife Linda.

CineScene.com (Don Larsson)

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

Chaikin, Eric and Julian Petrillo

WORD WARS B 84

USA (78 mi) 2004

Sort of a documentary follow up to SPELLBOUND, only instead of a children’s spelling bee, it instead follows the lives of 4 obsessed adults whose lives revolve around playing scrabble, eventually entering competetive tournaments for prize money. Though they have to pay their own way, their travel fees, their hotel fees, also their food, which for some includes brain nutritional supplements, and for others marijuana or hashish, the prize winnings grow larger each successive year - $25,000 first prize one year, $50,000 the next. This film was similar to CINEMANIA, as each crossed the line on what would be considered normal behavior, yet each had a voracious appetite for words and anagrams, in some cases actually memorizing the dictionary. These were individuals with extremely specialized skills, who could do on the scrabble board what mere mortals could only dream of. Despite the quirks and the humor, with offbeat guitar licks to sustain the tension, these were alienated souls, most of whom had few, if any, friends or family. Without the scrabble board, which they would spend 4 or 5 hours a day playing, what life did they have? There was a brief comparative glimpse into the New York City Washington Park speed-scrabble players, similar to chess players, none of whom played for glory or for tournaments, as they were too rooted to those particular seats in the park, and it would be unheard of to change their routines. I never knew the scrabble national anthem was John Lennon’s “Across the Universe,” but we got to hear several different personal renditions of this song, each heartfelt and illuminating.

Chamie, LIna

THE MILKY WAY (A Via Lacteal)

Brazil (88 mi) 2007

The Milky Way (A Via Lacteal) Lee Marshall from Screendaily

A cross-city drive turns into an existential odyssey in Lina Chamie's The Milky Way, which opened Cannes ' Critics Week sidebar. Part urban road movie, part stream-of-consciousness cinematic monologue, Milky Way layers flashbacks, bon mots about life and death, and variant versions of the same scene into what could have made an intriguing 30-minute short.

This being permanently gridlocked Sao Paulo, however, it drags on for almost 90, and an elegantly-managed twist at the end fails to make up for the frustrating feeling that we too have been stuck in a creative traffic jam, its emotional flow blocked by an excess of literary references and a tricksy structure that needs more genuine drama to counterbalance its cleverness. Unapologetically pitched at the arthouse, this slender title is unlikely to set the already crowded Brazilian market on fire; audiences there and abroad are more likely to see it in festivals and niche cinemateque outings.

After a row over the phone with his much younger girlfriend Julia (Alice Braga), in which he says things that he immediately regrets, introverted, solitary writer and literature professor Heitor (an intense Marco Ricca) decides to drive across town to make up with her in person. But this is Sao Paulo, and even once he's remembered where he parked the car, the drive takes forever. On the way, Heitor runs through salient episodes of life with Julia on his mental Avid: their meeting at a fringe-theatre performance of Euripides' Bacchae; the promises he made to her (or she to him? - a later variant flashback makes us unsure which of them was afraid to commit); his jealousy of Thiago, an actor whose interest in Julia seems to go beyond mere friendship.

The first part of the film is laced with nods to poems, plays and literary works, from Dante's Divine Comedy (the first lines of which appear on a roadside video billboard) to Roland Barthes' Fragments Of An Amorous Discourse, which Heitor keeps on the passenger seat of his car (we can't help feeling that a Sao Paulo A-Z would have got him there more quickly). The city's oppressive presence is underlined by subjective handheld camera as an increasingly frantic, fazed Marco is dazzled by lights and becomes prey to visions that may or may not be real (a beggar girl who seems to be able to hear Heitor's voiceover thoughts; Thiago in a car speeding ahead to his own romantic tryst with Julia). The sound texture of the film acts as a running counterpoint to the main action, mixing the Tom And Jerry theme with Schubert, Satie and Mozart, and foregrounding repeated siren and heartbeat noises that will be explained by the final twist.

Meanwhile, day turns to night and Marco is unmasked as an unreliable narrator, as flashbacks mix with flash-forwards to his arrival chez Julia, and both start to offer multiple, contradictory versions of what actually happened. Once you survive the drag of the first half and begin to guess at the surprise ending, the film picks up; but an involving finale is not enough to justify its feature-length running time.

Chan, Fruit

Film Festivals . com - Festival pages Fanfan KO (excerpt)

Born in Hainan Province, Mainland China, 40 year-old Fruit Chan fell in love with movies after watching a Soviet film in his childhood. While in Middle School he worked part-time in a theater projection room. The first film he screened was a traditional Chinese opera directed by the famous Hollywood cracker John Woo. Fruit Chan joined the entertainment business in 1982 and directed his first film in 1991. Unfortunately the film was stocked for three years, which made him almost totally give up. In 1997, Fruit Chan raised 500,000 HKD to make his award-grabbing Made in Hong Kong, which became a myth in Hong Kong film history. Fruit Chan was honored with Best Director that year at the Hong Kong Film Golden Awards, mostly for his courage and sincerity. Fruit Chan challenged the stable model of filmmaking in Hong Kong and was dubbed the "Hope" of Hong Kong Cinema (by other Hong Kong filmmakers).

"The making of Made in Hong Kong made me realize why composers always write their masterpieces at a time when they are lovelorn," Fruit Chan said. On being asked if he would become less"independent" after making his trilogy, Fruit Chan said he wished to mix commercial films with his more personal "auteur" films. His next film in the works is There's a Hollywood in Hong Kong starring Zhou Xun, the actress who won the Best Actress Prize at the Paris Film Festival for her performance in Suzhou River. "I enjoyed her acting in that film," said Fruit Chan, "she's wild and energetic, but with a face rather traditional."

culturebase.net | The international artist database | Fruit Chan Ulrich Jossner

Fruit Chan was born in 1959 in Canton in China. In the 90s, he was the first Hongkong filmmaker to go beyond the genre of Hongkong films and to make realistic films about Hongkong´s social and political situation independently of the big studios. With ´Made in Hongkong´ (1997), ´Little Cheung´ (1999) and ´Durian Durian´ (2000) he has won many film-prizes.

Fruit Chan was born in Canton in China but emigrated to Hongkong with his parents in 1969. He has shown that Hongkong films need not be what the name suggests and that a filmmaker may successfully start where the big studios leave off. After studying at the Hongkong Film Centre and working for a time as a director´s assistant, Chan directed the first of his own films ´Finale in Blood´ in 1991. This is a psycho-drama, in which the young director gives us a dark picture of Hongkong in the 1920s.

Chan´s ´Made in Hongkong´ was the first independent film which showed realistically the social situation in Hongkong at the time of its transfer to China. The nearly documentary view of parts of the city, as also the use of non-actors, make this melancholy and dark romance especially convincing. Chan tells the tale of three youths who wander together for awhile: the attractive Ah Ping with kidney-disease, the rather dim Sylvester and the eighteen year old protagonist Autumn Moon.

Moon has dropped out of college, is working for a drug-dealer and is not as hard as nails, since he is loath to kill. He roves through the streets together with Sylvester and Ping, encountering stray gangs of ´foes´ or individual fighters, against whom they have to be on their guard. The figure of the suicide Susan is a leitmotif. On falling from a block of flats she was holding two letters, which have passed into Moon´s hands. While Moon is lying in hospital after being shot, Sylvester and Ping are killed. Moon finds a surrogate family for the first time with his father´s new wife and the couple´s small daughter.

Fruit Chan shows eccentric mothers, who are helpless and overworked. Fathers move off as the going gets tough or earlier, or they even abuse their children. Moon witnesses how a smart lad at secondary-school hacks one of his father´s hands off in a public toilet to avenge the abuse of his sister. The director shows cramped flats and the back sides of glittering facades; and with quick cutting, slow-motion and freezes, he conjures up sadness, wit and irony. The tiny rooms with lattice-doors in heavy cement blocks are like cages. The only place which youths can go to for some peace and quiet is the graveyard. In this film the teenagers are outcasts searching for havens in a place with an uncertain future.

´Made in Hongkong´ is the first part of a trilogy about the transfer of the island-republic from England to China. The second part, ´The longest Summer´ (1998), shows five soldiers´ consequent crisis of identity. They are released from service just before the ceremonial transfer, in the midst of which they get involved in a bank-robbery. In this film, too, Chan works mostly with non-actors. Two of his main figures were soldiers in real life. Above all, he examines how someone loses his orientation, questions himself and then decides in favour of the underworld. He uses a lot of documentary material and shows the feelings of Hongkong citizens - from schoolgirls to pensioners - during the transfer.

Chan rounds the trilogy off with a light tale. ´Little Cheung´ (1999) deals with the transfer of the crown colony from the point of view of a lad who is living in the immigrant quarter Mengkok. Little Cheung wanders through the streets as a delivery-boy with snacks from his father.

In ´Durian Durian´ too, Chan turns to the consequences of social change in China. Yan, a young woman from northern China, hopes to get wealthy in Hongkong but ends up in the red-light district. ´Durian Durian´ shows no victims. Its heroines are pragmatic sex-workers with a chance to use their visas simply and effectively. Chan´s telling of tales is jumpy and often untidy. His hectic Dogma-camera captures not so much his protagonists´ inner conflicts as their outer effects. Yan, for instance, showers so often that her skin starts to peel from her feet. Chan draws attention to the contrast between the hectic neon-lit life of Hongkong and the calm winter countryside of northern China. But Yan´s period in Hongkong does not pass without leaving its mark on her. When at last she sings a communist song with her old schoolmates, the refrain turns into a collective orgasm.

Chan´s realism does not lack a sense of humour and the scurrilous, as shown by ´Public Toilet, WC´, which is a digital film about toilets in Korea. In it the change in the bathroom-culture in Korea is compared with the same in Japan, Hongkong, the USA and China. A Korean page in Internet eulogises: ´In one of these inimitable conveniences, one can listen to classical music, recline on plush sofas, gaze out at Namdaemun and Kanghwamun and even puff a Turkish cigar.´

Fruit Chan Hong Kong Movie DataBase

loveHKfilm entry Selected filmography

Hong Kong Cinemagic - Fruit Chan Gor

YESASIA: YumCha! - Fruit Chan - King of Hong Kong Independent ... Fruit Chan - King of Hong Kong Independent Filmmaking, Vicci Ho overviews Chan’s film career, November 1, 2004

The class imaginary in Fruit Chan's films Wimal Dissanayake from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Interview Fruit Chan Robin Gatto interviews Chan from Cinemasie, May 2002

Fruit Chan : the Career Interview Interview by Robin Gatto and Nassim Maoui at the Venice Film Festival, August 29 – September 8, 2002

Bright Lights Film Journal | Interview with Fruit Chan The Immortality Blues, interview by Boris Trbic, November 2005

Fruit Chan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

FINALE IN BLOOD (Da nao guang chang long)

Hong Kong (94 mi) 1993

The Illuminated Lantern review [1/4] Peter Nepstad

A radio announcer (Lawrence Cheng) finds an umbrella that contains the spirit of a dead girl (Ruth Winona Tao). Not quite what I expected from the title. He gets the spirit on the air where she tells her love story, how she fell in love with a cop (David Wu) and got married, but he kept shagging a hot prostitute (Chikako Aoyama) on the side anyway. Eventually, they cause her death. When they hear the story on the radio they are none too pleased, and soon they are after the poor radio host to make sure he stops talking. While the movie is passably interesting, the long awaited finale is less in blood and more in slapstick, a ridiculous ending that sucks the last remaining goodwill from the audience. Like ROUGE, only much, much worse. A brief cameo by Tony Leung Ka-fei just serves to underscore how boring and uncharismatic the male leads are. The women prop up the film as best they can, Ruth Winona Tao is likable and a strong performer in individual scenes, though her character as a whole never quite adds up. Still, I'd like to see more of her so it's sad that she only made a couple more films before disappearing from the industry. Chikako Aoyama fulfills the obligatory Japanese import role and handles the nude scenes, and her portrayal of the "other woman," rather than being entirely cruel, is fairly nuanced and sympathetic. After this, his first film as a director, no one would let Fruit Chan touch the camera again, until his breakthough independent production MADE IN HONG KONG (1997), which transformed his reputation, and combined with the films that followed made him one of the most celebrated directors in Hong Kong. Well, everyone has a skeleton or two in their closet, right?

MADE IN HONG KONG (Xiang Gang zhi zao)

Hong Kong (108 mi) 1997

User comments from imdb Author: Matador from NYC, New York

Despite a weak last half-hour, Fruit Chan's debut is absolutely stunning. It continues the 'new Hong Kong' visual style (strobe, overexposure, freeze-frames, and jump-cutting) that fellow director Wong-Kar Wai has pioneered in his last three films. In addition to superb cinematography and editing, the storyline also is exceptional, taking the viewer into the harsh realities of Hong Kong youth gangs. Autumn Moon, the main character, is a rare creation - both attractive and repulsive. The moment we begin to empathize with him, he pushes us away with his enormous capacity for violence. This perfect mix of tenderness and harshness push it head and shoulders above most Hong Kong cinema, not only of 1997, but of any other year as well.

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Bad things start happening to Moon, a kid from a housing estate, when he comes into possession of two bloodstained letters left behind by a schoolgirl suicide: his mother walks out, he starts having pesky wet dreams, his mentally handicapped best friend gets into trouble - and he falls for a girl who turns out to be seriously ill. The irresistibly named Fruit Chan, a long-serving assistant director in the film industry, got this indie feature made on a wing and a prayer: various industry figures (notably Andy Lau) helped out, hardly anyone got paid and the non-pro cast was recruited on the street. Much of it is fresh, truthfully observed and touching in its honesty, but the climactic escalation into triad melodrama and the several false endings suggest that old industry habits die hard. None the less, a striking achievement.

BBC Films review Tom Dawson

The first independent film to emerge from the former British colony since the changeover to China in 1997, "Made in Hong Kong" is an intoxicating drama about teenage alienation.

The narrator and central character Autumn Moon (Lee) is a high school drop-out, whose father has abandoned his family for his mainland mistress. Moon now works as a debt collector for a Triad member Wing, and it's on his daily rounds with the simple-minded Sylvester (Li) that he falls for Ping (Yim), the daughter of one of his debtors. She is suffering from a fatal kidney disease, so the teenager decides to accept an assassination contract to pay for her medical fees. He continues, however, to be haunted in his dreams by visions of a female classmate (Tam) who committed suicide. And when Ping herself dies, Moon decides to take revenge on the adult world.

The plotting to "Made in Hong Kong" may be over elaborate and the scenes of bloodshed predictably familiar, yet writer-director Fruit Chan's vision of youthful nihilism still carries a heartfelt charge. This is Hong Kong seen from a new perspective - a world not of glittering office blocks but of anonymous housing estates, fractured families, and ubiquitous crime, in which according to Moon, "There is no true or false, no right or wrong."

Impressively shot on hand-held cameras, it boasts convincing performances from the non-professional cast, whilst amidst all the pessimism, hopelessness and self-destructive behaviour, there are sequences such as a daytrip to the cemetery of genuine lyricism. The concluding Mao monologue that can be heard on the soundtrack - "You young people of flourishing exuberance in these thriving times" - makes for a powerfully ironic resolution. Made for just $100,000, it shows that a low budget need not be a hindrance to cinematic creativity.

Senses of Cinema (Acquarello) review Mass-Produced Alienation: Disposable Lives in Made in Hong Kong, January 2003

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]

Fruit Chan's "Made in Hong Kong" The Auteurs

THE LONGEST SUMMER (Hui nin yin fa dak bit doh)

Hong Kong (128 mi) 1998

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Chan’s recklessly original film centres on Chinese soldiers from the HK Military Service Corps (two played by real ex-members) who are left penniless and jobless when the Brits disband the force three months before Hong Kong is handed back to China. Ga-Yin (dancer Tony Ho making a terrific acting debut) gets work as a driver for a triad gang because his brother Ga-Suen (Lee, from Made in Hong Kong) is a member; then he and several unemployed mates decide to rob a bank. Everything goes wrong, but they end up with the money anyway - and with both cops and robbers on their trail. Shot to look like docu-drama and integrating vivid documentary footage of the handover, the whole film has a street authenticity rare in Hong Kong movies. The only bum notes are some misogynistic asides about delinquent schoolgirls. Otherwise, impressive and gripping.

User comments from imdb Author: ETCmodel02 from vancouver bc canada

This is a film that argues the vitality and worth of living beneath the rule of government, society, peers or even gangs of skirted schoolgirls. A sometimes heavy handed film about a group of disenfranchised guys who suddenly feel alienated in their own country as their employers, the British Military, pulls up anchor and leaves them behind during the hugely weird hand over of Hong Kong in 1997. Set against the backdrop of the largely uncertain and extremely anxiety ridden hand over, from a few months prior to just past the hand over the story arcs through a string of events that force each man in the group to confront himself on some level, and if surviving, to come out changed and scarred. Sam Lee, younger than I've seen him before, is amazing in this. The cadence of the film is often uneven, but forgivable. The filming often feels very impromptu and gorilla. The relationships among characters in the film seem as congruous as being lucky enough to twice drive beneath children chucking rocks off an overpass. There are some fresh visuals to haunt you afterwards, like the kid on the subway with the hole straight through his head, and the hole is an improbably healed hole, and we even get another child's POV view through the hole to gaze down the length of the subway aisle, or the story of how he got that way, the story that turns out to be oddly incidental, nearly unrelated. Maybe a bit too much like how real life works, I dunno. Still, the scene where Sam Lee, after being called a mainlander redneck by the loudest of an obnoxious group of school girls, chucks the offending girl out of the open 2nd story window of the moving bus down into traffic below makes this film worth the rental, not because I have anything against obnoxious gangs of HK schoolgirls (although the director appears to, they are a recurrent theme in the film, and often end up getting done over, a metaphor about karmic rewards apparently), but I have to applaud the unprecedented sudden burst of horrifying action this scene accomplishes. Now that is good shock cinema!

Perhaps the future of Hong Kong film lies with director Fruit Chan, who follows up his excellent first feature with one that may be even better.

No sophomore slump for director Fruit Chan, whose Made in Hong Kong was last year’s biggest surprise. He follows that up with another well-crafted drama about Hong Kong told through its most dubious citizens. Newcomer Tony Ho Wah-Chiu is Ga Yin, a former member of the British Army who is discharged pending the upcoming handover. Finding little steady employment, he falls in with his younger brother Ga Suen (Sam Lee Chan-Sam) as a triad in HK’s infamous gang underworld. With the uncertainty of the future bearing upon Yin and his comrades, the group decide to rob a bank to provide for themselves. However things don’t turn out as they expect, as the consequences for their actions prove disastrous. With July 1997 bearing down, the sky is full of fireworks as are the lives of these downtrodden Hong Kong citizens, each striving for their own identity in the rapidly changing world.

The Longest Summer is an affecting, sometimes strangely funny masterpiece. Fruit Chan is probably the most exciting director to surface in Hong Kong since Wong Kar-Wai. His talent for using unknowns (among his actors, only Sam Lee is recognizable) and eliciting strong performances from them is undeniably strong. Also intriguing is his subject matter, which is at once political and personal, allegorical and intimate. Chan manages to explore and elucidate his average characters through incident and inaction, and though the meaning of his work might seem opaque, it nonetheless elicits a stirring emotional response. With Made in Hong Kong, Fruit Chan showed that he could craft stunning narrative work which spoke of both personal and social concerns, and he did so with charged cinematic eloquence. With The Longest Summer, Chan does it again.

18th Annual Hong Kong Film Awards
• Nomination - Best Picture
• Nomination - Best Director (Fruit Chan Gor)
• Nomination - Best Supporting Actor (Sam Lee Chan-Sam)
• Nomination - Best Screenplay (Fruit Chan Gor)
• Nomination - Best New Artist (Tony Ho Wah-Chiu)
• Nomination - Best New Artist (Jo Koo)
• Nomination - Best Original Score (Lam Wah-Cheun, Bat Kwok-Chi)
• Nomination - Best Original Song ("Hui Nin Yin Fa Dut Bit Dor", performed by Andy Lau Tak-Wah)
5th Annual Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards
• Recommended Film

H.K. DVD Heaven (Chris Gilbert) dvd review

Chinese Cinema Page (Shelly Kraicer) review

LITTLE CHEUNG (Xilu xiang)

Hong Kong (118 mi) 1999

Nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards 2000:
Best Picture
Best Screenplay (Fruit Chan)
Best New Artist (Yiu Yuet-Ming)
Best Supporting Actor (Robin Lau)
Best Editing (Tin Sup-Bat)
Best Original Film Score (Lam Wah-Chuen & Chu Hing-Cheung)
Best Original Song: Po Moot Tung Jun (Farewell Innocence)
Music & Lyrics: Lam Wah-Chuen
Performed by: Jo Kuk

Award at the Hong Film Critics Society Awards 2000:
Film Of Merit

Awards at the Taiwan Golden Horse Awards 1999:
Best Screenplay Originally Written For The Screen (Fruit Chan)
Best New Performer (Yiu Yuet-Ming)

Time Out review Tony Rayns

There are three Cheungs in Chan's complex and inventive film: the dying Cantonese opera star Tang Wing-Cheung (to whom the film is dedicated), the original Kid Cheung (child star Bruce Lee in a '50s movie) and the film's nine-year-old protagonist, who helps out in his family's restaurant in the working class district of Mongkok, surrounded by hookers, gangsters, coffin makers and illegal immigrants from China. Framed as an investigation into the community's economic structures and dynamics, the film (set in 1996, on the eve of the handover) uses a non-pro cast and a free form plot to assert what's specific and distinctive about HK's culture - albeit defined across Chan's now-familiar scatological obsessions. With a Kieslowskian flourish the protagonists of Made in Hong Kong and The Longest Summer turn up in the closing moments, making this the third part of an informal 'handover trilogy'.

With a brilliant style and subject, and a nuanced, subtly balanced political subtext, director Fruit Chan's Little Cheung was the most impressive Hong Kong film on display at the 2000 Hong Kong International Film Festival. This film is the final part of Chan's 1997 handover trilogy, following Made in Hong Kong (1997) and The Longest Summer (1998), though the fact that it has its own sequel, Durian Durian [Liu lian piao piao, 2000] complicates matters (I left Hong Kong before Durian Durian screened as one of the two closing films, so I am not able to review it here). .

Set within a few blocks of Portland Street, an extremely dense, Triad-haunted working class Hong Kong neighbourhood of Mongkok, Fruit Chan's little masterpiece tells the story of Little Cheung, a 9-year-old occasional delivery boy at his father's short-order restaurant. In its focus on the family and the surrounding neighbourhood, the film recalls the classic family neo-realist dramas of an earlier Cantonese cinema. It is richly populated with vaguely clownish, slightly menacing triad toughies, wise old coffin makers, former Cantonese opera actors and extras, newspaper vendors, dishwashers, genial and not-so-genial cops: an entire self-contained little world that Chan portrays with dense realism and obvious affection. The wonderful cast, almost entirely made up of non-professional actors, brings all of these characters to vivid, three-dimensional life. But the film's centre has to be nine-year-old prodigy Yiu Yuet-ming, who gives an astonishingly powerful and charismatic performance as the slightly goofy, passionate, and impossibly world-wise narrator and title character.

Chan has described Little Cheung as a generation-spanning film, its characters balanced between children and the elderly. Little Cheung teams up with Fan, a girl his age who, along with her mother, is an illegal immigrant from China. Fan and her mother surreptitiously wash dishes down the street, behind a restaurant where Fan's father works legally. Little Cheung befriends Fan and offers her extra income as his delivery partner (they split the tips). His strongest relationship is with his grandmother, who seems to divide her time between telling him stories of her past and watching TV with him. In fact, Fruit Chan dedicates his film (in an opening title) to the subject of her viewing: Tang Wing-cheung. Tang, or "Brother Cheung" to his fans, was a real-life former Cantonese opera and movie musical star whose old films seem to play continuously on television. If her stories are to be trusted, Grandma seems to have known personally, co-starred with him in her youth, and perhaps even had an affair with him.

Like all of Chan's work, Little Cheung is also a political film. Brother Cheung's death coincides with the 1997 return of Hong Kong to Chinese control: both episodes play significant roles in the film. In a striking sequence, Little Cheung, in school, celebrates the "return to the motherland" with a flag waving mass salute bristling with regimented lines of schoolchildren and rigidly symmetrical camerawork (Chan needs nothing more explicit than this to comment on the HK Special Administrative Region's new political climate). But this scene is tempered with Little Cheung and Fan's rhapsodic bicycle ride along the HK harbour promenade, set against that inescapable Hong Kong skyline, as they fling louder and louder shouts of "Hong Kong is now ours" into the harbour. This scene is itself set beside the film's most heart-rending moments, of Fan and fellow mainlanders (who also have no HK residence permits) rounded up and marched into police vehicles prior to deportation back to the mainland.

Chan builds his film out of just such a counter-weighted structure. Scenes recoil from or counter-balance preceding scenes in a way that invites us constantly to re-evaluate what we have already seen, to rethink it in the context of what is presently unfolding in front of us. Think, for example, of the devastating image of Fan and her fellow child deportees starring out through the bars they are clutching of the police van that carries them away. And contrast this with the film's iconic image of Little Cheung naked from the waist down on the base of a pillar in the middle of the street, standing as punishment for having tried to run away from home. Soaked by rain and urinating, Little Cheung declaims his passionate, rebellious lament, quoting a famous song of Brother Cheung's while molding it into a lyrical defiance of patriarchal authority.

Little Cheung's neo-realism only goes so far. It is a background, a genre touchstone and inspiration off which Chan bounces his freely-spun flights of magical fantasy: passionately conceived scenes that skirt but just avoid sentimentality through their honest, precise detailing. Stylistic references are plural, heterogeneous. Chan will use long takes from fixed cameras through doorways (from a Hou Hsiao-hsien-influenced Taiwanese art cinema); wildly associative montages and variable speed shooting (out of John Woo's urban action cinema); skewed angle photography and dynamically tracking cameras (taking a page from Tsui Hark's film kineticism); Rabelaisian gross-out scenes of the broadest comedy (HK schlock-master Wong Jing's specialty); and adds to them elements all his own. There are moments when the film's extended frame of reference seems to embrace and ratify the whole recent history of Hong Kong cinema, while at the same time re-synthesizing it into a poetic montage that feels utterly fresh, daringly new.

Little Cheung - DVD Review Kenneth Brorsson from So Good Reviews

"Fruit Chan and class" p. 2 Wimal Dissanayake from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Little Cheung (2000) Paul Fonoroff from Hong Kong Movie DataBase

Film Festivals . com - Festival pages Fanfan KO

Little Cheung The World Film Festival, also seen here: The Reel Life Review [Paul Benmussa]

Hong Kong Cinemagic - Little Cheung good series of photos

Fruit Chan Gor Selected filmography from Love HK Films

Hong Kong Film Critics Society

LoveHKFilm.com - 19th Annual HK Film Awards

Chinese Cinema Page (Shelly Kraicer) review

YouTube - Little Cheung (Fruit Chan, 1999) - opening (1:30)

DURIAN DURIAN (Liulian piao piao)

Hong Kong France China (116 mi) 2000

You Can't Go Home Again Mark Peranson from The Village Voice

Reacting to the "one country, two systems" approach of post-handover Chinese life with alarming alacrity, Fruit Chan's semi-improvised film finds the new Hong Kong as sour as the titular fruit. A mainland transient in HK on a three-month visa, Yan lives the new capitalist's reality: She whores herself ragged and watches TV. Her friend, Fan, is an illegal dishwasher pulled from Chan's even better prequel of sorts, Little Cheung. Chan is most successful with the perversely sensitive, verité-styled HK half; when the troubled Yan returns home, the mood chills and the story meanders. But with two first-class films in one year, this guy's on a bigger roll than Steven Soderbergh.

Durian Durian is a two-part film split between Mongkok's Portland Street in Hong Kong and the north-eastern border region of mainland China. Ah Fan [Mak Wai-fan], the young girl from Little Cheung, lives in the former with her poor family, originally from Shenzhen, who illegally overstayed their three month visas to scrape together an income washing dishes and selling cigarettes. Fan meets Yan (Qin Hailu), a prostitute from the mainland, in a laneway behind Portland Street. They become friends after Yan's pimp is assaulted in front of Fan by an assailant wielding that most dangerous of weapons, a heavy, sharply spiney-skinned durian fruit. Yan returns to the north-east to invest what she has earned after her three month Hong Kong visa expires.

The film has the most well-defined formal structure of all of Fruit Chan's works, and seems to be about contrasts -- between Hong Kong and the mainland, hot, crowded Tsimshatsui and cold, barren, white north-eastern Heilongjiang. Film techniques seem to reinforce these oppositions; the former is filmed in bright, vivid colours, with an almost constantly moving, close-up, hand held camera, scenes are spliced together with quick cuts; the latter is filmed with a still, placid camera that stands off and films longer shots, and its palette seems desaturated, muted, much more controlled. But Durian Durian really asks you to look closer, and find similarities within differences: Yan's bathing in both places, Hong Kongers' and mainlanders' parallel obsessions with the anxiety of earning money, and most notably, the iconic presence of the durian fruit itself, offered first as a gift to Fan by her family, then as a gift to Yan by Fan. Both protagonists, too, trace parallel odysseys: first towards limited but enticing opportunity in Hong Kong dictated by a capitalism at its most brutal, an experience which wounds but doesn't seem to scar either of them. Then back to a mainland that, slipping away from a past marked by nostalgia towards a future that remains resolutely undefinable, seems charged with possibility.

Hong Kong and China: defined and constructed by history, politics, and sentiment as seperate places, yet inextricably bound together. "One country two systems", or two places sharing the same system? These are some of the themes that Fruit Chan explored throughout his '1997 trilogy' (Made in Hong Kong, The Longest Summer,and Little Cheung). Though never as richly or as subtly as here. Durian represents a stunning advance in technique and in conception for Chan. He manages to infiltrate his themes into the film's fabric, rather than stringing them up across the screen. DURIAN has a beauty, a tempo, and an integrity all its own, thanks to Lam Wah-chuen's richly varied, controlled cinematography, Tim Sam-fat's lively and expressive editing, and Lam Wah-chuen's (again) brilliant score (listen to the song and watch the trailer).

Reel Life Review [Paul Benmussa]

Variety (David Stratton) review

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review

Durian Durian - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HOLLYWOOD HONG KONG (Heung gong yau gok hor lei wood)

Hong Kong France Great Britain Japan (108 mi) 2001

KFC Cinema Branndon Fincher

Story: Hung Hung, a beautiful girl from Northern China, brings a magical sense of bewilderment to the lives of the inhabitants of the tiny village of Tai Hom. An obese father with his two portly sons and a local aspiring pimp, fall helplessly under the spell of this whimsical beauty as she acts as the catalyst for all sorts of calamities.

Review: Fruit Chan continues in his quest to work outside the Hong Kong machine. In an age and region saturated by romantic comedies and action flops, it is refreshing to see that a director exist with enough vision to bring an art house picture to a market that is caving in on itself with an overabundance of disposable entertainment.

In Hollywood Hong Kong we are introduced to Chu, the local roasted pork vendor, and his two sons, Tiny and Ming. Living a common life of the lower working class, these three go about there days butchering and selling off their edible swine to the passing consumers and hungry denizens of the district. Just down the block from Chu and the boys lives Keung, a young upstart with a website and a dream of amassing a stable of ladies with which to prostitute. Fancying himself the “Little Tiger” of the neighborhood, Keung’s dreams are to make it big using his harem of Chinese delights. Throw into this mix an alluring stranger named Hung Hung, with her sweet demeanor that unfortunately plays second fiddle to her desire to live the good life, and you have the foundation for this quirky little glimpse into the existence of the have-nots of Tai Hom.

The amazing part of this film is most certainly not the predictable storyline, but the manner in which it is delivered. Even though hands are chopped off, hearts get broken, and an all around sense of betrayal is in felt, the vibe of the film always manages to return to a state of harmless tomfoolery. This aspect is the true bait with which this spider sets its trap. With the aid of a delightful soundtrack, a scene consisting of something as gruesome as two men marching off to murder a woman with kitchen knives gradually turns into something capable of putting a smile on one’s face. That is not something that is easily achieved.

The film also does a great job of developing the lives of the characters. Hung Hung is the obvious center of this microcosm, but there is enough meat in the plot (no pun intended) to allow each character to grow with his own motives and desires. Even butcher Chu’s pet pig “mamma” gets some lime light when a crazed doctor forces her to make a jail break in order to save her own hide. If the subject matter of this film were dealt with in any other way it would not have been nearly as enthralling as it is.

Peculiar characters and bizarre twist aside, this film also has going for it a noteworthy aspect in the form of its aesthetic appeal. Carrying a look about itself that is far from typical, we find a lush pallet of colors to be discovered in the oddest of places. From the shades of pinks and browns in the fleshy hides of the butcher’s wares, to the hues of the seasons found in the rusted out sheet metal that endlessly lines the shacks and homes of the area, Fruit Chan truly reminds us that one man’s trash can be another man’s treasure.

Possessing a certain magic that is tough to nail down, Hollywood Hong Kong’s success is perhaps an attribute to the fact that its characters remind us of ourselves in our attempts to better our own situations while still adding unusual and unpredictable circumstances.

PUBLIC TOILET (Hwajangshil eodieyo?)

Hong Kong South Korea Japan (102 mi) 2002

40th Annual Golden Horse Awards
• Nomination - Best Art Direction (Ben Luk Man-Wah)
• Nomination - Best Make-up and Costumer Design (Ben Luk Man-Wah)
• Nomination - Best Original Song ("I'm Still Young", performed by Kim Hyo-Soo)
• Nomination - Best Sound Effects (Phyllis Cheng Wing-Yuen)
10th Annual Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards
• Recommended Film

The Beijing crapper where Dong Dong was born is a venerable 40 years old and has no stalls, just a couple of long benches with holes cut in them - which at least makes for free-flowing conversation. Fruit Chan's film is whimsical effluent: loosely connected ideas and sketches range across the globe (New York, India, Korea), but come back repeatedly to loos and lavatories. For better or (I think) worse, the movie feels as if it was made up as they went along: a series of hand-held DV postcards which ultimately fails to conceal an insubstantial shaplessness. Once or twice, however, Chan reminds you what a gifted film-maker he can be.

Chinese films at the 27th Toronto International Film Festival - A ... Shelly Kraicer from Senses of Cinema, November 2002, also seen here from The Chinese Cinema Page: Public Toilet (excerpt)

Also from Hong Kong, but miles from Shaolin Soccer's blockbuster aspirations, is the ultra-low budget Public Toilet (Renmin gongce, 2002). This film, shot by director Fruit Chan on digital video, didn't exactly take TIFF by storm. Its exceedingly rough look and rambling narrative seem to rule out its acceptance as standard entertainment or “art house” fare. Part of the problem might be its subject matter – let's call it toilet culture – something of a return of the (only partially) repressed, with a vengeance. Familiar items of Chan's unique world recur: a largely non-professional cast made up of student actors and “civilians” that he plucked from the street; astonishing images seemingly grabbed on location by Chan's inspired (and lucky) camera. But Public Toilet makes a radical break for the filmmaker in several ways. His focus explodes outside of the Hong Kong-China nexus that preoccupy his other features, to locations in Korea (Pusan), India (Varanasi), and New York. And he experiments boldly with digital video, capturing and manipulating images in ways that were only hinted at by the surrealistic underpinnings that poked out from the surface of his 35mm features.

Most striking, though, is Public Toilet's narrative complexity. Four stories intertwine in the film, all involving toilets, plenty of pissing and defecating, and quests for miracle cures: a Beijing adolescent born in a toilet is on a quest to cure his comatose granny; a young Hong Kong hitman performs his last mission in New York; a family of HK-born South Asians accompany their ill father on a spiritual voyage to the Ganges; a Korean fisherman discovers a mermaid, sick from a polluted sea, in his outdoor toilet. The film, like the Hong Kong SAR, looks outward, discovering Hong Kong's home no longer in its intensely and exhaustively argued-over relationship with the mainland, but in a world defined globally. Hong Kong faces a new identity crisis: it needs to remake itself as a global city now that it has been subsumed into the PRC. It can only thrive if it reconceptualizes its distinctiveness, if it constructs a new identity of its multicultural society, its richly interconnected communities and their links to the rest of the world. Hong Kong's hope lies in its recognition that, already globalized, it is already radically advanced. Public Toilet embodies vanguard HK globalism, a brand of globalism that is as yet undeveloped, inchoate, waiting to be shaped and formed. While Public Toilet's radical style and sensibility mirrors this formal instability, the film bubbles with the untapped energy of new possibilities waiting to explode.

User comments from imdb Author: edmame from beanie pods

Fruit Chan's uncanny knack to splice together the most personal, poetic and idiosyncratic, then make it stuff of collective empathy and profound lament in MADE IN HONG KONG '97, has forever made him one to watch. PUBLIC TOILET is no different, and it was intensely healing as the second half of a double-bill viewing with Michael Haneke's CODE UNKNOWN '00. While Haneke looked at the invisible, complex layers and years of history making us mutually exclusive, rejecting time bombs just biding for collision from marital squabble to ethnic-cleansing wars, Chan does the opposite.

Surely the common humanity that we all eat and discharge appropriately is an accepted cliché best left to no imagination. But Chan asks, why not -- and don't just imagine, but LIVE around such fecal acts - as motions of civilized life like to pretend we don't? Who knew relieving yourself can be so moving, especially in the context of an ailing body, or the precious portal to friendship when strangers are cramped in a small space when traveling? How about the different ways we set up facilities to handle "the deed", that say as much about our aesthetic pretensions (or lack of) in dealing with other people's discharge next to ours?

Some point out the clash between globalization and fading local culture, or how each culture is supposedly tagged a different verdict of where it's going in the film. But try not to think so hard, that the film's beauty goes into a rigid, cold box of "this means that." Instead, see how Chan almost gloats (via voice-over narration) that displaced Italian, Somalian, Chinese, Indian, Korean, and even non-Human in places they're decidedly foreigners, yet come to embrace their ambivalent existence. Or the whimsical trepidation and inevitable clutches of films and images about another culture, just might be discredited before your eyes by the reality you actually experience. The lament of youths at the forces pulling us away from each other, despite the toilets we all share, is strangely uplifting simply because Chan believes in the youthful consciousness as he gloomily began in MADE IN HONG KONG.

The courageous vision and multi-cultural, -generational casting, interaction in PUBLIC TOILET is true epic stuff for digital video, especially compared to the "DV for our own backyard"-approach to Japan's Love Cinema series (which nevertheless boasts gems like Miike's VISITOR Q '01.)

P.S. Sam Lee the MADE IN HONG KONG-star is appropriately, but in bittersweet fashion, doing a clichéd genre hit-man in PUBLIC TOILET, with more symbolic presence than camera-bracing face-time. It affirms Chan's lament, though an inevitable product of their mutual success as director and actor, that Lee has developed the professional's facade no longer suited to Chan's vision (aside from DUMPLINGS '04 of course.)

Eye for Film ("Marnie") review [3/5]

Asian Cinema Drifter Tuna

iofilm.co.uk Rebort

THREE…EXTREMES (Sam gang yi)

aka: Three Extremes

aka: Three

Hong Kong segment “Dumplings” d: Fruit Chan

Japan segment “Box” d: Takashi Miike

S. Korea segment “Cut” d: Park Chan-wook (118 mi) 2004

The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias

Anthology films are mixed bags by nature, partly because multiple novella-length features rarely complement one another when stitched together, but mainly because directors tend not to bring their A-games to a side project. If nothing else, the horror anthology Three... Extremes, a trio of macabre shorts from first-rate Asian filmmakers, provokes a strong effort from everyone involved, though they're not all wholly successful. There isn't much to connect the three in terms of style, which ranges from Park Chan-wook's thick baroque sensibility to Takashi Miike's uncharacteristically elegant formalism, but each concern the capacity people have for vindictiveness and cruelty when their feet are in the fire. Whether due to vanity, jealousy, or sheer desperation, the leads in all three stories commit atrocities that would seem beyond their capabilities.

In Chan's queasily effective "Dumplings," Miriam Yeung plays a stressed-out trophy wife in need of some polish, lest her wealthy husband leave her for a newer model. For this, she turns to the giddily sadistic Bai Ling, a former gynecologist who has parlayed her old career into a new one making "special" dumplings for older women seeking a miracle rejuvenation cure. Taken literally, the premise of aborted fetuses being ground up and cased in fried dough is distasteful in the extreme, especially when Chan plays up the sound of teeth grinding through the gristle. It's more acceptable (though blunt) as social commentary—the rich gaining luster by making a meal of the underclass, basically—but that doesn't make it any easier to digest.

Made between Oldboy and Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, the second and last entries in his revenge trilogy, the disappointing "Cut" is concerned with Park's usual pet theme, but it feels like he's going through the motions, albeit with his usual surplus of technical brio. Lee Byung-hun stars as Park's alter ego, a popular film director who returns home to an invader who ties him up and forces him to choose between atrocities: the murder of an abducted child, or watching his pianist wife get her fingers chopped off one by one. Gradually, Lee's response to this torment makes him seem as villainous as his captor, but Park's idea of revenge spreading like a poisonous contagion gets lost in the baroque unpleasantness.

The last and strongest of the three is Miike's "The Box," which is more abstract and less immediately accessible than the other two, but looks and feels unlike anything Miike has done. Unfolding like a waking dream, with memories of a past trauma flooding into the present, "The Box" follows Kyoko Hasegawa, a successful but lonely author whose latest book attracts an editor that reminds her of her childhood. As a little girl, Hasegawa and her twin sister were contortionists at their father's traveling magic show, but one night, her jealousy over her sister's close relationship to him leads to tragic consequences. Few directors are as "extreme" as Miike, but ironically, his entry in Three... Extremes is the least explicit; its suggestive tale of envy and guilt resembles Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" more than Miike's usual six-per-year gorefests. Could this mark the start of a new phase in his career, or will it be back to business as usual?

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Les Wright

Following the style and format of the old television series Night Gallery, Three...Extremes showcases a trilogy of short films by master directors of Asian cinema. In the order they appear in the U.S. release, these include Hong Kong director Fruit Chan’s macabre meditation on the fountain-of-youth-themed "Dumplings," South Korean Chan-Wook Park’s self-consciously cinematic psychodrama "Cut," and Japan cult director Miike Takashi’s much-praised trauma drama "Box."

The film’s billing as hybrid horror genre is somewhat misleading. All three narratives do have much in common with the long string of American trashy slasher films, going back to Hershell Gordon Lewis’s 1963 cult classic Blood Feast. But more notably, they partake of a specifically Asian cinematic taste for sadomasochistic family romances. The acknowledged masterpiece of this tradition is Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 world-wide hit In the Realm of the Senses, which re-enacts a famous "weird news" case from 1930s Japan, in which the sexual obsession between a man and a woman causes them to forsake everything, including life itself. The genius of Oshima’s film’s narrative lay in how it pursued the theme of sexual obsession until Oshima had emptied it of any sexual dimension whatsoever.

The shorts of Three … Extremes, however, celebrate their sexual perversion, blending the sexual metaphors of carnality, gustation and desire as vehicles of power. In each tale, an underlying, unresolved sexual obsession opens the door to baser cravings for control over other people. In "Dumplings" (referring to what is more popularly known as "potstickers" in the U.S.), for example, Mrs. Qing Li (Miriam Yeung), a not quite so young wife, sets out to regain the sexual attention of Sije Li (Tony Ka-Fai Leung), her husband, by visiting a former gynecologist (presented as a modern-day witch) known as Aunt Mei (Bai Ling) in her prison-like working-class high-rise cage of an apartment. Mrs. Li quickly embraces the diet of potstickers, steamed, boiled, or pan-fried, slurping the crunchy critters with ever increasing pleasure. As she and the audience come to know, viscerally, the source of the little meat hearts of the dumplings, Chan intensifies his montage of human body fluids and body parts, gleefully offering cannibalism, acts of abortion, and blood-disgorging sexual congress for the audience’s delectation.

In "Cut" (the title plays on both the notion of cutting with knives and a director’s command to "cut" a scene and ergo an actor’s ego), fictitious film director Ryu Ji-Ho (Lee Byung-Hun) comes home to find his wife bound to the family grand piano, her fingers simultaneously glued to the keys and attached to wires which spiral into the walls and ceiling. A disgruntled extra (played by Lim Won-Hee) has set a series of traps for Ryu, forcing the director to atone for being both rich and a morally good person at the same time (something which enrages the poor, no longer humble extra, frustrating his world view that the rich are morally bankrupt).

The absurdist challenges given Ryu (to strangle a child, to witness his wife’s fingers being chopped off one at a time, to morally debase himself in front of the actor) are mirrored in the self-conscious way in which director Park plays with the artificiality of film. Ryu leaves a sound stage after a day’s filming and returns to his home, which is the sound stage he had just left. The actor portraying a man bitten by a female vampire and left frozen on-stage turns up still frozen in Ryu’s home. The little girl Ryu is commanded to strangle turns out to be someone else, and even Ryu’s wife is cast in several different lights, depending on how a particular scene is being acted out at any given moment.

Three … Extremes is definitely an acquired taste of an art-house subgenre type. The dim sum-like array of choices, glimpses into contemporary Asian cinematic styles and prominent directors and actors, is noteworthy. The tension, of balancing visceral horror with psychological sadomasochism, requires a disciplined viewer. Whether this film achieves its pay-off depends upon the palate of the moviegoer, for this is a rare delicacy indeed.

Three of Asia's premier horror directors each delivering a 40-minute tale of terror sounds like a dream - or should that be nightmare?

Sadly, the end result is not quite the spine-tingling scare-fest you expect. While the three Twilight Zone-style movies - Dumplings, Cut and Box - are not without merit, they are far from satisfying or truly terrifying.

Most Asian horror offers up a large slice of the supernatural, often in the form of creepy, long-dead killers (Ring being the prime example) but Dumplings goes for gruesome over ghostly... and it is one of the most stomach-churning films I've ever had the displeasure to see.

There isn't slasher movie-style decapitations or buckets of blood - the story alone is enough to have you chucking up. There is no point to the short other than to disturb - a surprise and huge disappointment considering it was written by Farewell My Concubine scribe Lillian Lee. But there is a feature-length version of the movie, which perhaps develops the themes only briefly touched on here.

Ageing TV star Mrs Lee (Miriam Yeung) wants to recapture her lost youth and goes to visit Mei (Ling Bai), who makes dumplings that turn back the clock. But forget a Death Becomes Her-style magic potion and a few laughs - Mei's anti-ageing treatment is made from the cooked foetuses of aborted babies. All together now, "EEEWWWW". It gets worse... you get to see one of said foetuses after its grizzly home abortion and just before it gets sauteed. Now there's a version of Hell's Kitchen Gordon Ramsay has yet to try.

There are stylistic touches which save the film, as it is altogether too gruesome a concept to enjoy otherwise. Its themes of the desperate pursuit of youth are thought-provoking, though, and the movie also hints at an interesting social comment on China's one baby per family policy - particularly since the most potent anti-age foetuses are boys and they are rarely aborted - but it fails to fully develop this concept.

Next on the bill is Cut, from Korea's Park Chan-Wook. The acclaimed Sympathy For Mr Vengeance and Oldboy director serves up a sadistic revenge tale reminiscient of Saw - but this tale of torture could be a lot more bloody and shies away from any real gore.

It tells the tale of a likeable film director (Byung-hun Lee) who is kidnapped by one of the extras from his movies. The psychotic failed actor takes him to his movie set - incidentally a replica of his living room - where he is forced to witness his wife (Hye-jeong Kong) being mutilated.

His bride - looking truly terrified and yet almost comical with wild hair and a waterfall of running mascara - is sitting at the piano and tied up using an intricate, spiderweb-style system of piano wire - which could be used to inflict more inventive harm than is actually delivered.

Cut's saving grace is its twisted humour and bursts of unexpected ridiculousness - the extra demonstrating the roles he has played dressed as a soldier, doctor and even a swimmer, complete with flippers, are hilarious. His song and dance routine - complete with wacky faces Jack Black would be proud of - will also have you on the floor.

There are also wonderful fast tracking shots across the sets and quick, almost montage-like cuts to each character, brilliantly showing their fear, confusion and anger.

The final instalment is Box and it is the highlight of the disc, offering supernatural chills.

Young woman Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa) is haunted by nightmares of her child. Aged 10, she and her twin Shoko (Yuu Suzuki) performed as contortionists in a circus, with their star turn being their ability to fold themselves into a tiny box. But Shoko is killed in tragic circumstances and her twin is haunted by the past - literally.

A wonderful atmosphere of dread is introduced early on by Japanese director Miike Takashi, who brought us Audition.

The dark sets and solemn score lower the mood and create tension, while the Ring-style scene involving a little girl will put you firmly over the edge.

But the plot is confusing and the unexpected ending will have you scratching your head. But hey, at least this doesn't rely on gore to get a scare.

Reverse Shot [Michael Joshua Rowin]

Reel.com review [3.5/4] James Emanuel Shapiro

Classic Horror review Kairo

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

stylusmagazine.com (Jake Meaney) review

DVD Outsider Slarek

FilmsAsia [Soh Yun-Huei]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Jeremy Knox

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival report

filmcritic.com (Nicholas Schager) review [3.5/5]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4.5/5] Eric Campos

Twitch (Philippe Gohier) review

Twitch Nick

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib

CHUD.com (Jeremy G. Butler) dvd review

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [4/5]

Film Monthly (Andrew Dowd) review

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DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [4/5]

Scott Mendelson review [B]

Thoughts on Stuff Patrick

Bright Lights Film Journal [Ian Johnston] May 2005

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3/5] Heidi Martinuzzi

Lee's Movie Info (Lee Tistaert) review [C+]

FilmJerk.com ("The Real Dick Hollywood") review [B]

ReelTalk (Adam J. Hakari) review also seen here: Passport Cinema [A.J. Hakari]

Bloody-Disgusting review [3.5/5] T.W. Anderson

House of Horror (Caretaker) review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]

Korean Grindhouse Drew P.

Mike D'Angelo review

Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image] cartoon

Variety (David Rooney) review

Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Ty Burr

The Boston Phoenix review Brett Michel

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]

San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Crust) review

Movie review: 'Three...Extremes' Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune

The New York Times (Dana Stevens) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

DUMPLINGS (Gaau ji)

Hong Kong (91 mi) 2004

Time Out London (Ben Walters) review

After moving to Hong Kong from mainland China, former abortion doctor Mei (Bai Ling) has established a highly profitable black-market career selling dumplings from her small apartment in an ordinary housing block. Not just any dumplings, mind you: made with special stuff that Mei picks up on regular trips back over the border, these can halt or even reverse the ageing process – an irresistible proposition to former TV soap star Mrs Li (Miriam Yeung), already afraid of losing her looks and her husband (Tony Leung Ka Fai [the ‘other’ Tony Leung]). There’s just the small problem of what's actually in them…

‘Dumplings’ originated in the shocker compendium ‘Three… Extremes’, alongside work by Takashi Miike and Park Chan-Wook. Expanded to feature length, it remains a claustrophobic, queasy piece of work, relying less on supernatural horror, gross-out effects or even narrative suspense than on slowly curdling human relationships and heightened social realism. The womb-churning central premise is heavily signposted from the start but – a few deadpan cookery scenes notwithstanding – it’s used for satire rather than visceral exploitation: Mei’s cool-headed, border-hopping enterprise is a case study in market pragmatism, servicing the requirements of the HK vanity industry with the waste products of Chinese birth-control policy. Regular Wong Kar-Wai collaborator Chris Doyle’s photography offers a fine balance between shabby naturalism and improbable radiance while Bai Ling’s Mei is sexy, canny, flour-dusted and wise, but not quite real; Miriam Yeung’s Mrs Li is more plausible, vanity and compulsion gradually overtaking her initial revulsion. Like most elixir-of-youth fables, ‘Dumplings’ never seems actually credible and the plot baggily dissipates towards the end, but it leaves a lingering and distinctive aftertaste.

Talking Pictures (UK) review Shaun McDonald

With an opening shot taken from underneath a truck, the thumbprints of Christopher Doyle's excess of style and experimentation are evident in an instant.

Dumplings is an unusual modern East-Asian film, as this tag generally denotes work, particularly on the Asian Extreme side (which Dumplings can be said to belong to), who's virtues are innovative, gruesome violence accompanied by a throbbing, pounding soundtrack. The lack of said violence in Dumplings is more than made up for in its perverse, primal theme - that of eating dead foetuses in order to obtain eternal youth. The soundtrack is also markedly different as the incessant, rhythmic beats of the more music video-esque end of Asian extreme cinema are traded in for a very peculiar, jolting, though immediately effective score, with the noise of the scraping of knives and the boiling of water being amplified and exaggerated to a huge degree, giving each moment in the film a very awake and alive effect.

However these are really just details and side attractions. As in spite of the credits reading "directed by Fruit Chan," this is for all intents and purposes, to those who are aware of his work, a Christopher Doyle film. I say this because his presence is so obvious in every single shot of the film. Each set-up, each scene, there is the feel of constant experimentation, the constant drive to see how each image can be made more interesting and imaginative, that it is unmistakably a Doyle film. This constant freshness in the shot can have its downsides though, however not many of them are evident here. Though the main problem with Doyle's approach is that there is always the danger that his cinematography can eclipse the rest of what the film has to show, offer or say. It is very self-aware virtuosity that Doyle brings to the film, and to an extent this is the showcase. The mise-en-scene, the characters and their actions are all elements of Doyle's style, and they work for him, rather than vice versa. There are perhaps times when his shots get a bit too distracting in terms of keeping the audience involved in the plot, though it really isn't the plot that we are interested in. Not a great deal happens throughout the film and we are never really in a position of great sympathy for the plight of any of the characters.

On a whole the style sustains our interest for the compact 91 minutes running time, and the well designed sets - particularly in the flat of the Dumpling chef - means our interest is always kept alive through Doyle's unusual angles and framing.

VideoVista review Jonathan McCalmont

Dumplings first appeared in 2004 as one third of a short film collection called Three... Extremes. Despite also boasting short films by Takashi Miike (Audition) and Park Chan Wook (Oldboy), this collection was only recently made available on DVD in the UK and, intriguingly, it's the lesser known of the three directors (Fruit Chan) whose film now gets released as an extended feature-length director's cut. Dumplings (aka: Gaau ji) is less a traditional horror movie than it is a slow-burning drama about the hideous lengths to which people will go to feel young, and it's arguably one of the most exciting Asian films to be released this year.

Mrs Li was once a famous TV actress. However, over the years age has taken its toll and the acting jobs dried up as she was supplanted by a younger generation of actresses. When this younger generation also threatened to take her husband from her, Mrs Li is forced to seek out the services of Aunt Mei. Mei was once a renowned surgeon but she now makes her living as a midwife and a cook. Indeed, despite being in her sixties Mei looks to be barely out of her thirties thanks to the miraculous properties of her dumplings. Mrs Li's new diet wins back her husband's affections but also sets in motion a chain of events that will lead to Mei cutting her off, forcing her to look elsewhere for supplies in her constant quest to appear young.

The film itself is built around the tension between beautiful appearances and internal squalor and this tension is beautifully expressed through the constant juxtaposition of beauty with ugliness as magnificent food is produced in filthy kitchens and people eat with impeccable etiquette to an almost deafening symphony of grunts, slurps and crunches. Even the serene sensuality of the estranged couple's reunion is undercut by the body horror of a back-street abortion as Chan relentlessly hammers home the message that beauty and squalor go together and that for all the beauty you posses, you can never escape the corruption. The visual beauty of this film is perhaps hardly surprising given that its director of photography was Christopher Doyle, the man behind the visual style of controversial Jet-Li fascist apologia Hero.

However, for all the beauty and symbolic power of this film, what ultimately drives it forward are the performances. Ling Bai is stunning as the cook who manages to be sensuous and warm but at the same time utterly chilling. She is ably supported by Tony Leung Ka Fai and Miriam Yeung Chin Wah, who are initially made up to look a lot older than they actually are. These three play off each other wonderfully as they create an enigmatic love triangle that draws the film forwards despite never coming to dominate proceedings. Indeed, Chan perfectly balances the film by grounding it in human relationships but without ever allowing those relationships to overshadow the central theme of the film.

Chilling and darkly satirical, Dumplings steers clear of the usual J- and K-horror genre conventions to produce one of the more unusual but fascinating films to have emerged in recent years. Warmly recommended.

"Dumplings" by Chuck Kleinhans Jump Cut, Spring 2007

DVD Times [Anthony Nield]

Love HK Film Kozo (Ross Chen)

Twitch Nick

stylusmagazine.com (Sandro Matosevic) review

KFC Cinema Daniel Lee Fullmer

Illuminated Lantern Peter Nepstad

Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [4.5/5]

eFilmCritic Reviews Elaine Perrone

Hong Kong Digital

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib

The Lumière Reader A.Y.

Razor Reel Pat

BBCi - Films Matthew Leyland

The Observer (Mark Kermode) review

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]

Chan, Jackie – actor and stuntman

Jackie Chan Olympic Commercial (1:28) on YouTube

Top 10 Jackie Chan Stunts (5:55)

Top 10 Jackie Chan Fight Scenes (6:18)

Jackie Chan The Best Stuntman Tribute (8:10)

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Chan Ho-Sun, Peter

NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Peter Chan biography

Peter Chan, or Chan Ho-sun (陳可辛; born in 1962 in Hong Kong) is a film director and producer. The film director, on the right, gives last minute direction to the cast and crew, whilst filming a costume drama on location in London. ... A film producer creates the conditions for making movies. ...

He spent his teens in Bangkok, Thailand and studied in the United States, where he attended film school at UCLA. He returned to Hong Kong in 1983 and started working in the film industry. He served as a second assistant director and producer to John Woo on Heroes Shed No Tears, which was set in Thailand. He also was a location manager on three Jackie Chan films, Wheels on Meals, The Protector and Armour of God.

His directorial debut, Alan and Eric: Between Hello and Goodbye, was crowned best film at the Hong Kong Film Directors' Guild in 1991. It also won best actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards for Eric Tsang, who would become a frequent collaborator with Chan.

Chan was a co-founder of United Filmmakers Organization (UFO) in the early 1990s, which produced a number of box-office and critical hits in Hong Kong, including his own: He Ain't Heavy, He's My Father. Other critical and commercial successes followed, including Tom, Dick And Hairy, He's a Woman, She's a Man and Comrades, Almost a Love Story.

In the late 1990s, Chan worked in Hollywood, directing The Love Letter, which starred Kate Capshaw, Ellen Degeneres and Tom Selleck.

In 2000, Chan co-founded Applause Pictures with Teddy Chen and Allan Fung. The company's focus was on fostering ties with pan-Asian filmmakers, producing such films as Jan Dara by Thailand's Nonzee Nimibutr, One Fine Spring Day South Korea's Hur Jin-Ho, Samsara by China's Huang Jianxin, The Eye by Danny and Oxide Pang and cinematographer Christopher Doyle.

Chan's 2005 film, the musical Perhaps Love closed the Venice Film Festival and was Hong Kong's entry for an Academy Awards nomination in the best foreign film category.

Hong Kong Cinemagic - Peter Chan Ho Sun bio and filmography

Peter Chan Ho-Sun Love Hong Kong Film filmography

Peter Chan photos - Daylife

In Search of New Genres and Directions for Asian Cinema Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien from Rouge, December 18, 2002

Cue a fast pan across Asia - Los Angeles Times David Chute from The LA Times, June 1, 2003

Asian Film Foundation - 11/23/05 - Peter Chan Musical Perhaps Love Chow-Ee-Tan from The Malay Times, November 23, 2005

SFGate: Culture Blog! : SFIFF: Peter Chan Ho Sun, the Pan-Asian auteur G. Allen Johnson from the SF Gate Culture Blog, April 21, 2006

Peter Chan Ho Sun's Artistic Pursuit transcripted radio profile from CRIEnglish.com, October 10, 2007

bc magazine, hong kong Yvonne Teh from BC magazine (2007)

Harvard Asia Quarterly - The Pan-Asian Co-Production Sphere ... Jin Long Pao interviews the director, Summer 2002

Hong Kong Cinemagic - Interviews with Peter Chan: almost love stories (2005)

Interview: Peter Ho-sun Chan | 53rd Sydney Film Festival (9 June ... Interview by Saul Symonds, June 2006

“Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese ... Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, by Michael Berry, book review by Ruby Cheung from Senses of Cinema, March 2006

Peter Chan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ALAN AND ERIC BETWEEN HELLO AND GOODBYE (Seung sing gusi)

Hong Kong (106 mi) 1991

User comments from imdb Author: CHI-14 (chil_man@email.com) from Hong Kong

Peter Chan's movies often can play upon the heart-string of the audience without making something too measured. This movie is a prelude of his career and in fact has completely revealed the unique style of him.

The story is simple. Eric was the best friend of Alan and they all fancied a girl but Eric did not let them know. The girl thus became the girl friend of Alan. One night, Alan found out and Eric felt guilty therefore left them. Several years later, Alan found Eric in a hospital and the latter passed away near the ending of the movie.

A predictable script but still very moving. The content inside this simple story contains so many things - friendship, responsibility, loyalty, selfishness and love. Very complicated and thus the characters can be described in depth especially Eric. Peter Chan has also made the description in a manner quite natural although not as mature as that of "Comrade, Almost A Love Story".

Equally remarkable is the actors especially Eric Tsang. Maggie Cheung also gave good performance. It is a movie undoubtedly worth watching.

Tear-jerker from the guys who would go on to create the United Filmmakers Organization (UFO). The drama and the execution are not as polished as their later works, but it's still an affecting movie.

Pre-UFO drama from UFO’s main men, Peter Chan and Lee Chi-Ngai. This is an effective, though schmaltzy tearjerker about two lifelong friends, Alan Tam and Eric Tsang. Eric is a kindly, self-sacrificing man who gives everything up for those he loves. This includes a romance with the woman he loves, Olive (a winning Maggie Cheung). When it’s revealed to him that his easygoing buddy Alan digs Maggie and vice versa, he gladly steps out of the way to let them get it on. Alan eventually goes on to become a huge popstar (which makes for some easily obtained footage at one of Alan’s many concerts), leaving his two friends alone. When it’s revealed that Eric loves Maggie, the whole thing collapses, though a final plot device allows for some tear-soaked closure.

The sappy elements of this flick are all-too-apparent, as the UFO guys had yet to learn the magic of quirkiness which so often saves otherwise bland mushy stuff. Unlike later UFO efforts, supporting characters (like Blackie Ko, Barry Wong, and Paul Fornoroff) are left in the back and given little to do. Thankfully one of UFO’s major characteristics comes through: it’s the characters that drive the movie, not plot set-up. Both Cheung and Tsang are genuinely affecting, and there is real character work in Eric Tsang’s award-winning role. This is an affecting work, and a good primer for UFO's later films.

HE AIN’T HEAVY, HE’S MY FATHER (Xin nan xiong nan di)

Hong Kong (97 mi) 1993

Winning time-travel comedy-drama from those fellas at UFO. While a bit disjointed, it's also eminently charming, intelligent and affecting. The two Tony Leungs make a fine acting team.

The main men at UFO, Peter Chan and Lee Chi-Ngai, team up for this off-beat but affecting time travel movie that's more about characters than time travel. Tony Leung Chiu-Wai plays Yuen, a shallow real-estate salesman who resents his father Feng (Tony Leung Ka-Fai) for being too giving and philanthropic - and for not being overly successful in life. Yuen calls his father a "loser," and the next thing you know Feng is in the hospital and stuck in a coma.

Then it's fantasy plot-device time. Yuen gets whisked back in time and meets his father as a young man. Yuen figures he can act like Marty McFly and change the future by mucking with the past. Yuen's mother Laura (Carina Lau) was once the heiress to a large fortune, but her dad (Chor Yuen) disapproved of Feng, and Laura ended up chucking the cash for her future husband. Yuen tries to make his family rich by making Feng palatable to Laura's father, thus insuring that his future will be taken care of, too.

Unlike the nifty reformatting of time that Back to the Future glorified, He Ain't Heavy, He's My Father chooses a different path. This UFO film is about reconciling and appreciating the past, and using it to find hope and fulfillment for the future. In that, the film shows remarkable human sentiment as it asks that people change, and not the circumstances that create their lives. It's a message that seems tailor-made for Hong Kong residents (whining about the handover will get you nowhere), but it's also a lesson that anyone, anywhere, can relate to.

UFO has never been shy about making their messages evident, but they manage to do so in charming, enjoyable ways. The film is engaging and quite entertaining thanks to its low-key mixture of sci-fi, comedy, and maudlin family drama. Writer-director Lee Chi-Ngai throws some of his usual satire into the film with appearances by future HK notables, including Waise Lee as a young Lee Ka-Sing. That and other in-jokes can slip by the less seasoned viewer, but they don't detract from the film's charm.

The actors are uniformly good, with Tony Leung Ka-Fai standing out as the sometimes cartoonish, but always endearing Feng. He and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai work extremely well together, and Carina Lau, Anita Yuen (in two roles), and Lawrence Cheng turn in fine support. The film does stop for some brief HK-specific asides, i.e. musical numbers and situation comedy wackiness, but the uneven means never detract from the film's ultimately enjoyable whole.

TOM, DICK AND HAIRY (Feng chen san xia)

Hong Kong (99 mi) 1993 co-director: Lee Chi-Ngai

User comments from imdb Author: wendy-knottcomer from Florida, USA

This is one of the funniest and most charming "guy" films I've seen in a LOOOOOONG time!

It is a 90's look at three flawed (therefore REAL) guys sharing an apartment in HK.

Tony Leung Chui Wai is Tom, who has dated the same girl since high school and would like to know what he has been missing, but is too afraid to find out. Tony Leung Kar Fai is Dick - an aging womanizer who has never grown up and who is completely in the dark about his "regular" girlfriend's (Anita Yeun) love for and devotion to him. Lawrence Cheng (a real cameleon of an actor) is Giorgio - aka Hairy - who is a sensitive and clueless guy with effeminate characteristics.

The situations are crazy, the story line nuts, and the performances wonderful! These three have acted in films together, before. Who in HK has not? But, in this movie, the comraderie is so effective. You would swear that these guys really do live together and have known each other since childhood. Most of the goofiness is so spontaneous and natural that it often feels real.

I watch this film over and over (and not just to see the two Tonys - though that is reason enough!) just for the joy of seeing the interaction. I laugh so hard my face hurts. This is one of those films that just keeps getting better as you become more "friendly" with it.

This is a must see.

Myriad "guy issues" populate this overstuffed UFO entry that's quite fun and entertaining despite all the exposition. If you see this for the stars and the buoyant energy, you won't be disappointed.

The United Filmmakers Organization brought us this comedy about three bachelors who share an apartment and an assortment of nineties guy troubles. Peter Chan and Lee Chi-Ngai take their usual assortment of UFO actors and give us an enjoyable and overstuffed little movie.

Tony Leung Chiu-Wai is Tom, a nice guy who’s engaged to a high-maintenance woman named Joyce. He's stuck in a go-nowhere job and one night he takes home a club girl named Cat (Ann Bridgewater) and sleeps with her. His roommate Dick (Tony Leung Ka-Fai) is an aging lothario who can’t realize what he wants and plays the field incessantly. Though he appears to be a decent, caring guy, he uses his long-suffering girlfriend Fong (Anita Yuen) as insurance every night, guaranteeing that he has someone to sleep with. Lawrence Cheng is Giorgio (Hairy is just a name to complete the pun in the title), a fey shy guy who can’t meet women and has a Vivian Chow fixation. He engages in a dating service and ends up with a guy named Michelle (Michael Chow). Finally, Athena Chu is Tom’s younger sister, who has a crush on Dick.

The result of all these intricate relationships and character descriptions is actually a pretty good relationship comedy with some terrific stars in the leads. The story itself is woven together pretty well, and the characters are engaging. As this is a "guy's story," some of their attitudes and relationships could strain likeability, but the writers manage to portray the commitment phobias and guy-issues as possibly damaging. This isn't a win-win comedy where everybody comes out happy, and even the happy endings seem to have caveats.

As this is a UFO production, we get the usual doses of wordy self-examination and verbalized epiphany. However, we also get wacky musical numbers and an energetic spirit that's quite fun. It's questionable what weight the nineties guy issues actually carries, but that uncertainty doesn't stop this movie from being as entertaining as they come.

HE’S A WOMAN, SHE’S A MAN (Gam chi yuk sip)

Hong Kong (107 mi) 1994 co-director: Chi-Ngai Lee

Time Out review Tony Rayns

The United Film-makers Organisation (UFO) has made a splash in the tough Hong Kong market with a series of comedy-dramas about the problems facing yuppies. This one purports to deal with gender issues and has a smattering of gay supporting characters. A young woman (Yuen) tries to break into showbiz by posing as a male singer; a straight talent manager (Cheung) is disturbed to find himself fancying her, unaware of her actual gender. Almost unwatchably shallow and insincere, the film tries to give its affirmative hetero ending a gay-friendly spin.

User comments from imdb Author: jaedelen from Venice, California

An excellent parody into the workings of the Canto-pop industry for those familiar AND unfamiliar with it. Especially interesting that Leslie Cheung, a real life Canto-pop legend, plays the producer "Sam," to Carina Lau's singer-superstar "Rose." There are plenty of scenes involving music and songwriting, the best being the scene where the film's theme song "Chase" is "written" and performed by Cheung himself. Hilarious audition moments in the beginning of the film parody Chinese pop music, as well as equally funny portrayals of fan obsession. Poignant scenes between Lau and Yuen as "sisters," as well as for Cheung and Yuen while stuck in a darkened elevator. Carina Lau is perfect as the diva and Anita Yuen is truly phenomenal in her HKFilm award-winning turn as the gender-turned "Wing." Leslie Cheung is at the top of his form as straight man (no pun intended!). Laugh-out-loud comedy and great acting all around.

User comments from imdb Author: Havan_IronOak from NYC

Your typical boy meets girl (only masquerading as a guy) story. Although the story is set in a modern-day Cantonese milieu, this story has a number of parallels with Victor Victoria.

A straight man is attracted to someone he believes is a man and is worried about his sexuality. Of course his love interest is a woman so the audience can enjoy a laugh at his expense without being made uncomfortable themselves.

There is an older openly out gay man who is consulted for advice and generally accepted but he is used throughout for comedic affect and seems to be the only gay man in their immediate circle who's `getting any'.

This is another of those films that seems to be using gay themes to titillate the audience and sell tickets without actually showing any truly positive gay images but at least it's not anti-gay. Used to be there was a class of movies called `Blacksploitation' films. I'd suggest that this film and others like it (`In and Out', `Victor/Victoria') will one day be labeled `Gaysploitation' in much the same way.

On a technical level, the film is well done and enjoyable but the DVD copy had some problems. The white subtitles were often unreadable against the white backgrounds and some went by so fast that I found myself constantly pausing and replaying a scene to see what was said. The translation was a bit off as well. There were frequent misspellings and grammar errors and several of the Cantonese songs were not translated at all. What made this particularly annoying was that the subtitles only had one setting (English and Mandarin) so when these un-translated Cantonese songs were going on the Mandarin subtitles continued.

A Better Tomorrow (Peter A. Martin) dvd review

Entertaining and even affecting romantic comedy from UFO which features a hilarious, endearing central performance from Anita Yuen. Leslie Cheung and company turn in good performances too, and the script and Peter Chan's direction are sharp and effective.

Anita Yuen won her second consecutive HK best actress award in this winning UFO film from director Peter Chan Ho-Sun. Yuen plays Wing, a spritely girl who idolizes singer Rose (Carina Lau) and Rose's producer/boyfriend Sam Koo (Leslie Cheung). When the chance arises to meet her idols, she jumps at the chance.

Unfortunately, that chance is an open talent search for a male singer. Wing is so desperate to meet the two that she masquerades as a boy to enter the contest. In typical sitcom fashion, Wing wins despite not having a whit of talent, and discovers that there's more to Sam and Rose's relationship than she knew. It turns out the two are dysfunctional lovers, each possibly loving themselves more than the other.

Wing resolves to help her two idols stay together, but the road is fraught with difficulties. For one, Wing's sexuality comes into question. Since Wing is so effeminate, everyone believes Wing to be gay. Of course, Wing isn't gay; he's just a girl. Which makes it all the more difficult when Sam finds himself attracted to Wing without knowing that he is in fact a she, which must mean that Sam is gay. Right?

The overly commercial setup leaves itself open for all sorts of slapstick and poor gags, but Peter Chan and his excellent cast handle the material extremely well. The film has a glossy, Golden-Age of Hollywood feel, and story manages to be affecting without being overbearing. If the United Filmmakers Organization does anything well, it would be their ability to handle comedy and drama in a light, sophisticated way. Perhaps that's what makes their films so accessible to western audiences; their files are entertaining and involving without becoming cloying or given to the usual HK hyperbole.

Of course, a great deal of the credit should be given to the performances. Both Leslie Cheung and Anita Yuen are terrific, and the rest of the cast (Eric Tsang, Carina Lau and newcomer Jordan Chan) handle their roles effectively. Yuen, in particular, deserves credit as she actually plays a boy pretty convincingly, and manages to be endearing and lovable at the same time. Probably one of the best examples of Hong Kong commercial cinema that you could find.

Bright Lights Film Journal review Gary Morris reviews the “Who’s the Man” series, July 1997

spcnet.tv

love and bullets

THE AGE OF MIRACLES (Ma ma fan fan)

Hong Kong (100 mi) 1995

Anita Yuen plays a determined mother and deal maker who strikes a bargain with Death, trading ten years of her life for the survival of her sick second child. Peter Chan directed this 1996 Hong Kong comedy. With Roy Chiao and Alan Tam.

Inconsistent family comedy/drama that alternates between delightful and alienating. The actors are strong, as is Peter Chan's direction of them, but the film as a whole struggles to cohere.

This film from Peter Chan is a perfect demonstration of the notion that Hong Kong Film is a cinema of moments. His fantasy/comedy/drama is both touching and alienating, and only works some of the time.

Usual leading lady Anita Yuen dons [unconvincing] old woman makeup to play an elderly woman struggling with her mess of a family. Alan Tam is her eldest son, a mama’s boy who desperately wants to cut the strings, and has plans to emigrate to the U.S. - without mom. Her eldest daughter (Teresa Carpio) has multiple kids from multiple fathers and she’s come home to annoy everyone with her brassy personality. Finally, her youngest son is a shy, seemingly slow fellow played by Jordan Chan.

Anita runs into Death (appearing in the form of a kindly decked-in-white Roy Chiao), who informs her that her time is up. She pleads for more time to realize the happiness that she seems to have missed. It seems she bartered ten years of her life away when she was a young mother and Alan was near death with a vicious fever. Her prayers were answered but she’s supposed to check out ten years sooner than normal. Nevertheless, he gives her a short time to put her affairs in order.

The fact that Death lets her slide bespeaks implications that are never fully realized. Furthermore, Anita gains strange powers after meeting Death, leading to lots of fantasy/magical weirdness that adds to the odd flavor of the film. A lot of the film is touching, but at the same time there are so many emotional crescendos that you’ve got to wonder when it’s all going to stop. The script is incredibly creative yet also so conscious of itself that getting lost in its magic may be difficult.

Acting-wise, the cast does a credible job, especially Anita Yuen, who proves her range once again. The final scene between her and Alan Tam is especially good, and when she appears as a young mother she’s utterly convincing. Sadly, the child actors are distractingly poor. Peter Chan is a strong director of actors, and he wrings the most from his cast (just not the kids). Ultimately, the film comes off as overstuffed and inconsistent, which means that you have to wade through the bad stuff to get to the good stuff. There is magic in there, but you have to find it.

WHO’S THE MAN, WHO’S THE WOMAN (Gum gee yuk yip 2)

Hong Kong (107 mi) 1996

User comments from imdb Author: Alex Donleavy from New Orleans, Louisiana

A fun sequel to "He's a Woman, She's a Man" that focuses more on the sex-comedy aspects and less on the Canto-pop music industry. The movie begins right where the first one left off, and shows the fallacies of fairy-tale endings.

As with many sequels, it should really be watched with the first one. But to its credit, this is a must-watch if you enjoyed the first, and is in many ways superior to its predecessor.

Leslie Cheung gives a wonderful performance, as his character goes through more complex emotions than in the first movie. He looks absolutely bereft and heartbroken in some scenes, and manages to elevate the movie from being just a pleasant retread of the first. And he makes you believe that the ending in this movie is hard-won and worthwhile, and not a result of caprice and self-indulgence.

Anita Mui is a welcome addition as the woman who stirs everyone's feelings. She's made to look remarkably similar to Anita Yuen in some scenes, and the chemistry between the two Anita's is uncanny.

Anita Yuen is fine: somewhat less endearing since she's no longer a wide-eyed guttersnipe as in the first. But amazingly effective as both genders, since she pulls off a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman.

The title is very appropriate: "Who's the Woman, Who's the Man?" and really pushes the limits of all the bizarre sexual entanglement possibilities. Demonstrates the no-holds barred wackiness possible in foreign movies.

Teresa Lee plays a cute and cheerful lesbian who only seems to wear bathing suits and rollerblades. (Chinese Rollergirl?) Fish (Jordan Chan), while just a sidekick in the first movie, gets to enjoy a romance in this one. Eric Tsang returns as the wise old gay man "Auntie," who is privy to the hearts of both sexes.

[safe] (Terry Brogan) review

Sequel to the 1994 blockbuster is witty and entertaining, but also slightly muddled compared to the first. This isn't a bad movie at all, but sometimes they should leave hit movies alone.

This sequel to the immensely popular He’s a Woman, She’s a Man is entertaining but problematic. Picking up where we left off, Sam (Leslie Cheung) and Wing (Anita Yuen) move in together, but the problems start right after that. Once Wing becomes a hit (she pretended to be a male pop singer in the first flick), the public perception is that Sam and Wing are gay. This bothers Sam, who’s grousing about lack of space, freedom, and your usual single guy blessings.

More problems arrive when androgynous star Fan-Fan (Anita Mui) shows up and romantically distracts the two of them. This hitch is worse for Wing ´cause she starts thinking she’s a switch hitter. Meanwhile, Wing’s pal Fish (Jordan Chan) tries to get Fan-Fan’s personal assistant O (Theresa Lee) in the sack, but to no avail. It turns out she’s a lesbian, bringing the whole film full circle in plot and theme.

The magic of the first film is lost, but that may be a production value thing. Perhaps it was the rushed shooting schedule, but this film looks poor compared to the first film. Contrast is high, detail is startlingly harsh. The original film had a polished look that the sequel lacks.

Also, it’s hard to pinpoint where the film's going. It sort of follows the first film’s construction, but it veers sharply as all the characters question their sexuality (except Sam, who went through that in the first movie). As a result, the bread-and-butter of romantic comedies (“Will they or won’t they?”) is forgotten and what’s left is far less beguiling than the original.

Anita Yuen's performance is a bit troublesome this time out. Wing goes from charming in the first film to shrill and grating in this one, though she recovers nicely in hour two. Anita Mui gives a poignant performance, Jordan Chan and Theresa Lee are simply terrific, and Leslie Cheung dominates the movie with his performance. Worth a look, but make sure you see the first one. Despite my affection for all the characters in this movie, I sincerely hope that they do not make another one.

Bright Lights Film Journal review Gary Morris reviews the “Who’s the Man” series, July 1997

COMRADES, ALMOST A LOVE STORY (Tian mi mi) A- 93

Hong Kong (116 mi) 1997

Where, where have I seen you before Zai na li, zai na li jian guo ni

Your laughter is so familiar Ni de xiao rong zhe yang shou xi

(It's in my dreams) (Shi zai meng li)

I can't remember at the moment I can't remember at the moment

Ah... in my dreams A... zai meng li

In my dreams, in my dreams I've seen you before Meng li, meng li jian guo ni

Sweetly, smiles so sweetly Tian mi, xiao de duo tian mi

It's you! It's you! The one in my dreams is you! Shi ni! shi ni! meng jian de jiu shi ni

—“Tian mi mi” (“Sweet Honey”) written by Zhuang Nu, movie theme song sung by Teresa Teng

A nuanced love story that spans ten years and follows the aspirations of two Chinese mainlanders who come to Hong Kong, the city of their dreams, and finally New York, where they blend into the Chinese melting pot of America. The film stars Maggie Cheung who takes a Hong Kong newcomer, Leon Lai, under her wings until a stock market crash signals the end of their affair, only to meet again three years later after he marries his childhood sweetheart, newcomer Kristy Yang. Their passion rekindles, but she becomes a girlfriend to the Chinese mafia for security and safety, and is forced to depart for New York, where they cross paths again in a sentimental, but really glorious moment that reflects a genuine love that fills the screen. Best Actress Award for Cheung, Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Film, winner in 9 categories at the 1997 Hong Kong Film Festival.

Written by Ivy Ho, the film overcomes genre categorizations and some of the sappy musical cues and cleverly mixes humor with nostalgia, all leading up to Hong Kong’s sovereign return to the Chinese mainland in 1997, which is initially eagerly anticipated, coinciding with a stock market surge, but also reality sets in as the market cools its heels just prior to the ultimate transfer back to the mainland. One of the characters continually fantasizes about American actor William Holden and McDonald’s becomes a setting for international public relations, where learning English takes on a sudden significance in the job market (taught by none other than Hong Kong cameraman par excellence Christopher Doyle). The film is immersed in a tender romanticism, accentuated by the songs of Taiwanese pop star Teresa Teng, who actually becomes a subplot to the main narrative, as her songs are adored by the Chinese mainlanders who secretly bypass the official Chinese censorship of her music, while the more cosmopolitian residents of Hong Kong openly show disinterest while secretly adoring her music as well. Teng becomes emblematic of the duality of a split nation, where Hong Kong opens the possibility for a successful reunification. On several occasions, Cheung somewhat ironically calls Lai by his official title, preceding his full name by the word comrade, a reminder of the mainland influence in their upbringing, but it adds an element of personal intimacy to their relationship. Westerners will most likely find it amusing, as it transforms communist ideology and becomes a term of endearment. Also amusing is the repeated camera angle from inside an ATM machine, where both jostle in front of it to make transactions, where Cheung’s bank account becomes an accurate measurement for their lifted or deflated spirits. But easily the most amusing element of the film is the use of Eric Tsang, noted for his legendary Hong Kong gangster roles, who is charmingly adorable and menacing at the same time, ordering mafia hits with complete nonchalance while instructing Cheung not to interrupt his back massage.

Chan, born and raised in Thailand, offers a unique, somewhat internationalized Hong Kong perspective, as he understudied with John Woo after attending the UCLA film school. Perhaps reflective of the social realist world of Jacques Demy, Chan beautifully combines realism into what amounts to a romantic love story, adding Demy’s charming use of missed opportunities, as in his lyrical pastiche THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (1967), where the couple, once separated, continually criss-cross past one another in a pattern of near misses as they go about their daily routines, so caught up in the humdrum of everyday life to notice the possibilities that might be waiting for them just around the corner. This frustration allows the audience to anticipate any number of possibilities as well, not all of them happy outcomes, such as the utterly devastating scene where Lai reveals to his wife the truth about his relationship with Cheung, or the vividly real moment in New York where a man’s entire life is reduced to a senseless murder, so by the time this story ends, there is a feeling that it truly earned this kind of remarkably choreographed finale. This is a charming film that tugs at our emotions with what is easily one of Maggie Cheung’s most timeless and heart wrenching performances, balanced by Lai’s soft spoken grace and naiveté, but also an intelligence and wit throughout that endears us to these characters and their lives, turning the world itself into a wonderful mosaic that actually matters to us more afterwards.

16th Annual Hong Kong Film Awards
• Winner - Best Picture
• Winner - Best Director (Peter Chan Ho-Sun)
• Winner - Best Actress (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk)
• Winner - Best Supporting Actor (Eric Tsang Chi-Wai)
• Winner - Best Screenplay (Ivy Ho)
• Winner - Best Cinematography (Jingle Ma Chor-Sing)
• Winner - Best Art Direction (Yee Chung-Man)
• Winner - Best Costume Design (Ng Lei-Lo)
• Winner - Best Original Music Score (Chui Jun-Fun)
• Nomination - Best Actor (Leon Lai Ming)
• Nomination - Best New Artist (Kristy Yeung Kung-Yu)
3rd Annual Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards
• Winner - Best Picture
• Winner - Best Director (Peter Chan Ho-Sun)[tie]
• Winner - Best Actress (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk)
Seattle International Film Festival
• Winner - Best Picture

Time Out review Tony Rayns

A nine-times winner at the 1997 Hong Kong Film Awards, Chan's film charts the lives of two immigrants to Hong Kong from Mainland China across ten years. Li Xiaojun (Lai) is a naive and gullible northerner with a fiancée back home in Tianjin; Li Chiao (Cheung) is a street-smart southerner from Guangzhou who wants no emotional attachments in her life until she hooks up with a triad boss (Tsang). Both of them receive extended sentimental educations, sometimes together, more often apart. Very well played, the central near-romance serves as a barometer of the social and economic changes in Hong Kong since the mid-1980s. The supporting characters and subplots are far less interesting and credible; a dotty old brothel madam with a thing for William Holden (!) is especially wearisome.

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: morono from Los Angeles

An unusual and illuminating portrayal of crossed destinies and the fate of love supremely played with tenderness and compassion by Leon Lai and Maggie Cheung. Their performances are heartbreaking to witness and bring a dignity to life's ordinary events. This story went right through me and will be one of the most memorable and poignant films I've ever seen. This makes it to the top ten in romantic love stories and should not be missed. The beauty of this film lies in capturing the understated layers of emotions which pass between two people who are destined to be together but have yet to figure it out. Peter Chen is a magnificent director whose sensitive style of filmmaking make all the difference in others who try too hard. An absolutely brilliant way to restore the faith in the universal language of love.

Comrades, Almost a Love Story Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader, also seen here: JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Comrades, Almost a Love Story

Despite its sentimental aspects, this youthful, semitragic tale of two Chinese mainlanders in Hong Kong–the wonderful Maggie Cheung (Actress, Irma Vep) and pop star Leon Lai–and their fluctuating relationship as friends and lovers is the most moving film I’ve seen yet about that city’s last years under colonial rule (though the film’s final sections are set mainly in New York, where both characters emigrate). I suspect many Chinese viewers feel the same, because the film cleaned up at this year’s Hong Kong Film Awards, sweeping no less than nine categories (including best director, film, screenplay, and actress). Set between 1986 and 1996, and visualized by director Peter Chan with a great deal of inventiveness and lyricism, this movie is full of heart and humor, capturing the times we’re living in as no Western film could. Watch for a charming cameo by Christopher Doyle, the premier cinematographer of the Hong Kong new wave, as an English teacher.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Top 10 of 1997 Chicago Reader

This was a watershed year in the history of Hong Kong cinema, marking the end of the city’s colonial rule: a good many Chinese and Taiwanese films and videos of 1997, narratives as well as documentaries, addressed the subject directly. One of the better of these efforts, Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together—which for most of its length addresses the subject indirectly—will be opening here in a couple of weeks. But for me the most moving reaction to this momentous event is Peter Chan’s lyrical and heartfelt love story, set between 1986 and 1996, which played at the Film Center four times in late August. Starring Maggie Cheung and pop star Leon Lai, this youthful and semitragic tale about two Chinese mainlanders who meet in Hong Kong and eventually emigrate separately to New York swept nine categories (including best director, film, screenplay, and actress) at last year’s Hong Kong Film Awards. At least as much as Titanic, it qualifies as a millennial statement, catching the spirit of the times like few other pictures; its recurring shots from within an ATM are only one instance of its wit and invention.

User comments from imdb Author: moviecow13 from northern California

"TMM" is also known as "Comrades: Almost a Love Story." The Chinese title comes from a famous song by Teresa Tang, a Taiwanese singer who is important to the movie. In terms of plot, this movie is essentially a very focused/HK version of Forrest Gump, so the two major characters keep bumping into each other at very particular moments (more on that in a moment). Basically, there is an HK bias against those who come from the Mainland, and Mainlanders like Teresa Tang, so the characters' love(s) for the song is emblematic of how various characters deal with the transition from the Mainland to HK: picture a very nuanced version of city mouse/country mouse, complete with a different language. The movie basically will give some indication of when a scene is taking place, then segue to another scene. So, the fact that one character is making a killing means that this is a time when the HK stock market was booming, or people were worried about the handover, or the stockmarket crashed. Knowing that these characters are about to go through something that everyone in HK experienced adds a new level of meaning to the very, very good dialogue. There is a great twist at the end that places every scene in perspective, but spoilers are evil. Backstory: Leon Lai plays the male lead; he is essentially a one man Chinese Backstreet Boy. The gangster is played by a mainstay of HK movies. Maggie Cheung is one of the most beautiful and talented actresses in the world, so seeing her portraying a McDonald's clerk is amazing. An English instructor is played by Christopher Doyle, the cinematographer for "Days of Being Wild," "Happy Together," and "Hero,"

Comrades, Almost a Love Story Mike D’Angelo

A man and a woman, in love but not yet lovers, prepare for the woman's departure. It is a bitterly cold night, and the man insists that the woman borrow a few warm garments to wear for the journey. He also, gallant fellow that he is, offers to help her to put them on. Standing inches away, he silently, patiently buttons her into an almost comical succession of sweaters, coats, and jackets, until she looks ready to hop aboard a dog sled and cross hundreds of miles of frozen tundra. His hands move clumsily along her torso again and again, his knuckles repeatedly brushing her belly and ribs and the hollow between her breasts; their facial expressions clearly suggest that their physical proximity is driving them crazy. Finally, the task complete, he bids her farewell. No sooner does he do so, however, then the pair's inhibitions suddenly vanish, and they begin kissing passionately, almost frantically...at which point the man begins to fumble at the buttons of the outermost layer of her wall of insulation, hurriedly attempting to unfasten everything that he'd just spent several tortured minutes fastening. Only by laboriously erecting a barrier was he able to summon the strength to raze it to the ground.

This hilarious, almost unbearably romantic scene from Comrades, Almost a Love Story -- one of the rare non-action Hong Kong films to get even a token theatrical release in the U.S. -- is something of a microcosm of the entire movie, which is one of those pictures in which two people who are self-evidently made for each other somehow take two hours of screen time to figure that out. The scene actually takes place fairly early on, and though the man and the woman make love, both then and on various other occasions, it will be many years, and they'll have travelled many miles (the movie is set mostly in Hong Kong, but ends in New York City's Times Square), before it looks like they may finally begin to live happily ever after. There are, naturally, impediments: Jun, the man (Leon Lai) is engaged to a sweetheart on the mainland, to whom he feels a strong sense of loyalty and responsibility (even as he cheats on her repeatedly); Qiao, the woman (Maggie Cheung) is more interested in finance than romance, and has no intention of wasting her time with somebody who neither moves nor shakes. It's the Qiao-related stumbling block that forms Comrades' most pointed and potent subtext, as the couple's progress is explicitly linked to the rise and fall of Hong Kong's economy; there were times when I felt that my ignorance of recent HK history was preventing me from picking up on key thematic elements, but the story is so superficially charming that I tried not to worry about it. Instead, I marvelled at how beautifully the coat-bundling scene works as central metaphor: Jun and Qiao seem perversely determined to invent as many needless obstacles as humanly possible before finally succumbing to the inevitable. The film's penultimate scene, in which they finally "get it," is consequently all the more moving. (The final scene is a winner as well, though I saw something I wasn't meant to see in the opening scene, and hence correctly guessed what was to come.)

A romance flat-out does not work if the lovers aren't intensely appealing, and Comrades, fortunately, stars two of Hong Kong's most charismatic actors. Leon Lai, in a performance that couldn't be further from the ice-cool, almost reptilian hit man he embodied in Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels, makes Jun intensely sympathetic in spite of the fact that he's undeniably a naïve, goofy, simpleminded dweeb (at times his dorkiness approaches Pee-Wee Herman levels). Maggie Cheung, similarly, doesn't shrink from portraying Qiao as a mercenary, sometimes heartless, occasionally even cruel woman, yet she never loses sight of the character's essential humanity. With two such likeable, root-for-able protagonists at its center, the film's anachronistically (by Hollywood standards) overcharged melodrama and maudlin tone are at worst forgivable and at best thoroughly enjoyable. Indeed, my only complaint -- but rather a big one -- is that the ways in which Ivy Ho's script (if the writer's name is, indeed, Ivy Ho -- there seem to be contradictory accounts out there that don't simply involve alternative methods of transliteration) conspires to keep Jun and Qiao apart are often so ridiculously contrived that my disbelief came plummeting earthward. In particular, I just did not buy a scene in which Qiao, after agreeing to tell the wealthy gangster with whom she was not-very-passionately involved that she was leaving him to be with Jun, abruptly chose to flee the country with said gangster, leaving poor pathetic Jun standing in one of those symbolic rainstorms that tend to drench poor pathetic movie characters at the most depressing moments in their lives. At moments like this, Comrades felt overlong and underwritten. But -- full disclosure -- I saw this movie the day that I returned to New York from a week-long visit with the woman I love (who has the audacity to live in San Francisco), and I was in no mood to be churlish. Yeah, I know: Awwwww.

The Hong Kong local on film: re-imagining the global Wendy Gan from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

COMRADES: ALMOST A LOVE STORY Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Bookends of Hong Kong's Golden Age FilmPhile

A Better Tomorrow (Peter A. Martin) dvd review

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Michael Dequina, also seen here: Michael Dequina review

Comrades: Almost a Love Story | Benevolent Misanthropy Ian Michael Hamet

Comrades, Almost a Love Story Ohio State study guide site

Harvard Asia Quarterly - The Pan-Asian Co-Production Sphere ... Jin Long Pao interviews the director, Summer 2002

The Boston Phoenix Movie Reviews Gerald Peary

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3/5]

San Francisco Examiner (G. Allen Johnson) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Ruthe Stein) review

The New York Times (Lawrence Van Gelder) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

Peter Chan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Maggie Cheung Picture Pages profile page

Cult Sirens: Maggie Cheung

Comrades: Almost a Love Story - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Teresa Teng - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Taiwan Pop Singer Sways the Mainland - New York Times Nicholas D. Kristof from The New York Times, February 19, 1991

"Teresa Teng, Singer, 40, Dies; Famed in Asia for Love Songs Sheryl Wudunn from The New York Times, May 10, 1995

"Teresa Teng in loving memory forever China Daily, updated May 8, 2005

"Pop diva Teresa Teng lives on in Chinese hearts". China Daily, updated May 12, 2005

"Why Teresa Teng Could Not Visit Mainland China". Lei Zhao from Southern Weekend (via Sina.com) August 3, 2006

'Sweet Honey', sweet memory of Teresa Teng -- china.org.cn March 31, 2008

YouTube - Tian Mi Mi - Teresa Teng on YouTube (3:27)

Comrades Almost A Love Story (4:21)

Video at YouTube.com Live Concert for Democracy in China before an estimated 300,000 people in Hong Kong, May 27, 1989 (5:07)

Tian mi mi - Comrades, almost a love story (5:32)

THE LOVE LETTER

USA (88 mi) 1999

The Love Letter Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader

A tender and sometimes very funny romantic comedy set in a New England seaside town, this is also something of a parable about what overheated summers can do to romantic imaginations. An unsigned love letter falls into the hands of various individuals who make creative assumptions about the author and intended recipient; many of them work at a secondhand bookstore. I suspect that a fair amount of the wit derives from Cathleen Schine’s source novel, but producer and lead actress Kate Capshaw (who plays the owner of the bookstore and has never been better), director Peter Ho-sun Chan (Comrades, Almost a Love Story), and screenwriter Maria Maggenti (who wrote and directed The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love) make a wonderfully harmonious team. The other featured actors--Ellen DeGeneres, Tom Selleck (also at his best), Tom Everett Scott, Blythe Danner, Geraldine McEwan, and Julianne Nicholson--all seem to be on the same wavelength as well. (The music by Luis Bacalov also is quite appealing.) At times Chan’s quirky direction fudges the storytelling, but I didn’t mind.

We open with postcard-style snapshots of a sleepy New England fishing town, still cloaked in morning mist. The denizens of Loblolly-by-the-Sea - look, this won't get anywhere if you just sneer... It wants acquaintanceship, a sense of intimacy, a feel for the gentle rhythms of the place. Close in on the gritted face of Helen MacFarquhar (Capshaw) on her morning run; out again on other local folk going about their rounds. Helen keeps the town bookshop, where congregate a close circle of friends and employees. Going through a pile of papers after work, Helen finds a love letter. Oh, her beating heart! But who could it be from? Suddenly phrases from the letter are on everyone's lips; a violin rhapsody swells. At this point an asteroid hits the sleepy town of Loblolly-by-the-Sea and wipes out all its inhabitants. And the voice of God (me) booms out, and says: 'Peter Ho-Sun Chan, give us a break. Who's going to swallow romantic lines about peeling potatoes? What kind of a name is Miss Scattergoods? Quit with this gentle real life stroll - you're not Ozu - and show us someone interesting.' Well! A drastic turn of events, but this really wasn't getting anywhere. And maybe the final act's a tad unfair - but that's life, too.

SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4] also seen here: PopcornQ Review

"The Love Letter," a snappy comedy about the heart getting ahead of the mind, has the delightful air of a classic Hollywood romance. It could have been made in the 1930s or '40s with the likes Katherine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and/or Myrna Loy.

In the '50s or early '60s it might have starred Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Albert Finney, Audrey Hepburn and/or Jack Lemmon.

In this case, however, it stars Kate Capshaw, Tom Selleck, Tom Everett Scott and Ellen DeGeneres -- who may not have the same kind of marquee power and built-in adoration, but a movie this enjoyable could get them there if it can find an audience, opening this week opposite George Lucas' 800-pound gorilla.

The setup is simple -- an unsigned love letter, poetic in a corny way that makes hearts and imaginations race, chances its way through a sleepy, picturesque, New England seaside community, begetting Byronic assumptions (everyone thinks it's for them) and inspiring unlikely affairs.

It first lands in the lap of Capshaw, a scatterbrained, lovelorn book shop owner who seems cursed by bad romantic timing. She thinks the letter is from a 20-year-old, banter-weight Adonis working in her quaint, over-staffed (four employees, zero customers) store.

Scott is said strapping young stud, home for the summer from college, who assumes the letter is from Capshaw.

Despite the age gap, he thinks she's pretty hot stuff (he's right -- she's more beautiful now, in her 40s and sans makeup, than she ever was back in her "Temple of Doom" days), and they tumble capriciously into bed together.

Selleck plays a hunky Jimmy Stewart type, a tender-hearted nice guy with an irresistible smile (essentially a blue-collar version of his role on "Friends" a couple years back). He's a local fireman going through an ugly divorce and he also thinks the letter is from Capshaw, who he's been holding a candle for since high school.

Ellen DeGeneres, who continues to prove herself a better actor than anyone suspected, is the book shop's randy, sardonic manager who gets all hot and bothered thinking the letter is from Selleck.

The cast also includes Geraldine McEwan as Miss Scattergoods, the town eccentric with a sexual secret, Blythe Danner and Gloria Stewart as Capshaw's mother and grandmother, and the adorably freckled Julianne Nicholson as yet another bookshop employee, an insecure, virgin feminist with an unrequited crush on the tan and surprisingly sexy Scott.

Directed by Hong Kong transplant Peter Ho-Sun Chan ("Comrades: Almost a Love Story"), "The Love Letter" touches bittersweetly on passion, confusion, jealousy, insecurity, sex, unrequited love and misguided emotion without ever losing its laughs.

It's reminiscent in mood, setting and slightly unconventional romantic air to "Roxanne," the comedic 1987 "Cyrano De Bergerac" adaptation that turned Steve Martin into a believable romantic lead. But "The Love Letter" has a maturity that film lacked, thanks to 1) a sincere and witty script by Maria Maggenti ("The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love"), who adapted Cathleen Schine's novel of the same name, and 2) its cast of second-tier players who are all more talented than anyone has given them credit for up to now.

The picture does, eventually, identify the author and intended recipient of the letter in a bit of a strangely scripted twist, but unlike traditional romantic comedies it doesn't end happily ever after -- it just ends happily.

This refusal to conform to formula and the unexpected strength of the wonderful ensemble cast make "The Love Letter" my favorite romantic comedy so far this year.

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

Nitrate Online (David Luty) review

Reviews on the Side (Steven Lekowicz) review

Scott Renshaw review [3/10]

The Providence Journal review Michael Janusonis

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

Reel.com review [3/4] Robert Payne

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2/5]

Harvey S. Karten review

[safe] (Terry Brogan) review

DVD Verdict (Margo Reasner) dvd review

CNN Showbiz (Paul Tatara) review Paul Clinton

Entertainment Weekly review [C] Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Joe Leydon) review

The Globe and Mail review [2/4] Rick Groen

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

San Francisco Examiner [Wesley Morris]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

THREE (Saam gang) B+ 91

aka: Three Extremes 2

South Korea “Memories” d: Kim Jee-woon Thailand “The Wheel” d: Nonzee Nimibutr

Hong Kong “Going Home” d: Peter Ho-Sun Chan (128 mi) 2003 (Trailer: 300k)

This film features three different takes on similar horror themes from 3 different cultures, each allows elements of the supernatural, with characters obsessed with alienation, madness, death, power, and love. The South Korean opener is a thriller called MEMORIES where one character who lies dead on the pavement after a fall from a high-rise building actually gets up and attempts to reclaim her existence, not knowing, herself, just what spirit world she lives in. There is terrific use of fast cut editing and sound; the entire segment has the look and feel of some lost dream world, where Hell is just around the corner, creating some squeamish screams from the audience. This feature has the most inventive shot, sliced fingers falling from the ceiling clogging up the bathroom sink. The second Thai segment called THE WHEEL was the weakest, but features some glorious puppets, which just happen to have the power to curse anyone but their original and rightful owners, but of course, who believes such superstition? The exaggerations here were comical. This would look great on Saturday afternoon TV. But one senses some very high quality production values, as the continued use of wide-angle lens photography is superb, particularly Christopher Doyle in the 3rd Hong Kong segment, GOING HOME, which is easily the most powerful, and by itself makes this film worth recommending. The film has truly unique and stunning images of children, who are left alone in a giant, nearly empty high-rise complex where they imagine, each and every moment, their worrisome fates, with another storyline that reminded me of Almodovar's TALK TO HER (2002) screenplay, Made by the same director of COMRADES, ALMOST A LOVE STORY (1996), a wonderful love story, this is truly eerie and hauntingly evocative, especially the use of the exotic tenor solo in Bizet’s THE PEARLFISHERS, “Je crois entendre encore” — What mad hope is this? I think I can still hear, hidden under the palm trees, her tender and sonorous voice singing like a dove’s. O bewitching night, exquisite rapture, O delightful memory, mad elation, sweet dream! Under the light of the stars I can almost see her.

Three Ted Chen from The Reader

A 2002 trio of stylishly gruesome tales from the East, the best of which is Peter Ho-sun Chan's muted and hauntingly photographed "Going Home." A cop (Eric Tsang) moves into a seedy Hong Kong apartment tower with his son and befriends the couple next door, who harbor a sad and unsavory secret. As in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, vast empty spaces connect past and present, though Chan also draws on the Chinese ghost story's common themes of fate ironically twisted and redemption that leads to love eternal. "The Wheel" by Nonzee Nimibutr of Thailand plays like an exotic variant of a Hollywood slasher, with shadow plays and evocative gamelan music decorating a tale of cursed puppets bringing death to a greedy and jealous clan of puppeteers. "Memories" by Kim Jee-woon of South Korea cuts back and forth between a husband trying to recall what he's done and a wife trying to figure out where she is. Kim borrows liberally from Hideo Nakata's The Ring and Christopher Nolan's Memento, but his Grand Guignol creepiness is deflated by a cop-out ending. In Korean, Thai, Cantonese, and Mandarin with subtitles. 128 min.

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Co-ordinated by Peter Chan's Applause Pictures in HK, this East Asian ghost story omnibus was produced to foster closer links between the region's film industries. Unusually for such projects, it has no weak segment. Kim's opener goes for psycho-horror: a man whose wife has gone missing consults a doctor about his constant dizziness and blackouts; meanwhile his wife wakes in an eerie satellite town that's still under construction and tries to find her way home. The pay-off is notably gruesome. Nonzee's centrepiece is the most conventional (it's framed as a cautionary dream), but redeemed by its elliptical storytelling and snazzy digital effects. The ambitious leader of a temple dance troupe considers founding a more prestigious and lucrative puppet theatre troupe, but his dream suggests that he will ignore the malign spirits inhabiting puppets at his peril. Peter Chan's closer is a minor classic in its own right. A single-parent cop (Tsang) and his young son take temporary housing in a condemned block where the only other resident is a reclusive herbalist from China (Lai). The doctor has an incredible secret (he is poised to bring his dead wife back to life, for the best of reasons) and kidnaps the cop to protect it. Chan's film does involve ghosts (a phantom child, a derelict photo studio) but its elegiac love story catches the mood of present day realities in HK surprisingly acutely. (A 'Director's Cut' of Coming Home running 61 minutes has been released on DVD.

Three Kyu Hyun Kim from the Korean Film Page

Despite its current maligned status, the omnibus horror format has a long and distinguished history behind it, from Histoires extraordinaires (1968), where European giants Louis Malles, Roger Vadim and Federico Fellini try their hands at adapting Edgar Allan Poe for screen, to the theatrical version of the creepy and whimsical Japanese TV series Tales of the Unexpected (2000), with shades-wearing Tamori deadpanning as the host-narrator from beyond. Three adds a cosmopolitan wrinkle to the anthology format, by having its three components directed by talented, up-and-coming filmmakers from South Korea, Thailand and Hong Kong.

"Memories," directed by Kim Jee-woon (The Quiet Family [1997], The Foul King [2000]) was probably a trial run for some of the ideas featured in A Tale of Two Sisters (2003). An upper-middle class salaryman (Cheong Bo-seok) has trouble remembering the specifics of the night when his wife left him: he is worried that something terrible has happened to her. Meanwhile, his wife (Kim Hye-su) finds herself stranded in an anonymous road, also unable to recollect recent events. Kim crams a lot of cinematic techniques into this short film, some of which provide more than a few good jolts, such as the nightmarish prologue with its long, continuous shots and virtuoso lighting. The most impressive achievement is the film's looks: Kim and his team, including cinematographer Alex Hong (Il Mare [2000], The Foul King) and production designer Jeong Gu-ho, captures the menacing atmosphere of a hideously bleached, barren high-rise apartment complex. "Memories" is frightening but not very original. The influence of contemporary Japanese horror is pretty obvious: those familiar with Ring (1998: NOT the American version released in 2002) and Audition (2000) in particular may feel a sense of deja vu.

"Wheel" seems to start out as a variation on one of the most oft-abused cliches of anthology horror cinema since Dead of Night (1945), the ventriloquist's dummy. Actually, the "dummies" here belong to a traditional theater troupe, whose master perishes in a suspicious blaze after trying to dispose of his favorite puppets. One of his disciples, Kru Tao, seizes this opportunity and appropriates the puppets, despite the rumor that they are cursed. As expected, ghostly apparitions begin to haunt his dreams: unnatural deaths soon follow. Directed by Nimibutr Nonzee (who helmed the beautiful Nang Nak: The Ghost Wife [1998]), "Wheel" feels awkwardly compressed from a much longer film: the narrative takes too many twists and turns, supporting characters develop passionate relationships in the blink of an eye, and the climax, involving very busy cross-cutting, is more chaotic than riveting. Stylistically, the film is a curious mixture of MTV-style rapid cut and expressive cinematography and the old-fashioned, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't scare tactics. In the end, I found the film's insistence on predestination far more disturbing than its rather tame horrors. In "Wheel," no character has a shred of a chance of escaping his or her karmic destiny: even the narrative is cyclical, with no sense of resolution even after all principal characters have been put through the wringer.

"Going Home" opens with a beer-gutted, gruff cop, Wai (Eric Tsang), moving into a decrepit apartment with his young son. Wai grows suspicious of one of his neighbors, Yu Fai (Leon Lai), a pale, bespectacled practitioner of Chinese medicine, utterly devoted to his wheelchair-bound wife. This chapter is not really a horror film but a sentimental fantasy about the power of love (and limits of the "Western" scientific worldview). Director Peter Ho-san Chan (Comrades, Almost a Love Story [1997]) extracts excellent performances from Lai and Tsang, uncommonly naturalistic for a Hong Kong genre film. Like "Memories," "Going Home" is gorgeously photographed (by the frequent Wong Kar-wai collaborator Christopher Doyle) and well designed, saturated with near-monochromatic, faded colors and making good use out of deliberately anachronistic costumes and props.

Three could have used some restraint. Even Chan's "Going Home," which takes its time to develop the characters, cheapens the impact of a very impressive CGI sequence by showing it twice, as if Chan doubted that the viewers would "get" it the first time around. Curiously, "Memories" and "Going Home" are similar to one another in their settings (high-rise apartment complexes) and themes (the protagonist's "memories" of their spouses): they even feature large-headed, sad-eyed toddler girls who resemble one another! Had Nonzee been commissioned to make an "urban horror" short set in Bangkok, Three would have been more cohesive as a feature film.

Although Three will disappoint some viewers expecting over-the-top gore or a roller-coaster ride, it is worth checking out for fans of the psychological or "subtle" horror, and those curious about how different cultural assumptions and visual idioms can create different flavors for basically formulaic stories.

DVD Times Kevin Gilvear

Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [4/5]

DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [3/5]

Reel.com dvd review [3/4] Kim Morgan

HorrorTalk Damnation Doormat

Dread Central DVD review Andrew Kasch

DVD Talk (Mike Long) dvd review [2/5]

Slasherpool Review

Korean Grindhouse Drew P.

PERHAPS LOVE (Ru guo · Ai)

Hong Kong China Malaysia (107 mi) 2005

Tuna from Asian Cinema Drifter (link lost)

My personally most anticipated film of 2005, and Hong Kong's submission to the Oscar's foreign film category comes in the form of a revival; Of both the musical genre in China and Peter Chan's directorial career. Perhaps Love is soon to be yet another classic movie-within-a-movie film, using the premise of the production of a musical as a foundation for most of the entire piece's musical numbers. Call it a cop-out, excuse or a plot device but it works, as the premises of both Perhaps Love and the musical within Perhaps Love are essentially the same. Which equals more than a handful of allusions and narrative intertwining as a love triangle emerges, spelling tragedy.

Director Nie-wen is filming a musical in Shanghai about a woman who loses her memory, winds up at a circus as an acrobat and falls in love with a gangster. However, her old lover comes back into her life, trying to make her remember, so they can restart their relationship from where they left off. For the forgetful woman, Nie-wen casts his girlfriend Sun-na, a Chinese actress now famous because of her work in his films. And for her old lover, he casts Lin Jiandong, who just so happens to actually be Sun-na's old lover from ten years ago. But things aren't quite tense and connected enough, so Nie-wen sets the stage, by casting himself as the gangster in the film as well.

Filmed in gorgeously white locations full of snow and ice, Perhaps Love's visual style, courtesy of Peter Pau and Christopher Doyle, sets the mood and tunes the viewer in to the locations with remarkable precision and subtleties that unexplainably work. Never have I watched a film, and later looked out the window fully expecting floating flakes, a white world and icy layers on every inch of water. It sucks us in to the snowy flashbacks of Sun-na and Jiandong's poor and cold living conditions in Beijing. It helps us find the bits of warmth in their emerging romance. Or the suffocating rush from Jiandong's plunges into the water. The attention to the atmosphere is totally void of the musical and that is how Perhaps Love finds its success.

Most of the story is told in normal scenes, that transition into high melodrama, complete with a romance script that could have worked as a simple, short drama. The musical is thrown in to add some life and length into this drama. Chan gets to express a gaudy side to the musical with Western-style numbers consisting of hundreds of dancers from carnival performers to burlesque dancers. Then there are the slow love ballads placed whenever applicable, or even to transition into background music for emotional scenes in the story. Song composers Peter Kam and Leon Ko stick to classical film songs of either big-band proportions or soft minimal pieces. And wherever the musical numbers are, they walk this very fine line of not holding the film back with their tight constraints, but also transitioning easily between plot and dance without a hint of awkwardness. How does Chan do it? With the movie-within-a-movie gimmick.

The two narratives tie in songs and twists easily over the compatibility of plots and characters, and allow Chan some creative genius in connections, like Sun-na's character's accidental memory loss, versus the real Sun-na's method of forgetting. For the real event, there's the dramatized movie-plot counterpart. It's easily touching once the emotion begins to seep out and the 'real' characters show their share of overblown dramatics too. Takeshi Kaneshiro hasn't shined this much since his similar character in Chungking Express. It's also been years since we've seen Jacky Cheung excel in as demanding a role too. Zhou Xun rounds out the trio with her great contrast of cute innocence in the flashbacks and cold stardom in the present. And of course, our three main stars sure can sing.

Though this film was long awaited because of its status as a musical, the joy isn't found in its genre, but through the story, its emotion, and the use of the songs to bring us along for the ride. It's no use comparing it to other modern musicals. It does not have a great variety, or catchiness to keep up with the recent show tunes of Western ones. But instead, Perhaps Love captures a level of romance and heart that has remained unachieved in the genre for years.

Moviexclusive John Li

A movie-within-a-movie, featuring a love triangle plot that parallel between several actors’ lives. Jealousy, hatred and passion ignited by memories of the past, collide and culminate through the intervention of a seasoned heavenly being, a modern Cupid, who shares their joy and sorrow

There are many reasons to like this film. It stars well-known regional faces. It boasts of spectacularly-choreographed musical numbers. It tells a love story. Above all, the distributor has done a good job marketing the movie so there is no way you would not have heard about it.

However, there still lies one biggest concern when it comes to all movies alike: Does it touch you? Be assured, beneath all the beautiful packaging and strong promotional efforts, this is definitely one of the most affecting movies of 2005.

The story is introduced by a guardian angel that has the magical ability of putting “scenes” back into people's lives. He visits a Shanghai studio where a movie being shot. The male star is an old flame of the movie's female lead. The problem is that she denies ever knowing him. But flashbacks tell us otherwise.

To add drama to the plot, she is also the movie director’s protégé and love. Fearing a rebirth of his two stars' love affair, the director casts himself in one of the movie’s roles. Soon, real life and reel life are inextricably intertwined.

It has been nine years since director Peter Chan directed a full-length Mandarin movie. It was 1996 when he made the successful Comrades, Almost a Love Story starring Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai. Since then, he has been busy producing pan-Asian films. With a huge production budget for his latest effort, he shows us Asian movie-making at its finest.

First, the perfect casting of the characters gets thumbs up. Heartthrob Takeshi Kaneshiro stars as the endearing male lead who symbolizes remembrance. The camera lens loves him, and every angle only complements his moving performance as a man holding on to his memories. Representing forgetting is up-and-coming Mainland actress Zhou Xun, who plays the female lead. Playing her role with some innocence, her cold, heartless and piercing stare is still a heartbreaker.

The ideal choice to embody the pain and jealousy of the movie director is definitely “God of Songs” Jacky Cheung. Thankfully, this character does not fall into the trap of being a one-dimensional villain. With Cheung’s powerful and faultless voice, he effortlessly brings out the agony and hurt of his character. With a good sound system in the theatre, one will definitely be affected with his resonating vocals. Ji Jin-hee of Korean drama Jewel in the Palace fame rounds up the cast with his very pleasing performance as the guardian angel.

The strongest selling point of this movie is its musical genre. Unlike traditional Shaw Brothers or Cathay musicals, this one will remind audiences more of big-scale musicals like Chicago, The Phantom of the Opera and Moulin Rouge! Not that this is a bad thing though, because the director has successfully used this genre to tell the story.

With Bollywood choreographer Farah Khan in this production, the musical sequences are a joy to watch. Khan’s previous mainstream works include Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001) and Vanity Fair (2004). Coupled with songs written by Leon Ko and Peter Kam, the emotions of bliss, love, betrayal, hate and loss are all effectively presented through the power of music.

The cinematography of the film is also nothing short of breathtaking. The lush Shanghai scenes by award winning Peter Pau are nicely contrasted with the cold snowy Beijing scenes by the critically-acclaimed Christopher Doyle.

With all these strong production values in place, the final and ultimate test of the movie is whether it manages affect audiences on a personal level. While enjoying the aesthetics and the music of the movie, do take a moment to think about the themes it is portraying. They are so real and stark, it will make you reflect on what love and memories are all about.

Purists may criticize the lack of resolution at the end of the film, but think about it, isn’t that what love, and on a larger scale, life, is perhaps all about?

25th Hong Kong Film Awards
• Winner - Best Best Actress (Zhou Xun)
• Winner - Best Cinematography (Peter Pau)
• Winner - Best Art Direction (Yee Chung-Man, Peter Wong Bing-Yiu)
• Winner - Best Best Costume Design and Make-Up (Yee Chung-Man, Dora Ng Lei-Lo)
• Winner - Best Original Score (Peter Kam Pui-Tak, Leon Kam, Leon Ko)
• Winner - Best Original Song ("Perhaps Love", performed by Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau)
• Nomination - Best Picture
• Nomination - Best Director (Peter Chan Ho-Sun)
• Nomination - Best Screenplay (Aubrey Lam Oi-Wah, Raymond To Kwok-Wai)
• Nomination - Best Editing (Wenders Li, Kong Chi-Leung)
• Nomination - Best Sound Design (Kinson Tsang King-Cheung)
12th Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards
• Recommended Film
• Winner - Best Actress (Zhou Xun)

Perhaps Love (2005) Ross Chen from Love HK Films

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich]

KARAZEN Reviews: Perhaps Love Trailer and Lyrics : Jackie Cheung ... featuring many movie stills

Twitch Todd Brown

Dedicated to the Hong Kong Cinema: Perhaps Love

User comments from imdb Author: DICK STEEL from Singapore

Epinions DVD review [Stephen O. Murray]

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [2.5/5]

A Nutshell Review Stefan S

AsiaXpress.com [Alvina Yeh]

Variety.com [Derek Elley]

DVDBeaver.com - Blu-ray DVD Review [Gary Tooze]

THE WARLORDS (Tau Ming Chong)

China Hong Kong (126 mi) 2007 ‘Scope co-director: Yip Wai-Man

The Times of London review Kim Newman

In 1850 General Xinyi (Li), the sole survivor of the massacre of his troops by rebel forces, falls in with two bandits (Lau and Kaneshiro). The trio become blood brothers and re-enlist in the imperial army, cutting through red tape to win victories that make them more enemies on their own side than in the opposite camp. Xinyi, an idealist who hopes to improve the lot of all the people, sets aside his conscience to order the massacre of surrendering soldiers, and becomes estranged from his comrades – aiming the film for a tragic climax involving multiple assassinations.

This epic of 19th-century Chinese history, a loose remake of the kung-fu classic Blood Brothers, is notable for its spectacular battle scenes, and for giving Li, hitherto known for blandly cheerful martial arts heroes, a chance to tackle (very well) a serious acting role as the doomed Xinyi. Hordes of extras are trampled into the mud or filled full of arrows, while sinister old men plot to maintain the status quo. More impressive than enjoyable, with a mile-wide streak of melodrama.

Kung Fu Cinema review [7/5] Mike Pollard

Not quite historical war epic or martial arts actioner, director Peter Chan's THE WARLORDS is a gritty anti-war film starring Jet Li, Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro that is inspired by Chang Cheh's 1973 kung fu classic THE BLOOD BROTHERS. It features pulse-pounding, semi-realistic battle action never before seen in a Chinese film, vivid imagery from one of China's most violent periods in history and a melancholy story with moments of gripping intensity in what is otherwise a routine saga of heroic bloodshed, brothers-in-arms and vengeance.

Both THE WARLORDS and THE BLOOD BROTHERS were based on a famous assassination of a Qing Dynasty governor in 1870. Ni Kuang's 1973 script developed a compelling back story set against the bloody Taiping Rebellion, suggesting that the governor was one of three friends who had broken a blood pact for love of a woman and the assassination was an act of revenge. It was a story tailor-made for Chang Cheh and he worked it into a stylish and lean genre masterpiece that helped earn Ti Lung a Best Actor nod at the 11th Golden Horse Awards.

Asia Pacific Arts [Brian Hu]

About as solid a costume action film as you can expect from Asia these days, The Warlords is gritty where it counts, and emotional when need be. Three men (played by Andy Lau, Jet Li, and Takeshi Kaneshiro) swear to be blood brothers in a time of war. Their bond is tested by the enemy, by morality, and of course, by a woman (Xu Jinglei). Their battles against attackers are drenched in blood, but never lacking in the "you-go-boy!" homoerotic visual ass-slapping that you'd expect from a remake of a Chang Cheh film. As a result, the early battle are quite inspiring; you definitely get a feel for how these men come to respect, then love, each other during combat. Unfortunately, as in the Chang Cheh original (aptly titled, Blood Brothers), the heterosexual relationships are for the most part bland, though Peter Chan does turn things passionate and Xu Jinglei does look more natural than the ever-useless Ching Li of the original. As for the men, Jet Li and Andy Lau turn in powerful performances as men conflicted by love and loyalty, although it's really Takeshi Kaneshiro's boyish smile that keeps the homoeroticism at full amp. The action is predictably large-scale and gory, although as far as gritty action is concerned, I prefer the anything-goes sloppiness of Tsui Hark's Seven Swords. And that pretty much sums up The Warlords, which won the Golden Horse Awards' Best Picture prize: it does everything right, from the action to the love rectangle, but leaves rather little to the imagination.

Twitch ("The Visitor") review

The Warlords is something of an anomaly in Peter Chan's career. Chan is most famous for charming romances and comedies like Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996), a love story between two Mainlanders (Leon Lai and Maggie Cheung), both of whom migrate to Hong Kong and later to New York, that spans several decades and Perhaps Love (2005), which details a love triangle that arises in the set of a musical film. Going Home, the episode he directed for Pan-Asian horror triptych Three (2002), is about a father (Eric Tsang) and his son who moves in a dilapidated residential building where longtime resident (Lai) keeps a gruesome although ultimately heartbreaking secret. Chan's films have always featured strong female characters (Cheung in Comrades, Zhou Sun as feisty movie star in Perhaps Love, Kate Capshaw as forty something divorcee who gets intimate with a younger man in The Love Letter (1999), or even Eugenia Yuan as Lai's dead wife in Going Home).

Thus, The Warlords, which Chan claims as his attempt to bring back themes of male camaraderie and loyalty of 80's and 90's Hong Kong cinema, is a totally different creature in Chan's growing filmography. In fact, The Warlords features no strong female character. Lian (Xu Jinglei), the object of desire of both General Pang Qingyun (Jet Li) and Zhao Erhu (Andy Lau), is treated more as a plot device rather than a definite character. She indistinctly beds with both men, with her motives and aspirations conveniently overshadowed by the men who dominate the picture.

Notwithstanding this evident departure in themes, Chan succeeds in crafting a genuinely engaging picture. Inspired by Cheng Cheh's The Blood Brothers (1973) which is based on a historical event wherein a governor was assassinated in the late nineteenth century, The Warlords is about three men, Pang, Zhao and Jiang Wuyang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) whose fraternal pledge is tested under the pressures of surviving starvation and violence dealt upon by the Taiping Rebellion (whose death count supposedly outnumbers that of the second World War) and later on, the political ambitions and intrigues that accompany their wartime successes. Chan indulges in detailing the three men's intricate relationship, starting from explicating their personalities, differentiating their goals and motivations, inevitably leading to a clash of gargantuan egos, especially of Pang and Zhao's, who nearing the end of the film have come into a deadlock in their objectives.

More gargantuan than the clashing egos of the film's main characters are the battle scenes, choreographed, directed and shot with masterful precision and an exquisite attention to detail by Chan and his crew. The battle scenes do not have the operatic flourish of Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) or the theatrical affluence of Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet (2006). Chan approaches the battles with a grittier and more realistic tone, with dust and grime filling up the frames and severed limbs and fallen bodies punctuating the action. The battle scenes are simply spectacular. There's an undeniable visual splendor and energy beneath the pandemonium and violence that Chan adeptly orchestrates.

The Warlords also features one of Li's best performances. His embattled general, the lone survivor of a failed campaign where all his soldiers died, is vulnerable and emotional, traits that Li's usual cinematic personalities hardly possess. He performs alongside Lau and Kaneshiro, actors who have earned acclaim from more dramatic roles, and gives the most memorable performance of the three. Above everything, The Warlords, proves that Chan is a formidable filmmaker, with the ability to stage stunning and sweeping battle scenes without sacrificing characterization and storytelling.

The Warlords (2007) Ross Chen from Love HK Films

HK Neo Reviews

Twitch review Stefan S, also seen here: A Nutshell Review

The Storyboard Guo Shao-hua

Lunapark6

Moviexclusive John Li

Film4 [Daniel Etherington]

Variety (Derek Elley) review also seen here: Variety Asia Online

Time Out London (Tom Huddleston) review [4/6]

DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Leonard Norwitz

DRAGON (Wu xia) C+ 79

Hong Kong China (114 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

While Peter Chan directed one of the gentlest and most hauntingly beautiful romance films in the past 25 years, COMRADES: ALMOST A LOVE STORY (1996), starring Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai, a film exploring the rapidly changing worlds of both Hong Kong and the Mainland that was about to obtain sovereignty of Hong Kong, a capitalist island in the midst of an otherwise socialist nation, Chan has since amassed a fortune directing and producing martial arts films. Wu Xia is a Western influenced martial arts extravaganza set in the historical era of 1917 in China, heavily stylized by dramatic set pieces, gorgeous ‘Scope cinematography by Lai Yiu-fai and Jake Pollock, using slow motion and spectacularly choreographed martial arts action sequences created by lead actor Donnie Yen, stop action photography used by Guy Ritchie in the two SHERLOCK HOLMES (2009, 2011) movies, but most significantly a love for the forensic techniques familiar to television audiences of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000 – present), turning this into an extended episode of CSI: Hong Kong circa 1917. The storyline, however, though set in a historical era, resembles a mix of many martial arts movies, while bearing a significant resemblance to Cronenberg’s A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005), where a quiet family man, Liu Jinxi (Donnie Yen) hides a secret past, once a notorious outlaw, now living an unassuming and humble life as a bamboo cutter in the fields with his wife Ayu, Tang Wei from Ang Lee’s LUST, CAUTION (2007), and two children.

The film continues the prevalent use of supernatural physical skills mixed with unheard of mental powers, creating a heavily idealized, somewhat comic version of a martial arts hero as a kind of superman. Their dexterity displayed by flying through the air, lightning quick fighting techniques, running swiftly over rooftops, or even blunting the effects of a sharp sword simply by possessing some divine yet ancient blend of mental and spiritual power that makes a man nearly invincible. As if that’s not enough, they also have a unique ability to kill a man with a single blow to the temple, nearly impossible to any mortal man, but a learned technique to those trained by the gang known as 72 Demons. After Liu Jinxi draws attention to himself by single-handedly stopping a robbery in progress, where an extensive battle sequence carries over into the public streets where bystanders watch in utter amazement as one man ultimately prevails against two battle hardened gangsters with criminal records, the nation’s leading forensic expert is summoned. The chief investigator is Xu Baijie (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a grim, overly severe detective who rarely changes the expression on his face, which is constantly seen in the strangest positions examining evidence, often using stop motion photography to simply intercut his face.

The film loves to show forensic evidence, delving into camera views of supposed actions taking place inside the human anatomy from a blow suffered in combat, where Xu Baijie tests his theories, drawing references to similar incidents he has examined in the past. Always respectful and polite, he takes quite an interest in Liu Jinxi, especially his mysterious past, quickly realizing he possesses amazing skills that few men ever master. A series of interviews between the two men becomes a battle of wits, playing a kind of internalized chess game, where Liu Jinxi never overreacts to the constant probing of a past he has little interest in resurrecting, while Xu Baijie is equally cautious not to reveal what he begins to understand. This psychological chess match contrasts the subsequent blownup extravagance of the battle sequences to follow, where both Xu Baijie and Liu Jinxi’s actual family come searching for who they each contend is actually Tang Long, a notorious gangland killer of the 72 Demons and second in command. The explosion of his past resurfacing into the present leads to a spectacular series of action sequences that also display a rare degree of tension and suspense. While the film will play well to the devoted fanbase of martial arts films, to other cinephiles, the lack of character development is a serious drawback, where outside of these two principals the rest are largely exaggerated and stock movie roles, where throughout the film little sympathy is generated for anyone onscreen.

Time Out Hong Kong [Edmund Lee]

The year’s runaway winner for the most generic film title, Wu Xia is a carnival of pulp cinema clichés, flashy visual effects, fundamental moral torments and brutal, melodramatic excesses that are often worthy of Shakespeare. Under the assured direction of Peter Chan (Perhaps Love, The Warlords), what could have seemed chaotic and derivative becomes wildly imaginative and thoroughly compelling. This stylish homage to One-Armed Swordsman – Chang Cheh’s classic from 1967, which similarly charts a formidable martial arts master’s struggles to lead a reformed life of domestic bliss – is one of the best Hong Kong films in recent times.

The story takes place in 1917 – as if anyone is keeping up with the historical specificity – and the gentle papermaker Liu Jinxi is enjoying his peaceful existence with his wife (Tang Wei, understated) and two children in a rural village in Yunnan. That is, until the hapless hero chances upon a general store robbery, where he somehow causes the death of two notoriously violent criminals while bumbling about. Because Liu is played by Donnie Yen (who also serves as the film’s action director and choreographer), and nobody is exactly lining up to see him just act, it probably takes the viewers less time than the visiting detective and forensic expert, Xu Baijiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro, alternately nerdy and manic), to dig into the hero’s unspeakable past.

But no matter. For the film’s myriad of visual wonders – ranging from CGI sequences that take us inside the bodies of unwitting kung fu victims to slow-motion replays of the exhilarating fight scenes, in which Xu wanders and inspects around in real time – never really let our attention slip. For what it’s worth, Chan has even presented his audience with visions of Xu’s conflicted alter ego walking outside his body – which may suggest an undiagnosed case of schizophrenia in most other self-respecting movies, but here it’s merely an embodiment of the character’s splitting faith in humanity. Wu Xia may be the first ever martial arts psychodrama in history.

It all sounds rather outrageous, and the film’s intriguing first half is indeed more detective mystery than chopsocky. However, as Xu’s persistent investigation ultimately leads him to the 72 Demons gang, a secret league of deadly assassins headed by a Tangut leader (Jimmy Wang Yu, who played the titular hero of 1967’s One-Armed Swordsman) and his wife (Kara Hui), emotions run high and the action turns fierce. While there’s an anti-gravitational rooftop chase and a thrilling bull pen combat to boot, it’s with the brief yet poignant human dramas – if not also musings on karmic connections and free will – that the film truly dazzles. And if Wu Xia never rises above and separates itself from its peers, blame the title.

Wu Xia Fionnuala Halligan at Cannes from Screendaily

Noirish and very more-ish, Peter Chan’s lunge into the action arena is a sophisticated and satisfying blend of martial arts and effects. It’s a film which twists and turns and switches seismically mid-way, but Wu Xia is a smartly-written thriller which kicks some new life into the genre and should perform well both in Asia and internationally, where The Weinstein Company holds a slew of rights.

Hong Kong actioners have never shortchanged their audience when it comes to lavish set pieces, but Chan, working with his star Donnie Yen as action choreographer, ups the ante here. A saloon brawl is first staged and then re-staged in slow motion as Takeshi Kaneshiro’s detective sits inside the shots, forensically dissecting the proceedings.

It’s hard to top this gleeful inventiveness, although third-act showdowns with the triad parents from hell come a close second, and Wu Xia launches a race across the village rooftops which is at once an homage to and a progression of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s own nods to the Shaw Brothers classics of old.

The look of Wu Xia is darkly lush, and the all-male dynamic is typically intense (see Chan’s Warlords). In a picturesque yet somehow menacing village in Yunnan Province at the end of the Qing Dynasty (1917), ordinary villager Liu Jinxi (Yen) becomes involved in a fight with two wandering bandits. Fortuitously, he dispatches them - or they dispatch themselves - without leaving a mark and the loving husband (to Tang Wei) and father of two small boys becomes the town hero.

Detective Xu Baijiu (Kaneshiro), all dolled up like Sun Yat-sen with a Panama hat and owlish glasses, is suspicious, however. He has an appreciation for the physiology of martial arts that leads him to suspect such a seamless coincidence -and a propensity for reckless actions, such as pushing Liu off a bridge to see how his chi will interact with the drop. The slow realisation that Liu is hiding his past leads Xu to the dreaded 72 Demons triad and the realisation that Liu may be part of kung fu’s most seriously dysfunctional family unit.

Wu Xia, though cleverly written, could probably have shaved off a few twists and dropped a couple of internal shots of organs exploding (“You have hit his Yummen Meridien!”). But it’s so inventive, while still being so respectful of its forefathers, that audiences will easily go the distance, especially for a film that slyly inserts a few musical sequences before wrapping in a deus ex machina.

Yen performs his choreographing and acting duties with aplomb, while Kaneshiro is solidly charismatic in the less showy role; not much is required of Tang Wei, but old master Jimmy Wang Yu’s return to the genre is a welcome one, and Kara Wai’s “mom” is truly fearsome.

Chan’s decision to engage two cinematographers, using Lai Yiu-fai for the action sequences and Jake Pollock outside has paid off here, and the look is fresh but quite dark. Water is a recurring motif, with the green of the paddy fields and the burnt golden barn interiors contrasting with the darkness at Wu Xia’s soul.

Wu Xia (Dragon): Cannes Review Maggie Lee at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 14, 2011

A detective comes across a paper-maker who may or may not be a renegade mass murder in director Peter Ho-sun Chan's latest film, to be released in the U.S. under the title "Dragon."

CANNES -- Bursting with light and color, and a torrent of martial arts action both swift and savage (arguably the best that lead actor Donnie Yen has choreographed for years), Wu Xia is coherently developed and stylishly directed by Peter Ho-Sun Chan to provide unashamedly pleasurable popular entertainment. Wu Xia created buzz before its premiere with acquisition by The Weinstein Company, which will release the title stateside as Dragon. Almost as picturesque as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the film has a chance of expanding overseas audience base beyond Asian genre ghettos.

Set in 1917, on the cusp of China’s transition from monarchy to republic, Wu Xia depicts the internal moral struggles of a detective and a paper-maker who may be a renegade mass murderer. Unfolding like a noir mystery in which Colombo meets CSI. It represents Chan’s ambition to bridge the gap between Chinese and international tastes by giving a modern spin to the genre, while paying homage to the golden age of Hong Kong martial arts films through the special appearances of legendary action star Jimmy Wang Yu and Kara Hui.

Donnie Yen plays the said paper-maker Liu Jinxi, who has settled in an idyllic, hospitable village in Yunnan for ten years after marrying single mother Ayu (Tang Wei). The peaceful life of his family of four is disturbed when he accidentally kills two robbers who threaten his paper workshop. The incident has detective Xu Baijiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) sniffing in his backyard. Xu is convinced that Liu’s real identity is Tang Long, a runaway member of the 72 Demons, a dwindling clan of Tanguts (former rulers of China’s neighboring Xixia kingdom) for whom rape, pillage and massacre are a way of life.

What makes the exposition novel in the genre is the attempt to peel away layers of oriental mystique surrounding martial arts through Xu’s quasi-scientific or homeopathic theories of investigation, such as forensic science, physics, acupuncture and qigong, which also adds an endearingly nerdy side to his character. However, the CG-rendered charts of human anatomy are used too frequently until they interfere with the flow of action.

As a self-conscious homage to the brawny, starkly violent martial arts films of which Chang Cheh’s classic One Armed Swordsman series (starring Jimmy Wang Yu) is exemplary, Yen’s devises close-contact combats with a graphic, muscular, vicious style that aims to kill with a single strike. The three act structure each showcases a climactic combat in distinctly different styles. Liu’s fight with a female Tangut (Kara Hui) is the most inventive, as it takes place in an ox pen where they have to skirt nimbly, yet dangerously around a stampede of buffalos.

After going through the motions in a recent string of dramatically unsatisfactory works, Yen and Tang both return to acting form, emoting in a quietly stirring manner. Aubrey Lam’s subtle and understated script not only affectingly depict the pure but steadfast bonds of a simple family, but capture the neurosis of both Liu and Ayu, who separately grapple with their scarred pasts and fear that happiness is transient. The most fascinating character, however, turns out to be Xu, for whom the investigation becomes a personal moral and intellectual quest, in which he weighs the impartial efficacy of law against natural human compunctions of remorse and compassion. He too has to exorcize demons from the past, thus deepening the theme of redemption, which applies to Xu as well as to Liu.

Jake Pollock’s luscious widescreen cinematography adds a dash of fairytale color to the moist, glossy rolling hills, meadows and bamboo bushes of the ethnically-rich Yunnan countryside. While hard rock score of Peter Kam and Chan Kwong Wing (the composing duo of Bodyguards and Assassins, produced by Chan) tends to be too relentlessly energetic at times, sound is used expertly for maximum threatening effect, especially in the presence of the chief of the 13 Demons (Jimmy Wang Yu).

The Reel Bits [Sarah Ward and Richard Gray}

Wu Xia: Martial Arts Majesty Mary Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 15, 2011

Cannes 2011. Rushes: "Wu xia", "The Tree of Life" Daniel Kasman at Cannes from Mubi, May 18, 2011

Kevin Jagernauth indieWIRE Playlist, May 14, 2011

Sound On Sight Michael Ryan

Twitch [Todd Brown] also seen here: Cannes 2011: WU XIA Review

Wu Xia | Review, Trailer, News, Cast | SBS Film Russell Edwards

Gordon and the Whale [Joshua Brunsting]

Dragon (2011) Movie Review from Eye for Film Andrew Robertson

Kung Fu Cinema [Albert Valentin]

Daily Film Dose [Blair Stewart]

Bonjour Tristesse (English)

Cannes Film Festival 2011 – Day 4: Wu Xia Matt Bochenski at Cannes from Little White Lies, May 17, 2011

Cannes 2011. Out of Competition. "Wu Xia," "Pirates 4," "Bollywood," More David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 14, 2011

Read our interview with director Peter Chan here Edmond Lee interview from Time Out

Justin Chang at Cannes from Variety

Chandor, J.C.

MARGIN CALL

USA (107 mi) 2011 Official site

Electric Sheep Magazine [Sarah Cronin]

Based loosely on the sudden demise of Lehman Brothers and set over a 24-hour period, the writer and director J. C. Chandor’s Margin Call is a nuanced, intriguing look at the actions and events that led to the bank’s implosion and to the wider, global financial crisis. In 2008, the collapse of the sub-prime market had roiled Wall Street, forcing banks to cull employees in mass layoffs. Arriving at work as usual, Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), a senior executive in the risk management department, is led into a fish bowel of a meeting room, where he is unceremoniously offered his redundancy package before being escorted from the building. But just as the elevator doors close, he sees one of his junior employees, Peter Sullivan (played by Zachary Quinto, also one of the film’s producers); Dale hands him a memory stick with a request to look at his unfinished work, and a more ominous warning to be careful.

The research contained on the memory stick proves to be lethal to the bank’s fortunes. By the time that the junior analyst has convinced his superiors that the data is correct, leading to a series of emergency midnight-hour meetings, the over-leveraged, under-capitalised bank is already on its knees - it’s only a question of when the rest of the world finds out. Gliding through the neon-lit Manhattan streets in the back of a limo with another analyst, Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley), Sullivan (originally a scientist and easily smarter than his superiors) marvels at the blissfully oblivious crowds.

Audiences looking for an anti-capitalist polemic will be disappointed. While the arrogance of the men at the very top is breathtaking, the director tries hard to portray his characters as realistically as possible (mostly avoiding the slick glamour that usually stands in for Wall Street), and sometimes even sympathetically - something that will no doubt draw criticism from some of the banker-bashing public. The first-time director has pulled together an impressive ensemble cast, who serve as a microcosm for the breadth of personalities that populate the financial world. Penn Badgley captures the cockiness of the junior analyst who’s only in it for the money, constantly speculating about what the senior staff are paid; he later ends up crying painfully in a toilet stall when he realises that his career is already over, his ambitions shattered. Demi Moore is surprisingly well cast as the very serious, stern and professional lone woman, who is sacrificed to protect the men higher up the food chain. Jeremy Irons is pitch-perfect as the assured, aloof CEO John Tuld, whose misplaced self-belief has blinded him to his own imminent end, as he brings down his bank by insisting that they flood the markets with their toxic assets.

Chandor has done an excellent job keeping the film accessible without dumbing down, offering insights into the culture that caused the collapse while putting a human face on some of the players (there is no shortage of reviews on the internet criticising the film for exactly this). The often repeated description of the film as a ‘financial thriller’ is pretty close to the mark - it’s a smart, entertaining film, and an impressive debut from the director.

Film Review Online [James Dawson]

Blessed with a release date that coincides with spreading Occupy Wall Street protests and mounting public outrage at the financial industry, Margin Call offers an engrossing look at the collapse of a fictional but convincingly criminal trading firm. Although seemingly set during the 2008 economic meltdown, the movie does not come with a date stamp, perhaps because director/writer JC Chandor thought its exact era was unimportant. After all, as the utterly amoral head of the unnamed company in the film explains, this kind of thing happens over and over again.

Several employees at the firm have been tapped for termination, including risk-management head Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci). On his way out the door, he asks junior analyst Peter Sullivan (Star Trek‘s Zachary Quinto, possessor of cinema’s most impressively dramatic eyebrows) to look at a project he didn’t have time to finish.

Staying after hours, Quinto discovers (with a priceless expression of wordlessly horrified realization) that projected losses on the company’s mortgage-backed securities are greater than the value of the entire company. And that’s not even the worst part.

One clever aspect of the smart screenplay is the way the bad news figuratively and literally ascends to progressively higher levels of the company over the course of a single night. Quinto’s first call is to fellow analyst Seth Bregman (Gossip Girl‘s Penn Badgley), a recent hire who has gone out drinking with their businesslike but relatively unbastardlike boss Will Emerson (Paul Bettany). Sufficiently alarmed at what they see on Sullivan’s screen, the three agree their next call should be to Emerson’s boss Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey). He isn’t happy about returning to the office at 11pm, but realizes when he gets there that the matter is above his head.

When company honcho Jared Cohen (Simon Baker) and icy risk management supremo Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore) also blanch at the bad news, there’s only one guy left at the top of the phone tree and the building. The firm’s billionaire owner John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) arrives via helicopter in the wee small hours of the morning.

The film refreshingly avoids screaming matches, physical confrontations and the kind of trashy soap-opera antics that sunk last year’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Instead, Margin Call is about the everyday banality of corporate evil. Although objections are raised and resentments aired, the interactions are adult and indoor-voice reasonable. There’s more contemptuous seething than contentious shouting.

Margin Call also keeps its economics viewer-friendly, although it’s odd that the title term — which refers to the need for an investor to deposit additional money in an account if holdings bought with borrowed money decrease too far in value — never is defined.

Irons is perfect as the kind of regally self-interested titan who doesn’t care how many people must suffer so long as he remains on top. Spacey is good as the conscience-stricken sales manager, but a subplot about his dying dog is distracting and unnecessary. That’s because the movie is at its best when it stays stuck in the skyscraper where everything is going down, down, down.

Cinemonkey [D. K. Holm]

Margin Call is one of the best films of the year so far.

The film is about information. It is about knowledge, about what we think we know, what we don't know, and to put it Rumsfeldianly, what we don't know that we don't know.

The writing and directing fiction feature debut of J. C. Chandor, Margin Call takes place in the course of 24 hours one night in 2008 in the Manhattan offices of a multinational corporation whose investment wing this untitled entity represents.¹ The morning begins with mass firings, halving the trading floor of the business. As a departing gift, the risk analysis manager (Stanley Tucci) gives a tiny USB drive to one of his underlings, Peter Sullivan (TV's Zachary Quinto, also one of the producers). Sullivan stays late while other survivors are out partying. Looking at the material on the drive, he figures out that the firm has bet on certain financial "instruments," as they are called, with a formula that puts the business as a whole in a precarious position. The result is that if the value of the junk loans they are selling decreases by a certain margin, the whole firm loses all its money and then some. Sullivan tells his boss (Paul Bettany), who summons his boss, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), a divorced father grieving for the death of his pet dog, who tells his boss (TV's Simon Baker, reuniting with his L. A. Confidential co-star), who finally summons the big cheese, Jeremy Irons, playing a certain John Tuld.² In light of this disastrous information, Tuld must make a drastic decision and compel his employees to implement it. Their reactions to this mandate are a cross section of moral responses to the financial crisis we still endure.

Everyone in the film wants to know something, or thinks that they know something, or are taken by surprise by things they didn't know. When Sullivan bids farewell to his boss, he tries to express something emotional to him, but his mentor cuts him off by saying, "I know." Throughout the night, Sullivan's co-worker (Penn Badgley) keeps wondering aloud what people make, from the strippers they watch to the levels of salary that his overseers take in. Supposed financial experts keep telling their assistants to keep it simple, betraying the fact that even they really don't know how to do their jobs. In one of the film's already famous, but most clichéd moments, Sullivan looks out at the Manhattan crowds on the streets and ponders what is about to happen to them as the economy collapses.3 It's one of the film's few missteps. Overall, Margin Call evokes some of the great '70s paranoia and politics films that people always claim to love but never go to see when they are revived in modern works, such as the films of George Clooney or Steven Soderbergh, to name two descendants of the style. There is a Pakula-like style to the film, and not just because it is about another financial crisis like Pakula's lesser work, Rollover.

Margin Call benefits from a terrific cast that also includes Demi Moore, Mary McDonnell, and Aasif Mandvi. It's closest analog is to the Mamet adaptation Glengarry Glenross (the Spacey connection), but unlike Mamet's works there are gradations of emotional attitudes among the characters and they are not all cutthroats.⁴ The film is probably too slowly paced and at times hard to follow for some (that knowledge problem again), but for those with the patience Margin Call falls into line with that small group of truly adult films that includes Shattered Glass, Breach, The Good Shepherd, and Michael Clayton.

1 The firm is passed on Lehman Brothers, and Mr. Chandor's father apparently worked for Merrill Lynch.
2 "Tuld" = "Fuld" but with some Murdoch thrown in for pan-malevolent measure.
3 Being "too big to fail," Sullivan's firm will imperil all the other firms on Wall Street, among other disasters.
4 In fact the film has been maligned in some quarters for going easy on the traders.

New York Magazine [David Edelstein]

“Margin Call”: Inside the dreaded 1 percent - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

Parallax View [Sean Axmaker]

World Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier] November 4, 2011

“Margin Call” and “Anonymous” Reviews : The New Yorker David Denby

Margin Call · Movie Review · The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

Margin Call: A Clever, Well-Acted Drama About the 2008 ... - S Dana Stevens from Slate

REVIEW: Tense, Timely Margin Call Evokes Occupy ... - Movieli Alison Willmore from Movieline

Review: 'Margin Call' A Compelling 24-Hour Slice Of The Start Of Kevin Jagernauth from The Playlist

New Directors/New Films 2011: Margin Call | The House Next D Simon Abrams from Slant magazine

Oscar Prospects: Margin Call | The House Next Door | Slant M R. Kurt Osenlund from Slant magazine

Zero Dark Thirty, This is 40, Margin Call, & More - Slant Maga Understanding Screenwriting from Tom Stempel from Slant magazine

Film.com [Laremy Legel]

Little White Lies Magazine [David Jenkins]

Too Late to Succeed: Dramatizing the Financial ... - Village Voic Melissa Anderson from The Village Voice

JamesBowman.net | Margin Call

Margin Call (2011) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

'Margin Call': Thrills, Chills of Financial Ills - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Edward Champion

Margin Call: Toxic Assets | New York Observer Rex Reed

DVDTown.com [Ranjan Pruthee]

DVD Talk [William Harrison]

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Jaime N. Christley]

Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Clark Douglas]

High-Def Digest [Luke Hickman]

Cinema de Merde [Scott Telek]

The Digital Bits (Barrie Maxwell) Blu-Ray

World Socialist Web Site [Stefan Steinberg] Two intriguing Berlin competition films: Coriolanus and Margin Call, March 11, 23011

Cinemablographer [Patrick Mullen]

Cinescene [Howard Schumann]

Cinetalk [Katherine McLaughlin]

Digital Spy [Ben Rawson-Jones]

Entertainment Weekly [Owen Gleiberman]

Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson

JC Chandor's "Margin Call" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson has all the links

Boston Phoenix [Ann Lewinson]

Margin Call | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Tim Ben Walters from Time Out London

Margin Call Review and Showtimes, Kevin ... - Washington Post Michael O’Sullivan

Denver Post [Lisa Kennedy]]

Chris Hewitt - Pioneer Press

Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents [Omer Mozaffar]

'Margin Call' review: Clinical approach pays off - San Francisco . Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle

Margin Call - Featured Articles From The Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] Roger Ebert

'Margin Call,' With Zachary Quinto - Review - NYTimes.com A.O. Scott

Electric Sheep Magazine [John Bleasdale]

ALL IS LOST B+ 90

USA (106 mi) 2013 ‘Scope Official site

Thirteenth of July, 4:15 PM, I’m sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried. I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. All is lost here—except soul and body, or what’s left of them, and a half-day’s rations. I’m sorry.

—Our Man (Robert Redford)

Of interest, director J.C. Chandor is the only one of a throng of Sundance participants since 1978 to ever ask the festival founder, Robert Redford (age 77), if he’d ever star in a Sundance film, which he gladly agrees to do here. And that choice makes all the difference, as you don’t see anybody else in the entire movie, an old man and the sea adventure with just Redford (listed in the credits as Our Man), the boat, and the sea. There’s a brief opening diary entry that the old man recites, but other than a single word outpouring of frustration, which points the way to the inevitable, there is no dialogue either. The script is only 31-pages long, and Redford was impressed with the detail of specifics. Essentially a one-man survival tale, the film interestingly provides no backstory whatsoever, offering no reference to who he’s speaking to in the opening narration, who he is, what skills he has as a sailor, or why he’s out there alone in the middle of the Indian Ocean in the first place on a 39-foot yacht called the Virginia Jean, some 1700 miles from the nearest land. In the darkness, he wakes to discover water leaking into his sleeping quarters, only to find a gaping hole in the ship’s hull caused by ramming into the side of a floating shipping container that apparently fell overboard. The inside flood of water into the cabin destroys the electronic equipment used to navigate the ship as well as pump the water from the boat. Displaying undue calm, he’s able to detach the yacht by cleverly hoisting his anchor and placing it on the other side of the container, and begin the meticulous process of repairing his ship.

This opening round of assaults is just the beginning, as he quickly patches the hole with homemade glue and pumps out the water by hand until tiring from exhaustion. As he sets his sights on the horizon, another storm is approaching. After a few brief minutes, he’s lost his radio signal, so there’s no way to send an S.O.S. While he appears alert and clear-headed, he makes the best decisions he can, under the circumstances, though the next round actually overturns his vessel, breaking the mast, where the side is leaking again. Thrown about the cabin like a rag doll, he’s knocked unconscious by the severity of the ship’s sudden movements, awaking to water already as high as his bed. Redford is seen constantly in motion, never sitting still, going through a series of deliberate procedures in an attempt to stabilize the boat as best he can, but the groans of the ship still at the mercy of the undulating waves suggest there is little time left. He prepares a life raft and a survival kit, briefly taking what he can carry from the waterlogged cabin, and after surviving through the night, watches his vessel slowly sink into the sea. Floating in the life raft, he studies what he has left, which includes a sextant and a map, where he calculates his position and discovers he’s nearing a shipping lane, which is his best chance for flagging down a passing ship. But when he taps into his emergency water reserve, one of the plugs accidentally opened, leaving nothing but seawater to drink. He devises a plan to place a cellophane sheet across a cut out container, collecting moisture through condensation, but the amount of water collected is far too little.

The director doesn’t utilize any experimental or avant-garde aesthetics, and sticks to old-fashioned cinema, allowing the camera to tell the story, where it’s not exactly a silent film, as sound permeates throughout, giving the viewer a feel for atmospheric conditions, as it only grows quiet during the calm. The film is largely a showcase for his ingenuity, as he has managed to keep himself alive under the harshest conditions, keeping his wits about him, never panicking, maintaining his composure. During the quiet moments, Redford studies an old book, Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen, helping him use the sextant, noting he is venturing into the shipping lanes, keeping his eyes peeled for help. When he finally spots a ship, how ironic that it turns out to be the cargo ship MV Maersk Alabama, perhaps the exact same vessel used in Captain Phillips (2013), as it looks identical. He signals them with emergency flares, and amazingly they pass close by, but they keep on going, leaving him in abject despair. Another vessel awakes him in the night, where he again lights flares, but to no avail, where the tone of the film shifts from continually doing something about it, to there’s nothing left to do. Redford is suffering from thirst, hunger, and exposure, and when he finally stops moving around, sitting alone and dejected, we see his fate etched upon his face. It’s in these final solitary moments that Redford is most impressive, where he’s worth his weight in gold, as his entire life feels like a weight upon his shoulders, becoming a hushed poem of unending anguish, where the solemn orchestral music by Alex Ebert very much resembles Arvo Pärt’s remarkable Spiegel im Spiegel in Gus van Sant’s equally tragic GERRY (2002), Intro - Gerry - Gus Van Sant - YouTube (5:21). An ultimately moving experience, one must note that Redford did all his own water stunts while carrying the entire film on his own, all underplayed in a minimalist style, where only what’s essential is revealed.

A man – alone in the middle of the Indian Ocean – wakes to find the hull of his yacht has been breached by a shipping container adrift. The seawater has leaked in and destroyed the electronic equipment the man (Robert Redford) uses to navigate and, more vitally, to pump the water from the boat. Without panic, or fuss, the man disengages his yacht, stops to retrieve his sea anchor and tackle, and then sets about patiently repairing the damage, even as tropical storms brew on the horizon. He will face a struggle for survival in which he will be stripped bare of everything but his stoicism, cunning and ingenuity.

J.C. Chandor’s film at first seems like a complete departure from Margin Call (2011), his financial crisis-dissecting 24-hour drama. In that film, tension is built on talk, as a piece of crucial information is passed steadily upstairs via one explanation after another. However, for all the yada-yada, talk is relatively cheap. Words are used to evade, seduce, cheat and betray. As deadly as silk dipped in arsenic, Jeremy Irons – playing the CEO John Tuld – gives such a persuasive explanation for the crisis to Kevin Spacey that he manages to persuade even the audience, who are still living with the consequences of the greed and irresponsibility of CEOs like him. So in a way, the decision to dispense with dialogue in All is Lost is perhaps more consistent than it at first seems. The unnamed man is obviously wealthy, but he is detached from the world and has some obvious regrets, which grow as his world becomes significantly more elusive. Although this might be a push, his attempt at some kind of ideal of individual freedom is endangered by the invasion of the wild and the free spaces by the corporate. The container spills high-priced, cheaply-made trainers into the indifferent seas. It is this banality that might, in the end, kill him.

The man – unlike Tuld and his ilk – is in a predicament not of his making. His boat is well supplied for every contingency, and what skills the man does not already possess – and he seems to be more than an able seaman – he is willing to learn, pulling down a book on celestial navigation and getting down to some serious study as soon as he has the time. This could well be the performance of Robert Redford’s career. The vanilla-flavoured actor has become increasingly bland and gauzy with age, playing off the memory of better films and, unlike Clint Eastwood or the late Paul Newman, unwilling to accept and play to his age. Even in the forgettable The Company You Keep (2012), he has a crazily young daughter. Here, finally, age becomes part of the character, as the well-kept man slowly falls to pieces under the unrelenting physical struggle, the beating sun, the deprivation and salt water. Redford’s performance is unshowy. His character is lost (and found) in the pains, excitements and pleasures of just doing things. His emotional inner life is expressed by a small gesture, the retrieving of a personal item, a small sign of pique, the sight of him shaving carefully as he awaits a storm that he knows is approaching and might well take his life.

This is an action film in which the actions are all vitally important, unlike most action films in which a law of diminishing returns sees the explosion of the world itself as a ho-hum eventuality. All is Lost is the kind of action film a young Hemingway might have directed, should he have turned his hand to it. It is a small film that is underwritten by the epic nature of life and death and the ocean. Without words, it avoids saying anything: there are no audience surrogates (think Wilson in Cast Away, 2000), no monologues (aside from an opening prologue) and no prayers. And yet despite this, or perhaps because of it, All is Lost is a film that very eloquently provides an argument for the survival of heroes, or at least one hero.

Tiny Mix Tapes [Alan Zilberman]

“…it plays like a visual poem due to the lack of dialog and the emphasis on music.”

All is Lost is a fascinating meditation on survival and calamity, making this one of the sadder films I’ve seen this year. However, All is Lost is also one of the coldest movie experiences I’ve had this year, as it skates by in one-hundred and six long minutes with maybe eight lines of dialog, miraculous use of the ocean, a soft but careful performance by Robert Redford, and a riveting situation at hand. If anything, it’s another film that proves how much you can do with so little and that a confidence-boost for Redford and the masses that the man can still do things people half his age struggle to do.

Robert Redford plays a presumably experienced seafarer (billed as “Our Man” in the credits), who finds himself in dire circumstances when a large shipping crate collides with his boat and leaves a gaping hole in the side of his boat. The hole is big enough to allow massive amounts of water to drench what looks to be a pretty well-furnished home, complete with books, a large bed, a sofa, and an assortment of food. He patches it with paint and excess materials, but quickly spots a large, destructive storm in the distance. The remainder of the film plays like someone is making life and survival an endurance test for “Our Man,” and shows his methods of survival when all seems to be entirely lost.

Credit has to go to Redford, who, to my understanding, did all his own water stunts in addition to carrying the entire film on acting minimalism. Few words are spoken in All is Lost, and Redford uses the silence to showcase his actions and his response to the situation. This is the beauty of the film, as it plays like a visual poem due to the lack of dialog and the emphasis on music. Alex Ebert’s score makes up for the lack of dialog, utilizing everything in a subtle way, not relying on dramatic bangs and booms in the synthesizers to create for a pleasant mood or tonality to the picture.

The film’s greatest strength (and ultimate problem) is in its lack of dialog. Due to the minimal dialog and lack of conversation since Redford remains the only actor in the film, the film is inherently heavy on self-contemplation and viewer-thought. We are constantly thinking about what will happen next, what outcome will some situations have, and how “Our Man” will respond to the troubles that face him. This works because director J.C. Chandor gives the audience the impressionistic benefit of the film being exactly what we want it to be.

On an opposite note, that offers for little character development, which will be one of the reasons All is Lost will alienate itself from universal praise and possible awards. However, Chandor’s response to such criticism could be that we shouldn’t really need a reason to sympathize with Redford’s nameless character other than he is human and he is in trouble and that sympathy for somebody with those two characteristics is simply our nature. He has a point; everything else after those two things is pretty trivial in the broader picture. However, in the grand scheme, I blame this for an emotional resonance weaker than the one I had in Life of Pi, a film undoubtedly more emotional.

All is Lost is a strong film in terms of mood and score. I have no idea what audiences will think of it. Some will hail it for similar reasons, and others will loathe it for not getting more to the bottom of things and leaving each scene with some element of ambiguity. I could feel some anger as I exited the theater after being met with the predictably vague ending. I walked out totally satisfied because (a) its ending was on-par with one that would make me happy and (b) because the film stayed true to its roots and Chandor, as a writer and director, never compromised his vision.

All Is Lost begins with a quiet, matter-of-fact voice over about death and defiance. A man explains why he’s given up and the simplicity of the language is jarring; it’s like Hemingway, except without the exaltation of courage. JC Chandor’s follow-up to the excellent Margin Call is a complete reversal in ambition and scope: instead of a dialogue-heavy ensemble drama, we have one character who barely says a word. All Is Lost is nonetheless riveting thanks to its indifferent logic, and how nature cares little for our survival.

The credits list Robert Redford as “Our Man.” We learn from a title card that he’s 1700 miles off the coast of Sumatra, and he’s already in trouble when we meet him. He’s on his boat The Virginia Jean, and he’s alone. A shipping container fell off a freighter, and struck a small hole in the boat’s side. The man does not panic when he sees the container: he’s confused, and then starts to solve the problem. He does this wordlessly, and without any apparent fear or anger. Days pass, and then storms arrive. The Virginia Jean sinks, so the man sets off in the life raft. He hopes to drift toward a shipping lane where maybe a larger ship will notice him. Maybe.

The man’s situation is not a disaster from get-go. Unlike many survivals films that use catastrophe as a catalyst, Chandor builds the man’s situation inexorably. He’s only one move ahead, at least until nature pitilessly upends his hard work. It is fascinating to watch the man think: he sometimes communicates with his eyes, and Chandor uses the man’s improvisations to help us understand the limits of the boat, as well as what resources the man has. This type of filmmaking is highly subjective. Unlike The Perfect Storm, which zoomed out to give us the greater context of the storm, Chandor instead opts to keeping the action in the confines of the boat. It’s scary and disorienting (in the best way), and they only way we get through is the man’s taciturn nature.

I talk to myself sometimes. I have no idea whether it’s more or less than the average person, but when I’m riding my bike or walking through my apartment I sometimes blurt out song lyrics, profanity, or utter nonsense. I mention this because All Is Lost is noteworthy for how the man barely speaks. At first it seems like a flourish: Chandor challenges himself and the viewer by removing what’s most common in modern film. But the longer we stay with the man, the more plausible it all seems. Not many people would elect to spend time alone in the middle of the ocean, but I imagine there’s a shift in the ones who do. They’re comfortable with themselves to the point where speech isn’t required, and the film reflects that.

Early reviews from Cannes were ecstatic about Redford’s performance. One critic said he gives “the performance of a lifetime,” and the phrase “tour de force” was thrown around a lot. It’s a great performance, this is true, but not in the way these critics think. Redford’s work is reserved and workmanlike; there can be no tour de force when an actor turns down his charisma for the good of the film in question. Redford is compulsively watchable, but it’s because he shows how the man thinks and nothing in film inspires more careful attention.

There are two intriguing moments where we something about the man: the first is what happens he opens an untouched box, and the other is when he finally allows himself to curse his misfortune. These focal points raise more questions and answers, yet have an oblique way of addressing the grim language from the opening voice over. Chandor does not make a fuss of these moments, and they’re specific enough so that the man is more than a victim of circumstance.

It is easy to compare All Is Lost with Gravity, another minimalist survival story where one person must overcome an unforgiving environment. Whereas Gravity is technical marvel, All Is Lost is a triumph of storytelling. Chandor and Redford have the confidence to eschew anything too dramatic and find the suspense elsewhere. The storm scene is nowhere near as riveting as the moments leading up to it, in which the man realizes what’s about to happen and plans accordingly. This is not a story of a man who triumphs over nature. It’s the story of a man who succumbs to it. All Is Lost ends on a positive note, one that’s not entirely necessary, yet it’s earned by Chandor, Redford, and a character who is too smart and stubborn to be brave.

Death of a Sailsman: J.C. Chandor's All Is Lost - Cinema Scope Adam Nayman

Robert Redford dies at the end of All Is Lost. This is not, strictly speaking, a spoiler, as the climax of J.C. Chandor’s sophomore feature is calculatedly ambiguous—an existential Choose Your Own Adventure, if you will. The final image of Redford’s unnamed seaman reaching out to grasp the outstretched hand of an unseen rescuer is equally readable as a deus ex machina or a death dream; the faintly surreal quality of the visuals could indicate either genuine disorientation or a merciful, fatal hallucination. If I happen to come down on the side of the latter, it has less to do with the staging of the money shot than the way that it gets there in the first place. Of all the recent extreme-survival narratives in American cinema—from 127 Hours (2010) to Life of Pi (2012) to this year’s Gravity, Captain Phillips, and 12 Years a Slave—All Is Lost has the most powerful sense of inexorability. It also happens to be the most accomplished piece of filmmaking on that list by a nautical mile.

Though Chandor’s decent 2011 debut Margin Call featured lots of good actors crammed together in board rooms, it felt more artistically constrained than authentically claustrophobic: if the film’s long day’s journey into financial nightmare suggested an especially topical off-Broadway play, the glossy, HBO-ready cinematography kept it lodged in the realm of the comfortably glib. Where Chandor truly excelled was in his ability to perk up such oft-somnolent performers as Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons and rein in show-offs like Stanley Tucci, while his clever deployment of co-producer Zachary Quinto as an investment-firm Chicken Little (arching those Vulcanized eyebrows in alarm rather than aloofness) suggested that he was as much attuned to individual actors as ensemble dynamics—a rare inheritor of the Sidney Lumet tradition at a time when so many indie kids are strenuously seeking to evoke Terrence Malick.

There are a few lyrical moments in All Is Lost, but for the most part the film is an admirable case of form following function: the camera is always where it needs to be instead of where an overweening director might think to place it. And although the film’s almost total lack of dialogue is clearly a screenwriter’s conceit, the director’s choices are genuinely judicious. Starting with the opening voice-over, Chandor lets a very little bit of poetry go a long way: Redford’s reading comes over a shot of a massive, floating metallic object (we’ll later come to recognize it as the shipping container that crashes into the protagonist’s yacht, irreparably denting its hull), the obliqueness of the composition belying the plangency of the words, which eventually coalesce into an apology of sorts—an admission of failure tinged with guilt. While this tactic of beginning at or near the endpoint of a story and then circling back to the kickoff often undermines any sense of narrative drive, it works here because it establishes a meditative tone just long enough for it to be brutally punctured. The first thing we see in the movie proper is water seeping into the protagonist’s sleeping quarters, and while it’s not difficult to connect the dots between this little trickle and the water-logged visual of the prologue, the foreknowledge that things will not end well clarifies the film’s theme—which, simply put, is the inevitability of death.

Not that Redford’s character goes down without a fight. In the early stages, he’s surprisingly levelheaded about the fact that his boat has had its side smashed in, acting quickly but methodically to dislodge the container and try to repair the leak. These early passages are rich in thick, tactile details (e.g., the brown solvent that he uses to treat the hole before patching over it), but there’s a hovering sense of unease that has less to do with the approaching storm than some carefully repressed interior reckoning. Adrift and alone, all Redford’s solo voyager can do is to focus intensely on the state of his vessel, which gradually comes to seem like an extension of his body; he has to maintain the former in order to secure the safety of the latter. That the vessel betrays its fragility well before its passenger suggests that old maxim about spirit and flesh, and the unfortunate reality that the one will always be subordinate to the other.

Using a harrowing physical scenario to access grander metaphysical themes is a tried-and-true tactic, and Chandor’s film acquits itself far more honourably within this tradition than others of its contemporaries. Where Life of Pi’s concluding twist—that its whole believe-it-or-not adventure story was an allegory all along—is a self-saluting gesture passed off as narrative sleight-of-hand, the minimalist spaciousness of All Is Lost invites deeper interpretation in real time instead of saving it up for a big finish. And while Gravity briefly hits pause on its video-game storytelling to shove in some quick-hit sociopolitical commentary, as Sandra Bullock’s flailing astronaut makes her way from a stalled American spacecraft to a functioning Chinese one, complete with smiling Buddha figurine on the dashboard, All Is Lost sees and raises that ready-made resonance in a late shot of Redford trying and failing to flag down an internationally branded freighter: the literal and proverbial little guy bobbing helplessly in capitalism’s unheeding wake. And when it comes to vertiginous perspectives, Chandor tops Ang and Alfonso both: none of Pi or Gravity’s CGI-assisted swoops through sea, sky or space is as harrowing as a dangling camera capturing the sight of a 77-year-old man’s legs wrapped around a 60-foot beam, a breathless shot that offers a genuine three-for-one sense of peril—for cameraman, character and actor—all at once.

That contrast between the physical vulnerability of the aged man onscreen and the aura of invincibility surrounding the aged man who plays him is, of course, the great central tension of All Is Lost. Rather than writing yet another encomium to Redford’s award-worthy under-acting in this movie (not that one isn’t entirely deserved), I’ll just say that it was an especially smart move for Chandor to use one of the truly Teflon American movie stars in a part that pretty quickly strips away that untouchable surface. No less than Warren Beatty and more consistently than his old pal Paul Newman, Redford always seemed to have bigger fish to fry than being a star. When he and Beatty won directing Oscars in succession for Ordinary People (1980) and Reds (1981), it seemed less like consolation prizes for being overlooked at their day jobs than recognition of their true ambitions. Where the equally effortlessly glamorous Newman could wear that famous face and still disappear into roles, Redford always seemed to be playing some version of himself: an affable (if sometimes strenuously intense) genetic front-runner whose beauty was his birthright. The WASP-without-a-stinger quality that made him perfect for The Candidate (1972) and The Way We Were (1973) also rendered him somewhat unfit for duty in the decade’s true keynote works; even in his signature role as Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men (1975), he’s more the handsome blonde front-man to Dustin Hoffman’s hard-driving Carl Bernstein.

But then Hoffman could never have done All Is Lost, and neither could Al Pacino or Robert De Niro, and not only because they’ve all lately (over)exposed themselves as comedy-cameo clowns. (Newman could have done it, of course). Redford’s relative reticence to appear on screen in the years that he spent building the Sundance brand has made of him a quiet mentor figure rather than another embarrassing New Hollywood hangover. Chandor is one of Redford’s many Sundance Kids, and he’s a prodigious son, a smart operator who isn’t above using his father figure to give his old-man-and-the-sea yarn some extra-textual ballast. Like David Lynch’s sublime The Straight Story (1999), Chandor’s film is an earned sentimental journey, no matter that it substitutes Redford’s twilight handsomeness for Richard Farnsworth’s considerably more homespun mug. Offering up the grim spectacle of an icon being broken down piece by piece, All Is Lost collapses the gulf between audience and movie star more effectively and affectingly than any film I can remember.

All is Lost (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste Magazine Travis Maiuro

In his book Sailing Alone Around the World, Joshua Slocum recounts the true-life tale of when, as a fifty-one-year-old man, he departed Boston in a ramshackle boat and circumnavigated the globe, arriving back in Massachusetts three years later. The book was published in 1900, and according to the back cover of the Barnes & Noble Classics edition, it is regarded as one of literature’s greatest voyage stories. The book not only tackles Slocum’s adventures through monstrous storms and run-ins with pirates, but it also ruminates on the power of solitude.

Perhaps more interesting than the story in this book is what happened nine years later, when the sixty-year-old Slocum sailed off from Martha’s Vineyard and was never seen again. It’s a story that would make for an enticing film, if handled correctly. The open sea is like a femme fatale, seductive and beautiful, but also dangerous and deadly. Slocum met this femme fatale and she had her way with him, as she does with Robert Redford in J. C. Chandor’s pensive and compelling film.

The film begins with Redford’s septuagenarian protagonist already lost at sea. Title cards inform us that he is 1,700 nautical miles from Indonesia’s Sumatra Straits. The camera stares into a soft, early morning purple horizon against an eerily quiet ocean as Redford’s resigned and fear-tinged voice-over carries over the shot, “All is Lost here, except for soul and body.” These words not only apply to this man’s present situation as he is stranded at sea, but also to the film itself. Chandor strips the film down to its bare bones, to the soul and body of cinema—to the essence of the art form—and it’s powerful as hell.

All Is Lost could easily be a silent film and it practically is—dialogue is nearly absent, which is one reason the film feels so real. There are no clumsy moments in which Redford’s character talks to himself, simply for the sake of letting the audience know what he’s thinking. The same goes for voice-over, the only instance of which is the opening monologue that lasts no more than a minute and a half.

Simply put, the film is image and story. To be truthful, it’s debatable whether this film actually has a story. It is purely an account of one man’s quest to stay alive. A man wakes up one morning in the cabin of his yacht to find that his solo voyage has gone disastrously wrong. Water gushes through a now gaping hole in the side of his boat, compliments of a Chinese shipping container floating adrift in the Indian Ocean. And of course, it only goes downhill from there. As viewers, we’re just along for the ride, unable to offer help from the other side of the screen, but wanting to do so. Instead, we’re sitting back and watching this man struggle in his attempts to salvage his boat, signal for help, ration his food, and cope with solitude.

A number of survival films recently have been pitting man against nature and the prospect of death—Into the Wild (2007), 127 Hours (2010), Life of Pi (2012)—but All Is Losttakes risks those films do not. Along with the chancy move of very minimal dialogue, the film refuses to rely on expository flashbacks as a crutch to give us a peek into the life of Redford’s character and a sense of where he is coming from. Is he—or was he—a married man? His boat is named Virginia Jean—perhaps after a wife? Does he have kids? To whom does he address his words in the opening and only voice-over? Why is he in the Indian Ocean? There are no answers to these questions—we don’t even get the guy’s name. For all we know, he could be Jeremiah Johnson of the sea. We’re left watching a stranger of a man, but, at the same time, he’s not a stranger at all—his anonymity allows viewers to empathize, to share in his apprehension and dread. Such questions, in the end, don’t really matter. We hardly know him, but we still fear for him—he’s a blank canvas onto which viewers can project themselves. Chandor uses the guise of a survival film to present a mirror to the audience, a mirror that reveals two emotions overpowering all others: fear and regret.

Redford’s character is credited as “Our Man.” Our Man initially handles the hole in his boat with a level head, almost casually, infusing the character with a meditative quietness. With this role, it’s as if Redford, while looking death in the face, is looking back on a long and varied career in which he directed and starred in a few iconic films, along with creating a now internationally renowned film festival. He’s still sporting his trademark mop of boyish hair, but his face is now lined and grizzled, especially when squinting against the blinding sun reflecting off the sea. With no dialogue, Redford’s face is the main performer, and with subtlety, he gives so much. In one of the few vocal moments, after running out of canned water, Our Man finally breaks down and Redford, screaming to the heavens, lets out possibly one of the most heartbreaking “fucks” ever to resonate in the cinema.

The script, written by Chandor, totals a not-so-massive thirty-two pages—a bit of a turnaround from his previous well-received Margin Call (2011), an intense, dialogue-driven look at the hours leading up to the world financial crisis. Like All Is Lost, it’s a bit of a survival film, darkly cynical in tone. But unlike All Is Lost, Margin Call comes off almost as a stage production, taking place primarily on one floor. One could argue that All Is Lost, set on a boat and then a raft, is quasitheatrical as well, but that ignores the breadth of the film. The midsection of the film is swashbuckling in every sense of the word—man versus nature, man versus the femme fatale that is the sea. Our Man battles violent storms and crashing waves, having been knocked into the water multiple times, but still finding the strength to rise back up.

Cinematographer Frankie DeMarco and underwater director of photography Peter Zuccarini are, in part, responsible for the film’s jaw-dropping scope. Initially, the camera stays close to Redford, as if almost attached, upon his discovering the hole in his boat and tediously repairing it. The early shot compositions present the film as small, almost quaint. As it progresses, shots reveal that small and quaint have nothing to do with this film. In a scene that situates Redford in his crow’s nest of the yacht, a close-up shows him staring off into the distance, brow furrowed. The camera pans around Redford, exposing an oncoming furious-looking thunderstorm—a perfect encapsulation of that stomach-dropping, “Holy shit…” feeling. And the scene is quietly natural—just the sounds of water, no ominous musical score necessary.

Scored by Alex Ebert, a Los Angeles–based singer-songwriter, best known as the lead singer for the band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and therefore not a conventional film composer, the music fits perfectly. Ebert is an alternative but a fitting composer, given the risky choices Chandor makes throughout the film as a whole. Ebert provides a haunting yet delicate undertone for the film, echoing Redford’s emotional trajectory.

Redford has stated in interviews that, during all the years he’s watched over Sundance, none of the filmmakers showcased ever invited him to be in their next film—except for J. C. Chandor. “I felt like he was an actor who could pull it off,” Chandor has said about his leading man. Redford not only pulls it off, but he also perfectly embodies the rough-hewn, rational, defeated man. His storied filmography and his California golden-boy looks define him as a quintessential American actor. In this role, he’s playing an American Everyman, and while better looking than most, he’s still your father, your brother, your neighbor, your friend. In a larger sense, however, he’s the country of America, itself.

Playing the role of a fading America, Redford is forced to come to grips with the fact that he cannot always be the top dog, as viewers are forced to realize that the country can no longer play invincible king of the world. This man who thought he could conquer these foreign waters completely alone, with no help at all, is brutally made aware that there are other countries powerful enough to claim their own territory, powerful enough to cut him off and take the lead. (It’s perhaps no coincidence that the shipping container fatally gouging his boat is from China.)

In a smaller sense, Redford is the average American Joe, just trying to survive, whose plights are ignored by those too rich to care. Just when it seems all hope is lost, with one safety flare remaining, a colossal American cargo ship approaches Redford as he sits in his little raft. He stands up as the ship moves nearer and nearer—it’s so close now, maybe only fifty or so feet from him. Our Man fires his last flare but to no avail. The ship plows on, as Redford desperately attempts to flag it down, screaming and shouting and waving his arms wildly. The corporate powers bypass the little man—at sea or on land, it doesn’t matter where.

The role that Chandor has written is a somewhat provocative yet satisfying critique of where America stands as a nation and also where we stand as a people in this moment in time, enabling the film to work on a universal level—Redford’s character is far from perfect, his selfishness and pride responsible for landing him in trouble in the first place. But that’s what makes him work; it makes him honest and true.

The film isn’t as bleak as it may seem; a final shot of Our Man finally grasping a helping hand—whether real or not—says a lot. It’s a shot filled with hope and optimism. Hope that Our Man, in the midst of battling nature and self, has learned from the ordeal—an optimistic sense that Our Man, whether at the moment of his death or of his rescue, has finally realized that he cannot do it all alone—that he is indeed just a very small human being in a very large world. Repeated shots from underwater show his tiny speck of a life raft, followed by schools of fish and later sharks. And well into the film an extreme wide shot also captures this idea wonderfully, with Redford floating in his raft, nearly swallowed by the blanket of blue water. It’s quite incredible to recognize how gorgeous the face of death can be.

Sight & Sound [Michael Koresky] December 29, 2013

PopMatters Chris Barsanti

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Jason Bailey [Flavorwire]

The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]

All is Lost (2013) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Review: Robert Redford battles the sea and emotions in All Is Lo Gregory Ellwood from Hit Fix

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Patrick Naugle]

Sound On Sight [John McEntee]

Cinescene Howard Schumann

And So it Begins... [Alex Withrow]

Georgia Straight [Janet Smith]

AV Club [Mike D'Angelo]

Examiner.com [Kay Shackleton]

Robert Redford on All Is Lost - Vulture Kyle Buchanan interview, October 18, 2013

All Is Lost Review - Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

All is Lost – review | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks

'All Is Lost' movie review: Robert Redford delivers ... - Washingt Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

Charleston City Paper (T. Meek)

Review: Robert Redford shows why he's a star in 'All Is Lost' - Lo Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times

All Is Lost Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Ali Arikan

'All Is Lost,' With Robert Redford at Sea - NYTimes.com A.O. Scott

All Is Lost - Wikipedia

A MOST VIOLENT YEAR B+ 90

USA (125 mi) 2014 ‘Scope

There is always a path that is most right.

—Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac)

A throwback to the 70’s, in particular the peculiarly darkened style of THE GODFATHER saga (1972 – 74), though the film takes place in New York City in 1981, a year the city reportedly saw one of the highest crime rates in its history, starring Oscar Isaac from Inside Llewyn Davis (2012) as Abel Morales, owner of a small city oil company. What’s immediately apparent is the degree that Isaac channels Al Pacino’s performance of Michael Corleone from THE GODFATHER, where he continually tries to be that noble figure not only for his family, but his every move, even while being investigated and heavily scrutinized by the police, is made to garner “respect.” While his business was inherited through marriage, where his beautiful wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) comes from mob money, Abel spends the entire movie trying to get out from under the shadow of her father’s criminal underworld reputation, trying to prove to anyone who will listen that he runs a legitimate business. This becomes a running question throughout the film, as Chandor plays close to the vest when doling out plot information, keeping viewers on edge throughout even though it’s filmed in a mesmerizingly slow and hypnotic style. Stylistically, this low-key film is in a world by itself where nothing else really compares, shot deliberately with a degree of unusually quiet elegance throughout by Selma (2014) cinematographer Bradford Young, making a bold directorial statement simply by charting new territory in a popular genre that has been explored to death. Rather than accentuate the bloodshed, this film draws us into the strange and curious world of buying property and obtaining a loan, which is an art in itself when you’re trying to accumulate well over a million dollars, mostly from dirty guys that would just as soon rip your head off. While Abel makes a down payment on a piece of land owned by Hassidic Jews overlooking the waterfront, he comes under intense pressure from all sides when it comes to making the final payment, as if he misses the deadline he could lose it all. The threatening violence that pervades the mood throughout this film is also met with everyday, ordinary acts of theft, where Abel’s oil trucks are coming under attack, with his drivers are beat up at gunpoint and left on the street while their trucks are hijacked in order to steal every ounce of oil. This is a dirty business reeking with a history of corruption, where his independent drivers may be challenging the solidarity of the Teamsters union, his competitors may be trying to muscle him out of the way, while Abel’s business practices are being thoroughly investigated by the District Attorney (David Oyelowo, also from Selma) who is bound and determined to uncover wrongdoing in an election year.

Written by Chandor himself, the film is an existential nightmare where a well-intentioned individual is thwarted at every turn, bearing some similarities to the moral complexities of the Coen brothers’ A SERIOUS MAN (2009), where like the Old Testament character of Job, a man is challenged at every step of the way but still tries to find a meaningful significance to it all, to be a serious man, someone whose moral values remain intact and where God still has a place in his life. While the religious context is nonexistent in this movie, replaced by a solidly entrenched, mob-driven capitalistic system that is ripe with corruption, Abel is extremely cognizant of his family’s stature in the New York community, where his every move is driven to elevate their place in society. While his competitors are thugs that use mafia tactics, what’s intriguing about this story is that these are his friends and relatives, people that he socializes with and attends family gatherings, where cutthroat tactics is all they know. While Abel tries not to take it personally, he’s not the one that is strong-armed at gunpoint and hauled out of their trucks like his drivers who have literally come under siege. While common sense suggests they might arm themselves, this is not only illegal and could jeopardize the business, but it also leads to shootouts on public thoroughfares where innocent people are subject to being shot and killed. Short of hiring armed guards, which the company cannot afford, it’s a tricky situation that plagues not only Abel but his drivers, especially Julian (Elyes Gabel), who very much like Abel is trying to build a life for himself, to make something out of nothing, both of them starting out as drivers, but Julian has the misfortune of being traumatized by the events, especially when he repeatedly gets targeted. Ever since Steven Soderbergh’s underrated OUT OF SIGHT (1998), comedian Albert Brooks has made the remarkable transition to playing heavies, where he is brilliant underplaying the role of Andrew Walsh, a mafia lawyer, but he’s an essential component in any business transaction, as he’s the keeper of the flame, a company guy trusted by the underworld, the kind of person who has lived to see it all happen before his eyes, where nothing phases him any more, as he knows how things get done. Andrew is genuinely sympathetic to Abel, as he’s a kid with good instincts, but he may be in over his head.

Perhaps the real surprise in the film is the performance of Jessica Chastain as Anna, as no nonsense as any man, whose life behind the scenes is rarely even hinted at, but becomes more prominent as the film progresses, where Abel grows increasingly desperate, where his back is against it, yet his calibrated performance remains deliberate and measured throughout. Anna is a whole other story, where the audience is fortunate to see Chastain in a more menacing role as a gangster’s moll, the femme fatale, a Lady Macbeth, a woman from the streets who knows her way around a crooked business even as her husband strives to be a decent man. While she’s not easily intimidated, as evidenced by the way she mouths off to the District Attorney when they conduct a search of the home during her young child’s birthday party, seen passing out party favors to each kid at the door as they leave prematurely before reminding the counselor, “This was very disrespectful,” while flicking a cigarette in his face. As the feds bring multiple indictments against him, Abel has all his money tied up in buying this invaluable piece of land, and when his legitimate lenders dry up, scared away by the feds, he has to make the rounds through the nefarious connections of his own family, hat in hand, asking for last minute loans. Alessandro Nivola as Abel’s sinister rival Peter Forente is particularly creepy, a guy whose life is so defined by gangland murders that he basically has to spend his entire life behind a protected fortress. Yet this is a guy he grew up with, who could easily be behind the hijackings, but Abel treats him as a serious man, where otherwise he’d be thrown out on his ear. The crucial relationship between Chastain and Isaac is superbly developed, continually underplayed, with restrained fireworks and plenty of surprises in store, where this film continually takes unexpected turns in the road, yet never for a minute is anything less than compelling. Chandor, the driving force behind Robert Redford’s wordless performance in All Is Lost (2013), continues to be a director of intrigue, refusing to follow anyone’s path but his own, growing up in New Jersey, a graduate of The College of Wooster, making starkly different kinds of films than any of his compatriots, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with his first feature MARGIN CALL (2011) following more than a dozen years of making commercials. In this he resembles Swedish director Roy Andersson, who has directed over 400 commercials, but also Ridley and Tony Scott, Jonathan Glazer, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, not to mention David Fincher. The music by Alex Ebert is especially effective at the end, America for Me - YouTube (4:08), a dramatic rendition sounding much like Nina Simone.

A Most Violent Year, review: Jessica Chastain plays an edgy ... Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent

Oscar season is almost on us and films vying for award nominations are crowding the cinemas. J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year (which received its world premiere at the AFI Festival this week) is the latest hopeful to be unveiled. A mini squall is already blowing around the film because its co-star Jessica Chastain is also in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. As the New York Times has reported, an agreement is in place to stop her campaigning for any film other than Nolan’s blockbuster.

Without Chastain to bang the drum on its behalf, A Most Violent Year may struggle to make much din in this year’s Oscar race. It’s a well crafted, thoughtful thriller that will probably prove too muted to catch voters’ attentions in spite of Chastain’s edgy performance as “a backroom, cornerstore gangster’s daughter” and Oscar Isaac’s impressive turn as a Michael Corleone-like businessman. The film doesn’t have the impact of its director’s superb previous feature, All Is Lost, the “one-hander” starring Robert Redford as a yachtsman stranded at sea.

The setting is New York in the winter of 1981, statistically the most dangerous year in the city’s history. Abel Morales (Isaac) is an immigrant made good: a self-made businessman running a heating oil company. He has just put down a deposit to buy a huge storage facility that will give him complete control of the market. He has 30 days to come up with the money. If he doesn’t, his business will collapse. The DA is on his case. His rivals are hijacking his lorries and intimidating his drivers, and his bankers are losing faith in him.

A Most Violent Year carries obvious echoes of The Godfather. The key difference is that this isn’t really a gangster film - it just seems like one. The point that writer-director Chandor makes is that corruption and violence are so endemic in the New York of the period that an entrepreneur like Abel can’t help but be affected by them. He is honourable man who follows the right path but everybody around him, from his wife Anna (Chastain) to his lawyer and rivals, is on the take.

On one level, A Most Violent Year is a companion piece to All Is Lost - another survival story. Abel isn’t a lone sailor battling the elements but someone desperately trying to keep his company afloat. There are action sequences here - hijacking of oil trucks, chases - but Chandor’s real preoccupation is with Abel’s struggle to “run a fair and clean business” against the odds. He may be honest but he is tough and ruthless too. Oscar Isaac, who played the folk singer adrift in Greenwich Village in Inside Llewyn Davis, brings gravitas and a brooding intensity to his role as the increasingly desperate businessman. Chandor makes an excellent job of recreating the early 80s (although relatively little of the actionis set in the heart of New York itself.) This is an intelligent and probing drama but one that lacks the oomph factor you might expect in a real Oscar contender.

Slant Magazine [Christopher Gray]

J.C. Chandor’s return to land-based storytelling shares some of the predilections of last year’s Robert Redford vehicle All Is Lost. Both that film and A Most Violent Year are deliberately paced, refusing to rush their stories for the purposes of juicing the drama. This is not a bad tendency. It shows Chandor to be an unusually disciplined filmmaker in a landscape increasingly populated by the work of the eager-to-please. But not all subject matter supports the slow-and-steady approach, and that’s the case with A Most Violent Year.

It’s the winter of 1981 in New York, one year after the city’s most violent on record. Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) runs a heating-oil delivery business, one of many in an industry where disputes over territory and practice tend not to involve official authorities. Quietly driven, Abel has just put a down payment on a parcel of land that will help grow his business if he can come up with the rest of the money in 30 days.

Just as the clock starts ticking on that deal, one of his trucks is hijacked by men who leave his driver, Julian (Elyes Gabel), in the hospital and take off with $6,000 USD worth of product. At the same time, word comes down that Lawrence (David Oyelowo), the district attorney, is preparing a series of charges against him. When Abel asks his wife and bookkeeper Anna (Jessica Chastain) if they have anything to worry about, she says levelly, “We follow standard industry practice.”

This doesn’t reassure Abel, who looks like the kind of straight-arrow striver who would show up to high school wearing a tie and would be taking night classes after his night classes if they were offered. Anna is of a rougher and more careless cut. Vague references to her maybe-mobbed-up father and a casual attitude toward violence mark her as a risk in Abel’s orderly world. “Fuck the DA, we’re at war here,” Anna shouts at Abel in full far-borough rant. “Well, I’m not,” Abel replies, as cool as could be. He resists suggestions from his lawyer, Walsh (Albert Brooks), as well as the union rep (Peter Gerety) that he arm his drivers so they can protect themselves.

Abel’s caution isn’t just born of morality. His immigrant background leaves him less sure of his footing and more aware of how far he can fall. “English,” he quietly admonishes when Julian slips briefly into Spanish. Abel trains his workers as though they’re selling the word of God. His delivery is so disciplined and exacting that it’s easy to think that he actually believes that they treat his customers better than “these other guys”, his shadowy rivals who might be the ones hijacking his trucks and beating up his salesmen. He has moved his wife and children into a cold, modern new home outside of the city, and thinks that that means something—but the violence still follows them.

Isaac’s slow undertow of a performance provides a solid base for Chandor’s drama. At first it seems like Isaac, usually more energetic and charming on screen, is doing some kind of New York actor parody, modeled on early work by Al Pacino or John Turturro. Eventually, however, Abel develops his own persona, particularly shaped to come up against Anna’s flashing temper, as Chastain’s blazing blue eyes turn suddenly and deeply threatening.

The reserve in Isaac’s performance helps us to see Abe’s efforts to negotiate among the many competing interests jeopardizing his livelihood and the clawingly combative relationships in his life. But it doesn’t do wonders for the film itself, which suffers for its underwritten script. This is most apparent in A Most Violent Year‘s conclusion, which recalls those in Chandor’s previous films. Both All is Lost and Margin Call are masterfully detailed, their fascinating emotional landscapes rendered alternately against the high seas and a high-pressure Wall Street firm. But his films also maintain a certain detachment, and even as A Most Violent Year evokes chaos, desperation, and the sense that everything can collapse at any moment, it doesn’t create characters whose predicaments viewers will care about.

Like the work of Bennett Miller, J.C. Chandor's sexless, willfully understated dramas are threatened by a tendency toward oppressive symbolism. As Miller saddles his characters with funereal cadences and blunt physical tics (Brad Pitt's maniacal chewing in Moneyball, Channing Tatum's underbite in Foxcatcher), Chandor thrusts his characters into situations which highlight, italicize, and underline their own ethical and existential dilemmas. Robert Redford's encounters with marine life and consumer detritus in All Is Lost remain a polarizing example, sure to be joined by the head-on collision of a deer and a Mercedes driven by Oscar Isaac's Abel Morales in A Most Violent Year. But where Miller's Foxcatcher transparently, numbingly favors broadsides about American values over the interiority of its characters, Chandor is doggedly persistent in prioritizing issues of individual agency throughout his parables about capitalism's inherent moral corruption.

A Most Violent Year is, from the onset, soaked in an irony that juxtaposes economic progress and the decline of civilized society. The car radios of oversized sedans relay news of rape, murder, and random public stabbings in the New York City of 1981. Meanwhile, Morales meets his lawyer (Albert Brooks) to sign papers on a waterfront Brooklyn factory for his oil-distribution outfit, Standard Heating Co. "I woke up feeling very good about this," Brooks's Andrew Walsh says before the pair enter a murky trailer to put a down payment on the fuel yard. "Now that I'm all in, I'm loving it." Morales hands over most of his savings for the cash deal, and awaits a bank loan to formalize the contract in 30 days.

The deal would all but ensure the rise of Standard Heating over a cadre of competitors engaged in a heated turf war. Morales's workers, particularly an anxious young driver (Elyes Gabel), are beleaguered in the face of a series of brazen daylight hijackings, and the city's ambitious district attorney (David Oyelowo) is investigating the industry for price fixing and other corrupt practices. Morales's ascension is further imperiled by unrest at his new suburban glass-and-concrete home. His wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain), is both Standard Heating's bookkeeper and the daughter of the mobster from whom Morales purchased the company. When she's not chain-smoking and poring over company records with an adding machine, she's urging Morales toward riskier business practices. After a thwarted home invasion, she buys a gun, and is one among many urging Morales to arm his fleet.

These heightened stakes and looming threats are laid out in a series of scenes beginning with characters saying "As you know," but Chandor's command of atmosphere and pacing compensates for some of his script's clumsier exposition. A Most Violent Year's tone is immediately tense and increasingly leaden with dread. Cinematographer Bradford Young films his conversations in dimly lit rooms, buffeted by bright hallways and exteriors. His city streets are arid, unquenched by warm, orange sunsets. The visual motif is a striking reflection of both Morales's temperament and his moral dilemmas. Stubbornly opposed to outright deceit and criminal behavior, Morales can view his business and reputation from a cocoon of nobility. Outside forces prod that image, and Morales realizes that he'll not only have to beg, borrow, and steal in order to make it in America, he'll also have to get his hands dirty. His first confrontation with that reality comes with that injured deer on the road at night, and his second comes in a taut daytime chase by car, foot, and subway through the outer boroughs.

Chandor's fondness for situational irony is empowered by the spartan efficiency of his method, and that of most of his performers. (Chastain's Anna is a frustratingly mismanaged character, appearing in moments of outsized drama when it's convenient to the narrative.) As Morales, a character of intriguingly indistinct upbringing and ethnicity, Isaac looks as if he's been die-cast and transplanted from mid-career films by Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese. He delivers earnest, but nearly expressionless monologues about how to succeed in business and how to remain an honorable businessman, even as it becomes clear that the only way he can maintain his good name is through graft. In the tradition of Pacino's Michael Corleone, Morales's clear moral compass gives way to an intuitive knack for self-deceit, an ability to recalibrate that compass with minimal damage to his self-image. It's a cold, compelling performance, focused entirely on the ethical dimensions of decision-making. A Most Violent Year asserts that action requires corruption, and its considerable suspense arises not from how to act, but whether to.

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]

"There is always a path that is most right."

A Most Violent Year, set in 1981, is 2014's best film of the year and is opening on New Year's Eve in the US. J.C. Chandor's glacial and complex snapshot of the present through a cutthroat past is a guideline that promises the divided harbinger - half American dream, half the beginning of a descent into the inferno. They might be the same.

In crime-laden New York during the winter of '81, we are taken on the course running, accompanying Oscar Isaac's Abel Morales, owner of Standard Oil, an expanding fuel company. His morning jog on semi-rural roads leads us to the economic wasteland of heavily graffitied factories by the river.

Isaac seems to seamlessly switch ages from scene to scene. His Abel is young and eager and older than his years, wise, conflicted, slick and bold, depending on the circumstances. And these are extreme. A lesser man would collapse under the pressure to "make it" in the fuel oil business where multicultural strands of immigrant families intersect.

Abel gives usable and haunting advice, evocative of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. He tells his new sales staff, if a prospective client offers them a refreshment, to "always pick the fancy option," because they need to know that you want - and offer - only the best. "Stare longer than you should," is a classic. Even Paul King's Paddington, the bear, knows about the "hard stare" of intimidating eye contact. It doesn't really help when the other person is ready to knock you out.

Jessica Chastain, as Abel's wife Anna and mother of his two girls, does the firm's bookkeeping, and is very much involved in the business, a welcome departure from still far too prevalent Hollywood wife-role fare. Their relationship is complicated and they do not solely signal good couple or bad couple. After a passionate greeting, he wipes off her kiss. In certain aspects, they know as little about each other as we do. Anna exclusively wears Armani, a choice intended to protect her. The belted white coat, lacy négligées and connotations with class perfectly fit her personality and hide the internal struggles with her mobster family background under cashmere and silk. Costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone has the right touch as she did in Moonrise Kingdom.

Chandor does not spoon feed anything about characters or plot, he hides the spoon and dragoons the audience to smell the porridge first, to look at the bowl it comes in, and eat when it's ready. He knows the craft and takes bold, wonderful storytelling risks. Robert Redford, a boat and a storm, without a single word of dialogue, were all the ingredients he needed last time. In A Most Violent Year, we learn about fear, drive, and capitalism through deliciously precise dialogues in pointed constellations. Cinematographer Bradford Young, who proved in David Lowery's Ain’t Them Bodies Saints that timely and timeless are not mutually exclusive, excavates the city's core.

What are the rules here? Violence is volatile, affiliations opaque. The cold naturalistic and heightened at once. Intense conversations, often between two men, about the business of their business are breathtaking in miniature duels. These verbal jewels make us feel the wars inside. Albert Brooks as Abel’s unreadable company lawyer Andrew Walsh has seen and heard much.

Abel's camel hair coat is his shield, sleek, sharp, expensive, at the border between flashy and restrained, at the brink from the Seventies into the Eighties. As an upstart, he is highly aware of what his clothes signify to others. Chandor uses objects as more than metaphor with considerable sophistication. A small black plastic ashtray sits on the table during an all important deal between Abel and the Orthodox Jewish garment merchant Joseph (Jerry Adler), the reluctant seller of New York harbor property that would change the fate of Standard Oil's future. This ashtray, unused because nobody smokes in the scene, is the visual narrative stain that points to a big hole about to swallow up our hero.

Radio voices heard in the background underline with their crime reports that this was indeed the most violent year in New York history. A driver is pulled out of his fuel truck by two men and finds himself in the hospital with a broken jaw and six thousand dollars' worth of heating oil stolen. This is not the first incident and the drivers want to protect themselves with guns. Abel wants to hear nothing of it, as he knows that his company is under investigation from the ambitious District Attorney (David Oyelowo) who knows about Anna's father.

Alessandro Nivola plays Peter Forente, Abel's main competitor, to whom business success came a generation earlier and who defines himself through his indoor tennis court. Not since Billy Wilder's elegant Sabrina with William Holden and Audrey Hepburn has this kind of location been used more effectively. Here, the chauffeur's quarters, symbolised by a little indoor balcony, seem directly connected to the rich son's playground.

Forente speaks softly, as if the tone of his voice could wrap his competitor in caramel. "My father's in jail," he says, giving us a glimpse into yet another soul, sold and tortured, frightened and filthy rich. "Have pride in what you do and stop," Abel suggests.

It is probably too late for that.

“A Most Violent Year” Review - The New Yorker David Denby

A Most Violent Year review: Oscar Isaac and Jessica ... - Slate Dana Stevens

A Most Violent Year Is a Most Extraordinary Film Christopher Orr from The Atlantic

A Most Violent Year Review | Vanity Fair Richard Lawson

A MOST VIOLENT YEAR Movie Review - Badass Digest Devin Faraci

Spectrum Culture [Forrest Cardamenis]

'A Most Violent Year' Review: Never Seen a More ... - Pajiba Vivian Kane

In Review Online [Matt Lynch]

A Most Violent Year / The Dissolve Keith Phipps

Little White Lies [Adam Woodward]

Review: Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac anchor ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

A Most Violent Year Never Quite Summons Rough Old New ... Stephanie Zacharek from Minneapolis City Pages

The Film Stage [Nathan Bartlebaugh]

SBS Movies [Peter Galvin]

Concrete Playground [Sarah Ward]

A Most Violent Year - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

DVDTalk.com [Jeff Nelson]

James Kendrick - QNetwork Entertainment Portal

DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: A Most Violent Year Glenn Erickson

Film-Forward.com [Paul Weissman]

Review: A MOST VIOLENT YEAR Slow-Burns With ... - Twitch Jim Tudor

Review: J.C. Chandor takes another left turn with the gritty A ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club

MOST VIOLENT YEAR, A – Hammer to Nail Matt Delman

monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]

Sound On Sight Colin Biggs

A Most Violent Year movie review - CineSnob - CineSnob.net Kiko Martinez

South China Morning Post [Edmund Lee]

Daily | J.C. Chandor's A MOST VIOLENT YEAR | Keyframe ... David Hudson from Fandor

A Most Violent Year - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

VARIETY [Scott Foundas]

A Most Violent Year review | Peter Bradshaw's film of the week Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

A Most Violent Year review: plucky Oscars outsider draws ... Xan Brooks from The Guardian

A Most Violent Year review - The Guardian Mark Kermode

A Most Violent Year - Time Out Joshua Rothkopf

Toronto Film Scene [David Rudin]

Westender Vancouver [Curtis Woloschuk]

Examiner.com [Ben Kenber]

Charleston City Paper [T. Meek]

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

'A Most Violent Year' movie review - Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Review: 'A Most Violent Year' - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A Most Violent Year - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Most Violent Year Movie Review (2014) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz

JC Chandor's 'A Most Violent Year' Tests the American Dream A.O. Scott from The New York Times

Chang, Sylvia

PASSION (Zui ai)

Hong Kong (95 mi) 1986

Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

"Passion is the film which made everyone realize that Sylvia Chang was a creative power to be taken very seriously" (David Overbey, Toronto I.F.F.). Written and directed by the well-known actress, the film has two women, both widows, meeting for lunch, and reminiscing over their long-time friendship and their marriages. The two represent the very opposites of Chinese femininity: Ming (played by Cora Miao) is traditional, obedient, domestic; Wendy (played by Chang herself) is a creative, independent, self-motivated. In flashback, the romantic triangle which almost destroyed their friendship is revealed. George Lam co-stars as object of their joint affections, a man forced to choose between following his heart or living within the safe confines of middle-class society. "The film ends with a recognition of their solidarity as the women are liberated through the telling of their personal truths only made possible after the deaths of both husbands. They have recreated the protective space their friendship enjoyed before marriage where they can exist peacefully, not ruled by Passion. In the imaginary world created by Chang, widowhood authorizes respect for women in a patriarchal society without fear of reprisal for speaking the truth" (Carolynn Rafman, Le Nouveau Cinema Chinois). Hong Kong 1986.

IN BETWEEN (Xin tong ju shi dai) – made for TV

Part One: Taiwan (52 m) d: Sylvia Chang Part Two: Hong Kong (52 mi) d: Leung Chun Chiu and Yonfan 1994

THE STORIES OF RED RIBBONS Red Ribbons in Asia, by Hsing-chi Hu from Jump Cut, December 1998

Chang Tso-chi

THE BEST OF TIMES (Mei li shi guang) B 87

Taiwan (109 mi) 2001

The director is a fellow classmate of Hou Hsiao-hsien, but I was less than enthralled with the opening half of this film, which just featured various family members yelling and screaming at one another. I thought I was back at Middle School. The story meandered back and forth between unpleasant and uninteresting characters, and it was just going nowhere. But then a gun was introduced into the action and the film started to resemble Edward Yang’s MAHJONG. The noisy conversation dies down, the pace picks up, there’s a spare look to the film with some very nice, dimly-lit color sequences, and all of a sudden it gets interesting. The last half is worth sticking around for as this film has one memorable ending.

Chapiron, Kim

SHEITAN

France (90 mi) 2006 website

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival report

Let's get this out of the way: Sheitan (which I saw last night) is, against all odds and expectations, some kind of demented masterpiece. It's by some way the best picture I've seen since A History of Violence: I was really blown away by its punkish energy, unpredictability and confidence; most of all, I loved the way director Kim Chapiron (who I'd never heard of before) mixes horror and humour. So many movies try that balancing-act and come a cropper: Chapiron makes it look easy. She also puts the wildly overpraised Haut Tension and Calvaire very firmly in their place: Sheitan resembles both pictures in many ways, but is much their superior in terms of ambition, execution and sheer balls-to-the-wall chutzpah.

A picture I knew nothing about befor arriving in Amsterdam and spotting it in the catalogue: the presence in the cast of Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci caught my eye, but I went in fearing the worst - anticipated a flashily hollow exercise in exploitational style a la Jan Kounen's dire Dobermann (Kounen is, as it turns out, thanked in the end credits), reckoned I might well exit after 30 minutes if it didn't grab my attention. Knew after five minutes I was going to be in my seat for the duration: hyperkinetic nightclub opening sets the tone/pace/look (much hand-held camerawork, rapidfire editing, up-close-and-personal shots of the youthful protagonists).

Main characters are three pals of varying degrees of boorishness: Olivier Barthelemy as knucklehead Bart, who rapidly gets into a daft dancefloor fight and is smashed over the head with a wine bottle; Ladj Ly and Nicolas Le Phat Tan as Thai - this latter pair relatively sensible and restrained in comparison with their lecherous, thuggish mate. When Bart is ejected from the premises, the trio head off (at reckless speed) in Ladj's car, along with barmaid Yasmine (Leila Bekhti) and another copine, Eve (Roxane Mesquida). After careering through the city streets, the five (accompanied by Bart's dog Tyson) head for the countryside and the farmhouse where Eve's parents supposedly reside. No sign of the folks: instead it's maniacally grinning farmhand/housekeeper Joseph (a near-unrecognisable Vincent Cassel) who provides an extremely hearty welcome. It doesn't take too long for all hell to break loose - perhaps literally, 'Sheitan' being the Persian word for Satan...

Like most of the best films, the less you know about Sheitan beforehand, the better: and any synopsis can't really hope to capture what makes the picture so exhilaratingly effective. Best seen in a crowded cinema - ideally after a drink or two - this is a genuinely disturbing, genuinely hilarious rock-the-house crowdpleaser. Too extreme and jittery for some, no doubt - but how terrific it is to stumble across a film bursting with so much wildness and life. A no-holds-barred rural gothic: touches of Jeepers Creepers here and there, a bit of Cabin Fever - with Barthelemy's Bart a Gallic cousin of James DeBello's pricelessly doltish Bert from the latter.

And while Chapiron's direction and script (co-written with Christian Chapiron) are, of course, crucial, special mention must be made of Barthelemy, without whom Sheitan might not even work at all. His performance as the hapless Bart - whose sullen idiocy is punished in truly extravagant style - represents astonishing work. Bart is notably unintelligent, relentlessly unsympathetic: unredeemed and very probably unredeemable - a considerable challenge for any actor, never mind one making his first feature-film. But in Barthelemy's hands he becomes a compelling, utterly convincing three-dimensional creation - an intrusion of cloddish reality into what is otherwise a mind-bending journey into the surreal and the grotesque.

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival Yet more thoughts on the film

here Interview with the director by Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge

Chaplin, Charlie

“To the best of my knowledge, with the arguable exception of Dickens, no one else in the history of art has shown us in greater detail what it means to be poor, and certainly no one else in the history of movies has played to a more diverse audience or evolved more ambitiously from one feature to the next. The opening sequence in Chaplin’s second Depression masterpiece (1936), of the Tramp on the assembly line, is possibly his greatest slapstick encounter with the 20th century.”
—Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader, Modern Times | Chicago Reader

Chaplin, Charlie Art and Culture

The laughter he brought to the lives of others equaled the sufferings he experienced in his own. Born in the eternally gray London of 1889, Charlie Chaplin started out bleakly. He was to endure some very tough years of childhood before his sweetly infectious stage persona and razor-sharp characterizations would pull him out of a desperate situation and into the limelight. And even after he achieved success, Chaplin maintained an ambiguous relationship with the society that brought him fame and fortune.

Reportedly, Chaplin "could sing before he could talk and dance as soon as he walked." Not unlikely, given his mother was a vaudeville performer. However, during all this precocious singing and dancing, Chaplin’s mother suffered mental breakdowns and his kind father was generally drunk. The stage proved to be a surrogate home for young Charlie --at the age of five he stood in for his mother when she was too hoarse to sing. The adulation was immediate, as patrons threw money and affection at the charming waif. Throughout his youth, he performed any way he could –- clog dancing, miming, acting in circuses -- to keep himself out of orphanages and work houses.

Chaplin’s luck turned when he returned to vaudeville in his late teens. His talent for comic mime quickly garnered him spots with various touring troupes. After visiting America, he decided to set up camp there in 1910. By 1914, he had debuted in his first feature film, "Making a Living," with Keystone Films. And make a living he did, playing the baggy-suited, cane-carrying Tramp character. Chaplin's Tramp hit a nerve with audiences everywhere -– he was a passionate symbol of humanity’s triumph over adversity and persecution, of emotional individualism in the jaws of mechanized modernity.

Chaplin was so popular that studios had a hard time keeping up with his asking salary. Plus, he was still single, a rarity for such a star. He soon impulsively married, but he wouldn't stay wed for long -- a total of four marriages were tested against his intensely driven career. His first love was movies, and a controlling lover he was. Not content with silver-screen stardom, Chaplin helped establish United Artists in 1919 in order to produce and distribute his films independently.

Fully in charge, Chaplin rose to new levels of artistry. He relied heavily on improvisation and worked out the scenes on film with minimal prior rehearsal. He shot scenes over and over, experimenting with subtleties of expression and timing. As many as seven years could lapse before he released a film.

The string of films he produced –- including "The Kid" (1925), "City Lights" (1931), "Modern Times" (1936), "The Great Dictator" (1940), "Monsieur Verdoux" (1947), and "Limelight" (1952) –- show the fruits of such painstaking labor. They reveal a physical expressiveness otherwise lost in the world of "talkies." Full of both satire and pathos, they criticize and sympathize in equal measure. As he matured, Chaplin took on timely social issues. His "Modern Times" is a pointed commentary on industrialization and its alienating effects, while "The Great Dictator" made Hitler look ridiculous in a way only Chaplin could get away with.

His career moved along smoothly until the '50s, when he accused of ties with the Communist Party. His work made him an easy target for "Red" paranoia -- films like "The Idle Class" (1921) and "Modern Times" are blatantly suspicious of commerce and the idle rich. Chaplin was forbidden from leaving the United States until 1952, when the FBI admitted it had insufficient evidence to support its claims. He and his family immediately left the country and claimed permanent residence in Switzerland. He got his revenge in 1957 with the film "The King in New York," a satirical look at the House Committee on Un-American Activities, among other things. Chaplin and America did make amends in 1972, when he returned briefly to receive a special Academy Award for lifetime achievement.

Despite the controversy, Chaplin died in 1977 a universally loved cultural icon. He could provoke laughter with the roll of his eyes or that little ducky waddle. He could evince tears with the downturn of his shoulders. And he addressed social concerns from the heart, not the soap box. His work embodies all those things we hope to not forget in our modern times: freedom from conformity, compassion for the downtrodden, humanity in times of danger. Perhaps his own encounters with adversity prompted him to address these topics with such a loving hand.

Charlie Chaplin from the Spartacus educational site

Charlie Chaplin was born in London on 16th April, 1889. Both his parents were music hall entertainers and Charlie started appearing on the stage while still a child. His father, Charles Chaplin, deserted the family and eventually died of alcoholism. His mother, Hannah Chaplin, found it increasingly difficult to find work on the stage and in 1895 the family entered the Lambeth Workhouse. Later, Charlie's mother had a mental breakdown and was sent to the Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum.

When he was sixteen Chaplin won the part of Billy in a West End production of Sherlock Holmes. He later joined Fred Karno's music hall revue. While touring the United States in 1913 Chaplin was discovered by the film producer Mack Sennett. Over the next couple of years Chaplin made a series of short slapstick films for Sennett's Keystone Company. In these films Chaplin developed a character that wore baggy pants, tight frock coat, large shoes on the wrong feet and a black derby hat.

By his thirteenth film, Caught in the Rain (1914), Chaplin began to direct his own films. Chaplin now slowed the pace of his films, reduced the number of visual jokes but increased the time spent on each one. Chaplin placed the emphasis on the character rather than slapstick events. The themes of his films became more serious and reflected his childhood experiences of poverty, hunger and loneliness. Chaplin's work revolutionized film comedy and turned it into an art form.

Chaplin's films were highly successful and became a household name throughout the world. When Chaplin first started with the Keystone Company he was paid $150 a week, by 1915 he was receiving $1,250. Three years later, when he joined First National, Chaplin signed cinema's first million-dollar contract. During this period Chaplin's films included The Tramp (1915), The Pawnshop (1915), Easy Street (1917), The Immigrant (1917) and A Dog's Life (1918).

In 1919 Chaplin joined with D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford to form United Artists, a company that enabled the stars to distribute their films without studio interference. Films produced by Chaplin and his company included The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and City Lights (1931).

Chaplin became increasingly concerned with politics. A strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Chaplin's film, Modern Times (1936), was seen by some critics as an attack on capitalism. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), began compiling a file on Chaplin's activities, including his friendship with radicals such as Upton Sinclair, H. G. Wells, Hanns Eisner, Albert Einstein and Harold Laski.

A strong opponent of racism, in 1937 Chaplin decided to make a film on the dangers of fascism. As Chaplin pointed out in his autobiography, attempts were made to stop the film being made: "Half-way through making The Great Dictator I began receiving alarming messages from United Artists. They had been advised by the Hays Office that I would run into censorship trouble. Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain. But I was determined to go ahead, for Hitler must be laughed at." However, by the time The Great Dictator was finished, Britain was at war with Germany and it was used as propaganda against Hitler.

During the Second World War Chaplin played an active role in the American Committee for Russian War Relief. Others involved in this organization included Fiorello La Guardia, Vito Marcantonio, Wendell Willkie, Orson Welles, Rockwell Kent and Pearl Buck. Chaplin was also one of the major figures in the campaign during the summer of 1942 for the opening of a second-front in Europe.

After the Second World War the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began to investigate people with left-wing views in the entertainment industry. In September 1947 Chaplin was subpoenaed to appear before the HUAC but three times his meeting was postponed. Unknown to Chaplin, J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBI, now had a 1,900 page file on his political activities. Hoover advised the Attorney General that when Chaplin left the country he should be allowed to return.

In 1952 Chaplin visited London for the premiere of Limelight. When he arrived back he discovered his entry permit revoked and had been denied the right to live in the United States. As Chaplin pointed out in his autobiography: "My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them."

Chaplin, blacklisted from making films in Hollywood, responded by making A King in New York (1957). The film stars Chaplin as the deposed king of Estrovia who flees to America where he is tormented by McCarthy style investigations. Chaplin was once again accused of being pro-communist and the film was not released in the United States.

While in exile, Chaplin wrote his memoirs, My Autobiography (1964) and directed the movie, A Countess from Hong Kong (1966). Despite the objections of J. Edgar Hoover, in 1972 Chaplin was invited back to the United States to receive a special award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was also allowed to distribute his satire on McCarthyism, A King in New York. Charles Chaplin died in Switzerland on 25th December, 1977.

All-Movie Guide Bruce Eder from All Movie Guide

The first great screen comedian, Charles Chaplin was also one of the most gifted directors in history, in addition to being a formidable talent as a writer and composer. The son of music hall performers from England, he began working on the stage at age five. He was a popular child dancer and got work on the London stage, eventually moving up to acting roles. It was while touring America in 1912 that Chaplin was spotted by Mack Sennett, the head of Keystone Studios, and he was signed to them a year later. After a disappointing, relatively non-descript debut, Chaplin began evolving the persona that would emerge as his most famous screen portrayal, The Little Tramp, and after his first 11 movies, Chaplin began to manifest a desire to direct. By his 13th film, he had shifted into the director's chair, and also emerged as a writer.

Chaplin's 35 movies at Keystone established him as a major film comedian and afforded him the chance to adapt his stage routines to the screen. He next moved on to Essanay Studios, where he had virtually complete creative freedom, and The Little Tramp became an established big-screen star. In 1916, Chaplin went to Mutual, earning an astronomical 10,000 dollars per week under a contract that gave him absolute control of his films -- the Mutual titles, most notably The Immigrant and Easy Street, are still counted among the greatest comedies ever made. These modestly proportioned two-reelers were followed by Chaplin's move to First National Studios, where he made lengthier, more ambitious, but fewer films, including the comedy The Kid, which was the second highest grossing silent film after D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and made an overnight sensation of his co-star, Jackie Coogan. By this time, Chaplin had become an international celebrity of a status that modern audiences can only imagine because he achieved his success through comedy. With three other screen giants, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and D.W. Griffith, he founded United Artists, the first modern production and distribution company, and achieved further renown as a director with A Woman of Paris two years later. In 1925, he made what is generally considered his magnum opus, The Gold Rush.

Chaplin's success continued into the sound era, although he resisted using sound until Modern Times in 1936. He had his first failure in 1940 with the anti-Hitler political satire The Great Dictator at about the same time that his personal life -- he had been involved in several awkward problems with various women, including a paternity suit filed against him by aspiring actress Joan Barry -- began to catch up with him. Chaplin's career during the immediate post-World War II period was marred by continuing problems, as his pacifism and alleged anti-American views led to investigations. He also made the black comedy Monsieur Verdoux, which failed at the box office. It was followed, however, by the best of his sound comedies, Limelight, which, because of his legal difficulties, didn't open in Los Angeles until two decades later -- when its score, written by Chaplin, received an Oscar. A King in New York, in 1957, and The Countess From Hong Kong, made nine years later, closed out his career on a lackluster note.
After D.W. Griffith, Chaplin was the most important filmmaker of the silent film era. Through his clear understanding of film and its capabilities, and his constant experimentation -- he frequently ran though hundreds of takes to get just the right shot and effect he wanted -- he set most of the rules for screen comedy that are still being followed, and his onscreen image remains one of the most familiar.

Filmography BFI Screen Online

Any filmography of a film-maker of the earlier silent period - even one as celebrated and chronicled as Chaplin - is likely to remain, perhaps perennially, a work in progress. In the early years of cinema, nobody thought of history apart from last week's profits and costs. The first attempt at a Chaplin filmography - a pioneering essay in the genre - was Theodore Huff's Index to the Films of Charles Chaplin, published by the British Film Institute, itself at that time still a youthful adventure. Thirty years later Denis Gifford, with a sharp eye for identifying long-forgotten supporting players, greatly expanded Huff's filmography, correcting the old errors and inevitably introducing a few new ones. The filmography of David Robinson's 1985 biography Chaplin His Life and Art had the advantage of access to the Chaplin archives, which made possible comprehensive and detailed records of the post-1918 films. The revised edition of this book in 2001 was able to incorporate new research by Brent Walker, Phil Posner, Steve Rydzewski and Bo Berglund. This filmography has drawn freely and gratefully on all these resources and others, notably the anonymous contributors to the Internet Movie Data Base, whose claimed sightings of many bit-players have in many cases been incorporated here under the provisional heading of "unverified credits".

The system of numbering established in Uno Asplund's 1971 filmography Chaplin's Films, adopted by Timothy J. Lyons' Charles Chaplin: A Guide to References and Resources (1979) and supplemented in David Robinson's Chaplin His Life and Art is again followed here to avoid the confusion which might result from the co-existence of two systems. As far as may be ascertained, the footages given for films are those of the original release prints. "Other titles" signifies known titles given to a film on subsequent reissue.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Supertramp Sight and Sound, October 2003

Nearly one hundred years after his first screen appearance, Charles Chaplin's Little Tramp remains one of cinema's most cherished icons. But there's more to Chaplin than his battered bowler hat and mobile moustache.

Few careers in film have reflected the challenges of their time quite like Chaplin's. A natural-born entertainer, he was also one of cinema's first auteurs, creating work that drew on his personal experiences to delight millions; a tireless perfectionist, he filmed take after take in pursuit of the most carefree comic effect; steeped in the hard-knocks traditions of London's 1890s music-hall scene, his films mixed Victorian sentiment with sharp contemporary views. He made movies that danced to the rhythm of modernity and captured the anxieties of changing political times. As a package of theatrical and DVD presentations of his work is issued in the UK, we asked film-makers, actors and critics, including Woody Allen, Baz Luhrmann and Rowan Atkinson, for their views on Chaplin. Their comments are featured as part of a 13 page special on Chaplin in the magazine. And here, comedian and writer Paul Merton gets back to basics and explains why Chaplin is so funny it hurts

Over the years it's become fashionable to denigrate Chaplin. "Keaton," they say. "Oh yes, Keaton is extraordinary. But Chaplin? He's just pathos." Yet Buster Keaton himself said that Chaplin was the greatest comedy director that ever lived, and Stan Laurel agreed with him. Groucho Marx called him "the funniest man on earth", and Groucho Marx hadn't a good word to say about anybody. Three years ago Evening Standard columnist A.N. Wilson went so far as to argue that Chaplin had never been funny, that no one had ever been amused by him. In response I wrote a stiff letter on a piece of cardboard which they completely failed to publish in which I suggested that not only had Charlie never been funny, but that Michael Owen had never scored a goal and the Beatles had never had a hit record.

There are a lot of reasons why Chaplin fell out of favour, McCarthyism, bad publicity surrounding a trumped-up paternity suit in the 1940s, and also perhaps the natural pendulum swing away from the idolatry of the 1920s and 1930s. But I think there's a simpler explanation.

For many years the only place you could see a Chaplin movie was on television. My first memory of watching him was in a dodgy print of Easy Street, with my grandfather, who had watched his films as a child (my grandmother was born in Bermondsey, a few streets away from where Chaplin was brought up). I loved it. But for most people, watching terrible prints projected at the wrong speed on small television screens, with an inappropriate honky-tonk piano score, reduced the silent films to a bewildering succession of vaguely comprehensible actions involving big men in large fake beards being kicked up the arse in a monotonous fashion. Interestingly, in the 1960s Keaton's films good-quality prints with live-music accompaniment had been rediscovered on the arthouse circuit.

I think the DVDs which are now available, with cleaned-up images and newly recorded scores, go a long way to bringing these films back to life. But to appreciate the Chaplin phenomenon fully I would still go and watch his films on a large screen with a live audience. You have to see his eyes only then will you understand why he's kicking the fat man up the arse. In simple socio-political terms, he kicks the fat man up the arse because it's funny.

But Charlie is more than funny. Let me take you back to 1914. (I know some of you will have made other arrangements, but let's go back to 1914 anyway.) Chaplin has been a film star for just under a year, his superior acting and enormous charm quickly setting him apart from the frantic mugging and over-the-top histrionics of his fellow Keystone comics. He's funny, he's sexy and he's naughty. His early appeal rests with women and children. He flirts with the pretty ladies in the park while simultaneously kicking the fat man up the arse.

When he moves to Essanay Studios he has two weeks instead of two days to make a picture. One of these is The Tramp. It's set on a farm and much of it is tedious cartoon slapstick: a giant mallet smashed over a farmhand's head causes no more than a quick rolling of the eyes; pitchforks are tiresomely prodded into rustic bottoms. The violence is fake, and thus we feel no pain until when thwarting a robbery at the farm the Tramp is shot in the leg. Instead of jumping up and down in empty rage, he collapses. The wound is real. The pain is obvious. The Tramp is flesh and blood. He has dared, amid the cartoonery, to become real. And so, when he falls in love with Edna, the heroine who has nursed him back to health, then discovers she has a beau, we care. His misspelled note to her "I thort your kindness was love but it ain't cause I seen him. Goodbye" isn't intended to make us laugh.

This was Chaplin's first major artistic breakthrough. It is comedy of the soul. In the final scene Charlie shuffles away down the middle of a dusty track, hunched, dejected, lost. But then a tiny moment he kicks up his heels and straightens his back. There is now a cheery determination about him. Something will turn up tomorrow; the human spirit can't be crushed. We're with him all the way, and he achieves this with his back to the camera. We don't need to see the expression on his face. We know he's a human being.

This is one of the moments which Chaplin's detractors call pathos, as if a remarkable piece of sensitive acting is a weakness to be used against him. But for me it raises him above his contemporaries and sets new standards for the comedy film. After this breakthrough Chaplin was to use emotional reality in all his classic films. In The Immigrant it's his own experience of poverty and being an outsider; he starts making The Kid only days after losing his infant son. And in his often underrated masterpiece Limelight he uses his childhood the music halls, boarding houses and grinding poverty of Bermondsey ("Where we lived, next to the slaughter house and the pickle factory, after Mother came out of the asylum," as he describes it in his autobiography) and his own fall from grace to chart the decline of a major comedian. What happens when they don't laugh any more?

Charlie's own favourite among his films was The Gold Rush, which is packed with great scenes the dance of the bread rolls, eating the boot, Charlie as a chicken pursued by a hallucinating, hungry prospector. But if we judge the potency of a comedy scene by the number of laughs it generates, then the cabin balanced on the rim of the precipice is the funniest scene in the history of motion pictures. I took my wife Sarah to see the film at the Royal Festival Hall a couple of years ago. She couldn't believe a film could be so funny. For the seven minutes that the cabin teeters on the brink of the precipice, the audience couldn't stop laughing. And there's nothing that compares to being engulfed by waves of beautiful laughter.

In 1925 BBC Radio broadcast what was described as "An Interlude of Laughter: Ten Minutes with Charlie Chaplin and his Audience at the Tivoli". That's right: they broadcast an excerpt from a silent film. It was this very scene. And what did the listeners hear? According to the Star newspaper, they heard "whimsical crescendos of delirious delight, which culminated in torrential laughter that finally broke out into a terrific uproar a perfect storm of uncontrollable guffaws."

What more could you ask from another human being? Charlie gives you the lot. Riotous laughter, emotional depth, and the ever-present possibility that a fat man is about to be kicked up the arse.

Film Reference Gerald Mast

Charles Chaplin was the first and the greatest international star of the American silent comic cinema. He was also the twentieth century's first media "superstar," the first artistic creator and popularized creature of our global culture. His face, onscreen antics, and offscreen scandals were disseminated around the globe by new media which knew no geographical or linguistic boundaries. But more than this, Chaplin was the first acknowledged artistic genius of the cinema, recognized as such by a young and influential generation of writers and artists whose number included George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and the surrealist painters and poets of both Paris and Berlin. Chaplin may be the one cinema artist who might truly be called a seminal figure of the century—if only because of his influence on virtually every other recognized seminal figure of the century.

Chaplin was born in London into a theatrical family; his mother and father alternated between periods of separation and union, activities onstage and difficulties offstage (his father was an alcoholic, his mother fell victim to insanity). The young Chaplin spent his early life on the London streets and in a London workhouse, but by the age of eight he was earning his living on the stage.

Chaplin's career, like that of Buster Keaton and Stan Laurel, indicates that gifted physical comedians often develop their talents as children (as do concert pianists and ballet dancers) or never really develop them at all. By the time he was twenty years old, Chaplin had become the star attraction of the Fred Karno Pantomime Troupe, an internationally acclaimed English music-hall act, and it was on his second tour of America that a representative of the Keystone comedy film company (either Mack Sennett, comedienne Mabel Normand, or co-owner Charles Bauman) saw Chaplin. In 1913 he was offered a job at Keystone. Chaplin went to work at the Keystone lot in Burbank, California, in January of 1914. To some extent, the story of Chaplin's popular success and artistic evolution is evident from even a cursory examination of the sheer volume of Chaplin's works (and the compensation he received). In 1914 at Keystone, Chaplin appeared in thirty-five one- and two-reel films (as well as the six-reeler Tillie's Punctured Romance), about half of which he directed himself, for the yearly salary of $7,800. The following year, Chaplin made fourteen one- and two-reel films for the Essanay Film Company—all of which he wrote and directed himself—for a salary of $67,000. In 1916–17, Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in twelve two-reel films for the Mutual Film company, and then signed a million-dollar contract with First National Corporation to write, direct, produce, and star in twelve more two-reel films. The contract allowed him to build his own studio, which he alone used until 1952 (it is now the studio for A&M Records), but his developing artistic consciousness kept him from completing the contract until 1923 with nine films of lengths ranging from two to six reels. Finally, in 1919, Chaplin became one of the founders of United Artists (along with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith), through which Chaplin released eight feature films, made between 1923 and 1952, after which he sold his interest in the company.

In his early one- and two-reel films Chaplin evolved the comic tools and means that would lead to his future success. His character of the Tramp, the "little fellow," a figure invariably garbed with derby, cane, floppy shoes, baggy pants, and tight jacket, debuted in his second Keystone film, Kid Auto Races at Venice. Because the tramp was a little guy, he made an easy target for the larger and tougher characters who loomed over him, but his quick thinking, agile body, and surprising ingenuity in converting ordinary objects into extraordinary physical allies helped him more than hold his own in a big, mean world. Although he was capable of lechery (The Masquerader, Dough and Dynamite) he could also selflessly aid the innocent woman under attack (The New Janitor, The Tramp, The Bank). Although he deserved her affection as a reward, he was frequently rejected for his social or sexual inadequacies (The Tramp, The Bank, The Vagabond, The Adventurer). Many of his early films combined his dexterous games with physical objects with deliberate attempts at emotional pathos (The Tramp, The Vagabond, The Pawnshop) or with social commentary on the corruption of the police, the brutality of the slums, or the selfishness of the rich (Police, Easy Street, The Adventurer).

Prior to Chaplin, no one had demonstrated that physical comedy could be simultaneously hilariously funny, emotionally passionate, and pointedly intellectual. While his cinema technique tended to be invisible—emphasizing the actor and his actions—he gradually evolved a principle of cinema based on framing: finding the exact way to frame a shot to reveal its motion and meaning completely, thus avoiding disturbing cuts.

Chaplin's later films evolved and featured increasingly complicated or ironic situations in which to explore the Tramp's character and the moral paradoxes of his existence. His friend and ally is a mongrel dog in A Dog's Life; he becomes a doughboy in Shoulder Arms; acquires a child in The Kid; becomes a preacher in The Pilgrim; and explores the decadent Parisian high life in A Woman of Paris, a comedy-melodrama of subtle visual techniques in which the Tramp does not appear. Chaplin's four feature films between 1925 and 1936 might be called his "marriage group," in which he explores the circumstances by which the tramp might acquire a sexual-romantic mate. In The Gold Rush the Tramp succeeds in winning the dance-hall gal who previously rejected him, because she now appreciates his kindness and his new-found wealth. The happy ending is as improbable as the Tramp's sudden riches—perhaps a comment that kindness helps but money gets the girl. But in The Circus, Charlie turns his beloved over to the romantic high-wire daredevil Rex; the girl rejects him not because of Charlie's kindness or poverty but because he cannot fulfill the woman's image of male sexual attractiveness. City Lights builds upon this problem as it rises to a final question, deliberately and poignantly left unanswered: can the blind flower seller, whose vision has been restored by Charlie's kindness, love him for his kindness alone since her vision now reveals him to look so painfully different from the rich and handsome man she imagined and expected? And in Modern Times, Charlie successfully finds a mate, a social outcast and child of nature like himself; unfortunately, their marriage can find no sanctification or existence within contemporary industrial society. So the two of them take to the road together, walking away from society toward who knows where—the Tramp's final departure from the Chaplin world.

Although both City Lights and Modern Times used orchestral music and cleverly comic sound effects (especially Modern Times), Chaplin's final three American films were talking films—The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin burlesques Hitler and Nazism, Monsieur Verdoux, in which Chaplin portrays a dapper mass murderer, and Limelight, Chaplin's nostalgic farewell to the silent art of pantomime which nurtured him. In this film, in which Buster Keaton also plays a major role, Chaplin bids farewell not only to a dead movie tradition—silent comedy—but to a two-hundred-year tradition of physical comedy on both stage and screen, the tradition out of which both Keaton and Chaplin came, which would produce no clowns of the future.

Chaplin's later years were scarred by personal and political difficulties produced by his many marriages and divorces, his supposed sexual philanderings, his difficulties with the Internal Revenue Service, his outspoken defence of liberal political causes, and his refusal to become an American citizen. Although he was never called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Chaplin's films were picketed and boycotted by right-wing activist groups. When Chaplin left for a trip abroad in 1952, the State Department summarily revoked his automatic re-entry permit. Chaplin sent his young wife Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, back to America to settle their business affairs.

Chaplin established his family in Switzerland and conveyed his outrage against his former country by not returning to America for twenty years and by refusing to let any of his films circulate in America for two decades. In 1957 he made a very uneven, often embarrassing satire of American democracy, A King in New York. This film, like A Countess from Hong Kong, made ten years later, was a commercial and artistic disappointment, perhaps in part because Chaplin was cut off from the familiar studio, the experienced production team, and the painstakingly slow production methods he had been using for over three decades. In 1971 he enjoyed a triumphant return to Hollywood to accept an honorary Academy Award for a lifetime of cinematic achievement.

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Chaplin is arguably the single most important artist produced by the cinema, certainly its most extraordinary performer, and probably still its most universal icon. -- Andrew Sarris

The finest pantomime, the deepest emotion, the richest and most poignant poetry were in Chaplins work. . . He was the first man to give the silent language a soul. The Tramp is as centrally representative of humanity, as many-sided and mysterious, as Hamlet, and it seems unlikely that any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety or poignancy of motion. -- James Agee

Elvis, The Beatles, Princess Di ... forget it. In 1913, Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889-1977) was a relatively obscure English comedian. In 1919 -- before the Internet, before TV, before radio -- he was the most famous man in the world. . . The darling of writers, philosophers, and scientists, he was for many years the only comedian talked about by both mass audiences and intellectuals. -- Film Forum, New York

In recent years Chaplins achievement has sometimes been underestimated by critics without historical perspective. . . His popularity contributed much to Hollywoods prosperity and rise to world-wide pre-eminence. . . The sophisticated intelligence and skills he brought to slapstick comedy forced intellectuals to recognise that art could reside in a wholly popular entertainment. . . Even today [his Tramp] remains the most universally recognized fictional representation of human kind -- an icon both of comedy and the movies themselves. -- David Robinson

Chaplin was the first acknowledged artistic genius of the cinema . . . He was also the twentieth centurys first media `superstar, the first artistic creator and popularized creature of our global culture. . . Chaplin may be the one cinema artist who might truly be called a seminal figure of the century -- if only because of his influence on virtually every other recognized seminal figure of the century. -- Gerald Mast

Chaplin : Home official website, The Chaplin Association

Discover Charlie Chaplin Chaplin Newsletter and online store

All-Movie Guide bio info

TCMDB Turner Classic Movies profile

Biography 13-part online biographical series on Chaplin from The British Film Institute

Chaplin resources from BFI

Classic Movies Charlie Chaplin profile

Charlie Chaplin at Reel Classics another profile

Hollywood Renegades 5-part Chaplin profile

Charlie Chaplin - Biography - Photos - Kiera Chaplin, granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin comprehensive look at Chaplin’s life and career

Charlie-Chaplin.net a Chaplin bio

Charlie Chaplin Biography from My Classic Lyrics

A Tribute to Charlie Chaplin 4 part tribute from Classic Movies, including links

Radio '99 Chaplin biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film

Charles Chaplin - Yahoo! Movies The Yahoo Chaplin biography

Clown Ministry Tom Raymond from the Clown Ministry

American Masters . Charlie Chaplin | PBS more bio info

Teen Movie Critic - Charlie Chaplin yet more

Charlie Chaplin biography still more from Limelight Movie Art

Lenin Imports: Chaplin Biography from Lenin Imports

Charlie Chaplin St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture - Find Articles encyclopedia bio entry

Charles Chaplin from Classic Movie Stars

Charlie Chaplin a Chaplin filmography and early career timeline by Glen Pringle

Chaplin Filmography

Charlie Chaplin British Film Institute website devoted to Chaplin resource information

The Essanay Films: Volumes 1 and 2 BFI link

The Mutual Films: Volumes 1 and 2 BFI link

Essays & Articles BFI link

Conference Proceedings The BFI Charles Chaplin Conference July 2005

Conference Papers papers from Chaplin Conference, from BFI

Charlie Chaplin in the Machine Age a remarkable photo essay on Chaplin’s life and career by Claudia Silverman

Entertainment and Chaplin Chaplin’s life story, by Gloria Bond, including interesting links

Taylorology Newsletter original archival news stories from the beginning of Chaplin’s career

The Home Page of Bosse Johansson which includes an entire Chaplin section

Chaplin, (Sir) Charles (Spencer) Criticism and Essays a short essay on Chaplin’s life

CHARLIE CHAPLIN - Modern Times, Gold Rush, City Lights, The Great ... another Chaplin tribute

GoneMovie.com - Charles Chaplin a brief bio and trivia site

Charles Chaplin Hollywood Silents with photos

Chaplin Fans Unite! an enthusiastic fan base

The Little Fellow one fan’s website

Fan site another in German and English, offering a fabulous photo collection

Popstarsplus - Charlie Chaplin yet another fansite, offering a multitude of links

Chaplin's stained glass window at L'Odeon

Relationships With Charlie Chaplin

Astrocartography of Charlie Chaplin by Rob Couteau

Edna Purviance official website

Chaplin's Leading Ladies

The My Hero Project - Charlie Chaplin Artist Hero: Charlie Chaplin, by Neil from Fredericksburg

Charlie Chaplin: The Great Dictator a Chaplin website geared toward the concluding speech from The Great Dictator

page on Chaplin David Pinnegar’s The Song Remains the Same essay on the final speech of The Great Dictator

Charlie Chaplin Text Great Dictator -- Final Speech -- Inspired by ... the text of Chaplin’s final speech from The Great Dictator

American Rhetoric: Movie Speech from The Great Dictator - Adenoid ... and you may watch Chaplin deliver that speech himself from The Great Dictator

CybDem: Charlie Chaplin's Technoprogressive Speech in The Great ... or here, providing a text of the speech as well

YouTube - Charlie Chaplin Chaplin’s final speech from The Great Dictator

THE LIFE OF CHARLIE an odd multi-dimensional visual essay on Chaplin

Chaplin Library a special reference-only book collection

The Chaplin Revue another Chaplin book series

Corsier-sur-vevey a remarkable Chaplin statue location in Switzerland

Charlie Chaplin Museum proposed site at Manoir de Ban, Chaplin’s home in Switzerland, is currently on hold pending the result of an official opposition to the project by one sole individual who lives locally and has decided to hinder the museum for as long as he can

Charles Chaplin a French educational website (in French)

Chaplin Project The Chaplin Studios and personal archives are at present being scanned by the cinemathèque of Bologna in Italy, so Italian language skills may help you here, as much is (in Italian)

The Charlie Chaplin FBI File Fade to Black magazine obtained 2063 pages of FBI files on Chaplin

Chaplin Film Locations Then & Now an extraordinarily detailed documentation by Gerald Smith

Charlie Chaplin's Hollywood another glimpse at Chaplin from the maps of the Hollywood star’s mentality

Slideshows: Charlie Chaplin's Mansion, Chaplin's Old Stomping ... a former home of Charlie Chaplin

Neil Splonskowski Lighting Design: Lighting Charlie Chaplin’s Home ... an article on the home’s current upgrade

The religion of Charlie Chaplin, director and actor an essay providing detailed documentation of Chaplin’s religious affiliation

A new Chaplin film review of THE ADVENTURER from The Guardian, January 29, 1918

July 14 1936: Silent Genius: Chaplin in Modern Times The Guardian, July 14, 1936

Charlie Chaplin (Oxon.) - TIME an article about Chaplin at his home in Switzerland, from Time magazine May 4, 1962

1975: Comic Genius Chaplin is Knighted from BBC On This Day, March 4, 1975

Obituary, NY Times, December 26, 1977 Chaplin's Little Tramp, an Everyman Trying to Gild Cage of Life, Enthralled World by Alden Whitman

Goodbye Charlie | by Luc Sante | The New York Review of Books December 19, 1985

What Made Charlie Run? From Destitution to Global Acclaim: a Look at Chaplin on the 100th Anniversary of His Birth, by Stephen M. Weissman M.D. from The Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1989

Chaplin Essay #1 Charlie: The Development of an Icon, by David Gerstein (1995)

Chaplin Essay #2 Chaplin and the Youth Complex, by David Gerstein (1995)

Chaplin Essay #3 Chaplin, Charlie, and Fascism, by David Gerstein (1995)

Chaplin Essay #4 Charlie and the Iconic Construct of Class, by David Gerstein (1995)

Chaplin Essay #5 Modern Times and the Question of Technology, by David Gerstein (1995)

Chaplin Essay #6 Chaplin, Charlie, and the Political Left, by David Gerstein (1995)

Charlie Chaplin’s Film Heroines by Stephen M. Weissman, M.D. in 1996

Bright Lights Film Journal: Laurel and Chaplin Stealing the Clown’s Clothes, by Romano Giachetti, translated by A. K. Bierman, September 1996

Charlie Chaplin and His Times. - book reviews National Review ... a book review Kenneth S. Lynn’s Charlie Chaplin and His Times, by George MacDonald Fraser from the National Review, April 7, 1997

TIME 100: Charlie Chaplin The Time 100, by Ann Douglas from Time magazine, June 1998

Charlie Chaplin A Tramp Shining: The Many-Sided Character of Charlie Chaplin, by Steve Vineberg from The Boston Phoenix, July 23-30 1998

Charles Chaplin: Monsieur Verdoux The Guardian, July 29, 1999

Chaplin, An Essay Aaron Hale essay on Chaplin, August 1999

Alan Liu, English 165CI (Culture of Information) Student Papers ... Charlie Chaplin: Film as Information, by Nicole T. Simonian as an undergraduate student essay, Fall 1999

Proper Charlie The Guardian, October 4, 2000

The great composer Charlotte Higgins from The Guardian, November 26, 2000

US barred Chaplin knighthood Martin Bright from The Observer, July 20, 2002

Bright Lights Film Journal | Silent Film Comedians Why Are They All Ugly Little Men? Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Langdon: the great silent clowns reformatted, by Allan Vanneman from Bright Lights Film Journal, August 2002

The fears of a clown Kevin Brownlow from The Guardian, October 10, 2002

Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin [video review] Richard Schickel, film critic from Time magazine, reviews a Chaplin documentary in 2003

Silent genius MODERN TIMES review from The Guardian, April 11, 2003

Charlie Chaplin rides again Geoffrey Macnab from The Guardian, May 15, 2003

FILM REVIEW; Studiously Unraveling the Intricate Web of Chaplin as Filmmaker and Performer A.O. Scott reviews the same documentary, Charlie: The Life and Art of Charlie Chaplin, from The New York Times, February 2004

Charlie Chaplin – As Popular as Ever Randor Guy from Sify, August 30, 2004

Looking at Charlie: Keystone and Essanay Days Alan Vanneman from Bright Lights Film Journal (August, 2004)

Chaplin moustache may fetch £5,000 Maev Kennedy from The Guardian, December 9, 2004

Chaplin's hat and cane may fetch £150,000 Paul Lewis from The Guardian, November 16, 2005

Charlie Chaplin: The Mutual Films Philip French from The Observer, January 7, 2006

Off Screen Article (2006) The Great Artist, the Little Fellow: Reading Charlie Chaplin and James Agee, by Daniel Garrett from Offscreen, June 30, 2006

The reel thing Sarfraz Manzoor from The Guardian, July 23, 2007

In pursuit of what lies beneath Peter Conrad from The Observer, February 28, 2009

Tramps like us Simon Louvish from The Guardian, March 5, 2009

The little fellow who ruled the world Simon Callow from The Guardian, March 27, 2009

Bright spark of the silver screen Simon Louvish reviews Chaplin's Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill, by Miranda Seymour from The Guardian, May 8, 2009

The Chaplin-itis Saul Austerlitz from Moving Image Source, September 18, 2009

Little Tramp stays silent as Charlie Chaplin reborn in 3D animation Vanessa Thorpe from The Observer, January 9, 2010

The big picture: Chaplin on set Peter Conrad from The Observer, February 27, 2010

The Great Dictator: No 22 best comedy film of all time Phelim O’Neill from The Guardian, October 17, 2010

Chaplin at Keystone Philip French from The Observer, January 29, 2011

Was Charlie Chaplin a Gypsy? Matthew Sweet from The Guardian, February 17, 2011

Limelight Philip French from The Observer, April 23, 2011

Rare Charlie Chaplin film found in junk shop Ben Child from The Guardian, July 11, 2011

Clip joint: Charlie Chaplins Basim Usmani from The Guardian, July 13, 2011

Musical scores for silent films unearthed in Birmingham Stephen Bates from The Guardian, July 14, 2011

You want to make a silent film – about jazz?' Dan Pritzker from The Guardian, November 10, 2011

The Artist sparks Hollywood nostalgia boom for silent era Megan Conner from The Guardian, February 4, 2012

MI5 spied on Charlie Chaplin after FBI asked for help to banish him from US Richard Norton-Taylor from The Guardian, February 16, 2012

Weekly Top Five: The best of Charlie Chaplin Drew Hunt from The Reader, April 20, 2014

Chaplin, Charles from They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

'The Tramp was something within me' | Review | Guardian Unlimited ... Richard Meryman interviews Chaplin in 1966 from the Guardian, also seen here: 'The Tramp was something within me'

A big pair of shoes to fill Lyndsey Winship interviews Chaplin’s grandson James Thiérrée from The Guardian, October 17, 2007

Charlie Chaplin an extensive Chaplin photo gallery

Charlie Chaplin a foreign language site that also includes a photo gallery

Charles Chaplin a collection of stills

Charlie Chaplin Animated GIF showing Charlie watching himself watching himself in a movie

Download Charlie Chaplin Movies There are literally dozens of Chaplin films still listed under public domain

Download movies free video downloads movie classic movie free ...

Charlie Chaplin Festival a collection of early shorts available for viewing online from Free Movies entertainment magazine

Internet Archive: Details: Charlie Chaplin Festival an online presentation of four Chaplin shorts from 1917: The Adventurer, The Cure, Easy Street and The Immigrant, presented with music and sound effects

Charlie Chaplin Festival - Brightcove another version of the exact same short films

Stage6 · The Last Stop · Charlie Chaplin - Festival - Video and ... yet another version of the same Chaplin shorts, available for downloading

The Kid - Charlie Chaplin (1921) Silent entire 68 minute film presentation (with Arabic subtitles) on YouTube

Stage6 · The Last Stop · Charlie Chaplin - The Kid - Video and ... another version of The Kid, available for downloading

joox.net yet another version of The Kid, available for downloading

YouTube - Charlie Chaplin- Table Ballet Dance of the Dinner Rolls, “The Oceana Roll” scene from The Gold Rush

Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush (teaser) - Videos Cinema, theater ... another version of the same scene

The Great Dictator - The Globe Scene - Charlie Chaplin dances with ... the Globe sequence from The Great Dictator

MilkandCookies - Charlie Chaplin: The Dictator's Speech 5 minute dictator’s speech from The Great Dictator

The 8th Most Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker Poll)

Telegraph's Top 21 British Directors of All Time

Jonathan Rosenbaum's 5 Best Directors listed under EEUU

Charlie Chaplin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charlie Chaplin - Wikiquote

Urban Legends: Charlie Chaplin

BBC ON THIS DAY | 17 | 1978: Charlie Chaplin's stolen body found

Charlie Chaplin (1889 - 1977) - Find A Grave Memorial

Early Chaplin Shorts

Reel Chicago - Chicago Magazine - May 2007 - Chicago Reel Chicago, an article by Robert Loerzel from Chicago magazine, May 2007, including rare historical photos that recount the history of Chicago’s Essanay studios, founded more than 100 years ago, which launched the movie careers of Gloria Swanson and Wallace Beery and helped a cockney comic named Charlie Chaplin rocket to fame

The Unknown Chaplin - Episode One Brian Cady from Turner Classic Movies

The Unknown Chaplin - Episode Two Brian Cady from Turner Classic Movies

Unknown Chaplin - Episode Three Brian Cady from Turner Classic Movies

Chaplin at Keystone Studios Stephanie Thames from Turner Classic Movies

Chaplin at Essany Studios I Jay S. Steinberg from Turner Classic Movies

Charlie Chaplin at Essanay Studios II Roger Fristoe from Turner Classic Movies

Chaplin at Essanay Studios III Roger Fristoe from Turner Classic Movies

Chaplin at Essanay Studios IV Stephanie Thames from Turner Classic Movies

Chaplin at Mutual Studios II Roger Fristoe from Turner Classic Movies

Chaplin at Mutual Studios III Roger Fristoe from Turner Classic Movies

The Chaplin Revue Jay S. Steinberg from Turner Classic Movies

Images - Charlie Chaplin - Essanay Comedies Chaplin’s Essanay Comedies, by Gary Johnson from Images Journal

DVD Times - Charlie Chaplin: The Essanay Films Volumes 1 & 2 Anthony Nield from DVD Times

New York State Writers Institute - Charlie Chaplin's Shorts from ... Charlie Chaplin Shorts from Essanay Studios, by Kevin Hagopian

Images - The Chaplin Mutuals The Chaplin Mutuals, by Gary Johnson from Images Journal

The DVD Journal | Quick Reviews: The Chaplin Mutual Comedies: 90th ... The Chaplin Mutual Comedies: 90th Anniversary Edition, by Mark Bourne from DVD Journal

DVD Times - Charlie Chaplin: The Mutual Films Volume 2 Anthony Nield from DVD Times

Bright Lights Film Journal | Charlie Chaplin at Mutual Looking at Charlie – The Mutuals, by Alan Vanneman from Bright Lights Film Journal

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Charlie Chaplin: The Mutual Two-Reelers
The twelve short films that Charlie Chaplin made for the Mutual Film Company in 1916 and 1917 rank among his greatest achievements. Concise masterpieces of mime and comic characterization, they reveal an artist at the peak of his creative powers, and display Chaplin’s great gift for social satire. With this work, Chaplin crossed the abyss that separates talent from genius (Georges Sadoul). Eight of his marvellous Mutual two-reelers are featured in this special double-bill program.

The Fireman, The Vagabond, One A.M., and Behind the Screen
The Fireman (1916) has a bungling Chaplin losing the fire engine on his way to rescue the fire chiefs imperiled daughter. In The Vagabond (1916), Charlie is a down-and-out violinist who befriends a gypsy girl. One A.M. (1916) features Chaplin in a brilliant solo performance as an inebriated bon vivant returning home after a night on the town. Behind the Screen (1916) is set in a movie studio, where Charlie is the beleaguered assistant to the head carpenter. Length of program: 80 mins.

The Rink, Easy Street, The Cure, and The Immigrant

In The Rink (1916), Chaplin is a grievously clumsy waiter who spends his off-hours roller-skating, with calamitous results. Easy Street (1917) finds Charlie as a skid-row bum who reforms and becomes a policeman on the toughest street in town. The Cure (1917) has a dandyish Chaplin at a health resort, where he is seeking treatment for his addiction to demon rum. The Immigrant (1917), one of Chaplins most celebrated works, features Charlies Tramp newly arrived on Lady Libertys not-so-hospitable shores. Length of program: 80 mins.

The Chaplin Revue: A Dogs Life (1918), Shoulder Arms (1918) and The Pilgrim (1923)

In 1959, Chaplin added his own music to three of his foremost three- and four-reelers, all made for First National between 1918 and 1922, and all largely unavailable for many years (Chaplin had restricted their distribution). It was with these painstakingly crafted, masterfully comic works -- plus his other five First National films: the shorts Sunnyside, A Days Pleasure, The Idle Class, and Pay Day; the longer The Kid (all screening in this series) -- that Chaplin took the decisive steps towards feature-length comedy. It is [here] that one finds the first signs of the spiritual expansion of a craft into art, of skittish farce into comic narrative. . . Chaplins players [became] subtler and more nuanced in their characterization. And the sight gags had never been as logical or inventive before -- or since (Andrew Sarris).

A Dogs Life
The Tramp adopts a little dog. Chaplin’s poignant first film for First National (with whom hed signed a milestone million-dollar contract) has been called his best up to that time, his first real masterpiece (Theodore Huff) and the first complete work of art the cinema has produced (Louis Delluc). USA 1918. Director: Charles Chaplin. Cast: Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Sydney Chaplin. B&W, 35mm, silent with musical score. 42 mins.

Shoulder Arms
Mixing realism and fantasy, this celebrated satire of combat has Charlie single-handedly winning World War I. It was a great popular success and, for some, still remains Chaplin’s masterpiece (Georges Sadoul). USA 1918. Director: Charles Chaplin. Cast: Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Sydney Chaplin. B&W, 35mm, silent with musical score. 40 mins.

The Pilgrim
Chaplins perfectly observed last short film angered some religious groups and was banned in Pennsylvania. An hilarious, nothing-is-sacred swipe at hypocrisy and narrowed-minded puritanism, it has Charlie as an escaped convict who is mistaken for the new minister of a small Texas town. USA 1923. Director: Charles Chaplin. Cast: Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Kitty Bradbury. B&W, 35mm, silent with musical score. 43 mins.

TILLIE’S PUNCTURED ROMANCE

USA (82 mi) 1914 d: Mack Sennett Charles Chaplin – actor (City Slicker)

eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver

SCREENED WITH LIVE MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT: Fame is fleeting. When this film was first released, it had what was considered an all-star cast, and the title cards were all labeled "Marie Dressler in Tillie's Punctured Romance". Now, even many avid movie lovers would be hard pressed to identify any of those cast members other than Charlie Chaplin. Of course, this film was released in 1914, so maybe fame isn't THAT fleeting. It's well worth a look, both for its place in history - it's both the last time Chaplin would be directed by someone other than himself and the first feature-length comedy - and as a solid slapstick comedy in its own right.

And let me underline, italicize, and boldface that: This movie is a slapstick comedy. Roughly eighty percent of the movie involves people getting knocked around, falling down, and running into things, or so it seems. All this slapstick is performed by some of the silent era's greatest physical comedians - Dressler, Chaplin, and Keystone star Mabel Normand - but if that brand of comedy isn't your thing, this movie probably won't change your opinion. Truth be told, even fans might be somewhat daunted by the prospect of eighty minutes' worth, but this isn't the torture of watching a Three Stooges feature; the gags are at least mixed up a little.

And there is, in fact, a story. A con man from the city (Chaplin) blunders into the Banks farm, and wants nothing more than to get away from the run-down place and plain, overweight daughter Tillie (Dressler) until he sees the huge wad of money Farmer Banks is hiding. Then it's, hey, why don't you run away with me to the city? Just grab your father's money. As soon as they reach the city, though, he and his old girlfriend (Normand) hook up, abscond with the cash, and leave her to get thrown in jail for being drunk & disorderly. Unbeknownst to them at the time, she's the niece of a local millionaire, who's about to have a nasty mountain-climbing accident.

Part of the reason why a movie so based upon slapstick can work is that it offers up characters where the audience really doesn't mind if they get dumped on. Chaplin, in contrast to his best-known role, the lovable Little Tramp, is all oily smarm; he couldn't be more disreputable with a neon sign saying "do not trust this man" floating overhead. Normand is pretty but self-centered, with little more than a rudimentary conscience, easily suppressed. And Dressler's Tillie, though almost uniformly the victim of the story's events (she's treated as badly by her uncle as she is by Chaplin's crook), is such an obnoxious lummox that, while the audience might not exactly feel she deserves what's coming, they likely won't be above laughing at her misfortune.

The three main actors deliver different types of silent performances. Mabel Normand was possibly Keystone's biggest draw at the time, and gives the movie star performance - lots of rolled eyes, significant looks, and broad facial expressions. Chaplin's specialty is the rapid change of mood and smooth physical work: His comedy doesn't have the impressive, carefully choreographed intricacy of Buster Keaton, but he sells each individual move well, and makes simple things like changing directions on the run funny. Dressler is making her film debut - she originated the role on Broadway - and she is still obviously a stage actress, still playing to the balconies despite the fact that her new medium has close-ups.

Director Mack Sennett was a Keystone workhorse, directing dozens of single-reel comedies a year during the 1910s, and here was faced with the daunting challenge of adapting a hit Broadway musical to film - a medium change which is difficult now, and was doubly so back in the teens, when producing a six-reel movie was a massive undertaking and "talkies" were still in the future, meaning he had to work without dialog or musical numbers. For the latter, he substitutes location shooting and large slapstick set-pieces; where the stage production ended on a hit song for Dressler, the film's final reel delivers a Keystone Kops sequence, including pie fight. The dialog is largely replaced with the characters using broad facial expressions to express the gist of what they're saying, though Dressler frequently seems to be giving her stage performance, especially early on - she'll just be talking up a storm, but the audience can't hear her and there are no intertitles to give context to what she's saying.

The presentation at the MFA was, for the most part, quite good. The print screened ran approximately eighty-two minutes, about ten minutes longer than the currently-available DVD. The print looked, for the most part, to be in good shape, although it appeared to be cobbled together from multiple sources. Some portions of the movie seemed rather dark and beat-up; I wouldn't be surprised if these originated from a recently discovered and poorly-preserved source. The disparity in quality is distracting, but fortunately, the poor-looking moments are seldom critical ones. Musical accompaniment was provided by "Tillie's Nightmare" (a name taken from the original play), a five piece group made up of Ken Winokur (The Alloy Orchestra, percussion), Billy Novick (New Black Eagle Jazz Band, clarinet and alto sax), Robin Verdier (Paramount Jazz Band, piano), John Kusiak (a composer, here playing banjo and guitar), and Scott Getchell (Lars Vegas, cornet). Their score is bouncy and upbeat, an enjoyable pastiche of the period.

Despite the uneven quality of the film source, I hope this restoration and score appears on DVD. It's an important part of film and Hollywood history, and generates its share of honest laughs.

Turner Classic Movies Bret Wood

Tillie's Punctured Romance, directed by Mack Sennett and released in November 1914, holds the distinction of being the first feature-length comedy film ever made. At the time, feature films were only two years old and were generally the domain of "important" literary adaptations and historic epics, such as Cleopatra (1912), Shakespeare's Richard III (1912) and D.W. Griffith's Judith of Bethulia (1913). Comedy was considered best served in small doses, but Sennett, already a pioneer in the field of slapstick, was confident that the two-reel barrier could be broken.

Marie Dressler stars as Tillie Banks, a vivacious if ungainly farm girl who falls under the spell of Charlie, a big-city chiseler (Charlie Chaplin). Charlie romances Tillie, steals her money, and flees the scene with his girlfriend/confederate (Mabel Normand). When Tillie's wealthy uncle falls from a mountaintop, she stands to inherit a massive fortune, inspiring Charlie to resume their romance. Charlie marries Tillie and they move into a lavish estate, and the jealous Mabel takes a job as a housemaid to be close to her former partner in crime. A series of comic episodes, including a hilariously inept tango, Tillie's discovery of Charlie in a compromising position and the sudden return of Tillie's "deceased" uncle launches the film toward its madcap finale, in which the Keystone Kops are called in to restore order to the newlyweds' disrupted domicile.

Tillie's Punctured Romance originated as a vehicle for Dressler (1869-1934), who had achieved great fame as a star of the musical comedy stage but had never appeared in a motion picture. After securing the actress's services for the phenomenally expensive price of $2,500 per week (for a minimum of 12 weeks), Sennett and company began searching for a story suitable to this high-profile groundbreaking comedy. Keystone Studios screenplay editor Craig Hutchinson struck upon the idea of retooling one of Ms. Dressler's previous successes, Tillie's Nightmare, which had opened at New York's Herald Square Theater on May 5, 1910 (and which debuted the popular song "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl"). Screenwriter Hampton Del Ruth and Hutchinson supplied the revamped title of the film, which had at various stages of production been known as Dressler No. 1 and She Was More Sinned Against Than Necessary.

Curiously, the trade publication Moving Picture World stated that Tillie's Punctured Romance would be Dressler's first and last screen appearance but, probably due to the movie's overwhelming popularity, she quickly changed her mind and pursued a film career. Dressler was a screen comedienne throughout the silent era, and even appeared in two revisitations of her lovelorn creation, Tillie's Tomato Surprise (1915) and Tillie Wakes Up (1917), neither of which were produced by Sennett. She faded from the screen in the 1920s, but at the dawn of the sound era, in one of Hollywood's most remarkable comebacks, Dressler suddenly became a top star again. After her Academy Award-winning appearance in Min and Bill (1930), Dressler -- in various incarnations of the aging, overweight battle-ax -- became filmdom's most unlikely leading lady, named the number one box-office attraction in America.

While its unfettered slapstick (complete with pie fight) continues to provoke laughter today, Tillie's Punctured Romance has not aged gracefully, in cinematic terms. But its crude staging and the actors' shameless mugging offer a historic snapshot of cutting-edge comedy in the mid 1910s. Sennett's film would certainly occupy a more obscure spot in film history were it not for the presence of the young Charlie Chaplin, who had landed a contract with Keystone Studios earlier in the year. In his memoirs, Chaplin was rather dismissive of the film, remarking, "It was pleasant working with Marie, but I did not think the picture had much merit." The truth was, Chaplin had begun to direct his own films and enjoyed the creative spirit of on-the-spot experimentation that characterized his sets, and found it difficult to suddenly follow the demands of another filmmaker. Said Chaplin, "I was more happy to get back to directing myself again." With the exception of a few cameo appearances, Chaplin would never again appear in a film directed by anyone other than himself.

Among the directors Chaplin had worked for in the early months of his career was his co-star Mabel Normand. An often overlooked silent screen personality, Normand was among the first women filmmakers in Hollywood, as well as one of its most popular stars. Her skills at comedy were so deft that she could share the screen with slapstick legends such as Chaplin or Fatty Arbuckle without being outshined. For years Normand was involved in an on-again/off-again romantic relationship with Sennett but the pair never married, even though they remained friends and collaborators until Normand's death in 1930.

Before proving his genius at comedy, Sennett had been an actor at the Biograph Studios, often appearing in the films of D.W. Griffith, including The Lonely Villa (1909) and The Last Drop of Water (1911). Supposedly Sennett's entry into show business came about via Dressler. In 1902, he introduced himself to the actress with a letter of referral from the Sennett family's lawyer, Calvin Coolidge. Impressed by the 22-year-old's ambition, Dressler in turn wrote a letter of recommendation to New York producer David Belasco. Although the legendary impresario did not hire Sennett, the young actor's pursuit of stardom was thus set in motion.

While producing films first at Biograph, then at Keystone Studios, Sennett developed a roster of stars that would become a who's who of slapstick cinema: Chaplin, Arbuckle, Al St. John, Ford Sterling, Chester Conklin, Edgar Kennedy, Charley Chase and Mack Swain, among many others. Even though Dressler was instrumental in Sennett's climb to power, the two did not work well together. Sennett wrote in his autobiography, King of Comedy, "In the midst of a comic scene I had planned carefully beforehand, Miss Dressler would say, 'No, Mack, that's wrong. Now this is the way we're going to do it.' I was the head of the studio and I was supervising this particular picture, but neither of these things influenced Marie Dressler. My arguments didn't influence her either. 'Okay, Marie, you do it your way,' I'd say. And I would leave the set. Usually a sweating messenger would arrive within an hour [to summon me back]."

Disputes over the distribution of the film (which had been promised to Dressler's husband, James Dalton) caused the actress to file various lawsuits and appeals against Keystone, but without success, mainly because the promise was verbal rather than written. The actress later claimed that it was she who discovered Chaplin and selected him and Normand to appear in Tillie's Punctured Romance: "I think the public will agree that I am a good picker for it was the first real chance Charlie Chaplin ever had." This was, of course, a bit of an exaggeration. By the time Tillie's Punctured Romance was produced, Chaplin had already appeared in more than 30 films and was soon to leave Keystone for a lucrative contract at the Essanay Studios.

Dressler did, however, have a say in who was cast in the film -- or rather, who was not cast in the film. She refused to allow Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle to co-star with her. Both in terms of screen popularity and physical girth, Dressler insisted upon being the "biggest" star to appear in Tillie's Punctured Romance.

Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash)

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

A DOG’S LIFE A 98

USA (40 mi) 1918

As with all his films, written, directed, produced, and musical score written by Chaplin, his films are simply sublime eloquence, a poetic testament to humanity, using strong emotions and sentimentality as authentic, even indispensable tools for understanding and dealing with life, a master at blending comedy and drama. Of interest, has anyone ever portrayed the plight of the poor as brilliantly and sympathetically as Chaplin? This is one of the first films, CITY LIGHTS is the most famous, where the Tramp uses stolen money to pursue his dreams, and there’s nothing remotely criminal or morally objectionable about it. In fact, it’s part of the charm, the way Chaplin mixes fairy tales into reality, so that to the viewer, they are indistinguishable.

This version features a short introductory comment by the director, spoken over images of the construction of his movie sets in early Hollywood, featuring 32 takes of another little actor being manhandled from every possible position with two hands on his neck. “It started with an idea, then developed into a set...a comic ballet. Now I should hide behind my curtain of silence.”

A film regarded by many as Chaplin’s first masterpiece, opening with the Little Tramp asleep in a vacant lot, awakening to the smell of a street vendor selling hot dogs. The Tramp reaches through the fence and grabs one, then reaches back for the mustard, but a cop has his eye on him, so he cautiously puts it back before rolling back and forth under the fence to avoid the cop’s pursuit, all in a blur of motion. Next the Tramp sees two Help Wanted signs, one requesting Strong Men for Sewer Work, the other for a Brewery. The Tramp bypasses the he-men and runs into the Brewery, as other prospective workers re-read the signs and run in as well, all fighting over space on the waiting bench. When the window opens to hand out jobs, the Tramp is again a blur in motion, this time just missing the opportunity, always bumping into the back of somebody who gets to the window an instant before he does. All the jobs are handed out, leaving the Tramp alone and penniless.

This is immediately followed by an extraordinary sequence of dogs fighting in the street over scraps of food. The Tramp enters the scuffle to rescue a poor mutt, Scraps, from the dogfight, but becomes engulfed himself in a blur of whirling, leaping dogs, jumping after the Tramp as he tries to run away, grabbing onto his coattails, where the Tramp swirls them around and around, but eventually they make their escape. The Tramp feeds Scraps milk from the bottom of a bottle by dipping the dog’s tail into the bottle and letting him lick his own tail. Another timeless sequence features the Tramp stealing pieces of pie set out on a counter tray, always stuffing it into his mouth before the poor man behind the counter can catch him. Eventually a cop enters, but the man behind the counter has become so frustrated that he takes a swing at the Tramp, who ducks, and of course the cop gets walloped.

Next the Tramp enters a dance hall where a sign makes it clear no dogs are allowed, so he stuffs Scraps into his pants, but his tail keeps wagging through a hole in his back pocket, causing the Tramp to get thrown out. Undeterred, the Tramp returns during a rollicking dance number, where the drummer can be seen enthusiastically playing the tambourine on his head while leering at a dancing girl. The Tramp is asked to dance by one of the girls, but he’s in for a bumpy ride until the shy girl, Edna Purviance, sings a sad song that brings buckets of tears from the audience. Again, the Tramp is thrown out for not having any money to buy her a drink. Meanwhile, two robbers steal a wallet from a rich drunk, burying the money in the Tramp’s vacant lot. Scraps eagerly digs it up and the Tramp makes a hasty return to the Green Lantern, but his girl has been fired for refusing to dance with abusive customers. The Tramp shows off his cash, orders champagne, and describes to the girl his dream of a home in the country with several children, but the robbers see the money and bash him over the head, leaving him penniless when the champagne arrives, so he’s thrown out again. But he vows revenge, sneaking back in behind a curtain where the two robbers are sitting and wallops one of them in the head, knocking him out cold. And in a simply masterful performance, he uses his own hands as the hands of the still unconscious man in a finger and hand routine that is simply amazing, knocking the other man out and taking back the money. But the bartender catches him on his way out as the robbers wake up and snatch the money, but the Tramp snatches it back and runs outside, where the two robbers overpower him, causing him to drop the wallet. Scraps picks it up and runs away to the waiting girl.

When Dreams Come True – the Tramp is in his farmer’s attire planting seeds in his fields, while inside, domestic bliss, as he and his girl sit before the fire, a bassinet on the floor which is filled not with a baby, but with Scraps and her new pups.

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

In 1959, Chaplin added his own music to three of his foremost three- and four-reelers, all made for First National between 1918 and 1922, and all largely unavailable for many years (Chaplin had restricted their distribution). It was with these painstakingly crafted, masterfully comic works -- plus his other five First National films: the shorts Sunnyside, A Days Pleasure, The Idle Class, and Pay Day; the longer The Kid -- that Chaplin took the decisive steps towards feature-length comedy. It is [here] that one finds the first signs of the spiritual expansion of a craft into art, of skittish farce into comic narrative. . . Chaplin’s players [became] subtler and more nuanced in their characterization. And the sight gags had never been as logical or inventive before -- or since (Andrew Sarris).

Charlie Chaplin (in tramp mode) plays all of the great plot-lines in one roll: he taunts and assaults petty policemen, loves dogs, gets hit on by very strange women in bars, battles goons trying to rip him off...in fact the entire thing presages the Led Zeppelin saga, it's almost eerie. Edna Purviance's performance, her efforts at getting a free drink, deserve at least Honourable Mention in any litany of strange mating rituals. The slow-motion/sped-up scene where Charlie dances with dogs is poetry in motion-not for what it's depicting, but for what it is. The abruptly romantic happy ending is wonderful, but for me not quite so gloriously cataclysmic as a similar card played against a simpler palate by Jim Jarmusch in Down By Law. Social commentaries abound, presented forcefully and artistically, but obviously not without humour. Chaplin's early work can, and perhaps should, be seen as a blueprint for the brilliant Front Populaire directors in the succeeding decades. Funny how political and social movements wax and wane, sometimes simultaneously: the "When Dreams Come True" segment depicts hard work, a simple farmhouse, and a family. This may suggest that global socialists have received setbacks in accordance with their willingness to be distracted, and to cede their most compelling raisons d'etre, to the likes of the fundamentalists and Republicans, who haven't delivered on them either.

Turner Classic Movies Frank Miller

Charles Chaplin took a big step forward with the short, A Dog's Life (1918), both artistically, historically and commercially. It was both the longest Chaplin production to that time and, he would later claim, the first in which he seriously considered comic plot construction. Historically, the film was the first to come from his new studios at Sunset and La Brea. Commercially, it was his biggest hit to date, often advertised as his first film to make $1 million.

Chaplin told the press he had been considering the comic possibilities of working with a dog for over a year before making the film, though his brother Syd had introduced canine comedy to Fred Karno's Troupe, the vaudeville company in which both had performed as young men. With the opening of his new studios, he decided this was the perfect time for his dog film. Only he had to find the right dog. He tried a dachshund, a Pomeranian, a poodle, a Boston bull terrier and an English bulldog before realizing that what he needed was just a mongrel. The film was already in production when he picked up 21 dogs from the Los Angeles pound and brought them to the set. When neighbors complained, he cut the number to 12 and finally picked one adorable creature, Mutt, to be his new co-star.

The plot was simple, but revealed much more thought than many of his previous films. Once again cast as his popular tramp character, Chaplin saves a stray from a group of attacking dogs, then fights to keep them both alive despite unemployment and starvation. When he sneaks the dog into a dance hall, it helps him save singer Edna Purviance (Chaplin's principal leading lady at the time) from mobsters and recovers a stolen wallet that gives them the money to start a new life. Throughout all this, Chaplin linked the tramp's and the singer's actions to the dog's, often cutting between scenes in which they appeared in similar dilemmas. This use of association as the basis for plot construction gave him a way to string together what in earlier films had been simply a series of disparate gags. Years later, he would say that though it restricted his ability to use any gag he thought of, it ultimately made his films funnier and deeper. In addition, he used his comedy to explore some harsh realities of life: poverty, unemployment and prostitution among them.

The opening of a new film studio for one of the world's most famous actors was a major news event, and Chaplin's studio was flooded with visitors. At first, he imposed no restrictions on the guest list. Then two men claiming to be journalists were caught eavesdropping on a production meeting. A quick search revealed that in three days they had stolen sketches of sets for A Dog's Life, notes from story meetings and character descriptions. From then on Chaplin had to approve of visitors, though there was still a stream of guests, including Scottish stage comic Harry Lauder, who shared gags with Chaplin as cameras recorded the meeting of two comic legends. By some accounts, it was Lauder who suggested the film's title. Chaplin had started production under the title I Should Worry, but Lauder's statement, "It's a dog's life you're leadin' these days, Charlie" fit the film perfectly. Many critics have noted that the film contrasts the dog's life led not just by Mutt, but by Chaplin and Purviance's characters as well.

The dogs themselves posed some problems in production. Some were more independent than most human actors, leading to fights on set. Along with receipts for dog's meat, the props department's records include orders for a large syringe and 65 cents' worth of ammonia to be used to break up dog fights.

Chaplin's new studio included a standard set used in many of his films, a T-shaped street similar to the one he had first used at Mutual Films while making Easy Street (1917). Variously dressed, the street would turn up in several of his films representing cities from around the world. The technicians did such a good job of making the street look real that Chaplin had no problem cutting in scenes shot at various street locations around Los Angeles. For A Dog's Life, he shot for a day in front of the Palace Market, which became part of the studio street during editing.

A Dog's Life was a big hit for Chaplin, allowing him to continue working at his own studio and encouraging him to try ever-longer films. He would produce his first feature, The Kid (1921), three years later. Purviance would continue starring for Chaplin until 1923, when the failure of his A Woman of Paris and her desire to move into dramatic roles led him to seek other leading ladies. Nonetheless, he kept her on the payroll for the rest of her life. Even Mutt enjoyed the success of A Dog's Life. He was adopted by Chaplin and spent the rest of his life as a valued staff member at the star's studio.

A Dog's Life (1918) Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide

Bright Lights Film Journal [Alan Vanneman] also reviewing SHOULDER ARMS and THE KID

moviediva also reviewing two earlier 1917 shorts, EASY STREET and THE IMMIGRANT

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Verdict reviewing THE CHAPLIN REVIEW, a look at seven early Chaplin shorts

The Charlie Chaplin Centennial: A Genius Is Revisited Vincent Canby from The New York Times, also reviewing the THE IDLE CLASS, THE PILGRIM, THE KID, A WOMAN OF PARIS, and CITY LIGHTS

SHOULDER ARMS A- 93

USA (40 mi) 1918

Chaplin’s take on trench warfare, resembling a farce cast in a cloud of gloom, “Canons, bayonets, poison gas...those were the good old days.” The Little Tramp is in uniform here, trying to learn how to about-face without tangling his famous feet or bayoneting the soldier standing behind him, featuring his famous bit where he hoists his rifle about, finally slamming it on the soldier standing next to him, used later in THE GREAT DICTATOR. The enemy in this film is led by the little man in A DOG’S LIFE who was yanked around for 32 takes, seen here leading a squadron of giants, showing plenty of swagger, kicking them around in the trenches. There is a split screen of the Tramp in the trenches dreaming of a bar in New York City followed by a downpour of rain. Other soldiers are seen getting mail, the Tramp nothing, they receive cakes to eat, while he pulls out a piece of cheese from a mousetrap he carries around in his pocket, eventually he resorts to peering over other people’s shoulders to read their mail. Finally he does receive a package in the mail, but he has to put on his gas mask to open a package of limburger cheese, which he hoists into the enemy trenches, like a grenade, where it splats on the little man’s face. The trenches flood with rain, soldiers are forced to sleep in the water, but in the Tramp’s case, under water, where he is forced to use the speaker device from a phonograph like a snorkel.

Soldier #13 is ordered to go over the top, along with several others. The Tramp is eager to be the first out the trenches until he sees the smoke and the bombs, then he politely allows the others to have the honors. He is chosen for a volunteer mission behind enemy lines where he helps save the life of a radio operator. He finds a bombed out house with no walls left, but still opens the front door. Inside, he finds a young girl, Edna Purviance, his French dream girl, but soldiers arrive with a gun, the Tramp turns the gun back on them, but another enemy soldier arrives and points another gun on him. Eventually he escapes, but the girl is arrested and interrogated by the cigarette smoking, cognac drinking little man wearing spectacles who tries to manhandle her, ordering all others out of the room in order to have her all for himself, but the Tramp climbs down the chimney and hits him over the head with a poker. Immediately, the enemy is visited by the Kaiser, so the Tramp changes uniforms with the knocked out little man. They are bringing in his radio operator pal, so the Tramp pulls rank and orders all the soldiers away except for the Kaiser and his chauffeur, eventually stealing the Kaiser’s car, disguising the girl as his chauffeur, giving her a grease moustache, so when the Kaiser gets into the car – Bringing Home the Bacon – she drives them to the Allied forces. The radio operator signals ahead, so the Tramp gets a hero’s welcome from the jubilant troops when he arrives with his prisoner. “Peace on earth, goodwill for all mankind.” But it was only a dream, the Tramp awakens in his soldier’s tent.

from the New York Times in 1918 (link lost):

"The fool's funny," was the chuckling observation of one of those who saw Charlie Chaplin's new film. "Shoulder Arms," at the Strand yesterday—and, apparently, that's the way everybody felt. There have been learned discussions as to whether Chaplin's comedy is low or high, artistic or crude, but no one can deny that when he impersonates a screen fool he is funny. Most of those who go to find fault with him remain to laugh. They may still find fault, but they will keep on laughing.

In "Shoulder Arms" Chaplin is as funny as ever. He is even more enjoyable than one is likely to anticipate because he abandons some of the tricks of former comedies and introduces new properties into his horseplay. His limber little stick, for instance, which had begun to lose its comic character through overuse, does not appear. Instead Chaplin, camouflaged as a tree trunk, plays destructively with one of the tree's branches. The baggy, black trousers are also gone, giving place to a uniform and such equipment as a soldier never dreamed of. The comedian begins as a rooky, the most awkward member of the awkward squad, and ends by capturing the Kaiser, the Crown Prince and von Hindenburg. Between the beginning and the end there are many laughs.

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara

Shoulder Arms (1918) is a prime example of the most important aspect of Charlie Chaplin's artistry - his ability to gracefully skirt the line between comedy and tragedy. Initially, Chaplin's decision to make a farce based on the horrors of World War I was met with considerable skepticism; Cecil B. DeMille even tried to talk him out of it. But Chaplin was a man of instinct, and he felt he could generate a special kind of laughter by comically dismantling the hell endured by doughboys at the front.

The resulting three reeler is one of Chaplin's early masterpieces, a film that nonchalantly moves between sentimentality, comic violence, and outright surrealism without losing sight of its serious subject matter. The fact that it ended up being one of the biggest hits of Chaplin's hit-laden career suggests that he knew exactly what he was doing when tackling such a risky topic.

Matters of taste aside, there was another stumbling block between Charlie and an effective service comedy. When he signed his contract with Mutual Pictures, it included a clause stipulating that he couldn't leave the United States without the studio's approval. Members of the European press started suggesting that he was a "slacker", since this arrangement conveniently enabled him to skip serving in the British Army. Two years later, a similar contract with First National also kept him out of the U.S. military...or so it seemed. That time, Chaplain tried to enlist, but was rejected for being underweight!

Shoulder Arms isn't much of a narrative, but at 40 minutes, it really doesn't have to be. It's basically an opportunity for Chaplain to riff on the absurdities of Army life and modern warfare. Everything up to and including mail call, food in the trenches, and infestations of lice, comes into play, with consistently hilarious results. One sequence, in which Charlie moves through enemy territory while camouflaged as a rickety tree is a gem, one of the more potently bizarre interludes in any Chaplin picture. That such a sequence can still generate belly laughs 87 years after it was shot speaks volumes about the man's talent. There's simply no over-estimating the enormity of his gifts as a screen performer.

Shoulder Arms arose from a lengthy period of trial and error, but that was par for the course with Chaplin. (Rent the thoroughly fascinating three-part documentary, The Unknown Chaplin, for details on Charlie's grueling creative process.) The idea had been germinating for some time. In late 1917, Chaplin even designed a postcard advertising a film called Private Chaplain U.S.A., upon which he drew a picture of himself dressed as a doughboy and wrote, "Ladies and Gentleman - Charlie in this picture lies down his cane and picks up the sword to fight for Democracy."

But, with all due respect to Saul Bass, designing posters is the easy part. Originally, Chaplin shot a pre-war sequence in which he escapes his mean-spirited wife and houseful of kids by joining the Army, then endures the indignities of a physical exam. But, after taking several months to film it, he trashed the footage and started fresh. Then, after completing the picture as we now know it, he was still somehow convinced that he'd blown it. It was only when his dear friend, Douglas Fairbanks, laughed raucously while watching the movie that Charlie knew he had, indeed, hit the mark. "Sweet Douglas," he later said, "he was my greatest audience."

Movie Views [Ryan Cracknell]

Shoulder Arms Phil Posner from All Movie Guide

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller)

Video Charlie Chaplin More Heroic Work - Charlie, Chaplin, Heroic ... YouTube video from Shoulder Arms

Bright Lights Film Journal [Alan Vanneman] also reviewing A DOG’S LIFE, SUNNYSIDE, and THE KID

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Verdict reviewing THE CHAPLIN REVIEW, a look at seven early Chaplin shorts

SUNNYSIDE

USA (34 mi) 1919

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Charlie Chaplin goes to the farm. To the farm hotel, it can never be quite so easy with Mr. Chaplin, can it? Frivolity, dignified indignities, and funny walks naturally ensue, the rural church service was probably never so thunderous, and the inevitable romance turns things down the home stretch. The scene of a goat and organ trying to drown out Charlie's waltzy score is even more welcome than resourceful, and may have set off a better idea somewhere in Harpo Marx' head. It all moves along as you suspect it might, with a little help from the animals and the silliest looking lounge lizards I've ever seen. But how, pray tell, will that clever Mr. Chaplin turn any of this into the requisite happy ending?

Sunnyside Phil Posner from All Movie Guide

Charlie Chaplin's third film in his First National contract is a simple story of country life, an idyll, which contains two separate dream sequences, a characteristic Chaplin story device. Charlie is a farm hand and general factotum at a combination farm, general store and hotel. His boss, Tom Wilson, drives him hard, waking him early to prepare breakfast while he sleeps in. Charlie has devised some labor-saving techniques, such as sitting a chicken on the frying pan so she can lay an egg in it, or milking the cow directly into the coffee cups. After Sunday breakfast, the boss goes off to church along with most of the town, while Charlie must tend to the cows. Charlie, reading the Bible, loses the herd as they stroll peacefully up a country road. He finds them in town and must shoo them out of various buildings. When the whole parish comes running out of the church, Charlie enters heroically and comes out riding the bull, which eventually dumps him in a stream below a wooden bridge. Unconscious, Charlie dreams of dancing through the meadows with four lovely wood nymphs, in a scene of balletic grace and humor. Awakened at the bottom of the stream, he's pulled out by four men including his boss, who kicks him all the way home. Sunday afternoon is Charlie's time for visiting his girl, Edna Purviance, bringing her flowers and a ring. Their romantic tryst is hampered by her mischievous teenage brother, until Charlie sends him out to play blindman's bluff in traffic. Then Edna's father (Henry Bergman) interrupts their musical interlude at the pump organ, ordering Charlie away. Back at the store/hotel Charlie is again scolded for being late. A traffic accident outside brings a new visitor, a "city slicker" who is injured and must stay at the hotel. He's attended to by a horse doctor and shown to his room by Charlie, who later sits down to rest. Later, the slicker is preparing to leave when Edna enters the store and attracts the handsome visitor who follows her out of the store. Worried by the competition, Charlie eventually arrives at Edna's, observing through a window his rival's fashionable ways -- the spats on his shoes, the handkerchief up his sleeve and the cigarette lighter in the handle of his walking stick. Seeing that he's losing Edna, Charlie returns home and tries to emulate his rival by putting old socks over the tops of his shoes and rigging a match to the end of a stick. When he visits Edna she rejects him, giving back his ring. Despondent, Charlie walks out to the street and stands in the way of an approaching car. The impact he feels, however, is from the boot of his boss as he awakens Charlie from his second reverie. The guest is really leaving this time, and when Edna enters the store, she gives the slicker's advances the cold shoulder as Charlie proclaims his devotion to her. He helps the slicker load his baggage into the car and receives a tip. Charlie and Edna celebrate his departure with a loving hug, as the camera irises in.

Turner Classic Movies Stephanie Thames

After searching for creative freedom at three studios (Keystone, Essanay and Mutual), Charlie Chaplin signed a contract with First National in 1917. Under the agreement Chaplin would remain independent, deliver eight two reelers per year and cover all production costs using a $125,000 per picture advance from the studio. First National would pay for advertising and provide an extra $15,000 per additional reel if the film ran long. Once the expenses were covered, Chaplin and the studio would split the profits 50-50. It sounded like a sweet deal. But eight pictures a year would prove an impossible task for Chaplin. He'd long wanted to make a feature length film and was starting to spend more and more time on each project. Instead of eight films per year, it would take Chaplin five years to complete eight movies for First National (from 1918 to February 1923). And of these, only four were limited to two reels. Sunnyside (1919) was one of them.

His third film for First National, Sunnyside was the first to be held to two reels. And considering its production history, the length seems almost a matter of necessity rather than design. The movie was originally titled Jack of All Trades and after 150 days in production, Chaplin had little to show for his efforts. Most of the time had been spent idle or "talking about the story." Then finally, it seems inspiration struck and for three weeks Chaplin worked day and night filming the story of the newly named Sunnyside. The plot found Charlie as a handyman who is bucked from a cow, knocked unconscious and awakens to find himself surrounded by nymphs. It sounds a little wacky. It did in 1919 as well. As Kenneth S. Lynn relates in his book Charlie Chaplin and His Times, "the public was puzzled by [Sunnyside], the reviewers panned it and there was whispered speculation in Hollywood that "the 'Master' had lost his touch."

But the movie does feature two intriguing dream sequences, the second of which feels pretty modern for its day. Audiences don't even realize it is a dream until it's over. There's no reason to spoil the surprise by saying any more. But as for the first dream (that of the frolicking nymphs), the scene appears to be a Chaplin homage to the ballet L'Apres-midi d'un Faune. On a recent tour to Los Angeles, the Ballet Russes had fascinated Chaplin. Star dancer Nijinsky and the company visited Chaplin's studio, and when the comedian in turn showed up at the theater, Nijinsky kept the audience waiting half an hour while he and Chaplin chatted. It was perhaps a discussion about life as an independent artist as Nijinsky was attempting to break away from Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes.

It's been suggested that the dream sequences in Sunnyside are telling about the state of Chaplin's private life - that he attempted to escape into fantasy as in the first sequence or dwelled in a much darker place per the second dream. Lynn proposes in his book that, "marital bitterness and fears about his creative faculties had finally driven Chaplin into acting out, through his tramp counterpart, a suicide attempt." It is an interesting point to ponder while watching the end of Sunnyside. For indeed it was not a happy period for Chaplin. He had married a young actress named Mildred Harris in 1918. She was pregnant during the filming of Sunnyside. But by most accounts, the marriage was troubled. And shortly after Sunnyside was released on June 15, 1919, a tragic occurrence destroyed any hope for the marriage. Chaplin's son, Norman Spencer Chaplin, was born on July 7 and lived just three days.

For Chaplin it was also a period marked by creative frustration. His next film after Sunnyside called Charlie's Picnic folded only a few weeks into production. As Chaplin says in My Autobiography, "after Sunnyside I was at my wits' end for an idea." But from this place of personal and artistic despair would come Chaplin's greatest success to date - the completion of his first feature film The Kid (1921).

Bright Lights Film Journal [Alan Vanneman] also reviewing A DOG’S LIFE, SHOULDER ARMS, and THE KID

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Verdict reviewing THE CHAPLIN REVIEW, a look at seven early Chaplin shorts

A DAY’S PLEASURE B+ 90

USA (15 mi) 1919

Charlie takes his wife, Edna Purviance, and two children for a leisurely drive to the sea, all piling into their car, which shakes and spits and rattles when he starts it by turning the crank on the outside of the car, but then stops the moment Charlie tries to step inside. The bit is repeated about a half a dozen times until he pulls a thread from his pants and places it expertly into the engine, which works perfectly, so then they’re off for a boatride, which is advertised as “Children in arms free,” so Charlie carries both, stepping over another woman who has slipped and is holding onto the boat while her feet remain on the pier, making a perfect ramp.

There is a black Dixieland band on board, where the drummer uses another musician’s head for percussion. Here the camera takes to rocking back and forth in a dizzying, continuous motion. In a bit right out of an earlier short, the 1915 film A NIGHT IN THE SHOW, Charlie tries to sit, but the trombone player keeps sliding his instrument just under his nose, causing Charlie to throw the trombone player overboard. The passengers and the musicians are lulled to sleep by the perpetual rocking motion. Charlie tries to set up a lounge chair on deck, but it takes him about 5 minutes to try to put it together, unsuccessfully, so he throws that overboard as well. All the passengers appear seasick, and when Charlie rests his head on another woman’s lap, the husband takes offense. Kicking and fighting ensue.

On the drive back home, Charlie gets stuck in traffic. First pedestrians mull in the street, continually standing in front of his car, but when he finally gets a chance to move forward, the everpresent Chaplin traffic cop tells him to move back. Next a puddle of tar is dropped directly in front of his car. Charlie gets out and steps in it, then steps on a manhole cover, the cover sticks to his shoe, lifting the cover in the air when he lifts his leg, and the cop immediately plunges down the open hole. Charlie eventually gets stuck in the tar and becomes a Leaning Tower of Pisa trying to get out, swaying back and forth, then gets tangled with another man, and eventually the returning cop, all wrestling through various contortions, leading to an amusing innertitle, “You’ve been sticking around here too long.” Charlie escapes, leaving the other two stuck. “The end of a perfect day.”

from the New York Times in 1919 (link lost):

Charlie Chaplin is screamingly funny in his latest picture, "A Day's Pleasure," at the Strand, when he tries in vain to solve the mysteries of a collapsible deck chair. He is also funny in many little bits of pantomime and burlesque, in which he is inimitable. But most of the time he depends for comedy upon seasickness, a Ford car, and biff-bang slap-stick, with which he is little. If any, funnier than many other screen comedians.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Charlie Chaplin spends what seems like about half of the film's 18 minutes trying to get his Model-T started, but then redeems himself by utilizing a large woman as a gang plank and contemplating harpooning her with various nautical accoutrements. Float like a miniature freight train on methamphetamine, sting like a gnat. So it's just another early variation on problems with transportation modes. Then suddenly, with four minutes left, he reminds us that he wasn't just another clever joker on auto-schtick. Visionary work on the insufferable reality of traffic cops, with karmatic implications.

A Day's Pleasure (1919) Phil Posner from All Movie Guide

Charlie Chaplin's fourth film for First National is generally considered a lightweight entry and a throwback to earlier days. It begins with Charlie, Edna and their two boys leaving their house (actually a corner of Chaplin's studio at La Brea and De Longpre in Hollywood) for a day's outing. The family piles into the family flivver, and after Charlie's amusing efforts to keep the engine running, they arrive at a dock and board a crowded day cruiser. Charlie has a disagreement with another passenger (Tom Wilson), when he squeezes himself into a place on the bench next to the fellow's hefty wife, (Babe London). When Wilson tosses the famous derby onto the dock, Charlie races off the boat to get it. As the vessel pulls away from the dock, a large woman with a baby carriage tries to board, but ends up stretched between the dock and the boat. Charlie, returning with his hat uses her as a gangplank, then tries to pull her aboard with a grappling hook. Once the boat is under way, the passengers dance to the music of a small combo, but soon everyone is feeling the effects of the violently rocking cruiser. Charlie has to stop dancing with the lovely Edna to sit by the railing near the trombonist, whose own mal de mer turns the black man quite pale. Meanwhile, Edna and the kids are napping on deck chairs and Charlie decides to join them. In typical Chaplinesque fashion, he cannot seem to assemble his chair. Overcome by seasickness he collapses into the lap of the equally bilious Babe and is covered with a blanket by a helpful steward. When the lady's jealous husband returns with drinks he tries to attack Charlie, but becomes too nauseated to continue, of which the now recovered Charlie takes advantage. The return trip in the family car is equally eventful. Charlie runs afoul of a couple of traffic cops, is blocked by some irate pedestrians, one of whose foul language spurs Charlie to indicate the divine retribution awaiting him, and backs into a tar truck which spills its contents on the street. The cops, berating Charlie for blocking traffic, get stuck in the tar along with Charlie, but he cleverly steps out of his large shoes and drives off with his family, much to the amusement of the onlookers. This last scene may have originally been intended to occur earlier in the film, according to continuity sheets existing in the Chaplin archives, but was placed at he end of the film for the released version.

Turner Classic Movies Rob Nixon

Charles Chaplin made an excursion outside his usual Tramp character for A Day's Pleasure (1919), a comedy short about a middle class family man who encounters one difficulty after another while attempting to make a simple excursion by car and boat with his wife and kids. The movie was something of a departure for Chaplin, forgoing his usual touches of social commentary and satire in favor of a gag-heavy comedy (including several seasickness jokes, notably one involving a black musician who turns white from feeling ill).

Although a hit on its release, A Day's Pleasure was really just a quickie cranked out to fulfill a business obligation. In 1918 Chaplin had contracted with First National Exhibitors Circuit to distribute his independently produced films. After completing three short pictures under this contract (not counting a documentary short he produced on behalf of the war effort), Chaplin went into production on a lengthier and more ambitious project, The Kid (1921), starring a brilliant child actor he had under contract, Jackie Coogan. But First National company officers were leaning on him for some product to supply theaters. Not wanting to be pressured into a completion date for The Kid, Chaplin decided to put it on hold in October 1919 to produce this two-reeler with some of the same cast, including Coogan, Edna Purviance and Tom Wilson.

The bulk of A Day's Pleasure was shot in seven days on an excursion steamer in Los Angeles' San Pedro harbor. While editing the footage, Chaplin added material about the difficulties of operating a Model T Ford left over from an abandoned picture called "Charlie's Picnic," also about a family outing. On October 19, he delivered the completed short comedy to First National and returned to the far more personal and challenging The Kid. That picture took him nine more months to complete, much to First National's dismay, leaving Chaplin no release in 1920, the only year since 1914 that did not see one of his productions on screen.

The movie features Chaplin's almost exclusive leading lady of the period, Edna Purviance. Put under contract to Chaplin in 1915, she remained on his payroll until her death in 1958, although apart from uncredited bits in his films Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952), she stopped acting in the late 1920s. Chaplin had hoped to pay her back for all her years of work by making her a major star with A Woman of Paris (1923). The film, the first one he directed in which he did not play a major part, was a box office failure. She made only two more films after that (L'Education de Prince (1927), A Woman of the Sea, 1926) - neither directed by Chaplin - until her non-speaking parts in the later Chaplin films.

Jackie Coogan was one of the biggest child stars of the silent era. He made only the above-mentioned two movies with Chaplin, and although his fame declined as he aged, he continued to work throughout the next decades, achieving new fame in the 1960s as Uncle Fester on the TV comedy series The Addams Family.

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Verdict reviewing THE CHAPLIN REVIEW, a look at seven early Chaplin shorts

THE KID A 99

USA (60 mi) 1921

Chaplin began work on this film literally days after losing his own infant son, and the silent expression of love and anguish is completely realized in this first full-length feature, distinguished by its simplistic rendering of matters of the heart, a Chaplin trademark, a beautiful mix of uniquely insightful humanism with a brilliantly constructed comedic form.

“A picture with a smile, and perhaps a tear.”

A woman, her only sin, motherhood, Edna Purviance is released from a hospital with her baby, the gates are locked behind her. There is a brief image of Christ on the cross as she walks to a park bench and sits, distraught, until she decides to place the baby in the back seat of an expensive car and walk away, alone. However, two thieves hotwire the car, and upon discovering the baby, they dump him in the garbage in an alley. The Little Tramp is taking his morning promenade having people dump their garbage on him from the floors above, but he hears a baby crying. Picking him up, he looks around to see who may have left him behind. A woman strolls by with her baby carriage, “Pardon me, you dropped something,” but she berates him, causing him to sheepishly put the baby back where he found him, but a cop (Tom Wilson) strolls by and watches him, so he hands the baby to another bum walking by, who places it back in the same woman’s baby carriage. When the Tramp walks by, she clobbers him, giving him back the baby, so when the cop strolls by, the Little Tramp wanders off with the baby. They sit on the curb over a sewer grate, the Tramp opens it, wondering what to do, but then discovers a note with the baby, “Please love and care for this orphan child.” So they smile at each other. The Tramp brings him home and decides to call him John. John cries. The mother has a change of heart and goes back to where she left the baby, but the car is gone. The Tramp has designed a swinging hammock, and created a baby bottle by placing a nipple over the coffee pot. John is fascinated at watching the Tramp move about, following him with his eyes.

5 Years Later

John, played by Jackie Coogan, sits on the curb, a cop strolls by, so he goes inside where the Tramp inspects his ears, wipes his face, then they go out together on a little business. John throws a rock through a window. The Tramp just happens to be in the vicinity carrying a brand new window pane, which he’ll install for a fee, but they have to escape the long arm of the law, always just narrowly escaping. One one job, the Tramp is flirting with someone’s wife in the window when the husband returns. It is the cop, who pummels the poor Tramp.

Meanwhile, Edna has become a star with adoring kids following after her. Performing charity work for the downtrodden, she arrives at the Tramp’s doorstep holding someone else’s baby, and seeing John alone in the doorway, she gives him a toy dog. They stare at each other and wave when she leaves, promising to return again. Next morning, John is making pancakes while the Tramp is reading the newspaper in bed, smoking, until he is ordered to the table where it appears they both eat syrup for breakfast, the pancakes afterwards. Outside, another boy steals John’s toy dog, which leads to a fight, where the parent’s nearly come to blows as well, but back off and allow the kids to knock each other senseless. The two retreat to their respective corners where the Tramp spits water in John’s face and gives him a rubdown. Big brother arrives, telling the Tramp, “If your kid beats up my brother, then I’m going to beat you up.” The other kid throws one punch, the Tramp immediately raises his hand and declares him the winner, at which point John decks him, and the brother chases around after the Tramp.

As he’s about to get walloped, a woman grabs hold of her brother’s hand and stops the fight, telling the Tramp that his kid has a fever and needs to see a doctor. To the swelling of Tchaikovsky-like violins, a doctor arrives and checks the Tramp’s temperature, until he shows him the boy. The doctor, taking a look at the broken down premises, asks “Are you the father of this child?” The Tramp shows him the note requesting proper care and attention for this orphan child. “I’ll see to it,” the doctor adds. Proper care and attention arrives in a truck which reads “County Orphan Asylum.” They grab the kid, who pleads not to be taken away, so the Tramp puts up a fight for him, but the cops arrive, grab the kid, and place him in the truck. Once more, John pleads to the Tchaikovsky strings as he sits alone in the back of what looks like a livestock truck. The Tramp climbs to the roof and jumps down on the passing truck carrying the kid, kicking out the guard, waving him goodbye, then scaring the driver away. The two embrace and walk down the street hand in hand. Edna returns to the empty home, where only the doctor is there. He shows her the note that she originally wrote years ago, and she vows to get her son back.

The Tramp sneaks the kid into a one night dive, discovered by the manager while saying bedtime prayers, so the Tramp bribes him to let them stay. But later, while the Tramp sleeps, the manager reads in the newspapers that there’s a $1000 reward for a lost child, with a picture of John, so he grabs the kid and takes him to the police station. The Tramp awakes to find the kid gone, and in one of the most heartrendering of Chaplin silent images, the Tramp calls out the kid’s name over and over again, which can be read on his lips, as he frantically searches everywhere, eventually through all the flophouses in town for his lost boy. The moment is a cinematic revelation.

The kid is scratching and clawing anyone who comes near him at the police station. The mother arrives in her furs declaring this is her son. Through the furs and the feathers, she sheds a tear. The Tramp returns home to his apartment, but it’s been condemned and is locked shut, so he sits on the curb and enters dreamland, an incredulous display of inventiveness, another rapturous delight of pure cinematic joy.

Somehwat reminiscent of the Depression imagery from Harry “Mac” McClintock’s classic hobo song from 1928, “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” which hadn’t even been written yet, the entire neighborhood is out on the street dancing with angels, flowers are everywhere, cops are even being nice to kids, and the kid is safe in the Little Tramp’s arms. A dog with wings flies by, and next thing you know, the Tramp has wings as well. He keeps scratching at them with his cane, and the feathers fly all around. “Sin Creeps In.” The Tramp plays the lyre while the devil urges another woman to “Vamp him.” Devils are all around, each looking like the most simplistic child-like representation, a long tail, horns on their heads, carrying a trident. Police devils with wings come after the Tramp, but he kisses the boy and flies away to Edna, who kisses them both. Still, chased by flying devils, the Tramp attempts to flee by flying away, but flies directly into a locked door. “Jealousy Sets In.” There is a scuffle of angel feathers, as the Tramp is attacked by the devils, grabbing him by the neck. As the Tramp awakens from his dream, a cop is grabbing him by the neck and carting him away. They take him to Edna’s giant mansion where the kid jumps into his arms to a crescendo of strings. Love triumphs over adversity.

'A picture with a smile and perhaps a tear' says the opening title of Chaplin's first feature. There's no perhaps about it, what with Charlie struggling to nurture a cast-off illegitimate child in the face of unfeeling cops, doctors and orphanage workers. As always, Chaplin's opulent Victorian sentimentality is made palatable both by the amazing grace of his pantomimic skills and the balancing presence of harsh reality: the drama and the intertwining gags are played out amongst garbage, flophouses, a slum world depicted with Stroheim-like detail. As for the smiles, they're guaranteed too, although the gags don't coalesce into great sequences the way they do in later features.

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Generally cited as Chaplin’s first true feature, this 53-minute six-reeler was a colossal international success, and made a major star out of five-year-old child actor Jackie Coogan. A touching tearjerker with roots in Chaplins own Dickensian childhood, The Kid has Charlies Tramp adopting a young boy abandoned by a single mom. Charlie supports the child by working as an itinerant glazier, and fights efforts to send him away to an orphanage; in the meantime, the mother becomes a rich opera singer. Chaplin had to hide the films negative from estranged first wife Mildred Harris, who wanted to seize it in connection with their divorce proceedings; future second wife Lita Grey, here only 12 years old, is the flirting angel of the films heaven-set dream sequence. Remarkably innocent and pure. . . The most enchantingly Victorian of Chaplins features (Pauline Kael). The Kid remains one of Chaplin’s masterpieces and one of the best remembered and most loved of all motion pictures (Theodore Huff). USA 1921.

Chaplin's, The Kid: By Stephen M. Weissman MD

The Kid may not be Charlie Chaplin's best known film, but many critics cite it as his most affecting and meticulously produced work. A sensation when first released, this 1921 classic broke new ground, seamlessly merging physical comedy with wrenching emotion, and made ragamuffin Jackie Coogan (whom Chaplin discovered) an instant international star. The Kid also arguably inspired such later films as The Champ and even Three Men and a Baby with its simple tale of a tramp's undying love for an orphan child.

Chaplin, of course, portrays the inimitable tramp, but the story begins hours before he discovers the abandoned baby in a garbage-strewn alley. Feeling hopeless and overwhelmed, the child's unwed mother (Edna Purviance) puts her infant's interests ahead of her own when she tearfully leaves her son in a fancy parked car, hoping he might be adopted by a wealthy family. In a cruel twist of fate, two thugs steal the car, unaware of the cargo it contains. The thieves drive to a nearby slum, where the baby's piercing cries hurl them into a panic, and they discard "the kid" near a pile of trash. The Tramp soon discovers the bundle of joy, and at first tries to pawn off the infant on neighbors and passersby. Yet when he reads the note pinned to the baby's blanket—"Please love and care for this orphan child"—he can no longer shirk responsibility, and he becomes the boy's surrogate father. The Tramp's first attempts at parenthood are hilarious and typically Chaplinesque, as he attaches a nipple to the spout of a coffee pot to feed the baby (whom he names John), and sits the little tyke in an elaborately hung sling. Although his methods may be unorthodox, his burgeoning paternal affection is indisputable.

Five years pass and a deep bond develops between The Tramp and John (Coogan) that transcends their domestic lives. To make money, the pair concocts a surprisingly effective scam: The Kid goes around the neighborhood breaking windows only to have The Tramp "coincidentally" arrive on the scene a few minutes later offering to fix the shattered glass. Little do they know, however, that their idylic lives will soon be shattered as well, when John catches a fever and an overzealous doctor comes to treat it. The doctor disapproves of The Tramp's ramshackle flat and questions his parental claim. In the film's most emotional scene, The Kid is ripped from The Tramp's arms and taken away.

Meanwhile, John's mother has become a renowned opera singer and unknowingly comes into contact with John while doing charity work in the slums. She witnesses child welfare authorities whisking John away, then discovers the discarded slip of paper she wrote years ago, imploring a kind soul to look after her baby. All at once, she realizes John is her long-lost son and seeks to reclaim him.

From the above description, The Kid sounds more like a four-handkerchief soap opera than a slapstick comedy, but Chaplin marvelously weaves together the two genres and offsets tears with laughter—and vice versa. All of Chaplin's comedy (some of which is a bit tedious and drawn out) emanates from the characters, and this overriding sense of humanity makes the dramatic interludes seem natural. Sure, the film manipulates our feelings, but the overlapping comedy and drama rarely feels jarring or uncomfortable.

A mere 50 minutes, The Kid seems all too brief by today's bloated standards, yet the movie marked Chaplin's first foray into feature-length films. The actor/director had previously produced only short subjects, and he spent almost an entire year shooting—and endlessly reshooting—The Kid. His effort and dedication show, and although parts of the film (especially a bizarre dream sequence at the end) don't hold up particularly well, the picture possesses a smooth flow and much more substance than most comedies of the period.

Still, it's the emotional bond between The Tramp and The Kid that holds the picture together, and, at times, the pathos works better than the pratfalls. With his wide eyes and page-boy haircut, Coogan easily melts hearts. Chaplin, however, doesn't try to compete, playing his role as straight as the situations allow, and the result is a multi-layered performance that outshines the timeworn plot. Together, the two enjoy a lovely rapport that never seems forced or stilted, and their genuine mutual affection lends this sweet, innocuous film a warmth and resonance that hasn't faded over the course of eight decades.

Not bad for a tramp and a ragamuffin.

Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster

The Kid (1921) opens with the warning "a picture with a smile and -- perhaps, a tear," and it certainly delivers the goods in both regards.

This sentimental Charlie Chaplin film opens with a distraught new mother (Edna Purviance), who has borne a baby out of wedlock, leaving the protective shelter of a charity hospital for the harsh world outside. Desperation compels her to leave the fatherless child in the back seat of a wealthy family's car (loaned by D.W. Griffith to Chaplin for this film). But when the car is stolen, the child ends up abandoned by the thieves in an alley in an impoverished section of the city. The Tramp (Chaplin) stumbles upon the wailing child left in a bundle on the ground, and resigns himself to the child's upbringing. The Kid then flashes forward five years, with the child and his unofficial father having become inseparable companions. The Kid (Jackie Coogan) helps the Tramp earn a living as a window repairman (of the windows the Kid smashes). Their cozy domesticity is threatened when first the orphanage authorities and then the Kid's mother -- who has since become a theater star -- come looking for him.

The Kid was the first feature length film Chaplin wrote and directed, and proved a milestone for the director, who at considerable risk, borrowed $500,000 from an Italian bank to make the film. But the risk paid off when The Kid opened to critical raves and big box office.

The film's ability to combine genuine warmth, pathos and humor would later become a Chaplin trademark. No moment better illustrated that sublime combination than when the Tramp escapes the grim circumstances of his lot in the slums by imagining the place transformed into Heaven and its residents dressed in angel's wings.

Even the story behind Chaplin's making of the film contained an element of melodrama. Severely depressed after the death of his newborn son from birth defects, Chaplin one night attended a vaudeville performance in which comedian Jack Coogan performed with his young son. Chaplin was captivated by the dynamic, talented son Jackie, and began writing a story around the charismatic child, who had been coached as a performer by his father from the age of three.

The elder Coogan essentially put his career on hold to coach little Jackie Coogan through The Kid. Chaplin, in turn, rewarded Jack Senior's role in coaching the boy, as well as assuaged his performer's ego by paying Jack $125 a week, almost double the $75 a week Jackie was getting to costar. Jack Coogan Senior also played several roles in the film, as a bum who picks the Tramp's pocket, as the Devil in the Heaven sequence and as a party guest.

The off screen chemistry between Chaplin and Jackie Coogan was just as strong as their onscreen relationship in The Kid (initially titled The Waif). Every Sunday, during the first few weeks of filming, Chaplin would take Jackie to amusement parks and pony rides and other activities. Some have seen Chaplin's relationship with Coogan as an attempt for Chaplin to reclaim his own unhappy childhood, while others have interpreted Chaplin's attention toward the boy as recasting Coogan into the child he had just lost. The pair remained friends for the rest of their lives and Coogan eventually went on to enjoy a second career as Uncle Fester on the cult TV comedy "The Addams Family" (1964-1966).

Chaplin would also come to have a more involved relationship with another one of his young co-stars on The Kid, 12-year-old Lillita McMurray who plays a flirtatious angel in the Heaven sequence. Four years later, Chaplin and the actress, then known as Lita Grey, were married.

During The Kid's production, Chaplin was involved in an acrimonious divorce from his first wife, Mildred Harris, and her lawyers threatened to confiscate The Kid's negative in the divorce suit. Desperate to save the film he had labored so ceaselessly on from such a fate, Chaplin managed to sneak the 400,000 feet of negative out of California to Salt Lake City where he cut the highly flammable nitrate film on his hotel room floor.

A dedicated perfectionist, Chaplin took five and 1/2 months to shoot The Kid, a huge amount of time for a film production in 1921. But the reward was, again, enormous. Some have credited The Kid with earning Chaplin close to $60,000,000 over the course of time.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Alan Vanneman] also reviewing A DOG’S LIFE, SUNNYSIDE, and SHOULDER ARMS

The DVD Journal | Reviews : The Kid: The Chaplin Collection Mark Bourne

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller)

DVD Verdict Dan Mancini

The Kid (1921) Phil Posner from All Movie Guide

Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash)

The Kid - Charlie Chaplin (1921) Silent entire 68 minute film presentation (with Arabic subtitles) on YouTube

Stage6 · The Last Stop · Charlie Chaplin - The Kid - Video and ... another version of The Kid, available for downloading

joox.net yet another version of The Kid, available for downloading

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

The Charlie Chaplin Centennial: A Genius Is Revisited Vincent Canby from The New York Times, also reviewing the A DOGS LIFE, THE IDLE CLASS, THE PILGRIM, A WOMAN OF PARIS, and CITY LIGHTS

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

THE IDLE CLASS A 95

USA (25 mi) 1921

Similar to Buster Keaton in films like THE SAPHEAD (1920) or BATTLING BUTLER (1926), Charlie takes a satiric rip at the idle rich, playing a double role, a rich Charlie who drinks excessively and is married to the lovely Edna Purviance, and a poor Charlie who wreaks havoc on the golf course. Edna arrives at the train station in elegant furs, other passengers carry golf clubs, while poor Charlie gets out from underneath the train in tatters with his lone golf club. Rich Charlie has missed his wife’s arrival at the train station, having left his home without any pants, discovering his faux pas in a telephone booth, grabbing a newspaper, then walking out on teeny, little legs under the newspaper that make it look as if he had no legs at all.

In another scene, rich Charlie has his back to the camera and appears to be crying, but when he turns around, he is only shaking up his martini shaker and pours himself a glass. Poor Charlie takes to the links, but has no ball, so he steals another man’s ball, but as they are arguing, the golfer behind them hits his ball, Charlie points, and the two immediately become fast friends. However, the friend continually gets pummeled by the golfer behind them who is a huge oaf. Charlie discovers his ball in the mouth of a sleeping man, and discovers if he steps on his stomach, the ball pops up and he can hit it, which he does about 4 or 5 times, as the man never wakes. Poor Charlie is wonderstruck by Edna riding past the golf course on a horse in the nearby woods. Charlie sees a donkey, and runs to jump on, taking off after Edna. The mule kicks him off, however, so he runs and jumps onto Edna’s horse, there is a marriage, a baby, but alas, it’s all a dream, as she rides right on by.

Rich Charlie is dressed for a masquerade ball wearing a suit of armor with a white plume on the helmet, sipping his martini when the helmet gets stuck. Edna looks around for him but can’t find him. Poor Charlie arrives instead running away from the cops. Thinking it is her husband, she sits him down next to her and gazes at him longingly, then holds his hand, which poor Charlie obligingly kisses, witnessed by rich Charlie while still stumbling around trying to get his helmet unstuck, pleading with his wife, but she ignores him. Poor Charlie is introduced to her father, the huge oaf from the golf course (Mack Swain), and has the bad fortune of telling him he’s not married to his daughter, and immediately gets waylaid. Edna faints on the spot. Poor Charlie carries her into the bedroom, but gets attacked by rich Charlie, still stuck in his suit of armor, now pleading with Edna’s father. Poor Charlie helps by using a hammer to knock out rich Charlie, then pulls out a can opener to open him up, whereupon he immediately sees himself. Poor Charlie is immediately thrown out. But Edna tells her father the family owes that man an apology, so the father shakes hands with poor Charlie, who then kicks the giant oaf in the butt with glee.

Golf in the ruins. Beautiful elevator music. The opening credits of Charlie Chaplin movies are always so great. "Written, produced and directed by Charlie Chaplin. Starring Charlie Chaplin. Music by Charlie Chaplin." It's already like a little kid movie. I'm absolutely convinced, after watching Mr. Chaplin, Rowan Atkinson, and others; that the problem is not in the game of golf itself, but in the manner of people who play it. I mean, if you're that sub-strata of humanity that can't even be interesting drinking, what are you supposed to do? The answer is to take refuge in something (mistakenly believed to be) inherently boring, and hope that you won't be found out. Chaplin has no such problems, particularly given his fiendishly clever plot: two fellows, both looking exactly like Chaplin mind you, one rich and the other a tramp. One drinks, and the other plays golf, but perhaps not the one you might expect. Tremendously realized marriage of music and mime, flagrant disregard for choreography and blocking. I'm just not sure which is supposed to be the idle class.

from the New York Times in 1921 (link lost):

Charlie Chaplin's at the Strand. That's enough for most people. Without reading any further, they will rush off to get tickets—or drop the paper and say for the thousandth time, "I don't see why everybody goes so crazy about that vulgar little clown. He bores me to death." But those who stay at home never will be missed by those who go. Nor would they be noticed if they went along, too. They are an unimpressive minority.

But, still, they are not insignificant. There are some intelligent people among them, and it means something that even a few minds perceive only coarse horseplay in a Chaplin comedy. And it does not mean that such people are blind. The truth about many of them is that they have a taste for refined things and are antagonized by the undeniable crudities in the Chaplin comedies. Naturally, then, they are in no mood to discern and appreciate the really fine things about Chaplin's acting. If you are disgusted by the comedy of a well-placed kick in the seat of the pants in one scene, you are not likely to be on the alert to catch the finely shaded suggestion of the comedian's pantomime in the next. So your impression is one of horseplay and you wonder why some otherwise intelligent friend says that Chaplin is a great artist.

Now, refined taste is a good thing. The world needs more of it, and you are not to be scorned because of your sensitiveness. But you are missing something nevertheless. For Chaplin is a great artist, and you may satisfy yourself of this fact if you will go to this latest picture of his, "The Idle Class," and watch his pantomime. It is not his best picture. It is not as penetratingly human as "The Kid" and "Shoulder Arms," but Chaplin does finished work in it, and it is more free from slapstick than some of his earlier productions. The rough-and-tumble stuff has not been eliminated, but it's been largely reduced, and in a number of scenes Chaplin says more by a look or a gesture than other players can express in eight uninterrupted reels. Just watch for that, "O well, I'm a poor bum and she's a swell lady" expression when the girl on horseback rides away from him. There's philosophy in a flash.

Like most of the Chaplin comedies "The Idle Class" doesn't concern itself much with a story. Its main purpose is to give Chaplin a chance to contrast two characters—a wealthy fop and a foppish tramp. He makes both comic, of course, but each in a different way. It's hard to see how you can help enjoying both, even if they are exaggerated and the story they are in doesn't mean anything.

Turner Classic Movies Rob Nixon

As his screen popularity grew, Charles Chaplin began to desire greater freedom and independence in making his pictures, so when his contract with Mutual expired in 1917, he started construction of his own studios in the heart of the residential section of Hollywood at La Brea Avenue. Early in 1918, Chaplin entered into an agreement with First National Exhibitors' Circuit to market his films. At this time he also embarked on a national bond tour in support of the war effort and made a film the government used to popularize its Liberty Loan drive. Chaplin followed this with another comedy dealing with the war, Shoulder Arms (1918). He also began work on what would be one of his most famous pictures, the comic tearjerker The Kid (1921), which continued in production even as Chaplin completed two shorter movies, Sunnyside (1919) and A Day's Pleasure (1919).

In April of 1918, Chaplin joined with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith to found the United Artists Corporation, organized as a distributor of the four artists' films, with each of them retaining entire control of his or her individual productions. For the first time, film stars became their own employers and received the profits that had formerly gone to producers. But before he could move ahead with this historic venture, and despite the huge success of The Kid, Chaplin still had to deliver four pictures under his contract to First National. "In a quiet state of desperation," according to his autobiography, he wandered through his studio's prop room hoping to find inspiration for a story idea. He found it in a set of old golf clubs, and golfing sequences from an unfinished Mutual production Chaplin started a few years earlier ("The Golf Links"); it became the genesis of The Idle Class (1921).

Called "Vanity Fair" while still in production, The Idle Class features Chaplin in dual roles as the familiar Tramp character and as a heavy-drinking wealthy man whose wife is feeling badly neglected. The Tramp and the Wife arrive in Miami on the same train (she in a coach, he under it). Upset that her husband has forgotten to meet her train, she moves out, telling her husband he must stop drinking before she returns. That afternoon, while causing mayhem on a nearby golf course, the Tramp spots the Wife and falls in love with her from afar. Running from the law, the Tramp ends up at the Wife's costume party. She mistakes him for her husband, preferring the gentle, attentive man to her true spouse. Mistaken identity forms the basis of the party sequence's comedy before everything is sorted out.

The film features a memorable scene in which Chaplin plays with the audience's perceptions. Upon receiving the message from his wife that she's leaving him unless he quits drinking, the husband gazes longingly at her picture and, shot from behind, appears to be sobbing. As he turns, however, we see he is vigorously working a cocktail shaker.

The Tramp's chief nemesis in this movie is played by Mack Swain, who made nearly two dozen pictures with Chaplin, including most memorably The Gold Rush (1925) as the Tramp's rival prospector Big Jim McKay. The role of the Wife's maid is played by Lita Grey, who became Chaplin's wife from 1924 to 1927.

During production, Chaplin had an accident with a blowtorch that singed his leg through the asbestos pants he was wearing for the scene. The press got hold of the story, and by the next morning, Chaplin was reading that he had been severely burned on his face, hands and body. The studio received hundreds of letters, wires and phone calls, including one from British writer H.G. Wells expressing his great admiration for the star's work and his shock at hearing of the "accident."

Just as The Idle Class was being released, Chaplin sailed for Europe in September 1921, where he received rousing receptions in all the continental capitals he visited (and met the delighted - and much relieved - Wells). Refreshed from this extended vacation, he returned to Hollywood to resume production of his films and start his active association with United Artists.

Note: When this film was re-released in 1971, Chaplin composed the music score.

The Idle Class (1921) Phil Posner from All Movie Guide

Bright Lights Film Journal [Alan Vanneman] also reviewing THE IDLE CLASS, THE PILGRIM, and A WOMAN FROM PARIS

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Verdict reviewing THE CHAPLIN REVIEW, a look at seven early Chaplin shorts

The Charlie Chaplin Centennial: A Genius Is Revisited Vincent Canby from The New York Times, also reviewing the A DOGS LIFE, THE PILGRIM, THE KID, A WOMAN OF PARIS, and CITY LIGHTS

PAY DAY

USA (28 mi) 1922

Pay Day Phil Posner from All Movie Guide

Charlie Chaplin's last two reeler recalls earlier comedies such as the Essanay Work, with Chaplin casting himself as a worker rather than a Tramp, but the film shows great advances in film technique. Chaplin is a construction worker, who arrives late for work, bringing a flower as peace offering for his boss, Mack Swain. As a ditch digger, Chaplin leaves something to be desired, but as a brick catcher, he's amazing, due to a very clever reverse action scene. Lunchtime brings Swain's daughter, Edna Purviance with his lunch and Chaplin seems smitten. He has no lunch, but is lucky enough to partake of some of his co-workers' food due to a very active work elevator, which they all seem to use as a sideboard. It's pay day and Chaplin argues about his wages, despite being overpaid. His battleaxe wife Phyllis Allen (in their first re-teaming since the Keystone days) shows up at the end of the workday to collect his wages, some of which he's able to retain despite her efforts. That night, Chaplin and his co-workers go drinking and are quite looped at the end of the evening - bellicose but songful. In a rare night time photography scene, Chaplin tries to catch the last streetcar home but is pushed out one end when huge Henry Bergman pushes his way on at the other. In his drunkenness Chaplin boards a hot dog cart, thinking it's another streetcar, holding onto a suspended salami as a hand strap. Arriving home at daybreak, Chaplin has just started undressing for bed when the alarm clock rings, waking the wife. Pretending to leave for work, he tries to settle down to sleep in the bathtub, but is caught and sent out to work by his nagging mate. Payday began life as Come Seven, a story about two rich plumbers. Production was interrupted by Chaplin's trip to Europe after only eight scenes were photographed.

Turner Classic Movies Margarita Landazuri

Chaplin’s first marriage to Mildred Harris had ended in divorce in 1920. He had left behind the companies where he'd had his early successes, and signed a million-dollar contract with First National for just eight films. And he had made his first feature-length film, The Kid (1921). Chaplin had also made an important move toward independence and control of his films when he co-founded (with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith) United Artists, a production and distribution company, in 1919.

Pay Day (1922) was Chaplin's penultimate film for First National, and his final two-reeler. He had begun the film, and then abandoned it and gone off on a triumphant European vacation. Everywhere he went, Chaplin was greeted by enthusiastic crowds, and the extent of his worldwide popularity became gratifyingly clear. It also seems to have become clear to Chaplin during that trip that it was time to change direction. He worried about returning to Pay Day, telling friends that he didn't "feel funny." But he was satisfied with the finished product. It was reportedly his favorite of his short films.

In many ways, Pay Day is a typical "Little Tramp" comedy: a henpecked working man's adventures at work, at home with his shrewish wife, and carousing with friends. (Look for Chaplin's brother, Sydney, as one of them, the lunch cart owner.) But there were signs of what was to come. It had been Chaplin's habit to write a film's scenario during production, as a film developed, and ideas popped into his head. As a result, there were breaks in filming while he wrote. This time, there was only one pause during filming for story preparation. Up until this time, it had also been Chaplin's habit to shoot in narrative continuity. Perhaps because Pay Day was more fully prepared before shooting, he shot it out of sequence, filming the second half of the story in the studio first, and the construction site scenes on location later. Pay Day also displays a more sophisticated lighting technique than previous Chaplin films.

The reviews for Pay Day were of the "great, as always" variety. "Nothing has been said about Chaplin that has not been said a dozen times already," the New York Times critic wrote. But Chaplin's films would become more and more ambitious, and that blase acceptance of his talents would soon be insufficient. After completing The Pilgrim (1923), Chaplin left First National. His first United Artists film, A Woman of Paris (1923) was a shock. Not only did Chaplin limit his appearance in the film to a cameo, but the film was a serious and highly-praised drama about a kept woman. As the New York Times critic observed, "Our old friend Charlie Chaplin, the world's screen clown, has flung aside temporarily his shapeless trousers and his tiny derby...and in a well-tailored suit, has graduated into Charles Spencer Chaplin, director par excellence." The Little Tramp would return in Chaplin's next film, which many consider his masterpiece, The Gold Rush (1925), and would continue to play an important part in his future work.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Alan Vanneman] also reviewing PAY DAY, THE PILGRIM, and A WOMAN FROM PARIS

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Verdict reviewing THE CHAPLIN REVIEW, a look at seven early Chaplin shorts

THE PILGRIM A 96

USA (40 mi) 1923

A Chaplin western, opening with a cowboy song sung by Matt Monroe, featuring the memorable lyrics:

“I’m bound for Texas, for the wide open sky,

I’m bound for Texas land, to hear the moon and the wild snakes rattle.

I’m ready to fly, for the wide open sky...”

Yes, it’s just that good. Chaplin plays an escaped convict, his face on a wanted poster, who opens the film stealing the clothes of a preacher, and is forced, with increasing conviction throughout the film, to masquerade as a preacher. He makes his escape on a train, next to a man reading a newspaper about a man making a daring prison escape, prominently featuring his picture, and the man next to him wearing a sheriff’s badge. When he gets off at the first stop, parishioners are waiting for him. The sheriff in town introduces him to the elders and the pious ladies of the church, who tell him he’s just in time for the services. While walking to the church, he steals a bottle of booze from the Deacon’s (Mack Swain) back pocket. A little boy circles into the picture eating a banana, dropping the banana peal, which of course he and the Deacon immediately slip on, breaking the bottle. Both plead ignorance.

Inside the church, he’s placed at the front with 12 members sitting next to him in the pews. He immediately raises his right hand, placing his left on the Bible, seeing a Jury pass before his eyes, but he recovers in time to introduce a hymn. The Deacon passes a collection plate, which Charlie can’t keep his eyes off of, but he is asked to give the sermon, so he acts out the tall and short version of David and Goliath, which generates applause from one lone kid. So Charlie comes back for several curtain calls, then skips out with the collection plate. When he sees the sheriff outside, with no apparent escape, he returns it to the Deacon, who places the money in a bag and gives it back to him. Charlie and his brethren walk past his old cellmate Nitro Nick, feigning no knowledge.

As the new chaplain, Charlie is invited to tea with another couple who have a little kid who enjoys slapping people in the face. Charlie smiles and turns the other cheek, only to get slapped again. Charlie has eyes for the couple’s young daughter, who is making a cake in the kitchen. The kid places a hat over the cake, which still strangely does resemble the cake. Charlie puts on the frosting over the hat, and when the cake is served, that man looking for his hat is surprised to discover they are eating it. Nick knocks on the door and introduces himself as an old college friend. When he sees the father place his mortgage money in his wallet, Nick immediately picks his pocket. Charlie picks Nick’s pocket, who picks Charlie’s pocket. Charlie then resorts to a magic trick – poof, here’s your wallet, handing it back to the family who place it in a drawer. Nick knocks out Charlie to get the money, then heads for a saloon to gamble.

Charlie vows to get the money back and arrives at the saloon just as it’s being held up. The customers, including Nick, are holding their hands high. Charlie reaches into Nick’s pocket, takes out the wallet, and casually walks out. He returns the money the next morning, just before the sheriff arrives with his picture on a wanted poster, hauling him off to jail. But he takes him to the border instead, suggesting he look for flowers on the Mexican side, then appears to ride away. Charlie runs back to the American side with a bouquet of flowers, where the sheriff shows him the border sign, then boots him back to the Mexican side. “Mexico, a new life, peace at last.” Charlie enters immediate mayhem, where Banditos are having a shoot out, so he runs back to the border, straddling one foot in the USA, one foot in Mexico, and walks off into the sunset.

Chaplin's last film for First National has him as an escaped prisoner, metaphor intended. Chaplin dons a pastor's outfit to help get away, only to be roped in by locals who need a man of the cloth. Chaplin doesn't play The Tramp in his final short, getting most of the mileage out of mistaken identity gags. There's no one sequence to recommend this for, which doesn't enter it into the pantheon (you know that .001% of American silent films that are slightly recognizable) with The Gold Rush, Modern Times, Safety Last, and The General. However, it lacks Chaplin's usual downfalls; it's not a sappy love story, Chaplin clashes with the bratty kid rather than letting his own juvenile side take over, and though Chaplin acts honorably it's not a sentimental film. The sequence in the family's home where Chaplin tries to help them but everything goes wrong with a rolling pin falling on his head leading to him icing the missing hard hat rather than the cake could easily be out of a Keaton film. In addition, Pilgrim is a nice display of Chaplin's athleticism, particularly his nimble footwork.

The Pilgrim (1923) Phil Posner from All Movie Guide

In the final film of his First National contract (an early working title was The Tail End), Charlie Chaplin spoofs small-town life and morality. Chaplin is an escaped convict who steals the clothes of a swimming minister. At the railroad station he nearly gives himself away by guiltily running away from an eloping couple who want him to perform an impromptu wedding. He boards a train and travels to a small town, Devil's Gulch, Texas, where he is welcomed by his congregation, who have never met the new reverend they've been expecting. He meets the townsfolk and is enchanted by Edna Purviance, in whose house he will be boarding. Chaplin arrives just in time for church services and on the way he picks a liquor bottle from the pocket of a large Deacon, only to have it break when they both slip on a banana peel. The Deacon thinks that the spilled whisky has come from his pocket. The plucky fugitive goes along with the ruse and after seeing to the church collection, pitting one side of the congregation against the other in competition to see who contributes the most, he gives a wonderful sermon in pantomime -- the story of David and Goliath. His story is so effective that a young boy breaks into wild applause which Chaplin acknowledges with the aplomb of a seasoned theatrical. At the home of Purviance and her Mother, his impersonation is severely tested by a visit from a couple with a mischievous child, Dinky Dean Riesner. (In later recollections Riesner tells of how he had to be cajoled into punching and slapping his "Uncles" Charlie and Syd, something abhorrent to him in real life). A stroll with Purviance through town brings him face to face with a former cellmate, who is invited home for tea by the unsuspecting Purviance. During the visit he observes the hiding place of Mother's mortgage money and Chaplin valiantly but unsuccessfully tries to prevent the crook from stealing it. When the thief escapes, Chaplin gives chase, but the sheriff, by now aware of Chaplin's identity as an escapee, causes everyone to believe that the two are in league. Chaplin however, overpowers the crook and returns the money to Purviance. When the Pilgrim's true intentions are revealed, rather than arresting him, the sheriff escorts him to the Mexican border. He orders the fugitive to pick a bouquet of flowers. When Chaplin obeys, the sheriff boots him across the border and takes off, leaving him stranded between warring bandit factions on one side, and arrest as a fugitive on the other, slowly walking into the sunset with one foot in Mexico and the other in the USA.

Turner Classic Movies Brian Cady

The last film Charles Chaplin made for his First National contract, The Pilgrim (1923), was also the last Chaplin "short" before he turned exclusively to feature films. Too long to be considered a short even if, technically, it is not quite long enough to be a feature, The Pilgrim was a transitional work on the path to Chaplin's later and more famous creations.

Thought of now as Chaplin's take on religion, The Pilgrim began as a parody of Westerns, specifically the then-popular Westerns of William S. Hart. Hart, in films such as Hell's Hinges (1916), often played an outlaw who rides into a lawless Western town, sides with the put-upon church-going folks, reforms, and cleans up the town. In Chaplin's first draft for this film, entitled "Western," Chaplin was to play one of four desperate escaped convicts who steals the clothing of a minister. Arriving in an unruly Western town (in one draft referred to as "Heaven's Hinges"), he is mistaken for a minister. And the good townspeople were expecting this man to help reform a wild saloon full of gunfighters and harlots. So Charlie attracts the local rogues into church by replacing the church organ with a jazz band, showing movies and holding "respectable" dice games. At the end, Chaplin is unmasked as a convict by the town sheriff and goes off to meet his fate over the protests of his new, and now quite large, congregation.

Only some of this story remains in the much-simpler plot of The Pilgrim, which went before the cameras April 10, 1922 under the title "The Tail End," a reference to the conclusion of Chaplin's First National contract. Three years before, Chaplin had formed his own production/releasing company, United Artists, with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith and was anxious to end his duties to First National so he could begin making movies for United Artists. Whether that desire had an effect on the speed of shooting for The Pilgrim is not known, but Chaplin did shoot it in forty-two working days, a record pace for a Chaplin production of this length.

The Pilgrim is also the last Chaplin movie in which he co-starred with the woman who had played the female lead in all his movies since 1915, Edna Purviance. Chaplin would try to make her into a star in her own right with his next film, the drama A Woman of Paris (1924) and bankrolled her in a movie by the young director Josef von Sternberg, A Woman of the Sea (1926). The first film was a critical success while the latter was shelved after one showing. Edna retired, remaining on Chaplin's payroll until her death in 1958. Also notable in the cast is Chaplin's brother Sydney who appears in three roles as the eloping man, the train conductor and the father of the "slapping boy." The "slapping boy" is played by three-and-a-half-year old Dean Reisner and son of The Pilgrim's assistant director Charles Reisner (who also plays the pickpocket). Dean would grow up to become a leading screenwriter in Hollywood, penning the "do you feel lucky, punk" scene for Dirty Harry (1971). Keep that line in mind while he wallops Charlie and his brother in The Pilgrim.

The early 1920's saw a very conservative reaction sweep America and hackles were raised in anticipation of Chaplin mocking religion in his new comedy. Fearing such reaction, Chaplin chose "The Pilgrim" as the most-inoffensive possible description of his character. To a modern viewer there would seem to be nothing even the most fundamentalist religionist could oppose in this comedy. Nevertheless, the Evangelical Ministers' Association in Atlanta demanded its suppression as "an insult to the gospel" and the then very powerful Ku Klux Klan denounced it for holding the Protestant ministry to ridicule. Despite this and objections by local censor boards that seem ludicrous by today's standards, The Pilgrim was another Chaplin success, paving the way to the longer and greater works to come.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Alan Vanneman] also reviewing PAY DAY, THE IDLE CLASS, A WOMAN FROM PARIS, and CITY LIGHTS

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Verdict reviewing THE CHAPLIN REVIEW, a look at seven early Chaplin shorts

The Charlie Chaplin Centennial: A Genius Is Revisited Vincent Canby from The New York Times, also reviewing the A DOGS LIFE, THE IDLE CLASS, THE KID, and CITY LIGHTS

A WOMAN OF PARIS A- 93

aka: A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate

USA (100 mi) 1923

One of the few films written and directed by Chaplin that he doesn’t star in, though he does appear in a bit part as a railway porter, unavailable for nearly fifty years, a sophisticated comedy drama written for his long time leading lady, Edna Purviance, also starring Adolphe Menjou, called his “first serious drama.” Using themes of emotional failure and moral blindness, shown with a wealth of detail and sharp observations about morality, the film’s subtle use of innuendo, insinuation, and the use of objects to relay facts about events and relationships was a major influence on filmmakers in the 20’s, most notably Ernst Lubitsch.

A drama of fate – in a small village in France lives a woman of fate, Edna Purviance, a victim of an unhappy home, her step-father locks her in her room. When she crawls out the window to meet her lover, the step-father locks all windows and doors and refuses to allow her back in. Her fiancé takes her home to his parents, but a row ensues, and his father refuses to ever see him again. The couple plans to marry in Paris, agreeing to meet at the train station, but her fiancé never shows up as his father falls into a coma as he is about to leave. What happens afterwards is a series of chance encounters where she meets and marries a wealthy French aristocrat, the always dapper and debonair Menjou, played with wonderful humor and charm, a man of leisure, the richest bachelor in Paris, while her fiancé’s life without her turns to one of remorse and despair.

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

Emerging after being placed on the shelf by Chaplin for almost fifty years, with a reputation as the film that made all directors fall on their knees, A Woman of Paris had a lot to live up to. It's easy enough to appreciate the deftness with which Chaplin propels the narrative in this 'first serious drama written and directed by myself' (to quote the opening preamble); in particular, his use of objects (a pipe on the floor, a collar falling from a chest-of-drawers) to relay facts about events and relationships. Easy enough also to enjoy the insouciant charm of Menjou's lecher, who languishes in pyjamas, and tootles on a tiny saxophone while his mistress (Purviance) grows more and more bored at the frenzy of Parisian high society. Yet despite its wealth of detail and sharp observations about morality, the film remains curiously insubstantial with its refined dabbling in the elements of satire, sentiment and melodrama exploited with such panache in Chaplin's starring comedies. The final verdict has to be: fascinating, but...

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

A landmark in sophisticated sexual screen drama (Elliott Stein, Village Voice), A Woman of Paris was for many years one of the cinemas great missing masterpieces -- a Charlie Chaplin work as important and influential as it was atypical and unseen. Described by Chaplin as the first serious drama written and directed by myself, and notable as the only of his silent films in which Chaplin did not star (he has a brief cameo appearance only), A Woman of Paris is a subtle, psychologically nuanced, innuendo-filled comedy of manners in the best pre-Production Code tradition of Ernst Lubitsch, Hollywood master of the sophisticated sex satire. Lubitsch himself credited it as an important inspiration; French great Ren Clair called it the film in which the silent American cinema was renewed; and it is often cited as the work which established Chaplin as a director of genius. Edna Purviance, Chaplins leading lady to the time, stars as a French country girl separated by fate from her first true love. She moves to Paris and becomes the demimonde mistress of a cynical rich man (played by Adolphe Menjou), only to have fate reintroduce her to her lost beloved. A Woman of Paris made the debonair Menjou a major star. Critics loved the film, but the public, expecting the more familiar Charlie, did not; a chastened Chaplin later took the work out of circulation, and it was largely unseen for 50 years. Chaplin added a new musical score and allowed it to be re-released in 1976; influential New York critic Andrew Sarris named it the best film of 1976. USA 1923.

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Even though I've been a Charlie Chaplin fan for most of my life, I've always avoided "A Woman of Paris" (1923), Chaplin's "serious" film. Indeed, most of the moviegoing world avoided it when it first opened. Who wants to see a serious movie by a comic filmmaker? But now that "A Woman of Paris" is released on DVD, I checked it out and found that it's a Chaplin masterpiece and showed a layer to his work that I never knew existed.

Many comedians, and makers of so-called "light" entertainment, go through a stage where they feel they must contribute something "worthwhile" and "serious". This is the same philosophy shared by the Academy, which awards movies based on their political agendas rather than artistic merit. This yearning for notoriety led Jerry Lewis to make his ill-fated (and mercifully unreleased) "The Day the Clown Died". It was also the cause for Bill Murray's "The Razor's Edge" (1984), Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful" (1998), and much of Robin Williams' work, as well as Chaplin's "A Woman of Paris".

But sometimes these ventures turn out well. Though he does not appear in it (except for a small, almost unrecognizable cameo), "A Woman of Paris" is a remarkably accomplished film. Chaplin was never one for technical flourishes. This film doesn't have the style of something like F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise" (1927) or Carl Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928). He was more interested in getting the emotional core of his films. As an actor, he was a incapable of rendering a false note, and as a director, it seems he had the power to draw the same from his other actors. The film was made for Chaplin's longtime leading lady, Edna Purviance. She plays a poor girl from rural France whose father forbids her to marry a local artist (Carl Miller) and locks her out of the house. A misunderstanding causes her to flee for Paris where she ends up the mistress of wealthy playboy Adolphe Menjou. An ad in the paper announces the playboy's wedding to another, wealthier woman, and the woman accidentally re-discovers her former artist flame, now poorer than ever. So she has a choice: riches and comfort but not marriage and kids, or marriage and kids in abject poverty. Her final compromise--and the film's amazing ending--is a heartbreaking blend of both.

I've seen many silent films, but very few seem this smooth. The actors’ performances are so subtle and powerful that I often forgot I was watching a silent. The dialogue cards are natural and flow so perfectly from the gestures that they don't seem like interruptions. What could easily have been melodrama was dialed down to become an emotional reality. During one scene in which a tragedy befalls the artist, Chaplin cuts away briefly the artist's unknowing mother preparing soup. It's a simple moment that made my breath involuntarily leave my chest. It rings true and it's heartbreaking.

Sadly, "A Woman of Paris" tanked at the box office. This was doubly upsetting as it was Chaplin's first contribution to the United Artists, an organization made up of Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith. These artists were trying to gain more independence and get away from studio contracts and meddling. Chaplin was so devastated, he pulled his movie from circulation until 1976 when he composed a brand new score and re-released it once again to critical acclaim. (Andrew Sarris chose it as the best picture of 1976.) The new score is featured on the DVD, and like many of Chaplin's other scores, it's incredibly lovely.

The real reason I finally felt safe to rent "A Woman of Paris" is because it now comes on a DVD in a double bill with "A King in New York" (1957), another underrated Chaplin classic. It's much easier to gamble on a 2-in-1 shot. But anyone who rents this DVD will be a winner twice over.

Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster

A Woman of Paris (1923) was Charlie Chaplin's dramatic film debut, an attempt to prove he could do more than comedy and didn't need to star in a film to appeal to his audience. The sophisticated melodrama stars Chaplin's onetime lover, Edna Purviance, as Marie St. Clair.

The film opens with Marie planning to escape suffocating parents and her provincial village for Paris with her betrothed, Jean Millet (Carl Miller). But the sudden death of Jean's father keeps him from meeting Marie at the train station. The deeply wounded Marie boards the train for Paris alone. By the next scene, a year later, Marie has become the mistress of the city's wealthiest bachelor - and most notorious rake Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou) who lavishes Marie with material things, but is promised in marriage to an heiress.

When Jean reenters Marie's life, the second chance at happiness he offers is soon dashed by his mother's fears that he would be marrying the "wrong" kind of girl in the compromised Marie. A love sick Jean kills himself, and in a dramatically unexpected conclusion -- that Chaplin labored endlessly over -- Marie atones by running a rural orphanage with Jean's mother.

Chaplin's idea for A Woman of Paris's shocking love triangle came from Chaplin's "bizarre but brief" affair with Peggy Hopkins Joyce in 1922. Joyce was an international party girl and former Ziegfeld Follies dancer who was married to more than several millionaires in her lifetime and regaled Chaplin with tales of her romantic adventures while living in Paris. Some have claimed that it was Joyce's often financially rewarding romantic exploits which inspired the term "gold digger."

Though Joyce provided the story's inspiration, some have said the two romantic rivals Pierre and Jean in A Woman of Paris represented the dual aspects of Chaplin's personality, rake and romantic. By the same token the character of Marie St. Clair echoed certain aspects of Edna Purviance's own circumstance as a woman scorned by the womanizing Chaplin. Ironically, though Chaplin gave Purviance the role in A Woman of Paris as a last kindness after their failed relationship, it turned out to do little for her career, instead virtually ending it.

If the performances in A Woman of Paris are any indication, then the rake side of Chaplin must have won out. For while Carl Miller is less than memorable and rarely sympathetic as the mother-dominated, ill-fated artist Jean, Menjou is superb as the polished, seductive Pierre, based on Joyce's lover and prominent Parisian publisher Henri Letellier.

Menjou attributed his acting success to Chaplin. "Within a few days I realized that I was going to learn more about acting from Chaplin than I had ever learned from any director." Chaplin emphasized restraint over the theater and silent cinema's showy gesticulations, reminding his actors to "think the scene" rather than conveying feelings through gesture. Ernst Lubitsch who arrived in America the year of A Woman of Paris's release, claimed the film as a direct influence on the sophisticated treatment of romantic imbroglios in his own films.

New York Herald critic Robert Sherwood (future author of novels such as The Petrified Forest, 1934) said of A Woman of Paris "there is more real genius in Charles Chaplin's A Woman of Paris than in any picture I have ever seen." Other critics were no less effusive, comparing its director to Hardy, de Maupassant and Ibsen. Such praise seems surprising now, but at the time the understated performances and the novelty of the characters -- a morally divided heroine, a likable rake and a weak romantic hero -- felt radical to reviewers like one at Britain's Manchester Guardian who called the film "the greatest modern story that the screen has yet seen."

But despite the critical accolades, the film was a box office failure. Chaplin's fans wanted to see the actor performing his usual comic role (though he does appear briefly as a clumsy porter in the scene where Marie waits for the train to Paris), and not stepping behind the camera to direct an uncharacteristic drama.

DVD Net (Jules Faber)

A Woman of Paris (1923) Phil Posner from All Movie Guide

Bright Lights Film Journal [Alan Vanneman] also reviewing PAY DAY, THE IDLE CLASS, and THE PILGRIM

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Verdict Bill Treadway, also reviewing A KING IN NEW YORK

Doug Pratt's Laserdisc Review also reviewing A KING IN NEW YORK

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) also reviewing A KING IN NEW YORK

The Charlie Chaplin Centennial: A Genius Is Revisited Vincent Canby from The New York Times, also reviewing the A DOGS LIFE, THE IDLE CLASS, THE KID, THE PILGRIM, and CITY LIGHTS

THE GOLD RUSH A 100

USA (82 mi) 1925

An undisputed masterpiece, perhaps his funniest film, told in a style that is unmistakable, quintessential Charlie Chaplin, set during the Alaskan Gold Rush, a time when men from all parts of the world came to suffer from the bitter cold, a lack of food, and other unthinkable hardships, all with the same hope of striking it rich. We see the Little Tramp, known here as a Lone Prospector, walking gingerly around the icy cliffs, going around the corners with his cane – a bear follows. But he eventually reaches a point in the road, a vast emptiness of snow is all that can be seen in every direction, but there is a signpost. “Here lies Jim Sourdough. On this spot he got lost.” Encouraging.

We see the Little Tramp in a raging snow storm, where he eyes a lone cabin, also a wanted poster for Black Larsen (Tom Murray), who is in the cabin. Charlie immediately eats a drumstick, the only food he’s seen for days. Black Larsen tells him to scram, opening the door to allow for his exit, but the blowing wind is preventing the Tramp from moving forward, his arms and legs are moving, he’s struggling terribly, but he’s going nowhere. Black Larsen throws him out, but the wind blows him right back in.

Big Jim (Mack Swain) arrives on the scene. He and Black Larsen have a long, drawn-out struggle for the lone rifle, where the point of the rifle continues to point directly at the Little Tramp, despite his efforts to scamper around the cabin. 3 men – no food – the storm rages for days. The Tramp takes the wick out of the lantern, pours a little salt on it, and eats it. The three decide one must brave the elements and go for help, so they cut cards to see who goes. Big Jim pulls a king, the Tramp a 3, so he starts getting dressed, but Black Larsen pulls a 2. When he opens the front door, the force of the wind blows the Tramp out the back door.

Thanksgiving Dinner. The Tramp is boiling a boot, as well as the shoe strings. One a clean white plate, the Tramp serves the boot to Big Jim, serving himself the sole of the boot, peeling the shoe lining off the tiny nails as one might do filleting a fish, then forks the shoelace, savoring each bite as if this was a gourmet meal, pulling the nails out as if each were a delicacy, offering his companion the other boot as well, if he’s interested. Big Jim has other ideas, as he’s so famished, the Little Tramp starts to resemble a giant chicken in his eyes, his hand reaching for the carving knife, but the image soon vanishes. When he tells the Tramp what he’d seen, the Tramp hides the cutlery. But the hallucination returns, this time Big Jim grabs the rifle, chasing him outside where he is flapping his wings, which turns out to be the Tramp waving his arms. Big Jim just shakes his head, but the Tramp buries the rifle in the snow. Chicken or no chicken, his friend looks pretty appetizing, so Big Jim comes after him with an axe, the Tramp immediately unburies the rifle, both are armed when a bear walks in. Out of sheer fright, the Tramp shoots the bear. Never showing the plight of the bear, the Tramp immediately starts setting the table and sharpening the knives.

The Tramp wanders into a snowy town, sauntering into the Monte Carlo Dance Hall, where he stands alone on his cane watching couples dance. Georgia (Georgia Hale) is at the bar smiling at him, then comes to welcome him in, but it turns out to be the man standing directly behind the Tramp, Jack, the ladies man. When he sees her torn photo on the ground, the Tramp puts it in his pocket. After Jack starts ordering her around, Georgia decides to dance with the Tramp, who only has one boot, the other foot is wrapped in cloth. His pants are falling down, so he holds them up with his cane as he dances. During a pause, he finds a rope and ties it around his pants as a belt. But when he starts dancing again, the rope is connected to a dog, which the Tramp first starts trying to kick away, but when the dog sees a cat, the Tramp is down for the count until he can cut the rope. He picks up Georgia’s rose on the floor and hands it to her, but she gives it back to him. When Jack is back to ordering her to dance, she refuses. The Tramp intervenes and won’t let him bully her, swinging wildly into thin air when Jack pulls his hat over his eyes. But a man above drops a clock on Jack’s head, knocking him out. When the Tramp sees the man on the floor, he walks away victorious, his pride intact.

The Tramp feigns being frozen on someone’s front door, where he is immediately invited in for some food and warm coffee, continually holding his cup and plate out for more, gobbling down everything in sight. Surprisingly, the man leaves the Tramp in charge of his cabin while he goes out to visit his mines. Georgia and the girls are having a snowball fight in the street when he leaves on his dogsled, so the Tramp invites the lovely ladies inside, where Georgia happens to notice her picture under his pillow along with the rose. As they leave, Georgia invites all the girls back for New Years Eve at 8 o’clock. Outside the door, a lone scrawny tree sits in the snow, but inside, the Tramp is jumping up and down, swinging from the rafters, doing hand stands, tearing the pillows apart, throwing the feathers everywhere, so it resembles flying confetti. Georgia returns to the room filled with flying feathers, claiming she forgot her gloves, and gives him a weird look.

The Tramp makes a candlelight dinner, spreading rose petals on the table, one is heart-shaped with the words “To my love.” He has presents for each of the girls, but down the street, Georgia is dancing with Jack in a festive gathering. 8 o’clock, he waits, until he eventually falls asleep dreaming of the girls in party hats, all are happy. He kisses Georgia’s hand, telling her “I’ll do the Oceana Roll,” where he uses two forks poked into two baked rolls, the forks are legs, the rolls the feet, and with his hands, he kicks the legs, does a two step, performing a magnificent dance routine while his impassive eyes stare straight ahead. Just a terrific bit, and a wonderful gesture of unrequited yearning.

Aimless Big Jim wanders into town in a stupor, this after getting knocked in the face with a shovel by Black Larsen in a fight over his claim, a fight that had its own unique resolution. “The North – A Law Unto Itself.” Black Larsen met his own fate by falling to his death off a snowy precipice, while Big Jim wanders into the recorder’s office reporting he has a mountain of gold, but can’t remember where it is. By sheer luck, Big Jim sees the Tramp later that evening and his eyes light up, “The cabin!” grabbing the Tramp, promising him a fortune if he can show him the way to his claim

After a long and tedious journey through another raging snowstorm, they discover the cabin, but once inside, they discover it’s been blown to a precarious position, half of the cabin is on land, the other half is balanced in thin air over a mountain ledge. The Tramp wakes to blissful ignorance. When he walks to the side over thin air, the cabin tilts down, when he walks back, it becomes level again, so he tells Big Jim, “I’ll see what’s outside.” Smashing the door open, as it’s been frozen shut, he lunges out into the thin air, falling out the door, hanging on by a thread, crawling back inside, where he faints. The cabin starts to slide over the edge, little by little, Big Jim warns the Tramp not to move, but he sneezes, and falls back out the door again, but Jim pulls him back, then makes his way out the other door that opens on land. Once outside, he sees the cabin is resting directly on top of his claim. But the Tramp is still stuck inside the cabin, so Jim throws him a rope at the precise moment the cabin falls over the cliff, as the Tramp leaps to safety, showing a beaming close up of one man’s elation.

Next Big Jim and the Tramp stroll down Main Street in a top hat and coat, smoking cigars, heading for first class accommodations on an oceanliner. The press is there to cover the story, and they want a picture of the Tramp in his miner’s clothes. There he sees his photo of Georgia – Everything but Georgia. The deckhands are searching for a stowaway on board, as Georgia is seen under the main deck. Meanwhile, the Tramp is posing for photos on the main deck, asked to step back a little, until he accidentally falls over the railing directly into the arms of Georgia on the deck below. She tries to hide him, thinking he’s the stowaway, and offers to pay his fare just as he’s about to be arrested. But another passenger yells out, “A stowaway? Heck, that’s Big Jim’s partner, the multi-millionaire.” The Tramp and Georgia are reunited at last, posing for the photographers pictures with a big kiss. “Oh, you spoiled the picture.”

David Robinson from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

THE GOLD RUSH affirmed Charles Chaplin’s belief that tragedy and comedy are never far apart. His unlikely dual inspiration came from viewing some stereoscope slides of the privations of prospectors in the Klondyke Gold Rush of 1896-98, and reading a book about the Donner Party Disaster of 1846, when a party of immigrants, snowbound in the Sierra Nevada, were reduced to eating their own moccasins and the corpses of their dead comrades. Out of these grim and unlikely themes, Chaplin created high comedy. The familiar Little Tramp becomes a prospector, joining the mass of brave optimists to face all the hazards of cold, starvation, solitude, and the occasional incursion of a grizzly bear.

The film was in every respect the most elaborate undertaking in Chaplin’s career. For two weeks the unit shot on location at Truckee in the snow country of the Sierra Nevada. Here Chaplin faithfully recreated the historic image of the prospectors struggling up the Chilkoot Pass. Some 600 extras, many drawn from the vagrants and derelicts of Sacramento, were brought by train to clamber up the 2,300-foot pass dug through the mountain snow. For the main shooting the unit returned to the Hollywood studio, where a remarkably convincing miniature mountain range was created out of timber, chicken wire, burlap, plaster, salt, and flour. In addition, the studio technicians devised exquisite models to produce the special effects which Chaplin required, like the miners’ hut, which is blown by the tempest to teeter on the edge of a precipice, for one of cinema’s most sustained sequences of comic suspense. Often it is impossible to detect shifts in the film from model to full-size set.

THE GOLD RUSH abounds with now-classic comedy scenes. The historic horrors of the starving 19^th-century pioneers inspired the sequence in which Charlie and his partner Big Jim (Mack Swain) are snowbound and ravenous. Charlie cooks his boot, with all the airs of gourmet, in the eyes of the delirious Big Jim, he is intermittently transformed into an oven-worthy chicken – a triumph both for the cameraman, who had to effect the elaborate trick work entirely in the camera, and for Chaplin, who magically assumes the characteristics of a bird.

The lone prospector’s dream of hosting a New Year’s dinner for the beautiful dance-hall girl (Georgia Hale, who replaced 16-year old Lita Grey when Lita became pregnant and married Chaplin) provides the opportunity for another famous Chaplin set piece: the dance of the rolls. The gag had been seen in films before, but Chaplin gives unique personality to the dancing legs created out of forks and rolls.

Today, THE GOLD RUSH appears as one of Chaplin’s most perfectly accomplished films. Though his affection for his own work changed over time, to the end of his life he would frequently declare that this film was the one by which he would most wish to be remembered.

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Chaplin called The Gold Rush the picture I want to be remembered by. It may be his most celebrated film, and is the masterpiece with more memorable Chaplin moments than any other. The Tramp treks to the Klondike of 1898 in search of fortune, only to wind up snowbound in an hilariously unbalanced cabin, fending off attacks by bears and ferocious fellow prospectors, and -- in one of the cinemas most famed sequences -- staving off starvation by eating his own shoe. A 1952 Belgian survey of international experts selected The Gold Rush as the second greatest film of all time, after Eisensteins Potemkin. [It] manages to make high comedy out of hardship, starvation, and greed. . . In the subtlety of its characterization, the brilliance of its mime, and its blending of comic and tragic themes, The Gold Rush is Chaplin’s most characteristic work (David Cook). Anyone who saw Chaplin eating a boiled shoe like brook trout has seen perfection (James Agee). USA 1925.

Senses of Cinema Dan Harper

A little man, known simply as The Lone Prospector, has invited a girl named Georgia and a few of her friends who work in the local saloon to a New Year's Eve party in his cabin. He is 'cabin-sitting' for the cabin's owner, who has left town to do business elsewhere. It is Klondike, Alaska, at the time of the gold rush. The little man – the poorest of the poor, but adventurous, always hopeful – has come to the Klondike, along with thousands of others, to try his luck. He has raised a little money shoveling snow from local storefronts, just enough for a roast chicken and trifles for the girls. He has carefully decorated the cabin and set a small table for the party.

It is still very early, so the little man sits down at the table and irresistibly falls asleep. He dreams that his party is in full swing. They are all there, Georgia and her friends, and he is delighting them with little gifts and jokes. As a finale, he takes two forks, jabs them into dinner rolls, and performs an impromptu dance – the lighting and framing creating the wondrous illusion of the rolls becoming his tiny feet on the table, doing ballet moves, soft-shoe and sideshow dances. The girls cheer the little man when he is done and he pretends to swoon… only to awake at the same table, unoccupied, alone in his cabin. It is nearing midnight and his guests have forgotten his party.

Hearing noises of revelry from the town, the little man, his aloneness complete, walks the short distance from his cabin, halts outside the brightly lit windows of the saloon and gazes within just as the crowd of townspeople – mountain men, miners and bar girls – all join hands at the stroke of midnight, maudlinly singing “Auld Lang Syne.” When the song is done, shots are fired into the air, and the celebration is renewed. The little man turns toward us, casts a shatteringly sad look at the frozen night and then wanders off.

The scene, the little man's dream and sad awakening, is the centerpiece of Chaplin's The Gold Rush and evokes, in only a few short minutes, the breadth of his genius – the inimitable quality of laughter in the face of pain, the whole bittersweet invention of how and why this peerless film artist could have made a pathetic tramp into a figure of fun. Chaplin admitted in his autobiography (which he titled, with – for once – unintentional humor, My Autobiography) that no matter how famous or prosperous he had become, he could never forget the poverty, the want and the humiliation, of his childhood.

At first impish, often violent in the knockabout style of his Mack Sennett two-reelers, Chaplin's Little Tramp matured as he gradually acquired total control over his work. Once he had fulfilled the terms of his contract with First National, he was free to explore the character more deeply, giving him a romantic, even tragic, side. Until, in the final scene from City Lights (1931), the comic mask is shockingly lowered: Chaplin becomes an actual tramp – broken and shambling, but still oddly (beautifully) capable of dignity. But The Gold Rush presents us with this unique mixture of heartbreaking comedy in its most perfect balance.

The shoot became legendary, with Chaplin taking full cast and crew by train to Truckee, California in the Sierra Nevada mountains (where one of the first inspirations for the film – the 'Donner Party' episode – took place) with the intention of filming entirely on location. His young wife, Lita Grey, was cast as his leading lady and the shoot went smoothly (except for Chaplin's usual long pauses for inspiration) until Grey became visibly pregnant. Chaplin removed her from the picture and cast one of Grey's friends, Georgia Hale, in the part. He then took everyone back to Los Angeles to re-take most of the scenes on back-lot sets. Very little of Chaplin's location shooting remains in the finished film.

In 1942, Chaplin re-released the film with all the title cards removed and music, sound effects and narration (all by Chaplin, of course) added. Chaplin did this in order to regain copyright of The Gold Rush, which had fallen to the public domain, for his own production company. When it was released, in the middle of World War II, audiences and critics were delighted, most of them agreeing that Chaplin had improved his masterpiece.

But there are subtle differences in the re-release version. Chaplin often used two cameras during shooting, and some of the scenes are framed differently, suggesting he used some of the footage from the second camera. And one significant cut takes place at the very end of the film. In the original cut, The Lone Prospector (Charlie) and Georgia are having their picture taken by some reporters and Charlie gives Georgia a prolonged kiss. In the re-release the scene is gone, the film ending with Charlie and Georgia simply disappearing up some stairs, with Chaplin comically alluding in his narration to their future together. Perhaps Chaplin felt that the kiss was a too-happy ending for the Tramp.

Since the appearance of the re-release version, a preference for the original has developed among Chaplin purists. Many still find Chaplin's narration, though often discreet, to be too unsubtle for the film, sometimes belittling the action. For instance, Chaplin playfully mocks the (obviously intentional) overacting of Mack Swain – which is unnecessary editorializing. It was as if Chaplin were making excuses for a new audience unaccustomed to silent film.

But the original film, untampered with and unimproved, still resonates with audiences whenever or wherever it is shown. Chaplin's Little Tramp was so entirely a creature of the silent film that he never allowed him to speak – except the gibberish song he sings in Modern Times (1936). Chaplin is one of the very few film artists who, having made silence his métier, so prolonged the life of silent film that its persistence was guaranteed by his genius. The silent film lives through Chaplin.

Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster

Charlie Chaplin's lovable, luckless Tramp waddles humorously in derby hat and cane across the icy cliffs of the Sierra Nevadas in the prospecting comedy The Gold Rush (1925).

Followed by a grizzly bear and surrounded by signs marking the graves of dead prospectors, the Tramp stumbles across a cabin inhabited by the dangerous criminal Black Larson (played by former vaudevillian Tom Murray). The pair hole up in the midst of a blizzard, starving for food of any kind. When another prospector, the kindly Big Jim McKay (Mack Swain) -- who has discovered an enormous gold nugget in the mountains -- joins the snowbound pair, the trio cuts cards to determine which one will head out into the wilderness in search of food.

One of the typically inventive, whimsical films of Charlie Chaplin's long, prolific career in Hollywood, The Gold Rush wrests comedy from the struggles of this often helpless waif in the brutal American wilds. The Tramp is so slight, each time Larson opens the door to his cabin a chilly blast blows him across the room, and out the back door. In one hilarious vignette, the starving Tramp and McKay boil a shoe (which was actually made of licorice for the scene) for dinner, consuming the shoelaces like spaghetti, and licking each tack clean like a scrumptious bone. The scene reportedly took three shooting days and 63 takes, and the licorice prop's laxative effect momentarily incapacitated Chaplin and Swain. Just as amusing as that brilliant gag was its comic echo in the film - for the rest of the film the Tramp wears a burlap cloth wrapped around his shoeless right foot to reiterate his pathetic predicament.

There are also scenes of surprising tenderness in The Gold Rush, like the Tramp's infatuation with a lovely dance hall girl, Georgia (Georgia Hale), who offers a beautiful respite from the hardships of the cold and hunger. Hardened by her work, Georgia first mocks the Tramp's affection, then finds her own heart melted by his boyish ardor.

The Gold Rush was altered by Chaplin in 1941 during the sound era to include a new orchestral score composed by Chaplin, and the deadpan wit of Chaplin's voice-over narration adds another element of comedy to this revised version.

The Gold Rush was Chaplin's first starring role as a collaborator in the United Artists company, formed six years previously with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith. The inspiration for The Gold Rush was said to be twofold. Breakfasting with husband and wife Fairbanks and Pickford, Chaplin was intrigued by stereograph photos owned by the pair which depicted the Klondike gold rush. Chaplin was also fascinated by the tragic events of the Donner party, who in 1846, while traversing the United States in the snow, had to resort to cannibalism to keep from starving to death (reportedly the survivors ate the flesh of their dead companions). Part of the filming for The Gold Rush, in fact, took place close to where the Donner party camped.

A perfectionist always striving for the perfect end result, Chaplin made The Gold Rush at the enormous cost of over $900,000 and filmed under often physically brutal, rustic conditions in the Nevada town of Truckee. Testifying to the primitive working conditions, the film's first leading lady, Lita Grey, complained her hotel room featured a chamber pot and three cuspidors.

Chaplin had initially planned to feature Grey, the child star of his 1921 film The Kid, in the role of the dance hall girl at $75 dollars a week. But Chaplin found himself forced to change direction when he impregnated the 16-year-old Grey and her belly began to betray evidence of her condition. In a dramatic about-face, Chaplin averted a potential charge of statutory rape by marrying Grey and casting Georgia Hale in the role. A former Miss America contestant who used her beauty contest money to move to Hollywood, Hale was cast in the role of Georgia after auditions that had pitted her against such other talented beauties as Carole Lombard (then Jean Peters).

The Gold Rush has been cited by the International Film Jury as the second greatest film of all time (after Battleship Potemkin, 1925), and Chaplin said it was the film he would most like to be remembered by. Today The Gold Rush remains one of cinema's enduring comedy classics, starring, written and directed by the twentieth century's first media superstar.

DVD Journal Mark Bourne providing plenty of background information

Looking at Charlie — The Gold Rush: An Occasional Series on the Art and Life of Charlie Chaplin Alan Vanneman from Bright Lights Film Journal

digitallyObsessed [Matt Peterson]

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

The Gold Rush (1925) Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide

MediaScreen.com Paul Brenner

Senses of Cinema (Martyn Bamber)

YouTube - Charlie Chaplin- Table Ballet Dance of the Dinner Rolls, “The Oceana Roll” scene from The Gold Rush

Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush (teaser) - Videos Cinema, theater ... another version of the same scene

Read the New York Times Review » Mordaunt Hall

THE CIRCUS A 100

USA (71 mi) 1928

Perhaps not Chaplin’s best work, hard to top THE GOLD RUSH, CITY LIGHTS, or MODERN TIMES, but brilliantly entertaining, this is a hilarious and profoundly touching masterwork that has some of the most impressive imagery of Chaplin’s entire career, such as the deeply moving final shot, and especially the Fun House sketch that may have set the standard for the Hall of Mirrors sequence in the 1948 Orson Welles classic LADY FROM SHANGHAI. A bittersweet mix of slapstick and pathos, a heartbreaking romance with one of Chaplin’s saddest endings, signaling a poetic end of the Silent film era.

In the legendary sequence, the Little Tramp is making faces at a little boy who is held in his mother’s arms. The boy offers him his muffin, which the Tramp obligingly eats. A pickpocket strolls by, stuffing a stolen watch in the Tramp’s pocket when he sees the cops arrive searching for evidence. The Thief empties his pockets, nothing, but later when he tries to steal it back, the cops nail him, and there is a mad race away from the cops, led by the Little Tramp, of course, who still has the watch and runs into a house of mirrors, suddenly alone in a silent wonderworld of reflected imagery. The pickpocket stumbles in and tries to come after the Tramp, but in this mirror maze, he grabs only air, as the Tramp isn’t there. Instead, the Tramp kicks him and runs out, where the cops lie in wait. The Tramp, however, who makes a career outwitting the everpresent array of Chaplin cops, immediately transforms himself into a circus ornament. But the thief isn’t fooled, and he chases the Tramp into the middle of a live circus performance, where the audience howls with approval as the Tramp clubs him one before running back into that house of mirrors. The cops again are waiting inside and quickly grab him, but can’t figure out how to get out, as they’re lost in the maze, allowing the Tramp to make another one of his patented getaways, again running straight onto the circus mainstage, where the audience which was bored, suddenly roars with approval. A magician has been trying to make a woman sitting on a chair, re-appear in a little box, but now, of course, the Tramp is hiding in the box as the cops resume their chase, all to the thunderous applause of the audience. Eventually the Tramp throws the pocketwatch back to the cops and runs away emptyhanded, eventually finding an empty cart to sleep in, as the audience boos the tumbling clowns. Thus begins the Tramp’s career as the star of the show, eventually waited on hand and foot, in love with Merna (Merna Kennedy) the Bareback Rider, who performs her act on a white horse. But he loses her to a tightrope walker, Rex – King of the Air, and his career nosedives, basically sleepwalking through his routines, surpassed by the new audience favorite, the gallant and daring tightrope walker.

Time passes and the Tramp tries to learn how to walk a tightrope, using a wire one foot off the ground, but his circus performances continue to stink, even the clowns are growing sick of him. The ringleader, Merna’s tyrannical father (Allan Garcia), gives him one last chance as a replacement for the main act, the tightrope walker, when Rex mysteriously vanishes. When he opens his costume trunk, monkeys jump out wearing his clothes. Merna begs him not to do it, that he’ll get himself killed. Just then a bag drops on his head, falling from a practice harness, giving the Tramp the idea that he could use the harness in the air. So in the ring, he flies up the rope to the high wire where a monkey is waiting for him eating a banana. The Tramp does a hand stand, then a one-handed hand stand, then another one-handed hand stand, then pulls out a pole and does a hand stand on the pole. The audience is delirious, he’s an amazing success, but then the harness flies off without anyone, including the Tramp, noticing. The Tramp, buoyed by his success, becomes a daredevil, throwing the pole around, jumping up and down on the wire before he eyes the harness that is no longer strapped to him. Suddenly he panics, then a monkey jumps on his shoulder, another onto his face with his tail in the Tramp’s mouth, another is into his pockets pulling his pants down. This is simply a mad scene, ingenious, phenomenal, and unforgettable. A monkey leaves a banana peel on the high wire, and right when you think it’s curtains, the Tramp successfully races off the wire, down the rope onto a waiting bicycle, and out the tent he goes. A miraculous finish. But he gets into a fight with the ringleader, who kicks him out of the show. The poor Tramp leaves with no pants.

Under a moon in an open field, the Tramp is brewing coffee. A musical love motif plays as Merna arrives, saying she’s run away from the circus, that she’ll never return, pleading with the Tramp to take her with him. Telling her to wait right there, he runs back to the circus, gives Rex a wedding ring he was saving, and brings Rex back to Merna. The next morning they are married, the Tramp throws confetti on the happy couple, then all 3 head back to the circus. Rex and Merna are welcomed back by the ringleader with open arms, Merna insists he include the Tramp, who himself indicates two’s a party, three’s a crowd. The circus tents come down, the wagons are waiting, horse-drawn carts take the circus away, leaving the Tramp alone with his suitcase in a cloud of dust. He sits on the trunk, surrounded by the imprint of the ring where the circus used to be, a profoundly moving image of time passing him by, then he walks out into the sunset with his cane.

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Chaplin’s follow-up to The Gold Rush was The Circus, which earned him a special Oscar at the very first Academy Awards in 1929 for his versatility and genius in writing, acting, directing, and producing. Fleeing the police, Charlies Tramp takes refuge in a circus, where he studies to be a clown, and falls for a beautiful bareback rider. Classic comic sequences (Charlie in a hall of mirrors; locked in a lions cage; attacked by monkeys while walking the tightrope) balance with moments of great pathos (the Tramp discovering that he is only funny when he doesnt intend to be); The Circus has a perfect dramatic structure (Georges Sadoul). The laughter and tears on screen masked some serious heartache off: Chaplin was in the midst of a nasty divorce from second wife Lita Grey, and was the target of a vicious smear campaign by right-wing groups for his political views and personal life. Chaplin is said to have been close to suicide; many critics maintain that the sense of bitterness found in all Chaplins later films was first apparent in The Circus. Chaplin scholar Theodore Huff cites this as probably the first Chaplin film to show directly the influence of the intellectual critics. Slapstick, by now, had become `highbrow; and Chaplin’s pathos had been much praised. So it is possible he overdid both in this picture. USA 1928.

Will there ever be a greater movie star than Charlie Chaplin? Despite the almost instant global popularity conferred on today's movie stars, it's doubtful that any contemporary film personality will ever match the recognition of Chaplin's “Tramp” character, who remains one of the most enduring icons in cinema history. Even most people who've never seen a Chaplin film can easily identify the image of the Tramp, so ingrained is the character in the public's consciousness. In 2003, the British film magazine Sight and Sound celebrated Chaplin's remarkable contribution to cinema history, his influence on today's moviemakers and his continuing place in the affections of filmgoers all over the world. The fact that Chaplin is still a popular figure testifies to his excellent skill as a filmmaker, and his universal appeal as the struggling, put upon, shy, but quietly romantic, endearingly childlike and ultimately resilient Tramp.

At a time when film comedy seems dominated by ironic, cynical, self-referential and base humour, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, Chaplin's films use terrific visual comedy to, of course, make us laugh, but also to appeal to the feelings and aspirations of the “average” person, as well as to show the daily frustrations visited upon these individuals by powerful figures of authority and oppressive institutions. In a contemporary Hollywood cinema that's increasingly adverse to taking risks and confronting any kind of political or social questions, Chaplin's politically and socially conscious films are just as relevant today as they ever were, taking place in a world where technology threatens to crush the spirit of the individual (Modern Times, 1936), and where fanatical leaders endanger the stability of world peace (The Great Dictator, 1940).

Made between The Gold Rush (1925) and City Lights (1931), The Circus features Chaplin's Tramp, who inadvertently ends up working in a circus troupe while fleeing from the police – who think he's a pickpocket – thanks to a case of mistaken identity. Although the Tramp blunders into a circus tent mid-performance and causes no end of calamities, he isn't thrown out or turned in to the police. Instead, the boss of the ailing circus (Allan Garcia), whose acts are not popular with the circus audience, sees a winning act in the Tramp. He gets the laughs from the audience that the professional circus performers don't, even if the laughs are generated unintentionally. The Tramp is hired to work at the circus and he soon falls in love with the stepdaughter of the circus boss (Merna Kennedy), who is admonished by her stepfather for failing to perform her act properly. Things get complicated for the Tramp with the arrival of a tightrope walker named Rex (Harry Crocker), who threatens the Tramp's chances to win the stepdaughter's heart.

If all this sounds overly sentimental and melodramatic, it isn't. The Circus is both a heartfelt love story and a very funny film. Chaplin conjures up an array of comedic moments that are both ingenious and hilarious; from the Tramp's escape from the police in a hall of mirrors funhouse, to a dazzling and dangerous tightrope act performed by the Tramp without a safety harness (but with the attention of several monkeys who are running loose in the circus and decide to join him on the tightrope!) Despite these comic moments, The Circus, like many of Chaplin's films, is not purely an out-and-out comedy. The circus presented in the film is far from a fun and entertaining environment for the whole family. This circus is a cruel place, involving hard work that offers little reward for the performers, and which is overseen by a heartless proprietor who punishes his daughter continually and bullies the Tramp at every opportunity.

Although the film looks effortlessly executed on screen, The Circus was a troubled production. Filming began in January 1926, but the production was beset with difficulties and wasn't finished until nearly two years later. As well as problems with the processing of the film, which left scratches on scenes that were shot early in production (mainly the climatic tightrope scenes, which had to be re-shot), there was also a fire that completely destroyed the circus tent set. On top of all this, Chaplin was going through a protracted divorce with his second wife Lita Grey, a very acrimonious public separation that halted filming in January 1927. Filming resumed in September 1927 and despite all the difficulties incurred during production, the film was eventually completed by October of that year. When The Circus was finally released in 1928 it was a commercial success and Chaplin went on to win a Special Academy Award, in recognition of his “versatility and genius in writing, acting, directing and producing” the film. Over 40 years later, Chaplin revisited the film for its 1970 reissue, composing a new score and recording an opening title song, which he sung himself.

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara

It may not be an unequivocal masterpiece, but Charlie Chaplin's The Circus (1928) is a beautifully executed comedy that ranks with the very best works of silent cinema. Chaplin toned down the pathos a bit this time, relying instead on a meticulous style of slapstick that's reminiscent of his earlier short films. Some people viewed The Circus as a directorial step backward, coming, as it did, three years after the much more ambitious The Gold Rush (1925.) But Chaplin the performer was beyond reproach. He's arguably the greatest comedian in motion picture history, and his work here is up to his usual, dazzling standards.

In The Circus, Charlie plays the Little Tramp, the character that made him the most famous man on the planet. As the story begins, the Tramp is mistakenly accused of stealing a wallet while watching a circus sideshow, which leads to a wild chase through a variety of attractions, including the house of mirrors. This ingenious sequence ends under the big top, where the crowd thinks the Tramp's escapades are all part of the act. When Charlie is cleared of the theft, the circus owner (Allan Garcia) offers him a job as a handyman.

The circus setting alone promises enough material for three Chaplin movies. But there also has to be a love interest. Enter the owner's physically abused daughter (Merna Kennedy), a bareback rider. Charlie attempts to become a professional clown and stay close to the girl, but he finds that people only laugh at him when he's not trying to be funny. The owner takes note of this and secretly includes him in the show, even though he's only being paid as a lowly prop man.

Eventually, Charlie will compete with a handsome tightrope walker (Harry Crocker) for the girl's affections. The movie's most astonishing sequence takes place on the rope, with Chaplin desperately negotiating the wire while three small monkeys crawl on him and yank at his pants. Chaplin, the Robert De Niro of his time, actually learned to walk the wire for this scene. No trick photography was used to create the illusion of height, and, luckily, he never fell.

That's about the only stroke of luck he experienced at the time. Chaplin's life was in such an unbelievable uproar while he filmed The Circus, it's a miracle the movie was even coherent.

First of all, he was being sued for divorce by his 17 year-old wife, Lita, who was pregnant at the time...and she wasn't shy about airing their dirty laundry in public. The world gasped in unison when it was revealed that Charlie, the beloved Little Tramp, had tried to force his uninterested wife to perform fellatio on him, resulting in charges describing his sexual preferences as "abnormal, unnatural, perverted, degenerate, and indecent."

Chaplin was always a private man, and this little tidbit, along with other details of his marriage to a "woman" who was actually a semi-educated teenage girl, caused him a great deal of embarrassment. As a special bonus, his holdings were frozen during the trial, so he didn't have access to his home, studio, or bank account. This resulted in The Circus temporarily shutting down production about a month before it was complete.

Several women who Chaplin had been carousing with were mentioned in the divorce complaint, including Marion Davies, who also happened to be William Randolph Hearst's mistress. When Davies' name came up at the trial, Hearst, a violently jealous man, stalked onto the lot, ready to have it out with Charlie. Upon hearing of Hearst's arrival, Chaplin ran to another building and hid in the attic. He came out eventually, and the two had an intense discussion. Shortly thereafter, Chaplin paid Lita close to $1,000,000 to end the trial once and for all.

Chaplin truly seemed cursed while trying to finish The Circus. During shooting, the U.S. government sued him for over $1,000,000 in back taxes, and he was threatened with the possibility of jail time. Back at the studio, a month's worth of footage from the tightrope scene had to be scrapped when it was discovered that the negatives had been damaged, so he had to climb the ladder and do it all over again. Oh, yeah - then the movie's set burned to the ground. Hopefully, he was comforted by the fact that he was awarded a special Oscar for "versatility and genius in writing, acting, directing and producing The Circus" in 1928.

Reel.com DVD review [D.R. Jones]

"The Circus": Chaplin's little-known masterpiece Andrew O’Hehir from Salon

DVD Verdict Bill Treadway

The Circus (1928) Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

CITY LIGHTS A 100

aka: A Comedy Romance in Pantomime

USA (86 mi) 1931 Silent

A “comedy romance in pantomime,” where the comedy and pathos are in perfect balance, where the Tramp finds the woman of his dreams, a blind flower girl, and vows to restore her sight by any means, all the while trying to save the life of a suicidal millionaire, featuring Chaplin’s greatest ending, and he was a master of endings. The actual final moment may be the highlight of his career, an emotional landmark that ranks as one of the greatest moments ever captured on film, separating the genius of Chaplin from all the other mere mortals, particularly since this was 3 years into talking pictures. Chaplin knew he was leaving his mark on a medium that was out of date and would no longer be used, and he creates a magic moment, a stunning, silent testament to love, which represents the quintessence of humanity as he envisions it. Three-quarters of a century later, people are still scratching their heads wondering why they can’t create a moment like that? No one’s done it any better.

Angela Errigo from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Convinced that speech would mar the beauty of cinema, its greatest mime exponent, Charlie Chaplin, agonized over the introduction of sound technology and determined to ignore it, against all advice. Presented as “a comedy romance in pantomime,” his defiantly silent 1931 film CITY LIGHTS was in every way a triumph, its heartrendering melodrama and hilarity withstanding audiences’ craving for talkies. Although later, after the shooting of the film, Chaplin incorporated sound effects and composed and conducted his own score, as he would continue to do in his later pictures.

The Little Tramp is touched by a blind flower seller (graceful Virginia Cherrill) and saves an eccentric millionaire from suicide. His gentle wooing of the girl and his determination to restore her sight propel him into a variety of jobs that go awry – like the memorable “fixed” boxing bout – while his on-off relationship with the drunken unpredictable tycoon provides a parallel string of zany situations. As ever in Chaplin’s silent films, there is a deftly choreographed eating scene – here a party streamer entwined in the oblivious Charlie’s spaghetti – and a slapstick misadventure with the law. Beautifully acted, this quite perfect balancing act between laughter and eloquent pathos culminates in a deeply moving finish. One of the real, landmark greats.

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Of all Chaplin’s features, probably his most universally beloved is City Lights (Andrew Sarris); Albert Einstein is said to have cried with laughter at the world premiere in Los Angeles in 1931. Described by Chaplin as a comedy romance in pantomime, this winning mix of slapstick, sentiment and social criticism has the Tramp falling in love with a blind flower girl. When he discovers that her sight can be restored with an expensive operation, he goes to extraordinary lengths to raise the necessary money -- including a hilariously ill-advised turn as a prizefighter. She, for her part, believes her unseen benefactor to be a handsome millionaire. A synchronized musical score and comic sound effects were Chaplin’s only concessions to the new sound era; the film has nary a word of spoken dialogue. Jean Harlow appears as an extra in the nightclub sequence. James Agee called the famed final scene the highest moment in the movies. The most wistfully Chaplinesque of Chaplin features (J. Hoberman). Of all the comedies ever made, City Lights is the best; [Chaplin’s] best, probably anybody’s best. . . [It] packs an emotional wallop (Woody Allen). USA 1931.

Jiminy Critic Reviews "City Lights" Ben Delbanco

If I could only watch one film over and over again for the rest of my life, the decision to choose Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 masterpiece City Lights would be easy. The first time I saw this film was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was 1989, and for the celebration of the Chaplin centennial, the museum was showing his films on a big screen with a full orchestra playing the newly restored score. Along with Barry Lyndon, that night in the museum was the most sublime film experience of my life. Even deceased for more than a decade, Chaplin still had the audience in the palm of his hand, and the entire theater laughed, sighed, and cried as one. When the lights went up and an image of Chaplin (looking very glamorous without his trademark moustache and hat) was projected onto the screen, the audience gave this almost ghostly image a standing ovation.

City Lights is probably the most complete of Chaplin’s films, showing every aspect of his genius. (Literally every aspect, as he produced, directed, wrote, starred in, and even did the choreography and musical scoring for his films.) Some of his other films, such as his forgotten gem, The Circus, may be funnier. The Gold Rush and The Great Dictator are arguably more important in the history of film, and Modern Times displays a rarely duplicated passion. However, in my opinion, City Lights is his perfect achievement—a faultless blend of comedy and pathos. Every element of the film, from its plot to its music and acting are intertwined in a way that is completely unforgettable.

Chaplin stars in his final completely silent film (the first “talkie” had been released three years earlier in 1928) as the tramp, ever poor and ever alone. He unwittingly comes across and falls madly in love with a blind flower girl, who hearing the door of a fancy car shut, mistakes him to be a handsome rich gentleman. The rest of the film is concerned with Chaplin trying to earn enough money to pay her rent and get her surgery to gain her sight.

The genius of this film is not necessarily in its plot, although its very romantic overtones create a wonderful breeding ground for the pathos that Chaplin wanted to create. If not just the plot, the genius is in the execution of each scene, as the film builds to a crescendo that crashes into the final scene—perhaps the greatest ending in the history of cinema. Each scene was done to perfection—Chaplin shot the scene where he meets the flower girl 342 times until it was to his liking. Some scenes, like the famous boxing sequence, are hysterically funny, and others, such as where Charlie begs his millionaire sometimes-friend not to kill himself, are very poignant. The common theme, which winds itself into every aspect of this film, is the air of quiet desperation that pervades Chaplin’s character. Always the loner, the tramp has finally found the one person who accepts him--perhaps only because she cannot see him. In any case, he will do anything—anything—for her, and in the more manic scenes, the score appropriately rises to reflect his almost crazed passion.

Towards the end of the film, Chaplin is forced to essentially steal money from his friend to pay for the eye operation. (In a cruel twist of fate, his friend only remembers Charlie when drunk out of his mind.) After giving the money to his love, he tells her (through a dialogue card, of course) that he “will be going away for a little while.” In other words, he knows that he will soon be going to jail, but cannot quite bear to tell her. Months pass, and the final scene shows the even dirtier than usual tramp walking down the street. We come to realize that he is walking past the flower girl’s new shop—she can now see and is beautiful and sought after by very eligible young men. In an encounter that must be seen to be understood, she gives the tramp a flower out of pity, and touches his face. In that moment, she realizes who he is, and all her dreams of the rich gentleman who will someday come back to her are dashed. The camera fades to black on their faces as he asks her: "You can see now?" She responds simply: "Yes. I can see now." The last image is of Chaplin's heart-broken, yet slightly hopeful face.

Orson Welles said that City Lights was the greatest film ever made. Whether or not he is right, the final scene is certainly the most indelible cinematic moment in my mind. The mixture of mutual love and despair on the faces of Chaplin and the flower girl—all in a few fleeting seconds—display more emotion than thousands of words of dialogue could ever convey. The image of the tramp was once the most famous image in the world, topping even that of the President of the United States. Chaplin’s work has fallen on hard times, often now misunderstood as solely slapstick comedy without any true substance. Anyone who watches City Lights without any preconceptions will know otherwise and will not be able to watch any other movie in the same way again.

Reel.com DVD review [D.R. Jones]

100 films Lucas McNelly

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton)

DVD Verdict Dan Mancini

Filmjudge City Lights: Chaplin Explores the Value of Sound, essay by Mike

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

Home Theater and Sound [Wes Marshall]

Ryan Ellis

Turner Classic Movies Roger Fristoe

Piddleville [Bill Wren]

IndependentCritics.com [Richard Propes] great photo

eFilmCritic.com (Collin Souter)

DVD Review e-zine Guido Henkel

Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash)

City Lights (1931) Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide

Video Charlie Chaplin - Boxing from City Lights - Charlie, Chaplin ... YouTube Boxing sequence from City Lights

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1972

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1997

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) 1931 review with Chaplin arriving to the theater with a police guard

The Charlie Chaplin Centennial: A Genius Is Revisited Vincent Canby from The New York Times, also reviewing the A DOGS LIFE, THE IDLE CLASS, THE KID, THE PILGRIM, and A WOMAN OF PARIS

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

MODERN TIMES A 100

USA (89 mi) 1936 Silent

Chaplin was actually sued for this picture by the production company of René Clair’s 1931 film À NOUS LA LIBERTÉ for copyright infringement, as some of the assembly line scenes from Clair’s film were used in MODERN TIMES. Clair had the suit dropped, however, and according to Pauline Kael, he claimed “All of us flow from Chaplin, and I am honored if he was inspired by my film.” Clair also used a variation on the premise of Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS, where a taxi driver falls in love with a blind flower girl in his 1932 film QUATORZE JUILLET. Film critic Dave Kehr mused, “The difference between them is the difference between genius and talent.” One might say the granddaddy of all these films is Fritz Lang’s 1927 visionary masterpiece METROPOLIS, which in set design, special effects, and Lang’s stunning visual conception makes that “the” film dramatizing the industrial worker’s plight with machines and modernization. Lang uses architecture and the machine to portray the mixture of modernity and misery, high style and squalor in a contemporary city. The 1920’s were marked by a sense of social crisis, especially in Germany, where war and inflation left their economy in ruins. The powerful forces of capital and labor faced each other across a great divide that threatened to end in violence and chaos. Chaplin’s approach was considerably less dramatic, but is instead a brilliant comedy which fuses lots of slapstick gag routines and amusingly stylized sound with a dramatic visual design, elements not seen in the Lang film, which makes this an entirely different and unique concept, call it a Chaplinesque slant on the plight of the working poor.

The film is Chaplin’s final screen appearance for the Little Tramp, and his a highly complex, final silent film, a silent homage to the human spirit, expressed in a sarcastic, absurdist look at the modern, industrialized world, in particular life on the assembly line, complete with an extraordinary set filled with giant gears in motion, where the Tramp, of course, eventually gets caught in the giant, turning gears of the combine and gets carried along on a spectacularly mechanized rollercoaster ride. Opening with hordes of sheep, followed by throngs of people pushing their way through tight, crowded spaces, followed by an image of the Electro Steel Corporation, an industrial combine, a huge, giant lurking presence, where the Chief Executive Officer sits in his sterile, spacious office working a jigsaw puzzle, pushing buttons, clicking on various picture images of his factory workers at work. A giant, beefy shirtless man, looking very robot-like, operates the master controls, taking orders directly from the boss, who spies on his workers with a network of machines that look right out of Emperor Ming in Flash Gordon. One of the more unique slants is an automatic feeding machine to keep the workers on the assembly line, which of course typically goes awry in absurdist fashion, or Chaplin’s outrageous take on carpal tunnel syndrome long before anyone even knew what that was, as even after he’s left the assembly line his hand uncontrollably keeps making the exact same convoluted twisting motion of tightening bolts. The film also takes an interesting look at the new world of advertisements that successfully predicts what actually occured in 1950’s television. Especially worth mentioning is the female character played by Paulette Goddard, in what is one of the more peculiar roles on screen. It’s as if she’s not really human, but is an elusive spirit whose sole desire is to remain ever free, a dance-like ethereal nymph, providing an abstract force in contrast to the realist plight of the working man.

David Robinson from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

MODERN TIMES was the last film in which Charles Chaplin portrayed the character of the Little Tramp, which he had created in 1914 and which had brought him universal fame and affection. In the years between, the world had changed. When the Little Tramp was born, the 19^th century was still close. In 1936, in the aftermath of the Great depression, he confronted anxieties that are not so different from those of the 21^st century – poverty, unemployment, strikes and strike breakers, political intolerance, economic inequalities, the tyranny of the machine, and narcotics.

These were problems with which Chaplin had become acutely preoccupied in the course of an 18-month world tour in 1931-32, when he had observed the rise of nationalism and the social effects of the Depression, unemployment, and automation. In 1931 he declared to a newspaper interviewer, “Unemployment is the vital question...Machinery should benefit mankind. It should not spell tragedy and throw it out of work.”

Exposing these problems to the searchlight of comedy, Chaplin transforms the Little Tramp into one of the millions working in factories throughout the world. He is first seen as a worker driven crazy by his monotonous, inhuman job on a conveyor belt and being used as a guinea pig to test a machine to feed workers as they perform their tasks. Exceptionally, the Little Tramp finds a companion in his battle with this new world – a young girl (Paulette Goddard) whose father has been killed in a strike and who joins forces with Chaplin. The couple are neither rebels or victims, wrote Chaplin, but “the only two live spirits in a world of automations.”

By the time MODERN TIMES was released, talking pictures had been established for almost a decade. Chaplin considered using dialogue and even prepared a script, but he finally recognized that the Little Tramp depended on silent pantomime. At one moment, though, his voice is heard, when, hired as a singing waiter, he improvises the song in wonderful, mock-Italian gibberish.

Conceived in four “acts,” each one equivalent to one of his old two-reel comedies, MODERN TIMES shows Chaplin still at his unrivaled peak as a creator of visual comedy. The film survives no less as a commentary on human survival in the industrial, economic, and social circumstances of the 20^th – and perhaps the 21^st – century.

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Denounced as Red propaganda in the U.S., banned in fascist Italy and Germany, Modern Times remains one of the high points of screen comedy -- even if Chaplin may have borrowed more than a wee bit from Ren Clairs 1931 French classic A nous la libert (see May 7). A funny, forceful satire on industrialization, automation, unemployment and global economic crisis, Modern Times features Charlie as a factory worker with a mind-numbingly boring job tightening bolts on an assembly line. The monotony of the task soon drives him nuts; celebrated sequences have Chaplin caught in the cogs of an enormous machine, and used as a guinea pig for an automatic feeding machine designed to increase productivity by eliminating lunch breaks. The latter has been called probably the funniest episode in the history of cinema (Andrew Sarris). Appearing nearly a decade into Hollywood’s talkie era, Modern Times was for all intents and purposes still a silent film, save for a sly twist or two: its only audible dialogue emanates from machines, and Charlie does sing a song -- in gibberish. The luminous Paulette Goddard, Chaplin’s third wife, appears in her first starring role. Chaplin’s beloved Tramp persona appears for the last time. The passing years have only increased [the films] power (Georges Sadoul). [The] satire still retains its bite (David Robinson). USA 1936.

Charlie Chaplin's realization of the "alienation of the worker" in the opening segment is incredibly powerful, unquestionably Marxist, precisely on point, and "goes beyond itself" to a magnitude to make Nietzsche weep and surrender. ÜberCapitalists haven't figured out how to humanize assembly lines in the years since, though they've had more luck turning the unions (particularly in the states, which, it must also be said, reflects positively on production). In fact Charlie foresaw the problem of unions being out of touch with the workers here, along with other plagues including cocaine (I understand that many of us consider cocaine laws more of a plague-how can there not be a punk song called "Prison Gruel Jones" based on this scene?), politically charged police enforcement (that's always been a problem, I guess), and herd musical values. Chaplin is incredible, body humour for the ages, presenting material that is at once entertaining and challenging at every turn. But, despite his unique and outstanding performance, flawless directing (sets and black & white milieu for the ages), cool music...it's not his film, not just his anyway. Barefoot and with mud on her face, Paulette Goddard is more elegant and graceful than any gaggle of starlets adorned in Rodeo Drive's finest. Especially barefoot. Bless her and pray for her soul, what an endearing performance! The linear plot line, moving the protagonist from situation to situation in which he can expound or escape, has always struck me as more life-like than anything that you can tie a bow around at the end. It's a film that you can watch with the sound off, with your brain off, with your sociological antennae off...but it sets forth a series and assortment of psychological impressions that you shouldn't wish will go away. High comedy, political intrigue, great romance, idiotic antagonists...this has more relation to your life than anything ever offered up by the "cinematic realism" sect.

Filmdog - [Mike Fisher]

"Modern Times" is located at the crossroads where silent film meets the talking picture. Everyday dialogue is silent, but voices are heard from radios, phonographs, and videophones used by big industry heads. Chaplin uses this technique to symbolize his film's theme, which spotlights technology and the strain put onto the human spirit by factory work. Chaplin is successful in making a social comment, not to mention making "Modern Times" one of his funniest movies.

Chaplin is a nameless factory worker (it's said to be a steel mill) who works constantly on an assembly line, tightening a couple of bolts with wrenches all day. It doesn't take long for this work to drive him crazy, and so he starts running amok with his wrenches and causing all kinds of trouble. He is sent to the hospital and cured of a nervous breakdown, but he has lost his steel mill job. Before he can get himself a new job, however, he accidentally becomes the leader of a communist march and is thrown in jail.

In jail, the worker quite accidentally saves a couple of guards from being imprisoned by armed convicts. He is rewarded with a comfortable cell all to himself until the end of his sentence soon after. When he is told he is a free man, he is disappointed. He is so happy in his cell that he doesn't want to be free. He is given a note that says what a trustworthy man he is, which is supposed to help him get work. But when he acquires a job, he accidently lets a ship sail off from the harbor.

After failing at his new job, he runs into a young homeless girl (Paulette Goddard) who has just stolen a loaf of bread. Hoping to get himself back into prison, he claims that he stole the bread. However, eyewitnesses testify on behalf of the contrary, and so the girl is taken away. The worker then decides to steal a bunch of food and buy cigars for children to get himself arrested. This time he is successful, but when the girl escapes from the police, he follows her, perhaps just for the pleasure of company. The girl sticks with the worker through his failed jobs and unfortunate arrests. Eventually, they both land jobs at a cafe as singing waiters (we hear Chaplin sing here, but he is only speaking in jibberish, telling his story through gestures).

"Modern Times" ranks highest among the Chaplin films on the Internet Movie Database's Top 250 as voted on by IMDb users. It is also one of three Chaplin movies to make the American Film Institute's lists of the 100 funniest and 100 best American films. It may not quite be one of the funniest movies ever made (and certainly not one of the very best), but there are some very funny moments here. There aren't really any laugh-out-loud moments, although some may do so upon a first viewing (I think I did at least once or twice). However, there is enough humorous material in "Modern Times" to qualify as simply a very good comedy. One moment that continues to stand out in my mind is a scene where Chaplin mistakes cocaine (it is referred to as "nose powder") for a spice, pours it all over his food, and becomes quite exceptionally loopy after eating. The way Chaplin handles his behavior on this high is of comedic brilliance.

Chaplin's film also features its fair share of unusual and/or dangerous stunts. An easy example is the famous moment when Chaplin enters the inside of a conveyer belt and is moved about by a number of gears. A better one, though, I think, is a scene where Chaplin is roller-skating blindfolded on the fourth floor of a department store. The situation is made more dangerous by the fact that the fourth floor guard rail is not finished, and so he is skating dangerously close to a ledge. Again, Chaplin's grace in performing such a scene is amazing.

"Modern Times" isn't Chaplin's funniest film, but it is still a poingnant social satire. It offers a humorous yet thoughtful look at the impoverished and unlucky, as well as those who would rather be in prison than be out working in a factory, tightening bolts. It is not a film for with which to introduce oneself to the silent cinema. It contains sound effects and a little speech from radios and such which is not found in the earlier Chaplin films (except for 1931's wonderful "City Lights"). However, if you want to check out a good comedy, I recommend "Modern Times" wholeheartedly.

DVD Journal [Mark Bourne]

There once was a time when films could not be digitally enhanced. It was an era without special effects, without Technicolor, and without sound. Before you think that no one should have to suffer through watching one of these films from the cave man era of cinema, think again. Standing at the top of this time is the greatest comedian in film history – a man who actually ranks as one of film’s greatest actors, directors, screenwriters, and musical composers all in one –- Charlie Chaplin.

Modern Times is his greatest achievement, though some may argue that City Lights would occupy that spot. With this film Chaplin makes a more pointed political statement, but disguises it through his incomparable comedy.

Modern Times satirizes the Industrial Age from the opening shots that visually compare factory workers to sheep, to a scene with the factory president hard at work with jigsaw puzzles and comics, to scenes that show the Little Tramp (Chaplin) performing mindless assembly line duties, to a classic scene that shows the Tramp getting caught up in the wheels of the machinery itself, and to his battles with unemployment during the Depression. But the scenes that most will remember are the hilarious physical ones.

Among my favorites:

1. The impractical “feeding machine” that goes berserk when Chaplin “volunteers” to test it.
2. The tramp’s breakdown where he chases after the women who wear large buttons.
3. The tramp’s arrest for his role in picking up the red construction flag and ending up as the apparent leader of the worker’s union.
4. The skating sequence in the department store with Chaplin performing his own stunt work.
5. The morning dip into the creek.
6. Chaplin’s performance as a waiter where he attempts to serve a duck to an impatient customer in a crowded restaurant.

Other great scenes are scattered throughout one of the most enjoyable 90 minutes of film that you will ever see, and much of the reason that they are so funny is due to Chaplin’s impeccable timing and his subtle gestures. You simply have to watch his priceless facial expressions to catch the humor. No other actor ever expressed his dislike for uptight authoritarian characters or used his facial expressions (especially his eyes) as effectively. Despite getting by most audiences opposed to his left wing politics, Modern Times is one of the main reasons that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI put Chaplin under surveillance and eventually conspired to oust him from the United States.

Modern Times also demonstrates a great deal of heart, with Paulette Goddard playing an orphaned gamin without a home. Chaplin takes an interest in her, protects her, dreams about the American dream with her, and establishes a budding romance. The Tramp has fallen for other girls in other films, only to lose them by the final reel. Perhaps this one will be different, so stay through the end and the walk into the sunrise to see. The on-screen chemistry in this 1936 film is palpable-- Chaplin did marry Goddard in 1936. She would later star in The Great Dictator before their 1942 divorce.

Chaplin’s legendary perfectionism is evident here; perhaps easiest to realize when you listen to the musical score that he composed. The music remarkably matches every movement so perfectly that the film could nearly be classified as an operetta. The varied moods are amplified with musical parallels to Gershwin and Puccini in places while others use a solo tenor saxophone to support the comedy.

Another way to look at Modern Times is in context with the conflict that Chaplin was having with the changing technology of film. Chaplin, the unsurpassed master of the silent era when everything had to be communicated visually, was none too pleased with the coming of the sound era, and this film marks the transition between the two eras. In fact, this silent film is notable for containing a few actual sounds, and the Little Tramp sings near the end of the film for the first time.

This nearly perfect comedy continues to hold up over 60 years after its creation. I used to show Modern Times to my high school students, many of whom had never ever seen a silent film or a black and white film for that matter. What a joy it was to see them roaring with laughter and being mesmerized by Chaplin’s genius. Invariably they would ask if I had any other Chaplin films to show them, clearly demonstrating his station as the greatest filmmaker of the early era. Sixty years past his great silent era, Chaplin still continues to overcom hostile and indifferent audiences!

Film Commentary by CGK

Richard A. Zwelling

Offoffoff -- The Guide to Alternative New York Still Modern After All These Years, by Leslie (Hoban) Blake

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

here for the nun scene originally planned but finally deleted from Modern Times

Turner Classic Movies Jay Steinberg

Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]

The Film Judge MIke

DVD Review e-zine Ed Peters

Musings of a Cinemaphile - Revisiting the greatest films ever made Jerry Roberts

Modern Times (1936) Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide

Charlie Chaplin - Home Sweet Home - Modern Times Video YouTube Home Sweet Home sequence from Modern Times

Modern Times Frank S. Nugent from the New York Times

THE GREAT DICTATOR A 100

USA (124 mi) 1940

Chaplin’s first film with dialogue, a great, gutsy comical farce, a mad Marx Brothers-style spoof of the Nazi’s with a devastating lampoon of Hitler, causing Hitler to ban the film in Germany. Chaplin plays two roles, Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomania, and a poor Jewish barber from the Ghetto who is constantly under threat of religious persecution, a dead ringer for Hynkel who’s mistaken for him and sent to deliver a speech in his place. In this final address, Chaplin pleads to the world for sanity and world peace, often criticized for its length and moral preaching, but considering the times, and considering this was Chaplin’s first speaking role on camera, it’s simply another profound chapter on the complexity of the man.

Film critic Dave Kehr observes, “Chaplin is at his most profound in suggesting there is much of the Tramp in the Dictator, and much of the Dictator in the Tramp.” A note about the uncredited music that ends the film, and also plays in the most famous scene in the film when the Hitler look-alike (Hynkel) is laying on his desk, proclaiming himself the “Emperor of the World,” first twirling a balloon of the world around his finger, then drop kicking it into the air, bouncing it off his feet around the room in a rhapsody of enchantment, a dictator’s ballet of bliss. This is Richard Wagner’s brilliantly orchestrated Prelude to Act 1 from Lohengrin, an opera where a knight of the Holy Grail in shining armor makes his entrance in a swan-driven boat, initially banned in Germany at the time (1850) due to Wagner’s revolutionary activities, and was first performed by Franz Liszt instead in Switzerland with an orchestra of only 38 members. A taste of Chaplin’s stirring final oratory: “I'm sorry but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone… We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone…Greed has poisoned men's souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed…Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…Do away with greed, with hate and intolerance!..The clouds are lifting!..The soul of man has been given wings and at last he is beginning to fly…Into the light of hope! Into the future!..Look up, Hanna! Look up!” Like Scarlett O’Hara at Terra, the strings of Wagner all but melt the screen by the end of the film.

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

He Talks! went the ad campaign for Chaplin’s first-ever film with full dialogue -- and boy, did he ever have a lot to say! Released some 13 years after Al Jolson uttered Hollywoods first on-screen words, The Great Dictator was Chaplins response to the dire situation in Europe -- and his revenge on the Fhrer who, some maintain, appropriated Charlie’s famous mustache in a transparent effort to share some of his magic. Chaplin, in a dual role, is Adenoid Hynkel, Dictator of Tomania, and a meek Jewish barber who is Hynkels double. The hapless barber recovers from First World War-induced amnesia to discover that Hynkel is persecuting Jews and bringing Europe once again to the brink. Through a complicated set of circumstances, the two lookalikes are mixed up, and kind barber is thrust into the role of cruel dictator. Jack Oakie co-stars as Hynkels ally Benzino Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria; Paulette Goddard is a young Jewish woman the barber befriends. The most famous scene, by now iconic, has Hynkel in a sinisterly comic ballet with an inflatable globe of the world. The film concludes with a jarring six-minute speech in which Chaplin makes an impassioned plea for peace and freedom. I did this picture for the Jews of the world, Chaplin claimed, although he would later admit that, had he anticipated the enormity of Nazi crimes, he would never have made Hitler a comic figure. The Great Dictator was one of the rare anti-Nazi movies to emerge from pre-Pearl Harbor Hollywood; the Germany ambassador issued a protest, and the film was denounced by American isolationists and anti-communists. Critics were coolish, but audiences proved they still loved Chaplin, and it became one of his biggest box-office hits. A unique blend of slapstick, wordplay, parody and pointed political commentary. . . The Great Dictator contains some of Chaplin’s finest moments (James Monaco). USA 1940.

Introduction Sight and Sound

In a highly controversial project, Chaplin took on the role of the world's conscience; its best-loved star standing up to its most hated dictator. For political reasons he was strongly discouraged by everyone from the British government to Jewish Hollywood producers. Ignoring them, he financed the lengthy shoot himself. Bravely speaking out against Nazism with brilliant parody, he lampooned Hitler and Mussolini in this bittersweet farce. Playing dual roles as a humble Jewish barber and Adenoid Hynkel, the ranting dictator of Tomania, Chaplin combined trademark slapstick with sharp political satire.

When Chaplin began work on the script of The Great Dictator in 1938, there had still been no anti-Nazi films from mainstream Hollywood. By the time editing had begun, France and Denmark had fallen, and he considered shelving the film, feeling that "Hitler is a horrible menace to civilisation rather than someone to laugh at". Instead he decided to close the film speaking as himself in an impassioned plea for tolerance.

On its release in 1940 the film received standing ovations, especially in Blitz-torn Britain. Although banned in occupied Europe, South America and Ireland, The Great Dictator became Chaplin's biggest money-maker and was nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture. It contains some of Chaplin's most delectable sequences, including Hinkel's balletic pas de deux with a luminous globe and a spaghetti-tangled food fight with Jack Oakie's scene-stealing Napaloni ('Mussolini', in a masterful piece of casting).

As David Robinson, Fellow of the Charlie Chaplin Research Foundation, succinctly puts it: "The Great Dictator remains an unparalleled phenomenon... the greatest clown and best-loved personality of his age directly challenged the man who had instigated more evil and human misery than any other in modern history."

Reverse Shot [Chris Wisniewski]

In 1998, Roberto Benigni received much critical acclaim for his Life Is Beautiful, a comedy about the Holocaust. And director James Moll and producer Steven Spielberg crafted the latest heartbreaking documentary about life for the Hungarian Jews in concentration camps. But in 1940, no one knew the horrors that were going on. It was possible for Charlie Chaplin to make The Great Dictator because he didn't know the full extent of Hitler's hatred for the Jews. He himself said years later, "If I'd have known, I never would have made the film."

Lucky for us, though, that he did. I watched The Great Dictator nearly 60 years after it was made, and with plenty of hindsight, and I still think it's a masterpiece. It may be Chaplin's greatest work, even if it's not his most personal. It's also significant for being his first talkie, after fighting off sound for over a decade.

Chaplin plays two roles, Adenoid Hynkel, the screwball dictator who speaks both English and a kind of mish-mash German with lots of "sauerkraut" and such, as well as the character known only as "the Jewish Barber". It's the balance between these two characters that makes the film possible at all -- the ultimate good and evil. Hitler and Chaplin had quite a lot in common, really. They were born within a week of each other in April of 1889, and both sported little squarish mustaches. They were both incredibly powerful men, and reached enormous amounts of people. One spread laughter, and the other hatred. Chaplin saw his destiny was to speak out against the tyrant, and used the sound film in order to deliver his first speech.

The movie begins as the barber, in the thick of battle, inadvertently rescues a pilot and brings him to safety. But the barber suffers a concussion and loses his memory of the war. After he is released from the hospital, he goes back to work in his barbershop in the ghetto, only he doesn't know that his town has been occupied by the soldiers of the Double Cross (instead of a swastika). He tries to defend himself, and wins the admiration of a pretty neighbor girl, Hannah (Chaplin's ex-wife Paulette Goddard, who was also in Modern Times. Goddard was one of the three finalists for Scarlett in Gone with the Wind. If she had been chosen, perhaps The Great Dictator would never have been made.) By a twist of fate, the pilot whom the barber saved in the war becomes one of Hynkel's top men. Out of gratitude, he orders the goons to leave the ghetto alone.

Meanwhile, Hynkel holds a meeting with the Dictator of neighboring Bacteria -- Benzino Napaloni (Jackie Oakie) to discuss territory. Napaloni refuses to remove his troops from the border much to the fury of Hynkel. Hynkel also gets word that the funding they were trying to get for an attack (from a wealthy Jew no less) is not coming, so he launches an all-out attack on the Jews. The barber is thrown into a concentration camp, which to Chaplin's pre-war eyes, was a place where you goose-step all day long then go to sleep in a barracks. The barber escapes and is mistaken for Hynkel, leading up to the final, powerful, and controversial speech.

I say "controversial" because, although everyone would agree on the content, most people disagree with the artistic choice of ending this kind of movie with a long speech. But the speech is fine. It has things in it that should still be heard by audiences today. Other complaints about this movie are that it's not funny, it's too long, and it's too serious a subject to make fun of. The movie is not uproariously funny. It has many funny moments, such as the barber shaving to beat of a Schubert composition, and later absent-mindedly lathering Goddard's face with shaving cream. But Chaplin had other things on his mind besides just making people laugh. The scene in which Hynkel bounces the inflatable globe is more strangely beautiful than funny.

Secondly, the movie is too long. Perhaps, but who are we to judge? If there was any extra footage, I would want to see that too. The artistry in this movie is such that I was savoring every shot. And finally, the subject matter is too serious. Chaplin was well aware of how serious it was, and did not intend any bad taste, and there is none in the movie.

Earlier I said that The Great Dictator was Chaplin's best movie without being his most personal or his most ambitious. His most personal works are those with the Little Tramp, The Kid, The Gold Rush, and City Lights, in which he made us laugh and touched our hearts at the same time (after they said it couldn't be done). His most ambitious is perhaps Monsieur Verdoux, in which he abandons his Tramp character altogether for a cynical killer. The Great Dictator is his best movie because of its combination of the two Chaplins, and because of its hopeful message in which Chaplin does more than just get the girl or the gold. It's a masterpiece.

The New York Times (Bosley Crowtherwallace) October 16. 1940

Now that the waiting is over and the shivers of suspense at an end, let the trumpets be sounded and the banners flung against the sky. For the little tramp, Charlie Chaplin, finally emerged last night from behind the close-guarded curtains which have concealed his activities these past two years and presented himself in triumphal splendor as "The Great Dictator"—or you know who.

No event in the history of the screen has ever been anticipated with more hopeful excitement than the première of this film, which occurred simultaneously at the Astor and Capitol Theatres; no picture ever made has promised more momentous consequences. The prospect of little "Charlot," the most universally loved character in all the world, directing his superlative talent for ridicule against the most dangerously evil man alive has loomed as a titanic jest, a transcendent paradox. And the happy report this morning is that it comes off magnificently. "The Great Dictator" may not be the finest picture ever made—in fact, it possesses several disappointing shortcomings. But, despite them, it turns out to be a truly superb accomplishment by a truly great artist—and, from one point of view, perhaps the most significant film ever produced.

Let this be understood, however: it is no catch-penny buffoonery, no droll and gentle-humored social satire in the manner of Chaplin's earlier films. "The Great Dictator" is essentially a tragic picture—or tragi-comic in the classic sense—and it has strongly bitter overtones. For it is a lacerating fable of the unhappy lot of decent folk in a totalitarian land, of all the hateful oppression which has crushed the humanity out of men's souls. And, especially, it is a vithering revelation, through genuinely inspired mimicry, of the tragic weaknesses, the overblown conceit and even the blank insanity of a dictator. Hitler, of course.

The main story line is quite simple, though knotted with many complications. A little Jewish barber returns to his shop in the ghetto of an imaginary city (obviously Berlin) after a prolonged lapse of perception due to an injury in the World War. He does not know that the State is now under the sign of the double-cross, that storm troopers patrol the streets, that Jews are cruelly persecuted and that, the all-powerful ruler of the land is one Hynkel, a megalomaniac, to whom he bears—as a foreword states—a "coincidental resemblance." Thus, the little barber suffers a bitter disillusionment when he naively attempts to resist; he is beaten and eventually forced to flee to a neighboring country. But there he is mistaken for Hynkel, who has simultaneously annexed this neighboring land. And pushed upon a platform to make a conqueror's speech, he delivers instead a passionate appeal for human kindness and reason and brotherly love.

Thus the story throws in pointed contrast the good man against the evil one—the genial, self-effacing but courageous little man of the street against the cold pretentious tyrant. Both are played by Chaplin, of course, in a highly comic vein, beneath which runs a note of eternal sadness. The little barber is our beloved Charlie of old—the fellow with the splay feet, baggy pants, trick mustache and battered bowler. And, as always, he is the pathetic butt of heartless circumstances, beaten, driven, but ever prepared to bounce back. In this role Chaplin performs two of the most superb bits of pantomime he has ever done—one during a sequence in which he and four other characters eat puddings containing coins to determine which shall sacrifice his life to kill the dictator, and the other a bit in which he shaves a man to the rhythm of Brahms's Hungarian Rhapsody.

But it is as the dictator that Chaplin displays his true genius. Whatever fate it was that decreed Adolf Hitler should look like Charlie must have ordained this opportunity, for the caricature of the former is devastating. The feeble, affected hand-salute, the inclination for striking ludicrous attitudes, the fabulous fits of rage and violent facial contortions—all the vulnerable spots of Hitler's exterior are pierced by Chaplin's pantomimic shafts. He is at his best in a wild senseless burst of guttural oratory—a compound of German, Yiddish and Katzenjammer double-talk; and he reaches positively exalted heights in a plaintive dance which he does with a large balloon representing the globe, bouncing it into the air, pirouetting beneath it—and then bursting into tears when the balloon finally pops.

Another splendid sequence is that in which Hynkel and Napaloni, a neighboring dictator, meet and bargain. Napaloni, played by Jack Oakie, is a bluff, expansive creature—the anthesis of neurotic Hynkel—and the two actors contrive in this part of the film one of the most hilarious lampoons ever performed on the screen. Others in the cast are excellent—Paulette Goddard as a little laundry girl, Henry Daniell as a Minister of Propaganda, Billy Gilbert as a Minister of War—but Oakie ranges right along-side Chaplin. And that is tops.

On the debit side, the picture is overlong, it is inclined to be repetitious and the speech with which it ended—the appeal for reason and kindness—is completely out of joint with that which has gone before. In it Chaplin steps out of character and addresses his heart to the audience. The effect is bewildering, and what should be the climax becomes flat and seemingly maudlin. But the sincerity with which Chaplin voices his appeal and the expression of tragedy which is clear in his face are strangely overpowering. Suddenly one perceives in bald relief the things which make "The Great Dictator" great—the courage and faith and surpassing love for mankind which are in the heart of Charlie Chaplin.

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen

The Great Dictator (1940) traces the very different paths of two men from the imaginary country of Tomania: the first is a Jewish barber who suffers amnesia as a result of a plane accident which occurred while rescuing an officer during World War I. The second is Hynkel, the Dictator of Tomania, who gesticulates wildly, shouts incomprehensible gibberish and harbors not-so-secret ambitions of global domination. Years after his accident, the Jewish barber finally recovers from his amnesia and returns home, only to find the ghetto under the oppressive rule of Storm Troopers who wear the infamous "double cross" on their sleeves. The barber befriends Hannah, a spunky young laundry girl given to resistance; he later runs into Schultz, who is now a close associate of Hynkel but orders the Storm Troopers not to harass the Jews of the ghetto out of gratitude for the barber's help years ago. Meanwhile, Hynkel plans to invade the neighboring country of Osterlich but must negotiate with Napaloni, the wily Dictator of Bacteria first. The barber winds up arrested with Schultz and thrown into a concentration camp, but his uncanny resemblance to Hynkel gives him - and the world - one last hope.

The Great Dictator was a turning point in the creative development of Charles Chaplin. Up to that point he had played largely silent roles, resisting the transition to the dialogue-oriented filmmaking that dominated the sound era. His previous film Modern Times (1936) was not truly a silent film, insofar as it featured a limited amount of dialogue in addition to the sound effects and music on the soundtrack. However, Chaplin still relied almost entirely on visual gags as an actor for that film. While the Jewish barber in The Great Dictator talks normally (though sparingly), Chaplin's impersonation of Hitler via the character of Hynkel was an extraordinary tour-de-force. Chaplin not only imitated Hitler's gestures, he concocted a kind of pseudo-Germanic gibberish, which Hynkel shouts during public speeches and his frequent tantrums. Jerry Epstein has reported that Hitler's favorite architect Albert Speer regarded it as the most accurate impersonation of Hitler's mannerisms. According to some sources, Hitler himself screened the film twice in private, though never shared his feelings about the film. At the same time, the film has several visual gags that remind one of Chaplin's genius for physical comedy. The most famous of these is Hynkel's graceful ballet with a balloon painted as a globe. Two of the set-pieces--the Jewish barber shaving a customer to the tune of a Hungarian dance by Brahms and the competition between Hynkel and Napaloni as to who can raise his barber chair the highest--are surely the inspiration behind Chuck Jones' Bugs Bunny short Rabbit of Seville (1950), demonstrating Chaplin's continued impact on other filmmakers.

Some sources credit the initial concept for the film with a 1937 conversation between Chaplin and film producer Alexander Korda. However, Konrad Bercovici, a writer and close friend of Chaplin, sued Chaplin for five million dollars in 1942, claiming to be the author of the original story. The case was eventually settled for approximately $90,000. Such lawsuits over creative works are hardly uncommon - the French production company Tobis had previously attempted unsuccessfully to sue Chaplin over the alleged resemblance between Modern Times and Rene Clair's A Nous La Liberte (1931), to give just one example. However, Bercovici's case appears to have some merit: for her 1997 biography of Chaplin, Joyce Milton uncovered Bercovici's original treatment and quoted it at length. She suggests that Chaplin's failure to give credit was due at least in part to a desire to distance himself from Bercovici, who had run afoul of the Communist Party (with which Chaplin associated) thanks to his comparisons of Stalin to Hitler.

Chaplin's attempt to satirize deadly serious subject matter was destined to be controversial. In 1938, once word spread about the project, German Consul George Gyssling wrote a letter of protest to Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration, regarding Chaplin's plans to "burlesque" Hitler. Once the film was released, critics expressed mixed feelings about the film's approach. On the one hand, the reviewer in Variety felt that the film would be a hit with audiences in spite of "the portions of the film which dwell too strongly on the persecution of Jews in Germany, the pathetic lot of the ghetto unfortunates, or the manner in which Chaplin burlesques the dictatorships." Film critic Otis Ferguson was more critical, describing the film's central difficulty with his usual eloquence: "When this is funny it is funny as always [...] but it is also tragic because a people is being persecuted; these Jews are straight characters, not the old cartoons; and the laughter chokes suddenly and is reluctant to start again. Chaplin likes to pull out all the stops on sentimental passages, but this thing is too near and meaningful. It isn't that a comedian should be denied indignation and kept clowning forever; it is that old thing in all art of the demands of unity, of a complete or sustained mood or tone. He was always a funny figure against the rude world, but the gulf between a kick in the pants and a pogrom is something even his talent for the humorous-pathetic will not cross. And his unrelieved six-minute exhortation to the downtrodden of the world, look up stand up, etc., is not only a bad case of overwriting but dramatically and even inspirationally futile."

In spite of such reservations, the film was Chaplin's greatest financial success to date and received five Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor (Chaplin), Best Supporting Actor (Jack Oakie), Best Original Screenplay (Chaplin) and Best Score (Meredith Willson). Chaplin, of course, would not be the only great comedian to take on such subject matter. Jerry Lewis directed and starred in the legendary unreleased drama The Day the Clown Cried (1972), about a washed up clown who entertains children in a concentration camp. More recently, Italian actor Roberto Benigni directed and starred in Life is Beautiful (1997), which earned him Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Foreign Film. While Life is Beautiful may arguably do a better job of maintaining the impossibly tricky balance of slapstick comedy, sentimental romance and historical tragedy, it can hardly match The Great Dictator's Olympian heights of inspired lunacy.

Sins of Commitment: Adorno, Chaplin and Mimesis by Jennie Lightweis-Goff from Senses of Cinema

DVD Journal Mark Bourne

Notes from the Underground Cinema » The Great Genius and The Great ... filmlover from Notes from the Underground Cinema

Michael D's Region 4 DVD Info Page

Jiminy Critic Reviews "The Great Dictator" Ben Delbanco

Turner Classic Movies the idea behind the film by Frank Miller

Turner Classic Movies behind the camera by Frank Miller

Turner Classic Movies quotes and trivia from the film

Turner Classic Movies critical reviews

CineScene.com (Les Phillips)

Bina007 Movie Reviews containing the final speech

The Great Dictator - The Globe Scene - Charlie Chaplin dances with ... the Globe sequence from The Great Dictator

MilkandCookies - Charlie Chaplin: The Dictator's Speech 5 minute dictator’s speech from The Great Dictator

Charlie Chaplin: The Great Dictator a Chaplin website geared toward the concluding speech from The Great Dictator

page on Chaplin David Pinnegar’s The Song Remains the Same essay on the final speech of The Great Dictator

Charlie Chaplin Text Great Dictator -- Final Speech -- Inspired by ... the text of Chaplin’s final speech from The Great Dictator

American Rhetoric: Movie Speech from The Great Dictator - Adenoid ... and you may watch Chaplin deliver that speech himself from The Great Dictator

CybDem: Charlie Chaplin's Technoprogressive Speech in The Great ... or here, providing a text of the speech as well

YouTube - Charlie Chaplin Chaplin’s final speech from The Great Dictator

Modern Times (1936) Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide

The New York Times (Bosley Crowtherwallace)

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

MONSIEUR VERDOUX A 97

USA (122 mi) 1947

A film based on an idea by Orson Welles, who may have helped Chaplin see this grisly tale as ripe with comic possibilities, a black comedy about a mild mannered bank clerk who loses his job after 30 years due to the crash of the stock market during the Depression and works to support his son and crippled wife by becoming a Parisian Bluebeard, a con artist who marries and murders wealthy and gullible ladies. An elegant film full of bitter wit, wild farce, and melancholy lyricism that was years ahead of its time, the film was met with violent hostility upon its release, contributing strongly to Chaplin’s political exile to England during the McCarthyist 50’s, though its wry humor and pacifist sentiments make it quite contemporary when seen today. Two other films that come to mind are Claude Chabrol’s 1963 film LANDRU, American title BLUEBEARD, based on the true-life exploits of the infamous Henri-Desire Landru who placed ads in newspapers attracting lonely women, eventually dispatching a bevy of international beauties, succumbing to the guillotine in 1922 for murdering 11 women – a film comedy – or the glorious 1968 film by Truffaut, THE BRIDE WORE BLACK, which features four very clever and delightful murders in a sex reversal role by Jeanne Moreau, also a very black comedy.

A Comedy of Murders, Chaplin wrote the story and plays the part of 5 gentlemen, Monsieur Bonheur, Didier, Floray, Varnay, and Verdoux. “I became occupied with liquidating members of the opposite sex. Only a person with undaunting optimism would embark on such an adventure. What follows is history.” Apparently the popular audience was not ready to see the Little Tramp take on the role of a bigamist and suave serial killer. However the film is wickedly witty, especially the scenes involving Martha Raye as the intended victim who comically evades her new husband’s lethal traps. The convicted Verdoux makes some extraordinary remarks following his sentence: “As for being a mass murderer, doesn’t the world do this for a living? I’m an amateur by comparison...War is a business which conflicts with mankind. If the business of war is the logical extension of diplomacy, then murder is the logical extension of the business of crime. It’s all business.” When a chaplain comes to visit him before his execution, Verdoux tells him, “I am at peace with God. My problem is with man.” Chaplin clearly loves the monster he has created, his hands bound, the little walk of the Tramp returns for a moment as Verdoux is led to his destiny.

David Robinson from 2001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Charles Chaplin bought the idea for his blackest comedy (for $5,000) from Orson Welles, who had originally planned a dramatized documentary about the legendary French serial wife killer Desiré Landru. Chaplin gave the story a new and acute sociosatirical edge, in response to the then-growing political paranoia of the Cold War years. Verdoux (Chaplin), the suave and charming little bourgeois, only adopts his lucrative profession of marrying and murdering rich widows when economic depression removes the possibility of his earning an honest living as a bank clerk. Finally brought to justice, his defense is that although private murder is condemned, public killing – in the form of war – is glorified: “One murder makes a villain – millions a hero. Numbers sanctify.” These were not popular sentiments in 1946 America, and Chaplin found himself more and more the target of the political right – a witch-hunt that led to his permanent departure from the United States in 1952.

Verdoux, accompanied by his jaunty little theme tune (Chaplin as usual was his own composer), is a rich and vivid character. The tight economies of the postwar period obliged Chaplin to work more quickly and with much more planning than on any previous films. The result is one of his most tightly constructed narratives, which he unselfconsciously considered “the cleverest and most brilliant film of my career.”

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Chaplin’s blackest comedy, the unquestionable masterpiece among his later works (Elliott Stein, Village Voice). Based on an idea by Orson Welles, this stunningly cynical Comedy of Murders was the most controversial film of Chaplin’s career, and horrified Chaplin’s unsuspecting public by transforming their beloved Charlie into . . . a serial killer! Chaplin is dapper Henri Verdoux, a Bluebeard-like figure in late-1930s France who woos, wins and murders rich widows, all in order to support his young family. Martha Raye, in her most important screen performance, gives a truly memorable turn as the lively, outrageously vulgar would-be victim who proves to be Verdoux’s nemesis. A fair bit of pacifist philosophizing underlies the bad-taste (and misogynist) proceedings; Chaplin claimed that he made the film to protest the A-bomb. Nasty, sinister, unsettling -- and perhaps years ahead of its time -- Monsieur Verdoux was a hit in Europe, but American audiences of the day stayed away in droves. It has since amassed an enormous critical reputation, and become something of a cult favourite. Richard Roud cites it as one of the great films. . . a masterpiece and a film unlike anything before or since; David Thomson calls it by far [Chaplin’s] most interesting film. It shapes up as Chaplin’s most startling, most invigorating movie; its icy temperature is positively bracing after the hot syrup of his earlier work (Geoff Brown, Time Out). USA 1947.

Having retired from writing, Kurt Vonnegut took up painting. His paintings may not have taken the art world by a storm, but they are striking. Great spirits seek great expression. The cinematic world did not leave Charlie Chaplin behind so much as never catch up to him, and wonder where he went. For about two hours Charlie gives the appearance of a talented actor/director/writer (with a little nudge from Orson Welles/producer/composer)...is that even a category that anyone else fits in?...presenting a simple, but original film. The audiences of the day surely must have been shocked to find themselves identifying, perhaps even secretly voting for, an adulterer. But that's not all! Such an arch-adulterer that he carries it on to the obvious conclusion....murder! Aieeeee!!! And worst of all...stealing money and using that ill-gotten gain to buy stock!!! The horror, the shame, I certainly hope no one ever gets away with that sort of thing because I'd kind of like some stocks myself... So it's ground breaking as black comedy, but carried primarily by the innate sense of dignity of the protagonist. As a Marxist, Chaplin cut quite a bourgeoisie gentleman, even when he occasionally lurks into high-speed silent mode. But hark, the horns of propaganda awaken us from that genuine contemplation (no, you must, must be a boring capitalist to be a gentleman, and you definitely can't listen to the Grateful Dead). Martha Raye has some moments as the bimbo who won the lottery (painting with thick brushes today, are we Mr. Chaplin?), but the only truly great moments of the first two hours occur with both Chaplin and William Frawley in the picture. Frawley would take this experience with him into network television-"I can't be intimidated by Lucille Ball, hell, I've held my own with Charlie Chaplin!" And he does. The two vaudevillians show every young whippersnapper ever to be born how it's done: they're absolutely hysterical just standing there shifting weight, and once they get to talking...fuhgeddabawtid! And so the morality play winds down, the guillotine is sharpened, and the yokels in the audience are to be assured that there's no better way to engage in the stock market than to allow themselves to be ripped off by brokers. Then, my friends, then in a metamorphosis equaled in history perhaps only by St. Paul and the Grinch, Chaplin reveals his true colours. He has not been a competent technician offering a yeoman-like performance. He's been setting us up, creating a facade of a construct just like the one we recognize as our culture. And it's a fraud, and he'll tell you why if you listen. Is Chaplin's palate of situational ethics so broad as to render the situation irrelevant? I don't believe that it is, no more so than Sartre or Camus, who have also been denounced for their inaccessibility to the lazy. The trick is getting out of the flawed and contrived paradigm that you're given, and creating a proper and meaningful paradigm that is your own (Kierkegaard's "truth" being "subjectivity"). Verdoux' paradigm is not entirely acceptable to me...but it's more palatable than Pilate, Hitler, Stalin, Kissinger, Reagan, Sharon, Thatcher or Bush. "I used my brain..."

Charles Chaplin: Monsieur Verdoux Derek Malcolm from the Guardian

Chaplin is often referred to as the most important artist produced by the cinema. He was once dubbed the funniest man alive, and the most popular and best-known human being in the world. Yet, some time before his death in 1977, it was fashionable to prefer Buster Keaton, both as a performer and director of his own work.

The usual reasons given were that Chaplin was regarded either as a chronic sentimentalist or, conversely, as an icon who damaged his popular reputation by having ideas beyond his station. There is one Chaplin film, however, which more than equalled any of Keaton's: Monsieur Verdoux, which was made in 1947, and perversely attacked at the time for being utterly unsentimental.

It was certainly provocative. Chaplin played Verdoux, a character inspired by Landru, the real-life seducer and murderer of rich women who operated during the first world war, when eligible men were scarce, and was executed soon afterwards.

The real man, though charming, was clearly evil. But Chaplin, moving him forward in time to the 30s, makes him a victim of the Great Depression - a redundant bank clerk attempting to find any means at his disposal to protect his crippled wife and family by bigamously courting and marrying rich women, securing their property and then returning home with the booty.

You could say that, in breaking the taboos of that (or any) society, Verdoux was actually illustrating its hypocrisy: at the time the film was made the millions of war casualties were being thought of as more a consequence of the fight for civilisation than as a painful illustration of the foolishness of power politics.

Perhaps the philosophy behind Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin's most pessimistic and gag-free film, was simplistic. But his sarcastic and ironic gravity was astonishing for the time.

Eventually, Verdoux, doubling up as Varney, Bonheur and Floray, is caught and loses everything, including his wife and son. But then he becomes the accuser - a murderer taught to kill by the society that spawned him. "Wars, conflict," he says in prison before his execution, "it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions a hero. Numbers sanctify."

The film, in which Chaplin used sound as effectively as he ever did by dint of a clever if talky screenplay, is not without humour: such as the famous sequence when Verdoux, intent on another murder, falls into the water and is saved by his victim (the gloriously obstreperous Martha Raye, who has already somehow avoided the poison he has made for her).

Verdoux is nothing like the Little Tramp whom the world loved. He is a dapper, elderly man sporting a little French moustache, at one point carefully cutting roses in the garden as an incinerator burns the remains of his latest victim. The only point at which the tramp comes to mind is when Verdoux walks calmly towards his execution.

Chaplin hoped his central character would somehow express the pessimistic times in which he lived: "he is frustrated, bitter and, at the end, pessimistic. But he is never morbid."

The European public agreed, especially in France where half a million people saw the film - a huge number in those days. But in America, with the McCarthy witchhunts beginning, Monsieur Verdoux was ludicrously considered 'communistic' and flopped badly.

Even now, it is not generally considered one of Chaplin's best films. But though not characteristic, it leaves an indelible memory. Few remember, incidentally, that its story was taken not only from history, but from an idea by Orson Welles - who might well have thought about playing Verdoux himself.

Monsieur Verdoux Josh Vasquez from Slant magazine

“These are desperate days,” confides mass-murdering dandy Henri Verdoux to a companion at one point in Charlie Chaplin's darkest, loneliest and possibly funniest film. Verdoux quietly demands to be taken at his word when making such a grand pronouncement; as a man who marries rich women just to kill them for their money (in an effort to support an invalid wife and young child), he knows of what he speaks. Stranded somewhere slightly above the tide line of Chaplin's other works, Monsieur Verdoux maintains a constant faith in an uncertainty and despair that is only deepened by its director's comic inventiveness. If many of Chaplin's films rely on evoking, in one way or another, a certain narrative bleakness and humorous savagery, in Verdoux one finds these tendencies developing into a blackly poetic philosophy.

Released in 1947 to a mostly miscomprehending public, it's easy to imagine that the film's less than optimistic opinion of human nature and its grim, persistent laughter in the face of the view that "it's a blundering world and a sad one," was alienating to audiences prepared to celebrate following the end of the second World War. Though set a decade earlier in the ruinous wake of the world-wide depression of the 1930s, Verdoux uses its memory of the recent war to cast a precognitive shadow over its pre-conflict narrative, glancing back at a continent weighed down by history. The film is not only an account of the moral slippage of one man but the record of a far larger, seemingly uncontrollable escalation, a greater moral confusion, with Chaplin sending his graceful assassin scurrying across the landscape of a Europe teetering on a knife's edge.

This is the haunting presence of the film, felt at every turn. "What follows is history," Verdoux tells the viewer during the opening sequence, and it is an opening steeped in death; the first shot is of a cemetery over which we hear him speaking to us cheekily from beyond the grave. He tells the viewer that it was after being fired following 35 years of loyal service as a bank official that he became "occupied liquidating members of the opposite sex." For him, murder is a business; his job is to do away with "dumb animals," bourgeois women whose money would be better spent providing for his own family. A scathing satire of capitalist drives and consumerist values, and an indictment of the indulgences of the upper class on par with Renoir's Rules of the Game, Monsieur Verdoux imagines a man who is at once a victim and an aggressor, the metaphoric cog in the system so aptly envisioned by Chaplin himself years earlier during the "slide into the machine" scene in Modern Times and the angel of death sent to prepare the way for the end of the world.

The brilliance of the repeated sight gag of Verdoux rapidly counting the money of his deceased wives is due to its being both an act of efficient, trained rationality and an expression of a certain giddy enthusiasm—this is Verdoux's version of post-coital bliss. The film is filled with fascinating conflations—Verdoux the aesthete who quotes poetry, "how beautiful this pale Endimion hour," as he stares up at the rising moon, preparing to kill the miserly old Lydia Florey, Verdoux the businessman who is in constant touch with his stock brokers as he fondles the money of dead women, Verdoux the loving husband and father who discusses the uses of poisons to painlessly kill mindless things while sharing tea with his wife and neighbors, and Verdoux the gardener, pruning his rose bushes while a chimney churns out black smoke in the distance, rendering the remains of his latest victim into ashes. Chaplin positions Verdoux to align with viewer's sympathies but insistently complicates such identification. While a charmingly poised and clever man, there is a certain glacial intellectuality to Verdoux that is distancing, if satirically poignant.

Through Verdoux, Chaplin can take swipes at the hypocrisies of a crumbling infrastructure of aristocracy, finance and, as Verdoux puts it, a "monoxide world of speed and confusion," but one is continually reminded that Verdoux himself relies on the chaos in the world, the disconnection between people. There is Chaplin's repeated use of a shot of frantically whirling train wheels, symbolic of the systems of modernity that Verdoux must manipulate to carry out his schemes—a parallel to the idyllic scene in the rose garden interrupted by the shot of the chimney pouring out evidence of his terrible industry—and there is the director's daringly immediate introduction of the kinds of familial relationships one can expect in such a world, as seen in the opening sequence featuring the squabbling family of one of Verdoux's victims. This scene is reminiscent of W. C. Fields' caustic view of family life as seen in the opening of The Bank Dick—so much so that one wonders if Chaplin took inspiration from Fields' film—and it is easy to find oneself identifying with the one figure who expresses a certain style and withering wit in a sea of boorish louts like such a collection of bitter, resentful halfwits as found in the family or Martha Ray's loud-mouthed, uncouth and un-killable Annabella Bonheur.

Yet however much Chaplin may highlight Verdoux's perspective as the viewer's own, when Verdoux walks toward the gallows at the end, the director does not allow the viewer to travel with the doomed man, freezing the camera in place and leaving the viewer to watch discreetly at a distance (and from behind) as Verdoux is led out into the yard of execution. When he dies, Verdoux is alone, though one may well suspect that he prefers it that way, having rejected what to him are the dubious comforts of both the promise of lasting fame by way of a reporter or the promise of salvation by a priest.

While the descriptive phrase "ahead of its time" is all too often dragged out and tacked on to one marginalized film work after another, in the case of Monsieur Verdoux it is perhaps quite appropriate, given not only the film's lackluster reception in its day, but its surprising formal subtleties. The film's quite hilarious sense of humor, one part slapstick, one part steely wit, works in fluid conjunction with Chaplin's bleaker ruminations, and both are still quite contemporary and relevant even while being bound within very specific contexts. Monsieur Verdoux still matters, and it's still an urgent work of necessary art, and perhaps that is what is most important when calling something an essential film.

DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky

Turner Classic Movies Jeremy Arnold

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards)

Monsieur Verdoux (1947) Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

LIMELIGHT A 100

Great Britain USA (141 mi) 1952

An underrated poetic masterpiece, filled with wonderfully mature, dramatic revelations about what it is to perform for others, to, in effect, feel for others, to take responsibility as an artist to provide the world with inspiration and love, to think about what it is to inspire. This film captures the essence of what it is to create, to constantly create, which is, in effect, a selfless transcendence of the human spirit through art. But this is a profound piece about theater and aging, rivaling masterful films of John Cassavetes like OPENING NIGHT or CHINESE BOOKIE, revealing what happens to the damaged, deflated soul of an artist when he feels he is too old or just isn’t funny any more, and becomes, in effect, not a portrait of an artist as a young man, but a portrait of the aftermath of an aging artist. The spirit of love in this film is overwhelming.

Filmed in England, where Chaplin was born and got his start performing in music halls just like these, Chaplin’s star with the public never shone the same after he came out against the war, being an ardent pacifist, and he always refused to become an American citizen. All the more reason to reevaluate this autobiographical fantasy, perhaps Chaplin’s most personal statement. The scenes near the end where he works in bars for handouts and is at complete peace with himself, no longer a falling star but a working performer, are simply astonishing and can leave one breathless. This is a king who is at peace being a pauper.

This is also the only film that captures Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin working together, music hall veterans doing a piano and violin duet in complete silence, an incredible, unforgettable moment, one of the greatest two-man comedy acts ever filmed. Once more, Chaplin ends his film with a truly inspiring shot that speaks of the human spirit, of the transcendence of art, in a moving, eloquent image of a soul in flight. This should serve as an instruction manual for any dramatic artist, performed like a circus performer, with the elegance and poetic grace of the most charming man on earth, Calvero, Shakespeare’s Fool, an aging clown, the likes of which we’ll never see again.

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Limelight was Chaplin’s final American film, and is the only movie in which he shares the screen with that other great comic genius of the silent era, Buster Keaton. It is also his most autobiographical film: a vivid re-creation of the abject poverty, ratty pubs and second-rate music halls of his London youth, and a disquieting, sentimental self-portrait of a great physical comedian confronting old age and the decline of his gifts. Chaplin -- who also wrote, directed, produced, composed the musical score, and choreographed and staged the ballet sequence -- stars as Calvero, an aging, alcoholic, once-great music-hall comic who rescues a depressed young dancer (Claire Bloom, in her breakthrough role) from the brink of suicide, and gives her the support and confidence necessary to achieve success. Keaton appears briefly (and memorably) as Calveros partner in a comedy skit. Limelight was released at the height of McCarthyism, when Chaplin was a favourite target of rabid Red-baiters; his U.S. re-entry permit was revoked (on moral grounds) while he was en route to the films London premiere, and he would remain exiled from America for two decades. The film won an Oscar for Best Original Score -- in 1972, the year of its belated Los Angeles opening. [A] tragedy of Shakespearean grandeur, full of profound wisdom and human warmth (Georges Sadoul). Over-long, shapeless, overblown, and...a masterpiece. Few cinema artists have delved into their own lives and emotions with such ruthlessness and with such moving results (Geoff Brown, Time Out). USA 1952.

A story of a ballerina and a clown set in London in the summer of 1914, Limelight begins with washed-up pantomime performer Calvero (Chaplin) saving young Thereza (Bloom) from committing suicide. By the time the credits roll, Chaplin's taken us on a self-flagellating trawl through the highs and lows of success, failure, old age and celebrity.

Melancholic to the point of being embarrassingly self-pitying, Limelight is a profoundly moving film, an aging artist's philosophical mediation on life that's full of grandstanding declarations of intent: "What is there to fight for? Everything! Life itself. Isn't that enough. To have lived, suffered and enjoyed!" As drunken has-been Calvero claws his way back to the stage for one final moment of glory, with the help of the devoted Thereza, Limelight takes us deep into Chaplin's own fears and dreams, from the vaudeville world of his childhood to his awareness of the transitory nature of public adoration. How ironic, then, that it should be the last film he'd make in America, before the anti-communist lobby forced him into permanent exile.

Tackling the sad business of being funny with an unflinching - yet often overly sentimental - gaze, Chaplin delivers a true auteur's film, a work of great personal resonance that stands as the summation of his tragicomic view of life. In many ways, it's the inverse of Chaplin's acclaimed comedies, yet it's also a fitting conclusion to their vision of a world in which the good (like the perpetually downtrodden Tramp) are oppressed by great forces that are out of their control. Here it's celebrity and fortune that are the crushing oppressors, making Limelight a work of immense sorrow.

Moving, sentimental and deeply sad, this is the greatest moment in Chaplin's late career, a powerful work of cinema that remains essential viewing for Chaplin fans and non-believers alike.

Limelight (1952) Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide

London, 1914. Calvero (Charles Chaplin), a once-great music hall comedian, weaves drunkenly home to his shabby flat. As he arrives home, he is suddenly sobered by a bad smell. It isn't his shoes, as he originally assumes, but the smell of gas, emanating from behind a locked door. Calvero smashes his way in, finding the unconscious Terry (Claire Bloom). Carrying the girl to his attic apartment, Calvero revives Terry, then asks why she is so determined to kill herself. The girl explains that she has always dreamed of becoming a great dancer, but her legs are paralyzed. Calvero vows to raise enough money to help the girl. He goes back on stage, where his old-fashioned act is greeted with a riot of silence. Now it is Terry's turn to encourage Calvero to go on living-and in so doing, she regains the use of her legs. Hired by the Empire theatre corps de ballet, Terry arranges for the management to hire Calvero as a supernumerary. Impresario Postant (Nigel Bruce), not recognizing the famous Calvero in clown makeup, fires him. Only after Terry pleads with Postant to give Calvero another chance does the producer relent, securing a comeback appearance for the ageing comedian and his old partner (Buster Keaton). Calvero's antics bring down the house, just like the old days, but the effort is too much for the old fellow, and he collapses backstage. As Calvero dies, he proudly watches his protegee Terry carry on the "show must go on tradition" by dancing for the crowd. Thanks to the political climate of the time, Limelight was denied a wide distribution; in fact, it didn't play Los Angeles until 1972, twenty years after its completion. At that time, Chaplin's theme music, which had gained popularity on the "hit parade," was honored with an Academy Award. While the film has moments of unmatched hilarity (especially during the fabled Chaplin-Keaton teaming towards the end), the elegiac tone of Limelight was best summed up by critic Andrew Sarris: "To imagine one's own death, one must imagine the death of the world, that world which has always dangled so helplessly from the tips of Chaplin's eloquent fingers."

Out of his knowledge of the theatre and his sense of the wistfulness of man in the ever-repeating cycle of youth taking over from age, Charlie Chaplin has drawn the inspiration and the poignantly sentimental theme of his most recent motion picture, which opened here yesterday. It is, of course, his "Limelight," into which the famed artist has poured a tremendous amount of mellow feeling and cinema artistry. Neither comedy nor tragedy altogether, it is a brilliant weaving of comic and tragic strands, eloquent, tearful and beguiling with supreme virtuosity.

What Mr. Chaplin is telling in this film, which is being presented at the Astor and the Trans-Lux Sixtieth Street, is simply a tale of a great comedian of the English music halls who has gone to seed, yet who passes on to a young ballet dancer his vast abundance of courage and hope. That is what he is telling as the author, producer and director of the film—and also as the composer of the music, of one ballet and the comedy routines. But as its principal performer, he is not only playing the role; he is feeling it in its essence and projecting it from the screen.

Herein lies the brilliance of "Limelight"—in the artistry of Mr. Chaplin in the use of his sensitive face and his supple, mobile person as a positive instrument for the capture of thoughts and moods. From the moment his eyes, confused by liquor, are first studied as they strangely gaze upon the young heroine who has been so foolish as to try to take her life, those eyes and that face of Mr. Chaplin become the core and the focus of the film. The drama takes place around them, like the concentric ripples in a pool.

For, with all the dramatic variety and pictorial beauty achieved by Mr. Chaplin in this picture—all the poignancy of the intimate scenes, the hilarity of the comic outbursts and the vitality and grace of the ballets—the essential expression of all the pathos of loneliness and age is in those eyes. It is in the beautiful close-ups of the old clown as he takes his make-up off in the dressing-room of a provincial theatre where he has just been a pitiful flop or, as he sits in the gloom observing the first fine triumph of his protégée that all the dignity, anguish and surrender of an old trouper came through.

Turner Classic Movies Bret Wood

In his last American film before returning to his British homeland, Chaplin stars as Calvero, an aging, out-of-work music hall clown in 1914 London. Wandering drunkenly into his boarding house one day, he discovers that a young neighbor, Thereza (Claire Bloom) has opened the gas jets of her stove in an attempt to kill herself. Calvero rescues the girl and nurses her back to health, trying to instill in her a greater will to live. But just as Terry, an aspiring ballerina who has lost the use of her legs, is regaining her own confidence, Calvero faces professional setbacks of his own and slips into alcoholic self-pity. In spite of their hardships, the two lost souls come to rely upon each other, form a romantic bond, and are ultimately afforded a last opportunity to grasp the theatrical dreams that have so long eluded them.

Five years elapsed between Limelight (1952) and Chaplin's previous film, Monsieur Verdoux (1947). Always a meticulous director who involved himself in every facet of production, Chaplin reportedly spent two and a half years working on the script of Limelight. He even wrote a two-part "novel" which detailed the back-story of the two central characters. Variety quipped upon the film's release, "Limelight is a one-man show since Chaplin does almost everything but grow his own rawstock." As the script neared completion, Chaplin conducted a talent search for the role of Thereza, placing a classified ad in a trade publication which read, "WANTED: Young girl to play leading lady to a comedian generally recognized as world's greatest. Must be between 20-24 years of age. Stage, ballet experience preferable but not necessary. Apply Charles Chaplin Studios, Hollywood." This may have merely been a means of stirring publicity for the film, for the "discovery" of the leading lady was ultimately made by playwright Arthur Laurents, who recommended Bloom to the filmmaker after seeing her on the London stage in Ring Around the Moon in 1951. Chaplin asked Bloom to make a screen test, so during a week's hiatus in the play's run, she raced to New York for a filmed audition. It was four months before Chaplin notified her that she had been selected for the role.

Bloom and her mother often dined with Chaplin after the day's shooting and recalled that, "he spoke endlessly of his early poverty; the atmosphere he was creating for Limelight brought him back night after night to the melancholy of those years at home with his mother and brother." For Chaplin, Limelight was a sentimental revisitation of his early years as a struggling entertainer in the music halls of London. When asked about these aspects of the story, Chaplin told writer Richard Lauterbach, "Everything is autobiographical," then cautiously added, "but don't make too much of that."

Limelight is a melancholy valentine to all the great clowns of history, with homage to opera's tearful Pagliacci; the traditional pantomime of Harlequin, Pierrot and Columbine; and the bouncy risqu¿ritish stage comedians of Chaplin's youth. A poster on Calvero's wall, advertising the "Tramp Comedian," is a clear reference to Chaplin's own legendary persona. But Calvero's tramp is a different creation, wearing a straw boater and upturned moustache and, unlike the silent-screen "Little Tramp," this one speaks and sings. Chaplin paid tribute to his fellow veterans of the slapstick cinema by populating Limelight with faces familiar to comedy cinephiles. Buster Keaton appears onstage with Calvero in the film's comic climax, while smaller roles are filled by slapstick comedians Snub Pollard and Loyal Underwood (a supporting player in Chaplin's Mutual and First National comedy shorts), who play street musicians. Chaplin's former leading lady -- Edna Purviance -- is said to appear briefly as an audience member in the ballet sequence.

In addition to his professional family, Chaplin welcomed his own relatives to Limelight. Three of his children -- Geraldine, Michael and Josephine -- are the waifs who watch with amusement as Calvero drunkenly attempts to enter his domicile (a scene that recalls Chaplin's 1916 short One A.M.). Chaplin's eldest son Sydney portrays Neville, the starving musician who is the object of Thereza's affection, and Charles Jr. performs the role of a clown in the "Death of Columbine" ballet number. Half brother Wheeler Dryden appears as the kindly doctor who treats Thereza after her suicide attempt.

But Limelight was primarily a one-man show with Chaplin writing, producing and directing the film. He composed the lyrical score, co-wrote the comedy songs and even choreographed the dance numbers. The "Death of Columbine" ballet number was originally conceived by Chaplin in 1950 for Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin. When filmed for Limelight the roles were performed by Andre Eglevsky and Melissa Hayden (who doubled for Bloom in all Thereza's dance scenes).

Musically gifted but lacking in formal education, Chaplin hired an assistant, Ray Rasch, to help him record his songs on paper. Rasch spent five to seven hours a day for nine months (at a rate of $5 per hour) sitting at the piano trying to capture the streams of memorized and improvised tunes that Chaplin hummed while pacing the room or reclining on a sofa. "I was sure that I had met up with a madman," Rasch said, "I couldn't believe that this was genius at work. He would bellow for hours at a time and all that I could hear was a senseless jumble. But suddenly he would strike a note or sometimes a whole phrase and would scream at me to play it and jot down the notes." Even though Rasch had no experience as an arranger, Chaplin insisted that he orchestrate the score. "When a melody satisfied him, he would go over it and over it. He didn't seem to care that I was just playing on a piano. He would ask for French horns in one spot; then violins and cellos and woodwinds. I just kept pounding away until he was satisfied."

Chaplin's eccentric working methods proved fruitful, as the film won an Academy Award for Best Musical Score. In one of the more unusual twists of Oscar history, Limelight won its award twenty years after the film was completed because it had not received a Los Angeles theatrical run until 1972, and was only then eligible for recognition.

The film had been scheduled to open in Los Angeles in January 1953, but the Fox West Coast Theatres chain canceled the engagements due to political pressure from the American Legion, who announced plans to picket the film. Because of Chaplin's involvement in liberal politics in the 1930s and his refusal to file for American citizenship during his years in the States, he was targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. When Chaplin traveled to England to attend the premiere of Limelight, he was refused re-entry into the U.S., due to vague accusations of "making statements that would indicate a leering, sneering attitude toward a country whose hospitality has enriched him." In an open letter to Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, Chaplin wrote, "While you are preparing your engraved subpoena I will give you a hint on where I stand. I am not a Communist. I am a peacemonger."

Prose and Cons a reprinting of Pauline Kael’s initial reaction to LIMELIGHT from Artforum March 1, 2002

Pauline Kael, the New Yorker's film critic from 1968 until 1991 (save for a brief hiatus in 1978, when she took a short-lived job at a Hollywood studio), died on September 3, 2001. With all of the predictable eulogizing behind us, we asked five critics-Gary Indiana, Annette Michelson, Geoffrey O'Brien, Paul Schrader, and Craig Seligman-to step back and take the long view on Kael's celebrated if contentious career. Contributing editor Greil Marcus leads off by introducing Kael's first published essay-inexplicably excluded from her eleven collections of reviews-which we reprint here in its entirety.

The story goes that Pauline Kael's first review was called "Slimelight": That was what the late poet Robert Duncan, with whom Kael had gone to see Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, called the picture when they walked out of the theater. The word is used nowhere in or on Kael's piece, which-appearing in 1953 in City Lights, a journal that, like the San Francisco bookstore that published it, was named for another Chaplin movie-is still harsh enough to bring the reader up short.

At the end of City Lights (1931), Chaplin's tramp leaves prison so filthy and destroyed you don't want to look at him. He walks the streets, picking butts out of the gutter, and then, as James Agee wrote in 1949, 'the blind girl who has regained her sight, thanks to the Tramp, sees him for the first time. . . . She recognizes who he must be by his shy, confident, shining joy as he comes silently toward her. And he recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in her face. The camera just exchanges a few quiet closeups of the emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies."

That Chaplin was nowhere in sight in 1953; Kael tracked him to his hiding place in his own movie, in his own ego. Re-creating the context in which the movie was made and in which a certain movie lover paid her money and sat down to wait for the picture to begin-with the sense of time and place, here, not there, now, not then, that over the next decades would draw so many readers into real or imaginary conversations with her-she began in the audience, listening to the talk of the people around her, imagining herself talking to them. She began not with special knowledge, but with a sense of herself as any movie's ideal watcher: no better or worse than anyone else, as she sat in her seat, but maybe better out of it, because while everyone else got up and went about their lives, Kael stayed in the audience, even when she went home. The premise wasn't that her ideas about a movie would be deeper than those of other people, but that other people were busy-so she would draw on their reactions as well as her own and, as she wrote, put people back in the theater.

She looked at Calvero, the aging comedic saint Chaplin was playing in Limelight, and as the conceit of the character turned into its own bad joke, she came to life as a critic. The cruel wit, the natural reach from one medium to another, the sense of betrayal-the freeswinging, freewheeling yawp of the artistic citizen-it was all there from the start: "Calvero's gala benefit in which he shows the unbelievers who think him finished that he is still the greatest performer of them all, his death in the wings as the applause fades-this is surely the richest hunk of gratification since Huck and Tom attended their own funeral."

What nails it? What is it that signals the arrival of a new voice, impatient, in love with her subject and as keen to its betrayals as its promises, speaking American? "Hunk."

* * * * * *

RELATED ARTICLE: SOME NOTES ON CHAPLIN'S LIMELIGHT

PAULINE KAEL

A REMARK OVERHEARD: I don't care if he is a genius. I don't like that man."

If the audiences which attend Limelight in San Francisco are an adequate sampling of Chaplin's American public, he now attracts a somewhat segmented art-film audience. This is not the same audience he used to play to--but the reasons are considerably more complex than the "complicated" ones Calvero indicates to explain why the headless monster turned against him.

The majority audience (if some cleavage is necessary, let us say roughly the people who voted for Eisenhower) resents him partly for political reasons, partly for moral ones, and, more basically, because he appears in the guise of genius. When the mass audience became convinced that the clown who had made them laugh was really an artist, they felt betrayed. This is the same audience which turned Garbo into an object of ridicule when her beauty and distinction raised her to an eminence they could not tolerate. Then she, too, became the adored beauty of the minority.

The minority audience was always fascinated by the stills which revealed the beauty of Chaplin--the depth and expressiveness beneath the tramp makeup; the majority was perfectly satisfied with the mask of comedy. In a chance glimpse we thought we perceived a tragic countenance under the mask. Now Chaplin has given us too long a look--the face has been held in camera range for prolonged admiration--and the egotism of his self-revelation has infected the tragic beauty. The illusion, the mystery are gone--and with them possibly a good section of the minority audience as well. It is difficult not to be interested in what Chaplin will do next, but the bated breath has acquired a faint wheeze.

ODDLY ENOUGH, for all the mind and sophistication attributed to Chaplin, the hero of Limelight is surprisingly like the conceptions of the artist held by the vast American film audience (although this audience suspects, and quite rightly, that there are other elements...). Limelight is just as sentimental and high-minded about life and theatre as show people might wish. Possibly theatre people will see it as true and beautiful, just as so many Jews saw The Great Dictator as an awesome achievement. (Just as an analyst friend thought Mourning Becomes Electra the greatest film ever made.)

It is dubious, however, that Chaplin can regain the mass audience with this film: the suspicion that he is not a regular fellow is fairly widespread, and the simplicity of the film is pompous enough to mislead neighborhood audiences into thinking it is that abhorrence--art.

Chaplin's range as an actor is quite probably as wide as he thinks it is, but his range as a creative intelligence is certainly considerably less. He is almost the only man who is in the position to use the film medium for personal statement. (It is questionable if other creative film-makers would wish to do so; his aim may be as unique as his opportunity). His ideas and personality have pervaded his last three films. Verdoux remains fascinating, impudent enough to make one toss overboard some minor reservations. Mercifully in Verdoux the ideas are not nearly so explicit as in The Great Dictator and Limelight where the failures of taste and creative insight are alternately embarrassing and infuriating.

As Robert Duncan remarked, "It would have taken W.C. Fields spitting into Calvero's passed hat to restore the comic genius."

The Chaplin of Limelight is no irreverent little clown; his reverence for his own ideas would be astonishing even if the ideas were worth consideration. They are not-and the context of the film exposes them at every turn. The exhortations in the directions of life, courage, consciousness, and "truth" are set in a story line of the most self-pitying and self-glorifying daydream variety. Calvero's gala benefit in which he shows the unbelievers who think him finished that he is still the greatest performer of them all, his death in the wings as the applause fades--this is surely the richest hunk of gratification since Huck and Tom attended their own funeral. It was humor in Twain's day; Chaplin serves it at face value a hundred years later.

Calvero is not a little tramp who happily wins his waif or pitiably loses her. Calvero renounces his waif and renunciation carries a certain amount of prestige. Of course it was all "Platonic" anyway. Terry does however carry conviction when she says she loves him--we suspect she wouldn't love him if it weren't Platonic. For this Terry is the embodiment, the incarnation almost, of the recurrent Chaplin heroine--even to the name, Claire Bloom. Surely she has produced herself out of the same wonder and daydream from which Chaplin has drawn his images of the lovely waif. She is a very serious young actress and she moves with authority--she knows she is the real thing.

In early Chaplin films two babes-in-the-wood met. Calvero, though just as pure and innocent in heart, represents the same wisdom and experience of age--and hence renounces Terry. Somehow, whether intentionally or not, we are not made to feel that any great sacrifice is involved. It's as though genius has removed the necessity for human relations. Chaplin has composed a curious idyll of the sexes, replete with a second pure-in-heart young lover for Terry in the person of his son. The Svengali-Trilby theme is presented not for horror, not for satire, not even for laughs, but just straight; Calvero is ennobled by imparting strength to Trilby and still has it both ways, emerging himself triumphant as an artist.

Chaplin was a great comedian, but the demonstrations of Calvero's stage routines are, despite amusing and hilarious moments, rather mediocre. This is difficult to account for. Robert Hatch, in an otherwise excellent review in The Reporter, suggests that the acts "are deliberately not very good because comedians like Calvero were not very talented and their material was shabby even in 1914." This is ingenious but it doesn't fit the idea content of the film, nor can it account for the worse than mediocre ballet, performed presumably during the great days of [the] Diaghilev period. The mediocrity is scarcely intentional; on the contrary, it seems the not uncommon result of aiming at greatness.

Calvero is meant to be great all right. When he awaits Terry in the darkened theatre after her dance and says, "My dear, you are a true artist, a true artist," this is intended as "the shock of recognition." The camera emphasis on Chaplin's eyes, the emotion in his voice are intended to give depth to his words. This ghastly mistake in judgment and taste--this false humility which proclaims his own artistry in the act of asserting another's--this is not a simple mistake. It is integral to the creative mind which produces a Limelight.

Chaplin apparently is not content with the ideas which can be realized in comedy performance; nor is he content with the subtle riddles posed in Verdoux. He wants a wider range; he wants to state his ideas about life. The Sunday thinker is likely to think he knows some truths" that people should be told and more than likely he'll make an ass of himself in the telling. It is several thousand years since Socrates investigated the minds of artists and concluded that "upon the strength of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest men in other things in which they were not wise."

The sunday composer who is in the position to have his music written down for him, orchestrated, and even performed, is a rare bird indeed. The layman's desire to appear as a great composer is no less grandiose than Chaplin's score. Significantly, his derivations are not from the moderns, but from the popular masters of the 19th century, the patron geniuses of Hollywood music. If we compare his music to a typical Hollywood score, it sounds indistinguishable from others. But this is not the comparison he invites--and if we take him on his own terms and compare his score to an interesting film score, to Auric, Honneger, Prokofiev, or Walton, for example, Chaplin disappears from discussion.

One wonders what Chaplin makes of the developments in his own medium in the last half-century. Though a contemporary of Griffith, he is also a contemporary of Dreyer, of Cocteau, of Came and Renoir, of Bunuel and De Sica, of Carol Reed, Huston, Mankiewicz. The full measure of the dismal failure of Limelight comes when we place it against its contemporaries. We have been told that Chaplin is a man of wide culture, but Limelight might be the work of the fabled young man who was afraid to read a book for fear it would spoil his originality.

Portrait of an Artist as an Old man Peter von Bagh reviewing the book about the making of LIMELIGHT, Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man, from Senses of Cinema

Michael D's Region 4 DVD Info Page

A KING IN NEW YORK A 95

Great Britain (104 mi) 1957

Savagely funny satire of everything American, from sex to advertising to politics to the idle middle class, perhaps they’re all the same, filmed in England 5 years after his exile from the USA during the Red scare McCarthy years, the country that cowardly waited until Chaplin left the country on his own and then blatantly refused to re-admit him back upon his return, so this is the director’s first work “outside” the US. While the film flopped in America, critics claiming it reflected Chaplin’s own personal bitterness towards America, however that appears to be utter nonsense. This is simply a hilarious film, a biting political satire that’s not afraid to poke fun at the House Un-American Activities Committee, or let a child of a Communist parent speak his mind, a voice of the voiceless, something that was not allowed in America at the time. The film is Chaplin’s last starring role.

A comedy – “One of the minor annoyances of modern life is a revolution.” Chaplin plays King Sheruff, an overthrown European monarch who arrives penniless in New York, so he’s persuaded to appear in television commercials where he discovers his celebrity status is rewarded to an absurd degree, while his vision of putting an end to nuclear weapons and creating a utopian country is rejected out of hand. A child he meets is persecuted because of the political ideas of his parents, a witty satire that mocks the political paranoia of the 50’s in America.

Film Listings Archive: Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Chaplin’s response to his bitter exile from the U.S. was this made-in-Britain lampoon of the political paranoia and pop culture foibles of 1950s America. A King in New York stars Chaplin as King Shahdov of Estrovia, who arrives in the New World seeking exile after he is deposed in his homeland. A savvy T.V. personality (Dawn Addams) turns the amiable ex-monarch into an overnight celebrity, but a friendship with a very political 10-year-boy (played by Chaplin’s son Michael) leads to Shahdov being denounced as a Communist -- and hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. A King in New York has Chaplin poking fun at widescreen movies, rock-and-roll music, advertising, television, plastic surgery, and much else besides. The political enmity towards him was such that the film was not released in the U.S. until the 1970s; it remains one of Chaplin’s least-admired works. Critics today are divided over whether its satire of everything American is scathing or good-natured, understandably bitter or surprisingly gentle. Pauline Kael goes so far as to dismiss it as Maybe the saddest and worst movie ever made by a celebrated film artist; a more charitable and representative view has it as very odd indeed. . . One watches the proceedings with constant interest and constant embarrassment (Geoff Brown, Time Out). Only Chaplins final film, 1966s A Countess From Hong Kong (in which he did not star, and which is not included in our Chaplin series) received worse reviews. A King in New York is nonetheless a fascinating artifact from an amazing career. Great Britain 1957.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Ben Sachs

Chaplin’s post-Tramp features all build upon the theme of MODERN TIMES, bemoaning the loss of longstanding human values in the midst of unrestrained technological progress. In A KING IN NEW YORK, the threats to humanism are pandemic: they appear in the form of soulless advertising and factory-assembled pop culture and in the institutionalized cruelty of McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunts. Chaplin attacks these subjects as bluntly as he did Nazism in THE GREAT DICTATOR, his vitriol emerging as much from his leftist politics as from his experience of being all but expelled from the United States by the FBI, who had been keeping a file on him for years. (Chaplin remained a persona non grata in the U.S. for some time after his self-imposed exile; case in point, KING wasn’t released here theatrically until 1972.) Yet time has proven this a remarkably wise picture, defined by a generosity towards nearly all of its characters—even the various American hucksters met by Chaplin's deposed King Shahdov, who visits New York City after a revolution forces him to flee his home country. The film hinges on the King's friendship with a very funny Marxist caricature (played by Chaplin's 11-year-old son, Michael, whose beautiful, precise gestures were devised, down to the last detail, by his father), whose parents end up victims of the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Chaplin presents the relationship with surprisingly little sentimentality, which might be why the film's ending—a tragic reversal of the reunion that closes CITY LIGHTS—is among the most devastating moments in Chaplin’s career.

Michael D's Region 4 DVD Info Page

Making good on their promise last summer, Warner Home Video has now re-released the rest of the Chaplins on DVD. Six more discs make their debut, available separately or in a box set. Each title comes in a two-disc set, complete with tons of extras including outtakes, featurettes, stills, poster galleries, various language choices, and more.

Unfortunately, Warners has been unable to fix the slight flutter in the image; not every frame is totally clear. The movement tends to blur between frames.

Most likely, A Woman of Paris (1923) and A King in New York (1956) are the worst selling titles in the Chaplin library, and so they're been paired together here -- two for the price of one -- as they were on the old out-of-print Image discs. Fortunately, they're both terribly underrated and both contain moments of greatness. Chaplin does not appear in A Woman of Paris. It was a drama and his first film for the newly formed United Artists, and henceforth it was a flop. But it's a truly heartfelt story that never once strikes a false note. (See my full review.)

A King in New York was made after Chaplin was refused re-entry into the United States, and he clearly intended it as a biting satire. Chaplin plays King Shahdov, a monarch who barely escapes his country with the treasury. But his second-in-command makes off with the dough, and he's stuck in New York, broke. Chaplin stays the course well and true without ever tipping into either comedy or sentiment. The film's best gag has Shahdov getting his finger stuck in a firehose just before appearing in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He sprays them all down. It's freeing more than it is funny. And when the King discovers a genius child wandering the streets homeless, Chaplin avoids preaching or weeping. Because the film was mistakenly seen as anti-American, it was not released here until the 1970s, and it has never enjoyed the reputation it deserved. Even Chaplin's hated flop Monsieur Verdoux has eventually risen in the critical consciousness. And, like The Great Dictator, A King in New York proved prophetic, not only in the McCarthy witch-hunts, but also in the relentless advertising and television obsession we have today. Jim Jarmusch provides a few insightful comments on the disc's documentary.

Other titles in the collection include Monsieur Verdoux -- arguably Chaplin's greatest work -- the undisputed classic City Lights, the silent comedy The Circus (1928) and the groundbreaking hit The Kid (1921). The set concludes with The Chaplin Revue, featuring six of Chaplin's most expensive and elaborate short films: A Dog's Life, Shoulder Arms, Sunnyside, A Day's Pleasure, The Idle Class, Pay Day and The Pilgrim. Fans who buy the entire box set will also be treated to Richard Schickel's documentary Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

During the years of its exile, strange rumors grew up about Charlie Chaplin's "A King in New York." It was released in England in 1957, got lukewarm reviews, and was never screened or released in this country. But somehow the word got around that it was a bitter, cynical, anti-American film, made by a man who had turned against the country that nurtured him.

All of this turns out to be a lot of baloney. "A King in New York" doesn't rank with Chaplin's greatest work, but it is good stuff and there are three or four scenes of marvelous comic invention. And it's a hopeful film, more bittersweet than bitter. Only the hysterical frenzies of the Joe McCarthy era could have made it seem otherwise.

It's hard to understand today how controversial Chaplin had become in the early 1950s; old newspaper photos show American Legionnaires picketing theaters where his movies were playing. He sailed for his native England in 1952, and his ship was barely out of the harbor when the U.S. government announced he would be denied a re-entry permit. There was a problem about a paternity suit and certain questions about his personal morals - but mostly the attorney general resented his opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

It was probably inevitable, then, that any Chaplin film about communism, HUAC and American society would find opposition here. What is surprising is that Chaplin retained so much optimism about the prospect for America. It's in this area, in fact, that "A King in New York" goes overboard. Chaplin puts so many pro-Bill of Rights speeches into the mouth of his son, Michael, that after a point we're tempted to stand up and face the flag.

The movie begins with an observation, "Revolutions are one of the inconveniences of modern life," and then recounts the adventures of King Shahdov (Chaplin), who escapes from a revolution and takes refuge in New York. Shahdov is a kindly man with some ideas about how to harness the atom for peace. But he is bewildered by the craziness of American society, and it's here that the movie works best.

Almost the first thing the king does in New York is go to the movies, and Chaplin pokes fun at Hollywood with some funny "coming attractions" on screens so wide the heroes almost have to lie down. He also has fun satirizing an early rock concert (teenagers rock and roll in the aisles while the musicians collapse on their knees Bill Haley-style). And there's a hilarious episode in which the king is tricked into appearing on television: He's invited to a dinner party being televised by a hidden camera, and can't understand why his table partner keeps interrupting with commercials. This episode probably owes something to Ed Murrow's Person to Person.

The king supports himself by endorsing products in TV ads, and tries to win support for his atomic plans. So far, so good. But then he visits a school and meets a young boy (Michael Chaplin) whose parents were communists and have been asked by HUAC to rat on their friends. The lad is simply filled up to here with stirring patriotic speeches about human freedom and dignity, and Chaplin lets him talk much too long. In a few of these scenes, as in the overlong oration at the end of "The Great Dictator," the Chaplin who communicated so well without words depends on them too much.

There's some satire of a congressional investigation into communism, but Chaplin doesn't hit too hard and finally plays it for laughs (he gets his finger stuck in a firehose nozzle and inadvertently drenches the committee.) The film ends with the king comforting the young boy: "This madness won't go on forever. There's no reason for despair."

The engagement of "A King in New York" at the Carnegie marks the film's American premiere, and only its third public showing in this country. For the record, the audience enjoyed it immensely. Chaplin's political satire no longer seems as daring as it must have been in the 1950s, but his social commentary is, if anything, more timely now. It's a relief, somehow, to learn at last that Chaplin didn't bow out in bitterness, and that the last film he starred in was as gentle, optimistic and funny as the first.

Turner Classic Movies Bret Wood

The penultimate film by Charles Chaplin, A King in New York (1957) was the 68-year-old filmmaker's reaction to the inhospitable treatment he faced in the United States during the Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy Era. As did many left-leaning Hollywood celebrities, Chaplin openly supported Communist causes during World War II, and suddenly faced political persecution once the Cold War commenced and the Soviets were no longer America's allies. In 1952, Chaplin attended the New York premiere of his film Limelight, and immediately afterward departed to attend the European debut. Once his ship was at sea, however, U.S. Immigration officials notified the actor/director (who had never traded in his British papers for American citizenship) that his reentry permit had been revoked. He remained banished from the United States for twenty years.

A King in New York is a fantasy of what might have happened had Chaplin been allowed to return to the States after five years of exile. It is filled with fascinating references to Chaplin's own painful experiences, and is flavored by the aging filmmaker's curmudgeonly views of mid-century American pop culture.

After being ousted by a revolution in his homeland of Estrovia, King Igor Shadov (Chaplin) lands in Manhattan -- deprived of wealth and power -- to start his life anew. He is quickly surrounded by status-seekers still impressed by the exiled king's nobility. Shadov encounters a seemingly sophisticated woman, Ann Kay (Dawn Addams), only to find that she is a straight-talking television producer who is capitalizing on the King's notoriety to sell deodorant and toothpaste. He attempts to play along with this consumer-crazed society and even agrees to perform a commercial for an alcoholic beverage, but spoils the spot when he actually tastes the vile concoction.

No stranger to social commentary, Chaplin had brilliantly skewered Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940) and had dramatized the madness of Modern Times (1936). With A King in New York, Chaplin returned to political satire, as Shadov is exposed to some of the most marvelous phenomena of 1950s America: CinemaScope, rock'n'roll and plastic surgery.

A few episodes of A King in New York were directly inspired by Chaplin's own difficult experiences, and these grim memories are envisioned as comedy, laced with more than a trace of bitterness. The scene in which King Shadov jests with reporters as he is being fingerprinted by American immigration officials was inspired by an incident when Chaplin was arrested in 1944 (ostensibly for violation of the Mann Act, but in reality as a form of harassment for his Communist affiliations). Photographers were invited to attend the fingerprinting, which resulted in public humiliation of the once-cherished actor/director. In another scene of King, Shadov is stalked by a sinister stranger, who is ultimately revealed as a mere autograph hunter, an incident that occurred in New York shortly before Chaplin left the United States.

In the course of Shadov's American tour, he visits a progressive children's school, where he befriends a young student, Rupert (played by Chaplin's son Michael). Rupert is an angry liberal, a radical socialist who preaches gloom and revolution to the even-tempered and tolerant Shadov. Because of his friendship with the child, Shadov is brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and reduces the solemn proceedings to chaos when he becomes entangled with an unruly fire hose.

Michael Chaplin later recounted that his father offered few insights into performing for the camera, "The only advice my father gave me on acting was: 'What you have to try to achieve is to be as natural as possible.'" Although eleven-year-old Michael was praised for his role, his acting career was sporadic and small. He had an abrasive relationship with his father, and rebelled by dropping out of school, becoming a high-profile bohemian and winding up on National Assistance in 1965. When the media reported this ironic fact (the son of a wealthy filmmaker on the dole), Mrs. Oona Chaplin wrote an open letter to the press in which she proclaimed herself unwilling to "indulge him as a beatnik...the young man is a problem...he has stubbornly refused an education for three years and therefore he should get a job and go to work."

When writing A King in New York (originally titled The Ex-King) Chaplin employed a very unconventional working method while strolling and pacing about his Swiss mansion (at Corsier-sur-Vevey). His secretary, Isobel Deluz, recalled, "he would begin to prance around, talking at the top of his voice, repeating the same sentence over and over again, and then, when he was at the farthest corner of the room, with his back to me, he would whisper something I could not hear, and bounce round with a, 'That's it -- that's it. Fine. Got it at last.' But I had not! Then he would fall into silent brooding, sometimes for half an hour on end, with a faraway look in his eyes. Or he would gesticulate madly, his mouth forming noiseless words. Every possible expression would cross his moving face -- joy, sadness, courage, irony, tragedy, contempt."

Even though New York was the locale of the film, Chaplin was unable to film there, due to his involuntary exile. With the exception of a few sequences of stock footage, none of the film was shot in the United States. Instead, New York City was recreated on a soundstage at England's Shepperton Studios.

Since he had been banished from its shores, Chaplin decided he would withhold the film from American release. He even banned American journalists from a press conference announcing the completion of principal photography. In order to exclude the American market, Chaplin formed the Attica Film Company, to release the film to his exact specifications. This caused a rift between Chaplin and his usual distributor, United Artists, which he had co-founded in 1919. A King in New York was at last commercially screened in the U.S. in 1973, when bygones were bygones and the critical reevaluation of Chaplin's career overruled the political grudges that had doomed it to American obscurity.

"I cannot help but be bitter about many things that happened to me," Chaplin told New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, "but the country and the American people -- they are great." Even though it was inspired by Chaplin's bitter battles with the American media, HUAC and the Immigration Department, A King in New York is not angry or anti-American. It is instead bittersweet and mournful...an aging man's fantasy of a homecoming, a Quixotic comedy of errors in which all his problems (and the problems of blacklist-era America) are ultimately solved through the all-conquering power of comedy.

The New York Times (Nora Sayre)

DVD Net (Jules Faber)

A King in New York (1957) Bruce Eder from All Movie Guide

Turner Classic Movies James Steffen reviews The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) reviewing The Chaplin Collection, Volume 2

DVD Verdict Bill Treadway, also reviewing A WOMAN IN PARIS

Charles, Larry

MASKED AND ANONYMOUS

USA Great Britain (112 mi) 2003

Masked and Anonymous Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

It’s been days since I saw M&A, and I am still rolling it over in my mind. If this were only the “vanity project” that so many critics have claimed that it is, my reaction to it would be pretty simple – Dylan’s earned it, let’s move on. But vanity does not even come close to explaining the forensic analysis that Dylan is undertaking with respect to his own mythic status. To many, the plot is maddeningly vague – an America-like nation has been overrun with a Civil War whose causes and grievances are inscrutable, and a Central American-style dictator (the Dylan character’s dad) has been in charge (his presidential portrait painted on every available wall) but is now on his deathbed. But the vagueness is the point, and it makes perfect sense when we connect it back to the issue of Dylan and his assessment of his own meanings. Classic Dylan walked the fine line between overt social commentary and an oblique style more suited to pop-academic exegesis. This is his defining dialectic – poetry vs. activism. Now, looking back, Dylan seems to be calling all of this into question, recognizing that the creative impulse, however vital to his work (and that of others – Elvis, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Hendrix, and many others come into the line of fire), led to a body of texts which are infinitely mutable. The very vitality of Dylan’s aesthetic, its indeterminacy, turns around and faces him as collection of mythic signifiers. And yet somehow, as an author not-yet-dead, he is held accountable for their true meaning, as well as for the mythic persona he only partly chose. All of this is beautifully defined in the film’s two most affectively potent song numbers. In the first, Dylan and his band deliver a straight, plaintive reading of “Dixie.” The song has the potential to be offensive, but as we listen to it, we realize that the meanings which stick to it are only partially within the song itself. Like most any other text, “Dixie” was taken up and assigned meanings far in excess to its internal signification. Playing for an appreciative multi-ethnic audience, Dylan asks us to hear “Dixie” anew, to recognize that alongside the song’s unavoidable nostalgia for an unjust social order there also lies an affect worth salvaging, a love for the American South that could potentially be inclusive and available to all. It’s the accrued weight of the song’s offensive associations that makes it a free radical, something worth messing with and re-exploring, to see what if anything can be resignified and saved. The second moment, which echoes the first, has a little black girl singing an a cappella rendition of “The Times They Are A’Changin’” for a an attentive but affectless Dylan. The song, virtually the textual opposite of “Dixie,” is showcased here as a protest song, appropriated for the struggle for black civil rights, as well as many other social-justice causes. The girl’s voice cuts the silence like a clarion, stripping away its banality and allowing her audience to hear it all over again. And yet, Dylan’s apathy evinces supreme doubt as to whether the song can truly be heard. As with “Dixie,” one hears the meanings which others have attached to the song, not the song itself. And perhaps most importantly, Dylan’s unwillingness to applaud the little girl – he listens to her and then ignores her – points to his disengagement from the appropriation of his work by others. The song itself has meanings, and has performed cultural work, for which Dylan can take no credit. It becomes an object alongside him. The conventional reading of this situation would be something along the lines of “Dixie” performs bad cultural work, “The Times” performs good work. Dylan wants to presume both songs equally innocent. But in so doing, he must relinquish any claim to the positive outcomes from the protest songs composed by The Mythic Dylan. He steps away from the role of legend or author, in order to assume the role of listener. (Notice how little he speaks in this film.) He would rather attempt to strip away these song’s mythic coatings and see what remains underneath. This is profoundly self-critical film, and in its post-partisan self-assessment and philosophical questioning, it most reminds me of In Praise of Love. In its positioning of the icon as mumbling semi-holy fool, it recalls Keep Up Your Right. And nobody liked those, either.

VideoVista Donald Morefield

Co-written by star Bob Dylan and director Larry Charles under pen names (Sergei Petrov and Rene Fontaine) Masked And Anonymous is a slickly produced and directed black comedy. It's a weird post-revolutionary sci-fi drama peopled with a host of archetypal characters (inspired by Dylan songs) well suited to the protest-movie scenario.

With the aid of TV producer Nina (Jessica Lange), wisecracking promoter and entrepreneur Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) plans a crooked benefit concert, hoping that he can raise enough cash to siphon funds away to paying off his mafia debts without anyone noticing. To this end, he gets aged musician Jack Fate (Bob Dylan) out of prison and hypes the gig as a comeback show. Fate's best pal Bobby Cupid (Luke Wilson) is called in for support, while veteran journalist Tom Friend (Jeff Bridges) and his girlfriend Pagan Lace (Penélope Cruz) snoop around the set backstage chasing an exclusive interview, asking awkward questions and making nearly everyone, especially Uncle Sweetheart but including usually imperturbable Fate, somewhat nervous.

In place of a real plot, we have elements of fable, political analogy, rock history namechecks, and tantalising expectations that secrets from Fate's murky past will be revealed. There are speeches, monologues, metaphorical questions rather than proper movie dialogue, but this is essential viewing for its amazingly stellar cast. I don't think there have been so many Hollywood cameos in one film since Robert Altman's superb The Player (1992). Bruce Dern plays Tom Friend's editor, whose job it is to persuade the writer to get the scoop on Fate. There's Cheech Marin as a peripheral Prospero, Giovanni Ribisi as the traumatised and suicidal soldier on a bus, Val Kilmer as an animal wrangler on the TV studio backlot, Tracey Walter as a chatty hotel desk clerk, Christian Slater and Chris Penn appear as TV technical crewmen, and Fred Ward plays a barfly in an early scene. Other notable roles go to Susan Tyrrell as a fortune-teller, Angela Bassett as the unnamed mistress, and there are also vivid cameos from the likes of Steven Bauer, Ed Harris, and Mickey Rourke, with film director Richard Sarafian as the President.

Appreciation of its themes is subjective, but what the film says about rampant political sleaze, the scandal-mongering media, economic pressures upon western capitalist society during globalisation, and social problems of poverty and urban crime is often pithily amusing yet never trite. It's rarely unforgivably pretentious, and presented with commendable style for such a low-budget venture (it was shot on HD video, co-produced by the BBC), despite the obvious preaching tone of the wry yet deadpan commentaries. Masked And Anonymous is the directorial debut of Larry Charles (Emmy award winning writer-producer of TV comedy Seinfeld), and marks the welcome return of Dylan to screen work after a 13-year break. He plays a cultural ghost of himself, but he's a ghost of the legendary type. He haunts the war-torn LA setting and the world seems to circle around him even when he's not on screen. Masked And Anonymous isn't a vanity project. It's unlikely that so many big stars would have taken pay-cuts just to appear in a Dylan movie if they didn't believe the material was truly worthwhile.

An eclectic range of live music is one of this cultworthy production's populist saving graces and, in addition some excellent 'rehearsal' performances by Dylan as Fate (with Dylan's own band portraying a Jack Fate tribute/backing band), we get soundtrack covers of a few Dylan songs from such high calibre groups as The Grateful Dead, Los Lobos, and The Ramones.

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review)

Masked And Anonymous Gerald Peary

Reverse Shot Erik Syngle

Reel.com DVD review [Kim Morgan]

filmcritic.com Norm Schrager

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Peter S. Scholtes

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Bill White

Not Fade Away - The 50th New York Film Festival | Film Society of ...

BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN C 76

USA (89 mi) 2006

“Very nice.”

Interesting title, occasionally interesting road movie featuring Sacha Baron Cohen as a journalist with a microphone and camera, a hopelessly politically incorrect lunkhead working for a local TV station in Kazakhstan who journeys through America to make a documentary film about the American way with an overweight fellow Kazakh and a pet rooster, revealing plenty of his own prejudices mixed with our own, suggesting that somehow we’re all in this big wide world together, connected by the wild and crazy world of our own prejudices. The humor is tasteless, not always revealed at the beginning of certain sequences where he catches people off guard, based almost entirely on pushing provocative stereotypes, the kind of hit or miss humor that’s hilarious from its sheer awkwardness, much of which resembles off-beat television comedy sketches. As its premise is a lazy disregard for others, a dumb sonofabitch that falls into the category of I’m so dumb I can be excused for making these kinds of offensive remarks, plays like drunken humor – I can be excused because I was so drunk, but they’re really staged to intentionally look dumb and sound as offensive as possible, hoping, what? to diffuse anger by attempting to shock people into noticing their incredibly bad taste? Since some were calling this the funniest movie of the year (for me that might be AALTRA), or socially relevant through hilarious cutting edge sarcasm, it was worth a peek. The film’s humor is occasionally hilarious but hardly groundbreaking. I mean how funny could anything be having to do with the already way over-exposed Pamela Anderson, suggesting material that is more stupid and silly in the dumb and dumber category, and offers next to nothing in the way of political insight other than we are still a socially backwards nation. But we already knew that with W as our President. It just plunges ahead in its own largely forgettable vaudevillesque idiotic coarseness, barely registering on the relevancy meter. An overrated comedy of bad manners, what’s the big deal here?

Review -- Borat - Cinematical James Rocchi

Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron Cohen), Kazakhstanian TV reporter, is dispatched to America on a mission. Borat and his producer Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian) are supposed to shoot interview pieces around New York City and, in theory, also bring back some ideas that might help Kazakhstan move into the 21st Century. Hence the full title: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. And judging by Borat's opening scenes in "Kazakhstan" (which were actually shot in Romania), maybe even making it to the 19th Century might be a stretch in some areas. But anything can happen when traveling. Borat becomes obsessed with that symbol of all things American, Pamela Anderson, and abandons his mission to begin a poorly-funded, shoddily-planned and wildly ill-advised trip across America. ...

There is no way to quantify or qualify Borat as a film; you're pretty much immediately bowled over by a barrage of shockingly inappropriate jokes, and even then each one can be deconstructed down to individual atoms of brilliance. Early on, we get to see some of Borat's TV appearances; in one, he leans over a railing as a group of men wait in the streets for one of Kazakhstan's annual traditions: The Running of the Jews. That phrase is shocking, and so incongruous as to be funny ... but when the main attractions shows up, in a costume with a papier-maché head that looks like a perfect reproduction of a caricature from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, you're doubled over in laughter and a little awed by the amount of intellectual effort that's gone into a millisecond sight gag. And then there's a third joke that goes off like a depth charge a few seconds later ... and that leads to a perfectly timed, perfectly executed closer. This isn't a structured joke; it's choreographed, a dance of ideas and references and collective memories.

And then, of course, there are naked men wrestling. In the middle of a dinner meeting of realtors. The realtors, of course, did not know that their meeting would be interrupted by naked wrestling men as part of a low-cost comedy releasing on 837 screens in a limited, high-buzz platformed pattern, backed by 20th Century Fox. From what I'm given to understand, no one -- from the RV-driving frat boys to the inner-city homies, from sea to shining sea -- knew, as Borat interviews highly-placed elected officials, car dealers, leaders of clergy and the man in the street.

Put aside the ethical and artistic questions raised by videotaping what happens when you are out for a ride with a professional driving instructor and pull a mickey of vodka out of your coat -- and rest assured, there will be long, weird term papers written, titled The Ethics of Borat, in the near future. What's just as impressive about Borat is its scope. Driving from New York to California in a new vehicle -- "Something in the six-hundred to six-hundred-and-fifty dollar range," as Borat explains to a car salesman -- Borat and Azamat see America. Like Alexis de Tocqueville did in 1831, Borat's come to see how the American experiment is working. And, just as in 1831, the journey suggests it's a bit of a work-in-progress. Borat may be one of the most politically interesting comedies of the past 20 years, just in terms of the breadth and audacity of its ideas.

Oh, and there's livestock involved. And jokes about poop. And gratuitous nudity -- gratuitous male nudity -- and that really dumb joke where you tell someone they've just eaten something disgusting after they've put it in their mouth. Of course, the 'someone' in Borat is former Republican Congressman Bob Barr, and the 'something disgusting' is, in fact, truly disgusting. This is what separates Borat from, say, Jackass: Do you think Steve-o is smart enough to get within 50 yards of Bob Barr with a camera? Mel Brooks was once told one of his films was vulgar. His response was " ... my film rises below vulgarity." And so it is with Borat -- there's something here to offend everyone, which is interesting in that it makes you stop and think about what it is you're actually offended by, and why. And Borat is even funny in simple, elegant ways -- a gibberish line delivery that, in subtitles, becomes a perfect two-syllable joke; the way Cohen hijacks the singing of the national anthem at a Rodeo in Virginia, or gets a Texas Pentecostal assembly to serve as his collective straight man in an old-time vaudeville joke.

... Which leads into some speaking in tongues, which is not how I remember old-time vaudeville jokes ending. Borat is asked, at the rodeo in Virginia, if he is a Muslim. He shakes his head. "No, Kazahkstan -- We follow the hawk!" The gentleman nods and explains America is a Christian nation. Is the joke that for all we know, Kazakhstan may, in fact, have a long cultural tradition of hawk worship? Or is it that Borat sure believes some funny stuff, and we do too?

One of the films' hardest jokes to take is when Borat observes that a gathering of five or more women in his country is only allowed in a brothel, or a grave. It's as fast and as mean as a knife to the ribs. The laughter gives way to a real recognition of the ugly fact that there are nations where that joke is close to a fact of life. And then, there's the sight of a large mammal in a hotel swimming pool! Which can't be legal, or even a good idea! But there it is! And it's perfect! Borat the man and Borat the movie both walk through a world gone mad, where every punchline tastes a little like battery acid and you laugh until it hurts. Maybe because it hurt a little already. Borat's the most interesting, challenging comedy since, say, Blazing Saddles, and it's a welcome arrival: Desperate times call for desperate laughter.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own." -- Jonathan Swift

I barely feel like reviewing this one, since I don't want to end up representing the Humorless Left. (Too easily dismissed, plus it just makes you another of the film's stooges. As the Church Lady used to say, "How con-veeeeeen-ient.") But really, the only stuff that struck me as genuinely funny (naked wrestling / lobby chase; chicken on the subway; to a much lesser extent the destruction of Confederate antiques) could have been accomplished by the Jackass team, or by Tom Green, without all the problematic, laugh-at-the-backwards-foreigner nonsense (or, its equal and opposite number for the urban elites, laugh-at-the-racist-rednecks). Even Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd, operating in the same condscending register, made no claims for their "wild and crazy guys" as cultural criticism. Whatever Borat is, it isn't satire, because apart from the possibility of getting some bones broken, Sacha Baron Cohen isn't risking anything, nor is he making any real demands of his audience. Andy Kaufman implicated his own fanbase, and even led some people close to him to think he was actually insane. Hell, even Daisy Donovan (of the highly uneven, now-cancelled series "Daisy Does America") got whatever laughs she did at her expense alone. (If you happen to have TBS On Demand, her hip-hop episode is well worth a look.) But the Borat character embodies and exaggerates stereotypes of boorish men from underdeveloped countries, and then tries to play it off as if our reaction to his caricature says something about "our" expectations. It's called having it both ways, and it's cheap. As for the anthropological value, okay, Cohen caught some racist homophobes letting their guard down. Um, you think they wouldn't say the same thing to your face?

[ADDENDUM, WITH SPOILERS: If Juvenalian satire, as generally defined, uses "irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit to attack or expose vice, folly, or stupidity" in the contemporary world, than what exactly is Cohen attacking that he himself isn't largely instigating? The feminist stooges, for example, reveal that after spending years of their lives fighting sexism, they won't tolerate it in their midst. The redneck stooges admit they luuuuvre Jesus and hate gays, and the Southern Ladies and Gentlemen don't care for black people. Is this vice or stupidity really exposed by Borat? Moreover, if, as Cohen's proponents either argue or assume, it's precisely Borat's dumb-naive-foreigner act that affords him the necessary leeway to get into these tricky situations, why does Cohen himself use the backstory and frame material to play on the exact same sort of xenophobia (the "naughty, naughty" town rapist, his sister the award-winning prostitute, etc.)? Does this really implicate the audience, or pander to those fully prepared to find such stereotypes funny in the first place? And if the point is, as some say, to lure unsuspecting viewers into Borat's lair so as to -- bam! -- find yourself reflected in the frat boys, Pentecostals, or stentorian driving instructors, would anyone ever really discover their own face in that glass? Or is it up to the intelligentsia to laugh at you for you? Final note: the material that comes closest to the tactics of effective satire is, of course, the outlandish anti-Semitism. Seriously, in a world filled with Mel Gibson Easter epics, Syrian TV dramatizing the "Protocols of Zion," and Turkish blockbusters depicting the harvest of transplant organs for use in Tel Aviv, Cohen has some legitimate work to do here. And yet, through his failure to specify, his casual use of Kazakhstan as just some random backwater country, the fear and hatred of Jews Borat depicts is stripped of its real-world referent. (Borat, you'll recall, takes care to inform the racist at the Virginia rodeo that he is not a Muslim. "I am Kazakh, I follow the hawk." Frankly, Borat, I'd prefer that you followed through.)]

BORAT Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

a bloggish article The real story behind Borat, from USA Today On Deadline

Charreyron, Antoine

THE PRODIGIES

Luxembourg Belgium (96 mi) 2011

The Prodigies Lisa Nesselson at Cannes from Screendaily

Hell hath no fury like a young genius scorned in The Prodigies, a fetchingly animated 3-D adaptation of a bestselling French novel from 1981 that did for misunderstood Gallic youth what The Catcher In The Rye has done for generations of young Americans.

Visceral tale alive with physical and emotional violence is deeply European in its approach although all the characters are American and the action is set essentially in a beautifully rendered Manhattan. The film opens in France 8 June after an official Cannes showing for high school students.

A brilliant young man who was horribly abused as a child locates five young geniuses across the U.S. and brings them together for what he hopes will be mutual support and a nurturing exploration of their exceptional talents. But things go terribly wrong and five angry children suddenly and secretly have the upper hand in realms customarily run by adults.

As the book has sold million of copies and even carried the seal of France’s National Board of Education, there’s a built-in audience for this 27 million euro venture in France.

Producer Marc Missonnier, who read the novel at age 12, concluded with his Fidelité producing partner Olivier Delbosc, that the book’s incredibly dark vision - its adolescent protagonists are raped and beaten in New York’s Central Park - would be nearly impossible to render in live-action.

Even in animated form - motion capture-based with impressive, deeply evocative backgrounds - the characters have been bumped up from ages 11-to-14 to 13-to-15. A few aspects of the source novel that would have raised American eyebrows, as did Luc Besson’s original Leon (The Professional) have been eliminated or toned down.

What remains still has the level of violence of a kill-‘em-all video game redeemed by a potently emotional backstory. Material considered appropriate for ages 12 and up in France will almost certainly be branded with an R stateside. And that’s a shame, since this is a bigscreen production that youngsters can profitably dig their eyeballs and teeth into.

In a visually gripping prelude, 13-year-old Jimbo is playing with his electronic gear when his parents bring an argument into their son’s room-cum-workshop. Without provocation, Jimbo’s dad stomps on the boy’s treasured computing device and gives him a vicious beating. When the scene is over, Jimbo’s mother is dead on the floor and his father has hung himself.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Jimbo, who spent a week with the dead bodies, is locked up in an insane asylum when one Charles Killian, a distinguished press baron, comes to interview him. Kindly Killian understands that Jimbo is incredibly gifted and may possess a secret power he’s having trouble controlling.

Cut to Jimbo as an adult (voiced by Mathieu Kassovitz in the original French version and by Jeffrey Evan Thomas in the English-language version) teaching higher math and science at the Killian Foundation, living in a fab Manhattan loft and wed to understanding Ann, a TV anchorwoman. Jimbo’s drive home reveals a city where most of the billboards advertise Killian’s TV holdings or other media ventures.

That night, the test Jimbo and Killian hid in one of their popular computer games reveals five youngsters with stratospheric scores. Jimbo sets off to convince the 2 girls and 3 boys - scattered across the nation and representing a range of racial affiliations, socio-economic backgrounds and body types - to come to NY where their hyper-intelligence can be nurtured at the Killian Foundation.

By dint of their brilliance, the five kids are misfits; young Gil, who lives in a trailer in New Mexico, is beaten much as Jimbo once was.

While Jimbo returns from convincing the kids’ parents to let their offspring reach their full potential, his surrogate father and mentor Charles Killian dies. A very nice “Matrix-meets-Vanilla Sky” style scene freezes the action in NYC’s Times Square when Jimbo hears the news.

Killian left his empire to his brittle daughter Melanie who wants to shut down the money-losing Foundation. Seeing a way to make the little geniuses pay for themselves, Jimbo suggests an American Idol-style elimination TV show. Melanie loves the concept and dubs it “American Genius.”

But when the five kids sneak off one night to meet by the statue of Killian in Central Park, they are savagely attacked. What really happened is hushed up and the anger this unleashes is both deadly and unstoppable. With a finale that includes meeting the President at the White House, genius superpowers that can be used for malevolent ends are problematic.

Visually, the tale is very sophisticated, although there is always a residual creepiness to motion capture. The human characters have a deliberately stiff, sculptural quality while their surroundings are both pared down and rich to behold. The look is CGI plus oil paint, exploiting a European patina trained on iconic American settings. Reflections are particularly well rendered. The whole thing plays out like a lovingly crafted video game; which is almost certainly a plus for young viewers however disturbing their parents may find the material.

On an allegorical level, it’s a story of that youthful moment when kids feel both misunderstood and invincible and, in a nutshell, want to rule the world. The door is left open for a sequel.

The Prodigies: Cannes Review Jordan Mintzer at Cannes from The Hollywood Review, May 12, 2011

An intensely dark and violent addition to the recent slew of 3D animation flicks, French thriller The Prodigies will need to harness all of its superpowers to draw crowds to this Warner Bros. France summer release. Closer to R-rated anime than to family-friendly Pixar, this frenzied action tale, about traumatized child geniuses and their deadly mind-control games, may find that rape, suicide, shootouts and decapitation is better suited for ancillary than for a Sunday matinee.

Based on a 1981 bestselling novel by Bernard Lenteric, the story takes place in a somberly recreated New York City, where computer whiz Jimbo (Mathieu Kassovitz) teaches physics at an exclusive research institute funded by multimillionaire mogul Killian (Feodor Atkine). Between his beautiful girlfriend, Ann (Claire Guyot), and his incredibly adept smart phone, Jimbo looks to have finally overcome a nasty childhood event that left his abusive parents dead, for reasons that have something to do with their boy’s massive brain power.

When the aging Killian passes away, and his daughter, Melanie (Julie Dumas), decides to pull the plug on Jimbo’s projects, he needs to find a way to support a clan of five child prodigies that seem to share his lethal combination of nerd rage and ESP. Inviting them to participate in an American Idol-meets-Jeopardy-style game show, Jimbo sets out to meet the kids at night in Central Park. Before he gets there, they’re accosted by vicious thugs, one of whom savagely beats and rapes the 14-year-old Liza (Jessica Monceau).

That scene, like others in first-time director Antoine Charreyron’s extremely visceral depictions of assault and anguish, may be off-putting for viewers seeking either a superhero thrill ride à la X-Men, or an ironic adventure à la Toy Story. Instead, screenwriting team Alexandre de la Patelliere and Matthieu Delaporte (22 Bullets) go for all out pathos, exponentially upping the violence quotient as the masterminds team together to revenge Liza. We’re thus entitled to several slow-mo Matrix-style shootouts, a few pounding fistfights, and one gruesome bit where a guy gets his head sliced off by a subway car.

While such moments are virtuously rendered in motion capture by visual creator Viktor Antonov (Half Life 2), they’re so over-the-top that they squash the narrative. Lenteric’s book was a hit with French teens in the ‘80s, for whom its mix of comic book fantasy and adolescent misery was something new. Nowadays, such material has been handled with either more humor (Buffy) or more eye-candy (Twilight), and as The Prodigies drifts further into a 3D-modeled bloodbath, its message gets lost amid all the megabytes.

Chase, David

NOT FADE AWAY B+ 92

USA (112 mi) 2012 Official site

They say good things come in small packages, and this is the latest from The Sopranos (1999 – 2007) writer/director David Chase, where you’d expect plenty of advance publicity, but this little film flies under the radar. Set in the early 60’s paralleling a well-known story of when childhood friends Keith Richards and Mick Jagger met at a railway station in 1960, where the Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry records Jagger was carrying caught Richard’s eye, claiming he could already play some of those tunes on the guitar, and thus a band (with the help of fellow artist Brian Jones) named The Rolling Stones was born. Narrated at both the beginning and end by an unseen young girl (who turns out to be the lead character’s barely seen younger sister, Meg Guzulescu), she suggests this story concerns another band that no one’s ever heard of, similarly formed about the same time. This eerie voice is reminiscent of the rich, descriptive detail described by a collective Greek chorus narrative in the 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides, which turns out to be neighborhood boys recalling a family of gorgeously attractive young girls across the street during the 1970’s. Much like the director’s own life, this story concerns a group of young teenage boys from suburban New Jersey in the 1960’s, led by Douglas (John Magaro), the drummer and eventual lead singer of a rock band that he forms with a couple friends, temperamental lead guitarist Eugene (Jack Huston) and childhood best friend Wells (Will Brill), playing covers of bands admired by the Stones, giving this movie a killer soundtrack assembled by E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt. While all these guys talk about is music and their band, just waiting for the day when they get discovered, building their lives for that inevitability, they also all vie for the attention of a beautiful young girl who takes an interest in their music, Grace (Bella Heathcote), who adds a luminous Marianne Faithfull aura of mystique. What’s apparent from the outset is this is about more than the music, which is heard continuously throughout the film, becoming a strangely evocative period piece of the early 60’s.

Of interest, this film tells the story with jagged edges, as it never advances in a straight line, providing novelesque detail to what amounts to a short story, always adding more than the viewer needs, giving the film a poetic lyricism, becoming less about their individual lives and more about the time they’re living in. If viewers get hung up on the narrative of what’s happening, which includes plenty of plot meanderings, they may miss much of the period embellishment that is an essential ingredient to the film, actually becoming the central focus of the film, beautifully capturing the era’s conflicting attitudes. The band continuously gets bogged down in minor disputes and disagreements, eventually having to deal with the melodramatic, self-destructive outbursts of Eugene, where they are continuously in a state of flux, always becoming something they have yet to achieve. Meanwhile, life goes on, where Douglas’s Dad, none other than James Gandolfini (priceless, as always), gives him plenty of generation gap grief, “my son dresses like a queer,” where Dad’s upset by his Dylanesque hair and artsy fartsy plans, none of which pay the bills, waiting for him to get real and develop a legitimate career instead of throwing his life away on a stupid dream that will never amount to anything. But Douglas is a product of the times, keying into the bohemian subculture where art and music have a mystical ability to transcend ordinary, everyday routines. In this way, the film is a kissing cousin to Olivier Assayas’s similarly autobiographical account of his own turbulent life in the 60’s, Something in the Air (Après mai) (2012), though a few years before the Parisian student demonstrations in May ’68. One of the more amusing scenes is witnessing Douglas and Grace in a movie theater watching Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966), where Douglas is struck by lengthy scenes of silence in a public park where “nothing is happening” and there are no musical cues to evoke mood. Grace, however, has the good sense to recognize that “the trees are the music.”

Early in the film, the band, produced and assisted by Van Zandt (who interestingly also plays Silvio Dante, the behind-the-scenes consigliere to the Soprano family), spends plenty of time playing covers of familiar radio music, always searching for that ever elusive music contract, where by the time they finally discover an agent, Brad Garrett, he lays it out straight, giving them the facts of life, suggesting the music business is “10% inspiration and 90% perspiration,” instructing them to pay their dues and develop a loyal fanbase in local bar scenes, much like the Beatles did in Hamburg, Germany or the Ramones in New York’s CBGB. But in the changing times, Douglas wants to get away from Jersey with Grace and head to Los Angeles, parting company with the band. Once that part of the story ends, the final sequences are among the more poetically ambiguous of any film seen this year, as their coming-of age lives simply evolve. The transition from East coast to West coast is mesmerizing, especially the sadness etched on his Dad’s face watching his own dreams drive away in the form of his son, where in LA he may as well be a stranger in a strange land, as the West coast has a rapidly developing counterculture movement while he’s still dressing with the straight crowd wearing sport jackets. Having always defined himself as an artist fronting a band, he suddenly finds himself without a purpose or meaning in life, stripped naked, just a solitary soul, where there may be hundreds of thousands or more just like him, discovering he’s not so unique. This revelation is chilling, but one that personifies the 60’s, where the Baby Boomer’s sober up and come of age only to discover they’re just like everybody else, defined by their own mediocrity and routine. There’s a beautifully written scene where Douglas is aimlessly hitchhiking into the unknown, with no particular destination, a Jack Nicholson moment right out of Five Easy Pieces (1970), and someone dressed like one of the mimes in Antonioni’s BLOW-UP stops to pick him up, but he’s not yet ready to go there, into the empty spaces between what’s real and what’s only imagined, into the quiet rustle of Antonioni’s trees. It’s an open question whether cinema can replace music as the new obsession in Douglas’s life, or drugs, or the protest movement, becoming something of an unanswered reverie expressed only through a curious final abstraction.

‘Not Fade Away’ Soundtrack Track Listing

‘There Was a Time’ – James Brown
‘Tell Me’ – the Rolling Stones
‘Ride On Baby’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘Bo Diddley’ – Bo Diddley
‘Bo Diddley’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘Parachute Woman’ – the Rolling Stones
‘Go Now’ – the Moody Blues
‘Time Is on My Side’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘Dust My Broom’ – Elmore James
‘I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart’ – the Rascals
‘Good Morning Blues’ – Leadbelly
‘Train Kept A Rollin’’ – Johnny Burnette & the Rock N’ Roll Trio
‘Train Kept A Rollin’’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘Pretty Ballerina’ – the Left Banke
‘Down So Low’ – Mother Earth
‘Itchycoo Park’ – the Small Faces
‘Me and the Devil Blues’ – Robert Johnson
‘The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘T.B. Sheets’ – Van Morrison
‘Some Velvet Morning’ – Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood
‘Bali Ha’i’ (From South Pacific) – Original Motion Picture Cast
‘Road Runner’ – the Sex Pistols
‘Pipeline’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘She Belongs To Me’ – Bob Dylan
Digital Bonus Track: ‘Surgical Supply Jingle’

*Includes seven songs by the fictional band the Twylight Zones, with stars John Magaro and Jack Huston contributing their own vocals to the tracks, which were produced by Steven Van Zandt. The music was performed by Van Zandt and fellow E Street Band members Max Weinberg and Garry Tallent, with their old friend Bobby Bandiera of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.

The time is the mid-1960s, on the cusp of the Summer of Love. The place, suburban New Jersey. The music, 100 percent pure rock and roll. For his feature filmmaking debut, The Sopranos creator David Chase has crafted a wise, tender and richly atmospheric portrait of a group of friends trying to do what so many awkward suburban kids of the time dreamed of doing: form their own rock band. And these guys are good, fronted by a preternaturally gifted singer-songwriter (terrific newcomer John Magaro) who’s a dead ringer for the young Bob Dylan, even if dad (James Gandolfini) doesn’t take kindly to seeing junior strut around in long hair and Cuban heels. Masterfully capturing the era’s conflicting attitudes and ideologies, all set to a killer soundtrack produced by the legendary Steven Van Zandt, Not Fade Away just might be the best coming-of-age movie since Barry Levinson’s Diner—and one of the best rock movies ever.

Not Fade Away | Movie Reviews | Rolling Stone Peter Travers

You expect a hot dose of bada-bing, what with David Chase, creator of HBO's groundbreaking crime drama The Sopranos, making his feature debut as a writer-director. Instead, Chase offers a gritty, graceful salute to rock & roll. Like Douglas (John Magaro), his film's protagonist, Chase grew up in suburban New Jersey in the 1960s playing covers of Buddy Holly and the Stones in his garage. Unlike Douglas, Chase never went farther than his garage. But the impact of the music, the way it opened doors to a larger world that embraced TV, film, politics and renegade social change, never left Chase. His love for the period permeates every frame.

Douglas and his bandmates Eugene (Jack Huston of Boardwalk Empire) and Wells (Will Brill) vie for the attentions of Grace (a luminous Bella Heathcote), and they comically and touchingly prepare for a fame that never comes. Home from college, Douglas debates his old-school father (a splendid James Gandolfini), who hates his Dylanesque hair and Cuban heels. Later, at a restaurant, when Dad confesses to an affair and a possibly terminal illness, father and son make a connection that is more heart-piercing for being so tentative. Chase shows a natural affinity for actors, who are uniformly excellent. The awkwardness comes in letting some of the stories breathe at the expense of others, suggesting something lost in the cutting. The music, expertly curated by Steven Van Zandt, is in the film's DNA. Watching Antonioni's Blow-Up at a theater with Grace, Douglas complains about the lack of scoring in a silent park scene. "The trees are the music," Grace tells him. She knows the secrets that lie in the spaces between words and music. So does Chase. His ardent, acutely observed debut makes him, at 67, a filmmaker to watch.

The A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

David Chase’s feature-film debut as a writer-director tackles nothing less than the whole of the 1960s, from the death of JFK and the debut of The Beatles to the decline of the hippie ideal in a spiral of drug abuse and dissension. The Sopranos creator watches it all through the eyes of someone whose biography is a lot like his own: a working-class New Jersey Italian-American kid played by John Magaro, who mans the drums for a garage-rock band while dreaming of moving to Los Angeles to make movies. Not Fade Away focuses on Magaro’s creative disputes with his band’s guitarist (Jack Huston), who’s perfectly content playing cover songs for the local teenagers who idolize him, while Magaro wants to transition to writing originals like The Rolling Stones did. The film also tracks Magaro’s combative relationships: with his girlfriend (Bella Heathcote), his former high-school crush object who proves to be more complicated than she ever was in his fantasies; and with his father (James Gandolfini), who can’t understand why he busted his hump for 20 years for the sake of this long-haired college dropout.

The primary subject of Not Fade Away is how the revolutions of the ’60s affected one ordinary American family, which is such familiar material that not even a writer as skilled as Chase can make it wholly fresh. Chase’s take is more rooted in real-world details than most, and is never cartoony or blindly nostalgic, but he still relies on the old “it was a time of change” storytelling beats, from family disagreements over the civil-rights movement to a lot of “my son dresses like a queer” from Gandolfini. Worse, Not Fade Away has a muddled, meandering narrative, where events sometimes appear to happen out of their proper chronological order, and where it seems after a while that Chase could end the movie anywhere and it wouldn’t make much difference.

But while Not Fade Away is undeniably a mess, it’s a loveable kind of mess, where the missteps come from daring, not caution. Chase is covering well-trod ground, but he’s showing his own personal corner of it, lovingly filming the basements, street corners, and sandwich shops where he grew up. Then he ties it all to the transformative power of rock ’n’ roll, which the film’s narrator—Magaro’s romantic little sister—describes as filling ordinary kids with outrageous dreams. Chase deals with the mundane reality that squashes those dreams, but he doesn’t downplay the dreams themselves, which he keeps honoring throughout Not Fade Away, right up to an audaciously abstract final scene that rivals the end of The Sopranos for sheer nerve.

Slant Magazine [Jaime N. Christley]

With a production résumé that extends back almost 40 years, it's difficult to gauge what David Chase brings to the party when he dons his director's hat, with only the occasional television credit to his name. Among those few, however, are the noteworthy first and final episodes of The Sopranos, the exalted HBO drama he created and produced over the course of eight more or less consistent years. In fact, the final directorial/storytelling decision of the series, the enigmatic conclusion that many found infuriating, earned Chase a degree of notoriety that momentarily threatened to eclipse his larger achievement.

On the evidence of Not Fade Away, a few characteristics that describe Chase's directorial personality begin to emerge, and we can begin to make sense of things. While it's not exactly destructive or free-wheeling, his attitude toward traditional storytelling relies on the idea that viewers, when they see the film, aren't wet-eared newborns, but are, to everyone's benefit, forearmed with prior experience with similar stories about school friends, trying to get their basement rock 'n roll band to make the transition from the farm league to playing legit shows and, if all goes well, taking that big, life-changing record deal. This isn't unlike the way he presumed audiences had already "done the reading," i.e. seen Goodfellas and at least the first two Godfather movies, before tuning into The Sopranos. This kind of presumption frees Chase to build Not Fade Away according to his other passions. The clichéd narrative serves as an empty vessel, which Chase then fills with as many moments of fond (or bittersweet) remembrance as he can recall or invent.

The result is a kind of pure filmmaking in the guise of a familiar object, a gleeful disregard for expectations in order to transmit to the audience sensations of the time, the music, the language, the clothing, and the way youthful hormones have a transformative effect on reality not unlike psychotropic drugs: enhanced, more vivid, and hyperreal. Again, while Chase's attitude regarding narrative isn't destructive, it's at least playfully combative; the other genre that normally exerts a death-grip hold on this kind of story is the one exemplified by films like Forrest Gump and shows like Wonder Years and even Mad Men. These aspiring sagas of family and cultural life, their other strengths and weaknesses notwithstanding, sometimes find themselves burdened by a story structure that strains to acknowledge (even through countless layers of cliché) the events and Time/Life-certified images of the '60s.

In Chase's hands, Not Fade Away acknowledges these alleged points of historical interest with casual, glazed disinterest, the way old-school New Yorkers might absent-mindedly catch a glimpse of the Empire State Building from the window of their taxicab. The Kennedy assassination and the landmark Ed Sullivan Beatles broadcast matter to these kids a whole lot less than going to parties, chasing skirt, and smoking pot. To the question "the Beatles or Elvis?" they'd choose a third option, the Rolling Stones. Seeing Mick Jagger on the tube, it's apparent to Douglas (John Magaro), the film's main character, that the days of matinee-idol/heartthrob rockers may be on the wane—i.e., if a gaunt, not obviously attractive guy like Mick can get with the ladies and sing the blues, there's hope for the kid from Jersey too. Douglas's inspirational moment, over in half a second, provides the motive force for a story that's only partly of his own making.

Band sessions avoid most of the unnecessary setup baggage as well. Douglas and his buddies are already a fair distance up the road with their musical chops; in fact, the story's chapters are delineated at a rapid clip, with minimal setup. Chase places enormous trust in the viewer to make up temporal lapses, pick up on rifts between characters with minimal evidence, and allow Chase the indulgence to screw around with the camera, lighting, cutting, sound, and music. While his experiments aren't always fail-safe, and some parts of the film feel a little off (the sequence where Joy Deitz is carted off to the loony bin seems to have been smuggled in from a different movie, and not a good one), Not Fade Away triumphs when Chase's empowerment as a kind of autobiographical historian is balanced with the thrill of submersing the viewer in the tidal pool of his memories.

Village Voice [Scott Foundas]

Film.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

Indiewire [Rodrigo Perez]

World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]

'Not Fade Away': A Messy Sort of Liberation | PopMatters Chris Barsanti

Not Fade Away Lays Bare David Chases's Rock and ... - Village Voice Nick Schager

The Atlantic [Jason Bailey]

NPR [Mark Jenkins]

Not Fade Away Review: Please, Fade Away - Pajiba Amanda Mae Meyncke

Paste Magazine [Monica Castillo]

Culture Blues [Jeremiah White]

FilmSchoolRejects [Daniel Walber]

Digital Spy [Zeba Blay]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Dirk Sonniksen]

Screen Comment [Craig Younkin]

The Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]

New York Times [Stephen Holden]

'Not Fade Away': The Making of a Killer Soundtrack - WSJ.com Steve Daugherty

'Not Fade Away' Soundtrack Features Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan + ... Ultimate Classic Rock

Chaufour, Lucile

VIOLENT DAYS C+ 78

France (104 mi) 2004

An experimental Black & White film that has a terrific opening credits sequence on a nearly bleached out screen showing traces of a face and body, like a negative image, while listing ahead of time all the music that will be playing in the film. The film is nearly entirely rockabilly music, as it features a 50’s looking would-be band of three guys and a girl that wakes up after a raucous night of drinking and decides to drive from Paris 120 miles to the coast of Le Havre to see a rockabilly music club. While the look of the film continues to appear overly whitened, with at best amateur actors, what transpires seems to take forever, as it’s obvious the people in this film have negligible ability to get along with one another, so there are snippets of conversation, a shot to something else that may be wordless, such as a town mechanic or machine operator at work, shifting back and forth, but never finding anything of interest, as only the non-stop music keeps driving the film. Once they arrive, they argue whether to go directly to the club, but it’s early, so the girl wants to go to the beach, which bores the boys something silly, but they go to the beach, and then nag the girl the whole time, who grows sick of the guys being continuously bored.

Once the club opens, different bands play, while all the patrons are dressed in various states of the 50’s early days of rock n roll, every single person dressed the part, and spending plenty of time preening in front of the bathroom mirrors making sure their sprayed hair continues to stay in place. Everyone seems bored and listless, the boys don’t know how to talk to the girls, and no one is dancing. People pretty much ignore one another and spend all their time within themselves staring at the band or out into space. When people talk, they soon discover they have nothing to say, so there are continuing dreary arguments that grow monotonous after awhile. But as the evening progresses, people drink greater quantities of alcohol, there’s really nothing left to do but fight, so there’s a huge ruckus outside the door featuring the bouncers, and friends of underage kids that couldn’t get in. People are swinging baseball bats at one another, kicking and stomping people until ambulances arrive to take people to the hospital. Meanwhile, inside the music continues to play unabated, completely unawares of what’s going on outside.

As the night progresses, the dance hall grows more boisterous, guys are taking off their shirts and dancing drunkenly alone, while the women dance in steps by themselves. People continue to spend much more time thinking about themselves than taking any interest in anyone else. Eventually the place closes and people have to leave. Drunk, our party can’t seem to find their way out of town, nearly get killed driving recklessly, and when the girl complains about their stupidity, the boys throw beer all over her, so she gets out and walks, somehow ending up the next morning back at the beach. Over the end credits, the music has changed to electronic mysterious music, with images of the girl floating in the water, changing on and off to a screen of white with small patches of black in order to read the credits. From time to time the film resembles the disassociative multi-layered language of NASHVILLE, especially afterwards when lone souls wandered up to the microphone to perform while no one was listening, or the boredom and disinterest of Andrew Bugalski, making attempts at casual behavior through improvisational scenes that don’t seem to work, as they never generate any interest. This is a film of near total aimlessness, where every character in the film thrives on boredom and disinterest, even their supposed fascination with the music scene is a study of social outcasts who can’t communicate on any other level except violence and negativity.

Chazelle, Damien

GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH

USA (82 mi) 2009

Time Out New York David Fear

The gentleman picks up a trumpet, blowing out a work-in-progress tune to the woman standing next to him in the small, cluttered apartment (we can’t hear what the tune is yet, as a string-filled old-school musical score is playing over the scene). Soon, they’ll be sitting on, yes, a park bench, and the vibe between them is decidedly far more sour. The duo will go their separate ways—he’ll keep bopping around Boston, she’ll end up in New York City. But there’s something that suggests Guy, a jazz musician, and Madeline, a waitress and would-be performer, aren’t done with each other just yet. Destiny dictates that the couple will circle back to square one; before that happens, however, there will be unfortunate personal detours, romantic misfires and bad decisions. Oh, and an impromptu musical number in an after-hours T.G.I. Friday’s–style franchise restaurant.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle’s blissful, brilliant debut may bear a superficial resemblance to the work of the mumblecore crowd (he’s an alumni of the same Harvard undergrad film program that gave us the scene’s godfather, Andrew Bujalski). But the mind-set here is less SXSW than a lo-fi version of MGM, with roughshod 16mm scenes of urban slackerdom suddenly morphing into the sort of musical numbers associated with Stanley Donen. (One sequence involving a tap dancer, a jam session and a house party is arguably the most joyous five minutes you’re likely to experience in a theater this year.) Tribeca’s reputation as a maddeningly inconsistent festival—programming-wise, at least—is well deserved, but there’s always one title that comes out of nowhere and blindsides you: The Secret of the Grain, Dead Man’s Shoes, Rize. This is the true gem of 2009; don’t miss it.

First Look Amy Taubin from Film Comment, March/April 2009

Despite the hype from Sundance about this or that “Obama moment movie,” nothing at Park City sounded as if it fit the bill as nicely as Damien Chazelle’s debut feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (rumored to be premiering at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival). An ingenious, enchanting hybrid of an old-fashioned Hollywood-style musical and a vérité cityscape, the film was shot in 16mm black-and-white on a shoestring budget that was stretched to accommodate the orchestral arrangements of Justin Hurwitz’s lilting tunes and swingy score. It’s the latest in a series of brainy, innovative fiction films displaying a bent for urban ethnography nurtured in Harvard’s undergraduate film program. Among the others: Gordon Eriksen and John O’Brien’s The Big Dis (89) and Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha (02).

Set within Boston’s famed but far from economically thriving jazz community, Guy and Madeline is a desultory variant of the classic romantic meet-cute/break-up/reunite narrative. Here it’s boy meets girl, boy dumps girl, boy realizes he was an asshole and returns to girl, girl may or may not want him back. The “Guy” of the title is a jazz trumpeter (Jason Palmer), who begins and terminates his vaguely promising romantic connection to Madeline (Desiree Garcia) within the movie’s first 10 minutes on the park bench that is the title’s third term.

Madeline carries a torch for Guy for the rest of the movie, which doesn’t prevent her from briefly moving in with a New York–based French crooner (Bernard Chazelle, the filmmaker’s father). Guy, who is far more devoted to his trumpet than to any of the women in his life, is immediately distracted from Madeline by Elena (Sandha Khin), with whom he connects in the most erotic subway scene since Richard Widmark lifted Jean Peters’s wallet in Pickup on South Street. More wary than Madeline, Elena cocks an eyebrow when Guy tells her to cook up some pasta for his band, and turns off totally when he leaves for a couple of days to entertain his family, up from North Carolina for a visit.

Unlike the chatterboxes in Bujalski films, Chazelle’s characters barely communicate—except when they’re talking about or making music. Thus we are left to speculate whether, for example, Elena is pissed off because she doesn’t believe Guy’s story about his family or if she’s mad because he doesn’t offer to introduce her to them, and whether Guy doesn’t want her to meet them because he’s not that into her or because he thinks they’d be upset because she’s not black. Again, pure speculation. Where Barry Jenkins’s romantic talkathon Medicine for Melancholy puts the issue of African-American identity front and center, Guy and Madeline suggests a “post-race” Bohemia, at least as far as relationships are concerned. Art is another matter: Guy’s idols are Clifford Brown and Grandmaster Flash. Indeed, one of the ways to look at the movie is as a sequel to John Cassavetes’ Shadows; 50 years later, that film’s blow-out sequence about racial difference and passing as white is barely conceivable, and definitely not cool within this milieu. I’m a bit embarrassed that it even crossed my mind.

Chazelle has a light touch with his references—in addition to Shadows, Guy and Madeline footnotes Fred and Ginger musicals, Akerman’s Window Shopping, Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman, Rohmer’s Summer (aka The Green Ray), Rouch and Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer, and, closer to home, Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha. And that’s just for starters. What keeps the film from becoming mere pastiche is the handheld shooting style, which resembles Ricky Leacock’s with a bit more panache. In addition to directing and writing the script and the lyrics, Chazelle is the film’s uncredited cinematographer and editor. The camera moves smoothly from lingering close-ups to wide shots, and it’s every bit as interested in chance happenings at the real-life locations as in the fictional narrative. One of the best musical sequences involves a jazz performance in what looks like an apartment converted to a club by dint of a single illuminated exit sign. Stuck in a hall next to the minuscule main space, the camera covers the action by panning back and forth between two narrow doorways, the repetitive movement defining the music rhythmically and spatially. Chazelle is an exceptionally talented filmmaker. Let’s hope the independent film world has enough life left in it to do him justice.

National Public Radio [Ian Buckwalter]

Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench Michael Sicinski

Film-Forward.com Nora Lee Mandel

Siffblog [Kathy Fennessy]

Critic's Notebook [Marco Duran]

TheLoop21.com [Kam Williams]

filmsoundoff [Alex Roberts]

eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver

Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger] which includes a brief interview with the director, November 13, 2010

Adult Education Les Phillips from CineScene

Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench — Inside Movies Since 1920 Sara Vizcarrondo from Box Office magazine

Compuserve [Harvey Karten]

Screencrave [Tom von Logue Newth]

RowThree.com [Jandy Stone]

The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]

Interview: Damien Chazelle video interview (55 seconds)

Variety.com [John Anderson]

Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench: Two strangers, and all that jazz ... Stephen Cole from The Globe and the Mail

Review: Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench Gerald Peary from The Boston Phoenix

'Guy and Madeline': A muted, musical experiment Moira Macdonald from The Seattle Times

Movie review: 'Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench' - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

Movie Review | 'Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench': The Blissed-Out Rhythms of the Young and in Love Jeannette Catsoulis from The New York Times

WHIPLASH B+ 91

USA (106 mi) 2014

After his acclaimed 16mm debut film GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH (2009) was made on a shoestring budget, never playing in more than three theaters at the same time across the entire country, the follow-up effort won the Grand Jury 1^st Prize for a Dramatic Film at Sundance, while the year before the same film in a shortened version won a Jury Prize for Best U.S. Fiction Short Film. It’s a curious evolution in filmmaking these days when budding young filmmakers enlarge their awards tested short films into features (19 Short Films That Were Made Into Feature-Length Movies ...), where crime writer Cornell Woolrich (aka William Irish) made a practice of enlarging his short stories into novels, so it’s not like there isn’t a precedent for this kind of thing. Initially the director conceived the full-length feature, but couldn’t get funding for his film, so he submitted a short film to Sundance, winning an award, which brought about the needed funding of $3.3 million dollars. Shot in just 19 days, part of the brilliance of the film is the ferociousness in how it is filmed, bringing an edgy, unconventional style to the viewer’s experience, where it’s the first film about jazz music to capture the public’s imagination since Clint Eastwood’s BIRD (1988). Largely based on the writer/director’s own experience as a band student in high school, where the instructor ruled by fear and intimidation, Chazelle creates a screenplay that embellishes the feeling of teaching through public humiliation, where J.K. Simmons, largely a character actor throughout his thirty-year career, finally gets a juicy lead role and makes the best of it in one of the most physically demanding, emotionally exhaustive performances of the year. While it may actually be the best performance of the year, usually characters this appallingly deplorable do not go on to win Oscars, but it can happen, such as Forest Whitaker as the murderous egomaniac Idi Amin in THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (2006) or Anthony Hopkins as the fiendishly deadly and cannibalistic Hannibal Lecter in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991).

Set in a fictitious Schaffer Conservatory of Music in midtown Manhattan, considered the most prestigious music academy in the country, the film opens with a slowly developing drum roll in the dark, where Miles Teller, so good in The Spectacular Now (2013), plays Andrew Neyman, a relentlessly driven drums prodigy student just entering the school. In a brief opening encounter he realizes he’s being watched by the school’s most feared instructor, Terence Fletcher (Simmons), which sets the stage for an ongoing battle of wills for the duration of the picture. Surrounded by photos of Buddy Rich, constantly plugging his music into his ears, Andrew aspires to be the greatest jazz drummer in history. For the record, Rich was a showboating drum virtuoso known for his speed and power that promoted himself front and center above all other members of his band, often appearing on The Tonight Show billing himself as “the world’s greatest drummer.” Rich was full of macho swagger, a 60-year old black belt in karate who delighted in showing how tough he was, displaying a volatile temper with a short fuse and an imposing personality, well known for leveling insults and throwing backstage tantrums. It’s ironic that his musical role model also happens to fit his teacher Fletcher to a T, a musical instructor that believes in terrorizing his students, a man fixated with perfection, who will obsessively drive musicians to repeat certain passages literally for hours (“We’re gonna be here all night…”) while others stand around and wait, who teaches by hurling an angry tirade of personally malicious invectives at them, homophobic slurs, and a constant refrain of abusive and degrading insults, believing this motivates them to become better musicians. Simmons literally inhabits the role, as he has the timing of the vitriolic language along with the contemptuous tone of arrogance down perfectly, repeatedly cutting musicians off after just a few seconds, “Not my tempo,” he says repeatedly, forcing them to do it again and again, always demanding some fictionalized version of perfection that doesn’t exist, something only Fletcher knows, apparently, while others can only aspire to that same mindset.

What’s also right on target is the cutthroat competition among studio jazz musicians to sit in the lead chair, where students will obviously endure plenty if it will get them to that coveted position. Certainly one of the scenes of the film shows Andrew in the throes of this madly obsessive state of mind, where he will literally walk through a brick wall to please Fletcher, and out of nowhere he’s involved in a serious car crash, where blood is dripping all over his hands and shirt, yet he refuses help and insistently walks away like nothing happened, heading straight for the concert hall in order to get to that lusted after first chair. Andrew may be a fictionalized composite of many hopefuls who were literally driven into the ground by the ravings of tyrannical teachers. The title of the film is the name of a musical piece that is particularly notorious for it’s lightning quick drum tempo changes, where drummers live or die in their attempts to take on this monstrosity of tortuous hell, driving Andrew into incessant drum rehearsals with its self-imposed willingness to absorb punishment and pain, where the vigorous demands result in blood and blisters on his hands, and often even that’s not good enough. While it may be impossible to please someone who thinks the words “good job” are the most harmful words in the English language, as if they lead to complacency and mediocrity, the contentious relationship that develops between teacher and student becomes not only hurtful and abusive, but destructive, where the ruthlessly oppressive methods ultimately demand total submission, literally crushing his spirit. It’s painful to look at, yet audacious as hell, riveting stuff “full of sound and fury,” infused with a kind of ecstatic energy where drums unceasingly drive the pace of this film. The fierce acting between the two combatants couldn’t get more brutally intense, where raw emotion surges to the surface and literally bleeds onscreen, where your mind is racing, thinking “hell hath no fury” like what’s taking place between these two guys. The musical subject alone is a fascinating study, especially when we see Fletcher perform at the piano in a small west Village jazz club, where it’s nothing at all like we expect, as in our mind’s he’s ferociously driven to the point of death and destruction, instead it’s conventionally tranquil and bland, suggesting the guy outside the sheltered hallways of school is a complete sell-out in his convictions. But the film is ultimately a psychological study of misplaced obsession, two men fueled by their own inner fury of fire and brimstone, both crossing the line of outrageous morally unacceptable behavior, where you wonder where it will all lead. For a moment you think it’s the psych ward, a place familiar to many jazz artists that literally burn themselves out, but instead there’s an ultimate meeting of the minds, a battle royale with a decisively different outcome, where inevitably it’s the furious sound of the drums that has the last word.

What does it take to create a genius? You won’t find out from Whiplash, which follows the compelling travails of a young jazz musician but unwinds like a sports movie, complete with blood on the field—or, in this case, drum skins.

Miles Teller, unlikely costar of such films as Project X and That Awkward Moment, has played drums for years and he turns in a stellar portrait of Andrew Neyman, a ruthlessly committed student striving to find his feet at a fictional conservatory in Manhattan. He still meets his suburban, single dad (Paul Reiser) for foreign movies in the city, and also encounters a bright, if directionless, candy-counter girl (Melissa Benoist). But he’s not looking for those kinds of relationships.

Andrew wants to be the next Buddy Rich—better known for his showboating Johnny Carson appearances than for innovation on drums—and might have found a mentor in Terence Fletcher, played in an Oscar-worthy turn by J.K. Simmons, here making his cigar-chomping Spider-Man newspaper editor look like a grade-A pussycat. In Full Metal Jackass mode, he plays an authoritarian martinet who alternately charms and torments his students, saving the worst treatment—ethnic slurs, personal jibes, homophobic insults, and outright physical assaults—for those closest to him.

The acting is superb, and young writer-director Damien Chazelle deftly lays out the psychology of his characters in scenes that have just the right heft. But the idea that a teacher could be this criminally abusive in an arts school and not be noticed is preposterous. What’s really scary is the assumption—largely unchallenged by the movie—that musical greatness can bloom from such totalitarian grounding. Andrew shows no signs of personal creativity, on-stage or off-, and appears to be in it solely for the glory. That he gets his revenge by playing his ass off, in a thrilling version of “Caravan”, is appropriate to his personality. But this explosion of pure technique is nothing that would inspire Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker—both cited here but whose genius came from elegant, patiently developed imagination, not military drills.

In Review Online [Peter Labuza]

Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash opens with a drum roll of steadily increasing speed and intensity, and that’s as an appropriate a metaphor for the filmmaking as any. That sound is heard over a black screen; the next drum roll is accompanied by a slow tracking shot down a music conservatory hallway, to a young drummer named Andrew (Miles Teller). He stops playing when he realizes he’s being watched by Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), the school’s most feared instructor, a mysterious bogeyman who floats through hallways before bursting in doors like the Kool-Aid Man. “You know I’m looking for players,” he tells Andrew. “Yes, sir,” the young man replies. “Then why did you stop playing?” He resumes — and the instructor objects. He plays again, and Fletcher is gone, like a ghost.

The scene immediately establishes the terms of their relationship: as a head game, a plea for approval and acceptance. Usually, a hard case like Fletcher is seen as an inspirational figure whose unconventional methodology and tough love are ultimately redeemed by his results. Whiplash is not as simple a film as that; it’s a thorny, thoughtful movie that asks provocative questions and isn’t cocky enough to boast of knowing the answers.

What is crystal clear is what Fletcher is: a bully. He’s humiliates them publicly, is verbally and sometimes physically abusive, and is capable of reducing his players to tears. When he moves Andrew in to his showcase ensemble, he pulls him aside and makes chit-chat, innocent questions about his background and his parents; turns out, he’s not being nice, but gathering ammunition to lob at him in rehearsals. He throws around slurs like “limp” and “pussy” and “faggot,” with the understanding that a real man can take the abuse.

But should he have to? This is the central question of the film, Chazelle explained at a press conference in advance of its New York Film Festival debut last weekend; Whiplash is loosely based on his own experiences with tyrannical music teachers, and as a result of their efforts, “my motivation for being a good drummer was borne out of fear, which seems so antithetical to what art should be.” And it seems particularly peculiar when it comes to jazz, he went on, a music “renowned for its sense of freedom, and the whole music itself being a kind of fuck-you to authority, the fact that there’s such an authoritative streak, in big-band jazz at least, struck me as paradoxical.”

Yet Fletcher is not unique to jazz — he represents a certain type of feared, respected figure who is mostly cruel because he can be. (And his students follow suit; an awkward family dinner scene shows Andrew can give as good as he gets.) Yet they are tyrants in a tiny, tiny world, only important to a microscopic sliver of people. And it’s tough to condemn their methods entirely — after all, the insults and fury and chairs that Fletcher hurls at Andrew gets results. He practices until his fingers callous and bleed, and then he bandages them up and practices some more, until he’s good enough. (Not good enough for praise, mind you, but good enough to be left alone.)

From sports movies to military dramas, the tough-as-nails coach or commander has to break our protagonist in order to push them to the limit of their skills. But Andrew (and the movie) asks, not unreasonably, “Where’s the limit?” Fletcher insists no one understands what he’s doing (“I’m trying to push people,” he explains), and the movie lets him state his case. But it also knows that he’s a small, petty man, and Chazelle is a savvy enough filmmaker (in spite of his age — at the NYFF press conference, the amiable Simmons jokingly referred to his director as, variously, “an adolescent,” “a child,” and “11 years old”) to know the character, and the film, are more interesting if they carry a degree of moral complexity.

All of this chewy subject matter may make Whiplash sound like some kind of dry meditation on the nature of teaching and the power of reinforcement, but nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a breathtakingly paced, staggeringly visceral movie, much of it utterly brutal to endure, leaving any reasonably sympathetic audience member all bundled up and nervous for this poor kid. Chazelle directs like the drummer he once was, with a sure sense of visual and aural rhythm. He moves so fast and confidently, in fact, that you may not stop to question why he’s made a movie about jazz where the only important speaking roles go to white guys; I’m not sure any of the black musicians have more than a line or two, and I only spotted two women total in the three big bands.

So that’s a problem — as is the romantic subplot, which is so poorly developed and so clearly a box to be checked that Chazelle seems to have left out the bulk of it entirely (the relationship goes from first date to breakup seemingly overnight). But he wouldn’t be the first young, white, male filmmaker to make those kind of amateur mistakes, and they don’t negate what makes the picture so successful otherwise: its force, its energy, and its anger. Andrew leaves his blood on the skins, and so does this very fine film.

There’s a moment near the end of the second act of Damien Chazelle’s sophomore feature Whiplash that threatens to completely derail the narrative: a character gets into what looks like a fatal car accident and keeps moving like he’s the Terminator. But that moment also liberates the film from its previous concessions to realism. Chazelle’s tale of two psychopaths—student drummer Andrew Nieman (Miles Teller) and tough-as-nails teacher Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons)—at first could be seen as a film about bullying, or about what it takes to achieve greatness, or any sort of “themes” that can be discussed as part of a “cultural conversation.” But in that aforementioned moment, the film abandons all potential connections to reality and suddenly vaults into almost surreal territory. Instead, it’s simply about two people trying to best each other no matter the cost.

Whiplash is awkward at times, laughably constructed at others, but it has a manic energy throughout that is both disturbing and disturbingly entertaining. Chazelle, who debuted a few years back with the much gentler Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, spins the tale of Andrew, a 19-year-old ingénue drummer at a prestigious music school in Manhattan who is determined at all costs to be one of the greats. In the film’s opening shot, he pounds away in a basement until Fletcher, the school’s feared and ruthless instructor, sneaks up on him and demands a double-time swing. Andrew’s attempt to mimic the impossibly swift tempo is cut short seconds later as he discovers that Fletcher has already bolted out the door.

Thus a rivalry is set up between two impenetrable forces willing to do whatever it takes to prove their dominance over one another. Fletcher is the bigger personality, reminiscent of R. Lee Ermey’s bombastic performance in Full Metal Jacket. Once he invites Andrew into the school’s top jazz band, he’s a motor-mouth asshole, exhibiting physically and verbally sadistic tendencies, shouting and throwing whatever is needed to get his trumpets in tune and his drummer on tempo. Fletcher’s lunacies drive Andrew mad—practicing late into the night as blood drips down his hands, attempting to best someone who will in no way ever accept his talents as anything but amateur.

Whiplash premiered to raves at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and while some thoughtful critics have attacked it as an endorsement of bullying, it’s ultimately more striking as a pointed deconstruction of “inspirational teacher” tropes. In a late scene, Fletcher explains his extreme methodology to Andrew (“There are no two words more harmful than ‘good job,’” he says) that could be read as sympathetic, but Chazelle takes this point and brutally undercuts it by the end. Even the film’s seemingly unnecessary side-romance (Melissa Benoist, as a short-lived love interest of Andrew's, does what she can in a thankless role) leads to a resolution that gratifyingly defies against expectations. It’s quite telling that instead of referencing Rocky or other heart-warming tales of underachievers, Chazelle’s visual references are Martin Scorsese films like Taxi Driver (the long take apologetic phone call) and Raging Bull (blood dripping from a cymbal) in addition to stylistically paying tribute to Goodfellas through a showy editing style. By recalling these Scorsese films, Chazelle positions himself as a mere observer to these messed-up characters: Finding their story fascinating to follow is not the same as endorsing it.

However, Chazelle isn’t strong at constructing all of this in a convincing dramatic fashion, and at times can’t help but rely on heavy-handed didacticism to make his points. A family-dinner scene where Andrew is chastised for not having the right kind of success hits all too obvious notes, as does a mournful mid-movie monologue about a recently killed student of Fletcher’s that blatantly tries to give him a sensitive side (though even that moment is given a nasty twist later). And neither actor can overcome the limitations of Chazelle’s occasionally clumsy script. Both Teller and Simmons are extremely external actors, and Whiplash gives them a lot to do physically (especially the quite impressive drumming, much of which Teller did by himself). But their blaring physicality tends to overwhelm a deeper, more psychological understanding of the motivations of these characters.

But then comes the climax, in which all considerations of this tale’s wider-world implications are thrown out the window as we find ourselves bearing witness to a furious battle of technical skill and mental wits. There are a lot of drum bangs in the final 10-minute confrontation between Andrew and Fletcher, but no takeaways—simply the spectacle of two pairs of eyes engaged in a mental stare-down, finally meeting each other halfway. Thrilling and nihilistic, Whiplash doesn’t come in a tidy package like most of its Sundance counterparts (though Jason Reitman serves as a producer here, few would mistake this for a film of his): It’s messy, didactic, willing to let its audience both laugh in shock and feel disgusted at the same time. Chazelle’s film is wildly unruly, and all the better for it.

The New Yorker [Richard Brody]

Ruthless Reviews [Matt Cale] (Potentially Offensive)

Damien Chazelle's Whiplash starring Miles Teller ... - Slate Dana Stevens

INFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]

Sight & Sound [Calum Marsh] January 21, 2015

Whiplash Offers a Painful and Joyous Jazz Education ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice

World Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]

SBS Movies [Lisa Nesselson]

PopMatters [Jesse Hassenger]

ErikLundegaard.com - Movie Review: Whiplash (2014)

outlawvern.com [Vern]

Review: Miles Teller and JK Simmons in Whiplash ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Reel Insights [Hannah McHaffie] also seen here: Hannah McHaffie [Hannah McHaffie]

Whiplash | Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

[NYFF Review] Whiplash - The Film Stage Jade Constantine

Home Theater Info DVD [Douglas MacLean]

DVD Talk [Jeff Nelson]

Parallax View [Sean Axmaker] Blu-Ray

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Clark Douglas]

DoBlu.com Blu-ray [Matt Paprocki]

Grolsch Film Works [Ashley Clark]

Film Racket [Chris Barsanti]

Dog And Wolf [Dave O'Flanagan]

The Focus Pull Film Journal [Josef Rodriguez]

ArtsHub [Sarah Ward]

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 2014 [Erik Beck]

Sound On Sight [Mark Young]

Next Projection [Julian Wright]

Aisle Seat [Mike McGranaghan]

Alt Film Guide [Tim Cogshell]

Review: WHIPLASH Taps A Confident Beat | TwitchFilm Ryland Aldrich

Whiplash - Wall Street Journal John Anderson

Movie Mezzanine [Katelyn Trott]

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

Daily | Sundance 2014 | Damien Chazelle's WHIPLASH ... David Hudson from Fandor

Whiplash: Sundance Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

'Whiplash' Review: J.K. Simmons Shines in Damien ... - Variety Peter Debruge

Whiplash review – the Full Metal Jacket of jazz drumming ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Whiplash review - The Guardian Mark Kermode

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson]

Examiner.com [Ben Kenber]

'Whiplash' movie review - Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Charleston City Paper [T. Meek]

Whiplash Review - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

New York Times [A.O.Scott]

Whiplash Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert Brian Tallerico

Brooklyn Magazine: Brian Tran

LA LA LAND A- 93

USA (128 mi) 2016 ‘Scope

A critically acclaimed Hollywood revival that owes its artistic soul to Jacques Demy and his lavishly colorful musicals of the 60’s, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les demoiselles de Rochefort) (1967), as Demy was a great admirer of the Golden Age of MGM Hollywood musicals, where his films were basically a love letter to the Hollywood movies of the 40’s and 50’s, incorporating the dreamy music of Michel Legrand and bleak elements of poetic realism into his bursting kaleidoscope of colors that vibrantly come alive onscreen through movement and dance. A key to understanding Demy’s films was the effortless naturalism on display, where he didn’t hire the best choreographer or music instructor, as the singing and dancing were not legendary, but simply incorporated into the rhythm of the picture, part of the DNA of the product, so characters didn’t walk so much as skip and twirl down the street, where this visualized fantasy world included the bit players who simply exited gracefully offscreen, so that the totality onscreen was always greater than the sum of the parts. With that in mind, this film takes a while for the full effect to kick in, as at least initially it feels forced, opening without an introduction to any of the characters, so there’s no emotional connection established, yet it breaks into a show-stopping opening number that only reluctantly generates interest. Set in a typical Los Angeles freeway traffic jam where the traffic isn’t moving at all, where one’s patience is at the boiling point, one by one people start coming out of their cars, singing and dancing, climbing on the roofs of cars, creating this fantasized, color-coordinated alternate reality that makes the wasted time feel a little more bearable. What works is that the misery caused by this kind of freeway logjam is real, something we can all relate to, where our minds tend to wander anyway, so why not allow an outpouring of an over-sized imagination in response? So while it’s bit contrived, reality quickly kicks back in gear once the cars start moving again, where an unlikely road rage encounter between strangers (the two protagonists) results in typical hostility and disdain.

Only afterwards are the characters introduced, where Mia (Emma Stone) works as a barista in a corner coffee shop on the grounds of a Warner Brothers movie studio, where important people come in and out, people used to being ogled and pampered, often complaining of the service, where the employees are star struck by being so close to movie stars. When a customer accidentally spills coffee on her white blouse just before an audition, it does not bode well for her getting the job, probably more embarrassed than anything else, yet the rudeness of the people she is trying to impress stands out, cutting her off in mid-sentence, with some not even looking up from their phones. Meanwhile, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) lives in a near-empty apartment where none of the boxes are even opened as he wonders how he’ll pay next month’s rent, visited by an over-controlling, financially secure sister (Rosemarie DeWitt) who seems used to bossing him around trying to get his life in order, where she gets under his last nerve before he heads off to work as a jazz pianist forced to play Christmas tunes in an upscale restaurant, the epitome of artistic humiliation, which he endures for as long as he can before breaking into one of his own compositions, defying his boss’s strict instructions, none other than J. K. Simmons from Whiplash (2014). When Mia returns home, she has a giant Ingrid Bergman poster on the wall next to her bed, with a bedroom filled with Hollywood tributes. Her roommates, all in different colored attire, break out into song trying to cheer her up by inviting her to a posh party that evening. After initially blowing it off, she decides to join them at the last minute, but feels completely out of place in such an artificially contrived upscale environment. Making things worse, she’s forced to walk home, as her car has been towed. Hearing a lilting melody as she passes the restaurant, a lovely jazz riff with a beautifully melancholic theme, she is drawn inside at the exact moment Sebastian is getting fired for disobedience, recognizing him from the earlier road incident, but ignoring her complimentary remarks as he steams past her out the door, soon to become a distant memory.

Months pass before they meet again, this time at another poolside Hollywood party where Sebastian’s hiding behind dark sunglasses playing electronic keyboards in an 80’s pop cover band, the evening’s entertainment, so she plays along and offers a song request, doing a blatantly fake dance in response that is actually kind of cute, showing signs of an all but absent personality. Walking to their cars afterwards, the only emotion they share is utter sarcasm, reaching an overlook showcasing the glimmering city of lights, where despite their pretend contempt, they break out into an elegant song and dance, swinging on a lamplight in a riff of Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds in SINGIN IN THE RAIN (1952), lamenting how such “A Lovely Night” is wasted by being with someone who is so clearly not interested, yet for the first time a spark of magic is in the air, where we’re beginning to get the charm of these two delightful characters. When Sebastian shows up at the coffee shop, all bets are off, as they walk through a studio lot as if they’re gliding on air, suddenly hanging on every word, confessing their innermost dreams, as she’s been striving to become a successful actress since she was a little girl, while he’s always wanted to be the owner of his own jazz club, where the chemistry between them is electric. When she blurts out “I hate jazz,” suggesting it reminds her of Kenny G and elevator muzak, the kind of stuff that sends you to sleep, he’s compelled to reach into his soul and reveal what makes it so alive for him, suggesting every jazz musician composes their own spontaneously created symphony that is different every night, challenged by the musicians around him, the changing moods, constantly discovering new territory while playing onstage. It’s a kind of free form poetry that only exists in this intrinsically American art form that began by blacks playing live music in the brothels and bars of New Orleans, including Louis Armstrong, one of the most influential figures whose career spanned five decades, literally introducing a new style of music to the entire world. His enthusiasm is so apparent she can’t help but be moved by his passion, where he later brings her to a small jazz club where they are literally smitten. This conversion, of sorts, has a way of persuading the viewers to give this kind of movie a chance, where jazz and cinema are synonymous with a treasure-trove of history, where all you have to do is kick back and enjoy, allowing the artistry to work its wonders.

Much of the film does exactly that, borrowing from the past, replicating some of the wondrous moments of movie history, where couples would fall in love and find themselves transformed by imaginary Hollywood backlot sets that couldn’t be more luxuriously decorated, transcending the limitations of theatrical space, where we watch the couple float through the stars of the Griffith Observatory, waltzing into the air as planets and galaxies roll by. This is thoroughly enchanting stuff, where it’s hard not to be moved by the changing moods of the romantic couple whose lives become a brilliant mind-altering fantasia that comes to represent their unspoken interior worlds, filled with a dazzling elegance that literally fills the screen, shot by cinematographer Linus Sandgren in extra-wide CinemaScope. Most of this has been seen before, where it’s like a collection from movie history, but the most poignant moments are reserved for just the two of them, as the viewers become invested in their characters once they reveal themselves to us with such brazen authenticity. The film uses the changing seasons as chapter headings that invoke different periods of their lives, which don’t always mesh as we might expect. Perhaps the biggest contrast comes when Sebastian is hired to play keyboards in a popular jazz fusion band called The Messengers lead by an old school friend Keith (John Legend), complete with a singer, scantily clad dancers, and other MTV music video looks, where he’s finally making money, but growing farther away from his dream. Their onstage performance couldn’t be more hostile to the film’s artistic concept, yet it represents what’s more customarily accepted in the modern world, where the format is to make a record, then go on the road for a year or so promoting the music. This has a disastrous effect on their relationship, while Mia devotes all her time writing and staging a one-woman play that is an instant flop, sending her back home to the safety net of her parents. With their dreams deferred, a single event changes the status quo of avoidance and disinterest, offering Mia, and perhaps even their relationship another chance. Her audition is the most personalized and poignant moment of the film, “The Fools Who Dream,” (“Here’s to the hearts that ache, / Here’s to the mess we make”), becoming a mantra for the thousands of people who have flocked to Hollywood having this exact same dream, just hoping they might get their chance, but the exhilaration of most are left dejected and disillusioned. The film imagines two completely different endings, where one is like the flip side of the other, where you get your fantasy fairy tale ending as well as a more realistic possibility, where both are one in a million chances, but all it takes is that one lucky break. Mia’s heartfelt audition is easily the most original aspect of the film and is the one scene that far and away distinguishes it from the rest, as overall the film feels more like a recreative montage of cinematic scenes and styles that came before. Chazelle has stylishly created a melodramatic tearjerker, a musical film fantasia, and a sure audience pleaser.

Film Comment: Nicolas Rapold September 13, 2016 |

In Venice, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, the festival opener, furnished many critics with the opportunity to perform their enthusiasm. Far sadder specimens of the contemporary musical have elicited similar manufactured ballyhoo, so yes, again, nothing new. But the sonic shambles of the film’s opening number (a traffic-jam hoedown) set a low bar and display a tin ear, and the artistic-underdog story told by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling felt more and more like pandering. Instead of being gleefully transported by any given number, I began to cringe when a character could clearly feel a song coming on.

Senses of Cinema: Marc Raymond December 14, 2016

My favourite film of the festival, and the clear Academy Award frontrunner which had an enthusiastic reception at Venice, Telluride, and Toronto, is Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, one of the most exuberant expressions of pure cinema in many years. The only major critique is that it is fairly derivative, not so much of Classical Hollywood musicals but of the whole revisionist tradition, especially Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964) and Martin Scorsese’s underrated New York, New York (1977). But Chazelle’s execution here is almost flawless, putting to full effect the vast, expensive Hollywood machinery (including his charismatic stars) that most of his contemporaries manage to squander. From the joyous opening on a Los Angeles freeway to the bittersweet final fantasy, I cannot recall having a more enjoyable time in a movie theatre.

LA LA LAND Ken Rudolph Movie Site

Girl meets boy. Girl loses boy. Regret. That's the plot in a nutshell; but that isn't the movie. What auteur Damien Chazelle has done is to lovingly (and not always successfully) collect the musical tropes of the 1950s and give them a post-modern twist. The two lovers, played with fervor by Emma Stone and muted passion by Ryan Gosling, break into song and dance fantasies to express their emotional, but unspoken inner lives. The fantasies rely heavily on a familiar, but reality-enhanced version of Los Angeles. And the music is mostly jazz inflected (except for one rock anthem sung by John Legend). The film requires a suspension of disbelief that can only happen if the viewer is transported by the beauty of the music and visuals, and the skill of the actors to bring it off. For me, the visuals dazzled; but the music fizzled. I loved the innocence that Stone brought to the role of Mia. And I admired the keyboard chops and dedication of Gosling, even though his character never quite meshed for me. But more than anything, as an Angeleno of over seven decades, I was entranced by Chazelle's nostalgic love letter to my city and to the passé musical film genre that I yearn for. But that's just me. I loved this movie despite its flaws.

Cineaste: Richard Porton December 12, 2016

An overemphasis on “buzz” is perhaps the silliest, as well as the most dismissable, aspect of Toronto’s characteristically self-congratulatory fanfare. 2016’s loudest buzz was reserved for Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, a schematic retooling of the movie musical that had premiered several weeks before in Venice and was featured as a “Special Presentation” at TIFF. Chazelle’s film, while not without its pleasures, spawned fawning reviews by many journalists eager to laud a film that was deemed Oscar-worthy by the trade papers. Weighed down with forgettable songs and wan choreography, La La Land is an overcalculated synthesis of motifs culled from big-budget American Fifties musicals and Jacques Demy’s more melancholy film operettas. Cribbing its basic formula from A Star is Born, Chazelle attempts to reignite the glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Age with a tepid narrative that revolves around Mia (Emma Stone), an aspiring actress who ultimately achieves great success and her stormy, ultimately doomed affair with Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a jazz musician whose career is going nowhere fast. Despite some sporadically appealing scenes in which the stars show off their respective dance moves and fairly weak singing voices, Chazelle’s confection fails because it’s a pastiche that lacks the conviction of the films that inspired it. Perhaps La La Land has garnered praise merely because making any sort of musical at all in the twenty-first century is considered a noteworthy achievement.

Cinema Scope: Diana Dabrowska September 05, 2016

Alfred Hitchcock once said that a “good film should start with an earthquake.” Damien Chazelle must have kept that in mind, because La La Land kicks off with a bang, an energetic musical sequence that transforms a Los Angeles traffic jam into the coolest place on earth, a modern-day fantasy variation on Weekend (1967), appropriately shot in a single Godardian long take. The impossible becomes possible, but there are still some people on the ground that are “dragging and rushing” (to quote J.K. Simmons’ Oscar-winning Whiplash villain), chiefly Mia (Emma Stone), an aspiring actress, and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a jazz musician clueless about his future. Dreamers and outsiders both, they are clearly a match made in heaven, and when they dance together, they’re like poetry in motion.

Chazelle’s film is about love, but it’s also about something less romantic: it’s about learning how to compromise and to grow up, how to swallow humiliation, and all the things that get left behind in the process. The conceit of California as a place where a person cannot distinguish between winter and spring becomes a suggestive background for a generation that seems lost en route to true self-determination—there is no map showing the way from “La La Land” to the real Los Angeles. The characters are stuck in their dreams, like rebels without a cause—and Chazelle shows them watching Nicholas Ray’s movie together.

There are other Old Hollywood homages too, and yet while the musical numbers are amazing and fresh (and filled with nods to Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen), they’re not simply eye candy. La La Land shows the ambition of Whiplash meeting the melancholia of Casablanca. There, Humphrey Bogart had to make a fateful decision about his beloved’s faith, and the same thing happens here. Chazelle doesn’t just reference Curtiz’s classic—he updates it for a generation too realistic to decide that they’ll always have Paris in the end. The final sequence leaves you spellbound, reflecting our own desires back at us, which is the essence of cinema. La La Land may look like the world that we dream about, but it also understands the cruelty that can come out of (or undermine) those dreams. The film is happy, but without a happy ending; it’s shot in CinemaScope, and yet it’s still an intimate masterpiece.

Film Comment: Michael Sragow December 08, 2016

Everything about La La Land balances the retro and the cutting-edge, including the title phrase, which has a definite 1980s ring to it but may be coming back strong, just like denim jackets. Damien Chazelle’s musical about two Los Angeles dreamers, a jazz pianist named Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and a struggling actor named Mia (Emma Stone), is a slender, charming anomaly—a nostalgia trip geared for immediacy. Chazelle’s script combines a girl-meets-boy story with a glad-rags-to-riches tale, then filters it through the films of Astaire and Rogers, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, Vincente Minnelli, and, especially, Jacques Demy. For the 31-year-old Chazelle, who broke through with the mechanical and overheated Whiplash (2013), La La Land is a big leap forward. His filmmaking exuberance and the energy and sweetness of his two stars give this thin soup considerable tang.

The story is comprised of elements so dusty they could have been stored in a fall-out shelter. Seb and Mia meet not-so-cute on a backed-up freeway—he angrily honks his horn, she gives him the finger—yet she falls for his music when she stumbles on him tickling the ivories at a restaurant. We’ve already learned by then that Mia works as a barista on the Warner Bros. lot, rooms with three other aspiring performers, and has run the casting gauntlet on one fruitless, soul-shriveling audition after another. Now we go back in time to learn why Seb is in such a foul mood. There’s no market for what he wants to do, which is to play his idea of pure jazz, which encompasses Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, though his own pet compositions sound more like elegant movie music or Broadway reveries. His boss at the restaurant (J.K. Simmons) wants him to tinkle holiday tunes. He dreams of opening a jazz club on a historic site that he says is being desecrated as a “samba and tapas” joint. (Seb expresses disbelief at the concept, but a quick Google search suggests that “samba and tapas” is an actual thing.) Seb scowls at Mia during their first three meetings, but there’s no doubt that his serrated edges surround an honorable soul and that her big heart and innocence will pierce his defenses. The film’s wispiness, in an odd way, adds a modicum of suspense. After the film gambols through its romantic beats, we wonder, “Where will they go from here?”

The movie’s splashy freeway opening features dozens of dancers of every racial and ethnic type filling out an ultra-wide CinemaScope screen as they cavort in between and on the hoods of cars while singing an L.A. anthem: “Another Sunny Day.” It’s infectious and amusing, but after that and a girls-night-out group song called “Someone in the Crowd,” I dreaded facing one tricked-out chorus number after another—neat packages of energy tied up with gimmicky bows, like a water-soaked rotating shot from the point of view of fun-lovers who leap into a swimming pool at a Hollywood Hills party. Linus Sandgren’s virtuoso moving camera appears to have everything except a set of brakes, and Chazelle shoots the works with visual effects that make us feel we’re fizzing inside a champagne glass.

Still, from the start, Stone packs wit and passion into her nightmare try-out scenes, while Gosling is a master of slow-burn frustration. Chazelle’s canniest move was casting these two people, not only because of their acting gifts, but also because they were virtually “born in a trunk.” Gosling began his performing life as a Mouseketeer on the Disney Channel’s Mickey Mouse Club. Stone started acting on stage to overcome childhood panic attacks, and as a teenager moved to L.A. with her mom to act on TV and in films. Gosling, who has alternated strings of artistic and/or commercial hits with misfires, and has taken a couple of time-outs from acting, imbues Seb with a persuasive ebb and flow of cockiness and ruefulness. Stone, who once said she hit “rock-bottom” when the producers of TV’s Heroes turned her down, explores a sunny character’s capacity for humiliation and despair.

When Seb and Mia’s opposition turns to attraction, they face the music and dance—and they’re marvelous together. At that point, Mandy Moore, the choreographer, who comes from Dancing with the Stars, drops the rhythmic acrobatics and takes up the rough magic of two game performers expressing the push-pull of emotions via movements that go artfully in and out of synch. Chazelle and Sandgren frame their jumps, taps and sways so we see them from head to toe, registering every click of heel on pavement, each skyward-swooping gesture, as if they’re giving outward form to the swelling of their hearts. Both Gosling and Stone are comfortable enough to look as if they’re just playing around while maintaining a ballroom posture or a balletic line. As singers, they’re even better. Early on we learn that Gosling has an apt voice for balladry, soft and insinuating, like Chet Baker’s (Gosling belongs to an indie-rock duo, Dead Man’s Bones), while Stone has a breathy quality but is also firm and unwavering (she recently played Sally Bowles in Cabaret on Broadway). Whether vocalizing or whirling or both, they convey sentiment, lightness, and warmth more directly than most practiced musical-comedy stars. They provide us with a pleasure comparable to hearing Diane Keaton sing “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” in Woody Allen’s Radio Days, and they have the benefit of moving expressively, too, rather than standing at a microphone.

Considering that the songwriters had to create something out of nothing—a complete score from Chazelle’s Platonic ideal of show tunes—composer Jason Hurwitz and lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul inject surprising oomph into the lovers’ duets and a feathery lyricism into their solos. (Pasek and Paul have just won raves for the Broadway production of Dear Evan Hansen.) You want Mia and Seb to connect partly because you want to see Stone and Gosling perform together. And when they’re apart, they’ve still got game. In her designated showstopper, Stone manages to deliver a salute to what The Muppet Movie calls “the lovers, the dreamers, and me,” with a conviction that carries us along, even if the number itself does resemble Kermit the Frog’s “Rainbow Connection” reshaped as a torch song.

Chazelle dresses Mia and her friends in colors straight out of a primary crayon box (one of several nods to Demy’s Young Girls of Rochefort) and places them in a dreamscape that’s tantalizing, bracing, yet naggingly derivative of everything from Swing Time to Cover Girl. La La Land begs to be dubbed “a love letter to L.A.,” but it’s a tourist’s love letter, complete with the usual jokes about traffic and the dominance of the movie industry, and shrewdly put together from picture-postcard locations like the Griffith Park Observatory and the Watts Towers and Angel’s Flight as well as cultural landmarks like the Rialto Theatre in South Pasadena. Chazelle wants us to see that Seb and Mia are just passing through one apartment or another on the way to artistic fulfillment. Their supporting relationships—whether Mia’s with her interchangeable roommates and nondescript parents, or Seb’s with his loving sister (Rosemarie DeWitt) and affable bandleader (John Legend)—might as well have been written in invisible ink.

Mia falls in love with Seb’s talent, and Seb becomes Mia’s biggest booster, advising her to write a role for herself when the breaks don’t come her way. (She creates a one-woman show.) La La Land is said to be an “adult” fantasy because each of them eventually experiences the conflict between love and art. Chazelle proves that he can write a blistering domestic argument or two, but his vision isn’t rich enough to support the magical sight of the couple soaring to the top of Griffith Park Planetarium and dancing in the stars as well as the couple bickering over dinner about Seb being trapped in a regular job that takes him on the road playing music he doesn’t love. The movie’s two sides don’t mesh. Its resolution is too deliberately laid out to be authentically poignant. At the end it’s still an adolescent fantasy, just a bittersweet one—a wish fulfillment with a slightly guilty conscience.

Chazelle has said that his biggest influence by far is Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and the film’s “five years later” epilogue is an attempt to meld the devastating Christmastime postscript of Cherbourg with the kind of kaleidoscopic alternate-universe dance number that climaxed Minnelli and Kelly’s An American in Paris. It’s dazzling, all right, but there’s no zing or heartbreak to it. Demy’s song-and-dance universe was the unlikely, inspired product of his youth in Nantes, a commercial port town in Western France where his family ran an auto-repair shop. Chazelle is all about paper moons and cardboard seas and canvas skies.

Demy, unlike Chazelle, uses music and stylization to sustain an atmosphere of heightened feeling whether his lovers are together or torn apart. His romance about first love and adult love is the unusual movie that fully honors both. Everyone probably remembers something about Umbrellas: that the dialogue is sung; or that its songs became international hits (notably the one under the title “I Will Wait for You”); or that Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo, as the salesgirl in her widowed mother’s umbrella shop and the garage mechanic who lives with his aged aunt, are a surpassingly graceful couple. But the mother (Anne Vernon) is also a wonderful character, worldly wise yet not sour; and after Castelnuovo is called up for service in Algeria, the globetrotting Parisian who courts Deneuve turns out to be a hell of a guy, just as the gal Castelnuovo catches on the rebound becomes his rock of sanity. Chazelle’s conception doesn’t have that depth or follow-through. (And Demy was only two years older than Chazelle is now when he made his masterpiece.)

Chazelle possesses an undeniable gift for transport, and that is rare. But his yen for myth-making is too flimsy, because it isn’t rooted in anything except his love for movie musicals. He’s a talented director, but it would do him a disservice to laud him, prematurely, as a giant. He’s the opposite of Antaeus—he loses his potency when he comes to earth.

Reverse Shot: Nick Pinkerton Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, December 08, 2016

'La La Land': How a Young Filmmaker Resurrected the Hollywood Musical David Fear from Rolling Stone magazine

The Empty Exertions of “La La Land” Richard Brody from The New Yorker

The New Yorker [Anthony Lane]

The Novelty and Nostalgia of La La Land Christopher Orr from The Atlantic, December 9, 2016

Slant Magazine [Christopher Gray]

La La Land Scott Pfeiffer from The Moving World

MUBI's Notebook: Lawrence Garcia December 16, 2016

iNFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski] also seen here: The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]

Every Movie Has a Lesson [Don Shanahan]

Aisle Seat [Mike McGranaghan]

Movie Review: La La Land Kurt Loder from Reason magazine

ScreenAnarchy.com (Jason Gorber)

The much-chattered about opening scene of “La La Land” telegraphs a thoroughly stunted message Billy Kent from Salon, February 25, 2017

Fantastically Stylized 'La La Land' Is A Musical Tour-De-Force David Edelstein from NPR

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Owen Van Spall]

GQ: Scott Tobias September 15, 2016

The House Next Door [Keith Uhlich]

Screen Daily: Fionnuala Halligan

Time: Stephanie Zacharek August 31, 2016

The Film Stage [Rory O'Connor]

Indiewire: Eric Kohn

Sight & Sound [Tom Charity] December 14, 2016

I Heard That Movie Was [Justin Morales]

queerguru.com (Roger Walker-Dack)

MUBI's Notebook: Fernando F. Croce September 16, 2016

The A.V. Club: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

DVDTalk.com [Jeff Nelson]

AwardsCircuit.com [Clayton Davis]

An Old-School Hollywood Musical That's In Love With Hollywood: 'La La Land' Ella Taylor from NPR

JonathanRosenbaum.net: Jonathan Rosenbaum The Potent Manic-Depressiveness of LA LA LAND, December 16, 2016

HeyUGuys [Stefan Pape]

Flickfeast [Stephen Mayne]

Independent Ethos [Ana Morgenstern]

Battleship Pretension [Rudie Obias]

The Cinemaholic John H. Foote

Filmaluation [Hemanth Kissoon]

Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

jdbrecords [Jeffery Berg]

The Upcoming [Filippo L'Astorina]

Movies with Mae [Mae Abdulbaki]

Flickering Myth [Freda Cooper]

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Flickfeast [Katie Wong]

FilmFracture [James Jay Edwards]

Las Vegas Weekly: Mike D'Angelo

Movie Mezzanine: Tina Hassannia

Letterboxd: Brandon Nowalk

Here's How They Made La La Land's Extravagant Opening Musical Number Raisa Bruner from Time magazine, December 9, 2016

Oscars: Is La La Land Still the Front-runner? Kyle Buchanon from Vulture

All of Emma Stone's Adorable La La Land Press Tour Looks So Far E-Online

La La Land is EW's best movie of the year Entertainment Weekly, December 8, 2016

'La La Land' named best film by New York film critics Jake Coyle from Salon, December 1, 2016

'La La Land' stars take Castro by storm Ton Bravo interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, December 9, 2016

Showbiz Dreams Collide With Reality In 'La La Land' NPR interview by Audie Cornish, December 9, 2016

Emma Stone on Why the World Needs a Movie Like La La Land Right Now Raisa Bruner interviews actress Emma Stone from Time magazine, December 8, 2016

Emma Stone on Starring In La La Land and Working With Ryan ... Jason Gay interview with actress Emma Stone from Vogue magazine, October 14, 2016

'La La Land' Review: Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling Light Up a ... Todd McCarthy from The Hollywood Reporter

'La La Land': From Unrealistic Hollywood Dream to Critical Acclaim ... Rebecca Ford from The Hollywood Reporter, November 3, 2016

Oscars: 'La La Land' Asks the Academy to Take Song and Dance Seriously Gregg Kilday from The Hollywood Reporter, December 9, 2016

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: How 'La La Land' Misleads on Race, Romance and Jazz The Hollywood Reporter, February 15, 2017

'La La Land' Review: Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in a Retro ... Owen Gleiberman from Variety

Variety: William Friedkin

Telegraph Film [Robbie Collin]

Irish Film Critic [Ashley Marie Wells]

Irish Film Critic [Tracee Bond]

Charleston City Paper [T. Meek]

Los Angeles Times [Justin Chang]

For 'La La Land's' music, it's all about the characters and themes The Los Angeles Times

LA Weekly [Alan Scherstuhl]

La La Land (film) - Wikipedia

San Diego CityBeat: Glenn Heath Jr. December 13, 2016

Review: Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone Aswirl in Tra La La Land A.O. Scott from The New York Times, also seen here: Review: ‘La La Land’ With Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone

'La La Land' Sizzles in Limited Release in North America The New York Times

‘La La Land’ Makes Musicals Matter Again Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

L.A. Transcendental: How 'La La Land' Chases the Sublime Mekado Murphy from The New York Times

'La La Land' Has an Oscars Edge: Its Hollywoodness Cara Buckley from The New York Times, January 5, 2017

Chbosky, Stephen

THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER B+ 90

USA (103 mi) 2012

I, I will be king
And you, you will be queen
Though nothing will drive them away
We can beat them, just for one day
We can be Heroes, just for one day

And you, you can be mean
And I, I'll drink all the time
'Cause we're lovers, and that is a fact
Yes we're lovers, and that is that

Though nothing, will keep us together
We could steal time,
just for one day
We can be Heroes, for ever and ever
What d'you say?

I, I wish you could swim
Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim
Though nothing,
nothing will keep us together
We can beat them, for ever and ever
Oh we can be Heroes,
just for one day

I, I will be king
And you, you will be queen
Though nothing will drive them away
We can be Heroes, just for one day
We can be us, just for one day

I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing, by the wall (by the wall)
And the guns shot above our heads
(over our heads)
And we kissed,
as though nothing could fall
(nothing could fall)
And the shame was on the other side
Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever
Then we could be Heroes,
just for one day

We can be Heroes
We can be Heroes
We can be Heroes
Just for one day
We can be Heroes

We're nothing, and nothing will help us
Maybe we're lying,
then you better not stay
But we could be safer,
just for one day

—“Heroes,” by David Bowie and Brian Eno, 1977, David Bowie - Heroes + lyrics - YouTube long version (6:11)

Right now we are alive and in this moment I swear we are infinite. —Charlie (Logan Lerman), while listening to “Heroes”

A smart and perfectly delightful teen film that fills the vacuum left behind by John Hughes, written and directed by the source novelist Stephen Chbosky, who like Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, uses a series of letters written to an anonymous friend to describe events happening onscreen, expressed through the inner narration of 15-year old Charlie (Logan Lerman) as he is about to enter his first year of high school. While the book’s popular success in 1999 makes it part of the cultural landscape, following the exploits of a melancholic teenager whose troubled life has seen its share of sorrows, the movie version has a similar emotionally evocative tone, but leaves out pertinant details and many of the more memorable scenes from the book, including the infamous poem. Perhaps what works best is the author’s own adaptation which features terrific writing, extraordinary powers of observation, and a superlative cast of fully realized characters that bring the book to life. Set in the early 90’s in a suburb just outside Pittsburgh, Charlie is seen as a shy introvert bordering on suicidal, recently recovering from depression, filled with trepidation as he feels no one likes or understands him, including his family who haven’t a clue who he is or what he thinks, overshadowed by his more popular athletic older brother Chris (already in college) and straight A student sister Candace (Nina Dobrev). Dreading his first day of school, he measures the day by the numbers of accumulating disasters that occur and counting how many days are left in the school year. Only one class interests him, English, where his teacher, Mr. Anderson (Paul Rudd), is sadly the only friend he makes. Charlie has recurring flashbacks of his Aunt Helen (Melanie Lynskey), perhaps the closest relative he had as a child, as she died in a car accident when he was 6, something he still blames himself for, where bad feelings overwhelm him at the most inopportune moments.

What we learn from Charlie’s letters is an astounding honesty about himself, beautifully capturing the thoughts of an alienated and outcast young boy on the brink of experiencing life for the first time, including how to make friends, his first teenage crush, how to deal with his estranged family, and his first experimentation with sex and drugs, where we also learn he’s dealing with the recent suicide of his best friend. Lerman, who is certainly better looking than your typical teen wallflower, is a sympathetic figure and excels at quietly existing on the fringe, not really participating, but making himself available for others to interact with him just by being there. In his overly polite manner, not wishing to offend anyone, he manages to meet a group of non-conformist seniors who just pull him along, as they’re a friendly group that describe themselves as misfits, including his two favorite people, the outrageously nervy Patrick, Ezra Miller from We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), and Patrick’s delightfully gorgeous step-sister Sam (Emma Watson), who he secretly falls in love with instantly to the car radio music of David Bowie’s “Heroes.” Watson’s infamous Harry Potter notoriety works wonders here as millions have already fallen in love with her, so other than wearing too much make-up on occasion, she’s positively delightful, where especially after watching her dance so enthusiastically to Dexys Midnight Runners “Come On Eileen” THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER - Clip "Come On Eileen" YouTube (56 sec), or the same scene broken down by individual shots The Perks of Being a Wallflower - b-rolls 3 YouTube (5:43), any high school kid could only idealize being able to spend time with her. This dynamic duo of Patrick and Sam literally lead him into the promised land of opportunity, including his first party, his first experience of getting high, his first dance, and his first chance at being accepted into a clique, where Sam expresses joyfully “Welcome to the island of misfit toys.” Patrick is used to garnering attention as a class clown, where his natural flamboyance is startling, but much of that is all an act while he secretly has a closeted gay relationship with one of star football players.

Certainly one of the centerpieces of the film is the high school reproduction of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), where they all get dressed up in glam costumes while lip-synching, dancing, and mimicking the movie which is playing behind them. Both Patrick and Sam are featured prominently, while Charlie sits in utter amazement at all the glitter and exposed flesh. This production has a way of bringing them all closer together, but in typical high school fashion, things don’t go as they seem. Sam has a lame boyfriend, while Charlie’s own sister has a popular goofball for a boyfriend who he witnesses hitting her, where instead of help, all Candace wants is for him to keep this quiet. Meanwhile his affection for Sam is shown in a completely inappropriate manner, which makes everyone instantly recoil from him, sending him into his darker regions of despair, where he is overcome by his flashbacks and pent-up anxieties. Actually this is one of the things the film does best, which is take the time to develop complex but continually flawed characters who have their own hang-ups and insecurities to deal with, as they all come unglued at some point, where the reality of the writing is a welcome relief.

I walk around the school hallways and look at the people. I look at the teachers and wonder why they're here. If they like their jobs. Or us. And I wonder how smart they were when they were fifteen. Not in a mean way. In a curious way. It's like looking at all the students and wondering who's had their heart broken that day, and how they are able to cope with having three quizzes and a book report due on top of that. Or wondering who did the heart breaking. And wondering why.

In his letters, Charlie is always painfully honest, where his exhilaration allows the audience to soar with him, from the dizzying elation to the crippling depression, where the feelings are never condescending, People may look back at their high school days as among the happiest days of their lives, but when it’s happening, it also includes the most heartbreakingly painful moments, where young kids struggle to stay alive in those moments and not become engulfed in the pain. Charlie’s realizations are eye-opening, where the flood of possibilities barely ever materializes, where all the good times may be reduced to a few precious moments, where the intensity of those experiences are unlike any others. How do you live with that? How can you trust the future? Even though Charlie’s freshman year is a bit idealized, as rarely would seniors spend so much time with such a withdrawn kid, nonetheless he experiences the gamut of teenage problems, where we share his struggles to live through them, where the expressed emotions are painful and true.

Based on the book by Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower follows introverted teen Charlie (Logan Lerman) as he attempts to successfully navigate his first year of high school - with his status as an outsider alleviated by his friendship with a quirky brother and sister (Ezra Miller's Patrick and Emma Watson's Sam). One can't help but walk into The Perks of Being a Wallflower with almost impossibly high expectations, as Chbosky's timeless novel remains one of the best and most authentic portrayals of the high school experience. It's clear immediately, however, that Chbosky has, for the most part, done an absolutely note-perfect job of bringing this story to the big screen, with the movie's subdued yet frequently heartbreaking atmosphere heightened by the efforts of a spectacularly well cast group of performers. Miller and Watson are certainly quite good in their respective roles, yet there's little doubt that The Perks of Being a Wallflower's considerable success is due primarily to Lerman's note-perfect and consistently captivating turn as the astonishingly sympathetic central character. It's worth noting, too, that Chbosky manages to infuse the simplest of sequences with a palpably affecting feel that proves impossible to resist (eg Sam and Charlie's first kiss), and there's little doubt that the filmmaker has, generally speaking, done a superb job of shepherding his material's transition from an R-rated book into a PG-13 movie - which ultimately cements The Perks of Being a Wallflower's place as a stellar and consistently engrossing adaptation.

Exclaim! [Daniel Pratt]

Each generation has its staple "young adult" book that's revered and fondly looked back upon as a grown up. What was once To Kill a Mockingbird, Where the Red Fern Grows or Catcher in the Rye is today The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Fans of Perks are a ravenous group. They have sites scattered all over the Internet, in multiple languages, where they share their adoration of the book, as well as their high school experiences with one another. This is why it came as no surprise that fans were abuzz when it was announced that author Stephen Chbosky would be bringing his 1999 bestseller to the big screen.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is the coming-of-age story of Charlie (Logan Lerman) as he begins his freshman year of high school. Charlie, a smart and quiet young man that doesn't have any friends, is hopeful that high school will change things and grant him a new lease on social life.

His fortunes are initially rough, until he strikes up a conversation with Patrick (Ezra Miller), an older student in his shop class, later meeting Patrick's stepsister, Sam (Emma Watson), which helps him find his stride and a place to fit in. The story then follows Charlie as he navigates new friendships and experiences the ups-and-downs of being a teenager, all while dealing with some demons of his past.

The original book is a series of personal letters written by Charlie, which could have posed a challenge adapting to film. However, Chbosky incorporates some of the more effective entries as montages and voiceover narration to maintain the sense of intimacy. The deeply personal feelings of Charlie are always front-and-center, recreating the novelistic sense that we're inside his head sharing his experiences.

Aiding this is the vulnerability and awkwardness that Logan Lerman captures wonderfully, much as Emma Watson embodies the free-spirited and quirky Sam with aplomb. The standout performance comes from Ezra Miller, however, capturing our attention from the moment he steps on screen, generating the larger-than-life feeling of the character written in the book.

It's rare that a film adaptation can completely encapsulate a book's essence, yet in this case, Stephen Chbosky does a masterful job with his screenplay and direction. Chbosky had no prior directorial experience, other than an indie film (The Four Corners of Nowhere), but had experience writing the 2005 adaptation of Rent and the TV series Jericho.

While some campy moments of the film may seem reminiscent of John Hughes's classics of the '80s, the performances, thematic continuity and dialogue are sure to elicit smiles and tears.

While fans will undoubtedly flock to this film and will be pleased with the result, those unfamiliar with the story should also find it easily relatable since, at some point in all our lives, haven't we all felt like an outsider on the Island of Misfit Toys?

World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]

This new classic coming of age tale told in the form of an epistolary novel about the woes and wonders experienced by a sensitive youth of fifteen in his freshman year at a Pittsburgh high school in the 1990's has been made into a fine film directed by the book's author. Logan Lerman gives an extraordinary, scarily complex performance as the narrator-protagonist, Charlie, with a superb supporting cast headed by Emma Watson and Ezra Miller and including Joan Cusack and Paul Rudd. The Perks of Being a Wallflower opens in theaters September 21, 2012. In addition to the book (published in 1999), Stephen Chbosky was the writer and executive producer for all episodes of the cult TV series "Jericho." This is his sophomore effort as a director for the big screen.

Emma Watson steps beyond her Harry Potter fame to play Sam, the complex half-sister of Patrick (Ezra Miller), the slightly manic gay senior who magnanimously rescues green freshman Charlie from isolation and loneliness at high school, and the girl Charlie winds up longing for. For those who know Miller only as the horrific young killer of We Need to Talk About Kevin (and didn't see him in other films such as City Island) will find out he can play nice guys too, though there's usually an edge. Watson is subtle and understated; the striking, mercurial Miller seems to be having a fabulous time in his campy but appealing role.

Charlie has a repressed traumatic early memory (revealed at the film's end) that makes him feel crazy. He sees things, though when he connects successfully with people that goes away; hence the lifeline represented by Sam and Patrick and the circle they make him a part of. Equally important support comes from Charlie's English teacher Bill (Paul Rudd), who recognizes his brilliance immediately and gives him classics to read outside class and write about. Meanwhile Charlie is penning a series of letters, excerpted in voiceover here and the substance of the source novel, in which he describes his life to an imaginary friend. Charlie desires Sam but accepts as his girlfriend instead Mary Elizabeth (Mae Whitman), who forces herself on him. When he kisses Sam in front of the group and reveals that he prefers her, crushing Mary Elizabeth, Patrick tells him not to come around any more, and this ostracism leads to a return to depression and craziness -- till Charlie blacks out in the school cafeteria and protects Patrick from a gay bashing by friends of the football star Brad (ohnny Simmons), Patrick's secret lover. Charlie menaces all the bully boys and scares them off; Patrick welcomes him back into the fold and he becomes a bit of a superhero at school.

The novel references a great many books, movies, and TV shows, and Charlie wins over his new school friends with his great musical taste, staring with The Smiths being his favorite group. The kindly Bill gives him Harper Lee, Fitzgerald, and Salinger to read, among others. These include, in the novel, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and Chbosky's book too was often banned for containing strong references to homosexuality, drugs (Charlie smokes pot and drops acid), sex (he eventually has it), and suicide (his best friend has recently killed himself when the novel begins). Rocky Horror Show costume singalong nights are regular rituals for Patrick and his posse and Charlie eventually gets pressed to don a shiny gold bikini and is a success.

It's no mystery how Perks of Being a Wallflower the novel could have become a huge hit with young people, perhaps the Catcher in the Rye of the 2000's. Charlie is an adorable everyboy to identify with. He experiences every sort of teen problem, shyness, insecurity, sexual confusion, a disturbing fantasy life arising from abuse. He lives through and overcomes them all to morph from nerdy outcast to semi-feared cool guy. It's a transformation that may be a bit too satisfying but avoids being too easy, perfect, or permanent. Lerman proves equal to the demands of the role of Charlie. An impressive young actor, he's both a mirror and a window, his mobile face always suggesting a lot is going on in Charlie's volatile young heart and mind. I might prefer the dry wit of Richard Ayoade's Submarine. It's British, and its young protagonist is seen more ironically. On the other hand Perks quite successfully leads us through emotions that seem both painful and true, including along the way references to a ton of things young Americans relate to or want to learn about. The press screening I watched was packed with young people, big fans of the book who seemed not at all displeased with how its author had transferred it to the screen.

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cinemixtape.com [J. Olson]

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theartsdesk.com [Emma Dibdin]

DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan]

The Perks of Being a Wallflower - PopMatters Robert Alford

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]

Home Theater Info DVD [Douglas MacLean]

DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Thomas Spurlin] Blu-Ray

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Film School Rejects [Kate Erbland]

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower Karina Longworth from The Village Voice

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia novel

Cheadle, Don

MILES AHEAD C+ 78

USA (100 mi) 2015 ‘Scope IndieGoGo page

While it must be nearly impossible to write an original portrait of jazz legend Miles Davis, a guy that defied labels or standard definitions, who continually evolved musically throughout his entire career, much like Bob Dylan in the folk rock scene, two iconic figures that literally paved their own ways in the music industry, alienating fans in the process by moving from acoustic to electronic music, both ironically recording for the same music company, Columbia Records, where their music literally defined the changing 50’s and 60’s American landscape. That said, no one would have expected anything along the lines of this picture, requiring 30 producers, written by a conglomerate of writers that includes the director and lead actor, making this a definitive Don Cheadle project, yet what he’s produced is so ridiculously cartoonish and over-the-top that it amounts to a comedy, as in the Keystone Cops comedy of errors. Not sure that’s what they had in mind, but there’s nothing about this that remotely resembles the life of Miles Davis, yet, to its credit, it does contain authentic Miles Davis music throughout, like the familiar refrains of “So What” Miles Davis - So What - YouTube (9:06), but no archival footage, which might have been nice. One of the things that worked so well in Asif Kapadia’s Amy (2015), winning the Academy Award for best documentary feature, was the extraordinary range of personal expression obtained through archival footage, where by the end of the film the audience felt they knew her as a person. That’s simply not the case here, as Davis’s personal life has always been viewed as off limits, elusive and of secondary importance to a man of cool reserve and detachment who held everything back, at times even turning his back to the audience, revealing mysterious, enigmatic qualities of his personality, where his music revealed more than he ever did. Instead it was all about the changing styles of his music, continually redefining himself through the years, having been at the forefront of the bebop, cool jazz, symphonic and orchestral jazz, harmonic jazz, small combos, recorded live performances, free association and eclectic jazz fusion movements. By all accounts, he was literally a rock star at the end of his life, complete with a drug history, largely cocaine, where his reputation was that of an uncompromising artist driven to be constantly innovative.

What’s surprising about the film is its similarity to James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour (2015), another unauthorized biographical account of the life of author David Foster Wallace, as viewed from a Rolling Stone reporter who followed him for a week on a book tour. Here Ewan McGregor plays the obligatory Rolling Stone reporter Dave Braden, who ends up at the front door of Miles Davis’s luxurious Upper West Side apartment, something of a con artist driven to write his comeback story, who strangely latches onto him throughout the entire ordeal. What transpires is a mix of what actually happened, much of it seen in flashback, and a fictionalized version of what might have happened, as these were the kinds of thoughts that kept running through the head of Miles Davis during one of the more troubled periods of his life between 1976 and 1980 when Davis turned fifty and his drug addiction kept him from performing or even playing his horn. Why we need a cringingly unsympathetic reporter accompanying Miles throughout is anyone’s guess, feeling like a major misstep, as there’s no interest whatsoever in his shady character, as all eyes remain focused on Miles (Don Cheadle). In fact, the world is probably starved for a more definitive film on his life and his music, as he led such a reclusive and mysterious life, but this isn’t it. This is more of a comic action buddy picture where Braden accompanies Miles on a series of spontaneous misadventures revolving around drugs, money, guns, a stolen tape, and fast cars, with Davis as the temperamental, drug-addled, out of control gangster who pulls his gun out and starts shooting whenever things don’t go his way. While not mentioned in the film, Davis had hip-replacement surgery in 1975 and spent nearly a year recovering, using cocaine, heroin, and drinking heavily to alleviate the pain, an event that probably led to his public disappearance and might explain why he was walking with a noticeable limp during this time. Despite the immediate contempt and disdain expressed by Miles for this interloper reporter (and just about everyone else), they remain joined at the hip throughout, like a bloodsucking leech one can never get rid of.

Nothing compares to the prolific 30-year association of Miles Davis and Columbia Records from 1955 to 1985, where in jazz music there is simply no precedent, as the legendary artist released 48 studio albums, 36 live albums, 35 compilation albums, 17 box sets, 3 soundtrack albums, 57 singles, and 3 Remix albums. According to his biographer Ian Carr, (Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography, 1998), Miles was accorded a special status with Columbia Records shared only with classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz, where even through what he calls Miles’s “silent years,” both were regularly paid through a fund the recording company created just for them. In one of the earliest scenes in the film, Miles reveals his anger at not receiving a check for $20,000, which is the impetus for everything that follows, as he orders Braden to hop in the front seat and drive his deluxe Jaguar to Columbia, where he accosts one of the producers (Michael Stuhlbarg) with a gun, demanding immediate payment, taking whatever cash the man had in his pocket. After this little episode, he’s ready to part ways with Braden, but he pleads his case by promising to score some primo coke, which leads them into yet another escapade, the first of a neverending series of excursions through a dark labyrinthian alley. Unlike the path most taken, revealing a great artist at the height of his powers, Cheadle stakes out the territory for his worst years, where sex and drugs occupied the place in his life where music used to be. Always having a reputation for being cold, withdrawn, and distant, this film also accentuates his quick temper, though it does provide some underlying background, using Cincinnati as a substitute for New York City. While playing a club in the Village, he becomes fascinated by the smoldering beauty of celebrated dancer Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), utilized more as a femme fatale, where his playing and her sensual dancing lead to exquisite improvisational routines that reveal a playful intimate side of their relationship that leads to marriage. But Davis is over possessive, perhaps fueled by a drug and alcohol-induced jealous paranoia, demanding that she stop working and accompany him on his worldwide tours. In one racially tinged scene, he’s arrested by a white New York cop who thinks he’s loitering in front of Birdland in upscale Manhattan, bashing him over the head with his nightstick when he refuses to leave and promptly has him arrested. While this is a recreation of a real event, it was also a prelude to escalating domestic violence at home, where Taylor fears for her life and eventually leaves him.

Much of what transpires afterwards has the ache of regret, as if the past is viewed through a drug-induced stupor, where events feel exaggerated and lack coherency, yet they resonate with Miles’s abrasive personality, “If you gonna tell a story, come at it with some attitude, man,” with Cheadle’s performance feeding off that raspy voice, the result of a throat operation in the mid 50’s, where he’s the kind of guy that reacts to everything around him, where early on he objects to hearing his name on the radio connected to jazz, claiming the word is all but extinct. In something of a funk, he calls the radio program and tells them, “Don’t call it jazz, man — that’s some made-up word. It’s social music,” actually making a request to hear “Solea” Miles Davis - Sketches of Spain - Solea - YouTube (12:21), a sad, funereal lament that offers a wide range of timbres, tonalities, and harmonic structures that literally transcend the jazz medium. While there is a somewhat convoluted story about a missing tape that was stolen from his apartment, where Miles insists upon getting it back, by any means necessary, as it contains secret recordings that he was keeping from the studios, the standard gun-toting movie format utilized may equate to some masculine, superhero idea floating around in his head, like Superfly, but this inexcusably cheapens the man and the film, as it doesn’t feel nearly complex enough, though it does allow the viewer to spend a day in the life of an imaginary version of his persona, where if that’s any indication of what each day is like, the man was not cheated out of adventures in life. Jumping around to different periods in the past, his basement recording studio is like a time machine, where actors play the familiar roles of Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, and Wayne Shorter, seen informally rehearsing “Nefertiti” Nefertiti by Miles Davis - YouTube (7:55) while Miles steps upstairs in a violent fight with his wife, where the obvious link between the turbulence in his life and his music is unmistakable. Bits and pieces of the heavily percussive and electronic score of “Bitches Brew” Miles Davis - Bitches Brew - YouTube (7:30), also a brief snippet in performance, Miles Davis - Bitches Brew Clip 1 YouTube (2:04), can be heard as his life spins out of control during chase scenes and car shoot outs. What’s altogether missing in this film is any insight into personal relationships with band members or friends, as they are never seen conversing or just hanging out, instead it’s a portrait of a man living all alone in a dark, cavernous apartment haunted by memories, real and imaginary, where his life as a hermit has left him unable to play, where instead he’s been practicing on the organ. There is an invigorating moment when he plays father figure to a young upstart (Keith Stanfield), someone he’s been dismissive of throughout, where arguably the best parts of the film are the final scenes literally exploding in a psychedelic color fantasia, an imaginary concert in the future “after” his comeback where he’s worked his way back into supreme form.

Short Takes: Miles Ahead - Film Comment Andrew Chan, March/April 2016

Bad musical biopics pose a threat when their mythologies take hold in popular consciousness. There should be no danger of that with Don Cheadle’s flimsily conceived Miles Davis passion project, which never lingers in the mind long enough to do the music much damage.

The opening scene makes no promises of insight, dropping us into an SNL caricature in which the middle-aged icon rattles off one-liners in a crotchety rasp. It’s momentarily enjoyable as a showcase for one of Hollywood’s most charismatic and underappreciated actors. But the loose narrative that emerges around the performance does neither star nor subject any favors.

Only intermittently flashing back to the trumpeter’s glory days as a master of cool, Miles Ahead focuses on his drug-addled seclusion in New York in the 1970s. This savvy move enables Cheadle to highlight Davis’s contemporary relevance: free of the trappings of jazz traditionalism, the artist’s public downfall is reimagined as label-flouting heroism.

The film is undone not by its interpretation of Davis’s legacy but by its caper plot, in which a hapless journalist (Ewan McGregor) gets entangled in the chase for a missing session tape. As more characters are trotted out, a shade of irony is inadvertently thrown on Davis’s oft-repeated notion of “social music.” Far from evoking jazz’s communal ecstasies, Miles Ahead prompts us to ask how a genius could attract so many boring people into his orbit.

Don Cheadle Is Electrifying in Miles Ahead -- Vulture David Edelstein

When, in 2006, Miles Davis was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a family member announced that there was a biopic in the works starring Don Cheadle — which was, as it turned out, news to the actor. But the idea was inspired. As the cocaine-addicted Davis in Miles Ahead, Cheadle has the right wariness and sad, shocked-open eyes. He can seem at once self-contained and feral. His rhythms are his own.

Cheadle ended up co-writing (with Steven Baigelman) and directing Miles Ahead, too, and it’s half-marvelous. But it was hobbled from its inception. After years of jumping through hoops, Cheadle couldn’t get enough financing without a white co-star — who turned out to be Ewan McGregor, playing a journalist pushing a story on the musician’s five-year disappearance (circa 1979) from the music scene. It’s not as bad as it sounds, though. Rather than employing the usual, dopey, birth-to-death biopic scenario, Cheadle focuses on a single episode and leaves plenty of room for flashbacks. The emotional gist is that Davis has never recovered from the loss of his wife Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), who finally fled when — after cheating on and beating her — Davis pulled a gun and began hunting phantom intruders.

The movie’s actual scenario is a pure fantasia, complete with a McGuffin — an elusive session tape made during Davis’s fallow period that his record company wants and a nefarious manager (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his client, a young trumpeter (LaKeith Lee Stanfield), steal. There’s a lot of raging and gun-waving and even a car chase, and it might have all come together with a better, less abrupt payoff. Stanfield — who played a fiercely hurting teenager and wrote his own devastating rap in Short Term 12 — looks more and more like a major actor, and he doesn’t let the machinations of the story penetrate the character’s sphere of arrogance. Everything that’s great in Miles Ahead seems marginal to the main plot — when Cheadle lets himself go with the flow.

His style is jazziest when he travels into the past, as Miles’s memories drift in on a wave of blue notes and cigarette smoke and the younger Miles — aloof but not oblivious — surveys his listeners before fixing on Frances. As embodied by Corinealdi, she’s too much woman for Miles, not just ripely beautiful but bursting with a need to make her own art. Jealous whenever she travels (despite his own myriad sex partners), Miles makes Frances give up classical dance to devote herself to him. He bends his bandmates to his will, too, but gives them room to find their inner pulse. Miles Ahead probably doesn’t show enough of Davis’s rapport with Gil Evans and Herbie Hancock for the true fan, but it captures what you hear on many of Miles’s records — the sound of great artists alone together.

The writer George Grella Jr. described Davis as an “intensely, erotically intimate soloist: you overheard his thoughts, and he was ‘telling it like it is.’ ” That’s what Cheadle evokes when he’s onstage — and he is, at the very least, fingering the notes, having grown up playing sax. This is probably Cheadle’s most electrified performance since the one that made him a star, as the incorrigibly homicidal Mouse in Devil in a Blue Dress. Hobbled by illness, his Miles still seizes the space, using Davis’s high rasp to force people to lean in close. When he smokes cigarettes, he smokes hard. He burns too hot to settle into existing forms. He might have wished the movie broke out, too.

Don Cheadle Brings Miles Davis to the Big Screen in 'Miles ... Maria Garcia from Bio, October 2015

Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle’s first turn as director, plays like a buddy action movie, rather than a biopic about the iconic jazz composer and trumpeter Miles Davis. In a press conference at the 2015 New York Film Festival, the actor, who co-wrote with Steven Baigelman (Brother’s Keeper, 2002), and who portrays Davis in the film, said that the screenplay was inspired by the “stories in my mind when I listen to his music.” Cheadle’s imagination led him to one of the most troubled periods in Davis’s life, between 1976 and 1980, when his drug addiction made him unable to play his horn or to compose.

A trendsetter and iconoclast, Davis is credited with originating “modal jazz,” where one or two scales or “modes” are used to replace harmonic structure as the basis of a song’s theme. For the uninitiated, that style is best defined by “So What?” on the Kind of Blue album. Bits of that song and other cuts from Davis’s masterwork album are heard in Miles Ahead. Jazzheads will immediately note that the music often does not match the eras depicted in the film, although it is always used effectively. That is a tribute to Cheadle’s knowledge of Davis, and terrific work by composer Robert Glasper and Oscar-award winning sound editor Skip Lievsay.

All biographers (especially cinematic ones) take poetic license, but Cheadle creates an entirely fictional relationship between Davis and a Rolling Stone reporter named Dave (Ewan McGregor). This mismatched duo and their wildly improbable adventures involving guns and cars are necessitated by the unfortunate decision to set the film at a creative low point, when Davis turned 50, the age Cheadle is now, the age of summation and reflection.

Miles Ahead shifts between the “present,” the 1970s, and earlier periods in the artist’s life, sometimes with no obvious visual or aural cues. Triggered by events or by drug-induced stupors, these extended flashbacks are mostly about Davis’s first marriage to Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). She was a member of the famed African-inspired troupe, the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. (A head shot of Taylor appears on Davis’s album, Some Day My Prince Will Come.) Other memories are of Davis’s many extra-marital affairs, famed recording sessions, and his long struggle with debilitating hip pain from an osteoarthritic condition.

Cheadle accurately depicts Davis’s sexism and his penchant for violence. In the backward glance to Taylor, the trumpeter asks her to give up dancing in order to be with him. She does, but their marriage ends, as it did in real life, when Davis brandishes a knife in a jealous, drug-infused rage. Another flashback chronicles the 1959 incident outside the original Birdland jazz club in New York City that led to Davis’s arrest and beating by police. A scene set in the 1970s in which Davis demands money from Columbia Records, gun in hand, is amusing but imagined. During what biographer Ian Carr (Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography, Harper Collins, 1998) calls Davis’s “silent years,” he was awarded a status at Columbia then shared only with classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz—he was paid regularly through a “fund” the recording company created for him.

In the film, Davis’s limp is attributed, in part, to a gun battle at a boxing match in New York City in which a bullet enters his hip. (Production took place in Cincinnati, its exteriors not a convincing double for New York.) With Dave lending support, Davis retrieves a stolen tape of a secret recording session. While the events are fictional, the tape is not: In 1978, while Davis was recovering from his addiction, he began to play the organ, and taped part of an improv with guitarist Larry Coryell, bassist T.M. Stevens, and drummer Al Foster. In the movie, he finally plays that tape for Dave and a young trumpeter (Lakeith Lee Stanfield) as proof that even in a cocaine haze, he was working.

Cheadle gives a credible performance as Davis, the only well-drawn character in Miles Ahead. McGregor has inspired moments as the stereotypical and morally bankrupt reporter. Up and comer Corinealdi (The Middle of Nowhere, 2014) as Taylor is essentially eye candy. The film is aided by Roberto Schaefer’s excellent cinematography (Quantum of Solace, 2008) and Hannah Beachler’s (Fruitvale Station, 2013) skillfully designed sets. It is Beachler’s work, and Gersha Phillips’s (The Whistleblower, 2010) eye-popping costumes for Davis that often signal shifts between the movie’s “present” and the 1960s-era flashbacks.

The score in Miles Ahead is sublime, a mix of archival recordings of Sketches of Spain, Kind of Blue and Agartha, among others, and newly recorded music or orchestrations featuring eclectic composer-pianists Glasper and Herbie Hancock. The latter played with Davis as late as 1971, but mainly between 1964 and 1968. Cheadle, who plays saxophone, told Downbeat Magazine that he learned to play the trumpet for his portrayal of Davis, but that he is not heard on the film’s soundtrack. Cheadle credits Vince Wilburn, Davis’s nephew, and a drummer, for founding the project that became Miles Ahead.

As a child in 1979, Wilburn accompanied his mother Dorothy (Davis’s sister) to New York City; along with Cicely Tyson, they helped Davis kick his drug habit. According to Carr, Wilburn’s musical talent was nurtured somewhat by Davis, but it was the boy who played an important role in his uncle’s life, showing so much interest in his music that Davis again picked up his trumpet. The scene of the young trumpeter who, near the end of the movie, listens to the stolen tape and begins playing, may be a homage to Wilburn.

The music leads the storytelling in Miles Ahead, which is named for one of Davis’s albums. That begs the question of whether the film will appeal only to fans. Actually, Cheadle’s approach of ignoring chronology, and having the music evoke the images, makes Davis’s work accessible to all audiences. The screenplay is another matter. One wishes the filmmaker-biographers would have dropped the buddy plot and left us alone with Davis and his memories.

Kind of Clichéd: How the Miles Davis Movie Could Have Been Better Richard Brody from The New Yorker

Birth of the Uncool: Don Cheadle's Miles Davis Biopic 'Miles ... David A. Graham from The Atlantic, March 31, 2016

The Book on Miles - The Atlantic Francis Davis on Miles, the Autobiography, January 1990

Miles Ahead: Don Cheadle's Bold & Complex New Movie Armond White from The National Review

A white buddy for Miles Davis: Don Cheadle's struggle to get ... Paula Young Lee from Salon, February 19, 2016

Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead and Ethan Hawke's Born to Be ... - Slate Sketches of Pain, by Fred Kaplan, March 31, 2016

Miles Ahead :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Melissa Weller

Miles Ahead Review - Don Cheadle Captures Miles Davis ... Matt Patches from Esquire

Review: Don Cheadle hits lots of sweet notes in the not ... Drew McWeeny from HitFix

NYFF Review: Don Cheadle's 'Miles Ahead' Isn't Really a M ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE

The Film Stage [Nick Newman]

Spectrum Culture [Peter Tabakis]

Cheadle's 'Miles Ahead' Hits Bum Notes but Still Swings | Village Voice Alan Scherstuhl

Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead Is the Anti-Biopic -- Vulture Jada Yuan and Trupti Rami

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Luke Shaw]

World Socialist Web Site [John Andrews]

Miles Ahead | Film Review | Slant Magazine Elise Nakhnikian, also seen here: Slant Magazine [Elise Nakhnikian]

SassyMamaInLA.com [Courtney Howard]

Reel Insights [Hannah McHaffie] also seen here: Hannah McHaffie [Reel Insights]

Review: Don Cheadle Strives to Make a Film That Miles Davis Would ... Tambay A. Obenson from indieWIRE

Review: 'Miles Ahead' Pays Tribute to Miles Davis While Playing ... David Alm from Forbes, March 31, 2016

Review: Don Cheadle hits lots of sweet notes in the not ... Aric Suber-Jenkins from iDigital Times

Film Review: Miles Ahead | Film Journal International Doris Toumarkine

Miles Ahead Review: “Don Cheadle is astonishing as Miles” George Cole from Jazzwise magazine

Miles Ahead Peter Travers from Rolling Stone

Miles Davis beat his wives and made beautiful music · Hear ... Sonia Saraiya from The Onion A.V. Club, November 22, 2013

You've Never Seen Miles Davis Like This Before Angela Salazar from InStyle magazine

Don Cheadle Really Plays Trumpet In 'Miles Ahead,' But Not In The Way You Might Think Allie Funk from Bustle

How Accurate Is 'Miles Ahead'? The Movie Doesn't Act Like Your Typical Biopic Allie Funk from Bustle

PopOptiq (Dylan Griffin)

Filmaluation [Hemanth Kissoon]

Irish Cinephile [Eamonn Rafferty]

Don Cheadle and Emayatzy Corinealdi discuss Miles ... - Slate Aisha Harris, March 9, 2016

Don Cheadle on playing the drug-addled Miles Davis in “Miles Ahead,” and the toxic costs of Hollywood racism Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, March 29, 2016

Don Cheadle was the writer-producer-actor-director behind 'Miles Ahead' even before he knew it Mark Olsen interviews with writer and director from The LA Times, April 1, 2016

Don Cheadle's Miles Davis Biopic 'Miles Ahead': NYFF ... David Rooney from The Hollywood Reporter

'Miles Ahead' Review: Don Cheadle's Miles Davis Biopic ... Nick Schager from Variety

BBC - Culture - Film review: Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead Owen Gleibermn from The BBC

Miles Ahead review – magnificent mooch through the ... - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Miles Ahead review: Don Cheadle is reverent without much ... Jordan Hoffman from The Guardian

Miles Ahead review – ode to a jazz giant | Film | The Guardian Mark Kermode

Miles Ahead, film review: an open-ended biopic ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab

Miles Ahead review - The Telegraph Robbie Collin

The really stupid thing about genius biopics? They're ... - The Telegraph The really stupid thing about genius biopics? They’re (almost) all the same, by Robbie Collin

Toronto Film Scene [Aren Bergstrom]

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

In portraying jazzman Miles Davis, Don Cheadle took his cues from his subject Michael O’Sullivan from The Washington Post

Here's how Miles Davis and Nina Simone were alike and different Michael J. West from The Washington Post, April 15, 2016

'Miles Ahead' movie review: Jazz biopic eschews convention in search for the essence of Miles Davis Mike Scott from The New Orleans Times-Picayune

Miles Ahead (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

'Miles Ahead,' Don Cheadle's valentine to jazz and Miles Davis, hits a few strange notes Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

Miles Davis: A man and his quest - latimes Don Heckman from The LA Times, January 12, 2003

Miles Ahead Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Angelica Jade Bastien

NYFF 2015: "Miles Ahead" | Festivals & Awards | Roger Ebert Scout Tafoya

'Miles Ahead' review: Don Cheadle's inventive ... - Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Review: 'Miles Ahead,' an Impressionistic Take on Miles Davis - The ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

Don Cheadle Is Star and Director of the Biopic 'Miles Ahead ... The New York Times

Don Cheadle Narrates a Scene From 'Miles Ahead' The New York Times

6 Miles Davis Albums That Changed Music NPR

Chechik, Jeremiah S.

BENNY & JOON B 87

USA (98 mi) 1993

Some cultures are defined by their relationship to cheese. —Joon (Mary Stuart Masterson)

In the charming and whimiscal manner of DAVID AND LISA (1962), HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971), or DOMINICK AND EUGENE (1988), we now have BENNY & JOON. Made a few years after EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990) and the same year as WHAT’S EATING GILBERT GRAPE (1993), a film this very much resembles, with Mary Stuart Masterson as Joon playing the mentally challenged Leonardo DiCaprio part, what I found especially interesting is how Masterson holds her own onscreen with Johnny Depp, and may even provide the superior performance. Depp’s role is very showy, almost the stereotype of a Johnny Depp chosen eccentric, which is obvious from the very first moment we see him sitting alone in a tree. While there is a nod to Buster Keaton through a shot of a book Depp is reading, there is no tribute to Chaplin, as Depp completely steals the Dance of the Dinner Rolls, “The Oceana Roll” scene from THE GOLD RUSH (1925) seen here YouTube - Charlie Chaplin- Table Ballet on YouTube (1:02). It might have been nice over the end credits to see both performances side by side on a split screen, as Depp even copies the facial expressions and the Chaplin body language. While many assume Depp plays the title character, actually he plays Sam, with Aidan Quinn as big brother Benny, who looks after his mentally ill sister after both parents died in a car crash. Like the subsequent children’s story NANNY MCPHEE (2005), Joon wears out her housekeepers, going through the available list until all that’s left is a private group home that her psychiatrist (CCH Pounder) finally recommends to Benny. Reluctant to send her away, this idea hovers over the rest of the film like an elelphant in the room.

Joon seems to enjoy herself when left alone and doesn’t wander off or get into outside trouble, as she follows her routines faithfully and loves painting, but she has her moments when she feels suspiciously picked on and singled out, where the world is turning against her and she loses all sense of control, either striking back in an angry tantrum or feeling the heightened anxiety of a panic attack. She is apt to throw things, which sends the last housekeeper out the door. Benny works as a car mechanic where he gives the best cut rates in town, but otherwise is committed to taking care of his sister, always sharing affectionate moments with her every day, where the two have a special closeness, which prevents Benny from moving on in his life, as he has no life other than work and his sister. But unlike the horrible bad guy characters Quinn has become associated with late in his career, he’s an especially nice guy here, and the well rounded cast of his poker friends include Oliver Platt and Dan Hedaya, with brief appearances from William H. Macy. When they play poker, they don’t have money, so the stakes are things lying around the house, where Sam is an unwanted cousin given away in a poker game.

The two oddballs quickly express an interest in one another, which becomes fascinating when it turns romantic, where Depp goes through the repertoire of silent film comedians, wearing funny suits and a hat, rarely speaking, and performing mime tricks in public which always draw a crowd. Written by Barry Berman and Lesley McNeil, there are also a memorable string of one-liners in this film, making this an endearing film, perhaps overly cute in its treatment of mental illness, which gets glossed over in favor of laughs and sentiment. But give the two stars credit here, as they are both brilliant, where Depp’s comic timing and apparent ease with the physical comedy makes him look like a natural, and Masterson is wonderfully quirky with her innocent curiosity and quick mood changes, not to mention a surprising Holden Caulfield wit on display. Perhaps the real discovery is an early appearance by none other than Julianne Moore, absolutely adorable as a cute young waitress who dabbles in B-movies, who brings a much needed sanity to the situation, as she shows good judgment as the love interest for Benny, who’s too wrapped up in Joon’s swooning desires and sudden pangs of freedom to notice. Without Depp, no doubt few would ever have been attracted to this film, but Masterson is a scene stealer in her own right. However, few will forget the lunacy of Depp’s infamous window washing routine outside her window, something that would fit right into any Wallace & Gromit film.

"I'M GONNA BE (500 MILES)"
Written by Charlie Reid (as Charles Reid) and Craig Reid
Performed by The Proclaimers
Courtesy of EMI Records Group/Chrysalis Records
by arrangement with CEMA Special Markets

"PINETOP'S BOOGIE WOOGIE"
Written and Performed by Pinetop Perkins (as Joe 'Pinetop' Perkins)
Courtesy of Antone's Records and Tapes

"PUSHIN' FORWARD BACK"
Written by Chris Cornell (as Christopher J. Cornell), Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament
Performed by Temple of the Dog
Courtesy of A&M Records, Inc.

"HAVE A LITTLE FAITH IN ME"
Written and Performed by John Hiatt
Courtesy of A&M Records, Inc.

"CAN'T FIND MY WAY HOME"
Written by Steve Winwood
Performed by Joe Cocker
Courtesy of Capitol Records
by arrangement with CEMA Special Markets

Benny and Joon Time Out London

Another one flies over the cuckoo's nest in this soft-hearted romantic three-hander. Joon (Masterson) plays cooky - sorry, severely emotionally unstable. She's a vegetarian painter in airy print dresses and bobby sox. Sam (Depp) is a kind of gentle man-child fantasy creation, who expresses himself through Chaplin and Keaton mime routines. Piggy-in-the-middle is Quinn's blue-collar straight man, Joon's together brother Benny, who looks after her at home, just managing to keep her from being institutionalised. He refuses to bless Sam and Joon's marriage of true minds...It's acted out in the secondary emotional register of the glass menagerie: whimsical, delicate, idiosyncratic, barmy.

Benny & Joon Ken Eisner from Georgia Straight

The mentally ill are always with us. Hollywood, however, only notes this when a heavyweight star wears craziness well (Olivia de Havilland was a memorable wall-crawler) or when the times are rife with wackiness. Maybe the '60s are back, because Benny & Joon bears more than a passing resemblance to those Age of Aquarius films–like King of Hearts, They Might Be Giants, Morgan, and A Fine Madness–in which insanity was presented as just another groovy lifestyle choice. Still, this delightful new dramedy has enough grounding in today's lowered expectations to keep from floating off on whimsical fairy dust.

The title characters–an overprotective Spokane auto mechanic and his unbalanced sister–are played by Aidan Quinn and Mary Stuart Masterson at their puppy-dog best. (Woody Harrelson and Laura Dern were slated for these parts and dropped out, fortunately.) Sam, an illiterate local with a Buster Keaton fixation (played by a remarkably physical Johnny Depp), joins this charmingly dysfunctional family by default when June loses a particularly heated round of high-stakes poker with some neighbourhood buddies. June and Sam fall in love, of course, even if he can't spell her name, and in the bargain, they even drag a pretty waitress (Julianne Moore) into Benny's monklike life, but not without decorative complications.

There can be no doubt that Benny & Joon sanitizes its subjects. The film-makers dropped any reference to June's schizophrenia, fearing the dreaded "downer" effect, and her one freak-out scene appears shockingly out of place (where's Olivia when you need her?). What we get from June, mostly, is a lot of quirky behaviour–she's an abstract painter, natch–and, like the loquacious Irish housekeeper she dispenses with early on, the script is "given to fits of semi-precious metaphors". There's much banter but few concrete explanations: we know how Sam feels about his comic heroes, but what does his ignorance of language mean?

Happily, Montreal-born director Jeremiah Chechik (National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation) has such a light, unhurried touch that the cleverness never cloys. Great tunes from the Proclaimers and John Hiatt alternate with an offbeat score from Rachel Portman (she's done plenty of Mike Leigh films), and the leads are touchingly in tune with their underwritten parts. In the end, there's enough said by the actors' eyes to fill several clinical notebooks.

Review for Benny & Joon (1993) Ryan Ellis

One of my favourite romantic comedies is 'Benny & Joon'. It probably shouldn't be. There's plenty of precious behaviour, the kind of stuff that often tickles my gag reflex. And while I'd ordinarily throw darts at a film that asks us to believe that true love just might be able to overcome serious mental illness, it works beautifully this time. Cheese abounds, but this slice of processed fromage has both charm and grace in delectable doses (unlike this sentence).

Credit the actors. It's unlikely that Barry Berman's script or Jeremiah Chechik's direction would have succeeded without Johnny Depp, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Aidan Quinn playing the leads. This movie belongs to Depp, although he plays neither Benny nor Joon. Quinn and Masterson have those roles and they're effective as the grown-up brother & sister with a quirky co-dependent relationship. She's battling schizophrenia (the highs, the lows, the moments of pyro...) and he's sacrificed a social life to take care of her because their parents died in a car accident many years before.

It's only recently that Joe Average Moviegoer has actually bothered attending Johnny Depp's movies ('Pirates Of The Caribbean', for example) to turn him into the one-of-a-kind movie star he always should have been. If there was any lingering doubt after 'Edward Scissorhands' that the "21 Jump Street" pin-up star was a terrific actor, 'Benny & Joon' erased it. He actually manages to underplay here, even though he spends much of the film doing uncanny impersonations of Chaplin & Keaton. The highlight of this schtick comes in a clowning sequence straight out of the silent movie days. Depp's Sam is a kook, alright---with all his dicing of potatoes via tennis racket and his ironing of grilled cheese sandwiches---and I couldn't get enough of him.

Masterson's performance as a quirky artist woman-child is not quite as memorable, partly because the quirky artist nutso type has been a cinematic staple a bit too often over the years. However, Masterson hits the right notes, even when all the screenplay sometimes asks for is sulking and petulance. But even if she had been dreadful in this movie (which clearly isn't the case), I'd forgive anything for the look on her face when she sees her beloved Sam swinging outside the window of her hospital room. Ode to joy moment right there and you can never get enough of THOSE at the movies.

In a way, Quinn has the most difficult role. He's the serious grump, saddled with the cautious big brother bit. If Quinn hadn't been careful, Benny would have come off as a first-class bore. He doesn't, though, and that's probably because the actor is so natural and sympathetic. People find themselves putting their own lives on hold for needy family members all the time. Overprotective or not, this is the kind of man who can be counted upon to always do the right thing. Quinn has had to wade through these kinds of wet blanket waters in other movies (see 'Legends Of The Fall') and he somehow comes out okay on the other side. It's our good luck that good actors can do that.

It doesn't take long for Joon & Sam to fall heels over head in love, so the friction is between Joon & Benny. Chechik and Berman are smart to make the siblings resent each other quite a bit even BEFORE Sam enters the picture. They've spent a lot of time together and, love notwithstanding, they're kinda sick of each other. Sam is the ignitor for change in their lives, stirring up what needed to be stirred long ago. Like Rain Man before her, Joon is unbending and couldn't function if expected to change her routine. [Join the club, sister!] At the end of the story, she'll try to grow up a bit, but she might never have wanted to try unless she met Sam.

'Benny & Joon' gels because of those 3 actors, but the supporting cast is wonderful too. Chechik is either a marvelous judge of talent or just plain lucky to have cast so many superb actors. Julianne Moore, Dan Hedaya, William H. Macy, Oliver Platt, and CCH Pounder all turn up and do some nice things. Moore (who was just getting a solid foothold in Hollywood when this film was released in 1993) is vulnerable and sweet as Ruthie, a local waitress, former Z actress, and Benny's potential lady friend. Hedaya and Macy don't have much to do here, but they're 2 of the best character actors of the past 15 years and I had to at least give them credit for THAT in this review.

Also providing great support are The Proclaimers with their big hit, "I'm Gonna Be". The catchy tune opens and closes the film, and it made me want to find the song wherever it is on the ol' CD shelf and give it a few more spins before bedtime. Speaking of music, Rachel Portman, Charlie Reid, and Craig Reid are credited with the score. What they've composed is a delight, especially the circus-like orchestration during the climactic "love can conquer any psychosis" scene.

The state of modern rom-coms is mighty awful, so 'Benny & Joon' is even more of a standout now than it was in 1993. Its innocence and irresistible charm make up for credibility gaps, but the whole deal wouldn't fly without ol' Eddie Scissorhands. Sam is a Johnny Depp original. Nevertheless, Mary Stuart Masterson has the best line in the picture, sadly declaring that raisins are just "humiliated grapes". There's something about that line that made me smile. Then again, lots of things in this movie made me smile.

DVD Review - Benny & Joon Suzanne LaFrance

The Parallax Review [Hanna Soltys]

Mutant Reviewers From Hell listing many movie quotes

Qwipster's Movie Reviews - Benny & Joon review (1993) Vince Leo

DVD Verdict [Ryan Keefer]

dOc DVD Review: Benny & Joon (1993) Kevin Clemons

Review for Benny & Joon (1993) Mark R. Leeper

Benny & Joon Depp Inpact, including many quotes from the film

Benny & Joon | Movies | EW.com Owen Gleiberman

Variety.com [Emanuel Levy]

kamera.co.uk - film review - Ilo Ilo (2013) - Leo White

Movie Review - Benny & Joon - Review/Film; He's His Sister's ... Janet Maslin from The New York Times

Chen, Anthony

ILO ILO (Ba Ma Bu Zai Jia) B- 82

Singapore (99 mi) 2013 Official site

Awarded the Camera D’Or at Cannes for Best First Feature, where it reportedly received a fifteen-minute standing ovation, this is the first Singapore film to ever win a major award at Cannes, while several years earlier Chen was awarded a Special Mention prize for one of his short features. Chen also won the illustrious 50th Taipei Golden Horse Award for Best Feature Film, Best New Director, and Best Original Screenplay, beating out prestigious Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke’s 2013 Top Ten List #3 A Touch of Sin (Tian zhu ding), one of the best films of the year in two major categories, so this film comes to America with plenty of accolades. Chen graduated from the National Film and Television School based in the Beaconsfield Film Studios in Great Britain in 2010, where one of his instructors was Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski. Ironically Pawlikowski received the London Film Festival award for Best Film in 2013 with Ida (2013) while Chen won the Sutherland Prize for the Best First Film. Heralded as one of the best films to come out of Singapore, though I much prefer Eric Khoo’s more starkly unusual BE WITH ME (2005), this was written, directed, and produced by Chen, a film that drew on his own childhood experience, inspired by a Filipino maid that worked for his family in Singapore, but despite an honest and unpretentious style, the film is overly predictable and cliché ridden throughout, copying from far too many outside sources, lacking originality or any profound underlying complexity, where it actually recalls the more creatively inspired Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret’s Israeli film Jellyfish (Meduzot) (2007) that similarly won the Camera D’Or at Cannes in 2007. Both films feature a Filipino maid/nanny living abroad who is forced by economic circumstances to take care of other people’s family while their own children are looked after by family back home. The theme is also repeated in Lucas Moodysson’s MAMMOTH (2009), showing how a 7-year old grows closer to the Filipino nanny than her own emotionally distant parents, while a similar theme is expressed with a Mexican nanny in one of the sections of BABEL (2006). In each, the plight is the same as millions of service workers are forced to leave their families and countries of origin in order to earn an income that can support them all, always dreaming that this sacrifice will make a difference, where the distance creates heartbreaking circumstances when tragedy strikes at home, as they are powerless to do anything about it. To this one could add personal experiences of traveling through various establishments on the East coast all the way up through Maine, where Jamaicans seem to monopolize the service industry of housekeepers, all of them separated from their families back home, but financial circumstances create this dire necessity, where their work visas don’t allow full-time work, which means they are excluded from receiving health benefits, while their schedules and worksites can be changed at any time, creating built-in pressures and anxieties despite working in this country for over 20 years.

ILO ILO follows the Edward Yang template, especially YI YI (2000, though without the novelesque scope), in attempting to create a powerful family drama based upon a series of intimate moments, where the secret is creating realistic characters in a natural setting, where the use of meticulous detail is a key ingredient. This follows a similar pattern established in Boo Junfeng’s film SANDCASTLE (2010), where a Singapore director opened up his nation’s history to public scrutiny, which felt overtly modeled after the historical reflections of Hou Hsiao-hsien, who, it turns out, was one of the director’s teachers at the Asian Film Academy. While these are both inspirational Asian directors, they have a unique film aesthetic that is not easily copied due to the highly personal nature of their filmmaking. Nonetheless, Chen attempts to tell his own personal tale set against the historical backdrop of Asia’s 1997 financial crisis, where the father Teck (Chen Tian Wen) is a plastics salesman while his pregnant wife Hwee (Yeo Yann Yann, pregnant in real life, and winner of the Golden Horse Award for Best Supporting Actress) is part of a secretary pool for a large corporation. This leaves their dysfunctional 10-year old son Jiale (Koh Jia Ler) unsupervised for large periods of time, becoming a Macaulay Culkin HOME ALONE (1990) nightmare, a perennial headache for both the school and the family, as he can’t stay out of trouble, forcing the family to hire a nanny Teresa (Angeli Bayani), who has come to Singapore from the Philippines leaving her own infant son behind. Angry that he has to share his room, Jiale hates everything about her from the beginning, where she becomes Auntie Terry who feeds and bathes and dresses him, where she is otherwise attentive in every conceivable way, but he refuses to listen to her, avoids her at all costs, runs away every chance he gets, especially when she comes to pick him up after school, and continually jeopardizes Teresa’s job with neverending mischief, where she’s often forced to take the blame for his unruly behavior. Most of the action takes place at the same apartment complex or Jiale’s school during an era when electronic gadgets were all the rage, like the Tamagochi game that remains glued to Jiale’s hand, and the everpresent Sony Walkman that is plugged into everyone’s ears, reminding us of a time before Facebook when people did not need to be connected online all the time. Perhaps most striking is an incident when a man throws himself off the roof of their apartment complex, a jarring reminder of the dire impact of the tanking economy.

Taking a page out of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s TOKYO SONATA (2008), and before that Laurent Cantet’s TIME OUT (2001), the father loses his job but fails to mention this to the family, continuing to leave the house every morning in his daily routine while he explores a series of temporary jobs, where shame and humiliation play into this, where we see him scrubbing his own clothes by hand, refusing to allow Terry to help, as she’d otherwise discover a night watchman’s uniform. While Jiale plainly doesn’t receive the kind of attention he needs from his mostly absent parents, the only way he knows how to make sure they’re involved is to defiantly act up, by getting into constant trouble, where the school calls Hwee at her job as she’s typing out termination letters for staff at her job, which quickly downsizes in ever increasing numbers. But when the school gets ready to expel him for punching another kid, and neither parent can be found, it’s Auntie Terry who shows up pleading his case before the principal. A fascination with the lottery, of all things, gets him out of the school jam, as Jiale’s detailed scrapbook of winning numbers allows him to forecast winners with some degree of accuracy, something his teacher is able to take full advantage of. Hwee’s desperate turn to a self-help scam seems like a blatant reference to the mother’s supposedly bogus spiritual regeneration from a Zen mountain retreat in YI YI. As might be expected, Jiale slowly warms to his nanny, where their relationship becomes the primary focus of the film, as after all, she’s the one who’s around the most, who provides real affection, and has his best interests at heart, while he actually prefers her cooking to his mom’s anyway, so they eventually become fast friends. This mutual fascination catches the eye of his mother, feeling left out and neglected herself, especially as she enters the latter stages of pregnancy, where things only deteriorate when she discovers the full extent of her husband’s deceit, where their resources are depleted. No longer able to afford the luxury of her services, Terry regrettably must return back home to the Philippines, a move that plainly effects Jiale like no other, turning this sweet and slightly sentimentalized film into something of a heartbreaking tearjerker. Somewhat of a mix between commercial and arthouse fare, the rhythm of the film is established by the accumulation of daily activities, an observational character study combined with an eye toward ordinary everyday experiences, all set within a nation’s denial of overwhelming evidence leading to a financial collapse, necessitating a new society with different requirements and expectations. The film's title, as it turns out, comes from Teresa’s home province in the Philippines. In praising the film on awards night in Cannes, a jury headed by Agnès Varda said: “This film didn't have any music – and after being assaulted by overblown musical scores in so many pictures, that alone was a welcome sign of finesse and sensitivity.”

Ilo Ilo | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Joshua Rothkopf

The exquisite family dramas of the late Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang (especially 2000’s ‘Yi Yi’) are never far from the mind in Singaporean director Anthony Chen’s feature debut ‘Ilo Ilo’. Chen sets up a quartet of tense, realistic characters barely making it through Asia’s 1997 financial crisis. Teck (Tian Wen Chen) and his wife, Hwee (Yann Yann Yeo), are stinging from the economic bite, the former unable to confess his recent firing. Their wayward ten-year-old son, Jiale (Koh Jia Ler), is a bigger headache than your average Macaulay Culkin tyke, while a new Filipino nanny (Angeli Bayani, the movie’s anchor) accidentally drives a wedge between mother and kid. None of this is pushed into comic relief – the filmmaker lets his drama play out gently and us smile. Bath times become moments for frankness, squabbles spike into fury and forgiveness, and the work of keeping a clan together presses on. The whole thing is a warm beam of compassion.

New York : Ilo Ilo - Village Voice Chris Packham

In Ilo Ilo, director Anthony Chen depicts the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s in a decaying, claustrophobic world of temp job insecurity, bleeping Tamagotchis, bubble tea, and crooked hucksters selling "opportunity." Children play in the streets, seemingly oblivious to the cratered economy, but susceptible to the anxiety of their parents, aware of the laid-off workers throwing themselves from rooftops, and paying way more attention to the national lottery numbers than kids really should. Small details and incidents accrete into a pointillist rendering of despair. Teresa (Angeli Bayani), a young Filipina mother, has come to Singapore to earn money to care for her own distant family, working as a maid in the household of the pregnant Leng (Yeo Yann Yann) and the slobby, shambling Teck (Chen Tian Wen), a couple scrambling to support their maladjusted son, Jiale (Koh Jia Ler), and prepare for their unborn child. At first, resentful nine-year-old Jiale is angry that he has to share a room with the maid, bullying her and attempting to make trouble with his mother. But in the absence of his overworked parents, Teresa is his most reliable companion, their relationship evolving over six months into a cocktail of exasperation and love. Teresa struggles to maintain her poise against the growing resentment of Leng, who is jealous of the maid's friendship with her son. But where other films would pivot on that conflict alone, Ilo Ilo is about all four of the principal characters attempting to preserve their dignity in a world with a vested interest in stripping it away.

Teresa (Angeli Bayani) has left the Philippines in order to get a job in Singapore that will help with her family finances back home. She is to be a maid staying in the apartment building of the Lins family comprising Hwee Leng (Yann Yann Yeo) and Teck (Tian Wen Chen) together with their son Jiale (Koh Jia Ler). Her chores involve washing and cleaning as well as making food and looking after Jiale. Sometimes the rules and requirements placed upon her, particularly from Hwee Leng, seem a touch unreasonable, but her job is a necessity. An important duty is collecting Jiale from school, much to his chagrin and mocking from his classmates. He's a naughty kid, constantly in trouble with the teachers for his attitude. Teresa slowly forms a bond with Jiale, something that seems to be particularly important for him. She becomes Auntie Terry to the troublesome, stroppy boy who doesn't receive the attention he needs from his parents. They, admittedly, have a number of issues of their own to deal with. But circumstances change and, as time passes, maybe the family can no longer afford the luxury of a maid.

Anthony Chen's debut feature film is a carefully constructed drama helped by instinctively realistic performances. Inspired by his own recollections of his family having a Filipino maid during his childhood, the film's title is derived from a province in the Phillipines – the place where his own maid came from.

The pacing is languid as Chen slowly introduces us to this ordinary family dealing with their ordinary lives. The film is set around the time of the 1997 financial crisis and it becomes all too clear that, despite their perceived need for domestic help, the family are living beyond their means. The primary focus of the film is the relationship between Jiale and Aunty Terry. Jiale is a boy with needs that his parents do not really understand, he has a quick temper and he does not behave in a way that is expected of him, at home or in school. He does, however, seem to be developing an impressive set of bookmaking skills – using a scrapbook to predict horse racing and lottery results from news clippings. It's an unusual intellectual pursuit that does not impress his teacher... until Jiale gets out of trouble my advising him on the winning lottery numbers to purchase.

When Jiale attacks a fellow pupil who has mocked him mercilessly, the headmaster wants to expel him and it is Teresa who initially goes to the school to plead for him. Hwee Leng concedes to him receiving a whipping in front of the other pupils in order for him to stay; his own mother opting for corporal punishment over compassion. Teresa tries to maintain a position in employment whilst trying to understand a new society with different requirements and expectations. Jiale is undoubtedly troubled and needs more support than his parents can give him. His mother is expecting another baby and his father in total denial about the family's increasingly poor financial situation. And Teresa, too, has her own burdens. She has left her own baby in the care of relatives while she works in a foreign country to earn enough to support her family.

Ilo Ilo is an absorbing film that raises a number of issues, particularly surrounding migrant workers but, while these are important, Chen doesn't allow them to dominate what is ultimately a very human drama.

Cannes 2013. A Pinoy Ballad: Anthony Chen's "Ilo Ilo" Marie-Pierre Duhamel from Mubi, also seen here: Mubi.com Notebook [Marie-Pierre Duhamel]

Set in Singapore on the verge of the Asian crisis of 1997, Anthony Chen's first feature starts with a blurred shot: the back of a young boy doing something noisy and strange in front of a window. It works as a metaphor of what the film will tell: blurred reality, blurred futures, blurred conscience of the world in a young boy's mind before affection will make him grow up.

In young Jiale's middle-class family, Dad is a not too successful sales executive and Mom is a public officer, and she's expecting her second child. This is why she insists on hiring a maid. And since it is how the market goes, the maid will be Filipino. Teresa arrives in the family's small flat: not talkative, a good Catholic, keeping much to herself but frequently listening to music from home on her Walkman. Jiale bluntly rejects her, in the tradition of Chinese first born male tyranny. To the spectator's great satisfaction, Teresa reveals herself as a witty, strong-tempered woman who does not hesitate to firmly scold the brat. But while the relationships between Teresa and Jiale grow to affection and complicity, the family situation worsens. The financial crises eats up the family securities, the father loses his job and secretly takes on a night watchman position, the mother fears losing her own job and gives in to the local Dianetics-like phonies ("Hope is within yourself!"). Teresa secretly takes another job to make for the even more difficult situation of her family back home. Young Jiale alone seem happy to have found in Teresa the companion he needed, sparking off his mother's jealousy. The economics put a brutal end to Jiale and Teresa's friendship: the family has to send her home. Nothing is blurred anymore. Things are all too clear: inaccessible powers have made ordinary people pay for charlatan like speculations. The poorer they are the more they pay.

To tell his story of a not so far away past that says a lot about the present, Anthony Chen has chosen to focus on characters with a very welcome sense of "democracy." As Renoir's motto went: "Everyone has his own reasons." The father looks weak? He has the bravery to accept any job that comes. The mother nags more than the average? Despair and anxiety lead her to well-intentioned illusions. Jiale behaves like a brat? He dreams to cherish and protect someone.

In a time when "vintage" has affected so many productions, making most look like trendy antique shops on screen, Anthony Chen's reconstruction of the late 90s, thanks to his sense of colors, locations and faces, feels like a heartfelt, lived-through vision. Just as memory works: not as a catalog of objects but as a mix of images, sounds, words and details. Not easy to achieve in a place like Singapore where changes are lightning quick. Chen's direction mixes with great sensitivity his British NTFS experience and a most probable affection for Edward Yang's films, if not for Cantonese melodrama of the 50s. His commitment to real life and to characters make the episodes of the story unfold with a bittersweet naturel that never seem predictable nor forced.

In 2005, another Singapore director told the story of a Filipino maid in a middle-class family with one son. Kelvin Tong's The Maid was a horror film with a social touch. In Tong's film, the Filipino maid was a victim of a middle-class Chinese family's horrific plan during the "Ghost Month," when spirits and hungry ghosts come out from the lower realm. Anthony Chen's family also meets with the hungry ghosts that came to haunt Asian societies. Teresa has known them for ever. Anthony Chen, as well as young Jiale, wants her favorite song to be listened to and remembered.

Meniscus Magazine [Christopher Bourne]

Review: Singapores Oscar hopeful Ilo Ilo a hushed ... - HitFix Guy Lodge

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Owen Van Spall]

Cannes by Koehler: Ilo Ilo, Bends, and The Lunchbox - Film Comme Robert Koehler from Film Comment, May 22, 2013

Melbourne 2013 Review: ILO ILO, A Genuine Gem | Twitch Kwenton Bellette

Spectrum Culture [Pat Padua]

Ilo Ilo | Review - Ioncinema Caitlin Coder

Ilo Ilo Tim Grierson at Cannes from Screendaily, also seen here: Screen International [Tim Grierson]

Little White Lies [Oliver Lyttelton]

SBS Film [Lisa Nesselson]

Georgia Straight [Janet Smith]

Singapore Scores Big Win at Film Awards - Scene Asia - WSJ

Daily | Cannes 2013 | Anthony Chen’s ILO ILO David Hudson at Fandor, May 23, 2013

Daily | Cannes 2013 | BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR Wins the Palme d’Or David Hudson at Fandor, May 26, 2013

Ilo Ilo: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Dalton

Variety [Maggie Lee]

Film Business Asia [Derek Elley]

Stephen Holden - The New York Times

Chen Hsin-hsuan (Singing Chen)

GOD MAN DOG C 76

Taiwan (119 mi) 2008

Has anyone heard of a director named Singing Chen? Fairly obscure, you might think. Well remember little Yang Yang (Jonathan Chang) from Edward Yang’s YI YI (2000)? He shows up here in this Taiwanese film as a teenage guy who can consume more food than anyone else in the shortest period of time, like consuming ten bowls of noodles in less than 5 minutes, winning prizes for his talent. How about Jack Kao from MILLENNIUM MAMBO (2001)? You can find him here in this inter-connecting farce that thrives on weirdness and implausibility, chief among which is a traveling Buddha carousel on the back of a truck that Kao drives that lights up night, a kind of Buddha Las Vegas on wheels, adding a sense of religious enchantment where there really isn’t any. Kao plays a truck driving amputee in search of his new prosthetic leg who is also a sucker for repairing religious statues of all sizes in his spare time, while Chang is a parentless kid who stows away in the baggage compartment of busses to get from point A to point B. There are some wild, giant-sized advertising photos that follow Tracy Su around, as her specialty is modeling hands and legs, but having just lost her baby, she’s converted to Christianity yet remains in a spiritual funk that borders on manic depression, while her threatening, loud-mouthed husband, Han Chang (older brother of Hou Hsiao-hsien stalwart Chang Chen), shows us the look of perpetual ingratitude. Meanwhile, Alao Ugan is a Taiwanese Aborigine (who knew?) alcoholic who can’t quit the sauce, despite his best attempts to reach out to God, whose talented daughter, Tu Hsiaso-han, is a championship Sa Da combat kickboxer who pals around with her anxiety ridden friend Xiao Han beating the crap out of prospective S/M call girl clients. Hiromichi Sakamoto throws in a weird batch of musical numbers and what you have is a poutpourri of odds and ends that all comes together in a car crash that changes everyone’s lives. Oh, that’s been done before? Well not as silly (or perhaps as seriously ridiculous) as this. Unfortunately, despite the sheer pleasure of part of this film and agonizing disappointment in others, this is an uneven attempt to point fun at a few of societies obsessions, not the least of which is the internal dissatisfaction with whoever the hell we are. The beserko music playing over the end credits is hilariously upbeat—the kind of movie that perhaps the late Warren Zevon might have liked.

The Georgia Straight [Ken Eisner]

What do a one-legged trucker, a child thief, alcoholic aboriginals, a female boxer, and a suicidal hand model all have in common? Plenty, although it takes patience to see the threads gradually entwine in this lovely ode to faith and the search for inner connections. The English title for Singing Chen's beautifully crafted second effort is almost a palindrome; you just have to see the symmetry of man and woman–and animal spirit–for it to work. One of the fest's most quietly unforgettable discoveries.

The Hollywood Reporter review Maggie Lee

BUSAN, South Korea -- It's hard to say whether "God Man Dog" ("Liulang ren gou shen") is a flawed accomplishment or an accomplished failure. Director Singing Chen is obviously gifted with an exceptional visual sense that makes nondramatic images move on an intuitive level. However, her attempt to fashion an allegorical tragicomedy about the crisis of faith in contemporary Taiwan out of a mosaic of characters and plot lines, which crisscross like telegraph poles, is jumbled and difficult to grasp.

The film's attractive representations of Taiwan's coastline scenery and exotic religious spectacles could sit well with an art house audience. However, its unconventional narrative may try the patience of mainstream audiences.

"God's" artistic vision can be described as a cinematic equivalent to the magic realism of Isabella Allende's novels, such as "The Stories of Eva Luna," in which the sacred and profane, social reality, dreamscapes and epiphanies co-exist on the same imaginative plane.

The film spins four tenuously linked threads, each following the hopes and disappointments of four "couples." Ching (Tarcy Su) is a hand model who suffers from postnatal depression. She becomes estranged from her husband after their baby's cot death during his absence.

Aboriginal Biung tries to overcome alcoholism by trusting in God and his paternalistic pastor. While couriering some peaches, he and his wife hit a snag that leads to moral and spiritual chaos.

Biung's teenage daughter Savi aspires to a career in a kind of freestyle kickboxing called "Sa Da Combat." However, she gets roped into her bosom friend Xiao Han's reckless (and wickedly funny) schemes to scam clients of S/M call-girl services.

Yellow Bull (Jack Kao) is a one-legged psychic with the compunction to help stray dogs, homeless gods and shifty hitchhikers. When he gets tipped in dreams of where religious statues have been thrown away, he finds and mends them. On the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, he picks up Xian, a truant boy (Jonathan Chang, "Yi Yi") who hides inside the luggage compartments of coaches. Perpetually famished, could Xian be a hungry ghost?

A fateful car accident brings these modern pilgrims together.

There's a lot that Chen tries to cram in, like the emotional problems of urbanites, social problems of aboriginals, commoditization of the body, even a lesbian undertow. Yet, when she tries to pull everything together, the dramatic pieces just don't slot into place because there's no space for the characters and their internal landscapes to breathe. Just when you're about to lose yourself in a scenario, the narrative cuts back and forth to other scenarios. It's like making the audience play mental musical chairs with no chance to sit still and absorb everything.

The film's saving graces are the cast's understated performance, distinctive production design and cinematography, which presents a splendid palette of graded colors and image quality of depth. Somehow, the ethereal beauty of certain silent shots wraps itself around you like a lover, making you reluctant to let go of the film's memory.

LoveHKfilm.com Kevin Ma

A heavy drama turns into an amusing dramedy in this accomplished ensemble film from Taiwan featuring solid performances and an award-nominated screenplay.

Don't pull the plug just yet - Taiwanese director Singing Chen proves that Taiwanese cinema hasn't reduced itself to only making teen movies and Europe-friendly arthouse flicks with God Man Dog. Taking a cue from the recent spate of ensemble films, Chen explores the lives of Taiwanese people of different backgrounds who come together as the result of a car accident. Despite using a similar event and featuring similar themes, this isn't just 21 Grams in Taiwan. In fact, God Man Dog transcends the heavy drama of the Iñárritu film and become something uniquely Taiwanese, and yet with universal emotions.

The film starts off with the emotionally heavy stuff quickly. First, a professional hand model Ching (Tracy Su) suffers from post-natal depression and a bit of paranoia, but her architect husband Hsuing (Han Chang, older brother of Chang Chen) has no idea how to deal with it, driving their marriage to the brink of collapse. Meanwhile, a Taiwanese Aborigine couple struggles to overcome alcoholism while also trying to repair their relationship with their daughter Savi, who was sent off to the city because of past troubles with her parents. Lastly, Yellow Bull (Jack Gao, whose performance was nominated at the Asian Film Awards) is an amputee who is saving up for a new prosthetic leg through his day job, driving a giant illuminated Buddha to various temples for religious festivals. One day, he encounters a young stowaway (Yi Yi's Jonathan Chang, all grown up) with an insatiable appetite and a talent for hiding in buses.

In typical ensemble fashion, these stories will all come together, though not in a way one might expect. While a few of these plot lines do converge into a single incident, the events of God Man Dog do not surround this one incident. Chen is more interested in developing these plots as individual narratives, though the decisions some of the characters make do end up affecting one another. Surprisingly, these effects usually result in amused chuckles. While most dramas would start light and build towards an emotional climax, Chen and co-writer Yi-An Lou choose to go the other way; they weigh the film down with heavy emotions in the first half, then lighten things up in the second half with considerable humor. Chen seems to genuinely care for her characters, and she refuses to keep them emotionally tortured in favor of heightening audience emotions. This could be strange for some audiences, who may find God Man Dog to be a surprisingly light effort in the end.

Amazingly enough, the transition works. God Man Dog still deals with serious themes such as alcoholism, paranoia, depression, redemption, and religion throughout - and yet it can also include a darkly funny sequence involving two underage girls pretending to be prostitutes in order to rob their customers. These extremes exist because Chen doesn't exploit the serious themes, using traumatic experiences to build her characters rather then using them to test the characters' limits. However, Chen sometimes jumps between the stories too often in the first half, moving from one tragic event to another without giving the audience a chance to get involved in the individual stories. Nevertheless, the real fun in watching such ensemble films is seeing how these characters are connected, and God Man Dog's answer to that question is satisfying enough that the stories are able to come into their own.

The film's success can also be attributed to the performances. Jack Gao, known for playing mob characters, changes his image significantly for a subtle performance as the handicapped Yellow Bull. As the moral center of the film, Bull is the strongest character in the film despite being the most physically vulnerable. Gao's performance, as well as the screenplay, helps the character make a lasting impression on the audience - and this is without the benefit of any "give me an award"-style moments. On the other hand, Tarcy Su is given many of those moments as the emotionally unstable Ching. The singer/actress handles her heavy role capably, though her character is also sometimes frustrating and unlikable.

God Man Dog is not necessarily mainstream filmmaking because of its heavy themes, excessive symbolism (the dogs are cute, but a little too much) and a potentially confusing, broad canvas of characters. However, it doesn't come even close to the level of alienating arthouse films in the style of Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-Liang. It's a genuine attempt at ambitious storytelling that rewards - not punishes - involved audiences with its payoff. With solid performances, an impressive screenplay, beautiful cinematography, and a stirring score by Hiromichi Sakamoto, God Man Dog proves that there is still hope for Taiwanese cinema.

EyeForFilm.co.uk Chris Docker

Variety.com [Derek Elley]

here Wikipedia on Taiwanese Aborigines

Chen, Joan

Chen, Joan Art and Culture

When people look at Joan Chen, an irresistible urge to see her as the perfect china doll overcomes them, whether they are Chinese themselves or hail from the West. Chen's lifelong battle has been to act her way out of that porcelain persona, and to wrest the director's chair from the hands of those who would stultify her. In her sophisticated performances and controversial directorial debut she has repeatedly upset expectations of demure beauty and unwavering graciousness.

Chen was originally discovered by no less than Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao and head of the infamous Gang of Four. Jiang picked her out from a troop of girls who were demonstrating their skills at marksmanship and soon had her playing the ideal, virginal, selflessly dedicated revolutionary girl guard in propaganda films. This phase of Chen's career culminated with her performance as "Little Flower" in 1980, which won her China's Best Actress award.

But the 19-year-old Chen was ready to shed her green fatigues and dimpled, innocent smiles for something more vigorous and self-fulfilling. The little flower fled west to break into movies and modeling in the land of the capitalist running dogs. She entered film school at California State University, Northridge, and there was "discovered" once again.

As she was crossing a campus parking lot one day, who should espy her but Dino De Laurentiis, international producer extraordinaire. What he saw was the perfect raw material for the Asian exotic, and soon Chen was tempting British viewers in TV series like 1985's "Tai-Pan." The work wasn't any more fullfilling, but the connection to De Laurentiis had its advantages. It put Chen in the path of Bernardo Bertolucci, who cast her as empress Wan Jung in his Oscar-winning epic "The Last Emperor" (1987). Chen's transformation from a dream of beauty into a tremor-wracked, sunken-cheeked opium addict provided the film's most vivid depiction of China's cultural disintegration. The role allowed Chen to shatter her china doll image and finally play a real woman.

Some substantial roles followed, such as Josie Packard in David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" (1990), but old cultural imperatives soon prevailed, and Chen was depressingly returned to the exotic-beauty fold in dull American action flicks like "On Deadly Ground" and "Judge Dredd." Chen was privately in despair, close to abandoning her career, when a new and unique project emerged from her friendship with writer Geling Yan.

Chen turned her back on Hollywood and set out to direct her own film based on one of Yan's stories. "Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl" (1998) explored the real experiences of a revolutionary girl guard during the Cultural Revolution. Filmed on location at the China-Tibet border, "Xiu Xiu" depicts the lives of millions of girls who were "sent down" for social reeducation in China's remote countrysides. The unsuspecting protagonist encounters brutal treatment, exploitation, and abandonment. The Chinese government objected to this exposé of one of the tragedies of the Cultural Revolution and banned Chen from the country for filming without a permit.

Chen remains undaunted. She has a second project in the works with Yan -- a film based on her friend's novel "Fusang," the story of a Chinese woman sold into prostitution in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Hollywood has come courting, enlisting this director to handle Richard Gere and Winona Ryder in "Autumn in New York." As Chen breaks the confining mold of beauty and femininity in her own career, she heralds a new era in which those stereotypes may finally fade from view.

The Sent Down Girl Steven Schwankert from the Beijing Scene

Joan Chen: Guerilla Director Michael Sragow from Salon

XIU XIU: THE SENT-DOWN GIRL (Tian yu) B+ 92

Hong Kong USA Taiwan (99 mi) 1998

With Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl, actress Joan Chen (Twin Peaks) joins the so-called "Fifth Generation" Chinese filmmakers, a movement of courageous, politically committed directors responsible for some of the richest cinema of the last decade. While it would be unfair to expect her debut to measure up to the formidable work of Xhang Yimou (Raise The Red Lantern), Chen Kaige (Farewell, My Concubine), and Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Blue Kite), Chen's wan fable sorely lacks their historic pull and, more disturbing, accepts tragedy with needless passivity and sentimentality. Xiu Xiu is set during the last year of the Cultural Youth Revolution, Mao Zedong's misbegotten campaign to eradicate class differences by sending nearly eight million young people from the city to specialized training in the country's remote provinces. Uprooted from her home and family, Lu Lu gets "sent down" to an isolated Tibetan steppe, where she's assigned to learn horse-training from Lopsang, a quiet and sullen old herder. When it becomes apparent that her tour of duty will never end, she welcomes a succession of government officials into their encampment in the futile hope that sexual favors will prompt her eventual deliverance. Lopsang develops a paternal affection for Lu Lu and watches over her, yet his inaction in the face of her repeated exploitation doesn't make much sense, as he's wise enough to know it won't get her anywhere. Chen means to lament Lu Lu's (and China's) loss of youthful innocence, but she drives the story toward a bleak, contrived conclusion that betrays the well-wrought and affecting bond between her characters. In other Fifth Generation films, political forces deal tragedy to those powerless to stop it; in Xiu Xiu, it's dealt entirely by the director's hand.

Bright Lights Film Journal | Chinese Transnational Feminism (1) Andrew Grossman (excerpt)

Furthermore, if we consider the decidedly unintentional oriental’s orientalism of Joan Chen’s Mainland melodrama Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (1998), we see that female filmmakers can be equally guilty of perpetuating the aesthetic of female suffering advanced by male directors. Though banned in Mainland China ⁶ and directed by a Westernized Chinese filmmaker propagating pro-democracy ideas Zhang Yimou would not, Chen’s Anglicized feminism falls flat under the weight of its oriental prettiness, its seven Taiwanese Golden Horse Awards notwithstanding. Its narrative is cardboard determinist fatalism: an overly pretty Young Communist with an ironically red kerchief is raped by a Chairman Mao look-alike, and dies a silent, maddened martyr at the hands of a Cultural Revolution more interested in lining its pockets and paying deference to privileged families than Marxist ideals. Painted over with lovely countryside visuals, Xiu Xiu’s feminism is drawn only in witless caricature: the only "good" male character is impotent, the camera consciously demonizes the male gaze (when the heroine is bathing), and the heroine, under the guise of the tearfully banal demands of historical realism, must suffer an overdetermined fate as a victim cum martyr. Therefore, this "art film" — aimed at Westerners with capitalist preconceptions of art, such as expensive-looking cinematography — becomes more textually simplistic than, for example, the lower-budget "category 3" feminist films we will consider later, films that do not use nativist or nationalist aesthetics as a pretext to avoid discussing women’s issues more straightforwardly.

Disconcertingly, Joan Chen herself has said she was not attempting to "romanticize" the Cultural Revolution, but rather "poeticize" it — at best a dubious distinction. Referring to her own grandparents’ suffering during the Cultural Revolution, Chen says, "I believe when your experience is more crystallized through distance and time, you’re more able to poeticize something…but I don’t believe beauty exists without suffering…that’s just a tourist picture in a travel agency."⁷ Yet the overdetermination of the heroine’s suffering combined with stereotypically "poetic" cinematography conspires to reinforce exactly these ideas of transnational political tourism. In fact, the "distance" of Chen’s expensively aestheticized, capitalist images of Communist violence ironically fulfills nothing less than the damning prophesy that concludes Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: "[Mankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order."⁸

[…] Meanwhile, Xiu Xiu is essentially mainstream in Taiwan — it won the Taiwanese equivalent of the Oscar — but its tame, politically correct, liberal-humanist content is rendered through the Western politics of film distribution into something falsely, undeservedly oppositional, simply because any imported film can seem oppositional when weighed against Hollywood xenophobia. In fact, the oppressions of surgical beauty that A Fake Pretty Woman decries are analogous to the oppressions of cinematographic beauty that Xiu Xiu advances: both oppressions are products of First World technology designed to exploit the sensibilities of the gazer for profit. Simply, both plastic surgery and expensive cinematography are in the business of selling an economic definition of beauty to reinforce classist sensibilities of appearance-based value — it is merely a puritanical hypocrisy that disparages the capitalism of plastic surgery as deceptive and praises the capitalism of prettified cinematography as aesthetically genuine.

James Berardinelli's ReelViews

Certain historical periods provide rich and varied soil for the cultivation of motion picture storylines. The twilight of the Roman Empire is one. The American Civil War is another. World War II marks a third. And a fourth is the Chinese "Cultural Revolution," which spanned roughly a decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. This time of great upheaval, which was started by young ideologues forcing their harsh political views on the entire populace, led to frightened men and women denouncing others to save themselves. The events of those ten years have given rise to a number of stirring, powerful motion pictures, including Farewell My Concubine and To Live. Now, Xiu Xiu can be added to that list. This is a devastating and unforgettable portrait of hopeless love and the corruption of innocence set against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution.

The director of Xiu Xiu is Chinese-born actress Joan Chen, who established herself in the West with a key role in The Last Emperor and a recurring part in David Lynch's offbeat TV series, "Twin Peaks." Chen wears many hats for this motion picture, which is obviously a labor of passion. In addition to making her directorial debut, she functions as co-producer and co-writer. The result is one of the most stunning first features from any film maker since Quentin Tarantino burst upon the scene with Reservoir Dogs.

The movie takes place in mainland China near the city of Chengdu during the mid-1970s. A fifteen year-old girl, Wen Xiu (nicknamed Xiu Xiu, and played by Lu Lu), is joining the core of youths who are sent into the country to be properly "educated" (through hard labor) in service to their country. After an exemplary record on her first assignment, Wen is transferred to the Tibetan borderlands to study under the tutelage of Lao Jin (Lopsang), a master horse herder. She is supposed to be there for six months. Lao proves to be a gentle man who is at home with animals and nature, but uncomfortable around humans. Gradually, he develops a deep affection for the girl under his care, and, because he is unable to function sexually, there is no danger that the relationship will become inappropriate.

The months pass, with Wen Xiu and Lao Jin living in easy communion, but she makes no secret of the fact that when her tour of duty is up, she intends to return home to Chengdu. To her, life in isolation is worse than death – it is endurable only for a short time. But six months pass and she is not recalled. Shortly thereafter, a peddler from the city visits Lao Jin and hints that, in return for sexual favors, he might be able to pull a few strings to get Wen Xiu home. He becomes the first of many male visitors to share her bed. All promise results; none are able to deliver them. And, through all of this, Lao Jin must sit by and watch. He knows that none of the men are sincere, but Wen Xiu is so blinded by her desire to leave that she cannot see what is obvious: she has become a whore, and is being paid with worthless promises.

As its foundation, Xiu Xiu has the bedrock of two superbly-rendered, multidimensional characters. When the film opens, Wen Xui is an artless, optimistic young girl who faces the future with strength and courage. She is shy and sexually inexperienced, and refuses to undress in a situation where Lao Jin might catch her naked. By the time the closing credits roll, the hardships of her ordeal to return home have transformed her into a self-centered manipulator who uses sex as both a tool (to bribe men) and a weapon (to taunt Lao Jin). The tragedy is that she's still naïve enough (or perhaps desperate enough) not to realize that she is being used. 16 year-old actress Lu Lu gives an incredible performance as Wen Xiu, capturing the nuances of a role that demands great range. In her capable hands, Wen Xiu becomes a character we can sympathize with and cry for, yet, at the same time, despise her for what she is doing to Lao Jin. It is our ambiguity about Wen Xiu that fuels Xiu Xiu's extraordinary power.

Lao Jin is no less interesting, although our feelings about him are more clear-cut. He is a calm, self-assured man who loses himself completely to the girl who comes to live with him. Because of his inability to function sexually, his feelings for Wen Xiu come across as almost paternal, although it's clear that they run much deeper. He sees himself as her protector, although, because of an innate impotence (probably an extension of his sexual dysfunction), he is unable to save her from the human predators who stalk her. Nevertheless, even after it is clear what she has become, he persists in safeguarding the illusion of her innocence, although the reality of it has long since been lost. Only at the end are his eyes finally opened. Lopsang, the actor who essays this part, manages the difficult task of showing the complex web of pain, love, and frustration lurking beneath Lao Jin's seemingly-implacable exterior. It is a moving and subtle performance.

Xiu Xiu is a film with few flaws. Not only are the protagonists effectively written and expertly portrayed, but the story constantly moves forward, projecting Wen Xiu and Lao Jin along well-defined character arcs. (Despite an epic feel, the film does not have a bloated running length – it clocks in at a crisp 100 minutes.) The cinematography, which captures spectacular views of the countryside as well as impressive shots of approaching thunderstorms, serves to enhance Xiu Xiu's potent atmosphere. We see both the lonely desolation that is Wen Xiu's perspective of the borderlands as well as the comfortable solitude that is Lao Jin's.

Xiu Xiu will never be shown in Communist China. The film's condemnation of the Cultural Revolution is overt. Although it only explicitly depicts the downfall of one girl, it hints at a widespread corruption that is terrible to contemplate. Unlike movies such as Farewell My Concubine and To Live, Xiu Xiu is not a product of the Chinese film industry, so there is no danger of it being suppressed. The movie, which is currently making its rounds through the film festival circuit, will eventually achieve a limited distribution in North American theaters (Stratosphere plans a May 1999 release). Those who wish to seek it out will then be able to do so. And anyone who puts forth the effort to locate Xiu Xiu will be rewarded with the kind of forceful, emotionally-riveting experience that only the most accomplished motion pictures can offer.

culturevulture.net Tom Block

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs, also seen here: Nitrate Online

Political Film Review Michael Haas

indieWIRE Danny Lorber

Murali Krishnan

Memphis Flyer [Susan Ellis]

Chicago Reader (Pat Graham) capsule review

Chen Kaige

Chen Kaige from World Cinema

One of the most prominent and accomplished of the post-Cultural Revolution Chinese directors. Son of Chen Huaikai, also a well-known film director, he was forced at 14 by the Cultural Revolution to interrupt school and work as a rubber plantation, farmer, soldier, and factory hand. He entered the Beijing Film Academy in 1978. Following some shorts and television work, Chen created three colourful features, all set in China's recent past: Yellow Earth, The Big Parade, and King of Children. After leaving China for a stint in New York City (1987-90), Chen returned to his homeland to film Life on a String, a fable set in remote Mongolia about a blind man searching for a magic cure to recover sight. His 1993 feature, Farewell My Concubine, shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes (with Jane Campion's The Piano) and further widened his international reputation. Chen's films are renowned both for their emotional delicacy and their lavish spectacle, using an extensive palette of colour and state-of-the-art film technology. His cinematographer for his first two films was Zhang Yimou, later a director in his own right. Chen writes his own scripts. — Ephraim Katz, The Film Encylopedia

Kaige, Chen Art and Culture

It was only a matter of time before Chen Kaige, the child of a film director and an actress, pissed off the authorities in China. His fascination with sex, opium, costumes, and the individual in society exposed him as a romantic and a maverick. Chen’s characters burst at the seams with personality. Pitted against the conformity of either Communism or Confucian society, these characters can't help but meet a tragic end.

His first film, "Yellow Earth" (1984), features a young soldier sent off into the countryside to gather heroic folk songs from the farmers. Not surprisingly, the farmers are the same as workers everywhere and sing about lousy weather, lousy prices, and all the other things that bother them. Of course, the soldier gets in trouble when he returns to his superiors with the wrong material. It's not hard to figure out that Chen identifies with his protagonist: he's the artist bringing back conflicting news from the real world.

"Yellow Earth," whose cinematographer was well-known director Zhang Yimou, caught international attention. It marked a turning point in Chinese film, which had been suffering from stiff operatic theatricals and social-realist themes. Chen’s next several films drew less attention, but "Farewell, My Concubine" (1993) righted his career. The over-the-top, beautifully costumed film recounts the story of two male Chinese opera stars who fall in love with the same woman. Featuring the renowned actresses Gong Li and Leslie Cheung, the film departed from Chen’s earlier art-house aesthetic and instead aimed at commercial success.

Li also starred in "Temptress Moon" (1996), which draws parallels between the China of the ‘20s and the China of today. Li’s character is an obvious symbol for the soul of China (as well as, again, for the soul of the artist) in a time of transition. She "is ultimately destroyed because she is too honest," Chen has said.

The more recent "The Emperor and the Assassin" is a huge, ornate production that tells the story of an Emperor’s concubine against the backdrop of the mega-wars that created China. All of these films are at once personal studies and lush epics. They are also primers of Chinese history that don’t really accord with the party line, especially since they contain coded messages about contemporary society. It’s no wonder that Chen and his fellow Fifth Generation filmmakers are in disfavor with the government; it’s equally apparent why the rest of the film world has adopted these intrepid artists.

Film Reference Verina Glaessner, updated by Rob Edelman

Chen Kaige is, with Zhang Yimou, the leading voice among the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, the first group of students to have graduated following the reopening of the Beijing Film Academy in 1978 after the depredations of the Cultural Revolution. As both a participant in (as a Red Guard he denounced his own father) and a victim of the Cultural Revolution (his secondary education was curtailed and, like the protagonist of King of the Children, he was sent to the country to "learn from the peasants"), Chen is particularly well-placed to voice concerns about history and identity.

The majority of his films constitute an intelligent and powerfully felt meditation on recent Chinese history, within which, for him, the Cultural Revolution remains a defining moment. "It made," he has said, "cultural hooligans of us." He has a reputation within China as a philosophical director, and his style is indeed marked by a laconic handling of narrative and a classical reticence. This is largely deceptive: underneath is an unyielding anger and unflinching integrity.

Chen in interviews has stressed the complementary nature of his first three films. Yellow Earth examines the relationship of "man and the land," The Big Parade looks at "the individual and the group," and King of the Children considers "man and culture." Yellow Earth seems to adopt the structure of the folk ballads that provide a focus for its narrative, with its long held shots and almost lapidary editing. The Big Parade alternates static parade ground shots with the chaos of barrack room life, while the third film mobilises a more rhetorical style of poetic realism. Together the films act as a triple rebuttal of any heroic reading of Maoism and the revolution, precisely by taking up subjects much used in propagandist art—the arrival of the People's Liberation Army in a village, the training of new recruits, the fate of the teacher sent to the country—and by refuting their simplifications and obfuscations, shot for shot, with quite trenchant deliberation. Attention in Yellow Earth is focused not on the Communist Army whose soldier arrives at the village collecting songs, but on the barren plateau from which the peasantry attempts to wring a meager existence. In the process the account of Yenan which sees it as the birthplace of Communism is marginalized. King of the Children banishes the bright-eyed pupils and spotless classrooms of propaganda in favour of a run-down schoolroom, graffitied and in disrepair, from which the social fabric seems to have fallen away. Likewise The Big Parade banishes heroics and exemplary characters in favour of a clear-eyed look at the cost of moulding the individual into the collective.

In Chen's films what is unsaid is as important as that which is said; indeed the act of silence becomes a potent force. The voiceless appear everywhere—the almost mute brother in Yellow Earth, the girl's unspoken fears for her marriage ("voiced" in song), the mute cowherd in King of the Children. In Yellow Earth the girl's voice is silenced by the force of nature as she drowns singing an anthem about the Communist Party. It is almost better, Chen implies, not to speak at all, than—as he suggests in King of the Children—to copy, to repeat, to "shout to make it right."

Life on a String, a leisurely allegory whose protagonists are an elderly blind musician and his young acolyte, has as tangible a sense of physical terrain as Yellow Earth. It also has an icy twist. Dedicatedly following his own master's instructions all his life, the old man finds himself, in the end, to have been duped. The film, fitting no fashionable niche, was largely ignored. With Farewell My Concubine Chen seems, superficially, to have taken a leaf from his rival Zhang Yimou's book. The film has lavish studio sets and costumes and features Zhang's favourite performer, Gong Li. Funded by Hong Kong actress Hsu Feng's Tomson Films and based on a melodramatic novel by Lilian Lee, the film traces the relationship between a young boy, sold by his prostitute mother into the brutal regime of the Peking Opera School in 1920s China, and an older, tougher boy. Deiyi is destined to play female roles, and before he is accepted he undergoes a symbolic castration. The title is taken from the title of the opera in which they make their names—set during the last days of the reign of King Chu. The film follows their fortunes up to 1977, the end of the Cultural Revolution, and closes on a note of betrayal and sacrifice. Scrupulously performed, finely filmed, the subject allows its director scope to investigate the tortuous intersection of performance, identity, self, gender, and history.

Farewell My Concubine is one of a number of Chen's films that depict the indoctrination and degradation of children by those who should be loving and responsible. Such also is the case in Temptress Moon, which tells the story of a brother and sister who are introduced to opium by their father. The film may be set during the precommunist 1920s, yet it clearly is allegorical in that the father's irresponsibility symbolizes a present-day political machine that has so often callously abused its citizenry. The Emperor and the Assassin is set even farther back in Chinese history—the third century B.C.—yet it too tells a story with contemporary reverberations. It is the based-on-fact account of Ying Zheng, a manipulative, increasingly ruthless ruler who is intent on taking over the country's other kingdoms, and becoming the initial Chinese emperor. Ying Zheng might be viewed as the counterpart of Mao. Furthermore, his story, as presented here, could be a camouflaged allegory mirroring the failure of the Cultural Revolution.

Unsurprisingly Chen's films have met with varying degrees of disapproval from the official regime. Yellow Earth was criticised in an anti-elitist policy. The Big Parade had its final sequence cut and ends with sounds of the eponymous parade in Tianenmen Square over an empty shot. Life on a String and Temptress Moon were banned. Farewell My Concubine was shown, withdrawn, then shown again. The Emperor and the Assassin initially was rejected by the censors; roughly 30 minutes of footage reportedly were excised to make it more "regime friendly." To young filmmakers in China Chen's work, and that of other Fifth Generation directors, can seem academic or irrelevant. To the rest of us, the care with which Chen Kaige observes his protagonists' struggles for integrity amid lethally shifting political tides makes for a perennially relevant body of work.

All-Movie Guide bio info

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

A Chen Kaige Profile

A Leap Forward, or a Great Sellout? David Barboza from The New York Times, July 1, 2007

Chen Kaige They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Gerald Peary - interviews - Chen Kaige February 2000

Film Freak Central Interview with Walter Chaw, October 19, 2002

Movie City News Interview with Leonard Klady, May 31, 2003

Cineaste Interview by Richard James Havis, June 2004

YELLOW EARTH (Huang tu di) A 97

China (94 mi) 1984

A rather unique collaboration between two 5^th Generation Chinese filmmakers, the first group to graduate after the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Yimou who provided the stunning cinematography and the director himself. This is essentially a Chinese Communist opera on film, a highly stylized antidote to Antonioni’s RED DESERT, only instead of the absence of the urban heart, this film represents a search for the agrarian communist heart, using huge imagery and peasant songs with simple poetry to develop the story. Bold enough to criticize both the old and new political systems, it also meticulously recreates the working conditions giving rise to the need for more from the new revolutionary system, as its reforms for change never reach into these vast rural villages. It features easy to identify with characters who have such a strong emotional drive, a yearning, a need for something more, a new hope, something actually worth dying for.

Set in the spring of 1939, a lone Red army officer walks through an empty, eroded desert landscape into a small, remote village in the Shaanxi province that is suddenly filled with color and life, as we see a multitude of people playing music, singing songs, dancing with bright red waistbands and scarves, celebrating the wedding of a young bride covered in red cloth. The officer stays with a cave-dwelling family consisting of an old father, a 14-year old daughter and her younger brother, claiming he is searching for peasant folk songs to be adapted by the army, replenished with the new spirit of the country, paving a new road where women can choose their own husbands rather than be sold by their families for money, which is in direct contrast to the current practices in this village, which we hear in song: “Engaged at 13, married at 14, widowed at 15, a daughter’s life is miserable. Who will listen to my misery?”

Xue Bai is beautifully appealing as the shy 14-year old daughter, capturing the eye of the camera which can’t take its eyes off her, meticulously following her wherever she goes, as she walks 10 miles to the river for water, carrying two giant buckets on a stick across her shoulder, a routine she repeats daily. She tends to the family stove, cooks dinner, weaves clothes and shoes, and is impressed when the officer helps her with the “women’s” chores, so she listens to his tales of a different world far from her home, which remains untouched by the sweeping revolutionary changes. The officer helps the father plow the fields, spread the dung, they even have a picnic together where the family appears small on a ledge against a huge landscape, but without ever saying a word, the daughter is off again on her journey for water, looking over her shoulder, expressing her silent interest, disappearing behind the rolling hills in a scene that reappears often and effectively.

The officer decides he has to return to his home, causing both children to panic, as they’ve grown attached to him, and each sings him a personal song. They want to leave with him, as he has brought them hope, and they fear the unchanging, harsh realities of their impoverished world. But he leaves, and the father explains to his daughter that he arranged a long time ago for her to be married to a middle-aged farmer, that he has already spent most of the money he received in the arrangement, and what little is left is needed for his son’s wedding. The daughter cringes in silence, but carries out her duty. At her wedding, there is an extraordinary scene of dancers, like a highly decorated army, reminiscent of Paradjanov’s brilliantly elaborate costumes featuring rich imagery mixed with sensuous music, but it’s from her wedding that she makes her escape, thinking she will join the army across the river, expressed through a kind of poetic, magical realism, essential to the heart of the nation. “Rooster on the wall, the Communist Party saves all.”

Revolutionary communism butts uncomfortably against entrenched provincial tradition in this 1984 debut by Chinese director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine). The film broke definitively with Chinese studio tradition and introduced a new sense of ambiguity in the relation between political ideology and praxis, with an emphasis on image over narration that elicited comparison with the work of Jancso and Bresson.

Time Out Tony Rayns

The first 'modern' film to emerge from China, and one of the most thrilling debut features of the '80s. Its storyline couldn't be simpler. A Communist soldier visits a backward village in 1939, and is billeted with a taciturn widower and his teenage daughter and son. The soldier's mission is to collect folk songs, and it's through the exchange of songs that he gradually wins the trust and affection of his hosts. But the girl is to be sold into marriage with a much older man, and all the soldier's talk of breaking with feudal tradition fills her with unrealistic hopes of escaping her fate. The soldier returns to his base, leaving her to take her future in her own hands... There are political undercurrents here that got the film into trouble in China: the encounter between the CP and China's peasants is shown not as an instant meeting of minds, but as the uneasy, frustrating, and ultimately unresolved process that it actually was. But what really stirred things up in old Beijing was the film's insistence on going its own way. Chen Kaige and his cinematographer Zhang Yimou have invented a new language of colours, shadows, glances, spaces, and unspoken thoughts and implications; and they've made their new language sing.

Pacific Cinematheque (link lost):

This striking first feature by Chen Kaige (Life on a String, Farewell My Concubine, Temptress Moon) was widely acclaimed upon its release in the West as the most impressive film ever to emerge from mainland China. A work of deliberate narrative ambiguities and vaguely dissident tone, Yellow Earth is a quiet, subtle film set in rural Shaanxi province in 1939. Its protagonist is Gu, a soldier collecting folk songs in the region while billeted with a shy peasant family. Cuiqiao, the family's 14-year-old daughter, is about to be married off to a much older man. In desperation, she asks Gu to help her escape. . . The film offers a masterly mix of music, poetry, dance and drama, set against the stunning landscapes of the Yellow River basin. The sumptuous cinematography is by Zhang Yimou, who also shot The Big Parade, Chen's second feature, and who made a striking directorial debut of his own in 1987 with Red Sorghum. "Yellow Earth has given Chinese cinema the shake-up it has needed for decades. It is also one of the very few first features of the 1980s that had broken new ground" (Tony Rayns). China 1984. Director: Chen Kaige. Cast: Xue Bai, Wang Xueqi. Colour, 16mm, in Mandarin with English subtitles. 89 mins.

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]

The 5th generation of Chinese filmmaking made their first mark with this collaboration between the two members who would become the best known, Kaige Chen & Yimou Zhang. Yellow Earth depicts the harshness of rural life and traditional values for a 14-year-old peasant girl living near the famous river in 1939. Her life is mapped out, struggling against nature on her father's farm until she's soon forced into an arranged marriage with some much older man like her 12-year-old sister was. The girl has an awakening when a communist soldier shows up looking to learn folk songs so he can teach them to his comrades. It seems to have the propaganda aspect of suggesting salvation lies is joining the army, trying to pawn off the joy of singing as a sign of freedom even though at least left alone with the animals you can choose your own song. However, the relationship between the girl and soldier isn't the transcendental one we suspect, instead it subtly shows the gap between the ways of the people and the ways of the party, the fact that a new ideology doesn't readily change an ancient way of life. The end turns out to be another cruel joke of fate. We are left with the ironic closing song "The Communist Party will save us all!" but the communist does not save the girl as he promises. It's a classic subversive closing, showing both the old and new ways to be equally indifferent to providing a quality life, content to just swallow people up. In the process, reviving these folk songs for a new audience helps reclaim some of the old culture the communist party wound up destroying. Yimou was still a cinematographer at this point, and his photography is the biggest reason to see the film. He takes full advantage of the imposing desolate mountainous terrain with lengthy takes and panoramics to show the negatives (loneliness, isolation, inescapability, humans are dwarfed if not swallowed up) as well as positives (space, freedom, nourishment at times). The film has very little dialogue, much is conveyed through the landscapes and the unstated. The use of sound is very important, with the songs that provide the thoughts and feelings of the characters and wind and water running showing nature's undeniable influence. Given the problems these two have had with censorship, it's a wonder this film wasn't banned in China like some of their later works. Perhaps the lack of literal storytelling confused the censors enough that they didn't pick up on the ironies?

David Dalgleish retrospective [4/4]

Chinese feminist film criticism Gina Marchetti reviews Dai Jinhua’s book, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

THE BIG PARADE (Da yue bing)

China (94 mi) 1987

A documentary like story from Kaige which focuses on a group of Chinese soldiers rehearsing and going through intensive training for a televised Tiananmen Square parade; familial crises and triumph over adversity dominate the proceedings, as does the cool military precision with which those involved rise to the challenge. While we're more used to seeing Chinese films which act as thinly-veiled attacks on the political system, Kaige's film is positively celebratory in tone, and although it makes for fascinating viewing it's hard to tell whether he intends to show the regime in a positive light or not. Zhang Yimou provides some stunning cinematography though.

User reviews from imdb Author: ironside (robertfrangie@hotmail.com) from Mexico

"The Big Parade" concerned the training of military cadets for the National Day Parade… Again, Chen set himself apart from the gung-ho propaganda of most Chinese military films to focus on the personal sacrifice involved in allegiance to a regimented army (and, by implication, to China itself); again, his methods were inventive and original…

Visually, military conformism was conveyed in static, formalized images of the trainees as an homogeneous mass, while more private emotions were evoked by the less abstract mobile shots of teeming barracks life; aurally too, frequent voice-overs testified to the soldiers' various inner doubts concerning the cost, and worth, of national unity… Indeed, the desire for independence and freedom of thought is central to Chen's work, both thematically and in terms of its uncompromising style…

David Dalgleish

KING OF THE CHILDREN (Hai zi wang)

China (106 mi) 1987

An unschooled young man, one of the countless victims of Mao's Cultural Revolution, is labouring in the countryside when he is suddenly assigned to teach in a near-by village school. Gradually, he finds the confidence to ditch the Maoist textbook and encourage the barely literate kids to write about their own lives and feelings. At the same time, through a series of dream-like meetings with a young cowherd, he begins to sense the possibilities of a life beyond the parameters of traditional education. There are echoes here of a film like Padre Padrone, but Chen's film is completely free of flabby humanist sentimentality. It takes its tonality from the harsh beauty of the Yunnan landscape of soaring forests and misty valleys: a territory of the mind where hard-edged realism blurs easily into hallucination. By Chinese standards, this is film-making brave to the point of being visionary. By any standards, this follow-up to Yellow Earth and The Big Parade is also something like a masterpiece.

Haizi Wang Stephen Teo on Haizi Wang (King of the Children), 1987

King of the Children is a deceptively simple film. It tells the story of a young man who becomes a teacher of junior high school students in the Yunnan countryside and realizes, in a heart-wrenching way, the extent of his task. He discovers that his students are not given any textbooks and that they are used to learning by rote. The time is the Cultural Revolution. Lan Gan, the young man, was part of a brigade made up of city youths sent to the remote countryside for re-education by working alongside illiterate peasants. He gains a transfer from his brigade to a softer job as a teacher even though he is not qualified, having hardly graduated from high school himself.

The young man's experiences mirror director Chen Kaige's own experiences during the Cultural Revolution as a zhishi qingnian, or "intellectual youth." Sent to Yunnan to work in a production brigade in the late 1960s, early 1970s, Chen was attracted to the story by novelist A. Cheng (a fellow production brigade member in Yunnan) because of its simplicity. But the director has invested his own aesthetic references in the adaptation. These references are entirely visual—their meanings and significance are implicit and open to interpretation. What cannot be denied is the film's emotive power conveyed entirely through its images and an interesting montage-mixture of sound effects which illustrate certain scenes (sounds of tree felling, a voice chanting folk melodies, and so on).

To begin with, Chen films his protagonist Lan Gan mostly in distant long shots, locating him in an environment of harsh, primitive beauty (by the by recalling the stunning compositions in Chen's first film, The Yellow Earth, where earth seems to engulf a man). As well as reinforcing the effect of rural stupor, lethargy and boredom felt by the lead character, these long shots reveal the immensity of space and the concrete, objective world in which the character finds himself. He can no more hope to transcend this space than the problems of humanity within that space. Similarly, we first see the central setting of the school in a very long shot (which in point of fact, opens the film), in a photographic time-lapse sequence from mist to clear sky to sunset. The school, where the central drama unfolds, is seen in open air, flanked by mountains—it appears as a minor, unchanging spot in a flurry of changing time.

The narrative is punctuated with elliptical cuts, deliberate omissions, and long-held shots which impart information on a subliminal level but which in fact hold the key to Chen's mode of visual storytelling. A direct, linear mode is avoided. Instead, we look to visual detail and the behaviour of the characters to draw narrative (and emotional) sustenance. Thus, the film's spare use of medium to close shots, as in the scenes of Lan Gan reacting to his students in class (particularly the sensitive Wang Fu with whom he strikes an uneasy rapport), gain even more impact. Time and space are wondrously controlled. A second viewing of the film shows how tightly edited and temporally well-sustained the narrative actually is (the film even feels shorter than its nearly two hours running time) and also reveals more clearly the rich metaphorical layers which Chen creates to underline the simple story.

The metaphor of objective space to illustrate man's smallness is obvious while it also points out the results of the more complex, and destructive urges, of man, small as he is. The protagonist is shown at crucial points in still shots standing in a wilderness of burned tree stumps. The final scenes of these tree stumps manifested as wooden statues of strawmen and other grotesque figures, the burning of the forest (for swidden agriculture), and the intriguing sub-plot of the young cowherd urinating on the ground to disconcert cows too stubborn to move along (which gives rise to Lao San's explanation of his use of a compound word made of the characters of "cow" and "water" in his valedictory lesson to his students) are all a manifestation of man making a mark on earth.

The last message of Lan Gan to Wang Fu as he leaves the school (having been dismissed for his unorthodox teaching methods) may be summed up in one word: creativity—he implores Wang Fu not to learn by rote and to start thinking for himself. However, man's creativity is compromized, Chen seems to say, by man's failure to understand and come to terms with his environment. On the other hand, even as Chen underscores the effects of human alienation, poverty and neglect, there is no simplistic explanation offered for the obviously disastrous effect that human foolishness has waged on human affairs (the devastation wrought by the Cultural Revolution on a generation of students, for example).

Chen has succeeded in bringing out the abstract core of his story without diminishing its effective simplicity. In fact, the film comes across as a moving indictment of China's education policy, its politics, and the country's backwardness and endemic poverty. King of the Children is also the first film in which Chen deals with the disaster of the Cultural Revolution in personal terms. It is a subject that Chen and other Fifth Generation directors have a great deal to say about having experienced it at first hand. It offers great human drama, ranging from the tragic to the absurd. In King of the Children, Chen depicts the Cultural Revolution as a national tragedy but he does not condemn it outright. In that sense, Chen is less interested in the political implications of the Cultural Revolution. A philosophicalminded director, Chen has shown that his real subject is man and the ambiguities and implications of his behaviour.

Alsolikelife.com [Kevin Lee]

Chinese feminist film criticism Gina Marchetti reviews Dai Jinhua’s book, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

LIFE ON A STRING (Bian zou bian chang)

China Germany Great Britain (110 mi) 1991

Chen Kaige's lyrical fable focuses on a blind musician, who is told that his sight will be restored only after he has broken the 1,000th string on his banjo. Encouraged by the prediction, he spends 60 years travelling from village to village entertaining the locals and finding spiritual enlightenment through his music. Beautifully filmed, Kaige's leisurely trawl through his protagonist's life is quietly absorbing, if not always action-packed; as well as its obvious Buddhist overtones it offers a moving portrayal of how one man copes with his disability. While he is not always likeable, he is certainly to be admired.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton)

If it's hard occasionally to divine the precise meanings of Chen Kaige's lush, mystical fable, its poetic beauty and overall clarity of purpose are impossible to deny. An old, blind master musician wanders from desert village to desert village, accompanied by his headstrong, likewise afflicted pupil and amanuensis. As a child, the master was promised by his own mentor that when he had finally broken the thousandth string on his sanxian, he might open up the instrument and find a prescription to restore his sight. But his teenage apprentice, sceptical of his master's ascetic beliefs, is resolved to lead his own life, and takes up with a village girl against the wishes of both the old man and her family. Chronicling the widening of the gulf between man and boy, Chen explores the conflicts between age and youth, spirituality and physicality, discipline and disobedience, and - most movingly - the persistence and absence of faith and hope. Rarely have landscapes been photographed so sumptuously; rarely, too, has music in a film been used to such spine-tingling effect.

Oggs' Movie Thoughts

Chen Kaige's Life on a String opens and ends with death. It begins with the death of a blind grandmaster who tells his young disciple to break the one thousand strings of his banjo to open the box that contains a prescription that will cure his blindness. Sixty years after, the young disciple has turned into an old master (Liu Zhongyuan) yet still carries the same banjo that contains the secret prescription, with only a few strings remaining intact. Along with his also blind disciple, Shitou (Huang Lei), the old master travels to a remote village that is torn by two warring clans. The old master is considered a saint, and through his songs, the two clans are momentarily pacified. However, the young disciple is beholden by the village lass Lanxiu (Xu Qing) and further neglects his duties to his old master.

Life on a String is a beautiful, if not mysterious, fable that discusses the peristence of old age and the whims of youth. The old master persists in breaking all of the one thousand strings that the grandmaster has promised him would restore his eyesight. The young disciple is however in the more physical attractions of life. The film is both a philosophical and a coming-of-age film. While the old master struggles with his impending death and the impending result of a life's work, the young disciple is enchanted by the delights of youthful romance. The intersection of the duo's concerns erupts into conflict, depicted under the grand landscapes visualized by Chen and cinematographer Gu Changwei.

The deceit of the film that it blankets conflict with the serenity of the film's surroundings. A resulting suicide is drowned by the vastness of the valley, and Shitou's despair is heard at once with the howling wind. Drama is emphasized with nature's calmness. The old master's poignant resolution after being sung a song by a teahouse owner's wife is backdropped by a noisy and strong waterfalls. Most telling is the scene wherein the old master is pleaded to resolve an encounter between the two warring clans. The landscape shows the vast desert with hordes of men fighting. The old master sits in quiet assurance and sings a song that feels too big to come from his frail body. The result is miraculous and utterly hopeful. It must be remembered that the old master is considered a saint, and it is quite likely that the gods are singing through his music.

Chen's film is coupled with conflicts and contradictions. As explained above, dramatic and emotional turmoil is backdropped with serene scenery, the woes of old age and the innocent concerns of the youth intersect. Moreover, the film discusses hope, rejection, and finally resolution. The old master's sixty year journey to break all the strings ends, not with a miracle, as might be expected from Chen's fable-like filmmaking, but with an all too real revelation. Life is not about the result of one's hardwork, but life is the hardwork. As much as the old master has dedicated his life to play his banjo until the strings naturally break and finally give him the prescription for him to see, it is also about the fact that his life is the string, and the music that results from his persistence.

DVD Times Noel Magahey

CineScene [Howard Schumann]

FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE (Ba wang bie ji) A 99

China (157 mi) 1993

Hitherto, Chen Kaige's films have specialised in poetic, allusive allegory: in King of the Children and Life on a String, especially, socio-political content was conveyed by elliptical narratives and vivid but often enigmatic images. Here, however, Chen adopts a direct and less personal approach to his country's troubled history as he charts the similarly troubled relationship, from 1925 to 1977, of two Peking Opera actors. Their boyhood friendship arises in protective reaction to the disciplines of the Academy; but by the time they've become stars, Dieyi (Cheung) has fallen for his friend Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi), mirroring the on-stage devotion of the concubine he plays for Xiaolou's King of Chu. Inevitably, he is distraught when Xiaolou marries a prostitute, Juxian (Gong Li), who is more than a match for Dieyi's jealous hysteria; but the trio are also caught up in bigger events so that over the decades their mutual suspicion, deceits, divided loyalties, betrayals and acts of desperate support for one another chime with the mood of China itself. Appropriately operatic, Chen's visually spectacular epic is sumptuous in every respect. Intelligent, enthralling, rhapsodic.

Farewell My Concubine  Terrence Rafferty from the New Yorker

Chen Kaige's film is a big, eventful historical soap opera of the "Doctor Zhivago" school—the sort of drama that uses the unsettled emotional lives of a handful of characters to portray the human cost of war and of constant political upheaval. The movie follows a pair of male Beijing Opera performers, Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) and Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi), from their school days, in the nineteen-twenties and early thirties, to their farewell performance together, in 1977. Duan (who plays warriors and kings) and Cheng (who plays the important female roles) have an ideal relationship onstage, but offstage they often seem less like mythic lovers than like miserable, muddling-through partners in an arranged marriage. Chen keeps the action charging forward breathlessly, for more than two and a half hours, and at a certain point you begin to realize that the obvious theatre-versus-life ironies are only a small part of what the movie is about. The real subject is whether it's possible, in times that demand perpetual revolutions in values, to remain true to anyone or anything: an art, an ideal, a friend, a wife, oneself. Also with Gong Li. Screenplay by Lilian Lee and Lu Wei. Co-winner of the Golden Palm at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. In Mandarin.

Asian Cinema Drifter Tuna

Another film banned in China and doused in international acclaim, the 1993 Palm d’or winner at Cannes, Farewell My Concubine is a sprawling 171-minute piece spanning from 1920’s China to 1977. The film begins at a Beijing Opera troupe school, depicting the lives of children performing rigorous training exercises that might be familiar to fans of Sammo Hung’s Painted Faces. However, Farewell My Concubine focuses on the friendship of two actors, Xiaolou and Dieyi, who play the king and concubine, respectively, in the troupe’s most prized performance. They are propelled into super star-dom, but with turbulent times in China’s history awaiting them, their friendship and lives face many great difficulties.

So in separate elements, from the perfect acting of Leslie Cheung and Zhang Fengyi, to the lavish costumes, striking sets and keen focus on China’s history, Farewell My Concubine is a film worthy of the loads of praise heaped upon it. The writing, based on a book of the same title, is also exemplary as it ties in everything from China as a republic, to the Japanese occupation, to the nationalist rule and finally the communist revolution. These are all connected strongly to the main characters and guide the direction of the plot as new obstacles are thrown into their paths. Along with this is the unique literary merit of tying Xiaolou and Dieyi to the characters they occupy in the opera. They are brought up as children to nearly live out their lifelong roles, so Xiaolou as the king soon develops a dominating personality, while Dieyi, (again Cheung is amazing) struggles with issues of dependency and masculinity as we constantly get glimpses into his tortured soul.

However, while all these elements stand-alone deserve acclaim, something about the piece as a whole fails to come through by the end. It may be that the film is simply too long-winded for a single viewing, as repetitiveness in personalities and scenarios is a key aspect of the film. It also feels as the movie goes on, the characters seem to grow more distant from the audience, and Dieyi, the most heartbreaking of the characters, has scenes of relative annoyance as well. It’s a disappointment in some ways, as this historical drama has so much going for it, only to be unappreciated in its character connections with the audience. But still, there’s always the off-chance that any other viewer could fall in love with the characters because it might be a matter of taste. Either way, if you have three hours to kill, it’s worth a try in the end. Recent polls in Hong Kong do indicate that this film was voted most popular Chinese film of the last century. I would assume that counts for something.

Farewell My Concubine" is two films at once: An epic spanning a halfcentury of modern Chinese history, and a melodrama about life backstage at the famed Peking Opera. The idea of viewing modern China through the eyes of two of the opera's stars would not, at first, seem logical: How could the birth pangs of a developing nation have much in common with the death pangs of an ancient and ritualistic art form? And yet the film flows with such urgency that all its connections seem logical. And it is filmed with such visual splendor that possible objections are swept aside.

The film opens on a setting worthy of Dickens, as two young orphan boys are inducted into the Peking Opera's harsh, perfectionist training academy. The physical and mental hardships are barely endurable, but they produce, after years, classical performers who are exquisitely trained for their roles.

We meet the delicate young Douzi (Leslie Cheung), who is assigned to the transvestite role of the concubine in a famous traditional opera, and the more masculine Shitou (Zhang Fengyi), who will play the king. Throughout their lives they will be locked into these roles onstage, while their personal relationship somehow survives the upheavals of World War II, the communist takeover of China and the Cultural Revolution.

Under the stage names of Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) and Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi), the two actors become wildly popular with Peking audiences. But they are politically unsophisticated, and Dieyi in particular makes unwise decisions during the Japanese occupation, leading to later charges of collaborating with the enemy.

Their personal relationship is equally unsettled. Dieyi, a homosexual, feels great love for Xiaolou, but the "king" doesn't share his feelings, and eventually marries the beautiful prostitute Juxian, played by China's leading actress, Gong Li. Dieyi is resentful and jealous, but during long years of hard times Juxian stands heroically by both men.

That the Peking Opera survives at all during five decades of upheaval is rather astonishing; apparently its royalist and bourgeois origins are balanced against its long history as a Chinese cultural tradition, so that even the Red Chinese accept it in all of its anachronistic glory. What almost does it in, however, is the Cultural Revolution, as shrill young ideogogues impose their instant brand of political correctness on the older generations, and characters are forced to denounce one another. Xiaolou even denounces Dieyi as a homosexual, and Dieyi counterattacks by denouncing his friend's wife as a prostitute.

The movie's director is Chen Keige, who knows about the Cultural Revolution first hand. Born in 1952, he was sent in 1969 to a rural area to do manual labor; the scenes involving the Peking Opera's youth training programs may owe something to this experience.

The son of a filmmaker, he was a Red Guard and a soldier before enrolling in film school, and at one point actually denounced his own father, an act for which he still feels great shame. (The father, sentenced to hard labor for several years, worked with his son as artistic director of this film.) "Farewell My Concubine" won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, but Chen Keige returned to find his film first shown, then banned, then shown again and banned again in China. His particular offense was to show a suicide taking place in 1977, a year in which, government orthodoxy holds, life in China did not justify such measures. The Chinese authorities were also uneasy about the homosexual aspects in the story.

What is amazing, given the conditions under which the film was made, is the freedom and energy with which it plays. The story is almost unbelievably ambitious, using no less than the entire modern history of China as its backdrop, as the private lives of the characters reflect their changing fortunes: The toast of the nation at one point, they are homeless outcasts at another, and nearly destroyed by their political naivete more than once. (It is perhaps an unfair quibble that although they must be 60ish by the end of the story, they look only somewhat older than when they were young men.) The Peking Opera itself is filmed in lavish detail; the costumes benefit from the rich colors of the world's last surviving three-strip Technicolor lab, in Shanghai, and the backstage intrigues and romances are worthy of a soap opera. In a season when "M. Butterfly" sank under the weight of John Lone's uncompelling performance as a transvestite, Leslie Cheung's concubine is never less than convincing, and his private life - he is essentially raised by the opera as a homosexual whether or not he consents - contains labyrinthine emotional currents. Gong Li, as the prostitute, is sometimes glamorous, sometimes haggard, and always at the mercy of two men whose work together has defined their individual personalities.

The epic is a threatened art form at the movies. Audiences seem to prefer less ambitious, more simple-minded stories, in which the heroes control events, instead of being buffeted by them.

"Farewell My Concubine" is a demonstration of how a great epic can function. I was generally familiar with the important moments in modern Chinese history, but this film helped me to feel and imagine what it was like to live in the country during those times. Like such dissimilar films as "Dr. Zhivago" and "A Passage to India," it took me to another place and time, and made it emotionally comprehensible. This is one of the year's best films.

DVDTimes review Noel Megahey

PopcornQ Review Lawrence Chua

external review Michael H. Kim

Raymond Maihin Chowkwanyun

outrate.net (Mark Adnum)

Maoist Intl'ist Mvmnt

Farewell My Concubine Engendering Identity: Female Impersonation in Farewell My Concubine, by Shuqin Cui, also here: Session 98. INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: CHINA

DVD Verdict Dean Roddey

Edinburgh U Film Society [Jane Picksley]

Movie Magazine International [Andrea Chase]

TEMPTRESS MOON (Feng yue)

China Hong Kong (130 mi) 1996

Temptress Moon Mike D’Angelo

Chinese cinema desperately needs to head in some new direction -- the last five or six films I've seen from the mainland all seem to meld together into one unmemorable lump of picturesque period hokiness. Temptress Moon, which was shot by Wong Kar-wai's regular cinematographer, Chris Doyle, is visually ravishing, like just about every other recent Chinese movie, but that's the only level on which it works. Everything else -- performances, dramatic pacing, narrative logic -- is readily sacrificed...assuming, that is, that Chen Kaige (whose last film, Farewell My Concubine, also underwhelmed me) ever cared about anything besides his superb compositions in the first place. The main characters, played by the preposterously beautiful Gong Li and Leslie Cheung, are impenetrable masks of alternating lust and grief; the story, which as I recall (it's been nine months since I saw the film; I should really quit waiting for the theatrical release before writing the review) has something to do with gigolo Cheung being hired to seduce and rob childhood sweetheart Gong, is somehow both pedestrian and impossible to follow. Miramax, ever prepared to make whatever alterations are necessary to achieve Miramaximum accessibility, have attempted to render the latter a bit more comprehensible, via the addition of an explanatory prologue and their requisite trimming (have they ever released a foreign-language film at the same length in which it was seen in its native country?), but I frankly can't figure out what attracted them to it in the first place, apart from their previous relationship with Chen. A major feeling of déjà vu permeates the whole affair, to the point where I felt like substituting the film's generically poetic (and essentially meaningless) title on the marquee with the words Automatic Pilot. (Okay, so there was no marquee at the New York Film Festival, where I saw Temptress Moon. A good line is a good line, so just back off.) It's high time for the Fifth Generation to stop making stately, exquisite period melodramas and turn their attention to other times and other genres. They might want to think about peeking over at the work being done in their brand-new territory, for starters. Doyle could probably make the introductions.

The Chinese have every reason to recoil in horror at the recreational use of opium. A good case can be made for it being the reason that the empire fell, thanks to the British, who introduced the opium trade to begin with. Chen Kaige's latest film, the visually sumptuous "Temptress Moon," offers a case in horrifying point about opium's ability to mess up the lives of everyone it touches, user or not.

The film opens with a little girl looking into the camera and asking someone off screen about opium. Her eyes are wide with curiosity and when the pleasures of opium are described, an evil smile splits her face. The child, we learn is Ruyi. The young man answering her question is her opium-addicted, older brother, Zhengda. It is his addiction to and Ruyi's seduction by opium that sets in motion the tragedy that their lives will become.

Ruyi is the headstrong, pampered daughter of awealthy rural family still living in feudal splendor in 1911. Also in the household is her poor cousin, Duanwu, who is devoted body and soul to caring for her, and Zhongliang, whose job in the house is to prepare the opium pipe for Zhengda. When his sister, Zhengda's wife, herself takes to the pipe, the stage is set for an act of sexual betrayal that sends Zhongliang running from the house, but only after committing an act of revenge that will destroy four lives with sexual intrigue, decadence, and betrayal.

The story, spanning ten years, is photographed sometimes with a fisheye lens, but always with liberal use of tracking shots. The effect on the viewer is what the world might look like through an opium eaters' eyes. The dreamy quality also drives the performances, which are subtle but devastating, particularly Kevin Lin as the faithful cousin, who goes from lackey to demon with only one small, startling change of expression and Leslie Cheung who plays the wronged and vengeful Zhongliang with eyes as hard and cold as obsidian.

"Temptress Moon" tells a riveting story of people so consumed by drugs and anger that they are no longer able to distinguish between happiness and despair. And perhaps driven beyond the ability to feel anything.

LoveHKFilm.com (Ross Chen)

Set against the blustering, turn-of-the-century opium trade in China, Chen's newest film resonates on enough levels to satisfy everyone from the hardcore China enthusiast to fans of Melrose Place. Especially fans of Melrose Place. While not nearly as sinuously fluid as Chen's 1993 breakthrough, Farewell My Concubine, Temptress Moon is nonetheless one of the most gorgeously lavish Chinese productions in some time, much of which is due to cinematographer Christopher Doyle's opulent handiwork and a pair of brilliant performances from Gong and Cheung, the Asian Streep and De Niro. As the film opens, it's 1911, and the ancient dynasties that have controlled China for centuries are coming to a close under the thumb of British gunboat diplomacy. Near Shanghai, at the estate of the Pang family, a young orphan, Zhongliang (Ren), comes to live with his sister Xuiyi (He) and brother-in-law Zhengda (Zhou). There, he carefully fills and refills their opium pipes while trying to maintain an air of scholarship. Studies are impossible, though, amidst the dank clouds of narcotics, and before long, Zhongliang is forced into a bitter, incestuous relationship. Despite the friendship of young Ruyi (Gong) and Duanwu (Lin), Zhongliang flees to Shanghai one night and throws himself into an underworld of petty crime, prostitution, and easy money. Taken in by a benevolent gangster boss, Zhongliang is ordered one day to return to the Pang estate -- now but a shadow of its former glory -- to seduce the now grown Ruyi (Gong), the family's sole remaining heir. Against his better judgment, the now-adult Zhongliang (Cheung) finds himself falling in love with Ruyi while all about them crumbles. Essentially a Shakespearean tragedy masquerading as a Chinese period piece, Temptress Moon is a marvel to behold. All three leads, Gong, Cheung, and Lin turn in blazing performances, packed with bitter, endless defeats both in and out of the bedroom. Chen's film moves at the stately, leisurely pace you'd expect from a story dealing with a crumbling dynasty, but once the seeds of destruction are set in motion, the film fairly hurtles inexorably towards its dark, soulless conclusion, grabbing the audience with Doyle's breathtaking camerawork (he also did Chungking Express) and, especially, Cheung's tortuous performance as the doomed Zhongliang. The analogies to modern-day China fly thick and fast in Temptress Moon but never detract from the universality of the story. The cruel destruction of bitter hearts and innocent lives, plus opium wars to boot… what more could you ask for?

Temptress Moon Noel Megahey from DVD Times

Pedro Sena

The Boston Phoenix Gary Susman

Philadelphia City Paper review by Cindy Fuchs

THE EMPEROR AND THE ASSASSIN (Jing Ke ci Qin Wang)

China Japan France (162 mi) 1998 The Emperor and the Assassin website

This epic from director Kaige Chen (Farewell My Concubine) is set in China, 3rd-century B.C., when seven kingdoms were warring for supremacy. The King of Quin, Ying Zheng (Xuejian Li), pledges to his childhood love, Lady Zhao (Gong Li), that when he wins, he will unify China and rule "all people under heaven" with kindness. He and Zhao plot to generate sympathy for the invasion of the neighboring Yan kingdom via a fake assassination plot. However, Zhao falls in love with her hired sword (Zhang Fengyi) and Zheng turns increasingly bloodthirsty during his campaign: in other words, everything goes wrong as a romantic triangle develops. Highlights include several bloody, fast-cut battle scenes, gorgeous period costumes, incredible panoramas showing troop formations and landscapes, and Gong Li’s exquisite face. Funded in part by Sony Pictures Classics, the film boasts the largest budget ever for a Chinese film. Like Kaige Chen’s previous work, it sets the emotional and ethical dilemmas of a specific set of characters against broad historical circumstances, such that its various tragedies have simultaneously small and sweeping effects.

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

If one consistent element fuses the distinct visions of Chen Kaige, Xhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and other rightly celebrated "Fifth Generation" Chinese filmmakers, it's their brave and striking use of allegory to smuggle bold political sentiments past government censors. Chen began this tradition with his spare, gorgeous rural fable Yellow Earth (which was banned by authorities in 1984) and has since expanded into luxuriant period melodramas, including 1993's sweeping Palme D'Or winner Farewell My Concubine and 1997's confused, elliptical opium dream Temptress Moon. Billed as the most elaborate historical epic ever filmed in China, his fitfully exhilarating Shakepearean sprawl The Emperor And The Assassin concerns nothing less than the country's foundation itself, forged in tyranny and blood. Though set during the third century BC, contemporary meanings can be read into the story of an idealistic king (Li Xuejian) who tries to unify the seven dominant Chinese kingdoms under his rule, but eventually succumbs to ambition and an unexpected capacity for violence. The plan begins in earnest when his lover from childhood, played by the incomparable Gong Li, hatches a scheme to provoke an attack on the neighboring kingdom of Yan. To that end, she recruits a glowering killer-for-hire (Zhang Fengyi) for a phony assassination plot but, touched by his desire to change his ways, falls in love with him instead. In its extravagant attempt to plaster history on an immense canvas, The Emperor And The Assassin sacrifices some coherency and depth for the sake of eye-popping spectacle, but its major setpieces are exciting and beautifully orchestrated. Chen's use of broad archetypes instead of more detailed characters makes the film more convincing as adventure than political treatise, but on that level, his skill is undeniable.

Remember a few years back when they dug up all those fiercely mysterious terra cotta warriors standing guard in front of an ancient Chinese grave? That grave was the burial site of Ying Zheng, the first emperor of China, who died in 210 B.C., and is the primary subject of The Emperor and the Assassin. He was the leader who, driven by a holy mission to "unite all under heaven," created a unified China from seven warring states. But his signature flaw was that he became a horrific murderer who conducted massive campaigns of torture and cruelty in the pursuit of his quest. Much as Bernardo Bertolucci gave us the spectacle of The Last Emperor on film, Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige now offers us the tale of that country's first emperor and the result is even more sumptuous, epic, and engrossing than anything Bertolucci might have ever imagined. It's both fair and unfair to make such comparisons, unfair because any work obviously needs to be viewed on its own merits, but also fair because the experience of watching The Emperor and the Assassin incites memories of other film wonders from De Mille to Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune to Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. Clearly, this is a film in good company. Nevertheless, it charts its own course. At about $20 million, the film is the most expensive Chinese production to date. Everything about its scale is epic, and the result can be seen on the screen. Exquisitely mounted compositions populated by literal "armies" of extras stir the eye while intimate human dramas and deeply disturbing horrors fill the foregrounds. Behaviors so mandarin that they fascinate our imaginations with their pomp and ritual alternately contrast with graphic brutalities that embarrass our very souls to witness. The movie can be so compellingly baroque (at least to Western senses) and medieval, but then switches to dramatically operatic and in-your-face visceral. The mise-en-scène goes from distilled lighting to bloody battlefield document to stunning depth of focus to mannered contextual fields as frequently as it goes from blazing action drama to court intrigue. I worried at first that the film was going to require too much understanding of medieval Chinese history as well as a commitment of two hours and 40 minutes to watch. Not long into the viewing, all fears of history subsided as the epic swept me under its spell, parceling out judicious bits of background on a purely need-to-know basis. It's a spellbinding tale, and it's also a love story, a dramatized history, and a saga about the reality of morality. The Emperor and the Assassin is also, most certainly, meaningful as a contemporary Chinese allegory (two of Chen's previous films are banned for screening in China). There is always the sense about this film that it is possessed of greatness, and one of the proofs of that is because of its multiple intriguing paths of entry. Pick any one and you're likely to find yourself on a very good path.

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Emperor and the Assassin (1999) Richard Falcon from Sight and Sound, August 2000

PopMatters P. Nelson Reinsch

The Emperor and the Assassin: On-Line Review by Christian Leopold Shea.

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KILLING ME SOFTLY

USA Great Britain (100 mi) 2002

A debased update of those films noirs in which an unsuspecting girl starts to wonder if she's carelessly married a murderous sadist. Alice (Graham, miscast as a raving beauty) enjoys a vigorous fuck with Adam Tallis (Fiennes) just minutes after making eye-contact at the traffic lights; she's an American in London, he's a mountaineer who lives at permanently high altitude, even in Islington. When they marry, Adam's honeymoon treat is an uphill hike followed by sex enhanced with strangulation games in a country cottage. Bliss for the literally breathless Alice - until the anonymous notes start arriving, warning her that she's married a heel. Inane and shopworn material with a truly cheesy final twist, this is made excruciating by direction that takes it all deadly seriously. The fact that Chen chose this for his first non-Chinese film suggests that (a) he really wanted to direct a sex scene or two, and (b) he can't tell a Mandarin duck from a turkey. (From the novel by Nicci French.)

Alfred Hitchcock may be the father of modern suspense, but he's also the father of the genre's redheaded stepchild, the erotic thriller. A thin line separates the kinky, restrained elegance of Hitchcock's work and the more graphic, less artful sensationalism of its Cinemax-ready progeny, and Chen Kaige's beautiful but almost comically overwrought Killing Me Softly crosses that line early and often. Denied a theatrical release in America in spite of abundant, often gratuitous nudity from two of cinema's most attractive stars, the movie stars Heather Graham as an Indiana-bred "flatlander through and through" who lives in London with her safe-but-dull boyfriend. Graham's life is turned upside-down once she meets Joseph Fiennes, a dark, brooding Byronic figure who introduces her to a dangerous but seductive world of kinky sex, fearless mountain climbing, and dark secrets. Graham leaves her boyfriend to marry Fiennes, but doubts begin to emerge about his past once she begins receiving anonymous warning notes. Can Fiennes be trusted? What's the deal with his spooky, unusually possessive sister, Natascha McElhone? Is Fiennes a larger-than-life hero, or a rapist and murderer? As Graham attempts to uncover the truth about his past, the film grows increasingly convoluted, leading to a twist ending that will come as a surprise only to those who've never seen a Shannon Tweed movie. Graham and Fiennes make a fetching couple, but their performances border on self-parody. Her wide-eyed, nubile web-geek with a taste for the dark side plays like a straight version of her porn-star-posing-as-virginal-fiancée character in The Guru, while Fiennes plays the sort of hyper-masculine cartoon who nearly beats a thief to death, then proposes to Graham, both in one fell swoop. His character has enough testosterone to become alpha-male of all Britain: He's not just a famous mountain-climber, but also apparently the manliest man ever to suffocate a lover during sex. Like Basic Instinct, Killing Me Softly lends an air of visual sophistication to a script permeated by pulpy idiocy. The result may not be enduring cinema, but it does make for watchable trash.

DVD Times Noel Megahey

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Brad Slager

eFilmCritic.com Slyder, perhaps the most negative review out there

LoveHKFilm.com (Calvin McMillin)

TOGETHER (He ni zai yiqi) B+ 90

China South Korea (116 mi) 2002

Chinese films at the 27th Toronto International Film Festival - A ... Shelly Kraicer from Senses of Cinema

Chen Kaige's new comedy Together (He ni zai yiqi, 2002) occupies something like the negative space of Unknown Pleasures, though it is ostensibly engaged with similar concerns. It takes its formal templates right out of the genre playbook of mainstream (state sponsored) Chinese cinema: it combines rural innocents lost in the big city (which dates at least to the 1920s and 1930s era of classic Shanghai films) with a student's apprenticeship saga (the master student template made famous by many a martial arts tale) and a Westernizing technical epic (usually the tale of a scientist or engineer who masters Western technology for the benefit of the motherland). Here, the technique is Western classical music, and the story shows the struggles of naïve rural violin prodigy, Xiaochun, and his father, Liu Cheng, to flourish in big flashy modernizing Shanghai. Such a thematic catalogue readily lends itself to a sort of commentary on China's current crises, which include what might be characterized as the apprenticeship of a nation in Western technique, and the ensuing cultural shock as this apprenticeship envelopes (or ignores) the rural heartland.

Together really isn't about cultural crisis though: we are far from the Chen Kaige of Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984) and King of the Children (Haizi wang, 1987), films whose poeticized ambiguities were fraught with the feeling that though everything was at stake, no answers were available. Together itself deploys a highly polished technical expertise: fine luminous cinematography, tight plotting, sensitive, nuanced performances. It wants to entertain and comfort, to reassure audiences that problems are solvable, that happy endings are within our grasp. It reaches its own inevitable happy ending with a final dazzling display of montage (parallel scenes intercut in ways that fairly guarantee to pull the heartstrings and set your pulse racing) that almost obscures the sleight of hand needed to pull it off. With virtues like these, Together became one of the commercial sensations of TIFF: audience enthusiasm led to a mini bidding war among North American distributors; international commercial success should be assured.

The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]

Chen Kaige's Together reprises themes that the director has previously riffed on: adolescent rites of passage, teacher-student relationships, music as salvation and rebellion, the rituals of performance. Same old song, then, but in a different key. With this violin-whiz inspirational, a filmmaker who began his career with mournful, ambient tone poems takes an all-out stab at a middlebrow pop hit.

Straight from the provinces, pensive 13-year-old Xiaochun (Tang Yun) and his peasant father, Liu Cheng (Liu Peiqi), arrive in Beijing for a violin competition to find that, in the big city, it's a matter of pulling—and not sawing—strings. But with simpering bumpkin persistence, Liu hounds the reclusive, disheveled Professor Jiang (Wang Zhiwen) into taking on Xiaochun. The ensuing homiletic imperatives ("Feel the music in your heart!") and table-turning huzzahs (student motivates teacher to comb hair and clean up after cats) are enough to make you wish Isabelle Huppert's taskmistress was in charge. Gold-digging glamourpuss neighbor Lili (Chen Hong) exists mainly as a receptacle for Xiaochun's puppy-dog devotion.

Together glosses over the Sixth Generation theme of spiritual tumult in the face of growing materialism. Even Xiaochun's unworldly dad doesn't think twice about ditching mad-haired, bohemian Jiang when he encounters the distinguished, career-making Professor Yu (played by the director himself). There's potential for a richer meditation than Chen seems willing to undertake—especially since his subject is Western classical music, a forbidden pleasure during his Cultural Revolution boyhood. But surface luster is paramount: While the setting doesn't allow for his usual money shots (no open vistas or brocaded dens), his present-day Beijing is an almost fairy-tale world of cozily shabby courtyards, amber light poised to flood into any given interior.

Mawkishly clichéd as it is, Together is an odder hybrid than it first appears—at once populist and deeply cynical about the price of popularity. (It's hard not to see this conflict in the context of the director's recent losing streak. His last film was the Joseph Fiennes-Heather Graham erotic thriller Killing Me Softly, destined never to appear at a theater near you.) Contrary to the rules of the Western musical-prodigy heart tugger, Xiaochun's talent, despite a vague mystical tint, is relatively unromanticized. The kid's passion for music is less evident than his reluctance to commit to the punitive life of the pro entertainer (see also the grueling Beijing Opera apprenticeships in Farewell My Concubine). In the end, Together argues that to offer one's art up for public consumption is to risk contamination—a peculiar message for a movie that so badly wants to be loved.

filmcritic.com Don Willmott

In his nine feature films, Chinese auteur Chen Kaige has given Western audiences amazing opportunities to learn the ins and outs of China’s tumultuous history, most notably in Temptress Moon, The Emperor and the Assassin, and the Oscar-nominated Farewell My Concubine. Chen’s latest, Together, is a more humble effort than those historical epics, but beyond its heartwarming tale of a 13-year-old violin prodigy and his impoverished father’s attempts to give him a better life no matter what there’s a gritty depiction of old China colliding with new, for better and for worse.

Liu Xiaochun (Tang Yun, in a piece of casting that’s nothing short of miraculous) has already amazed all the locals in his provincial town with his musical talents. He needs a bigger stage. His widower father Liu Cheng (Liu Peiqi) decides to leave his nightmarish job as a restaurant cook, tuck his meager life savings into his red cap, and take Xiaochun to Beijing, where he hopes to find a suitable violin teacher and new opportunities for his son.

Both father and son are astonished by the city’s sprawling size and frantic pace, but soon enough they find their way through some decrepit alleys to Jiang (Wang Zhiwen), a once famous piano player who now gives music lessons while stoking a coal fire in his dirty one-room house, a house stacked to the rafters with sheet music, old musical instruments, and cats. Jiang and Xiaochun have a rocky relationship punctuated by petulance and fights, and it isn’t long before Liu Cheng realizes his son may need someone a little more on top of his game to coach his son. Surprisingly, Jiang agrees.

Enter Professor Shifeng (Chen Kaige himself), a powerful and wealthy music professor who can promise Xiaochun a future of music academies and international performances. The price? Liu Cheng must agree to let Xianchun live with the intimidating professor and another student in his opulent and totally Western apartment. Father and son must be willing to separate. Naturally, Dad agrees at once, even as dismay and heartbreak register on his face. After all, Xiaochun is literally the only thing he has in the world.

Xiaochun finds himself so stressed out by his situation that his behavior becomes increasingly erratic. At one point, he even sells his violin to buy a coat for his new neighborhood crush, the lovely Lili (Chen Hong), who may or may not be a high-priced “hooker with a heart of gold.” Her comical addiction to designer labels makes her the movie’s most obvious embodiment of the new China, and Xiaochun is dazzled by the shopping malls through which she drags him day after day.

The movie’s suspense is built around Xiaochun’s troubled mind. Unlike Billy Elliot, in which the father fights the son’s dream, here the son is fighting the father’s dream to a certain extent, and the ultimate outcome could go either way.

Together is a crowd pleaser in which everyone Xiaochun encounters is on his side all the way through. Given Chen’s track record of depicting China’s harsh historical realities, it’s surprising to see him come up with such a sentimental script. In interviews, he’s said that his love of classical music inspired him to write a film that would be infused with beautiful music throughout. He got what he wanted: a story of old China versus new, of the transforming power of music, and of the love between a father and his son.

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THE PROMISE (Wu ji) B 87

China (102 mi) 2005 ‘Scope

What is it about Asian directors where they want to put their own definitive stamp on epic martial arts love stories, each more earth defying than the last, with characters flying through the air with the greatest of ease, defying all of the laws of gravity, and each more luxuriously photographed than the last? What began with Ang Lee’s 2002 film CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, then two Zhang Yimou (who happened to be Kaige’s cameraman in his 1984 film YELLOW EARTH) releases, HERO in 2002 and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS in 2004, and now Chen Kaige again in 2005? While the money has been well spent on extraordinary sets, glorious costumes, sumptuous art direction and photography, as well as incredible marital arts choreography, the love stories have been minimized and dwarfed by the furiously-paced action sequences. This film is no exception, which features the brilliant camera work of Peter Pau (who also shot CROUCHING TIGER), very much reminiscent of Kurosawa’s landscape color schemes during battle, featuring swooping camera action to heighten and accentuate a ferocious pace. While there is more of an element of fantasy to this film, with the appearance of gods, and the ability of one human to race as fast as Superman, so fast that he can go back in time, but there are limits to everything, and some of the ground rules here make no sense, but we are expected to simply accept the story as is, without question. There are some interesting characters here, and some dazzling sequences, even a shadow hero and lover, which is a nice change of pace, but despite a dazzling opening, it fails to live up to its promise, all attributable to a storyline that fizzles out at the end which was co-written by the director himself.

There are great expectations from the opening sequences, one where children are the only survivors in a battlefield of the dead, which leads to a mythological visit from a fascinatingly dressed goddess, the immaculately beautiful Chen Hong, where her hair and gown are flowing in the breeze whether she flies through the air or is standing still, where there are photographic still images resembling classical paintings, and where the imagery onscreen matches the look of being immersed in one of those paintings. There’s an interesting battle sequence in a canyon, where thundering horned buffalo lead the charge, and where bright-red armored soldiers clash against the evil men in black, where a General (Hiroyuki Sanada) gets down and dirty and takes on all comers in a dazzling display of martial art kills, and where one man blessed with supernatural powers can actually outrun the thundering buffalo while carrying a dead man on his back. This man, Kunlun, (Jang Dong-Gun), has lost track of any family or where he has come from, and has been a slave for as long as he can remember, yet he is the focal point of interest throughout the story. When his master has been killed, the General becomes his new master, and when he is seriously wounded in what appears to be a battle with dark spirits in a maze-like forest, somewhat similar to THRONE OF BLOOD, Kunlun must put on his battle armor and act in his behalf to save the King. His rescue sequences are among the best in the film, and there are several.

Up until this point, one is caught up in the imagery and weirdness of the story, but it doesn’t maintain it’s pace, becoming bogged down in a faux love story with a princess, Cecilia Cheung, a General who seems to have a personality disorder, and a strangely cruel cut-throat of a ruler, the Duke of the North, Nicholas Tse, who gains way too much screen time as a remorseless, overly dressed, constantly preening prima donna who casually slays a dozen men responsible for a blemish on his clothing. This otherwise forgettable character, along with the General, become more comical than serious, yet they become the focal point of the story, which then degenerates into their loathsome world. At least at the end of Tarantino’s KILL BILL PT 1, there was an ever-evolving crescendo that was at least intriguing, here it loses all intensity with a somewhat banal ending. Too bad, as there’s plenty to like in this film, particularly scenes set amongst gloriously blooming flowers or in the serenity of snow, or where a floating feather has a mind all its own, but there’s some mysteriously odd editing that puts the brakes on some scenes that simply end in fadeout with a sudden thud, as if someone has altered the length of the film to fit a producer’s time requirements rather than the quality of the film. As it turns out, 19 or so minutes were indeed cut in the American release from the Chinese version that premiered last year. Still, some of this is spectacular and in the martial arts cinematic fantasia, it is among the best of the bunch.

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]

One of the most respected and celebrated directors in China, Chen Kaige ("Farewell, My Concubine"), follows fashion with "The Promise," his contribution to the wuxia pian (martial chivalry) genre of martial arts, magic, star-crossed romance and tragic melodrama.The costume epic, set safely in the ancient China of warring clans, is the story of a ruthlessly successful general (Hiroyuki Sanada), his supernaturally gifted and unswervingly loyal slave (Jang Dong-Kun) and the haughty princess (Cecilia Cheung) whom they both love.

The triangle, complicated by the web of mistaken identities and repressed feelings that apparently are required in such bigger-than-life romantic adventures, is threatened by the prissily aristocratic Duke of the North (Nicholas Tse), who imprisons the princess in a literal gilded cage.

Cut from the original Chinese release by 18 minutes (with the help of notorious import tinkerer Harvey Weinstein), the American version is a storybook myth of tall tales and tragic sacrifices driven at a breathless pace. Every shot looks digitally buffed and tweaked to bring out gleaming silvers, glowing yellows, burning reds and blooming greens, an unreal world in which magic shimmers in the air.

For all the melodramatic bluster and elevated vows, the emotions are more proclaimed than felt, in part because the cast lacks the star power and larger-than-life presence of "Crouching Tiger" and "House of Flying Daggers." Amid the mythic feats executed with cartoonish overkill (like the slave's impression of the Road Runner, complete with speed smears), the actors struggle to hold their own in the film's landscape.

Like many of Chen's movies, which are so precise and composed and lush, it's not really emotionally engaging. It is, however, a dazzling and dynamic spectacle that risks being ridiculous to create an unreal world of the romantic imagination.

The Promise Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

The strange thing is, The Promise finds Chen returning to his cinematic roots, and the fact that it doesn't really work is instructive in its own way. Over the years, one of the things that stuck with me about Chen's bizarrely poetic debut Yellow Earth is that in a lot of ways, it's a movie that doesn't move. Like its central narrative confrontation (traditional peasantry and centralized, official modernization), Yellow Earth uses the inherently forward-looking movement of the cinematic medium to gaze at a way of life that, while not exactly static, operated on a wholly inassimilable temporal plane. The result was highly pictorial, only slightly more kinetic than the films of Sergei Parajanov. When we rejoin Chen in 2006, we find that his high-budget martial arts fantasy is equally devoid of motility. The Promise seems to move in fits and starts, often doling out only the slightest modicum of narrative data before closing the curtain with a hasty fade to black then moving on. This actually struck me as one of Chen's most intriguing formal gambits, but then who knows; the international version of the film shaves off a hefty 22 minutes, so this could just be a post-editing artifact. Nevertheless, Chen's unease with the material stems from an odd dialectical mandate, one it's unclear he ever fully worked through. A martial arts film relies on ass-kicking kineticism, or at least nominal propulsion. Yet, from its fairy tale premise to its expansive sweep, The Promise is about residing in a kind of mythological non-time. Thus, we have epic battle sequences that read like an ant farm, and long stretches of faux-painterly CGI that gives way to dotty Playstation chintz. Granted, Chen's economical approach (expensive though it may be) does bear more family resemblance to the B-picture craftsmanship of Tsui Hark than the white-elephantitis of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou. But in the end, there's something to be said for carved-ivory opulence, for actually putting the money on the screen. The Promise wants to fly, and it mostly just flies apart.

Coming closer even than Zhang Yimou's Hero and House of Flying Daggers to resembling the Chinese cover art for a vintage Iron Butterfly album, Chen Kaige's The Promise is psychedelia extremis. Hardly a minute passes without a concentrated dose of digital froufrou and lavish cartoon- poetic imagery: floating ocean goddesses, flying swordsmen, Final Fantasy waterscapes, horse manes dyed fuck-me red. One can only imagine what impact some 1971-grade LSD might have on a courageous viewer. The assault of chintz is relentless—in support of a half-baked honor-love-mistaken-identity yarn—but it's also wildly campy. The cursed heroine (Cecilia Cheung) is kept prisoner in a giant birdcage that seems designed for Siegfried & Roy; eye shadow, feather boas, and scarlet capes are de rigueur for the men. More ejaculatory effort has been expended on the knights' Vegas-style ensembles than on a coherent narrative, and the upshot is a new-millennium wuxia pian that risks all its marbles on nonsensical style and none on storytelling.

Which is the genre's bread and butter. Like the western, the Chinese martial arts movie is a frontier playground for moral crisis; the fighting and supernatural high times were methods of escalating dramatic torque. This was well understood in the HK salad days of the '70s and '80s, when speed and nerve were the only tools available to make these crazy contraptions fly. But the yuan talks, and video game spectacle is the most reliable of international McMovies. Chen's story is harebrained but hardly simple, conflating the fates of Cheung's princess, a likable windbag of a general (Hiroyuki Sanada), and his devoted slave (Jang Dong-gun), who can run like the Flash and, without the training usually thought necessary for this sort of thing, defy time and space as well as any master monk. Who loves who and why is never made clear, and the mano a mano is managed via quick edits, not the actor's movements.

There are lovely moments—the slave rescuing the feather-robed princess on a tether and flying her like a kite—but they're gumdrops in a vat of cheap candy. You can't help wondering how the same Fifth Gen filmmaker who made Yellow Earth and Life on a String could've fallen on such hard times, or justified such goofiness to himself.

The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]

Veering between stylish arthouse hits (Farewell My Concubine, The Emperor And The Assassin) and bland genre failures, Fifth Generation Chinese director Chen Kaige has seen his critical reckoning and future prospects jag up and down like a California seismograph. In that respect, his gorgeous, mythic new wu xia feature The Promise seems almost like a gimmick, a calculated crowd-pleaser designed to win back his fans after the one-two whiff of his weak English-language thriller Killing Me Softly and the dull, overlong family drama Together. But gimmick or no, the film works wonders toward restoring his good name. A deft, expansive, beautifully realized epic fable in the mode of Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Promise is an unadulterated pleasure from beginning to end.

As the film opens, a starving young girl stealing food from battlefield corpses is approached by a goddess, who proffers a deal: As an adult, she can be the most beautiful, coveted woman in the world, but she will always lose any man she truly loves. The girl agrees, and is next seen as grown-up Cecilia Cheung, the Emperor's concubine and a practiced, heartless manipulator of men. Meanwhile, the Emperor's forces enter battle under famed general Hiroyuki Sanada, who quickly learns that Dong-Kun Jang, a slave he bought as cannon fodder, has an inhuman, impossible gift for speed. After winning the battle via a great deal of the kind of cartoony, over-the-top CGI silliness that packed Kung Fu Hustle, Sanada makes Jang his personal attendant and sends him off to encounter the Emperor and Cheung, setting the stage for a complicated love triangle involving mistaken identities, a magical assassin, a lost country, a great deal of lush pageantry, and a thoroughly fairy-tale-esque aesthetic.

Like so many wu xia films, The Promise naturally expresses its mythic qualities through stunning visuals, breathtaking costuming, and a great deal of action, and it adds in Kaige's Ridley Scott-like fondness for vistas full of floating, drifting objects, from feathers to flower petals to snow. But the resonance goes much deeper, thanks to a compelling story that uses notions of feudal honor, class barriers, and destiny to temper the characters' passion; the principals' respect for and obligations to each other make the story far more compelling and tragic than simple romantic competition could. For Kaige, The Promise can't exactly be called a return to form—it's more a return to Hero and House Of Flying Daggers director Zhang Yimou's form. Either way, it's still glorious.

DVD Times Noel Megahey

DVD Talk - U.S. DVD release [Jamie S. Rich]

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Twitch (Todd Brown)

KFC Cinema Louis Lantos

Bina007 Movie Reviews Tomiwa

DVD Verdict [Joel Pearce]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Lucid Screening Ben

Los Angeles Times [Kevin Thomas]

CAUGHT IN THE WEB D 60

China (117 mi) 2012

Whatever happened to Chen Kaige’s promising career? YELLOW EARTH (1985), magnificently filmed by fellow director Zhang Yimou, and FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE (1993), still the only Chinese film to ever win the Palme d’Or, are two of the best Chinese films ever made, yet the director remains in utter obscurity today, forgotten in the faded relics of history amidst the Chinese mad dash to modernity. How does the director feel about his earlier masterworks? “Yellow Earth? No one would come to see this film today in China. The people walking into theaters and sitting in the dark are all in their twenties. They know nothing about history and are not interested. Their choice is to find something to make them relax. They don’t want to think. They need to think a lot in their daily lives already. Film is just entertainment.” Nowhere is urbanization accelerating at a faster clip than in China at the moment which is transforming from a traditional agrarian socialist collective into a supply-and-demand economy, adopting the Hollywood model where the market determines what films are made. Historical costume dramas, among Chen’s specialties, where THE EMPEROR AND THE ASSASSIN (1998) was the most expensive Chinese film ever made at the time, are currently a thing of the past, as investors nowadays are only interested in making money, having little interest in what the film actually has to say. This does not bode well for the future of the nation, where if this film is any indication, the floodgates are open for mindless drivel that substitutes for content, supposedly a satire on the dawning of the Internet age in China, expressed almost completely through an overreliance on computers, cellphones, texts, insta-photographs, and YouTube videos, with no reference whatsoever to the government’s suppression of Google and other search engines that reach for information from the outside world. Instead the entire film takes one long, repetitive look at the impact of a single trivial incident captured on a cellphone that goes viral once it’s aired on national TV, turning into a comic farce about the ridiculous behind-the-scene maneuvers to manipulate and publicize so-called reality videos that can overnight become topics for national conversation.

What’s immediately apparent is the shift in style from any of Chen’s earlier films, where gone is the luscious beauty of the image, replaced by a quick edit style where few shots last beyond 5 seconds, where it intentionally becomes a film that reflects the short attention span of the nation, where all that matters is the present, as people’s lives have no future and no past. Within this framework the director sneaks in an old-fashioned tearjerker, something of a melodrama about a woman, Ye Lanqiu (Gao Yuanyuan), diagnosed with terminal cancer who chooses to live out her final days in grace and dignity. Still in something of a daze after her diagnosis, she is the victim of cyber bullying, initially captured on smart-phone footage sitting on a bus, refusing to give up her seat to an elderly man, even after repeated badgering by hostile passengers, which is then broadcast across the nation as an example of today’s self-centered youth. In a rush to generate as much media attention as possible, her identity is quickly revealed, also a fictitious story about how she’s having an affair with her boss. Totally embarrassed by this encounter, Ye seeks solace in solitude, refusing to show her face to the public after offering an apology which is never aired. Showing how easy it is to manipulate the truth, broadcasting any scenario that generates controversy, all designed to provoke the public’s interest, where cynical people working behind the scenes are constantly seeking headline grabbing storylines that have a short shelf life, soon replaced by the next fabrication. Reality TV broadcast in this manner is little more than the spreading of vicious gossip and rumors in place of the truth, posing doom for the future of the nation. Ye Lanqui develops a sentimental love interest in Shoucheng (Mark Chao), an earnest young man, but their doomed love, played out like a soap opera, mirrors the fatalistic view of the nation. All told in cardboard cut-out characters who yell and scream at each other, spend their time staring at computer screens, where exaggerated farce becomes the reality of the day, this adaptation of an Internet novel is little more than an embarrassment, where there’s simply nothing to recommend about this movie. An emphatically dull and depressing example of what was once a glorious film industry, this is the absolute flipside of Jia Zhang-ke’s riveting and mystifyingly surreal A Touch of Sin (Tian zhu ding) (2013), which is similarly built around real life incidents, where this is supposedly China’s 2013 selection for Best Foreign Film of the year, but it’s also a candidate for one of the worst films of the year.

Chicago Reader Ben Sachs

For the first time in a decade, writer-director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine, The Promise) looks at contemporary rather than historical China, focusing on such topical issues as Internet surveillance and the 24-hour news cycle. A corporate secretary (Yuanyuan Gao of Johnnie To's Don’t Go Breaking My Heart) gets caught on camera refusing to relinquish her bus seat to an old man; a sensationalistic TV news show blows the event out of proportion, and within hours the woman finds herself a pariah. Other complications involve her CEO boss, his jealous wife, and several muckraking reporters; Chen interweaves these plot strands as though constructing a farce, yet the tone is bitter and moralistic. This isn't a success, but it has insight and energy. In Mandarin with subtitles.

CAUGHT IN THE WEB Facets Multi Media

Although veteran director Chen Kaige (Yellow Earth, Farewell My Concubine) has made epics on Chinese dynastic history a specialty of his wide-ranging career, Caught in the Web shifts radically to our Internet-obessed present for a fascinating melodrama hinging on corporate intrigue and cyber-bullying.

Set in modern-day China, this byzantine thriller starts with a small incident: Ye Lan-Qiu (Gao Yuanyuan), a secretary for powerful businessman Shen Liu-Shu (Wang Xueqi), is told at a routine medical check that she is showing symptoms of terminal cancer. Still in shock, Lan-Qiu refuses to give up her seat on the bus to an elderly man and is verbally accosted by fellow passengers—an incident captured on camera by Yang Jia-Qi (May Wang), an ambitious intern at a local television station. The aftermath affects her personal and professional life as the power brokering and the strategies used by both sides—portrayed as a cynical satire on the Chinese media climate, becomes a riveting and well-woven ensemble piece about media manipulation.

Caught in the Web | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Abby Garnett

Chen Kaige’s nearly 20-year career has been marked by several high points representing various forms of extremity. His 1993 historical epic Farewell My Concubine garnered international acclaim, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes (still the only Chinese-language film to do so.) Some five years later, another epic, The Emperor and the Assassin, became the most expensive Chinese film ever made (it’s since been surpassed many times over.)

Yet Chen has rarely found success when he ventures outside the realm of fantasy or historical fare and engages with contemporary reality. With the Chinese film industry now fully entrenched in the model of big-budget, high-technology spectacle, his most recent film, Caught in the Web, attempts to set itself apart through a modern, urban setting and a plot that ostensibly turns on the hypocrisies created by social lives outsourced to the internet. Its central event occurs when the beautiful, unfortunate Ye Lanqiu (Gao Yuanyuan), who has just been given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, coldly refuses to give up her seat on the bus to an elderly man, ignoring the pleas and reprobation of her fellow passengers. An upstart reporter named Jiaqi (Wang Luodan) and her footloose cousin Shoucheng (Mark Chao) also happen to be present; when Jiaqi takes footage of the incident to her boss, Ruoxi (Chen Yao), who runs a modest-sized news program, it ends up splashed all over the web.

The incident isn’t severe enough for its aftermath to make sense to American audiences, but it has the secondary effect of illuminating the uneven positions of women in Chinese society. Four of the six major characters are women, of varying ages and levels of professional success, and it seems deliberate that they’re the ones faced with the most challenging moral conundrums. In comparison, the young and handsome Shoucheng is mostly passive when he’s not exhibiting his leading man prowess by running or punching someone, and Mr. Shen (Wang Xueqi), the powerful executive who involves himself in the scandal when he gives Lanqiu a large sum of money, is an emotionally distant paean to male stoicism. As the principal actors respond to Lanqiu’s overnight fame with censure, sympathy (“This society’s a pressure cooker,” offers Mr. Shen amiably) or salivating opportunism, the film creates an effective portrait of the lurching dissension a viral event can create.

But when you try to more closely examine the film’s morality, it doesn’t hold up quite so well. Part boy-girl buddy caper, part emotionally saturated melodrama, and part lite social commentary, Caught in the Web is a durable, well-shot film with a strange lack of emphasis. Our female protagonists are rewarded and punished unevenly, and each person’s relative importance is dependably tied to their level of wealth or physical attractiveness — towards the end, when Jiaqi experiences some good luck, her appearance shifts suddenly from bespectacled, banged and bubblegum-chewing to sleek and glasses-free. During a few anomalous action sequences, the camera work is startlingly elegant — we see a nearly silent on-foot chase from the side and then from below in long, measured sweeps — but the editors seem to have run into problems in post-production. There are jarring, obvious cuts that interrupt the dialogue in a few scenes, indicating that perhaps there were other, more egregious problems that needed to be covered up.

It’s an issue that extends outwards into the rest of the film: with each moment of incongruence, it becomes increasingly difficult to relate to the action (Why, for instance does ambitious worker and caring girlfriend Ruoxi end up jobless and alone? And where does something like the strange Bucket List-like bungee jumping scene fit into Chen’s vision of dubious morality?). Scenes that might have been charming on their own, like a wine-fueled bonding session between Ruoxi and the lonely Mrs. Shen, become lost in the uncertainty of the larger arc, and by the time the final events fall tragically into place, it’s difficult to pinpoint their significance in the bog of melodramatic consequence.

It’s worth noting that China, frequently a hotbed for censorship issues, is currently embroiled in a tactical war on microbloggers. In that context, the film seems like a pale attempt to situate internet chatter as a threat to the young and beautiful, obscuring the interest the government may have in suppressing liberal voices. At the very least, it’s certainly a limited view of the issues technology poses in contemporary society. Its generality makes it potentially appealing to American studios looking to mine foreign markets for awards-bait fare that engages with a young and progressive demographic, and with a little surgery, a remake could work. But the minor successes in Chen’s film come from depicting humans interacting with humans, not humans reacting to tech phenomena, and as such the emotional payoffs, however universal, feel a bit misleading.

Review: CAUGHT IN THE WEB Chooses Love Over China's ... - Twitch James Marsh

Review: 'Caught in the Web' - Variety

Film Review: Caught in the Web - Film Journal International Doris Toumarkine

Review: Chen Kaige's Internet Drama 'Caught In The Web' | The ... Gabe Toro from The Playlist

Movie Review - 'Caught In The Web' - Too Tangled A Tale : NPR Tomas Hachard

Caught In the Web (2012) Movie Review - Film School Rejects Rob Hunter

ScreenDaily Dan Fainaru, also seen here: Caught In The Web | Reviews | Screen

Caught in the Web Stumbles to Find a Point - Page 1 - Movies - New ... Nick Schager from The Village Voice

Chen Kaige on China's New Filmmaking Machine Allan Tong interview from Filmmaker magazine, June 11, 2013

TimeOut HK: director interview Edmund Lee interview, December 3, 2012

Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young

'Caught in the Web,' Directed by Chen Kaige - NYTimes.com

Review: 'Caught in the Web' traps us in a moralizing melodrama Inkoo Kang from The LA Times

Chen Kun-hou

GROWING UP (Xiao bi de gu shi)

Taiwan (100 mi) 1983

User comments from imdb Author: gmwhite from Brisbane, Australia

'Growing Up', coming out of the context of the Taiwanese 'New Wave', was directed by Chen Kunhou (also spelled Chen Gwen-Ho), and was written by Hou Hsiao Hsien. This alone makes it worth tracking down for students or fans of Taiwanese film, and it does repay viewing, though in a typically Taiwanese understated manner, in which there is more going on under the surface than is immediately apparent.

The story focuses upon a boy called Xiao Bin, or Young Bin. The Chinese title of the film is indeed 'The Story of Xiao Bin', which casts light upon the beginning of the story, for the child, an illegitimate son, was initially Xiao Lin. He only became Xiao Lin when his mother entered a marriage of convenience with a mainlander who was much older than her, and all alone in Taiwan. Without overstating or overdetermining motives or reasoning, his life with his mother and new father is followed as he progresses through primary and high school. Along the way, there is the addition of younger brothers, truancy and assorted adolescent problems, young romance, and family problems. Continuity during gaps in the story is preserved by a woman narrator, who had appeared then as his classmate and neighbour.

Beneath this rather simple story there lie a number of questions regarding the psychology of the characters and the intricacies of their relationships. Occasional outbursts of anger, frustration and violence provide more obvious signposts into such motivations, but as in life itself, even oneself is often not entirely aware of the reasons for much of one's own actions. The audience is left to tease much of this out, and cast back onto their own insights into humanity. This vagueness may have been frustrating had the characters been flat and unconvincing, but they felt so entirely authentic that one could say that they were either superbly acted, or that they were not acted at all, that they were indeed who they were, without the involvement of artistry.

Coming out of the context of the Taiwanese New Wave, this film is located in a specific place and time, touching upon issues pertinent to the context, for instance, the relationship between Mainlanders and Native Taiwanese, as encapsulated by the marriage of convenience. American music is also present, though not to the same extent as in 'A Brighter Summer's Day', by Edward Yang. But like the motivations and attitudes of the characters themselves, these are present as nuances and subsurface details rather than as topics for didactic exposition.

Wonderfully understated, superbly acted and a pristine example of directorial restraint, I would not hesitate to recommend this work to anyone interested in Taiwanese film, and even to those who are unfamiliar with it. The involvement of Hou Hsiao Hsien makes it of immediate interest to his legion of fans. On the other hand, it would be quite accessible to those viewers unfamiliar with the details of Taiwanese history and merely looking for a human-interest story. It is entertaining, often humorous, and moving. In sum, 'Growing Up' is well worth seeing.

Doc Films A Time for Freedom: Taiwanese Filmmakers in Transition, essay by Edo S. Choi and Paola Iovene, Spring 2009 (excerpt)

Even a brief overview of Taiwan cinema in the second half of the 20^th century must take into account its multilingual context. The majority of films produced in Taiwan in the 1950s and early 1960s were in Taiwan's native Southern Min language, and represented locally popular genres such as opera films and romantic comedies. By the 1960s Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party, the sole ruling party since its ousting from the Mainland by Mao Zeodong's Communist Party, was aggressively enforcing the teaching of Mandarin in schools and the use of Mandarin in cinema and other media. Launched by the state-owned Central Motion Pictures Corporation (CMPC), so-called ``healthy realism'' became the dominant genre. Mostly set in rural Taiwan, these films imagined a harmonious agrarian society, a vision which was often well-received by local audiences, but also represented the ideological whitewash of a repressive government.

Pressured by foreign competition, mostly from the Hong Kong industry, CMPC sought to diversify their production, experimenting with costume melodramas, comedies, and musicals. Pai Ching-jui's romantic comedy The Bride and I (1968) well exemplifies this attempt to compete with glitzier foreign products by toning down ideological content. One of the highlights of this important filmmaker's career and a box office hit, this delightfully self-reflexive work calls attention to the constraints that both political and commercial demands imposed on filmmakers at the time, thus combining light comedy and veiled cultural critique.

With the death of Chiang Kai-shek and the diplomatic isolation that followed the 1971 UN decision to recognize the People's Republic of China, the 1970s marked a dim, claustrophobic period in Taiwanese history, where cookie-cutter escapism prevailed, mostly in the form of adaptations of popular romance novels. But by the 1980s, facing ever-increasing competition from Hong Kong and Hollywood, CMPC inaugurated a ``newcomer policy'' aimed at attracting new talent to the local film industry. This institutional support was crucial for the emergence of the New Taiwan Cinema, whose exponents were given carte blanche, as well as the full wealth of the company's subsidies. Economic imperatives had at last superseded political ones, as the Nationalist Party gradually lost its grip on the country's imagination.

In 1980, Wu Nien-jen, a precocious novelist, found himself hired as a creative supervisor to reinvigorate CMPC's productions. The resulting project In Our Time (1982) inaugurated the New Taiwan Cinema with its quotidian tales of childhood mortification, sexual awakening, and urban maladjustment. It also occasioned the first film from a young former journeyman of television, Edward Yang. But it was Growing Up (Chen Kun-hou, 1983) that first attracted broad critical and popular attention to the movement. Penned by Hou Hsiao-hsien, eventually the movement's most prominent filmmaker, in his first of many collaborations (nearly every work of his career) with another novelist, a young woman named Chu T'ien-wen, Growing Up established some of the movement's key stylistic approaches and narrative concerns, with its subdued manner in relating the story of an adolescent boy grappling with everyday pangs amid Taiwan's fraught provincial context. The same year saw the release of The Sandwich Man, Wu Nien-jen's second omnibus film consisting of three shorts including Hou Hsiao-hsien's first personal project as a director. It was immediately hailed as a ``completely new start for the Chinese cinema of Taiwan.''

One of three films that ignited the New Taiwan Cinema, Growing Up, directed by Chen Kun-hou and written by Hou Hsiao-hsien, was a significant commercial and critical success, inspiring many to produce works in its vein. The narrative focuses on the defining events of a student's adolescence—his mother's remarriage, his high school shenanigans, and his first romance—while concomitantly the style emphasized understatement in its attentiveness to character psychology and restraint in its evocation of social issues, such as the relationship between Mainland Chinese and Native Taiwanese.

OSMANTHUS ALLEY (Kuei-Hua Hsing)

Taiwan (112 mi) 1987

Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)

Based on Hsiao Li-hung's popular historical novel of the same name, Chen Kun-hou's Osmanthus Alley is a stylized drama tracing one woman's fortune in a small Taiwanese fishing village over the course of 60 years. The protagonist is Ti-Hung, a young orphan whose destiny is written in the lines of her hand. Her talent for embroidery -- and her "golden lotus" (bound feet) -- attract the attention of the well-to-do Hsin family, who arrange for her marriage to their son. "Immaculately staged and shot by Chen himself. . . [the film] it is a tour-de-force for actress Lu Hsiao-fen, who moves from shy bride to stern matriarch of a rich family as the men in her life fall victim to the sea or her own pride (Derek Elley, International Film Guide). The protagonist, a strong woman who maintains control of her fate and survives amidst the rule of men, can be read as a female personification of Taiwan in the face of the monolithic, masculine Chinese mainland; her life's journey parallels Taiwan's emergence, by dint of hard work, assertiveness, and self- determination, from backward fishing village to modern, enlightened urban society. In this hope for and faith in a renewed, modernized China, director Chen displays an idealism common among Chinese filmmakers of the 1980s and early 90s. Taiwan 1987.

Chen Kuo-fu

THE PERSONALS (Zheng hun qi shi) B+ 92

Taiwan (104 mi) 1998

The Personals Shelly Kraicer from a Chinese Cinema Page

Chen Kuo-fu manages to pull off the near-impossible here. He's made a sparklingly entertaining film that is also rich and provocative, packed with complex structure and ambiguous meaning.

The formal framework is neat and clear: a series of interviews that Du Jiazhen (Rene Liu Jo-yin) holds with prospective suitors, all respondents to a personals advertisement that she's posted in a Taipei newspaper. Each interview takes place in the same fancy (mostly empty) Taipei restaurant, and each is decorated by a title announcing the name, age, and occupation of the prospective suitor. Most of them are funny, in various ways, but two stand out: Chin Shih-chieh's shy, intense schoolteacher Yu-wen, whose monologue on loneliness is so beautifully written and so masterfully performed (by one of Taiwan's greatest theatre actors) that we're sorry when he brings it to an end, collapsing flamboyantly into a fragile and self-conscious shell, his arms all wrapped up around his face.

And Chen Chao-jung's preternaturally beautiful ex-con, who actually manages to impress Liu to the point where they sleep together, with poignantly sad results (that look and feel like they might come out of a Tsai Ming-liang film).

But emphasizing the presumptive men in Du's life misses the focus on her, both on Du Jiazhen, the lonely opthamologist she plays, and on Rene Liu the actress. Both are remarkable, acute, and beautifully expressive listeners: most of the shots show Liu's extensive range of exquisitely modulated reactions to the men's spiels.

Complicating the structure of the film is not only this background story, but another extended conversation, broken up and inserted between the suitor-interviews, that Du has with her former teacher. It's perhaps the only sustained, communicative "conversation" in a film composed almost exclusively of conversations. And it's here that Chen Kuo-fu becomes ambitious, and somewhat abstract, in a way that doesn't clearly mesh with the rest of the film. Her teacher talks, somewhat generally and philosophically, about Liu's search for identity, but this seems too intellectualized, too preachy, to fit with the rest of the film. It does lead to a revelation about the teacher, which provokes Du's own tears. As if his account of self-discovery means more to her than all the ideas he's been preaching, as if she suddenly sees that it's not a husband whom she's been searching for, but in the end, herself.

A bit of a trite destination, perhaps, after such a fun, daring, wild, brilliantly structured trip? Several stylistic strategies protect The Personals from this fate: a rapid fire, almost self-consciously playful cinematography style, which mixes idiosyncratically framed shots (speakers isolated at the edges of the frame, alternating between each side between and among conversations) with video montages of eyeballs (from Du's ophthamology practice), punctuated by a typically Taiwanese film trope: repeated shots of Du travelling by bus, watching the city pass by through the coach windows.

Lighting is brilliantly designed: dominated by subdued, soft blues and whites which pick out Liu, immersed in a pale and luminous world as if she were a fish in an aquarium, on display for our viewing pleasure. Which raises one of the film's central concerns -- the pleasures and dangers of watching and being watched. From the opening shot, in which the camera peers through a bathroom window and catches Liu undressing, the viewer is clearly implicated as a "voyeur". The film then articulates a complex structure based on voyeurism: with Du at the centre as both object and subject of the voyeuristic gaze, both of which positions seem to alternately empower and victimize her. She starts by quitting her job as ophthamologist: a technologist/enforcer of "correct" vision. She watches and listens to the parade of prospective suitors, enjoying their intimate revelations. She imagines herself under a similar scrutiny as she leaves a series of messages on the answering machine of her former lover. She finds herself the recipient of her former teacher's confidences. And finally, she discovers that someone completely unexpected is in fact monitoring the phone messages that she had left. There is a power in viewing, in manipulating the technologies of surveillance, but there is also, for Du, a liberating power in inverting this relationship, in being viewed: "I feel like a voyeur," she says, "he in the light, me in the shadows, but how do I get into the light?"

A colleague from Hong Kong complained that The Personals was too much of a "film critic's film" (director Chen Kuo-fu is also a prominent film critic in Taiwan), whose complex strategies of film style and structure draw attention to themselves, to the way the film functions as a Godardian film-essay, as a series of propositions to be argued and explored. While I can understand why one might say this, I'm not convinced. I think that the film's strength is that it is pitched at a number of possible audiences, and manages to works on many levels at once (Ru-Shou Robert Chen's article in the current issue of Cinemaya (no.45) explains exactly how The Personals became a hit in Taipei). For a Taiwanese film industry that's barely able to keep a domestic audience, even though it continues to reap attention, awards, and renown internationally, this can only be an encouraging development.

Monogamorphous Desires, Faltering Forms: Culture Content and Style in Chen Kuo-fu’s "Zhenghun Qishi" Nick Kaldis, October 2000 (pdf format)

Chen Shi-zheng

DARK MATTER B 87

USA (90 mi) 2007 Official site

There’s something altogether uncomfortable about this movie, though one of its joys is the chances it takes both in style and tone, utilizing an endearing performance by Liu Ye as Liu Xing, one of the most brilliant astrophysics students in the department’s history, a Chinese scholar with few English language skills who is initially pampered and coddled by his academic advisor Jacob Reiser (Aidan Quinn), heading his research team during his doctorate studies, but something happens that changes this warm welcome as his professor instead prefers to play favorites and his rising star falls out of favor. Though this is based on a true story, the university is unnamed and there is no mention at all about any real life incident. Without this knowledge, what stands out is an intriguing element of the American Dream, underscored by themes chosen by Van Dyke Parks from American folk ballads that reveal the possibility of unlimited hope, as personified by Liu Xing’s own hopes and aspirations, which are nothing short of winning the Nobel Prize, followed by themes of the dream denied, where all the open doors are suddenly and mysteriously closed, which may make little sense to the uninitiated who could not have foreseen the petty insecurities of academic culture which brags about having the best minds, but then rudely and inexplicably places mandates and restrictions on those minds to ensure the professor gets all the credit for their work. When someone exhibits signs outside the scope of the department, beyond the realm of the accepted and prevailing views, they are viewed as a threat to the department’s reputation and prestige and are singled out and isolated as an example to others. It makes no difference that they may be the best and the brightest, as students they must remain in a subordinate role.

With Liu Xing, the department has a free thinking student who’s capable of brilliant theories on the formulation of the universe, suggesting all we can really explain is about 1 % of the universe, the rest is all dark matter subject to theories and speculation. But he has devised models about the unknown that are mathematically accurate, though outside the scope of the department’s knowledge, so Reiser refuses to accept his Doctoral thesis as it doesn’t conform to his own views, which brings a world of shame into the scholar’s life that he can’t explain, sending him spiraling into serious depression, a condition he has no answer for. A thread that plays throughout the film shot in grainy, colorless imagery is his family working back home in China performing mindless, back breaking industrial labor. All their faith has been bestowed upon their brilliant son in America. His letters back home suggest their faith has been rewarded, even embellishing the truth when his world turns upside down, as he refuses to bring dishonor upon his household.

There are many elements of discomfort here, such as a research team that is exclusively comprised of Chinese recruits, whose work regimen resembles academic sweatshops, as they are completely at the mercy of their financial sponsors who work them to death and then take full credit for their labor, even offering them Chinese cultural field trips by rich alumni (Meryl Streep) that patronizingly suggests America welcomes its immigrant labor pool, but all they’re really interested in is the services rendered. It’s a bit like building a house of prostitution next to an army base, anything to boost morale, even if such a short-term investment shows no moral foresight. Streep and Quinn are the ugly Americans, the rich successful capitalistic models of the American Dream, but they are all façade supported by money and power, as their self-centered, ivory tower worlds require servitude and slave labor from third world countries to support the lavish lifestyles they have become accustomed to. In this bigger picture, the students are nothing more than investments, each one a business decision, where they are expected to produce a profitable return for their investment.

Liu Xing has no concept of this universe, as he’s too focused on the origins of the real universe motivated by his own brilliance and the sheer exhilaration in his work. All throughout the film there are symbols of freedom and individuality, yet really he and his Chinese team are nothing but indentured servants. When another in his team gets recognized for applying the professor’s formula, Liu Xing is aware that the theory doesn’t work, which motivates him even more to produce an original concept that no one has ever published before, which he thinks will bring honor and recognition to his school and his department, but instead it is perceived as a power grab and the work is shelved, leaving him in utter turmoil and disgrace. In his field, he may as well be blacklisted, as without a recommendation from his department head, no one will hire him. His career is effectively ended. The ending of the film is surprisingly muddled and confused compared to the rest of the film, very obviously designed, seeming a little too contrived, but the fact is, America welcomes these foreign students with open arms and shows little regard for them after they have gotten what they need and have no further use for them. It’s an academic plantation system that thrives on cheap, foreign labor. Like any other poorly run enterprise, unforeseen accidents occur that they are ill-equipped to handle, leaving them blameless and pointing fingers at everyone else but themselves. By the end of the film, there’s a blisteringly angry version by Sharon Jones of “This Land Is Your Land,” a Woody Guthrie song filled with soulful outrage that plays over the end credits, a pointed reminder to anyone listening that feels laceratingly relevant.

Chicago Reader JR Jones

A brilliant Chinese student (Ye Liu of Purple Butterfly) thinks his dreams have come true when he arrives at a California university to study astrophysics under his idol (Aidan Quinn), but after the young man develops a dazzling new theory that contradicts his mentor's model of the universe, he gets a chilly lesson in academic politics. Billy Shebar based his script on the true story of Gang Lu, a doctoral student who killed five people at the University of Iowa in 1991, and fails to pull off a comparably bloody climax. But first-time director Chen Shi-zheng shows great sensitivity to the pressure and isolation felt by Chinese brains at American universities, and the relationship between Liu and Quinn provides a rare look at the intellectual serfdom of graduate study. With Meryl Streep. R, 88 min.

The Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]

"Inspired by" the 1991 University of Iowa school shootings, Dark Matter gives a sympathetic picture of its doctorate candidate turned sociopath, Liu Xing (Liu Ye). Maladjusting to cultural amputation, the international student's letters home become increasingly Travis Bickle–like in their remove from reality. The China he's left behind is drear, but at least it's a comprehensible, straightforward wasteland—unlike the mirage of America, where we see freedom and opportunity extolled, but toadying and conformity rewarded. First-time filmmaker Shi-Zheng Chen shows little aptitude for accurately transcribing the textures of human interaction; there's not a single credible performance here, not excluding Meryl Streep as a faculty Sinophile, doing that thing where she grinds every line through a gauntlet of tremulous inflections. More surprising, considering Chen's pedigree in opera directing, are his conspicuously inept mad scenes: Liu Xing's final snap is dramatized in a disco-strobed student lounge. So what pushes him over the edge? That he can't get laid? Indigestion from mixing wuxia with cowboy culture (the film implicitly perpetuates the think-piece insipidity that American gun violence has more to do with Zane Gray than lax handgun laws)? Who knows? Despite overtures toward evenhandedness, Dark Matter's insights go no deeper than "chickens coming home to roost" banality.

Dark Matter Facets Multi Media

In his stunning feature film debut, renowned opera director Chen Shi-Zheng (The Peony Pavilion) follows the passionate ambition of Liu Xing, a brilliant and talented Chinese student, who immigrates to Valley State University to pursue his Ph.D. in cosmology. Initially, Liu seems to live a charmed life in America: he works for the research team of the famous cosmologist Jacob Reiser (Aidan Quinn) and earns recognition for his ability to grasp difficult scholarship, while also finding favor of a wealthy university patron and Chinese culture enthusiast Joanna Silver (Meryl Streep). He relishes the freedoms of American life: unadulterated television, flirting with a woman at the coffee shop, and being considered a peer of his academic advisor. But as Liu's obsession with uncovering the mysteries of "dark matter" challenges his mentor's life work, his seeming success comes crashing down as Reiser casts him as a pariah. Liu's need for recognition runs deep, and as he is pushed to the margins and his relationships around him sour, he is driven to desperate measures. "Dark matter" becomes a compelling metaphor for the gulf between what director Chen has called "the idea of America and the America [that is] experienced." The black hole of desire, success, and recognition can become impossible when we strike out on our own -- contrary to the tenets of the American dream. Directed by Chen Shi-Zheng, U.S.A., 2007, 35mm, 90 mins.

Austin Chronicle [Josh Rosenblatt]

If I’ve got this right, cosmologists use the term “dark matter” to refer to the 99% of the universe that doesn’t emit enough light to be seen. They’re not sure what it’s made of exactly, but they theorize it has enormous gravitational effect on all the things we can see out in space, namely galaxies, stars, and alien spaceships. In other words, dark matter is what’s bubbling just below the surface of things, the unknown quantity making everything tick, which is an apt enough metaphor for Chen’s directorial debut that has less to do with the darkness permeating the cosmos than it does with the darkness rattling around in our own heads. Loosely based on the story of Gang Lu, a Chinese student at the University of Iowa who turned violent after his doctoral dissertation failed to win a prestigious academic award in 1991, Dark Matter follows the sad tale of Liu Xing (Liu), a young genius from a poor neighborhood in Beijing who arrives in small-town, big-sky America to build elaborate computer models of the universe for a theoretical-cosmology heavyweight named Reiser (Quinn). Now, it’s true that in the movies it rarely takes much to turn a prodigy crazy – a piano concerto by Rachmaninoff or the belief that communists are planting subversive code in copies of Life magazine should do the trick – but demanding a detailed map of the infinite cosmos is enough to run anyone mad, especially a sensitive foreigner stuck in Middle America with barely enough English to order a cup of tea. So when Liu thinks he’s discovered the reconciliation point between Reiser’s cosmic string theory and his own love for the mysteries of dark matter (his eureka moment, like all cinematic eureka moments, comes not in a lab or a classroom but in the kitchen, while cooking eggs), he glows with the light of a thousand supernovas, only to learn that his master – as capable of jealousy as anyone – won’t give his theory the time of day. It’s hard to ask for juicier, or more timely, subject matter than high-pressure academic ambition turning violent, but to map the descent of a genius into madness isn’t a task to be taken lightly. Sophisticated psychoanalysis will be required, as will sensitivity to the slow accumulation of slights and disappointments that, over time, add up to a rationalization for terrible behavior. There is, however, no need for a scene in which your hero loses touch with reality via cockeyed camera trickery and thumping techno music – especially when you’ve got in your arsenal a heartbreaking scene showing your disenchanted Einstein reduced to selling skin-care products door-to-door to make ends meet. That scene (featuring a predictably brilliant Streep) says more about the frailty of human identity and the depths of shame than any thousand hallucination sequences or contrived foreshadowings ever could.

Political Film Society

Presumably based on a true story, Dark Matter focuses on Liu Xing (played by Chinese actor Ye Liu), a brilliant physics graduate student at an American university near the Rockies who is hired upon arrival from Beijing as a research assistant by a Professor Jacob Reiser (played by Aidan Quinn), the author of a supposedly famous theory about the big bang. Of the many Chinese graduate students in Reiser’s project, he regards Xing as the most brilliant, but he is unprepared for how brilliant. The film proceeds at four levels. One focus is on Xing’s parents in China, who work hard in factories, obviously have saved a lot of money to put him through college, now expect him to succeed in America, and Xing in turn does not want to disappoint them. A second focus is on Joanna Silver (played by Meryl Streep), whose husband has become rich by importing goods from China, possibly those produced by Xing’s parents. With an abiding love of Chinese culture, she provides off-campus support for students from China through excursions and receptions. The third level is the effort by Xing to find an American girlfriend, Claire (played by Jodi Russell), but Xing evidently is not experienced enough to realize that she is only mildly interested in his attention. The fourth level is the interaction between Xing, his fellow Chinese students, and the opportunities provided at the university. The down-to-earth Chinese enjoy free entertainment and food but quickly realize that their path to success requires them to work on a problem preapproved by Professor Reiser. Xing, however, wants to do a thesis beyond Reiser’s theory. He believes that space is not empty and occasionally populated by galaxies and stars; instead, he believes that space is otherwise filled with dark matter, and he wants to prove his theory with mathematics. When he finishes, he appears before his doctoral committee to defend his dissertation, but he is rebuffed by Reiser, who requires that he must recalculate everything. Mortified, Xing gets a gun, shoots Reiser and four others before killing himself. But the film ends without titles that might enable filmviewers to better understand that Xing’s situation may not only be based on a true story (the shooting was at the University of Iowa in 1991, when a Chinese student did not receive a top award for his completed dissertation) but also typifies the clash of cultures between brilliant students expecting to be rewarded for thinking outside the box and an academic world in which professional egos limit that aspiration. What is particularly unfortunate is that students similar to Xing often do not know how the academic world operates, and even academics are unaware of the human and cultural elements impacted by their decisions. Xing had nowhere to go for support on campus, and Reiser’s academic colleagues were similarly unskilled in knowing what to do in order to avoid tragedy. Virginia Tech in 2007 has made the same point. Alas, cultural awareness training that is required in many businesses and government agencies is lacking at universities. Director Shi-Zheng Chen has unfortunately missed an opportunity to promote that awareness by not using clarificatory voiceovers and failing to place titles at the end about the 1991 situation and the larger context.

indieWIRE Leo Goldsmith from Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The House Next Door [Keith Uhlich]

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Zack Haddad

Variety.com [Justin Chang]

Chicago Tribune Maureen Hart

New York Times Stephen Holden

Gunman in Iowa Wrote of Plans In Five Letters Michael Marriott from The New York Times, November 3, 1991

Iowa Gunman Was Torn by Academic Challenge Michael Marriott from The New York Times, November 4, 1991

The Fourth State of Matter extended excerpts by Jo Ann Beard from her book, The Boys of My Youth (1997)

In Touch With Her Inner Brat The Boys of My Youth, by Jo Ann Beard (208 pages), a book review by Laura Miller from The New York Times, February 22, 1998

BookPage Interview Meet a rare creature: the wholly talented, wholly modest Jo Ann Beard, interview and book review by Ellen Kanner from BookPage (February 1998), including a brief paragraph from the book

Salon Books | The Boys of My Youth book review by Charles Taylor from Salon, April 15, 1998

A Tree of Legacies: The UI Murders 5 Years Later Crockett Grabbe, November 2, 1999

Recalling a snowy, blustery November day Amir Efrati from The Daily Iowan, November 1, 2002

New York Times (2) A Tale of Power and Intrigue in the Lab, Based on Real Life, by Dennis Overbye, March 27, 2007

Gang Lu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chenal, Pierre

NATIVE SON B 84

USA Argentina (104 mi) 1951 US version (91 mi)

Anyone who’s read Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son realizes what an incendiary work it is, actually divided into three sections, Fear, Flight, and Fate, an intensely engaging work where much of it is told in a naturalistic, stream-of-conscious style taking place inside the mind of the lead character Bigger Thomas, a poor and uneducated black youth from Chicago in the 1930’s charged with the murder of a wealthy white woman, where his second murder of a black woman is almost completely ignored, where Bigger is very much aware of how racial stereotypes play in the minds of white society, where historically blacks are routinely charged for rape in order to justify a white hysteria around any alleged crime. In Wright’s mind, Bigger Thomas

stands for that historical black male figure in both the North and South who has been picked up by police and hauled off to jail on trumped up rape charges, leading to a public outcry of condemnation, much of it fueled by racial overtones, described by Wright as a compilation of young black men “who consistently violated the Jim Crow laws of the South and got away with it, at least for a sweet brief spell. Eventually, the whites who restricted their lives made them pay a terrible price. They were shot, hanged, maimed, lynched, and generally hounded until they were either dead or their spirits broken.” Anyone familiar with The Central Park Five (2012) case realizes how prevalent this persistent social pattern continues into the present, often leading to wrongful convictions of black males, where the jails are filled with similar convictions, often cast in racist overtones best summed up by “Well, it’s only a nigger,” where in their zeal to obtain high conviction rates, prosecutors have been known to cut corners and convict convenient subjects, often teenagers, many of whom have been bullied into marathon interrogation sessions leading to confessions. Ten to fifteen years later, when DNA evidence shows they’ve convicted the wrong men, few in the criminal justice system seem to care anymore, as all they remember was the all-important conviction, which suits the law-and-order mentality of the electorate. Wright’s novel challenges the idea of justice in a racist society, where white perceptions determine the outcome, from the newspaper reporters, lawyers, judges, and jury, where few, if any blacks could be found in the Jim Crow South. The 1940 novel appeared on the “Book of the Month Club,” though in an edited version, the first bestseller by a black writer, while the film faced similar censorship and was cut from its original listing of 104 minutes in the Argentine version, streamlined to 91 minutes in the American version.

The importance of the novel was particularly evident in the era in which it was written, as it lit a fuse that shocked many people, including people of left-leaning sympathies who were called out in the book as selling out the black man just as much as the deeply rooted racists in the South, as in the end, arrested black males continued to be stigmatized in the press by left-leaning white publications that used racially lurid and inflammatory headlines to attract interest and sell papers, at the expense of those arrested. Wright’s story was inspired by the 1938 arrest and trial of Robert Nixon, who confessed to five slayings and multiple assaults, though the Chicago police alternately beat him and offered him sweets and strawberry soda, depicted with racist imagery in the mainstream press with lurid descriptions of sex crimes, eventually executed in the electric chair at the Cook County jail in 1939. The social controversy surrounding the book, prompting a scorching defending essay by the author himself "How Bigger Was Born" in March of 1940, made it impossible to ever make and/or release a movie in the United States, in much the same way author Richard Wright, a former member of the Communist Party and an avowed black Marxist, whose works were blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950’s, and fellow author James Baldwin, an avowed black homosexual, both outspoken intellectuals disappointed in the nation’s inability to hear voices of social protest, emblematic of what this book represents, were eventually forced to leave America altogether and move to France, which seemed to tolerate racial diversity without all the race hatred. So it’s perhaps appropriate that the filmmaker chosen to make this film is, in fact, French, but also Jewish, where he was forced to leave Nazi-occupied France during the war and emigrate to South America, making several movies in Argentina where this film was eventually made.

With that in mind, it might surprise people that the film’s opening is a veritable time capsule of Chicago in the late 40’s and early 50’s, capturing the architectural skyline and the fully lit-up downtown movie marquees at night which are seen repeatedly through rear projection images in various car rides. The thriving street life, the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower, the CTA busses and elevated trains, the old Conrad Hilton Hotel and Buckingham Fountain are all given elaborate recognition, where people can see this and immediately relate to the Chicago they know. But then the images shift to the South Side of Chicago, the poor black neighborhoods where people are stacked on top of one another, where kids play openly in the alleyways and on the streets, with dogs running freely, but also newspaper pages are left in the breeze on the sidewalks, where dirt and broken glass are more prevalent, also abandoned buildings and empty lots, as this is a decidedly poorer and filthier neighborhood than the picture postcard view of an immaculate downtown. One of the things this film does well is differentiate between the two different worlds, presented almost as if they can’t coexist. While Bigger is only twenty in the book, living at home in a one-roomed apartment with his younger brother and sister under his mother’s roof, he’s seen as little more than a sullen teenager whose constant anger and moodiness leave him drifting in a world of poverty and unemployment, alienated from the larger world around him. Instead of an exasperated kid who doesn’t have the words to explain his inner anguish, in the movie he is played by author Richard Wright himself, where at 42 years of age he’s already a full grown man whose chief characteristic is being an overbearing bully, particularly to his girlfriend Bessie (Gloria Madison), always ordering her around, while remaining docile and submissive in the white world. Wright’s performance in particular, the only one of his career, was singled out as being wooden and ineffectual, never conveying the complexity of the character, though this version of the film, both the American and the Argentine, was preserved by the Library of Congress in 2004, where the historical influence of the material outweighs any cinematic limitations, such as being made on the cheap. Of interest, Native Son was directed by Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater and ran successfully on Broadway from 1941 – 43, and was Welles’s last real triumph on the New York stage.

Like the book, the film is presented in three segments, though they are untitled and run continuous, where the initial sequence is easily the best, where a series of events lead Bigger into employment as a chauffeur for a rich white family living in Hyde Park who have liberal feelings about blacks, seeing them as a disenfranchised people, so they give Bigger a chance even though he’s had a few run-ins with the police. Bigger is stupefied by the behavior of their college-age daughter, Mary (Jean Wallace), whose sympathies for blacks (in the book) leave Bigger to believe she’s making sexual advances, toned down here, stripping the story of any Communist subplot and a scene where Bigger kisses the white girl, where instead she gets dead drunk and can’t stand on her feet, forcing Bigger to carry her upstairs into her room, where her blind mother walks in on them. Bigger’s blind fear of getting caught in a white girl’s bedroom, growing up and hearing all the stories, knowing that’s the one thing that can get a black man killed, causes an overreaction, where he accidentally suffocates her while trying to keep her quiet. Making matters worse, he throws her body in the incinerator and begins covering up his tracks with a series of lies. Up to this point the film is a marvel of social provocation, and even interesting cinema, using several clever tracking devices, until it seems to run out of money and disintegrates into predictable territory. Once the detectives and the white press get involved, exaggerated and way over the top, the story turns into a series of stereotypes, using cardboard characters whose opinions hardly matter. Besides Bigger, Bessie is probably the best developed character, a singer in a jazz nightclub and crazy about her man, as evidenced by a unique scene of black lovers at the beach on Lake Shore Drive, but by the end she is overshadowed by Bigger’s turbulent world coming apart. Nonetheless, his race to elude the police resembles Raoul Walsh’s earlier White Heat (1949) and Cody Jarrett’s climb to the top of a water tower, where the water hoses used by the police foreshadow the fire hoses used during the Birmingham campaign in the lead-up to the 1963 Civil Rights demonstrations. By the time Bigger is arrested, however, the story is dominated by his Communist Party attorney, Don Dean as Max, whose spirited defense of Bigger at the spectacle of his trial becomes, in effect, Wright’s own Marxist assessment of racial relations in America. While not excusing the crimes committed, Bigger’s destiny is seen as inevitable, along with other black Americans who find themselves in similar circumstances, a byproduct of a racially hostile society that created them and formed them in the nation’s own thoroughly defective image.

Despite leaving the Communist Party in 1944 and help found the literary Paris Review in Paris in 1949, Wright constantly reevaluated and transformed his Marxist thinking, where the influence of this book remains controversial, stirring up criticisms on every front, not the least of which was a literary war. Baldwin wrote his own response in a 1949 essay called Everybody’s Protest Novel that was later published in 1955 as a collection of essays Notes of a Native Son initially published in various magazines, where he repudiates Wright’s novel for portraying Bigger Thomas as an angry black man, which he felt lacked psychological complexity and painted a bulls eye on the backs of black Americans in a majority white society, an essay that effectively ended their friendship. Former Folsom State Prison inmate and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver took both Baldwin and Wright to task in his book Soul on Ice (1968), much discussed during the 60’s, using arch conservative and homophobic views to pit the feminine side of gay writer James Baldwin against the masculine side of Richard Wright, who he felt was a more liberating example for the Panthers and the next generation of young blacks. Irrespective of one’s views, the work defined 20^th century discussions on racial relations in America, where Wright’s intention seemed to be to redefine blacks more accurately for white readers, destroying the myth of smiling and submissive Uncle Tom black men, where Bigger’s internal rage is in full view, even at the more sympathetic liberal whites who he hates with equal relish, especially the way they flaunt their wealth, as they represent everything that remains unattainable to blacks. Once ensconced with the existentialists in Paris including Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Wright wrote his second novel The Outsider (1953), which critics found too existential and pessimistic, while blacks felt it was a deviation from his black roots, but in effect, he was attempting to transform his original more provincial American ideas onto the world stage, joining forces, one might say, with (another key influence on the Black Panther Party) Frantz Fanon’s idea of blacks actively struggling against societal oppression, where violence and anger are products of opposing racial oppression, spending much of his later years supporting nationalist movements in Africa, dying penniless in Paris at the age of fifty-two. Along with Wright’s earlier works, his autobiography Black Boy (1937) and Uncle Tom's Children (1938), a collection of short stories, these are his crowning achievements, seminal works in attempting to destroy white myths and provide a complex understanding of a profoundly different view of blacks in today’s modern society.

Native Son | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

A genuine oddity: a 1951 adaptation of Richard Wright's great novel of black Chicago, shot in Buenos Aires by French director Pierre Chenal and starring the author himself as his protagonist, Bigger Thomas. Wright is clearly too old for the part, and there are many other ways in which the film can't begin to do justice to the extraordinary power and density of the original, but it's still a noble and interesting if highly uneven effort. With Jean Wallace, Gloria Madison, and Nicholas Joy.

Blacker than Noir - Adaptation - Oxford Journals

Richard Wright’s 1951 film of Native Son could have been the essential African-American film noir, as Wright, a Black expatriate living in Paris, was part of the very intellectual scene that invented the noir sensibility. However, contemporary prints of the film reveal it to be an ugly, difficult film. Using archival historical research into the film’s production and censorship, and analysis of the film’s noir components, this article explores how Wright (and co-writer and director Pierre Chenal) used the film’s darkness and its lacks to create a cinematic text critical of capitalism, criminalization, and American race relations, one grounded in an aesthetic that is Blacker than noir.

Native Son - The 50th New York Film Festival | Film Society of ... Film Comment

When the French director Pierre Chenal teamed with American novelist Richard Wright to create a film version of Wright’s controversial bestseller Native Son, they quickly realized it would be impossible to make such a film in America. The year was 1950, with the Civil Rights Movement still in its infancy and Sidney Poitier just beginning to change the image of blacks in Hollywood movies—and Wright’s novel dealt with that most taboo of subjects: a poor black man charged with the murder of a wealthy white woman. So Chenal and Wright decamped for Buenos Aires, where the author was cast in the lead role of the persecuted Bigger Thomas, and the story’s Chicago setting was meticulously reconstructed on the stages of Argentina Sono Film studio. When it was released the following year, Native Son became a local critical and commercial success, but upon export to the U.S. the film was shorn of nearly 30 minutes—including all of its most provocative racial content—by the New York State Board of Censors. For decades, Chenal’s original version was feared lost, until a complete print recently resurfaced in Argentina, which provided the standard for this restoration undertaken by the Library of Congress. The results reveal a flawed but fascinating film light years ahead of its time in its depiction of race, as well as a rare, very stylish example of African-American film noir. Special thanks for this screening to Edgardo Krebs (Smithsonian Institution) and Fernando Martin Peña (Malba Museo de Arte Latinoamerico de Buenos Aires), who teamed to recover the film and research its complicated history. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Edgardo Krebs and journalist Stanley Crouch.

Native Son | Top 25 Important Movies On Race | TIME.com Richard Corliss

Richard Wright’s Native Son was the first major black novel to speak against American racism in an angry voice. The tale of Bigger Thomas — a Chicago youth who is hired as a white family’s chauffeur, goes joyriding with the family’s rebellious daughter and accidentally kills her and is pursued for her murder — was a sensation on its publication in 1940. The following year, Orson Welles (fresh from Citizen Kane) dramatized it on Broadway, but Hollywood wouldn’t touch the property, though one producer said he’d do it if the main character could be changed to an ethnic white kid. By the late 40s, Wright had moved to Paris, where he hooked up with director Pierre Chenal and revived the project. The French government, fearful of official American reprisals, offered no funding, so Chenal made the movie in Buenos Aires, with non-actor American tourists in the supporting roles and Wright himself as Bigger. When the film got a furtive release in the U.S., it was cut from nearly two hrs. to 87 mins. So far as I know, it has never been restored.

The surviving shards suggest a movie bold by the standards of its day, tepid compared to the book. Stripping the story of its Communist subplot and a scene where Bigger kisses the white girl, this Native Son is still the first boyz-n-the-hood movie — the first to examine, with a kind of documentary dispassion, the downward pull of a restless young man into the black underclass and his resentment of the white bourgeoisie he is expected to revere. Wright was no actor — here he is miscast as someone half his age. But his very stiffness reflects Bigger’s alienation from the white and the black worlds; he is critical of both societies that have rejected him, an outlaw and an outcast. When his fairly genial employer puts a paternal(ist) hand on Bigger’s shoulder, Wright throws him an instinctive suspicious glance. If you learn one thing growing up in a black ghetto, “a prison with no bars,” it’s wariness.

Even when Native Son devolves into a long climactic chase through streets that look nothing like Chicago’s, it summons the pressures not only on Bigger, but on the film itself — a project as doomed as its young antihero to end in tragic frustration. Today the picture is notable as a forgotten sire of angry black cinema, and for the rare sight (Mickey Spillaine as Mike Hammer in The Girl Hunters being the only other example that comes to mind) of a best-selling author playing his own creation.

Public Enemy: Richard Wright's Native Son | FilmComment Stanley Crouch

To accurately discuss pierre chenal’s uncut 1950 film version of the novel Native Son, made in Argentina and starring its author, Richard Wright, we need to think about the context in which this film, like 1947’s Crossfire, and 1950’s No Way Out, faced up to certain truths that were not being addressed at the time. These truths about race in America have usually been most melodramatically delivered since then, with self-righteous overstatement rather than high cinematic quality. In our electronically layered modern age we have sometimes been forced to conclude that, in a mottled masterpiece like D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, wonderful things can be messed up by propaganda. Despite its epic impact and unprecedented expansion of cinema’s vocabulary in the silent era, certain things are no less true just because of the discomfort that accompanies them. From Griffith, we learned a grim fact about modern times: aesthetic genius can be interwoven so powerfully with a surrealistic big lie that a stereotypic factoid is actually seen as a fact. From the moment it becomes profitable, mass media will submit to and accept its buffoonish conventions—in this case, racist stereotypes that remained in place until at least 1950. Even though the dream machine recognized No Way Out with Academy Award nominations, Native Son, which distributors butchered according to the rules of the cinematic game of the time, was little noted.

To get to it very bluntly, Native Son is not a great film because too much of what it is about exists in the off-screen world; conversely, writer-actor-director Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil is the real thing. Every shot, every camera position, every bit of dialogue, every piece of cloth and material used in costuming and set design, is part of the shadow-driven conventions of film noir but achieves a geometric vibrancy that goes beyond the genre, which is why the film deserves the overused term “great,” far more often claimed as an advertisement than aesthetically achieved. But that’s show business.

Even so, Native Son handles itself quite well as a very good film for a number of reasons. The presence and rhythm of the actors in the lower-class black community and the upper-class white community come forward as much more real than contrived. Richard Wright plays Bigger Thomas as a knucklehead who measures himself in a variety of ways. He does this by bullying his girlfriend, by leading a small, petty criminal gang, by taunting for his own enjoyment his sister’s fear of a dead rat by shaking one in her face, by submitting to white people he feels smarter than even if they are economically above him, whether left-wing liberals, condescending white men of the press, or authority figures from the police to the justice system. They amount to imbecilic lames as far as he is concerned, and he is as often right as he is wrong. That fluctuating difference is what makes him a tragic urban character, not an urban legend.

Wright’s Bigger Thomas is quite related to the all-American lower-class rebel who sees material resources and homespun smarts as the answer to everything. He does not believe in education, aristocratic blood, or class. Force will do. In some inferno, he would be comfortable exchanging points of view with James Cagney’s Tom Powers from Public Enemy or Humphrey Bogart’s Duke Mantee of The Petrified Forest. In the latter film there is Slim, the black member of the criminal gang who tells a “faithful” chauffeur among their hostages that he should not be so submissive to “MISTER Chisholm.” Bigger was already brewing. He was ready to pop not as a tart but as a poisonous dart.

In that sense, Wright was more interested in human types within an American context than he was in clichés about class and color, no matter how well intended they were. His vision went beyond lockstep ideology. He proved that in the full version of his mutilated 1945 memoir Black Boy, which he originally intended to be titled American Hunger (Ralph Ellison told me he had read it in full form while in unedited manuscript, strongly suggesting that it was one of the literary fathers of Ellison’s complexly assertive Invisible Man). Mississippi-born Wright was ambivalent about the left and shows that again in his screenplay and in his performance. For the occasional mastery of the film noir vocabulary, the unexaggerated human fire, empathy, and tenderness that now and again arrive, and the unpredictable and suitably mysterious qualities of human motivation that spill outside of clichés and ideology, Native Son is well worth seeing. The full uncut dose is an affirmative example of how much human clarity was wished for and was given a damn good foot in the right direction of whenever any chance came along. Kicking a field goal in show business is never less than very, very hard. After living through the shining effects and the dark defects of Hollywood, from then until now, we should all be able to acknowledge that observation as a fact invincible to any sentimental bleaching. There it is.

"How Bigger Was Born" Richard Wright essay from Anthology of Thirties Writing, March 1940

The Night Editor: Native Son (1951) Jake Hinkson includes the (pdf version) of Noir City magazine, Winter, 2012

Northwest Chicago Film Society Blog [Kyle Westphal] which includes an interview with James Cozart from the Library of Congress

Richard Wright Books and Writers

A Brief Defense of Richard Wright and Other Writers Jerry W. Ward Jr.

Making the Wright Connections Jerry W. Ward Jr.

One Writer's Legacy Richard Wright Jerry W. Ward Jr.

Cinema Viewfinder Tony Dayoub

Native Son (1951) - Notes - TCM.com

New U.S. Black Cinema by Clyde Tayor Jump Cut, April, 1983

Unseen Films: Native Son (1951) New York Film Festival 2012 Steve Kopian

From Page to Screen: a Comparative Study of Richard Wright's ... From Page to Screen: a Comparative Study of Richard Wright's Native Son and Its Two Film Adaptations, by Raphael Lambert

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

The Movie Boy Dustin Putman

NATIVE SON (1951) 11^th Noir City Festival

Six Authors Who Appeared in Film Adaptations of Their Work ... Matt Prigge from The Philadelphia Weekly, July 3, 2012

Native Son - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chéreau, Patrice

All-Movie Guide Jason Buchanan

Primarily known as a stage director in his native France, Patrice Chéreau has also made quite a name for himself in the realm of cinema with such acclaimed features as Queen Margot (1994) and Intimacy (2001). The Lezigne native crossed from stage to screen with the 1975 thriller Flesh and the Orchid, and the auspicious debut earned its up-and-coming director two César nominations. In 1984, Chéreau shared a Best Writing César with Hervé Guibert for his feature The Wounded Man, and in 1994, Chéreau scored his biggest hit to date with the bloody historical drama Queen Margot. Adapted from Alexandre Dumas' novel, Queen Margot was nominated for Best Costume Design at the 1995 Academy Awards in addition to taking home top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and the César Awards. Following a pair of successful television endeavors, Chéreau returned to the screen to great success with the emotional drama Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (1998). An introspective tale of an artist's final wish to be buried in his hometown and the friends and acquaintances who see that his wish is granted, the film was nominated for 11 Césars and took home trophies for Best Cinematography, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress. Though his 2001 drama Intimacy drew fire from conservatives for its graphic, lingering sex scenes, the director publicly defended the film with claims that it was about human relationships, and sex was simply one component of many that makes up those relationships. Despite the controversy, the film proved quite a hit in the European market. In 2003, Chéreau documented the fragile relationship between two estranged brothers with the tender drama His Brother.

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

A much heralded French theater and opera director, Patrice Chereau has increasingly been directing feature films, finding his widest audience with "La Reine Margot/Queen Margot" (1993), adapted from the Dumas novel about the politically expedient marriage between the title character and Henry de Navarre in an attempt aimed at quelching the Protestant tide in France.

Chereau began directing for the stage in 1964 with a production of "L'Intervention" by Victor Hugo, then became the director of le Theatre de Sartrouville for three years, where he excelled with productions of Moliere classics. In 1969, Chereau made his debut as a director of opera with a production of Rossini's "L'Italienne a Alger" in Paris, which led to his six year (1971-77) as co-director of Le Theatre Nationale de Paris. He took time away from these duties to stage a production of the Wagner opera "L'Anneau du Nibelung" at the 1976 Bayreuth festival, which brought him personal attention. More recently, Chereau directed a 1988 production of "Hamlet" for the Theatre des Amandiers in Nanterre, France and a 1991 version of Botho Strauss' "Le Temps et la chambre." In opera, he has been associated with the works of Alban Berg, notably "Lulu" (1979) and "Wozzeck" (1992).

Chereau segued to films with "La Chair de l'orchidee" (1974), starring Charlotte Rampling in a tragic chase melodrama. Simone Signoret headlined "Judith Therpauve" (1978), a film about the difficulties of a country newspaper. Chereau linked with Claude Berri, who produced "L'Homme Blesse" (1983) and "Hotel de France" (1987), the latter likened to the American "The Big Chill" in that it focused on 10 friends who meet for a reunion. Chereau spent several years researching "Queen Margot", which he also co-wrote with Daniele Thompson, and which increased Isabel Adjani's international fame. He also occasionally acted both on stage (Shakespeare's "Richard II" 1969) and in films. His most prominent roles in the latter medium include portraying the historical figures Camille Desmoulins in Andrzej Wajda's "Danton" (1982) and Napoleon in Youssef Chahine's "Al-Wedaa Bonaparte" (1985). American audiences might recognize him as General Montcalm, the leader of the French forces who allows Mugua (Wes Studi) to swing his savage hand, in Michael Mann's "The Last of the Mohicans" (1991).

The Boston Globe Article (2006) Patrice Chéreau: the outsider looking in, by Leslie Brokaw from the Boston Globe, July 30, 2006

Chéreau, Patrice They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Stumped? Interview by Chris Neumer from Stumped magazine, October 2001

indieWIRE Interview by Anthony Kaufman, October 16, 2001

THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN (Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train) A 96

France (122 mi) 1998

In an encore special presentation of previous Chicago Film Festival prize winners, this film has a brilliant style, and the intelligence to match, constantly challenging the viewer with the forces of unpredictability, as it is a fast paced comedy drama surrounding the funeral of a bisexual Parisian painter who wanted to be buried in Limoges, a town of 140,000, but with 185,000 burial plots, who left the instructions, “Those who love me can take the train.” This film blows THE BIG CHILL out of the water, using clever dialogue that matches the constantly fluctuating mood and imagery, cinematography by Eric Gautier, which is nearly always underscored by wonderfully inventive, ever-changing musical selections. It’s a brave subject matter that includes the infighting of jealous gays, a transsexual, the remnants of a family empire, and a collection of friends who are mostly agitated with one another, but who are brought together by this single event. The story digs deeper and deeper into the hidden secrets of everyone’s lives, beautifully acted by an ensemble of France’s finest, including Jean-Louis Trignant playing dual roles as the deceased as well as his surviving brother, also Dominique Blanc, Charles Berling, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschy, and Roschdy Zem.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (1998) Chris Darke from Sight and Sound, September 2000

At a Paris railway station, the friends and family of Jean-Baptiste Emmerich, a recently deceased painter, gather to travel to Limoges for his funeral. Among them are François, who listens to taped conversations with the painter recorded at the end of his life, Jean-Marie and Claire, a couple in the throes of divorce, Lucie, a former lover of Emmerich, and Louis, a close friend of François, who's fallen in love with Bruno, a young man who's HIV+. As they head towards Limoges, the mourners watch aghast as the car carrying Jean-Baptiste's coffin is driven recklessly alongside the train by their friend Thierry. During a short break on the journey Claire, an ex-drug addict who's discovered she's pregnant, argues violently with Jean-Marie.

At the Limoges cemetery Jean-Marie meets his father, Lucien, who is Jean-Baptiste's twin brother. Thierry arrives and sneaks off with Jean-Marie to take drugs together. At the graveside, Jean-Marie launches into a vicious tirade against families and declares he will never become a father. Claire is disgusted. The wake takes place at Lucien's family home where the atmosphere soon degenerates into arguments over who was closest to Jean-Baptiste. Claire discovers that a young woman at the wake, Viviane, is in fact Jean-Baptiste's son, Frédéric, who's had a sex change. Later that night, Thierry and Jean-Marie have an argument that ends in violence. The following morning, the mourners leave: François on his own, Claire and Jean-Marie reunited and Louis and Bruno having decided to forge ahead in a relationship.

Review

While being firmly rooted in the present day, Patrice Chéreau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train shares the intimate focus and ensemble dynamics of the director's 1994 ballet of bloodletting La Reine Margot. Following an ill-matched group of mourners, travelling from Paris to Limoges for the funeral of a painter, Jean-Baptiste Emmerich, Chéreau breaks his film down into three distinct parts: the journey, the funeral and the wake, which is presided over by Jean-Baptiste's brother Lucien (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant). But where Margot, set in the poisonous, back-stabbing atmosphere of Charles IX's court, was about blue blood gone bad, Those Who Love Me is more prosaic, concentrating on the sundered relationships around the Emmerich family and the competing claims of friends and kin over the memory of the dead painter. This may suggest Chéreau is mining a similar family plot to the ones recently excavated by André Téchiné in Alice et Martin and Olivier Assayas in Late August, Early September, where domestic drama is played out around the death of a loved one. But Chéreau's excursion into this familiar territory has extraordinary vigour about it, so much so that the first third of the film threatens to overwhelm what follows by being almost excessively vivid.

The journey to Limoges is a triumph both of exposition and choreography. Aided by co-screenwriters Danièle Thompson and Pierre Trividic, Chéreau manages to distinguish the individuals within the crowd of mourners that pile onto the train. But he does so through cinematic means that push at the borders of incoherence. Director of photography Éric Gautier's use of handheld 'Scope cinematography gives the feeling of both buffeting movement and swooping detail. The sense of intense physicality, of bodies in antagonistic proximity, conveyed in the extended sequences on the train brings to mind La Reine Margot. But Chéreau really ups the formal ante through his use of sound. Jean-Baptiste's voiceover, reminiscences recorded by his friend François, overlap with the loaded dialogue of the cortège and an insistent, almost pointedly illustrative use of music. At one point, a group of the train-bound mourners watch as Thierry, who's transporting Jean-Baptiste's coffin by road, guns his car to keep up with the speeding train. The welling guitar introduction to Jeff Buckley's 'Last Goodbye' works with the camera as it closes on Thierry's vehicle and drives home a sense of headlong recklessness that counterpoints the song's mellow lyrics. These gusts of music carry like fumes from the smoker's carriage and thicken the film's emotional textures; at any moment it feels like the whole journey might spiral off into hysterical anarchy.

In the subsequent funeral and wake sequences the cast get a chance to steal the film back from their director's hyperactive choreography. And it's some cast: Charles Berling is Jean-Marie, the overwrought, feckless and tempestuous son of Lucien Emmerich; Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi as Claire, his ex-addict wife who's carrying his child, exudes desperation and resolve in equal measure (Bruni-Tedeschi, with her Anna Magnani-like mournful sensuality, was born to play Joan of Arc); Vincent Perez is affecting in drag as Jean-Baptiste's sex-change son; and Trintignant presides over family breakdown with sorrowful, seedy stoicism. Chéreau was recently in London, shooting the film version of Hanif Kureishi Intimacy. It's worth waiting to see if he's able to bring the operatic-kinetic tendencies visible in Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train and La Reine Margot to his adaptation of Kureishi's aptly named novel.

Film feature Manohla Dargis from LA Weekly

PATRICE CHÉRAU'S Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train opens with an image of repose, but there's barely a frame in this flamboyant, pumped-up film that doesn't seem to tear by -- half the main characters are shooting smack, but the movie itself feels like it's hopped up on speed. At first it's unclear what the hurry is, given that the story is essentially an extended postmortem. A renowned painter named Jean-Baptiste, seen in intermittent, teasing flashback in the person of veteran actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, has died and is to be buried in his hometown of Limoges, a middle-class city in central France that he'd gladly left for Paris years before. The film's eccentric title is taken from the painter's last, belligerent testament: To an interviewer, he has declared that those who love him -- blood and spiritual relations alike -- can travel enormous lengths to his funeral, no matter how inconvenient. And shortly thereafter, they do -- friends, lovers and toadies jostling for space aboard the train as they'd once jostled for the great man's affection.

Released in France last year, the film is the seventh feature directed by Chéreau, who has also directed theater and opera, and who occasionally acts on stage and on screen (he appeared in Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans). Chéreau's last film was Queen Margot, a pleasurably vulgar epic about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, designed as a showcase for star Isabelle Adjani but memorable only for the director's eye for spectacle and the phalanx of beautiful male actors camping about in 16th-century drag. Although the unbearable Adjani is, gratefully, nowhere to be seen in Those Who Love Me, several of the other principals have returned, most importantly Pascal Greggory, who prowled Queen Margot in a de Medici fright wig and had previously enriched several Eric Rohmer movies. Here, Greggory plays cool to the rest of the cast's overheated mass. As François, he's come to mourn Jean-Baptiste, for whom he sustains a longing that rebounds brutally against his own lover, Louis (Bruno Todeschini). This pair, plus Bruno, a seductive bit of rough trade played by Sylvain Jacques, form a tortured ménage à trois that, along with the violently estranged Jean-Marie (Charles Berling) and Claire (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), furnish a perverse running commentary on the destruction wrought by Jean-Baptiste, in death as in life.

François and Bruno, Jean-Marie and Claire make it to Limoges for the funeral, and afterward the four, amid a retinue of squalling mourners, travel to the estate of Jean-Baptiste's twin, Lucien, also played by Trintignant. There, the ties bound by Jean-Baptiste are tightened yet further, like a noose, and French heartthrob Vincent Perez shows up as a pre-op transsexual. Not all of it makes sense, at least consistently, but neither is it meant to, since the story is about life as it's lived, not rehearsed. Eventually, the storm does quiet, at which point Chéreau fires up Mahler's unfinished 10th Symphony as accompaniment to a magnificent visual coup de grâce -- a soaring tour above Limoges that's close to divine. Most of Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train isn't nearly as thrilling, but the film is persuasively performed and rapturously cinematic; director of photography Eric Gautier moves the CinemaScope camera so lightly it's as if he were balancing feathers, not a hunk of machinery. If this were an American movie, the distributor would no doubt be pitching it as a gay film, a categorization that isn't necessarily wrong, only unnecessarily limiting. In this emotionally chaotic story, men love one another without inhibition, sometimes with kindness. Much like the film itself, there's passion in these human relationships, even if there's not always clarity or reason.

INTIMACY A 95

France Great Britain Germany Spain (119 mi) 2001

While this is not cinema verité, or existential angst and despair, there is a complete sense of urgency about this film, an extreme exhilaration which is presented at breakneck speed, but when the camera idles and slows down, the characters in the film are devastated and at a loss how to recover emotionally, each attempt seems to take a little bit more out of them and us.

Intimacy | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Every Wednesday afternoon, Claire (Kerry Fox) knocks on Jay's (Mark Rylance) door. They exchange discordant gazes before throwing their clothes to the ground. Jay's grubby London flat is the setting for this fiery sex-play. Like animals, these figures claw their way toward each other from opposite sides of the room. Claire exits, leaving Jay in silent comfort; the primal ecstasy they seem to get from this physical love becomes the unspoken promise of her return. Not since Last Tango in Paris has a film so ravishingly explored the many fine connections between desire, physical intimacy, and romance. It doesn't matter where Claire came from or where she met Jay, because the genius of Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy is its unspokenness. A series of flashbacks reveal Jay growing apart from his wife, his now grimy apartment once alive with the laughter of his young boys. Because his wife refused to touch him, he cries during masturbation, but in the ghostly Claire, Jay seems to have found salvation. His mistake, though, is that he falls in love with her and seeks something more than just her touch. Following her home one day, Jay learns too much: where she lives, where she works, whom she is married to. "It's like we owe it to each other," he says, seeking to shatter unspoken rules. She's an actress in a dingy production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and her husband Andy (Timothy Spall) drinks and plays pool at the bar that hosts the play. Jay begins to manipulate Andy as if trying to break the couple up, but Chéreau is mindful of everyone's pain and mistakes, including Andy's. This makes Intimacy an unusually complex film. To the director, sex, like theatre, becomes something akin to performance art. When Andy tells Claire that she'll never be an actress, it's his way of telling his wife that she has failed to keep her performance with Jay a secret. Rylance, in a remarkable performance, truly evokes the horrifying pain of bleeding for someone and getting nothing in return. Intimacy's truths are remarkably universal, so painful yet so sexy in Chéreau's hands.

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Limits Of Sex Richard Falcon

Explicit screen sex has become integral to some of the most urgent and relevant new European films. Many of those cited below in Richard Falcon's article about Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy include penetration shots, and Chéreau's film itself - a London-set drama about a couple who meet once a week for anonymous sex - has already caused an outcry for showing Kerry Fox putting Mark Rylance's penis into her mouth. Denmark's Lars von Trier has been similarly confrontational in The Idiots, but explicitness seems a particular concern of the newer French directors. Other recent films from France that have not gained UK distribution, such as Ilan Duran Cohen's La Confusion des genres and Didier Le Pêcheur's J'aimerais pas crever un dimanche, are equally fascinated by the boundaries of screen sex. In Cannes this year the two most controversial works were both French productions designed to make us queasy about sex - Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher and Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day.

The Haneke film is about a strict musical martinet played by Isabelle Huppert, who has a repressed yen for a much younger student. She indulges in genital self-harm with a razor and later gives her lover a list of ways she wants him to punish her sexually. Though Haneke is an Austrian director adapting an Austrian novel, there's a sense in which his film has to compete with the new norms of French cinema in order to affect the audience, especially at film festivals where shock is an effective strategy. There is no 'real' sex in this film, but the self-mutilation takes its place in shocking us. Denis has characters played by Béatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo infected with a virus that makes them want literally to devour the people they fuck. Here too, the lashings of gore and the dental rapacity of the stars offer a substitute shock.

Apart from reflecting the prevalent turn-of-century mood in which the flipside of email solipsism is a post-religious fascination with the body, these French directors are also operating at a time when France is waking up to the sexual harassment of women in the workplace. The Chiennes de Guarde (Guard Bitches), an association designed to protect women from routine male abuse, has sprung up and the release of the female revenge movie Baise-moi seemed to match this new mood among French women questioning their role in the heterosexual equation. The film rocked the French establishment, raising a number of issues which Linda Ruth Williams explores on p.28. It stars porn actors and juxtaposes real sexual activity with fictional violence.

With both Intimacy and Baise-moi being released in the UK, the new-found tolerance of Britain's censors has been tested and might seem to be unshakeable, but Mark Kermode argues on p.26 that in having one rule for the likes of 'Baise-moi' and another for the banned US genre movie The Last House on the Left the BBFC is showing undue bias in favour of the arthouse and its middle-class audience. Intimacy is a much less controversial film that shoots sex - which Chéreau says he scripted to the point of orgasm (see p.24) - in a far from pornographic manner, but it raises questions about how far serious actors will be required to go. For Kerry Fox (see p.23) it was about braving out a truthful portrait of a sexual relationship, but also 'terrible to shoot'. Changing sexual mores have brought us back to a point where the border between the art film and the porn movie is more elastic. This series of articles explores the new screen attitudes at 'The Limits of Sex'.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Last Tango In Lewisham Richard Falcon, July 2001

Sick Sisters Linda Ruth Williams looks at Baisé-moi

Left On The Shelf Mark Kermode looks at The Last House on the Left

SON FRÈRE

France (95 mi) 2003

Son Frère Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Patrice Chéreau cuts to the core of human agony with the kind of precision that escapes most living directors. In the heartbreaking Intimacy, Chéreau observes what happens to a man when he falls in love with the married woman he fucks regularly inside his dingy London flat. When she stops calling, his world falls apart. In the elegiac Son Frère, he chronicles a desperate reconnect between two brothers when one is diagnosed with a mysterious blood disease. The man and woman at the center of Intimacy claw at each other like wild animals. In Son Frère, a straight man uses his failing body as a means to bridge the gap between himself and his younger gay sibling. In both films, skin becomes a kind of existential burden. This conflict is evocatively set up in the first few minutes of Son Frère, when an old man nearly bores the two brothers to death with the story of ferries carrying passengers across watery divides. Thomas (Bruno Todeschini) accuses Luc (Eric Caravaca) of running away years ago, and Luc blames Thomas's alleged homophobia for their separation. For Chéreau, this is excess emotional baggage, and once the brothers have quickly sorted through it, the director forces an emotional reunion so honest and unselfish it should shame anyone who takes Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions with anything more than a grain of salt. How good is Chéreau at what he does? Luc is not attracted to Thomas, but their love for each other is unmistakable. When Luc divulges to Thomas's conflicted girlfriend that his brother was the first boy he ever experimented with, there's absolutely nothing perverse or pretentious to the revelation. Instead, it's something altogether beautiful—an innocent bonding ritual that ushers Luc into manhood, and one that's every bit as ravishing as the memory of Thomas helping Luc evade a swarm of bees. When Luc kisses Thomas's girlfriend, their frustrated passion isn't offensive because it isn't sexual; instead, it's an act of love and shared remorse. From a naked beach to the hospital where Thomas is interned, Chéreau bravely lingers on human flesh. However old, taut, hairy, saggy, or cut up, it's all the same: a gratuitous barrier that too often prevents us from crawling inside each other. The beauty of Chéreau's films is that they ask us to emotionally transcend that skin. Luc does, and as such the physical space his brother leaves behind on a picnic bench is that much easier to take.

Son frére Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

It seems that Chéreau is making a valiant effort to rescue one of the most mawkish middlebrow genres (the terminal-illness drama) through the sheer alchemy of Gallic poetic realism. Sadly, the result is a film so divided against itself that it begins to resemble transplant-rejection. Chéreau's rapt attention to the carnality of illness -- sunken frames, thick sutures, chest-length scars, vellum-like flesh that bruises to the touch -- is the film's greatest strength. Eric Gautier's cinematography lends everything a sickly radiance, with hospital-green walls and mottled skin simultaneously impressing their ghastly physicality and providing a study in grainy half-light. The film works when it concerns itself with bodies in disrepair (the lengthy surgery-prep sequence that begins the final half-hour is the film's finest moment), or simply in the throes of confusion (Eric Caravaca's Luc, the healthy younger brother, has trouble taking carnal pleasure in his boyfriend after days spent viewing his older brother as a blotchy pin-cushion). But when people actually start talking, it disintegrates into a bevy of clichés (the girlfriend who can't handle Thomas's illness; the blustering patriarch who lashes out instead of coping with his anguish; the family member more attuned to his brother's condition that the medical professionals, etc.). The hackneyed script doesn't completely sink the picture (and Bruno Todeschini's strong performance as Thomas certainly helps), but its lack of imagination leaves the film unconscionably hobbled. Things perk up near the end with a nightmare sequence set to Marianne Faithful, but by this point Chéreau's just throwing up a Hail Mary.

GABRIELLE B+ 92

France Germany Italy (90) 2005

A highly stylized, overly theatrical adaptation of the Joseph Conrad short story, The Return, which very much resembles experiencing an intense, perfectly executed Strindberg play, where we witness the disintegration of a marriage through the opulent interiors of their gigantic estate, a giant mansion that devours the doomed lovers, eventually taking on the characteristics of an Edgar Allen Poe haunted house story. Isabelle Huppert sizzles in one of her most assured roles as the unpredictable lady of the manor, who is looked upon as a prized possession by her upper class, cold-hearted husband, the supposedly educated and gentlemanly Pascal Greggory, whose life is so complacent he never knows what hits him. She leaves him a letter one day that she has left him for the love of another man, but mysteriously returns a few hours later. The rest of the film is the intricately written fireworks that ensues between the two of them, brilliantly woven into the ritualized quiet of the housemaids and attendants who remain at a discreet distance, but regularly enter and exit between verbal volleys. Also, there is plenty of heightened, expressive music by Fabio Vacchi that reveals the repressed psychic turbulence that the characters are experiencing while attempting to maintain their aloof facade of calm.

The staging of the maids resembles the exaggerated claustrophobic interiors of Fassbinder’s play THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, another film that also explores the motivating and destructive forces of love, the mechanics of sexual captivation and its emotional upheaval, where Irm Hermann, much like the maids in this film, is always on the outer fringes of the frame, as if she’s not allowed to protrude any further, creating a hermetically sealed environment. Most of GABRIELLE’s interiors are filmed at night, sumptuously photographed by Eric Gautier, as the maids silently carry a bright white light up and down the stairs of the house while making their evening rounds. We know the husband has crossed the line of indecency when he enters her room at night without permission as she’s undressing for the evening, causing a noticeable gasp, and is quickly surrounded by a host of attendants, protecting her dignity. Huppert’s character was openly dismissive of the maids early in the film, but eventually opens up to Yvonne, one of the attendants, as a personalized expression of her developing humanity.

The initial exit scene resembled Dreyer’s GERTRUD, who was similarly seen as a possession of her rich husband, just one of the fixtures in the palatial estate, along with the paintings and sculptures and mirrors, forcing her to leave him in search of a real love, never willing to relinquish her free will. GABRIELLE plays out along similar lines, but what would happen if Gertrud returned? Of interest, Gabrielle tells her husband that she is only returning because she knows her husband doesn’t love her, so she feels free to come and go as she pleases, that if he loved her, she could never return. Chéreau was present at the screening and indicated it was reading those particular lines that inspired him to make this film, a period piece from Paris in 1912, a ‘Scope film opening in Black and White to emphasize the period details before moving to color. One of the comments from the audience suggested the wife made up the letter, that there was no adultery, it was simply a device used by the wife to irritate and get under the skin of her husband, allowing her to extricate herself from his domineering control, regaining her free will in the process and her ability to make her own decisions.

Gabrielle Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Cheung, Mabel

AN AUTUMN’S TALE (Chou tin dik tong wah)

Hong Kong (98 mi) 1987

User comments from imdb Author: Leigh Melton (leigh@nbi.com) from USA

A warm, sweet film about the love between a simple man and a shy young woman adjusting to life outside her family and upbringing. Very understated with many touching and funny moments.

A young woman named Jennifer leaves Hong Kong to study in the USA with her boyfriend. Upon her arrival she meets "Figurehead", who is watching out for his "4th aunt's 13th cousin". Jennifer is cultured and refined, 180 degrees away from Figgy as he is called, a former sailor who is now a waiter in Chinatown. Though he is crude and uncouth he is faithful and kind, unlike Jennifer's cheating boyfriend.

After seeing her through homesickness, a bit of culture shock and a broken heart, Figgy falls for Jennifer... but of course there are complications and that's basically what this movie is about: the complexities of love.

Chow Yun-Fat gives a great performance as Figgy - while he is often lauded for his action roles, he is under-appreciated as a dramatic and comedic actor. Cherie Chung is superlative as usual.

This film won Best Picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 1988, and Chow and Chung were both nominated as Best Actor and Actress, respectively.

A beautifully shot film, directed with style and humanity. Good for the entire family.

Films on Disc (Stuart J. Kobak) dvd review [B-,C+]

A charming, subtle romance from the team of Mabel Cheung and Alex Law. Chow Yun-Fat and Cherie Chung turn in wonderful performances, and the sentiment on display is hard to resist. An HK Cinema classic and a great date movie, to boot.

One of HK's classics, this romantic drama set in New York features a terrific pairing between Chow Yun-Fat and Cherie Chung. She's Jenny, a college student who travels from Hong Kong to New York to reunite with boyfriend Danny Chan. However, things aren't what she expects, because Danny's been playing the field in her absence. Luckily, Jenny has her distant cousin (Chow Yun-Fat) to help her, but the two are decidedly different souls. He immediately takes a shine to her, but she's slow on the uptake. And besides, how can two incredibly mismatched people ever be together?

Plot and story are not the emphasis of Mabel Cheung's film. Though there's the obligatory set-up, the path the film follows rests entirely upon the development and growth of its principal characters. Chow Yun-Fat plays your typical Chinatown HK immigrant, who gambles and talks bigger than he delivers. When he finds Jenny, he decides he wants to become a better person to earn her affections. His effort is understandable, as Jenny is portrayed by Cherie Chung, who turns in a subtle, charming performance. Jenny must grow as well, though her goals are different from her cousin's. She simply would like to become a woman, and that journey may or may not mean romance for her.

The obstacles for the would-be lovers are largely free of your standard movie-like plot devices. As such, the relationship develops naturally and not through some forced set of circumstances. In contrast to the verbalized epiphanies and soap-opera plotting of most romances, the tone here is incredibly serene, and even deceptively languid. Awkward silences, silent pining and misdirected intentions are the language that Mabel Cheung and scriptwriter Alex Law use, and in the hands of such actors as Chow Yun-Fat and Cherie Chung, the results are incredibly engaging. Though the two are major stars, the film doesn't make them star-crossed. Their chemistry feels pleasing and real, and not a byproduct of their status as the two prettiest people onscreen.

Ultimately, the two characters find some resolution to their issues, and the results are neither unexpected nor wholly predictable. The results simply feel natural, and the quiet humanity with which the characters are portrayed makes them extremely sympathetic. Mabel Cheung's suitably understated direction brings the perfect touch to the proceedings, and Alex Law's script is remarkably sensitive. Nothing truly earth-shattering occurs here, and the love that grows isn't a world-beating, destiny-fulfilling match made in heaven. However, thanks to likable, identifiable characters and perfect lead performances, An Autumn's Tale is a Hong Kong romance that's nearly matchless.

7th Annual Hong Kong Film Awards
• Winner - Best Picture
• Winner - Best Screenplay (Alex Law Kai-Yu)
• Winner - Best Cinematography (James Hayman, David Chung Chi-Man)
• Nomination - Best Director (Mabel Cheung Yuen-Ting)
• Nomination - Best Actor (Chow Yun-Fat)
• Nomination - Best Actress (Cherie Chung Chor-Hung)
• Nomination - Best Original Score (Lowell Lo Koon-Ting)

review A Free Man in Hong Kong

Cheung Yuen-ting

THE SOONG SISTERS (Song jia huang chao) B- 82

Hong Kong (147 mi) 1996

A remarkable story about the 3 real-life daughters of Charlie Soong, all 3 educated at Wesleyan College in Georgia, later returning to China where one married the richest man in China, Ai-ling, played by Michelle Kwan, one married Chiang Kai-shek, May-ling, played by Vivian Wu, who is still alive at over 100, once the most powerful and feared woman in Asia, and one married Sun Yat-Sen, Ching-ling, played by Maggie Cheung, becoming the mother of modern China. Advertised as: “One loved money, one loved power, and one loved China,” the film has a Steven Spielberg look, sound, and feel to it, namely overdone excess, lots of money, and a superficial style to present what would otherwise be an amazingly rich and real accounting of historical events in the split between mainland China and Taiwan. But this is a family dispute, a portrait of the sister’s jealousies, the father’s rage, the mother’s loyalties, in other words, a Chinese GONE WITH THE WIND, the truth be damned.

Chevigny, Katy and Ross Kauffman

E-TEAM C 76

USA (88 mi) 2014 Official site

The film is a fairly choppily edited sequence of events following reporters working for the Human Rights Watch, an international organization that investigates and documents human rights abuses. While very little information is provided about the organization itself, what footage is provided is accompanied by views seen through the eyes of the journalists, both as they’re on their jobs, but also while safely at home having meals with family and friends. What’s quickly apparent is the differentiation in social and economic class, as the journalists are well-educated, living comfortably in the lavishness of a wealthy lifestyle, where a husband and wife team is seen leading a quiet life outside of Geneva, Switzerland, but drop everything after receiving phone calls sending in the E-Teams, emergency teams into battle zones where people are in the midst of heated violence, with mobs of people on the streets filled with abandoned buildings raked by shrapnel, where people are literally under attack, often with nearby explosions and bullets flying, where people are fighting for their lives. In the intensity of the moment, a mob mentality prevails, where like-minded people are all too willing to blame the other side when talking to reporters, where it’s often hard to distinguish between fact and fiction. A building was bombed, children were killed or injured, where an on-the-scene interview with the mother may not be the most accurate or objective piece of reporting, but it’s dramatic as hell. This film feels forced and manipulative, always looking for a worse case scenario, seeking to incite the most outrageous sense of drama, where it’s edited like an adrenaline-laced emergency room television program, following one disaster after the next, elevating the level of trauma and outrage, where anyone willing to fit that profile will be interviewed, failing to provide a more detached explanation of what’s happening on the ground. More importantly, most of what’s being documented is old news, where more current reportage and analysis has already provided a more recent understanding of the conflicts shown.

Taking us into well known crisis regions, like Libya in the aftermath of Muammar Gaddafi, or attacks on civilians near Syrian rebel outposts by Bashar al-Assad, but even backtracking to the Kosovo War that took place more than a decade ago, where one of the reporters actually testifies in the Hague, documenting what he witnessed, subject to hostile, face-to-face questions from Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian President accused of war crimes. While the team conducts interviews on the street and attempts to collect evidence of atrocities, it’s clear they’re in a harrowing business, often smuggled into the most dangerous regions of the world, where what they do is indisputably valuable, yet the tone of the entire film is also filled with in-your-face moral self-righteousness, suggesting we were there, we risked our lives to obtain this footage, pounding the viewers on the head about the immediate significance, attempting to provide a sense of urgency, yet what we see onscreen is nothing new. The airwaves are filled with this stuff, as are plenty of online sites, where the raw footage of a ravished war zone looks pretty much the same whether you’re in Syria or the West Bank, Iraq or Afghanistan. War is hell. What’s missing in their pieces, as opposed to the distinguished photojournalism of Tim Hetherington (who was killed in Misurata, Libya recently while filming the conflict there) and Sebastian Junger in RESTREPO (2010), who spent a year with one platoon in the deadliest valley in Afghanistan, is the extent of time spent in each location. What they’re reporting are specific flash points, a dramatic moment in time, but they fail to provide an overall, in-depth sense of what’s going on in the region, which would include a more balanced sense of the region’s place in history. We never get at the root of the turmoil, the origins of any of these conflicts, but instead focus upon the incidental casualties of innocents.

While the film makes claims that it investigates atrocities on both sides, this is clearly not the case, as there is simply no footage anywhere to be seen of Israel’s assault on the West Bank, or America’s occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, including extensive accounts of hundreds of innocents dying from errant bombs. The reason for this is obvious, as western reporters are simply not allowed into the most dangerous regions on earth. With the recent revelations of videotaped beheadings of western journalists by the extremist rebel jihadists of ISIL in Syria and Iraq, it’s impossible to minimize just how dangerous it is to enter these regions. Even the downed passenger plane, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, shot down over the war zone in territory controlled by pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine was impossible to investigate as western investigators were simply not allowed near the crash site. Nonetheless, that doesn’t stop frantic requests from E-team journalists on the ground urgently asking their superiors to demand a no-fly zone to try to prevent Syrian air strikes against civilian villages. When the leaders of their own organization hesitates, believing such an action would be premature, the journalists feel betrayed, as if they’re risking their lives for nothing. This incident attempts to expose an existing rift that inevitably occurs between bureaucracies safely tucked into the background and the extreme realities that happen every day in a war zone, which by the way, was Kubrick’s subject in PATHS OF GLORY (1957). This is a rather simplistic way of expressing similar themes that those waging wars are nowhere to be seen near the front lines, oblivious to the often gruesome consequences of their own acts, hiding behind the belligerent rhetoric of war. While the journalists themselves steadfastly believe in the power of images, especially when they are the first on the scene, but their self-congratulatory tone of how essential they really are sends the wrong message, making themselves the subject of their own photos, falling in love with seeing themselves in front of the cameras, which only comes across as western arrogance, much like the soldiers sending selfies of themselves with prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison.

E-Team | Chicago Reader JR Jones

During the Balkan conflict, Human Rights Watch created the "Emergencies Team" to plunge into war zones and investigate unfolding atrocities; according to HRW veteran Fred Abrahams, a harrowing photograph taken by the E-Team in Serbia and published in the New York Times transformed the debate over the conflict in the Clinton White House. This documentary by Katy Chevigny (Deadline) and Ross Kauffman (Born Into Brothels) follows the E-Team into Syria as they investigate the reign of terror by President Assad's forces, collecting anguished tales of young men being rounded up, murdered, and incinerated. In addition to this gripping material, Chevigny and Kauffman include personal profiles of the HRW professionals who undertake these dangerous assignments; scenes of them relaxing at home with their loved ones provide a striking contrast with the fearful environments they document.

2014 True/False Film Fest Michael Sicinski

The Trouble With Issue-Docs, Part 1: Let the record show, there is absolutely no question that E-Team is profiling some of the worthiest work going on anywhere in the world (in this case, the efforts of Human Rights Watch field workers, conducting interviews and collecting evidence on the ground during ongoing conflicts and atrocities). The subject matter is not the problem, even if I myself find the film a bit one-sided in that Kauffman and Chevigny might have taken the time to broaden the frame of their inquiry a bit. By focusing on Syria (Assad's attacks on civilians), Libya (the aftermath of Gaddafi's reign) and HRW's historic victory over Milosevic at the Hague, E-Team will highlight the group's toughest and most admirable work, while in no way ruffling the feathers of any Western viewers. (In other words, Allied war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan are conspicuously off the table.) Furthermore, the filmmakers seem to have far less faith in the organization they are examining than its members do. The Russian-Norwegian couple who snuck into Syria to amass evidence against the Assad regime are shown reporting back to the main HRW headquarters in New York, asking that the group recommend a no-fly zone to try to prevent Syrian air strikes against civilian villages. The NGO's administration argues that such a move is premature, which disappoints the investigators, but this sort of thing must happen quite a lot. Kauffman and Chevigny very deliberately stage this decision as a showdown between intrepid, passionate individuals and the bureaucracy that only looks after its own interests, an interpretation that is simplistic in the extreme. But then, E-Team continually sacrifices nuance, or even basic decency, in order to heighten conventional drama. It's not just the patent pornography of the slow zoom into the face of a weeping Syrian mother as she describes the death of her two sons in a bombing raid. It's the way that the romantically involved investigator couple's domestic life becomes Kauffman and Chevigny's narrative refrain, as though in the end, they are just two concerned parents making the world safer for the baby who will be born in the very last scene. What does this tell us? Clearly, E-Team is made by and for people who do not really believe in altruism.

Netflix Doc E-Team Showcases Human Rights Workers ... Steve Erickson from The Village Voice

Well-known both for its political activities and for its long-running film festival, Human Rights Watch becomes the subject of a documentary itself in E-Team. Katy Chevigny and Ross Kauffman's film isn't a broad portrait of the organization.

Instead, it focuses on four Europe-based case workers on the HRW emergency team: Anna Neistat; her husband, Ole Solvang; Peter Bouckaert; and Fred Abrahams. Starting in 2011, they investigated human rights abuses in Syria and Libya. Initially, these are presented almost as if E-Team were a fictional adventure film and Neistat a female Indiana Jones.

The emphasis on the team's daring amid mass chaos seems a bit off: This threatens to become yet another film about white Americans and Europeans telling the stories of Third World people. But the rest of the film does much to redeem that dubious trope: E-Team is ultimately about activists trying to summarize the crimes of Syria's Assad regime in a way that will inspire the world's media and governments to take action.

The results are sometimes maddening: A Moscow press conference leads to accusations of HRW being part of an American conspiracy. Abrahams points to his experiences in Kosovo in the late '90s and the eventual prosecution of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic as success stories for the organization. However, it's much harder to put an upbeat face on three years of slaughter in Syria, all documented by the E-Team. You sense them struggling to remain positive, even as the very existence of this film suggests that many people care deeply about the work of Human Rights Watch.

Slant Magazine [Clayton Dillard]

E-Team documents several members of the Human Rights Watch, an international organization that investigates human-rights abuses around the world, as something akin to international terrorism superheroes, no better epitomized than the role-call format of the opening credits, with each of the four subjects introduced in successive headshots. Directors Katy Chevigny and Ross Kauffman attempt to complicate this initial proffering, however, by making consistent forays into the members' personal lives. Anna testifies about atrocities committed by the Syrian regime in one scene, while at home with her parents, talking about quitting smoking in the next. Ole, engaged to Anna, remains resilient with sounds of cluster bombs outside of a Syrian apartment, but serenades his bride-to-be with a piano tune inside their Paris apartment. Fred, the jokester, who was in part helpful in getting Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević extradited for war crimes in 2001, sits in his Berlin apartment recounting the events, but lapses into jokes and asides to enliven the proceedings. And Peter, the stoic one, meticulously works to sort through potential human-rights violations by the Gaddafi regime, stopping briefly to criticize Fred, who takes too long ordering an airport breakfast.

These comprehensive juxtapositions between on-the-scene and off-the-cuff moments reveal an inherent contradiction between filmmaker and subject; while the team members claim they work from evidence first, then reach conclusions, Chevigny and Kauffman have set out to make a hagiographic observational documentary that is more interested in putting a human face on an organization than it is operating with a more rigorous, journalistic precision. Although outwardly operating as a procedural, documenting the team's recent forays into Syria, Libya, and Turkey, the representational mode is largely sentimental and littered with plastic ironies, such as when Anna, dressed in an abaya for disguise, is driven by a wall reading "freedom," while T. Griffin's somber music provides the scene's outro.

Even more inexcusable is a scene in which Anna's son watches a scene from Mr. and Mrs. Smith on his laptop, with Angelina Jolie wielding a machine gun while bombs detonate around her. In just the previous scene, Anna speculated aloud about her son's fears regarding her life. It's a manipulative, disingenuous gesture that displays a lack of self-reflexivity from Chevigny and Kauffman, who clearly view their documentation as separate and more noble than the cacophony of spectacles and violence propagated by Hollywood filmmakers. It's an especially glaring issue, since the filmmakers have no issue slow-zooming on a mourning woman who claims her slain children were unarmed or using angry citizens as mostly backdrops to the investigations being conducted. There's edifying information in E-Team, but it's tainted by forced dramatic tactics.

Mia Farrow Reviews E-Team | Vanity Fair

One of the instructions given to screeners for True/False is to treat documentaries as "cinema." Does a given film play well as a movie? There are documentaries by the scores that fail at this very specific function, whether from a misguided view of documentary as journalism or from a simple inability to string together a coherent narrative that will hold an audience's attention for seventy five minutes. The ones that succeed at this, though, sometimes succeed big. Some footage is inherently cinematic, for want of a better word.

My own corollary to this is: "trust your b-roll." Film after film fails to make the leap to "cinema" from a simple desire to explain too much, whether with intrusive textual elements or an over-reliance on talking heads. It's a cliche to say that a storyteller should show rather than tell, but it's true. I mean, you can get away with a movie that's interviews and archive footage, but that is often dependent on who you're interviewing and what they're talking about. Last year, True/False showed The Gatekeepers, which is a stark example of what I mean by this: it's a film that's cinematically dull. It's almost all talking heads. It's who those talking heads are that makes it compelling (in that film, it was the last six heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security service). That film became an Oscar nominee, though it lost the award to Searching for Sugar Man, a film that fails as a document but succeeds as feel-good entertainment. It's a double edged sword.

E-Team (2014, directed by Katy Chevigny and Ross Kaufmann) sometimes plays as a thriller, too. Its opening scene finds its pair of human rights investigators speaking to the victims of bombings in Syria as another bombing campaign commences. There's a sense of the film as a thriller during this and subsequent scenes. This is a film that doesn't rely on interviews. It goes out into the field and shows the audience what the E-Team actually does and the very real dangers they court by doing this. We don't often think of films as "death-defying" these days, but this is a film that definitely qualifies for that description.

The eponymous E-Team is the task force the human rights watchdog, Human Rights Watch, sends into areas where it suspects war crimes are being committed. The focus of this film is on four people: Ole Solevang and Anna Neistat are a team, both personally and professionally. They've been sent to Syria to investigate the atrocities rumored to be committed by General Assad's forces in the ongoing civil war. Ole and Anna are then tasked with presenting their findings to the world in a press conference in Moscow as a means of getting the attention of Russia itself, Assad's biggest supporter on the world stage. Fred Abrahams, the founder of the E-Team, whose history with investigating war crimes dates from the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s. Fred is currently investigating the aftermath of the Libyan revolution with Peter Bouckaert, an arms expert whose knowledge is key to decoding the aftermath of crimes, many of which leave no traces but bullet holes and dead bodies. In between "missions," we see the team members leading ordinary lives--particularly Anna and Ole, who live a comfortable, mundane life in Paris with Anna's 12 year old son. Their lives seem so ordered and comfortable that one wouldn't imagine the horrors they confront in the course of their work. The movie is clear-eyed about this, though. There are horrors aplenty in this movie. Certainly, the testimony of the survivors of a cluster-bombing in Syria are harrowing, as is the field of unexploded ordinance left over from the Libyan conflict.

This is a film that trusts its b-roll. There's a real sense of daredevil filmmaking as the filmmakers follow Anna and Ole on foot through a clandestine crossing of the Turkey/Syria border or through the bombed out ruins of a rebel city. The sound of aircraft is deeply alarming as Anna and Ole move through Syria. The threat of death is ever-present. One of the film's credits notes that cinematographer James Foley disappeared in Syria subsequent to the filming of E-Team, so none of this is actually theoretical. There's often a very real sense of dread in this movie that a reliance on some of the lazier tricks of documentary filmmaking might blunt. This throws the personalities of its protagonists into stark relief. Anna and Ole seem more pragmatic than idealistic, though the idealism is there. There's a scene early in the film when Anna pulls a veil out of her closet and notes that she finds its anonymity comforting rather than repressive when she's in Muslim countries. Fred goes on elaborate shopping excursions in airports before flying off to uncertain fates. Peter claims that he does his job because he "loves fucking with bad people." None of them deliver a polemic, though the footage of Anna's Russian press conference is illuminating when it comes to the way politics works in the world. The Russians think Human Rights Watch is a stooge for Americans and say so bluntly, to her face.

The division of storylines in this film hurts it. Most of the Libyan storyline is framed in the past tense. True, it's images are haunting, particularly the bullet-ridden scene of a massacre and the aforementioned field of bombs waiting for some other collection of bad men to come along and collect them, but the film starts with Syria, with the cinematic equivalent of a killer opening scene, then reneges on it in order to backtrack. The film retreats even further from its lede when it fills in Fred's back story as one of the people confronting the crimes of Slobodan Milošević. This last is thematically useful given the way the film ends. These scenes carry a real sense of futility, as do the subsequent events in Syria as Assad deploys chemical weapons. These are people who are tilting at windmills. More, they seem both aware of this and resigned to it. Change can be glacially slow until, suddenly, it isn't, after all.

The ultimate futility of their activities informs the very end of the film, though. During the course of the film, Anna becomes pregnant and the film chooses to end with Anna's labor and birth. In the very last scene, though, Anna gets a call in her recovery room with a new crisis. It's a funny scene. For a film about war crimes and the people who investigate them, this is a surprisingly hopeful film.

'E-Team': James Foley's Last Film - The Daily Beast Marlow Stern

Sundance Review: Real Life Heroes Save The ... - Indiewire Carlos Aguilar

The E-Team - Movie Review - Documentaries - About.com Jennifer Merin

Darren's World of Entertainment [Darren Bevan]

Run Edward Run: “Citizenfour,” “E-Team” - Newcity Film Ray Pride

Facets : Cinematheque Schedule: E-Team

Common Sense Media [Kari Croop]

Katy Chevigny and Ross Kauffman on Tracking the “E-Team” Stephen Saito interview from The Moveable Feast, October 20, 2014

'E-Team': Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Duane Byrge

Sundance Film Review: 'E-Team' - Variety Rob Nelson

'E-Team' movie review - The Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Review: 'E-Team' - Los Angeles Times Michael Rechtshaffen

'E-Team' Examines Human Rights Watch Investigators - The ... Jeannette Catsoulis from The New York Times

E-Team - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chigira, Kôichi

BRAVE STORY B- 81

Japan (112 mi) 2006

A beautifully designed Japanese animé film that has its moments, as early on it establishes credible characters, Wataru, an 11-year old boy and Mitsuru, a mysterious new kid in school that Wataru befriends. They meet outside school in a haunted house where Wataru and his best friend are exploring for the opportunity to actually “see” a ghost, where Mitsuru may have actually entered a spirit world through an invisible doorway at the house. Beset by bullies, Wataru helps his friend escape on his next visit, but the excessive means Mitsuru uses to magically silence his enemies shocks Wataru. Without realizing it at the time, they will cross each other’s paths again. In somewhat ambiguous fashion, we learn Wataru’s father may be leaving the home, which comes as a surprise to his mother, and then we learn his mother falls gravely ill, sending Wataru into an emotional rabbit hole.

There’s plenty of inventiveness here, but unlike the tasteful selection in a Miyazaki film, if it appears at all, the warring elements of this film get all the attention, exaggerated like a Hollywood feature, where this cycle of spectacular violence becomes the focal point of the film’s interest. In this mysterious secret universe, a multitude of new characters are introduced, all of whom are intriguing, but they don’t become fully developed and instead become secondary almost forgotten people once that war takes center stage. This is disturbing, as the film sends mixed messages, going to great lengths to tell the audience exactly what to feel, throwing subtlety out the window and taking a moral stance, where Wataru goes on a great journey like Dorothy in the WIZARD OF OZ and encounters many inventive characters, gaining valuable insight in the process, but then the filmmaker undermines the importance of that lesson by making the most exciting part of the film an unending series of action packed battle sequences. This exact same thing occurrs in NARNIA, the adaptation of the C.S. Lewis story, where a very minor referenced battle in the book, some 2 or 3 pages at most, expands into an action packed all-out battle sequence that extends upwards to thirty minutes or more. Some moral lesson, it sounds more like movie economics.

The film is hardly seamless, as there are abrupt tonal shifts in some of the editing, and some of the creatures are direct descendents of Ghibli creations, the baby dragon on Wataru’s shoulder that feels right out of NAUSICAÄ, the cuteness of amusing little adorable TOTORO inspired creatures, and Mitsuru’s single-mindedness at the end resembles the short sightedness of Muska, the mad scientist from CASTLE IN THE SKY. But there is a terrific build up of interest in the kind of characters Wataru meets, from his surrealist entrance into the world itself to a mysterious voice that offers advice, from a water creature that can’t contain his excitement at meeting him to a warrior princess that initially suspects him, but ultimately befriends him. The contrast between Wataru and Mitsuru is initially compelling, as Mitsuru treats him like a little brother, teasing him about his so-called softness and his privileged background. Unfortunately as the secrets of their relationship unravel in gratuitous preachiness at the end, so does the film. This is a perfect example of more is less, as the more that is piled on in explanation, the less emotionally plausible the film becomes. It loses its grip on us, becoming a piece of mere entertainment. Unfortunately, this film worked too hard to be more than that and it appears someone lost their nerve, something that happens all too often in this industry.

A Nutshell Review Stefan S.

Say "Anime" these days, and the brewing spat between the local anime community and the company Odex will spring to mind, with the latter suing illegal downloaders of their licensed anime and allegedly gloating over the internet, leaving a bad aftertaste amongst the online folks. But I'm not into serialized anime (ok, I hear those chants of you-don't-know-what-you're-missing), but frankly, I prefer animated movies, as they're to the point, and nothing beats watching them on the big screen.

I thought Brave Story was going to be quite ordinary (from the trailer), but I was glad I was so wrong. It had an interesting premise, and built up nicely to a satisfying conclusion. It played on one of the questions I used to ask myself - what if one day you find everything going just wrong for you, and you're presented an opportunity to make them all right again, albeit with heavy personal sacrifice. Will you leave things as they are, or take the risk and go for it, with zero guarantees everything will come out just fine?

Based on a novel by Miyuki Miyabe, Brave Story has its protagonist, a young boy named Wataru, who seemed to be living the good life, until his world comes crashing down and he sees for himself his dad walking out on the family, and his mum succumbing to illness and is hospitalized. With a tip from the new boy in school, Mitsuru, he decides to try his luck at changing his destiny by passing through a magical gateway, which transports him to the World of Vision, a fantasy land where he has to look for the Tower of Fortune, where the Goddess of Fortune resides in and will grant a single wish. For Wataru, the choice is simple - to get his mother well again.

Fans of medieval fantasies like Dungeons and Dragons (not the movie incarnation) and games like Might and Magic, will have plenty of reasons to like Brave Story. It's like being the gamemaster, and observing your gamer wander around the make believe land recruiting followers, strike alliances, and battle foes, with some sword and sorcery thrown in. The world of Vision that Wataru journeys to, feels like Disneyland with its many worlds partitioned separately for exploration, and adventure. And it strikes the chord right in the beginning, offering some masterful strokes of comedy, and bestowing our protagonist not with great power, but starting him off right at the bottom, as a "hero apprentice", thereby holding your attention as you wait patiently for him to gain some experience.

What made Brave Story work, is clearly the character of Wataru. He's not all powerful, and through his earnestly unwitting and bumbling ways, serve to appeal to you as time goes by. For the young, he's sort of an ideal role model, at times too ideal (hey, I got no qualms with Jin Yong's goody-two-shoes Guo Jing character too) but then you realize that sometimes, these are the kind of boy scout heroes who are lacking screen appearances, and for a change, refreshing. They are plenty of situations where Wataru has to make critical decisions on sacrifice and morals, and in doing so however, stunted the story with predictable outcomes.

But Brave Story more than makes up for it with a host of supporting casts like the Lizard humanoid Kee-Keema, feline Meena, a pet baby dragon, and The Highlanders. The antagonist Mitsuru though, provides ample tussle and the clash of values with Wataru, and he's primarily the "villain", although a sympathetic one, to make our hero look good, and play off against, providing strong messages on friendship - sometimes your values are different, but if you're the friends forever type, you surely know who to count on when the going gets rough.

The animation might not be cutting edge, but it presents the material squarely, and occasionally had the wow-factor, especially in its grander depiction of the finale battles towards the end. Watch this in a proper theatre, and you'd appreciate the job the folks at Skywalker Sound has done. Brave Story might not have a lot of bells and whistles, but its buildup to the story, and its powerful ending, more than makes up for any potential flaws. Animes don't make it to our local screens very often, so supporting a good film like this, will pave the way to more good material coming our way.

Twitch (Todd Brown)

Once again Twitch regular Eight Rooks has posted a lengthy review over in our forum and once again it is far too good to leave it sitting there out of sight. So here it is reposted on the main page, a look at Gonzo Digimation’s Brave Story

In the fourteen years Gonzo Digimation have been around they’ve become one of the most commercially prominent production houses in the animation industry, licensing their franchises the world over, many of them serving as the public face of Japanese pop culture broadcast by the Cartoon Network or released on DVD by companies such as ADV, Geneon or Funimation. Since their first major projects, almost a decade ago - working on animated sequences for videogames on the Sega Saturn - one criticism levelled at them time and time again is they lack the narrative skill to match their technical ability; that their series are more concerned with the violence, blockbuster atmospherics and/or melodrama mainstream audiences flock to. Their first feature-length production, Gin-Iro No Kami No Agito (known as Origin: Spirits Of The Past in the West) was criticised for placing style squarely over substance, skipping past all manner of plot holes, character development and entire sections of narrative in favour of further opportunities to dazzle the viewer with the skill of Gonzo’s animators, designers and CG artists.

Brave Story is their second such feature within a year, adapted from a novel by Miyuki Miyabe, the author behind (among many other things) the pyrokinetic Japanese horror production Crossfire. A young boy - Wataru - discovers the way into a fantasy kingdom known as Vision, where a series of trials will grant him the right to impeach a goddess for a single wish - through which he plans to return his problematic childhood to “normal”. Already adapted into a manga series spanning twelve volumes and counting, Gonzo elect to tell the story in a little under two hours.

If one expects anything different from Gonzo’s usual approach to storytelling, initial signs are far from encouraging. Barrelling through the pre-title sequence in a matter of minutes (discovering the gateway to Vision in an abandoned tenement building) Brave Story begins at a fairly rapid pace. Characters are sketched in as fast as possible; our hero’s reticent and not especially capable but basically good-hearted; his mysterious opposite number (the new arrival at school who also seems to be headed through the gateway) is withdrawn, self-centred and nurses a Dark Secret; we have the bumbling sidekick, the amazon, the flower vase and various other predictable supporting roles, all of whom are swiftly sidelined next to the central thread. This being plotting by numbers, Gonzo content to stick with the videogame tropes that made their name - Wataru’s initial trial sees his physical attributes scored on points, or more importantly an audience with the goddess can only be achieved through collecting five jewels to be stored in the “hero’s sword” he’s awarded. Backstory for the various political, theological and military factions introduced to us, such as they are, is mentioned in passing and just as quickly discarded.

Yet basically, what was a source of frustration in Origin is markedly less so here. Obviously not everyone will agree - the film rarely if ever attempts to persuade the viewer to forget this is disposable genre entertainment first and foremost - but where Origin suffered from dour, apocalyptic pretention and a lack of human warmth Brave Story charges forward with a lightness of tone and an eye for spectacle which never gets in the way of the gist of the narrative, however simplistic that might be. Where Origin tried to floor its audience right from the word go, Brave Story is far more restrained - the journey into Vision proper doesn’t begin until just before the twenty minute mark and arguably the first attempt to outright wow the viewer doesn’t come until twenty-five. Brave Story adopts a far more pastoral aesthetic, where against the rural and urban backdrops Gonzo play with downtime, simple comedy, or whole sequences largely for the uncomplicated visual pleasure they afford - the closest the film gets to a femme fatale, feline Meena, may not have much to do in service of the narrative but her brief trapeze performance is a delight the studio’s television output rarely measures up to.

Though it still suffers from the impression it’s talking down to anyone over a certain age, Brave Story manages a sense of fun and adventure, a scope and scale which makes a good case for its initial release in cinemas. Though not up to the best of Studio Ghibli’s work (the obvious high water mark) the world it presents is often startlingly beautiful - the mid-point time lapse sequence which sums up a long journey by the main party, or the climactic resolution after evil has been overcome to name but two instances. And if it resorts to a crushingly predictable deus ex machina near the end, at least it does so with a thrilling visual flair. Plus, unlike some recent high-profile productions, Studio 4C’s Steamboy or Square’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, it does ground these fantasy pyrotechnics with some degree of consideration for the basic human emotions involved and their physical and emotional cost. The nominal villain’s motivation is nothing wildly new or surprising but it’s laid out with more sympathy than one might expect, and the impact of his unleashing ultimate evil - while glossed over to a significant extent - is still given far more real, tangible impact, even a touch of genuine horror, than Steamboy’s laying waste to vast sections of Victorian London or Spirits Within’s planet-wide devastation. And ultimately, though Brave Story’s resolution still simplifies certain privations of childhood, commercialises them, it does deserve some applause for not taking Hollywood’s way out, firmly avoiding the temptation to insinuate everything can be tidily concluded if we only try.

The voice acting is generally of a high standard, never descending to outright histrionics even in those soliloquies or moments approaching moralising afforded by the script - while most of the dialogue is merely serviceable the film does give people more to do than, say, Takashi Miike’s live-action The Great Yokai War which for all its good points reduced a perfectly capable child lead’s performance to little more than impassioned screaming every few minutes. Dance act Juno Reactor’s orchestral score has few outright standout moments, but remains more than competent throughout, never grating on the ear or intruding too heavily on the action. Many of Gonzo’s television series have suffered frequently from obvious lapses in quality - while Brave Story obviously lacks the same budget as a Ghibli or Production I.G. film it never seems the producers took the budget from one scene to shore up the animation in another.

Overall, while one has to keep in mind this is a blatant attempt to court a very specific demographic which can be rightly criticised as such, Brave Story is a vast improvement on Origin and one of the highlights of Gonzo’s history thus far. Simplistic, flawed and not terribly profound, it is also entertaining, captivating, pleasing to the eye and even somewhat emotionally moving. Mainstream audiences will doubtless eat it up, but there is definitely enough of worth here anyone who appreciates skilled animation, artistry or even simply top-flight commercial filmmaking should also appreciate it. Most definitely recommended.

Midnight Eye - japan_cult_cinema Paul Jackson

Moviexclusive John Li

Chiha, Patric

DOMAIN (Domaine) B+ 91

France Austria (110 mi) 2009 Domaine | Filmtrailer - YouTube

While this is basically a highly atmospheric and toxically charged character study that continually surprises us with a unique and unorthodox intimacy and continually changing narrative direction, it’s also a pedestal for the incomparable Béatrice Dalle as Nadia, where the director wrote the part specifically for her and she summons the brazen audaciousness that has defined her screen presence throughout her career, discovered as a sex kitten in BETTY BLUE (1986), which also takes an unconventional turn, she is now an aging Parisian who finds order in the universe through mathematics and logic, where to her “words are disorder.” While a few of her friends are older, closer to her age, she’s instead enthralled with the presence of youth, in particular a young man who hangs on her every word, Isaïe Sultan as Pierre, an almost beautiful looking 17-year old boy who follows her around like a puppy dog, often seen with his friends as school lets out where he immediately gives Nadia a call telling her he’ll “be there in 30 minutes.” They typically go for a walk through the lavishly designed natural beauty of a gorgeously immense park filled with hidden walkways, a place Nadia describes as the most beautiful park in the world, where what describes her is her walk, seen here: DOMAINE, un film de Patric Chiha-Extrait 1 - YouTube (1:58), where she is the picture of confidence, almost strutting like a peacock, always the center of attention in her stiletto heels, where she goes on long, rambling monologues reminiscent of live theater that move effortlessly between her ordered personal philosophy to a kind of morbid view of the world that disappointedly fails to live up to her standards. What might seem curious, the nature of their relationship, remains hidden and off limits to the audience, something that feels like a key ingredient of the film.

Perhaps the most outstanding feature is the phenomenal use of lighting, given a German expressionist feel, shot by Pascal Poucet where the vibrant colors are accentuated by brief hints of light engulfed by a surrounding darkness that is always framing and protruding into the action. This moody atmosphere of darkness is more than a theme, as it becomes synonymous with their ever more dour moods where they descend into the depths of a bleak, underground cabaret nightclub that resembles the decadence of Berlin, where Pierre appropriately picks out the glam clothes for Nadia to wear, seen here: DOMAINE, un film de Patric Chiha-Extrait 2 - YouTube (2:28), where Dalle does what she does best, admire herself while lavished with attention by a beautiful young boy, but also where we first start to see cracks in her orderly perfection. On the crowded dance floor, they immerse themselves into the mixed gay and straight aesthetic of a dreamlike world, dancing to an intoxicating techno beat that lulls one into a mesmerizing slow dance, where Pierre’s inner self is less hidden, displayed in a kind of gay awakening, a common theme in Dalle films, also expressed by the men in Christophe Honore’s brilliantly impressionistic SEVENTEEN TIMES CECILLE CASSARD (2002). Pierre finds a lover that takes his mind off Nadia’s growing sense of obsessive self-indulgence, spending less and less time with her, where in café’s, Nadia doesn’t so much sip alcohol as consume alcohol, finding the world around her less inviting, where Pierre’s mother shows a concern, encouraging her to seek help, but Pierre protects her, where both he and Nadia live with the constant denial of their choice, hauntingly expressed in this downbeat sense of morbidity: White Wine & Sleeping Pills (John's Song featuring Raphaël Bouvet) (2:33).

Emilie Hanak’s (Milkymee) hauntingly eclectic musical soundtrack, where one song is appropriately called “Gloom,” can be heard here along with two extended Dalle monologues (in French): Domaine (Original Soundtrack) | milkymee. The rhythm of the film continually seeks out the beauty of nature, perhaps the only perfect orderly existence, always shown in luxuriant shots of insurmountable beauty (unfortunately not on 35 mm), which contrasts with the theatrical feel of Dalle’s multiple monologues, often feeling like a play, becoming poetic ramblings about her deteriorating appreciation for life and the people around her, finding less and less use for them, until eventually they don’t matter at all. Her attraction to youth and to young boys reflects her obsession with youth, where her real fear is aging and growing old, where alcoholism becomes a substitute for futility and fatalism, as she can’t reverse the aging process. When the circumstances grow dire and she finally seeks treatment, it’s set in a magnificent upscale mountain resort setting of Austria surrounded by even more snow-capped mountains, where the prominent theme of darkness is temporarily replaced by the enveloping whiteness of snow, seen here on Pierre’s arrival to visit Nadia: DOMAINE, un film de Patric Chiha-Extrait 3 - YouTube (1:55). It is here that the film grows most mysterious, where Nadia appears well on the road to recovery, but she also delivers her most laceratingly pessimistic monologue, a stinging rebuke of life itself, given a sense of ambiguity as to whether it was meant for anyone else to hear. Reminiscent of Norwegian Wood (2010), especially the bleak subject matter and the use of natural settings, along with the sudden turn toward futility, where only the intransigence of the natural world offers any hint of human transcendence. In the end, engulfed in the naked beauty of the surrounding world, none of that matters, given an eerie and hauntingly beautiful sense of finality, boldly and dramatically poetic, yet finally unambiguous.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Michael Castelle, May 16, 2012, also seen here: cine-file.info/forum

In this Béatrice Dalle vehicle scripted and directed by Patric Chiha, Dalle plays Nadia, an implausible, fashionable, Gödel-obsessed alcoholic mathematician who hangs out regularly with teen cypher Pierre (Isaïe Sultan). An obvious fan of the work of Claire Denis, Chiha adds a sub-Aronofsky understanding of advanced mathematics to this tale of unproductive cosmopolitan intimacy; one memorable late slow-motion sequence set in an imaginary, smoky club elegantly captures those momentary interactions which compose the dancefloor phenomenology. The filming locations (streets and parks of Paris; mountains of Austria) provide a scenic backdrop for the increasingly doomed Nadia’s plight. (2010, 110min, DigiBeta)

Domain - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Melissa Anderson

Fearless Béatrice Dalle, who made her screen debut at age 21 as the sexed-up, self-mutilating title character in Betty Blue (1986), has, in the past decade, played a cannibal, the Queen of the Northern Hemisphere, and a fetus-snatcher. As Nadia in Patric Chiha's hypnotic first feature, Domain, Dalle might have a more cerebral profession—a mathematician who specializes in Gödel—but her capacity for destruction, both of herself and others via bottomless glasses of Vouvray, remains just as infinite. "Words are disorder," the magnetic intellectual announces—one of the many insights that draw her 17-year-old nephew, Pierre (Isaïe Sultan), to her. Forgoing peers his own age, Pierre joins his Ungaro-clad aunt for Saturday strolls in the park; at nightclubs where, in the film's best set piece, the mixed gay-straight crowd dances with dreamlike slowness; and at cafés where Nadia's alcoholism unleashes a lacerating tongue and face-plants. As his aunt's dissipation eclipses her charm, Pierre starts to respond to the blond, bearded hunk who has been cruising him for weeks. Dalle, with a mouth that could devour the world, unravels inexorably but with decadent dignity, and Chiha's singular film never relies on cliché in its examination of illness, disappointment, and abandonment.

The House Next Door [Joseph Jon Lanthier]

Beatrice Dalle icily rules the action of Patric Chiha's suggestively successful debut Domain. As Nadine, a rock star mathematician slowly losing her marbles to alcoholism, Dalle exudes an arrogant, feral sexuality that makes her addiction seem irrepressibly iconoclastic; her talon-like high heels and asphyxiating black outfits imply an irresistibly independent, high-cultured ruthlessness (and I still can't get that erotic gap between her front teeth out of my mind). Nadine takes her young, socially awkward nephew, Pierre (Isaie Sultan), under her wing and the film follows their relationship's gestation from borderline cross-generational manipulation to an emotionally mature but scathing give-and-take. Chiha's dialogue occasionally over-limns his attempted milieu (Nadine's brief conversations with other math and science professors seem included only to establish her social circle's left-brain hipsterism), but his skill with actors, moody lighting, and visceral sound design (the clacking of leather shoes and snapping of foresty twigs abound) achieves a sustained undertone of somber but exhilarating incest. One thumping club scene in the movie's middle, though a jarring pause in the action, is a tour de force of sound and image; as a smooth, bare-chested eunuch of a singer croons a soft teenage hymn, we observe Pierre coming into his own, Nadine spiraling downward, and the pulsing of strobe lights gently drawing sublimated sexual tension to the surface.

Review: Domaine - Film - Time Out New York Keith Uhlrich

Viva Béatrice! The glamorous, gap-toothed Ms. Dalle—who devoured men wholesale in Claire Denis’s delirious cannibal-vampire dirge Trouble Every Day—has a new target to consume in Patric Chiha’s captivating first feature. She plays Nadia, a Bordeaux-residing, high-heel-rockin’ alcoholic mathematician who takes her gorgeous, gay teen nephew, Pierre (Sultan), under her broken wings. Pierre is just starting to come out of his shell, and his smart, slinky aunt, whose stilettos clack in metronomic rhythm with her arithmetical verbosity, is his perfect fetish object: Campy and canny, she’s as likely to quote passages from Gödel as take Pierre to an underground discotheque presided over by a posturing Joan Crawford groupie.

Pierre puts his aunt above all else (“Be there in 30 minutes,” he constantly tells her—always 30 minutes), until he slowly becomes wise to her savage, dipsomaniacal manipulations. Chiha keenly charts the duo’s relationship from its beguiling early stages to its inevitable downward slope, and never in the expected ways. The moment when Pierre starts to show backbone comes not with a blowout fight but in a surreal, smoky musical number in a nightclub that’s an early contender for scene of the year. And when the action eventually switches to an Austrian rehab retreat, Dalle gets to make like the best of the Old Hollywood divas and waste away with devastating reserve—an icon quietly, crushingly crashing to earth.

Joshua Reviews Patric Chiha's 'Domain' [Theatrical Review ... Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast

Relationship dramas are a tough breed of film to nail perfectly. Then toss in an age gap, and you’ve got a film that is one bad sequence away from feeling like ‘To Catch A Predator’ or one goofy sequence away from seeming like a skit from your favorite weekly sitcom. However, there are the occasional classics. The soon to be Criterion-approved ‘Harold And Maude’ is easily one of the best and most noteable age-defying relationship film, and while this film isn’t nearly as good, nor does it have as large a gap between the two leads, Patric Chiha’s ‘Domain’ is definitely a film that proves that if done right, this type of film can thrive.

‘Domain’ follows the story of Pierre, a teenager, and looks at his relationship with a woman in her thirties, Nadia. A student, Pierre is drawn to his older aunt, a mathematician, but soon finds out that she is far more flawed than he had expected. Fighting a battle with alcoholism which is only made tougher with her pessimistic view on the world and those who inhabit it, the two, and their relationship, plays the film’s primary focus for its 110 minute runtime.

A flawed film, ‘Domain’ is also a moving look into a relationship, and also what it’s like to watch a person that you genuinely love and admire, fall as far from grace as humanly possible. A devastating look at a series of topics from illness to the idea of abandonment, ‘Domaine’ may feel a bit cold and distant for those who are looking for something a bit more bombastic, but will feel brutally intimate for those looking for something a bit more brooding.

The film thrives when its star, Nadia, is on the screen. Given a breathtaking performance by iconic French actress Beatrice Dalle, one can see why writer/director Patric Chiha (making his directorial debut) wrote the script with her in mind. Playing the role of the neo-nihilistic mathematician with a penchant for booze, Dalle not only gives the character a shocking sense of brood and impending doom, but an even stronger sense of dignity, in the face of her vices.

Coming to the film’s conclusion, her performance only becomes more palpable, as the sense of abandonment once felt on the shoulders of Pierre now comes to her, when she discovers that her nephew has recently found himself a boyfriend, who (not so shockingly) is older than he. It’s this strong sense of being abandoned by people that not only fuels Nadia’s pessimism towards the world, but also plays as the overall concept behind Chiha’s rather moving film.

Isaie Sultan is great here as well, taking on the role of Pierre, but is ultimately asked to do far less than his co-star. Best described as a blank slate, Pierre as a character is one to have most of the film happen upon him, save for the one decision he does make, to leave his aunt. However, there is a deeply powerful sense of longing he evokes, and there are also an occasional beat here and there where you realize that he himself is not only dealing with his love for his aunt, but also the fact that he’s a gay man. It is this inner struggle that, and it’s the same struggle materialized in Dalle’s performance, holds this film’s head above water.

Making his debut with this film, the film’s primary flaws rest upon the shoulders of this still very green filmmaker. Visually, the film seems to riff on the style of many more intimate directors, think Olivier Assayas’ ‘Summer Hours,’ with some artistic flourishes ala Derek Jarman sans the impressionistic touches. It’s a distant film aesthetically, something that poses quite a problem for a film that should feel like you are a fly on the wall. However, featuring a great soundtrack and some music cues that are absolutely killer, one feels as though Chiha is definitely a filmmaker to keep the absolute keenest of eyes on.

Overall, ‘Domain’ is a quietly moving picture that feels far too long and far too distant. Spearheaded by two fantastic performances and a director who is still looking for his voice both narratively and aesthetically, ‘Domain’ feels a bit scatterbrained, but for those who give this film a chance will find a moving portrait of two people seemingly abandoned by the world. This is simply one of the most interesting films this young year has to offer.

Slant Magazine [Matthew Connolly] also seen here: The House Next Door [Matthew Connolly]

Eric Rohmer Meets 'Harold and Maude' in Patric Chiha's "Domain ... Eric Kohn

Film-Forward.com [Yana Litovsky]

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Patric Chiha's DOMAIN--from last year's Film Comme... James van Maanen from Trust Movies

Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune : Viennale report

2010 picks here Listed #1 on John Waters Top Ten list from 2010

'Domain,' Written and Directed by Patric Chiha - Review - NYTimes ...

Chijona, Gerardo

TICKET TO PARADISE (Boleto al paraiso) D 61

Cuba (88 mi) 2011

You never know what you’re getting out of Cuba these days, but this is little more than an after school special, the kind they used to play in the afternoons dealing with relevant social issues, something to help instill values on today’s youth. This is a look at the AIDS crisis in Cuba, mixing it with the heavy metal drug culture, offering a glimpse of Cuban youth that feels right out of the 1980’s. Cuba has always lagged behind the rest of the world when it comes to human rights, barely tolerating certain “undesirables” among their culture, like homosexuals or the mentally ill, something they once considered one and the same, also social outcasts or jailed criminals they tend to exile or export to the USA, as on the Mariel boatlift, where they attempted to eradicate from their society the scum of Cuban nation, while here they’re patting themselves on the back for acknowledging the existence of a drug culture and an AIDS crisis more than 30 years after the fact. Very much contrived to fit someone’s idea of youth, this utterly stereotypical movie uses loathsome and abusive adults as a means to create a sympathetic portrait of kids being driven to the streets where they form their own family community.

Eunice (Miriel Cejas) has a father that won’t keep his hands off of her, so she runs away, reluctantly hooking up with a group of “freakies” about her age, boys with long hair and a love of heavy metal, but they relentlessly call her “the hick,” as she’s a naïve and innocent country girl uninitiated in the ways of drugs, alcohol, and sex, not to mention music, all of which make her something of a square in their eyes, but she’s pretty, so all is forgiven because Alejandro (Héctor Medina) is interested in her. Joining this little communion isn’t easy because women are expected to pay their way by performing sexual favors for pick up cash with people they meet along the road. What especially rings untrue about this portrayal is that the idea is coming from the women themselves, as if this is their idea of a liberated sexual expression, while what they’re really doing is subjecting themselves to all manner of creeps, perverts, or other abusive men, the same kind they’re running away from. So while they dress up in sexually provocative clothing, this seems more to titillate the viewer than add any relevance to the story.

More damning is a friend they run into who has AIDS, but is not exhibiting any symptoms, not a single lesion anywhere on her body and she has a nude scene, as the kids have an idyllic get high and get naked on the beach party scene, where they’re obviously not paying attention to sexually transmitted diseases. The girl mentions a hospital for AIDS patients that feels like a paradise for the homeless, as they offer you a home and provide food and health care, something that tantalizes Alejandro, who gets accepted into the program, as he’s the only one who tests positive for the disease, but soon discovers the reality doesn’t meet the dream, especially when he sees his friend withering away and near death. This is all too simplistic, where the storyline with Eunice is the only compelling portrait, where Miriel Cejas is stunning, while the rest are mere stereotypes that don’t reflect the wit or wisdom of street kids, who would likely be far more intelligent about the implications of AIDS than shown here. Nonetheless, the film does make an attempt at a portrait of disaffected youth, but its complexity appears targeted for 10 to 12 year olds.

The House Next Door [Oscar Moralde]

Boleto al Paraiso, directed by Gerardo Chijona, is somewhat more explicit in its political examination. It's set during the Cuban "special period" following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting economic downturn, taking us on a journey through the fractured underbelly of Cuban culture and counterculture. It's a story of love in the time of AIDS with the way Chijona weaves together a tragic romance with a glimpse of the methods used by the Cuban government to try to curb the spread of HIV.

The film follows Eunice (Miriel Cejas), a country girl who escapes the clutches of an abusive father by falling in with a group of "freakies," young vagabonds who party hard, deal drugs, and listen to Metallica and the metal band's Cuban equivalents. As the group journeys to Havana, Eunice forms a bond with idealistic punk Alejandro (Héctor Medina), who has grand plans for a new life in the city. But their romance takes a dark turn as the hardships of Cuban society press down upon them. It's a harsh tour through the ills of social decay as we're buffeted by street crime, homelessness, and prostitution—with the specter of AIDS as yet another affliction upon the body politic.

Chijona takes a dour, jaundiced lens to the society on display, and Eunice's struggle for survival is evoked through moments that come to us by turns melodramatic and operatic. As with Habana Eva, Boleto al Paraiso is quite self-conscious about the signifying qualities of its narrative; it's especially clear in the film's sexually charged moments, where the themes of family, community, disease and decay all converge and reach a boiling point. They're staged and shot and scored in a way that infuses them with a symbolic weight they struggle to bear.

Yet amid the heightened energy of the fiction there are intriguing glimpses into the realities of this historical moment, especially when it takes us into the AIDS hospices. Part of Cuba's top-down command approach to preventing an epidemic, we see the patients are well cared for, but they're also unable to leave. The weight of that paternalistic restraint is emblematic of the narrative as a whole. And even as the film veers straight towards the histrionic in its final act (a trait it shares with Habana Eva), it still provides a window on the youth of Cuba struggling to make the best out of a set of bad options. They try to forge personal identities in a society ill-equipped to support them, and cling to idealistic hopes in a place where there seems little to hope for.

Variety Reviews - Ticket to Paradise - Film Reviews - Sundance ... John Anderson

An ICAIC and Malas Companias presentation, in association with Loasur Audiovisual, 12 Gatos. Produced by Camilo Vives, Antonio Hens, Jose Antonio Varela. Executive producer, Isabel Prendes. Directed by Gerardo Chijona Valdes. Screenplay, Chijona Valdes, Francisco Garcia Gonzalez, Maykel Rodriguez Ponjuan. With: Miriel Cejas, Luis Alberto Garcia, Hector Medina, Dunia Matos, Fabian Mora, Ariadna Munoz.

A heartbreaking collision of joyous, reckless youth, abject despair and cosmic disharmony, "Ticket to Paradise," is set in Cuba, circa 1993, when the fall of Soviet Union led to dire conditions and the kind of desperation helmer Gerardo Chijona Valdes uses to make memorable, honest and unforgettable drama. Content is harsh, and several of Chijona Valdes' moves are suspect, but the virtues of his storytelling and its Cuban locales should make the film a natural for U.S. speciality houses.

Against a background of grinding poverty and dessicated architecture, "Ticket to Paradise" introduces Eunice (the marvelous Miriel Cejas), who has stolen a wallet at school, evidently so she can flee her father's house: His wife long dead, Armando (Luis Alberto Garcia) has started having sex with Eunice, and is unlikely to stop; a later scene, in which her sister Ruth (Beatriz Vina) reflexively recoils from her father's touch, speaks volumes about the family in a single, understated gesture. Finally, Eunice makes a break for it, hopping several buses cars and trucks -- anyone with gasoline is suddenly an entrepreneur in Cuba -- and meets the people who will change her life.

Alejandro, Lidia and Fito (Hector Medina, Dunia Matos, Fabian Mora, respectively) are "freakies," street kids who steal, deal drugs and writhe to metal music, having no support system, no chance for employment and no sense of a future. Eunice is immediately attracted to Ale and the four soon become a tight clique, using whatever they can sell -- in one absolutely riveting scene, Lidia and Eunice hand their underwear over to a pervert, who agrees to give them a ride to Havana. Eunice, whom the others call "hick," careens between the feeling she's in hell, and the kind of camaraderie she's never known before.

Based on the Cuban realities of the time, the screenplay by Chijona Valdes, Francisco Garcia Gonzalez and Maykel Rodriguez Ponjuan takes auds on a trip into ultimate Cuban nihilism: Milena (Ariadna Munoz), Alejandro's ex, appears one night, having left the AIDS facility where she lives -- it's the only kind of facility in Cuba where someone like her can get government food, clothing and shelter -- and the others want in. Eunice flees, but the other three devise a way to make sure they all can live indoors.

"Ticket to Paradise" is a shocker, but despite the severity of its narrative, it always maintains a sense of honesty and, as might be expected, dread. It's not an overtly political film, but the implied critique embodied in Eunice and her friends is potent and bitter.

Production values are mixed. The excellent work of d.p. Raul Perez Ureta and editor Miriam Talavera is undercut by second-rate processing.

Camera (color), Raul Perez Ureta; editor, Miriam Talavera; music, Edesio Alejandro; sound designer, Osmani Olivare; associate producers, Loasur Audiovisual, 12 Gatos. Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (competing), Jan. 23, 2011. Running time: 88 MIN.

Mariel boatlift - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ching Siu-tung

Title : A Chinese Ghost Story Trilogy

Actor : ( Part 1 1987) Leslie Cheung, Joey Wang, Wu Ma ,

( Part 2 1990 ) Leslie Cheung , Joey Wang , Jacky Cheung , Michelle Ries

( Part 3 1998) Tony Leung , Jacky Cheung , Joey Wang , Nina Li

Directed by : Ching Siu Tung

Produced by : Tsui Hark

Synposis : ( Part 1 ) A rainstorm compelled LING Choi Sin (Leslie Cheung) to trespass Lan Po Temple for a night on his way to Kwok Pak Village collecting debts. In the middle of the night, LING is awakened by the bewitching music played by the feminine and attractive LIT Siu Seen (Wong Tsu Hsien). LING is unaware that the resident Taoist Monk YIN Chek Hsia (Wo Ma) has impeded LIT's murder attempt. Despite YIN's objection, the young couple are madly in love and decided to run away from the monastery...

( Part 2 ) The hero Lin (Leslie Cheung) is put into prison innocently after he has left his good friend Yin (Wo Ma). The former meets a learned, Tso Kot (Co Fung) who helps him to escape from prison. He then meets a young and witty Taoist Monk Chi Chau (Jacky Cheung). The two become friends and live in an abandoned big house together. The big house is horrifying and a giant corpse lives there. Lin and Chi Chan are attacked by a group of ghosts there and finally reveal that they are actually human beings who prepare to save the innocent Lau (Lau Siu Ming) from imprisonment. Fu has 2 daughter, Chung Fung (Wong Tsu Hsin) and Yuet Chi (Michelle Rics). Lin finds that Ching Fung looks alike to his former lover. Siu Seen and resumes her life as Ching Fung. Both Ching Fung and Yuet Chi love Lin...

( Part 3 ) A spectacular film from the Hong Kong film industry, this supernatural-themed second sequel, based on Chinese legend, is a vibrant visual feast featuring haunting atmospherics, acrobatic stunts, and pyrotechnical special effects. Set 100 years after the second movie in the series, a young monk falls in love with--you guessed it--a ghost! One stormy night, wise High Priest and his student, Fong, pass by the Orchid Temple and realize it is haunted. here, Fong encounters two lady demons, the seductive Lotus and her hated sister, Butterfly. Although Fong knows his Master wants to capture these evil spirits, he finds himself attracted to the ghost and allows them to go free. The monks stay at the Temple is prolonged due to Fong carelessly misplacing their valuable Taolisman, the gold suddna. During a trip to the corrupt local town, the High Priest meets Yin by chance and a series of misunderstandings evolve...

Ching Siu-Tung Hero Won't be Less Meritorious than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, by Ching Siu-tung from Martial Arts Movies and TV Series

A CHINESE GHOST STORY (Sien nui yau wan) B 86

Hong Kong (98 mi) 1987

Following on the heels of John Woo’s A BETTER TOMORROW (1986) and Stanley Kwan’s ROUGE (1987), Cantonese gay pop singer Leslie Cheung was called upon to star in this Hong Kong fantasy phantasmagoria produced by Hong Kong action master Tsui Hark, a trend setting blockbuster film featuring a high flying Swordsman Yen, Wu Ma, known as the Bearded One who battles ghost warriors in mid air, flying from tree to tree in a haunted forest near a graveyard, all with seemingly unlimited supernatural powers. Cheung (Ning) is reviled in town when they discover he’s a tax collector, where no one will offer him a room, so they send him to the nearby haunted Lan Ro temple where immediately dead crawling things seem to come to life, though always in the creepiest context. This is contrasted with the exquisite beauty of Joey Wang (Hsiao Tsing), seen singing a gorgeous melody, as there is apparently nothing more intoxicating than the sound of a lute on a lake. Early on, we notice the theme of ghost women in the forest luring men to their side before they suddenly turn on them, stunningly sucking the life force out of them, leaving them a withered, zombie-like corpse. Tsing seems to have the same plans, but is amused by Ning’s innocence and charm, instantly changing her plans and acts to protect him instead from the strange attacks in the forest, where it seems no one walks (or flies) without a pursuer nearby who is hellbent on killing them. Yet miraculously, Ning, who remains comically oblivious to the perils surrounding him, strides through the forest and spends the night at the temple unharmed.

The attraction of the two brings them back together again in a hilarious scene with her family, where she keeps him stuffed underwater in her bath to hide him from her mercilous captor who smells the presence of a human, a hideous Tree Demon who has apparently also captured her sisters, all servicing the Demon with a fresh supply of humans in addition to what she can catch herself with a hundred foot long tongue that easily suffocates her prey. This scene takes some length, so it is a battle for Ning to keep breathing, especially when Tsing keeps dunking him, or hiding him with her own body, disrobing at one point for a bath which completely catches him offguard, even more so when she helps him breathe with underwater kisses. It turns out she is to be wed against her will in three days to an enormously powerful, one thousand year old underworld Black Lord. While both battle to save the other, the Bearded One continues to fight the spirits, even breaking out in an uproarious graveyard song at one point chanting lyrics from the I Ching. They end up going to the gates of Hell to fight the Dark Lord for Tsing’s opportunity to be reborn on earth, which features a miserable, fire-laden hell of lost souls that continually sucks them further and further into the Dark Lord’s control.

Becoming something of a cult classic, it’s all in good fun, as this is a good and evil scenario surrounding a love story with supernatural mayhem flying all around them from every which direction, using fast action martial arts choreography, high flying sword fights, magical disappearing acts, creepy crawling zombies, heroic last minute rescues, and death defying feats to save the chosen ones from a destiny with death. The sheer excess of this fast-paced martial arts exhilaration may be a bit too much, but the comical tone throughout, with occasional downright silliness offers a slight change of pace, like the musical numbers or another scene where they get slimed by the dead, where the ridiculous fun everyone seems to be having starts to feel like a delight. It’s a bit jumbled, like they’re cramming too much into 90 minutes so it always feels weird, where even the lousy subtitling adds to the spirit of having a rollicking good time, as somehow the deliriously hysterical surreal action sequences all work to the benefit of this bizarre love story, leaving the audience craving for more, which of course they get in Parts II and III, until they get so sick of it they can’t stand any more.

A Chinese Ghost Story Marjorie Baumgarten from the Austin Chronicle

Oh, man. This Tsui Hark-produced classic is the real deal. A million times better than its two sequels, A Chinese Ghost Story asks the eternal question: Is it possible for a man and a ghost to find happiness in love, especially when thwarted by a vampiric transsexual spirit who is the ultimate in pure evil? The film’s effects are wonderful and the spirit world is made into a palpable presence. But the really amazing thing is how transcendent the love story remains amid all the flying through trees, finger-zapping, and the memorable 40-foot animated tongue. You are not really ready to see Ang Lee’s eagerly anticipated fall 2000 release, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon unless you have A Chinese Ghost Story already under your belt.

A big hit in Hong Kong, credited to a young director of mildly innovative martial arts films, but showing all the signs of having been gazumped by producer Tsui Hark, director of cult hits The Butterfly Murders and Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain. Many of the ideas and visuals are swiped from recent horror movies like The Evil Dead. The storyline is a Ming Dynasty chestnut about a wandering scholar who falls in love with a glamorous female ghost, only to find the hordes of hell on his tail. Low points include the scenes in town, with market stallholders endlessly rhubarbing warnings about not going near the old house on the lake. High points include the special effects and a rap version of the opening words of ' Tzu's Tao Te Ching by a Taoist priest (Wu Ma, himself a director of some talent).

Asian Cinema Drifter Tuna

In an incredibly colorful and incomprehensible explosion of a fantastical plotline and supernatural romance, A Chinese Ghost Story is a prime example of a film that runs on overloading the viewer’s senses with creativity spilling all over the floor. The film is a landmark one in Hong Kong cinema, as one of the works in the late eighties that turned heads towards that tiny landmass putting out flying swordsmen and outlandish stories with touching characters to boot. While the film is eternally praised for its excelling in very genre conceivable, I’ve got a couple bones to pick, namely with the action. Mostly lying in the hands of a Taoist ghost hunter outfitted with weapons and even some magic spells up his sleeves, the absurd wire-fu never holds my attention as much as any of the other elements of the film. Perhaps the enemies weren’t the best of choices, or the scenarios could have been chosen better, but in terms of enjoying fight choreography and visual goodies, A Chinese Ghost Story simply gets too insane for my own good. Cheesy effects and Evil Dead style elements aren’t particularly problems, but the sheer excess of it all makes some parts difficult to enjoy. What really shines though, is everything else, from the bumbling character of a young Leslie Chung and his immediate chemistry with the alluring Joey Wong, to the lavish and campy production design and unmatchable visual composition. Most Hong Kong film lovers have a special place in their hearts for A Chinese Ghost Story, often for nostalgic reasons. It’s this special title that tells you how it effective it was as an introduction to HK cinema to turn these unsuspecting viewers into full-fledged HK film fans.

Chinese Ghost Story, A Michael Brooke from DVD Times

Probably because it got a limited cinema release and BBC2 screening in the late 1980s, this 1987 opus is by far the best-known of Hong Kong's legendary supernatural martial arts extravaganzas, and one of the best-loved. Producer Tsui Hark (who had already become firmly established as the Spielberg of Hong Kong with such classics as Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain and Peking Opera Blues) and choreographer-turned-director Ching Siu-Tung (who went on to make Heroic Trio) established the style for Hong Kong fantasy, which went on to have a huge impact on film-makers in the West: dynamic camera angles, elaborate Steadicam movements, rapid MTV-style cutting, ultra-stylised sets and colours, and heavily backlit action scenes relying more on wire work and special effects than the martial arts skills of old - a far cry from the primitive and rickety techniques that dominated Hong Kong cinema in the 1970s.

Hapless tax collector Ning Tsai-shen (Leslie Cheung), spurned by the townspeople after they realise what he does for a living, is forced to spend the night in the haunted Lan Ro temple. There, he meets and falls in love with the beautiful Tsing (Joey Wang) - but unfortunately, as tends to happen in this kind of film, she's bound for all eternity to an evil hermaphrodite tree spirit with an incredibly long tongue that creeps out at night, wrapping itself around hapless wanderers in order to suck out their "yang element" (this has to be seen to be believed!). Fortunately, the heroic Taoist Swordsman Yen (Wu Ma) is never far away, and his supernatural kung fu skills eventually save the day.

A Chinese Ghost Story is a perfect introduction to Hong Kong cinema - it blends haunting visuals and a touching love story with high-speed near-slapstick action, genuinely creepy set-pieces and a subjective camera style heavily indebted to The Evil Dead (an obvious influence). Classic scenes are legion, the high points being the zombies in the cellar, Swordsman Yen's rap song extolling the joys of Taoism (sadly unsubtitled in this version), the duel between our heroes and a gigantic killer tongue, and the final trip to a superbly-realised Hell, tinted blue and crammed with skulls, flying severed heads and ghostly horse-drawn processions - though, unusually for a Hong Kong film, these are never allowed to entirely overshadow the central story: we genuinely care about the lovers and their fate.

The transfer is generally fine, as is the original print (there are a few spots and scratches, but they never get too obtrusive), and the encoding copes well with the fluttering veils that dominate almost every indoor scene. The soundtrack has been remixed into Dolby Digital 5.1 (though without much effect: its mono roots are all too obvious), and is available in Cantonese and Mandarin, with eight subtitle options including English - which occasionally is a bit ropey in terms of strict linguistic accuracy but this doesn't seriously affect comprehensibility. Sadly, the songs on the soundtrack aren't subtitled, as they were in the print that played UK cinemas in the late 1980s. As with most Hong Kong DVDs, chapter stops are in single figures - nine in this case.

Extras include bilingual (Chinese and English) notes on the actors, producer and director, with brief biographies and comprehensive filmographies for Tsui Hark, Ching Siu-Tung, Joey Wang and Leslie Cheung. There's also the original theatrical trailer, a great showcase for some of the film's most striking images, even though it's in unsubtitled Chinese (this doesn't really matter, as there's only a brief dialogue exchange). There's also a well-edited and dialogue-free trailer for the rest of Media Asia's back catalogue, highlighting the most memorable scenes in Police Story (and its first two sequels), Jackie Chan - My Story, Option Zero, A Chinese Ghost Story (and both its sequels), Theft Under the Sun and A Better Tomorrow (and both its sequels) - which compress a fair number of some of the most memorable action scenes from Hong Kong films into just two-and-a-half minutes.

VideoVista Tony Lee

Produced by Tsui Hark, this classic Hong Kong supernatural comedy-adventure is one of the greatest fantasy pictures ever made. I rate it among the all-time best screen fantasies, alongside John Boorman's masterpiece, Excalibur (1981), Terry Gilliam's highly imaginative The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen (1989), Ray Harryhausen's mythological fable Jason And The Argonauts (aka: Jason And The Golden Fleece, 1963), John Milius' swords 'n' sorcery epic Conan The Barbarian (1982) and Ridley Scott's picturesque Legend (1985).

Loosely based on a collection of traditional spooky tales (originally published in book format as The Magic Sword), this tells the story of tax collector Ling Choi-san (played by gay Canto-pop singer Leslie Cheung, who makes for a somewhat effeminate hero), who rather foolishly spends a night alone in haunted Lan Yuek temple - simply because it offers free shelter from a rainstorm - where he endures attacks by hungry corpses (more like the mobile stiffs of Raimi's Evil Dead than Romero's grisly zombies), and falls in love with the enchanting Siu Sihn (played by starlet Joey Wong, who later appeared in God Of Gamblers and City Hunter) a beautiful flying ghost being held captive by a hideous tree demon - who plans to marry her off to the 1,000-year-old Dark Lord of Black Mountain. A formidable Taoist swordsman and priest, Lau Yat Dou (Wu Ma), who is later revealed to be the retired Mandarin judge Yin, attempts to intervene in Siu Sihn's seduction of Ling, and save the young man from his own desires, but...

Unpredictable and dream-like, if not quite surrealistic, events lead to a descent into the very pits of hell, where Ling must save the tormented soul of his ladylove from the clutches of the Dark Lord. Hyperactive monk Yin delivers some amusing 'rap poetry'. Hong Kong directors Wong Jing and Ronny Yu guest star in a scene at the magistrate's courtroom. The naïve hero wanders into mortal danger in the smoke-filled woodlands lit by Chinese lanterns, while the heroine soars above the treetops, fighting the influence of a weird and wicked hermaphrodite antagonist. Sanskrit incantations and daylight are like weapons of mass destruction that may vanquish all evil. Nowhere else will you find a marriage of delirious slapstick and bizarre gender inversions such as this.

"The tongue is coming again!"

With immeasurable charm and style, A Chinese Ghost Story (aka: Qiannü Youhun) is a riot of colour and sound perfecting the crudely uncanny atmosphere of Hark's directorial debut The Butterfly Murders (1979), while redefining the non-stop action pace of his Zu Warriors (1981), into a seamless wall-to-wall extravaganza of mayhem and magic that dares to include such self-parodying visions of monstrous evil as a stretching yards-long tongue, which relentlessly pursues our much harassed hero through a night bewitched forest. The film is a peculiarly intoxicating brew of amazing swordplay and expertly crafted aerial ballet, imaginatively designed creature effects, eerie occult spells and delightfully witty romantic comedy scenes, with a particularly memorable and evocative score by Romeo Diaz and James Wong. Daringly derivative, with iconic and theatrical caricatures bordering on generic pantomime instead of truly authentic characters, this film is wildly entertaining nonetheless, and demonstrates how extraordinary and breathtaking pure fantasy cinema may become when black magic is allowed out of the shadows of horror.

The tremendous international success of A Chinese Ghost Story resulted in two sequels A Chinese Ghost Story II (aka: Qiannü Youhun zhi Renjian Dao, 1990), and A Chinese Ghost Story III (aka: Qiannü Youhun III Dao Dao Dao, 1991), reuniting the director and producer if not the main cast.

The DVD offers a digitally restored and re-mastered anamorphic transfer with rich Dolby digital 5.1 audio, a typically helpful and interesting expert commentary by Bey Logan, a tribute to Leslie Cheung (who committed suicide early this year), exclusive interviews with Tsui Hark (in Master Of Illusion, 24 minutes), and Wu Ma (in The Warrior, 29 minutes, English subtitled), plus two trailers.

A Chinese Ghost Story Once upon a time in Hong Kong, from Howard Hampton from Film Comment (excerpt)

[...] GIVEN THE WAY Tsui's films refract upon each other, it's somehow inevitable he would have his own double or alter-ego: the innovative, audacious, and very nearly uncategorizable Ching Siutung. As action director on many of Tsui's productions (including A Better Tomorrow II and The Killer - Woo's "trademark" shootouts owe a lot to Ching's eloquent choreography and spatial instinct), he helped as much as anyone to shape the look and feel of recent Hong Kong cinema. And Peking Opera Blues and A Better Tomorrow III would scarcely be the same ilms without the poetic sensibility Ching brought to them - the floating, mythological air that gives violence a dreamlike sheen. He and Tsui seemed to bring out the best in each other: Ching's most famous for the popular Chinese Ghost Story films (87/90/91) but Tsui is still often erroneously cited as their principal auteur: while producer Tsui may have applied structure to Ching's dazzling flights of fancy, the serenely lunatic vision is entirely Ching's. From 1990 to 1993 he would direct or co-direct the lion's share of the Film Workshop's finest productions, including The Terracotta Warrior (90, costarring Gong Li and none other than a marvelously stone-faced, dashing Zhang Yimou), Swordsman (90), The Raid (91), Dragon Inn (92, King Hu redone as a cross-dressing Rio Bravo), his masterpiece Swordsman II (92), and its uneven but still more astonishing continuation The East Is Red (93).

One of the ironies of their work, together and apart, is that Ching has the more distinctive, immediately recognizable style of the two. It would take a welltrained eye indeed to identify Tsui's insultingly coy, fraudulent The Lovers (94) as the work of the same person who directed The Blade less than a year later (the only conceivable link between the two is that The Blade is an act of atonement for the previous film). But glance at even such a minor film as I Love Maria (88) and Ching's touch as action director is instantly apparent. Quite apart from the scatterbrained hash of buddy comedy, Japanese sci-fi, and Metropolis (did I mention producer Tsui also costars as one of the buddies?), there are extraordinary fleeting images (Ching fuses slow motion with quick, almost subliminal cuts): blue light streaming through bullet holes, Sally Yeh's titular robot climbing a building, bodies hurtling through fog, a belltower taking off like a rocket, a water tower exploding like a pornographic pinata. Ching has a gift for ejaculatory excess, a love for translating sexual metaphors (trains crashing through walls, dreamers flying through the night) into intoxicating action sequences. They seem to erupt out of an inner world of childlike perversity and adult obsessiveness, and are held together by Ching's longing for each moment to register as indelible: making the viewer experience these images like flashbacks to some great, unaccountable epiphany or trauma. (Perhaps like seeing Vertigo when very young and having pieces of it come back later in life entangled with one's childhood fears, sexual awakening, and superhero fantasies.) [...]

To; then there is the ravening, demon'seye-view camera Ching lifted from The Evil Dead for A Chinese Ghost Story. (Since Raimi borrowed heavily from earlier HK horror films, the influence flew both ways.) But he takes it much further, into the romance of unreason and profane beauty: a surrealist impulse that devours the boundaries of the possible like a tapeworm inside a magician. There's no telling where Ching's quest for exquisite incongruities may lead. It can be something as airy and charming as the toyland battle scene in his actioncomics adventure The Raid, which trumps Indiana Jones by suspending full-size biplane replicas inside the soundstage and having them strafe the heroes while soldiers leap from the slowmoving wings and join in hand-to-hand combat. It's one thing to set a giant boulder after Harrison Ford (who wouldn't root for the boulder?), but another to assemble planes, locomotives, and whole bewitched forests inside the studio and turn it all into a vast nocturnal playground. Thus A Chinese Ghost Story departs from Raimi in terms of both ancient and movie folklore, soaring off into the uncharted terrain of Busby Berkeley's verv posthumous Evil Dead: The Musical - a good old boy-meetsdead-girl romance, complete with a singing ghostbuster, a she-male demon with a hundred-foot tongue, and a descent into hell a la Orpheus.

The extravagance is shaded, nuanced: wonder and the sinister go hand-in-hand, or hand-on-throat. Olivier Assayas is only stating the irresistibly obvious when he juxtaposes The Heroic Trio with Feuillade. I would also contrast it with Caro and Jeunet's The City of Lost Children, a lesser - and less enchanted - film: the archaic future and anarchic past collide in a fable pitting phallic mothers against demon fathers, with the dread of reunification hanging over the film like a curse. (The heroines must also exterminate those children who have been inducted into the army of darkness.) There is a throwaway scene in the spellbinding sequel to Heroic Trio, Executioners (released 94, but shot simultaneously), that is quintessential Ching Siu-tung. It's Christmas Eve in the near post-97 future, martial law is in effect, and weary military policemen are resting in a crowded corridor. Suddenly an anonymous, griefstricken woman - who materializes for this scene alone - bursts in, dragging a body past them. They order her to halt and she whirls, firing an automatic rifle, killing them all; she kicks in the door to the captain's office and hurls the body at the officers feet. Sobbing that they're responsible for the death of her husband on a suicide mission, she kneels beside the body and swiftly turns the rifle on herself. The sequence is one sweeping, panoramic gesture that serves no purpose but to instill itself in the viewer, a desperate cry that echoes through the movie like an aria.

In Swordsman, there is an instant when a wizened fighter comes out of an opponent's body the way a bird darts out of a tree - there is something so unreasonable and thrilling in that image, defying physics and common sense with such matter-of-fact aplomb. Ching is a true primitive who grew up on movie sets (his father was a director of kung-fu films) and knows no other world, yet his images are expansive and complex, so full of the wish to go beyond themselves. He first came to prominence as martial arts director on Patrick Tam's fine drama The Sword (80), wherein his flying duellists took off from King Hu country and began the trek that would culminate in his directing debut, Duel to the Death (83) quite terrific, formalist, at once detached and grandly unhinged. Though he'd worked with Tsui on Dangerous Encounter, it was on 1983's Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain that the collaboration took hold, in the process paving the way for the entire modern HK fantasy genre. (It should be noted, however, that the film was the first indication of the baleful influence of Star Wars on Tsui's thinking.) The contrast between their most popular movies, Ching's Chinese Ghost Story series and Tsui's Once Upon a Time in China franchise, is telling in that, while both succumb to the lure of formula and ritualized familiarity, Ching's tone is much surer throughout. Tsui offers up phonyendearing characters like the wellnamed "Clubfoot" and many crassly genteel bits of business, but Ching goes for flow almost in spite of characterization - his particularity there is in the dream and not the insipid dreamers.

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Daniel Fienberg -- Epinions

Mike Bracken--Epinions.com

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! Liz Kingsley

DVD Review e-zine Guido Henkel

HKCuk.co.uk Hong Kong Cinema UK

KFC Cinema Peter Zsurka

Kinocite K.H. Brown

Urban Cinefile (Australia) Richard Kuipers

Bearded Freak's Reviews

Kung Fu Cinema [Rob Daniel]

Joey Wang fan site

A Chinese Ghost Story - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

chinese ghost story-opening (5:55) on YouTube

A Chinese Ghost Story Bath tub sequence (3:32)

A Chinese Ghost Story I - 1 (9:12)

A Chinese Ghost Story I - 2 (9:40)

A Chinese Ghost Story I - 3 (3:48)

A Chinese Ghost Story I - 4 (3:55)

Ching Siu-tung "A Chinese Ghost Story" Interview (10:00)

Tsui Hark "A Chinese Ghost Story" Interview Part 1 of 3 (10:00)

Tsui Hark "A Chinese Ghost Story" Interview Part 2 of 3 (10:00)

Tsui Hark "A Chinese Ghost Story" Interview Part 3 of 3 (4:15)

Wu Ma "A Chinese Ghost Story" Interview Part 1 of 3 (10:00)

Wu Ma "A Chinese Ghost Story" Interview Part 2 of 3 (10:00)

Wu Ma "A Chinese Ghost Story" Interview Part 3 of 3 (9:34)

A CHINESE GHOST STORY II (Sien nui yau wan II yan gaan do) B 83

Hong Kong (104 mi) 1990

An experience to remember, the perfect late night midnight feature, you think you’ve seen special effects, well hold onto your hats, this is a speed-of-lightning-paced erotic comic book adventure story with millions of friendly and evil flying spirits from heaven and hell, sometimes hard to tell which. But no matter, this is a bizarre and imaginative fantasy world that ultimately proves to be just too much, it’s simply overwhelming. This film picks up right where the first film left off, with a quick rehash of the previous events leading to a humorous screen heading “The Story Continues…” Leslie Cheung returns as Ning, while Joey Wang has reincarnated to a new identity, Windy, who along with her sister Moon (Michelle Reis) both vie for his attention. A new addition is Jacky Cheung as Autumn, a weird Taoist martial arts priest with supernatural powers. Wu Ma returns as the Swordsman Yen, but is only seen in the opening when he and Ning part while traveling together on the road, as they do in all great westerns, only to reunite again in the finale.

While this film retains the same theme song throughout the series, the overall tone lacks much of the original’s vitality, including the memorable rap song in the graveyard sequence, or the unpredictable nature of other characters breaking out into song at any moment, also the exquisite beauty of that original temple on the lake, where the mixture of foreboding and beauty was enhanced by unexpected humor. This film doesn’t have the same compelling personality, nor is the story of much interest, instead it relies on more B grade level special effects, a rather cheesy looking monster along with a corrupt high priest whose interest appears to be the adrogynous nature of its human form which relies on a dull, hypnotizing mantra, which is little more than an unending drone, shape-shifting into more powerful monsters when the situation calls for it. Also of interest was Autumn being called upon to repeatedly resuscitate Ning by kissing him on the lips, the supposed cure for providing the missing yang element. Once more characters get slimed by monsters, poisoned by thieves, missing arms and limbs go flying through the air from expert swordsplay, everyone flies through the air at one point or another, as enemies become allies and just as quickly become enemies again. There’s another bathing scene where Ning must protect Windy’s modesty, as the monster steals her clothes, but it’s nothing like the inventive bathing sequence in Part One, and there’s an attempt at a love story, which generates an amusingly long, twisting in mid-air kiss between the two of them, professing everlasting love, but unfortunately they have little onscreen chemistry here, and of course she’s destined to marry another. One would be hard pressed to see how financiers were lining up for yet another adventure, but I guess the early 90’s was an epoch of wealth and extravagance in the Hong Kong film industry.

Mike Bracken--Epinions.com

After the rousing success (both in Asia and on the art house circuit here in the U.S.) of producer Tsui Hark and director Ching Siu-Tung’s film A Chinese Ghost Story, a sequel seemed to be in order. And while A Chinese Ghost Story 2 is a follow up to the first film, it’s also a movie that gives us a whole new plot instead of simply rehashing all the good stuff from the first movie-making it a film that stands well on its own.

Last time we saw our heroes, tax collector Ning (Leslie Cheung), Swordsman Yen (Wu Ma), and the lovely ghost Tsing (Joey Wang), they’d defeated a demon in Hell and insured that Tsing would reincarnate. A Chinese Ghost Story 2 picks up right where the first film left off (even going as far as to superimpose the words "the story continues" on the first shot) with Ning and Yen going their separate ways out into the world. Ning is arrested in a case of mistaken identity, and spends months in a cell with an elder named Chu. Chu decides that Ning is a good guy, one of a dying breed, and helps him escape before he’s executed. Free again, Ning meets Autumn (Jacky Cheung), a Taoist swordsman with some cool occult powers. While travelling together, they’re attacked by a band of guerillas led by Windy, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the recently departed Tsing. Windy and her band of warriors are off to save her father, who’s about to be executed by the Imperial court. Ning is mistaken for the wise elder Chu, and winds up leading the party. From there, the heroes battle everything from demons, to a gigantic flying centipede, to corrupt politicians, and more.

Like the first film, A Chinese Ghost Story 2, blends a diverse range of film genres to make a movie that’s hard to classify, yet always entertaining. There are elements of fantasy, sci-fi, horror, drama, romance, chop socky, and comedy in the film, all interwoven into a narrative that never slows down. Scenes can switch moods in the blink of an eye, constantly keeping the viewer off balance and trying to guess what will happen next.

Ching Siu-Tung’s direction is once again outstanding. In fact, I think some of the visuals in this film exceed his work in the first movie. The moody, atmospheric lighting is still in effect, but even the day scenes here look really impressive. Also worth noting is the editing; the film features more Kung Fu sequences than its predecessor, and Ching cuts the scenes in a way that makes them very frenetic and fun, but never lets you see the wires or dwell on the improbability of the action.

The performances are fantastic, especially the newly added Jacky Cheung. Cheung’s character is fun to watch, giving us the majority of the action and comic relief stuff provided by Wu Ma’s swordsman Yen in the first film (Yen really only shows up for the climax of this movie, sad, because he and Jacky had a real chemistry that was fun to watch in the few scenes they shared). Leslie Cheung and Wang are just as good as they were in the first film, whether the scenes call for them to be funny, or scared, or serious, they’re always up to the task, which is one of the reasons the film is so much fun to watch.

Like the first film, A Chinese Ghost Story 2 isn’t frightening in an American horror film way. The horror aspect here is more like fairy tale style horror, complete with some cheesy looking monsters. There are a few gory bits, including a guy who gets bit in half, a group of cannibalistic criminals, and a guy who gets his arm chopped off.

The film is available on DVD, with English subtitles. Like A Chinese Ghost Story, the subtitles leave a lot to be desired. There are rampant spelling, usage, and grammatical errors, but they’re not so bad that you can’t follow the action. One particularly humorous typo occurs when Ning and company are surrounded by enemies; he looks to Windy and tells her "we’re surrounded by our toes" instead of foes. Another recurring one deals with the "exercising" of demons; who knew that demons were out of shape? All joking aside, while the subs are far from perfect, they’re the best you’re gonna get unless you speak Cantonese or Mandarin.

Like its cinematic progenitor, A Chinese Ghost Story 2 is another great example of why Hong Kong cinema is so cool. It’s a silly film that has no other desire than to entertain its audience for roughly 90 minutes, a task it completes more than admirably. While it’s certainly less explicit than its genre counterparts (i.e. the An Erotic Ghost Story series, reviews forthcoming one of these days), it’s still an entertaining thrill ride, one guaranteed to amuse a wide range of audiences. If you’ve never checked out the Hong Kong film scene, what are you waiting for? Broaden your horizons and check out these films.

HKCuk.co.uk Hong Kong Cinema UK

City Pages [Eric Henderson]

A Chinese Ghost Story II ( 1 ) (10:37) on YouTube

A Chinese Ghost Story II ( 2 ) (10:17)

A Chinese Ghost Story II ( 3 ) (10:30)

A Chinese Ghost Story II ( 4 ) (10:30)

A Chinese Ghost Story II - 5 (3:58)

A Chinese Ghost Story II - 6 (8:46)

A Chinese Ghost Story II - 7 (7:12)

A Chinese Ghost Story II - 8 (8:42)

A Chinese Ghost Story II - 9 (6:45)

A CHINESE GHOST STORY III (Sien lui yau wan III: Do do do) C 73

Hong Kong (104 mi) 1991 co-director: Tsui Hark

Certainly more spectacle than the earlier features, including considerably less character development, no doubt due to the influence of Tsui Hark taking over the director’s chair midstream, picking up 100 years later after a brief recap with Tony Leung filling into the Leslie Cheung role of the little monk, as he did in his own fashion at the conclusion of Wong Kar-wai’s DAYS OF BEING WILD (1991) filmed the same year. The film is a slight variation on the original story in Part I, only it’s much sillier. A young monk named Fong (Tony Leung) follows his aging Taoist Master (Shun Lau) carrying a golden Buddha which repels ghosts into the Orchid Monastery, a haunted ancient temple, only to run into demons, including the awakening of the Tree Demon who is back with a vengeance. While the Master searches the forests for evil demons, Fong falls pray to a beautiful young ghost Lotus, the luxurious and ever alluring Joey Wang who remains simply incandescent throughout the entire 3-part series, who was sent by the Tree Demon to seduce and kill him, as she has done to so many others before, but instead she playfully flirts and falls in love with the purity and innocence of the young monk whose constant prayers give her an awful headache. Tony Leung’s physical comedy has to be seen to be believed, but he’s already a ladykiller, even with his shaved head and awkward, bumbling nature, where he quickly loses the Buddha, dropping it upon the frantic arrival of his hysterical guest at the door.

Most of the film takes place between the reserved Fong and the fleeting spirit Lotus, with a nice recurring musical theme, where they have to amusingly pretend the other doesn’t exist, protecting each another from the special powers of both the Demon and the Master who are both intent on wiping each other out, whose spells nearly kill the carefully concealed Lotus until Fong quickly plots to rescue her. But that doesn’t stop the high flying Master from going toe to toe with the Tree Demon, with its infinitely long tongue as well as all the branches of the forest at its disposal to wrap around its intended victim like a snake. The Master discovers too late that the Buddha has broken, leaving him unexpectedly vulnerable. Fong must get it repaired in order to save him, but all the people in town are liars, cut-throat thieves, and charlatans, each more deceptive than the next, all trying to steal the monk’s gold until he is rescued by Jacky Cheung as Yin, a mercenary swordsman who is overly concerned about naming his price before he jumps into action. When he comes to the monk’s defense, he becomes preoccupied with the beauty of the second ghost sister Butterfly (Nina Li Chi) who attempts what the first failed to do, confused at finding two men and a hidden ghost sister.

All of which leads to a final showdown with the Tree Demon and his merry band of giggling bald concubines as well as three ghost sisters, where Lotus’s hair becomes a lethal weapon, Butterfly’s extended fingernails as well, in an all out flying assault that bears little resemblance to the first two films, as there are far more explosions and wanton destruction. The element of distrust is a continual theme that plays throughout the entire film, not only the corrupt people in town, each more deceitful than the next, but also the lies needed to protect allies Fong and Lotus from powerful forces that are out to destroy them, and still more lies to protect Lotus from the all too human interests of Yin, who is fascinated by her beauty. The idea that one needs to lie or disguise what is important in order to protect what is valuable is an interesting one. Despite the frenetic pace and the near slapstick humor, the production values cheapen and grow tiresome the later we get into the film, ending with a rather cheesy looking battle episode that could have been taking place on a Star Trek TV show. Going out with a bit of a whimper, it’s obvious the money and the ideas simply ran out on this project.

Time Out Tony Rayns

One hundred years later, as promised in Part One, the androgynous tree demon returns, this time to terrorise a timid Buddhist monk (Leung) and his elderly master. Surprisingly enough, history repeats itself almost exactly. Glam wraith Lotus (Wang) tries to snare the virginal prey but complicates matters by falling in love with him. The Taoist end of things is held up by Yin (Cheung), a mercenary swordsman. Anyone who saw the other episodes will find this inexpressibly tedious, despite three plus factors: Tony Leung's performance, a brilliant opening scene (the funniest severed limb gags since Monty Python and the Holy Grail) and a great theme song.

Even with the revered Tsui Hark filling in as director, this second sequel was derided upon its release in Hong Kong for adhering a bit too closely to the framework of Ching Siu-Tung's original passion play. Set 100 years after the first two films, Ghost Story III follows a grizzled Taoist master (Lau Shun) and his puppy-eager tyro Fong (Tony Leung), who are transporting a precious golden Buddha figure through a land crawling with thieves, charlatans, and your basic run-of-the-mill nymphomaniac ghosts. While the storyline is essentially an extended (albeit complicated) courtship between Fong and the goodhearted demon Lotus (Joey Wong), Tsui and Ching's relentless visual pinwheels (including the ghosts' bullwhip hair and sword-like retractable fingernails) suggest a Kwaidan remake directed by the Evil Dead 2-era Sam Raimi. Yet simple comparisons can scarcely do justice to a film so overripe that each fish-eye frame threatens to spill out from the screen. And while it never quite evolves into anything more ambitious than eye candy, Ghost Story III still manages to make hash of the concurrent Ghost. Speaking of which, the mind reels with delight at the notion of Patrick Swayze lashing his enemies with a tongue the size of a vaulting pole.

Films on Disc (Stuart J. Kobak)

100 years have passed since the end of A Chinese Ghost Story, and the evil tree demon is back, having licked its wounds and recovered from its battle with the Taoist Master Yan. A Chinese Ghost Story III is in many ways a remake of the original instead of a sequel. It's as if Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung have returned to the original material and re-written it, with subtle variations. Nevertheless, it makes for an engaging picture, because it follows the rule of sequels: make everything the same as before, but bigger.

Our hero this time is Fong, a young Buddhist monk, who is traveling with a sacred Gold Buddha with his Master. The ouline of the plot starts out very much the same as the original film -- the two monks are traveling, they encounter a vicious swordfight, they enter into town, and soon are forced to seek refuge in the abandoned Orchid Monastery. The tree demon has more minions at his disposal this time, including a bevy of bald concubines, and three beautiful ghost sisters who seduce travelers and take them to their doom.

When the two monks arrive, the tree demon decides to have some sport with them, and sends ghostly Lotus (played, as you may have expected, by Joey Wong. Again.) to seduce young Fong. Fong, although uncertain whether he even should be a monk, knows of no other life, and successfully fights off Lotus's affection. Lotus, after trying to seduce and kill the monk several times, starts having feelings for him. She's a different sort of ghost than Hsiao-Tsien from A Chinese Ghost Story, however, in one crucial way: she's perfectly happy to hang out at the temple killing people. It's a nice, steady job. She has a home. It's something she never had, when she was living, she explains. She was sold again and again, finally to a man who had many concubines and treated her cruelly. So she kills, and does it with gusto. Why not?

When the Buddhist Master returns to the temple and finds Lotus there, he nearly kills her. But just at that time, the tree demon attacks, his massive tongue uprooting trees and breaking down walls. The Monk fights the demon to a stalemate, and then attempts to use the power of the Gold Buddha to defeat him. Unfortunately, the Buddha is cracked, and the Monk is defeated. He cries out to Fong to fix the statue and come back to his rescue. Fong heads back into town to try to find someone to help him.

In this age, the people are shown to be worse than they ever have been before. Casual violence has been amply illustrated among the commoners in the first two films, but here, the people have sunk to a new low. Everyone is armed. If you bump into someone, if you look at someone funny, if you dispute an item of food brought to your table, it could lead to violence, even death. It would be funny, were it not for the fact that I know gang kids who actually would fight and maybe even kill someone who looked at them the wrong way. Perhaps we are living in this dark age still.

Fong finally finds help in the form of swordsman Yin (Jacky Cheung), who will only do anything for money. He uses the beads of his abacus to count the value of his help the way a monk uses the beads of his rosary to count recitations of the diamond sutra. Together with the ghost Lotus, who may or may not help them, they must rescue the Master, and defeat the tree demon.

The special effects are as eye-popping and exciting in this film as in the first two installments. Here, it seems Ching Siu-Tung was inspired by the giant tongue of the tree demon and found other simple body parts to use as weapons in the other characters. The old Master uses his ear lobes, not only to detect truth from falsehood, but, when called upon, to shield his eyes from further damage. Lotus uses her hair as a deadly weapon, her sister Butterfly uses her fingernails. Extremities gone wild.

When taken as a whole, the Chinese Ghost Story trilogy does, in a way, form a narrative whole. Each of the two sequels to the first film explore further the characters and themes from the first movie. In the first movie, the Pu Songling story The Magic Sword provides the backing to a plot thick with superstition and magic. In A Chinese Ghost Story II, the tale is peeled away, revealing a complicated political struggle amid signs of the collapse of the government regime. Finally, in A Chinese Ghost Story III, we see the after-effects of the collapse, where men are reduced to savagery and greed, and only a pair of monks and their powers can help restore the balance. When seen this way, the themes of the three films roughly parallel the themes explored in King Hu's A Touch of Zen. I am reminded of that film again during the climax of A Chinese Ghost Story III, when the Master cuts himself to use his life essence to defeat the evil demon and he bleeds a brilliant gold. A fine conclusion to a ground-breaking trilogy.

HKCuk.co.uk Hong Kong Cinema UK

KFC Cinema Peter Zsurka

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Pulpmovies Review Paul Pritchard

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov)

A Chinese Ghost Story III ( 1 ) (10:13) on YouTube

A Chinese Ghost Story III ( 2 ) (10:07)

A Chinese Ghost Story III ( 3 ) (10:09)

A Chinese Ghost Story III ( 4 ) (10:13)

A Chinese Ghost Story III ( 5 ) (10:21)

A Chinese Ghost Story III ( 6 ) (10:24)

A Chinese Ghost Story III ( 7 ) (10:03)

A Chinese Ghost Story III ( 8 ) (10:13)

A Chinese Ghost Story III ( 9 ) (10:05)

A Chinese Ghost Story III ( 10 ) (10:29)

A Chinese Ghost Story III ( 11 ) (3:16)

EXECUTIONERS (Jin doi hou haap cyun) B 83

aka: The Heroic Trio 2

Hong Kong (97 mi) 1994 co-director: Johnny To

More what-the-hell-is-this, a sequel to “The Heroic Trio,” which featured a futuristic Hong Kong comic book where the world turns into a post-nuclear-holocaust-wasteland, sort of a cross between Godzilla’s Tokyo and MAD MAX, featuring three exotically beautiful women all decked out in black leather, Maggie Cheung, who deals in pirated water, the most precious commodity in this era, Michelle Yeoh (Khan), who guards military transport trucks, and Anita Mui, Wonder Woman, who tries to raise a small child while concealing her secret powers. The three super heroines honor the pledge of eternal sisterhood, agreeing to combine forces to save all of Hong Kong, but most importantly Wonder Woman’s husband and child from the threat of a master fiend who wants to become supreme ruler by militarily controlling all sources of pure water. What more could you ask for?

Chainsaw Fodder

This is the sequel to the hugely popular Hong Kong action flick "The Heroic Trio". I enjoyed this one much more than the first one although I do recommend seeing them in order. Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui, and Maggie Cheung star as the three superheroes out to fight evil. This time they are against a crazy doctor who is polluting the world's water supply. Sometimes annoying and sometimes menacing Anthony Wong ("Untold Story") plays the doctor. There are a lot of cool fight scenes, explosions, and stunts in this movie and it is much more dramatic than it's predecessor. I have found that a typical action movie tends to center more on the action and less on the drama while this movie manages to ensure that both aspects are dealt with equally. Things happen in this film that are very untypical of action movies for the most part. I guess that we must remember that this is a Chinese action movie which are usually better than American ones anyways. If you are a fan of Hong Kong action or are thinking of a place to start, I would definitely recommend "The Heroic Trio" and "Executioners".

LoveHKFilm.com (Ross Chen)

Follow-up to The Heroic Trio is more compelling but also more over-the-top. If you can handle the abundance of sappy montages, then you should be okay.

The follow-up to the hit The Heroic Trio is much more serious. The result turns out to be more compelling, but the overdone direction can leave you bewildered. Thankfully, the ace cast of Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung return, and the production proves to be just as entertaining as the first film, if not more.

Years after the wonderful incidents of The Heroic Trio, the world has apparently gone to hell. An apocalyptic future awaits out heroes, and to top it all off there's a water shortage. It seems megalomaniac Mr. Kim (Anthony Wong in makeup) owns all the world's uncontaminated water. However, all that turns out to be a scam as there's plenty of uncontaminated water just out of reach of the populace. Our heroes decide to combat Mr. Kim's blatant water bill fraud by seeking out the pure water source. Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung) teams up with a hat-wearing rogue (Lau Ching-Wan) to find the water, while Invisible Girl (Michelle Yeoh) attempts to protect the President and prevent a military coup by the power-hungry Paul Chun. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman (Anita Mui) has domestic issues with police chief hubby Damian Lau. Then she goes missing, which can only make matters worse.

The plot is waaaay ridiculous, but Ching Siu-Tung's action is terrific. Johnnie To goes overboard with a veritable marathon of montage sequences. It seems every key moment in the film needs to be punctuated by a pop song usually sung by Anita Mui. The overdone romanticism sort of works, as the film has incredibly huge tonal shifts which change between silly and tragic. The plot shifts gears quickly, making the film a strangely wrenching experience.

Given To's emotional bullying of the audience, the film turns out to be more compelling than its prequel. He chooses to defy commercial expectations, and the results can leave you tired and exhilirated - but also annoyed if you happen to like mega-mega happy endings. At least the three female leads turn in fine work, bringing presence and dignity to the overdone comic book plotline, as well as a believable athleticism to the action. Thanks to its overdone emotion, quick pacing, terrific action and strong female leads, Executioners turns out to be a prime example of Hong Kong Cinema at work.

Like its prequel, Executioners was purchased by Miramax/Disney and is currently no longer available in a subtitled, letterboxed DVD from Tai-Seng. The alternate Universe HK DVD is still in press, though the quality is a step down.

DVD Review e-zine Guido Henkel and Lieu Pham

Stomp Tokyo

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Evil Dread

HKCuk.co.uk

PopMatters [Daniel Mudie Cunningham]

Choi Kai-kwong

LAI MAN-WAI: FATHER OF HONG KONG CINEMA (Xianggang dianying zhi fu Li Minwei)

Hong Kong (140 mi) 2001

Lai Man-wai: father of Chinese cinema Shelly Kraicer from A Chinese Cinema Page

This feature-length documentary on early Chinese film pioneer Lai Man-wai (Li Minhui) premiered at the 2001 Hong Kong International Film Festival, and has now been released on DVD. Directed by Choi Kai--kwong, it is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the origins of Hong Kong and Chinese cinema.

Lai Man-wai, born in Japan in 1893 and educated in Hong Kong, became arguably the central figure in the birth in Chinese cinema. The documentary's most valuable contribution to Chinese cinema history is to argue this thesis, patiently, carefully, with copious detail: using interviews with surviving collaborators and family members, contemporary photographs, newsreels, and especially extended excerpts from the films that Lai Man-wai directed, starred in (early in his career), or co-produced, through the Minxin and Lianhua Film Studios.

The film also argues that Lai's political convictions -- he joined Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary party in 1911 -- played a central role in his filmmaking. From crucial work in pioneering cinema in Hong Kong -- along with Joseph Brodsky, he shot Hong Kong's first short film in 1913, Zhuangzi Tests His Wife (Lai played the wife) -- through his trailblazing early documentary work shooting Sun Yat-sen's anti-warlord campaigns through southern China from 1921 to 1928, Lai arrived in Shanghai and helped to precipitate that city's "golden age" of cinema. After several spectacular (but money-losing) productions at Shanghai Minxin Studio, he established, with Lau Ming-yau (Luo Mingyou) Lianhua Film Company, the studio responsible for a series of masterpieces in the 1930s that remain among the finest works of Chinese cinema. Lianhua was the studio of the great actress Ruan Lingyu, as well as actors Jin Yan, Chen Yanyan, Li Lili, and Lai Man-wai's second wife Lin Chuchu.

The documentary offers generously long excerpts from Ruan Lingyu's Goddess, New Woman, and Love and Duty, among others, and takes a substantial excursion in order to recount her brief, illustrious career and tragic suicide. The film and stills of her funeral are perhaps the most moving sequences in the documentary.

Following Lianhua's financial decline from the mid-1930s, and the Japanese attacks on Shanghai (Lai felt compelled, characteristically, to record the attacks and destruction in an instant resistance documentary, along with cameraman Chu Shu-hung), Lai and his family left Shanghai for Hong Kong in 1938. The film's story ends with Lai and his family's flight as refugees through China (and their partially successful attempts to save parts of his film library), and his return to Hong Kong, where he died in 1953.

All of this is explained and illustrated in fascinating detail, largely through interviews with Lai's contemporaries. Although the film, at 140 minutes, seemed too long, in need of some judicious trimming when shown at the HKIFF, it fits naturally into a DVD format, whose sections can easily be consulted separately.

The DVD release is graced with superb features and packaging: the film is subtitled in both traditional and simplified Chinese, as well as English, French, German, and Japanese. And the accompanying booklet contains the complete screenplay, production notes, extra photographs, and a fascinating analytical essay in Chinese and English by Law Kar (Lai Man-wai: a legacy of enlightenment") that nicely complements, and in some cases provocatively supplements, the information provided in the film. This disk will become an essential resource for libraries, documentary broadcasters, scholars, and anyone who needs to discover the early history of Chinese cinema. Congratulations to all of the film's creators, including producer/writer Law Kar, writer Stephanie Ng, cameraman Lai Shek (one of Lai Man-wai's eleven children) and director/producer/editor Choi Kai-kwong, to whose two and a half year labour we are all indebted.

Cholodenko, Lisa

HIGH ART A 96

USA Canada (101 mi) 1998

Written and directed by Cholodenko, awarded Best Screenplay at the 1998 Sundance festival, featuring some of the best acting seen this year, particularly the performances by the 4 leading women, an intense, raw and tender film, much better than the recently seen NILS BY MOUTH, which also uses naturalistic settings and dialogue, sort of small tributes to Cassavetes. This film, however, lacks that feeling of spontaneity, but delivers in mood and atmosphere. Every frame is filled with an essence of urgency, moment by moment, throughout the film, meaningful and meaningless glances, Altman-like barely audible background conversations contrasted against some brilliantly original, and always interesting dialogue. Despite the fact that the story itself is highly predictable, loosely based on the real life artist Nan Goldin, what’s interesting is the way this story is told, exposing a little more of each character’s dark side, layer by layer, reminding me of HUSBANDS, exposing how vulnerable it can be to need someone, and be needed in return.

Ally Sheedy as Lucy and Radha Mitchell as Syd give the best actress performances seen this year. They are irresistible on screen, understated, revealing what isn’t being said. Syd has a good, but not great relationship with a guy she lives with while working as an assistant editor for a chic photography magazine, a company filled with self-indulgent, high-powered egos who won’t give her a second glance. By chance, she meets her neighbor upstairs to report water is leaking into her apartment, and discovers a fascinating world of decadence and drug addiction, including Lucy, one of the more prominent photographers who simply dropped out of the art world 10 years ago. Lucy is living with her heroin-addicted lover and model, Greta, played by Patricia Clarkson in a terrific supporting role, a has been Marlene Dietrich-ish German actress from the Fassbinder era who was taught by Rainer that “the quality in women is vanity.” (Please don’t inform her that Jack Kerouac and Ecclesiastes 1 from The Bible reached the same conclusion about us all, “Vanity of vanites, all is vanity.”) Lucy is supported by her rich and eccentric mother, Tammy Grimes, who lives in her own mystery world.

Enter Syd, “the chick with the leak,” who takes an interest in Lucy’s work, sparking a curious reaction, “It’s been a long time since I’ve been deconstructed.” But Syd has ambition and brings her in to a meeting with the editors, where Lucy agrees to do a cover shoot, but only if Syd is her editor. What follows is spontaneous combustion in the sexual chemistry between these two smart and beautiful women, who very slowly and tenderly fall in love. Everyone else takes a back seat while these two simply sizzle on screen. Lucy decides to feature her own photos of Syd in various states of undress as the cover feature, returning to Greta for one last night together before they part, where she inexplicably dies in the night. Everyone at the magazine is happy, the photos are a huge success, lives are compromised, everyone uses everyone else. There are no rules, the bottom line is fortune, fame, and success. Is it any wonder that so many artistic flames are snuffed out in this highly personal, high risk, high stakes game of hit or miss Russian roulette?

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Drug-addicted artists and the bohemian underworld are, by now, pretty tired subjects for movies, most of which offer only romanticization, condemnation, or some confused mixture of the two. Fortunately, the thoughtfulness evident in High Art allows it to easily transcend the clichés of its subject matter. Australian actress Radha Mitchell (who looks as if she graduated from college sometime around yesterday) plays an assistant editor at a fashionable photography magazine. With a degree in critical theory behind her and the chauvinism of her superiors in front of her, Mitchell's prospects look dim until she discovers that her upstairs neighbor (Ally Sheedy) used to be a famous photographer in the '80s. After befriending her, Mitchell begins to push the heroin-sniffing Sheedy to resume working. Despite the domineering presence of Sheedy's self-destructive, aging German film-star girlfriend (Patricia Clarkson, in a memorable performance), Mitchell soon finds herself falling in love with Sheedy, as the distinctions between artist and subject, critic and creator, observer and participant begin to blur. Though High Art has more than a few awkward touches—all the male characters take up less than one dimension, for example—it's otherwise a nicely underplayed, memorable, beautifully filmed movie. Sheedy's presence may seem like stunt-casting at first, but that suspicion disappears quickly thanks to a performance that makes it easy to forget such films as Short Circuit and Man's Best Friend. She and Mitchell create fully developed characters whose complex relationship is essentially all there is to the movie, and all it needs. This is the first feature from Lisa Cholodenko, and the term "promising debut" should be reserved for films such as this one.

Nashville Scene [Donna Bowman]

One of the reasons it's hard to make a good movie about art and artists is that audiences resent being told that the fictional art is good and the fictional artist is talented. If the movie is anything other than a biopic about Michelangelo, the filmmaker will have a hard time convincing the audience that these modernist scribbles are the products of a genius (especially when the purported genius is being played by, say, Ethan Hawke). So a movie about art has an additional hurdle it must overcome to establish credibility and keep the viewers focused on its real themes.

High Art, a slow, serious, and ultimately rewarding film due in Nashville theaters in coming weeks, not only manages to say something interesting about art but also finesses the question of quality in a disarming way. Syd (Radhu Mitchell), an assistant editor at a photography magazine, is trained in critical theory. So when she takes an interest in the photographs on her neighbor Lucy's bathroom wall, she praises them with a thesaurus-load of critical buzzwords about "intensity" and "immediacy." Syd believes the pictures are art because Lucy carefully chose composition, setting, and all the other photographer's variables; Lucy (Ally Sheedy) doesn't care if they're art, only that they represent her life. "Actually, I think that was a snapshot," she answers when Syd praises the casual qualities of an image.

Syd is drawn to Lucy's lack of ambition--she retired from the art-photography world 10 years ago--and the static, emotionless world of her circle of bohemian druggies, who include Lucy's girlfriend Greta (Patricia Clarkson), a former Fassbinder actress turned full-time addict. Lucy's life contrasts favorably to Syd's life as a magazine flunky with a fancy title and frustrated ambition. But when Syd persuades Lucy to create a spread for her magazine, she can't help bringing her working self, the one who takes deadlines seriously, into Lucy's world of found art. She is a willing partner in Lucy's seductive purposes, but their passion finally leads to an artistic achievement that Syd finds hard to reconcile with her professional persona.

Writer-director Lisa Cholodenko has crafted her plot well: The final revelations about Syd's character and the nature of art don't become clear until just before the credits roll. And her cast is uniformly excellent. Although the movie has attracted attention because of Sheedy's "comeback" role, the standout performance is Mitchell's. Her character suffers from a combination of eager youth and genuine good taste without an environment in which she can prove herself and mature as a critical thinker. Mitchell's inner conflicts enliven many a scene where to all outward appearances nothing is happening.

The one real flaw in Cholodenko's work is that a lot of scenes cry out to be so enlivened. Lucy had heroin chic before heroin chic was cool, and most of the movie takes place in a narcotic haze. Moments of ironic levity, provided by the snobbish editors in Syd's workplace, are few and far between. And as such, it's even possible to mistake High Art's solemn tone for a reverent attitude toward art and artists.

That would be a shame. Cholodenko understands that chaotic vitality and personality need to be recognized in, and as, art; she's in direct opposition to the movie's professionally managed, deadline-crunched arbiters of taste, who canonize collectibles, not creations. That High Art presents this dilemma in a solid, character-driven movie indicates that Lisa Cholodenko is herself an artist to watch.

Film Journal International (Chris Grunden)

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

BFI | Sight & Sound | High Art (1998) Leslie Felperin from Sight and Sound, April 1999

BFI | Sight & Sound | Queer And Present Danger B. Ruby Rich from Sight and Sound, March 2000

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

AfterEllen.com - Lesbian and Bi Women in Entertainment Veronica Holmes

Movie Magazine International [Andrea Chase]

Thoughts on Stuff Patrick

QNetwork [James Kendrick]

Reel.com DVD review [Bonnie Fazio]

DVD Talk (Robert Spuhler)

Los Angeles Times (Jack Mathews)

LAUREL CANYON B- 80

USA (103 mi) 2002

Performances stand out in Lisa Cholodenko's follow-up to High Art. As a California record producer whose medical resident son (Christian Bale) and his thesis-writing fiancee (Kate Beckinsale) take up temporary residence in her house/studio, Frances McDormand has the earthy naturalism of a woman who's cut her own path in the world. And as the incipient rock star who's cutting an album in her house, Alessandro Nivola is a revelation, incarnating the kind of nascent sex god whose appeal is only increased by his seeming effortlessness. Bale and Beckinsale's squares aren't nearly as compelling; at bottom, you feel like they're just sounding boards for the film's more freewheeling characters. (The squares loosen up, but the free spirits don't get any less free.) Despite its endorsement of the laissez-faire life, Laurel Canyon is as neat as a military bed; it would've been a lot more effective if Cholodenko had left some of the seams showing.

"Either it pulls you in or it leaves you cold," Frances McDormand tells future daughter-in-law Kate Beckinsale, explaining her approach to producing records, and her credo toward the rest of the world. A rock 'n' roll veteran, McDormand lives in a house in which gold records overlook tables covered with beer cans and empty tequila bottles. Her Almost Famous character would single out her Laurel Canyon character for shame, even though they share a tenacious adherence to the principles of their choice. Sure, McDormand can enjoy an affair with Alessandro Nivola, the lead singer of the band she's currently producing, without getting bothered by the Fleetwood Mac-ness of it all, but she'll be damned if she'll tailor a radio-friendly song just so it can come out in time for Christmas. Parenting has also left her cold, or so it would seem from son Christian Bale's attitude when he and Beckinsale move from the East Coast to the West, he to take a job as a psychiatric resident, she to finish a thesis that involves sorting through reams of data on DNA and the mating habits of fruit flies. Told that McDormand's house would be vacant, they move in, only to discover that a change of plans will force them to share the house with her and the endless bustle of her life. As much as Laurel Canyon is driven by its characters and the deft performances of its cast, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko (High Art) was smart to name her second feature after its setting, the rock-star-rich L.A. neighborhood that refracts the glamour of the Hollywood hills through a grimy lens. It's a place where everything is permitted and nothing is supposed to hurt, but its freedom weighs heavily on some of its residents. Having long since left the area for more cerebral pursuits, Bale has no taste for it at all, and he watches in dismay as Beckinsale gets drawn into the lotus-like charms of days spent stoned by the pool or in the studio, slowly perfecting the music of Nivola's band. But then, when confronted with a desire of his own in the form of an increasingly intense relationship with coworker Natascha McElhone, he unironically offers "sublimation" as a viable option. In a place that allows no sublimation, he has no place. Cholodenko cleverly sets up some obvious relationships that challenge the balance of repression, freedom, and excess, then lets them develop in less-than-obvious ways. Occasionally, the film invites a more dynamic touch than the careful slowness Cholodenko carries over from High Art. But that same care gives the movie a seductive quality that would have been lost in a more hurried approach, and brings to the surface the real hurt beneath the comic contrast of mother and son. Between the ivory tower and the shady canyon, Cholodenko finds a rare patch of common ground.

filmcritic.com Jules Brenner

What a shock: There's licentious sex going on up here in the Hollywood Hills. I say "up here" because Laurel Canyon, Sunset Blvd., etc. is my 'hood. So, to those who might take the events of this movie as a generalized portrayal of the area, let me assure you that it's strictly on a lot by lot basis. These hills are crawling with people from the movie and music industries, some of whom might actually resemble the characters of Laurel Canyon. Double shock.

This intimate drama (by director Lisa Cholodenko) deals with the effect a liberal living standard might have on a young, impressionable, Harvard graduate with a conservative nature and great looks. She's Alex (Kate Beckinsale), the fiancé of Sam Bentley (Christian Bale), who needs to come to Los Angeles to complete his residency at the renowned Hausman Neuropsychiatric Institute. The move to a quiet hillside home will enable Alex to complete her dissertation on Drosophila Genomics, the world of chromosomes and centimorgans applied to the reproductive aspects of the fruit fly. No dummy, this lady.

The plan is to stay at Sam's mother's place on Hollywood Way, off Laurel Canyon Blvd. while she, Jane Bentley (Frances McDormand), a successful record producer with a hippie lifestyle, is at her Malibu pad. But plans have a way of going awry in this household. Jane has given the Malibu house to her ex-lover and has remained in the Hollywood home, a property with swimming pool and recording studio, working to complete her new boyfriend's album.

Disappointed in his mother's laissez faire, unapologetic attitude, Sam tasks Alex with finding a rental house while he spends his workdays in residence at the medical institute, where he meets the attractive co-resident Sara (Natascha McElhone). While this leads to certain temptations for Sam, they're nothing compared to where Alex is going.

Without Sam around, Alex becomes so fascinated by pleasure seeking Jane and Ian McNight, her sexually opportunistic younger boyfriend and the lead singer of the group, that she abandons her studies, feints her efforts to find alternate lodgings, and embarks on a course of behavior that leads to a menage à trois and a rather total betrayal of her unsuspecting fiancé.

The questionable character behavior and the avoidance of consequence (with a copout ending) for what would and should be life-changing, relationship-adjusting acts, are story weaknesses -- the acts depict exceedingly reckless choices for such smart people. First of all for Alex, who takes a direction that seems not likely to be part of her character possibilities, dramatic though it may be. The dissolution of her moral values is the core of the drama, raising the ante for its persuasiveness. Secondly for Jane, who, for all her freewheeling ways, is a complex and vulnerable person with considerable intelligence and control. Before she would engage in forbidden sexual fruit, she might be expected to balance it against the betrayal of her own son, for whom she avows her constant motherly love. Would she so readily abandon that for a little instant gratification?

Despite the insistent prurience in the writing, the performances are pro and much production value is accomplished on a modest budget. We've never before seen McDormand as a self-indulgent woman of tight jeans and bleached hair -- a gal so far away from her "sheriff" in Fargo or her "mother" in Almost Famous that you're reminded of what acting skill is all about. Pert Londoner Beckinsale shows some departure from the safety of primmer roles, such as her Nurse Lt. Evelyn Johnson in Pearl Harbor, though she does her three sex scenes here with a fastidious lack of nudity. Bale plays Sam with convincing emotional injury while struggling against temptation, providing the sympathetic rock we cling to, and leaving us with a desire to see more of this actor's capable naturalness.

Cholodenko, with credits for directing episodes of Six Feet Under and Homicide: Life on the Street, TV series, previously wrote and directed High Art in 1998. Her arousal of emotional fireworks when disparate lifestyles and values clash, with the attempt to draw in the vulnerability under everyone's skin to balance the battle, portend creative product ahead that will be worth watching for.

Since this town provides star sightings as regularly as Lotto winners, I'm going to be especially vigilant for Natascha McElhone driving down Laurel, as she does in the film. What an image to contemplate. And, please, you folks who don't live here, don't take this steamy romp for a representation of Hollywood life. You hardly even see any hippies around here anymore.

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Kate Sullivan

Nitrate Online [Nicholas Schager]

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek)

stylusmagazine.com (Jen Cameron)

Film Freak Central Walter Chaw

Slant Magazine Chuck Rudolph

Reel.com DVD review [Jerry Renshaw]

DVD Verdict Mark Van Hook

Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones)

Laurel Canyon Gerald Peary from the Boston Phoenix

Chicago Tribune [Loren King]

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT B+ 90

USA (104 mi) 2010

Herself an advocate for alternative lifestyles as she lives in a lesbian relationship raising a 4-year old son by way of artificial insemination, director Lisa Cholodenko and co-writer Stuart Blumberg have conceived an extremely generous film version of Scenes from a Lesbian Marriage, an easy to like social observance comedy that turns into the feel good and feel bad movie of the year, as this mostly sunny film with dark elements combines both moods into this generally excellent family drama of a relatively complacent lifestyle in middle class Los Angeles. The real dramatic heft is carried by the long-term lesbian couple, Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening), who are raising two teenage kids together, affectionately called the two moms by Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson). When Joni turns 18, her younger brother grows curious about their real dad, a sperm doner, and he urges her to call him. Mark Ruffalo is brilliant as Paul, that dad waiting in limbo, running an organic restaurant with a small organic garden nearby where he raises his own vegetables and herbs. Everything comes easy to this guy, who uses his natural charm and good looks to get women, become a success, live a life with as little conflict as possible, and pretty much do whatever he wants to do. This raises a red flag for the two moms, especially when their kids take an interest, as he seems to represent all the wrong ideals. But there’s a connection right away, where the guy is honest, a bit younger, and enjoys their company, where the kids are more than a bit surprised by all this new attention. Both kids have rather lame and underdeveloped friends, people barely worth thinking about who are more trouble than they’re worth, which might be attributed to these kids being pre-occupied with themselves most of the time, with parents who laud attention onto them, so they’re used to it and expect it. They may be tired of being babied and overprotected by their parents, but they’re kids who have always been given everything.

Once they start hanging around dad, each kid develops a rebellious side that never existed before, where they stand up to their moms and show a defiant side. As these are smart and sweet kids who have always done what’s expected of them, as that’s pretty much all they know, they’re as confused by this newly discovered attitude as anyone, but Joni in particular is tired of the mothers hording over her, being overly critical about everything, always expecting her to be perfect. Laser is a go along kid who’s never developed any side to his personality except safe relationships around sports that require as little effort as possible. Both parents think he’s spending way too much time with Clay, his only friend, a low life jock who seems to have little regard for anyone else. Jules is a sweet natured left-over hippie from the 60’s who avoids confrontation, verbal exactitude, or professional commitment, as she’s been supported by Nic the breadwinner who works at a local hospital. Bening feels like a character written by Noah Baumbach, as there’s always a monster written into his movies, and Bening is a manipulative, constantly driven, over controlling perfectionist who always gets her way and expects everyone else to fall into line. She’s a holy terror to be around, which pretty much describes how the kids feel. Of course they leap into Paul’s life with no boundaries the first chance they get, as there’s no repercussions except from home, where the moms unsuccessfully try to reel them back in. Interesting developments ensue as they enter no man’s territory, including several scenes where they break bread together with the enemy, a heterosexual man, and something deliciously unexpected happens.

The first half of the film is extremely funny, featuring witty dialogue and nuanced, tour de force performances that match the upbeat music. But like a new toy, the kids eventually grow tired of it and are ready to throw it away, having no use for it anymore. That is the unceremonious fate of their new dad (and the gardener, and their friends). This heartlessness is all they know, as they’re spoiled kids who have been loved unconditionally all their lives, sometimes to their own detriment, as they haven’t yet learned to think for themselves when someone’s always been there to do it for them. The second half grows eerily sad when things don’t turn out the way anyone would like, as everyone seems to be disappointed with others and at themselves. Some own up to their deficiencies, others don’t know how, but all are a fairly self-centered group who live their lives expecting they can do pretty much whatever they want. They can be inconsiderate, hostile, and intolerant of others, even the people they love, yet there’s little evidence they’ll ever be any different. When Joni goes off to college and her family drives away, she literally looks petrified, not liberated. Who will protect her now? And without his big sister to pester him, Laser thinks he’ll finally be left alone. Little does he know. But the beauty of the film is the unvarnished imperfections of every one, especially Moore and Bening, who bravely offer us their real faces without touch ups from make up, who are used to bulldozing their way through life, rarely stopping to think about the feelings of others. What’s really sad is how many people fit this depiction of an emptyheaded suburban lifestyle where the parents browbeat their kids to be what the parents have decided these kids would be from before the time they were infants in kindergarten. The kids never really had any choice. It was already decided for them. Few kids ever figure this out until it’s too late. Everyone in this film remains clueless, though the mainstream media may gush and swell at what a beautiful example of a lesbian marriage living through family hardships this film turns out to be, where the lesbian aspect is really just as misguided as any other parents, as they all think what they’re doing is right. Little do they know.

Time Out New York review [3/5] Keith Uhlrich

Budding landscaper Jules (Moore) and determined career gal Nic (Bening) are a Los Angeles lesbian couple with two teenage kids—daughter Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and son Laser (Josh Hutcherson)—who they conceived through a sperm bank. The donor for both is organic restaurateur Paul (Ruffalo), a sleepy-eyed semi-fuck-up whom 18-year-old Joni contacts out of curiosity. The kids hit it off with their sorta-father, but the “Moms” (as they call them) want to grill the guy before things get too familial. One awkward dinner later, Jules has promised to redecorate Paul’s backyard with some flora, while Nic maintains her skeptical stance. And for good reason…

Lisa Cholodenko’s self-consciously low-key drama—a hit on the festival circuit—never quite shakes its sitcom-ish setup. The director alternates incident-laden storytelling with penetrating character moments that her terrific cast acts to the fullest. The sheer joy of watching Bening and Moore do dyke, with barely a hint of straight-playing-gay self-congratulation, mitigates many of the film’s missteps. These great actors can lend depth to most anything, even a contrived hidden-porn gag. Ruffalo is every bit their equal, especially when he’s being bad. The smile he cracks after he beds someone he shouldn’t is revelatory: Infidelity may be wrong, but in the moment it’s hella fun. Yet there’s something suspect in the way the film disposes of him, as if his very real complications (the paternal love he shows alongside his libidinous flaws) have no place in the unconvincingly traditionalist family portrait Cholodenko is painting. Moore’s “marriage is hard” climactic speech is particularly unfortunate—an Oscar clip trying desperately to mask its award-grubbiness, the kind of faux-profound summation that would make Aesop cringe.

While notable for its topical political presence (advocating same-sex marriage), writer/director Lisa Cholodenko's latest character-based, ideological satire set in Southern California displays a mastery of self-righteous urban bohemian dialogue, much like her previous works, Laurel Canyon and High Art. She has a knack for presenting alternative lifestyles with a complexity beyond one-note platitudes, juxtaposing intolerant conservatives with ironic hipsters without patronizing either, revelling in equal parts hypocrisy and acute observations.

The Kids are All Right is no exception, as, ostensibly, the main character triangle of lesbian couple Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) and sperm donor Paul (Mark Ruffalo) are essentially the same character types as those in Laurel Canyon, only in different circumstances, creating a similar power dynamic and organic comic interface. Of course, here the central question is whether a male role model and traditional family is necessary for the healthy development of children, as explored when Joni (Mia Wasikowska) reaches out to her mothers' sperm donor following her 18th birthday.

Undoubtedly, this sort of premise could easily devolve into a bout of preaching and overt pedagogical posturing, but Cholodenko is far more concerned with examining relationship dynamics and well-intentioned people that make mistakes than she is in pointing fingers. Jules' eventual acquiescence to Paul's flirtation isn't presented with bias or villainy, coming off more as a mutual curiosity and middle-aged questioning of life choices.

What's more, as these characters interact, keeping secrets from each other and evolving together, their differences and very candid reactions frequently prove hilarious. For example, when Laser (Josh Hutcherson) asks his mothers why two lesbians would watch gay male porn during sex, the facial responses and natural chemistry between Bening and Moore make it impossible not to literally laugh aloud. In fact, body language and throwaway facial reactions add quite a bit to an already intelligent and exceptionally detailed script.

Most importantly, as the film progresses and the title becomes increasingly apt, the only annoyance is the realization that it will eventually end. While not exceptional or life changing, this tale of familial hiccups and growing pains proves deeply satisfying and thoroughly engrossing, regardless of orientation, preference or bias.

The Onion A.V. Club review [A-] Keith Phipps

The Kids Are All Right is the story of a marriage, whether it’s a legally recognized one or not. The spouses live amid the comforts, compromises, and long-recognized shortcomings of a decades-long partnership as they raise two teenagers. They alternately work well together, exhaust each other’s patience, contradict each other, drive each other away, and unite for the greater good. The fact that they’re both women (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) is neither beside the point, nor the whole of it. Working with co-writer Stuart Blumberg, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon) has created an intimate, funny, occasionally upsetting depiction of a loving family that is, like so many families, often only just functional.

Bening plays a doctor and the family’s primary breadwinner, a flinty, demanding woman who loses her ability to censor herself after two glasses of wine. She’s come to specialize in suggesting vulnerability beneath a hard surface, and that skill rescues the character from villainy as she nags her children—believably realized by Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson—and neglects Moore, who’s put her professional ambition on hold for decades, though her passiveness has limits. They’re stumbling by as Wasikowska prepares to leave for college, but what passes for order in their house gets upset when the children contact the sperm donor used to father them. A successful, free-spirited restaurateur played by Mark Ruffalo—first seen shouldering a basket of vegetables and looking like the embodiment of virility—he’s asked whether he’s interested in meeting his genetic offspring, and quickly answers yes. When he meets them, he begins to recognize a piece missing from his own life.

From there, an already-complicated situation grows more complicated still. As Ruffalo gets to know the kids and their mothers, dynamics shift, new alliances form, and neither Cholodenko nor the cast pull back from capturing the situation in all its tender awkwardness. Every scene looks like the result of years of accumulation, be it the affections and resentments that have piled up between Bening and Moore’s characters, or the clutter of their suburban L.A. home. Cholodenko’s casually observant style perfectly matches the cast’s thoughtful work, though the film ultimately proves more successful at creating messy situations than trying to resolve them: The final act finds character after character saying out loud what they’ve been expressing without words for much of the film. That’s a small failure amid tremendous successes, however, and one that arrives on the heels of beautifully realized scenes like a long Joni Mitchell-inspired dinner-conversation-turned-sing-along. In moments like these, the film almost seems to melt away as we observe lives being lived before our eyes, with neither the hurt nor the beauty filtered out.

Movieline (Stephanie Zacharek) review [9.5/10]

Annette Bening has a genius for a kind of “existential” acting—for illuminating the chink (or moat, or abyss) between a person’s front and the quivering creature underneath, desperately trying to hold the mask in place. As Nic, the more patriarchal half of a same-sex married couple in Lisa Cholodenko’s high-strung comedy The Kids Are All Right, she wears a short, blunt haircut; drops her voice (she purges the tinkle); and presents to her teenage children, a boy and a girl, a façade of stability, of someone who values structure above all. Nic’s political agenda is unspoken but implicit: that two mothers (the other is Jules, played by Julianne Moore) can create a home that’s every bit as traditional as one with a mother and father. Nic is admirable, inspiring, but also a bit of a pill (and a compulsive drinker). Like the best comic protagonists, she takes herself very, very seriously and tries so hard to do the right thing—which all but guarantees that her orderly world will become unmoored and collapse in a shower of travestied ideals.

It happens like this: As her inward, angry son, Laser (Josh Hutcherson), skateboards on the edge of delinquency, her daughter, Joni (Mia Wasikowska), decides to track down a true father figure for the boy—in this case, their anonymous sperm donor. (Both Joni and her half-brother have the same biological dad, although each mother carried a child.) Enter Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a shambling, freewheeling bachelor restaurateur. When he shows up for dinner on his motorcycle, Nic regards this interloper with distaste bordering on horror. (Bening’s frozen deadpan barely conceals a hundred different impressions—all bad.) But the flightier, femme-ier Jules is intrigued.

Cholodenko, who wrote the screenplay with Stuart Blumberg, has a female partner and a child, and in this political climate, with gay marriage and parenting under fire, you wouldn’t expect she’d even flirt with the notion that two moms aren’t enough. But she’s a true comic dramatist. She tests what is, presumably, her ideal, her design for living; she bombards it with every weapon in her arsenal. Then she surveys the wreckage, ostensibly in the hope it can be reassembled into something more in balance. And why not? Boys do, in this culture, look to fathers to help form their identities. Introspective modern kids do attempt to discern which parts of their personalities are nature and which nurture. As in her High Art and (to a lesser extent) Laurel Canyon, Cholodenko’s world is too complex, too discombobulated, to let the characters she loves—all of whom practice an “alternative lifestyle”—get away with thinking their revolutionary bubbles are necessarily impregnable.

Cholodenko and Blumberg reportedly wrote many drafts of The Kids Are All Right, and the scenes are beautifully shaped. Moore’s dithery lyricism carries echoes of Diane Keaton, but as a duettist she’s in a class of her own. She takes on the rhythms of her co-stars—implying that marriage to someone as strong-willed as Nic would have kept Jules soft and suggestible. When alone with Paul, for whom she’s designing a backyard garden, she turns giddy and girlish and self-deprecating. It’s easy to see why she’s charmed. Working in mainstream films, Ruffalo has been in danger of losing that incisive flakiness that made him so magnetic in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me. Well, it’s back, baby. What’s so winning is how hard Paul, who is naturally abstracted, tries to make contact: first, with supreme awkwardness, with his biological kids; and then with the woman who gives him a glimpse of how good domesticity—how making gardens grow—might feel.

The kid actors are more than all right—less showy but sharp. Wasikowska has the gift of watchfulness. Her Joni (named, yes, for the singer) is about to leave for college and needs to fit together the pieces of her puzzle life. She also needs to leave her half-brother in a better place. Hutcherson at first seems too closed off, but that’s part of his strategy. More and more, he lets you in: not all the way, but enough to let you glimpse, in embryo, the person who’s fighting to emerge.

The title, like Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give, is one that trails you out of the theater and gives you something to brood on. (It has nothing to do with the Who—who spelled all right wrong anyway.) I think Cholodenko wants you to see that, despite the gaps and uncertainties in the pioneer family life of Nic and Jules, Joni and Laser have enough of a foundation, enough love, to grope their way to all-rightness. That this idea might be viewed as radical or degenerate is part of the larger tragicomedy of American life. But the self-satire of The Kids Are All Right is so knowing, so rich, so hilarious, so damn healthy that it blows all thoughts of degeneracy out of your head.

The Kids Are All Right Sophie Mayer from Sight and Sound, November 2010

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review at Sundance

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones] also reviewing DOGTOOTH

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

IFC.com [Alison Willmore]

Slant Magazine [Lauren Wissot]

DVD Talk (Jason Bailey) review [4/5] theatrical review

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3.5/4]

Boxoffice Magazine (Ray Greene) review [3/5]

Film School Rejects [Neil Miller]

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3/4]

Cinema Blend review Eric Eisenberg

RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [B]

Film Monthly (Sawyer J. Lahr) review

Variety (Rob Nelson) review

Screen Daily.com [Tim Grierson] registration required

So How Good is The Kids Are All Right?: A Movieline Conversation Seth Abramovitch and Kyle Buchanan discuss the film from Movieline, January 28, 2010

Lisa Cholodenko | Film | Interview | The A.V. Club Nathan Rabin interview, July 6, 2010

Josh Hutcherson: 'Everybody Has Roles They Wanted and Didn't Get' Kyle Buchanan interview from Movieline, July 7, 2010

Why women directors don't need Hollywood Rachel Cooke interview from The Observer, October 3, 2010

The Hollywood Reporter review Justin Lowe

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [4/4]

Los Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review

Lisa Cholodenko - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michael Musto's Man on the Street: Lesbian vs. Predator video viewer responses by Michael Musto from Movieline (2:39)

Chomet, Sylvain

THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (Les Triplettes de Belleville) B+ 91

France Belgium Canada Great Britain (80 mi) 2003

A wonderful romp through the imagination of writer-director Sylvain Chomet in this, his first full-length feature film, following his cartoon short, THE OLD LADY AND THE PIGEONS. In a near wordless film which uses no subtitles, we follow the comical adventures of granny whose cycling phenom grandson is kidnapped right off the hills of the Tour de France, leaving granny, their train-hating dog, and the intervention of the frog-loving, fun-loving triplets themselves to track him down from the evil wine Mafia. Paying homage to Jacques Tati and his inventive sight gags, including clips from JOUR DE FÊTE (1949), this film takes plenty of time for character development, including some wonderful dream sequences from the dog. The best sequences are from the triplets, whose relentlessly upbeat performances rule the day. You can't knock the rock.

The Triplets of Belleville Gerald Peary

THE ILLUSIONIST (L'illusionniste) B+ 91

France Great Britain (90 mi) 2010

Rather than pay homage to Jacques Tati like Sylvain Chomet’s last film, this one is adapted from an actual Tati screenplay that features an animated version of the legendary character Monsieur Hulot himself, which creates something of a controversy as it perhaps mis-identifies which missing daughter he was attempting to recognize, as the story closely resembles Tati’s relationship with his own daughter that he neglected (Sophie Tatischeff), no doubt due to his obsession with his career, but also points to his firstborn, an illegitimate daughter (Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel) born 4 years earlier outside his marriage, a girl he all but abandoned, as she was raised in an orphanage. In 1955 when Tati wrote the script, Helga would be age 13, and Sophie, 9, though he continued to tinker with the script for another four years. The script was actually handed to the director by Sophie in 2000, two years before she died, and the film is dedicated to her, which the family of Helga feels is a major oversight. (See: The secret of Jacques Tati - Roger Ebert's Journal and also from The Guardian: Jacques Tati's lost film reveals family's pain and The Telegraph: Jacques Tati's ode to his illegitimate daughter - Telegraph) Set in the late 1950’s, he’s known as the great magician Tatischeff, carrying around in his pocket a circus poster showing him doing his act which he displays at various theaters around town where he performs to an ever dwindling audience that is becoming non-existent. His music hall act is charmingly adorable, where he pulls a rabbit that bites out of a hat, an animal that prefers to poke its head out prematurely, and performs all sorts of miracles, but few are interested anymore, replaced by a hilarious sequence of British rock ‘n’ rollers who refuse to leave the stage, performing an endless series of narcissistic encores until the house empties afterwords with the exception of an elderly woman and her bespectacled, ice-cream eating young son who keeps checking his watch.

What’s marvelous about this film is how it’s perceived through multiple layers, one of which includes extended Miyazaki-like travel sequences, always accompanied by a sublime musical score which was written by the director himself, moving from the spectacular Paris venues to obscure Scottish pubs during the rainy season, eventually settling for awhile in Edinburgh, as Tatischeff spends his life on the road searching for new venues that will hire him, many with the help of his fellow performers who keep offering him their business cards. Another layer is the presence of a stowaway, a young girl who attaches herself to the great magician like a father figure. Though they stay together at a run down hotel, this girl has a life of her own, following her curiosity, spending her days roaming through the city. One of the more wonderful sequences is when she makes soup, which Tatischeff belatedly discovers is rabbit soup, where he looks around frantically for his missing rabbit. But in this scene she generously feeds other vaudevillians staying in the hotel as well, some close to starvation, as it is filled with performers who are at poverty’s edge and are later seen facing even more dire circumstances.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this film is the autobiographical aspect, as Tati himself considered the material too personal, thinking himself a failure both as a performer and as a father, yet that’s precisely what makes such an intimate work so endearing, where at one point Tatischeff cleverly sneaks into a theater that is playing MON ONCLE (1958) where, as an animated figure, he’s stupefied at seeing himself in real life. The magician’s act is always performed with the utmost professionalism and grace, even when he’s forced to become a department store live window mannequin, selling women’s perfume and brassieres, making them appear and disappear. In the same way, Tatischeff refuses to disappoint the young girl, who is convinced that as a magician he can make anything appear out of thin air, where her fascination is based on her gullibility and naiveté. But the harsh reality is that time is passing by these charming vaudeville acts and money is hard to come by, especially when his act closes as quickly as it begins, so he spends more time away from her in search of work. There’s an underlying pathos in every scene, all near wordless, as the dark tone and bleak existence in the world is never sugar coated. In fact, much of this resembles early Chaplin when his Little Tramp is desperately searching for work or for a bite to eat. By the end of the film Tatischeff has sadly become obsolete, perhaps even to the girl who is discovering her own life and her own independence.

Sylvain Chomet’s melancholy, mostly wordless animated adaptation of an unproduced script by the great French comic Jacques Tati has received its share of criticism, mostly revolving around the film’s interpretation of Tati’s enigmatic creative intentions. The primary point of contention: Did Tati author this deceptively lighthearted fable—which concerns a traveling magician and the young woman he takes under his wing—as a love letter to his legitimate daughter (Sophie Tatischeff) or as an apology to his illegitimate one (Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel)? The controversy makes for a fascinating behind-the-scenes story—one that adds an extra wrinkle to the film and seems, as family matters often do, to have no easy resolution.

On its surface, The Illusionist (Chomet’s follow-up to The Triplets of Belleville) appears to be a Sophiecentric version of the material (there’s an end-credit dedication to her, and the eponymous main character bears the name Tatischeff). But look closer and you’ll see that a disturbing ambiguity runs under every pluck at the heartstrings. The magician himself is drawn to resemble Tati and the daughter-by-proxy is adorably bashful. Yet once they arrive at a run-down artists’ hotel in Edinburgh, Chomet counterpoints the tenderness with bracing bitterness. To support the girl’s many fancies, Tatischeff takes on various odd jobs—a surrogate parent caught between sentiment (wanting to give his child everything) and harsh reality (knowing that he must inevitably disenchant her). Chomet builds this beguiling symphony of sadness to a poignant finale that does ample justice to the many layers of Tati’s tale, both in text and out.

Empire Magazine [UK] review [4/5] Helen O’Hara

This must be the final nail in the coffin of those who claim that animation is only for kids. Sylvain Chomet’s 2003 film, Belleville Rendez-Vous, was a frothy, froggy story of espionage in the world of competitive cycling, bittersweet but filled with the sort of broad characters and dream logic of a child’s story. This, however, is a mature and near-wordless story of loss and grief and shattered illusions, where even the clowns contemplate suicide. That it is also funny and heartfelt takes this from downbeat oddity to dazzling magic trick.

The film’s story was written decades ago by genius French comedian Jacques Tati, he of M. Hulot’s Holiday and a string of almost-silent comedies that found absurdity and pathos in the minutiae of everyday life. Tati, apparently, considered this story too personal and shelved it for his lifetime, but Chomet has picked at his script and plays this, at least partly, as a homage to the master. Our illusionist is called Tatischeff (Tati’s full name) and his long-legged, plump-bodied silhouette is based closely on the caricature on Tati’s posters. There’s even a strange moment of dissonance when the illusionist goes to see Tati’s Mon Oncle, perhaps a step too far when our hero’s every gesture is based closely on Tati, but one that is quite literally shrugged off as the illusionist goes on about his business.

His business, at least in the course of this story, is trying to survive in the dying days of the music hall, as obnoxious rock groups take over and a magician and his rabbit have to struggle to survive. Against this background he meets Alice, a young girl who’s convinced he’s a real magician and who he is reluctant to disappoint. But as she begs for gifts she’s convinced he can magically provide, he faces the harsh reality that there is little money coming in and no way to keep her illusions alive.

Played out against an impeccably-realised Edinburgh washed in watercolours and tinted in shades of tweed, and with witty little touches and echoes of films such as Local Hero, this feels like an elegy to a dying time, the illusionist a tragically sane Don Quixote tilting at the windmills of change as his world collapses around him.

From Sylvain Chomet, the brilliant French director whose great 2003 Oscar-nominated hit The Triplets of Belleville raised the bar for animated films throughout the world, comes a true masterpiece of visual enchantment. One of the most original and unique geniuses in cinema today, Mr. Chomet directed, wrote, illustrated and composed the music for this holiday jewel, an homage to the sweet, sad melancholia of the legendary French comic Jacques Tati. Adapted from an old, unproduced screenplay by Tati, The Illusionist follows the heavy-footed adventures of an aging, washed-up magician named Tatischeff, a relic from the old school of vaudeville who is rejuvenated by the affection and companionship of a young chambermaid named Alice.

Moth-chewed but still holding on to his dignity, Tatischeff leaves Paris and tries to jump-start his career in London, where he discovers the changing times have taken their toll on his kind of act. Rock 'n' roll bands now fill the seats of abandoned music halls. Jukeboxes have replaced live music. But in a shabby rooming house for performers in Scotland, the friendship that develops between the old man and the naïve, innocent girl feeds both of their needs-she rekindles his lost pride, and he lovingly buys her new clothes to replace her rags. She naïvely believes he plucks them out of thin air, so he takes a night job in a gas station to keep her dream alive. What he doesn't realize is that her newfound beauty is turning her from a ragamuffin into a desirable woman. Desertion is inevitable.

Mr. Chomet's passion for hand-drawn figures gives the film the look of museum-quality watercolors that move. From the Scottish highlands to the bustling traffic jams of Edinburgh, the animation is so three-dimensional that when the illusionist's disagreeable rabbit escapes through the hurling bodies of a trio of robust acrobats, wreaking havoc in the theater, you really feel as though it's heading for your seat. Both natural and incandescent light filters through an elaborately designed department store photographed through plate-glass windows. The most amazing effect of all: Tatischeff (the real surname of Jacques Tati) enters an empty cinema where a tiny audience watches an actual movie clip of Mon Oncle, one of Tati's classics. It has to be seen to be believed. It is such high art that you will never believe you are looking at one canvas at a time.

To the age-old tradition of animation, Mr. Chomet adds the literary illusion of French literature by Proust and Pagnol. The Illusionist is 80 minutes long without one wasted second, and almost totally silent—living proof that a film doesn't need words when it's so chock full of feelings.

Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks may dominate animation in movieland, but every so often a little gem from outside that titanic trio slips through the cracks. Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist is one such example. Based on an unmade script from French cinema legend Jacques Tati, it's a lovingly-realised throwback to old school 2D animation, a poignant story of a middle-aged entertainer who finds himself sidelined as rock 'n' roll begins to take hold of popular culture at the tail end of the '50s.

Belleville Rendez-Vous creator Chomet's idiosyncratic animation and Tati's bittersweet tale are in perfect harmony. The animation may blunt the tragedy of the story somewhat, but it adds a timeless, dreamlike quality that may not have come across in live-action. The titular illusionist journeys from France to England then on to Scotland seeking out increasingly obscure venues to perform his routine. Along the way he picks up Alice, an impressionable young girl who believes she's witnessing real magic. The pair find a place to live in Edinburgh and the illusionist goes to work at a small local theatre while Alice plays homemaker. They wrestle with the magician's disobedient rabbit, meet a trio of gymnasts, a permanently drunk ventriloquist and suicidal clown (which provides the film with its darkest moment).

The central relationship plays out as a father/daughter one, highlighting the autobiographical nature of the story - in its original incarnation The Illusionist was intended as a live-action feature with Tati's daughter Sophie Tatischeff as Alice. As events unfold the magician begins to shower Alice with gifts, but the arrival of a boy pulls her attention away from her adopted father-figure. This leads to a heartbreaking if inevitable conclusion, with Chomet really tugging on the heartstrings as the conjurer writes a short but devastating note to Alice.

The Illusionist plays out with mainly no dialogue; there are grunts, groans and snorts but never extended scenes of back-and-forth conversation. Instead, Chomet uses moving images to shape his warm and emotionally complex story. It proves that the old-fashioned approach of painstakingly drawing out every frame still has value as 3D and computer technology bounds forward to create elaborate CGI toons. The sublime craft and artistry of The Illusionist is, for sure, thanks to that human touch.

Every frame has been meticulously fashioned with detail and depth. The renderings of London's King's Cross station and the streets of Edinburgh look fantastic on the big screen, as do the smoky interiors of the theatre venues and the offbeat character drawings. Though they appear very briefly, each member of rock band Billy Boy And The Britoons has their own unique and quirky style. A final swooping shot over Edinburgh closes the movie and, although it looks to be computer-aided, it doesn't spoil what's been a charming and wonderful journey.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: The Illusionist (2010) Anton Bitel from Sight and Sound, September 2010

Christian Science Monitor [Peter Rainer]

The Daily Notebook [David Cairns] Mubi

The Digital Fix [Gavin Midgley]

Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

Eye for Film (Andrew Robertson) review [4/5]

eFilmCritic Reviews Brian Orndorf

Sound On Sight Brent Morrow

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A-] also seen here: Film.com [Eric D. Snider]

Cinematical [William Goss]

Close-Up Film [Carol Allen]

Wall Street Journal [Joe Morgenstern]

Film-Forward.com Jack Gattanella

hoopla.nu [Stuart Wilson]

The Reel Bits [Sarah Ward]

Daily Film Dose [Blair Stewart]

Compuserve [Harvey Karten]

Looking Closer (Kenneth Morefield) review

Phil on Film (Philip Concannon) review

The Illusionist (L'illusionniste) — Inside Movies Since 1920 Richard Mowe from Box Office magazine

exclaim! [ J.M. McNab]

Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young

Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) capsule review [4/5]

Alone in the Dark [Paul Greenwood]

Screencomment.com [Ali Naderzad]

Entertainment Weekly [Lisa Schwarzbaum]

Variety (Leslie Felperin) review

Time Out London (David Jenkins) review [5/5]

M. Hulot's alter ego Derek Malcolm from the Guardian, May 17, 1971

Fun and games with Monsieur Hulot Emilie Bickerton from The Guardian, December 5, 2009

Jacques Tati's lost film reveals family's pain | World news | The ... Vanessa Thorpe from The Guardian, January 31, 2010

Jacques Tati's ode to his illegitimate daughter - Telegraph Henry Samuel from The Telegraph, June 16, 2010

The Illusionist Philip French from The Observer, August 22, 2010

Independent.co.uk - Edinburgh Film Festival [Geoffrey Macnab] June 17, 2010

Independent.co.uk [Jonathan Romney] at Edinburgh, June 27, 2010

Independent.co.uk [Anthony Quinn] August 20, 2010

Independent.co.uk [Nicholas Barber] August 22, 2010

San Francisco Chronicle [Amy Biancolli]

The secret of Jacques Tati - Roger Ebert's Journal May 28, 2010

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] January 12, 2011

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis, December 23, 2010

Conjuring Tati’s Spirit With Animation Dave Kehr interviews the director from The New York Times, October 29, 2010

Chopra, Yash

THE WALL (Deewaar)

India (174 mi) 1975

User comments from imdb Author: Odedra from London England

One of my greatest films of alltime, the film has an eerie, grey feel about it. Amitabh who went on to amazing status really shines and portrays the character who is (based on Haji Mastan a notorious mumbai outlaw)isolated from society and family magnificantly, the role won him best actor 1975. A film richly layered in metaphor and meaning, with deeply powerful dialogues and symbolic significance. The camera work however makes the film look very dated which may put people off watching an old film, but if your not judging a book by the cover, based on sheer performances and script well worth a watch.

User comments from imdb Author: Althaf from Warszawa, Poland

This movie can be termed as one of the best in the annals of Indian Cinema history. A perfect script by Salim-Javed and equally captivating direction by Yash Chopra makes this movie a treat to watch. Amitabh as usual lives his role as Vijay. Every dialogue, body language of his is just extraordinary. The only drawback of this otherwise class movie is its music.

The movie released during the tensions then prevailing in India made the people to identify with the character of Vijay (Amitabh). Was a stupendous hit and is still considered a classic. On totality the movie is a treat to watch.

User comments from imdb Author: nmainkar from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States

Younger audiences (and especially newcomers) introduced to Hindi cinema by the stars of the 1990s must often secretly wonder why Amitabh Bachchan is such a big deal. He has never had the bulging biceps and ripped body of a Hrithik Roshan. Even in his early films, he couldn't dance nearly as well as Shahrukh. Few of his movies offered elaborate song and dance numbers like those favored today. Sure, he might have turned in some first-rate performances — most recently, in films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and Baghban — but nothing about him seems to *quite* justify his status as superstar-of-the-millennium. Right? If you muse upon these questions but are afraid to address them to your esteemed elders (Bachchan groupies all), then I have the answer for you:

Go rent Deewaar.

Every once in several decades comes a movie that breaks all the norms and still manages to become not only a runaway success but also an established classic. Deewaar is one such movie. Thirty years after its release, Deewaar remains one of the most famous movies Bollywood has ever produced. Those who love Hindi cinema for its extravagant song and dance routines, its mix of romance, comedy, action and melodrama, and its over-the-top emoting may be surprised to learn that this 1975 explosion-of-a-movie is conspicuously devoid of such characteristic elements. Yet Deewaar is certainly a mainstream Bollywood film. It just happens to be a phenomenal one.

Deewaar begins with a terrible choice: in order to save his family's lives, Anand Verma (Satyen Kappu), the union leader of the local mine workers, betrays his constituency, surrendering to the mine-owners' extortionate demands. In return, he is humiliated and ostracized by his community. Unable to bear the shame, Anand absconds, leaving his wife, Sumitra Devi (Nirupa Roy), and his two sons, Vijay (Master Alankar, Amitabh Bachchan) and Ravi (Master Raju, Shashi Kapoor), to fend for themselves.

Ravi, the youngest child, largely escapes the backlash, sheltered from the community by his mother and brother. Vijay, on the other hand, bears the brunt of the trauma; he becomes the target of brutal public humiliation. The consequences of Vijay and Ravi's very different experiences only intensify as the brothers grow up. In a desperate bid to give his mother the material comforts he thinks are her due, Vijay takes to a life of crime. In contrast, Ravi, disgusted by repeated rejections in a job market powered by nepotism, decides to enroll in the police force. Inevitably, the siblings' differing ideologies lead to an epic moral clash that creates a "deewaar," or wall, between them. This wall becomes insurmountable when Vijay's mother refuses to accept his ill-gotten riches, and forsakes him to live with Ravi. Ultimately, Vijay's misery compels him to seek redemption, but his attempt to obliterate the wall dividing his family will exact an unthinkable price.

Deewaar is, in one word, taut. From start to end, the movie is unrelentingly tense, tight, somber and serious but the seriousness of the film works for two vital reasons: the absolutely amazing, scorching and explosive under-acting by Amitabh Bachchan; and the screenplay and dialogs by Salim-Javed.

To say that Amitabh has acted really well in Deewaar is like saying Niagara Falls is a really big waterfall: it misses the enormity of the fact by several million gallons. To lovers of true cinematic acting (and yes, there are some such fans even in Bollywood), Deewaar offers a true, unadulterated, powerhouse performance unparalleled in Hindi cinema. There is no living (or dead, for that matter) actor who could have performed some of Deewaar's most muted and yet powerfully moving scenes -- scenes in which Vijay's silent anguish abruptly transmutes to violent eruptions, literally burning up the screen with intensity, anger, brutality, vulnerability and gritty resolve. To the small but fiercely loyal group of Amitabh fans, Deewaar is and will always be his best performance. To some of us, it defines the gold standard in Hindi film acting. It is Amitabh and only Amitabh who turned this movie from a typical over-the-top melodrama with great dialogs but no good songs into a gripping three-hour experience that leaves the audience mesmerized (and in an overwhelming majority of cases, crying uncontrollably as the end credits roll).

As for Salim-Javed...apart from developing what is arguably the tightest script ever written for Hindi film, the pair should have gotten an award for the sheer number of quotable lines in Deewaar. Salim-Javed's script was also daring detour from the mainstream in more ways than one. Consider the oddities. The leading man has no songs in the movie. There is absolutely no comedy - no Johnny Lever or Asrani anywhere in sight. Meanwhile, the leading lady (played convincingly by Parveen Babi) is a hooker, who -- as the narrative explicitly insists -- has sexual relations with the hero. True, both characters' occupations entailed a set of moral values that are less-than-perfect by Indian middle-class standards, but the screenwriters still took an enormous risk by depicting some pretty bold scenes . Yet the power of the script was such that in the end, audiences were rooting for both characters with great sympathy and support. Finally, the leading man is an atheist (albeit superstitious). Not only that, one of the now-famous temple scenes has Amitabh clearly defiant and contemptuous towards God. Quite an audacious step, considering modern heroes are always shown to be terribly pious and god-fearing.

Finally, the most significant evidence of Deewaar's superiority is the fact that unlike other hit movies like Sholay and more recent ones like DDLJ, no one has ever dared to copy it. It is the one film whose magic other film-makers realized could not be duplicated. The confluence of extraordinary acting and a uniquely brilliant script cannot be converted into a formula and regenerated ad nauseum. In the end, that may be the biggest tribute Hindi cinema can pay to this all-time, genuinely inimitable classic.

Deewar by Jyotika Virdi The "fiction" of film and "fact" of politics, by Jyotika Virdi from Jump Cut, June 1993

VEER-ZAARA

India (192 mi) 2004

Veer-Zaara Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

This picture (mega-producer Chopra's first directorial effort in nine years) opens with Shahrukh Khan (Bollywood's official Bad Boy, he of the acid-washed jeans and vaguely Jay-Z-esque visage) traipsing through country roads, singing to his beloved in flowery fields, often anchoring the foreground in close-up while amber waves of the Motherland sway on the other side of the screen. In short, it's insipid, the sort of sub-Celine Dion video imagery that reflects certain unkind stereotypes regarding Indian musicals -- "our' silliest pop images, from twenty years ago, unwittingly appropriated and played straight. (I cringed at having brought Jen and my mom to the theatre with me to witness this dreck.) And then, with a literal bang, Chopra reveals this overwrought fantasy for exactly what it is. Surprise -- the joke's on us. Veer-Zaara is replete with little moments like this, in which Chopra employs the swoony, no-kisses-allowed romanticism and florid mise-en-scene Bollywood's famous for, precisely to reveal its hidden paradox. A love lost, a dream deferred, takes on epic, overblown proportions in the mind, especially in the absence of any humanizing element within the material world. At the same time, I would be remiss if I gave the impression Veer-Zaara treats its Hindustani Romeo / Pakistani Juliet story with ironic detachment. Even when it flies in the face of good sense, Chopra embraces his doomed lovers with generosity and absolute sincerity. They sing about their land, and how much it looks like the other's land, as swooping, angled crane shots fill the frame with otherwise nondescript rural meadows. The point is clear -- what keeps Veer and Zaara apart is artificial, because religion and the India / Pakistan partition are just ideas, belied by the physical continuity of the earth that reared them. In a similar spirit, Chopra offers a surprisingly nuanced feminist stance, showing how women on both sides of the border become constrained as the bearers of tradition, and yet manage to assume new roles through a balance of hardheadedness and careful negotiation. It does no good to overstate Chopra's political accomplishment here; he represents the liberal wing of Indian culture, similar to the way Spielberg represents American liberalism, with all its attendant pitfalls. Nevertheless, it's in the narrative contortions and earnest speechifying ("you've taught me a valuable lesson, and so I'm giving up my law practice"!!) that Veer-Zaara demonstrates its beautiful belief in its own escapist premises. Women's rights can be won, and the India / Pakistan conflict overcome, in fantasy first, simply by believing it could be so. In dance numbers, it seems, begin responsibilities.

Chow, Stephen

KUNG FU HUSTLE (Kung Fu)

Hong Kong China (95 mi) 2004

Kung Fu Hustle Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

I fully expected to enjoy Chow's latest, but I was blindsided by the formal mastery, utterly impeccable comic timing, and total commitment to old-school martial arts cinema (despite its satirical exaggeration). Easily one of the greatest comedies of the past few years, Kung Fu Hustle is a tender, madcap riff on Shaw Brothers chop-socky, but it's also capacious enough to incorporate elements of The Shining, Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner cartoons, even Popeye-era Altman. After an introductory dance sequence that's part Warriors, part West Side Story, Chow brings us to the village of Pigsty, a multi-tiered spatial creation on par with Jerry Lewis. In classic form, some unlikely supporting players reveal themselves to be secret kung fu masters, but Chow's willingness to shuttle his most peripheral characters to the forefront delivers shocking comedic surprises, as well as bespeaking a thoroughgoing generosity. Chow and his sidekick are minor players, part of the tapestry like Tati in Playtime. In fact, the whole film is a bit like Tati-on-PCP, a whirlygig of misdirection and outlandish ass-kicking. But Chow's most impressive formal achievement is probably his exacting, innovating use of CGI. Instead of using it as a filmic shortcut in order to avoid engaging with the physical world, Chow intensifies and explodes his action sequences, creating live-action cartoons that remain grounded in what real, athletic bodies can do. The fighting is classical, and the graphics just blast it through a megaphone. And did I forget to mention this film is non-stop, wall-to-wall, gut-bustingly funny? By any measure, Kung Fu Hustle is a major artistic triumph. [NOTE: I've written a slightly longer review for the Nashville Scene, available here.]

Review: Kung Fu Hustle - Film Comment Sam Ho from Film Comment, March/April 2005

With Kung Fu Hustle the myth of Stephen Chow achieves critical mass - not just for the enduring cult he has created, the phenomenal box office his work generates, or even the collective pleasure his local audience experiences whenever he releases a film. Such marvels are by now routine. Opening at a time when Hong Kong was mired in an economic and political funk ominously symbolized by the continuing decline of its film industry, Hustle has given the people a reason to believe again.

Chow does it by simply reaching back and looking forward. True to its title, the film draws generously from wuxia (martial arts) films, the genre that put Hong Kong on the map of brand-name cinemas. Chow is a genius in generating extraordinary drama from the familiar. Here, he not only pays tribute to wuxia but also uses its history - not just conventions - as narrative shorthand and fodder for comedy. He dips into the lo-tech Cantonese films of the Fifties and Sixties, striking a balance between necessary cynicism and sentimental nostalgia by at once milking them for laughter and essaying them to create a world of rich human complexity beneath its deceptive surface. The key source is the five-part 1964 series Buddha's Palm, which attained cult status in the Seventies when discovered by late-night television viewers who reveled in its melodramatic excesses, kitschy special effects, and slapdash spirituality.

The appeal of Buddha's Palm to Chow is easy to understand. Its hero is a no-talent martial artist picked on by everyone from his own sifu to the girl he loves to the guy she marries, until he fortuitously masters the titular fighting technique and becomes the martial world's Supreme Number One. Chow built his stellar career on playing the underdog, a Chaplin-esque figure who rises above his wretched station by overcoming impossible odds. Undaunted by the constant humiliations heaped upon him by people of higher social standing, Chow's character never fails to have the last laugh, more often than not by a few clever twists of his nimble tongue. Such verbal humor involves the exercise of an attitude known as mo lay tau, an irreverence expressed in mischievous, nonsensical comic remarks, often adopted by the defeated as a face-saving stance to claim moral victory. Popular since the late Eighties, when Hong Kong was cloaked in gloom and doom over the impending reunification with China, this attitude has endured through the recent years of economic slump and political frustration. Chow's comedy so successfully embodies mo lay tau that he has become synonymous with it.

It's a mode marked by superb timing, idiosyncratic line reading, and an iconoclastic deadpan delivery. Unlike Jackie Chan, whose expressive face is rigged to a hyperactive nerve center, Chow sports a visage deliberately excised of emotions. He fires off his jokes with measured phrasings and exaggerated pauses, calling attention to the blankness of his expression, written all over with fake seriousness. He is also a highly physical comedian, so flexible and agile that he frequently performs his own stunts. Such abilities further endear him to Hong Kong audiences, who, after years of exposure to high-caliber action, are very good at sniffing out impostors.

Chow also gets a lot of mileage out of blending genres. In Kung Fu Hustle, he marries his wuxia references to the tenement film, specifically the 1963 Guangdong classic 72 Tenants (and Chor Yuen's popular 1973 remake), a Capra-esque tale about poor people living in the crowded lower depths. Chow sets the film in a Shanghai shantytown, tracing the story back to its actual city-stage origin. Doing so, he not only takes Hong Kong viewers back to their days of hardship but also extends an invitation to his new audience in China, where a cult was spawned by the star's two-part masterpiece A Chinese Odyssey. In fact, Chow appropriates Hong Kong's past to address China's current anxieties over rapid modernization and secures the former colony's bond with its semi-reunited motherland-in both emotional and film business terms. It's not surprising that Hustle was a runaway hit in both markets.

But merely conquering China isn't enough for Chow. This time, with obvious designs on a wider global impact, he's teamed up with Columbia Pictures. Aiming for more universal appeal, he tones down his patented verbal humor and plays up the underdog persona. And, with the studio's deep pockets, he updates the wuxia myth by staging fight scenes with the kind of CG effects used in The Matrix and other American sci-fi films that had appropriated kung-fu choreography in the first place. In other words, with his new film Chow positions himself for West consumption by turning the tables on Hollywood with reverse sampling.

The politics of historiography in Stephen Chow's "Kung Fu Hustle" by ... Kin-Yan Szeto from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Kung Fu Hustle - New York Magazine Movie Review Ken Tucker

Review: Kung Fu Hustle | Screen Rant Vic Holtreman

KUNG FU HUSTLE Program Notes - Austin Film Society Julie Peterson

Kung Fu Hustle Movie Review & Film Summary (2005) | Roger Ebert

Kung Fu Hustle - Wikipedia

Chow Yun-Fat – actor

Yun-Fat, Chow Art and Culture

When Chow Yun-Fat steps into view, your eyes are immediately drawn to him. He commands the screen with an undeniable charisma and an imitable sense of the cool. For his cool is not detached, it’s not ironic or cold or urban in any familiar way. No, Chow Yun-Fat’s cool is distinctly warm: you trust him, want to be around him. He’s the perfect lover –- handsome, considerate, chivalrous, funny -- and he’s the best of best friends, loyal to the end, a lot of fun along the way.

And always, he's the warrior, "the Killer" (perhaps his most memorable role, certainly his most famous): a masterful tactician, he moves only as much as he needs, strikes at the propitious moment, kills as the situation demands, is as ruthless as necessary. A certain moral ambiguity surrounds his characters: he’s the good-natured outlaw, equally cold-blooded, loyal, and loving.

Like Cary Grant, Chow (his last name, not his first) moves with grace. His clothes hang impeccably on his body, and he never seems far from a smile. While associated with the kinetic violence of John Woo’s action films, Chow provides a warmth and charisma which lend Woo's gangster tales a complex morality. Amidst the ballistic balletics –- two guns relentlessly firing as bodies stream this way and that –- Chow offers the assurance that all the mayhem is somehow necessary. It is this charisma which allows him to alternate between tough-guy and lover roles.

It was in Woo's 1986 film "A Better Tomorrow" that Chow made his mark. At the time, Woo was not well known and Chow had been pegged as a TV actor. In fact, after leaving the family farm and drifting from job to job for a time, he had gotten his start as a TV extra. Later he submitted to a year of actor's training and, after graduating, clinched a 14-year contract with a TV station. Since "A Better Tomorrow," he’s worked exclusively in film, winning three Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actor and appearing in over 70 movies.

A Free Man in Hong Kong: Chow Yun-Fat definitive website

Chow Yun-Fat: God of Actors another website

The Chow Yun-Fat Real Video Archive

Christensen, Benjamin

HÄXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES

Sweden (104 mi) 1922

Häxan Criterion essay by Chris Fujiwara, October 15, 2001, also here: Häxan (Witchcraft through the Ages)

Häxan: About the Music Criterion essay by Gillian Anderson October 15, 2001

Häxan (1922) - The Criterion Collection

Haxan - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages (1922/2001) - PopMatters Film ... David Sanjek

The DVD Journal: Häxan / Witchcraft Through the Ages: The Criterion ... Mark Bourne

Häxan - Wikipedia

Christensen, David

SIX FIGURES

Canada (108 mi) 2005

By Adam Nayman Domestic Violence: David Christensen’s Six Figures, including an interview from Cinema Scope

It would be accurate to say that Six Figures isthe most underrated Canadian feature in recent memory. It would also be understating the case. Largely ignored last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival and rushed into theatrical release in order to qualify for Canada’s Genie awards (it received only one nomination, for best original screenplay), by Calgary-based writer-director David Christensen’s first feature has not received one-tenth of the attention accorded to countryman David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence—a film that isn’t even Canadian.

This disparity isn’t surprising: Cronenberg is Canada’s pre-eminent narrative filmmaker, and A History of Violence is a fine piece of work. But it doesn’t cut particularly deep. When Viggo Mortensen’s Tom Stall returns home from his killing spree to take his place at the head of the family table, it’s a mordant joke (his daughter presents him with a bloody slab of meatloaf and some Mantle retractor-calibre implements with which to carve it) with no real fear behind it: Daddy’s got a temper, but there’s no reason to expect his brood will ever bear its brunt. The ending of Six Figures also describes the uneasy return of a father figure, but where Tom Stall is quite clearly a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Warner (JR Bourne) is another animal altogether: it’s entirely possible that earlier in the film, he attacked his wife Claire (Caroline Cave) with a hammer, putting her into a coma.

Christensen’s debut, adapted from a novel by Fred Leebron, is a whodunit with only one real suspect. Everything we see before the attack suggests that Warner and Claire’s marriage has become strained, and that their decision to buy an expensive house in Calgary despite their foundering finances (she works at a small art gallery) and Warner’s probationary status at work (where he’s been set up as a fall guy) is a dubious one. They give off the signals of a couple in severe distress; meeting with a real estate agent, they fail to present a united front; their rental home has toys on the floor and stains on the carpet; a dinner with the in-laws turns quietly snide; a would-be romantic idyll over glasses of wine devolves into a mutual bitch session.

There is a savage argument at Claire’s gallery—in full view of their two young children—and then we see Warner driving around in an agitated state, the kids asleep in the backseat of the car. In the very next scene—an elegant, backtracking take that works to steadily distance us from the approaching horror—a male figure comes upon Claire, alone on her knees, boxing up paintings behind translucent curtains, strikes her, and departs.

As Claire languishes in the hospital and the police investigation stalls, both sides of the couple’s family enter the fray. Claire’s controlling mother Louise (Deborah Grover) tries to convince anyone who will listen that Warner, whom she has always disapproved of, is guilty. Her in-laws Alan (Frank Adamson) and Ruth (Joyce Gordon) offer only nominal support, nervously tiptoeing around their son even as he strenuously (if coldly) maintains his innocence. Warner’s relationships with his parents are fraught with tension, and the sudden prevalence of these older characters cues us that this is not so much a film about a man who may have assaulted his wife than an examination of inherited behaviour and how intimacy clouds rather than enhances understanding. “Nobody knows anybody,” says one character late in the proceedings, and while this bit of dialogue might seem uncharacteristically declarative in contrast to the rest of Christensen’s beautifully modulated screenplay, it’s as eloquent a summation of the film’s themes as any critic might devise.

Canadian critics are the only ones who’ve seen Six Figures, and they’ve been fairly kind,but if it were a subtitled film—or if it had someone else’s name on it, like, say Atom Egoyan—it might have been properly hailed as a masterpiece. (That it was not officially selected for Canada’s annual Top Ten is a scandal.) Christensen, an estimable short filmmaker and documentarian (his verite-ish 2005 film War Hospital neatly surveys the swarm of activity at a crowded Kenyan field hospital), works in an austere, palpably European style, framing most of the dialogue scenes in long two-shots and often letting scenes drift beyond their obvious endpoint. The compositions are clever without being ostentatious—a few pivotal shots, like Claire applying makeup in a bathroom mirror or Warner frowning behind a car’s windshield, half-obscured by the reflection of bare tree branches, carry the cool tingle of Michael Haneke at his best. The images are so powerfully weighted, in fact, that the film often feels like it’s on the verge of ending, even in the first hour.

Christensen’s style is terrifically assured, and, more importantly, sustained; the film feels suffused with anxiety but never once boils over into melodrama. And the performances are remarkable: Bourne’s got the barely sheathed irritation that passes for professional demeanour down pat (Warner’s forced smiles when dealing with his unctuous boss will prompt shivers of recognition for anyone who’s ever worked anywhere) and his handsomeness has a bland, formless quality (exacerbated by Christensen’s decision to shoot him almost exclusively in medium shots.) Cave, who almost didn’t appear in the film (a stage production in Toronto fell through), downplays Claire’s impending-victim status and makes her bracingly brittle and, at times, completely unsympathetic.

During the course of our correspondence, I suggested to Christensen—an ardent cinephile who worked as a critic and programmer before turning his attention to filmmaking—that an alternate title for his unsettling almost-thriller might well be A History of Violence. He responded that a better choice might actually be Cache, adding“I can only hope that I make a film that approaches either of those two one day.” Funny thing is, he already has. It may sound like an astonishing claim for an unheralded little movie from the prairies, but Six Figures, which is precise and powerful and very nearly flawless, is totally worthy of consideration on the international stage.

Christensen, Pernille Fischer

A SOAP (En Soap) A- 93

Denmark Sweden (104 mi) 2006

One has to go back to Volker Spengler’s magnificent performance in Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden... (1978) to see a transsexual portrayed with such probing depth. But that film has a searing anguish, haunted by a pervading sense of death that hovers over every aspect of that film. This film is more about the loneliness and desperation of disconnected souls, almost like a primer for the various phases of love, how it’s a circuitous route before one fully understands its ramifications. This is a beautifully realized chamber drama that moves effortlessly back and forth between austere realism and quirky comedy, that largely takes place in two apartments, one on top of the other in the same building. Slow in developing, using chapter titles with a brief black and white grainy visual that ends in a still image, as a humorous narrator with a voice like Christopher Lee relishes telling us in brief a recap, including a hint of what’s yet to come, inviting us to stay tuned, like a serial series, as chamber music plays in the background. Also, there is a familiar shot of a cherry blossom tree in different stages of bloom, shot in different lights, like the passing of the seasons.

Actually this film features sensational performances from the two leads in this film, with each contending for the performances of the year. Trine Dyrholm plays Charlotte, a blunt-spoken, free spirited thirtyish owner of a beauty salon who, with no backdrop to the story, moves out on her long-term boyfriend Kristian just as he passes his residency to become a doctor, which begins a series of one night stands with guys that in her eyes just can’t get enough of themselves, finding the male species insufferably boring. She loves the sex but can’t wait for them to disappear. Just below her lives Ulrik, a transsexual who goes by the name of Veronica, in a rare performance by David Dencik, who is just waiting for a letter to arrive authorizing the sex change to become a woman. Meanwhile she lives with her dog Miss Daisy watching television soap operas, has occasional visits from her mother bringing various treats, visits kept secret from her father who refuses to acknowledge her existence, and a few forlorn men who come for dominatrix-style humiliation and quick sex.

Initially the two neighbors get off on the wrong foot, as Charlotte exhibits incendiary language thinking it’s no more than cutting-through-the-bull flirtation, but eventually they develop an odd respect for one another on each other’s own terms, something they each find otherwise near impossible, and in doing so, open up avenues for the viewer. It’s an extremely delicate matter with natural humor and a realist texture, expressed non-verbally through smiles, quick glances, and facial expressions with only scant background music, as Veronica goes through bouts with suicidal depression, but her intact sensitivity is alarmingly real to Charlotte, who obviously could use a bit of it after a broken relationship of her own. Magnus Jarlbo and Sebastian Öberg wrote a quiet understated score that rarely intrudes and is in perfect balance with the subtle eloquence of the film.

A Soap | Chicago Reader Ronnie Scheib

Danish director Pernille Fischer Christensen's claustrophobic debut feature unfolds within a single apartment house. The focus is on an evolving relationship between two apparently incompatible neighbors: a repressed, pre-op transsexual (male-to-female) loner who spends her days watching TV soaps and a no-nonsense beauty salon owner who just left her lover and is enjoying a series of one-nighters. At intervals a smarmy male voice-over introduces black-and-white recaps and flash-forwards of the film's story line as Dogma-influenced femme director Christensen wryly uses soap opera conventions to wallow in the genre's hyperemotional intensity while disavowing its cliches. The gender-confused nature of the protagonists' attraction affords some much needed, un-Dogmatic relief from Christensen's deliberately drab deconstruction of melodrama. In Danish with subtitles. 104 minutes.

Risk and Renewal in Danish Cinema Risk and Renewal in Danish Cinema, by David Bordwell, published in FILM #55, February 2007 (excerpt)

The strategy of sentiment-inoculation has been picked up in Kim Fupz Aakeson's screenplay for Annette K. Olesen's "1:1". In this social melodrama, ethnic suspicions flare up in a neighborhood of housing estates. The final shots open the possibility of a happy ending, but that turn of events will in turn precipitate more problems in the lives of characters we have come to care about. Similarly, Pernille Fischer Christensen's "A Soap" juxtaposes its central romance with the TV series that holds the gender-switching Veronica spellbound. At the climax, lines that would sound overblown coming from our protagonists – "Love is a promise…," "You saved me with your love…" – are channeled through the TV monitors they watch fairly impassively. It's not that the lines voice their feelings, but we have to consider that they might feel these very things. Pathos, again, is deflected. The movie is itself a soap, but it's also aware that soap-opera emotions, though strong and genuine, are sometimes too simple for the complications thrown up by real life.

The centrality of melodrama has helped Danish cinema attain what is in effect a Cinema of Quality – perhaps the first full-blown one since the French tradition of the 1950s. Excellent performers, sophisticated directors, and well-carpentered scripts are the mainstay of recent Danish film. This is yet another unintended consequence of the Dogme manifesto, which called for a break with conformity; of such ironies is history made.

The problem with a Cinema of Quality is that it can become sleek, stodgy, and predictable. Danish filmmakers, I think, recognize this risk and are moving in new directions. One option is to "theatricalize" melodrama quite overtly. This is most apparent in von Trier's stagebound "Dogville" and "Manderlay". In a dark vacuum with only the sketchiest indications of place, these films evoke not only Brecht but (another irony) the Thornton Wilder play "Our Town", a classic of American middlebrow theatre. A milder form of theatricality is found in "A Soap", which by confining its action to a few apartments recalls the kammerspiel aesthetic of silent cinema and, further back, of Scandinavian drama. Yet another instance is "How We Get Rid of the Others", a bold drama of ideas that could easily be a stage play but gains intensity from its hard-edged cinematic treatment.

A Soap - sneersnipe film review David Perilli

Lantern jawed pre-op transsexual Veronica (nee Ulrik) is addicted to her favourite television soap opera, some trashy US import. The beauty is though that A Soap has a storyline worthy of the most outrageously debauched daytime fantasy. Charlotte moves out from her boyfriend’s place to the flat above Veronica’s and as they get to know one another the glimmer of romance blossoms, a proposition alien to both of them given their current states. It’s to director Pernille Fischer Christensen’s credit that A Soap grounds such a highly charged emotional situation into the very hermetic world of an apartment block. The only shots outside are of the apartments through rose blossom. It’s also very funny. Using the episodic convention of a soap opera, A Soap divides the story into episodes punctuated by short narrations and inter-titles with black and white images in a similar way to fellow Dane Lars von Triers’ television series The Kingdom.

Performances dominate in the isolated environment and both lead players excel particularly Trine Dyrholm (as Charlotte). She really captures a woman in her thirties dissatisfied with her life and trying to move on. In any stereotypical conventional production Dyrholm would doubtless be pigeonholed as a character actor, so it’s liberating to see her lead and given the freedom to play the part so naturalistically. In British television terms she comes across as looking fairly similar to recent Ricky Gervais collaborator Ashley Jensen. The setting is drab and residential yet Charlotte comes across as a wilful human being again backing up the reality side of the film against the soap opera stylings. These are real people caught in an unusual situation. Charlotte’s character is quixotic at times adding spice to the production through her unpredictability. Although her ex-boyfriend later proves himself unworthy by hitting her, at the start he merely seems slightly boring. It’s never quite clear why she wanted out making Charlotte appear capricious to begin with. At several times she almost teases him, goads him, clouding their break-up. More understandably this impinges on her growing relationship with Veronica as they grow closer. David Dencik (as Veronica) has less to work with until the relationship takes prominence but he touchingly subverts all his very male physical traits (that prominent jaw-line, a muscled torso etc) with lots of little feminine mannerisms like shyly brushing his wig hair back when embarrassed.

Part of what makes the relationship between Charlotte and Veronica so erotic is in the desperation with which Veronica desires a female body. Clearly he/she wants one and from the start is waiting for the local authority to approve the gender reassignment operation. One scene undermines the expected hetero male infatuation with breasts because Veronica wants a pair for herself. The hormones haven’t worked and she doesn’t want silicone implants. Whether Veronica, as a man, wants sex with a woman is doubtful and the film’s resolution is down to whether Charlotte can handle loving someone for who they are, not what sex they are; an easier ideal to uphold in theory than in practice. On Veronica’s part having a relationship with a woman so close to becoming one himself is highly distressing and one of the film’s most horrendous moments (along with Charlotte being beaten up) is Veronica crying that she ‘doesn’t want to play anymore’ in the midst of an embrace with Charlotte.

Whilst the plotting is a little obvious at times (Girl meets Boy. Boy wants to become girl etc) A Soap is a hilariously touching love story that opens up the generally grey areas (to most of us) of gender bending relationships. With an ending that gives hope to us all, the film doesn’t overstay its welcome and unusually seems to finish suddenly; making one wish it would continue. A rare feat for such warm hearted work.

New York Sun [Nicolas Rapold]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Susana Krawczyk

Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

Soap : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video - Video Game Talk Svet Atanasov

Soap | Film Review | Slant Magazine Nick Schager

A Soap | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes, movie ... - Time Out Ben Walters

New York Times

Christlieb, Angela and Stephen Kijak

CINEMANIA B+ 90

USA (83 mi) 2002

Very funny, terrific use of music and imagery to effectively uplift and drive the pace of this film, each of the subjects seemed very much in their element within the pleasure and safety of the movie theaters, but desperately alone and out of sorts within the reality of their own, tiny, claustrophobic worlds at home - describe anyone you know?

Chukhrai, Grigori

BALLAD OF A SOLDIER (Ballada o soldate)

Russia (88 mi) 1959

This picaresque tale was a great classic of post-war Soviet Realism - but don't let that put you off. Ivashov makes a touching figure as the teenage WWII combatant who wins four days' leave as a reward for an act of courage against the Nazis, heads off home to repair his old mother's leaking roof, yet finds himself constantly waylaid on his journey by people who need his help. Chukhrai's film may come from the stylistically more conservative wing of the Russian cinema, but its careful detail and underlying emotional clout are never in doubt.

DVD Times [Michael Brooke]

Beginning with a beautifully framed composition, a melancholy woman slowly moves through the village road towards the country and gazes down two roads. Silence is broken with narration, explaining that it's been two years since this mother (Antonina Maksimova) has seen her son—he never returned from the war. She knows him better than anyone—at least from birth to the day that he left for the Russian front, but this leaves a final gap in her knowledge. The narrator tells us that her son was a hero, now buried in a distant land, and honored as an unnamed "Russian soldier" by those who visit his grave. We are to be filled in on the rest of the story, unknown to Mother Skvortsov.

Had more Americans seen Ballad of a Soldier (Ballada o soldate) when first released in the U.S. in 1960, the Cold War might have thawed much faster. Most imagery of the Russians at that time focussed on stern and obedient Russians content with the Communist regime, resigned to stand in long bread lines without complaint, or their angry leader banging his shoe at the United Nations swearing to bury the "Free" world. Never mind that the Russians had been staunch allies during WWII, lost more people to the war than any other nation, and single-handedly endured Hitler's attacks on the eastern front. Most Americans imagined cold-hearted Russian villains during those naive years immediately following the McCarthy era, and writer/director Grigori Chukhraj's intimate 88-minute film would have painted an entirely different human face on Russian soldiers.

Ballad of a Soldier holds up remarkably well as a fine character study, largely due to the strength of its black and white cinematography, the emotional power of the script, and the engaging performances of its lead actors. Once again, The Criterion Collection revives interest in an overlooked gem with its recent release. The film transfer is magnificent, but only one relatively weak extra is available—an interview with the director and the two lead actors recorded at New York's Four Seasons restaurant for radio broadcast. Communications problems plague the interviewer, and Dukhraj spends most of his time repeating how he borrows ideas from Russian directors that he admires but is independent from any of them.

Comparing Chukhraj to Russian icon Eisenstein is far too obvious and ludicrous since the two operated under entirely different periods and restrictions. No longer was Chukhraj required to portray grandiose Russian history heroically as Stalin demanded from cinematographers, but he was free to show the smaller and more human side of a Russian character. And charismatic 20-year-old actor Vladimir Ivashov carries the film admirably through the heroic Pvt. Alyosha Skvortsov character.

Initially Alyosha is cowering in a foxhole as an enemy tank bears down on him. The frightened private races ahead of the tank towards the Russian lines until all hope is lost, and he desperately shoots the tank. A miracle! The tank explodes! Buoyed by his good fortune, Alyosha fires at a second tank and is now recognized as a hero. Instead of receiving a medal, Alyosha requests leave to return home to see his mother and is granted six days. This requires hitchhiking via the rails and through muddy roads, and forms the central core of Alyosha's adventures through the people he meets along the way.

A good hearted optimist, Alyosha's sensitivity shines throughout the journey by giving a despondent one-legged soldier hope, unselfishly delivering greetings and news to an anxious family, shaming an unfaithful wife for her indiscretions, and gaining the trust and love of a shy, suspicious girl named Shura (Zhanna Piokhorenko).

Alyosha is so pure hearted and likeable that we can't help but root for him, but the opening scene prepares for eventual tragedy, creating suspense throughout. Will he see his mother to say a proper farewell? Will his newfound love interest reciprocate?

These issues will play themselves out in a tautly paced and well-acted film that never contains dead spots. Had Ballad of a Soldier received wider play in 1960, more Americans would have realized that individual Russians are real human beings—with hopes and dreams, essentially good hearted and caring, family oriented, and no more in love with war than the common people we all know in the U.S. Forget about political agendas—all Alyosha desires is to see his mother and survive the war, and his nature compels him to touch others. It's surprising to find that Chukhraj's universally relatable film wasn't well received by the Soviet government when it was first released due to its more personal style and portrayals of character weakness (as if the rest of the world was to believe that sexual adventures and adultery didn't exist there). Arguably the best post WWII Russian film to date, Ballad of a Soldier communicates a human interest story for the ages.

by Vida Johnson Criterion essay

Senses of Cinema Julia Levin

The DVD Journal [Mark Bourne]

DVD Verdict [Michael Rankins]

Reel.com DVD review [Doug Jones]

digitallyOBSESSED [Mark Zimmer]

All Movie Guide [Tom Wiener]

Ballad of a Soldier by Grigori Chukhrai 1959 Mark from Movie Masterworks

DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson] also reviewing THE CRANES ARE FLYING

New York Times (registration req'd) Bosley Crowther

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gregory Meshman]

Chukhrai, Pavel

THE THIEF (Vor) B+ 91

Russia (90 mi) 1997

Written and directed by Chukhrai, the son of another Russian filmmaker, Grigori Chukhrai, BALLAD OF A SOLDIER (1959), the film is narrated by a man looking back at his life as a child, painting a devastating portrait of a lost generation, Stalin’s children, as Stalin is everpresent in this film. His force is everywhere, all the characters know it and feel it, and live their lives around it. This is a terrific story, extremely well acted, with terrific performances by a family of three. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have an ending, actually repeating an earlier scene, something of a gimmick, thoroughly sentimental, and not at all in character with the rest of the film, ruining an opportunity to be a truly great film.

The film opens as a woman walks alone through an empty landscape, as the narrator reveals his mother gave birth to him alone on a roadside in 1946, his father, a soldier, died 6 month’s earlier, and he would spend the rest of his childhood searching for his father’s memories. Jumping ahead to 1952, the child Sanya (Misha Phillupchuk) is age 6 traveling on a train with his mother Katya (Ekaterina Rednikova), who is irresistibly drawn to another soldier on the train, Tolyan, in one of the strongest performances of the year by Vladimir Mashkov, who seduces her. They remain together after they depart from the train. Sanya is told “uncle Tolyan” will be living with us for awhile, so why don’t you start calling him “Daddy?”

As it turns out, Tolyan isn’t a soldier at all, but wears a uniform to gain people’s trust, which he uses to get what he wants. He and Katya have madly passionate sexual encounters, locking Sanya out, largely ignoring him until he comes home all beat up one day. Tolyan tells him that if he wants to be a man, he’ll have to start using his fists, and kick and bite whoever it was that beat him up, before returning to another sexual escapade with Katya. One of the neighbors interrupts, holding Sanya by the ear, demanding to see his father, as Sanya has been attacking other children with a stick. Tolyan casually slugs the man holding Sanya’s ear, smashes his kid’s bicycle, then tells Sanya to start slugging one of the kids who beat him up while he watches, a rather convincing display of bully bashing, immediately winning Sanya’s heart, a fatherless child who continues to have flashbacks of his imaginary father. Tolyan shows him his tattoos, one is of Stalin, who he calls his father, explaining he wears them to frighten people. Tolyan reminds Sanya that in Russia, people respect nothing but brute force, a rather chilling example of fatherhood, but certainly an accurate reflection of Russia recovering from the war under Stalin’s rule.

Tolyan becomes brutal with Sanya’s mother, throwing her across the room one day. Sanya grabs a little knife pointing it at Tolyan, but drops it in fear. Tolyan picks it up and puts it back in his hand, ordering him to use it. “That’s the rule of the game. You don’t pick up a knife unless you intend to use it,” causing the child such fear that he pees in his pants. Tolyan follows this incident with a charming gesture of friendship, buying vodka for all the neighbors at their communal dinner, toasting his comrades and Stalin, singing a few songs with an accordion, providing circus tickets for the weekend, and when all are away, he robs them, grabbing the next train out of town, a game that is repeated again and again, a family of thieves wandering across the country, including stays at some of the swankiest hotels, which is accompanied by an exaggerated, romantic love ballad.

Katya becomes silently enraged, frequently drunk, dominated by this scoundrel but loving him anyway, until eventually he gets caught and sent to Outer Slobovia, where Katya and Sanya blindly follow, watching the prisoners being herded from their cells into waiting trucks, the guards with dogs biting at their heels. In the bitter snow, Sanya runs after the prison truck yelling “Daddy, daddy, don’t leave us alone,” but the truck disappears into the emptiness of a desolate landscape of endless snow. Sanya then loses his mother, who dies with complications from an abortion. Sanya crawls though waist deep snow trying to surround his mother’s grave with pieces from bed frames, offering her some protection against the bitter elements, but all we see is a vast, empty landscape.

The time shifts to Sanya as a teenager living in an orphanage, still dreaming that one day Tolyan will come and rescue him from his dreariness, carrying Tolyan’s gun and a portrait of Stalin as his only personal mementos. He hears a man singing with an accordion, walks right up and stares, too shocked to speak, as it is Tolyan, who asks who he is. He answers “Katya’s son,” but the man can’t remember Katya or Sanya, until Sanya reminds him of who he is. Saving face in front of his new girlfriend, Tolyan calls Katya “some whore I slept with one night,” sending Sanya away. But Sanya waits at the train tracks, watching Tolyan throw his loot onto a train making another one of his patented getaways, but this time Sanya shoots him with his own gun, erasing from his memory any remaining traces of a previously existing family he once had. “All I had left was nothing...nothing...nothing.”

Chung, Lee Isaac

Hammer to Nail [Tom Hall]

Raised in rural Arkansas by Korean parents, Lee Isaac Chung headed to Yale to study Biology. But after seeing Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express, a new seed was planted. He began to voraciously study cinema and subsequently got his graduate degree at the University of Utah. After shooting a documentary in China (which has yet to see the light of day as the material was quite sensitive), Chung headed to Rwanda to teach film production to eager youngsters, but he realized that the best way to teach them was to make an actual film. The result of that experience was Munyurangabo, which went on to premiere in the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes before embarking on a hugely successful festival run throughout the world. Deservedly so. Munyurangabo is one of the most impressive low-budget American indies of the decade, a tender, beautifully photographed tale of impending revenge that shines a positive, poetic light on the Rwandan situation in the years following the genocide

MUNYURANGABO B+ 91

aka: Liberation Day

Rwanda USA (97 mi) 2007

This is a film where the heart and soul are in the right place, but where the craftsmanship may not be up to the same high artistic standards, yet simplicity can be deceiving in this utterly understated portrait of Africa today, as seen through the lives of two kids who represent the aftermath of Rwandan genocide. A film shot in Rwanda by an American filmmaker, the son of Korean immigrants raised on a rural farm in Kansas who was visiting the country with his wife as volunteers on a Christian good will mission, eventually leading a filmmaking class at a Christian relief base in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, which included orphans and refugees from the 1994 Rwandan massacre of somewhere between a half a million and a million Tutsis and moderately sympathetic Hutus by the fanatical Hutu majority, an indescribable horror that took place in only 100 days, which led to the making of this film. Shot in only 11 days, it's the first narrative feature ever made in the Kinyarwanda language, and one of the few actually shot there, as most of the film is shot in the rural countryside. The almost negligible story features two friends in Kigali, Ngabo and Sangwa, one Tutsi and one Hutu, though we’re not aware of any ethnic background until halfway through the film, who set out on a journey, where one of them, Ngabo, carries a large machete in his backpack vowing to kill the man who murdered his father. From the outset, it appears they are best friends. As they venture into the countryside, they find Sangwa’s home, whose parents are baffled about not hearing from him in the past 3 years, but over time, Sangwa is finally welcomed back home. Not so Ngabo, as Sangwa’s father immediately recognizes him as a Tutsi, an enemy of their village, and openly treats him with a hostile suspicion, where anything bad that happens is due to the presence of this young boy.

While the pace of life slows considerably, where other than occasional family interplay, there’s not much going on other than repeated walks to the water hole, which is only a slow drip, or an attempt to patch leaky walls with fresh mud, there is a colorful ceremonial dance sequence that is fascinating, but Chung shows an amateurish ability to pan the crowds, making the rookie mistake of moving his camera too fast, which deprives the viewers of being able to observe anything as everything is whirring by. But at the ceremony, Sangwa doesn’t even stand next to Ngabo, as the father’s views eventually pass to his son, where Ngabo is forced to remind Sangwa of his father’s insulting comments and that the man who killed his father was very much like Sangwa’s father, which leads to a breakup in their friendship. When Sangwa returns home, he’s thrown out of his house after his father learns of Ngabo’s intentions, something he finds simply outrageous, especially considering his son was planning to help him. The aftermath of this fallout is violent and heartbreaking, as we soon realize Sangwa is such a young kid who was just learning to appreciate his parent’s love, only to lose it instantly in a fierce beating, which leaves him in such agony that he is literally a bloody mess wailing on the side of the road. When he tries to make up with Ngabo afterwards, he is just as instantly rebuffed.

Up to this point, the film is expressed with a poetic realism, but that soon changes in a reverie sequence as Ngabo, in contrast with the depiction of Sangwa’s exile from his existing family, narrates his own disturbing personal recollections of what happened to his mother and father as we hear the solemn, rhapsodic piano music of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. This is a harrowing moment due to the sudden shift of mood to the emptiness Ngabo must feel as he has no home and he has no parents, a horror that guides the rest of the film, using impressionistic imagery that includes day dreams, wishful thinking, or even an imaginary vision where Ngabo is sitting peacefully in a golden field listening to his father speak to him reassuringly, reminding him how his name was chosen. One of the more interesting sequences is where Ngabo runs into the poet Edouard B. Uwayo, Rwanda’s poet laureate, who recites his poem Liberation Is a Journey straight into the camera, captured in a single shot, a scathing piece that not only reminds us of Rwanda’s bloody past, but offers a passionately optimistic present day context that seems to be directed at Ngabo personally, as he’s still carrying that machete around in his pocket. Rwanda and Africa are one and the same here, commingled in a shared responsibility to end the slaughter and turn the lives of kids like Ngabo around, offering them some degree of hope for the future, which in Uwayo’s poem includes equality for women and the liberation of Darfur. This film offers no easy answers, but without an ounce of condescension it does examine intimate moments in the lives of emotionally scarred Rwandan children, suggesting now is the time their dreams should be taken seriously.

TimeOut Chicago Hank Sartin

Working with a nonprofessional cast he met while leading a filmmaking workshop in Rwanda, American Chung has wisely opted to keep things simple. In the long shadow still cast by the genocide, Ngabo (Rutagengwa) and Sangwa (Ndorunkundiye) set out on a journey from Kigali into the countryside. Ngabo is Tutsi, Sangwa is Hutu, and their friendship is tested by the intolerance of Sangwa’s family. There are no easy resolutions, and Chung doesn’t ask the friendship to carry the whole symbolic weight of history. He tells an interesting story, and that’s enough.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

Korean-American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung’s debut feature “Munyurangabo” (which debuted at Cannes 2007) captures with great ambivalence the fate of the survivor. Two teenagers (Jeff Rutagengwa and Eric Dorunkundiye) become friends in Rwanda, one Hutu, the other Tutsi, while the first seeks revenge for the massacre of his father. Working in a modest, quiet, yet assured neorealist vein, Chung manages to make the slightly rugged edges work for this small, often poetic film (shot in Super 16mm in eleven days). What could have been familiar, violent or patronizing drama becomes touching. I’d like to think the late Ousmane Sembène might have been impressed. 97m.

Munyurangabo Andrea Gronvall from The Reader

In the aftermath of one of the bloodiest civil wars in recent history, two youngsters leave Kigali for a job in a remote region of Rwanda. En route they visit the Hutu family one lad left behind three years ago; his return angers his father, who is further distressed that the prodigal's travel companion is a Tutsi. As the son (Eric Ndorunkundiye) strives to make amends, his brooding orphaned friend (Jeff Rutagengwa) hardens his resolve to seek revenge against his own father's killer. Working with nonprofessional actors who improvised their dialogue, Korean-American director Lee Isaac Chung has crafted a taut, atmospheric drama (2007) that evokes the mythic while reflecting contemporary African realities. With Rwandan poet laureate Edouard B. Uwayo. In Kinyarwanda with subtitles. 94 min.

MUNYURANGABO Facets Multi Media

An exquisite, deeply moving feature from Korean-American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, developed and shot in Rwanda as part of a filmmaking class he taught there. Munyurangabo paints a sensitive portrayal of Ngabo and Sangwa, two friends of different ethnic backgrounds, struggling with the legacy of the genocide that devastated their country. In the midst of a journey whose goal is revealed only gradually, the two stop for several days at the home Sangwa left years ago. Faced with the hatred harbored by Sangwa's father towards the Tutsi, their friendship is threatened by the sorrow, anger, and guilt inherited from their forebears. Observing the painful and difficult process of coming to terms with this burden, Chung and his cast of non-actors convey the enduring tragedy of the Rwandan genocide while expressing a measure of hope in the capacity of individuals to overcome the obstacles standing in the way of reconciliation.

Village Voice Nicolas Rapold

A heaviness—call it lived-in shellshock—hangs over the green Rwandan hills in Lee Isaac Chung's serious-minded, immersive debut. Sangwa joins fellow capital-city flotsam Ngabo on a trek to avenge Ngabo's father, but first, they visit Sangwa's estranged family. There, the journey stops before it begins: Sangwa takes root in his home turf, yielding to his mother's cooking and reconciling with his rigid father. Ngabo (short for "Munyurangabo") finds a drinking buddy, but as a Tutsi, he's suspect, and, watching father and son, feels orphaned and friendless anew. The 28-year-old Chung, an American, shot the movie on Super 16 in 11 days while teaching filmmaking at a relief mission, but it feels fully formed, re-energizing the idiom of pastoral drift, folklore, and elemental tension that is so popular in festival-circuit village narratives. Blunt dialogue undercuts the elliptical plot, and the acting is lethargic beyond any intended mood. But Chung's handle on a super-fraught milieu is sure, and carefully considered images of Sangwa's family farming or Ngabo vacillating stick. Without proselytizing, what's left in this machetes-to-ploughshares tale is, unexpectedly, a powerfully Christian film.

The House Next Door [Keith Uhlich] (excerpt)

Finally, Munyurangabo, which tells of a Rwandan orphan, Ngabo’s (Jeff Rutagengwa), journey to kill the man who murdered his parents during the mid-90s genocide. In Ngabo’s company is his friend Sangwa (Eric Ndorunkundiye), the latter of Hutu heritage as compared to Ngabo’s Tutsi background. This fact alone adds an underlying tension to their relationship, a “sins of the father” strain that constantly threatens a coming-to-blows, perhaps at the end of the machete that the boys steal in the film’s opening scene. The majority of the film takes place in Sangwa’s childhood home where Ngabo witnesses the generational push-and-pull between his friend and his parents, as well as, due to his different tribal legacy, being shunned by Sangwa’s father (Jean Marie Vianney Nkurikiyinka). For a while, the film concerns itself with the everyday, so much so that the thread of revenge, which isn’t definitively introduced until a quarter of the way through, seems to be buried under the mere fact of eking out a living. But Ngabo is not to be deterred.

What occurs next is best described by Robin Wood in his recent Film Comment review (I offer him a virtual thanks for steering me into Munyurangabo’s path), so I’d instead like to focus on a shot from the film’s final passages. As we’re presented with plenty of beginnings in life, we’re also given our fair share of endings, and I knew that the image of Ngabo and Sangwa at a water pump, both fixed in silent contemplation, posed as to evoke the god Janus, should be the capper to my experience at Sarasota '08. It had, in its uniquely powerful way, the open-ended finality of a nighttime reverie come to a close, that instant when we feel our wandering souls sink back into our bodies, alert, refreshed, and prepared, once more, to meet the day. A true moment of realization, and one that provides, I think, a more appropriate answer to the query that opened this piece, namely that I don’t fall asleep during movies, but I do—entirely, definitively, and continually—dream.

Hammer to Nail [Tom Hall]

With his powerful debut feature Munyuragabo, Lee Isaac Chung has taken a series of improbable cultural dilemmas and spun them into a new, transcendent moment for independent cinema. Filmed in Rwanda by the Brooklyn-based director, Munyurangabo confronts the aftermath of that nation’s genocidal past through the visual power of cinematic storytelling. But this is no simple morality tale. The first film ever made in the Kinyarwanda language, it represents a new cinematic intersection where American independent film embraces the world.

Munyurangabo is the story of two friends, Ngabo (Josef “Jeff” Rutagengwa), a Tutsi, and Sangwa (Eric Ndorunkundiye), a Hutu, as they set out on foot from the streets of Kigali and into the Rwandan countryside with an ominous purpose: the boys intend to find and murder the man who killed Ngabo’s father during the genocide. As they make their way toward their intended target, the boys stop at Sangwa’s family home and are immediately scrutinized; when Sangwa’s parents discover a machete among Ngabo’s personal effects, the weight of their ancient distrust rises to the surface, forcing the boys back on the road.

Ngabo, having suffered a series of perceived slights and delays at the hands of Sangwa’s Hutu family, rejects Sangwa and expels him from the journey. Suddenly alone, Ngabo finds his way to a small village where he loads up on supplies to see out the remainder of his journey. Once again, the sight of his machete betrays him and a local poet (Edouard B. Uwayo, Rwanda’s poet laureate), sensing the terrible prospect of impending violence, seizes the opportunity to recite a poem, Liberation Is A Journey, which he has composed for a national holiday. Chung has Uwayo deliver the poem directly to the camera in a staggering, one-take close-up that serves to both contextualize the reactionary horror of Ngabo’s mission and implicate the audience in Rwanda’s future. Uwayo’s unflinching stare, his dream of beautiful day rising from the ashes of a bloody history, makes each of us responsible for seeing that it becomes so.

Refusing to be chastened, Ngabo continues until he discovers his own ancestral home, destroyed by fire and abandoned; the sight of his past in ruins only serves to redouble his desire to have vengeance. And then, without warning, transcendence, that most elusive of cinematic emotions, arrives in the film’s wrenching finale; sitting in a golden field straight out of Days Of Heaven, Ngabo meets his father’s ghost and recovers a portion of what had been missing in his own life, nothing less than an understanding of death itself.

The role of family, both adopted and literal, is central to the drama in Munyurangabo; Sangwa’s exile at the hands of his parents and his best friend are rendered as equal to Ngabo’s loss of a father. But as the film abandons Sangwa to exile, it is Ngabo and his bloody intentions that propel the film forward. Chung, who worked closely with his actors to develop the film’s narrative, deftly allows the weight of these losses to balance against the forward momentum of his character’s lives. As the boys move toward an understanding of the world around them, their relationship to their own history, from the familial to the national, grows more and more complicated with each and every physical step they take.

It is the grace and poetry of Chung’s film that is most unexpected; The mere suggestion of an American filmmaker working with first-time actors in Rwanda is sure to inspire concerns about how to fit Munyurangabo into pre-conceived categories of what independent cinema should be. And yet, while Chung’s internationalism looks forward to a broader, more inclusive understanding of independent filmmaking, his aesthetic choices also tether the film to our cinematic past; Shot on film, Munyurangabo has a physical texture and that recalls both the cinema of Malian Director Souleymane Cissé and the early films of American director David Gordon Green. The decision to use film allows Chung to straddle the line between time and place, between history and the here and now, in a way that the immediacy and documentary quality of video might otherwise undermine.

If anything, Munyurangabo proves that the past is unable to contain the complexity of today’s global reality. American cinema is changing, adapting to the international concerns of an increasingly connected world. These connections are not merely virtual and introspective, but physical, working relationships built upon creative collaboration across the artificial boundaries of nationality and culture. Munyurangabo is a beautiful, haunting reminder that by opening its creative arms to the world, American cinema has the power to transform it.

A Better Tomorrow - Film Comment Robin Wood, March/April 2008

“Great art is intelligent about Life.”—F. R. Leavis

I saw Munyurangabo at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival almost by accident. I knew nothing of it and had not even read the description in the 479-page program guide, which covered over 400 titles (all, of course, highly recommended!). I simply had time to pass between screenings, and its press show was just about to begin, with perhaps 20 people scattered around the auditorium. This is a common occurrence in a festival of this kind, where the policy is to squeeze in as many films as possible and hope for the best. There are long lines for the new films by established directors, all of which will be released within weeks or months; most of them have already been bought up by distributors before the festival ends.

To me, Munyurangabo was a time-filler for which I had no particular expectations. It proved to be my favorite film of those I saw. I watched it again at a public screening in a large auditorium that was almost full and at which the director, Lee Isaac Chung, was present: word had got around. I have seen it several times since, courtesy of its director, who sent me a DVD. Chung, in fact, is American: he “grew up in Arkansas and studied biology at Yale University and film at the University of Utah,” according to the festival program guide. He and his wife went to Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide, he to film, she to teach. Munyurangabo is his first feature.

The American cinema, in its more serious manifestations, has produced a number of critically acclaimed (and undeniably distinguished) films recently, works that address the state of Western culture with intelligence and a certain integrity. If I single out No Country for Old Men and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, it’s because they are rooted in two of the foundations of American culture, respectively the Old West and “family values,” both now seen as irredeemably corrupted. To borrow from a Chabrol title, rien ne va plus. They are in obvious respects intelligent, yes. But “intelligent about Life”? I would say the reverse: they leave their audiences with nothing. We hear so often today of the “collapse of Western culture” that it comes to sound like a bit of cocktail party repartee, almost taken for granted, such an obvious fact of life that of course there’s nothing we can do about it, like global warming. Nothing could be more dangerous.

Munyurangabo also grows out of cultural collapse on a grand (and horrific) scale, and then proceeds to transcend it. A “small” masterpiece? Small—indeed minimal—in budget, no spectacle, no “cast of thousands,” with only a very few moments of (familial) violence, no sex, no recognizable actors, cast entirely with nonprofessionals. The early days of Italian neorealism offer perhaps the nearest precedent, but set, cast, and photographed in the aftermath of an admittedly very different war, internal rather than international.

Among the most remarkable aspects of the film is its total lack of condescension—none of the Noble American putting things straight for the ignorant natives. One would never guess, without prior knowledge, that the film was the work of an outsider. Chung, one might say, has given it to the people of Rwanda, allowing them their voices without intervention—that, certainly, is the impression the film gives, even as its complex narrative structure suggests otherwise. It draws together a range of traditional structures: 1) the male love story (not necessarily sexual), with its commitments, its tensions, its breakups; 2) the journey/quest narrative, with its diversions and stopovers; 3) the revenge narrative (very precise: the film opens with the theft of a machete; around the midpoint we learn what it was stolen for; at the end the machete is discarded); 4) the “family” narrative, which dominates the central (and longest) section of the film, and in which the political tensions ultimately erupt.

With limited space, I want to focus on the film’s last 10 minutes, following the apparently final breakup of the friendship between Munyurangabo and Sangwa, among the most moving in my experience of cinema. As this necessitates giving away much of its detail, those who have not yet been able to see the film might prefer to put what follows aside until that opportunity arises—though, so far, it has not been picked up for distribution.

The final segment is preceded by a remarkable interruption in the narrative. Munyurangabo, when he reaches the town where the man who killed his father lives, stops for a drink at a roadside café before completing his mission. A young man suddenly appears in front of him, announcing that he is a poet and that he is going to recite, for practice, the poem he has composed for a public gathering. That this is a moment—a punctuation point—outside the narrative is underlined by the totally different camera style: a single long take in close-up, the camera tied to the movements of the performer. The poem amounts to a passionate, all-embracing demand for a new Rwanda, as a land of togetherness, freedom, unification, equality (including even the equality of women), and no more slaughter.

The message is apparently lost on Munyurangabo: we see him motionless in long shot at the top of a rise, set against a blue sky so dark it’s almost black, staring ahead, machete in hand. Cut to his view: a crude wooden house, which we guess is the home of his intended victim. As he approaches, he becomes increasingly hesitant and uncertain (under the influence of the poem?). Inside, he finds his victim, no longer the vicious murderer of his father but a helpless man in a bed on the floor. He is in the last stages of AIDS; he asks for water.

Outside, Munyurangabo is hesitant; birdsong, barely audible until now, suggests spring, new life. This triggers Munyurangabo’s mental journey backwards: we sense that it is not only because of the man’s helplessness that he spares him but the accumulated incidents of the entire film—the friendship with Sangwa, his experience of the family, the poem… We witness his long hesitation, alone in a neighboring field, then at night. There is a passage of “magic realism”: night in the fields; the disembodied presence of the dead father, reminding him that he is named after a Rwandan mythological hero; the father’s words culminating in the challenge “What is your battle?” It’s the final line spoken in the film. Then a dream: Sangwa in the Kigali neighborhood of Kimisagara, the two friends’ joyous reunion in the streets. Then rain, and the return to reality.

Munyurangabo is back at the top of the rise, looking at the house; there is no sign of his machete. We see him carrying out the plastic containers for the water; the birdsong (which sounds really present, not dubbed in) is louder than ever. We watch him filling the containers to the brim, almost lovingly; suddenly Sangwa is there, seated, a few steps behind him. The End. We are left to decide for ourselves: has Sangwa returned? Neither speaks, neither shows awareness of the other. A presence, a memory, an influence? Whichever you pick, it’s an authentically beautiful film. “Great art is intelligent about Life.”

(Note: I have not been able to trace the F. R. Leavis quotation to a precise source, but I hear him saying it. It may have been in one of his many lectures I attended at Cambridge University, England, almost 60 years ago…)

Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung, 2007) Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at Mubi, July 25, 2009

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5]

Munyurangabo | Film Review | Slant Magazine Nick Schager

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

Variety Robert Koehler

Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [4/6]

San Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review [3/4]

Munyurangabo Movie Review & Film Summary (2009) | Roger Ebert also discussed in Roger Ebert’s blog, July 22, 2009, seen here: The light in the tunnel

New York Times A.O. Scott, also seen here: Lee Isaac Chung's Quiet Film About a Still-Traumatized Rwanda - The ...

Munyurangabo - Wikipedia

Cinema Without Borders Diane Sippl interviews the director in 2007

Munyarangabo : A prayer for the world Olivier Barlet interviews the director from Africultures, July 6, 2007

New York Times: director interview Interview by Dennis Lim, March 23, 2008

/ HAMMER TO NAIL » Blog Archive » A Conversation With Lee Isaac Chung Interview by Michael Tully from Hammer to Nail, May 28, 2009

YouTube: director interview (4:14)

US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide | World news | The Guardian Rory Carroll from The Guardian, March 31, 2004

Q&A: Genocide in Rwanda Peter Walker from The Guardian, December 18, 2008

Rwanda's Himmler: the man behind the genocide Chris McGreal from The Guardian, December 18, 2008, also seen here: Theoneste Bagosora: The mastermind of the Rwanda genocide

UN tribunal jails Rwanda genocide mastermind for life Chris McGreal from The Guardian, including a video report (2:56), December 18, 2008

The horror of the Rwandan genocide Chris McGreal’s disturbing video report from The Guardian, December 18, 2008, on YouTube (2:56)

'Tutsis died because people were angry with them' Chris McGreal from The Guardian, December 19, 2008

Rwandan Genocide - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rwanda: The Wake of a Genocide

GENOCIDE - RWANDA

Chung Mong-hong

PARKING (Ting Che)

Taiwan (112 mi) 2008

Parking (Ting Che) Dan Fainaru at Cannes from Screendaily

A man is rushing back home to his wife but a double-parked car blocks his way. He searches in vain for the driver and encounters a variety of persons who cannot or do not want to help him. When he finally gets home the next morning, he is a different person - not only because he is adorned with a gigantic black eye, but because he has learned to see the world differently.

Moving confidently from one episode to the next and one style to another in the tracks of his main character, director/cinematographer Chung Mong-hong has made a distinctive calling card here, smartly zipping through the different genres from tearjerker to gangster. Though not 100 percent convincing by itself as a story, such reservations fade in the light of strong performances from a solid ensemble cast with impeccable credentials, including some of the better known faces in Taiwan and Hong Kong cinema. Arthouse seems likely, and perhaps more in Asia where handsome lead actor Chen Chang is a sought-after name. Undoubtedly, Chung Mong-hong has established himself as a name to watch here and his next will be eagerly-awaited – if only to work out which genre he'll plump for.

Once Chen Mo (Crouching Tiger's Chen Chang) parks his car next to a patisserie called Cream (just like the film's production company), troubles start to pour in, one after the other. First he offends the sales lady, then he finds out he can't leave because someone has double parked next to him. This being Mothers' Day in Taipei, the police are too busy to help. In his efforts to unearth the owner of the vehicle and convince him to move it away, he stumbles upon an old couple and their grandaughter; a former Chinese cop turned ruthless pimp (Leon Dai) and one of the girls he exploits (former model Peggy Tseng); a one-armed barber (Jack Kao) cooking fish-head soup; and an unemployed tailor (Chapman To) on the run from the mafia, to name but a few. In every case, there is an expansion plus flashbacks to support the characters.

Chen Mo's story is the focus, however, and the script introduces in flashback his wife (Kwai Mei-Lun) and the marital problems they are facing.

Suddenly cutting from one episode to the next, Chung's film unblinkingly switches from sheer sentimental melodrama (the blind old woman who was never told her son had been executed for murder) to slapstick comedy (Chen Mo and the dead fish he finds in the sink of the barbershop toilet). There's also lurid sex scenes, and, for good measure, a few comments on the economic troubles in China which have driven many into Taiwan looking for work.

As a story by itself, this doesn't really gel. But veterans like Jack Kao and Chapman To in supporting roles next to Chen Chang's solid performance in the lead propel this film through any bumps.

SOUL (Shi-hun) B 88

Taiwan (112 mi) 2013 ‘Scope Trailer

I saw this body was empty so I moved in. —A-Chuan (Joseph Chang)

A moody and atmospheric thriller that is beautifully photographed in saturated colors by the director himself, a film built on an editing scheme with fades to black, where the sheer look on ‘Scope far outshines most any other film seen this year. The film has a supernatural element that remains ambiguous throughout, where story and intent are submerged beneath the veneer of the film’s beauty, where something sinister is taking place, almost like a haunting. The story concerns A-Chuan (Joseph Chang), a sushi chef in a small Japanese restaurant, who collapses while slicing up a fish that is still flopping around, even after a large portion has been carved out. What is taking place is a mysterious transformation, as A-Chuan is not himself afterwards, but diagnosed with depression, as he’s entirely subdued, as if on anti-depressants, while more likely his body has been inhabited by another wandering spirit. Part of the film’s complexity are the many layers of existence built into our human comprehension, where this may also be an artfully brilliant exposé on schizophrenia, where the director intermixes layers of spiritual, supernatural, and clinical, molding a most unusual story that has a painterly beauty while exploring alternate interior realms. Even more impressive, the story shifts at some point and becomes a supernatural karma thriller, where A-Chuan’s father, Old Wang (Jimmy Wong, martial arts veteran from the infamous Shaw Brothers Hong Kong studios) is curiously haunted by his actions in the past when he went unpunished for the killing of his wife, traumatically witnessed by his son, where now a day of atonement arrives in the form of a demonic possession that has maliciously taken control of his son. It’s quite clever how the storyline shifts from the audience’s interest in what’s happened to the son, and suddenly a larger and more compelling universe engulfs this one, where the father’s unraveling secrets literally consume the audience’s attention.

A-Chuan’s sister Yun (Chen Hsiang-chi) drives her brother to their rural, mountainous home near Taichung, central Taiwan, where they grew up, where he is placed in the care of their father who grows orchids in the mists of an isolated mountain. Yun grows wary of her brother’s condition, as he doesn’t speak or eat or respond to the world around him, where after bashing his head against the wall, it soon emerges that he’s been possessed by the soul of a psychopath, as Wang returns home one day only to find his daughter lying in a pool of blood, with his son hovering over her indicating he is not A-Chuan, “He left. I took his body. A-Chuan will be gone for a long time,” claiming he passed A-Chuan on his way into the body, suggesting he would be back “one day.” Wang tries to hide the body just as a police officer friend turns up at the door, eventually burying her, while drugging this aberration version of his son, locking him up as a prisoner in a storage shed in back of the house, waiting for his real son’s spirit to return, where a lone window connects him to the outside world. Strange visions, however, start to haunt A-Chuan, providing a backstory for his family’s disturbing past, where curiously this dreamlike window to the past through flashbacks is more revealing than the shed window in the present, as it was in this building that A-Chuan witnessed his father kill his mother. One of the more enticing scenes is a mystical character known only as The Messenger (Chin Shih-chieh), an old man with a bamboo basket that discovers a mountainous trail leading to a hidden well, somehow convincing A-Chuan to jump into a seemingly bottomless pit, which might explain his disappearance.

A kind of tug of war persists between the inhabited son and the overly suspicious father, who must figure out how to contend with this afflicted spirit while keeping the body alive for his son’s eventual return. The first killing, however, sets into motion a series of violent acts, where Wang, seemingly impassive to the tragedy, goes to great extremes to cover them up, each more violent than the next, becoming obsessed with protecting his son at all costs, crossing all moral boundaries, turning into an overly stylish blood splatter film. While the film is not without humor, especially in the folksy character of local cop Little Wu (Vincent Liang), who has a history with Old Wang and respects the ways of the mountain, who seems preoccupied or easily distracted, but his perseverance throughout even after sustaining a hideous injury is impressive. When his superior arrives, Yang (Tuo Tsung-hua), he’s more of a no nonsense character who gets right to the heart of the matter, questioning Wang about the strange disappearance of several missing people. Things soon veer out of control, as this is a film about instability, not balance, where things are not as they seem, exploring cruelty and pain in an extremely detached manner, while also examining a rather twisted father and son relationship. Wang must cover up his son’s crimes while attempting to fathom whether his son has lost his mind or has been taken possession by a demonic spirit. Yet the overriding constant is the lush beauty of the Alishan forest, resembling a mountainous rain forest where dew is everpresent, as is a surrounding mist, where Wang’s character is completely in tune with the rugged, unyielding nature of the mountain. The sequence out of the mountains on a tiny rail car is nothing less than exquisite. Not sure why so many Asian films insist upon blood-letting scenes which may taint the film’s poetic allure, but the mix of ghostlike inhabitation and murder mystery remains fascinating throughout, as it’s a beautifully directed film, meditative and disquieting, with a chilling and fascinating world of violence that at least according to Ho Yi from The Tapei Times (Movie review: Soul - Taipei Times) “are among the most gruesome and exquisite that Taiwanese cinema has seen in decades.”

White City Cinema [Michael Smith]

Venerable Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang (whose latest, Stray Dogs, is also playing this festival) has indicated in interviews that he may not make another film. It was therefore fitting and intensely gratifying to discover this bold Lynchian mind-bender by up-and-coming Taiwanese writer/director Chung Mong-Hong. Soul has been tagged as a “supernatural thriller” and a “horror movie” by various critics and programmers although, in spite of the inclusion of a couple of gruesome murder sequences, it’s far more adventurous than those labels imply. What story there is revolves around the question of transfiguration — as a young sushi chef from Taipei suddenly loses consciousness and collapses while on the job only to wake up and claim to be someone else. His co-workers take him to his father’s rural orchid farm to recuperate but dark family secrets soon come to light and a series of bizarre murders ensue. The real protagonist of the film is the father (a great role for the legendary Jimmy Wang Yu), a recent stroke victim who is consumed by feelings of guilt and a desire to amend past wrongs, and the way Chung explores father-son dynamics is hauntingly ambiguous: is this a literal tale of possession or is there a psychological explanation for everything, one that demands the film be read more as allegory? Either way, this is gripping and highly original stuff.

Exclaim! [Scott A. Gray]

A uniquely moving and disturbing picture, Soul uses surreal cinematic poetry to postulate schizophrenia as a dissociation of the spirit. Taiwan's Chung Mong-Hong (The Fourth Portrait) is an accomplished visionary capable of balancing a calculated use of technical ability with instinctual artistry, as demonstrated throughout this emotionally gripping and consistently stimulating film.

Soft cut like the slow blink of an eyelid in hypnotic rhythm, the opening scene of a sushi chef collapsing while filleting a live fish is as meditative as it is disquieting. Always with a reason and never going to excess, Chung uses heavily askew camera angles as part of his aesthetic, effectively conveying that some fundamental elemental of existence is out of whack.

Showing that his world has literally been turned upside down, our fainting chef wakes up on his back with the camera locked to his perspective: gently bouncing trees stabbing down at the sky. His co-workers are driving him to his father's remote mountainside orchid plantation to recuperate from his unexplained episode. There, almost entirely despondent at first, A-Chaun (Joseph Chang) is cared for by his sister and nearing decrepitude yet still spry father, Wang (Jimmy Wong). Unresolved family issues bubble around the edges of their inquiries into A-Chaun's mental state, but Wang, in particular, exhibits unconditional love and acceptance that are quite touching.

However, all is not roses. A-Chaun's sister grows wary of the increasingly unnerving changes in her brother, while Wang's moral compass is clouded by a parent's commitment to his child. The situation gradually mushrooms out of control as it becomes clear that A-Chaun has either had some form of mental break or is subletting his body to a malicious wandering spirit.

To signify the possibility of energy emanations that some consider evidence of the soul, in many shots, characters bloom with natural ephemeral emissions, like steam rising from A-Chaun's warm body in the cold rain. This sort of artfully embedded symbolism gains purchase throughout the film. It's not just image-based artistry Soul is brimming with either; subtle sound effects, like the perpetual low howl of wind, contribute to the overall nightmarish quality tainting the picture's beauty.

Adding to the near-perfection of this sure to be under-seen work of uncommon acuity, the score by Tseng Szu-Ming, which places a haunting string arrangement atop an entrancing murmur of reverse electronics, is as phenomenal as every other component of Chung's intricate and affecting Soul.

Movie review: Soul - Taipei Times Ho Yi

Beautifully executed in a vibrant cinematic style, Chung Mong-hong’s latest film, Soul, is billed as a psychological thriller about a man who loses his soul and whose abandoned body is inhabited by a stranger. But don’t expect a genre flick about supernatural forces. Though it is blessed with the best murder scenes the Taiwanese cinema has seen in years, the film is nevertheless director Chung’s stylish meditation on life, death and family.

The film begins inside an upscale Japanese restaurant in Taipei, where chef A-chuan (Joseph Chang) is seen filleting a fish. Suddenly he collapses; the fish, most of its flesh sliced off, remains alive, gasping for air. A few days later, A-chuan is sent to live with his aged father, Wang (Jimmy Wong), who supports himself by growing orchids among the mists of an isolated mountain.

Having fallen into a strange mental state, A-chuan doesn’t speak or eat. Neither does he respond to the world around him. One day, Wang returns home from work, finding his married daughter Yun, played by Chen Shiang-chyi, lying dead in a pool of blood.

A-chuan, the killer, remains vacantly calm, looks at the father and says: “I saw this body was empty so I moved in.”

Seemingly impassive to the tragedy, Wang buries his daughter’s body, drugs the young man who appears to be his son and locks him away in the cottage next to the orchid farm. Yet it is beyond the old man’s control to stop more bloodshed from taking place. Meanwhile, strange visions come to A-chuan at night, and little by little, a family secret is revealed.

Under the guise of a psychological thriller, the film is an eerily beautiful reincarnation of the two recurrent themes in Chung’s cinema: death and father-son relationships. In his 2006 documentary Doctor, the filmmaker follows a Taiwanese-born physician in the US, who lost his teenage son to suicide. His second feature film The Fourth Portrait (2010) revolves around a little boy who must cope with a brutal stepfather after the death of his biological one.

In his latest work, Chung, who doubles as the film’s cinematographer, tells the story of an estranged father and son haunted by their past, while imbuing the peculiar tale with the opulent aesthetics that have become his trademark. Profound sentiments are conveyed purely through visual forms, by way of close-ups on small creatures and insects such as a beetle inside a flower, two slimy earthworms intertwined and moths flapping their wings in the air as if they are the bearer of deep meaning and share an inexplicable connection with their human counterparts.

Audiences rarely have the chance to indulge in the characters’ pain and suffering, as the director finds tearjerkers and exaggerated emotions distasteful. Rather, feelings and moods are conveyed through expressive colors, striking mise-en-scene and lighting that make up Chung’s unique sense of cinematography. Under his lens, the lush forests in Lishan Mountain become wild and enigmatic where human instinct and desires transcend the boundary of civil behavior, while the incessant chirping of cicadas turns hauntingly poetic as they resonate through the murderous valley.

The murders, portrayed by the stroke of a poet’s pen, are among the most gruesome and exquisite that Taiwanese cinema has seen in decades.

Exploring cruelty and pain in a cold, detached manner, the film nevertheless offers a glimpse of hope and human warmth through humor and the possibility of redemption. In the end, A-chuan survives, either as A-chuan or the stranger who inhabits his body, and is able to face the father, albeit in the enclosure of a mental institution.

Graced by the topnotch performances of seasoned thespians including Chin Shih-chieh, Leon Dai and Tuo Tsung-hua, the film affords audiences a delightful surprise by casting Wong as the father who lives in solitude and persists to lead a normal life after a stroke. A kung-fu legend noted for his commanding on-screen presence, Wong admirably invests in his aged character unflinching strength and a sense of fragility.

Toronto 2013 Review: Soul - WhatCulture! Josh Cornell

Independent Cinema [Christopher Cross]

At Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Film Business Asia [Derek Elley]

Oscars: Taiwan Nominates 'Soul' for Foreign Language Category ... Patrick Brzeski from The Hollywood Reporter

Toronto Film Review: 'Soul' | Variety

Chytilová, Vera

One of the undiscovered filmmakers of the year, one of the unrecognized wonders of the Czech New Wave, actually threatening, at one point, to jump out a window if she wasn’t given permission to shoot a script (documented in the film VELVET HANGOVER), she studied philosophy and architecture, worked as a technical draftsman for a chemical laboratory, as a photo retoucher, and as a fashion model before discovering a passion for film around age 28, working as a script girl in a film studio. Having been refused recommendation, let alone a scholarship, Chytilová obstinately battled her way into Czech film school. Her films were banned and condemned at home while being recognized internationally. Chytilová was always quite experimental, effortlessly blending colorful animation and humor, consistently delivering truly imaginative imagery while always maintaining her own artistic integrity. Her films feature very unique, timeless, and powerful performances by women who rebelliously try to subvert the patriarchal system and gender stereotypes—and fail. Chytilová’s films often expose the absurdity of “good behavior” in a world gone mad. Utilizing a bravura visual style, images that would not seem out of place in a Jan Švankmajer film, she possesses a love for mixing farce and fantasy with social critique.

Chytilová, Vera from World Cinema

Czech director. Verz Chytilová worked as a draftswoman, fashion model and continuity person before studying at FAMU [the Film Faculty of the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts] (1957-62). Her commitment to experiment was already apparent in her student films, and her graduation film, Strop/Ceiling (1962), the study of a fashion model, was a defiant mixture of cinéma-vérité and formalism. There were echoes of this in her first feature, O necem jiném / Something Different (1963), which told the parallel stories of a woman gymnast and a housewife, the first as documentary, the second as fiction. Working with her husband, the cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera, and writer/designer Ester Krumbachová, Chytilová directed the two most inventive films of the Czech New Wave, Sedmikrásky / Daisies (1966) and Ovoce stromu rajský jíme / The Fruit of Paradise / We Eat the Fruit of the Trees of Paradise (1969). The first was a non-narrative montage of the destructive antics of two female teenagers which demonstrated that an avant-garde film could also be funny, while the second was an allegorical portrait of male/female relations presented in images of remarkable formal beauty. After the Soviet invasion of 1968, such excesses were not encouraged and Chytilová found herself unable to work. In 1976, she wrote an open letter to President Husák and was surprisingly reinstated, returning with a lively parable of sexual relations, Hra o jablko / The Apple Game (1976), and the unusually abrasive moral tale Panelstory / Prefab Story (1981). She renewed her collaboration with Krumbachová for a comic portrayal of a middle-aged Don Juan, Faunovo velmi pozdní odpoledne / The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun (1983). In recent years she has derived much of her inspiration from theatre, directing a film version of the mime play Sasek a královna / The Jester and the Queen (1987), and working with the avant-garde theatre group Sklep (The Cellar) on Kopytem sem, kopytem tam / Tainted Horseplay / Snowball Reaction / A Hoof Here, A Hoof There (1988). A retrospective of her films was shown on French television in 1989, but she has still to receive similar recognition from the English-speaking world. — Peter Hames, Encylopedia of European Cinema

Vera Chytilová Josef Skvorecký, updated by Verina Glaessner from Film Reference

So far the only important woman director of the Czech cinema is Věra Chytilová, its most innovative and probably most controversial personality. She is the only contemporary Czech filmmaker to work in the Eisensteinian tradition. She combines didacticism with often daring experimentation, based in essence on montage. Disregarding chronology and illustrative realism, she stresses the symbolic nature of images as well as visual and conceptual shock. Influenced to some extent also by cinema verité, particularly by its female representatives, and militantly feminist in her attitudes, she nevertheless made excellent use of the art of her husband, the cameraman Jaroslav Kučera, in her boldest venture to date, Daisies. This film, Chytilová's best known, is a dazzling display of montage, tinting, visual deformation, film trickery, color processing, etc.—a multifaceted tour de force which, among other things, is also a tribute to the classics of the cinema, from the Lumière Brothers to Chaplin and Abel Gance. It contains shots, scenes, and sequences that utilize the most characteristic techniques and motives of the masters. Daisies is Chytilová at her most formalist. In her later films, there is a noticeable shift towards realism. However, all the principles mentioned above still dominate the more narrative approach, and a combination of unusual camera angles, shots, etc., together with a bitterly sarcastic vision, lead to hardly less provocative shock effects.

The didactical content of these highly sophisticated and subtly formalist works of filmic art, as in Eisenstein, is naive and crude: young women should prefer "useful" vocations to "useless" ones (The Ceiling); extremes of being active and being inactive both result in frustration (Something Different); irresponsibility and recklessness lead to a bad end (Daisies); a sexual relationship is something serious, not just irresponsible amusement (The Apple Game); people should help each other (Panel Story, The Calamity). Given the fact that Chytilová has worked mostly under the conditions of an enforced and harshly repressive establishment, a natural explanation of this seeming incongruity offers itself: the "moral messages" of her films are simply libations that enable her, and her friends among the critics, to defend the unashamedly formalist films and the harshly satirical presentation of social reality they contain. This is corroborated by Chytilová's many clashes with the political authorities in Czechoslovakia: from an interpellation in the Parliament calling for a ban of Daisies because so much food—"the fruit of the work of our toiling farmers"—is destroyed in the film, to her being fired from the Barrandov studios after the Soviet invasion in 1968, and on to her open letter to President Husák printed in Western newspapers. In each instance she won her case by a combination of publicly stated kosher ideological arguments, stressing the alleged "messages" of her works, and of backstage manipulation, not excluding the use of her considerable feminine charm. Consequently, she is the only one from among the new wave of directors from the 1960s who, for a long time, had been able to continue making films in Czechoslovakia without compromising her aesthetic creed and her vision of society, as so many others had to do in order to remain in business (including Jaromil Jireš, Hynek Bočan, Jaroslav Papoušek, and to some extent Jiří Menzel).

Panel Story and Calamity earned her hateful attacks from establishment critics and intrigues from her second-rate colleagues, who are thriving on the absence of competition from such exiled or banned directors as Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer, Jan Němec, Evald Schorm, and Vojtěch Jasný. The two films were practically withdrawn from circulation and can be occasionally seen only in suburban theatres. The only critical film periodical, Film a doba, published, in 1982, a series of three articles which, in veiled terms and using what playwright Václav Havel calls "dialectical metaphysics" ("on the one hand it is bad, but on the other hand it is also good"), defended the director and her right to remain herself. In her integrity, artistic boldness, and originality, and in her ability to survive the most destructive social and political catastrophes, Chytilová was a unique phenomenon in post-invasion Czech cinema. Unfortunately, during the last years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, she seems to have lost something of her touch, and her latest films—such as The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun or The Jester and the Queen—are clearly not on the level of Daisies or Panel Story. Since the "velvet revolution" she has maintained her independence as idiosyncratically as ever. Refusing to take up any comfortably accommodating position, she has been accused of nostalgia for the Communist years. This would be to misrepresent her position. A fierce campaigner for a state subsidy for the Czech film industry, she cannot but lament the extent to which the implementation of the ideology of the "free market" has been allowed to accomplish what the Soviet regime never quite could—the extinguishing of Czech film culture.

She has made a number of documentary films for television as well as a 1992 comedy about the deleterious effects of sudden wealth, which was publicly well received but met with critical opprobrium. She has so far failed to find funding for a long-cherished project, Face of Hope, about the nineteenth-century humanist writer Bozena Nemcova. The continuing relevance of Daisies, and its depiction of philistinism in several registers, is surely the strongest argument in support of Chytilová's position. It is a film that shines with the sheer craftsmanship Czech cinema achieved in those years.

Vera Chytilová The Savage Cinema of Věra Chytilová, by Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix, May 16 – 22, 2003

CEILING (Strop) B+ 91

Czechoslavakia (42 mi) 1962

Her graduation film, using staged improvisations with non-actors, a somewhat experimental-mixed-with-realist black & white documentary style, looking into the world of a fashion model and her subsequent disenchantment and ennui both with men and her career, with a strong lead performance by Marta Kanovská, adding an extremely humorous narrative, such as the chatty off-screen voices of bored, inattentive males who constantly criticize the models as mere subjects, featuring quite inventive and witty music.

DAISIES (Sedmikrásky) A 98

Czechoslovakia (74 mi) 1966

To my knowledge, this is the only Chytilová film currently available on video, one of the treasures of film, the Charleston dance number is one of the funniest sequences in all of film history. Two sexy and charming women delight us throughout, Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová, with their brash and sassy cleverness, serving as the model for Jacques Rivette’s CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING. This film is constantly inventive, wildly experimental, and hysterical - and of course, banned at the time of it’s release for being too, ahem…liberating for the masses?

Jonathan Rosenbaum from 2001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Surely one of the most exhilarating, stylistic and psychedelic cinematic explosions of the 1960’s, Vera Chytilová’s DAISIES is a madcap and aggressive feminist farce that explodes in any number of directions. Although many American and Western European filmmakers during this period prided themselves on their subversiveness, it is possible that the most radical film of the decade, ideologically as well as formally, came from the East – from the liberating ferment building toward the short-lived political reforms of 1968’s Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.

Featuring two uninhibited 17-year-olds named Marie (Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová) – whose various escapades , which add up less to a plot than to a string of outrageous set pieces, include several antiphallic gags (such as slicing up cucumbers or bananas), a penchant for exploiting dirty old men, and a free-for-all with fancy food (rivaling Laurel and Hardy) that got Chytilová in trouble with the authorities. This disturbing yet liberating tour de force shows what this talented director can do with freedom. A major influence on Jacques Rivette’s CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, DAISIES is chock-full of female giggling, which might be interpreted in context as what critic Ruby Rich has called the laughter of Medusa: Subversive, bracing, energizing, and rather off-putting (if challenging) to most male spectators.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Anne Orchier

Vera Chytilová's films have earned her acolytes and enemies at an equal rate--particularly DAISIES, an anarchic, poetic, visually exhilarating film lacking in any affirmation whatsoever. In more recent years, it has cemented Chytilová's stature as an avant-garde genius, a feminist icon, and a major influence behind films such as CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING and MULHOLLAND DRIVE. In the period immediately following its release, Chytilová was marked as both a dangerous dissident (by the Czechoslovak government, who unofficially blacklisted her) and a political traitor to the Left (by Godard, who made her the central figure of his anti-Soviet/Czechoslovak documentary PRAVDA). During one of the first screenings of her work in France, audience members walked out, complaining that "they shouldn't make that kind of film. It undermines people's faith in socialism. If that is the way it really is, then none of it is worth it at all." DAISIES leads with exactly this kind of "objectionable" nihilism, opening with the two protagonists deciding that "the world is spoiled; we'll be spoiled, too." These two teenage girls, both named Marie, spend the rest of the film on a hedonistic rampage of consumption and destruction, in no particular order, culminating in a banquet scene that merges both tendencies to an apocalyptic conclusion. Marie and Marie do everything that decent women shouldn't (cheat, steal, make messes, advertise casual sex without following through, overeat, etc)--and care about precisely nothing. They speak in nonsensical, non sequitur dialogue that seems like it could have been randomly generated ("Why say 'I love you?' Why not just 'an egg?'"), but was actually carefully curated by Chytilová to serve as "the guardian of meaning" for her "philosophical documentary." During production, the only thing that she insisted remained untouched was the original script; everything else was up for grabs. Her production team took full advantage of this freedom in depicting the Maries' nihilistic spree, resulting in a surreal and stunning display of meaningless excess at every turn. Most notably, Jaroslav Kucera, the film's cinematographer (and Chytilová's husband), shot the film as one of his famous "colour experiments," and Ester Krumbachová, the film's costumer, styled the Maries in trendy mod bikinis and minidresses as often as elaborate sculptural outfits made from newspaper and loose wires.

DAISIES Virginie Sélavy from Electric Sheep

Two young women in their bathing suits sit listlessly by a pool, overcome by the alienation and apathy frequently observed in the youth of 60s European cinema. They move in jerky doll fashion, each gesture accompanied by creaking noises that emphasise the metaphor. After a brief philosophical exchange on the state of things, they conclude that, as the world has become bad and corrupt, they shall be bad too. What follows is a string of joyous anarchic pranks in which Marie I and Marie II eat, drink, smoke, mock, play with and destroy everything they can lay their hands on.

Given the central characters’ rebellious streak and their mischievous manipulation of men, the film has often been seen as feminist. The two Maries certainly do not conform to traditional expectations of femininity: they gleefully stuff their faces, fool around and fall over disgracefully or uninhibitedly take their clothes off. They display a total lack of interest in romance, ignoring a lover’s maudlin, clichéd pleas, all of which feels like a refreshingly truthful and satisfying representation of women. But their insubordination is not just an act of female resistance against patriarchal society: Vera Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) is more Dada than women’s lib, and the two Maries are above all non-conformist individuals, outsiders to the grinding machinery of society. Echoing Tristan Tzara et al responding to the madness of the First World War by retreating to Zürich to conduct turbulent artistic experiments, the girls’ bad behaviour is a direct response to the state of the world. This is emphasised by the stylised images of explosions that open and close the film, circumscribing the girls’ escapades within references to war. The resonance is made all the stronger by the film’s avant-garde style, the interest in visual experimentation, the sonic and graphic play with words, the non-sensical narrative and the delectable juvenile humour.

According to the accompanying booklet written by Peter Hames, the moral message of the film, as well as Chytilová’s own position in relation to her protagonists, are the subjects of some debate, with various commentators arguing that the director originally intended the film to be a critique of the girls’ behaviour. After the final scene of Dionysiac excess during which they ravage a richly laid out banquet hall, the two Maries, under threat of death, are forced to promise that they will now be good. But as they go about clearing the mess they’ve made, they do so in a manner that is entirely subversive, scraping cake off the floor before piling the revolting mush back onto dishes, or arranging fragments of broken plates and glasses in a mockery of the elegant table they ruined. In spite of their repeated assertions that they are ‘good’ and will work hard, order is not restored, and under the pretence of compliance the girls are still agents of chaos and destruction.

This final scene has been read in many different ways, with some critics seeing in it the failure of the girls’ revolt, and others a deserved punishment for their behaviour. Whatever Chytilová’s original intentions may have been, it is undeniable that the film delights in the characters’ total freedom; their anarchic spirit proves irresistibly infectious, and the same playfulness and irreverence infuse the direction. The corruption of the world is what liberates the girls from the social norm, and this liberation from convention, whether filmic or social, unleashes an enormous amount of energy, both creative and destructive. This, more crucially than anything else in the film, is profoundly Dada. The voracious embrace of absolute freedom, and of the chaos that inevitably comes with it, is what makes Daisies so thoroughly energising and joyously inspiring.

FRUIT OF PARADISE (Ovoce stromu rajských jíme) A- 94

Czechoslovakia Belgium (99 mi) 1970

An avante-garde, highly stylized and somewhat incomprehensible Adam and Eve story, perhaps about the unequal struggle between a man and a woman, and how Eve was not allowed back into Eden. Reminding me of the Guy Maddin style, filmed as if in the silent era, with operatic, ballet-like exaggerations. Opening with a wordless, truly splendid, delightfully experimental collage of Eden, mixing animation over naked bodies, I loved the performance by the incredibly naïve Eve, Jitka Novákova, again, powerful use of music, color, and narration.

PREFAB STORY (aka: PANEL STORY) (Panelstory aneb Jak se rodí sídliste) B 88

Czechoslovakia (96 mi) 1980

More stunning visuals with the camera actually changing the lens within the same shot, creating a fluidity of motion, also another wordless opening, about a monstrous, perpetually unfinished, housing complex and the zany residents who reside within. The mood and tone was more of the same of Chytilová’s previous works, with moments of exaggeration and over-acting hysteria, so I found this film less inventive, but spotty, with some hilarious sequences, showing the difficulty under the socialist regime to demonstrate individuality or free will without disastrous consequences.

WOLF CHALET (Vlci bouda) A- 93

Czechoslovakia (92 mi) 1987

This is one of the great midnight creep features, unlike anything else you’ve ever seen before, wonderful camp in the hands of someone who obviously understands and appreciates the teen terror genre. This film covers all the bases, a psychological, sci-fi, horror film featuring aliens who love to franticly frolic in the snow, who kidnap a group of ski students on the guise of offering exclusive, private ski instructions, but lo and behold, they are trapped at the wolf chalet and no one can leave alive until they name one amongst them to be killed and left behind with the aliens as a human sacrifice, causing quite a group stir, but as always, this film is actually about something altogether different, like the psychological community pressure that each individual must endure in order to survive under the madness of a totalitarian government.

TAINTED HORSEPLAY (Kopytem sem, kopytem tam) B- 82

aka: A Hoof Here, A Hoof There

Czechoslovakia (133 mi) 1989

Theater of the absurd, using several plays within the play, describing the lives of a group of care-free young professionals in the vein of LA BOHEME who lead rather outgoing lives of gaiety and freewheeling promiscuity until late in the film when a few are diagnosed with AIDS, the consequences of which are nearly impossible for them to fathom, both the afflicted as well as those who remain virus free. This film apparently demonstrates what the Czech government was afraid of when banning DAISIES, too much liberation leads to social consequences, again, expressed using a very exaggerated, dramatic style, leading to moments of over the top hysteria akin to watching vampire films, which are both humorous, but also accurately reflects how people view this disease.

Cianfrance, Derek

BLUE VALENTINE C+ 79

USA (114 mi) 2010

According to IMDb trivia, the film was originally set to shoot in spring of 2008, but was delayed due to Heath Ledger’s death. The producers and director delayed the film out of respect for Michelle Williams, Ledger's ex-girlfriend and mother of his daughter Matilda, rather than going ahead and shooting the film with another actress in Michelle's role. This felt more like a sketch, like it was incomplete scenes from an actor's workshop, as if they were still working on it by the time they filmed it because it never feels like they got it right. Sometimes you can spend too much time on a project. In this case, the director (and who is he anyway?) had been working to get this film made on and off for 12 years, Michelle Williams for six, and Ryan Gosling for four years. So one gets the feeling that what was missing was any feeling of immediacy or fresh insight. By the time it was captured onscreen, this all felt like old news. Part of the problem is the choice to make both characters so ordinary, so everyday and typically like you and me, that in the end "neither" of the two characters is very interesting and never once is there an epiphany moment that one could essentially call "moving." In a drama, you need drama. By the end of this movie I couldn't wait to get out of the theater as it was that unpleasant an experience - - and so predictable that I wasn't even watching the screen anymore as they simply weren't finding new territory, instead retreading the same grounds. There's more energy in the end credit sequence than there is anywhere else in the entire film. There's nothing wrong with either Gosling or Williams, this just feels poorly written and poorly directed, as there should be some emotional connection with the audience.

This feels like a throwback to a different era of filmmaking, perhaps Cassavetes making SHADOWS in 1959, a time when this kind of raw, emotional intimacy onscreen contrasted against the more conventional mainstream epics that passed for movies, where characters rarely revealed emotional truth on any kind of a regular basis, where Sirkian exaggeration of the 1950’s through melodramatic hysteria subverted and disguised what was really emotional conformity of the era. With counterculture films like BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967), FIVE EASY PIECES (1970) and THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (1972), they began to question just what moviemaking was all about, where overly confessional characters could spend the entire movie in turmoil searching for that inner truth that has evaded them. Over time, action features became less important to leading performances, replaced by indie films sending cameras in search of more soulful representations of our lives, where Terrence Malick and David Gordon Green seemed destined to reduce scenes of our lives to cinematic poetry and art. In their films, life’s realism is presented so thoroughly and without artifice so that the inner lives onscreen blossomed and became the focus of character development. In this manner, film became the cinematic expression for emotional realism, which is what indie films were really searching for in the first place. All of which leads us to this film, lauded by some for revealing such raw emotional truths in the performances of the two lead characters, whose lives are exposed and then literally ripped apart before our eyes, showing only the initial romantic surge told out of time, mixed and interspersed with the falling out of a horrible marriage. From the viewer’s standpoint, it feels like a sadistic exhibition, the manipulations of a slasher film, a grotesque example of WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF (1966) when placed in the wrong director’s hands, as the abusive Edward Albee language and incendiary emotional fireworks desperately need the human context of what seems on the surface to be a successful marriage, when the claustrophobia of exposed nerves and routine patterns of failed intimacy begin to open wounds of inner rage and disgust. We’re entering Tennessee Williams territory of sexually repressed and dysfunctional relationships that pretend for all the world to see as if nothing is wrong.

What’s missing in this film is any sense of theatricality, the interplay of characters, where the audience develops a sense for the people depicted onscreen. Because the editing is all chopped up and spit out in disconnected pieces, the audience sees the aftereffects of the drama, but not the drama itself. The focus of the story centers around a married couple on the rocks, Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling), where from the outset the audience can sense Dean freely speaks his mind while Cindy doesn’t, as she’s caught up in a motherly role of exclusively doing for others, remaining busy to such an extent that she has no time and no life for herself, which includes any intimacy with her husband, where there is apparently a wall between them that is crushing her, but Dean hasn’t a clue and needs everything explained to him. Throughout the film he is continually peppering her with questions about what she’s thinking and why, always changing the focus to her, never acknowledging any wrongdoing on his part, always the innocent one placing the blame and the burden on her shoulders, which is a weight she eventually can’t carry anymore. Dean, however, acts like this is all news to him, as if he’s been on another planet, that somehow the enormity of her unhappiness has escaped him. Again, what’s missing in this marital deconstruction is theatrical urgency, as it’s missing the eloquence of direction and structured writing. Instead, much of this feels flatly improvised, where they seem to rely upon repetitious language and similar fallback positions, never really accumulating any power of drama. The camera is raw and in-your-face, featuring close ups that fill the entire screen, shot on Super 16 mm and Digital giving it a seedy, grainy look that is absent any natural color, but the dialogue and nudity are too tame and the audience has difficulty developing a connection or even an interest in these characters who are simply not memorable, instead they come and they go all too quickly, in the end actually becoming forgettable. Perhaps we’ll remember the song, “You and Me” by Penny and the Quarters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvAQ2Q4zKro (3:06).

Time Out New York [Joshua Rothkopf]

Thanks to its modish nested chronologies, you know where locally shot Blue Valentine is headed, but that doesn't make the trip there less harrowing. Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play two halves of a failing couple — she a middle-class wannabe nurse, he a mover and house-painter whose greatest aspiration is to care for his wife and daughter. Writer-director Derek Cianfrance doesn't spare either character from the camera's penetrating gaze, and steers clear of easy — and arguably any — explanation for their marriage's disintegration. The movie's observational approach flirts with superficiality, but Williams and Gosling bring every emotion close to the skin.

Blue Valentine - Film - Time Out Sydney Sarah Cohen

A beautifully shot, and stunningly acted virtual two-hander starring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling as a couple who married too young and are facing the fall-out. The film flows between flashbacks shot on 16mm of the relationship’s early days and digital footage of their heartbreaking present situation, and the visual contrast elegantly conveys how falling in and out of love can dramatically change the way the world looks. The story is slight – and as old as the hills – but writer-director Derek Cianfrance applies intelligence, authenticity and originality to every detail, from the space-themed hotel room where the couple go for a last-ditch romantic getaway to the Grizzly Bear-scored soundtrack.

Blue Valentine: movie review - CSMonitor.com Peter Rainer

Watching two of our best young actors go at it for almost two hours ought to be more rewarding than “Blue Valentine,” starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as Dean and Cindy, a couple falling out and in and in and out of love.

Director and coscreenwriter Derek Cianfrance traces the rocky terrain of their relationship from coy courtship to marriage, a daughter, and nothingness. Dean is a charming working-class lout while Cindy, a college grad, works in a doctor’s office and pines for a better life.

The film’s time structure is splintered into shards of past and present, which is probably just as well – a strictly narrative chronology would make this wallow seem even sloggier. Grade: C (Rated R for strong graphic sexual content, language, and a beating.)

We visit three different places and times in Derek Cianfrance’s extraordinary—and extraordinarily sad—relationship drama. One of them is the unnamed Pennsylvania suburb that’s home to a slackening hipster family: scruffy house painter Dean (Gosling); his medical-technician wife, Cindy (Williams); and their four-year-old daughter, Frankie (Wladyka). The second place, toggled to with a sharp sense of rhythm, is Brooklyn, a handful of years (and pounds) earlier. The two young adults are in happier, blurrier days, meeting cute, flirting on the street and rising, uncertainly, to the occasion of an unplanned pregnancy. The third place, a kind of purgatory, is a motel’s space-themed “future” suite, like some cheap-ass version of Tron: Legacy, in which the older-aged characters lamely try to reconnect. They drink themselves into a stupor.

Blue Valentine has a quiet, resigned wisdom to it: the clear-eyed perspective of a love affair borne aloft by ukulele strumming and weighed down by the realities of money, jobs and disenchantment. It’s truly a shame that, thanks to the NC-17 brouhaha, most people will be coming to it wondering how sweaty the sex scenes are. (They serve the story; let’s leave it at that.) Something more worth shouting about: a magnificent performance by Ryan Gosling, spinning his boyish charm into a daringly unkempt chubby hubby turned insecure. Michelle Williams, in perfect sync, has the tougher role, the cryptically impatient mom internalizing her dissatisfaction. It’s a quieter turn and less of a knockout, but both of them do some of the finest American interplay of the year, developed over months of improv. If you care about the integrity of independent cinema, you’ll steel your heart and go.

Blue Valentine | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Nathan Rabin

Derek Cianfrance’s relationship drama Blue Valentine conducts a harsh, unblinking autopsy on the doomed marriage of Ryan Gosling, a heavy-drinking slacker much too comfortable with his complete lack of ambition, and Michelle Williams, a practical wife who comes to the bitter realization that she needs to grow old with a man, not a boy, no matter how impishly charming the boy might be. It’s an emotionally claustrophobic drama, played with frayed nerves and raw emotions, and it serves as an unrelenting glimpse into relationship hell. It could easily have devolved into sweaty, pretentious melodrama or ersatz John Cassavetes if Cianfrance and his actors didn’t maintain perfect control over the material.

In the latest of a long string of astonishing, frighteningly committed performances, Williams stars as a nurse who falls for amiable loser Gosling in spite of herself. She’s initially able to look past his rudderless existence, but ultimately tires of waiting for the man-child she married to grow up. For Gosling, Williams is his soulmate, his everything; for Williams, Gosling is good enough until he isn’t. That imbalance proves fatal. As the couple’s relationship reaches a debilitating end game, Cianfrance cuts back and forth between the agonizing finale and the dreamy, romantic beginning, to devastating emotional effect.

Blue Valentine plays like a warped reverse-highlight reel of the most painful moments in a dying relationship: It has the sting and sadness of real life. The effect is powerful, yet strangely not overwhelming. Even at its most intense, Blue Valentine never lapses into melodrama. The film made headlines when it was rather ridiculously saddled with a now-rescinded NC-17 for an “emotionally intense sex scene.” Though it wasn’t designed as such, the NC-17 is still considered a mark of shame to many, but Blue Valentine’s fearless candor and extreme emotional intensity should be a source of pride for everyone involved in this remarkable, utterly wrenching film.

Combustible Celluloid film review - Blue Valentine (2010), Derek ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine is the kind of movie that John Cassavetes may have dreamt about. It's a mature work for mature audiences, and it doesn't particularly care if teen boys are interested. It's focused on characters and behavior rather than plot. Even more importantly, it's not entirely focused on characters, but also conjures up a kind of visual scheme, or else, why make a movie at all when a play would be much cheaper?

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams star as Dean and Cindy. We see them during two periods of their lives, when the meet and marry, and then about five years later when their marriage begins to crumble. The film flashes back and forth between the two times. During the first, Cindy is unsure of herself, and has been known to let a heartless jock called Bobby (Mike Vogel) paw at her body. Dean gets a job as a mover, and while helping an old man relocate into a home, he spots Cindy and falls madly in love with her.

I won't go any further here, but suffice to say that Cindy is less sure of her love than Dean is. She's perhaps looking for comfort, security, and safety, not to mention that she's probably happy that someone loves her. Five years later, Dean and Cindy have a chance to spend the night together alone while Cindy's father watches their daughter. Dean decides to check them into a sex hotel, into the "future room," where everything is covered in silver cloth and red buttons. Unfortunately, there isn't much future here, either figuratively or literally. They drink too much and Cindy leaves early, called to work in her job as a nurse.

Simple plot details don't do justice to the richness of this film, though. Its strength comes in the pure nakedness and comfort the actors share with one another, and even sex here is matter-of-fact (the film initially received an NC-17 rating, which was happily changed with no cutting involved). The actors handle the two time periods masterfully, registering subtle shades of dissatisfaction and maturity, though Williams fares slightly better than Gosling, who relies on hair and makeup to differentiate his two ages. (Gosling is also brave enough to allow his most charming little tics to grow more aggravating in his older half.) None of this is packaged as anything like true romance. Their meet-cute scene -- with a ukulele and tap-dancing no less -- is a little on the pathetic side, and the ending is gnashing and painful, but direct and honest. (Williams and Gosling co-produced the film and apparently rehearsed and improvised extensively before shooting.)

Blue Valentine also has the courage to leave out bits and pieces of exposition, just as the middle five years is left out of this marriage. Images, such as the little girl searching for someone, a pet, in a field, take on a new resonance because of this out-of-time quality. These are the kinds of things that happen slowly, when we're not looking, or just when we think we've grown comfortable. It's not the kind of thing a movie can show in a scene or two. (The theme song is "You Always Hurt the One You Love.") This is a very strong movie, a terrific movie, but approach it at your own risk. I'm glad I saw it, but I don't think I'd like to see it again.

Review: Blue Valentine Gerald Peary from The Boston Phoenix

Look to the sky above Scranton, Pennsylvania. There's a rainbow nestling among the downtown buildings as, below, a city bus crosses in traffic. Can we assume it's conferring a benediction on the young man and woman who, moments later, meet adorably on that very bus and, despite her suspicions, embark on a torrid romance? He's Dean (Ryan Gosling), a blue-collar furniture mover with a goofy charm, a wide-eyed sentimentalism, and a disarming belief in love at first sight. She's Cindy (Michelle Williams), a tough-minded college student who, though thinking ahead to medical school, becomes fatally distracted by this ukulele-strumming suitor, a high-school dropout.

What we're seeing is time past in Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine. There, in a stream of flashbacks, Dean's giddy romanticism somehow triumphs. Cindy, who is pregnant by another, a boneheaded college wrestler (Mike Vogel), climbs off the doctor's table where she's gone for an abortion. She's going to keep the baby and marry Dean.

There's a second bus scene: they hug in a back seat, and he declares, "Let's be a family." But there's no rainbow this time. And a few years down the connubial road, we find love evaporated, a marriage curdled, and two lost souls with a child, Frankie (Faith Wladyka), to deal with.

In many films, it's the past that poisons the present. Blue Valentine works differently. It's the terrible present, Dean and Cindy's wrecked marriage, that makes the poignant, tender, nostalgic flashbacks seem so deluded. It's the present that also may freak out moviegoers. Blue Valentine is so nervy, so "real," that it poses a dire threat. Dean and Cindy are such decent folks. How do we know what happens to them couldn't happen to us?

So what's wrong here? Nobody has cheated, or been abusive. Both honor their daughter. There's nothing dramatic. It's mostly the oppressive everyday. Why does Cindy feed little Frankie instant oatmeal? Why doesn't Dean take out the garbage? Why does Cindy start a conversation with an old boyfriend? Why doesn't Dean have more ambition?

But one of the two is the more obviously unhappy: Cindy. She never became a doctor. She's just a nurse. Her Chekhovian life: "Been here, stayed here, never left here." Self-hating, she's sickened by Dean also. He's still the man she married, but everything he says and does makes her cringe.

Much has been written about the 12 years it took to make Blue Valentine — the 66 drafts of the screenplay, the obsessive artistry of writer/director Cianfrance, and the commitment of the lead actors, who also are executive producers. Well, it was worth it. Cianfrance is a major new talent in the John Cassavetes mold.

What's more, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams deliver the most nakedly courageous performances of 2010. They are great!

Everything climaxes at a "theme room" sex motel. Our protagonists go there, at Dean's urging, to salvage their marriage. It's a blue-lit ersatz space station where, with its revolving bed, they struggle to have an erotic night. Instead, they drink too much and talk hatefully. Again, it's frightening and threatening for the movie audience to be so intimately present when Cindy laughs scornfully at her husband's aspirations. And when a proud Dean refuses his wife's desperate request for rough sex, it's clear their marital intercourse has lost its punch.

David Edelstein on 'Blue Valentine,' 'Another Year,' and ... New York magazine

Blue Valentine, with Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, reviewed ... Love Among the Ruins, by Dana Stevens from Slate

The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]

Stephanie Zacharek | Movieline

The Village Voice [Karina Longworth]

Filmcritic.com Sean O’Connell

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] also interviewing Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling

In 'Blue Valentine,' A Romance In Shades Of Rue Scott Tobias from NPR

Review: Blue Valentine - JoBlo.com Chris Bumbray

Time [Mary Pols]

Screen Rant [Kofi Outlaw]

Film School Rejects [Neil Miller] at Sundance

IFC.com [Alison Willmore]

SBS Film [Peter Galvin]

eFilmCritic Reviews Brian Orndorf

Film review – Blue Valentine (2010) « Cinema Autopsy Thomas Caldwell

Cannes Movie Review: Blue Valentine (2010) – RopeofSilicon.com ... at Cannes

Movie Review - Blue Valentine - www.ericdsnider.com - The Official ... Eric Snider

Slant Magazine [Paul Brunick]

Quiet Earth [Marina Antunes]

Shadows on the Wall | Blue Valentine Rich Cline

A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity [Adam Lippe]

FirstShowing.net [Brandon Tenney] at Sundance

Twitch [Greg Christie]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson] at Austin

ReelTalk [Betty Jo Tucker] Love On the Rocks

Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]

Sundance Review: Blue Valentine - The Moviefone Blog Kevin Kelly, also an interview with Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams and Derek Cianfrance right here

Blue Valentine — Inside Movies Since 1920 Ray Greene from Box Office magazine

BLUE VALENTINE - ShowReview Frank Swietek from One Guy’s Opinion

Blue Valentine - DAILY FILM DOSE: A Daily Film Appreciation and ... Alan Bacchus

Film-Forward.com Yana Litovsky

The Reel Bits [Sarah Ward]

The House Next Door [Matt Noller] at Cannes

Blue Valentine | Review | Screen Tim Grierson from Screendaily

hoopla.nu [Stuart Wilson]

FirstShowing.net [Alex Billington] at Sundance

exclaim! [Christine Estima]

The Hollywood Reporter [Duane Byrge]

Blue Valentine | Movies | EW.com Owen Gleiberman

Variety Reviews - Blue Valentine - Film Reviews - - Review by Todd ... Todd McCarthy

Blue Valentine Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun, also a January 7, 2011 interview with actress Michelle Williams here: Waking up with Michelle Williams

Blue Valentine: A beautiful portrait of a doomed marriage - The ... Rick Groen from The Globe and the Mail

Cannes Film Festival 2010: Blue-Valentine, review - Telegraph Sukhdev Sandhu at Cannes

'Blue Valentine': Portrait of a relationship's ups and downs ... Steven Rea from The Philadelphia Inquirer

Blue Valentine movie review -- Blue Valentine showtimes - The ... Wesley Morris from The Boston Globe

Movie review: 'Blue Valentine' - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] January 5, 2011

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] at Sundance, January 30, 2010

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott, December 28, 2010

A Marriage’s Death, and Post-Mortem Dennis Lim from The New York Times, December 22, 2010, where the director discssues a scene on Video (2:40): Anatomy of a Scene: 'Blue Valentine'

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES B 89

USA (140 mi) 2012 ‘Scope

This is a major improvement over his initial film, BLUE VALENTINE (2010), which despite major stars and critical accolades, and the potential to be so much more, felt overwritten, poorly directed, and badly edited, feeling more like a sketch of what it wanted to be, loosely improvised, never developing any real dramatic impact and ultimately failing to connect with the audience. This is a peculiar follow-up piece, which at times resembles an overwrought literary melodrama, but continues to surprise by elongating the story, by going places few films ever dare to venture. The epic nature and novelesque reach of the film is impressive, even when it often appears to be a trainwreck about to happen. Like Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960), it’s a shock to see such a prominent character killed off so quickly, where initially the viewer tends to wrap things up in their heads, preparing for the inevitable finale, but it simply moves ahead in a completely different direction. It plays out as if there were chapter headings, where the film is divided into separate biographical segments, but none match the intensity of the opening, featuring Ryan Gosling as daredevil motorcycle rider Luke Glanton, an over-the-edge carnival rider who continually has to get amped up before his daring performances before the public, entering a steel circular cage where three riders zig zag around a globe at full tilt, often defying gravity, as they circumnavigate their way through a blur of nonstop motion. As he travels the circuit, he moves from town to town, never taking root, drifting aimlessly for years, where he runs into an old flame, Romina (Eva Mendes), but despite a few sparks, nothing materializes, as he’s leaving town the next day. Through a few plot contrivances, he discovers she’s kept a secret, a young two-year old boy, claiming he was gone before she could ever tell him. For some inexplicable reason, Luke’s life, which has no boundaries or even definition, suddenly develops a focus around this little boy, as he wants to be a part of his life even though Romina already lives with a boyfriend.

While there’s a whirlwind of activity as Luke has to decide how to connect with a kid he doesn’t even know, his first step is to decide to stay in the Schenectady, New York region, where the Mohawk derivation of the city name explains the title and the region itself becomes a mysterious connecting link to the story. Luke meets a fellow biker, Robin (Ben Mendelsohn), who runs a dilapidated garage outside of town, offering him a near uninhabitable trailer as a place to stay, where a couple of grease monkeys can tinker with their bikes. Robin, however, concocts an ingenious idea for how Luke can apply his skill set in supporting his son, by robbing banks. While these heist sequences are among the weakest in the entire movie, with Luke growing more reckless over time, the chase sequences afterwards are simply enthralling, where he diverts the police by pulling into the back of an awaiting truck. For a brief moment, in what amounts to an instant, Romina allows Luke the chance to be a father, but he quickly oversteps the boundaries, arriving whenever he feels like it and colliding into the lives of others, like a demolition derby driver, destroying anything that he can’t control. So much for subtlety, but it does speak to his unorthodox character, where he routinely crosses the line of criminal and morally unethical behavior, not exactly the right formula to express paternal interests. All his plans to be a provider backfire when his ambitious appetite for quick fix robberies suddenly catches up to him and the police have him cornered. In a strange and mysterious turn of events, the narrative attaches itself to a young police officer, Bradley Cooper as Avery Cross, the man who miraculously survives the violent shootout. While the intricate detail of the shifting storyline is interesting, and a daring narrative tactic, it lacks the immediacy and sense of urgency of the Gosling segment. But out of nowhere, it introduces us to Ray Liotta as a fellow police officer, immediately submerging the viewer into the moral ethics of Goodfellas (1990), where the Schenectady police force is a sewer of corruption. Like something out of a Bobcat Goldthwait depiction, the exaggerated satire of a guy lauded and uncomfortably paraded around town as a police hero is actually tarnished with his own stain of corruption, as among other things, he feels guilty for having killed the father of another young kid just about the same age as his own son.

Much like Luke, though from a completely different socio economic background, Avery chooses the fast track of career advancement, joining the district attorney’s office, where his personal ambition takes a toll on his marriage, jumping ahead fifteen years later where we see the changing focus on his over privileged and smugly arrogant son, Emory Cohen as AJ, who by accident or design seeks out Dane DeHaan as Jason, the surviving son of Luke Glanton, whose mother has told him nothing about his father, which only makes him more curious as he gets older. But the budding friendship of these two, uncomfortable to say the least, is a completely manipulative relationship where AJ places pressure on Jason to provide ecstasy pills and other illicit drugs. Why he succumbs, no one knows, as he appears to have little or nothing to gain, as AJ is little more than a spoiled, pampered and overly obnoxious bully pretending to be some kind of cool hip cat, but he’s just another bratty rich kid who gets away with murder by having well influenced parents. As his behavior veers more out of control, he continues to suck the life out of Jason, who doesn’t realize the connection between the two fathers until it’s too late, finally realizing he’s been duped all along. While the film attempts to suggest the sins of the fathers weigh upon the damaged and broken lives of the teenage boys, reconnecting back to the original story by means of exploring various other subplots, this is reminiscent of a long line of interconnected movies, the most infamous being the phony and completely pretentious Paul Haggis, karma oriented CRASH (2004), or Guillermo Arriaga’s interweaving sagas for Alejando González Iñárritu. Yet this somehow feels different, emptier, more spacious, less defined, where the memory of the past has a haunting power over the present, where characters are actually connected in ways they barely understand themselves, and however improbable, becomes highly impactful by the end with a terrific blend of poetic interior moods, beautifully established by the music of Arvo Pärt, and the gorgeous upstate New York visualizations by Sean Bobbitt. The heavily impressionistic mosaic actually works as an extended atmospheric piece, held together by the power of the performances and deft direction that allows a richly textured mood to prevail over all the slowly developing narrative landscapes.

The Place Beyond the Pines: movie review | review ... - Time Out Josh Rothkopf from Time Out New York

You’re not going to learn it from the movie itself, but the poetic title of Derek Cianfrance’s latest is an English translation for Schenectady, the Mohawk-derived name for the New York town where it’s set. That’s a clue: For what’s basically a grubby sins-of-the-father story, the mood here is grander than expected—mythic, portentous and likably heavy, even in its overreach. We start in Dardenne-brothers territory, as a mysterious, tattooed carnival stunt biker (Ryan Gosling) awakens to his status as a father, bailing on the circus to provide for his infant son by robbing banks. We’re too close to Drive to see this performance as anything special, but when Suicide’s “Che” churns to life on the soundtrack and Gosling peels out, there are thrills to be had.

Cianfrance has too much love for this blond Robin Hood to judge him all that harshly, and just as our hero is cornered by the law, we’re asked to switch allegiance to the “hero cop” (Bradley Cooper) who enters the tale, also a young parent and surrounded by bad influences. (In his case, it’s a corrupt precinct dominated by the ever-menacing Ray Liotta.) The shift feels like whiplash—another one’s in store, when we jump 15 years ahead to see the fates of the two kids—and there’s a distinct feeling that the movie is trapped in its own pop psychology. Yet after the actorcentric fireworks of Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine (2010), it’s impressive to see him going after a wider sociopolitical scope, one that would have been better served by a less repetitive structure. Even if the place beyond the pines is just Schenectady, the ambition will lead to higher ground.

The Place Beyond The Pines | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Nathan Rabin

Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine was defined by an almost unbearable intimacy, an eagerness to plumb deep into the most wrenching emotions of a doomed romance, captured with raw candor and honesty. The Place Beyond The Pines, Cianfrance’s remarkable but overreaching follow-up, initially shares those qualities, as well as another riveting star turn from Ryan Gosling, who lends his soulful trick motorcycle rider turned outlaw antihero the minimalist magnetism of a young Steve McQueen. Few actors are as riveting doing absolutely nothing, and The Place Beyond The Pines perfectly typecasts Gosling as a noir staple: the decent but rudderless drifter driven to violent and desperate action. To the film’s credit, it’s damn near impossible to imagine where The Place Beyond The Pines will end based on where it begins, even though its ever-widening scope causes it to lose some of the grubby intensity of its early scenes.

Gosling’s life is a neon blur of highways, carnival tents, shitty diner food, and one-night stands before he re-encounters pretty single mom Eva Mendes during a small-town stop and must wrestle with the unexpected but hardly shocking consequences of their brief fling years earlier. The previously directionless Gosling suddenly has something to live for, but his desperate attempts to provide for his new family lead him into a charged encounter with a well-born lawman (Bradley Cooper) that has dramatic ramifications on both men’s lives—which in turn ricochet through the lives of their families as well.

It’s tricky to do justice to the ambition and vision of The Place Beyond The Pines without giving away too much about its plot, since the time period, scope, and protagonists change with each act. The Place Beyond The Pines is never more compelling than in its first act, which has the succinct characterization and deft sense of time, place, and class of a first-rate, hard-boiled short story. As it gets more ambitious, the film’s take on its material grows less assured, though its unwieldiness as it moves toward its conclusion is largely a byproduct of its Herculean ambition. It begins as an assured character study and ends as an epic, but it’s best before it widens the frame.

The Place Beyond the Pines is an epic, foolish, hugely contrived melodrama that nonetheless hits with the force of a locomotive. It is Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up to Blue Valentine, but where that film was so organic, its pain so steeped in experience, that it barely felt like a movie, Pines is a screenwriter’s creation through and through – not quite Guillermo Arriaga-level schematic, but close. That it still connects so strongly is a testament to Cianfrance’s deft hand with grand gestures, big themes, and credible characterization. Try to imagine Crash as written and directed by James Gray and you might come close to conceptualizing this beguiling film.

It begins as a weird combo of The Wrestler and Drive, with Ryan Gosling as “Handsome Luke,” a stunt motorcyclist who takes to robbing banks after learning that he has a son by a sometime fling (Eva Mendes) and deciding that he needs to provide for his family. We spend a foreboding 45 minutes watching him try to make good by being bad, and it’s a perfect representation of the film’s odd appeal: the set-up is awfully lazy, bordering on ridiculous (Luke immediately gets a job from a weirdly over-eager mechanic, played by Ben Mendelsohn, and is told “You’re good at what you do but I can’t pay you more — wanna rob a bank?”), but Cianfrance plows through the contrivance with such confidence that he practically wills the film into taking on the weight of tragedy. It helps to have a quintessential Ryan Gosling performance as another mysterious, intensely unironic young man who’s always a furrowed brow away from a fearsome explosion of violence. It also helps to have generous heaps of raw talent at your disposal. The first act ends with a motorcycle chase that’s genuinely shocking in its no-CGI immediacy. And Cianfrance is good at slowly turning up the pressure until something has to blow, as in a scene where Gosling passive-aggressively (and then aggressively) confronts Eva Mendes’ new boyfriend.

Later, other characters edge Handsome Luke out of the spotlight, and the film becomes one of those sprawling multi-generational tableaus with the characters’ fates intertwining, sons following in the footsteps of their fathers, and the screenwriter’s chosen themes weaving through all of their lives just so. It shouldn’t work, but Cianfrance and the actors sell the shit out of it: my biggest takeaway from The Place Beyond the Pines has to do with the power of avoiding sentimentality – or just hinting at it – in situations that seem to beg for it. This is the stuff of soap opera, but the emotional beats come in quick, powerful jabs (what Luke says on the phone after barricading himself in a stranger’s bedroom) or faint callbacks to something introduced earlier (Dane DeHaan’s character eating ice cream with his stepfather). Bradley Cooper plays a police officer with a wrenching ethical dilemma, but the way he deals with it is the opposite of what you might see coming, denying us the emotional payoff that most filmmakers would consider our due. Late in the film there’s an extraordinary performance from a young actor named Emory Cohen that is stunningly convincing without regard for likability, in a role that we’d otherwise expect to tug at our heartstrings. Cianfrance is so careful in weaving his weird tapestry that when he does get to a bona fide Big Moment in the final shot, it’s a very serious punch in the gut despite being something one might consider hopelessly hackneyed out of context.

And for all the improbable coincidence in which The Place Beyond the Pines traffics, it’s not a film about fate or karma or “connection” any of the other mystical or political bullshit we might get from Arriaga or Haggis or Inarritu, or any of the other usual practitioners of this sort of film. It’s a mournful meditation on how we affect the lives of others, and how we’re shaped in very real, very direct ways by where we come from and how we’re treated. The Place Beyond the Pines feels at once kind of ridiculous and entirely true. The ability to create something with those qualities is rare and should be treasured.

'The Place Beyond the Pines': Fathers, Sons, Motorbikes | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Ryan Gosling Is Your Trailer Park Prince Valiant in ... - Village Voice Scott Foundas

The Place Beyond the Pines : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Jamie S. Rich

Paste Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]

“The Place Beyond the Pines”: Almost a great American ... - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

Place Beyond the Pines, The - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

ReelTalk [Frank Wilkins]

Film-Forward.com [Jack Gattanella]

MonstersandCritics [Ron Wilkinson]

Review: 'The Place Beyond The Pines' A Searing Tale Of Fathers ... Kevn Jagernauth from The Playlist

The Place Beyond the Pines starring Ryan Gosling ... - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens

The Place Beyond the Pines Review: Less Than Meets the ... - Pajiba Daniel Carlson

Sound On Sight Derin Spector

The Place Beyond the Pines: Three-Part Disharmony - TIME Mary Pols

The Place Beyond The Pines (2012) Movie Review from Eye for Film Ann-Katrin Titze

Electric Sheep Magazine [Pamela Jahn]

The Place Beyond the Pines - HitFix Gregory Ellwood

The Film Stage [Jared Mobarak]

theartsdesk.com [Emma Simmonds]

Film.com [Laremy Legal]

Georgia Straight [Patty Jones]

Movie Review - 'The Place Beyond The Pines' - Moody ... - NPR Mark Jenkins

Exclaim! [Scott A. Gray]

The Place Beyond the Pines | review, synopsis, book ... - Time Out Tom Huddleston

The Place Beyond the Pines – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

The Place Beyond the Pines – review Philip French from The Observer

Ann Hornaday reviews 'The Place Beyond the Pines' - Washington ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

10 things to know before you see “The Place ... - Washington Post Veronica Toney

Austin Chronicle [Leah Churner]

'The Place Beyond the Pines' review: While the plot ... - Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt

The Place Beyond the Pines Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Richard Roeper

The Place Beyond the Pines - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times Simon Abrams

The Place Beyond the Pines - Movies - The New York Times A.O. Scott

Cimino, Michael

TCMDB biography

Regardless of credits to come, it seems a safe bet that people will always associate Michael Cimino with two movies. The first, "The Deer Hunter" (1978), won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director and provided him with the clout to let his megalomania run amok filming the second. That unqualified disaster, "Heaven's Gate" (1980), was responsible for bringing down a troubled United Artists, a studio that had managed to endure from the glory days of Chaplin, Griffith, Pickford and Fairbanks.

A successful commercials director noted for his sophisticated camera work and arty filming techniques, Cimino relocated from NYC to L.A. in 1971 to pursue a career in features. He earned his first writing credit for co-scripting (with Deric Washburn and Steven Bochco) the Douglas Trumbull ecological sci-fi drama "Silent Running" (1971). His second, Ted Post's "Magnum Force" (1971), introduced Cimino to Clint Eastwood who agreed to play the lead in "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" (1974) and hired the writer to direct as well. Cimino's debut drew praise for its "attention to minor details and incidental characters," and earned Jeff Bridges a surprising Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Yet, amidst mostly glowing reviews, some critics deemed his impressive first effort somewhat lacking in control, an ominous portent of things to come.

On the strength of "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot", Cimino was able to interest EMI in an outline for a story about the Vietnam War that would become "The Deer Hunter". Serving as producer as well as director, he traveled 150,000 miles scouting the American locations alone, often accompanied by star Robert De Niro, studying the places and people that would become an integral part of the film. (Few professional actors apart from the principals appeared). Great performances by the cast, which included John Savage, Meryl Streep, John Cazale and Christopher Walken in an Oscar-winning turn, bolstered the script, and the movie, derided by many as racist and fascist, stirred audiences deeply and provoked intense discussion and controversy, particularly for its now infamous scenes of soldiers playing Russian roulette. Though complaints that he manipulated history ring true, Cimino was never striving for literal accuracy, and "The Deer Hunter" at three hours remains a work of great and disturbing cinematic power, a picture large enough to carry its defects.

"Heaven's Gate", however, gave new meaning to the word excess, and the miscasting of several principal roles was perhaps the least egregious of its unredeemable flaws. Cimino brought it in ridiculously over budget and excessively long (219 minutes), concentrating much attention and expense on the film's big set pieces and pointless, but beautifully choreographed, sequences. He further compounded the awfulness of his script with a totally unwarranted reverence. The narrative line was virtually non-existent, and the resultant series of unconnected, hopelessly confusing scenes was made worse by cacophonous background noises in Dolby which drowned out the actors' voices. Critics and audiences were in universal agreement as to the film's complete absence of merit, and United Artists immediately withdrew it from exhibition. An abbreviated version met with no greater success in 1981.

People remember Michael Cimino as the man who toppled a studio, so it is little wonder that he has worked intermittently since the fiasco of "Heaven's Gate". He abandoned whatever economy he practiced as a New York commercial director soon after arriving in Hollywood, and his later movies (including "Year of the Dragon" 1985, "The Sicilian" 1987 and "Sunchaser" 1996) have exhibited, albeit to a lesser degree, enough signs of his signature excess to deter the cautious soul from hiring him. No one could deny Cimino's directorial talent, but until he proves he can exercise a sense of proportion, mainstream Hollywood never again may take him seriously.

Film Reference profile by Robin Wood

All-Movie Guide bio from Hal Erickson

FilmForce Featured Filmmaker bio from Scott B.

Filmbug Profile short bio

Three Monkeys Online: An Encounter with Michael Cimino by Michael O’Connor, August, 2005

Cimino, Michael They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

THE DEER HUNTER

USA (182 mi) 1978 ‘Scope

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

This is probably one of the few great films of the decade. It's the tale of three Pennsylvanian steelworkers, their life at work, at play (deer-hunting), at war (as volunteers in Vietnam). Running against the grain of liberal guilt and substituting Fordian patriotism, it proposes De Niro as a Ulyssean hero tested to the limit by war. Moral imperatives replace historical analysis, social rituals become religious sacraments, and the sado-masochism of the central (male) love affair is icing on a Nietzschean cake. Ideally, though, it should prove as gruelling a test of its audience's moral and political conscience as it seems to have been for its makers.

The greatness that America claimed to be pursuing militarily in Vietnam was instead attained by talented young directors shining light on the abject hypocrisy involved. Perhaps the most intense film in cinematic history. The metaphors are powerful, and suitably subterranean for metaphor digger hounds, but when the drama is this heightened, the story so good, and the characters so brilliantly depicted metaphors are a bit extraneous. Meryl Streep is perfect, there's no one else who could portray a character at once so vulnerable and so strong, you just want to take her and hold her, she emotes so much character that it literally appears to be physical beauty to non-cerebral guys. This is the movie where Christopher Walken became Christopher Walken, somewhere in the second act. John Cazale is much more effective here as a bowling alley casanova than he was as Freddie in the Godfather II. Robert De Niro's also in it...playing impossible hybrid macho-sensitive scenes that would have you in the aisles laughing at any other actor. Here, you just want to hug him too, or better yet have Streep do so. Through the brilliant, horribly depicted war massacre of children scenes, grown men forced to play Russian roulette, prostitutes with their baby in the workroom, returning invalids that we knew as exuberant young men, through the blood and gore and hatred and waste and manipulation and extravagant disregard for humanity...somehow Michael Cimino highlights Joe Strnad as particularly grotesque with a flawless cameo as a bingo counter throwing out monotone free association including validation at a Veteran's Administration hospital. See, that's the problem with not livin' in Berkeley where there are educated people to tell you not to go. Fuckin A.

Turner Classic Movies Paul Sherman

The leap from a single-disc DVD to a "two-disc, all-new special edition" DVD is a tricky and dangerous one. The Deer Hunter, one of the first titles in Universal's Legacy Series of such discs, doesn't even come close to clearing that leap. It crashes and burns.

The first disc is great. If Universal hadn't been so grandiose and had just replaced the movie's 2002 no-frills DVD with this disc?containing Michael Cimino's powerful drama chronicling the effects of the Vietnam War on a group of friends from a Pennsylvania mining town, along with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond's new commentary-I would have nice things to say. But, no...the studio had to inflate the re-release to two discs, and the second is one of the flimsiest discs of bonuses anyone has ever dared to release. More on that later.

I imagine The Deer Hunter is grossly underseen by viewers who aren't old enough to have caught it during its 1978-79 theatrical run. But it's a rare movie because not only is it a big hit that's good, it's also a Best Picture Oscar®-winner that's good. Unfortunately, though, director Michael Cimino's reputation became seriously colored by the excess and the critical and commercial failure of his follow-up movie, Heaven's Gate. He hasn't made a movie in a decade, and anyone watching his accomplished work here has to wonder why. To many people, the infamous Heaven's Gate is the first movie to associate with the name Cimino, not The Deer Hunter. That's too bad because, first off, The Deer Hunter is an essential 1970s movie and, secondly, Heaven's Gate ain't so bad, either.

A few other things new arrivals to The Deer Hunter might want to know before sinking their teeth into Cimino's meaty, 3-hour drama:

Back in 1978, the presence of Robert DeNiro in a movie's cast was something special. After he made a name for himself in 1973's Bang the Drum Slowly and Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, he was very selective about who he worked with. He didn't do commercial movies for the money, as he often does now (i.e., Hide and Seek, Godsend). Between Mean Streets and 1984's Once Upon a Time in America, he was in only nine movies, three for Scorsese. There was still a mystique about him, and it rubs off on his character, Michael, the most self-reliant and "different" of the three buddies who head to Vietnam together.

Neither Christopher Walken, who plays another of those buddies, Nick, and Meryl Streep, who plays Nick's fiancee, were yet stars before The Deer Hunter. Neither was defined by our preconceptions about them, either. Rather than playing someone "special," Streep just plays an ordinary blue-collar young woman, conflicted by her attraction to both Nick and Michael. And rather than playing a wild-eyed, semi-comic character as he so often does now, Walken is all drama as Nick, and he nabbed an Academy Award for the tragic role.

John Cazale, who plays Stan, the lowest in the pecking order of Michael and Nick's larger group of mill-worker buddies, was perhaps the quintessential 1970s American New Wave actor. Dying from cancer while filming The Deer Hunter, he starred in five movies (the two Godfather films, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon and this) in which he portrayed the sort of weak, unglamorous characters Hollywood usually shies away from. He's a classic.

The brutal and controversial Russian roulette sequence, in which captured Michael, Nick and Stevie (John Savage) are forced to play the game while their Viet Cong captors bet on their performance, lasts 17 minutes long. Could a studio-pressured director get away with such a long sequence nowadays?

Of course, the Russian roulette sequence is just one of the amazing set pieces in the movie, including the opening action in the steel mill, Stevie's marriage in an elaborate Russian Orthodox ceremony, the buddies' first hunting trip and the fall of Saigon. The movie often depicts emotions that are just too painful for words for its characters, yet there's also humor and a lifelike range of moods. So disc one of the rerelease shows that The Deer Hunter still packs a punch, and it adds an entertaining and informative audio commentary by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Hired Hand, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), one of the definite good guys in movies.

But what of the second disc? There's only about 20 minutes of footage, plus some text screens of "production notes." Although the movie runs three hours, I assume the three-minute trailer and the text could fit on disc one. That makes the 17 minutes of so-called "deleted and extended scenes" the justification for the additional disc. But, save for one conversation between Michael and Nick, these "scenes" aren't scenes at all. There is nothing else in here that was ever meant to be a legitimate scene. Because these aren't scenes, they're takes. For instance, there?s footage of Savage as trapped Stevie, calling for Michael as an offscreen Cimino instructs him to do it louder, then louder still, and then has the crew turn on the rain machine so he can film Savage doing the same thing when it's raining. This is not a scene; it's just a group of footage for Cimino to have used as cut-ins, using however loud or wet a moment he wanted. The other "deleted" footage is similarly uninteresting. It's debatable whether it's even worth sitting though once.

The "deleted scenes" are simply too weak to be the only reason for the second disc. Of course, the question that then arises is: Where are the featurettes that appeared on The Deer Hunter's English DVD, including a Cimino interview? There's certainly room for them on this undernourished 2-disc release, which truly takes the special out of special edition.

DVD Times [Raphael Pour-Hashemi]

DVD Times [Eamonn McCusker]

Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US films Tim Dirks

eFilmCritic.com Slyder

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

eFilmCritic.com (Paul Bryant)

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio] - Legacy Series Edition

The Digital Bits Todd Doogan

filmcritic.com Mark Athitakis

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht)

Talking Pictures (UK) Lucinda Ireson

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson

Cinematheque [Paul Logan]

About.About.com - DVD Review [Ivana Redwine]

DVDBeaver.com [Mathias Nielson]

Read the New York Times Review » Vincent Canby

HEAVEN’S GATE

USA (219 mi) 1980 ‘Scope Revised version (149 mi)

Time Out Tom Milne

For all the abuse heaped on it, this is - in its complete version, at least - a majestic and lovingly detailed Western which simultaneously celebrates and undermines the myth of the American frontier. The keynote is touched in the wonderfully choreographed opening evocation of a Harvard graduation in 1870: answering the Dean's ritual address urging graduates to spread culture through contact with the uncultivated, the class valedictorian (Hurt) mockingly replies that they see no need for change in a world 'on the whole well arranged'. Twenty years later, as Hurt and fellow-graduate Kristofferson become involved in the Johnson County Wars, their troubled consciences suggest that some change in the 'arrangements' might well have been in order. Watching uneasily as the rich cattle barons legally exterminate the poor immigrant farmers who have taken to illegal rustling to feed their starving families, they can only attempt to enforce the law that has become a mockery (Kristofferson) or lapse into soothing alcoholism (Hurt). Moral compromise on a national scale is in question here, a theme subtly echoed by the strange romantic triangle that lies at the heart of the film: a three-way struggle between the man who has everything (Kristofferson), the man who has nothing (Walken), and the girl (Huppert) who would settle for either provided no fraudulent compromise is asked of her. The ending, strange and dreamlike, blandly turns a blind eye to shut out the atrocities and casuistries we have witnessed, and on which the American dream was founded; not much wonder the American press went on a mass witch-hunt against the film's un-American activities.

A quarter-century after its original failed release, which helped bring an end to United Artists (the studio originally formed by Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith), the career of director Michael Cimino and, some claim, the director-as-star mentality that dominated Hollywood in the 1970's (coincidentally, the last truly great period of American filmmaking), the infamous “Heaven’s Gate” is finally appearing in Chicago in its original full-length version for an extended run at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Seen today, relatively divorced from all of the publicity surrounding its bloated budget (a then-scandalous $40 million) and disastrous reception, is a crazily ambitious epic that is about a hundred times better than its reputation would suggest.

The film stars Kris Kristofferson as a Harvard graduate (an event illustrated during an extended 20-minute prologue that was, somewhat obviously, filmed at Oxford instead of Harvard) who turns his back on a life of privilege to serve as the sheriff of a small Wyoming town largely populated by immigrants who have been working the land for years in order to own it outright to build homes for themselves. The local cattle ranchers, led by evil Sam Waterston, aren’t too thrilled with what this could mean for their plans to own the land for themselves and hire a band of “deputies” (i.e. mercenaries) to hunt and kill 150 of the immigrants. Also caught up in the events, which culminate in a full-scale battle between the mercenaries and the immigrants (in which the cavalry appears to save the day in the nick of time, though it wouldn’t be fair to tell who they save), is conflicted mercenary Christopher Walken (in a fine performance) and Isabelle Huppert as the frontier madam that they both love.

Yes, there are some considerable flaws–the 219-minute running time is a bit excessive, the soundtrack is so overwhelmed with chaotic ambience that it is sometimes impossible to hear any of the dialogue and it concludes with a ludicrous epilogue that should have been scrapped–and the bleak and brutal tone of the story will probably put off a lot of viewers. (The film is, at its heart, essentially a four-hour quasi-Marxist Western in which the cavalry appears in the nick of time to rescue the bad guys)–but there are so many great things on display here that I am willing to overlook them. The performances, with the exception of Waterston’s turn as the Snidely Whiplash-inspired chief villain, are strong and thoughtful (other actors popping up here include Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Brad Dourif and a shockingly young Mickey Rourke), everything is beautifully photographed by legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and the final battle sequence, while entirely a figment of Ciminio’s imagination, is a masterpiece of controlled chaos that fully captures the frenzied insanity of battle without ever falling into confusion itself.

For all of its mistakes, “Heaven’s Gate” is, in the end, a strange kind of masterpiece that I, for one, would cheerfully rank over nearly every film that has taken home the Best Picture Oscar in the past 25 years.

filmcritic.com Michael Athitakis

Heaven’s Gate is not, as its reputation suggests, the worst Hollywood movie ever made. Looked at in a certain light it even has some brilliance to it, and at stray moments you can even forget that Michael Cimino’s film is now a three-and-a-half-hour metaphor for the hubris of ego and the dangers of not watching your budget. (Heaven’s Gate had an original budget of $7.5 million, eventually cost a whopping $44 million, took in less than $2 million at the box office, financially kneecapped United Artists, and scotched Cimino’s career as a director. The gory details, wonderfully told, are all in the book Final Cut, written by then-UA production exec Steven Bach.) Strip away the behind-the-scenes story, and Heaven’s Gate is an enigma, as difficult to like as it is to dismiss. It is arrogant and it is beautiful. It is thematically clever and rhetorically dull. It is sensitive and it is condescending. It has enormous ambition and winds up with nothing to say. Eventually, it’s just sadly exhausting.

One thing’s for certain: Kris Kristofferson is blameless. A solid if not terribly nuanced actor, he plays James Averill, an upstanding marshal who arrives Johnson County, Wyoming to investigate rumors of turmoil there. It’s worse than he imagines; as the station agent explains when Averill arrives, Johnson County (not Cimino) has become “the asshole of creation,” thanks to ongoing bloodshed between wealthy WASP landowners and the immigrant settlers who try to work their small parcels of land. The landowners are led by the obscenely amoral Frank Canton (Sam Waterston, razor-sharp), who draws up a “death list” of 125 Johnson County residents who are legally approved to be killed under false accusations of thievery.

On the list is Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert), the local whore who’s beloved by Averill but also courted by Canton’s lackey and Averill’s old friend Nate Champion (Christopher Walken). The personal and political tensions gather steam until the film’s conclusion, a half-hour bloodbath that features at least half a dozen poor decisions about plot (including one, involving a suicide, that’s completely indefensible). Like The Deer Hunter, Cimino’s previous film, Heaven’s Gate is supposed to be an allegorical tale about how easily American pluralism can shift into authoritarianism. But Cimino has no real feel for his characters – the immigrants who are supposed to be the heroes are given to us as a weeping, screaming mass. Kristofferson’s Averill is appropriately stoic, but he lacks layers. And Huppert’s casting as Ella was an enormous misstep. Speaking in a French accent so thick it’s occasionally indecipherable, she’s a weak actress in a role that’s completely wrong for her. Plus, because she’s supposed to be the fulcrum between Averill and Champion, she winds up dulling those two characters as well.

Now, you’re probably thinking: What would help here is weighing down the movie with a half-hour introduction set 20 years earlier that sheds precisely no light on the main plot. More than the acting and the script, it’s the structure of Heaven’s Gate that botches the film. To be fair, much of the movie looks utterly gorgeous, and Cimino (along with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond) meticulously crafted dozens of shots that look as well-lit and well-composed as paintings. The size of the Great Plains are exploited well in the panoramic shots of the region, capturing the sky, mountains, and general enormity of the landscape. And however foolhardy Cimino’s accounting was, the money is there on the screen. The shots of Casper, stuffed full of extras and with buildings stretching far into the distance, give a real sense of both the place and its lawlessness.

But those strengths never congeal into a solid narrative; it’s just Cimino showing off how big he is. The only version that now makes the rounds on video is 219 minutes long, the same one that was first released in 1980 and panned mercilessly; a later release cut out over an hour. But getting rid of some length doesn’t help here, in the same way that cutting off an arm doesn’t help when the cancer’s spread to the whole body. Cimino doesn’t seem to know the people he’s putting on screen, and worse he doesn’t seem to like them much. The same confused contempt he seemed to have for the townspeople in The Deer Hunter bled into Heaven’s Gate as well. A misanthrope to the core, there was no way his attitude could make an effective, trustworthy story about America. Cimino had artistry in spades, but he had no art.

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Phil Hall

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Heaven’s Gate Dana Stevens from Slate, March 29, 2013

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr, as dumb and boring as all tarnation

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht)

eFilmCritic [Jack Sommersby] lengthy review concluding it doesn’t get any worse, folks

Read the New York Times Review » Vincent Canby

THE SICILIAN

USA (115 mi) 1987 ‘Scope Director’s Cut (146 mi)

In adapting Mario Puzo's novel, eschewing the political complexity of Francesco Rosi's classic Salvatore Giuliano, Cimino opts for silly and mendacious mythologising. Here the Sicilian bandit Giuliano (Lambert) becomes a heroic Christ figure, his acts of theft and murder prompted by sympathy for the peasantry, his death the result of a Judas-like betrayal manipulated by sinister and dishonorable figures of State, Church and Underworld; incredibly, he is even exonerated from responsibility for the notorious massacre of innocent Communists. Bathos abounds: American Duchess Sukowa falls head over heels for the noble savage; even Mafia capo Ackland sheds a tear for the brave son he never had. The dialogue is ponderously poetic, stilted and over-emphatic, characters are convenient cyphers, and both cutting and photography tend towards the bombastic. Folly, then, but gloriously inept and overblown.

Make no mistake about it: Michael Cimino's "The Sicilian" is unambiguously atrocious, but in that very special, howlingly grandiose manner that only a filmmaker with visions of epic greatness working on a large scale with a multinational cast can achieve.

In his novel "The Sicilian," Mario Puzo uses the story of the young Michael Corleone from "The Godfather" story during his exile in Sicily to frame the saga of the legendary Sicilian bandit-hero Salvatore Giuliano. In Cimino's version, which was written (at least partly) by Steve Shagan using Puzo's novel as its source, the filmmakers have dispensed with the Corleone story completely to concentrate on Giuliano.

The movie isn't just bad, it's bad in a uniquely emblematic, Hollywood way. And what it demonstrates, chiefly, is that debacles of this sort don't just happen -- they have to be worked at. If you add to the usual problems the lawsuit filed by Gore Vidal to include his name as author of the screenplay (a mind-boggling move, given what's up on the screen) and action taken by Cimino against his producers over cowriting credit and the right to final cut (both of which he lost in arbitration), you begin to see how films as baroquely awful as "The Sicilian" are born. The party or parties ultimately to blame for this mess may never be known (the release version is the work of David Begelman, the president of Gladden Entertainment, which produced the film).

Which isn't to say that Cimino isn't capable of cooking up a whopping dud all on his own. Cimino isn't interested in life-size figures; he builds his characters architecturally, out of limestone and granite. In "The Sicilian," Giuliano, played by Christopher Lambert, is a combination of Robin Hood and Christ. Shot in the stomach by the police while trying to run away with a cart of stolen grain, he is taken to a monastery, where he's expected to die. When he doesn't, he feels the winds of fate at his back. He will be the savior of his people -- whether they want one or not.

The movie moves through Giuliano's story, as he grows in stature from a scandalously dashing outlaw to a man who becomes such a hero to the Sicilian peasants that he threatens the power of the Mafia. All of this is told in the sort of florid, impassioned style of a historical-romance novel. It's like "Gone With the Wind" with Sicilians.

Puzo's material is pulp -- as it was with "The Godfather" -- but Cimino tries to recast it as myth. (In making the "Godfather" films, Coppola did the opposite and allowed the mythic structure to support his pop cliche's.) What Cimino has created here is a windy combination of self-seriousness and trash -- it's bloated pulp.

With the most outrageously ludicrous lines springing out of the actors' mouths in a hilarious cacophony of accents, it's hard to take any of this seriously. As Giuliano's girlfriend, Giulia Boschi is ravishingly beautiful, but she arches her back when she delivers her lines like a Playmate of the Month. Still, she's spectacular shouting out communist slogans in her high heels to the peasants, and she gives a ringing bravado to lines like, "It is I who am the unwise one, for I love you, blood and all. God help us both." And, as Giuliano, Lambert glowers at the camera as if he'd been hypnotized before each take, and his line readings have a sort of Steve Reeves, "Hercules Unchained" woodenness. He acts phonetically.

In general, a mad arbitrariness seems to have guided the casting. The German actress Barbara Sukowa -- whose dialogue sounds like it was dubbed by an AT&T operator -- turns up playing an American married to a Sicilian prince played by Terence Stamp, who's British.

With its sweeping, lyrical camera, and the radiant Sicilian locations, "The Sicilian" is an exceedingly handsome disaster, and, taken by themselves, some of the sequences are breathtakingly shot. There's a difference between watching a Volkswagen and a Rolls-Royce go plunging over a cliff, and this is definitely a Rolls. And just as definitely, it goes plunging, all in flames.

Matewan. The Sicilian History, politics, style, and genre, by John Hess from Jump Cut

Siskel & Ebert video

McMillan-Stewart Fellows Gallery, The Film Study Center

Cissé, Souleymane

Cissé, Souleymane from World Cinema

He began his film career as a projectionist after Mali gained its independence in 1960. In 1963, he received the first of several scholarships to study cinema in the Soviet Union at the State Institute of Cinema (VGIK). After returning home in 1969, he made newsreels and documentaries for the Mali State Information Service. His first fiction film was Cinq Jours d'une vie (1972). He has since become one of Africa's most admired filmmakers, drawing on indigenous folklore and experience to explore conflicts in Mali society, particularly that between change and tradition. In 1987, he directed, wrote, and produced Yeelen, the mythic story of a power struggle between two magicians, called by Film Comment "the best African film ever made." — Ephraim Katz, The Film Encylopedia

Yeelen Michael Dembrow from Portland’s 15^th Cascade Festival of African Films (excerpt)

Born in Bamako, Mali, in 1940, Souleymane Cissé is one of Africa’s pre-eminent directors, with a varied body of creative work. As a young man, he worked as a photographer and a projectionist in Mali. From 1963 to 1969 he studied filmmaking in Moscow at the State Institute of Cinema, where a number of other future African directors (including the great Ousmane Sembène) received a firm grounding in the technical art of cinema under the accomplished Soviet director Mark Donskoi.

Cissé returned to Mali in 1969, where he went to work for the Ministry of Information as a documentary filmmaker. He made his first short fiction film, Five Days in a Life, in 1972, then his first feature, Den Muso/The Young Girl, in 1975. This was followed by Baara/The Porter in 1978, Finyé/Wind in 1982, Yeelen/Brightness in 1987, and Waati/Time in 1995.

His films have received numerous awards at international festival, including the Jury Award for Best Film at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival for Yeelen. Cissé was recently named the recipient of the fifth annual Genevieve McMillan and Reba Stewart Fellowship for Distinguished Filmmaking at Harvard.

Along with his work as a director, Cissé has been a tireless advocate for African cinema, and just last week organized an important gathering of filmmakers in Bamako. It is a great honor to have Souleymane Cissé with us in Portland for the opening of the 15^th Cascade Festival of African Films.

Souleymane Cissé Samuel Lelievre from Film Reference

Souleymane Cissé was the most recognized African filmmaker of the twentieth century. A participant in a general movement toward social realism in African cinema, Cissé was the first African to win a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival. While the success of both Finyé and Yeelen at the Cannes Film Festival garnered Cissé acclaim and increased attention for African cinema, Cissé has spent his career filming African subjects. Such concentration requires a special devotion because Africa is prone to economic and social precariousness. But after studying in Moscow, Cissé returned to his home land to perfect his craft. In doing so he has contributed significantly to the development of social realism in African cinema.

Cissé used his creative skills to tell stories of everyday Africans. While working at the SCINFOMA he made more than thirty newsreels and documentary films that examined different African societies. His projects carefully depicted the cultural heritage and typical lives of Malian and other African people. Using the very limited technical means provided by the government for which he was still working at that time, Cissé created Cinq jours d'une vie , a short movie relating the disappointments of an unemployed young man from Mali in 1972. Cissé's realistic style garnered Cinq jours d'une vie considerable attention at the Carthage Festival. Buoyed by the success of the film, Cissé formed his own company, Les Films Cissé, to produce his own films without government support.

Den Muso is both Cissé's first feature movie and the first film in Bambara language in African cinema. This movie deals with the suicide of Ténin, a deaf-mute urban Muslim young woman who is rejected by her family when she bears the child of one of her father's employees. Though the story sadly relates the story of Ténin it also comments on the value of social classes in modern society. Highlighting the moral conflicts of adhering to traditional values in contemporary society, Cissé accounts for the condition of the modern Malian woman.

The first great African movie dealing with the proletarian class, Baara is the most Marxist of Cissé's movies, both in its liberal form and its topics. The film grapples with the greed and corruption of the business elite and highlights the emerging social awareness of workers and women. In the film, Balla Traoré, a young engineer newly graduated in Europe, decries the economic exploitation in the textile factory he supervises and the corruption of his manager who will eventually have him murdered.

Finyé is one of the finest and densest movies made on the African continent. Centered around a love affair between two university students with very different backgrounds one father is a traditional chief and the other is a military governor the film tackles the friction between tradition and modernity in African society. In the film, the students join a mass protest against the falsification of exam results and are later supported by the chief who renounces his powers and allies himself with the youth. Meanwhile the military governor, whose authoritarianism bears some similarities to Moussa Traoré's politics when he ruled Mali from 1968 to 1991, remains firm in his defense of the government. In the end, Cissé succeeds in illustrating the power of mass protests against the government. Although not the equal of his later film, Yeelen , Finyé offers a complex reflection on African culture and politics. Yet the complexity of the film is portrayed with a lightness and efficient simplicity that has come to typify Cissé's work. With a certain virtuosity Cissé combines scenes of everyday life with dreamlike sequences or magic rituals.

Despite the seemingly effortless simplicity conveyed in his films, Cissé works diligently to achieve these results. He aspires to technical perfection and wants his movies to reach the same esthetic level as foreign cinema. To create his films, Cissé must rely heavily on western help and other non-African technicians. And, unlike other filmmakers who consider a movie as primarily a political tool, Cissé has cultural and esthetic visions for his movies.

Paramount to Cissé's work is his use of feminine themes to highlight the feminine condition and to evoke the symbolic sense of femininity in Africa. Cissé has often given feminine themes a central role in his films. In his first feature film Den Muso , one can interpret Tenin's dumbness as a way to show Malian women's submissiveness to patriarchal values. In his later film Waati , the character Nandi illustrates the role of African women in general. All of Cissé's films use these feminine themes as a metaphor for life in Africa.

Working within these feminine themes, Cissé also brings historical perspective to his films. Each film provides a complex web of historically inspired stories, situations, settings, and speech. A full understanding of Cissé's films requires careful attention to his efforts to place his films in historical context. In Finyé , for example, Cissé juxtaposes the film's fictional youth protest with footage from a real protest in Mali in the early 1980s. Unfortunately censorship concerns forced Cissé to only touch on the issues surrounding the ensuing fall of Traoré's regime in Mali. Nevertheless, the force of his Cissé's film highlighted the power of popular protests and, during the events of 1991, Finyé has been remembered for its political significance.

In the early 1990s, Cissé crossed the Malian border to film Waati , a film about apartheid. In Waati , Southern Africa is described as submitting to apartheid whereas Western Africa is almost depicted as an idyllic place. Waati can be considered as the first genuine Pan-African creation at a time when Pan-Africanism was still a theoretical discourse promoted by the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI). While offering a rather predictable description of apartheid, Waati reveals the artistic limits of the topic. Images of the arbitrary violence under apartheid permeate the film. Despite the limited artistic success of the film, the African vision on the barbarism of apartheid was not ineffective. One of the first scenes has obvious cathartic and emotional virtues: on a beach prohibited to Black people, Nandi, the heroine, sees her father and little brother slaughtered by an Afrikaner rider. Using her supernatural powers, Nandi succeeds in killing the rider. All the members of the audience, whether they are African or Westerner, can identify with her gesture as the ultimate defense against evil.

Misunderstandings about his work have been increasing since the release of Waati. Some have severely criticized Cissé as the director of an agonizing Pan-Africanism, while others favor his approach. These contradictory receptions may illustrate the intrinsic paradox of Cissé's work: his aspirations toward technical and esthetic quality as well as his desire to concentrate on African cultures. While critics and scholars usually consider speech as the main element in African cinema, Cissé emphasizes the visual aspects of his movies. Concerned with pictures and camera movement, his portrayal of everyday life and religious rituals—especially since Finyé —dramatizes the political nature of the activities. Cissé's work seems to be increasingly focused on a reflection of cultures to the detriment of a realistic description of Malian or African societies. But in addition to bringing various cultures to the screen, Cissé's contribution to African cinema is based on the development of a style that superposes traditional and modern elements, creating an art that is neither traditionalist nor modernist but rather within post-modernity.

Souleymane Cisse @ Art + Culture biography

Biography short biography

The Power of Culture Special: Cinema in Africa - The Power of ... The Power of African Imagination, by Peter Vlam from The Power of Culture which includes African cinema expert Erna Beumers list of the 15 greatest African films ever made, none after the year 2000 (undated)

Subsaharan African film history Technological paternalism, by Manthia Diawara from Jump Cut (April 1987)

African filmmakers' new strategies Olivier Barlet from Africultures, January 10, 2001

Souleymane Cissé The Films of Souleymane Cissé, by Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix, November 15 – 22, 2001

Harvard Film Archive Sympathetic Magic: The Cinema of Souleymane Cissé, from Restrospective (2001)

Souleymane Cissé The Right of Expression Hassouna Mansouri from Fipresci magazine (2006)

Adventures and Misadventures Olivier Barlet from Fipresci magazine (2006)

BFI | Sight & Sound | African Cinema: Invisible Classics Mark Cousins from Sight & Sound, February 2007

African Film Analysis Defining Africa, 14-page essay including an extensive analaysis of Cisse’s YEELEN, July 21, 2007 (no author attributed)

Amoeblog > 2008-12 > Cinema of Mali Eric S. from Amoeblog, December 2008

African Cinema Dr. Gloria Emeagwali interviews Souleymane Cissé at Harvard University, November 18, 2001

Interview with Souleymane Cissé, by Olivier Barlet Africultures, July 3, 2003

Souleymane Cissé - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Image results for Souleymane Cissé

FINYE (The Wind)

aka: Le vent

Mali (100 mi) 1982

Time Out Tony Rayns

A campus protest movie, complete with drugs, generation gaps, fascistic policing and boy-girl problems. Cissé's students actually are living under a military dictatorship and trying to come to terms with a patriarchal society still weighed down with hundreds of superstitions. No one is caricatured, and the film develops its conflicts with splendid directness, shifting easily between realism and fantasy. It boils down to a fairly simple argument for liberal democracy, but the specifics of the setting give it an immediacy that an equivalent western film could never approach.

Brandon's movie memory » Finye/The Wind (1982, Souleymane Cissé)

While less impressive than Souleymane Cisse's subsequent Brightness, this 1982 feature about campus rebellion and ancestral, tribal memories in contemporary Africa is full of fascination. Bah, the grandson of a traditional chieftain, and Batrou, the daughter of a military governor representing the new power elite, become involved with a campus rebellion, drugs, and each other)--which leads to their arrests. Although the social forces of contemporary Mali contrive to keep them and their traditions apart, a recurring dream sequence illustrated by a little boy filling a gourd with water, which symbolizes sharing and the exchange of knowledge, points to deeper links that unite generations as well as this couple.

Batrou is a cute student, the privileged daughter of a hardassed military governor/colonel with three wives. His youngest wife is strong-willed and troublesome (aren’t third wives always?) and close to the daughter’s age. The daughter is in love with Ba, and they hangs out with friend Seydou, studying for exams.

I’m not sure exactly what happens with the third-wife plot, or why the boys’ failing their exams helps to launch a student protest against the government (maybe the protest was already in place, and the boys just joined it), but the result is that Ba and Seydou are arrested and sent to hard training camp, where Seydou dies from the stress, and even Batrou is arrested by the unapologetic colonel.

Suddenly we’re back in familiar Cissé territory when Ba’s grandfather hears of his arrest, puts on his tribal garb and heads for the trees to make sacrifices and wish for supernatural assistance in overthrowing the colonel’s evil plans. Walks out of the trees into the colonel’s backyard and threatens him – colonel reponds as we’d expect by shooting grandpa in the back, but the bullets have no effect.

Bulletproof robes are all the ghosts of grandpa’s ancestors can provide, though – when he gets home he finds the house has been burned down and Ba is rumored to have been killed, so grandpa burns his ceremonial outfit and joins the people’s march against tyranny, which shakes up the government enough that the colonel is ordered to release Ba, who’s now free to run off with the colonel’s daughter.

This preceded Yeelen, which featured two of the same actors (the grandfather and the colonel). It lacks much of Yeelen’s striking imagery and unhinged craziness but it’s still a good movie (I liked it more than Xala) and oughtta be more readily available than it is.

N.F. Ukadike: “Ironically, Finye was partly financed by the military government of Mali. Tolerance and maturity prevailing, the government demonstrated that it is capable of listening to constructive criticism.” Kino’s promo copy plays up the romance and compares to Romeo & Juliet, says it “casts a critical eye on both the ancient and modern values.”

M. Dembrow: “In reality, young Malians would have to wait ten years after the making of Finyé for the military regime of Moussa Traoré to crumble. But with this film—and with Yeelen as well—Souleymane Cissé gave them powerful images of hope and resolve.”

AvaxHome -> Finyé (Le vent) - Souleymane Cissé (1982)

Movie Review - Reassemblage - 'WIND' FROM MALI AND 'REASSEMBLAGE ... Janet Maslin from The New York Times, September 24, 1983

YEELEN (Brightness) A 97

aka: The Light

Mali Burkina Faso France Germany (105 mi) 1987

The rich imagery and symbolism are carefully depicted to achieve a specific goal and significance, which is to invite the spectator to seek for the deeper meaning which transcends the literary meaning of what the entire film signifies. —Souleymane Cissé

Nothing less than the story of the world’s creation, set in an ancient Malian kingdom of West Africa, as told through an elaborately visualized African mythology and lore as seen through the eyes of a young Bambara native, Niankoro (Issiaka Kané), who upon reaching manhood discovers his life’s destiny, that the he must confront his own father who has relentlessly been tracking him down since birth vowing to kill him. His father Soma (Niamanto Sanógó) is an evil sorcerer who can summon magic powers and walks the earth chanting to the gods with a magic post carried by two servants. Although Niankoro recognizes his future is fraught with danger, he follows his mother’s instructions wearing a neck fetish for protection before setting out on a spiritual journey where he not only intends to escape from his father but also hopes to find his uncle, his father’s twin Djigui Diarra (also played by Sanógó), who will offer him more protection. His mythical adventures are the subject of the film where heat makes fire, and a union of the two worlds, earth and sky, exist through light, expressed through oral African traditions, oftentimes featuring tribal ceremony, as Niankoro crosses through various tribal regions. Often considered the greatest African film ever made, interesting that it was specifically designed to highlight African as opposed to Western influences, yet it surprisingly contains Western influences as well, including an Eden-like quality to the landscape, surrealistic mysticism, and an adherence to an Oedipus complex that the director may have subconsciously not even been aware of. African directors such as Cissé used to be educated in Moscow film schools, a practice that is no longer occurring to the detriment of new young African filmmakers, as there are few, if any on the horizon.

Set in a timeless age, the Bambara even today remain the most powerful ethnic group in Mali, a country that prides itself in the inclusion of minority groups, each of which maintains their own distinctive ethnic culture. While the Bambara culture features ancestor worship, the film is steeped in the traditions of the komo, a ritualistic blending of science and nature, mastered by the descendents of powerful magicians, some of whom, like Somo and his younger brother Bafing, have misused their gifts, becoming corrupt with their power, sharing their wisdom only within their small enclosed ranks, refusing to use it for the benefit of all, which is the ideal sought by Niankoro who has inherited his father’s gifts. Simply put, this is the story of good and evil and what happens when the two forces finally encounter one another. Much of it told through the amateurish performances of non-professional actors in an excruciatingly slow, non-narrative, dreamlike quality, much of it perplexing, remaining a mystery, where Niankoro, despite his magical gifts, is an everyman that the audience can sympathize with as he’s the only character that’s fully realized, as he’s earnest and kind-hearted, a young man who means well, where people willingly bestow upon him their wisdom in ordinary, everyday conversation. Many of the rituals displayed are impressive, even if not fully understood, as the filmmaker is adhering to the authenticity of the Malian people. Somo continues to spew venom about his desire to kill his own flesh and blood, beautifully expressed in a secret komo ceremony where he convinces the others within the circle, also in another weird moment where he magically forces a dog and an albino man about to be sacrificed to the gods to walk backwards towards him, as if being pulled against time, which only adds to the layered richness of the setting. Niankoro grows curious why his father hates him so much, a mystery that is addressed but never really answered, especially since he was abandoned at birth, so true meaning remains engulfed in mystery, continually hidden throughout, even to those who seek such knowledge.

Like Ulysses, Niankoro sets out on his journey alone, a bit like Nicolas Roeg’s WALKABOUT (1971), where after they separate, perhaps for the last time, his mother performs a sacred river baptismal asking the gods for his blessing, pouring milk over her naked upper torso, a quiet but immensely moving image. Niankoro in bare feet walks through the arid landscape of the nomadic Peul people, a tribe featuring horses and spears, who are intent on arresting him before he casts a spell to freeze one of the Peul warriors before the eyes of their King, an impressive feat. His sorcery leads to his use in an upcoming battle with a warring tribe, as after a ritualistic head-on-head physical confrontation between two warriors, they are overrun by a neighboring village and are heading towards the King. Niankoro sets angry bees and fire upon them to turn them back. Having already saved his kingdom, the King asks if he could fix the infertility of his youngest wife so she could bear him a child, which he does willingly, but can’t help himself and succumbs to her beauty, actually impregnating her himself, a mistake he regrets afterwards, making him fallible, but instead of enduring the King’s wrath, he offers the girl to him before ordering them both out of his kingdom, forcing them into the cliff-dwelling lands of the Dogon, natural stargazers who have the only natural spring for miles, who offer him the advice: “Science is inexhaustible, miracles eternal.” Both Niankoro and his new Peul wife Attou (Aoua Sangare) purify themselves in the waterfall before being led to his blind uncle Djigui Diarra who has the gift of prophecy and offers his wisdom, confirming that his wife is indeed pregnant and carrying his son who is “destined to be a bright star,”also offering his aid, a sacred magic wing known as the Koré, where all along Niankoro has been carrying the eye given to him by his mother as a gift to his uncle. Together, they increase his powers, leading to the ultimate showdown with his father—and then the universe was born. With such a visually hypnotic film, the cinematography by Jean-Noël Ferragut and Jean-Michel Humeau is brilliant, while the music and sound design by Salif Keita and Michel Portal is equally stunning, especially at the finale, where the film remains quiet and haunting as it unravels its mysteries.

Jonathan Rosenbaum from the National Society of Film Critics, also slightly edited from The Reader here: Brightness (Yeelen)

YEELEN (Brightness), Souleymane Cissé’s extraordinarily beautiful and mesmerizing fantasy, it is set in the ancient Bambara culture of Mali (formerly French Sudan) long before it was invaded by Morocco in the sixteenth century. A young man (Issiaka Kané) sets out to discover the mysteries of nature (or komo, the science of the gods) with the help of his mother and uncle, but his jealous and spiteful father contrives to prevent him from deciphering the elements of the Bambara sacred rites and tries to kill him. In the course of a heroic and magical journey, the hero masters the Bambara initiation rites, takes over the throne, and ultimately confronts the magic of his father. Apart from creating a dense and exciting universe that should make George Lucas green with envy, Cissé has shot breathtaking images in Fujicolor and has accompanied his story with a spare, hypnotic, percussive score. Conceivably the greatest African film ever made, sublimely mixing the matter-of-fact with the uncanny, this wondrous work provides an ideal introduction to a filmmaker who, next to Ousmane Sembène, is probably Africa’s greatest director. Winner of the Jury prize at the 1987 Cannes festival. Not to be missed.

Happy Birthday, Kino - at the Walter Reade Theater

This luminous and beautiful film is set, at an indeterminate period, among the Bambara peoples of Cissé's Mali homeland, in Central North-West Africa. At its core is a spiritual battle waged to the death between a father and son (Kané); the son coming to full maturity and potency, physically through his joining with one of a local chief's wives, and spiritually through his self-driven initiation into the ancient knowledge of the Bambara, encoded in the Komo. This is no ethnographic tract, despite being uniquely informed and filled with the fetishes, rituals and codes of this threatened culture. It is a film of complete integrity: the landscape stunning, the performances (non-professional) remarkable; full of light and fire, quiet passion and profundity, pure and simple.

Souleymane Cissé's YEELEN evokes the ancient Bambara culture of Mali (formerly French Sudan) well before its 16th-century invasion by Morocco. In this luminous, beautifully photographed film that is equal parts creation, myths and Oedipal reality, a young man arrives at the crossroads between childhood and adulthood. As he begins to fathom the mysteries of nature - or komo, science of the gods - his father cruelly prevents the son from deciphering the elements of the Bambara sacred rites. After his mother rescues and sends him away on a heroic journey, the boy masters the tribe's initiation rites and ascends the Bambara throne, and wields the sceptrelike Kore to confront his father. A local drama with universal themes, YEELEN is no mere coming-of-age story, but an anatomy of social responsibility.

Yeelen Bayho

Capturing the dramatic green-yellow landscape of West Africa with clear, cold photography, YEELEN is the bold story of Nianankoro, a young man with great powers. He is cursed by his evil father, Soma, who is pursuing him with the help of prayers to the gods and the magic post--a compass-like instrument carried between two servant men. Nianakoro's mother sends him off across the land to escape his father and seek his uncle--his father's twin, Djigui Diarra. Along the way Nianankoro has a series of adventures. He uses his special powers to help a tribe that is being threatened by warriors. And, when called upon by the king of the tribe to cure his youngest wife of her infertility, Nianankoro learns a hard lesson about honor. Meanwhile, Soma is meeting with a group of talismen to whom he explains his need to kill his son. He conducts a chanting ritual with them, under the influence of strong grog. The speech and singing of the Bambara people is rhythmic and uniquely musical and adds to the film's already mysterious premise. Based on a Bambaran creation myth, the story shows Nianankoro's struggle to depose the corrupt ruling power represented by Soma, resulting in knowledge for all.

User comments from imdb Author: ironside (robertfrangie@hotmail.com) from Mexico

Its director, Souleymane Cissé, from Mali in West Africa, has expressed his desire to make films which are uniquely African in style rather than imitating those of the United Sates or Europe… To this end he relies on stories, true and mythical, told by old men and handed down through the generations…

A young warrior (Issiaka Kane), threatened with death by his evil sorcerer father (Niamanto Sanogo), goes on a journey where he learns the power of magic… The film inhabits a world of dreams, but not the kind described by Dr Freud…

However, the movie's basis in a mystical tradition does not render it inaccessible to Western audiences… The structure of the narrative, based on a quest for magical knowledge and power, is clear and firm, and the consistent pattern of imagery based on the elements of fire, water, earth and light (the title translates as 'brightness') is not specific to African culture… The film's use of landscape, yellow spaces of the desert, is one of its chief glories… The performers too have great charm…

Amoeba Music > 2008-02 > Yeelen (Brightness)

Niankoro, a young man in the powerful Malian Kingdom, is relentlessly pursued by his evil sorcerer father Soma in this mythological tale set in the 1200s. It seems Niankoro has stolen secret knowledge reserved exclusively for a secret society of old men with the intention to share it openly. He seeks out his father's twin and fellow sorcerer, Djigui Diarra, for protection. Niankoro's travels take him through the lands of the cosmologically-oriented, cliff-dwelling Dogon and the Peul, whose king enlists Niankoro's aid in protecting them from raiders and giving him a child - which he does (although not through magic) and Niankoro picks up a wife in the process. Niankoro avoids his father but Soma won't back down, however, and the confrontation between father and son becomes inevitable.

Cissé attended the Moscow School of Cinema and Television on a scholarship and Yeelen, based on Bambara legend, is very reminsicent of the Soviet films of Tarkovsky or Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami with a slow, methodical pace and lots of quiet space. Salif Keita and Michel Portal's score is minimal and used sparingly. The use of magic is handled similarly without flashy special effects along the lines of Tarkovsky's Stalker or Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock. There's ritualistic drinking, sniffing and smoking of various unnamed substances and Cissé depicts everything with an appropriate sort of hazy, dreamlike detachment. For a genre not generally known for restraint, this is one of the calmest films you'll ever see.

Notes on Older Films Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

It took me awhile to catch up with this major African film (considered by some to be one of the best films of the eighties, although that's damning with faint praise, now isn't it?). Sise seems to effortlessly generate poetic images, striking landscape sequences and morphing close-ups, all in the service of a kind of seduction. The narrative thread of Yeelen is never exactly clear, even to the protagonist himself, who knows his father wants to hunt and kill him, but is not sure why. The closest we get to an explanation has to do with a segment of the Bambara clan, of which Niankoro (Issiaka Kane) is a part, that wants to reveal the ancient secrets, making them accessible to all. Niankoro's father seems to object to this de-hierarchizing of the clan. The images Sise produces, and in particular his stunning use of desert space (blocking a sparse number of performers amidst an equally sparse smattering of trees, slowmy moving the camera through this arrangement), take our attention away from narrative concerns, bringing us into a kind of hypnotic "now" that seems to rhyme thematically with the tribal magic that saturates this tale. Also, the final showdown between father and sun is a striking conclusion, both a classic Western-style face-off and an abstract rendering of generational inheritance. Highly recommended. [NOTE: I have gone with the spelling of the director's name on the credits, which appear to be in Bambara. The more common spelling, however, is the Francophonic rendering Souleymane Cissé. If you care.]

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

In Souleymane Cissé's hypnotic Yeelen (Brightness), a young Bambara native, Niankoro (Issiaka Kane), leaves his mother's house on a quest for spiritual enlightenment. Along the way he negotiates the implications of his magical powers and sexuality before battling the sorcerer father who abandoned him and his mother many years ago. This wondrous, purist statement evokes an ancient cosmos on the brink of destruction and whose rebirth hinges on the young Niankoro's will to resist his father's spiritual contrivances. "You have to know how to betray in order to succeed," says the malicious Soma (Niamanto Sanogo) in the film, anticipating the final battle with his son but also pointing to various other patriarchal clashes. King Rouma Boll (Balla Moussa Keita) asks Niankoro to help his wife, Attou (Aoua Sangare), conceive a child, but the magician's penis betrays him and sleeps with the woman instead. And rather than punish his wife and Niankoro, the defeated king gives the woman away to the young man to follow him as his wife and guide though the film's barren topography. The focus on the power of the mother-son relationship in the film (Niankoro's mother bathes herself with milk while praying for the safety of her son) truly evokes a Mother Africa dependent on female self-abnegation. This is a distinctly African film, but because the spiritual struggles depicted here are so familiar and often central to countless religions, its scope and appeal is a universal. Just as there's no mistaking the story's Oedipal overtones, there's an Eden-like vibe to many of the film's more elemental sequences. Cissé can evoke the wondrous magical powers of the film's Bambara people with as a little as a dog and an Albino native walking backward in time. You won't find an image this powerful and as deceptively simple in your average Hollywood blockbuster that never brings us as close to the souls of its characters as Yeelen does. Cissé tries to capture the Bambara people's belief in time "as circular, not linear, always returning to that initial 'brightness' which creates the world." The film begins with a shot of the red-hot sun rising on the distant horizon and ends with Attou and her son lifting two egg-like objects buried beneath the desert (presumably the bodies of Niankoro and Soma). It's a sign of true genius that a director can summon the rise, fall and subsequent rebirth of the cosmos with such a profound understanding and respect for the shape of things.

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [4/4] also here: Best Films of 1987 Top Movies Greatest Films Movie Reviews

Every would be fantasy film director needs to see Yeelen because it proves you can make a top notch entry without much money and do not need to rely on special effects. The key is returning to the past, the elimination of technology eradicates the need for much frivolous expense. This mystical metaphysical film depicts Mali's ancient Bambara culture; it's one of the most beautiful simply by exploiting 13th century settings, in other words nature. It has all the spells and hocus pocus you could ask for, but it values mental power over physical, everything is performed through hyper concentration. It's far more intense and surprising because rather than those boring punishing spells that blow the receiver backwards and are so obviously gimmicked even the smallest child is more likely to laugh at them than fear them, you aren't sure what the spell is going to be or do until it unfolds. And there's no need to finish it off with gore or concede to sanitized MPAA friendly violence; it's all psychological so though it seems to have action it essentially does not in any traditional manner. This highly atmospheric work thrives on the subjective point of view, putting you "in the zone" of the spell caster. In that sense it's The Red Shoes of magic films, but things are much more toned down. The decision to always rely on the least makes the film more sensual and exotic and adds much to the credibility by refusing to expose the filmmaking process. The actors are non-professionals, but the dialogue is sparse and the film mainly features leaders (two sorcerers and one king) who demand respect and thus need not explain themselves. Though it's a fantasy film, it's actually based on ancient legend passed down aurally through the ages and offers the opportunity to learn a decent amount about African history and mythology in a non soporific manner. Part of its greatness is its ability to maneuver between fact and fiction in a manner that doesn't take away from one by shifting the balance too far in the other direction. The cinematography is top notch, really dragging you into this ancient world and making it transcend ordinary boundaries and limitations. The frugal score featuring African drums has a lingering mesmerizing effect, providing just enough in short bursts to set and maintain the mood. Salif Keita & Michel Portal's work here sounds like what you might get if Toru Takemitsu was working with African period instruments rather than Japanese. Though in a sense a very foreign film - it has to explain a few key words in the beginning so we have an idea what they are talking about - it's essentially a very accessible tale of the good son coming of age by overcoming his evil powerful father who is out to kill him.

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith)

“Heat makes fire, and the two worlds (earth and sky) exist through light.”

So reads the epigraph to the 1987 Malian film Yeelen. Like many stories of creation, Yeelen begins with light: the sun rises over a barren West African landscape. This image is immediately paired with another — that of a live chicken immolated in a sacrificial ceremony. In its opening frames the film establishes the contrary nature of light, heat and fire, in their capacity for both destruction and renewal.

Yeelen is a story of cosmogony, an account of the origins of the universe. The film dramatizes this as a process of regeneration, both in the genealogical sense and in the sense of a rising from the ruins. It tells the story of a father’s quest to find and kill his son, and the son’s own journey to gain the powers necessary to fight back. Soma, the father, is fearful of the great supernatural power that his son, Nianankoro, has inherited from him, and summons the destructive forces of the gods to help him find Nianankoro and destroy him.

Theirs is a conflict, not only of generations, but also of ideology. Soma represents an effete, oppressive tradition, and his wrathful jealousy of his son’s power is emblematic of “one of those who use their power only for evil and injustice.” Their final confrontation is apocalyptic in its scope: in order to depose his father’s power, Nianankoro must bring about the destruction and renewal of the entire world order.

Yeelen portrays this clash of old and new in its form as well as its narrative. The film’s soundtrack, composed by famed Malian vocalist Salif Keita and French jazz pioneer Michel Portal, alternates between the sounds of synthesizers and those of more traditional instruments. The two styles are only combined at the very end of the film, in a syncretic manner characteristic of Keita’s music. Similarly, as a cinematic adaptation of an ancient oral legend, the film itself is an example of new replacing old. In Yeelen, the light of cinema reinterprets and revives the oral storytelling tradition.

It has been suggested that the film’s drama of intergenerational conflict and of the world’s creation is universal in its import. The tale bears certain similarities with the myth of Oedipus and other stories from the Western canon, but such a claim for universality belies the distinctiveness of Yeelen’s cultural context. The film’s ambiguously prehistoric setting is evoked with a special attention to the rituals and traditions of Bambara culture. (Though the precise setting of the film is unspecified, the DVD’s packaging claims that the film takes place during the 13th century, in the time of one of the largest Malian empires. The film itself suggests an earlier, pre-Muslim age, however.) Ceremonies and sacrifices are presented in detail, and, even without contextualization, these scenes evoke a complex animist symbolism. The film further reinforces this in its emphasis upon the features of the natural world. Trees, rocks, bodies of water, and animals all have their place in the narrative along with the human figures at its center.

Far from being universal, the film can be quite oblique in its cultural specificity, and this fact has caused some confusion among Western critics. Since its appearance at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival (where it won the Jury Prize), many critics have praised Yeelen for its lush imagery, expert cinematography, and its vivid portrait of Bambara culture, but question the strength of the film’s narrative structure. The film’s story is non-linear: scenes are not clearly sequential; their significance is left unexplained or unresolved. Some critics call the film’s method of storytelling “faulty” or “uneven”; others go so far as to call it “primitive” or “crude.” As one is not likely to hear the structure of a film by Wong Kar-Wai, for example, described as “primitive,” this classification suggests that Yeelen, as an African film, in spite of its ability to capture natural beauty, nonetheless lacks the formal sophistication of films from other countries.

Technically, however, the film is by no means crude or primitive. It boasts a complex sound design and stunning cinematography by Jean-Noel Ferragut and Jean-Michel Humeau. And the film’s director, Souleymane Cissé, was hardly a novice, having studied filmmaking in the Soviet Union and made several films in Mali since the 1960s. In any case, there is much to suggest that the film was not the work of amateurs and that its structure did not arise out of an imperfect understanding of the medium. Rather it is as likely that Cissé is adapting the narrative structures of the oral traditions of Mali, or that he is embracing the formal complexity of contemporary European films, or even combining these styles into a new narrative language all his own. Like the folklore of nearly any culture (even one less remote than that of Mali), the story of Yeelen draws from a complex tradition, which, though full of resonances and implications of meaning, is not wholly reducible or assimilable into Western interpretive language. That the film is nonetheless accessible, even engaging, is an indication of the filmmakers’ ability to realize their culture and its stories on film.

Yeelen Michael Dembrow

Yeelen - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Sylvia Paskin from Film Reference

African Film Analysis Defining Africa, 14-page essay including an extensive analysis of Cissé’s YEELEN, July 21, 2007 (no author attributed)

Review of Yeleen (1987) directed by Souleymane Cissé Talatu-Carmen from Abubuwan da nake Rubutawa

Yeelen Patricia Aufderheide from Cross-Cultural Film Guide

The Tech (MIT) (Manavendra K. Thakur) review

culturebase.net | The international artist database | Souleymane Cissé Ulrich Joßner

Yeelen (no 48) « Wonders in the Dark Allan Fish

Brandon's movie memory » Yeelen (1987, Souleymane Cissé)

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5] also seen here: Movie Vault [Goatdog]

Film Notes -Yeelen Kevin Hagopian from the New York State Writer’s Institute

Schema Blog: February 2006 Archives

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]

Brightness (1987) The Auteurs

Souleymane Cissé Chris Fujiwara from The Boston Phoenix, November 15 – 22, 2001

Oedipus complex - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Movie Review - Yeelen - Film Festival; 'Yeelen,' Based on Myths ... Caryn James from The New York Times, October 8, 1987, also here: The New York Times (Caryn James)

Yeelen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Image results for Yeelen

WAATI

France Mali Burkina Faso (140 mi) 1995

Waati - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An impressive film chronicling the life of a woman who is forced to flee her South African home when her father is killed during a fight with a white farmer. She studies in Abidjan and spends some time observing a tribe in the Sahara but is eventually driven to return to South Africa after the end of apartheid. An intelligent film with a great performance from its star, Waati is a rarely seen gem that sheds fresh light on racial politics in Africa. Directed by one of African cinema's great masters, Cissé, of Yeelen fame.

User comments from imdb Author: dalton-9

This film, which has been shown twice in France on the Arte channel but is, I believe, not available on video, is one of the most impressive films from one of the francophonic world's greatest directors. Beginning in South Africa under the apartheid regime, it follows a young girl who flees the country after a violent confrontation with a local white landowner in which her father is killed. She settles in Abidjan, where, ten years later, she has become a university student. As part of her studies, she visits the Taureg tribe on the edge of the Sahara before at last returning to post-Apartheid South Africa. This is a vastly ambitious film, attempting as it does to deal with a number of cultures and countries of contemporary Africa, each with its own history, language, and political and social conflicts. At its center are two immensely impressive performances by the actresses who play the heroine, first as a young girl, and later as an adult. Thus it manages to be at once an intimate portrait of a young woman, and a vast fresco of much of a continent.

Variety.com [Godfrey Cheshire]

Filming in four African countries and obviously aiming to offer a grand summary of that continent's recent experience, veteran Malian helmer Souleymane Cisse in "Waati" turns out a monument of turgid bombast that should serve as a lasting example of thematic overreaching. While beautifully lensed in scenic regions from the Sahara to South Africa, pic lets its human reality get swallowed up in billows of windy attitudinizing and overly simplistic political allegory. Holding little appeal even for devotees of current African cinema, pic should find its career limited to the international fest circuit.

Story opens with a rare moment of charm as a South African grandmother spins a fable of animals and humans vying for control of the world. If Cisse had stayed with Africans and their folklore, what follows might have had an air of involving authenticity. Instead, he quickly plunges into a cartoonish account of apartheid, centered on Little Nandi and her family, who live in a rural region where all whites are Snidely Whiplash-like brutes and blacks exist in a state of cowed submissiveness. For nearly an hour, tale describes this milieu without making a single concession to subtlety.

The characters never emerge from the level of crude abstractions, and if that's unfortunate for the laughably evil whites, it's even more so for the put-upon blacks, whose uncomplaining servitude deprives them of both dignity and dimension.

Nandi goes off to school, but things remain miserable for her family. When policemen confront them for walking on a beach that's off-limits to blacks, her father and brother are gunned down and Nandi, after killing a policeman, flees for her life.

Landing in the Ivory Coast, she continues her education in a setting of all-black harmony and cultural awareness that is idealized to the point of utter blandness. She meets a handsome young man, Solofa, who wants to marry her but gets only her agreement to accompany him on a humanitarian mission to his tribal home near Timbuktu.

Gorgeous throughout, pic's lensing hits a high point in these desert scenes. Nandi, however, seems to grow more self-absorbed as the tale continues, so rather than committing to Solofa and the humanitarian work, she sets off for the new South Africa, taking along a little Taureg girl as her de facto daughter. Surprisingly, her homeland seems never to have heard of President Nelson Mandela , because story's end has her again confronted with brutish, all-white officialdom; it sends her packing but leaves her aggrieved self-absorption quite intact.

Cisse evidently set out to say something about injustice and recent changes in Africa, but his approach is so stiffly mannered as to produce both tedium and exasperation, especially at how little credit it allows blacks for hard-fought battles that reflect courage, commitment and shrewd compromise rather than a wan martyrdom.

"Waati" seems made by a filmmaker more concerned with his own self-importance than with the complex experiences and issues it nominally treats.

Waati > Overview - AllMovie Sandra Brennan

Waati The Auteurs

Image results for Waati

MIN YÈ (Tell Me Who You Are)

Mali France (140 mi) 2009

Min Yè (Tell Me Who You Are) : The New Yorker Richard Brody (capsule)

From the standpoint of a romantic triangle in the Bamako beau monde, the Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé sketches a scathing portrait of a society that is rotting from the top down. The domineering, arrogant Mimi (Sokona Gakou), a well-to-do public-health bureaucrat, is having an affair with a younger man, Abba (Alou Sissoko), while married to Issa (Assane Kouyaté), a veteran filmmaker at work on a drama about an upper-class woman’s adulterous affair. As the story sprawls and lurches like a soap opera through the expansive arc of its melodramatic plot points, Cissé maintains patience, and even tenderness, for his self-deluding characters while depicting a wide array of underlying ills, including polygamous marriage, political corruption and cronyism, inflexible class hierarchies, and religious hypocrisy. The pathos of an artist too tangled in his personal agonies to look outside his gated courtyard, of a doctor who lives large without seeing a single patient, and of a politically connected playboy with an invisible source of income is heightened by Cissé’s stark visual contrast of chic white-walled villas with the roiling, unpaved roads just beyond. In Bambara.

Howard Feinstein at Cannes from Screendaily

Polygamy and the double standards for men and women get a necessary drubbing in Malian director Souleymane Cisse’s first feature set not only in an urban milieu, but also among the country’s bourgeoisie. In Bamako, the nation’s capital, the middle-aged wife of a polygamous husband takes a lover, in part because she is fed up with wife number two, who loves nothing more than a bitchy catfight.

Western aficionados of the director’s work are accustomed to village locales, in which tribal rituals and lush textures provide an escape from our own rites and routines. Here, though, the lifestyle of the characters matches in many ways our own. Even in the best case scenario, this transposition of locale would hurt the arthouse prospects which stemmed from the otherness of earlier films. Tell Me Who You Are, however, fails to deliver much that’s new to the battle of the sexes, despite tackling the issue of polygamy. In addition, few will respond to its visual murkiness and redundant scenes of the up-and-down relationship between the lead couple.

Mimi (Gakou) is a well-educated, successful government bureaucrat, a professional who works on economic development for this poor country. At 52, she is restless and begins an affair with Abba (Sissoko), a polygamist as well. Her husband Issa (Kouyate) is a renowned filmmaker whose current project mirrors the tensions he is experiencing with Mimi. She tries to divorce him, but he beats her to the punch by filing a grievance about her alleged liaison, something she emphatically denies.

The hypocrisy of his having multiple partners, no matter that they are legal, while she is expected to remain faithful never dawns on him, but then he is the product of a culture which has sanctioned multiple wives for males since ancient times. Mimi is a rarity, a woman in Malian society unafraid to break with tradition and speak her mind. She is quite the firecracker, holding back only when she uses her feminine allure to seduce her husband or lover.

A sub-theme of Tell Me Who You Are is how polygamy affects the relationship between females. A warm conspiracy exists between Mimi and some of her women friends, more charged perhaps than they would be in a society where women have more influence. On the other hand, as evidenced by the bitchy interaction between Mimi and Issa’s second wife, it can breed hostility between the ladies, who vie for their husband’s affection and financial status.

There is a class element as well: Mimi channels her anger and frustration toward the female servants who labour in her huge house (the wives have their own homes). All of the women in the film are much more interesting than the men. In fact, both Issa and Abba are dull. Cisse also touches upon Mali’s warped network of connections which the privileged count upon to achieve their aims.

One of the movie’s attractions is its music, mostly indigenous songs and appealing melodies played on guitar and drums. Visually, however, this film is not distinguished.

Min Ye… (Tell Me Who You Are) | Reverse Shot Divorce, Malian Style, Leo Goldsmith from Reverse Shot, October 2009

"Each film is a miracle," said Souleymane Cissé, and in his 40-year career, the filmmaker has made about a half dozen of them. Min Ye… (Tell Me Who You Are) is the Malian director's first feature in over a decade, and it comes to us, as do many films from contemporary Africa, partly due to European funding and technical support. But the film also draws on the resources of Mali's best-funded and most popular visual media—television—to present its take on the culturally entrenched practice of polygamy. Unlike in other parts of West Africa, where the video market comprises the bulk of visual culture, television production and broadcasting receives healthy state funding in Mali, where Malian cinema struggles for financing from abroad and wide release at home. Originally planned as a ten-hour miniseries, Min Ye seems to take some of its form and idiom from Malian television serials, with their lurid, twisting plotlines, expressive soap-operatics from their performers, and functionality as a popular platform for social debate.

Cissé's most famous film in the West is probably Yeelen, his visionary Pan-African creation myth, which won Cannes' 1987 Grand Jury Prize. But that astonishing film is in fact the mythopoetic centerpiece of a career book-ended by works of social realism that deal with issues of class, gender, and labors in Mali. Earlier films, like Den Muso (The Girl) and Baara (Work) dealt explicitly with social class divisions and their impact on the community at large, while later films, like Finye (The Wind), addressed military rule. (Yeelen also touches upon social issues in more subtle ways, and Cissé has spoken of his use of folklore and fantasy to veil his social criticism at the time of making the film.) In Min Ye this is all set against the backdrop of an increasingly consumerist Malian middle class, whose complacent disregard for gender inequity and income discrepancies Cissé portrays in myriad tiny details.

Min Ye stars Assane Kouyate as Issa, a filmmaker who lives in the torment of jealousy and suspicion about one of his wives, Mimi (played big by the popular TV presenter and journalist Sokana Gakou), who works as a doctor for a national development project. The couple’s sources of income are far from clear—Issa's weighty occupation suggests only that he’s sensitive and thoughtful, in spite of his clinging to the polygamist tradition; her work is seen only briefly, and it doesn't occupy much of her time. Indeed, what the couple do spend much of their time on is scheming—she to meet her lover; he to catch her in the act—and then quarreling, rendered by Cissé in repeated, explosive outbursts.

The emotional fireworks mainly come from Mimi, Issa's least favorite wife in this comedy of unmarriage, whose moods and whims change with her wardrobe. And what a wardrobe: her flowing caftans of shimmering, vivid fabric and puzzlingly large golden rings are nearly overshadowed by her great gobs of makeup and a medusa-like shock of shiny, black locks. She’s a force to be reckoned with—and aims to prove it when Issa's impatience and suspicions prompt him to involve his lawyers. “He's going to go through hell,” she tells a friend, who in turn cautions her, “Powerful women aren't popular here.”

This may be so, but it’s one of the paradoxes of Cissé's vision of Mali that there are so many powerful women about, yet so few powerful enough to alter the old-fashioned, problematic traditions. Once Issa involves the law, the story pitches back and forth between the domestic space and the civic and social organs of the community, as Mimi and Issa's bust-ups and family squabbles become the problems of those around them, too: servants, wives, children, siblings, friends, lawyers, policemen, and even the local fortune teller. In all of this, it’s often the women—sisters, wives, attorneys, and officials—who find themselves upholding a tradition that permits male polygamy and forbids female philandering. With Mimi as a foil for wise, clear-headed women everywhere, Cissé shows how their roles as stabilizers or unifiers force women to work against their own interests, as in a scene at Issa's birthday party, which can't help but devolve into intra-wife name-calling and a nearly literal tug-of-war for the husband's attention.

Not that Issa is let off entirely, even if he’s one of many men in the film whose adherence to tradition causes trouble in his life. Abba, Mimi's lover, also has wives (two of them— one of whom he identifies as “a slut”), and he somehow symbolizes them with the two cell phones he carries. (“I'll call you back,” he says into the mobile in his right hand as Mimi waits on the other end of the one in his left. “I'm on the phone.”) With his usual evenhandedness, Cissé treats the love scenes between Abba and Mimi as genuinely tender, but there is the lingering sense that Abba is no fool, a materialistic creep who relies on the cronyism of the local police force to duck out of Issa's lawsuit.

This distinctly TV-friendly mix of surface complexity and populist characterization will make the film a slog for many expecting the lush totemic grandeur—or indeed the African exoticism—of a Yeelen (in spite of a gorgeous soundtrack featuring Ali Farka Touré, Vieux Farka Touré, Rokia Traoré, Oumou Sangaré, and the Ensemble Instrumental National du Mali; even the ring tones are beautiful). Cissé packs in plot information in a manner that betrays the project's origins as a work five times longer. Furthermore, inconsistency in sound, framing, and exposure suggest a film made quickly and cheaply (reflected in scenes of Issa at work alongside a cinematographer carrying consumer-grade equipment).

But this comparative roughness is not the work of a sloppy, amateurish filmmaker—much less a primitive sensibility, as some contemporary Western reviews of Yeelen ventured when puzzled about the film's non-Western narrative structure. Cissé learned filmmaking in Moscow in the early Sixties, and his recent adoption of the populist television production model suggests that he is simply adapting to the realities of cinema in a country that, by his account, has exactly one movie theater (he's hoping to book his film there). With financing for feature films becoming increasingly unattainable for West African filmmakers (unless they have Danny Glover's help, as Abderrahmane Sissako did for Bamako), the more affordable forms of television and video provide new avenues for filmmakers to engage audiences, tell stories, and address issues on their own terms. Min Ye is not a perfect specimen of this, but it offers the rare chance to watch a master working in an idiom to which we are seldom exposed.

Min Yè | Film Review | Slant Magazine Kevin B. Lee

Tell Me Who You Are David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 24, 2009

The Auteurs Daily: NYFF. Min Yè David Hudson from The Auteurs, October 18, 2009

Tell Me Who You Are (2009) The Auteurs

Citron, Michelle

DAUGHTER RITE

USA (49 mi) 1980

Michelle Citron's Daughter Rite Living With Our Pain, and Love, by Jane Feuer from Jump Cut

Civeyrac, Jean Paul

THROUGH THE FOREST (À travers la forêt)

France (65 mi) 2005

Through the Forest Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

It's easy to see from this evidence why Civeyrac has commanded attention, since I can't think of anyone who is making films quite like this. Ozon in serious mode comes closest, but whereas he subsumes performance values into a carefully modulated whole, Civeyrac places performance front and center, to the detriment of visual values or narrative construction. And this is accomplished in an incredibly strange way; I never figured on seeing a featurette composed of ten unbroken takes wherein the elaboration of space is pretty much a non-issue and the camera movements, which stumble into grace on occasion, are mostly utilitarian. A fragmented, elliptical story of a young woman trying to find emotional her way through the accidental death of her lover, Through the Forest assays big themes and big, unwieldy prose, and while at first it seemed clunkily declarative and artless, eventually the film's formal unity and conviction succeeds in generating a context in which this awkward verbosity makes sense. Bergman works this way, but Civeyrac makes no appeals to conventional spiritual or theological thought, and he is much closer to Strindberg -- a world in which the soul in crisis invests the quotidian with the otherworldly, the magical, and the ruptures of the unconscious. If only it weren't so damned digital-looking, with its flat images and its willingness to stake its claim so exclusively on the subtle fluidity of the human visage across the span of a long take. (Apparently it was shot on 35mm, but it certainly fooled me.) Bazin has won, and I'm surprised by how little I approve of the result.

"The Dynamics of the Image, or Civeyrac Matters" Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Sounds, Images, September 6, 2010

Jean-Paul Civeyrac made À travers la forêt in 2005; it’s his most recent feature to date. It played a few festivals, but, like every Civeyrac film, no US distributor has seen it fit (or thought it would make a good enough return) to either put it in a theater or on a DVD. It’s a small film and a big one, both in the old-fashioned sense. Small, meaning that it’s barely over an hour long and was shot on just a few sets in less than two weeks, the sort of schedule Joseph H. Lewis and Edgar Ulmer used to work with back in the day. Big, in that it’s larger than its production budget, that its images are worth more than the money spent on making them. Maybe Civeyrac hasn’t made a feature since À travers la forêt because it is the ultimate Jean-Paul Civeyrac film: he would have to think long and hard to express himself more fully. But who knows — people are capable of a lot of things; to watch movies is to intend to be surprised. But, anyway, that it’s the “ultimate” Civeyrac — an auteurist honorific of the lowest order — isn’t what makes it important. Just because Defiance is the ultimate Edward Zwick movie (and it is) doesn’t mean you should see it. No, the reason that a film being the ultimate Civeyrac matters is that Civeyrac himself matters, whether we know it or not.

Civeyrac was born in the last week of 1964. That makes him 44 now — not a young man, but still a “young director,” because, after all, there isn’t a profession that requires as much living (or fewer qualifications) as directing films. But he’s also a “young director” in the sense that he will always remain one — he’s one of those people like Nagisa Oshima, Manoel de Oliveira, Aleksandr Sokurov or George A. Romero, one of those for whom a hundred and fifteen years isn’t quite a history. There are older things (de Oliveira and Sokurov), newer ones (Oshima) or modern ones (Romero) to worry about. There are no people alive now who were around before people shot movies, yet, at the same time, there’s still a lot to discover, a lot of ideas to work out. Cinema only appears old because there are old movies, but the two things are as separate as art is from paintings or literature is from novels.

The opening shot of À travers la forêt is seven minutes long. Actually, every shot in À travers la forêt is about seven minutes long: there are ten of them in a 65 minute film. But Civeyrac’s technique isn’t fetish and it isn’t a question of “prolonging” or some conceptual take on duration: his films move rapidly, faster than almost anyone else’s, and in one of his long takes there are more distinct and original ideas and feelings than in many of the most complicated (which isn’t to say complex) editing schemes. Civeyrac is no virtuoso; he has nothing to prove about himself, only about the image and its capabilities. There’s a basic truth that forms the basis for his style: a simple picture can show you light or it can show you darkness, but only a movie can show the light changing, clouds suddenly appearing on the horizon or the Sun coming out after a storm. It’s in moving from one thing to the next that a certain sensation impossible in anything else occurs.

The idea behind the opening shot of À travers la forêt, on a basic level, seems to be to construct a long take — the camera shifting from wide-shot to close-up, circling around and moving forward— out of a parade of ordinary pleasures: flowers, mirrors, a woman’s hair, hands, breasts, a man’s ass. Yet the shot is not about any of those things; if I had to describe "Civeyrac," I'd say that he’s what happens in the movement between those objects. He’s not the framing, but what occurs within the take when the camera moves from one framing to the next, the moment of the dissolve and not the image dissolved from or into, what occurs in the camera’s movement forward rather than the framing that results from its arrival at the end of the dolly track, the pan rather than what’s being panned between. His cinema is the transition, the dynamic, and also the blur. That transition is also a sort of tension, like in his 2000 film Les Solitaires, where the domestic tension of the plot is rivaled by the director’s own tension, a high-wire act between the traditions of naturalism and his own impulse towards truth (the solution, apparently, is theater — the theater of the image, you could call it, and that’s probably how Miklós Jancsó thinks of it, too).

The other key Civeyrac idea is that a person can die in a moving image. While painting or photography can show a moment of death, cinema can portray the transition. This raises a good question: is death Civeyrac’s great subject because of the nature of cinema, or was he drawn to cinema because of death? Either answer seems likely; it’s probably a combination of the two. He’s not haunted by death like, say, Philippe Garrel (for whom death has always been a sort of failure and life, by extension, the road to failure); no, death for him isn’t something final, but a sort of transition in and of itself, maybe into memory or into history. A ghost haunts every grainy image of Les Solitaires. Civeyrac's pre-Raphaelite short Tristesse Beau Visage tells the story of how Orpheus seduced Eurydice, in color and black & white (or is it how Eurydice seduced Orpheus? You’re never really sure — all these turns).

And it’s the turn, and the uncertainity that comes with it, that makes Civeyrac important — a director of small films working with one of the greatest tools available to an extent that’s unrivaled, like some unknown who discovers a secret to painting and toils in obscurity. He is against the definitive and for an image that shows what exists between things instead of the things themselves, what we feel between emotions. And we should be with him.

YOUNG GIRLS IN BLACK (Des Filles en Noir)

France (85 mi) 2010

Young Girls In Black (Des Filles En Noir) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

Emo/Goth culture and its attendant melancholia come to French art cinema in Young Girls In Black, Jean Paul Civeyrac’s languorous but distinctive study of teenage ennui. Civeyrac – whose films include Through the Forest (CH) and All These Fine Promises - has a cult following among the aesthete hardcore of French cinephiles, but is yet to make a splash internationally.

Young Girls certainly won’t break him big-time, but it could give his reputation a discreet nudge, perhaps even win him a younger audience among more inquisitive French studentry. Two moodily charismatic leads should help find this quietly stylish item a berth with the nichiest of niche buyers.

The film starts with a suicide attempt by moody emo-styled teenager Noémie (Lhomeau), whose room is decorated with her own downbeat artwork. A year later, she’s supposedly on the mend but still flinging sullen invective at her hard-working single mother (Acron). Back at school, Noémie’s best friend and cultural twin Priscilla (Tissier) is having boyfriend and study troubles. In front of their jeering classmates, Priscilla helps the defiantly highbrow Noémie – a promising flautist – to read her class project on German Romantic poet Kleist, whose suicide the girls see as the coolest thing ever. The duo decide to follow Kleist’s lead and make a pact to say, ‘Goodbye uncool world’.

The problem is, they can’t get hold of the sleeping pills they need, and also land in trouble with the police after venting their contempt for the bourgeoisie all over their head teacher’s car. After a hugely awkward party at Noémie’s grandparents, the girls decide that it’s time for them both to make the fatal plunge, but things don’t quite go to plan. The film’s coda follows one of the duo’s apparent rehabilitation but leaves us wondering what her future holds.

Young Girls in Black resembles a stylised, hyper-aesthetic take on the teen-alienation material associated with US directors such as Gus Van Sant or Gregg Araki - although the girls’ cerebral affiliations have a decidedly French slant. Civeyrac doesn’t overdo the emphasis on youth-tribe trappings – although there’s plenty of Goth and emo regalia on show chez Priscilla – but concentrates to intimate effect on the girls’ mutually dependent, implicitly sapphic bond. Their folie à deux carries echoes of Heavenly Creatures and My Summer of Love, but with a powerful streak of abstraction. References to Kleist and extracts from Brahms emphasise the film’s high-culture dimension, highlighting the debt to German romanticism and taking the story’s scope beyond the confines of contemporary youth-cult realism.

The two young leads play for the most part in a low-emoting register that sometimes verges on Bresson minimalism, although they also excel at manic outbursts: much of the time, sullen glares have the desired effect. Acron is also good as the long-suffering parent embodying the reality principle. Overall, the film altogether bears Civeyrac’s stylistic stamp – long takes and extended horizontal camera moves giving the film an almost dream-like quality, emphasized by actual dream sequences set in thick fog. Hichame Alaouié’s photography, with its eerily faded palette, makes the film a very elegant and idiosyncratic package.

Clair, René

Clair, René from World Cinema

One of the first auteurs of world cinema, Clair epitomized a certain idea of "Frenchness," with his light, witty and elegant films which ranged from farce to sentimental comedy. Although Jean Renoir now stands as the greatest French director of the classical era, at the time Clair had a higher standing: André Bazin could write in 1957, "René Clair is probably, after Chaplin, the most esteemed director in the world" (an opinion not shared by other writers at Cahiers du cinéma). Clair was an actor and film critic before becoming assistant to Jacques de Baroncelli and joining the French avant-garde. Entr'acte (1924) and Paris qui dort / The Crazy Ray (1924-25) wedded formal experimentation with Surrealist fantasy and a touch of the populism which characterized his later work. He injected movement into two Labiche farces, Un chapeau de paille d'Italie / The Italian Straw Hat (1928) and Les Deux timides (1929), especially with the comic chases inherited from early cinema which became his trademark. Sous les toits de Paris (1930), Le Million (1931) and Quatorze juillet (1932), all brilliantly designed by Lazare Meerson, fixed an iconography of popular Paris—a "sweet" version of the darker Poetic Realism, full of street singers, irate concierges and neighbours, and pretty midinettes (like Annabella in the latter two films). At the same time, Sous les toits de Paris, one of the first French talking pictures, was a remarkable experiment in sound, both technically and in its discourse on the possibilities of the new dimension. As a social satire on modernization, À nous la liberté (1931) foreshadowed Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). By 1934, the failure of Le Dernier milliardaire (another social satire, about an imaginary dictatorship) hinted that Clair's style was going out of fashion. — Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema

Film Reference Philip Kemp

During the 1930s, when the French cinema reigned intellectually preeminent, René Clair ranked with Renoir and Carné as one of its greatest directors—perhaps the most archetypally French of them all. His reputation has since fallen (as has Carné's), and comparison with Renoir may suggest why. Clair's work, though witty, stylish, charming, and technically accomplished, seems to lack a dimension when compared with the work of Renoir; there is a certain oversimplification, a fastidious turning away from the messier, more complex aspects of life. (Throughout nearly the whole of his career, Clair rejected location shooting, preferring the controllable artifice of the studio.) Critics have alleged that his films are superficial and emotionally detached. Yet, at their best, Clair's films have much of the quality of champagne—given so much sparkle and exhilaration, it would seem churlish to demand nourishment as well.

At the outset of his career, Clair directed one of the classic documents of surrealist cinema, Entr'acte, and this grounding in surrealism underlies much of his comedy work. The surrealists' love of sight gags (Magritte's cloud-baguettes, Duchamp's urinal) and mocking contempt for bourgeois respectability can be detected in the satiric farce of Un Chapeau de paille d'Italie, Clair's masterpiece of the silent era. Dream imagery, another surrealist preoccupation, recurs constantly throughout his career, from Le Voyage imaginaire to Les Belles-de-nuit, often transmuted into fantasy—touchingly poetic at its best, though in weaker moments declining into fey whimsicality.

The key films in Clair's early career, and those which made him internationally famous, were his first four sound pictures: Sous les toits de Paris, Le Million, A Nous la liberté, and Quatorze Juillet. Initially sceptical of the value of sound—"an unnatural creation"—he rapidly changed his opinion when he recognized the creative, nonrealistic possibilities which the soundtrack offered. Sound effects, music, even dialogue could be used imaginatively to counterpoint and comment on the image, or to suggest a new perspective on the action. Words and pictures, Clair showed, need not, and in fact should not, be tied together in a manner that clumsily duplicates information. Dialogue need not always be audible; and even in a sound picture, silence could claim a validity of its own.

In these four films, Clair created a wholly individual cinematic world, a distinctive blend of fantasy, romance, social satire, and operetta. Song and dance are introduced into the action with no pretence at literal realism, characters are drawn largely from stock, and the elaborate sets are explored with an effortless fluidity of camera movement which would be impossible in real locations. These qualities, together with the pioneering use of sound and Clair's knack for effective pacing and brilliant visual gags, resulted in films of exceptional appeal, full of charm, gaiety, and an ironic wit which at times—notably in the satire on mechanised greed in A Nous la liberté—darkened towards an underlying pessimism.

As always, Clair wrote his own scripts, working closely on all four films with designer Lazare Meerson and cinematographer Georges Périnal. Of the four, Le Million most effectively integrated its various elements, and is generally rated Clair's finest film. But all were successful, especially outside France, and highly influential: both Chaplin (Modern Times) and the Marx Brothers (A Night at the Opera) borrowed from them.

In some quarters, though, Clair was criticized for lack of social relevance. Ill-advisedly, he attempted to respond to such criticisms; Le Dernier Milliardaire proved a resounding flop. This led to Clair's long exile. For thirteen years he made no films in France other than the abortive Air pur, and his six English-language pictures—two in Britain, four in America—have an uneasy feel about them, the fantasy strained and unconvincing. By the time Clair finally returned to France in 1946, both he and the world had changed.

The films that Clair made after World War II rarely recapture the lighthearted gaiety of his early work. In its place, the best of them display a new-found maturity and emotional depth, while preserving the characteristic elegance and wit of his previous films. The prevailing mood is an autumnal melancholy that at times, as in the elegiac close of Les Grandes Manoeuvres, comes near to tragedy. Characters are no longer the stock puppets of the pre-war satires, but rounded individuals, capable of feeling and suffering. More serious subjects are confronted, their edges only slightly softened by their context: Porte des Lilas ends with a murder, La Beauté du diable with a vision of the atomic holocaust. Nearest in mood to the earlier films is the erotic fantasy of Les Belles-de-nuit, but even this is darkly underscored with intimations of suicide.

In the late 1950s Clair came under attack from the writers of Cahiers du Cinéma, François Truffaut in particular, who regarded him as the embodiment of the "Old Guard," the ossified cinéma de papa against which they were in revolt. To what he saw as Clair's emotionless, studio-bound artifice, Truffaut proposed an alternative, more "truly French" cinematic tradition, the lyrical freedom of Renoir and Jean Vigo. Clair's reputation never fully recovered from these onslaughts, nor from the lukewarm reception which met his last two films, Tout l'or du monde and Les Fêtes galantes. Although Clair no longer commands a place among the very first rank of directors, he remains undoubtedly one of the most original and distinctive stylists of the cinema. His explorations of sound, movement, and narrative technique, liberating at the time, still appear fresh and inventive. For all his limitations, which he readily acknowledged—"a director's intelligence," he once wrote, "can be judged partly by his renunciations"—Clair succeeded in creating a uniquely personal vision of the world, which in his best films still retains the power to exhilarate and delight.

All-Movie Guide bio info

René Clair Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Films de France Profile

New York Film Annex brief synopsis of several films

Clair, René They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

PopMatters David Sanjek, an overview of several early films

ENTR’ACTE

France (22 mi) 1924

Experimental and avant-garde offering from director René Clair that was produced by the French dance company Les Ballets Suis, and features the members mourning the loss of their star dancer, Borlin. Outrageously surreal and silly, it offers such sights as a funeral procession with the hearse being pulled by a camel and the dead occupant giving a final performance. Eric Satie (who is uncredited) composed the music and makes an appearance towards the end.

Rene Clair's directorial debut is a technical display of cinematic virtuosity. Dadaist art that features the stars of the movement such as composer Erik Satie, photographer/director Man Ray, playwright Francis Picabia, & artist Marcel Duchamp. The film isn't about anything, which is the beauty of it. It's a strange brew of absurd impossible unrelated sequences. Inanimate objects are brought to life, while people jump around at various motions, and sometimes even backwards! In a way, everything is the opposite of "the way it's supposed to be", but basically it's a satirical attack on societal convention and narrative coherence that denies interpretation at every turn. You can choose to decipher it any way you want or just enjoy for it's wild imagination. The most memorable segment has mourners in hot pursuit of a coffin pulled by a camel and disappearing after the dead man is resurrected.

Entr'acte (René Clair, 1924) starts out with the intercutting of seemingly random, provocative images: a ballerina leaping in the air as seen from directly below; people moving in slow motion or reverse; an egg floating over a fountain that is shot by a gun, etc. The pace gradually speeds up until we see a coffin escape from a camel-drawn hearse and scoot along the road on its own with all the mourners in pursuit. The editing become more and more frantic and ingenious, until the coffin eventually stops and the dead man steps out, making his pursuers disappear by magic.

As the title indicates, the picture was designed to be shown between the acts of a performance—in this case, a ballet by Erik Satie, who also composed a score for the film. The brilliant synchronization of the editing with the score makes the film especially entertaining and accessible.

PopMatters David Sanjek, an overview of several early films

Entr'acte Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

THE CRAZY RAY

aka: Paris Qui Dort

aka: Paris Asleep

France (18 mi) 1925

A genuinely weird science fiction short from the brain of Clair (based on one of his own daydreams, apparently), about a cheerfully mad scientist who decides to try out his new 'freezing' ray on the unsuspecting people of Paris. The upshot is that a bunch of folk find themselves temporarily turned into statues. Far more fun than the story is watching the 20s stop-motion animation and the various poses adopted.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Rene Clair's first feature (1923), known in French as Paris qui dort, is a remarkable early SF effort about a mad scientist who immobilizes Paris--except for a watchman on the Eiffel Tower and a group of airplane passengers, who roam about the city while everyone and everything else is frozen. A brilliant meditation on some of the differences between film and still photography as well as an engaging comic story that is full of poetic notions, this is one of the landmarks of French silent cinema.

The first feature of director-writer-novelist-Dadaist René Clair resembles his better-known short 'Entr'acte' in its manic comic invention and its all-round energetic absurdity. It starts out with a crazed inventor perfecting a ray that suspends animation throughout Paris, and then has a great deal of fun tracing the paths of a handful of 'survivors' through the frozen city. The prolific jokes about motion and stasis are fundamentally movie concept gags, and they relate directly to contemporary avant-garde film concerns.

Paris qui dort Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

Paris qui dort (1923) is Clair's first film. It is a science fiction story, suggesting Clair's affinity for sf and fantasy in many works to come. The plot seems reminiscent of Onésime horloger (Jean Durand, 1912).

The characters here get a holiday from their regular work and life, and are free to enjoy themselves. Clair treats this as light entertainment, although he develops this aspect with great vividness and detail. Clair will return to alternatives to the world of work with political seriousness in À Nous la liberté (1931).

The comedy chase down the Eiffel Tower will later be recreated by Louis Malle in Zazie dans le métro (1960). Clair will also make a brief documentary, La Tour (1928). The shots of the tower here are excellently composed, and display a vivid visual style. The vertical descent of the camera down the tower, recalls the up and down vertical crane shots that open Sous les toits de Paris (1930). Clair likes overhead and aerial views; these too will re-appear in Sous les toits de Paris, although from much lower heights.

Many of the film's exteriors show the characters against large Parisian building facades. This will be a recurring element in the director's work.

The scientist's lab is in a pure geometric style: circles, straight line segments. It looks like an abstract painting, turned into a set. The film was made the year before Aelita, Queen of Mars (Jacob Protazanov, 1924), which would embody abstract, geometric art to the fullest. The set here is much simpler and purer than the hero's lab in Judex (Louis Feuillade, 1916), which is full of elaborate machinery in the high-tech style. Paris qui dort does share the slightly disconcerting approach of Feuillade in general, contrasting realistic exteriors shot on location, with highly artificial looking studio-shot interiors.

Clair includes brief animated sequences, which illustrate the spread of the scientist's rays. These remind one a bit of the diagrams in comic books to come. Such diagrams break the flow of the realistic, representational images that make up the bulk of a comic book story, and display a schematic image that helps the viewer understand what is going on. These often include cross sections of buildings, blueprint-like pictures of machinery, astronomical maps, and other informative sketch-like images. Such diagrams are very useful for understanding the plot. But they are much rarer in films than in comics. Perhaps commercial film practice demands the illusion of "realism": that all shots represent some sort of reality being displayed to the viewer. Fritz Lang would also include animated sequences in Metropolis (1926), but these represent abstract imagery involving a loss of consciousness, not diagrammatic information. Much later would come films that alternate between live action and cartoon sequences, such as Edd Griles' video She-Bop, with Cyndi Lauper, and Run, Lola, Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998). These are not diagrammatic either.

The film follows a standard movie convention, in having the hero better and better dressed as the film progresses. He starts out in shirt sleeves, then puts on a not very prepossessing tie. By the movie's end, he is in a sharp pinstriped three piece suit. The pilot also gets to be in fancy clothes by the film's end: wearing a suit with elaborate patch pockets and belt, much like a pilot's uniform. Albert Préjean, the actor playing the pilot, will return in Sous les toits de Paris as the leading man. In that film, his shirt will once again have uniform like patch pockets, and his suit will have variations on them. This will all have less relationship to his character in the second film, a street singer.

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

PopMatters David Sanjek, an overview of several early films

UNDER THE ROOFS OF PARIS (Sous les toits de Paris)

France (96 mi) 1930

From its graceful opening pan across the (studio recreated) rooftops of the title to the multiple variations on its naggingly memorable theme song, the enchantment of Clair's first talkie has remained intact. Even the slight awkwardness of the semi-synchronised soundtrack, as scratchy as if played on a wind-up phonograph, complements its nostalgic, almost anachronistic visuals. That, plus Lazare Meerson's elegantly spare sets, George van Parys' jingly score, and the naïve if still affecting performances, make for a miniaturist masterpiece.

It's extraordinarily hard for us, weaned on movies and television, to imagine the excitement and possibility of these new media when they first appeared. (I suppose the Internet is our contemporary equivalent, and though it has much to offer, I don't know that the entertainment possibilities provided by the Net are near the top of the list of its advantages.) Unquestionably a sameness has crept into moviemaking, into Hollywood studio pictures especially; it's unusual to get a shudder, a rush of creative possibility not from the latest independent release, but from a movie made more than seventy years ago, but that's exactly what's so appealing about René Clair's Under the Roofs of Paris.

One of the great pleasures of this movie is in watching an accomplished storyteller like Clair find his way with the new tools at his disposal. He was rightly concerned that the coming of sound would mean the death of cinematic invention, and unfortunately the intervening decades have proved him to be largely correct; his effort here is to do something other than merely a talking picture. (And certainly the new technology was cumbersome and unfamiliar; the idea of doing a dialogue-driven film with a locked-down camera, even if it appealed to him, was almost certainly a technical impossibility.)

And so what's here is a charming pastiche, part music hall revue, part vaudeville, part melodrama, part silent screen comedy. There isn't terribly much to the story—Albert (Albert Préjean), who makes rent by hawking sheet music, meets the lovely Pola (Pola Illery), a young Romanian woman; Albert gets set up by one of his less savory pals, and while he's in prison, Louis (Edmond Gréville), his best friend, is making time with his girl. Albert's profession allows Clair to show him leading the people of Paris in song, on a street corner—it's the kind of thing that only happens in the movies, but still, you may mourn for the passage of such scenes, for this is the Paris that exists only and marvelously in our imagination.

Many of the scenes play out exactly as they would in a silent movie, though here with non-synchronized music. I'd wager that this is the first cinematic use of the William Tell Overture, which plays under a spirited bar fight—hi ho, Silver! And while the casual attitudes about sex are rather disarming for a movie of this period—oh, those French—it is locked solidly into movie conventions in that the raciest thing a young woman can do is not sleep with a man, but dance with him.

The narrative is largely beside the point, essentially a convenience; Clair was clearly a quick study, as much more attention is paid to the storytelling in the operetta-like Le Million, made just a year later. But what's absolutely astonishing here is the camerawork. The moving camera in the opening shot is as controlled and formally expressive as anything done decades later with dollies or Steadicams, and throughout the shots are composed with flair and elegance. (If you're familiar with the other arts of the period, more than once Clair's compositions may put you in mind of the photographs of Atget.) The editing is a bit more pedestrian, with a few too many insert shots, underlining story points that are readily evident when the camera is further back from the action. Then again, it may be unfair to expect this early talkie to conform to the film grammar that it helped to establish, and these really are small blemishes that won't interfere with your enjoyment of this splendid movie.

by Luc Sante Criterion essay

DVD Journal Mark Bourne

Sous les toits de Paris Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon)

filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]

PopMatters David Sanjek, an overview of several early films

Movie Habit DVD review Breck Patty also reviews À NOUS LA LIBERTÉ

LE MILLION

France (83 mi) 1931

Classic early René Clair, this is the one about a hunt for a lost lottery ticket which ends in a football scrimmage on an opera stage, foresh adowing A Night at the Opera. It features asynchronous sound and other experimental devices of the time. Luckily it's lively enough to survive the worst textbook bromides: the playing, the delightful music, and the dialogue (half-sung, half-spoken) all mesh together in a way no one but Clair ever quite matched.

When sound came to motion pictures in 1927, avant-garde director Rene Clair prophesied the deathof film. He proved himself wrong with his amusing musical comedy, Le Million, whichmakes extravagant use of sound and song to underline the action and to comment upon it.

Impoverished artist Michel (Rene Lefevre) is being harassed by his creditors while he attempts tomake love to his model, Vanda (Vanda Greville). Discovered by his fiancée Beatrice (Annabella),a ballet dancer, Michel tries to patch things up with her but is distracted when the creditors show upagain. At the same time, a master thief, Grandpa Tulip (Paul Ollivier) ducks into Beatrice'sapartment and helps himself to Michel's jacket. When Michel learns that he has bought the winningticket in the Dutch lottery, he is chagrined to find that the ticket is in the coat which has nowwandered away. The rest of the film concerns the attempts of Michel, his roommate Prosper (LouisAllibert), Vanda and Beatrice to recover the coat in a wild romp that finds Michel behind bars and onstage at the Lyric Opera.

In this prototype for the Hollywood musical, Clair is nearly arrogant in his insertion of songs into theaction. In addition to the Greek chorus of creditors who comment on Michel's fortunes andmisfortunes, there are also several voiceovers in which Michel and Prosper sing to themselves. Aduet onstage at the opera plays out over the wordless exchanges between Michel and Beatrice on thescreen, giving an interior view of the characters through pantomime to the lyrics of the song. In theclimactic tussle over the jacket at the opera, Clair boldly uses the sounds from a football game,complete with cheering crowds.

Lefevre makes an appealing and sympathetic protagonist; his small size lends him a Mickey Mouse/everyman quality that makes his plight seem even more a trick of fate. Beatrice is a fairly standardfemale lead, but Vanda Greville really is notable as the scheming golddigger. Louis Allibert makesa fine amoral Prosper. The irritating tenor who ends up with the jacket, Sopranelli, is beautifullysketched in a brief exchange where it is established that he hires young women to throw him bouquetsafter his songs.

The film has an almost Magic Realism feeling to it; we're firmly planted in the real world but thereare touches of the bizarre as well. The opening sequence, on the Paris rooftops, prefigures the unrealrooftop world of Mary Poppins, and the mass of leaves which falls upon the romancingcouple backstage at the opera give us a distorted sense of reality that is highly intriguing.

by Elliott Stein Criterion essay

Bright Lights Film Journal [Alan Vanneman]

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng)

DVD Verdict -Criterion Collection Barrie Maxwell

DVD Talk (Chris Hughes)

UTK Daily Beacon [Albert Dunning]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)

PopMatters David Sanjek, an overview of several early films

À NOUS LA LIBERTÉ

aka: Freedom for Us

aka: Liberty for Us

France (104 mi) 1931

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)

With its barrel-organ score and mechanistic choreography (rather than direction) of actors, this jolly satire on automation may be dated, but no more so now than in its own time. Though it pales in comparison with the anarchic, even scatological, vulgarity of Chaplin's Modern Times, which it influenced, it's well worth a look today as simultaneously vindicating Clair's former high reputation and his subsequent expulsion from most critical pantheons.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

As far as socialist musicals are concerned, you're better off with René Clair's charming 1931 film, which follows the exploits of two ex-prison inmates: one who finds fortune as an industrialist, the other who ends up working in his factory. It's de rigueur to compare Clair to his contemporaries Renoir and Vigo, which is more than a bit unfair -- Clair represents a previous, theatrically bound tradition at its peak, while Renoir and Vigo were the heralds of a new age. Compare Nous la Liberté, instead, to Chaplin -- after all, Clair's distributor did, and sued Chaplin for plagiarism after Modern Times was released. (The fascinating saga is chronicled in an audio essay on the disc, though its pro-Chaplin bias is evident; Clair petitioned his distributor to drop the suit, saying if Chaplin had been "inspired" by him, he was honored.) Watching them within the span of a couple of months, it seems unavoidable that Nous is the superior film, less self-consciously universal, more successfully railing against the dehumanization inherent in the assembly line: Clair personalizes the workers, while Chaplin only seems to have time for the Tramp. It's still early enough in the sound era for Clair to treat sound magically, so when a wind whips up, you hear something more akin to a spacecraft landing rather than someone sticking a microphone out the window -- by comparison, the characters' tendency to break into song is hardly even noteworthy. Like Criterion's other Clair discs -- Le Million and Sous les Toits de Paris -- this one comes with a host of opportunities for further study, in this case additional interviews and Clair's 1924 short Entr'acte, a Dadaist landmark with appearances by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

While highly critical of the advent of sync sound in motion pictures in the late 1920s, director René Clair would be among the first to fully realize its potential in the early 1930s. With his third sound film (following Under the Roofs of Paris and Le Million), À Nous la Liberté (Liberty for Us) Clair had found his stride, artfully incorporating the new technology through dialogue, music and sound effects. The film also had more depth to its theme than his earlier works, presenting a biting but lighthearted satire of the modernization sweeping the world, and its dehumanizing effect on civilization.

The film opens in a penitentiary, where prisoners work on a manual assembly line building toy horses. Cellmates Émile (Henri Marchand) and Louis (Raymond Cordy) conspire to escape, but only Louis is able to make it out, re-establishing himself as a phonograph manufacturer, eventually becoming a respected and powerful industrial magnate. This escalation into the realms of successful industrialism is not without its problems. When Émile finally escapes from incarceration, he inadvertantly winds up working in Louis' factory, and upon recognizing his old prison buddy, is in a position to severely damage Louis' position. Anxious to maintain his image, Louis strikes a deal with Émile, setting him up with the woman he is transfixed on, but as the factory continues to grow, more outside influences end up in the picture, leading to a farcical turn of events that offers to free the pair once and for all.

The film builds up the notion that "work is liberty," then turns the idea on its head. Director Clair presents a progression of mechanized society from the manual assembly lines and regimental life behind bars, to the phonograph company, employing the same techniques and uniformed atmosphere as the penitentiary. The idea is telescoped to more and more automated lines, until eventually the machines build themselves, freeing the workers to a life of whimsy. À Nous la Liberté skillfully combines slapstick comedy, social commentary, political satire and musical numbers. The playful plot devotes ample time to complicating matters, with a number of setups and sight gags, especially following Émile's infatuation with Jeanne (Rolla France), the factory secretary, always under the eye of her watchful uncle. Cinematographer Georges Périnal, who had worked with Clair on his previous sound films, utilizes imagery that captures the symbolic industrial trappings and comedic elements with equal flair, while Georges Auric (Blood of a Poet) provides a score that punctuates the visuals with a number of rousing musical numbers.

In the end, Clair was apparently disappointed with the film due to its hurried shooting schedule, and trimmed the feature by ten minutes in the years following its release. By contrast, fans consider it one of his most important works. Perhaps the most notable distinction for À Nous la Liberté is its similarities to Chaplin's Modern Times, created six years later, an issue that has caused much controversy, and a lengthy plagiarism lawsuit brought on by Clair's producers against United Artists. Chaplin denied ever seeing Clair's film, and Clair himself wanted nothing to do with the suit, believing that if Chaplin—one of Clair's own influences—had borrowed from him, it should be considered an honor. Nonetheless, Tobis persisted in its demands for compensation for over a decade, and eventually settled out of court. Similarities or not, À Nous la Liberté provides a humorously entertaining and insightful look at the rewards and pitfalls of industrialization, while offering an early example of the marriage of sound and motion picture.

À nous la liberté Criterion essay by Michael Atkinson August 19, 2002

À nous la liberté (1931) - The Criterion Collection

Senses of Cinema (John Flaus)

Turner Classic Movies Jay Carr

À Nous la liberté Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television

ToxicUniverse.com (John Beachem)

The Q Network Film Desk [James Kendrick]

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon)

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Barrie Maxwell

Apollo Guide (Dan Jardine)

filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]

The DVD Archives [Brian Huddleston]

PopMatters David Sanjek, an overview of several early films

Movie Habit DVD review Breck Patty also reviews UNDER THE ROOFS OF PARIS

The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) insightful 1932 review

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

QUATORZE JUILLET

aka: Bastille Day

France (86 mi) 1933

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

The opening shot, in which Périnal's camera cranes sinuously around Meerson's distillation of a Paris quartier to the accompaniment of Jaubert's gently lyrical score (what a team!) is followed by a series of vignettes introducing the principal characters as they prepare for the 14th July festivities. It's lovely but, oh dear, you think, I bet there's going to be a story. In fact, there isn't much of one. Taxi driver Rigaud and flower girl Annabella (emblematic '30s occupations) are lovers. They fall out, spend some time being separately unhappy, until Clair contrives a whimsical reunion for the finale. It's the most Borzage-like of Clair's romances, with such incidents as the death of the heroine's mother lending unaccustomed weight to the proceedings.

This 1933 film closed Rene Clair's most creative period, and while it isn't the equal of Le million or A nous la liberte, it's well worth seeing for its blend of light romance and social realism--a blend that remains, for many people, the quintessential "French film." Largely plotless (though overplotted when it comes), the film is an episodic look at events leading up to Bastille Day in a working-class neighborhood of Paris. Some of the characters--a drunken millionaire, a flower girl--seem lifted from Chaplin's City Lights, just as Chaplin borrowed from A nous la liberte for Modern Times. With Annabella.

The New York Times M.H.

I MARRIED A WITCH

USA (77 mi) 1942

Heresy here: Clair's '30s musical comedies have always been acclaimed as enormously original, innovative classics, far superior to his American films. But where those French films now seem dated and Chaplinesque in their twee sentimentality and naïve desire to make a serious point, the American films remain delightful: unpretentious, pacy and genuinely witty. I Married a Witch sees Clair at his peak, with an ambitious, puritanical politician (March) being plagued by the mischievous Lake, a witch reincarnated and bent on revenge after being burned at the stake by his ancestors. Lake is delightfully effective as the malicious woman, whose ideas of punishment are often beautifully absurd, and March provides an excellent foil.

Monica Sullivan from Videohound’s Independent Film Guide:

One of the coolest movie stars between 1941 and 1947 was...Veronica Lake (1919-73) AND I MARRIED A WITCH is one of her coolest movies. Along with her father, Daniel (Cecil Kellaway), she is burned at the stake during the Puritan era. For their part in this nefarious deed, the male descendants of the Wooley family are doomed forever to be the most miserable married men on earth. Cut to the early 1940’s: Wallace Wooly (Frederic March) is about to be married to Estelle Masterson (Susan Hayward), a real shrew. Not if Jennifer (Lake) can help it! Wooley also wants to become Governor with the support of his future father-in-law, J.R. (Robert Warwick). He “rescues” Jennifer from a fire (well, she IS a witch!), and she proceeds to bewitch him, as only she can. Estelle and J.R. don’t like it one bit. Tough. Jennifer and Daniel make mischief in Wooley’s life, until she falls in love with him and loses her magic powers. (There’s a lesson here!) French director René Clair keeps things moving at a merry clip, and Robert Benchley is a delight as always as Dr. Dudley White. His Algonquin Round table crony Marc Connelly contributed to the splendid adaption of Thorne Smith’s The Passionate Witch. Look for exquisite five-year old Ann Carter as Jennifer’s daughter, soon to receive rave reviews for Val Newton’s THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE and as Beatrice for Mark Hellinger’s THE TWO MRS. CARROLLS. P.S. Ten years after what turned out to be the highlight of her career, Lake accepted a television assignment on an episode of TALES OF TOMORROW entitled “Flight Overdue.” Her glorious blond mane had been hacked away in favor of a butch cut suitable for an aviatrix. The primitive video lighting was harsh on a young woman of 32, and so were the ghastly costumes. But the saddest thing about the show is the script. Lake speaks forcefully of her right to live her life as she chooses and, after her Amelia Earhart-style disappearance, Walter Brooke as her icky husband says, “I’m glad she’s gone and at last I’m free.” This horrifying bit of sexual propaganda from the spring of 1952 nearly broke my heart.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Stomp Tokyo Chris J. Maygar

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [4/10]

Clark, David

GALAPAGOS

USA (40 mi) 2001 co-director: All Giddings

Galapagos (IMAX short) Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

It is a curious fact," wrote Charles Darwin in his world-shaking tome On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, "and one previously unrecorded in scientific annals, that the Galápagos Archipelago, situated under the equator, between 500 and 600 miles from the shores of South America, is home to many of the planet's most bitchin' forms of terrestrial and marine life."

Okay, maybe he didn't write precisely that. Still, such will be the inevitable conclusion of those who see Galapagos, the latest IMAX 3-D travelogue (suggested slogan: "It's just like being there, only you've got a pair of really dorky-looking goggles on your head"). Alhough Darwin concerned himself largely with the area's numerous species of finches and the minute variations in their beaks, the movie wisely concentrates on the cool stuff: hammerhead sharks, moray eels, big-ass iguanas (that may not be the proper nomenclature), tortoises large enough to be employed as step stools in libraries with fairly low ceilings. An odd-looking fish hugging the ocean floor, its asymmetrical eyes seeming to hover a few millimeters above its face as if on tiny stalks, looks downright startled when the suction-equipped arm of a scientist's submersible vehicle makes its move. (The fish won't fit in the collection tube, so it just gets carried along like a sock caught in a vacuum cleaner.) Granted, the scenery is spectacular, too—craggy hills, tidal pools—but it's the fantastic fauna you'll want to see more of. Even millions of years of evolution seem unlikely to have produced some of these creatures.

Narrated in a surprisingly generic BBC cadence by Kenneth Branagh—I didn't even know it was him until his name appeared in the closing credits—Galapagos won't disappoint nature lovers, but it might have been even more effective as a traditional two-dimensional presentation. Maybe it's just me, but while the 3-D illusion produced by IMAX's (really dorky-looking) goggles is remarkably convincing, it somehow makes everything look vaguely artificial; you're so busy adjusting to the unexpected and slightly distorted depth of field that the basic grandeur of the images sometimes goes unnoticed. Still, unless you can afford to hop on a Beagle of your own and see this strange world for yourself, this is probably as good as it's going to get.

Clark, Larry

KIDS

USA (90 mi) 1995

Monica Sullivan from Videohound’s Independent Film Guide:

A very grim look at the lives of depressingly young children. Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) is terminally incapable of zipping it up. He will succumb to AIDS eventually but he doesn’t know it yet. However, Jennie (Chloë Sevigny), who’s tested HIV positive, DOES know it. She was among a long line of virgins who had sex for the very first time with Telly. Telly seduces a very young blond (Sarah Henderson) at the start of KIDS, and picks up Darcy (Yakira Peguero) by picture’s end. The tragic irony is Telly probably enjoys bragging about his virginal conquests to his friend Gasper (Justin Pierce) even more than he digs the sex. KIDS shows a parentless world where a gang of homophobic, racist kids drift through the streets of Manhattan, and where children of ten turn on and/or drink themselves into a stupor. Harmony Korine was just 19 when he wrote KIDS, and Larry Clark was over 50 when he directed it.

Twenty-four hours in the lives of a group of Manhattan teenagers, mostly skateboarders, mostly on drugs, mostly into random, casual sex. Notably active in the latter arena is scrawny Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), an unlikely Lothario with a predilection for depriving post-pubertal girls of their virginity. Shot in a loose, semi-documentary style, the film's drama - or, more accurately, melodrama - kicks off when Jenny (Chloe Sevigny), one of Telly's previous conquests, discovers that she is HIV positive, and since she's only ever been with one man, Telly is a carrier. The film alternates between Jenny's frantic search for Telly, and Telly's exploits around town with best mate Casper (Justin Pierce). Strong material, demanding strong, sensitive handling, which is precisely what it doesn't get from debutant director Clark - a fiftysomething best known as a photographer - and scriptwriter Harmony Korine. Kids is nowhere near as perceptive, original or impressive as Korine's later directorial debut, Gummo, lazily settling instead for a hip, deadpan nihilism that smacks equally of exploitation and phoniness. The film isn't without moments of interest and offers a fresh perspective on familiar New York locations, but it never recovers from a gratuitously unpleasant set piece in which a young black man is savagely beaten by Casper's skateboarding gang. If the film is worth watching at all, it's mainly for Sevigny's striking debut performance, which effortlessly manages to transcend the limitations of the script and direction. It's a strong debut from an actress whose deserved - and later got - better service from her collaborators.

ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE

USA (101 mi) 1998

BFI | Sight & Sound | Another Day in Paradise (1998) John Wrathall from Sight and Sound, August 1999

BULLY

USA (107 mi) 2001

BFI | Sight & Sound | Daddy Cool James Mottram for Sight and Sound, March 2002

WASSUP ROCKERS 85 B

USA (111 mi) 2005

Hey hey we’re the Monkeys

This film has a lot going for it, not the least of which is the wonderful spirit of optimism generated by this improbable group of “Mexican punk rockers,” considering they’re not Mexican, but are from El Salvador and Guatamala and places unknown, yet they’re continually called names throughout the film based on racist assumptions that predominate the landscape of Los Angeles, and in doing so, the film challenges our own views as well. The best thing this film has going for it is the authentic personalities filled with a charming wit and humor of this otherwise inarticulate group of teenage guys, who feel out of place everywhere else except in each other’s company, exhibiting much of the playfulness of the early Monkees TV show, which was loosely based on the likeability factor of the Beatles in their early films.

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” The camera playfully follows this group of 7 Hispanic kids living in South Central Los Angeles, “we’re from the ghetto” one of them reiterates, all of whom are on their skateboards throughout most of the film, jetting down the sidewalks and streets at high speeds, or sailing over stairs, sometimes leaving them in a crumpled mess, writhing in pain on the sidewalk, perhaps limping afterwards, but always back up on their skateboards. There’s some terrific scenes of the boys playing in a high voltage punk band sounding very much like the Ramones, music that provides energy and serves as the nihilistic soundtrack throughout the film, or scenes flirting with girls at high school, where one of the boys is Romeo, as girls always flock to him, while the others look and giggle, always joking at themselves, which gives them the means to handle the physical taunts and outlandishly prejudiced comments hurled in their direction. Usually these kids just playfully send it right back, or look at one another with a look of recognition that the world is full of idiots. Interesting that in this film, these kids are considered the idiots by a society that sees what it wants to see, and never looks inside or hears a word these kids are saying.

All hell breaks loose when these kids decide they want to go skateboarding in Beverly Hills. First they’re arrested just for having the audacity to be there. “You don’t belong here,” the straight, white officer admonishes them, as Office Krepke writes them up for a ticket. At first the kids think he’s just playing with them, but when they realize he’s for real, they make a break for it and we see them skate past the Beverly Hills Hotel under the gentle palm trees, or past the elegant mansions that mark the landscape, collectively skating into one of these mansions, as a couple of girls watching them skate earlier had invited them over. Everything continues realistically, as there’s some interesting exploration by one of these couples, sitting there in a state of undress, talking about each other’s lives that reflects an inquisitiveness that was refreshing.

But everything changed with one image, that of a precise shot of a Rolls Royce or whatever richmobile arrives and out pops the Beverly Hills brothers, who could easily be mistaken for one of the 4 Preps or the 3 Lads or some other 50’s looking white kids with their short cropped haircuts looking ever so preppy. Then, in a somewhat surrealistic stroke, bad things started happening to people, quite by accident, leaving these kids to blame for by stereotypical thinking, whether they had anything to do with it or not.

Everything is working perfectly upon their arrival to Beverly Hills, the problem is when they attempt to leave, as they seem to get stuck in some pergatory that is reflective of the same misguided thinking we witnessed earlier, only now it is the whites who are pigeon-holed into crude stereotypes, such as the rich filmmaker who commits murder, but wants everything kept out of the papers, and this kid “probably didn’t have papers anyway,” or the lush lady of the house who wants to get into one of them’s pants, or the dapper gay blade who wants to get into one of them’s pants. This exhibits views as crude and as demonstrably stereotyped as those earlier more realistic views targeting the skateboarding crew. This leaves the audience off the hook, really, as the film meanders into a mindless territory that is as unsettling as it is inarticulate.

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones]

ACTION, A SHORT-LIVED FOX SITCOM that satirized the movie business, once opened with an elderly director sitting in a producer’s office dressed as a skate punk while his agent tries to pass him off as a hot young talent. The gag sprang to mind when I was thinking about Larry Clark, the poet laureate of fucked-up teens, who was born in 1943. He was a highly respected photographer when he made his directing debut in 1995 with the notorious indie drama Kids, which chronicled the sex life of a callow 17-year-old skateboarder in New York City. To some extent, each of Clark’s subsequent features—Another Day in Paradise (1998), Bully (2001), and Ken Park (2002)—has delved into the secret world of teenagers, leaving writers (Tom Wolfe in I Am Charlotte Simmons) and other filmmakers (Catherine Hardwicke in Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown) huffing and puffing to catch up with him.

Wassup Rockers, Clark’s latest exercise in teen anthropology, follows the misadventures of seven Latino skaters as they make their way from South Central to Beverly Hills and back again. It’s the least impressive of the Clark features I’ve seen (not including Ken Park, which has never been released in the U.S.), but its flaws are illuminating. Clark first made a name for himself with the photo book Tulsa (1971), whose moody portraits of thieves and junkies influenced Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish. When Clark made the transition to movies he brought to the big screen that same realism and eye for character-defining detail, but the documentary element in his work has always mixed uneasily with the dramatic demands of commercial filmmaking. In Wassup Rockers the conflict is especially pronounced: the first half is a striking piece of photojournalism with little dramatic interest, and the second half is a highly contrived narrative that forfeits any claim to realism.

The inconsistency seems to be mostly the result of Clark’s approach to casting. For Kids he was able to round up impressive amateurs, three of whom—Chloe Sevigny, Rosario Dawson, and Leo Fitzpatrick—went on to become successful professionals. Clark used professional actors for Another Day in Paradise and Bully, then mixed professional adults with amateur kids for Ken Park; he says the kids were so raw and unpredictable the adults were forced to keep it real. For Wassup Rockers Clark cast seven teenage boys he met on the street while doing a magazine photo shoot, and the script draws on their real-life experiences. I wouldn’t count on any of them becoming the next Rosario Dawson; they’re uniformly awful, delivering their lines in a self-conscious monotone and occasionally stumbling over them or glancing at the camera. Even playing themselves, they’re unable to create on-screen characters, which has the effect of making them seem interchangeable.

The stilted performances are especially unfortunate when one considers what a fine documentary Clark might have gotten out of the same material. He captures the kids’ daily lives in intimate detail as they roll out of bed, lift weights, ride skateboards to school, flirt with girls, and rehearse their punk band in the basement. Offering a textured sense of a world we might never see otherwise has always been Clark’s gift, and the movie’s first half is so rich with candid, authentic moments he could easily select a few dozen frames as still photographs and publish them in book form. But when the kids open their mouths reality evaporates, leaving behind a rickety high school play.

Wassup Rockers abruptly switches gears when the seven friends pile into a rusty Dodge and set off for Beverly Hills to do some skating. Pulled over by a couple of bicycle cops, they confess that no one has a driver’s license and surrender their vehicle, though that doesn’t stop them from catching a couple city buses and enjoying an afternoon of skating at Beverly Hills High School. A pair of rich girls invite them over for sex, and after that encounter ends in chaos the rockers scurry from one palatial backyard to the next, trying to make their way home. At this point the movie turns picaresque, as the kids run amok and Clark pokes cheap fun at spoiled Hollywood types, most of whom regard the kids as exotic animals or earthy sex objects.

According to Clark, this part of the movie was inspired by two cult classics: Walter Hill’s surreal street-gang saga The Warriors (1979), whose title hoods navigate the turf of various rival gangs as they try to make their way home to Coney Island, and Frank Perry’s equally strange The Swimmer (1968), about a suburban New York man who resolves to swim all the backyard pools that lead back to his house. Those models might account for the episodic narrative, but the satire and slapstick (one socialite tumbles down a flight of stairs, another is electrocuted in her bathtub) are weirdly reminiscent of A Hard Day’s Night, another movie that starred amateur actors in a script drawn from their own experiences. Whatever its antecedent, the second part of Wassup Rockers takes place not just in Beverly Hills but in movieland

Larry Clark Gerald Peary

Clark, Zach

WHITE REINDEER B 85

USA (82 mi) 2013 Official site

An absurdist, black comedy for Christmas may be the perfect thing to accompany all the office parties and egg nog, where people tend to overdo their festive merriment during the holidays, often to cover up their own insecurities and emptiness inside. But either way, this film will likely lead you down a road not taken before, especially its particularly bizarre take on Christmas, where part of its intrigue is counting down the days before the big event, where our heroine gets herself ever deeper into disturbing events that test her Christmas spirit. Anna Margaret Hollyman, from Small, Beautifully Moving Parts (2011), is Suzanne Barrington, a chirpy, real estate agent seen selling a young couple (Joe Swanberg and Lydia Hyslop) a new home in Virginia suburbia, where she seems particularly thrilled to ease their fears about home break-ins, telling them she and her husband live just around the block. This feeling of coziness is reinforced by a bout of noisy lovemaking in the kitchen, Greek-style, where her husband Jeff (Nathan Williams) has a tendency to talk his way through the moment with porn sounding sex talk, which sounds a bit edgy. While he’s the likable local TV meteorologist, he announces over dinner that he’s been offered a new job in Hawaii, starting in January, so this will be their last Christmas in Virginia. Immediately her mind lights up with thoughts of white sandy beaches and the ocean waves lapping at her feet, where somehow her perfect life just got a little bit better.

Disaster strikes, however, when Suzanne returns home one evening only to find her husband lying on the floor dead with part of his skull blown away. This sends her reeling into instant depression, staying with her parents afterwards, where she remains in shock throughout the funeral, still besieged by thoughts of Hawaii. When she returns home, however, she seems determined to make a fresh start by immediately decorating for Christmas, though she does this by binge-buying on the computer, ordering just about everything, spending a fortune. But not to worry, as apparently money is the least of her concerns, especially after Jeff’s best friend awkwardly reveals her husband was having an affair with a stripper before he died, immediately sending her to his laptop where she quickly gains entry, discovering his favorite porn site, which she sits and watches while nonchalantly munching on a salad. Before you know it, she’s found her way to the local strip club, where she finds Fantasia (Laura Lemar-Goldsborough) in the dressing room, a young black woman with eyelash extensions that appear to have hanging attachments on the end, a marvel of physical science that they’ll even stay in place. Fantasia is not the least bit phased by the visit, and even offers a hug over the death of their mutual amour, and then out of the blue, asks Suzanne if she wants to hang with some of the girls at a dance club afterwards. With literally nothing on her plate, why not? What else has she got to do? While they all binge drink and do lines of cocaine, Suzanne politely refuses, but as the evening wears on, she decides to give it a try, shown in a blur of white flashes, as she literally can’t stop herself from indulging.

Waking up in a daze on someone’s sofa, as a little black girl is yelling in her face that it’s time to get up, Suzanne asks where she is? “Maryland” is the unexpected response, as if she’s suddenly become Alice after falling down the rabbit hole. But she’s safely with Fantasia, who lives with her mother and young daughter, where they politely offer her breakfast after she pukes in the bathroom. Again, having no other plans, Fantasia decides to invite her shopping, which becomes a cocaine-fueled excursion of high-end shoplifting at Macy’s, where they wrap their stolen possessions in aluminum foil, as if this is a secret criminal code, followed by nonstop partying at a friend’s house. Suzanne is a good sport and the women are surprisingly accepting of this vanilla white bread, suburban girl with hardly a hint of personality, while they get blitzed to super aggressive punk rock songs. While there are amusing stretches, including an anything goes, Joe Swanberg-hosted sex party, where Suzanne finally loses it in the bathroom, where her emotional world is simply crumbling all around her, but she’s being comforted by a woman dressed in a naked catsuit. Much of it is too absurd for words, a turbulent rollercoaster ride into a psychological descent of utter Hell, but it has to be said people are reaching out to her in her hour of need, so it’s not like she is going through her turmoil alone. Again counting down the days to Christmas, her parents compound the ordeal by announcing they are separating, which is more like a punctuation mark on an utterly devastating series of events. Nonetheless, her recurrent flashes of an imaginary Hawaii are a persistent reminder that there’s plenty more to discover out there, where the blur of her own life needs an abrupt shift to something new, where the film offers an amusing blend of naturalism and an imaginary world beckoning. The director Zach Clark’s WHITE REINDEER joins the ranks of several American independent filmmakers like David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche (2013), Jeff Nichols’ Mud (2012), Aaron Katz’s COLD WEATHER (2010), and Chad Hartigan’s This Is Martin Bonner (2013), where they are all graduates of the North Carolina School of Arts.

Review: White Reindeer | Newcity Film Ray Pride

Zach Clark’s nimble, absurdist near-comedy “White Reindeer” is not your father’s Christmas story, but maybe your slightly criminal, usually sad uncle’s tale about real estate, weather men, being a contented consumer, murder, strippers, internet sex, cocaine, contemporary kink, sudden death, adultery, and more strippers, all set around the holliest, jolliest time of the year. (And gifts came earlier in the form of Kickstarter finance for the film, the backers of which include a number of indie film luminaries.) Suffice it to say, bittersweet excess ensues and Clark’s use of bumpy pacing and off-balance, sometimes flat acting begins to feel inspired. The ironic use of the usual hideous earwig Christmas tunes includes the original “Strip for Satan” by The Brimstones. With Anna Margaret Hollyman, Nathan Williams, Lydia Johnson, Joe Swanberg and Laura Lemar-Goldsborough as “Fantasia.”

In Review Online [Ty Landis]

“Christmas is whatever you want it to be,” says a character in director Zach Clark’s subversive yet overwhelmingly earnest White Reindeer. Clark’s fourth feature similarly wants to be a lot of things: tragedy, character study, pitch-black comedy. Such a tonally erratic setup suggests a disaster in the making—yet Clark, as not only director but also writer and editor, grounds the film in such a way that, by the end, it broadens into a resonant vision of life and living.

Things are looking up for Suzanne (Anna Margaret Hollyman), a 31-year-old real estate agent living in suburban Virginia with her husband Jeff (Nathan Williams), a TV weather reporter who, in talking about the weather, hints that “anything goes this Christmas”—a line which, it turns out, could aptly serve as the film’s tagline. Suzanne has just closed a home deal with George and Patti, a married swinging couple played Joe Swanberg and Lydia Hyslop; meanwhile, Jeff has received a promotion that will move the couple to Hawaii. All seems well in Suzanne's life…until one day—within the film’s opening 10 minutes—she comes home to find Jeff brutally murdered after a home invasion. The rest of White Reindeer follows this character as she trudges through the remnants of tragedy while also existing as a beacon of hope.

White Reindeer is a sad film, to be sure, especially as Suzanne, amidst her grief, finds herself having to deal not only with the news of her parents’ separation, but with the fact that her late husband, before he died, had an extramarital relationship with a stripper named Fantasia (Laura Lemar-Goldsborough). Despite these devastating developments, however, Clark refuses to wallow in misery; his is a world full of humor and redemptive grace amidst the tears. His handling of Suzanne’'s reaction to Jeff's relationship with Fantasia is a case in point. Other films might have gone down a familiar path where Suzanne and Fantasia would butt heads; instead, in White Reindeer, they end up hanging out, doing drugs, and shoplifting. Such a twist on audience expectations speaks to Clark's keen interest in depicting the unexpected curves life throws us all.

By now, you may be wondering how Clark’s film could possibly be considered a “Christmas movie.” Well, the film earns that label in the way its characters find themselves yearning for past images of Christmas: childhood, innocence, magic. “It’s all I’ve got,” Suzanne says in her despairing state at one point. White Reindeer may be a warped version of what we’ve come to expect amid all the clothes, commercials, decorations and wrapping paper, but, in spite of all the pain it observes, it possesses a hopeful heart. White Reindeer is the kind of film in which a character wakes up in Maryland after a night of drugs and drinking, finds herself at the breakfast table of her late husband's mistress and her family, and ultimately deciding she’s content with it. In other words, it's a film about living, with all the joy and heartache that accompanies a life lived to the fullest.

Paste Magazine Danny King

With White Reindeer, director-writer-editor Zach Clark has devised an atypical entry into the Christmas-movie genre, one characterized by both a genuine affection for the spirit of the holiday and a thorny character-study plot that, as is to be expected with Clark, contains its share of edgy material. Following an initially context-free opening image of serene clouds, palm trees, and a vast body of water, Clark assertively dresses his film in Christmas iconography: trees, scarves, stockings, ornaments, candy canes, holiday-themed jewelry, adorable e-cards. The clash between these traditionally uplifting signifiers and the narrative’s tough, confrontational detours provides the movie with its central tension. Clark’s idiosyncratic tone skillfully resists resting on one side in this tricky balancing act, although it’s a testament to his careful modulation that White Reindeer somehow arrives at a catharsis that feels of a piece with the lore of Hollywood melodrama. (Clark has cited Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, from 1955, as a prime influence here.)

White Reindeer begins in late November: the temperatures are dropping, and Christmas sweaters bedeck the inhabitants of the film’s suburban-Virginia setting. Real-estate agent Suzanne Barrington (an exquisite Anna Margaret Hollyman) has just sold a house (in very close proximity to her own, it turns out) to a charming matching-wardrobe couple (played by Joe Swanberg and Lydia Hyslop, one of the stars of Clark’s previous Vacation!). Suzanne is married to Jeff (Nathan Williams), the popular local meteorologist; after what seems like a typical night of kitchen lovemaking (complete with Jeff’s play-by-play commentary) and dinner conversation, Jeff announces to Suzanne that he’s been offered a new job in Hawaii. With the new position set to begin in January, Jeff and Suzanne vow to make the most of their “last Christmas in Virginia.”

However, unexpected tragedy dawns on Suzanne when she arrives home one evening to find Jeff dead from a horrific gunshot wound to the head. The subsequent scenes—a funeral plagued by a poor microphone, a gathering at the house, a dream of a beach—play out in a sustained fog, Suzanne’s consciousness still reeling from the shock of the incident. She is revived, at least a little bit, when a friend (Mark Boyett) awkwardly confesses to her a transgression in Jeff’s past. This sends her on something of a scavenger hunt that, naturally, begins on the computer; while browsing through the Internet history on Jeff’s account, she comes across a link to a pornography website. In one memorable comedic image—which encompasses despair, confusion, disorientation and embarrassment—Suzanne watches the pornography while eating a salad.

As with Clark’s previous two films, Modern Love Is Automatic and Vacation!, White Reindeer is about being jolted awake from the routines of one’s lifestyle by a sudden, unforeseeable shift in one’s circumstances. In 2009’s Modern Love, aimless twenty-something nurse Lorraine (Melodie Sisk) rejects her heretofore adrift, affectionless lifestyle and starts moonlighting as a dominatrix, slapping and insulting leather-clad men in motel rooms while still maintaining her signature disinterested expression. In 2010’s Vacation!, a group of four old college friends take a weeklong trip to North Carolina’s Hatteras Island only to be shaken into oblivion when one of the girls turns up dead in a swimming pool. But whereas the dead-friend plot point in Vacation! didn’t arrive until well into the picture—resulting in a seismic tonal shift that didn’t quite work—Jeff dies only minutes into White Reindeer, shrouding the vast majority of the film in a kind of post-traumatic frame that allows Suzanne ample time to work through her many conflicting emotions.

In Modern Love Is Automatic, much of the Sisk character’s arc grew out of her interactions with her new roommate, played by Maggie Ross. (Amusingly, both actresses have cameos in White Reindeer: Sisk as a magical cashmere-sweater model, Ross as a grocery-store cashier.) Likewise, in White Reindeer, Suzanne’s experiences are influenced greatly by her unlikely friendship with Fantasia (striking newcomer Laura Lemar-Goldsborough), a 22-year-old stripper and single mother. That one-line character description of Fantasia reads like a laundry list of indie-film clichés, but the rapport developed between the two actresses—culminating briefly in an extraordinary scene of dialogue in which the characters, both cloaked in black sweaters, put all their cards on the table, revealing their personal histories—is anything but rote. That Suzanne also relies on Fantasia for a form of escapism—cocaine-fueled dance-club sessions, aluminum-foil-aided runs of shoplifting at Macy’s—further exposes and enriches Suzanne’s psychological journey.

Like a number of his contemporaries in the American independent cinema—David Gordon Green, Chad Hartigan, Aaron Katz, Jeff Nichols—Clark is a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts. But where films like Hartigan’s This Is Martin Bonner, Katz’s Cold Weather, and Nichols’s Shotgun Stories are aiming to achieve a certain brand of naturalism, Clark’s films (especially the earlier ones) are highly mannered, garishly colorful exercises in outré comedy. White Reindeer, however, while retaining traces of that heritage (a Joe Swanberg-hosted sex party, to provide one example), nevertheless projects a different overall ambition; returning cinematographer Daryl Pittman, shooting on the Red Epic, exchanges the bright pinks, purples, blues and yellows of Modern Love and Vacation! for a balmy, cream-colored palette that appears formidably muted by comparison. The result is at once Clark’s finest and most emotionally direct film to date—a mature, grown-up, abnormal character study that improves on the director’s previous work while still feeding off the same recognizable worldview.

Spectrum Culture [Jake Cole]

Review: 'White Reindeer' - Film.com Calum Marsh

Film Pulse [Kevin Rakestraw]

White Reindeer / The Dissolve Nathan Rabin

White Reindeer is the least festive Christmas movie ... - The AV Club Mike D’Angelo

Review: Oddball Holiday Dramedy 'White Reindeer' Both ... Katie Walsh from The Playlist

How WHITE REINDEER Defies Cliches of Grief | Press Play Max Winter from Press Play

SBS Film [Simon Foster]

Twitch [Ryland Aldrich]

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Milan Paurich]

White Reindeer: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck

'White Reindeer' Review: Zach Clark's Complex, Compassionate ... Variety

White Reindeer: movie review | review, synopsis, book ... - Time Out Sam Adams

'White Reindeer,' Directed by Zach Clark - NYTimes.com Jeannette Catsoulis

Clarke, Shirley

Women Film Makers: An Outline of Herstory Dennis Toth from Film Notes from the CMA, August 20, 2008 (excerpt)

Shirley Clarke began her career in the 1950s as both a dancer and an experimental filmmaker. She emerged most forcefully, however, as a documentary and narrative artist with such films as The Connection (USA 1960), The Cool World (USA 1963), and Portrait of Jason (USA 1967), films in which the romanticism of her early works gave way to a raw and direct look at people who existed on the edge of mainstream American society. In turn, her films achieved a sense of gritty realism rarely attempted within the American cinema. Clarke's career as a filmmaker and videographer has taken place totally outside the context of the American commercial media which has resulted in the limited amount of exposure her work has received. Yet, she remains firmly committed to this independent path which has allowed her to deal with a range of subject matter that is, for all practicable purposes, forbidden for presentation within the mainstream.

The Cool World was filmed on location in Harlem, using a cast composed of professional actors and local residents. Clarke's use of naturalistic photography and direct sound recordings was influenced by the original films of the Italian Neo-Realist movement and her non-judgmental presentation of the film's narrative forces the viewer, in part, to experience the ghetto environment and gang psychology on its own terms.

In Profile: Shirley Clarke Moving Image Source

A former dancer, choreographer and head of the National Dance Association, Shirley Clarke began making short films in 1953 with the seven-minute Dance in the Sun. She then went on to make a series of short films about dance, including In Paris Parks (1954) and Bullfight (1955).

By the time she made A Moment in Love (1957), Clarke had begun to explore movement as a means of communicating story. Skyscraper (1959) traced the construction of a building, used color and black-and-white shots, and was made in collaboration with Willard Van Dyke and Irving Jacoby. The film, which Clarke characterised as "a musical comedy about the building of a skyscraper", won several festival prizes and earned a 1959 Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short Subject.

After developing a searing cinema verité style in her experimental shorts and documentaries, Clarke graduated to features with The Connection (1960), based on Jack Gelber's play about junkies awaiting their dealer, and the extraordinary Portrait of Jason (1967), an interview with a black male hustler. Clarke directed the Oscar-winning documentary short Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel With the World (1963), which had been commissioned by President John F Kennedy.

While alienating her from Hollywood, Clarke's provocative subject matter made her a major influence on American underground film culture. She was a co-founder with Jonas Mekas (an EIFF guest in 2002) of New York's Filmmakers’ Cooperative in 1962. In Agnes Varda's Lion's Love (1969), she appropriately played 'Shirley Clarke', a character trying to interest a producer in a film project. While teaching at UCLA from 1975 to 1983, Clarke completed what would be her last film, Ornette: Made in America (1985). Begun in 1968 and utilizing film and video, it was a documentary portrait of jazz musician Ornette Coleman. Clarke died in 1997 after suffering a stroke.

Shirley Clarke - Films as director:, Other films: Lauren Rabinovitz from Film Reference

Shirley Clarke was a leader and major filmmaker in the New York film community in the 1950s and 1960s. Her films, which exemplify the artistic directions of the independent movement, are classic examples of the best work of American independent filmmaking. Clarke began her professional career as a dancer. She participated in the late 1940s in the avant-garde dance community centered around New York City's Young Men's-Young Women's Hebrew Association's (YM-YWHA) performance stage and Hanya Holm's classes for young choreographers. In 1953, Clarke adapted dancer-choreographer Daniel Nagrin's Dance in the Sun to film. In her first dance film, Clarke relied on editing concepts to choreograph a new cinematic space and rhythm. She then applied her cinematic choreography to a non-dance subject in In Paris Parks, and further explored the cinematic possibilities for formal choreography in her dance films, Bullfight and A Moment in Love. During this time period, Clarke studied filmmaking with Hans Richter at City College of New York and participated in informal filmmaking classes with director and cinematographer Peter Glushanok. In 1955, she became an active member of Independent Filmmakers of America (IFA), a short-lived New York organization that tried to improve promotion and distribution for independent films. Through the IFA, Clarke became part of the Greenwich Village artistic circle that included avant-garde filmmakers Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas. It also introduced her to the importance of an economic structure for the growth of avant-garde film, a cause she championed throughout the 1960s. Clarke worked with filmmakers Willard Van Dyke, Donn Alan Pennebaker, Ricky Leacock, and Wheaton Galentine on a series of film loops on American life for the United States Pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. With the leftover footage of New York City bridges, she then made her experimental film masterpiece, Bridges-Go-Round, utilizing editing strategies, camera choreography, and color tints to turn naturalistic objects into a poem of dancing abstract elements. It is one of the best and most widely seen examples of a cinematic Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.

Clarke made the documentary film Skyscraper in 1958 with Van Dyke, Pennebaker, Leacock, and Galentine, followed by A Scary Time (1960), a film commissioned by the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF). Clarke also began work on a public television film on Robert Frost, A Lover's Quarrel with the World, but due to artistic disagreements and other commitments she left the project before the film's completion while retaining a credit as co-director.

Influenced by the developing cinema-verité style in documentary films of Leacock and Pennebaker, Clarke adapted cinema verité to two feature-length dramatic films, The Connection and The CoolWorld. The Connection was a landmark for the emergence of a New York independent feature film movement. It heralded a new style that employed a greater cinematic realism and addressed relevant social issues in black-and-white low budget films. It was also important because Clarke made the film the first test case in the courts in a successful fight to abolish New York State's censorship rules. Her next feature film, The Cool World, was the first movie to dramatize a story on black street gangs without relying upon Hollywood-style moralizing, and it was the first commercial film to be shot on location in Harlem. In 1967, Clarke directed a 90-minute cinema verité interview with a black homosexual. Portrait of Jason is an insightful exploration of one person's character while it simultaneously addresses the range and limitations of cinema verité style. Although Clarke's features had only moderate commercial runs and nominal success in the United States, they have won film festival awards and critical praise in Europe, making Clarke one of the most highly regarded American independent filmmakers among European film audiences. In the 1960s, Clarke also worked for the advancement of the New York independent film movement. She was one of the 24 filmmakers and producers who wrote and signed the 1961 manifesto, "Statement for a New American Cinema," which called for an economic, artistic, and political alternative to Hollywood moviemaking. With Jonas Mekas in 1962, she co-founded Film-Makers Cooperative, a non-profit distribution company for independent films.

Later, Clarke, Mekas and filmmaker Louis Brigante co-founded Film-Makers Distribution Center, a company for distributing independent features to commercial movie theatres. Throughout the 1960s, Clarke lectured on independent film in universities and museums in the United States and Europe, and in 1969 she turned to video as her major medium in which to work.

Go to Complete Biography » Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide in The New York Times

EIFF Biography of Shirley Clarke | EdinburghGuide.com

The Cool World: Frederick Wiseman | The Harvard Crimson Allan Katz from The Harvard Crimson, April 24, 1962

Shirley Clarke - The New York Review of Books one of the undersigned in a Letter to the Editor, May 9, 1968

DeeDee Halleck's interview with Shirley Clarke (Afterimage/Early Video Project) 1985, also seen here: Shirley Clarke Interview

DeeDee Halleck's obituary of Shirley Clarke (Afterimage) January/February 1998

Los Angeles Film+TV - Cool Like Her - page 1 Ernest Hardy from LA Weekly, April 16, 1998

An Article by Andy Gurian Millennium Film Journal, Fall 2004

'A New World: Shirley Clarke' - Movies - Village Voicepage 1 ... Melissa Anderson, July 19, 2005

AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center The Cool World of Shirley Clarke, March 16 – April 10, 2007

ScreenGrab: The Nerve Movie Blog - Indie Film News, Reviews and Gossip Video of the Day 1: Shirley Clarke’s Bullfight (8:39), April 12, 2007

Director Without Borders David Cairns from Moving Image Source, July 14, 2008

Afterall • Online • Broken Americas: The Cool World and The Exiles Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer from Afterall, November 19, 2008

clarke connection - artforum.com / film Amy Taubin from Artforum magazine, April 19, 2009

/ HAMMER TO NAIL » Blog Archive » FILMS OF SHIRLEY CLARKE AT ... Cullen Gallagher, April 22, 2009

Shirley Clarke Interview DeeDee Halleck interview from Afterimage, 1985, reposted by Davidson Gigliotti from Davidsonsfiles

As filmagens de «The cool world» | Shooting «The cool world» Lauren Rabinovitz interview from We Have Yet to Start Thinking, January 5, 2007

New York Women in Film and Television Shirley Clarke Fund

NYC, Just Like I Pictured It brief review of an early short, by Ted Shen from the Reader

Shirley Clarke: A Retrospective - Edinburgh Film Festival TV Video tribute (5:10)

Ubuweb a collection of Shirley Clarke shorts available for viewing online, also seen here: Shirely Clarke Shorts (1953-1982)

Portrait of Jason in YouTube (4:26)

Shirley Clarke: A Retrospective (5:11)

Bullfight (8:39)

NIGHT AT HOTEL CHELSEA (68:32 mi) in 1974

Shirley Clarke Wikipedia

DANCE IN THE SUN

USA (6 mi) 1953

Ubuweb a collection of Shirley Clarke shorts available for viewing online

Drawing from her training as a dancer, Dance In the Sun, Shirley Clarke's first film, is perhaps closest in form to her previous medium of expression. It already displays themes which were to be elaborated on in her later works, and as Clarke explained in an interview with Lauren Rabinovitz, "All these kind of things I discovered about the choreography of editing and the choreography of space/time came from making that very first film". In dance in the sun, produced with dancer/choreographer Daniel Nagrin, Clarke cuts between scenes of the same dance, shot in the studio and on the beach, creating a rhythmic pattern that accelerates at film's climax. Through Clarke's careful attention to choreographic detail and continuity editing, the dancer Daniel Nagrin, moves between an exterior setting, the beach, and an interior studio. The space interchange with increasing intensity, connected by Nagrin's body alone.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm) from Scotland, United Kingdom

Dance in the Sun (Short. 4 & a half stars) 1953 (Part of the Shirley Clarke Early Works (I) retrospective) Although she would go on to make her name as one of the most influential of experimental filmmakers, Shirley Clarke first studied as a dancer. Her style was the Martha Graham School. Clarke would go on to make other shorts, but it is in this, her Dance in the Sun, that she best expresses the spirit of dance – rather than focussing primarily on film-making.

The dance in question (choreographed and performed by Daniel Negrin) is a piece expressive of the forces of nature. Clarke edits the film in such a way that we repeatedly cut from a studio performance to an outdoor one. As Negrin performs a certain movement in the studio, the same movement is picked up as he dances on the sea shore. The effect is to lead the viewer into an appreciation of the vision within the dancer.

Graham was one of a small number of dancers - that also numbered Isadora Duncan - who changed the face of modern dance forever. Dance became an expression of something from within, rather than an adornment to something else (such as music, film or theatre). In Dance in the Sun, Negrin's movements have a fluidity, using curves more than the angular shapes of classical ballet. The dance materialises as an expression of the power of nature coming from within the human spirit. The dancer is at one with his surroundings. (The mimicking of dance movement and the movement of nature is taught more specifically in Duncan Dance. Serious readers may wish to refer to photographer Hal Eastman's outstanding collection, "Natural Dance" for a continuation of the ideas in this film.) In her later shorts, Bullfight and A Moment in Love, Clarke had subsumed the supremacy of dance to her own work for the camera. Dance in the Sun, while less complex than these, uses the camera merely to help communicate aspects of the dance through another medium. Dance in the Sun would prove a building block for Clarke. In an interview with Lauren Rabinovitz, she would go on to say, "All these kind of things I discovered about the choreography of editing and the choreography of space/time came from making that very first film." Parallels to her other editing techniques abound (described in Rome Burns: A Portrait of Shirley Clarke), such as the use of spontaneous soft focus.

While many of Shirley Clarke's early experiments contain flaws as well as triumphs, Dance in the Sun has a single-pointedness of intention, perfectly executed.

Its major shortcoming, as with much of Clarke's work, is that it is aimed at an educated audience already in tune with this artist's aspirations. Without sufficient clues, like many refinements in the art world, it could leave the newcomer feeling blank.

IN PARIS PARKS

USA (13 mi) 1954

EyeForFilm.co.uk Chris Docker, also seen on imdb here: User comments

I’ve only come across two films by Shirley Clarke focusing on children. One is her film made in aid of impoverished and malnourished Third World children, A Scary Time. This one, made six years earlier, is more lyrical. Almost a ‘city symphony’ of children playing in Paris parks.

Paris was a city that Clarke spent considerable time in and this is perhaps her tribute to it through the simple eyes of children at play. And sometimes, not just children. We see young and old at play in various ways.

In the context of Clarke’s overall approach to film, it emphasises her feeling that we all have to learn to ‘play’ to be creative and experience creativity (for her, this was especially true with video – although In Paris Parks was filmed on 16mm).

The shortcoming of the film is that such reflections that might be made in the context of her overall work are not particularly self-explanatory in this short itself. Kids on hobby-horses. Older people playing cards. Children feeding animals at the zoo - a brown bear, pigs. A Punch and Judy scene. I didn’t easily relate to the desultory subject matter and noticed several other members of the audience seemingly feeling irritated.

The film is mostly, at least to this viewer, of interest in comparison to her New York cityscapes, such as Brussels Loops. Filmmaker DeeDee Halleck called it: “a lyrical look at gesture and movement in a public landscape.”

While some of Clarke’s films are rather difficult and aimed at the connoisseur, In Paris Parks plays like a loving home video of the capital’s children, and maybe of adults who have remembered how to be children at heart.

MOMENT OF LOVE

USA (11 mi) 1956

Ubuweb a collection of Shirley Clarke shorts available for viewing online

Clarke moves away from the strictly depictive perspective maintained in Dance in The sun and towards an expressive and interpretive use of the camera in A Moment in Love. As the dancers move, the camera not only follows them but exceeds and breaks their trajectories. It manipulates their perceptible movements to such an extent that the dancers appear to be gliding among the clouds, suspended in endless and even supernatural bliss. As Clarke explains: "I started choreographing the camera as well as the dancers in the frame". With bright, lustrous tone, Clarke goes beyond subjective camera work to the point that her camera becomes subject itself.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm) from Scotland, United Kingdom

A balletic meeting between two lovers progresses from a woodland tryst up to the mountain tops.

There are some interesting camera effects with multiple exposures or a vanishing figure. Unlike Clarke's early Dance in the Sun, or her later dance-based films (Four Journeys into Mystic Time), A Moment in Love places cinema uppermost and the dancing second. As the dancers move, so does the camera, becoming almost like a dancer itself. Says Clarke, "I started choreographing the camera as well as the dancers in the frame". At one point, the dancers appear to be suspended in the clouds.

Although an interesting piece, especially for pushing boundaries, it is more contrived than her 'pure dance' shorts, and the dancing is more rigid. It has the feeling of attempting something that is a bit beyond the technology of the time.

BRIDGES GO ROUND

USA (4 mi) 1958

Ubuweb a collection of Shirley Clarke shorts available for viewing online

In the late 1950s, Clarke was hired by Willard Van Dyke to produce several "sponsored films" for the 1958 Brussels World Fair. Bridges-Go-Round was taken from footage shot for one such film, Bruxelles Loops (1957). The film represents a study on perpetual motion achieved through camera panning, rhythmic editing, and flipping and layering the same scenes shot from different points of view. A static figure ÉÆ a bridge- is transformed into a somewhat abstract, active creature by the camera and the idea of "choreography in editing" or as Clarke once said, "you can make a dance film without dancers". Using the magic of film to set Manhattan's bridges free from their moorings, Clarke sends them on a dizzying carousel ride around the city.

By Clarke's request the film appears twice: first accompanied by an electronic soundtrack by Louis and Bebe Barron and second with jazz performed by Teo Macero and his ensemble. It is her feeling that sound, so essential to music and movement, greatly alters the experience of viewing the dance. These soundtracks are often credited for altering the viewers perception of the images.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm) from Scotland, United Kingdom

Shirley Clarke's Bridges-Go-Round is a short film played twice. Once with a sweeping jazz score and once with electronic music. There is no narrative, just sweeping images of the bridges of New York City. She records these structures driving across them and then superimposes images of the structural steel across the sky. Panning shots in opposite directions are superimposed. It could be argued that the superimposed shots seem to have no agenda other than artistic experimentation. A kaleidoscope of bridges with added coloured tints.

But the two 'versions' produce different reactions. The lifting jazz score emphasises the curves sweeping towards the sky, the pacing and editing, and the camera movements. The electronic score (by Bebe and Louis Barron, the same composers who scored the 'tonalities' for Forbidden Planet) directs our attention more to the abstract patterns produced as we observe the open steel structures outlined against the sky and against other images of the same bridge.

Many of Clarke's favourite techniques seem to hearken back to those used by the 'city symphony' genre of filmmakers. In a 1928 film by Joris Ivens, The Bridge, we see different viewpoints of a massive iron bridge in Rotterdam. In Bridges-Go-Round, Ivens' patterns of massive girders are apparent, but Clarke has added lyrical camera panning and superimposition to create a non-linear sense of movement. Many of Clarke's bridges travel 'into each other', creating a 'symphony' of geometrical shapes.

Other city symphony methods can be discerned in Clarke's work. Chronologically –

1954 In Paris Parks – in spite of its name, this early work focuses on people rather than the city, but still uses the collage structure common to city symphony filmmakers.

1957 The composite shots of Brussels Loops are perhaps most easily identifiable as a city symphony.

1958 Bridges-Go-Round suggests a direct continuation of city symphony descriptions of a specific structure.

1959 The award-winning Skyscraper adds a coherent diegesis to the visual imagery, painting both a visual picture of a building and a 'story' of its construction.

1964 The acclaimed feature length film, The Cool World, uses contrasts of wet and dry streets, a common device of city symphony filmmakers to construct a multi-viewpoint 'feel' of a city. (The Cool World was extensively praised for its realistic depiction of Harlem.) The use of wet streets to create realistic atmosphere could perhaps be traced to another of Ivens city symphony films, Rain (1929) which explored the changing look of Amsterdam before and after a shower.

Clarke's endless fascination with, and love of, the city is perhaps best expressed by one of her students –

"One night we all agreed to "do dawn." We broke into five groups and went out with video cameras to collect footage of the city, agreeing to come back at 6:30 to play back our tapes. We reconnoitered on the roof with stacks of monitors and cued up the five tapes from the five groups. Shirley rang up for bagels and champagne and when they were delivered we toasted the pink sky and switched on the decks for a multi-channel piece of morning in New York City. Shots of steam rising from the street vents, tracking shots of bottle collectors pushing their carts, shots of pigeons in flight mixed and matched across the screens. The natural sounds of the live streets below mixed with the taped steam hisses and pigeon coos made a city symphony of sounds as well as sights. Behind the pyramid of monitors flickering the black and white visual poems were the pastel sky scrapers, their widows reflecting the rising red sun ball. A special moment was when a flock of pigeons flew right to left across one of the monitors and appeared in the bottom left of the neighboring monitor, as if in continuous flight."

The draw of 'a cinema of the city' is endless. We live in a world where cities are integral to our lives yet our romantic notions of them are played mostly within our own minds. Where associations can be montaged or superimposed. The technology of cinema allows the way we dream to be expressed in front of our eyes. A bridge may be wonderful in itself, but a simple photograph cannot articulate the myriad of feelings that a favourite structure conjures up. From our memories, we add our favourite associations, incidents, even the songs that were playing. All these things make a structure of steel girders more than simple engineering. They affect the way we think about it. Bridges are a favourite symbol of poets and writers. They feature in mainstream cinema (One only has to think of The Bridges of Madison County.) Bringing this to conscious awareness is another development and achievement in Bridges-Go-Round. We are forced to acknowledge that different music affects the way we see things. The simplicity of Clarke's object-lesson film demonstrates psychological re-framing in a basic, almost mathematical way.

If you are fortunate enough to be able to watch the film at home, you can try it with the sound turned down and other types of music. I experimented with Chopin's Nocturne, Opus 9 No. 1 in B flat minor. And then again with the popular Beatles song, Blackbird. The former made me look at what was beyond each bridge, to the cityscapes. The second made the film seem almost like a road movie. The film ends each time with an image of travelling along a bridge directly into the heart of the city but in an abstract way, as there is no end of the bridge in sight. Clark offers a bold lesson in how even non-diegetic sound affects our interpretation of what we see.

SKYSCRAPER

USA (20 mi) 1960

User comments from imdb Author: abner2665

This short 20 minute film is an excellent and entertaining documentary of the building of a skyscraper in New York City. Of particular interest is the Roxy Theater which is visible in the background. This documentary was mostly filmed in black-and-white and has an interesting jazz soundtrack. During the last five minutes, it switches to color with very entertaining special effects and a nice jazz song "My Manhatten." Hopefully, this film will one day appear on DVD. It is worth watching, but right now the only way is with a 16mm sound projector. This film won an Academy Award in 1959 for best documentary on a short subject. I have seen it many times during the days the library loaned 16mm films.

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm) from Scotland, United Kingdom

There's a wonderful sense of anticipation, hearing of an exciting theme or gripping plot. And then the enjoyment of seeing it realised on screen. But what of the 'dull' themes that unexpectedly turn out to be enthralling? Isn't there an even greater sense of thrill, as we ask, "How did they make such a riveting film out of such ordinary material? Shirley Clarke's brush with Hollywood came with an Oscar nomination for this early experimental documentary. About a building. The Tishmann Building at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York, to be exact.

Immediately Skyscraper starts we are propelled into a new perspective. Voices off-camera are discussing the film, looking out for people they know. It gives the film an immediacy and intimacy. It feels as if this is a private film made for, by, and about, the workers. As if they are watching it at a private screening. Construction workers are recognised by name. We are part of an inner circle. A circle that is at the heart of all the practical issues. Why are there 'bumps' on the cladding enquires one voice? A colleague explains that it increases strength. (The voices are in reality actors playing workers.) When we are sitting on the girders high above the tarmac below, this closeness almost induces vertigo. What would induce panic in most normal people is made real enough to touch as they open their sandwiches on a work break.

Camera techniques recall both sequences from Brussels Loops – where construction was filmed so fascinatingly – and Bridges-Go-Round – where geometrical shapes are studied for their own unique beauty. Jazz songs reflect various stages of the process (The film's irreverent tone has even caused it to be described as a 'musical comedy.') Jazz music was a genre Clarke would continue to develop into her features, etching a free-flowing realism, such as in her more-real-than-real depiction of Harlem in The Cool World. But in Skyscraper we see her using the medium in perfect harmony with the subject, the words of the songs immortalising the building as if it were the subject of folklore and the sort of thing people would naturally write songs about.

Skyscraper shows a master filmmaker taking a seemingly random subject and re-creating it with a depth and sense of awe that enriches the world around us.

Clarke was not particular pleased to be nominated for an Oscar – by an institution she had little respect for. Later, when Roger Vadim tried to draw her into mainstream, she retorted, "What Roger wanted was for me to be 22 years old. I realised that he didn't have any idea who the f*** I was... He wanted me to shoot his script, each scene in wide, medium and close-up so that later on he could edit it. For me to make a cheapy film I didn't respect with a script I didn't like, without the right to at least do it the way I want, for God's sakes, that's insane." Clarke never bowed to Hollywood, even when they bowed to her. Skyscraper would set the tone of the rest of her career. Pure class.

THE CONNECTION

USA (110 mi) 1962

Time Out Tony Rayns

The gimmicky premise of Jack Gelber's play - that those were real junkies up on the stage waiting for their fix, killing time by improvising jazz and making with street-jive monologues - probably makes more sense as a movie than it ever did in the theatre. Clarke films it as if it were documentary (so that when the cameraman himself takes a fix, the camera-work goes to pieces), and the Living Theatre actors are convincing enough to sustain this close a scrutiny. Some creaky business with a Salvation Army sister recalls the piece's stage origins, but the music and the sense of 'dead time' retain a 'beat' authenticity.

The Connection Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

I saw the Living Theater's legendary production of Jack Gelber's play (directed by Judith Malina) three times during its initial run in the early 60s, and no film adaptation half as long could claim its raw confrontational power. Echoing The Lower Depths and The Iceman Cometh, it's about junkies waiting for a fix (among them a performing jazz quartet with pianist-composer Freddie Redd and alto sax Jackie McLean), and spectators were even accosted in the lobby by one actor begging for money. Shirley Clarke's imaginative if dated 1961 film uses most of the splendid original cast (Warren Finnerty is especially good), confining the action to the play's single run-down flat. It's presented as a pseudodocumentary; the square neophyte director, eventually persuaded to shoot heroin himself, winds up focusing his camera on a cockroach. The film retains the same beatnik wit that the play effectively distilled, as well as a few scary shocks. With Carl Lee, Garry Goodrow, and Roscoe Lee Browne. 105 min.

User comments from imdb Author: ianlouisiana from United Kingdom

In junkie mythology there was a clear connection between heroin and jazz music,the long - discredited belief held by second rate players that if they shot up they would be as good as their heroes who,as it happens were brilliant improvisers long before they started using,and not the other way around as their emulators told themselves.For example,alto player Jackie Maclean,a follower of Charlie Parker,took H in an effort to play more like his hero despite Bird's active discouragement. In "The Connection" Mr MacLean blows fierce Parkerisms knowing full well that heroin in real life robbed him of articulation and logical musical thought. I remember when the play opened in London the musical press held up its hands in horror despite knowing that a goodly number of British modern jazzers were victims of a tragic and wasteful culture. "The Connection" could not be said to encourage drug taking any more than "Trainspotting" a generation or so later. Addicts have a squalid and meaningless existence in any recognisable sense of the term and this is well realised in the movie. Anyone who has taken any type of drug will know that time flows at a different rate from people on the planet earth,the mind becomes befuddled subject to the very occasional flash of amazing clarity and the actors convey this state of mind very accurately. The "film within a film" conceit distances the viewer from the pointlessness and boredom of the average junkie's life and it can be viewed with rather more detachment than might otherwise have been the case. The actors are acting at "acting" until they get used to the presence of the camera when they revert to concentrating on their sole purpose in life,waiting for The Man. "The Connection" is a fine portrayal of life outside the mainstream of American society in all its sordid bleakness.Here there is none of the artificial glamour of "designer drugs",these are people living on the verge of oblivion,not models and pop - stars,rich and smug with the knowledge that they are above the law. When you're at the bottom in this movie,the only way is down.

CINE-FILE Chicago

“When I did THE CONNECTION, which was about junkies, I knew nothing about junk and cared less. It was a symbol—people who are on the outside. I always felt alone, and on the outside of the culture that I was in. I grew up in a time when women weren't running things. They still aren't.” Though filmmaker Shirley Clarke's words refer to her landmark 1962 feature, which enjoys a rare revival this week as part of Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Great Transition" series, the sentiment could just as easily apply to her entire career of filmmaking from the margins. She took up the medium in the mid-'50s—when the number of known woman directors could be counted on a single hand—and quickly fell into the vibrant Greenwich Village independent film scene with the likes of Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, and Maya Deren. But Clarke's greatest films stand apart from the standard canon of the New York underground, which might account for the fact that her work is less celebrated and harder to come by. Though she dabbled in abstraction to begin with, Clarke's trio of mid-'60s masterpieces (THE CONNECTION, THE COOL WORLD, and PORTRAIT OF JASON) are unflinching, Neo-Realism-inspired depictions of fellow outsiders: the poor, blacks, homosexuals, drug addicts. THE CONNECTION, adapted from an off-Broadway play, depicts a couple of square filmmakers clumsily working to document an apartment full of junkies. Through a clever narrative device in which we see only see what the fictional cameraman sees, we are brought along both as voyeurs of an unsettling spectacle and witnesses to the qualities and limitations of documentary realism. Cinematically, the movie is a triumph: It leaps over the usual stage-to-screen hurdles of a comatose camera and visual vapidity by bringing us into a Kracauerian dream of constant movement. Melissa Anderson of the Village Voice wrote, "What's most radical about Clarke's movie isn't the depiction of the needle and the damage done but her critique of the burgeoning American cinema vérité movement and its claims of capturing the truth." (110 mins, B+W, 35mm, Restored Print).

Bill Blick on The Connection (Senses of Cinema) August 2004

It began in the 1950s. Angel-headed hipsters were making some noise in coffee houses and on the page. The Beats made some cracks in the stifling façade of 1950s America, and soon dynamic, independent filmmakers got the vibe. A new type of cinema was born. Shirley Clarke was one such filmmaker who got the vibe and became a leader of the American avant-garde cinema.

In 1953 Clarke made her film debut with Dance in the Sun and was nominated for an Academy Award for her short film, Skyscraper, in 1960. In 1961 she produced her first feature, the highly controversial The Connection, which won the critic's prize at Cannes. The Connection is a hybrid of cinema verité, nouvelle vague sensibilities and the pulse of American bohemia. The film was banned because of its obscenity and the way its frank depiction of drug culture made some critics uncomfortable. It brilliantly captures the be-bop infused counter-culture of the early 1960s with as high a level of verisimilitude as one can get.

The Connection depicts the same type of angel-headed hipsters that Kerouac coloured his books with, and is set in a one-room tenement where junkies, musicians, and other dudes await the arrival of the Cowboy. The Cowboy is their “Connection” who will provide them with their heroin fix. All the while, Clarke shows us a documentary filmmaker who wants to capture the hip scene encouraging his subjects to just “act naturally” in front of the camera. Like many other filmmakers and artists of the period, “acting naturally” is the key to Clarke's work. In letting it all hang out, a new aesthetic seemed to sprout.

Clarke based The Connection on a Jack Gelber play of the same name, which was performed at the historic Living Theater in New York. Full of jump-cuts, sloppy camera-handling, and improvised dialogue, The Connection serves as a reminder that filmmaking can maintain an intoxicating chaos in spite of the very rigid technical limitations of the medium. The film may be short on plot and character development, but is technically innovative and reminds the viewer of the unlimited potential of cinema.

While Clarke was a highly innovative filmmaker on the level of experimental, cinematic virtuosos such as John Cassavettes and influential cinema verité practitioners such as the Maysles Brothers and D. A. Pennebaker, she undeservedly received less notoriety. Clarke shows an adept hand at jazz-like constructions of image and sound and the film's recreation of a junkie haze is as intense as anything you're likely to encounter from that era.

Clarke was a dancer and choreographer before she delved into cinema, and she has often been quoted as saying that her films were “a choreography of images”. The Connection is often a rambling, chaotic display of debauchery and suffers from over-hip pretensions. However, the wrangling of wild, spontaneous footage into a semi-cohesive form while still maintaining its authenticity and molding a narrative is what Clarke's film pulls off.

Among some of the most memorable characters in the film are the sarcastic Leach, played convincingly by Warren Finnerty, and the super-cool Carl Lee as Cowboy. However, Clarke manages to elicit solid performances from all of the ensemble. The film quietly jangles the nerves as the characters descend into withdrawal.

Clarke's film depicts a generation who seeks drugs and alcohol to assuage feelings of disillusionment. While certainly more objective than most social commentary, The Connection does have a social heartbeat. The dramatic situation it offers can be applied to a larger social context and lends itself to any number of interpretations about the hypocritical society that these characters inhabit.

For all its pretensions and sometimes frustrating lack of coherency, The Connection maintains an appeal that has held over the years. It is also a testament to an important pioneer of experimental film. Shirley Clarke's work should continue to be screened, studied, and discussed, as she remains an iconoclastic artist who is vital to the development of the medium.

CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell] (capsule review)

The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]

The Neglected Books Page » Robert Nedelkoff

New York Times (registration req'd) Bosley Crowther

ROBERT FROST: A LOVER’S QUARREL WITH THE WORLD

USA (60 mi) 1963

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm) from Scotland, United Kingdom

"Never do it to pay a bill – cos you probably won't." Robert Frost's advice to aspiring poets could apply to any calling in life. But especially to the arts. His passion for poetry not only paid his bills but won him four Pulitzer prizes. And Shirley Clarke's documentary of his life won her an Oscar.

Robert Frost was a quintessentially American poet. He could express the charm of rural life with a depth that allowed this love of nature to inspire thoughts of life and the universe. We see him both through the eyes of a filmmaker researching his earlier years, and again with live footage, up close in his last months, still working. He is perhaps to Americans what Rabbie Burns is to Scots, so although his language is quite accessible it takes me a while to warm to the man.

His common-garden assertions, "Peace is something you only get by war or the threat of war," need a little more substance to convince me. His pro-Americanism – "the greatest country that has ever existed" – sounds mere arrogance to a foreigner who doesn't happen to agree. He seems a nice man. But why are so many in awe of him? Then we have shots of Frost giving a lecture, including readings of his own work. A tremendous, vibrating voice. Eyes of many in the audience are glistening. Biting a lip, you can feel them savouring each syllable. (Yes, he also brings a tear to my sceptical eye.) Listening to Frost is almost a spiritual experience. There is no discernible reason for the effect his simple words have. He becomes his words. (Readers who remember the 60s can maybe identify with similar sort of charisma that Dylan held sway as you sucked into the words flowing off his tongue.) If Frost comes alive reading his verses, set in the countryside, it lets us see the man in a new light. As he digs potatoes. A man of the earth. Of the soil. But above all, a man. A man who can express in words to reach anyone the unique feeling of becoming one with the land. Breathing in the breadth of the countryside, its timelessness. A slower pace. One that re-charges overworked city batteries that run on caffeine and tomorrow's deadline.

"When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.

Ice-storms do that."

I had never more than glanced at Robert Frost's poems. But by the end of the film I was enchanted. His work has a pastoral quality reminding one perhaps of Seamus Heaney (Compare, if you will, 'Birches' with Heaney's 'Exposure'). Both men tend to blur the distinction between humour and seriousness. They want us to enjoy the grand cosmic joke that is reality.

Frost is evidently pleased with the way Clarke is making the movie. He suggests, gesturing, that it is being done right 'this time' (apparently dissing earlier documentaries of his life). This involvement with the camera is typical of Clarke's tendency to make the film-making part of the subject of the film.

A Lover's Quarrel with the World is less harrowing in style than Portrait of Jason, with its monolithic attention to the documentary subject until he breaks down and exposes his 'soul'. Clarke's portrayal of Frost is loving and respectful, yet also seems to bring out the essence of the man. This film is more accessible, and one of Clarke's most mainstream offerings. The structure eventually makes all the film an illustration of his lecture, his lecture an illustration of his poetry. The film becomes the Poem.

"I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world," he wrote in his own epitaph. This line is from a poem called The Lesson for Today. In the film, Frost says, "I thought of modifying that, and saying I had my lover's quarrels, plural, with the world, but I make that one sustained quarrel all my life . . . It's a long sustained quarrel." And as if to balance wryly that thought with its opposite, another Frost saying is, "I never take my side in a quarrel." A remarkable accomplishment.

THE COOL WORLD A- 94

USA (105 mi) 1964

There goes Duke, he’s a real cold killer. —from the imagination of Duke (Hampton Clanton)

A landmark film, coming on the heels of John Cassavetes’ SHADOWS (1959 – both versions), each set on the streets of New York where the documentary style, cinéma vérité reality brings the city to life in ways never seen before, so vividly depicted that it actually becomes the lead character of the film. This is a true radical work, however, using an in-your-face experimental style that is never comfortable, where the freewheeling visual style matches the frenetic intensity of the Dizzy Gillespie jazz-driven musical soundtrack, written by Mal Waldron, along with the starkly superficial, plainly dubbed in spots, overlapping, improvised speech patterns of non-professionals that at times suggests the need for subtitles, that might be more representative of the first, rarely seen, entirely improvised, and perhaps more amateurish version of the Cassavetes’ film that fellow avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas preferred. From the opening shot of a Black Muslim street preacher who doggedly derides and degrades the white man’s place in the world, this is truly something different to behold, especially coming years before the rise of the Black Panthers or any Black Power movement in America, and must have been stunning to behold when it was released. Made immediately prior to Michael Roemer's Nothing But a Man (1964), among the best American black-themed films I've ever made, each starring the first two roles of actress Gloria Foster, both films currently in the Library of Congress National Registry, which contains few black films, though both interestingly enough were written by white Jewish men. Adapted from the novel by Warren Miller, set entirely on the streets of Harlem, the novel was a favorite of Harlem-born author James Baldwin who couldn’t tell if the author was black or white, this film predates Claude Brown’s epic street novel Manchild in the Promised Land, released in 1965, which similarly features young men growing up too fast, told with a lightning speed quickness that provides a visceral, spontaneous feel for the rhythm of life on the streets of Harlem.

Literally a story about a young teenage boy who wants to buy a gun, thinking this is the way to ensure his young gang will be protected from outside interference, namely other gangs, and where he envisions respect as he passes down the street, until he realizes too late that this is a foolhardy plan. Instead the film rises and falls on small incidental details of each passing day, where friends meet on the street, or a young street gang meets in a clubhouse, playing music, smoking pot, drinking, and having sex with a girl Luanne, Yolanda Rodríguez in her only screen appearance, brought in as exclusive property of the gang. The aggressive intensity of the film is mildly offset with nocturnal images of the city set to a smooth jazz score, luminous impressionistic moments of quiet before each day bursts with energy anew. The oldest gang member Blood (Clarence Williams, later Linc from TV’s The Mod Squad) initially intimidates and manipulates the younger members, but they soon realize he’s rarely around to enforce his gang rules, so Duke (Hampton Clanton) quickly rises to the leadership position, supplanting Blood, who becomes an addict, seen here as the lowliest, most pathetic dregs of the earth. As the leader, Duke is pestered into providing the game plan for taking out their rival gang, which he assumes will be no problem with a gun, but he can’t raise the $50 bucks needed to buy it from an older gang lord named Priest (Carl Lee, script co-writer, later seen in SUPERFLY [1972]).

Along the way Duke takes Luanne to the ocean for the first time in her life, as it’s something she’s always wanted to see but never realized it was accessible by subway. The Coney Island scenes are memorable for the mad rush of energy they provide, where they soon realize there’s a life outside the few city blocks where they live, leaving Duke more hesitant than ever to carry out his own plans of gang revenge. The aggressive nature of the film will surprise viewers, as will the jarring or at times hard-to-hear overlapping layers of dialogue which were recorded before the era where director Robert Altman specialized in this specific cinema technique. While Altman reduced the actual words to secondary status, making character the central focus of the film, Clarke’s improvised dialogue provides windows into her various characters, many of whom continue to be introduced as the film evolves. Duke also has narrated passages that flow over the sea change of street activities captured by Baird Bryant’s highly active camera. This is nearly a first person, stream-of-consciousness, coming-of-age story that encounters unexpected difficulties each passing day, each of which changes the landscape for this young man, whose future slips farther and farther away from his grasp, instead capable of living only in the present. By the finale, by the sheer audacity of filmmaking bravado, the audience has lifelong impressions of Harlem that are surprisingly authentic, even when seen 40 years after the film was made. Of interest, this film was produced by documentarian Frederick Wiseman and working with Shirley Clarke represents his initial entry into the film business.

James Baldwin called The Cool World “one of the best novels of Harlem that has yet come my way” and said that when he first read it he could not tell if Warren Miller (1921-1966), a Jew from Pennsylvania, was black or white.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES - Film Detail

“THE COOL WORLD…look[s] as radical today as [it] did in the 60s. The first fiction feature to be shot entirely on location in Harlem, THE COOL WORLD was adapted by Clarke and her frequent collaborator Carl Lee from Warren Miller’s novel about a black teenager who gets caught up in a culture of gangs and guns. Shot verite style with the light-weight equipment that had just come on the market, it seems as much a documentary of inner-city life just before Black Power as it does a fictional coming-of-age story.” –Amy Taubin, VILLAGE VOICE

Time Out review Tony Rayns

The Cool World was Frederick Wiseman's first involvement with cinema (he produced it) and Shirley Clarke's second feature as director/writer (after The Connection). At heart, it's a not-very-interesting melodrama about a black kid in Harlem learning the hard way that crime is no answer to social problems. But on the surface it's a very much more interesting view of day-to-day life in the ghetto, patterned as a flow of 'insignificant' incidents, variously angry, frightened and defeated characters, and all too credible pressures. Often crudely photographed, but with a brilliantly multi-layered sound-track which integrates some fine jazz.

Bright Lights Film Journal :: American Independent Narrative ... Gary Morris, January 2000 (excerpt)

Some directors combined visual and aural experimentation to breathe life into what they viewed as a moribund art form. Shirley Clarke's The Cool World (1964), for example, contains a brilliant sequence in which Duke, a 14-year-old gang leader, is talking to a young whore, Luanne. Clarke allows just a few sentences of dialogue between them, then dubs a brief segment from Mal Waldron's powerful jazz score over their words, then returns to the conversation, continuing this variation to tremendous surging effect. The color and dynamism of Clarke's rendering of this encounter contrast with the squalid, carefully observed urban backgrounds of New York, circa 1964.

Teen Screen, Winter 2010, Block Cinema, Block Museum, Northwestern ... Block Films

Pioneering independent filmmaker Clarke casts a documentarian’s eye for verisimilitude on this gritty tale of teenage gang life in 1960’s Harlem. Shot on location with a largely nonprofessional cast, The Cool World follows Duke (Hampton Clanton), an ambitious young tough eager to rise to the top of his gang, The Pythons. In order to earn the fear and respect of both his neighbors and rivals as a “real cold killer,” Duke hits the streets in search of a then-rare prize for a kid with delusions of gangster grandeur: a gun. In addition to further cementing Clarke’s reputation as one of New York City’s premier cinematic chroniclers, the film also launched the career of its producer, Frederick Wiseman, whose own High School (1968) opens this series.

MoMA | The Cool World

1964. USA. Directed by Shirley Clarke. Screenplay by Clarke, Carl Lee. Music by Mal Waldron. With Hampton Clanton, Yolanda Rodriguez, Lee. A black teenager robs, brawls, and peddles dope on the mean streets of Harlem, dreaming of walking tall with his gang, the Royal Pythons, and his idol, a hipster-pusher named Priest. Produced by Frederick Wiseman, Clarke's raw, vital film is a landmark of American independent cinema—the critic Albert Johnson called it "a tone poem of the slums"—blending ragged storytelling with documentary-style location shooting, improvisation by a cast of nonprofessionals (Lee and Clarke recruited the toughest kids in Harlem's settlement houses, social clubs, and schools), and Mal Waldron's bluesy bop score, in which he is accompanied by the powerhouse lineup of Dizzy Gillespie, Yusef Lateef, Aaron Bell, and Art Taylor. 105 min.

Shirley Clarke's The Cool World (1964) « Cured Sweet Potatoes April 23, 2009

Not to be confused with Cool World (Ralph Bakshi’s last animated feature film) The Cool World is a real, raw and straight from the streets of Harlem, U.S.A. Satorially, the brothers on the cover of Manchild In the Promised Land (see the post below) look a lot like the characters in this film but slightly older. This is a period I’m very interested in right now: mid-Sixties style in cinema, including but not limited to the urban milleu. Satorial mindedness aside, The Cool World is the story of Duke, a teenager making his way through the minefield that is 1960s Harlem. Played superbly by a 14 year old Rony Clanton (who would 10 years later star in the classic The Eduacation of Sonny Carson) Duke looks to by a gun from the neighboorhood hustler Priest (Superfly’s Carl Lee) in order to become president of his gang. Stark, rhythmic and hip, The Cool World is the unknown and rarely seen gem of American Cinema Verite.

The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]

"Which comes first—the movie or reality?" wonders Shirley Clarke, playing a fictionalized version of herself in Agnés Varda's trippy Lions Love (1969). It's a question Clarke, one of the founding members of the New American Cinema movement, explored in her feature-length films, all of which blur the lines between fiction and documentary: The Connection (1961), The Cool World (1963), and Portrait of Jason (1967, not included in the series). A fine retro offering in the cinematic season of scag (joining Last Days and Olivier Assayas's upcoming Clean), The Connection centers around a doofus documentarian filming a bunch of junkies waiting for their fix in a decrepit Manhattan loft. What's most radical about Clarke's movie isn't the depiction of the needle and the damage done but her critique of the burgeoning American cinema vérité movement and its claims of capturing "the truth." Filmed in Harlem with mostly nonprofessional actors, The Cool World features rumbling rival gangs, cutting frequently to real-life scenes (fat men smoking, twisting teenagers) around 120th Street and Fifth Avenue. Clarke's kinetic vision of New York is also marvelously displayed in two of her rarely screened shorts: the kaleidoscopic Bridges-Go-Round (1958) and Skyscraper (1959), a jazzy ode to the Tishman Building.

Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Beth Capper

"There's no question that my career would have been different if I was a man," said Shirley Clarke in an interview from 1993. Unfortunately, Clarke's name is still comparatively obscure despite her incredible contribution to the New American cinema of the 1960s, with films that teeter between reality and fiction, and rival John Cassavetes and direct cinema makers like the Maysles and Frederick Wiseman. Clarke was also a central figure, now forgotten, in the New York early video movement where she ran workshops in her Chelsea Hotel loft, the participants of which were called THE TEEPEE VIDEOSPACE TROUPE (1970-78). However, it is doubtful that there is no Shirley Clarke Criterion release because of misogyny. Clarke, who died in 1997, sold the rights to many of her films, and these rights are scattered; THE COOL WORLD is owned by Wiseman's company, Zipporah (he produced the film). [Since the original of this was written, Milestone Films has been undertaking a massive effort to restore and release much Clarke's work, theatrically and on home video, though this seems not to include COOL WORLD, which is still owned by Zipporah.—Ed.] THE COOL WORLD is an unflinching semi-narrative set in Harlem's slums following African-American teenagers embroiled in gang violence. Clarke's use of non-actors, themselves living in the situations in which the film finds them, undoubtedly influenced filmmakers like Larry Clark, although she manages to capture her "characters" without it feeling exploitative. More than anything, THE COOL WORLD appears motivated by a profound desire to portray the injustices of racist America as a call to action, as well as to humanize her subjects and portray the complexities of their lives.

User comments from imdb Author: (ericcody) from Decatur, Ga

"The Cool World", a 1963 independent film directed by Shirley Clarke is probably the most shocking, interesting, and realistic film I have ever seen. The films follows the character of Duke played by Rony Clanton. This film shows how it really was to be an African American teen growing up in urban America (Harlem, N.Y.) in the 1960's. The gun serves as a character in the film itself, for it demonstrates manhood for the character of Duke.

By no means is this film a glorification of street life that is so common today in American pop culture. The viewer will see in this film how ugly crime is especially these characters who are driven to commit crimes because of the desperate, depressed situations of the ghetto. The character of Duke searches throughout this movie for a gun to own as almost a way to arm himself against the failures that surround him daily such as rat infested tenements, garbage filled streets, drugs, pimps, prostitutes, gangs, and over zealous cops.

If John Cassevetes is considered the new phase of film making that occurred in the late 1950's with his superb film "Shadows" then Shirley Clarke is his female counterpart. Shirley Clarke masterfully merges documentary footage and Jazz music to the actual film that creates somewhat of a frightening, haunting, realistic portrait of urban America that I feel has not been seen very much in cinema since "The Cool World". It is interesting to note that actors Clarence Williams III, Antonio Fargas, Gloria Foster, and Peter De Anda who appeared in this film went on to make great strides of achievement in both film and television in the 1970's.

"The Cool World" is shown in many film festivals across the country. Unfortunately it is not on video, but someday I hope it will be for the world to see. I rate this movie **** excellent.

Mellart: The Cool World (1964)

The Cool World is about life in the African-American ghetto in the early 1960s. A black teenager robs, brawls, and peddles dope on the mean streets of Harlem, dreaming of walking tall with his gang, the Royal Pythons, and his idol, a hipster-pusher named Priest.

There is a clearly patent allegory of an attempt to attain manhood and identity in the only way accessible to him - the antisocial one: the desperate meaning of segregation that will not easily be erased even if every civil rights battle is won for the next ten years…

The Cool World is the first film about Harlem that was actually shot in Harlem. Shilrley Clarke's film is a landmark of American independent cinema for its blending storytelling with documentary-style location shooting. Hanging the camera from the ceiling provides a very personal experience for the viewer. Dark yellow hued interior scenes capture the true feeling of the dwellings of the gang members.

Clarke looks at the horrors of Harlem ghetto slum life filled with drugs, violence, human misery, and a sense of despair due to the racial prejudices of American society.

Armed with the eye of an Italian neo-realist, Clarke stand as benchmarks of the American new wave, exploring the boundaries between fiction and documentary. Clarke's lens was more than a recording device: it was a provocateur exploring the cinematic bond between actor, filmmaker and viewer.

The Cool World: Frederick Wiseman | The Harvard Crimson Allan Katz from The Harvard Crimson, April 24, 1962

Shirley Clarke, director of the film version of The Connection and several award-winning short subjects, is now casting for her next film, The Cool World. It is being produced by a Boston attorney and former teacher at Boston University Law School, Frederick Wiseman, who is currently on a grant to study sociology at Harvard.

Wiseman's interest in the law is largely sociological; he has been studying the relationship between psychiatry and the legal process, and is writing a book that explores case histories that demonstrate the law's inadequacy in assessing and dealing with the plea of insanity in criminal cases. It was the inadequacy of sociology that interested him in The Cool World. He felt that the Warren Miller novel from which the movie is taken, gave a far more realistic picture of the way in which the social structure of Harlem and its relationship with the outside world give rise to delinquency than any study of the problem he had seen. His primary concern in all three of his fields--the law, sociology, and movie-making--is that they should treat human problems as they are experienced by human beings. He feels that in all three fields too great a concern with traditional methods prevents one from recognizing and coping with problems as they exist.

His first association with film-making was as an investor in The Connection. Miss Clarke's first film was financed, as Broadway plays are, by a limited partnership arrangement; over two hundred investors put up sums ranging from fifty dollars to twenty-three thousand dollars. The principal advantage of this method of financing low-budget films is that it enables the producer to find investors who are interested in his particular project and who are willing to leave artistic control in the hands of the director.

In The Connection, Miss Clarke uses documentary techniques to explore the world of the junky in grimy, naturalistic detail. But the film, which was first shown at the Cannes Film Festival last summer, has excited European critics and film makers not because of its sensational subject matter, but because of its brilliant use of the camera as a character. The junkies know they are being photographed; the camera man is drawn into their drama. This is a revolutionary American film, the first to use the techniques discovered by Europe's "new wave." The producers of The Connection are currently fighting censorship by the New York State Board of Regents; ironically, in a film that deals graphically with such themes as dope addiction and homosexuality, the Board of Regents objects only to the use of the word "shit," which appears twenty-eight times (Variety counted). When Ephraim London, who represents the producers, wins his court fight (he says he will take his case to the Supreme Court if necessary), the Board of Regents will discover that it has been good for business.

The Cool World is another film which Hollywood could not handle. It will be shot this summer in Harlem and will explore juvenile delinquency in a way that people who found West Side Story a great movie might discover hard to take. Its mood is the oppressive apathy of Harlem; its hero is "Duke" Custis, a fourteen year old Negro boy, who has struck out to find his identity according to the only standards he has ever seen honored, as head of a street gang.

Miss Clarke's screenplay is an improvement on the Miller novel, just as The Connection was an improvement on the Gelber play. She has tightened the structure and cut out a mawkish ending.

Wiseman who is still seeking investors is confidant that the movie will go into production by the beginning of the summer. He is certain that, like The Connection, it has a potential audience outside the art movie houses. Miss Clarke's films may mark the beginning of an important trend in American film making. If a change is to be made, it will be done by people who finance and produce their movies outside of Hollywood.

Afterall • Online • Broken Americas: The Cool World and The Exiles Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer from Afterall, November 19, 2008

Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [5/5] also seen here: Picture Show Pundits [Keith H. Brown] and here: EdinburghGuide.com

clarke connection - artforum.com / film Amy Taubin from Artforum magazine, April 19, 2009

/ HAMMER TO NAIL » Blog Archive » FILMS OF SHIRLEY CLARKE AT ... Cullen Gallagher, April 22, 2009

Women Film Makers: An Outline of Herstory Dennis Toth from Film Notes from the CMA, August 20, 2008

Zipporah Films The Cool World

Field trip to Anthology for Shirley Clarke's THE COOL WORLD, Wed ... Kings County Cinema Society

Books: Jungle Book - TIME The Cool World, by Warren Miller (241 pages), Time magazine book review, June 15, 1959

The Atlantic | August 1977 | Getting Whitey | Denby Getting Whitey, by David Denby from The Atlantic Monthly, August 1977

Remembering Shirley Clarke - actress | Afterimage | Find Articles ... DeeDee Halleck from Afterimage, January/February 1998

Shirley Clarke Interview DeeDee Halleck interview from Afterimage, 1985, reposted by Davidson Gigliotti from Davidsonsfiles

Shirley Clarke Is Dead at 77; Maker of Oscar-Winning Film Lawrence Van Gelder from The New York Times, September 26, 1997

Current.org | Documentarian Frederick Wiseman Fred Wiseman’s novelistic samplings of reality, by David Stewart from Current, February 2, 1998

Gloria Foster@Everything2.com Actress Gloria Foster profile, January 5, 2001

Chelsea Hotel by Thelma Blitz New York 2004, from the Leonard Cohen Files

Mediascape In Response to the AFI: Top 100 American Films by Women Directors, by Erin Hill and Brian Hu, Spring 2008

Thanks for the Use of the Hall - Archive: July 2008 Dan Sallitt, July 25, 2008

Movie of the Week: THE COOL WORLD (1964) | Amy Robinson, April 16, 2009

Voyages of discovery: the cinema of Frederick Wiseman - Google Books Result Barry Keith Grant, excerpt from Chapter 7, The Bad and the Beautiful, pages 197 – 210 (pdf format)

THE COOL WORLD Adelaide Cinemathèque (pdf format)

Movie Review - The Cool World - Shirley Clarke Scans 'The Cool ... Thom Jurek reviews the Mal Waldron movie soundtrack music

Dizzy Gillespie Cool World CD CD Universe

Dizzy Gillespie: I'm Beboppin Too & The Cool World George Kanzler from All About Jazz, October 4, 2009

Mal Waldron: 1925-2002 Obituary from Jazzhouse (2002)

The Cool World (1964) The Auteurs

Hard To Find Films

All Movie Guide [Richard Gilliam]

The Cool World (1964) Turner Classic Movies

What have the mods ever done for us? | Film | The Guardian Crazy Cats, by Will Hodgkinson from The Guardian, July 25, 2003

Films Selected to The National Film Registry, Library of Congress ...

Jazz on Screen: The Sparks Are Eclectic Matt Zoller Seitz from The New York Times, April 13, 2008

25 Films Added to National Registry The New York Times, November 15, 1994

National Film Registry Titles of the US Library of Congress Tim Dirks filmsite

Warren Miller (author) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia author of the novel

The Cool World - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia the novel

National Book Award (U.S.) fiction winners and nominees 1950-2009 ...

Warren Miller: White Novelist in a Black World

The Cool World 1963: Movie and film review from Answers.com profile page

The Cool World - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia the film

Image results for "The Cool World"

PORTRAIT OF JASON

USA (105 mi) 1967

Portrait of Jason Dave Kehr from the Reader

Shirley Clarke's 1967 study of a black male prostitute, Jason Holliday, was a pioneering study of the cinema verite movement--a 105-minute record of Jason conversing, performing, confessing, dissolving. It's an intense, commanding film, though Clarke's wholesale appropriation of Jason's life and pain for the purposes of art causes a moral queasiness that, typically for the verite movement, is never addressed or acknowledged.

Time Out Tony Rayns

Shirley Clarke's third feature is almost as straightforward as its title. It picks up the passionate interest in ghetto subcultures that Clarke established in The Connection and The Cool World, but this time without feeling any need to create a fiction: Portrait of Jason is simply a two-hour conversation with a middle-aged, black, homosexual prostitute. The new simplicity of approach reflects the enormous influence of Andy Warhol on independent film-making in the '60s: a new trust in basic film-making techniques, and a new distrust of 'artifice' like editing. Jason himself certainly provides enough artifice to keep any audience engrossed: his colourful, self-mocking account of his life reveals a great deal about the situation of a ghetto boy with 'white-boy fever'. The moral catch is that by fulfilling Jason's dreams of himself as a 'performer', the movie deliberately pushes him out of his own control...

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] (excerpt)

Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason, also released in 1967, is an even more polarizing experience. Composed entirely of interview footage shot in a single drunken evening, Clarke's portrait of Jason Holliday, a black gay hustler and self-described "houseboy," is aesthetically rigorous and unfailingly intense. It's also cold, alienated and vaguely ethnological. The more you watch Holliday gesture and grimace in front of a white living-room wall, the more he starts to resemble a butterfly pinned to a slide. The hazy focus-pulls which start and end most shots turn Jason's howling laugh into a rictus of pain, dissolving his face into undifferentiated blotches. And the ubiquitous drinks in his hands, not to mention the off-camera prompts for favorite stories, gives the exercise the queasy feeling of a cross between a minstrel show and a chicken dancing on a hot plate. In a 1983 interview, Clarke admitted, "I started out that evening with hatred, and there was a part of me that was out to do him in, get back at him, kill him," a sentiment evidently shared by her boyfriend Carl Lee (the son of the actor Canada Lee), who lashes out at Jason during the movie's climactic confrontation, calling him a "rotten queen."

After 90 minutes of repartee, you can see the source of Clarke's frustration. Jason is a polished raconteur, tossing off anecdotes about cleaning up after San Francisco society women and palling around with Miles Davis in the same brisk, besotted cadence, always implicitly shilling for the nightclub act he's never gotten around to composing. His uncontrollable laughter never stops, even when he's describing being beaten by his father. But Clarke seems to see his forced joviality as a dodge rather than a defense, not satisfied until she's ruptured his facade and reduced him to tears. To be fair, Clarke said that she "grew to love" Jason over the course of editing the film, and its unfettered depiction of a homosexual man was nothing short of sensational in 1967. But from this distance, its embrace seems all too guarded, its intensity less exacting than uncharitable.

User comments from imdb Author: el-mno-p from Newcastle, England

Clarke's filmed conversation with her friend Jason Holliday is a fascinating document of one man and the way he sees himself in society. Jason grew up in the rough, rural Southern USA, where he not only had to deal with anti-black racism, but the pressure of growing up gay in a household dominated by an aggressive, proud father. He left home as a young man and travelled across the country, often hustling or working as a houseboy for rich white families, all the while holding his dream of being a nightclub performer close to his heart.

It's these experiences that inform Jason's character, and he is magnetic. The success of the film depends on his 'performance' for the camera, and he acts out each anecdote as if he were constantly living them, embellishing every detail with wit and energy. It's extremely difficult not to warm to him. His comfort in front of the camera makes it easy to forget that we're watching a film: more like we're in the room with him. And, indeed, even when the camera occasionally runs out of film and a new reel has to be found, the sound remains largely continuous. It's like driving through a tunnel while talking on your mobile phone, losing the connection briefly, those few tense seconds where you wonder if the other person is still on the line. So immediate.

The film does have a progression, of sorts, spurned on by Jason's (and also, I'm assuming, the crew's) copious intake of alcohol and pot. As his behaviour in front of the camera begins to dissolve into fits of laughter and half-formed sentences, we hear more and more voices from behind the camera. The tone becomes uncomfortable, as the film becomes less of a social document and more of a private, and very real, drama. In a way, it exposes the voyeurism implicit in all documentary film-making, but laid bare for us because there is a sense that this is not something we are meant to see, something that we wouldn't normally be allowed to see in a portrait such as this.

But what Clarke and Holliday give us is the closest to a complete picture of the man as it would be possible to get. The intimacy of the situation and Jason's willingness to delve deep inside himself and talk about everything, about what it means to be him, makes for a powerful film.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kian Bergstrom

In 1966, Jason Holliday was a 33-year-old black gigolo and aspiring nightclub headliner, a man of tremendous physical presence and sensuality. Shirley Clarke's fascinating documentary, made over the course of a grueling alcohol-fueled and drug-addled twelve-hour shoot, presents him as a loquacious, charismatic, self-described 'male bitch' projecting a stunning immediacy, as though every aspect of his life, his feelings, his tragedies and achievements is open to us without reservation, and he seemingly has nothing but desire to reveal to the camera the entirety of his history. Clarke filmed him in her apartment with a minimal crew and two 16mm cameras as he reminisced, drank, smoked joints the size of my thigh, and in general ripped into everyone and everything in his life with candor and glee. But the very first words spoken are to reveal that 'Jason Holliday' was not his real name, that he was born instead Aaron Payne, and a mere four minutes into the movie, Holliday announces his ambition in life: 'What I really want to do is what I'm doing now, is to perform.' And so, from the very start, PORTRAIT OF JASON is insistent that we remember all we see here is illusion and fakery. Performance is the major theme of Clarke's film: the performances of Holliday himself, both of the celebrities he impersonates at various points and, more deeply, of the Holliday persona itself; the stories Holliday tells of his employers, friends, lovers, and enemies, all in various crises of identity; the ambiguous presences of the off-screen Clarke and collaborator Carl Lee, whose voices are heard but whose faces are never seen; and that of the film itself, which has been crafted in the most artificial and patently alienating manner. Filled with jarring, out-of-focus compositions, perpetually mobile camerawork, zooming, panning, capturing and losing Holliday's face, PORTRAIT is a film of unparalleled artifice: there's not a moment that doesn't call attention to itself as constructed, as at least somewhat false, as deliberately foreign. Lauren Rabinovitz has claimed that Holliday's work in the film is done 'in order to make himself an object of art,' arguing that the film has two mutually-contradictory end-games in mind, both to endorse and enable Holliday's transmutation of the raw material of his existence into beauty and at the same time to reveal that very transformation to be founded on nothing but an elaborate network of fictions and deceit. His 'self-aware expertise at playing the victim and at manipulating his position,' she writes, 'puts in doubt his role as the unassuming object of the camera's gaze.' Indeed, there's nothing unassuming at all about Holliday. Within the film, he's a figure of almost purely unadulterated assumption: playing with our assumptions about what life as a gay black hustler would mean, playing with the conventions of the documentary form that lead us to assume his stories, his tears, his soul-bearing is all real. The film is incredibly moving throughout, a masterpiece of affective manipulation, and just as strongly is an elaborate self-critique, continually stressing at every turn that nothing we see is unadorned, no story we hear can be trusted, no sob not at the same time a back-handed chuckle. Has Holliday been lying all along? And would that really diminish the power of his words? The central triumph of the film is that it shows truth as something strange to itself, a side-effect of the narratives we concoct to make sense of our lives and a consequence of the incessant self-doubt that at every second threatens to collapse all those narratives into despair.

Review of Portrait of Jason by Ed Howard at Only The Cinema

The eponymous subject of Shirley Clarke's fascinating documentary Portrait of Jason is Jason Holliday, a gay black man, originally from the deep South, who led a rough and varied life. Clarke simply puts Jason in front of the camera and lets him speak, and this proves more than enough to make this portrait engaging, funny, and genuinely moving in a surprising way. Jason seems to be a born entertainer, and the camera hardly phases him in the least. He immediately launches into a stream of hilarious anecdotes, acts out scenes from famous Hollywood movies, and generally riffs on himself and his life. He'd been a male hustler, a houseboy, a kind of amateur con man, and done all sorts of odd jobs — everything, that is, but hold down a steady 9-to-5, which he says early on is not for him. Jason's bitchy, extravagant persona is a perfect focus for a documentary of this kind, where he's the only thing on screen throughout the film. Clarke occasionally lets the camera lose focus, reducing the image to a blur, which allows her cameraman to imperceptibly switch reels while Jason's voice continues on the soundtrack. But other than these moments of visual abstraction, the whole film takes place in a single room, with the camera aimed squarely at Jason, sometimes showing him lounging in full body, sometimes focusing in for a tightly framed close-up on his expressive face. In the memorable image I've captured above, Clarke allows a skull in the background to provide a mirror image to Jason's strained grin.

Jason is always grinning here, and laughing too. He's one of those people who will laugh longer and harder at his own jokes and stories than anyone else around him, and his wild laughter is contagious. After many of his stories, he simply throws his head back and howls, collapsing backwards in gales of laughter. Even so, one senses almost immediately that there's something behind this merriment. In unguarded moments, when there's a lull in the unceasing monologue, Jason seems a bit drained and empty, uncertain even, as though only the constant flow of words and fun can keep him from fading away. In one striking scene early on, Clarke films a break in the streams of words, with Jason quietly smoking a cigarette; she shows him in a head-on tight close-up, and his unfocused eyes and blank slate of a face are a stark contrast to the vibrant, dynamic figure we'd seen before then.

Indeed, as the film goes on, the portrait being created here becomes darker and darker, with more subtle hints of what's to come. Jason's drinking, pronounced throughout the film, becomes increasingly reckless towards the end, and by the final twenty minutes he's visibly stumbling and slurring his words, clutching a bottle as his monologue takes an introspective turn. What emerges is a sense of a man who has created his entertainer persona as a shield against a pretty ugly life — an abusive father who beat him daily, racism encountered everywhere, lots of empty sex and a lack of real love. Clarke simply allows him to keep talking long enough so that the created persona falls away and the man begins to show. She's clearly heard most of his anecdotes before, and when he seems uncertain of where to go next, she's heard off-camera coaching him, "Tell the one about..." So one definitely gets the sense that she's playing a kind of waiting game here, letting Jason get through all his usual stories and acts until he runs out of the everyday stuff and has to dig deeper. He winds up digging into his childhood and his darker experiences of racism and homophobia, telling them increasingly without the nervous laugh that often accompanied his earlier, more humorously presented tales.

Clarke's film is endlessly fascinating and entertaining, largely because Jason is so fabulously interesting. The hallmark of a great documentary is to treat the subject with an aesthetic that brings out its essence, and Clarke is certainly able to do this with Jason. This sustained focus on his words and his life provides an intimate glimpse into the man, in the process casting a harsh glow on the social prejudices that guided him into the life he wound up leading. This is a stark, uncompromising portrait, both wildly entertaining and ultimately harrowing as well.

Bright Lights Film Journal | Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason Tom Sutpen, May 2005

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Eye for Film ("Chris") review [4/5] Chris Docker, also seen on imdb here: User comments

Time Out Film Guide [Geoff Andrew]

Portrait of Jason in YouTube (4:26)

TRANS

USA (9 mi) 1978

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm) from Scotland, United Kingdom

Trans is part of a set known as Four Journeys into the Mystic. (I'm reviewing them together as they make rather less sense separately.)

There are four thematically related dance pieces: Mysterium, Trans, One-2-3, and Initiation. They comprise the dancers in their own pools of light, with no external props. As if somehow distinct from space and time. The dances are in strong contrast to Clarke's earlier dance films (Dance in the Sun, Bullfight and Moment in Love). The choreographer is Marion Scott.

Mysterium. There is a long thrumming sound, as from Tibetan bells (or bowls). Two dancers perform a geometrically interesting piece of Body Balance / Body Sculpture. The light casts shattered red shadows across the floor in what is otherwise a sea of darkness. The dancers wear skin-tight opaque outfits and have an almost androgynous (or sexually part-formed) appearance.

Trans. A solo contemporary dance. The dancer appears to be wearing a trouser suit of gauze-like material. The shadows on the dancer's body are carefully manipulated – probably during filming and then by additional processing. This gives a trailing movement and other visually notable special effects. At the start of the piece, it almost looks as if there is another body contained in the dancer's body. The 'floor' is simply a pool of golden light in a sea of darkness. Eventually the darker body becomes one with the darkness.

One-2-3. A figure in a suit, tie, bowler and a veil explores the changing colour of the screen. A second figure, white clad, does the same. Each figure originated from a simple white pool outline. A third figure enters wearing a 'glam' costume. The three meet. The man removes the veil.

Initiation. (10/10) The most impressive of the three pieces and with a larger complement of dancers. Initially there is a gauze-clad figure, lit from beneath. (The costumes and spirituality of this section in particular remind me of the style of dance pioneer Ruth St Denis, a style connected to Clarke through her training in the Doris Humphrey-Charles Weidman technique and Denishawn dance.) The first figure could represent a high priestess or shaman – whoever guards and opens the gate of initiation. Lighting starts from a white core light, to which blue is added. Nine figures approach and circle the first one. Tibetan bells again. She draws them into the light. Two circles form. Five join hands and rotate around the central figure clockwise as an inner circle move anticlockwise. From some Body Balance dancing off to one side, a figure carries another into the circle. The costumes appear to be skin tight blue with a white gauze over the top. The carried figure awakens or comes to life. At this point one might consider the similarity to the pagan rite of the Green Man of Spring or countless rituals of different cultures. But the dance is minimalist to make it symbolic, fitting any, rather than the specific. It is one of the most creative dance pieces I have ever witnessed. The white moonlike disk becomes red, and the other figures dance and cavort (without veils). There is a single figure astride the white orb.

ONE-2-3

USA (6 mi) 1978

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm) from Scotland, United Kingdom

SAVAGE LOVE

USA (28 mi) 1981

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm) from Scotland, United Kingdom

This is one of two works by Shirley Clarke (the other is Tongues) that comprises a monologue by an actor to musical accompaniment. It starts off more entertaining than profound. "Can you give me something of yourself?" he asks - speaking as it were to a lover he may have lost. It becomes clear that he is obsessed by a woman ("You, the missing part of me") and is incapable of giving the very thing he asks of her – in other words, a 'part of himself.' His idea of pleasing her, instead of being himself, is to imitate what he thinks she wants. "I designed a special smile for you," he says. And he even wonders if he can be like Mick Jagger for her if this is what she wants.

Interleaved images of the actor and musicians, very fast, produce a 'dreamlike' or Brechtian effect. Maybe the man's unconscious is speaking. Is obsession a lack of awareness of oneself, not 'knowing oneself? The film takes on a more serious note, prompting profound reflections in the viewer, and the actor breaks down, asking the audience, "Which presentation of myself will make you want to touch (me)." Jump cuts are used to underline a stammering section. I was reminded of Steve Reich's work, "Come Out to Show Them" and the way repetition can be a struggle for meaning. Clarke seemed happy with the combined artistic efforts, saying, "Savage Love, the Sam Shepard video piece with Joe Chaiken, was originally written for the theater. It was then taken by me and re-filmed, taped and after that put through a video process that changed it. And both of them, upon seeing the finished product, loved it."

TONGUES

USA (20 mi) 1982

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm) from Scotland, United Kingdom

Although another piece by the same author as Savage/Love (Sam Shepard), Tongues uses even more cinematic special effects, compressing and expanding the image vertically or horizontally.

It is like a precursor to the Performance Art of Laurie Anderson, especially when an image is altered to evoke death. (For instance, years later, Anderson would used advanced technology to slowly transform a live image of herself into a 'devil' to mirror as song as she sings it.) It feels like witnessing the faltering steps of an earlier pioneer. Which, of course, it is. The theme includes a dying man delivering his own last rites.

Ubuweb a collection of Shirley Clarke shorts available for viewing online

A tour-de-force synthesis of theater and video, Tongues is the collective title of a two-part collaboration by Shirley Clarke, distinguished actor/director Joseph Chaikin, and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard. Both one-act monologues integrate the distinctive styles of these three artists: Shepard's innovative, stream-of-consciousness language; Chaikin's kinetic and exacting performance, which unifies the pieces; and Clarke's dynamic, expressive choreography of image, sound and text. The cadences and inflections of Shepard's jazz-related narrative voice and Chaikin's dramatic expression of a multitude of personalities are heightened by Clarke's syncopated use of digital effects, slow motion, and editing techniques to distort and manipulate the image.

In describing one man's quest for love, Savage/Love mirrors the search for romantic attachment, from infatuation to insecurity and disillusionment. With its propulsive romantic quest, Savage/Love is a prelude to Tongues, in which a dying man delivers his own last rites. As Chaikin enacts the man's fantasies and recollections, Clarke parallels the narrative and emotional intensity of his performance. Through her ingenious camera work, precise editing, and imaginative use of electronic imaging, Clarke powerfully transforms these stage pieces into resonant video drama.

ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA B 85

USA (85 mi) 1985

A film twenty years in the making, as Shirley Clarke went over a decade without making any films at all after PORTRAIT OF JASON (1967), initiating a film about jazz with saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whom she met in the 60’s through Yoko Ono, but the project floundered until she discovered the video camera in the 80’s, making a few shorts before returning to this film. Video techniques play a prominent role in the making of the film, as it allows the director to mix and match how she wants to effect the screen image, mixing realistic images with animation and elements of surrealism, creating an otherworldly effect, which matches the endlessly expanding universe that at least partially explains the music of Ornette Coleman. Seen in the opening sequence receiving an honorary plaque from the mayor and a key (which astronaut Alan Bean had taken to the moon and back) to the city of Fort Worth, his home town, his first hometown appearance in 25 years, the site of a world premiere of his “Skies in America,” a combined jazz and symphonic work utilizing his regular combo along with the Fort Worth Symphony. In fact, much of the documentary is a recording of this performance which is the centerpiece of the film. In it we hear Coleman’s free jazz style, which is completely non-melodic, played at such a rapid tempo with such quickly maneuvering improvisation that some are apt to question whether it even qualifies as music. During the 50’s, other musicians walked off the stage in defiance when he played, some destroyed his instruments, while others physically attacked and beat him, deemed a jazz pariah, and to some an embarrassment, receiving some of the harshest music criticism along with fellow avant garde pioneer, pianist Cecil Taylor. Both seem to play in abrasive clusters, characterized by an extremely energetic and physically aggressive approach to sound, never allowing it to remain static, but continually challenging the listener’s capability to comprehend. Even today, more than half a century later, the jury is still out on that. But this is not the focus of the film, which instead allows his music, and Clarke’s visual style, to continually expand what the audience is used to.

One of the surprises is realizing just how much of Coleman’s music is written composition, similar to filmmaker John Cassavetes, where both are attributed to using an improvisational style of art, yet each carefully compose and scrutinize every note and word ahead of time. However, neither artist believes it ends there, as they constantly tinker and adjust and rewrite, allowing the work to breathe like a living organism, where it’s never really cemented in time. Coleman rarely plays jazz standards, concentrating on his own compositions, where there seems to be an endless flow of enormous sound. Ironically, Coleman’s demeanor is that of a quiet and unassuming man, not at all vain, egotistic or reflective of the assaultive power of his work, where his mind is continually tinkering with new ideas and perceptions, heavily influenced by Buckminster Fuller, an inventor, futurist, and theorist, and also beat writer William S. Burroughs who is seen performing a reading dedicated to Coleman. Fuller, however, best represents what feels to Coleman like an ever expanding but mathematically ordered universe, where Clarke shoots a string ensemble sequence inside one of his geodesic domes. Coleman was particularly influenced by Fuller’s view that there was no up or down, but simply the concept of outward, as we are all effected by being inside or outside the gravitational pull, where he has always been driven to push his music outside orthodox realms, like a spaceship breaking through the boundaries of gravity. Clarke has some fun with animated sequences of Coleman in a sporty The Jetsons style space ship juxtaposed over grainy images of Neil Armstrong’s moon walk. During these space images, it was hard not to think of equally controversial jazz leader Sun Ra, whose musical mantra was always “Space is the place,” often seen performing in concerts dressed as a space traveler, with the band wearing an equally distinctive science fiction uniform, where he was an ardent believer that avant garde artists took themselves much too seriously.

One of the more questionable ideas was using a child actor to play Coleman as a young child, where he wanders alone by the train tracks carrying a saxophone, images which are interjected periodically throughout the film, rather manipulatively reminding us of the roots but also the pathos of poverty. Some of her other ideas are equally misguided, using abstract expressionist video techniques coinciding with abstract streams of Coleman’s music which have a diminutive rather than enhancing effect. Somewhat mysteriously, Clarke may actually misunderstand the musical artform, as she accompanies the music with some trippy psychedelic sequences that may have seemed cutting edge at the time, but they’re completely out of synch with the awesome power of Coleman’s music. Like many greatly misunderstood artists in their youth, Coleman’s refusal to acquiesce to popular tastes led to a reversal of critical opinion, calling him an uncompromising jazz genius later in his lifetime. Clarke’s film, showing different stages of his career from 1968 to 1983, doesn’t really capitalize on this clamor of support, where Coleman’s innovation clearly outshines that of the film director, who strains to keep up, using quick cuts, some unusual editing, where time moves simultaneously backwards and forwards, never in a traditional linear fashion, which makes this a somewhat rare and unusual documentary, but one that fails to honor the unique stature of the featured artist.

Too little information is provided about the man, too few interviews, too few performances, no archival footage, and barely a hint at the peculiar path he took to greatness. Only one interview from a jazz critic in New York gets it right, recalling a magical moment in New York on a snowy night when Coleman broke out in Charlie Parker style, often copied but never equaled, yet Coleman matched that same eccentric passion and precision, playing on into the night, never once faltering, matching the near impossible physical and technical demands of one of the most heralded musical greats in all of jazz. Yet when asked to explain his unforgettable performance afterwards, Coleman nonchalantly indicated he likes to do that every once in awhile “just for fun.” Clarke began her artistic career as a dancer and studied with the Martha Graham Dance Company, among other dance luminaries, developing an artistic kinship to jazz as a free form artistic expression, perhaps similar to what she was trying to accomplish in film. Her first films were dance movies, becoming more radically experimental, adding racial issues and a social conscience, often blurring the lines between fiction and documentary. This was Clarke’s last work, failing to capture the energy and imagination of her 60’s films like The Cool World (1964), which also happens to have an exceptional jazz musical soundtrack from Mal Waldron. Nonetheless, flawed as it is, the fusion between Ornette Coleman and Shirley Clarke can’t help but generate interest, both unheralded yet rare artists whose stature has only grown over time, where this unusual film is a part of jazz and cinema history.

Not surprisingly, the musical content in this documentary about modern jazz's greatest iconoclast is superb: much of it revolves around a 1983 performance of Ornette Coleman's 'Skies of America' suite, with orchestra and the harmolodic Prime Time band. Clarke's film, however, is something else: with updated psychedelic visual tricks, and little info on the master's life or career, it fails to do him or his music justice. But for the sight and sound of the man in action (including some fine archive footage from the early '70s), it's essential viewing for any jazz aficionado.

Ornette: Made in America Dave Kehr from The Reader

Shirley Clarke's first feature after her 1967 underground classic A Portrait of Jason was this disappointing muddle of concert footage, unfocused interviews, dated psychedelia, and indifferently staged dramatic scenes centered on jazz great Ornette Coleman. Clarke happily avoids the PBS trap of trying to explicate Coleman's notoriously difficult music, but neither does she give the music the time and space it needs to explain itself. Her rush to enshrine Coleman as a member of a nebulous, spacey avant-garde tradition (among the interviewees are Buckminster Fuller and William S. Burroughs) leaves the work itself off to one side, where it's still going to sound like noise to most people.

Ornette: Made in America Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader, also seen here: Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum]

The last major work of the late, great American independent Shirley Clarke (The Connection, Portrait of Jason, The Cool World), this 1985 documentary about the innovative and singular jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman finds her straining at times to match his eclecticism. (Among the interview subjects are William S. Burroughs and Buckminster Fuller.) The film's biggest limitation may be its focus on a single piece, "Skies of America," through many performances and incarnations over a seven-year period, which stretch geographically from Fort Worth and Berkeley to Morocco and Italy--a good idea in theory, but the third-stream trappings of the piece make it less than ideal for this kind of workout. Still, this ambitious and affectionate effort to capture an elusive subject is undoubtedly worth a look. 90 min.

40 Frames - Screening Archives - Fall 2002

“A leading figure in the American avant-garde cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, and a pioneer of video in the 1970s, Shirley Clarke brought a distinctive aesthetic—the ‘choreography of images’—to her work.” — (Electronic Arts Intermix)

Shirley Clarke was born in New York in 1925. Starting out as a dancer, her first films were dance films, such as Dance in the Sun (1953), and In Paris Parks (1954), a lyrical look at gesture and movement in a public landscape. In 1959, she made one of the best and most widely viewed examples of abstract expressionist cinema, Bridges-Go-Round.

Her films of the early 1960s—The Connection (1962) and The Cool World (1963)—are landmarks of the American New Wave movement. Utilizing a New York version of Italian neo-realism, Clarke’s work remains the best expression of marginal life in that era. Portrait of Jason (1967) was one of the first films to look at a gay protagonist in an open and sympathetic (and completely unromantic) manner.

In the early 1970s Clarke pioneered live and taped video performance, installation, and documentation with a collaborative group of artists and technicians called the Videospace Troupe. Her cutting-edge work in this field was an important source of inspiration and experimentation for much of the video art and experimental television work that followed in the United States. In 1975 she was appointed professor of film at the University of California, Los Angeles; her subsequent film and video work included 24 Frames per Second (1977), Mysterium (1979), Tongues (1983), and Ornette, Made in America (1986).

The jazzlike structure of Ornette: Made In America—combining old and new footage, intercut dramatic sequences, and electronically processed video interludes—is as complex and exciting as Ornette Coleman himself. Clarke and Coleman worked together exploring his ideas about music, artistic creation, and life. The film follows Ornette through different stages of his career, with footage dating from 1968–83, documenting jazz performances in Morocco, Nigeria, Berkeley, and Fort Worth. This rich and poetic portrait includes commentary from the likes of William S. Burroughs and Buckminster Fuller. Shirley Clarke died September 23, 1997.

User comments from imdb Author: madsagittarian from Toronto, Canada

40 years on, the jury is still out on Ornette Coleman. His "harmolodic" theory was/is one of the foundations of the free jazz movement. His original quartet (with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins) was the scourge of the jazz world in the late 1950's... and even today the revolutionary sax player is still a hot topic for debate.

I am not schooled enough in music theory to properly explain free jazz to those who may not know the term, but the best attempt I can say is that free jazz players ignore melody and seem to play in one long line of sound, rather than playing off of each other. (Hope that makes sense...)

Anyhow, there haven't been many films made on free jazz, but of the few I've seen, Shirley Clarke's documentary on Coleman is by far the most thorough in terms of explaining the revolutionary sense of the music. Although I like free jazz, I prefer Cecil Taylor, Art Ensemble of Chicago or Pharoah Sanders to Coleman. He was instrumental in giving voice to this strain of music, but still I think his sound is one of the least interesting of the movement. But that's just my subjective response to the man. The beauty of ORNETTE: MADE IN America is that it doesn't try to change one's mind about him. It is however a fascinating study of a figure who really sacrificed a lot for his unique voice.

The film opens in the present tense with his band Prime Time (which adapted his theories to jazz fusion)- and it is ironically amusing seeing him play before a black-tie crowd in his native Texas. Yes, Coleman has come home again.... and to open arms, however this warm greeting was hard won. In Coleman's own words, the sudden appreciation of his work is this: "I guess if you live long enough, you get to be an elder statesman."

It is enough to see Coleman practice his music in one of the most unholy places in Urbana (an abandoned building often populated by addicts and knife-wielding crazies)- fittingly working on outlaw music among other societal outcasts. However, this film pushes Ornette's legacy even further-- he often comes across as some kind of pop icon or superhero (as best exemplified by the cartoonish image of his likeness flying across a starry backdrop)- while he may be more mainstream than ever, this silly bit pushes it a little too far.

Sadly, ORNETTE MADE IN America is not widely available. My one and only screening of this in 2001 at Toronto's Cinematheque was made available by a film print which came and went under the arm of someone from New York the same day. It is a revealing, complex and somewhat moving portrait of a person who stands by his art regardless of its interpretation.

Cinespect [David Fitzgerald]

Ornette: Made in America | Spectrum Culture Jake Cole

Slant Magazine [Joseph Jon Lanthier]

Back to the Futurism by Charles Mudede - Seattle ... - The Stranger

ORNETTE: Made in America--Shirley Clarke's experimental look James van Maanen from Trust Movies

Ornette: Made in America | The Cinematheque

ORNETTE Made in America - Documentaries - About.com Jennifer Merin

Ornette: Made in America: movie review - CSMonitor.com Peter Rainer

The Films of Shirley Clarke at Anthology - - Movies - New York ... Melissa Anderson from The Village Voice

Review - Ornette: Made in America | Jeffrey M. Anderson

Shirley Clarke | Senses of Cinema Angelos Koutsourakis, December 2012

UCLA Happenings - 'Ornette: Made in America' (1985) - March 24 ...

"Ornette: Made in America" Eric Kohn from indieWIRE

Perlentaucher [Lukas Foerster] Berlinale blog (in German)

Ornette: Made in America: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter

Time Out New York [Keith Ulhich]

American Independents: Shirley Clarke and Ornette Coleman's ... Marjorie Baumgarten from The Austin Chronicle

Film: ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA - Austin Film Society

Ornette: Made in America: The 1985 Jazz Documentary Gets a ... Melissa Anderson from Seattle Weekly

"Jazz Portrait 'Ornette' 20 Years In The Making" Don Snowden from The Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1986

New York Times [Janet Maslin]

"Woman With a Lens, Restored" Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

Ornette: Made in America - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ornette Coleman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ORNETTE COLEMAN personal website

Clarkson, S.J.

TOAST C 71

Great Britain (96 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

A difficult movie to appreciate as it feels badly conceived and overly sloppy, never sure what it was intended to do, as this is based on Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger, the memoir of Nigel Slater, a culinary writer and Food Network TV host, Britain’s answer to Julia Childs, as seen through his eyes starting as a young 9-year old child. Apparently food deprived since birth, as Nigel’s mother (Victoria Hamilton) hasn’t a clue in the kitchen, whose idea of dinner is boiling whatever comes in tin cans, where the ironic title comes into play when she allows the water to evaporate, actually burning the contents “inside” the cans. On those occasions, her perky reply is: “Well, there’s always toast!” This film was initially shown on British TV in late December where it was an unqualified success. On the screen, the film is inexplicably shot in ‘Scope, though there’s rarely any cause for it, as much is shot indoors in the ugly and grimy home of Nigel’s completely tasteless parents, the kind of four walled home where the wallpaper has never changed from the original owners a half century ago. While the movie version projects Nigel as an only child in the 1960’s, he apparently had two older brothers who were completely left out of the movie. Instead, Nigel has a perfectly miserable childhood, where his father (Ken Stitt) takes grumpy to new heights, as he’s downright hateful to his son, always yelling and losing his temper, blaming him for everything that goes bad, apparently stressed and overly worried about the declining health of his wife, who has failing lungs, exacerbated by the increasing stress around the household.

Part of the problem here is that the characters are so self absorbed there’s little sympathy for any of them, including young Nigel, who’s ridiculously spoiled and self-centered, never allowing any leeway for his mother’s medical condition, always making it about himself, which in the eyes of the audience makes him a horrible little wretch. Yes, his father is belligerent and a blowhard, but his mother is generous to a fault, but simply hasn’t the energy to spend with her son. The parents are never straight with him about her illness, or about anything really, so he always gets his hopes up that things will be better, then is terribly disillusioned when things don’t work out the way he’d hoped, becoming extremely disappointed to the point of hateful towards both parents. Nigel is spiteful and contemptuous of others, especially those closest to him, never showing the least amount of concern or empathy for others, becoming a serial whiner in a movie where he’s the lead. This doesn’t bode well for the audience’s sympathy, which is rare for a child lead actor, who almost always generates plenty of sympathy, even under the worst of circumstances, except Patty McCormack in THE BAD SEED (1956). He never wins the confidence of the audience, so when he loses his mother at age 9, leaving him alone with his obnoxiously overbearing father, there’s still some question why this has been turned into a movie, as there’s little interest generated onscreen. Easily the best thing in the picture is the use of Dusty Springfield music, allowing some songs to play through the duration, which couldn’t feel more gratifying, as she’s an extraordinarily heartfelt singer.

Enter the indomitable presence of Helena Bonham Carter, thankfully, as Mrs. Potter, whose onscreen/offscreen eccentricities are a constant delight, though she arrives much too late to save this picture. Because of her immediately recognizable image, perhaps an early, amusing, foreboding hint may have helped, like almost being hit by a bus or something while Nigel completely unawares continues along his usual shopping excursion. Both father and son find it hard to take their eyes off her as she’s an uninhibited, cigarette smoking, floral dress wearing washer woman who cleans while exposing her garters and stockings, along with high heels. Without any backstory, she takes over the household with her aggressive personality and phenomenal ability to cook, sending Nigel into a jealous swoon, as she’s the complete opposite of his mother, just adored by his father, which is more than Nigel can bear. He thinks of her as a disaster, or as some horribly amoral creature, yet without her presence, there’d be little reason to watch this film at all, as she completely upstages the little brat, who is continually harping on her deficiencies, as she’s considered “common,” out of her social class, yet defies all ill mannered insults hurled her way by having superpower knowledge of culinary and cleaning skills. Rather than adore her, since that’s Nigel’s interest as well, he spends the rest of the film hating her too. The problem here is that he’s such an insufferable bore, an ill bred kid that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about others and who doesn’t at all have the unhappy life that he continually insists he has. The film dwelling so much of the time on his self-inflicted misery just sends the wrong message, as by the time we see early signs of his blossoming career in the kitchen, he’s not the one we’re interested in. The focus is always elsewhere where our hopes are continually dashed in some of the more underdeveloped characters or storylines that receive short thrift.

Three Imaginary Girls [Imaginary Embracey]

It's tough to believe famed British chef/writer Nigel Slater was ever the helpless, uninteresting, namby-pamby teen on display in this middling-at-best film. In telling of his '60s Midlands early family life (mum and dad were averse to most non-tinned food, despite the veg garden out back), his mother's death (sad and untimely), and his later-teen years in a new town with a new stepmum (deliciously vile Helena Bonham Carter, the best thing here), Toast's simplistic broadness compromises its plausibility; a Dusty Springfield-heavy soundtrack can't even redeem it.

Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]

Premiered as a BBC1 telefilm, now flaunting its wasteful widescreen in theaters, Toast adapts the autobiography of Nigel Slater, a popular British food writer looking back in condescension on the Midlands of his youth. The film begins in the middle-class Wolverhampton home where young Nigel is raised on a tinned-food diet by his asthmatic mum (Victoria Hamilton), a cook who could burn water, and his chronically indigested, owlish dad (Ken Stott). Nigel’s only respite is the visits of a free-spirited young gardener in motorcycle leathers—the way Nigel gazes on his mentor gives us some inkling of the boy’s nascent adult desires. When mum passes, she’s replaced by Helena Bonham Carter’s lower-class housekeeper—a gifted cook—who seduces dad and competes for his affection through food preparation with Nigel, who has grown into a home economics prodigy. Oscar Kennedy and Freddie Highmore, respectively playing Nigel as an adolescent and teenager, are remarkably well-matched in lack of screen presence, if not in looks. Slater’s book was evidently an ax-grinder, and the resulting film, directed with tone-deaf comic rhythm by S.J. Clarkson, shows pity and bemusement for the people raising Nigel but rarely human interest in them. More damning still, even the food looks ugly.

Time Out New York [Sam Adams]

Based on British celebrity chef Nigel Slater’s memoir, S.J. Clarkson’s adaptation is preoccupied with the wrong kind of taste. Nigel (played by Oscar Kennedy as a wide-eyed youngster, and Highmore as his appetites mature) is raised in a 1960s household, where tinned vegetables are favored over fresh produce and spaghetti bolognese is a suspiciously exotic dish. Although there’s precious little food worth savoring, he still manages to equate cuisine with (mostly withheld) love, whether it’s his mother’s fallback of toasted bread or the meals he makes for his gruff father (Stott) after her death.

Nigel’s attempts to work his way to his dad’s heart through his stomach are thwarted by a cleaning woman (Bonham Carter), whose succulent dishes turn the father from employer to suitor. As the lad’s culinary skills grow, their conflict grows more explicit; things come to a head over the issue of whether his lemon meringue can best that of his new stepmom.

The first-person source material might explain the one-sided account of the struggle, but the film is crippled by its underhanded treatment of Bonham Carter’s character, including a healthy dose of unmitigated middle-class snobbery. Toast’s glossy, dewy-eyed look at England’s foodie dark ages is suffused with rosy nostalgia but surprisingly very little genuine feeling. It’s the cinematic equivalent of wax fruit: Look, but don’t bite.

Nigel Slater: the best Brit you've never heard of - CSMonitor.com Rachel Meier, April 19, 2011

I want Nigel Slater to be knighted. He is hands down the best thing to come out of Britain since the Beatles. (Actually, Nigel Slater is about a million times better than the Beatles but you people seem inordinately fond of those boys from Liverpool – and they were knighted, or at least one of them was.)

Anyway, cue the uncomprehending stares because, at least if you’re American, you probably have no idea who I’m talking about. Heathens, all of you!

Nigel Slater is who you’d get if you combined Alice Waters with Mark Bittman: a garden-to-table advocate whose goal in life is to make people love fresh produce and cooking because they are – gasp – fabulous and fun and do not have to be fussy in the slightest. Slater lauds fresh ingredients as the foundation for simple food without being Slow-Food militant.

By his own account, Slater is a cook who writes. (Emphasis on the word cook – not chef.) He has been the food columnist for the Observer for 18 years and is presenter of BBC1's "Simple Suppers." He is the author of seven fantastic books on food, basically none of which have been published in the United States (crime). But rejoice, humanity, Ten Speed Press is about to blow the lid off with the publication of "Tender," Slater’s magnum opus.

The premise of "Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch" is simple, and well summed up by the book’s subtitle. The book is organized by vegetable (alphabetically) and offers notes, insights, recipes, and usage guides for each.

But because Slater writes about food in a way that no one else does, "Tender" is so much more than the sum of its parts (or vegetables). Slater integrates food writing and recipes so thoroughly (as opposed to ghettoizing each in its own chapter or section) that his prose takes the form of something utterly unique. His writing feels fresh, deceptively simple, and immensely satisfying. And lest I overlook his recipes, they are some of the best I’ve had the pleasure to cook from. (I would go on holy crusade for his fava bean frittata, cauliflower soup, and spinach and mushroom gratin.)

"Tender" is also visually stunning. With its thick matte paper, full-bleed photographs, and perfect layout, it is every bit as much a tactile experience as it is a literary one.

If 600-plus pages of home-grown, cooked, and eaten goodness aren’t enough for you (and they won’t be; trust me), "Tender" is actually broken up into two volumes, the second of which – “a cook’s guide to the fruit garden” – is every bit as delectable as the first (released in the U.K. September 2010; as-of-yet unannounced in the U.S.). Also, Slater’s "Kitchen Diaries" is one of my all-time favorite books on food (and probably on anything). It basically chronicles a year in Slater’s head, kitchen, and garden. They are both worth tracking down (sometimes Booksmith and Omnivore Books, both in San Francisco carry them; otherwise try bookdepository.com, they’ll ship from the U.K. for free).

Nigel Slater’s books belong on the nightstand as much as they do the kitchen counter. And now that he is finally being published on this side of the pond, I suspect they’ll soon be found on both.

The Guardian [Sam Wollaston] December 30, 2010

You can tell a lot about a person from their kitchen. But I've always been a bit confused by Nigel Slater's in his telly cookery shows. Well, it's obviously gorgeous – big and bright and beautiful. But there's something a bit unreal about it. I'm talking about the identical spacing between the jars on the shelves, the strategically placed bowls of lemons, the lack of clutter or mess. There's something too perfect about it; it looks like a show kitchen, rather than one that lovely food comes out of. And yet lovely food does clearly come out of it, almost continuously.

Having now watched Toast (BBC1), Lee Hall's delightful adaptation of Slater's bestselling memoir, Nigel's perfect north London kitchen maybe makes more sense. Nigel wasn't born into Islington ponciness; he earned it. Nothing lovely came out of his childhood kitchen in Wolverhampton. The cupboards were stuffed with tins of braised beef, bottles of salad cream, Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies. Mmmm. His own attempts at more cosmopolitan fare (spaghetti bolognese) ended in failure, and toast.

It wasn't just the food that was sad. His mum, who he adored, died; dad took up with the cleaner, who Nigel didn't adore at all. These events had unhappy foody associations. The death of his mother meant the breaking of a promise, to make mince pies together before she went. The new woman, though coarse and common, a 1960s West Midlands Wife of Bath, was a wonderful cook. She and young Nigel embarked on a bitter private ongoing Masterchef competition, the perceived prize being the love of Nigel's father (the way to a man's heart, etc). On top of all that, Nigel had the complications of his emerging sexuality to deal with. These weren't easy times.

The film is beautifully done – poignant and sad, but with lightness and humour. There are fine performances, from Ken Stott as Nigel's middle-class, middle-management, middle England, middle everything father; and by Oscar Kennedy and Freddie Highmore as young Nigel and slightly less young Nigel. And especially from Helena Bonham Carter as the new woman. HBC scrubs down surprising well.

Top marks to the art director too. There's enough period detail to have anyone old enough to remember the dreariness of 1960s England sighing with nostalgia throughout: not just the food, but the brown Rover, the wallpaper, the appliances (those upright Hoovers with fabric bags and the red foot button to make them start, ah!).

And it all goes a long way to help understand the man Nigel Slater is today. His love of good food (of all the telly chefs, his passion is probably the most believable), his awkwardness and gentle shyness, the perfect kitchen with everything just so – it's all the result of all this stuff. Oh, and he gets a little cameo at the end; plays a head chef and hires himself. That's nice too.

And welcome, for example, to a special Christmas Shooting Stars (BBC2). No, I don't know what that "for example" is doing there either, but that's what Bob Mortimer says – and it's funny. Shooting Stars is about the baffling, the surreal, the unexpected and the unbelievably silly. This festive episode begins with a hanging (of a mouse) and ends with a race (between Ricky Tomlinson and Ronnie Wood, on mobility scooters). In between is half an hour of the usual lunacy.

Bob is impaled, up the arse, on the end of of Vic's electric guitar; Walter Hottle Bottle jumps in slow motion; Ulrikakaka downs a pint of Advocaat in one, then burps loudly; Jack Dee has a face like an abandoned winkle-picker, or a willy warmer with mouse droppings all over it; Joanna Page is Welsh and pronounces words funny; Thandie Newton is pestered by Bob; Angelous has been hiding in the trees outside Ulrikakaka's bedroom; the Christmas tree catches fire; a stuffed buzzard loses its confidence when a cocktail is thrown in its face; Ricky rides a rocking horse while eating chicken drumsticks.

And there are some fiendishly difficult questions. Like: true or false, muesli is a byproduct of coffin-making? (true). And will bacon stick to Bob's face? (Yes). And what's the latest Ron ever stayed up? (Very).

I'm still not convinced it was a good idea to bring back Shooting Stars. It was a show that fitted so perfectly into the 1990s, like Seinfeld and Britpop. But this Christmas special was a party.

Nigel Slater on the film of his life Nigel Slater from The Observer, November 13, 2010

On the Box [Sean Marland]

Leicester Mercury

Crimespree Magazine [Patti Abbott]

User reviews from imdb Author: thomasjwilliams from Kansas City, MO, USA

User reviews from imdb Author: talynsun-1 from United Kingdom

Helena Bonham Carter on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: 'I don't want to be remembered as a sadomasochistic witch' Julia Mueller video interview with the actress from The Guardian, November 17, 2010

Variety [Leslie Felperin]

Nigel Slater's 'Toast' (BBC1): The over-egging of a perfectly good ... Charles Moore from The Telegraph, January 2, 2011

Nigel Slater's stepsisters accuse food writer of cruel lies about their ... Elizabeth Sanderson and Christine Challand from The Daily Mail, January 9, 2011

'Toast,' About the Food Writer Nigel Slater - Review - NYTimes.com

Nigel Slater - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nigel Slater personal website

Claudel, Philippe

A CHILDHOOD (Une enfance) B+ 91

France (100 mi) 2015

Philippe Claudel has written half a dozen novels and spent more than a decade working as a teacher in prisons, currently a Professor of Literature at the University of Lyon while turning out his fourth film, a coming-of-age foray into social realism, using a novelistic, kitchen sink style portrait of a child coping with the brutality of life while living a marginal existence, following Jimmy (Alexei Mathieu), a 12-year old in 5^th grade, having already repeated two grades. As much a portrait of a deeply troubled child as it is the working class environment where he lives, it’s appropriately set in the filmmaker’s home town of Dombasle-sur-Meurthe, a small industrial town of less than 10,000 residents in northeastern France not far from the German border. No one photographs children like the French, where they seem to have a mastery over the medium. To the filmmaker’s credit, except for a few exceptions, the small cast consists of non-professionals working for the first time, where he plans to revisit the subject of Jimmy in three and six years from now, completing a trilogy by the time he turns 18. Using the Truffaut template from The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959) or The Kid With a Bike (Le gamin au vélo) (2011) from the Dardennes brothers, the strongest elements of the film are its naturalism and the stunning power of Mathieu’s performance. From the outset we see the difficulty he’s in, all but ignored by his drug addicted mother Pris (Angelica Sarre) who has just been released from prison, living on her welfare check, while her boyfriend Duke, Pierre Deladonchamps, last seen in Stranger By the Lake (L'inconnu du lac) (2013), is an obnoxious, continually agitating petty thief, dope dealer and pimp that ridicules the working class while sitting on his ass watching television, drinking beer, and an assortment of other drugs while abusively scaring the living bejesus out of the kids to leave them alone, where Jimmy and his 9-year old brother Kevin (Jules Gauzelin) are forced to take care of themselves, which includes setting the morning alarm, making sure his little brother is up, clean and fed, as they’re off to school without the adults so much as moving an inch, as they spend their nights partying and making a racket, drinking and consuming whatever drugs they can find. Duke is a candidate for the worst stepfather cinema has ever seen, though Deladonchamps literally inhabits the role, as you don’t wish him on anyone, even your worst enemy.

Since they’re constantly kicked out of the house, Jimmy and his brother turn up everywhere, breaking into an abandoned warehouse screaming profanities, seen wandering the streets, the city canals, and the nearby farmer’s orchards in the countryside, where they’re often shooed away for trespassing in areas they’re not supposed to be. Kevin follows him around, sometimes as a comical sidekick, profanely lambasting his ineptitude as goalie in a local soccer match or wanting to come to a student’s birthday party he wasn’t invited to, which turns out to be a cute girl from Jimmy’s class named Lison (Lola Dubois) living in the luxury of a giant backyard surrounded by gardens and trees, stealing a pair of earrings from his mother (that she never notices missing) to offer as a gift. Picking up an old racket from the trash, Jimmy spends idle time watching the action on the tennis courts, where he has seen footage of Jimmy Connors play tennis on TV. When the instructor encourages him to sign up for lessons at 60 euros, this is way beyond anything his family can afford, so he doesn’t even bother to ask for it. On Sunday’s they visit their grandmother, wishing they could stay with her instead, as she leads a much more calm and sensible lifestyle, but she can’t accommodate them, leaving them stuck in an endless cycle of misery. While their life would be altogether different without the sinister presence of Duke, the kids can see their mother is brutalized by him, literally beating her into submission in order to pimp her out for sexual favors, as they helplessly see him rewarding her afterwards with flights of heroin, making her more dependent upon him than ever. Seething with an inner rage, Jimmy tries to stand up to him, but he’s just a kid, where he’s routinely instructed to get lost. Claudel continually contrasts the incessant brutality with tender moments from an original musical score by Ray LaMontagne reminiscent of the early folk style of Neil Young, or scenes of Jimmy sheltering a baby kitten in the wilds of a nearby bush, or inexplicably getting occasional hugs from his mother.

Winner of the Gold Hugo for Best Film at the 2015 Chicago International Film Festival, one gets the sense that there’s an improvisatory rhythm to the way the story unfolds, loosely structured with a very matter-of-fact maturity surrounding Jimmy’s perspective, often feeling like an extended series of small incidents that may serve little overall purpose except to highlight his reaction to a variety of circumstances, where he’s often forced to play the adult, seen buying the family’s groceries or allowing his younger brother into bed with him after having a nightmare, but scenes from his classroom suggest he just doesn’t fit, where in a film about childhood what’s surprising is how little time is actually spent in the company of other kids. These two simply don’t have any friends to speak of, as they’re instead continually left alone to fend for themselves. Despite the best efforts of his well-meaning teacher (Patrick d’Assumçao), he can’t prevent this kid from falling through the cracks, as there’s literally so support system in place. A visit from the welfare worker is an infuriating joke, the neighbor next door who can hear and see it all keeps his mouth shut, where the saddest truth about a world besieged by budget cuts is allowing kids like this to fail, where there’s no tutor, extracurricular activity, or the availability to spend quality time with others. The benefits of learning socialization skills have been replaced by test scores and a reliance on scientific measurements at the expense of helping a child adjust to an often cruel world around them. This kid is bright and mature beyond his years, but lacks proper guidance, where there’s clearly no indication he has much of a chance to succeed. It’s a dense and often muddled journey, with literally inspired acting from the two brothers, where you can literally feel the accumulation of time, beautifully shot by Denis Lenoir, the longtime cinematographer for Olivier Assayas, prolonged by a continual series of painterly images accentuated by the bright sunlit colors of the long and lazy days of summer vacation where Jimmy futzes around with nothing to do, as his brother is shipped off to grandmother’s house, where the world is radiantly alive, but he’s simply not a part of it. The director himself makes an appearance at the end as a tennis instructor, finally allowing Jimmy onto the court once all the lessons are done and there’s otherwise no activity to speak of, adding a personal autobiographical context that at least offers a sliver of hope.

What to see at the 2015 Chicago International Film Festival Madeline Wolfson from Time Out Chicago

This tender look at growing up through the eyes of a 13-year old boy is more than just a French take on the themes so honestly captured in last year’s Boyhood, and only partially due to the richness and universality of “the coming of age story” as a film genre. Acclaimed director Philippe Claudel (I’ve Loved You So Long) brings us the story of Jimmy, a boy who dreams of growing up enjoying family vacations and tennis, yet is forced to mature too quickly with a drug addicted mother living in poverty in a small town in France.

16 Films in International Feature Competition at 51st ...

In this tender, keenly observed look at growing up in poverty in small town France, 13-year-old Jimmy dreams of a bourgeois life with family vacations and games of tennis. Trapped in an unstable household with a drug-addicted mother and her criminal boyfriend, Jimmy is forced to grow up too quickly. Over the course of a sweltering summer, Jimmy must find moments of hope in a world full of strife.

CIFF 2015: In Preview | Keeping It Reel David J. Fowlie

Writer/director Philippe Claudel (2013’s “Before the Winter Chill” and 2008’s “I’ve Loved You So Long”) delivers a tender tale of Jimmy (a wonderful Alexi Mathieu), a 13-year-old living with his younger brother Kevin (Jules Gauzelin), both of whom live with their addict mother and her criminal boyfriend in a low-income neighborhood in France. Forced to fend for himself and care for his brother, Jimmy longs for the birthday parties, family vacations and tennis lessons he sees his classmates experience, during one hot summer as he navigates his way through his own childhood. Although the storyline feels familiar, Claudel creates an authentic atmosphere with an honest lead performance from Mathieu (reminding me of River Phoenix crime “Stand By Me”) that draws us in and invests us in this boy’s life.

What to see at the 51st Chicago International Film Festival ... Ben Sachs from the Chicago Reader

Familiar but affecting, this naturalistic French drama by writer-director Philippe Claudel (I've Loved You So Long) follows a 13-year-old boy living in a small town with his drug-addicted mother and her boyfriend, a petty criminal. It sticks mainly to the boy's point of view, presenting both major and minor events in the same curious yet detached style. One empathizes quickly with the young hero, who's clearly intelligent and creative but lacks the proper guidance to make the most of his better qualities. There are some positive role models on display—an enthusiastic schoolteacher and a children's tennis instructor played by Claudel—yet sadly they hover at the periphery of the film, unable to make a real impact on the protagonist. The radiant cinematography is by Denis Lenoir, a longtime collaborator of Olivier Assayas. In French with subtitles.

'A Childhood' ('Une enfance'): Film Review - The Hollywood ... Boyd van Hoeij from The Hollywood Reporter

The fourth film by French novelist and director Philippe Claudel ('I've Loved You So Long') looks at the coming-of-age of a young boy from a tough background.

After making Before the Winter Chill, a classical drama about bourgeois ennui that starred Daniel Auteuil and Kristin Scott Thomas, French novelist and occasional director Philippe Claudel (I’ve Loved You So Long) does something radically different in his fourth film, A Childhood (Une enfance). This Ken Loach-ian story of a 12-year-old boy who tries to survive in a provincial household where a belligerent step-dad and drug use run rampant, is more impressionistic and, somewhat paradoxically, undone by an unexpected plot twist. And instead of stars, the small cast is a mix of non-professional actors and relatively fresh faces, which didn't help at the French box-office, where it opened to decent reviews and tepid numbers. It will bow stateside at the Chicago Film Festival.

The entire narrative of Claudel’s latest unfolds in the director’s birthplace, Dombasle-sur-Meurthre, an anonymous town of just under 10,000 souls on the outskirts of provincial capital Nancy, in the Lorraine region (on the border with Germany). Indeed, there’s a sense throughout that Claudel wanted to tell a story that’s close to him and close to home (Winter Chill was set in Luxembourg), which might also explain why, for the first time, he also appears onscreen in a small role. The novelist-filmmaker plays a tennis instructor from a poor background who tries to goad the young teenage protagonist, Jimmy (newcomer Alexi Mathieu), into signing up for a summer tennis course. However, the boy, who’s twice repeated a year at school so he’s now two years older than his classmates, is wise beyond his years and knows that his family can’t afford the €60 (almost $70), so he doesn’t even bother to ask for it.

Jimmy’s mother, the 30-year-old Pris (Angelica Sarre), lives with her current boyfriend, Duke (Pierre Deladonchamps, Stranger by the Lake) and her two young sons by other fathers: 12-year-old Jimmy and his younger half-brother, Kevin (Jules Gauzelin). They live in a working-class and shambolic row home — Samuel Deshors did the excellent production design — though Duke spits on people who have or even look for a job, since all employers are "only interested in exploiting their workers and lining their pockets." Instead, he spends his days drinking cheap beer, doing heroin and other assorted drugs and bossing everyone around. He's the kind of man who thinks nothing of recruiting Jimmy to help him out during a burglary in the middle of the night or send him to his dealer to pick up his shit.

Claudel, who again wrote his own screenplay, abandons the more rigidly structured approach of his previous films here in favor of a much looser way of storytelling, with many scenes not having a clear narrative function beyond helping sketch an idea of what the lives of these characters are like and how the family members relate to each other and the world around them. What emerges quite early on is that Jimmy has taken on a role in the household akin to that of a substitute parent, not only doing groceries and making sure he and Kevin have regular meals but also looking after their mother, especially after the drug-fueled parties at their house. This creates a messy but fascinating power imbalance because Jimmy is occasionally forced to be very independent and mature while at other times he’s treated like a child by the adults around him.

Duke — Lorraine used to be a Duchy, so his English-language name suggests he’s a bit of a cowboy while also nodding to local history — is often unreasonable and sometimes physically aggressive. Rather incredibly, Deladonchamps manages to make the character’s many contradictions believable; he blames the misfortunes of himself and his country on "the Arabs," for example, even though his best friend (Fayssal Benbahmed) has Arab origins too. Though the film stays close to Jimmy’s perspective, Claudel also manages to suggest Pris’ obvious emotional and sexual dependence on her good-for-nothing boyfriend, even though he brings nothing to the table himself and might even be dangerous for her children.

No doubt hardened by his experience, Jimmy is often aloof and sometimes fickle in the way young boys from rough backgrounds can be (see Loach’s Kes or the protagonist of the Dardenne brother’s The Kid with a Bike). But audiences understand he’s neither blind to what others have nor heartless, as his interactions with a cute white kitten and a cute bourgeois classmate (Lola Dubois) demonstrate. (The former subplot’s more of an outline or facile shortcut though the latter is played just right.) Young Alexi Mathieu is certainly a find, and as the film’s title already seems to suggest, Claudel plans to pull a Boyhood and revisit Jimmy/Alexi in films three and six years from now.

For most of the running time, there’s nothing new on-screen but the film forges ahead just fine as a soberly atmospheric take on a childhood summer in a tough family and a region that has clearly seen better times. But Claudel the novelist’s desire for structure and meaning starts to get the better of him as the film develops and he seems to be too attached to minor characters who might have a sentimental meaning for himself, such as a kind schoolteacher (Patrick d’Assumcao, also from Stranger by the Lake), who gets quite a lot of screen-time to do nothing much. (Claudel's own few moments as a tennis coach are more powerful.) And then there’s the closing sequence, in which a major plot twist suddenly sheds a very different light on the protagonist. The problem here is that there’s no time left to examine the impact of Jimmy’s drastic decision, which makes this film unsatisfactory, at least as a stand-alone item.

Trailer de Une enfance (a childhood) HD - YouTube (1:49)

A Childhood - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Clay, Thomas

SOI COWBOY

Thailand Great Britain (117 mi) 2008

Boyd van Hoeij at Cannes from european-films.net

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) might have found a European acolyte in the surprising person of UK director Thomas Clay, who shot his second film Soi Cowboy on location in Thailand. The story of a portly European (Denmark’s Nicolas Bro, Offscreen) and his local girlfriend “saved” from the bars is also a bifurcated drama with two only loosely connected stories, but rather than reaching the heights of the Thai Boy Wonder’s films, Clay’s follow-up to the promising if extreme The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael only proves that it requires more than just pointing a camera somewhere to create mystery and meaning. The fact that the first twenty minutes are without dialogue and that more than half of it is in black-and-white will mean the death knell for this film in any commercial ventures. The film is part of the Un certain regard section here in Cannes.

That Clay has a fondness for the ennui generated by simply waiting is clear, as both Robert Carmichael and Soi Cowboy share a structural similarity in which the running time is used against the viewer in an attempt to generate a quiet before the storm-type anticipation that cannot but end with a violent catharsis. The problem with Soi Cowboy is that this quiet is awfully quiet. Antonioni, to whom this film pays “indirect homage” as the director puts it, made ennui exciting cinematographically, but Clay’s screenplay and editing leave out almost anything that might make the two main characters worthwhile to take an interest in for an hour or two.

Soi Cowboy Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

Young director Thomas Clay is one of the very few figures in current British cinema who can justifiably be described as a maverick. Clay's debut The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael - seen in Critics' Week in 2005 - won him admirers, but also saw him attacked for that film's use of extreme violence. Shot in Thailand, Soi Cowboy will similarly divide viewers but is a sure-footed, deliberately-paced feature that boldly wrong-foots us in the final stretch.

Commercially, however, Soi Cowboy is unlikely to make much of a mark, although festivals may be intrigued by this distinctive anomaly.

An opening shot in grainy black-and-white sketches the relationship of obese Scandinavian Tobias (Bro, creepy yet touchingly vulnerable) and Koi (Thampanyasan), a young Thai woman who's pregnant, although whether by him is unclear. They share a Bangkok flat ut have little to say to each other, and while Tobias is apparently besotted by her, she seems to have no interest in him except as a live-in revenue stream.

Their relationship is sexual, Tobias sustaining himself on Viagra, although Koi tells a friend she finds his attentions a nuisance.

Little happens in the opening hour - and indeed, after a painstakingly slow opening in the couple's apartment, it's a full 25 minutes before the film's sparse dialogue even kicks in. Later on, the couple visits an out-of-town tourist spot, and it becomes apparent that the awkward Tobias is unsuccessfully involved with cinema. Little happens on the trip, however: there's an extended digression involving an old lady hobbling along with a Zimmer frame, seemingly designed to amuse and infuriate the audience in equal measure. There's also a key conversation in Thai between Koi and a waitress - without subtitles, to remind us that Tobias is very much a fish out of water in this culture.

After an hour, however, the couple temporarily drops out of the picture, as the film shifts into vivid colour and a looser, more documentary-like camera style, by contrast with the long takes and largely fixed shots of the Bangkok section. A young man, Cha (Mekoh), seemingly Koi's younger brother, returns to his village. It's at this point that a startling piece of violence occurs - handled much more discreetly and effectively than in Clay's first film - and the story winds up in a sequence that may be fantasy, but is certainly indebted to David Lynch.

Some viewers may well take against Clay's unashamed cinephile tendencies: the slow takes and camera crawls of the film's first part echo Bela Tarr, while there are also nods to Reygadas's and no escaping comparisons with Thai innovator Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose Syndromes and a Century was also shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Indebted as he may be, though, Clay clearly thinks about cinema in a way that few British directors do.

Andrew Pulver Get Ready for the British New Wave, a profile of new directors from The Guardian, May 14, 2008

Clayton, Jack

THE INNOCENTS A 97

Great Britain USA (100 mi) 1961 ‘Scope

What shall I sing to my lord from my window?

What shall I sing for my lord will not stay?

What shall I sing for my lord will not listen?

Where shall I go when my lord is away?

Whom shall I love when the moon is arisen?

Gone is my lord and the grave is his prison.

What shall I say when my lord comes a calling?

What shall I say when he knocks on my door?

What shall I say when his feet enter softly?

Leaving the marks of his grave on my floor.

Enter my lord. Come from your prison.

Come from your grave, for the moon is a risen.

Welcome, my lord.

—Miles (Martin Stephens)

seen here on YouTube: The_Innocents_1961_Miles_Poem.MP4 - YouTube

They are both playing, or being made to play, some monstruous game. I can’t pretend to understand what its purpose it, I only know that it is happening—something secretive, and whispery, and indecent.

We must try to learn what it is these horrors want. Think, Mrs. Grose, the answer must lie in the past.

Unless he’s deceiving us, unless they’re both deceiving us—the innocents.

They can only reach each other by reaching into the souls of the children and possessing them. The children are possessed. They live, and know, and share this hell.

—Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr)

One of the true classics of Gothic horror, an extraordinary adaptation of Henry James ghost story The Turn of the Screw, a novella written about 1898 and initially published in serial installments. “It is a curious story," begins James, “a most poisonous tale,” says Oscar Wilde, while according to Virginia Woolf, “Henry James's ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts—the blood-stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of the dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origins with us...We are afraid of something unnamed, of something, perhaps in ourselves.” Without an ounce of blood or gore, and no trace of physical violence, this remains one of the most menacing films ever made, where the film version loses nothing in the translation to another medium, as all the ghastly wickedness is retained. Set during the Victorian era, the story concerns the care of two children living on the immense grounds of a beautifully landscaped English country manor in Essex known as Bly, cared for by the housekeeper and servants, as due to the death of their parents, the uncle in charge of their affairs, Michael Redgrave, travels the world and has no time to take care of them, so straightaway he hires a new governess, Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), a prim and proper pastor’s daughter, where the question that concerns him is whether she has an imagination, putting her in charge with strict instructions not to have any communications with him. This opens the door to an entirely new world, as transported from reality as a visit to Transylvania, but Miss Giddens relies on sound reasoning and her good judgment.

Her sunny outlook, however, is met with clues that something is amiss, as immediately the young boy is expelled from school for unspecified charges, where it was alleged he had a contaminating influence on the others. Happy to return back to the grounds of Bly, he has a very adult air about him, carrying himself with extraordinary confidence, where the two children remain always together, secretly laughing and whispering between themselves. Miss Giddens inexplicably views two apparitions in broad daylight, which leads her to believe that the children are under the evil power of ghosts, where she feels bound and determined to save them. Miles, the young boy about 13, is haunted by Peter Quint, the former servant to the uncle, currently deceased, while Flora, age 10, is haunted by Miss Jessel, the former governess, also deceased. Quint openly flaunted his abusive sexual control over Jessel, now his sexually obedient accomplice, never hiding his crudeness in front of the children, scaring the longtime housekeeper Mrs. Grose (Megs Jenkins), who never uttered a word. It is never known if these spirits are inventions of the sexually repressed imagination of the inexperienced governess, who may secretly be trying to please the guardian uncle, to whom she may hold some sexual thoughts, or if they really do exist. By observing the children’s behavior, however, which grows suddenly mysterious in their presence, she is convinced the children can see them and that the apparitions hold a strange power over them.

Everything is seen through the eyes of the governess, which reaches a peak of hysteria when the children play dress up and Miles recites a haunting poem about the powerful presence of death hovering over him. Both Giddens and Mrs. Grose greet the children with huge smiles on their faces, indulging them in their playful fun, but Giddens’ face turns to utter horror at what she hears, fearful for the lives of the children. James described Peter Quint and Miss Jessel as “my hovering blighted presences, my pair of abnormal agents,” a “haunting pair” driven by a “villainy of motive,” a motive which, in neither the book nor the film, is ever explained. Kerr gives perhaps her best performance, especially as she presents herself as such a grounded character, but her agility and range of expression throughout is unparalleled in her career. Since this comes from such a popular literary work, the screen adaptation is equally impressive, actually based on the 1950 stage adaptation by William Archibald, but especially the contribution of Truman Capote, who seems to thrive in the voices of the children, emboldened by the solitary worlds of their own invention on the spectacular grounds of the decaying estate, offering them a wisdom beyond their years. The production design is chillingly appropriate, with candle lit reflections in the tall mirrors, winding staircases, columns, statues, paintings, and a constantly burning fireplace. The ‘Scope cinematography by Freddie Francis is claustrophobic and charged with atmosphere, the work he personally considers his best effort, filled with slow fades and a blurring of the boundaries between life and death, the real and the imagined, all of which contribute to Miss Giddens’ growing awareness of something sinister in the air that she knows for certain is “something secretive, and whispery, and indecent.” Described by Pauline Kael as “The best ghost story I’ve ever seen,” this production leaves intact the power of the original work that makes sure the experience rests in the dusty cobwebs of our own imaginations.

The Incredible Shrinking Man to Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion Pauline Kael

Directed by Jack Clayton and photographed by Freddie Francis (in CinemaScope, in black and white), this version of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is one of the most elegantly beautiful ghost movies ever made. It features a scary, intense performance by Deborah Kerr, as the governess who sees demonic spectres and forces one of her two charges-the little boy Miles (Martin Stephens)-to confront them. Both Kerr and Michael Redgrave, as the gent who hires her, have just the right note of suppressed hysteria in their voices. The settings-the house, the park, the lake-are magnificent, and the script by William Archibald, Truman Capote, and John Mortimer offers the pleasures of literacy. The filmmakers concentrate on the virtuoso possibilities in the material, and the beauty of the images raises our terror to a higher plane than the simple fears of most ghost stories. There are great sequences (like one in a schoolroom) that work on the viewer's imagination and remain teasingly ambiguous. With Pamela Franklin, Megs Jenkins, Peter Wyngarde, and Clytie Jessop. Music by Georges Auric. Released in the U.S. by 20th Century-Fox. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book I Lost it at the Movies.

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Truman Capote and William Archibald adapted Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" and turned it into one of the most memorably chilling horror films of the 20th century. It has the flavor of one of those polite British studio productions, with many hands contributing to the final product, but Jack Clayton's direction and the gorgeous, widescreen, black-and-white cinematography by Freddie Francis help make it a one of a kind film (though it is almost always paired on a double-bill with Robert Wise's The Haunting). Deborah Kerr stars Miss Giddens, a preacher's daughter who takes a job as a nanny for two kids in a remote mansion. (Their uncle is a busy, swinging single and has no time for kids.) Miss Giddens meets Flora (Pamela Franklin) and everything is fine, but then the other child, Miles (Martin Stephens) comes home early from school, having been expelled. Miss Giddens begins to experience strange things, seeing specters and noticing odd behavior in the children. She concludes that two dead servants (illicit lovers) are possessing the children, and she decides to do something about it. The film makes remarkable use of drastic spaces, both interior and exterior as well as terrifying soundtrack noise. It hasn't lost a bit of its effectiveness over the years and remains a must-see for horror fans. If you listen carefully, you can hear Capote's witty pen at work, probably in much of Miles' dialogue, and definitely in some of the uncle's dialogue.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Jenny Jediny]

Widely acknowledged as the best cinematic adaptation of Henry James’ novella “The Turn of the Screw”, this atmospheric thriller by director Jack Clayton is a true gem of the horror genre. James’ novella is notoriously ambiguous, with readers left to determine whether the noises and visions experienced by Miss Giddens (Kerr) are real or imagined — but it’s made fairly clear here that Kerr’s increasing paranoia is self-induced, and that the tragic ending is of her own making. Indeed, screenwriters William Archibald and Truman Capote do an admirable job translating James’ difficult psychological story into literal visuals, while simultaneously keeping us in suspense about whether or not Miles and Flora really are “innocent” — and, if so, in what way.

The performances in The Innocents are, across the board, superb. It’s difficult to imagine anyone better than Kerr at playing Miss Giddens, an idealistic, faithful, sexually repressed woman who is mortified to learn that her sweet charges may have been corrupted — and who will stop at nothing to “clear” them of their sins. Both Pamela Franklin (who, six years later, starred in Clayton’s Our Mother’s House) and Martin Stephens (from Village of the Damned) are entirely believable as the inscrutable siblings, and Megs Jenkins rounds out the cast beautifully as the children’s well-meaning, naive maid — her performance never hits a false note, and is essential to the success of the story.

Equally impressive are the film’s visuals, including the stunning black-and-white cinematography, appropriately baroque set designs, and effective use of pastoral outdoor settings. Much like in Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) and Val Lewton’s early films for RKO, the frights here are cinematically suggested rather than made explicit, with Clayton using a variety of techniques (including deep focus framing and double exposure) to evoke horror; yet even some straightforward shots — such as a bug crawling out of a statue’s mouth — are enough to cause one to jump. Ultimately, the “horror” here is truly psychological, indicating that the worst monsters are the ones we — like Miss Giddens — conjure up for ourselves.

The Innocents BFI Screen Online

"The best ghost movie I've ever seen" —Pauline Kael

On 2 June bfi releases new prints of The Innocents, Jack Clayton's celebrated adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), scripted by William Archibald (whose play of the book had been on Broadway) and Truman Capote, with additional scenes and dialogue by John Mortimer.

A brilliant exercise in psychological horror, The Innocents tells of an impressionable and repressed governess, Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), who agrees to tutor two orphaned children, Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin). On arrival at Bly House, she becomes convinced that the children are possessed by the perverse spirits of former governess Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop) and her Heathcliffe-like lover Quint (Peter Wyngarde), who both met with mysterious deaths.

The sinister atmosphere of The Innocents is carefully created not through shock tactics but through its cinematography, soundtrack, and decor: Freddie Francis' beautiful CinemaScope photography, with its eerily indistinct long shots and mysterious manifestations at the edges of the frame; Georges Auric's evocative and spooky soundtrack; and the grand yet decaying Bly House, with spiders crawling from dilapidated statues, ants from the eyes of dolls, and rooms covered in dust sheets.

But it is Deborah Kerr in the performance of her career - struggling to veil her mounting hysteria under a civilised façade - who makes The Innocents such an intensely unsettling experience. Are the ghosts the products of Miss Giddens's fevered imagination and emotional immaturity, or a displacement of her shock at the sexually precocious behaviour of ten-year-old Miles? Is she the protector or the corrupter?

Despite a lukewarm critical reception on its original release, The Innocents was passionately defended by Pauline Kael who called it "the best ghost movie I've ever seen". It is now widely considered to be one of the greatest of all cinematic tales of terror, and continues to inspire today's 'haunted house' movies, most notably The Others of Alejandro Amenábar.

A Few Great Pumpkins—Fourth Night: The Innocents ... Robbie Freeling from the Reverse Shot Blog, October 26, 2006

The pedigree of The Innocents is so estimable that one would think the film to be bronzed upon delivery: Henry James adapted to the screen by Truman Capote (!) starring British Hollywood royalty Deborah Kerr, and directed by an up-and-comer named Jack Clayton, whose prior film, the kitchen-sinky Brit new waver Room at the Top, got a Best Picture nomination. What’s most surprising, even forty-five years later, is that The Innocents remains one of the least compromised, most genuinely unsettling studio films of the 1960s, a horror film in both the metaphysical and psychological senses, brought to the screen with more care and craftsmanship than the haunted-house genre probably ever received before or since. Robert Wise’s The Haunting, similarly black-and-white and predicated upon the thin line between possession and madness, stole its thunder two years later, and seemingly for the rest of the century: the latter, a slightly more resolved and narratively accessible trip into the supernatural, shows up regularly on Scariest Movies of All Time lists, while Jack Clayton’s devastating journey into the interior world of the haunted has been greatly forgotten.

What a shame, because anyone who pops in the recently released DVD of The Innocents is in for a big, wide shock: this Cinemascope adaptation of James’s The Turn of the Screw is one of the most exquisitely modulated ghost stories ever shot. When I say that The Innocents is the most “classical” of horror films, I refer primarily to its view on death. Death is here something to be profoundly feared, something that can’t be quantified; the ghostly realm exists not as a concept but as a reality and an end point. Vividly representing that fear is Deborah Kerr’s increasingly wide-eyed Miss Giddens, the pastor’s daughter who takes the job as governness of two young orphans at a remote British estate; her transition from tremulous truth-seeker to manic madwoman, as she begins to suspect that young Miles and Flora are possessed by the spirits of the dead, is so gradual as to be imperceptible, and her invocation of fear is breathtakingly palpable, even as we begin to distrust it. Yet young Pamela Franklin and, especially the preternatural man-child Martin Stephens (who one year before was in Village of the Damned, natch) are every bit her match; theirs is a secret world (the world of children, perhaps nothing more?) that Miss Giddens begins to greatly distrust, until she tries to violently snap them out of it.

What’s most remarkable about The Innocents isn’t merely its tonal and narrative faithfulness to Henry James’s story (it is simply shocking that the film has the same grim ending as the book), but that in so doing, Clayton still manages to make something uniquely, utterly cinematic. The Innocents features some of the most effective 2.35:1 compositions in film history, as well as the best use of the dissolve cut I can recall in a mainstream movie (often one scene will fade out onto one another, slowly, lingering as though draped over the next like a vapor, or a death shroud). There are more grab-your-throat gasps and literal hair-raising moments in this film than even in its soul sister, Alejandro Amenabar’s masterful 2001 homage The Others, which managed to create its own unique world while trading in Clayton’s same hushed, candlelit setting.

The Innocents is a ghost story (faces materialize at nighttime windows, a woman dressed in black appears amongst tall reeds by a rippling pond, shadows and silhouettes seem to dance at the corners of every wide frame), yet it’s not content to just be a ghost story. Even James’s sexual frankness, and intimations of pedophilia snake their way onto the screen—preadolescent Miles’s supposed possession by the “handsome” lothario Quint makes for some seriously perverse magnetism between he and his “pretty” governness. The Innocents hasn’t dated a day thanks to its sophisticated ambiguity; here, explanations mean nothing, and nobody has answers, just an endless tangle of secrets, hazy motivations, and impenetrable facades. As close as we get to Kerr’s unraveling governness, the less we know her, until it’s far too late.

Read TCM's article on The Innocents Jeff Stafford, also seen here: The Innocents

One of the great ghost stories in world literature, Henry James' 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw, has been adapted countless times for the stage, television, cinema and even as a ballet, an opera (by Benjamin Britten in 1954) and a graphic novel (by Guido Crepax in 1989). Among the many film versions, however, most agree that The Innocents (1961), directed by Jack Clayton, is the most elegant, evocative and frightening of them all.

The screenplay by Truman Capote was actually based on the 1950 stage adaptation by William Archibald and may be one reason Henry James purists find fault with the 1961 film version. The story of a governess, Miss Giddens, who is entrusted with the care of two small children, Flora and Miles, by their uncle at a remote country estate, James' novella creates a mood of dread and menace through the increasing anxiety of Miss Giddens who suspects that the children may be influenced and corrupted by the malevolent spirits of the deceased former governess, Miss Jessel, and caretaker Peter Quint of Bly House. The beauty of The Turn of the Screw is that you are never sure whether Miss Giddens is imaging the supernatural occurrences or whether they are actually happening. In The Innocents, there is never any doubt that Bly House is haunted - you see the ghosts. Yet a sense of mystery and ambivalence still exists regarding the children. Are they conduits for the evil spirits or truly innocent? Miss Giddens' obsession with discovering the truth brings a feverish intensity to the proceedings which is almost as chilling as the phantoms she seeks to exorcise.

In Conversations with Capote, conducted by Lawrence Grobel, the author recalled his involvement on The Innocents: "When it was offered to me to do it as a film, I said yes instantly, without rereading it...Then I let several weeks go by before I reread it and then I got the shock of my life. Because Henry James had pulled a fantastic trick in this book: it doesn't stand up anywhere. It has no plot! He's just pretending this and this and that. It was like the little Dutch boy with his fingers trying to keep the water from flooding out - I kept building up more plot, more characters, more scenes. In the entire book there were only two scenes performable."

Regardless of Capote's comments about Henry James' novella, he based the screenplay structure on the Archibald stage adaptation and added the Freudian subtext of Miss Giddens' repressed sexuality which surfaces in scenes of a disturbing erotic nature such as an uncomfortably long goodnight kiss between Miles and his governess. Playwright and screenwriter John Mortimer (Rumpole of the Bailey) is also credited with adding additional scenes and dialogue for The Innocents.

In the biography Deborah Kerr by Eric Braun, director Jack Clayton recalled how The Innocents and the casting of Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens came about. "Deborah had one film to do for Twentieth Century [Fox], and so did I: that was the one we both wanted to do and which we had discussed when we met the previous year. I had admired her work in two films with that very underrated actor, Robert Mitchum - Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison [1957], which showed her at her best without makeup, and The Sundowners [1960], in which her freckles were so attractively in evidence."

Kerr remarked in the same biography on her performance: "I played it as if she were perfectly sane - whatever Jack wanted was fine; in my own mind, and following Henry James' writing in the original story, she was completely sane, but, because in my case the woman was younger and physically attractive - Flora Robson had played her wonderfully on the stage - it was quite possible that she was deeply frustrated, and it added another dimension that the whole thing could have been nurtured in her own imagination."

Filmed on locations in East Sussex, England and Shepperton Studios in Surrey, The Innocents proved to be a physically challenging role for Kerr. Clayton said, "To achieve what we wanted in the monochrome photography the arcs had to be of considerable intensity, and the atmosphere on the set, with fifteen "brutes" burning away, often stifling. During a long schedule, imprisoned in those voluminous Victorian dresses, she never complained, never showed a trace of the discomfort she had been feeling." She also had to do a scene that required numerous retakes where she had to carry Martin Stephens (who was cast as Miles) in her arms. She later revealed to the director that she had felt quite ill and feverish during that day of filming but never acknowledged it at the time.

Clayton discovered prior to production on The Innocents that the film needed to be shot in Cinemascope, a screen format he did not want to use. Luckily, he had one of the best cinematographers in the business working for him - Freddie Francis; they had previously collaborated on Room at the Top (1959). In The Horror People by John Brosnan, the cameraman recalled that, "...I had quite a lot of freedom, and I was able to influence the style of The Innocents. We worked out all sorts of things before the picture started, including special filters. I still think it was the best photography I've ever done - as much as I like Sons and Lovers [1960] I think The Innocents was better, but you rarely get an Academy Award for a film that isn't successful no matter how good your work on it."

As strange as it seems now, The Innocents didn't receive any Oscar® nominations. It did garner international awards such as a Best British Film nod from the BAFTA and a Palme d'Or nomination at the Cannes Film Festival. Still, the film was not a box office success in the U.S. Francis said, "I'm sure Jack [Clayton] was terribly disappointed with the reaction that The Innocents received. He, unfortunately, gets terribly tied up in his films. Everybody, I'm sure, involved with it thought it was a great picture and I'm not completely sure what went wrong but I think it was because it was based on Henry James. When you read James you've got to think about it and make up your own mind...The film lacked this ambiguity and I think, basically, that was the reason it wasn't a success...in the film all the suspicion fell on the children - whereas having read The Turn of the Screw one doesn't know whether it is the governess who is a bit strange or the children."

Deborah Kerr has her own theory about why The Innocents wasn't a success at the time. In the Braun biography, she noted "The subtlety with which he [Clayton] and his team established the atmosphere of the two worlds - the everyday and the spirit world - was so evocative of decadence, in the most delicate manner, that it completely escaped the majority of the critics. Today, a new generation of young movie "buffs" realize how extraordinary were the effects he achieved. One instance is the way the edges of the screen were just slightly out of focus, as though seen through a glass, perhaps. Now it is acclaimed as a great work of art; then they didn't push it because they didn't know how to respond to something so genuinely spooky - so interwoven with reality that it could be real - and that's something people didn't like."

Not all of the critics unfavorably compared The Innocents to Henry James's original novella. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker called the film "one of the most elegantly beautiful ghost movies ever made...The filmmakers concentrate on the virtuoso possibilities in the material, and the beauty of the images raises our terror to a higher plane than the simple fears of most ghost stories. There are great sequences (like one in a schoolroom) that work on the viewer's imagination and remain teasingly ambiguous."

Besides Clayton's superb direction, Francis's stunning cinematography and Kerr's masterful performance (possibly the best of her entire career), The Innocents is distinguished by an unforgettable supporting cast including Michael Redgrave in a brief opening cameo, Megs Jenkins as the fretful Mrs. Grose, Peter Wyngarde in a chilling, non-speaking role as Quint, Clytie Jessop, equally silent but haunting as Miss Jessel and two of the finest child actors of their generation - Martin Stephens as Miles and Pamela Franklin as Flora. Stephens had already made a strong impression as the blonde alien child leader in Village of the Damned (1960) but he would retire from acting in 1966 and pursue an education in architecture. Franklin would go on to star in other similar genre efforts such as The Nanny (1965), And Soon the Darkness (1970), Necromancy (1972), The Legend of Hell House (1973) and The Food of the Gods (1976).

Among the other notable adaptations of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw are numerous television productions including a 1959 version with Ingrid Bergman (directed by John Frankenheimer), one in 1974 with Lynn Redgrave (directed by Dan Curtis), one in 1995 entitled The Haunting of Helen Walker with Valerie Bertinelli, Michael Gough and Diana Rigg, and one in 1999 with Jodhi May and Colin Firth. Film versions of the novella include the 1985 Spanish film Otra vuelta de tuerca, directed by Eloy de la Iglesia (Cannibal Man, 1973), The Turn of the Screw (1992) with Patsy Kensit, Stephane Audran, and Julian Sands, Presence of Mind (1999) with Sadie Frost, In a Dark Place (2006) with Leelee Sobieski, and even a prequel to the events in the James story entitled The Nightcomers (1971), a kinky S&M portrayal of Quint and Miss Jessel played by Marlon Brando and Stephanie Beacham. None of them appear to have the fervent cult following of The Innocents which looks better and better with each passing year.

Shadows of Shadows: Techniques of Ambiguity in Three Film ... Shadows of Shadows: Techniques of Ambiguity in Three Film Adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw”: Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), Dan Curtis’s The Turn of the Screw (1974), and Antonio Aloy’s Presence of Mind (1999), by Dennis Tredy, June 15, 2007 (pdf format)

Bright Lights Film Review Tom Sutpen, November 2005, also seen here: Bright Lights Film Journal :: The Innocents

Tom Sutpen perhaps an earlier draft

Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - The Innocents Matt Shingleton on the BFI Blu-Ray

THE INNOCENTS (Jack Clayton, 1961) « Dennis Grunes reviewing both the book and the movie versions

Classic-Horror Review Julia Merriam

The Innocents « These Glory Days Amner, February 7, 2008

“The Turn of the Screw” and “The Innocents” « The Argumentative ... The Argumentative Old Git, July 17, 2011

The Innocents (1961) | Blu-ray Review | Horrorview.com Blackgloves

Essay 4 - The Turn of the Screw -- FilmGuru.Net Ghosts and the Governess, by Kevin Wohler from Film Guru

Irish Journal Of Gothic and Horror Studies: Film Review Issue 2 John Exshaw

The Innocents (1961) – Retrospective Review | Cinefantastique Online Steve Biodrowski

Goodfella's Movie Blog: 1961: The Innocents (Jack Clayton) Dave

DVD Outsider: The Innocents DVD review Camus

The Innocents Blu-ray review Slarek from DVD Outsider

DVD Savant Review: The Innocents Glenn Erickson

Classic Film and TV Cafe: Nuanced Terror - Jack Clayton's "The ... The Lady Eve, October 28, 2010

Something Secretive, Whispery and Indecent | Electric Sheep ... Robert Barry from Electric Sheep Magazine

The Innocents (1961). Moria - The Science-Fiction, Horror and ... Richard Scheib

eFilmCritic Reviews MP Bartley

The Innocents (1961) - Jack Clayton Readerman from Watch Classics, November 5, 2010

kindertrauma [Lance vaughan]

commentarytrack[Richard Winters]

International Cinema Review: Jack Clayton | The Innocents Green Integer Blog, April 17, 2011

THE INNOCENTS - Movie Review Jonathan Stryker from Horror Express

Remembering Deborah Kerr and "The Innocents" - Filmcritic.com ... Matthew Kiernan

The Innocents - Movie Reviews - Movie News | Movie-Vault.com ... Mel Valentin

American Cinematographer: DVD Playback Kenneth Sweeney, December 2005

The Innocents review (Blu-ray) | Screenjabber Adam Stephen Kelly

The Innocents Amanda DeWees from DVD Verdict

Innocents - DVD review (1 of 2) John Puccio

dOc DVD Review: The Innocents (1961) - digitallyOBSESSED David Krauss

Innocents, The John White from 10kbullets

The Innocents - DVD Movie Central Ed Nguyen

Foster on Film - Ghost Stories

Frame by Frame • View topic - The Innocents/Turn of the Screw Barry Purves

Deborah Kerr - Scottish Rose - The Innocents

The Innocents - Cinepinion Henry Stewart

The Innocents - Directed by Jack Clayton • DVD Reviews • exclaim.ca Travis MacKenzie Hoover from Exclaim

Jack Clayton - Director - Films as Director:, Other ... - Film Reference Raymond Durgnat

The Innocents DVD Review | Digital Retribution David Michael Brown

Reviews: THE INNOCENTS DVD REVIEW Canfield from Twitch

The Innocents / Jack Clayton / Deborah Kerr / 1961 / film review James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

The Innocents Horror Movie Review from BHM: Stephens is the ... Dr. Chills from Best Horror Movie

MMI Movie Review: The Innocents Monica Sullivan from Movie Magazine International

Britmovie

Variety Reviews - The Innocents - Film Reviews - - Review by ...

Greatest Film Moments and Scenes Tim Dirks Film Site

Best Films – 1961 Andre Soares from The Alt Film Guide

Brian Koller

CineScene Capsule Review Richard Doyle

• View topic - The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) Criterion Forum, Film discussion group, September 14, 2005

"The Innocents" on Blu-Ray - Film Forum on mubi.com Film discussion group

The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) Cult Movie Forums, another Film discussion group, May 18, 2008

The Innocents (Jack Clayton) - Blu-ray Forum Yet another Film discussion group, June 22, 2009

Channel 4 Film [Daniel Etherington]

Time Out Capsule Review Ben Walters

100 best British films contributors: Critics – Time Out London

Colm Tóibín The Guardian, June 2, 2006

Innocence found Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, June 3, 2005

The Innocents: No 11 best horror film of all time Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, October 21, 2010

The Innocents, directed by Jack Clayton | From the Observer | The ... Philip French from The Observer, December 23, 2006

Classics corner: The Turn of the Screw William Skidelsky from The Observer, May 29, 2010

'The Innocents': Scared? You will be... - Features, Films - The ... Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent, June 8, 2006

NY Times Original Review Bosley Crowther, December 26, 1961

Jack Clayton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Turn of the Screw - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The_Innocents_1961_Miles_Poem.MP4 - YouTube Miles poem and other clips

The Innocents 1961 Sweet Melody Video clips

The Innocents - Jack Clayton (1961) YouTube clips

Clément, René

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival | Battle of the Rails (excerpt)

René Clément (1913, Bordeaux-1996) studied architecture at Paris’s Academy of Fine Arts. From the mid-1930s on he began to work as a cameraman and director of documentary films. During the occupation he was involved in the resistance movement while, at the same time, documenting the French resistance with his film camera. After the war, these shots became the basis for his first feature, The Battle of the Rails, considered the first neorealist work. The war also underlies what is probably his most important film, The Secret Game (Les jeux interdits, 1951), here present in the conduct and behaviour of innocent children. The film was awarded at Cannes in 1952 and also won the Venice Grand Prix that year, and in 1953 it won an Oscar. Clément’s filmography in the following years contains works of varying genres. Apart from an adaptation of Zola’s novel The Kill under the title Gervaise, he made comedies (Knave of Hearts / Monsieur Ripois; The Joy of Living / Che gioia vivere; Joy House / Les félins) and crime stories (Purple Noon / Plein soleil; Rider on the Rain / Le passager de la pluie, etc.). The majority of his films were popular with audiences. The critics acknowledge Clément’s excellent technical skills, but condemn his films’ somewhat impersonal aloofness.

Film Reference Dudley Andrew

René Clément was the most promising filmmaker to emerge in France at the end of World War II. He became the most technically adroit and interesting of the makers of "quality" films during the 1950s, only to see his career begin to disappoint the critics. In the years of the New Wave it was Clément, above all, who tied the older generation to the younger, especially through a film like Purple Noon. In a more recent phase he was associated with grand-scale dramas (Is Paris Burning?) and with small, personal, lyric films (Rider on the Rain). Clément began his career auspiciously, helping Cocteau with Beauty and the Beast and directing France's only great resistance film, La Bataille du rail. These films showed the world his wide range. The first is a classic of fantasy while the second exhibits what can only be termed a "neo-realist" style. Because La Bataille du rail was shot on location with non-actors, and because its episodic story was drawn from the chronicle of everyday life, Clément, at the end of the war, was championed as France's answer to the powerful Italian school of the liberation.

For a time Clément seemed anxious to live up to this reputation. He associated himself with the progressive journal L'Ecran francais and sought other realist topics for his films. In Les Maudits he observed the plight of a group of Germans and refugees aboard a submarine. Evidently he was more concerned with the technical problems of filming in small spaces than with the moral dimensions of his plot, and this film was not a great success. But with The Walls of Malapaga Clément recovered his audience. This film, which won the Academy Award for best foreign film, was in fact a Franco-Italian co-production and brought together on the screen the most popular star of each country: Jean Gabin and Isa Miranda. The plot and style returned Clément to the poetic-realist films of pre-war France and continued to exhibit that tension of realism and abstraction that characterized all his work.

Unquestionably he was, along with Claude Autant-Lara, the most important figure in the French film industry during the 1950s. His Forbidden Games remains a classic today and is notable both for the ingenuous performances of his child actors against a natural location and for the moral incisiveness of its witty plot and dialogue, scripted by the team of Aurenche and Bost. Doubtless because he had begun working with these writers, Truffaut condemned Clément in his notorious 1954 essay, "A Certain Tendency in French Cinema," but Bazin, commenting on this essay, found Truffaut to have been too harsh in Clément's case. Indeed Bazin lobbied to have the Cannes Film Festival award its Golden Palm to Clément's next feature, Monsieur Ripois. Starring Gérard Philipe, this film makes extensive use of subjective camera and voice over. Shot on location in London, it is clearly an experimental project.

But Clément's experiments are always limited. Technical problems continue to interest him, but he has never relinquished his belief that a film must be well-crafted in the traditional sense of that term. This is what must always distinguish him from the New Wave filmmakers with whom he otherwise has something in common. His all-knowing pessimism, and his literary good taste, finally put him in the camp of the "quality" directors. Clément, then, must be thought of as consummately French. His technical mastery sits well with his advanced political and moral ideas. He is cultured and trained. He makes excellent films both on a grand scale and on a smaller, more personal one. But finally there is something impersonal about even these small films, for, before representing himself, René Clément represents the institution of filmmaking in France. He is a good representative, perhaps the best it had after the war right up through the New Wave.

All-Movie Guide bio by Hal Erickson

TCMDB profile from Turner Classic Movies

Rene Clement / films / director / filmography biography from James Travers from FilmsdeFrance, at Cinema Forever

French Films Biography

The History of Cinema. Rene' Clement: biography, filmography ... Italian and partial reviews in English

René Clément The Auteurs

René Clément NNDB profile page

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Obituary: Rene Clement - People, News - The Independent David Shipman from The Independent, March 20, 1996

Andre Bazin on Rene Clement and literary adaptation Bert Cardullo from Literature Film Quarterly, 2002

Clément, René They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

René Clément - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE BATTLE OF THE RAILS (La bataille du rail)

France (85 mi) 1946

The French neo-realist 'movement' began and ended with this film, whose innovations were developed neither in Clément's nor the national cinema. A semi-documentary study of World War II resistance among Breton railwaymen, using non-professional actors and natural locations, it's compromised by the director's periodic recourse to affirmative, audience-rousing set pieces, but achieves overall a sobriety that is oddly modern, even 'Bressonian' in tone.

La Bataille du rail (1946) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Now regarded as a classic of French cinema, La Bataille du Rail was almost universally praised when it was released in 1946. It won the Grand Prize at the first Festival of Cannes in 1946 and established René Clément as a great director. Whilst it is undoubtedly an impressive film, it is probably its historical significance that gives it its legendary status. Filmed immediately after the end of the Second World War, with the full support of the French Railways company and the French Resistance, this is unquestionably the most accurate and realistic depiction of the secret war against the occupation in film history, and possibly the most accurate war film ever made.

This is actually a film of two halves, which came about because of a two month hiatus in making the film. The first half appears like a documentary, whilst the second half resembles more a conventional war film, with plenty of action. Fortunately, Clement’s direction and Henri Alekan’s photography are of such a high calibre that the film does not appear too disjointed. On the contrary, there are some very gripping, and some deeply moving moments in both halves of the film. The most memorable scene is where, as a reprisal for a train being derailed, six railway workers are randomly chosen and shot by a German firing squad. The scene is made more poignant by the sound of a train whistling in the background.

This is a surprisingly honest depiction of the war. In stark contrast to subsequent war films (particularly those from the other side of the Atlantic), there are no single heroes in the film, and no individual villains. Young men, old men, French and German, soldiers and civilains – all are shown to play their anonymous part in the struggle. Many are killed, a few survive – the victors to savour their triumph, the vanquished to mourn their defeat. The depiction of the war is almost prosaic in its realism, and that gives the film its edge. This is not fantasy; this is the way things were, during one of the worst periods in human history. As a result, the brutality of the battle scenes, where scores of French resistance members are slaughtered, is as about as harrowing and moving as it is possible to achieve in the medium of film.

La bataille du rail: a great film that brings home the horrors of war and venerates the contribution of the railway workers in the French Resistance.

Border Crossings: Placing René Clément's La Bataille du rail Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, July 2003

DVD Savant Review: La bataille du rail (The Battle of the Rails) Glenn Erickson

Video Business capsule dvd review

La Bataille du Rail (The Battle of the Rails) (1945) Vernon Johns summarizes the entire film

FORBIDDEN GAMES (Jeux inderdits)

France (102 mi) 1952 alternate version (84 mi)

Forbidden Games (1952) - The Criterion Collection

Second-rate filmmakers will tell stories of war through the eyes of children as a means of justifying their faux-naïve sentimentality. Conversely, a world-class artist employs the same dramatic device to illuminate life. The opening scenes of René Clément's classic Forbidden Games anticipate the equally dazzling opening minutes of André Téchiné's Strayed, except Clément's aesthetic—coarser than his contemporary's but certainly no less breathtaking—serves a more paradoxical purpose: Along with the final devastating scene of a frightened Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) stranded inside a Red Cross shelter, the documentary veracity of this opening tableau—in which Luftwaffe planes strafe the French countryside with bombs and Parisian refugees scatter for their lives—helps to frame an ironic fairy tale.

After witnessing the death of her parents, Paulette follows a loose "war horse" through the countryside. Dragging the corpse of her dead doggy behind her (she crushed him beneath the weight of her body after trying to avoid bullets falling from the sky), the girl is led by a cow to a peasant boy, Michel (Georges Poulouly), who rescues her from her isolation and takes her into his parents' home. The war, now, moves to the background of the story, a reflection of five-year-old Paulette's failure to comprehend the harsh reality that claimed her mother and father's lives. This is the way Clémént validates the aloof nature of childhood, which is not to say the psychological toll of war isn't part of the story's philosophical fiber.

Paulette may not understand death the way adults do (her state of impenetrable mystification is cunningly evoked when she feels her dead mother's cheek and, soon after, an old woman tosses the girl's dead dog into a river), but in her interactions with Michel it's obvious that she's processing her grief on a subconscious level. (This is most instructive during the elaborate burials the two children conduct for dead animals.) Clémént's aesthetic isn't faultless. Unlike De Sica or Téchiné, he's unable to give his fairy-tale iconography the explicitly lyrical affectation that might have helped to ease the dilemma of his cartoonish vision of peasant life, but the man had an uncanny gift for structural and theoretical contrast (see 1960's chillingly sexy Purple Noon for further proof). Besides, it's difficult to fault a film that scrutinizes the veracity of childhood with such clarity.

Jeux interdits (1952) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Jeux interdits is almost unquestionably the most compelling and intensely poignant drama featuring young children ever filmed. The film retains its power to shock and to drive its audience to tears, fifty years after its first release. Few films possess the purity of expression and haunting poetry which this film sustains from start to finish.

Although it is not directly a film about the abomination of war, Jeux interdits makes a powerful anti-war statement, mainly by showing its effect on impressionable young children. The disturbing way in which the children Michel and Paulette incorporate what little they see of the war into their play not only reveals the corrupting influence of the worst in human activities, but it brings home with startling vividness the true sickening perversity of war. It is as if the children are holding up a flickering candle to show the worst – the absolute worst – in human nature.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about this film is the way in which the behaviour of the children Michel and Paulette is presented as being almost adult. Their "forbidden game" is rendered totally acceptable from their perspective, so that when the animal graveyard is finally revealed, the effect is one of tragic poignancy rather than horror. By contrast, it is the adults who torment the children who appear irrational and menacing. Whilst Michel and Paulette conduct themselves with dignity and act from what appear to be the purest of motives, their parents and their neighbours bully, deceive, threaten and fight. The children create a world of unparalleled beauty and purity whilst the adults around them ruin their world with their lies and their petty differences. Notice that it is only Paulette who refuses to drink milk from a dirty glass containing a dead fly. The grown-ups appear quite oblivious to the filth they live in.

What makes this a truly great film, one which will endure for as long as film archives will, is the quite remarkable performance from the two child actors, Georges Poujouly and Brigitte Fossey. The angelic Fossey is particularly captivating, showing not just great promise as an actress, but possessing a genuine infantine purity which is responsible for much of the film’s charm and impact. Fossey’s innocence is contrasted superbly with Poujouly’s impish mischievousness, and the two actors have a brother-sister rapport which is quite mesmerising to watch. Narciso Yepes’ spiritually moving music heightens the effect, making some of the scenes involving the two children very emotionally demanding for an unsuspecting audience.

The making of the Jeux interdits is also quite noteworthy. Originally, its producer, Robert Dorfmann envisaged making a film containing three segments, of which Jeux interdits would form the middle part. He had to abandon the project when, having made the Jeux interdits segment in 1950, the funds dried up. However, Dorfmann was so pleased with this short film that he decided to extend it to a full-length film. The following year, the filming resumed, with the same cast and location, to complete the film. So successful was director René Clément’s skill at hiding the fact that the children and location had changed considerably since the first filming that the join is virtually unnoticeable in the final film. Another problem was that the film was cut by 15 minutes to 85 minutes prior to its first release, resulting in an abrupt start and end to the film.

In spite of this, the film was an immediate success throughout the world. Not only was it a box office triumph, receiving favourable reviews from virtually every quarter, but it was showered with awards to an extent which is rare for a European film. It won the Grand Prix Indépendant at Cannes in 1952. the Golden Lion award at Venice in 1952, the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1953, a British Academy Award in 1954, and many others. This immense popularity and deluge of prizes is a genuine reflection of the quality of the film, which is a masterpiece by anyone’s standards, but also of its capacity to engage and move its audience, no matter who that audience might be. Jeux interdits has something which appeals to a common humanity, offering a simplistic moral perspective which makes it probably one of the most eloquent and genuine works in the history of cinema.

Forbidden Games: Death and the Maiden Criterion essay by Peter Matthews

Forbidden Games Criterion essay by David Ehrenstein

Film review: Forbidden Games by René Clément | French cinema ... Stephanie Lundahl from Culturazzi

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg]

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

Film-Forward.com [DVD review] Marie Lida

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale

Strictly Film School Acquarello

GERVAISE

France Italy (117 mi) 1956

An adaptation of Emile Zola's L'assommoir by that most ploddingly naturalistic of French directors, Rene Clement (Forbidden Games, Rider on the Rain). With Maria Schell and Francois Perier (1956).

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

Always unpredictable, René Clément here turned to Zola's tale of alcoholism and the poor (L'Assommoir) to mount a terrific exercise in literalism. The movie's images are so carefully arranged as to sustain the illusion for whole stretches that its story of a club-footed laundress and her misfortunes was indeed shot on location in 1850s Paris. The film is a succession of set pieces designed to impress: the fight in the laundry between Gervaise and a rival, the bored wedding guests wandering round the Louvre, the crippling of Gervaise's roofer husband. And impress they do, though as usual with Clément it all seems a bit soulless. The last few moments - Gervaise's little daughter playing with a ribbon while the child's mother stuns herself on absinthe - are a reminder that in the Zola context, this counts as a prequel to Renoir's 1926 Nana.

Clément teamed with his Forbidden Games scenarists, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, to create this adaptation of Émile Zola's novel of working class degradation, L'Assommoire. Gervaise (Maria Schell) is a lame washer-woman whose lover (Armand Mestral) abandons her and their two children. Eventually she marries a roofer, Coupeau (François Périer), who becomes an alcoholic after he's injured in a fall. With the help of a loan from a friend (Jacques Harden), a blacksmith who secretly loves her, she opens her own laundry shop, but her troubles are just beginning.

The novel is an intensely realistic story of life at the lowest rung of the social ladder, vividly detailed and containing several masterful set-pieces, including a wedding and a feast, that illuminate an entire lifetime through the depiction of single events. It is always a daunting task to adapt a novel of such scope to the screen. The film seems to rush through the novel's opening sections rather too briskly, so that it's hard to grasp who the characters are or how much time has elapsed. Fortunately, things settle down after Gervaise marries Coupeau, and Clement manages to attain something close to the density and scathing naturalism of the text.

The film's period detail is a model example of historical accuracy. This is Paris during the time of Louis Napoleon -- the sets and costumes, and the production design as a whole, are flawless. Robert Juillard's black-and-white photography has just the right texture for this period, and Clement's instinct for finding the most interesting shots and camera placements is almost uncanny. Among the performers, Périer is brilliant as the drunken Coupeau, but the entire cast shines as an ensemble (much of the action occurs with groups of more than two people, since the characters exist in close quarters).

Maria Schell does possibly her best work here, showing Gervaise's descent from a trusting, hopeful young woman into gradual cynicism, apathy, and despair. But although it seems unfair to say so, I think she is perhaps too beautiful for the part. The point of the book is to portray the lives of ordinary, poverty-stricken people. In the film, because of Schell's beauty, the tendency is to identify with her as a tragic victim of circumstance in a conventional sense, rather than seeing her with her vices and faults and ignorance as Zola does. Nevertheless, Schell does an excellent job, creating a moving portrait of a woman's sufferings.

It has been tempting for critics to see this as a story about class, or poverty, or alcoholism. Yes, it contains all those elements, but its vision aims to encompass the entire human experience under the stress of intolerable living conditions. That is to say that the interest lies in the reality of life and character rather than in making points about society. Zola's perspective is very dark. Gervaise's story exposes the poisoning influence of grasping self-interest and the triumph of mere survival over empathy. Clement's film, bursting with life and harrowing in its precision, does justice to the book.

Gervaise: True Grit Criterion essay by Michael Koresky

Gervaise (1956) - The Criterion Collection

PopMatters (Chadwick Jenkins) review

Turner Classic Movies review Loraine LoBianco

User comments from imdb Author: tintin-23 from United States

User comments from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

PURPLE NOON (Plein Soleil)

France Italy (118 mi) 1960

The Talented Mr Ripley's Matt Damon was by no means the first to bring Patricia Highsmith's murderously amoral antihero to the big screen - the author disapproved of scruffy Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders' 1976 The American Friend because she didn't think he was sufficiently good-looking. No such objections were possible to the previous Ripley, the famously beau Alain Delon. And he's probably the best thing about this hyper-glossy first adaptation of 'Talented', in which Ripley assumes the identity of the megarich pal he bumps off during a Med boat-trip then lives the dolce vita in the ritizer corners of Italy, eluding the authorities at every step. The ending will shock those familiar with the book or the Damon version, but this is otherwise a very safe-hands, conventional thriller: just the kind of gorgeous-looking but airlessly lavish production, in fact, which inspired Godard, Truffaut and co to come up with the radical nouvelle vague.

René Clément and Chabrol's collaborator Paul Gégauff got hold of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley decades before Wim Wenders laid hands on the novelist's psychopathic protagonist in The American Friend. In his third film appearance, 24-year-old Delon exudes icy charm as Ripley, the emissary sent by an American industrialist to rescue his son (Ronet, sublimely dissolute) from yachting decadence. Delon, though, has a killer scheme of his own - murder the guy, pocket the loot, and steal his girl (Laforêt). Easy. It just takes a thread of steel in the nerves - and a director with the stealth and patience to wind up the tension and avoid rushing the pay-off. Audiences weaned on switchback cutting and adrenalin pace will have to adjust, but even the admittedly clunky first 30 minutes make sense in retrospect. Delon's determined chill aside, there's much to enjoy: a narrative stitched together with old school expertise; vivid marine camerawork by Henri Decaë; a startling rinky-dink piano score by Nino Rota.

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

René Clément’s 1960 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is far less faithful than Anthony Minghella’s screen version of a few years back (for one, the Cate Blanchett character never appears at all), but it arguably gets more directly to the heart of Highsmith’s twisted psychology. A lesbian crime novelist who frequently returned to the subject of intense, quasi- (and not so quasi-) sexual friendships between men, Highsmith sometimes gave her female characters as much short shrift as the men in her stories. As the third corner of Purple Noon’s homoerotic triangle, Marie Laforêt is so colorless and piggishly plain you have to suspect that Clément never intended her to be any real competition for the movie’s swooningly beautiful male stars, Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet. Henri Decaë’s cinematography (reproduced well on the new DVD) makes the Mediterranean skies an incandescent blue, pristine and savage at the same time. Purple Noon suffers from a degree of psychological opacity; Clément clearly wanted Delon’s Ripley to be acting out of instinct, but his reasons for murdering his best friend and stealing his life are so obscure that the plot sometimes seems to be moving ahead merely out of obligation. But the cornered ferocity in Delon’s performance answers every question on an emotional, if not a logical, level. Clément luxuriates in the air of debauchery and madness like a sunbather lounging in a tropical wild, basking as long as he can without getting burned.

The great Alain Deloin plays Tom Ripley in this, the first filming of Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. He is a hanger-on to the handsome and rich Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet), and has been hired by Greenleaf's father to convince the wayward son to come back to America from Italy where he is spending his inheritance. Ripley wants to be Philippe's friend, but he also wants more: he wants his friend's life, his girlfriend, and, eventually, his identity. Marge (Marie Laforet), Greenleaf's girlfriend, dislikes and distrusts Ripley, for good reason.

Greenleaf quickly gets the idea that something is wrong with his friend after walking in on Ripley imitating his voice and wearing his clothes. The three friends go on a sailing outing where Greenleaf becomes more and more impatient with Marge, eventually casting her manuscript for a book overboard. I couldn't imagine ever forgiving someone for doing that, but she only gets mad enough to leave the boat, giving Ripley his opportunity. First, though, he and Greenleaf have a really great conversation about "what if" Ripley actually wanted to kill him. Well, that doesn't go on very long before it actually happens. Ripley spends the rest of the film attempting to live Greenleaf's life while avoiding the police.

Seeing this film with French actors and French dialog was a strange experience. I thought 1999's version starring Matt Damon was simply brilliant, a near-perfect, dark, and ingenious thriller that proved once and for all that Matt Damon was more than a pretty face. This version, which bears a different title for good reason, is a completely different experience. The homoerotic overtones of Tom's relationship with Greenleaf in the 1999 version are nearly all gone, as is the subtle transformation of Tom Ripley from a schlep into a psychopath.

This is more of a straight suspense thriller. The first half deals with Tom's relationship with Philip Greenleaf, who is a childhood friend in this version. The second half deals with his attempts to take over his friend's life after his premeditated murder on a sailboat. There's a great ending that has to rank up with the best I have seen for a thriller, and the leads are excellent. I would suggest watching this film and the 1999 version back to back, then follow them up with 1977's The American Friend, featuring Dennis Hopper as a 40-something Ripley.

Camera as Cocksucker: Rene Clement's Purple Noon Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal

Kamera.co.uk Edward Lamberti

Plein soleil (1960) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Film Scouts (Karen Jaehne)

filmcritic.com basks in the Purple Noon Christopher Null

Movie Habit (Marty Mapes)

Purple Noon Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Washington Post [Eric Brace]

Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni) review

RIDER ON THE RAIN

France Italy (120 mi) 1970

Time Out review Tom Milne

A promising start with a girl going home to a lonely house, unaware that she has a sex maniac in the boot of her car. He rapes her, she shoots him, and the film spirals into a mad Hitchcockian mystery (the dead man's name is finally revealed, in tribute to the Master, to be MacGuffin), which is rather nullified by the fact that nobody behaves with any sort of credibility. Good performances from Jobert and Bronson, though, and glossy direction from Clément.

User comments from imdb Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

A lonely passenger of a bus arrives in a rainy day in a remote place in Marseille; he stalks, follows and rapes the gorgeous Mélancolie 'Mellie' Mau (Marlène Jobert), who is married with a jealous husband that is a navigator of Air France and is coming back home. Mellie shoots and kills the masked rapist, but she does not call the police; she prefers to dump his body in the sea and destroy the evidences of his identity. Sooner, the mysterious Harry Dobbs (Charles Bronson) arrives in the location and meets Mellie. Harry seems to know what she has done, scaring Mellie and forcing her to tell the truth.

The cult "Le Passager de la Pluie" is one of those unforgettable thrillers of my adolescence, with intelligent and witty dialogs in the duel between Mellie and the smart Harry Dobbs and one of the most beautiful music scores of the cinema history. In this movie, Charles Bronson certainly has the best performance of his successful career, and Marlène Jobert is impressively beautiful performing a very clever character. Unfortunately this film has not been released on DVD in Brazil, but at least the rare VHS has a good quality of image. My vote is eight.

Le Passager de la pluie (1969) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

After the commercial failure of his big budget war-time drama Paris brûle-t-il? (1966), director René Clément returned to somewhat safer ground for his next film, the ever-popular psychological thriller. His previous forays into this genre – Plein soleil (1960) and Les Félins (1964) – were big successes and showed a genuine talent for suspense and intrigue. Although Le Passager de la pluie isn’t quite in the same league as these two films, it is a compelling and distinctive work, an obvious homage to Hitchcock, but also subtly different to conventional thrillers.

The strength of this particular thriller lies mainly in the performances of its two lead actors, Marlène Jobert and Charles Bronson. Jobert is particularly good at playing mixed up, terrified but gutsy young women, and the anxiety she portrays on screen is easily transferred to the spectator. The American actor Charles Bronson needs no introduction but here he appears to be playing across, if not sending up, his confident hard guy image. Playing a character that is neither obviously good nor bad, Bronson carries the unsettling ambiguity in his part very well. The rapport between the two actors is both jarring and magical, like a married couple who derive some kind of sado-masochistic pleasure in living together, even though they are clearly ill-suited for one another.

As well as being a thriller, the film is also a strange kind of love story. Even when he is taunting Mellie to distraction, Colonel Dobbs is clearly drawn to her, and she for her part is easily seduced by his charms and brutal attentions. The fact that Dobbs’ real intentions are not revealed until near the end of the film adds a dark psychological dimension to what is very nearly a familiar French romantic drama.

Connecting the present drama to a past crisis in Mellie’s life is a nice touch, adding a layer of sophistication which works well in explaining why the characters behave as they do. Unfortunately, this is somewhat undermined by some bizarre comic elements in the latter part of the film, which propels the narrative dangerously close to self-parody. Overall, however, the film hangs together very well. There’s a touch of genius in the final shot – so poignant, yet so irresistibly funny.

RIDER ON THE RAIN Mark Stafford from Electric Sheep

Mélancolie ‘Mellie’ Mau (Marlène Jobert) looks every inch the swinging 60s chick, a gamine with boyish red hair in a killer white plastic number and matching go-go boots. But it’s raining in the pretty French coastal town she swings around, her mother is a bitter lush and her husband is an unbearable sexist prick. Both are absent when a creepy stranger only she has seen breaks into her house and rapes her. She rather enterprisingly kills the bastard, but cannot face dealing with the police and elects to dump the body and hide the crime. It seems to be working until the mysterious Harry Dobbs (Charles Bronson) turns up at a wedding, and everywhere she goes thereafter, mocking, flirtatious and menacing by turns, full of questions, but not a cop. Slowly, everything Mellie knows about her life seems to be called into question. The stakes of this cat and mouse game are unclear…

For much of its length, Rider on the Rain is a two-handed play well handled by the leads. Jobert is great, sexy, vulnerable and defiant; we may worry for the seemingly friendless Mellie, but she is never a victim. It’s a tough trick to pull off, and I wish I was more familiar with the rest of her CV – it’s a damn shame if she wasn’t given the scope to be this good again. Bronson’s turn saddens for different reasons. He briefly holds a gun in Rider on the Rain, but, to many viewers’ doubtless confusion, fails to use it to blow away a gang of curiously multiracial street scum. It’s kind of heartbreaking to see him in this, giving the kind of playful, solid macho performance Hollywood leads used to deliver. His classic 60s roles behind him, a sea of right-wing horseshit ahead, and here he is being charming, graceful and strange. He’s not De Niro, but it’s a performance, goddamnit, and suggests that he was a lot better than Death Wish 14.

René Clément’s film comes from 1970, near the tail end of a lost age of Euro-cinema, the films that used to pepper the TV schedules in the 70s and 80s and then slowly disappeared: not art-house, they would be described as stylish in the listings, boasting chic clothes, swish locations and sharp camerawork. And it’s pretty damn fine, too, conjuring a dreamy, off-kilter atmosphere (it starts with a quote from Alice in Wonderland) in which we can’t quite be sure who’s up to what, or whether they are quite real at all. Clément at least plays with the idea that some or all of this may be in Mélancolie’s head, with odd flashbacks, recurring visual motifs and artful framing. It nods to Hitchcock (not subtly, a character is named Mac Guffin,) and satisfies as a conventional thriller, but is more open and ambiguous than Hitch would allow. No car chases, kung fu or exploding helicopters here – the best moments are created by actors being filmed with cameras by someone who knows what they are doing. Sweet.

User comments from imdb Author: lor_ from New York, New York

VideoVista review Gary McMahon

Pure Movies [Jenny Tregoning]

CLÉMENTI, PIERRE

CERTIFICATE NO. X (Visa de censure numéro X)

France (42 mi) 1967

NEW OLD

France (63 mi) 1979

IN THE SHADOW OF THE BLUE SCOUNDREL (À l'ombre de la canaille bleue)

France (80 mi) 1986

SOLEIL

France (16 mi) 1988

The Films of Pierre Clémenti Rob Humanick from The House Next Door, June 11, 2010

The cinema of Pierre Clémenti resists easy comprehension in much the same way its maker resisted society's pigeonholes. I've been thinking about his films for days now with little progress to show for it in the way of more articulate opinions on them. All I can say with certainty is that I'm better off for having seen them. At some point, it dawned on me that the best way to appreciate Clémenti's films are as works deliberately frustrating and structurally, even thematically, diffuse, their carnivalesque levels of madness host to something of an inverted world where easy comprehension is not only undesirable, but a lie. His films, to their varying levels of success, are all kaleidoscope visions of intensely personal inquiries, the kind of fearless experimentation rarely seen in cinema either mainstream or not, an infrequency thanks as much to audiences resistant to such material as the general lack of artists daring enough to make it (you'll remember that even Francis Ford Coppola was greeted with forked tongues across the board in response to his dense, monolithic masterwork Youth Without Youth).

Perhaps best known for his role in Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour, Clémenti the actor was also an ardent creator who sought to explore cinema's intrinsic connection with the subconscious, a relationship often made literal in his distinctly, deliberately avant-garde works. Hindsight sees these films as distinct creations of their time, ready to be dismissed by those who see only the counterculture elements long since rendered cliché. Treading arguably pretentious and fatuous grounds, Clémenti's smorgasbord utilization of sight and sound demands one engage it on its own ever-shifting terms, which routinely break the fourth wall and were surely made with the intention of being experienced under the influence. Viewed sober, his films (considered here are four works: Certificate No. X, New Old, In the Shadow of the Blue Scoundrel, and Soliel) remain trips whose nature transcends traditional designations of good or bad; as if finally escaping a hazy, disorienting fog, the only word I could use to describe them is essential.

Certificate No. X is broken up into two separate works that, while bearing separate names, Visa de Censure No. X and Carte de Væus, and filmed eight years apart (1967 and 1975, respectively), render what appears in context to be a seamless whole. Seamless, however, is hardly a word to use in describing a viewing experience that makes everything from Un Chien Andalou to Inland Empire look relatively straightforward by comparison. Commencing with the image of a nude man (Clémenti himself, a regular in his films) exiting the mouth of a cave (Plato's, perhaps?), Visa de Censure quickly lobs the viewer into a tailspin of psychedelic imagery both thrilling and exhausting. Images of war, religion, oppression, and frank nudity are interspersed with a stylistic freefall of strobe lighting, camera filters, layered shots, and scoping effects, among others. The effect is less powerful in any given instance than it is as a cumulative, primordial mood piece, though several key images leave a lasting impression (a face is juxtaposed over simmering flames, a man "plays" a woman with a violin bow, etc.). Steadily, a theme of broad enlightenment emerges: Obsession with circles gives way to eyes and spectatorship, and the film wordlessly speaks to the necessary union held between the art, the artist, and the viewer.

The smooth transition into Carte de Væus suggests a deliberate comedown from the preceding hysteria. Warm images aplenty (including the face of a girl Clémenti was obviously enamored with, at least as a subject) don't negate the heavy lifting, however, a quality humorously acknowledged by the image of a white bunny being forcibly pushed along toward the inevitable rabbit hole. Coming on the heels of Visa de Censure No. X, an experience that initially suggested the freak-out sequences of Ken Russell's Altered States, Carte de Væus is something singularly unique, and Clémenti pulls out all the stops in establishing a self-serving mythological tone (the same can be said for all of his works to some extent). Words flash across the screen as additional mood enhancers atop images as far ranging as that of an animated skiing penguin and an impromptu shot of a vagina. As art goes, the entire Certificate No. X is most certainly fubar. It's up to each viewer, I suppose, to determine whether that's a good thing or not.

New Old, from 1979, is described as Clémenti's autobiography, but viewers hoping for something more narratively straightforward might be disappointed to instead find a work merely somewhat less diffuse than its predecessor(s). Assembled from the approximately 15 hours of footage Clémenti shot during a self-described nomadic existence (carefree frolicking, streaking, and dancing abounds), the hour-long feature bears witness to an unflinching life of exploration complete with an ongoing creative struggle and insatiable longing for truth. The framing device of a writer at his typewriter is both appropriate and, scantly returned to, only vaguely literal. New Old's bombardment is more controlled and, ultimately, more scintillating than Certificate No. X's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, tapping into a dreamlike euphoria as it utilizes similar techniques with greater focus as well as a number of devices from the silent era's bag of tricks (the use of a negative shot recalls Nosferatu, but a simple effects shot involving Satan on a beach is my favorite). The film doesn't end so much as eventually wind down, affirming the work of an artist as a lifelong endeavor. The words of Robert Altman hover about the proceedings: "Retirement? You're talking about death, right?"

The closest Clémenti ever came to making a traditional film was In the Shadow of the Blue Scoundrel (shot and assembled from 1978 through 1985), a noir-ish tale of social dystopia and political espionage, the subversions of which are probably all the greater for their relatively straightforward presentation. Placed in the fictitious Necro City and starring Clémenti as the city's military leader General Nutsbody, Blue Scoundrel is less stylistically assaulting in composition, but its ramshackle appearance (fish eyed lenses, over- and underexposed images, cheap effects and makeup, etc.) are both oddly poetic and appropriate to the storyline, suggesting that the film itself is the product of revolution. Amid a plot involving drugs, murder, and hidden motives, what stands out is the voiceover used to increase dramatic momentum, while the looping used for dialogue, while probably a budgetary necessity, further suggests that the film is little more than its maker's id poured directly onto the screen.

For an artist so purely guided by creative self-actualization, it seems obvious that his final work, the short film Soleil, would be his masterpiece. Released in 1988 (11 years before his death at the hands of liver cancer), it is a breathless outpouring of exquisitely rendered philosophical rhetoric comprised more of questions than answers, delivered here in the form of a stream-of-consciousness voiceover set to personally and politically appropriate imagery. In its dogged quest for truth, it encapsulates an entire worldview, and to attempt to further put the experience in words would be both futile and an affront against its purity of essence. The use of footage from the previous three films shows an artist both resourceful and daring, one who cares not what you think of him, only that he might force you to truly think in the first place.

Clifford, Graeme

FRANCES

USA (140 mi) 1982

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [Special Edition]

The sad life of '30s and '40s actress Frances Farmer is surely the stuff of melodrama: the story of an intelligent, uncompromising young actress with strong radical political opinions, who fell or was pushed from grace in Hollywood and ended up undergoing a lobotomy in an asylum. But in this version the vein becomes increasingly American Gothic; the potential romantic exploration of the American Left is abandoned in favour of a concentration on the star's incarceration in a series of increasingly Hogarthian asylums. Indeed, Farmer, as scripted here and played by Lange, unsurprisingly remains something of a cypher.

The word "tragic" is thrown about with abandon these days, but it is seldom meant in its classical sense of a fatal character flaw that results in the character's destruction. However, it's perfectly applicable to the frankly horrifying true tale of what happened to Frances Farmer, who was mostly guilty of being a freethinking, modern woman trapped in 1938.

While still a teenager, young Frances Farmer (Jessica Lange) was already scandalizing 1931 Seattle with her essay about the death of God and taking trips to Soviet Russia. A beautiful woman with acting ambitions, she quickly garners a Hollywood contract, but her rebellious and leftist ways make her studio bosses resentful. When she goes to New York to be in Clifford Odets' (Jeffrey DeMunn) Group Theatre production of Golden Boy, the suits are determined to make an example of her. Her return to Hollywood results in cruel treatment and she turns to the bottle as things spiral out of control. Her stagestruck mother, Lillian (Kim Stanley), eventually has Frances declared incompetent and takes control of her life, trying to force her back into Hollywood against Frances' wishes. When Frances attempts to defy her mother, she winds up in mental hospitals, subjected to the most cruel and inhuman treatment possible, leading to heartbreak and disaster.

At this point in her career, Lange was primarily a joke and eye candy, having appeared as the love interest of a giant ape in the notorious remake of King Kong, and as a leggy personification of Death in Fosse's All That Jazz. However, with Frances, she garnered the attention of critics and audiences alike with a tremendously powerful performance that is often harrowing. She captures Farmer's personality beautifully, with her rebelliousness and fire, tempered by self-pity and self-destructiveness. Both she and Stanley were justifiably nominated for Oscars®s for this film (while not winning here, Lange won the same year for her supporting role in Tootsie). Stanley, a stalwart of the Actors' Studio, both produced an unforgettable picture of the well-meaning but highly destructive Lillian Farmer and helped get the best performance possible out of Lange, who acknowledges she learned a great deal from Stanley. The scenes of the two of them together are emotionally charged and difficult to watch in their intensity. In support is Sam Shepard (who later married Lange) as Harry York, a leftist who is in love with Frances but is rebuffed despite his attempts to help her escape from her downward cycle. His down-home earnestness gives the film an everyday grounding that provides a focus for audience identification. Also, in bit parts are Kevin Costner and Anjelica Huston.

While the film is emotionally centered on Frances, and we're clearly meant to sympathize with her, it also serves as a bleak cautionary tale. In essence, the message seems to be that opening your mouth to express atheist, leftist beliefs and a sense of independence can result only in disaster. It's probably no accident that several productions centered on Farmer's life all started shooting in the early years of the Reagan regime, as the country was violently swinging to the right. Indeed, it's hard to say that things have improved much, with a President who believes that atheists are not citizens. The clear message is that it's not safe under any circumstances to be different. Of course, Farmer didn't help her own case by mouthing off to judges and psychiatrists, lending a complexity to the situation that transcends black and white.

The scenes in the mental institution are particularly harrowing, with insulin and electric shock treatment and amateurish brain surgery as centerpieces, with forced prostitution as a garnish. Certainly such places were calculated to make one mentally ill if one wasn't in the first place (shades of Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor). Even after 20 years, these things still pack a hugely powerful punch.

Even though Frances was director Graeme Clifford's first film, his background in editing and apprenticeship as assistant director for Robert Altman served him well. Although lengthy, scenes flow well from one to another and the running time feels much shorter than it is. The film looks great, and the production design is meticulously evocative of the 1930s and 1940s. John Barry's score, with a haunting theme delivered in even more heartbreaking manner on harmonica, gives the movie a mournful edge. Powerful and bleak, Frances is one of the most memorable pictures of the 1980s.

Self-Styled Siren

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [B]

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digitallyOBSESSED.com (Bob Mandel) dvd review

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review [Special Edition]

The A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Cline, Edward

THE BANK DICK

USA (72 mi) 1940

by Dennis Perrin Criterion essay

Clooney, George

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND C+ 77

USA Canada Germany (113 mi) 2002

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Michael Agger from the New Yorker

Just as audiences are recovering from the multi-layered madness of "Adaptation," here comes another Charlie Kaufman script. George Clooney directed, but this project is pure Kaufman: fact and fiction tossed in the blender together, with plenty of formal trickery. The story, or more precisely, the leaping-off point, is the autobiography of Chuck Barris, the producer who invented "The Dating Game," "The Newlywed Game," and "The Gong Show," which he also hosted. Then, there is this small matter of political assassinations: Barris claimed to be a C.I.A. hit man, tapped for various "wet" operations throughout his television career. Sam Rockwell plays Barris as a carnal, slightly crazed man who's also deeply insecure that he'll be remembered as a purveyor of trash. Is this what tipped him into his fantasy life? This nimble and free-spirited film doesn't say; it continually shifts perspective and plays with the mystery. In the end, it's a story of wayward ambition and an object lesson in what people will do when placed in front of a television camera. With Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts, as the duelling women in Barris's life, and interviews with Dick Clark and other colleagues.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is the latest and best in a recent cycle of real-life rise-and-fall stories set in the ’60s and ’70s — a cycle that also includes The Kid Stays in the Picture, Auto Focus, and Catch Me If You Can. All these films fetishize their period, the dour and prim Catch Me If You Can least of all, the boisterous Confessions perhaps most. But Confessions has an excuse: its hero is TV game-show producer Chuck Barris, auteur of The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong Show and a cult figure — less for the two innuendo-laden but determinedly bland Games than for The Gong Show, one of the most savage programs ever on American TV. And as if those credits weren’t enough to establish the dangerousness of his mind, Barris disclosed in his autobiography that before and during the period of his success as a producer, he was a contract killer for the CIA.

The script by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) is cavalier with the details of Barris’s revelations. The film isn’t a historical document but a fantasia alongside history, and it plays on ambiguity. Was Barris telling the truth about his CIA adventures, or were his stories a hoax? Or was he delusional? As Barris (Sam Rockwell) gets recruited by superspy Jim (director George Clooney) and takes part in unexplained missions in foreign lands, Kaufman and Clooney leave it open whether these scenes are B-movie-like because they’re parodying B-movies, because they’re saying that real-life spying is like B-movie spying, or because they’re saying that it’s all taking place inside the head of someone who’s watched a lot of B-movies.

Fortunately, this isn’t the main question the film asks (if it were, the result wouldn’t be too interesting). At the center of Confessions is a mystery and a hollowness. Who is Chuck Barris? Why does Jim latch on to him? What’s the "profile" Jim claims Barris fits? We see little about him that’s extraordinary: he’s sexually voracious, ambitious, good at selling himself. Perhaps he’s summed up by Dick Clark’s testimonial (one of several interspersed with the narrative): "He had a great feel for what people wanted."

What people wanted, evidently, was pabulum. As the film details, Barris got his foot in the door of the entertainment business writing Freddy Cannon’s rollicking ode to banality, "Palisades Park," and became successful with shows in which people compete to attract lovers or predict the responses of their new spouses. The appeal of The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game was their staging of banality as spectacle. Previous game shows rewarded contestants for their knowledge of esoterica or their ability to solve some kind of riddle: on Barris’s shows, the riddles were the contestants’ own lives, and the esoterica were their habits, tastes, and quirks.

At bottom, these shows were about fear — the fear of being seen as an undesirable date or an inattentive spouse. The Gong Show was Barris’s most explicit exploitation of fear. Mercilessly showcasing its contestants’ lack of talent and distinction, the program mocked the average person’s longing to be loved just for what he or she is. If the CIA’s magic profile included the willingness to look steadily at the emptiness and absurdity of life, then Barris’s audience fit there as well: millions tuned in to experience vicariously the dashing of their own hopes of being thought worthy of love. The relationship between such entertainment and killing for the CIA gives Confessions considerable tension and interest.

Sometimes the film is too eager to please. A laborious sight gag involving Brad Pitt and Matt Damon is more trouble than it’s worth. Some of the TV-show re-creations seem calculated to appeal to viewers whose standard of TV ribaldry is more liberal than the one Barris worked with. And the collection of tunes on the soundtrack has more to do with post-’80s retro hipness than with popular tastes in the era when the film is set. (It’s unlikely, though possible, that the composer of "Palisades Park" spent the late ’60s grooving to Esquivel and German and Italian thriller soundtracks.) But the acting is mostly good: Rockwell has Barris’s Gong Show–host shtick down, and he and Clooney have an interesting Jerry-Lewis-and-Dean-Martin-like releationship. The cinematography by Newton Thomas Sigel switches tonalities inventively. And in his promising directorial debut, Clooney gets away with most of the flourishes he allows himself.

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK B 88

USA (93 mi) 2005

A Black and White film that takes us back to the McCarthy era, when Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy was conducting Senate hearings claiming there were Communists under every doorstep, and the mere charge and suggestion was sufficient to ruin people’s lives. While news outlets largely reported his accusations as fact, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 people,” creating a period of hysteria in the early 50’s, CBS news broadcaster Edward R. Murrow decides to start questioning McCarthy’s methods of secrecy, his lack of evidence, and doing so with on-air commentaries that nearly brought his own network down, as sponsors started disassociating themselves with the unwanted controversy. Clooney, who co-wrote the film, plays Murrow’s tight-lipped producer, Fred Friendly, while Frank Langella, played with plenty of muster and earthy savvy, is the clear-speaking but ever practical CBS President William S. Paley. David Straithairn is a revelation as Murrow, an unnerved, sharp-as-a-tack professional whose solid reputation was established by his radio broadcasts in London during the war, always with a quick quip, an ability to think on his feet, and with the everpresent cigarette dangling from his fingertips. While the sheer brilliance of the man’s command for words and communication skills is undeniable, “We cannot defend freedom abroad by denying it at home,” he was a television icon who came to represent the conscience of the nation, something clearly missing in today’s broadcasting, drawing connections between McCarthyism and today’s post 9/11 state of fear, where going against the grain and challenging the government’s repeated litany of unsubstantiated claims is a lonely profession.

Shot exclusively in the claustrophobic newsrooms and television studios, or a neighboring saloon, without a single exterior shot, narrowing the focus to “the terror is right here in this room,” the film is energized by the sheer will and determination of the individuals involved, reviewing actual newsreel clips of McCarthy that take on a decidedly CITIZEN KANE look, then deciding how to go on the offensive, usually relying on the unwavering coolness and intellectual shrewdness of Murrow’s own written comments. Much of the film is taken from McCarthy and Murrow’s actual historical recordings. While the immediacy of the news is riveting, Murrow also has to fulfill the station’s obligations by interviewing celebrities on his “Person to Person” show doing puff pieces, going into the homes of famous people and lobbing them easy questions that resembles little more than gossip. Of peculiar interest, changing the entire dynamic of the focus on the Red-threat and the inter-personal relations of a behind the scenes news team, continually interspliced into the story is a jazz band recording in a neighboring studio, where black vocalist Dianne Reeves sings cool smoky ballads that act as a kind of Greek chorus, a prophetic emotional film narration describing personal interior moods, exploring the melancholic depths of the moment through abstract, but intimately suggestive poetry. In my view, these songs, no fewer than five in all, are overtly mood oriented, and become too disconnected from the reality focus in the newsroom, feeling disruptive after awhile, as they continually interfere with and play havoc with the viewer’s ability to believe, with any degree of objectivity, just what we are seeing onscreen. Despite the actively political content, which suggests there are two sides to any issue, but rather than presenting any real balance to those positions, the director chooses instead to use jazz music to somewhat heavy handedly tell us what he wants us to think and feel. The film really has no ending, leaving us what amounts to a lecture, a sad, prophetic look at an era that was to come, when corporations running the networks would show more concern about making money by cozying up to and indulging government officials instead of educating the public with good well-researched news stories.

studio songs:

TV Is the Thing This Year

I’ve Got My Eyes on You

You’re Driving Me Crazy

How High the Moon

Straighten Up and Fly Right

BFI | Sight & Sound | Good Night And Good Luck Geoffrey Macnab from Sight and Sound, November 2005

George Clooney's second feature as a director is set in the early 1950s at the height of Senator Joe McCarthy's communist witch-hunt. CBS reporter and anchorman Ed Murrow, one of the legendary figures of US journalism, challenges McCarthy's bullyboy tactics on air. In doing so he puts his career in jeopardy and exposes the network to McCarthy's wrath.

Clooney's film has the same edge and intensity as the live US television dramas of the 1950s (Marty, Requiem for a Heavyweight). He fills the soundtrack with music from jazz singer Dianne Reeves and the film is shot in black and white with almost all the action concentrated in the CBS offices and studios where Murrow works. As in the great cinéma vérité documentaries Primary and Crisis (which Clooney has acknowledged as influences), there is often a sense that we are eavesdropping on momentous events.

Good Night, and Good Luck is also a celebration of professionalism. Clooney (whose father was an anchorman) evokes a lost era of journalism, long before the excesses of Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and Fox News besmirched the reputation of the US media. By 1958, the point at which the film starts with Murrow making a valedictory speech, the rot is already setting in. Murrow may be revered, but his bosses no longer want him on the air.

The screenplay, by Clooney and Grant Heslov, doesn't just concentrate on the Murrow vs McCarthy stand-off. As in all newsroom dramas, there is an emphasis on the camaraderie and backbiting behind the scenes. One newscaster is so dismayed at being labelled a communist that he is driven to suicide. Another couple need to keep their marriage secret or risk losing their jobs.

"I didn't make this film as a protest against any administration," Clooney has stated. "I made this film as a historical record because I grew up as a fan of Murrow." Nonetheless, he points out that Good Night, and Good Luck (the title comes from Murrow's catchphrase) is not intended as a biopic. Few Americans nowadays remember the great newscaster - and at a preview screening in Los Angeles, 70 per cent of the audience didn't even recognise McCarthy.

David Strathairn's extraordinary performance dominates the film with its gravitas, pathos and even a streak of deadpan humour. With a cigarette held between thumb and forefinger, the chain-smoking Murrow banters with colleagues, but the moment he's on air he speaks intently and with utter conviction. "We needed an actor who seems to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders. You always felt that with Murrow," says Clooney of the decision to cast character actor Strathairn (best known for his roles for his friend John Sayles).

McCarthy, meanwhile, plays himself in that Clooney uses only old newsreel footage for the Wisconsin senator. "If we'd had an actor, people would have said we were making him too harsh or too feeble," the director says. "We thought McCarthy could do the best job playing himself - there's even word that he's up for Best Supporting Actor."

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jonathan Rosenbaum, also seen here: The Constant Compromise

Film Society of Lincoln Center Harlan Jacobsen interviews screenwriter Grant Heslov from Film Comment

My interview with cinematographer Robert Elswit Bryant Frazer from Film & Video

THE IDES OF MARCH C+ 79

USA (101 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

America remained obsessed with the ramifications of the Vietnam War for decades afterwards, where the anti war protests of the 60’s and 70’s left the Democratic left subject to attacks from the Republican right for being soft on defense, a criticism that stuck a chord with American voters, leading President Reagan to coin the phrase the Vietnam Syndrome, which was a reluctance on the part of Americans to support foreign military intervention, still reeling from the negative effects of the experience in Vietnam, where so many lives were unnecessarily lost. This led to a series of Republican Presidents in a 24 year cycle from Nixon to Bush, interrupted only for four years by Washington political outsider Jimmy Carter, who offered amnesty for draft dodgers that fled to Canada during the Vietnam era. The quick success of American troops in Operation Desert Storm (1991), declaring a cessation of ground operations just 100 hours after the campaign started, made many forget about the shameful debacle of Vietnam, which remained something of an unspoken embarrassment for decades afterwards.

What this film does is resurrect the scandalous legacy of the Clinton years, completely ignoring any political success or failures during his two terms, but instead focusing entirely on the shameful conduct of his personal life, much as the Republican opposition did when he was impeached by the House of Representatives in 1998, later acquitted by the Senate. All people talked about during that era was how a President having extra marital sex in the White House demeans the office of the Presidency. If one didn’t know better, you’d think this movie was a Right wing smear campaign against Clinton, only to discover George Clooney directed and co-writes this script with Grant Heslov, adapting Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North, which resuscitates from the dead the Republican argument 15 years after the fact, all but conceding the Republican view that Clinton’s womanizing was an embarrassment to the nation, as if the nation’s cynicism about politics can be traced to this single act.

Despite the preaching and overreaching tone of seriousness where everything looks larger than life, this is basically a rehashing of the Monica Lewinsky story where a Democratic Presidential candidate (Clooney) is again caught having sex with a young intern (Evan Rachel Wood), despite believing he had taken every precaution to avoid getting caught. The story even includes the intern having a powerfully connected father, as here he is the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. This is all about the inside ramifications within a political operation rather than the overall effect it has on the nation, but certainly by the end, there is no denying that politics itself have been tainted with this kind of tawdry descent into tabloid journalism. For Clooney to exploit the salacious sex angle undermines any other meaningful point the movie may be trying to make, as a revisitation of the immorality of the Clinton years is quite simply an astonishingly regressive step. Nonetheless the movie is so slick that many may actually miss this point, as it’s not so much a movie about THE CANDIDATE (1972), where Clooney himself is relegated to a mostly offscreen secondary role, it’s instead what’s going on in the lives of the political operatives behind him, where their lives are surrounded by the intense pressure and daily intrigue of running a high profile political campaign.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is the rumpled, cigarette smoking man behind the candidate, the head political operative with all the years of experience, where his wing man media advisor is the up and coming rising star, Ryan Gosling, where together this team runs a formidable political operation, known for their shrewdness in manipulating the press and for their inspirational political savvy, making sure their candidate stays on message. In contrast, the opposition campaign is run by none other than Paul Giamatti in a Rabelaisian role of a guy willing to “get down in the mud with the fucking elephants” and play dirty tricks and political hardball, not at all afraid to use smear tactics to raise his candidate’s standings in the polls. The behind-the-scenes intrigue is especially convincing by the power of Gosling’s performance, as he single handedly elevates this material, as does an affecting turn from Evan Rachel Wood, as the two are the real heart and soul of this movie. Despite excellent performances from some heavy hitters, the problem is that this never elevates the political discussion, instead it only rehashes old news, bringing it all back to the forefront, something we all hoped was forgotten long ago. Leave it to a liberal leaning Democrat to once more embarrass the Democrats with another eager young intern and cast an ugly stain over the entire political system in the process. All that’s missing is the blue dress.

The House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce] at Toronto

Possibly reflecting their maker's own split superstar personality, George Clooney's films as a director have so far alternated between Coen brothers imitations played at the wrong speed (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Leatherheads) and ensemble narratives of idealism and engagement (Good Night, and Good Luck and now this behind-the-scenes look at a political campaign, adapted from Beau Willimon's play). Clooney also stars as a charismatic progressive candidate (complete with Obama-like posters) during an early Democratic primary, but the story's central conscience belongs to the whiz-kid press spokesman (Ryan Gosling) who believes in "making a difference" with integrity even as rivals insist that the only way to get to the White House is to "get down in the mud with the fucking elephants." As cracks appear in the candidate's white-knight armor and the young consultant faces the quandaries of public image versus personal vice, the film shifts from Mike Nichols snap to Alan J. Pakula anguish. As a filmmaker, Clooney shows a knack for widescreen bustle and jostling close-ups, for old-Hollywood lighting pierced by sudden splashes of red, white, and blue, and for cannily integrating his own celebrity image into a vigorous cast that includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, and Marisa Tomei. Had it had a more complex argument on its mind than just "power corrupts," it could have been more than a solid, slick entertainment.

Program: Gala
Headline: Newsflash… Politics is a dirty business
Noel’s Take: The Ides Of March isn’t quite The Candidate; more like The Campaign Manager. Director-star George Clooney’s adaptation of Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North features Ryan Gosling as an idealistic political consultant who believes he’s found a real “change candidate” (played by Clooney), but soon discovers that even doing what’s right in politics requires so much compromise that it’s impossible to stay ethically pure. Clooney has assembled a terrific cast here (including Philip Seymour Hoffman as Gosling's mentor, Paul Giamatti as the manager of a rival campaign, Marisa Tomei as a pesky reporter, and Evan Rachel Wood as a sexy intern with a power fetish and a political pedigree of her own); and The Ides Of March goes down easily, with a sophisticated bustle and a strong third act twist to test the hero’s mettle. But it all feels a bit inconsequential—perhaps by design. This is a political drama that’s not about big issues (though Clooney's character gives a lot of stump speeches that seem designed to paint him as a Democrat’s dream candidate) but is instead about matters of trust, fidelity, and the perniciousness of rumor. And though that’s probably a lot closer to what real politics is like, as drama it’s pretty slight. Had The Ides Of March been more like the work David Mamet or Aaron Sorkin—two writers capable of turning the language of powerful men into a weird, catchy music—then the movie might’ve had some real pop. As it is, it’s slick and respectable, and delivering old news.

exclaim! [Joseph Belanger]

Despite the titular nod to Julius Caesar (that’s when Willy the Shakes had the big guy bumped off), no one is outright assassinated in The Ides of March. The backstabbing is plentiful, though, and pretty good, thanks to director George Clooney’s smooth treatment of Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North via the screenplay he wrote with partner Grant Heslov and the playwright.

Clooney spends much less time on-screen than behind the camera, although his up-and-coming presidential candidate, Governor Mike Morris—so that’s what a “fiery liberal” looks like—is the big motivator for the main character, precocious political operative and press secretary Stephen Myers (ubiquitous Ryan Gosling). This sharp-suited fellow is a true believer, and he bridles under the more jaded constraints of his boss, Morris’s top aid (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Myers lets his hair down around Evan Rachel Wood’s comely intern—Danger, Will Robinson!—but that isn’t his worst mistake. Out of curiosity, or something, he meets with the campaign manager for his employer’s opponent (Paul Giamatti, almost out-rumpling Hoffman), who wants the youngster to help his candidate, a slightly more conservative Democrat who’s pulling even in the primary polls. This sets in motion much complicated trouble, occasionally involving a reporter (Marisa Tomei) and an ambitious senator (Jeffrey Wright) that Morris doesn’t like.

This stuff will be catnip to political junkies and solid entertainment for people simply looking for a Manchurian Candidate–type thriller. There are pretty good twists here, some even relatively believable—which the final payoff is not, exactly. I just wish there was a bit more of everything: longer scenes with the key characters, deeper questions raised by their conflicts, and a few more connections made with the current political climate in the U.S.

Anyway, I’ve seen the movie, and come the next election I’m still voting for George Clooney.

George Clooney has wanted to make The Ides of March ever since the Beau Willimon play it's based on, Farrugut North, debuted in 2008. Three years later, he's finally ready to unveil his political thriller, and latest directorial effort, to the voting public.

Clooney also stars in the movie as Governor Mike Morris, a seemingly genuine politician who's trying to secure the Democratic Party nomination for the upcoming presidential race. To get where Morris is, you need a crack team behind you and his includes actors as diverse and talented as Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Evan Rachel Wood.

Hoffman is the veteran, Wood is the intern and Gosling is the shiny new guy who's clearly destined for greater things. Naturally, Morris isn't as good a guy as everyone thinks and it isn't long before Gosling's Stephen Myers realizes this, raising the threat level across the board. This lead performance is another that will certainly continue Gosling's current Hollywood hot streak.

Clooney's execution is smooth and effective, but it does cater a little too often to his political views. Clooney didn't want his character to be a Republican, as he thought the criticism would be too obvious. As a Democrat though, he gets the chance to voice all of his platforms on topics as heated as gay marriage and tax incentives for the super-rich. Everything he says seems so sensible that the film becomes something of a criticism about all politicians, as if to suggest it could be as easy as he claims if they would just get it together.

The Ides of March is a compelling and engaging thriller, despite not bringing much new to the table. And while Clooney may not be ready to run for president, he earns my vote for being a top-notch film director.

World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]

The perfectly captured gray slush of Ohio in winter provides a suitable backdrop for George Clooney’s morality tale about politics in America. Clooney’s fourth directorial outing calls to mind Seventies political thrillers such as The Candidate and All the President’s Men (both of which starred Robert Redford, who, perhaps not coincidentally, is a handsome leading man and sometimes director who, like Clooney, is also well-known for his liberal politics). The Ides of March is not as perfectly realized as those Seventies films, nor does it live up to the Shakespearean overtones of its title. However, as a modern morality tale about the ongoing battle between idealism and corruption, The Ides of March beats to the pulse of our times.

Clooney plays a secondary role in the film as the Democratic candidate Gov. Mike Morris, who is engaged in a presidential primary in the swing state of Ohio. Clooney also co-wrote the screenplay with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon, upon whose play, Farragut North, the film is based. In the play, Morris isn’t even an onstage character, but in the film, liberal sympathizers will practically have to restrain themselves from standing up and cheering at some of the stands Morris takes. (Bullied about his atheist beliefs, Morris declares his only religion to be the U.S. Constitution.) Yet, according to this film, the realities of the political battle eventually force a candidate to climb a few rungs on the slippery slope of compromise and concession. It’s a slope that has a foundation in that gray Ohio slush, and one that most candidates climb with a helpful boost from their campaign strategists and support teams.

This story about the erosion of idealism and loyalty is told from the perspective of Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling), Morris’ press secretary. The film’s well-thought-out opening scene tell us everything we need to know about the fusion of politics and entertainment in our popular culture. Smart and skilled, Meyers thinks of himself as beyond corruption because he so totally believes in his guy and their cause. Meyers’ mentor is Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whose tired, rumpled, and flabby demeanor and constant second-guessing tells us everything we need to know about the mental state of political operatives. He is matched in kind by Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), the campaign manager of Morris’ rival, who is equally rumpled and flabby but just a little bit meaner. (Duffy talks of getting down “in the mud with the fucking elephants.”)

Would that there were more scenes in The Ides of March between Hoffman and Giamatti: Mano a mano, the film’s riot of language and unfiltered cynicism might become something transcendent. That’s not to take away from the performances as they are – wonderful and nuanced. Add to that Gosling again proving his vast versatility and Marisa Tomei as a hustling Jewish journalist trolling for a scoop. Where the film bogs down is in the intrigue that involves the 20-year-old intern Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), who is involved with more than one of the characters. Too much of the film, especially in the latter half, is devoted to the subplot put into motion by her (and her partners’) actions. Cherchez la intern should be seen as an obvious ploy in our fiction, even if the characters’ real-life counterparts haven’t yet caught on to that cliché. Despite this narrative misstep, The Ides of March still ranks as one of the season’s most intelligent and polished films.

Filmcritic.com Bill Gibron

The Ides of March - New York Magazine David Edelstein

“The Ides of March” Review : The New Yorker Anthony Lane

CNN.com [Mark Rabinowitz]

Intrigue Drowns Out Argument in Political Thriller Ides of March ... Katrina Longworth from The Village Voice

The Ides of March Review: What Do We Do Now? - Pajiba Daniel Carlson

Slant Magazine [Jaime N. Christley]

indieWire [Eric Kohn] at Toronto

THE IDES OF MARCH Review Peter Martin from Twitch

Temple of Reviews [Nathan Adams]

Sound On Sight [Simon Howell]

Commentary Track [Helen Geib]

Ides of March, The - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Bernardinelli

The Ides of March | Film Blather Eugene Novikov

DCist [Ian Buckwalter]

Little White Lies Magazine [Jonathan Crocker]

George Clooney in 'The Ides of March ... - Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

The Ides of March - Daily Film Dose Alan Bacchus

Eye for Film : The Ides Of March Movie Review (2011) Ali Hazzah

'The Ides of March' Review | Screen Rant Kofi Outlaw

The Ides of March; The Women on the 6th Floor ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

What's Brett Watching [Brett Blumenkopf]

The Film Stage [Jordan Raup]

ReelTalk [Frank Wilkins]

EricDSnider.com [Eric D. Snider]

Cinemablographer [Patrick Mullen]

FILM REVIEW: The Ides of March - Things That Go Pop! - CBC.ca Eli Glasner

Review: 'The Ides of March' | KPBS.org Beth Accomando

Review: 'The Ides of March' Doesn't Amount to ... - Film School Rejects Luke Mullan

Bina007 Movies [Caterina Benincasa]

Trash Film Guru [Ryan C.]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Caitlyn Collins]

The Film Pilgrim [Kieron Moore]

ReelTalk [Diana Saenger]

Boxoffice Magazine [Sara Maria Vizcarrondo]

Battleship Pretension [Scott Nye]

Shalit's 'Stache [Matthew Schuchman]

AdvanceScreenings.com [Matthew Fong]

Relevant Magazine Scott Elliot

FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [James Jay Edwards]

www.screenspotlight.com [Jonathan Jacobs]

Culture Blues [Jeremiah White & Jeff Hart]

Twitch [Michael Guillen] at Toronto

tonymacklin.net [Tony Macklin]

Entertainment Weekly [Owen Gleiberman]

The Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]

The Ides of March | Film review | Xan Brooks | Film ... - The Guardian

The Ides of March Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun

First Night: The Ides Of March, Venice Film Festival - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab

The Ides of March – review Philip French from The Observer

The Ides of March – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

The Ides of March: Beware the clichés and con ... - Globe and Mail Rick Groen

MontrealGazette.com [Al Kratina]

'Ides' a smart political thriller - BostonHerald.com Jamese Verniere

Review: The Ides of March - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

The Ides of March movie review -- The Ides of March ... - Boston.com Ty Burr

Review: Fast-paced political drama ... - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt

The Arizona Republic [Bill Goodykoontz]

'The Ides of March' review: The political animals Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle

'The Ides of March': movie review - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Ebert Presents: At the Movies [Christy Lemire and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Movie Review - 'The Ides of March' - 'The Ides of March,' With ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times

THE MONUMENTS MEN C 74

USA Germany (118 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Official site

A rousing World War II adventure drama that emulates the spirit of 1960’s movies like THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963) and THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967), though hardly living up to the action level of either one, which were fun WWII war movie that kids loved because they featured all those cool stars with plenty of personality, who personified courage and heroicism, where many didn’t survive to make it home afterwards. Similarly, George Clooney has assembled a cast of a bunch of his friends, where this has a bit of the party feel of Soderbergh’s OCEAN’S ELEVEN (2001, 2004, 2007) series, where this group clearly has a good time together while making movies. While the overall premise is interesting, inspired by Robert M Edsel and Bret Witter’s 2009 book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Hunt in History, which documents a small group of American and British (there were no French included) experts on art sent to the Allied front to rescue artworks stolen by the Nazi’s, while Edsel also co-produced THE RAPE OF EUROPA (2006), an important documentary work that explores the Nazi plunder of art treasures from German-occupied territories. But there are other equally valid historical sources, such as The Monuments Men: Rescuing Art Plundered by the Nazis, an article by Ronald H. Bailey from World War Two magazine, May 2007, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, by Lynn H. Nicholas in 1995, and The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II, by Ilaria Dagnini Brey in 2010. Hollywood, once again, embellishes the truth, as they did in the Academy Award winning Argo (2012), where the script by George Clooney and Grant Heslov takes major artistic license in its depictions of the mission, giving director George Clooney as Lieutenant George L. Stout, a World War I veteran and art conservationist at Harvard, responsibility for forming the group, passionately making his case to President Roosevelt about saving the value of artwork from Nazi looting and destruction from Allied bombing campaigns, while in reality the formation of what would become Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) was created without Stout’s input. The idea originated in Europe where British archaeologist and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler grew concerned that remnants of ancient Roman ruins in Libya, the Leptis Magna, would be destroyed by tank warfare. Wheeler was joined by Lieutenant Colonel John Bryan Ward-Perkins and a civil support team to reroute traffic, photograph the damage, post guards, and organize repair efforts at the site, none of which is shown in the movie.

This action to minimize damage to ancient relics inspired a collective effort by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to inspect historical shrines and artifacts as part of the war occupation, where the first man sent in, American Captain Mason Hammond, felt the mission was “utterly foolish and a waste of time,” while Clooney and his men remain undaunted by the initial military resistance to their ideas. Fogg Art Museum’s associate director Paul Sachs is also not depicted in the movie, though he was one of the earliest voices advocating a protection of art during wartime, initially proposing the idea of “special workmen” to implement the protection. Sachs was appointed to the Roberts Commission, a Presidential commission designed to consolidate earlier efforts with the U.S. Army to help protect Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) in war zones, eventually taken over by the State department after the war. It was Sachs that selected Lieutenant Stout (George Clooney as Frank Stokes, who would eventually become the curator of the Fogg Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museums in Boston), to join an elite officer corps, while also choosing James Rorimer (Matt Damon as James Granger, the eventual director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), his former professor at Harvard, who had already been drafted into the Army. Rorimer inspected buildings in Normandy, Paris, and the surrounding countryside, eventually discovering an official Nazi looting operation of French private collections that were sent to the Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany. While Rorimer did develop a crucial relationship with Rose Valland (Cate Blanchett as Claire Simone), an employee at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, the central transport station used by the Nazi’s, who secretly recorded the whereabouts of the artifacts stolen by the Nazi’s in France, who in real life is actually the unsung hero of this entire operation, the movie turns her into a romantic femme fatale love interest for Matt Damon, thereby diminishing her legacy, though she eventually shared her information with Rorimer, who also discovered the Heilbron salt mines which stored art from German museums, something he was able to ascertain without support from the military. Rather than six or seven men, as depicted in the movie, the group of assigned MFAA officers originally consisted of eleven men, seven Americans and four British, but they lead a team of closer to 350 men and women, most of whom volunteered from 13 different nations, where many had expertise as museum directors, curators, art historians, artists, architects, and educators. In the last year of the war, they tracked, located, and in the years that followed returned more than five million artistic and cultural items stolen by Hitler and the Nazi’s. Their role in preserving cultural treasures was without precedent.

The film also distorts the historical accuracy of Hitler’s Nero Decree issued near the end of the war when most of the conquered territories had been liberated or recaptured, but was a desperate attempt to prevent Allied forces from using resources against the Reich during the war. In the decree, Hitler ordered that “all military, transportation, communications, industrial, and food supply facilities” be destroyed, but it never explicitly included art. In the movie, however, when Stokes reads the decree aloud, he lists “archives and art” among the things set to be destroyed. Hitler’s will specified that his art should go to German museums, suggesting he never wanted art to be destroyed, though the Nazi’s had a way of condemning certain “degenerate” works, either Jewish or Impressionist for example, which they burned by the thousands. The prized 12-panel Ghent Altarpiece depicted in the film, a Flemish 15^th century masterpiece and one of the first major oil paintings, described as the ultimate Catholic artifact, was beloved by Hitler as an example of “Aryan genius,” while Michelangelo's white marble sculpture of the Madonna and Child on display in Bruges, created around 1504, is the only sculpture of Michelangelo's outside of Italy. There was no mention, by the way, of the more than 50,000 artifacts stolen from The National Museum of Baghdad during the first days of the American occupation of Iraq during the 2003 invasion, containing relics of past civilizations dating back 5,000 years, and the largest collection of archeological and historical artifacts in the entire Middle East. This little footnote in history might have brought home the notion that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, as history has shown through modern acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide that in a few short years, all physical and cultural evidence of targeted groups can be wiped away and completely destroyed, where Stokes can be heard saying “If you destroy their achievements and their history, it’s like they never existed.” So while the intent of the movie is noble, where Hitler, in what is perceived as “the greatest theft in history,” stole more than 5 million cultural objects, what we have in this Hollywood version is filled with stereotypes and cliché’s, featuring a good old boy’s portrayal of American ingenuity and know-how, where if you believe this version, it was these seven guys that actually ended the war by discovering Germany’s hidden gold reserves, as they were tucked away in mine shafts along with all the stolen works of art. The film also recalls John Frankenheimer’s THE TRAIN (1964), a Black and White historical thriller featuring a French resistance stationmaster (Burt Lancaster) pitted against an art-obsessed Nazi officer (Paul Scofield) trying to get a train filled with stolen art in to Germany. In contrast, this film pales by comparison, offering a meandering pace, an indifference to history, and a lack of dramatic conflict throughout, where the stellar cast barely ever engages one another, but are seen off on their own explorations, where it simply feels like an imitation of better films that were made during the 60’s. One hopes it is not these inaccurate and streamlined Hollywood Cliff Notes version of history that people remember instead of the real individuals involved who actually made history, because as viewers we deserve better, especially from someone as intelligent and talented as this director, where it wouldn’t hurt if Hollywood historical movies “inspired by real events” actually told the truth for a change, as their value is diminished otherwise.

INFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]

The Monuments Men is a historical comedy-drama with a very intriguing history, but comedy that isn’t funny and drama that isn’t always interesting. From the get-go, we are greeted with the courageous “Monuments Men,” men who were instructed to retrieve numerous valuable pieces of art that the Nazis had stolen during World War II, however, never we do we develop a relationship with anyone of the men involved with such a large and dangerous undertaking. I exited the film knowing just as little about these men as I did entering.

This is especially surprising given the cast of characters: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Cate Blanchett, Bob Balaban, and even Jean Dujardin of The Artist in what I believe is his first major film since his Best Actor win. Despite assembling one of the year’s best casts so far, director Clooney struggles to bring character identity to these courageous, often unsung men. With World War II and The Holocaust being such enormous chunks of world history, with numerous events taking place and a great number of people involved, it’s only inevitable that some will be shortchanged or almost entirely forgotten to hopefully rise to prominence in the future. It’s unfortunate that the “Monuments Men” have their prominence in a less-than-compelling mainstream film when their story is most certainly very compelling.

Those leading the brigade of men are tasked with retrieving the art are Lt. Frank Stokes (George Clooney) and Lt. James Granger (Matt Damon) and assist in leading four other men to help with this mission. The remainder of actors such as Murray, Goodman, Dujardin, and Balaban are only given sporadic times to shine, which is already disappointing seeing as they can practically carry an entire movie on their own. However, the real issue is we know nothing about these characters and their backgrounds. The running joke in the film is that Murray and Balaban’s characters have a long, heated history and insult each other whenever they get the opportunity. This would be funny if we got insight as to why they don’t like each other and have their friendship that is predicated off of insults and heated exchanges. Yet because we have no idea, it just seems like meanness for the sake of meanness.

Then there are Clooney’s speeches about why art is important, where he reiterates the talking points likely to be used in an AP art class about how “art defines culture” and “art isn’t owned by anyone.” Never do we really get any perspective or any reason that firmly cements why these men are doing what they are doing except for a few generic, talking points reasons.

With all that said, the acting is still what holds the film together mostly. Just because Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov’s screenplay lack in key areas, doesn’t mean that the actors aren’t trying, or not on-par with their previous work. Clooney is assured and believable, per usual, Damon works as your typical everyman trying to do right, and when the aforementioned four get screentime, it’s usually time to cherish. It’s just a shame that more exposition and scenes involving these remarkable character actors were traded for less-than-compelling scenes of the men plotting to steal art and then tracking the pieces down.

The sad thing is that this will probably be people’s first and only introduction to “The Monuments Men” as people and Clooney unfortunately directs a middling and dry film to credit them in what should’ve been a rousing and greatly informative picture on one of the most troubling and frightening times in world history. Don’t let the strong ending fool you – I don’t think we’ve seen the real beginning and middle yet.

Movie Review: The Monuments Men -- Vulture David Edelstein

George Clooney’s The Monuments Men tells the true (if embellished) story of a squad of art experts tasked to protect masterpieces of European society from Nazi theft and Allied bombardment at the end of World War II — a story that might be expected (in this country, anyway) to elicit responses like, “Okay, but it seems weird to worry about paintings when millions of people are dying.” Clooney — who directed, co-wrote, and stars in the film — clearly anticipates such Yankee anti-elitism. He opens with a scene in which his character, Frank Stokes, makes the case to FDR (we view the back of the president’s head) that such works are the very foundation of the civilization that the United States seeks to protect. As the Allies drop bombs on cities in Germany, Italy, and France, he asks, “Who will make sure that the statue of David is still standing and the Mona Lisa still smiling?” Later, he labors to make the same case to commanding officers on the front lines, men obviously racked by the loss of Allied lives and incredulous (and indignant) at his request to stop shelling their art-filled targets. In a pep talk to his own men, Stokes avers that if these countries’ achievements and history are destroyed, “it’s like they never existed.”

I emphasize Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov’s speechifying on behalf of their heroes’ mission to suggest why The Monuments Men never quite shakes off its family-friendly squareness. It’s a graceful, engaging film—I enjoyed it. But it could have been called The Tasteful Dozen. After helping to shape such acid, anti-imperialist movies as Syriana and David O. Russell’s Three Kings, Clooney must have been eager to make a hopeful, positive war picture, with a lighthearted marching-drum-and-woodwind score by Alexander Desplat — and an implicit subtext that government funding of the arts is vital to our very existence. But he plays it so safe. Perhaps fearful of being called exploitative, he doesn’t bring out the tension between timeless masterpieces and the chaos and obscenity of war. He doesn’t even linger on the paintings and sculptures, which seem like fodder, MacGuffins. And he panders to the mainstream audience. It’s only when the Monuments Men come up against snipers and murderous commandants that Stokes announces they’ve earned the right to wear their uniforms. But if they need to take bullets to prove they’re soldiers, what are all those high-flown speeches about preserving civilization about?

The all-star ensemble is at half-mast, though it’s hard to resist them. How can you not be charmed by the assembling-the-team sequence in which Matt Damon is plucked from atop a ladder as he works on a church ceiling and Bill Murray from leading a tour of a skyscraper? Alcoholic Hugh Bonneville has a chance to come back from disgrace and redeem himself, heart-wrenchingly. John Goodman gets a laugh by shrugging off basic training and waddling through an obstacle course while bullets fly around him. Jean Dujardin is the happy Frenchie, Bob Balaban the serious specialist who trades low-wattage insults with Murray. The pair has a good scene in which they visit a man with ties to France’s art world and discover some extraordinarily well-done reproductions on the walls. A little too well-done. There were worse crimes in the forties than stealing paintings, but low thievery of high art earns its own circle of hell.

At the inner circle, of course, is Hitler, who made Aryan culture a centerpiece of his Reich and directed Nazi soldiers to make off with every well-regarded painting and sculpture they could get their mitts on, plundering not just museums but the homes of deported Jews. The scale of that plunder is laid out in the 2006 documentary The Rape of Europa and thrillingly evoked in John Frankenheimer’s The Train, featuring Paul Scofield as an art-obsessed Nazi and Burt Lancaster as the stationmaster bent on keeping France’s masterworks from reaching Germany. In The Monuments Men, it’s seen through the eyes of Cate Blanchett as a prim, bespectacled French curator who secretly plots against a piggy S.S. man preparing trainloads of art for the Führer’s proposed Über-museum. (Now and then, there are shots of a diminutive Hitler staring at a model of this monument to himself.) Earnest Damon has to prove to Blanchett that he’s not rounding up paintings to ship back to America, and when she’s satisfied that his aim is art for art’s sake, she lets down her hair and wants into his pants. Alas, he’s been staring too long at church frescoes.

I can’t predict if there will be a huge audience for The Monuments Men, but in its way it’s a great piece of escapism. As Iraq explodes (we broke it, we didn’t buy it) and Afghanistan metes out madness and death once again to hubristic occupiers, World War II grows even larger in our hearts. Clooney wants us to agree that liberating the Madonna of Ghent from godless Nazi murderers was maybe our last selfless act as a nation in the theater of war. It’s a pipe dream of decency in a world that has lost its moral compass.

How Accurate Is The Monuments Men? Aisha Harris from Slate, February 10, 2014

The Monuments Men made $22 million over the weekend, good for second place, despite being been panned by most critics. (It currently holds a 32 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes; one critic found it so reprehensible he walked out.) Cinematic shortcomings aside, is the World War II action-comedy fairly faithful to the true story it’s based on, at least?

Not really, no. While it preserves key facts and big moments, the script by George Clooney and Grant Heslov takes major artistic license in its depictions of the mission. As historian Elizabeth Campbell Karlsgodt told me, “It’s accurate on a very basic level, with the idea that President Roosevelt charged these art experts, led by Americans, but also including other Western Allies … to protect cultural heritage” during the war.

Beyond that, there are a number of “distortions,” in Karlsgodt’s words, starting with the very setup for the mission. The initial task, Karlsgodt explains, was to protect historic buildings, not recover art. “They were initially going to try to provide lists so that Allied forces wouldn’t bomb historic sites, and once they were on the ground, then identifying damaged buildings and trying to carry out repairs when they could.”

Using the film’s original source material, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel (with Bret Witter), as well as Karlsgodt’s expertise, I’ve sorted out fact and fiction in the film. Spoilers follow.

Lieutenant Stout was a World War I veteran and art conservationist at Harvard. Along with Fogg Art Museum’s associate director Paul Sachs—who is not depicted in the movie—he was one of the earliest and most prominent advocates for protecting art during the war and he proposed the training of “special workmen” for conservation. After trying and failing to enlist museum leaders in a collective national conservation effort, Stout applied for active duty in the U.S. Navy in early 1943.

In the film, we first learn about the mission when Stokes, in late 1943, passionately makes his case to President Roosevelt (Michael Dalton) for the value of saving artwork from Nazi looters. But while The Monuments Men puts him at the center of the formation of what would become Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA), in reality the subcommission was created without Stout’s direct input.

The Mission’s Beginnings

Meanwhile in Europe, British archaeologist and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler grew concerned that what remained of Leptis Magna, an ancient Roman ruin in Libya, would be plundered and decimated in the midst of the war. Along with Lieutenant Colonel John Bryan Ward-Perkins, and with the support of a Civil Affairs Officer, Wheeler “rerouted traffic, photographed damage, posted guards, and organized repair efforts” at the site, as Edsel explains. (None of this is depicted in the movie.)

This inspired greater efforts once President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill agreed to invade Europe. One British and one American officer were sent to Sicily to inspect the monuments and territories “as soon as practical after occupation,” Edsel writes. American Captain Mason Hammond arrived first; with no supplies or support, he doubted the validity of the mission. “Even the first ‘Monuments Man’ … initially thought the manner in which the army was going about the mission was utterly foolish and a waste of time,” writes Edsel. The movie, on the other hand, portrays the officers as more or less undaunted by their task.

In September 1943, Sachs was appointed as a member of the Roberts Commission, which had a mission similar to what Stout originally proposed (with Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts as chair). Sachs attributed the commission’s formation to Stout’s prior efforts, and he selected Stout to join the officer corps of the MFAA, an outfit the Commission decided to form.

Rorimer, who was drafted into the Army in 1943, was brought on to the mission by Sachs, his former professor at Harvard. Prior to his military stint, he helped expand the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval collection. As a Monuments Man, he played a key role in helping to discover the Heilbronn mines that housed art from German museums. Karldsgodt, who has read his diaries, says he accomplished a great deal alone, with little support from the military. In one instance, Rorimer wanted to inspect the island commune of Mont Saint-Michel 100 miles away, and was given authorization by his superior officer—but was informed he’d have to walk. (The Monuments Men spent much of their time hitching rides and walking, some of which we see in the film.)

The Other Monuments Men

Most of the rest of the gang portrayed in the film are based on real-life people.

Walter Garfield (John Goodman) is inspired by Walker Hancock, described by Edsel as a “renowned sculptor of monumental works.”

Donald Jeffries (Hugh Bonneville) is based on Ronald Balfour, a British officer who, like his fictional doppelganger, was killed in the line of duty. Unlike Jeffries, Balfour was not trying to save the prized Madonna of Bruges statue on his own when this occurred, but was evacuating other artifacts, along with four German civilians, from a damaged church in Clèves, Germany.

Richard Campbell (Bill Murray) resembles Robert Posey, a quiet, reserved architect who was relatively unknown within the art world prior to the mission.

Preston Savitz (Bob Balaban) stands in for Lincoln Kirstein, who would go on to found the New York City Ballet.

Sam Epstein (Dimitri Leonidas), the Jewish officer who fled Germany before the start of the war, is based upon Harry Ettlinger, one of the last surviving Monuments Men.

Jean Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin) doesn’t appear to have a real-life equivalent. Karlsglodt informs me that there were no French officers who worked alongside the American Monuments Men.

The original assembly of assigned MFAA officers consisted of 11 men, seven Americans (including Hancock, Posey, Rorimer, and Stout), and four Brits, including Balfour. There were many more involved than are depicted in the film.

Rose Valland, like her fictional counterpart Claire, was an employee at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris who secretly recorded the whereabouts of the artifacts stolen by the Nazis in France. She also had a close and crucial relationship with Rorimer, which resulted in a pivotal dinner meeting, where she finally shared her information on the Nazis after several months of working with him.

Unlike in the film, however, their relationship was strictly professional: “There’s no way there was romantic tension between them,” Karlsgodt tells me. “And I think it’s unfortunate because she risked her life to carry out that intelligence work, and also later became a captain in the French army, and played in the restitution process once all that art had been recovered.” While Valland’s story is becoming more well known, and she’s now considered a “wartime hero,” Karlsgodt doesn’t think the film does enough to honor her legacy.

Hitler’s Plans for the Art

According to Karlsglodt, the depiction of Hitler’s Nero Decree is “oversimplified.” The decree was issued on March 19, 1945 as an attempt to prevent Allied forces from using resources against the Reich during the war. In it, Hitler ordered that “all military, transportation, communications, industrial, and food supply facilities” be destroyed, but it didn’t explicitly include art. In the movie, however, when Stokes reads the decree aloud, he lists “archives and art” among the things set to be destroyed. This, Karlsgodt points out, “enables the plot to move forward,” so that our heroes are “racing against the Germans who are set now to destroy the art if Hitler can’t have it.”

In actuality, Hitler’s will specified that his art go to German museums, “strong evidence” that he didn’t want that art destroyed. Karlsgodt also finds it highly improbable that the Monuments Men even knew about the decree during their mission. “The systematic destruction [as seen in the film] being carried out as a result of the Nero Decree never happened,” she says. “Nazis destroyed art that they considered degenerate, like Cubist, Surrealist, Expressionist paintings, and we know that they burned several thousand—at least—paintings that they thought were actually toxic to the German spirit… [But] they didn’t destroy the art they valued.” (This included Germanic art, and the Ghent Altarpiece depicted in the film, which Hitler considered to be an example of “Aryan genius.”)

The Madonna of Bruges

Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges plays a pivotal part in the script, serving as the holy grail that the Monuments Men must reclaim in the memory of Jeffries, who dies trying to save it from Nazi capture. While it’s true that the statue (as well as the Ghent Altarpiece) would have been a priority for the mission, Karlsglodt feels that the film’s focus on those artifacts undermines the true significance of Hitler’s plans and their connection to the Holocaust. “It leaves out a really crucial aspect of this history,” she says. “Hitler saw it as a key way to seize the assets of Jews. He was not only eliminating Jewish influence, he was also getting their art.”

Though the Madonna was found in the Altaussee salt mine as it is in the film, the climactic race against the clock to excavate the art before the Soviets arrive to claim their territory is sped up for dramatic effect. As Edsel details in his book, the contents of the mine were recovered and recorded over the months of May and June 1945; when Allied-conquered territory was handed over to Soviet power, the crew had several days to carefully remove the most valuable pieces (including the Madonna and the discovered remaining panels of the Ghent Altarpiece) from the mine. Thanks to some disagreements over the deadline for relinquishing the territory, Stout and the other men at the scene had extra time, and were able to remove those pieces from the mine within a few days.

The Monuments Men: An establishment film, in almost every way Joanne Laurier from the World Socialist Web Site

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Review: 'Monuments Men' talks big but lacks artful direction - latimes . Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

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Robert M. Edsel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Monuments Men: Rescuing Art Plundered by the Nazis Ronald H. Bailey from History Net, from WWII magazine, May 2007

The Ghent Altarpiece: the truth about the most stolen artwork of all ... Noah Charney from The Guardian, December 20, 2013

'The Monuments Men' wonders: Is art worth a life? | National ... Rose Pacatte from The National Catholic Reporter, February 6, 2014

Clouse, Robert

ENTER THE DRAGON

Hong Kong USA (98 mi) 1973 ‘Scope 25^th Anniversary Edition (110 mi)

Mutant Reviewers from Hell review

The first of a burgeoning series of American film industry attempts to colonise the kung-fu market, this manages to be inferior to even the weakest of Bruce Lee's echt-Chinese movies. A sorry mixture of James Bond and Fu Manchu, it tacks together the exploits of a multi-national crew of martial artists converging on Hong Kong for a tournament, infiltrated by Lee - fresh from his Shaolin temple - on an assignment to bust an opium racket. Worth seeing for Lee, but still unforgivably wasteful of his talents.

eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder

After the mixed success of his third effort, The Return Of The Dragon, Lee started to work in his next project, The Game Of Death. Shooting was taking place for four months in India when all of a sudden Lee was offered an American offer to appear in the lead role in a new film called Enter The Dragon. Lee wasted no time and decided to interrupt the Game Of Death shooting and work 100% in what was to be his breakthrough film in the US, and what a breakthrough it was. Enter The Dragon cemented the final block for Bruce Lee to be proclaimed as the greatest martial artist of his era, if not, of all time. The film is nearly perfect, with a pretty tight but predictable script, superb performances, and ass-kicking fighting scenes. The film remains a classic in the martial arts genre; sadly, Lee didn’t live to see it shine.

Han (Shih Kien) is an evil drug lord and murderer of young girls but has never been directly proven for it. So Lee (Bruce Lee), who’s a Shaloin monk, is hired by the Interpol to infiltrate Han’s island through a martial arts tournament that he stages every three years, in which he invites martial artists around the world to participate, to find out and uncover hard evidence so they can arrest him. And he doesn’t go alone, two American martial artists, Roper (John Saxon) and Williams (Jim Kelly) are also invited. Roper is a hard-hitting gambler that owes money and needs to find cash to pay back, while Williams is a wanted man in the US. Lee also goes for personal reasons, since it was Han’s bodyguard O’Hara (Robert Wall) who killed his sister. You know what happens next.

The plot is somewhat of a cross between James Bond and lots of 70’s cheese, and it’s pretty much predictable. It kind of leaves some pretty loose ends when it comes to Han’s “daughters” since they’re never mentioned again in the film. And the storyline is practically pure formula, and yes, Han is character wise, a carbon copy of Dr. No. Still, the script scores high at character development. The flaws take some shine off the film, but it keeps it’s momentum thanks again to Lee’s martial arts sequences.

The fight sequences are choreographed to perfection, and never miss a beat, and the cinematography is superb, catching every kick and every punch with accuracy. Hell, they even make John Saxon look like he’s fighting even though he doesn’t know jackshit about martial arts, still, it’s pretty much fun to watch him act. Jim Kelly, even though he’s not an actor, still manage to put on some cool hard knocks, but of course, the man who steals the show is no one else but Lee, who again gives out some of the best fighting throughout his career. His re-match with Robert Wall (he fought him in Return Of The Dragon) is a must, along with his classic fight with martial artist Shih Kien (Han) in the room of mirrors. Again, that’s cinematography and acting at it’s best. Robert Clouse’s direction manages to keep the film under control, despite the scripts predictability; he injects the suspense in the precise moments and the rest is history.

In the end, the film isn’t a masterpiece, but it damn well delivers, thanks to the three leads. The film remains though, a classic, due to the great fight sequences that has. It’s arguably the best martial arts film ever made if not, one of the best. Unfortunately, Lee would die of a brain edema a month before the film was released, his status of a hero would soon pass into legend due to the great influence he had on the martial arts genre. He’ll be sorely missed.

Turner Classic Movies review Lang Thompson

Rather than being just a weak imitation of the crowd-pleasing films Bruce Lee made in China, Enter the Dragon (1973) - his first mainstream American film - captures all the excitement of his previous Hong Kong hits. In fact, it's often called one of the greatest martial arts films ever made and one reason is because people who aren't martial arts fans also enjoy it. By Hollywood standards, the film was a B-movie, yet every aspect of it from the acting to the direction was way above average for an action thriller. And, of course, the fight scenes are mesmerizing and unlike anything previously seen in American films. Enter the Dragon was a huge hit but sadly Lee didn't live to see this, dying just a few weeks before the premiere.

Putting an espionage twist on the familiar revenge theme, Enter the Dragon features Lee as a martial arts expert whose sister was killed by drug smugglers. The smugglers' island is heavily guarded which prevents Lee from easily gaining access until a police agency recruits him for a secret mission there. It turns out that the smugglers' boss is hosting a martial arts contest which allows Lee and two partners to visit the island as contenders in the championship.

The genesis of Enter the Dragon began with producer Fred Weintraub who thought Hollywood could make a good martial arts film. He convinced Warner Brothers to back the project and then hooked up with Bruce Lee's own production company, Concord. Michael Allin was hired as the scenarist (he would later write Truck Turner (1974) and the 1980 Flash Gordon as well as Zarafa, an acclaimed book about the first giraffe brought to Paris). The director was Robert Clouse, a two-time Oscar nominee for Best Live Action Short Subject (The Cadillac (1962), The Legend of Jimmy Blue Eyes, 1964). Supposedly Clouse was the only director who wanted the job. For added box office appeal, the producers signed up perennial B-movie actor John Saxon and karate champion Jim Kelly.

Because it was his first starring role in an American film, Lee felt tremendous pressure to succeed. In fact, he was so nervous that he didn't appear for the first three weeks of shooting. Producer Weintraub told writer Rick Meyers at the time that Lee was feuding with his old boss Raymond Chow and giving him a hard time as well. The first day Lee appeared, his nerves manifested themselves in a facial tic that required 27 takes to get a good shot.

Most of the extras were actual martial arts fighters and some of them couldn't resist the urge to take on the famous Bruce Lee, scuffles that invariably ended in Lee's favor. But Lee knew what he was doing. He staged all the martial arts sequences that made the film so memorable. One of his kicks was actually so fast that it was filmed in slow motion so that viewers could see it wasn't a camera trick; other shots were sped up. After principal photography was completed Lee added the Shaolin Temple scene that places Enter the Dragon in a cultural context, linking it more closely to Chinese traditions. Weintraub recognized Lee's immense talent and was planning to sign him for a second American film at the pay rate of one million dollars.

But Lee died July 20, 1973 of a brain edema. Enter the Dragon was released in the U.S. barely a month later and became a huge hit. Many of Lee's earlier Hong Kong films were then dubbed and released in the U.S. Other Hong Kong martial arts films starring Jimmy Wang Yu, Ti Lung and other Chinese stars began appearing in U.S. theatres, often presented in poorly dubbed and crudely re-edited versions. The Bruce Lee clones appeared as well, featuring names like Bruce Li, Bruce Le and the quite improbable Bronson Lee (sporting a Charles Bronson mustache; he was actually Japanese). It would be years before martial arts films would overcome the negative image created by this flood of third-rate product.

Today, kung fu fans and martial arts film buffs will find plenty of familiar faces in Enter the Dragon. The most famous have two of the smallest parts. At the start of the film Lee spars with Sammo Hung and at the end one of the men in the crowd fighting Lee is Jackie Chan (Lee breaks his neck). Yuen Biao, another friend of Hung and Chan's, also has a small part. You can also spot Chuck Norris, Lam Ching-Ying, the vampire-buster from numerous ghost films, and Yuen Wah, a perennial action star. But even the larger roles feature martial arts stars. Mr. Han was played by Shih Kien, who appeared in numerous films as the legendary Wong Fei-Hong (the same quasi-historical character that Jackie Chan plays in the Drunken Master films, Jet Li in the Once Upon a Time in America series and Donnie Yen in the Iron Monkey films). Angela Mao (as Su Lin) was one of the best-known of the many female martial arts stars and Bolo Yeung (as Bolo) has enjoyed a long career in this genre though the quality of his films can't compare with Bruce Lee's work.

Dragan Antulov retrospective [8/10]

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

VideoVista review Richard Bowden

Cinescape dvd review Brian Thomas

Vern's review

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [3/5]

Salon (David Lazarus) dvd review

Action in motion: kinesthesia in martial arts Aaron Anderson from Jump Cut, December 1998

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]

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CHUD.com (Dave Davis) dvd review [Special Edition]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Edition] Colin Jacobson

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [3/5] [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Verdict (Dennis Prince) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [HD-DVD Version] Nicholas Sheffo

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

Kung Fu Cinema review [8/10]

And You Thought It Was Safe [David DeMoss]

Edinburgh U Film Society (Keith H. Brown) review

DVD Times Michael Sunda, Bruce Lee Ultimate DVD Collection

San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review

The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow

DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Leonard Norwitz

Clouzot, Henri-Georges

Clouzot, Henri-Georges from World Cinema

French director and scriptwriter, one of the most controversial film-makers of the postwar period. Clouzot's early activities were decoted to writing. After an early short (La Terreur des Batignolles, 1931), he began adapting thrillers in the 1940s, a genre he pursued throughout his career. The first was his debut feature L'Assassin habite...au 21 (1942). Le Corbeau (1943, produced by the German-owned Continentale) turned him into both a celebrity and an object of scandal. Its vicious portrait of a strife-ridden small town was deemed "anti-French" and Clouzot was suspended from the film industry in 1944. Ironically, historians now read the film as anti-German. Clouzot resumed film-making in 1947, shooting a small but significant and highly successful body of films epitomizing (with such directors as Yves Allégret) the French noir tradition. Most, like Quai des Orfèvres (1947) and Les Diaboliques (1955), combine tight, suspenseful crime narratives with critical depictions of bourgeois milieux. Le Salaire de la peur / The Wages of Fear (1953), the ultra-tense story of two men delivery a lorry-load of nitro-glycerine, was a triumph at home and abroad. Clouzot directed one of Brigitte Bardot's best films, La Vérité (1960). His films also include Manon (1949) and Les Espions (1957), and a documentary on Picasso, Le Mystère Picasso (1955). Ironically for a film-maker who wrote all his scripts and insisted that a director "be his own auteur," Clouzot suffered at the hands of New Wave critics, who saw him as a mere "metteur-en-scène" and disliked the black misanthropy of his vision. A reassessment of his work is long overdue. — Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema

Film Reference Dudley Andrew

In a country like France where good taste is so admired, Henri-Georges Clouzot has been a shocking director. A film critic during the age of surrealism, Clouzot was always eager to assault his audience with his style and concerns.

Like so many others, Clouzot found his chance to move from scriptwriting to directing during the Occupation, a time when there was a paucity of directors in France. His first effort, L'Assassin habite au 21, was a safe film. Its script followed two similar films he had written which had been well received by audiences. These witty police dramas were exercises in style and cleverness, befitting the epoch. Le Corbeau, made the next year, was in contrast a shattering film, unquestionably hitting hard at the society of the war years. Retaining all the conventions of the thriller, Clouzot systematically exposed the physical and psychological grotesqueries of every character in the film. A grim picture of small-town mores, Le Corbeau was condemned by the Nazis and French patriots alike.

When the war ended Clouzot found himself barred from the industry for two years by the "purification committee," an industry-appointed watchdog group that self-righteously judged complicity with the Germans. Clouzot's crime was to have made films for a German-financed company, though he was officially arraigned on charges of having maligned the French character and having demoralized the country during its dark hours. But even at this time many critics claimed that Le Corbeau was the only authentically engaged film made during the entire Occupation.

When he did resume his career, Clouzot's grim view of life had not improved. Both Quai des Orfèvres and his 1948 adaptation of Manon emulated American film noir with their lowlife settings. Both are extremely well acted, but ultimately small works.

Clouzot's fame in the United States came in the mid-1950s when The Wages of Fear and Diabolique gave him a reputation as a French Hitchcock, interested in the mechanics of suspense. In France, however, these films, especially Diabolique, were seen as only well-made studio products. His 1960 La Vérité, starring Brigitte Bardot, was designed to win him favor in the youth culture of the time, which was obsessed by New Wave life and movies. While the film outgrossed its New Wave competition, its cloyingly paternalistic style showed how far Clouzot was from the spontaneity of the New Wave. The cafe scenes in the film are insincere, and the inevitable indictment of society rings false.

All of Clouzot's films, even up to the 1968 La Prisonnière, were financial successes, but in the end he ceased being the instrumental force in the film industry he had been twenty years earlier.

Henri-Georges Clouzot movies, photos, movie reviews, filmography ... bio by Bruce Eder from All Movie Guide

TCMDB profile from Turner Classic Movies

Henri-Georges Clouzot | Senses of Cinema Fiona Watson from Senses of Cinema, July 2005

Henri-Georges Clouzot - Explore - The Criterion Collection

Clouzot's Cruel Crow: Le Corbeau Eric Gans from P.O.V.

Films de France

Henri-Georges Clouzot biography FilmsdeFrance

American Cinematheque including a brief synopsis from several films, April 30 – May 4, 2004

The Worlds Best Films: Top Ranked Films of Henri-Georges Clouzot The Worlds Best Films, December 16, 2011

The Complete Henri-Georges Clouzot - Harvard Film Archive November 26 – December 18, 2011

MoMA | Henri-Georges Clouzot December 8 – 24, 2011

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Dark Side: Movies | KQED Public Media for ... Michael Fox from KQED, January 12, 2012

Henri-Georges Clouzot - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Steve Seid, January 12 – February 4, 2012

Clouzot, Henri-Georges They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Images for Henri-Georges Clouzot

Top 250 Directors

501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

Henri-Georges Clouzot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LE CORBEAU (The Raven)

aka: The Crow

France (91 mi) 1943

David Thomson calls Clouzot's a 'cinema of total disenchantment'. This exposé of a malicious small town in France must be one of the most depressed films to emerge from the period of the German Occupation: everyone speaks badly of everyone else, rumours of abortion and drug addiction are rife, and a flood of poison-pen letters raises the spiteful hysteria to epidemic level. Clouzot's misanthropy concludes in total defeat; his naggingly over-insistent style occasionally achieves a great blackness.

Opening BAM's retrospective (through March 2), Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1943 second feature, The Raven (Le Corbeau), is as brilliantly nasty as Wages of Fear and Diabolique or indeed anything this misanthropic filmmaker ever did. (It's also as surprising as his backstage policier Quai des Orfèvres.) Made for a German production company in occupied France, The Raven takes clinical pleasure in detailing a small town's moral disintegration and morbid sexuality as it is "terrorized" by a writer of anonymous poison-pen letters. Hypocrisy runs rampant—and extended into the movie's reception. Clouzot, often called the French Hitchcock, is not just a master of suspense but is also most adroit at implicating his audience. (Not for nothing is BAM's retro subtitled "Murder and Malice.") This unflattering social portrait, in which all authority is held up to ridicule, was attacked, and briefly banned, as collaborationist after the liberation. As it turns out, the scenario had been written and registered in 1937. Seen today, The Raven seems less an apology for, than an exposé of, occupied France.

Mini Reviews Gerald Peary

Gallic filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique) studied M and other exemplars of German Expressionism to make this cold, troubling, paranoiac work about a poison-pen letter campaign causing havoc in a small French town. Most of the letters are aimed at a gloomy, mysterious, doctor (Pierre Fresnay), accused of adultery, medical misconduct, and being an abortionist. Other citizenry are brought down by these pernicious epistles, until the town feels like plagued Thebes.

Le Corbeau operates as a satisfying intellectual thriller, in which the spotlight switches person to person as to who is the letter-writer. But what is Clouzot really saying? Is this movie a sly attack on France under the Vichy Government, though made with Vichy money during the German occupation? Or, as was alleged by the French Communists after the War, is Le Corbeau an unpatriotic diatribe against the French people, made by a Nazi sympathizer?

In my opinion, both views are awry: this is a work of metaphysical pessimism, misanthropic and Catholic at the same time, anticipating the despairing religious cinema of Robert Bresson.

Le Corbeau, only Henri-Georges Clouzot's second feature film, feels slightly less assured than its follow-up, Quai des Orfèvres, though it may be less compromised as an expression of the director's decidedly bleak worldview. Casting a dark eye on human tendencies toward gossip and defamation, Clouzot explores the psycho-emotional havoc wreaked on a small town in the French provinces by a letter-writer whose anonymous poison-pen missives, signed "le Corbeau" (the Raven), claim to identify a wide variety of debaucherous activities on the part of various citizens. Most of the film's characters, of course, seem to have both opportunity and motive to author the letters. Even Dr. Germain (Pierre Fresnay), who's the locus of the virtiolic accusations, is a likely suspect.

Clouzot closely examines the ways that the flurry of mysterious letters arouses guilt and paranoia within the villagers, who seem to be motivated by fear and shame. The director's renowned mordant humor is on full display in a film that combines noir stylings with characters written at full soap-opera pitch. Check out the gimpy but incredibly sexy hypochondriac Denise (Ginette Leclerc), who does everything but hump Germain's leg when she lures him to her bedside to diagnose an alleged illness, or the old doctor on his way to mass who's asked whether he's religious. "I'm cautious," he responds. "When in doubt, I take out insurance. It's cheap enough."

Clouzot is also a showman on the order of Hitchcock: the sequences depicting the profane appearance of new letters in sacred places -- during a church service and amidst a funeral procession -- are staggeringly well staged and photographed. There are single images in Le Corbeau that are freighted with a more accurate sense of malevolence and dread than in, say, the Lord of the Rings movies, for all their bluster about good and evil (and their considerably high level of craft). Among contemporary films, I'd say Se7en has a similarly permeating sense of twisted moral righteousness. It all flags a little toward the end, when the proceedings hew too closely to whodunit expectations, but it's still splendidly entertaining and disquieting.

Cultural distance and well developed senses of cynicism probably help contemporary audiences easily relate to this stuff, which was considered outright scandalous by many of Clouzot's compatriots. The film was made in Nazi-occupied France, and that it was bankrolled by German distributor Continental only amplified arguments that Clouzot had committed cultural treason, making a piece of pro-Nazi propaganda that depicted the everyday Frenchman as a petty, duplicitous and malicious sort. After the war, Clouzot wound up getting banned from the French film industry - fortunately, he was reinstated a few years later, when he made the terrific Quai des Orfèvres, which actually evinces some degree of affection for its characters, haplessly duplicitous as they may be. He went on, of course, to direct Wages of Fear and Diabolique, ambitious suspense films whose impact would be felt worldwide. They also demonstrated that his dim view of human behavior was decidedly independent of Nazi influence.

France, the "present" (1943). A medium-sized town in the rural Seine-et-Oise region of northern France is plagued by a series of poison-pen letters signed "Le corbeau" ('the crow' or perhaps 'the raven'). Claiming to possess l'oeil Americain (i.e. an "all seeing eye"), the anonymous writer repeatedly attacks the reputation of the town's doctor Germain (Pierre Fresnay), accusing him of carrying out illegal abortions and dalliances with various married women. But the cynical/stoical Germain is far from being the only target of such vicious defamations. The finger of suspicion points to almost every citizen, until Germain realises he must reveal his own tragic secret and expose the true culprit before the community tears itself apart...

Far from endowing us with l'oeil Americain (a telling choice of argot for a 'wartime' picture), Clouzot ensures that we come to question and/or doubt everything shown us by Nicolas Hayer's prowling camera. Or, even more importantly, not shown: as in the film's most famous and virtuoso sequence, in which the chief suspect, corvine-featured nurse Marie Corbin (Helena Manson) is pursued through the dusty streets by a noisy, tumultuous mob who are deafeningly heard but (a touch of genius, this) are never actually seen. Less inspired is the fact that Corbin doesn't appear after this scene. Manson delivers an outstanding, compellingly ambiguous performance as one of the more vivid characters in a large ensemble where it isn't always easy to work out who's who in relation to whom.

Ferociously attacked by both right and left on its first release, the tense, claustrophobic, ever-so-slightly melodramatic Le corbeau is now generally regarded as a classic parable of life in Vichy France under German occupation - a Gallic counterpart of contemporary, masterful British calls-to-arms such as Cavalcanti's Went the Day Well (1942) and Powell/Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944).

But while the situation in the nameless town is clearly informed by events of the day - and the hunt for le corbeau foreshadows the post-war search for les collabos - there are no actual references to the war, the Germans, or the Vichy government. And as the opening title inform us, this could be happening ici ou ailleurs ("here or anywhere else.") Clouzot's "all seeing eye" ranges wide: his subject is the hypocrisy and friction inherent in any human community, with only the colours, details, vocabulary and clothes changing according to the fashions of the day.

Arthur Miller often stated that, while The Crucible was written in response to the McCarthy witch-hunts, his play isn't just about Salem or McCarthyism. And Le corbeau likewise would make a terrific double bill with Dreyer's Day of Wrath - a 1943 double-bill in which the Clouzot should be played second, as it does feature rather more misanthropy-leavening humour than the austere Danish gloomfest (one or two moments of municipal chaos even have something of a Preston Sturges air), and it does conclude on a note which could be construed as relatively optimistic, with the Crow unmasked and punished in the most severe fashion by an implacable, razor-wielding Nemesis.

But was justice actually done, and seen to be done? Clouzot and his co-writer Louis Chavance (who came up with the nifty scenario) don't quite tie up every loose end with their frenetic climax in which the Crow seeks to shift the blame to supposedly innocent parties. We end up as confused as the hapless Germain - there seem to have been several different writers or various degrees of culpability, and it's entirely possible that the real Crow has flown away scot-free.

by Alan Williams Criterion esssay

Clouzot's Cruel Crow: Le Corbeau Eric Gans from P.O.V.

Bright Lights Film Journal Roderick Heath

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016

DVD Times Mark Boydell

Electric Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Movie Vault [Mel Valentin]

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks

DVD Verdict -Criterion Collection Dan Mancini

HorrorView.Com Suspiriorum

QUAI DES ORFÈVRES

France (106 mi) 1947

The Village Voice [Elliott Stein]

It's unfortunate that The Wages of Fear is virtually the only Clouzot film that anyone remembers, since his real background lies in a much more traditional French thriller vein, of which Quai des Orfèvres is a fine example. The plot is suitably marginal: a hard-times couple (Blier, Delair) whose marriage is crumbling find themselves implicated in a murder. Clouzot doesn't waste a moment over the rampant implausibilities, but devotes all his energies to a romantically bleak evocation of the low-life settings: run-down music-halls, squalid apartments and gloomy police stations, peopled with lonely hookers, lesbians and pornographers. Jouvet's Maigret-esque cop gets all the best lines, and gives the film its human, tragic focus.

After The Wages of Fear (1953) and Diabolique (1955), Henri-Georges Clouzot became pigeonholed as the French Hitchcock. Somewhat lost in the shuffle has been his richer, more idiosyncratic Quai des Orfèvres (1947), back in town in a restored print with new, unexpurgated subtitles. Quai des Orfèvres (the Paris equivalent of "Scotland Yard") concerns coquettish chanteuse Jenny (Suzy Delair, the director's real-life partner and muse for many years) and her jealous pianist husband (Bernard Blier), who become involved in a murder. The thriller plot is just the pretext for an atmospheric portrait of post-war Paris: little old streets, smoke-filled music halls, the circus, sordid apartments, and depressing police stations peopled with loquacious characters. Clouzot was working for the first time with Armand Thirard, who became his favorite cinematographer; the visual style has an expressionistic undertow, rich in shadowy chiaroscuro compositions.

While Delair is lively and appealing, Charles Dullin is magnificently creepy as the murder victim, a lecherous hunchback who had agreed to further her singing career, at a price. In a role that would have been unthinkable in an American film of this period, the striking Simone Renant plays photographer Dora, Jenny's best friend, who's in love with her but suffers in silence. The most complex character, as embodied by Paris stage star Louis Jouvet, is Antoine: a sardonic Maigret-like police inspector who'd like to devote himself to the care of the mulatto son he brought back from the colonies. Clouzot's view of things may be the most jaundiced in all French cinema, but here, he treats Jouvet's cop with rare warmth. Toward the end of the film, there's a lovely scene in which Antoine, realizing why Dora has risked so much for Jenny, remarks: "You and I are two of a kind—we'll never get lucky with women."

This 1947 drama from Les Diaboliques director Henri-Georges Clouzot is a splendid find - part policier and part marital comedy, replete with that winking, twisting sexuality that the French have always done so well.

Among the dramatis personae are Maurice, a middle-aged songwriter who lives in perpetual dread that he's about to be cuckolded by his lovely and voluptuous wife, stage name Jenny Lamour, who shakes her tra-la-la to the delight of theater patrons and dirty old men alike. A dirty old man is, in fact, involved, as well as a lovesick photographer named Dora, who carries her own torch for Jenny. Halfway through, a policeman (the great Louis Jouvet) shows up to investigate a murder that Maurice, Jenny and Dora have, wittingly and/or unwittingly, gotten themselves mixed up in.

The ensuing investigation takes place mostly in conversation, with the hapless Maurice trying to extricate himself from underneath a heap of circumstantial evidence and the cunning interrogator Antoine parsing every word he says carefully in an effort to implicate him. But more striking than the specifics of the thriller plotline is the atmosphere of the piece, with Paris making a lovely backdrop, photographed in wonderful, glowing tones with a chiaroscuro lighting scheme doubtless informed by American film noir. The restored print that showed earlier this year at Film Forum is marvelous, yielding up scalding whites and thick blacks that hint more at the passions involved - and the threat posed to the working man by the police - than to the surprisingly benign character motivations.

In keeping with Clouzot's body of work, the subtext has to do with the lot of the working class. Jenny nearly prostitutes herself in a bid to get a film role, and the police are seen circling, like vultures, over the heads of those without the money to buy their way out of trouble. The twist is that, despite the hard-boiled title (which refers to the address of Parisian police headquarters) and Clouzot's reputation as an unsparing observer of human vices, Quai des Orfèvres is nowhere near as noir as you might expect. In one playful shot, the tension underscoring an argument between Margeurite and Maurice is ratcheted up by the furious see-sawing of a violin on the soundtrack - at least until you notice the violinist himself advancing on the couple from the band rehearsing behind them.

It's the humor alongside the dread - the musical numbers and the sexual tease, including a whiff of lesbianism - that makes Quai des Orfèvres a highly entertaining exercise in pulp cinema. More, it boasts splendid performances and a full-throated expressionistic style. And, against the odds, it has that rarest of all noir attributes - a happy ending.

Camera Eye Evan Pulgino

It is said that Alfred Hitchcock considered French director Henri-Georges Clouzot as his main rival for the title “Master of Suspense.” Clouzot fought and beat out Hitchcock for the rights to make a film version of Pierre Boulieau and Thomas Narcejac’s crime novel Les Diaboliques (Hitchcock eventually got a Boulieau/Narcejac story with Vertigo).

Like Hitchcock, Clouzot is a master at taking ordinary people and turning them into murderers through circumstance. Quai des Orfèvres is very Hitchcock-esque murder story that hinges on big indiscretions and small details.

Jenny Lamour (Suzy Delair) is a cabaret singer with dreams of grandeur. Her musical accompanist Maurice Martineau (Bernard Blier), also her husband, is a mild-mannered but jealous man who watches over Jenny like a hawk. The couple live above Dora (Simone Renant), a childhood friend of Maurice who is a professional photographer. While getting publicity photographs taken at Dora’s Jenny meets Brignon a powerful womanizer who can offer her a better gig.

Dora tells Maurice that Jenny has fallen under the clutches of Brignon. An insanely jealous Maurice decides to kill both Brignon and Jenny. He plots out every minute detail to make sure that he has an alibi and the trail of blood does not lead back to him. When he arrives at Brignon’s mansion, hoping to catch the old man and Jenny in the act, he finds that Brignon has already been murdered.

Meanwhile Jenny has returned home. She confides to Dora that Brignon made a pass at her and in self-defense she struck him and killed him. Dora pledges to keep Jenny’s secret, even when Maurice returns home and tells her about his failed plan. Dora even goes to Brignon’s mansion to clean away Jenny’s prints and retrieve her misplaced fur coat.

An existentially exhausted police detective (Louis Jouvet) works the case. It turns out the Maurice’s alibi is sloppy and the detective begins to suspect that he is the murderer to the horror of the now guilt-stricken Jenny.

Clouzot’s complex, entangling plot is perfectly constructed and has the ability to turn on a dime, taking its passengers down unexpected paths. The film remains dark and merciless (but not mirthless) until the incongruous ending. Quai des Orfèvres‘ story is a guided tour of Paris’ seamy post-WWII underbelly.

The film is extremely full with lots of hidden subtext. The two richest characters are two minor ones: the detective and Dora. Louis Jouvet is likable and funny as a dour man. He plays the lonely inspector/single father with a hangdog world-weariness and emotionally disconnected persistence as he interviews patrons and employed of the Parisian cabaret scene. Clouzot all but comes out and says that Dora is a lesbian and is harboring an unrequited love affair with Jenny. When the repulsive Brignon tries to pick up Jenny, Dora behaves as if she is the wronged party.

Much like Hitchcock films, Quai des Orfèvres is also about the fear of the power of the police. In spite of the likability of the detective, the film is really an indictment on the actions of the police. The prison scenes at the end of the film feel like those in one of Hitchcock’s darkest films, The Wrong Man.

Quai des Orfèvres is a beautifully shot, superbly performed and textually rich film noir. It is a complex film that demands multiple viewings and a masterpiece from one of France’s best crime filmmakers.

by Luc Sante Criterion essay

Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Nigam Nuggehalli

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016

Electric Sheep Magazine Peter Momtchiloff

eFilmCritic.com (Elaine Perrone)

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

MANON

France (100 mi) 1949

KQEK.com Film Review [Mark R. Hasan]

Director Clouzot's noirish tale of love and betrayal set amid the turmoil of the Second World War. Manon Lescaut (Aubry) is accused of collaborating with the Nazis and is rescued by Desgrieux (Auclair), an activist who takes her to Paris. Once there, the relationship quickly disintegrates as they sink into a desperate circle of prostitution and profiteering. Manon's sexuality is at the heart of the story - her only crime being to sleep with the Nazi soldiers, rather than collaborate with them. A pointed and powerful metaphor for the futility of war and the damage it does to the human spirit - and one of Clouzot's finest films.

Abbé Prévost's famous novel, Manon Lescaut (volume 7 in the Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité / Memoirs and Adventures of a Man of Quality series) has been adapted many times in different mediums since its publication in 1731. Initially banned in France, the book's themes of lust, obsession, denigration, and sexual freedom were a particularly hot combination, and while it's unsurprising that it was filmed by French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, one can imagine how the book's most provocative elements would've been toned down, inferred, or deleted to suite Hollywood's tightly corseted Production Code, should a studio have dared to produced a film version.

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The film's finale would've appealed American censors, however, since Clouzot and Jean Ferry's script balanced the increasingly naughty & morally destructive behaviour with an ending that pretty much foreshadows the gravel pit journey Yves Montand takes in order to deliver a lethal cargo of nitro glycerin in Clouzot's 1953 thriller, Le Salaire de la peur / Wages of Fear (1953). Hallucinatory, tortuous, and ultimately dooming, it's a finale that also seems to have influenced Sorcerer, William Friedkin 1977 remake of Wages, with driver Roy Scheider being taunted by voices as he passes by weirdly surreal ‘mineral trees,' much in the way spiny desert palms tease and break down Manon's lover before his collapse in the desert.

What's most intriguing about Manon, however, is Clouzot's decision to completely update, transfer, and adapt the basic story and characters to wartime France and the couple's flight to Palestine in place of the novel's French and concluding Louisiana settings.

Just as intriguing are the textural politics that start the film: during a midnight rendezvous, a small shipping freighter smuggles aboard Jews fleeing the Nazis for a trip to Palestine . A crewman discovers two lovers hiding behind a baled cargo, and during the captain's interrogation, their story of love and hatred unfolds in a flashback structure, establishing their masochistic relationship as a manipulative town sexpot rescued by a malleable resistance fighter who believes her claims of sublime virtue, and slowly adapts to her demands of fine clothes and multiple partners, even when she works in a brothel when Leon can no longer afford the scandalously lavish lifestyle they've established in postwar France.

The brothel scene is also where Leon ultimately loses his will to the peroxide monster, and any hope of converting her to a faithful creature with some level of compassion. Leon 's illegal smuggling has sustained their lifestyle, but she moves on, and jealousy and betrayal result in a murder that forces the couple to ultimately flee the police and head for Palestine , camouflaged among Jewish refugees.

Arriving at the edge of the desert, the group must trek through deadly terrain, only to be slaughtered by Arabs. In the novel, Leon (the Chevalier Des Grieux ) mistakenly believes he killed Manon's suitor, and the couple flee into the bayou, where Manon dies from exposure to extreme elements, and Leon heads back to France and becomes a priest, but Clouzot leaves no hope for his couple, and perhaps goes for a finale that logically punctuates a tale of masochistic, obsessive love: after Manon dies from a single gunshot wound, Leon carries her by the legs through the desert, with her body draped over his backside, facing the camera. (Clouzot even allows a bit of nudity to slip through Manon's torn frock in shots that would've been a major no-no in Hollywood .) After burying Manon up to her face, Leon offers a final kiss, and curls over her body, and offers himself to the lethal desert elements.

[End Spoilers]

As an adaptation, it's a fascinatingly topical effort for 1949; in Hollywood, it was the film noir genre where ruder conflicts happened, raw sexuality was inferred through dark lighting and form-fitting costumes and bare-chested men, and all perpetrators of elicit acts had to end up incarcerated or die for their shameful misconduct (the latter certainly occurring in Manon ).

Dramas such as the Best Years of Our Lives (1946) may have chronicled the traumas of returning soldiers, but in Manon we see some of those nightmarish images: bloodied bodies being carried through the ruined French towns, and women accused of co-mingling with occupying Nazis being dragged through the streets with their heads shaved, wearing sullied undergarments – the latter part of a central plot point in Malena (2000).

Alongside France, other European countries such as East Germany and Poland acknowledged dispossessed and persecuted Jews in social dramas like Die Mörder sind unter uns / The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) and Ulica Graniczna / Border Street (1949), respectively, while Hollywood seemed to feel Jews could only exist on film as local folk being ostracized by smiling, ignorant gentiles in rare social dramas like Gentleman's Agreement (1947).

In Manon, the Jewish refugees speak a mix of French, German and Yiddish, whereas Yiddish was seemingly isolated to specific films produced by independent filmmakers for specialty audiences, and the plight of specifically Jewish refugees didn't seem to reach screens until the late fifties and sixties, when the Diary of Anne Frank (1949), Morituri (1965), and Exodus (1960) made persecution a central element.

Clouzot's film, however, is flawed mostly because the lead couple are generally dislikeable creatures who deserve the final fates. Their meeting/teasing/romancing/declaration of love happens within minutes and is completely improbable, and the brothel scene has Leon tease, spit, and strangle Manon before an eruption of passion flips a murderous rage into immediate surrender and lovemaking. Collectively, they're straight movie conventions, but these flaws are also heightened forms of melodrama, and are just plain ridiculous.

The film's sets and locations are first-rate, and Armand Thirard's black & white cinematography is truly gorgeous – masterful compositions enhanced by fine dramatic editing, and melodic but straightforward orchestral score from Paul Misraki (a prolific and underrated composer who would later collaborate with Thirard in Roger Vadim's sumptuous CinemaScope dish, Et Dieu... créa la femme / And God Created Woman in 1956).

After making her debut in Manon , the baby-faced Cécile Aubry was cast as Tyrone Power's waifish love interest in The Black Rose (1950), before she returned to France and appeared in a role beautifully suited to her energetic and mischievous persona and acting style, Barbe-Bleue / Bluebeard (1951).

Currently unavailable in a Region 1 DVD, this is another intriguing Clouzot work that begs for a definitive Criterion release.

All Movie Guide [Richard Gilliam]

THE WAGES OF FEAR (Le Salaire de la Peur) B+ 92

France Italy (131 mi) 1953 France (156 mi) Director’s Cut (148 mi)

In the manner of GREED (1924) or THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), this is a film that pits men against their most primal instincts, themselves, pitiless victims who are tragically unable to control their baser instincts, set against a larger canvas of enveloping darkness that is all but waiting to envelop them—capitalism. Like an entryway to Hell, the film opens in a godforsaken, backwater town in the middle of nowhere, supposedly somewhere in South America, a place one could legitimately call the end of the road, filled with penniless, out-of-work men, mostly European exiles with expired or non-existing visa’s lining the streets desperate for money and a ticket out of there, instead sitting on their hands in a kind of involuntary purgatory of the down and out, a way station where there’s no telling how long they’ve been stuck there like prisoners. Set in two parts, where the initial scenes have the claustrophobic feel of men continually getting on each other’s nerves, a hopeless and monotonous life where day after day nothing ever changes, where perhaps the only consolation is the pretty barmaid, played of course, by the director’s wife Véra Clouzot (actually born in Brazil), the object of every man’s desires, yet continually mistreated by the sleazy bar owner who treats her like property and Mario (Yves Montand), who she actually cares for. When a white-suited big shot from Paris arrives into town, Mr. Jo (Charles Varnel, penniless like the rest of them), milking it for all it’s worth, as yet to be exposed as a fraud, he strikes up a friendship with Mario, as they are both French con men at heart.

What transpires next is the kicker, as a seedy representative from an American oil company arrives with armed guards and is looking to hire experienced truck drivers for a delicate mission hauling 200 gallons of highly explosive nitroglycerin over 300 miles of rocky, mountainous terrain. It seems a handful of men have already died and nearly a dozen more injured in a massive oil rig fire, a little known fact the company wants kept secret to avoid a public relations disaster. More to the point, a.) the oil company has trucks but no shock absorbers or safety equipment, b.) nitroglycerin is highly unstable and explodes if shaken or spilled, but c.) is needed to put out the oil rig fire, as a carefully induced explosion can suck the oxygen out of the fire. Oh, and the company is willing to pay $2000 to any man who can deliver the goods without getting blown to bits. Despite being a suicidal mission, every man in town lines up for the job and are angry about being turned away. The company hires four drivers for two trucks, a Corsican (Yves Montand), a Parisian (Charles Vanel), a German (Peter Van Eyck) and an Italian (Folco Lolli), where those turned away are angry, knowing this is their only ticket out of town, where one of the rejected drivers commits suicide while another may be murdered so that the Parisian can take his place. From the outset, it’s a dirty business where you have to resort to any means just to have a chance to get yourself killed, and with luck, survive. The trucks pull out in the dead of night, where what follows is a highly charged suspense thriller where the director delights in placing unforeseen obstacles in their path, upping the ante in exposing just what men are willing to do for the money.

Turning into a truck lover’s dream, where we follow trucks and nothing but trucks for the last hour and a half, where at any moment catastrophe awaits, this also becomes a battle of nerves and wits that plays out in the minds of the drivers. Sitting in the self-enclosed driver’s seat, the conversation resembles an existentialist play like Sartre’s No Exit, as you can’t predict what’s in the twisted minds of these desperados, where both sets of drivers maniacally push the other to the limit, introducing daredevil tactics that only tighten the screws of the already unbearable tension, as they continually tempt death throughout the journey. Adapted by Clouzot and Jérôme Géronimi from the novel by Georges Arnaud, this is a nailbiter of a movie, unusual for the adventure format as mostly nothing happens, but the anticipation cleverly instilled in the audience’s minds is searingly intense. The bravado of the men comes into play, where Montand turns into a kind of reckless hotshot as his partner Vanel wilts under pressure, visualizing every rock and crevice along the road, while the other pair barely know one another at the outset and are highly suspicious, refusing to be undermined by the other’s lack of will or sheer incompetancy, but become fast friends, brought closer together by sharing the danger and the difficulty, where they eventually learn to respect each another. Not so Montand and Varnel, where they are continually at odds with one another. Overwhelmingly bleak and exhausting, the fatalistic atmosphere of doom is everpresent, stuck in one of the more barren landscapes ever devised for a film, occasionally broken up by moments of levity, where a nice touch thrown into the mix is Clouzot’s incessant use of cigarettes, as these guys continually light up in front of such volatile explosives, much like casually smoking around a gas pump, where any spark could set off a massive explosion. And in this artificially devised waiting game, Clouzot does not disappoint.

Joshua Klein from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

A withering depiction of greed and corrupting influence of capitalism disguised as an adventure film, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear justifiably stands as possibly the most tension-filled movie ever made. Set in South America, two teams compete to complete a relatively straightforward task: transport a truckload of nitroglycerin along a three-hundred mile mountain pass to the site of an oil refinery fire so that the oil company can then blow the pipeline and put out the blaze. The catch? Notoriously unstable and sensitive, the nitro cargo will blow the drivers to bits if they’re not exceedingly careful.

With sadistic invention Clouzot throws as many obstacles in the way of the two trucks as they race (at a snail’s pace) through the bumpy mountain pass. Hairpin turns and rickety bridges would pose their own innate problems were the trucks not primed to blow, and each pothole or falling rock brings with it the possibility of instant doom. It isn’t the promise of glory that sets each pair of drivers on such a dangerous task, either, but the promise of cash, and as the film proceeds you begin to wonder how far they will go to get their hands on the money.

Vitally, Clouzot precedes the death-defying action with a long segment—set in the slum of a South American crossroads where wanderers and vagabonds end up after they have nowhere else to go, and where we learn that the rogues willing to risk their lives for money are in many ways almost not worth knowing. Their suicidal actions are driven by selfishness and desperation, traits to be exploited by the opportunistic corporation that cynically holds out the carrot on the stick for these de facto mules. Indeed, full of distrust and dislike, the motley crew of mercenaries act with a primal, feral quality, posing as much of a threat to one another as the truckloads of explosives do to them all. It’s a lose-lose situation, as the finish line promises financial reward at the cost of spiritual ruin.

Le Salaire de la Peur is among the most suspenseful films of the 1950s, notable for slowly building character development and atmosphere before its dramatic climax. In its original 148-minute version, the story lags in spots as director Henri-Georges Clouzot indulges some anti-United States propaganda. Not surprisingly, the film was re-edited for release in the U.S., and many critics preferred the faster pacing and more focused narrative. International acclaim came quickly, including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Yves Montand gives one of his best performances, though current-day audiences may find his character's chauvinism and condescension toward women unappealing. The female lead is strikingly played by Véra Clouzot, the director's wife. She had only a brief film career but appeared in two classics, this film and Les Diaboliques, which was also directed by her husband.

Buried at the time of William Friedkin's shabby remake (Sorcerer) but now blessedly with us again, this confirms the view of Clouzot as one of the sourest of modern film-makers. A slow first hour establishes a world of sweating, poor expatriates hanging out in the feverish bars in French colonial Latin America, which inevitably brings to mind such far-flung adventurer films as Only Angels Have Wings. But Hawks' classic depends upon the fraternal bonds forged among his existential heroes by flying in the face of death. When Clouzot's foursome decide to drive a load of nitro-glycerine through the jungle in order to raise some cash, the motive is greed and the results are as black a vision of human infidelity as any since Othello. The cliff-edge tension wracks the nerves, of course, but never obscures the fact that men in contest with each other will crack up and die; one truck blows away without reason; the other only arrives by running over its co-driver, in an oil-pool that looks like the pit of hell. A reeking bandana movie, with all the expected thrills, but a vision of men as scurrying insects with no redeeming features.

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] : "most searingly nihilistic of all thrillers"

Henri-Georges Clouzot takes on Hawks and Huston, his first shot puts man on the ground with cockroach and vulture for the benefit of Peckinpah. The South American cactus-town is the parched void in which men exercise their petty cruelty on dogs and each other, "there’s so little to entertain us." Third World misery is catnip to American imperialism ("If there’s oil around, they’re not far behind"), Rita Hayworth appears as part of the mural in a sordid cantina, the film’s equivalent of the movie poster in Bicycle Thieves. When a refinery explodes, the Southern Oil Company seeks men desperate enough to drive the nitroglycerin to the burning well; pub king Yves Montand, Parisian gangster Charles Vanel, weak-lunged Italian worker Folco Lulli, and Teutonic fugitive Peter Van Eyck take on the suicidal mission for a chance to escape. The trucks race over crater-cracked paths, steer atop rotting trestles, and detonate rocky roadblocks, Vanel’s bulldog façade cracks into fear and vulnerability just as Montand’s Bogartian pose reveals sadistic sides. "Can’t you see he’s just a walking corpse?" "You think we’re not?" When contrabandists become businessmen and human life is blown away as simply as the tobacco in a half-rolled cigarillo, heroism and grace are notions that wither in the heat -- the pigtailed saloon gal (Vera Clouzot) prays under a tree for divine mercy and finds instead a body dangling above her shrine. The pipe-puffing skull on a "danger" sign is a Clouzot gag, the thick morass of oil that swamps trucks and mangles limbs brilliantly visualizes the bottomless blackness that oozes out of his world. And yet again there’s that link to Renoir, grudging and unmistakable, as the multilingual prison and compassion between tramps from Grand Illusion materialize in the truck seat with Vanel and Montand (one expires with "rien" on his lips, the other staggers toward the inferno). The existential punchline mocks the idea of a happy ending -- when Clouzot’s characters dance on the edge of the precipice, they fall in. Cinematography by Armand Thirard. With William Tubbs, Dario Moreno, Jo Dest, and Antonio Centa. In black and white.

Four European desperados – a Corsican (Yves Montand), a Parisian (Charles Vanel), a German (Peter Van Eyck) and an Italian (Folco Lolli) – must drive two truckloads of gelignite across 300 miles of perilous South American terrain. The explosives are intended to blow up a remote, blazing oil well, but the men are more bothered about their $2,000 wages, and the simple matter of staying alive…

First-time viewers aware of the film’s exalted reputation may wonder what all the fuss is about during the soporific first half-hour or so. Clouzot takes forever to sketch in the main characters and the middle-of-nowhere backwater town where they start their journey - his approach during this section is off-puttingly old-fashioned, not helped by some broad overplaying from the multi-lingual performers, including his own wife Vera as a barmaid who takes Montand’s eye.

But once the drivers set off on their expedition the film changes gear altogether. Wider philosophical, existential elements of the film come into focus, lifting proceedings a notch above the era’s gritty trucking dramas such as Hell Drivers. Because of their hyper-volatile load, Montand and company must drive slowly and carefully: the horror of their initial situation had been one of inertia and stasis, but the open road offers only the most agonisingly measured form of ‘escape.’ Clouzot presents the various obstacles that block the way with a ferocious attention to pragmatic, mechanical detail: the last hour or so is basically a virtuouso series of these intense set-pieces, with death and disaster always just a heartbeat away.

Clouzot’s most masterful coup comes when disaster does strike: one of the trucks explodes, but the event is never shown, despite our having sweated and strained with the two drivers through all sorts of mishaps and scrapes. It’s hard to imagine a more chilling illustration of the sheer arbitrariness of life and death – we’ve stumbled into a perverse, fickle universe where expendable individuals have zero control over their destinies. It’s no accident that the very first shot of the movie shows insects scrabbling in the dust, struggling to escape the strings children have tied to their legs and bodies – living creatures of all kinds get a pretty rough ride in this movie.

There’s no denying Clouzot’s vision can be overwhelmingly bleak – viewers who can’t deal with misanthropic attitudes should steer clear of his whole directorial output. But there’s no denying the skill and extremity with which he translates these attitudes onto celluloid, and, while none of the main characters is especially sympathetic, by the end you’ll feel as though you’ve been through the mill with them yourself. It’s a long, straight road that leads all the way to hell: the inferno of the oil-well that sends billowing flames into the dark sky, turning night to day. Stunned, exhausted collapse is the only sensible reaction.

It’s a chilling climax, but it isn’t quite the end – there’s an epilogue of deceptive jauntiness, which then suddenly veers into yet more arbitrary tragedy. While this fits in with the generally downbeat, fatalistic tone, the whole sequence feels wrong, studio-imposed, somehow not Clouzot’s. It’s too literal, too over-emphatic, especially the absurdly heavy-handed final shot. A truly great movie wouldn’t need to go for such cheap effects – but Wages of Fear remains, nevertheless, the most searingly nihilistic of all thrillers.

filmcritic.com [Chris Barsanti] also seen here: Filmcritic.com

“The best thriller ever made” is perhaps too much praise for the movie, while “best examination of the human condition” is too faint to be heard. Nevertheless, one can safely say that Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear is to film of the nail-biter variety what Raymond Chandler is to detective fiction: pretty damn essential. For pure thriller mechanics, it’s a textbook in step-by-step screw-tightening, while those looking for something of more substance will find themselves swimming in the stuff.

The South American village of Las Piedras is located just past the edge of nowhere, baking in the sun and providing just the correctly seedy backdrop for a number of Europeans to wallow in their own misery, abusing the locals, and lazing about the saloon, to the pained chagrin of its hapless owner. There’s no work, the road doesn’t go anywhere, and a plane ticket out it too expensive. It’s the kind of place where dead-enders show up after getting kicked out of the Last Chance Saloon, a hole to crawl in to die. The most dashing of the dead-enders is Frenchman Mario (Yves Montand), a dashing and immoral louse who sponges off his hardworking roommate, acts abusively towards his erstwhile girlfriend, the barmaid Linda (played with va-va-voom naïveté by the director’s wife Vera Clouzot) and looks cooler than Humphrey Bogart through all of it.

Into this hotbed of atmospheric slack drops Jo (Charles Vanel), a former smuggler who had to light out fast from another town and washes up in Las Piedras. Sensing a kindred Gallic scoundrel in Mario, the two pair, desultorily look for the scam that will get them out of town. Where director/writer Clouzot starts really putting the screws to his characters is by providing them that break, but making it something that nobody without a death wish would ever consider. Southern Oil Company, an American-run concern (one character bleakly notes that wherever oil is, the Americans aren’t far behind), has had a deadly accident at one of their nearby fields, which is still burning and thus unusable. The solution? Hire four men to drive two trucks full of nitroglycerine 300 miles to that field, where it will be used to stop the fire. These men would have to be suicidal, of course, as the road is rough and the nitro unstable enough that your average pothole could set it off. The payload packs enough wallop that the trucks are supposed to drive a half-hour apart, so that if one goes it doesn’t take out the other. Calling the job a suicide run doesn’t quite cut it.

Mario and Jo jump at the chance, while the other truck is manned by Mario’s salt-of-the-earth roommate Luigi (Folco Lulli) and Bimba (Peter van Eyck), a walking skeleton of a fatalist. The drive itself an eye-clawing, gut-twisting exercise in tension. The trucks grind along at a painfully slow pace when the roads are good, and even slower when not. There’s a stretch where the road is so rutted that the only way to not jostle the nitro is to floor it and fly over the ruts, and another spot where the only way around a corner is to back the trucks onto a rickety wood platform built over a deep ravine. Then it starts to get really hairy. As Jo puts it, “I’ve died 50 times since last night.” Not surprisingly, it’s all a litmus test for what kind of men these four are, a sort of reverse Treasure of the Sierra Madre (a glossier piece of work which this film nevertheless bears some relation to). The fuse is lit but the explosion waits, and waits, and even when it comes it hasn’t really come, because there’s something even worse just around the corner.

Clouzot has a view of mankind’s time on the planet that could charitably be described as Hobbesian – solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short – but given extra gloom by some triple-espresso jolts of mid-century existential despair and sheer misanthropy. It all paints a bleak enough picture that that other cuddly filmmaker Sam Peckinpah was inspired to lift Clouzot’s opening shot (a child torturing cockroaches) to kick off his comparably heartwarming The Wild Bunch. While Clouzot’s film is suffused with rage at the evil things being done to the world (the oil company’s rape of the countryside) and those done by mankind to each other, it’s an impotent sort of rage, made hopeless by cold reality. Mario talks with Jo about how nice Luigi is to him, doing all the cooking and everything, only to gratuitously add – in the director’s voice, one’s tempted to think – “chump.” A woman prays to the Virgin Mary only to see behind the statue a corpse hanging from a tree; one of the Europeans who’d given up trying to get out of Las Piedras. There’s a critique of capitalism to be seen somewhere within the film’s view of rapacious corporations and opportunistic scavengers, but also a human critique as well. Nobody and nothing gets off easy here. After all, what is one to do with men driving bombs-on-wheels over the worst roads in the world; the trucks come with signs that say, “No smoking within 50 feet,” but these guys puff away in the cab.

The Wages of Fear is a frantic, vicious, existentialist howl that still manages to laugh; it goes grinning into the void.

The Criterion Collection package of the film is incomparable. The first disc has the restored high-def transfer of the film, which looks about as sharp as it probably did on screens back in 1953. The second has a swell package of goodies, including new video interviews with Yves Montand and the film’s assistant director, as well as a couple of documentaries (one on Clouzot, the other on cuts made for the film’s 1955 U.S. release).

Criterion Collection Film Essay [Dennis Lehane] The Wages of Fear, No Exit, October 24, 2005

Criterion Collection Film Essay [Danny Peary] The Wages of Fear, December 8, 1991

Criterion Collection Film Essay [Michael Koresky] September 23, 2009

The Wages of Fear (1953) - The Criterion Collection

Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - Wages of Fear Michael Brooke from DVD Times

Cinelogue [Mark Mesaros]

No Ripcord [Dan Schneider]

Wages of Fear (1952) - Articles - TCM.com - Turner Classic Movies Pablo Kjolseth

KQEK.com [Mark R. Hasan] extensive essay

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016

Slant Magazine [Budd Wilkins]

Electric Sheep Magazine Paul Huckerby

culturevulture.net Bob Wake

The Onion A.V. Club [Mike D'Angelo]

Soft Censorship [THE WAGES OF FEAR and MEMOIRS OF AN ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, also seen here: Jonathan Rosenbaum

DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson] Criterion Collection, also seen here: Wages of Fear - Turner Classic Movies

The Film Journal [Tim Applegate] comparing THE WAGES OF FEAR to the William Friedkin’s remake, SORCERER (1977)

Old School Reviews [John Nesbit] also seen here: CultureCartel.com - Henri-Georges Clouzot - 1953 - Salaire de la ...

Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second Adam Batty

digitallyOBSESSED! [Mark Zimmer] Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Mike Pinsky] Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Ian Jane] Criterion Collection

Q Network Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict (Blu-Ray) [Clark Douglas] Criterion Collection

The Spinning Image [Steve Langton]

The Cinema Pedant Patrick

That Cow [Andrew Bradford]

Mark R. Leeper

Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]

Corndog Chats [Adam Kuhn]

Jersey Film Society - review

Austin Chronicle [Kathleen Maher]

Baltimore City Paper: The Wages of Fear | Movie Review Lee Gardner

DVDBeaver.com Blu-ray Review [Gary W. Tooze]

New York Times (registration req'd) Bosley Crowther

DIABOLIQUE (Les Diaboliques) B+ 91

France (116 mi) 1955

You can lead a corpse to water but you can’t make it sink. —Newsweek magazine review

Made immediately following Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur) (1953), both are suspenseful dramas that take a long time getting started, paying plenty of attention setting the scene, introducing the characters, and establishing the various conflicts between the characters. Actually this film is a throwback to earlier eras, where the stylistic use of shadows and darkness prevent the audience from seeing too much during suspenseful moments, where it’s often unclear what’s happening onscreen until it’s finally sprung upon you at the last moment. Reminiscent of Val Lewton productions and Jacques Tourneur’s CAT PEOPLE (1942), where the thrill of the picture is the director’s ability to maximize the power of suggestion through shadows and offscreen sound, also the swooning female leads of Cukor’s GASLIGHT (1944), Hitchcock’s own Suspicion (1941), or Polanski’s Rosemary's Baby (1968), where the director delights in tormenting his lead character, often indistinguishable whether it’s real or imagined. Adapting a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the writing team used by Hitchcock in VERTIGO (1958), where Clouzot barely beat Hitchcock in obtaining the rights for this film, supposedly by only a matter of hours, something that apparently irritated Hitchcock, where Psycho (1960) was his jealous attempt to outdo Clouzot, a contemporary of Hitchcock, actually known as the French Hitchcock, whose work was a rival to the Master of Suspense. DIABOLIQUE with its terrifyingly strange plot twists was a huge box office success, where both utilize famous bathroom scenes. Both directors were known for their meticulous preparation before shooting, where they knew how it was going to look, storyboarding all their scenes, where the film was largely finished before they ever stepped onto the set. Hitchcock was so confident of what he already captured on film that watching the daily shoots never interested him. Clouzot had a different approach to actors, as his wife Véra Clouzot was often his lead, but the intensity and borderline obsession with perfection in filmmaking is something they both share. Hitchcock relishes wit and humor in his sophisticated thrillers, while Clouzot’s movies are decidedly more bleak and downbeat, but both share a love for the dark and macabre, where ordinary people can be compelled by circumstances to commit despicable acts.

Set in a small, rundown, private boy’s school owned by Christina (Véra Clouzot), her husband and school headmaster Michel (Paul Meurisse) is abusive and bullying, the kind of mean-spirited and dominating villain that deserves his comeuppance, where Christina is often seen cowering in fear, where one of the other teachers, Nicole, Simone Signoret providing the real backbone, is often seen coming to her side. Certainly in the tradition of Suspicion, Christina has one of the weakest constitutions of any lead character in the movies, where it’s suggested she’s a former Catholic nun, continually sick and bedridden, complaining of a weak heart, but anyone with a relentlessly vile husband like Michel would have one hell of a migraine headache to deal with all the time. Apparently, through gossip heard by people working on the grounds, Nicole is also Michel’s mistress, opening the film sporting a black eye. Their affair seems to have gone cold, however, as the two women are often seen commiserating with one another, wondering what they can do about Michel. While the origin remains a mystery, by the time the audience finds out about it the two have already hatched a plan to do away with the poor bastard, drugging him before drowning him in a bathtub. Despite Christina’s continual second thoughts, forever beleaguered by every possible outcome, gone wrong, perhaps just wishing Nicole would go ahead and get it over with. But Nicole’s no fool, as she’s much more steady and level-headed than the ever flighty Christina. The two go back and forth, like arguing teenagers, but finally decide they have to do it over the school’s brief holiday. No one deserves it more, from the audience’s point of view, where the spectators become willing accomplices to the final grisly act, where it’s not so easy to lug around a dead body and then try to get rid of the evidence, as they do by dumping him in the school’s murky swimming pool which is already a cesspool of filth. All they can do is return to normal and let someone else discover the missing body, but of course nothing is that easy, as they eventually concoct a plan to have the pool drained but the body is mysteriously missing.

The two women have held it all together so far, but soon become unraveled by the inexplicable turn of events, driven to near madness by the ever changing circumstances that suggest it’s possible he’s not dead. One of the kids reports he’s seen him, and is punished dearly for this outburst, as once Michel’s been reported missing, there’s been no other sign of him. But strange clues start popping up that suggest he may be vowing revenge, but every one turns out empty, especially a missing body dropped in the Seine that matches his description. Christina’s interest in the dead body attracts the interest of a retired police inspector, Charles Vanel, a pestering, old-fashioned character who always seems to be snooping around, likeable and charming, overly polite and sweetly sympathetic, where his tireless pursuit of following every clue is the likely origin of Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo character, one of the more popular police detectives in American television (1971 – 2003). The two women are literally driven up a wall, where they unravel before each other as they simply can’t bear the suspense, feeling guilty about what they’ve done, driven to near confession, where each will implicate the other. Clouzot has a tendency to string along the characters for as long as possible, slowly enveloping them in a web of lies and deceit, where especially with Christina, she always seems on the edge of a mental breakdown, where the shadows surrounding her grow larger, consumed by her ever building guilt and paranoia. Clouzot goes to great lengths to surround her with less and less light, until eventually she’s literally fumbling around in the darkness, unable to distinguish between what’s real or imagined, growing dizzy from the ideas swimming around in her head. Simultaneously, Clouzot elevates the irritating use of sound, where creaky doors open, water is dripping, and the sounds of footsteps can be heard, all adding to a growing sense of panic in the air that creates a sense of hysteria. From the outset, that foul stagnant water in the pool is a symbol of lingering trouble, the kind that can’t be washed away, where long afterwards it will be hard to shake the effects of this movie, where like Hitchcock, Clouzot delights in terrorizing the audience.

Kim Newman from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

In a run-down, provincial public school, murderous passions seethe just below the surface. The put-upon, weak-hearted wife (Véra Clouzot) and mysteriously sensual girlfriend (Simone Signoret) of a sadistic headmaster (Paul Meurisse) murder him, dumping the corpse in a weeded-over swimming pool. When the pool is drained, the body is missing and the women start to lose their minds, especially when a pupil claims to have seen a ghost. Soon, the women too are seeing things, and something ghastly shows up in the bath.

A major international hit in 1954, Les Diaboliques has lost little of its power to disturb, though dozens of films (e.g., Deathtrap, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte) have borrowed its tricky storyline and made familiar the most shocking moments. Henri-Georges Clouzot directs with a gray cruelty that combines a nastily tangles storyline worthy of Hitchcock (the Master is rumored to have made Psycho to reclaim the King of Suspense crown he lost briefly to Clouzot) with three strong central performances and a marvelously seedy setting. The film has scenes of physical horror (one trick with contact lenses is unforgettably creepy), but Clouzot also sets the flesh creeping with incidences of ordinary nastiness, as when Meurisse forces his wife to eat a disgusting school dinner.

Diabolique | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

The notoriously ruthless 1955 thriller by France's most neurotic director, Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear). Clouzot cast his own wife, Vera, as an invalid who plots the murder of her husband, assisted by his mistress (Simone Signoret). Set in the rotting confines of a private school for boys, the film is cruel, sour, and—unfortunately—very effective. In French with subtitles.

Diabolique Time Out London

Headstrong mistress (Signoret) and retiring wife (Clouzot) conspire to murder the man they share, a tyrannical headmaster of a seedy boarding-school whose curriculum offers nothing but stagnation and decay. But in this black world (where, ironically, only the dead comes to life) everyone is in the end a victim, and their actions operate like snares setting traps that leave them grasping for survival. The camera watches these clammy proceedings with a cold precision that relishes its neutrality. At least one source claims that all Clouzot's films were shot in an atmosphere of bitterness and recrimination. It shows. But in this case it makes for a great piece of Guignol misanthropy.

notcoming.com | Diabolique - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Jenny Jediny

Dank, stagnant water fills the screen as the credits roll in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique. The film’s reputation is entangled in film lore, mainly concerning Alfred Hitchcock’s losing bid for the film rights to Pierre Boileua and Thomas Narcejac’s source novel, C’elle qui n’etait plus, by a matter of hours, only to reconfirm his status as the master of fright with 1960’s Psycho (Hitchcock would eventually purchase the rights to another novel by the French authors, D’entre les Morts, as the source material for Vertigo). Aside from the implied rivalry between Hitchcock and Clouzot, this image of water forges a connection between the two films. While Psycho gained notoriety with the shower sequence, and surely overshadows Clouzot’s French predecessor, Diabolique utilizes water foremost for its own gruesome murder scene, but brings it back again, and yet again, until the screen practically reeks from it.

The film’s French title Les Diaboliques commonly translates to “The Devils,” a playful choice considering the sound of a children’s chorus piping over the opening credits. Set in an all boys’ boarding school, the scene is ripe for childish havoc, and there are light moments involving the students and their pranks. The devilish behavior belongs to the adults however, and it is apparent through sadistic headmaster Michel the place has gone to pot. Michel serves both the students and faculty spoiled fish and cheap wine, insults his colleagues, and abuses his delicate and wealthy wife Christina (Clouzot’s own wife, Vera) in every way imaginable, including an obvious affair with a teacher, Nicole. The school is a hellish site; aside from the rotten lunches is the filthy pool, with moss growing along the surface, and a student body and faculty that walk on eggshells around their headmaster. Vengeance lurks under the surface however, as we learn of a plot devised by Nicole and Christina to rid themselves — and the student body — of Michel.

It is the set up and subsequent murder that occupies the first third of the film, and the relationship between both women is exposited beautifully: Nicole, blonde and voluptuous, is the propelling force, both physically and mentally stronger than Christina, who is not only petite but ailed by a heart condition, and identified clearly as an outsider for her Spanish heritage. The ladies lure Michel to a small town under the premise of divorce, drug him and drown him in a bathtub by pinning him down with a heavy statue. The camera lingers on the body weighted beneath the water, and later on the water stains that leak through the trunk housing it as Nicole and Christina make their way back to the school. The women dump Michel’s body into the pool and plan to wait for it to float back to the surface. And so they wait… and continue to wait. And it is here that Christina’s Catholic guilt turns to paranoia and terror as the pool is drained and absent the corpse disposed in it.

The film centers on Christina, who, in the tradition of the female leads in Gaslight, Suspicion, and Rosemary’s Baby, may or may not be going mad. Clouzot cleverly establishes our identification with her, not only through this question of the missing body, but initially through camerawork and scrupulous character development. Michel’s abuse of Christina is rooted in condescension; he treats her as a child, cruelly calling her his “precious little ruin,” and mocks her devotion to the well being of the students. In a particularly vile moment he forces her to swallow the rotten fish being served for dinner, speaking to her as though she were a disobedient child, and threatening the entire student body if she does not visibly finish her food. The camera frames her from above in several shots, with both Michel and Nicole looking down on her, forcing her into a figurative yet tangible submission. Unable to take action against her husband on her own, she has formed this bond with Nicole, seemingly genuine and sisterly, until Nicole verbally abuses her in an already familiar tone, leaving us to wonder what motivates her decision to join forces with Christina.

Clouzot’s film feels more wretched and grimy than Hitchcock’s work at the time, although the plot twists have a familiar feel: Michel’s suit mysteriously appears via the dry cleaner, and he appears to be registered at a hotel in town, although never seen by the staff. Then a student claims that the headmaster has returned and disciplined him, much to Christina’s horror and increasing alarm. Left alone at the boarding house by Nicole, she hears bumps in the night—the poor woman finds herself in an eerie and quite atmospheric encounter with flickering lights, an invisible typist, and a corpse that won’t stay dead. The sound design for this sequence remains hair-raising, silent save for the rattle of typewriter keys, footsteps, creaky door hinges, water dripping and the increasing frequency of Christina’s screams.

Effectively, even timelessly horrific, Diabolique retains even more strength in its examination of rotten relationships and female paranoia. The sadomasochistic triangle between husband, wife, and lover is synonymous with their surroundings of decay and fetid water, an intricate feat for the director, and yet Clouzot remains the more anonymous figure in the company of Hitchcock.

Diabolique (1955) - Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Sometimes a film's setting can become the driving force behind the narrative and in the case of Diabolique (aka Les Diaboliques, 1955), it becomes a character in its own right. Set in a seedy public school for boys in some unspecified French provincial town, Henri-Georges Clouzot's landmark suspense thriller creates a disturbing environment of decay, stagnation and impending dread that surrounds a menage a trois - Michel, a sadistic headmaster; Christina, his long-suffering wife who has a heart condition, and Nicole, the headmaster's much abused mistress who also serves as a schoolteacher. As Michel's cruelty to the two women increases, so does their hatred of him until the duo devise a plot to drug him and stage his death as an accidental drowning in the school's swimming pool. Their plan succeeds but when the police come to investigate and drain the pool, no body is found, leading to a series of increasingly strange and frightening occurrences.

A contemporary of Alfred Hitchcock's whose work was often compared to films by the "master of suspense," Clouzot is not as well known today but Diabolique created quite a stir upon its initial release, generating huge box office profits on both sides of the Atlantic and inspiring Hitchcock to outdo Clouzot's famous bathtub murder sequence with his own infamous shower stabbing in Psycho (1960). The two directors shared other similarities - the way they pre-planned and storyboarded their movies prior to filming, their skill in evoking a feeling of complicity in the viewer, and their attitude about acting. Though Hitchcock was once quoted as saying actors were "cattle," he enjoyed a good working relationship with most of them which wasn't always the case with Clouzot who could be cruel and dictatorial with his cast. For the sequence in Diabolique where the students are served bad fish and the headmaster commands them to eat it, it was rumored that Clouzot actually forced his actors to eat spoiled fish for the scene. In an essay on Diabolique by Ronald Koltnow (in Magill's Survey of Cinema), Simone Signoret was quoted as saying Clouzot "is concerned with every detail, almost to an obsession. He has to work in a constant ambience of crisis. He has to be depressed, he has to be sad. And he expects all his artists and technicians to share his sorrow completely." Certainly, Clouzot's films can seem relentlessly bleak and humorless in comparison to Hitchcock's thrillers which were often alleviated by moments of black comedy and sparkling wit. But, if you watch closely, you'll glimpse fleeting moments of macabre, deadpan humor in Diabolique like the look on Christina's face as she pours her husband a second glass of drugged whiskey.

Clouzot once admitted his sole purpose in making Diabolique: "I sought only to amuse myself and the little child who sleeps in all our hearts - the child who hides her head under the bedcovers and begs, 'Daddy, Daddy, frighten me." But Diabolique is no simple amusement; it's a dark, decadent tale that glistens like an ugly diamond. One of the most telling sequences in the movie is Michel's carefully planned demise which proves Hitchcock's point that murder can be hard work. From the lugging of the heavy, water-soaked body to a desperate attempt to submerge the corpse in the stagnant pool, the entire act of murder is shown to be a ghastly business indeed. [SPOILER ALERT!] Equally memorable is the double twist finale which has been copied repeatedly in subsequent thrillers though none can top the original shock ending of seeing a corpse remove his own eyeballs (a homage to Luis Bunuel's and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou, 1929).

Not surprisingly, Diabolique divided the critics over its merits. Among those who praised it was critic Paul Dehn who wrote "Clouzot handles this bloodcurdling material in the one way guaranteed to make it horrifically effective, i.e., by rejecting every melodramatic artifice...and photographing his story head-on - at human eye-level - as though he were making a newsreel." On the other hand, some were offended by the film's overt cruelty to Christina, the only marginally sympathetic character in the film. Critic Dilys Powell mirrored the opinions of the latter reviewers when she dismissed the film, writing, "Grand Guignol sets out merely to horrify. I don't think one should take moral exception if it succeeds." In spite of the controversy, Diabolique ended up sharing the New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film with Umberto D. and even today, you can see homages to Clouzot's thriller in the movies of Stanley Kubrick (the haunted bathtub scene in his version of The Shining, 1980) and other filmmakers. Diabolique later inspired a thinly disguised B-movie remake by Curtis Harrington in 1967 entitled Games with Simone Signoret playing a variation on her Nicole character, a made-for-television version called Reflections of Murder (1974) featuring Tuesday Weld, Joan Hackett and Sam Waterston, and, of course, there was the forgettable 1997 remake starring Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani.

Diabolique was based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac entitled Celle Qui N'etait Plus. Hitchcock would later adapt one of their novels and bring it to the screen as Vertigo (1958), now considered his undisputed masterpiece and recently placed in the top ten poll conducted by Sight and Sound magazine.

Diabolique Criterion essay by Danny Peary, February 1, 1999

Diabolique: Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts Criterion essay by Terrence Rafferty, May 16, 2011

Three Reasons: Diabolique chosen video scenes

Diabolique (1955) - The Criterion Collection

Don't Tell Them What You Saw: Les Diaboliques (1955) vs. Diabolique (1996) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, September 19, 2009

Criterion Reflections [David Blakeslee]

Not Just Movies: Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) Jake Cole from Not Just Movies

BFI | Sight & Sound | Review: Les Diaboliques (1954) Derek Prouse from Sight and Sound, Winter 1955/56

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016

Diabolique | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Chuck Bowen

Les Diaboliques (1955) Film Review | The Film Pilgrim Kevin Knapman

CriterionConfessions.com - Blu-Ray [Jamie S. Rich]

Diabolique Criterion Collection Foreign Film Movie Review 1955 Matthew from Classic Art Films

The Complete Henri-Georges Clouzot - Harvard Film Archive November 26 – December 18, 2011

Diabolique (1955) - Articles - TCM.com

Behind the Camera - Diabolique - Turner Classic Movies Greg Ferrara

The Essentials - Diabolique - Turner Classic Movies Greg Ferrara

Pop Culture 101 - Diabolique - Turner Classic Movies Greg Ferrara

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]

Les Diaboliques/The Fiends Richard Scheib from Moria, also seen here: The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review

Les Diaboliques (1955) / Henri-Georges Clouzot / film review James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Movie Review - Diabolique (1955) - eFilmCritic MP Bartley

More Psycho than Psycho: Clouzot's Diabolique - Interview Magazine

Les Diaboliques - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Roy Armes from Film Reference

DVD Verdict Sean McGinnis, Criterion Collection

AVForums (Blu-ray) [Chris McEneany] Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Diabolique Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray

Blu-ray Review: Diabolique | High-Def Digest Steven Cohen, Criterion Blu-Ray

The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion Blu-Ray

Diabolique Blu-ray Matt Hough from Home Theater Forum, Criterion Blu-Ray

Diabolique: The Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of ... Ian Jane from DVD Talk,

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Clark Douglas] Criterion Blu-Ray

Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel] Criterion Blu-Ray

Diabolique Blu-ray Review - Blu-ray.com Criterion Blu-Ray

'Diabolique' is all surprise, all mystery, one twist after another — Film ... Michael Wilmington from Film Noir Blonde

Diabolique Mondo Digital

James Berardinelli's ReelViews also seen here: James Berardinelli

411Mania.com [Dunn]

Welcome to Emanuel Levy » Diabolique (1955): Scariest Film Made

Diabolique | | Bloody DisgustingBloody Disgusting David Harley

Revisit: Diabolique | Spectrum Culture David Harris

Box Office Magazine

EyeForFilm.co.uk Moominkat

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Diabolique (Les Diaboliques), 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot, France ... Richard Corliss from Time magazine (capsule)

Review: Les Diaboliques (Diabolique, 1955) | Bill's Movie Emporium

Steve Rhodes

Creative Loafing Charlotte [Matt Brunson]

Hidden Treasures of Film - Cinescene Devin Rambo

Bonjour Tristesse (English)

DIABOLIQUE - Movies - Film Forum

Diabolique Criterion Review Review | Movie Reviews and News ... Chris Nashawaty from Entertainment Weekly

Diabolique Review - Movie News - TV Guide

Les Diaboliques Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun

Les diaboliques – review | Film | The Observer Philip French

Les Diaboliques – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Henri-Georges Clouzot's suspense classic 'Diabolique' makes its ... Mike Scott from New Orleans Picayune

Read the New York Times Review » Janet Maslin

Read the New York Times Review » Bosley Crowther, November 22, 1955, also seen here: The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

NY Times Original Review also seen here: Diabolique - Movies - The New York Times

Les Diaboliques (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT’S INFERNO B+ 91

aka: L’Enfer (documentary reconstructed from 13 hours of film shot by Clouzot in 1964)

France (102 mi) 2009 d: Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea

A superb documentary that’s a blast to watch, which captures famous French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, nicknamed the French Hitchcock, being so influenced by Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) and examples of the wildly liberating pop art from the era that he chose to completely alter his style of filmmaking for a 1964 film called INFERNO, where he completed a total of 13 hours before suffering a heart attack, where the film was never completed or released. Known for black and white post war film noir crime thrillers of the 40’s and 50’s that reflect a grim side of the human condition, usually tight, suspenseful narratives shot with a meticulous precision, where critic David Thomson calls Clouzot's a ‘cinema of total disenchantment,’ this was the first of his films to ever use color, but where the director also lost track of himself on the set given total artistic freedom and a supposedly unlimited budget, becoming more and more obsessed with experimentation and multiple takes, slowing the entire process down, quickly exhausting the film’s resources, where no one had a clear idea just what he intended, including himself, where he kept hoping for some kind of miracle breakthrough. However in examining what he did shoot, it’s nothing like 8 ½ , one of the most brilliantly edited films ever made, more like John Frankenheimer's dizzyingly out of control SECONDS (1966) or Hitchcock on acid. Much of what we see is an outrageously stunning screen test shoot of 26-year old lead actress Romy Schneider with blue or purple lips, a blue tongue, or olive oil on her face with a bit of glitter thrown on where she is seen preening or smoking seductively for the camera, also run backwards, all shot with heavily expressionistic lighting designs which seem to be fed by lights on the end a moving fan, continually changing the look on her face with moving shadows of light continually traveling across her face, providing an explosive look that literally jumps off the screen. Clouzot was going for technical invention and much of what he shot is exactly that, showing manic hysteria through kinetic energy with lights pulsating on and off continually altering the look of the screen. Serge Reggiani plays her obsessive husband who’s in a state of near panic with jealousy, as he’s terrified of loosing her, ultimately convincing himself she’s having serial affairs with another man (Jean-Claude Bercq) or even another woman (Dany Carrel), turning his life into a nightmarish dream where he’s literally going out of his mind, where the film’s dazzling production design is geared towards hallucinations, psychological instability, disturbing dreams, and his mental disintegration.

Having not made a film in four years during the rise of the French New Wave directors, this was supposedly Clouzot’s answer to the New Wave, much as Bergman’s PERSONA (1966) was at least partly in response to the experimentalists of the ‘60’s, using the ‘60’s arsenal of electronic music, shock cuts, abstraction, symbolism and a jarringly experimental narrative structure. But Clouzot turned into the tyrannical Otto Preminger on the set, where his unorthodox style of yelling and berating his actors, literally wearing them down before he’d start the cameras rolling, caused much friction, especially with Reggiani, who eventually walked off the set. This was a highly ambitious film project where the subject matter began to resemble the obsessive meltdown of the director himself, where Clouzot had 3 entirely different camera teams working each day, supposedly to speed things along, but Clouzot chose to run each of the camera teams himself, which could only operate one at a time, so mostly the other two sat around with nothing to do and waited as the perfectionist in Clouzot continually ordered reshoots until it could be captured perfectly. There were so many people involved in the making of this film that they had to stagger the lunch hours, as they couldn’t all fit at the same time. Clouzot was also a known insomniac who would routinely awake at 2 am and demand that someone be present to hear his ideas and take notes, as he allegedly did daily rewrites. In this way, he eventually confused and wore out the nerves of his entire crew. They found a perfect location, an old Côte d’Azur hotel on a lake with an iron bridge where trains regularly crossed, all perfect for cinematic imagery, but they were on a time schedule, as in 30 days the water from the man-made lake was scheduled for draining. This little tidbit certainly perked up my imagination, as the idea of filming a lake receding into a dry gulch seemed particularly fascinating, especially in a film where things are not what they appear to be, where running it backwards would show the formation of the lake, where the viewer might be caught off guard wondering which one is real. Unfortunately, the production shut down before any opportunity presented itself.

Perhaps the shot of the film is Romy Schneider tied naked on the track of an oncoming train, or psychedelic shots of lights in her eyes moving in a circular motion as she makes beguiling looks for the camera. But there are also slo-mo shots of Schneider water skiing on the lake where she swivels her hips while smiling for the camera or makes out with sex temptress Dany Carrell on a boat, which was the shot that sent Clouzot into cardiac arrest, as it was intended to do for the viewers. Clouzot enlisted electro-pop star Glbert Any to develop a sound design of distorted and overlapping voices to accentuate mental deterioration, spoken through an inner narrative where words would continually repeat themselves, an eerie reflection that someone’s mind has been temporarily disabled. To read scenes that were written but not filmed, the filmmakers use two modern day actors, Bérénice Bejo and Jacques Gamblin, to reenact several scenes, an effective idea as they help extend the original narrative. Speaking to several collaborators on the set, including filmmaker Costa-Gavros who was a young assistant director on the film, their recollections help frame the confusion of this wildly ambitious project where Clouzot’s insatiable desire to create on-camera special effects is matched by some of the found footage which is near miraculous, where we see Schneider naked underneath a cellophane coat, or provocatively playing with a slinky, or the camera repeatedly zooming in and out, where Bromberg the director joins the fun and superimposes several images, placing Clouzot in the middle smoking his pipe, looking ever so grim, where the psychedelic style is so completely foreign to anything Clouzot had ever attempted before during his somewhat conservative career. This is not a biographic look at the director, simply an innovative glimpse into what could have been. The music by Bruno Alexiu is a tasteful accompaniment, but the real fun is being able to see the technological wizardry of a director trying something radically different with a more than willing participant in bouncy actress Romy Schneider who is stunningly captured before the camera’s loving adoration.

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

There are several valid reasons for wanting to see this film, not least the unshown footage of Romy Schneider who had the lead role opposite Serge Reggiani, add to that a film written and directed - in so far as it went - by Henri-George Clouzot, reminiscences of the shoot by the likes of Catherine Allegret and assorted technicians, the roping in of Jacques Gamblin to flesh out (via reading) some of Reggiani's scenes and what's not to like. The film was doomed from the start. Clouzot was a changed person and thought nothing of waking the crew at 3 a.m. to discuss an idea. Reggiani finally ankled on the grounds that enough is enough and was replaced by Jean-Louis Trintignant who never got on set because Clouzot suffered a heart attack and the film was closed down. It remains fascinating for any French film buff, especially when you throw into the mix the fact that Clouzot's widow, Ines, sold the script to Chabrol who went ahead and shot it. Old School versus New Wave. It's no contest and this fragment eclipses every movie that Godard ever shot.

Time Out London (Tom Huddleston) review [4/5]

Like a hugely ambitious DVD extra for a film that never was, this documentary charts the development of legendary French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1964 riposte to the new wave, to be titled ‘Inferno’, and the film’s subsequent collapse in the face of spiralling budgets, recalcitrant performers and a director spinning off the rails.

It’s a remarkable feat of cinematic archeology, taking in reminiscences from the key players plus Clouzot’s raw location footage and wildly sensuous test photography of star Romy Schneider. The director’s impulse to widen the boundaries of cinema led to a series of experiments with all sorts of brand new psychedelic visual and audio techniques, leading to some remarkably warped and worrying imagery.

It remains unclear whether ‘Inferno’ would’ve been the masterpiece Clouzot was anticipating: his reliance on tripped-out visuals and a staunchly unreconstructed attitude to sexual politics may have dated the film rapidly. What survives is a striking cautionary tale for budding filmmakers and a haunting evocation of experimentation run amok.

The Onion A.V. Club review [B] Keith Phipps

Few directors exerted such exacting control over the medium as Henri-Georges Clouzot. In films like Quai Des Orfèvres, The Wages Of Fear, and Diabolique, Clouzot made every element work in harmony, from the remarkable work he coaxed from his cast to a command of suspense techniques that rivaled Alfred Hitchcock’s. A demanding perfectionist who, by some reports, never slept, Clouzot held tight to the reins. In 1964, those reins slipped from his hands while he was working on L’Enfer (Inferno), a story of obsessive jealousy that would have found Clouzot using experimental techniques of a sort never before attempted. Instead, he ended up with 13 hours of exposed footage and a film he’d never be able to complete.

Part reconstruction, part investigation, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno finds co-directors Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea Annonier attempting to determine what happened with L’Enfer while conveying a sense of what the film might have been like through existing footage and scenes of contemporary actors performing key moments from the film. It doesn’t do a brilliant job with any of those functions. The new performances, while fine, add little, and Bromberg’s narration takes a casual, details-light approach even when covering major developments in the film’s production. Thankfully, the story—and especially Clouzot’s existing footage—is fascinating enough to transcend the treatment.

Eager to catch up with the French New Wave, which shunned him, and inspired by Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, Clouzot decided to go to the edge with L’Enfer. Given a virtually bottomless budget, he shot can after can of test footage for hallucinatory scenes meant to illustrate his protagonist’s madness, drawing from then-thriving movements like op art and early electronic music, and working, as one of his collaborators called it, in “the improbable colors of madness.” Seas of eyes blur as they flow into one another. The faces of two men join together at the halfway point. Abstract shapes bulge lustfully, and plants turn shades not found in nature. As glimpsed here, L’Enfer looks weird and disorienting in ways that make James Stewart’s descents into madness in Vertigo appear almost tame. Would it have worked in the finished film? Clouzot’s inability to complete the film due to conflicts with the actors and his own health problems leaves that as one of film history’s most frustratingly unanswerable questions. But folly or masterpiece, L’Enfer would still have looked like no other film ever made. While Bromberg and Annonier’s film has shortcomings as a documentary, simply bringing Clouzot’s lost work to light makes it a significant achievement.

not coming to a theater near you review Mike D’Angelo

One of the ostensible perqs of attending a public film festival like Toronto is the opportunity to see actors and directors talk about their work—sort of an in-person DVD commentary track, and one in which you can potentially ask questions yourself. As a critic attending designated press screenings, I don’t get to take much advantage of that, for better and worse. Sometimes for much, much better. One of the few public screenings I caught this year, for example, was for the documentary Inferno, which had premiered to great fanfare at Cannes back in May—and, sure enough, the film’s director, Serge Bromberg, showed up to make a few introductory remarks. If the people who invested money in this picture have any sense whatsoever, they will muzzle the guy in future, because his charming, hilarious prologue very nearly killed the movie dead.

I guess one could argue that that was apropos, since Inferno concerns a movie that actually was killed dead. Back in 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot, the so-called “French Hitchcock” – his most celebrated films include Diabolique and The Wages of Fear – began shooting an experimental quasi-thriller called L’Enfer (literally The Inferno, colloquially Hell), starring Serge Reggiani and Romy Schneider. The film’s jealous-lover scenario was fairly basic, by all accounts (though Claude Chabrol wound up directing his own version of the script decades later), but Clouzot was apparently less interested in the story than in appropriating for the screen some of the crazy kaleidoscopic imagery that he’d recently seen in various art galleries. Alas, the film was shut down after just three weeks of shooting, never to be completed; until now, the extant footage had been moldering in its original cans, unseen by the world for more than 40 years.

Prior to the Toronto screening, the personable and enthusiastic Bromberg told the audience, in fascinating detail, the story of how he obtained this celluloid mini-Grail, ending the anecdote on a cliffhanger set in an elevator and promising that the movie would provide the climax. Sadly, his introduction was both more entertaining and more informative than the film itself, which not only omits the tale of Bromberg wheedling Clouzot’s widow (the elevator bit is mentioned only in passing), but also never really provides a coherent or compelling account of why the making of L’Enfer was such, well, l’enfer for everybody involved. We learn that Clouzot was an indecisive martinet whose endless delays and abrupt manner prompted Reggiani to walk off the picture, but that’s hardly earth-shattering enough for a five-minute segment on Entertainment Tonight, much less the skeleton of a feature-length documentary.

Thankfully, the long-unseen L’Enfer footage delivers. Shots from the narrative proper, in stark black-and-white, look typically gorgeous—albeit not as gorgeous as the 26-year-old Schneider, a middling actress who was nonetheless a stunning camera study, perhaps nowhere more so than in this unfinished project. But the primary reason to see Inferno (and the only real justification for its existence, frankly) is Clouzot’s amazing experiments with superimposed imagery, which look almost proto-Greenaway in their hallucinatory visual fervor. As Bromberg noted (though again, only in the Q&A, not in the damn film!), these remarkable shots, which go on for up to a minute or even longer, would likely have been edited to a few seconds in the movie itself, and hence come across here as more avant-garde than Clouzot may have intended. But I could happily have spent 90 minutes watching tiny pinpricks of light dancing in carnival-midway circles around Romy Schneider’s irises.

theartsdesk.com [Jasper Rees]

When a film shoot is in trouble, with actors dying on set, the heavens opening and other acts of God putting a spanner in the works, it’s usually a gigantic directorial ego which hauls the troubled production over the line. You think of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and above all Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, all films characterised by epic folie de grandeur and flirtation with insanity. But no film, surely, has ever been quite so divorced from reality, in almost every sense, as L'Enfer. For a start it was never made. You can’t get a lot less real than that. Forty-five years on, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, part documentary, part reconstruction, attempts to explain why.

Clouzot is not to be confused with the hapless Inspector of almost the same name. Or at least I don’t think he is. In the Forties and Fifties he was one of France’s leading directors. By the time he came to make L’Enfer, he was in a position to extract from Columbia a limitless budget. He chose to make a film about a man who, domiciled in rural France with his delectable young wife, is unable to quell his irrational jealous rages. Eventually he murders her.

It sounds a modest enough idea for a film. It was shot in and around one lakeside location. And the cast was small, led by Romy Schneider, comely young starlet, as the wife, and Serge Reggiani as her slightly ugly older husband. But Clouzot’s ambition was to create a new cinematic language with which to convey the psychosis of his male character. This involved modernist distortions, weird trippy tricks with mirrors and lenses which must have been great fun to play around with in the lab. In the reels of film stock recently unearthed and forming the core of this documentary, they don’t do a whole lot to convince that Clouzot was onto something.

Maybe he knew it himself. He kept three full-time camera crews on standby at all times, but would leave two of them idle for expensive, morale-sapping swathes of time. The actors became increasingly fractious, though as neither of the leads is any longer around to explain what happened (Schneider was to experience a lonely alcohol-related death aged 43 in 1982), it is left to crew members, including Costa-Gavras, to fill in the blanks.

One recalled that, as Clouzot (on set with Schneider, picture right) was an insomniac, he would wake up his colleagues in the small hours to discuss the next day’s shoot. The Nouvelle Vague directors, who espoused the credo that things should happen spontaneously on a film set, may have derided Clouzot as an over-meticulous planner – “I improvise on paper,” he even boasted. But here he didn’t improvise on paper enough. Maybe that’s what hell is in cinema: being stuck on a film which doesn’t know what it’s doing. Scenes were neurotically reshot. Ruggieri was made to spend hours each day running (the husband does a lot of chasing). Eventually he walked. Clouzot carried on regardless until a few days later he had a heart attack when filming a – for 1964 - very daring girl-on-girl kiss between Schneider and a female co-star.

The 15 hours of soundless rushes were found in 2005 by Serge Bromberg, a curator of vintage film. Some of it is indeed intriguing. Schneider is always nice to look at in a bikini or less, even when wearing blue lipstick to counterbalance the effects of the colour inversion in the fantasy sequences. In one bit of reversed footage she appears to swallow smoke (picture left). There is one toweringly strong shot in which a steam train bears down on Schneider lying naked on the track. Of the copious illustration of technical wizardry elsewhere in the rushes, you’d have ditched the lot to have the ingenuity of this one explained. The re-acted scenes starring two contemporary actors are also oddly powerful.

The film makes a half-hearted effort to find some sort of consonance between the obsession of the jealous husband and the delusional director. But frustratingly there is no final diagnosis of Clouzot’s affliction. He knew the lake was due to be drained, thus terminating the shoot, but he ploughed obliviously, slowly on. Why? No one’s exactly sure. The film that never was is, generically speaking, a cul-de-sac off a back alley of the cinematic highway. All Terry Gilliam had to show for his version of Don Quixote was Lost in La Mancha, the fly-on-the-wall documentary about how it never got made. But that reveals rather more about its subject than Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno. In effect these are the DVD extras - the deleted scenes, the interviews, the shots of costume fittings. As for the film that should have gone with it, we’re still in the dark.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film review: Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno ... Catherine Wheatley, November 2009

The Auteurs [Fernando F. Croce]

Slant Magazine (Kevin B. Lee) review

Cinema Without Borders (Robin Menken) review

Bomberg, Medea: Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno 2009)--NYFF Chris Knipp from Filmleaf

Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4.5/5]

Phil on Film (Philip Concannon) review

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

World Socialist Web Site [Richard Phillips and Ismet Redzovic] July 23, 2010

Sound On Sight Joel Gregory

Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind [Bob Turnbull]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Moviemuser.co.uk [David Steele]

Long Pauses [Darren Hughes]

Bina007 Movie Reviews [Caterina Benincasa]

Screenjabber review Doug Cooper

Little White Lies [Matt Bochenski]

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

The Hollywood Reporter review Stephen Farber

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]

The Times of London (Edward Porter) review [4/5]

The Times of London (Kevin Maher) review [4/5]

The Globe and Mail review Stephen Cole

The Boston Phoenix (Betsy Sherman) review

Jean Cocteau Biography - Jean Cocteau Website

Coccio, Ben

ZERO DAY

USA (92 mi) 2003

Film Comment Michael Rowin from Film Comment (excerpt)

"This film is fictional. Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental." This routine disclaimer in the closing credits of Zero Day codifies the disavowal and evasion running through 27 year-old Ben Coccio's debut feature. Only people from another planet will fail to recognize intentional similarities to the tragic events of Columbine High School and the story of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Unlike Bowling for Columbine or Elephant, films that deal with high school in general and Columbine in particular, Zero Day exploits vague rumors about Klebold and Harris, purporting to gain insight into their lives and minds. Combining video diary aesthetic with dispassionate neorealism, Coccio provides a superficial treatment of one of the most traumatic events in recent American history.

Mini Reviews Gerald Peary

Who is ready for Columbine again exploding in your face? Ben Coccio's Zero Hour is a potent, unsentimentalized, and definitely unsettling fictional imagining of what lead up to, and what happened, on that kamikaze day of random murder.

The audience is a captive witness to a year of homicidal planning, cooped up with Calvin (Calvin Robertson) and Andre (Andre Keuck), creepy high school lads with a fetishized love for weaponry, a warped romantic belief that they are high school samurais, and an essential American obsession with having their death-trip saga live on for the media. They tape everything, to be turned over, ideally, to Wolf Blitzer at CNN. Zero Hour is shot quite brilliantly, low-res-and-improv Blair Witch-style, and the two unknown leads are charismatic in a sick, nasty kind of way. Zero Hour, a low-rent Taxi Driver Meets Compulsion, deserves a niche audience.

Zero Day Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Everything Elephant is not, Zero Day plays pretty much like the greatest MFA-thesis film in the history of the world. Damning with faint praise? Hardly. This film is a virtual primer on how to make budgetary and technical limitations work to your advantage. Constructed as the first-person video diary of two sharp but very average nerds who call themselves "The Army of Two" (nice touch, since as we know, an "Army of One" is more than sufficient to wipe out entire countries), Zero Day resists every tendency to veer into gimmickry. The non-professional actors, Andre Keuck and Calvin Robertson, only occasionally break the verisimilitude by coming off as a bit too articulate and self-aware, and this is the film's only real tactical error. However, this has the added benefit of making both characters fascinating to watch and listen to. These kids are not monsters, as the film goes to great lengths to point out, but they do share with Hannibal Lecter a giddy, affable intellectualism that managed to make me start rooting for them. Given that the acts committed in Zero Day are directly referencing Columbine, it was chilling to find myself identifying with these kids, and this speaks volumes about the force of charisma and the hypnotic power of cinema. So, while Cal and Andre burn their media collection and tell the diary's viewers that books, music, comics, and videogames had no impact whatsoever on their decision (and to its credit, the film makes this argument very plausible; these characters have more in common with the Nietzschean streak of Leopold and Loeb), the film itself simultaneously mounts an implicit argument in the other direction. Art and entertainment do have enormous power, but their outcomes are as unpredictable and indecipherable as Columbine itself. Where Elephant takes refuge in easy-to-discard stereotypes, Zero Day eschews simple explanations of "them" by showing us a complex portrait of ourselves. (This is driven home by the final shot, an image of our culture's reaction-formations against the anguish of mind-boggling tragedy.) A profoundly humanist film, Zero Day is one of the year's best.

Cocteau, Jean

Cocteau, Jean from World Cinema

French artist, writer and director. Cocteau's artistic output was prodigious—poems, plays, opera libretti, essays, drawings, church murals—and the cinema was only one aspect of it. Yet on account of their beauty and singularity his relatively few films have had a disproportionate impact. Cocteau introduced a rare element of the fantastic in French cinema, reworking myths and fairy tales which he rendered with a "magic" imagery of mirrors, baroque objects and architecture and fabulous creatures. Apart from his avant-garde short feature Le Sang d'un poète / The Blood of a Poet (1930), Cocteau's cinematic activity was confined to the 1940s and 1950s. La Belle et la Bête, starring Jean Marais (1946), is one of the most beautiful French films ever made, a cult movie for cinéphiles and children alike. Cocteau pursued two main avenues in his films: myth, with L'Eternel retour (1943, dir. Jean Delannoy), Orphée (1950) and Le Testament d'Orphée (1960); and Oedipal drama, with Les Parents terribles / The Storm Within (1948, described by André Bazin as Cocteau's most theatrical and most cinematic work) and Les Enfants Terribles / The Strange Ones (directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950). — Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema

Cocteau, Jean Art and Culture

His artistic avocations were many -- poet, novelist, painter, playwright, set designer, actor -- but Jean Cocteau's work as a filmmaker distilled his creative vision with a special lucidity. In film he could bring his Surrealist language and imagery together, making the dreamlike palpable and present. Cocteau's literary works announced the themes that would obsess him across mediums and genres -- unrequited love, narcissism, self-destruction, and poetic creativity. He was particularly concerned with critiquing bourgeois family life through a psychoanalytic lens, as in his great novel "Les Enfants Terribles" (published in 1929, adapted to film in 1950) and in his many reworkings of Greek myth: from the play "Antigone" (1922) and the opera-oratorio "Oedipus Rex" (1927 written with Stravinsky), to his life-long fascination with Orpheus -- a figure he explored in a play and two films.

These themes are realized most strongly in his films, where Cocteau used images of mirrors and self-portraits to explore the trap of narcissism, employed duplicated rooms and reverse projection to symbolize the separate "cameras" of the mind, and cast devastatingly beautiful actors to embody the yearning for the flesh that underlies much of his animus towards social convention. A cinematic piece like "La Belle et La Bete" (1946), with the clarity of Josette Day’s Beauty and the vividness of Jean Marais’s Beast, literally and metaphorically represents the dream world of fairy tale and the dangerous impulses of the subconscious. Sumptuous costumes, elaborate makeup, and a vast array of optically illusory effects make this film the culmination of Cocteau’s Surrealist work.

Cocteau had considered himself "the prize booby of his class" growing up. His father’s suicide disturbed his unremarkable life, and he became a mediocre student who sought refuge in his imagination and in passionate crushes on other youths. Then he emerged as a major artist in the avant-garde circles of 1920s Paris, publishing his first poetry at age 19, crafting plays with Pablo Picasso as set designer, and collaborating with composers such as Satie and Stravinsky. Included in his variegated biography are a stint as an ambulance driver in World War I, a face-lift, a fondness for wearing leather trousers and matador capes, and, more memorably, a passion for translating the sensuousness of reality into a Surrealist film.

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Jean Cocteau is a preeminent figure in 20th century French culture. A major contributor to the history of the cinema, he is also noted for his work as a novelist, poet, painter, sculptor and playwright.

Cocteau wrote, directed, narrated, edited and performed in his first film, "The Blood of a Poet", shot in 1930. Privately financed by the Vicomte de Noailles, the film's release was delayed for two years due to the scandal that surrounded another 1930 Noailles production, Dali and Bunuel's "L'Age d'or", which was denounced as "sacrilegious" when first screened.

"Blood of a Poet" was certainly influenced by the work of Dali and Bunuel, as well as other surrealist films by Man Ray and Rene Clair. But in its unprecedented use of sync-sound dialogue, narration and music (by the prolific and accomplished Georges Auric), juxtaposed with free-form episodic imagery, Cocteau's debut marked a watershed in non-narrative, personal filmmaking. Bracketing the beginning and end of the work with a shot of a factory chimney collapsing (to show that the events represented actually take place in an instant of "real time"), Cocteau designed the piece as a series of disparate sections, each centering on the adventures of a young poet/artist condemned to walk the halls of the "Hotel of Dramatic Follies" for his crime of having brought a statue to life. Perhaps the most famous of the film's striking images is the sequence in which the young man, having created a drawing with a moving mouth, wipes the mouth onto his hand in an effort to erase it from the picture; whereupon the mouth takes on a life of its own, begging for air and later drinking from a bowl of water. Another memorable--and much-imitated--conceit is that of the poet passing through a mirror which turns into a pool of water.

Cocteau worked only intermittently in film for the next 15 years, one reason being his recurring addiction to opium. His return to directing in 1945, with "Beauty and the Beast", was partly due to the efforts of his favorite actor and close associate Jean Marais, who played the Beast in the film.

Relentlessly romantic, beautifully mounted (despite the problems attendant on film production in post-war France) and flawlessly acted, "Beauty and the Beast" marked a triumphant return to the screen for Cocteau. With its linear narrative and familiar mythic structure, the film was less experimental than "Blood of a Poet". Yet Marais's unforgettable performance, the beast's (pre-prosthetic) make-up and Cocteau's inspired visual conceits (the beast's fingers smoking after a kill, human hands used as candelabras in his castle), made the film one of the director's most memorable--and most enduringly popular--works.

Cocteau directed two films adapted from his own plays, "The Eagle with Two Heads" and "The Storm Within" (both 1948). "Eagle" is a rather ordinary palace romance which the director later claimed he had created solely to please Marais. "The Storm Within", on the other hand, is perhaps the finest of all Cocteau's narrative films. At the center of the work is the magnetic performance of Yvonne de Bray as Marais's violently possessive, drug-addicted mother, who kills herself when her son decides to marry. Shot almost entirely in one apartment, "The Storm Within" achieves an unparalled sense of claustrophobic melancholy, highlighted by brilliant camera movement within the confines of the small, cramped flat.

In 1950 Cocteau made the film for which he is perhaps best known, "Orpheus", again starring Marais, this time as a young poet beset by artistic and romantic rivals. When his wife dies, Orpheus descends to Hell to rescue her, only to be brought before a tribunal where his final fate is determined. Once again, Cocteau makes considerable use of liquid mirrors through which his protagonists enter and leave rooms. Attacked in some quarters as being too mannered and occasionally pretentious (a charge that followed Cocteau throughout his career), the film is on the whole a successful blend of the real and the fantastic, "a realistic document of unrealistic events," as Cocteau had termed "Blood of a Poet" many years earlier.

Over the next ten years Cocteau worked on several projects, providing dialogue and/or off-screen narration for a number of features by other directors and contributing to several short films. His one-act, one-person play "The Human Voice" was made into an excellent short film ("L'Amore") in 1948 by Roberto Rossellini and also provided the inspiration for Pedro Almadovar's 1988 farce, "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown". Cocteau also adapted his novel "Les Enfants Terribles" into the screenplay for Jean-Pierre Melville's 1950 film of the same name. Like Jean Delannoy's "L'Eternel Retour" (1943), the work bears Cocteau's stamp far more than that of its nominal director.

In 1959, with private financing (part of it coming from Francois Truffaut), Cocteau made his last film as a director, "The Testament of Orpheus". A rather elaborate home movie starring its director, the work features cameos from numerous celebrities including Pablo Picasso, Yul Brynner and Jean-Pierre Leaud. A nostalgic return to the legend of Orpheus in the manner and style of "The Blood of a Poet", the film lacks the earlier work's imagination and intensity.

Jean Cocteau Page official website

The Jean Cocteau Website The Blood of a Poet

Jean Cocteau - Films as director:, Other films: Roy Armes from Film Reference

Jean Cocteau extensive bio and essays

Who's Jean Cocteau? bio from the Mediterranean Center

Jean Cocteau Criticism biography and brief criticism

All-Movie Guide bio from Jason Ankeny

Original Edition of Ceramics by Jean Cocteau

Books and Writers Biography

Jean Cocteau Richard Misek from Senses of Cinema

Poetry in Motion an overview of his work by Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix, November 21 – 27, 2003

Cocteau, Jean They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Surreal Lives Chapter one from The Surrealists 1917–1945, a book by Ruth Brandon

Jean Cocteau Papers

Cocteau et La chapelle Saint-Blaise-des-Simples

Bright Lights Film Journal: Orphic Trilogy by Gary Morris

Find-A-Grave profile for Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE BLOOD OF A POET (Le sang d'un poète)

France (55 mi) 1930

Time Out Tony Rayns

Cocteau described this first feature as the playing with one finger of a theme that he orchestrated in Orphée twenty years later. That puts it fairly enough: the movie has an avant-garde roughness and unpredictability in its construction and use of symbols, but it's fundamentally a very characteristic, neo-Romantic study of the joys and agonies of being an artist. It's in two distinct parts. The first presents the artist (Rivero) trapped by his own work, eventually opting for the rebirth of a romantic martyrdom; the second plunges back into autobiography (reworking the snowball fight from Les Enfants Terribles), and resolves itself into a 'cosmic' riddle. The honesty and robustness of the images prevents the movie from lapsing into pretension or preciousness; it remains extremely interesting as a source of Cocteau's later work.

Lee Miller in Blood of a Poet BFI Screen Online (link lost):

During the heady days of Surrealism where anything seemed possible the model and photographer, Lee Miller, persuaded Jean Cocteau to cast her in his new film Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d'un poete). Legend has it that in the Parisian nightclub Le Boeuf sur le Troit Jean Cocteau was quizzing his friends about who he could get to play as the female statue in Blood of a Poet. Lee Miller, who was sitting nearby with her boyfriend the Surrealist photographer and artist Man Ray, overhead the conversation and audaciously offered herself for the part. Bowled over by her blonde hair and striking features Cocteau eventually offered Lee Miller the role.

Lee Miller had taken Paris by storm as a top fashion model and having met Man Ray became his lover and collaborator, she established her own successful portrait studios in Paris and New York. Lee Miller then surprised everyone again by marrying a rich Egyptian twenty years her senior and based herself in Egypt. The relationship was not to last and by 1937 she had met and fallen in love with the English painter Roland Penrose. Miller's affair with Penrose lasted for many years until they married in 1947.

In 1944 Lee Miller became a US war correspondent where she saw at first hand the horrors of war. She also returned to Paris with the American troops in 1944, on the day of liberation, visiting Jean Cocteau and Picasso to celebrate the moment. She photographed the siege of St. Malo and the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, producing images which sent shock waves through the world.

Le Sang D'Un Poete Roy Armes from Film Reference

Though the 1920s are generally considered the most significant years of experiment with filmic forms in French cinema, two of the acknowledged masterpieces of the avant-garde, Jean Cocteau's Le sang d'un poète and Luis Buñuel's L'age d'or, both date from the beginning of the sound era in the early 1930s. The bitter opposition, feuds and mutual denunciations existing at this time between Cocteau and the Surrealists seem in retrospect of less importance than the common avant-garde impulse which unites them. Significantly, both Le sang d'un poète and Buñuel's film were funded in exactly the same way, through private commissions by the wealthy art lover and socialite, the Vicomte de Noailles. Despite their differences and incompatibilities both films have proved to be lasting works of cinematic imagination. They provide a common inspiration for later independent filmmakers throughout the world.

Jean Cocteau came to the cinema as an amateur who had already acquired a literary reputation, though he was never concerned with the application of literary ideas or practices to film. Instead he saw filmmaking as a manual craft and gave far greater weight to the qualities of the film image than to the demands of a conventional narrative development. As Le sang d'un poète shows so clearly, he was a filmmaker able to disregard the conventionalities of cinematic construction simply because he never learned them in the first place. His essentially amateur approach is reflected in his choice of non-professional players for most of the key roles of the film. This did not preclude him from calling upon highly talented collaborators with real professional skills—such as George Périnal or Georges Auric— to assist him with the photography and music for Le sang d'un poète.

Cocteau has often denied that Le sang d'un poète contains either symbols or allegorical meaning. It uses some of the mechanics of the dream, not to explore social or psychological realities, but as ends in themselves. His concern is less to analyze than simply to recreate a state of inner consciousness, a world preceding rational thought. To this end he applies a whole range of trick devices—animation, mirrors, reverse action, false perspectives—and deliberately blurs the boundaries between the live action and graphic work or sculpture. Though haunted, like so much of Cocteau's work, by the omnipresence of death, Le sang d'un poète is a lyrical, idyllic work without tension or conflict. In Cocteau's mythology, death is reversible, just one aspect of a constant play of transformation. It is the director's ability to present this in a totally personal manner—aided by the first-person narration spoken by Cocteau himself—which makes the film such a fascinating work.

Le sang d'un poète introduces a distinctive new voice to world cinema. It contains an initial statement of virtually all the guiding themes of Cocteau's film work, and since it was followed by a dozen or more years of silence, it has a hauntingly premonitory quality. The wealth of themes and obsessions it contains is brought out clearly by the rich series of films from La belle et la bête to Le testament d'Orphée, which Cocteau made when he returned to film directing after World War II. Both as a work in its own right and as a forerunner of the director's later feature work, Le sang d'un poète has lost nothing of its power to fascinate and intrigue.

In depth review of film at Alternative Film Guide Dan Schneider from Cosmoetica

Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet essay by Mark Oeding (2006)

Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet Within the Art(ist)

BLOOD OF A POET Lech Majewski creates a video instillation art exhibit

Georges Périnal - Films as cinematographer: Wheeler Winston Dixon from Film Reference

Senses of Cinema [Julia Levin]

DVD Verdict [Mike Pinsky]

digitallyOBSESSED! [Debi Lee Mandel]

Movie Martyr [Jeremy Heilman]

CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell] (capsule review)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Images Movie Journal Gary Morris reviews the Orphic Trilogy, also seen here: Bright Lights Film Journal [Gary Morris]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Keith Phipps reviews the Orphic Trilogy

Mondo Digital reviews BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and the Orphic trilogy

DVDBeaver - Full Graphic Review Gary W. Tooze reviews the Orphic Trilogy

The Blood of a Poet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blood of a Poet by Jean Cocteau 12 images from the film may be seen here

The Blood of a Poet 1933 : Online Video | Veoh Video Network The opening 5 minutes may be seen here (YouTube video)

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (La belle et la bête) B+ 90

France Luxembourg (96 mi) 1946

Time Out Tom Milne

Cocteau's fairytale set standards in fantasy which few other film-makers have reached. Despite the Vermeer-like compositions, he has some trouble capturing the right tone for the 'realistic' scenes, but the sequences in the enchanted castle - wonderfully designed by Christian Bérard complete with fantastic living statuary, and dignified by a Beast at once ferocious, erotic and genuinely tragic - are pure magic. René Clément is credited as co-director, but had very little to do with the mise en scène.

Beauty and the Beast Pauline Kael

Jean Cocteau's first full-length movie (he wrote and directed it) is perhaps the most sensuously elegant of all filmed fairy tales. As a child escapes from everyday family life to the magic of a storybook, so, in the film, Beauty's farm, with its Vermeer simplicity, fades in intensity as we are caught up in the Gustave Doré extravagance of the Beast's enchanted landscape. In Christian Bérard's makeup, Jean Marais is a magnificent Beast; Beauty's self-sacrifice to him holds no more horror than a satisfying romantic fantasy should have. The transformation of the Beast into Prince Charming is ambiguous—what we have gained cannot quite take the place of what we have lost. (When shown the film, Greta Garbo is reported to have said at the end, "Give me back my Beast.") The delicate Josette Day is, quite properly, Beauty.

The Village Voice [Michael Miller]

One of the most widely known fairy tales thanks to its plethora of adaptations, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is a timeless story about inner beauty. Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film version is visually lustrous and richly marked by stunning costumes, elaborate set design, and imaginative use of practical effects. Jean Marais’ duel roles as the unsightly Beast and the blonde, pretty boy Avenant, both of whom are determined to win Belle’s (Josette Day) hand in marriage, are juxtaposed against one another to represent France versus Germany during World War II. Cocteau possesses a fascination for eyes in this film with the implication that they are the windows to the soul. Repeated images of doors, windows, and mirrors all lend themselves to a metaphorical sense of discovery about the inner workings of a person’s mind. When mirrors are present, a self-reflection occurs, the introspection frequently taking on negative connotations. When an observer peers through a window or an enchanted door magically opens, extrospection is often employed, leading to a hidden trait being revealed about a character. The film’s romantic yet semi-tragic tone draws influence from the works of Shakespeare and Greek tragedies: Romeo and Juliet and hubris leading to a downfall serve as signifiers. For a film about surface appearance, two production asides seem appropriate: various film stocks used due to a post-war shortage produces textures in the image can be noticeably different from one scene to another, and a debilitating skin disease that Cocteau developed during the shoot is an ironic mimicking of the repulsiveness of the Beast. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, showing in a newly restored 35mm print, is ultimately one of the most haunting and dreamlike films ever to grace the silver screen.

Beauty and the Beast Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

"Give me back my beast!" a famous actress (usually said to be Greta Garbo, but Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead have also been cited) allegedly exclaimed at the conclusion of Cocteau's magnificent fairy tale. Her distress, however apocryphal, makes perfect sense. Sans makeup and appliances, Jean Marais comes across as a shallow, ridiculous fop, hardly worthy of so kindhearted and forthright a woman as Belle (Day); as the Beast, however, his guttural growl and wounded stare can freeze bone marrow at 200 paces. The movie as a whole exhibits a similar dichotomy: Stilted and silly when set in the real world, it springs to eerie life whenever the action shifts to the Beast's enchanted castle, in which human arms jut from the foyer walls to light Belle's way with candelabra, and bas-relief faces swivel to follow her unsteady progress. (The folks who designed Disneyland's Haunted Mansion were clearly inspired by this picture.)

Long available only in tatty 16mm prints, Beauty and the Beast has been painstakingly restored from the original nitrate negative, and the difference is more than cosmetic. Like Victor Sjöström before him and Terry Gilliam after him, Cocteau used production design and art direction expressively rather than decoratively, so that background details, now fully visible, are frequently as much the focal point of a given scene as the foreground actors. Scenes that previously felt somewhat poky now thrum with life, in large part because your eyes are free to roam across the frame at will, settling on baubles and trinkets that reinforce the general mood of surreal splendor. (This freedom offers yet another reason why digital video, with its pitiful depth of field, will always be celluloid's bastard cousin.)

Still, in the end it's the Beast whose somber presence remains most indelible. Marais, who was Cocteau's lover, companion and muse, was a stiff actor of limited range (he nearly sinks Cocteau's otherwise brilliant Orpheus), but the makeup somehow both dignified and ennobled him, catalyzing his one great performance. It's good to have him back.

Jean Cocteau: La Belle et La Bête Derek Malcolm from the Guardian

It has often been said that Jean Cocteau was the first major poet and writer to treat the cinema with total seriousness. But actually it was the cinema that made him into a major artist. "The movie screen," he said, "is the true mirror refecting the flesh and blood of my dreams." And one of his most poetic, dreamlike films was La Belle et La Bête.

Watching it now, you can't feel its audacity as you might have done at the time. Faithfully, but not totally innocently, based on the fairy tale by Madame LePrince de Beaumont, it is almost purely visual, even if a Freudian analysis is possible. And it is certainly completely different in atmosphere and style from anything that had gone before, at least in the commercial cinema.

The team who made it in 1946 - and it was a team - broke a good many rules at the urging of Cocteau. Georges Auric's memorable music didn't so much underline the visuals as frequently cut across them, reaching a synthesis at vital moments. Henri Alekan's equally extraordinary cinematography, which the studio described unsympathetically as "white cheese", is the opposite of conventionally fantastic. "I'm pushing Alekan in precisely the opposite direction from what fools think is poetic," Cocteau wrote. Alekan's black-and-white photography was sharp and unfuzzy, set in a credible French country landscape that contains not just the realistic home of Beauty but also the weird, enchanted domicile of the Beast. It could almost be a documentary - which allows us to believe anything Cocteau asks of us.

The result was a film that dared to be naive, asking its audience to revert to childhood, the better to accept its practical magic. It is one of Cocteau's few films that it is wiser to take at face value, rather than explore at the level of later, perhaps more sophisticated (and certainly more pretentious) works, such as the two famous Orphée films. Only when the Beast is transformed into the handsome Jean Marais, and the flight to happiness provides a harmonious ending, do we begin to doubt anything - apart, perhaps, from the Beast's curiously squeaky voice. But even then we are willing to suspend our disbelief. After all, isn't everything else perfectly normal?

I'm prepared to entertain the argument that Beauty and the Beast is not Cocteau's most "important" film and that it does have some creaky moments. But it is probably his most perfect, because it speaks to so wide an audience with its intensity of vision and the emotions that it inspires in us. Watch Beauty looking into a mirror and seeing her face replaced by that of the Beast, her almost trance-like walk through the Beast's melancholy hallways, or her pacing backwards and forwards as she impatiently awaits his nightly visit as a statue behind her follows her with its head, and you see a precisely imagined fantasy. It's all the better for not relying on astonishing special effects but on the private thoughts of the watcher. Would some Hollywood films today do us that honour?

The importance of Cocteau's work on film was that it embodied a number of different traditions and disciplines, and was as behoven to classical drama as to the avant-garde. That is why it remains so fascinating today and so strong in people's memories. Cocteau was almost 60 when he made Beauty and the Beast, his first full-length feature. But the astonishing fact is that this elderly poet had, and still has, a huge influence on the avant-garde of American film. In worshipping the new in Cocteau, some of them had little idea of the traditions from which his art sprang. But he affected them just the same.

Like the Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont fairy tale on which it's based, Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) bluntly celebrates a love that privileges interior beauty over external repulsiveness. Embodied by the titular Beast, physical ugliness here is only skin-and-mottled-fur deep. Cocteau's earlier The Blood of a Poet (1930) was surrealism for surrealism's sake, but B&B grounds its fantastical visual style with a linear romance narrative. What's both appealing and problematic is its visual opulence. Full of baroque interiors, elegant costumes, and overwrought jewelry (even tears turn to diamonds), the film is all surface, and undermines its own don't-trust-a-pretty-face and anti-greed themes at every turn.

Belle's family, like most found in fables, consists of hastily drawn types, many of them grossly flawed. In Cocteau's film, there's a wastrel brother, two mocking and greedy sisters, and a nebbish father who has just lost his fortune. Belle's virtue, in this case, resides in her lack of insight. Whereas Disney's bookish Beauty aspires to leave her one-horse village, Cocteau's Belle (Josette Day) is a homebody simp. Incapable of noticing her brother's laziness or sisters' ill will, she leaves home only after her father accidentally stumbles into Beast's creepy manse and earns a death sentence for picking a rose in the garden. Trading in one domestic hell for another, she places herself under house arrest at the Beast's castle in order to save her father's life.

The castle is at once an enchanted palace and a stifling prison. With designer Christian Berard, Cocteau transforms the architectural space into living, breathing form. Human arms emerge from the walls, holding candelabras that light themselves. Caryatids open their eyes and blow smoke. Hands emerge from a table to serve food. Doors open without being touched. There is something haunting about the way this house dresses and feeds Belle, anticipating her every need. It is not luxurious so much as infantilizing.

And so is the Beast, played by Jean Marais dressed in a magnificent costume that evokes Chewbacca crossed with a tabby cat. He dotes on Belle with a mixture of unquenchable desire and extreme self-loathing. All breathy exhortations, he comes off like a lovelorn drill sergeant with laryngitis. The Beast's successful courtship via internment is about as plausible as Antonio Banderas's of Victoria Abril in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, but it makes sense here because Cocteau chooses to keep Belle so childish, despite her hardships. Later asked what Beast has for dinner, she responds, hilariously, "He doesn't eat." Actually, he devours deer, leaving their ravaged carcasses on his castle's grounds.

At the film's beginning, Cocteau makes the following request: "I ask of you a little . . . childlike simplicity." This call for naïveté and belief in fantasy was, at the time, meant as an antidote to the harsh reality of post-occupation France. But it serves another purpose: Viewers must get in touch with their inner child to fall for Belle's eventual love for Beast. The film seems somewhat aware of this, casting an ambiguous hue on its happily-ever-after conclusion.

When Beast shape-shifts into Prince Charming (also played by Marais), he sheds his self-doubt along with the fur. His smooth, smug demeanor is not that attractive, and this isn't entirely lost on Belle. She recoils from his touch and tells him, comically, "I must get used to it." The audience must, too. But before anyone can adjust, the happy couple flies away into the sky. This could be yet another moment when Cocteau wishes the viewer's submission to a delightful acceptance of the unreal. Mostly, though, it feels like another fantasy move meant to mask the director's troublingly unnuanced version of the story.

La Belle et la Bête Roy Armes from Film Reference

Fantasy Films HISTORY from Film Reference

Beauty and the Beast essay by Prof. Waller Hastings from Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota

DVD Journal Mark Bourne

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Turner Classic Movies Frank Miller

Old School Reviews [John Nesbit](english)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Pretentious Musings (Kevin Koehler)

Beauty and the Beast John White from 10kbullets

filmcritic.com Matt Langdon

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Edinburgh U Film Society [Katia Saint-Peron]

Fantastic Movie Musings & Ramblings - BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946) David Sindelar

Mondo Digital reviews BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and the Orphic trilogy

Beauty and the Beast (1946 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ORPHEUS (Orphée)

France (95 mi) 1950

Marais (Cocteau's companion) plays the '40s poet (alias Cocteau) who's won fame, fortune and the hatred of Left Bank youth. Desperate for inspiration, he follows an imperious Princess flanked by Fascist (or 'Cruising') type police. Her rubber-gloved hand leads through the looking-glass to a slow-motion night kingdom. This Sur-Noir fantasy has more meanings than the Book of Revelations. It's an allegory for Poetry. It's the Confessions of a Gay Opium-Eater. Its mirrors and misogyny, optical tricks and enigmatic phrases, mark it as prime meat for Lacanians and feminists. With its Resis-tance Band radios and brutal militiamen it catches the terrors of Occupation life. Its tight cross-lacing of paranoid dreaming and poetic realism grips like a bondage corset. When Alain Resnais in Japan couldn't get the crew of Hiroshima, Mon Amour to understand, he'd refer to Orphée, whose weird myth fascinated them all.

World Cinema: Films -- Orpheus (1950) Pauline Kael

A masterpiece of magical filmmaking. Though it is a narrative treatment of the legend of Orpheus in a modern Parisian setting, this film, written and directed by Jean Cocteau, is as inventive and as enigmatic as a dream. Orpheus (Jean Marais), the successful poet who is envied and despised by younger poets, needs to renew himself; he tries to push beyond the limits of human experience, to reach the unknowable—the mystery beyond morality. Dark, troubled, passionate Maria Casarès is his Death: attended by her roaring motorcyclists, the hooded messengers of death, she is mystery incarnate. The jazzy modern milieu has urgency, and Cocteau uses emblems and images of the then recent Nazi period and merges them with more primitive images of fear—as, indeed, they are merged in the modern consciousness. This gives the violence and mystery of the Orpheus story a contemporaneity that, in other hands, might seem merely chic; Cocteau's special gift was to raise chic to art. The death figure and much of the film's imagery derive from the American movie Death Takes a Holiday (1934), starring Fredric March; the only modern film image of death that, visually and psychologically, stands comparison with Maria Casarès is in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957).

Introduction BFI Screen Online (link lost):

Poet, novelist, painter, playwright, film-maker: Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) worked in many different artistic media.

The breadth of his talent and the depth of his vision finds full expression in Orphée: Hades looks like occupied Paris; messages from the after-life are broadcast from car radios; and Death drives round in a vintage Rolls Royce accompanied by leather-clad bikers.

Strikingly visual and darkly enigmatic, Orphée features memorable performances from Cocteau's companion Jean Marais and the muse-like Maria Casarès, and is famed for its optical effects and breathtaking cinematic illusions. It won the Prix International de la Critique at the Venice Film Festival in 1950, and in 1951 took first prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Jean Cocteau is celebrated as one of French cinema's greatest and most versatile artists, whose impact is disproportionate to the relatively small number of films he made. He undertook a large range of artistic endeavours but his primary concern was with the role of the poet. This is reflected in his corpus of films including titles such as The Blood of the Poet, Orphée and The Testament of Orpheus.

Cocteau's playful use of the fantastical, the mythical and the avant-garde set him apart from his contemporaries and still defines his unique brilliance today.

Orphée | | guardian.co.uk Arts Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian

Jean Cocteau's 1950 variation on the Orpheus myth has the compressed and expressive brilliance of poetry, and the exuberance of sublime music. It is a ghost story, a tragedy, a policier and a drawing room comedy: a captivating story performed with childlike unselfconsciousness. Cocteau devises ingenious theatrical stage-sets and suggests the dreamlike and the uncanny with low-tech visual effects, which still look remarkably persuasive.

The action is transposed to postwar France in which Orphée (Jean Marais) is a famous poet in early middle age, suffering from the ennui of success and living modestly in a small town, which nevertheless has a lively café society whose rowdy young aesthetes despise him.

Death (María Casares) enters the realm of the living with her servant Heurtebise (François Périer) to take his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa); Orphée follows and makes his legendary bargain - he can lead his wife out of the netherworld if he does not look back at her.

Cocteau's myth suggests his anguish is an infatuation with death, and a quasi-erotic need to destroy the self. "Mirrors are the gates through which death enters," says Heurtebise. "Look a lifetime in a mirror and you will see death at work." It is a haunting piece of film-making.

Orphée Ronald Bowers from Film Reference

No discussion of modern European cinema can be complete without the inclusion of Jean Cocteau's Orphée. It is not only the capstone of Cocteau's artistic career but also a foremost example of poetry on film which influenced an entire generation of young filmmakers. The film represents the artistic zenith of Cocteau's lifelong pre-occupation with the myth of Orpheus. In the words of Pauline Kael, "It was with Orpheus that Cocteau orchestrated the themes of the dreams and ecstasies of the poet and his obsession with the unknown."

Orphée is Cocteau's most philosophically complete film and the second in his trilogy of films à clef dealing with the "orphic identity." The first was the milestone Le sang d'un poète, an enigmatic and surreal work of art which André Bazin described as a "documentary of the imagination." Cocteau completed his trilogy in 1960 with Le testament d'Orphée, a personalized coda to his poetic quest in which Cocteau himself played the poet.

To Cocteau "poet" meant the creative artist, and the Orpheus of Greek mythology—the god of the lyre, song, and poetry—was Cocteau's personal muse. For Cocteau the plight of the poet was an unending search for truth and immortality, a life of suffering and martyrdom during which the poet must experience many deaths. In his introduction to Orphée, Cocteau wrote: "The poet must die several times in order to be reborn. Twenty years ago I developed this theme in The Blood of a Poet. But there I played it with one finger, in Orpheus I have orchestrated it."

The film, derived from Cocteau's 1925 play Orphée, revolves around the Poet Orpheus, the conflict with his wife Eurydice, and his struggle with the unknown world of "inspiration" personified by the Princesses. Like the mythical Orpheus's journey to Hades, Cocteau's Orphée must journey to the unknown—herein called the "zone"; which Cocteau, rather than building an artificial set, filmed in the bombed-out military academy of Saint-Cyr.

Cocteau's modernization of this fable is delineated much like a whodunit; Cocteau himself described it as "a detective story, bathed on one side in myth, and on the other is the supernatural." To evoke the supernatural Cocteau employed a number of cinematic tricks reminiscent of Méliès, most notably the vat of mercury to depict his mirror. He was, however, no mere filmic prestidigitator. These devices were simply the technical means by which he transcended the ordinary boundaries of the narrative film to create a "cinematograph" (a term he invented) detailing the "frontier incidents between one world and another."

Orphée was greeted with indifference and ambivalence by many critics who thought Cocteau a dilettante and a visual trickster, though perhaps their animosity derived from their own homophobia. The film, however, did receive the International Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival, and through the years has achieved the deserved status of masterpiece.

DVD Review of Orpheus Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica

The Criterion Contraption: #68: Orpheus Matthew Dessem

DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky

Movie Gazette DVD review [Anton Bitel]

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

DVD Talk (Jeremy Kleinman)

Images Movie Journal Gary Morris reviews the Orphic Trilogy, also seen here: Bright Lights Film Journal [Gary Morris]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Keith Phipps reviews the Orphic Trilogy

Mondo Digital reviews BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and the Orphic trilogy

Orpheus (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze] reviewing the Orphic Trilogy

THE TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS (Le testament d'Orphée, ou ne me demandez pas pourquoi!)

France (79 mi) 1960

Time Out Tony Rayns

Cocteau's last film is as personal and private as its title suggests, and it makes little sense for viewers unfamiliar with his other work. It's a wry, self-conscious re-examination of a lifetime's obsessions, with Cocteau playing himself at the centre of the mythology that he created in countless books, plays, films and paintings. This mythology yields a torrent of familiar characters, situations, effects and images, all of them quoted in a spirit of bewilderment and growing disillusionment: Cocteau finally disappears into his fictional world, leaving the real world to a noisy new generation. Nothing about the film is in the least seductive except for its fundamental openness; the tone veers between gentle irony and low-key pessimism. Cocteau admirers will probably find it very moving.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Frank Manera]

Jean Cocteau was one of the most prominent european poets of the first half of the twentieth century. His involvement with major artistic trends (especially Surrealism) is well documented and it was perhaps only a matter of time before he exploited the century's new medium as a means to generate a work full of vivid personal and allegorical imagery.

Le Testament d'Orphee follows the 1950 production of Orphee, which examined the life of a celebrated poet (alias Cocteau) and was marked by a tight cross-lacing of paranoid dreaming and poetic realism, and continues the author's obsession with his own life. As a result, Testament... is fairly obscure and may baffle those who know nothing about Cocteau' s works or life story

Features Yul Brynner and Cocteau's lover Jean Marais.

The Testament of Orpheus 1960: Movie and film review from Answers.com Wheeler Winston Dixon from All Movie Guide

The third film in Jean Cocteau's Orphic trilogy, The Testament of Orpheus followed The Blood of a Poet (1932) and Orphée (1949) as a fitting tribute to Cocteau's lifelong obsession with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as well as the continual presence of Death (moving about the world of the living through mirrors), personified in Orphée and Le Testament d'Orphée by the incomparable Maria Casarés.

The provenance of Le Testament d'Orphée is unusual; desperately wishing to make a film in his last years but unable to find the backing, Cocteau turned to the younger generation of filmmakers who had always admired his work and found a willing participant in François Truffaut, whose first feature film, Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) won Best Director at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, with Cocteau's adroit political maneuvering giving the film an added boost. Truffaut signed on as co-producer of the film, putting up 100,000 dollars toward the project, and brought on Jean Thuillier, who had produced a number of key New Wave films, as his associate. Truffaut also worked as informal assistant director on the project, for Cocteau's health, never robust, made him relatively uninsurable for such an ambitious project, and ambitious it certainly was.

Although he had made cameo appearances in some of his films and provided his mellifluous voice as a narrator for others, in Le Testament d'Orphée, for the first and last time, Cocteau took over the leading role in one of his films, essentially playing an idealized version of himself. Some have suggested that this was immodest, but Cocteau was never one to let his presence go unnoticed, and here, gathering his friends about him for the last time, he creates a world of fantasy, wonder, and enchantment, assisted by a truly stellar group of co-conspirators. Georges Auric's music is dreamy and appropriately ethereal; Martial Solal provides some jazz for the soundtrack. The immense cast includes Cocteau, Françoise Arnoul, Claudine Auger, Charles Aznavour, Brigitte Bardot, Maria Casarés, Edouard Dermit as Cégeste (Dermit would become the executor of Cocteau's estate after the writer's death in 1963), Daniel Gélin, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Serge Lifar, Pablo Picasso, Francoise Sagan, Annette Vadim, Roger Vadim, and Cocteau's longtime patron, Francine Weisweiler. The film's structure is episodic; as the poet, Cocteau wanders from one location to another, lost in his daydreams and reveries, meditating upon his past and his legacy as an artist, and relies upon a grab bag of special effects, particularly reverse motion (as in the scene in which Cocteau "reconstructs" a flower from its petals). Some of Cocteau's staunchest and most perceptive admirers, such as Cocteau's most astute biographer, Francis Steegmuller, have suggested that the film is so self-indulgent that it should not have been made; this seems to be missing the point entirely. Cocteau spent his entire life creating a world of make-believe and escapism in which the artist and the poet could move about freely without being bound by the constraints of society. As his final bow before the camera, it seems more than fitting that the artist himself should take center stage, and regale his audience one last time with the undeniable evidence of his cinematic mastery. Le Testament d'Orphée is a gentle, deeply felt film which serves as a fitting tribute to a life spent in the arts, and for all lovers of cinema, it is absolutely essential viewing.

Alternative Film Guide review of DVD Dan Schneider from Cosmoetica, also seen here: Dan Schneider on Testament Of Orpheus

CineMythology reviewing the film in context with the Orphic trilogy

DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky

DVD Talk (Jeremy Kleinman)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Death Taken Seriously by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, April 1960, from Rivette’s website

Images Movie Journal Gary Morris reviews the Orphic Trilogy, also seen here: Bright Lights Film Journal [Gary Morris]

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Keith Phipps reviews the Orphic Trilogy

Mondo Digital reviews BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and the Orphic trilogy

Testament of Orpheus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

FILM FESTIVAL; PORTRAITS OF RENOIR AND COCTEAU Vincent Canby from The New York Times, October 5, 1985

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze] reviewing the Orphic Trilogy

Coe, Fred

A THOUSAND CLOWNS

USA (118 mi) 1965

Thousand Clowns, A Matthew Lotti from Cinematic Threads

The "thousand clowns" of the title are people who go to work everyday, same time, mindlessly, for all their lives - in other words, you and me. Jason Robards, the eccentric who lives in an apartment of cluttered junk (filled with way-too symbolic eagle statues and a kite - 'freedom,' if you will), has to choose between his bohemian existence that he loves so much and settling down to a life of what we've come to call 'normalcy' to maintain custody of his whip-cord smart nephew. Pictures like this were made for people like me, the people who wake up every day to re-enact the same routines a la Groundhog Day (such is the life of a teacher, alas), never 'getting time' to see the sights around us (no one in the movie, despite living in NYC, has ever been to the top of the Statue of Liberty). Pandering to the 'beatnik' sensibility? Yes, but it's also sadly true, not to mention meticulously performed (Martin Balsam won an Oscar for what amounts to one speech - but what a speech it is).

Movie Magazine International [Purple]

Attention movie studios I have an announcement to make, as schlockbuster video stores jam the shelves with hundreds of the latest Hollywood product, some of the best movies ever made are fading away. At the top of my waiting for DVD list is the 1965 black and white classic "A Thousand Clowns".

I would love to see the full DVD treatment for this film. Clean up the soundtrack, restore the original aspect ratio, and celebrate one of the great cinematic nonconformist characters around. "A Thousand Clowns" stars the late Jason Robards as Murray Burns the underemployed icon that refuses to get swept up in the daily grind of the working world.

Robards, like child actor Barry Gordon reprise their roles from the original stage production written by Herb Gardner. This movie was nominated for four academy awards, including Best Picture in 1965 and Martin Balsom won as best supporting actor for his role as Murray's straight-laced Brother Arnie. The film features some familiar faces like William Daniels as Albert, the weaselly social worker who seeks to remove Murray's nephew from his custody, and introduces Barbara Harris as Sandy a social psychologist who falls for Murray's fast talking charm as quickly as she realizes that she's not going to get him to change his ways.

Anyone who faces college graduation or unemployment needs to watch this film. But be forewarned, this is a dangerous movie that embraces an anti-establishment philosophy smoothly sold by Robards' delivery of the smartly written dialog. This movies inspires dramatic reactions from people, who either support the working man machine and regard the self-indulgences of Murray's character as an arrogant clown to people who this movie re-affirms the struggle that all non-conformists face of being true to themselves and yet working along with the machine enough to survive.

Regardless of your philosophy, this movie's energy is infectious, and presents a picture postcard view of Manhattan in the 1960's that deserves to be seen and preserved. Unfortunately, as its years out of print, the only way you are likely to see "A Thousand Clowns" today is if your hip film school professor shows it to you in class, or a sweet girl tracks down a copy on eBay for you.

So c'mon you studio executives, before you give us another extras filled DVD of the newest releases, look into your libraries and dig up some timeless gems like "A Thousand Clowns" and share them with the rest of us. Let's snap to it!

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

THE cheeriest and most approving comment that can be made about the film, "A Thousand Clowns," is that it maintains the spirit and the humor of the Herb Gardner play on which it is based.

It starts right off as an erratic and wildly comic conversation piece in which a firmly dedicated nonconformist explains his casual attitude toward the world—and especially toward gainful employment—to anyone who will listen.

"I see a horrible sight," he gasps to the beaming lad who is galloping along with him on an early morning jaunt around Manhattan at the very beginning of the film. "I see a lot of people going to work!"

And it rolls on in that disdainful fashion — when the two return to their digs, which is a vast, cluttered one-room apartment, with accessories, in an old apartment barn; when they take on a pair of earnest workers from the Child Welfare Bureau who call to determine why the lad should not be taken away from his irresponsible uncle and put in a foster home; when the cute lady welfare worker gets taken with a wild bohemian urge, moves in and tries without too much enthusiasm to get the rebel to find himself a job.

And it concludes, after some little shuffling with a few other characters and a great deal more wild and comic talk, with the three characters who most matter wrapping themselves up in a nice, cozy ball.

What's more, it has Jason Robards, who did a lot to make the play the lark it was, still doing most of the talking and skylarking in the uncle's role, and Barry Gordon, who was his Broadway sidekick, still acting the quick, responsive boy.

It has the new and sensational Barbara Harris playing the appropriately lightheaded girl almost as wryly and irrationally as she was played by Sandy Dennis on the stage. And it still has Gene Saks contributing that hilariously freakish bit as television's Chuckles the Chipmunk, which turned the play into a blistering burlesque.

It has all of these in rich abundance. And since Mr. Gardner also wrote the script, which Fred Coe (who staged the play) directed, the comic essence of the play is in the film.

What is missing — or is strangely dissipated — in the almost two-hour long work, which, opened yesterday at the Trans-Lux East, is the play's spontaneity and pace. Mr. Coe has attempted to inject them with several interlude sequences that bounce his characters all around Manhattan—to the Statue of Liberty, the docks, Central Park, Wall Street. Greenwich Village—and he has tacked on a musical score that crashes with bursts of Sousa marches when a triumph of nonconformism is won.

But somehow these cinematic splashes of action and atmosphere, which are bright in themselves, seem extraneous and inharmonious with the long and stagy scenes of kooky but constricted conversation that take place mainly in one room. It is as though the interludes are but filling, to suggest the look and the frenzy of New York that are already well enough suggested in the deliciously erratic dialogue.

Also, there's just too much of it. The point is clear after an hour that the uncle, an ex-TV writer, persists in his off-beat slant on life because he wants to raise his nephew to be a human being, a person who enjoys himself—not, as the uncle puts it, a chair. That is fine, a reasonable thesis for light, harmless comedy. But it palls a bit after too much talk. And the long scene with Chuckles toward the end, which simply establishes the cheap absurdity of TV comics, is a little too much too late.

Even so, the humor is still surprising, and Mr. Robards is still full of spice with his clownish wise-cracks and the map of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey stamped all over his face. If you didn't see "A Thousand Clowns" on Broadway, you should certainly see it on the screen.

Slacker Film Guide

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Bob Aulert

Turner Classic Movies Stephanie Thames

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]

Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan

Coen Brothers Art and Culture

Joel and Ethan Coen cut their teeth on relatively low budget, fringe films. The black-humored brothers’ deviant reinterpretations of Hollywood formulas laugh in the face of the studio system. Influenced more by cartoons, B-movies, and exploitation flicks than by pretentious prestige productions, the brothers’ off-center takes on American culture helped propel the Independent filmmaking movement into the thriving artistic forefront it enjoys today.

Working as an inseparable team -- Joel directs, Ethan produces -- they co-write and co-edit their eccentric films. They make use of a growing stable of actors, including Steve Buscemi, Frances McDormand, John Turturro, and Jon Goodman, who play lunatic anti-heroes and heroines, funky misfits, and deranged criminals in deliberate mockery of cinema's stock characters. Thus far, the siblings have hatched a slyly farcical collection of screen gems -- variations on classic Hollywood genres loaded with visual flair and quirky dialogue. The Coens revel in their skewed brand of genre pastiche, literary homages, and wealth of twisted characters. They specialize in screwball mayhem with a bloody twist. Their greatest literary influences are the grim giants of hard-boiled detective fiction, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.

Running interference with industry-driven, big-budget recipes, the bizarro brothers' reworkings of genre staples have produced startlingly fresh takes on Noir film ("Blood Simple" (1983), "Miller’s Crossing" (1990), and "Fargo" (1996)) and the screwball comedy ("Raising Arizona" (1987), "The Hudsucker Proxy" (1994)). "Fargo’s" now-classic blend of murder and mayhem won the maverick filmmakers two Academy Awards: best screenplay, and best actress (for Coen-cohort and star Frances McDormand). When hitting their best grooves, the Coens’ singular brew of irony, ingenuity, and intoxicating wit bubbles to vivid, satiric life with visual aplomb and top-notch, original writing.

Film Reference R. Barton Palmer

Although Joel Coen had worked as an assistant film editor on commercial projects and had made valuable contacts within the industry (particularly director Sam Raimi), he and brother Ethan decided to produce their first feature film independently, raising $750,000 to shoot their jointly written script for Blood Simple, a neonoir thriller with a Dashiell Hammett title and a script full of homages to Jim Thompson. Though Joel received screen credit for direction and Ethan for the script, this distinction is somewhat artificial both here and in their subsequent productions. Joel and Ethan co-write their scripts and meticulously prepare storyboards in a collaborative effort unusual for the American cinema (the closest analogy perhaps comes from abroad with the British team of Powell and Pressburger).

Blood Simple was hardly the first film the brothers Coen made together. Addicted to TV and movies at an early age, they spent a good deal of their childhood writing films and then shooting them on a Super-8 camera. Movie brats in the Spielberg tradition, Ethan and Joel desired commercial success but were determined to retain control over what they produced. Hence their initial decision to make an independent film rather than continue working in an industry where Joel was already beginning to be established.

A hit with many on the art film/independent circuit but also a commercial success in art house and cable release, Blood Simple was the perfect choice to achieve this aim. Here was a film that succeeded because of its individual, even quirky vision. Using the film noir conventions popular with American audiences for half a century, the Coens offer a clear narrative, solidly two-dimensional characters, and the requisite amount of riveting violent spectacle (including one scene that pictures a dying man buried alive and another featuring close-ups of a white-gloved hand suddenly impaled by a knife). Blood Simple, however, is by no means an ordinary thriller. The plot turns expertly and unexpectedly on a number of dramatic ironies (no character knows what the spectator does, and even the spectator is sometimes taken by surprise). Unlike hardboiled narrative à la Raymond Chandler, the narrative delights in its Aristotelian neatness, in its depiction of experiences that make perfect sense, climaxing in a poetic justice that the main character and narrator, a venal private detective, finds humorous even as it destroys him. Thematically, the Coens offer a compelling analysis of mauvaise foi in the Sartrean vein as they develop characters doomed by bad intentions or a failure to trust and communicate (an existentialist theme that results perhaps from the fact that Ethan majored in philosophy at Princeton). Blood Simple's most notable feature, however, is an expressive stylization of both sound and image that creates an experiential correlative for the viewer of the characters' confusion and disorientation. These effects are achieved by a Wellesian repertoire of tricks (wide-angle lenses, tracking set-ups, unusual framings, an artfully selected score of popular music, etc.). The film noir genre naturalizes this stylization to some degree, but Blood Simple exudes a riotous self-consciousness, a delight in the creation of an exciting cinema that offers moments of pure visceral or visual pleasure.

Though some critics thought Blood Simple a kind of pointless film-school exercise, audiences were impressed—as were the major studios who competed for releasing rights to the brothers' next project. The Coens' subsequent five films have all been made with substantial commercial backing; but these films continue to be independent in the sense that none fits into the routine categories of contemporary Hollywood production. In fact, the art cinema tradition of the seventies has been kept alive by the Coens and the few other mavericks (e.g., Quentin Tarantino) who have emerged to prominence.

The least successful of these films—Miller's Crossing—is the most traditional. A "realistic" drama (though the scenes of violence are highly stylized) with a well-developed plot line, this saga of Prohibition-era mobsters, like Scorsese's Goodfellas (released the year before), aims to debunk the romantic tradition of the gangster film most tellingly exemplified by The Godfather (1972). The central character, a "good guy" high up in the organization, confusingly seems more a victim of his poor circumstances than a force to be reckoned with. The plot is otherwise dependent upon unbelievable characters and unlikely twists and turns. Some elements of parody are present, but are not well integrated into the film's structure, indicating that the Coens were uncertain about how to proceed, whether to make a gangster film or send up the conventions of the genre.

The other films share a different representational regime, a magical realism that does not demand verisimilitude or logical closure, but has the virtue—for the Coens—of permitting more stylization, more moments of pure cinema. Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy offer postmodern versions of the traditional Hollywood madcap comedy; in both films, a series of zany adventures climax in romantic happiness for the male and female leads. Raising Arizona concerns the ultimately unsuccessful attempt of a zany and childless couple to kidnap a baby; The Hudsucker Proxy sends up, in mock Capra-corn style, the triumph of the virtuous, if obtuse, hero over the evil system that attempts to use him for its own purposes. Barton Fink, in contrast, is a darker story, heavily indebted to German Expressionism (an influence to be noted as well in the elaborately artificial sets and unnaturalistic acting of The Hudsucker Proxy). The film's main character is a thirties stereotype, a left-wing Jewish playwright committed to representing the miseries of what he calls "the common man." Hired away from Broadway by a Hollywood studio, he embarks unwittingly on a penitential journey that lays bare the forces of the id both in the apparently common man he meets (a salesman who is actually a serial killer) and in himself (abandoning his writing responsibility, he finds himself at film's end at the beach with the beautiful woman whose picture he first saw in a calendar).

All three of these films abound in bravura stylizations. A man dives out a skyscraper window and the camera traces the stages of his fall (Hudsucker); a baby's meanderings across the floor are captured by a camera literally at floor level (an elaborate mirror shot in Arizona); wallpaper peels off a hotel room wall revealing something warm and gooey like human flesh underneath (Barton Fink); exaggerated sounds—a mosquito's flight, a noisy bed, a whirling fan—perfectly express the main character's self-absorption and anxiety (Barton Fink again). With Fargo, their 1996 release, the Coen brothers return to the crime drama. Set primarily in Minnesota, the film follows an immensely likable and very pregnant sheriff (played by Frances McDormand, Joel Coen's wife) as she pursues a couple of dimwitted and cold-blooded kidnappers. A macabre thriller veined with moments of comedy, Fargo features the Coen brothers' trademark cinematic flair (though the landscape mutes this somewhat) and intelligent narrative focus.

The Coens appear to have abandoned for good the stylized realism and Aristotelian narrative that made Blood Simple such a success. But in an era that has witnessed the commercial success of cartoonish anti-naturalism (Dick Tracy, the Batman films), their concern with striking visual and aural effects may provide the basis for a long career, though difficult films like Barton Fink, despite critical acclaim, will never gain a wide audience.

Coen Brothers - "You Know, For Kids!" the movies of the Coen brothers Coen Brothers website

THE COEN BROTHERS FAQ JD La France from “You Know, For Kids!” (pdf format)

Coenesque Coen Brothers blog

Coenesque - Joel and Ethan Coen Biography

All-Movie Guide: Joel bio from Rebecca Flint Marx

TCMDB: Joel biography from Turner Classic Movies

All-Movie Guide: Ethan bio from Rebecca Flint Marx

TCMDB: Ethan biography from Turner Classic Movies

Joel and Ethan Coen Paul Coughlin from Senses of Cinema, March 2003

Gods of Filmmaking Joel Ethan Coen directors of Big Lebowski ... biography

The Coen Brothers profile page from Mahalo

Optimus Prime Films | Directors | Coen Brothers

Who are the Coen Brothers? Phil Shepley at the Wise Geek

Joel & Ethan Coen: The Brothers From Another Planet - Rolling Stone David Handelman from Rolling Stone magazine, May 21, 1987

Guardian Article Lost Brothers, John Patterson from the Guardian, June 19, 2004

Coen Heads - New York Magazine David Edelstein, September 24, 2007

Primer: The Coen Brothers | Film | A.V. Club Scott Tobias from The Onion A.V. Club, November 29, 2007

The Observer profile: The Coen brothers | Film | The Guardian Andrew Anthony, January 13, 2008

Complete Coen Brothers - AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center Coen Brothers restrospective, February 8 – March 6, 2008

Cinematical Seven: Best Coen Brothers Supporting Characters ... James Rocchi from Cinematical, March 2, 2008

Burn After Reading | The Coen Brothers: From Blood to Burn, and ... brief synopsis of each film by Nick Dawson from Film in Focus, August 27, 2008

Sleeping and Severed Toes: Ethan Coen & Joel Coen on the Art of Screenwriting William Preston Robertson from Film in Focus, August 29, 2008

The Dude Abides: The Cult of The Big Lebowski Jason Guerrasio from Film in Focus, September 5, 2008

Brad Pitt Brad Pitt Has Multiple Personalities, by Nisha Gopalan from Film in Focus, September 10, 2008

Movie Crunch » Ranking The Films Of The Coen Brothers Wendy, September 11, 2008

Top Coen Brothers Movies - 5 Best Joel and Ethan Coen Movies Scott Marks from About.com (Undated)

ReelzChannel: Top 10 Minor Coen Brothers' Characters September 12, 2008

Laughter is the Worst Medicine Mikita Brottman from Film in Focus, September 16, 2008

Carter Burwell Scott Macaulay from Film in Focus, September 19, 2008

Genesis of a Poster Andrew Percival at Mojo House from Film in Focus, September 25, 2008

The Curator | “In the Parlance of Our Times”: An Insufficient ... Jefferey Overstreet from The Curator, September 25, 2008

WILLIAM FAULKNER: THE PERFECT COEN BROTHERS HERO | More ... Daniel Arizona from More Intelligent Life, December 2008

Coen brothers shoot an ad busting the 'clean coal' myth | Grist Kate Sheppard from Grist, February 26, 2009, on YouTube (31 seconds)

Coen Brothers, Dispelling the Myth of “Clean” Coal - PSFK March 2, 2009

The Coen Brothers - Coen Brothers Spotlight | UGO.com Matt Burch from UGO, March 4, 2009

The Rumpus Gets Smart: The Definitive Essay on Dudeness J.M. Tyree and Ben Walters from The Rumpus, July 31, 2009

A Coen brothers movie you'll enjoy the hell out of - scanners Jim Emerson from Scanners, August 10, 2009, on YouTube (3:19)

Film and Video » A Coen Brothers Movie-Title Still Retrospective. Kristina from the Walker Art Center, August 19, 2009

A Serious Man: The Coen Brothersé Jewish Question - TIME Richard Corliss from Time magazine, September 12, 2009

A Coen brothers zodiac | Features | Movies | Culture | A.V. Twin ... Lara Avery from The Onion A.V. Club, September 17, 2009

The films of the Coen brothers Photo gallery from MPR NewsQ, September 17, 2009

The Coen Brothers come home | Minnesota Public Radio NewsQ Euan Kerr from MPR NewsQ, September 18, 2009

Cathleen Falsani: The Coen Brothers Get "Serious" with a Comic ... Cathleen Falsani from The Huffington Post, September 18, 2009

Coen Brothers Want John Turturro To Get Old For 'Barton Fink ... Adam Rosenberg from MTV Moview Blog, September 21, 2009

I Watched Every Coen Brothers Movie David Haglund from Slate, August 11, 2011

Slate Readers Choose the Best and Worst Coen Brothers Films David Haglund from Slate, August 15, 2011

O Coen Brothers, Where Art God? A Conversation Between ... - Indiewire O Coen Brothers, Where Art God? A Conversation Between Matt Zoller Seitz and Jeffrey Overstreet from indieWIRE, March 31, 2013

No one can agree on the top 5 greatest Coen Brothers films - HitFix February 4, 2016

The Latest Definitive Ranking of the Coen Brothers' Films - The Atlantic David Sims, February 5, 2016

The Two Lebowskis: The Coen Brothers' Battle Of The Boomers - Uproxx Scott Tobias from Uproxx, July 12, 2016

Coen, Joel and Ethan Coen They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Joel and Ethan Coen aka The Coen brothers Cinepad interview (1991)

A conversation between author Cormac McCarthy and the Coen ... Time magazine, October 18, 2007

MinnPost - Rob Nelson: Coen brothers tell press to burn after ... Rob Nelson covers Coen brothers press screening, September 8, 2006

The Coen Brothers: Interviews brief synopsis of book edited by William Rodney Allen (240 pages)

Ranked 3rd on The Guardian's 2004 List of the World's 40 Best Directors

New York Film Academy's 20 Great Movie Directors

BLOOD SIMPLE A 95

USA (99 mi) 1984

The world is full o’ complainers. An’ the fact is, nothin’ comes with a guarantee. Now I don’t care if you’re the pope of Rome, President of the United States or Man of the Year; somethin’ can all go wrong. Now go on ahead, y’know, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help, ‘n watch him fly. Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else... that’s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, an’ down here... you’re on your own.

—Private Detective Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), Blood Simple (1/11) Movie CLIP - Down Here, You're on Your Own (1984) HD YouTube (1:17)

A film that suggests how our own view of the world ultimately affects the outcome of our lives, where it’s not fate but our own personal blinders that prevent us from seeing the bigger picture, often ending up wallowing in self-pity as a result. FFalling somewhere between an absurd comic thriller and a modernistic neo-~~film~~ noir, the film provides the signature Coen brothers trademark, displaying their lacerating wit in subversively blending dark and light tones. Drawing from a phrase out of Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest, “blood simple” describes the mind-numbing panic and confusion~~fear~~ engulfing a killer at the moment he realizes he’s actually killed someone. Two male characters go “blood-simple” over the duration of the film, causing extreme internal alarm when they lose their composure, yet the mindset exists throughout the picture, exhibiting disastrous consequences. This ~~sense of~~ intense personal anxiety and sense of dread pervades nearly every frame of this film, where a deep sense of foreboding accompanies every shot, like John Carpenter movies ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976) or HALLOWEEN (1978), where the atmospheric techniques to provide ~~excitement~~ ~~and~~ tension and suspense make the film resemble a slasher movie. The thrill of writing a movie like this is creating a labyrinth for which there is no escape, where the audience has access to clues that the characters in the film do not, snaring them in a web of their own delusions and deceit. As the first Coen brothers movie written, directed, co-produced and co-edited by the two brothers Joel and Ethan, none of the major Hollywood studios were willing to release the film, calling it “too gory to be an art film, too arty to be an exploitation film, funny but not quite a comedy,” ~~instead~~ premiering instead at Sundance in 1985 where it won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize before touring at Cannes, New York, and the Toronto Film Festivals to great acclaim, easily recouping their original investments, although the original VHS release didn’t obtain the rights to one of the featured musical tracks, playing Neil Diamond’s “I’m a Believer” instead of what turns out to be a brilliant theme song in Four Tops - It's The Same Old Song (1966) HQ 0815007 - YouTube (2:41), which was corrected by the time it came out on DVD. Essentially a story of broken hearts, a lover’s separation stems from a lack of trust, where the guy’s too big of a jerk to express his love for his wife, so an age-old dilemma of forbidden sexual encounters results in her sleeping with another man. The husband would rather kill them both than see her with another man. Meanwhile, the man she’s run off with kills her husband supposedly to protect her, believing she tried to kill him, where he simply finishes off the job someone else started. The wife thought she loved this new guy, but has second thoughts when she realizes he’s actually killed someone. The new guy thought he loved the other guy’s wife until he suspects she’s framing him for the murder. Happiness turns into betrayal and a series of misplaced assumptions that are never actually discussed, both becoming haunted by a painful memory that stands between them, where the song lyrics ironically reveal, “It’s the same old song, but with a different meaning since you’ve been gone.” Creating a tightly-plotted, low-budget indie film, the same can be said for the Coen’s stylistic revival of a familiar film noir murder genre, much like CHINATOWN (1974), BODY HEAT (1981), or even Pulp Fiction (1994) — same song, different meaning.

Using an intriguing method to raise money for the film, the Coen’s made a fake trailer featuring the two brothers themselves. With only enough money to rent camera equipment for one day, they chose a Thursday ahead of a President’s Day Friday and Monday holiday, allowing them to shoot for 5 consecutive days. With trailer in hand, they shopped the film around ~~made the rounds~~ for ~~little~~ more than a year of asking potential~~for~~ investors, accumulating half of the $1.5 million dollars needed from 168 private investors, which was enough to start production. A bleak melodrama of adultery, double-crosses, and murder, not to mention a continuing series of blunders and major misunderstandings, the Coen’s use a dazzling film technique that only heightens the interest, using virtuoso camera movements, high and low-angle shots, and vividly expressive lighting effects in a throwback to a James M. Cain style film noir to tell a dark and violent story with devastating turns and plot twists. Similar to Cain’s characters, illicit desires lead them into a shadowy spiral of ill-fated destruction, where the ominous opening voice-over monologue, presented as a prologue, may more appropriately be viewed as the epilogue, becoming one of the film’s unanswered mysteries, but it certainly sets a tone of inevitable doom, accentuated by headlights shining on a dark highway with an effective montage of a barren west Texas landscape, including isolated oil pumps and refineries silhouetted against a mammoth sky, including an abandoned outdoor drive-in theater, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, serving as a viewer introduction to the Reagan years, an America lost in a wasteland. It’s a very clever way for the Coen’s to introduce themselves in their first film. Not only the camerawork from fellow director Barry Sonnenfeld, who supposedly watched The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970) and THE THIRD MAN (1949) in preparation for making the film, but also the hypnotic, Carpenteresque music from Carter Burwell and a superb sound design add unique stylish touches to this film, with clear connections to the horror genre. Following the gloom and doom of the opening narration, the screen turns dark, with a lone car headlight slowly approaching the center of the screen from a distance, leading to the title sequence, where the monotonous sound of windshield wipers takes over as the camera then places us inside that car, where Abby (a very young Frances McDormand, marrying Joel Coen later that year) is leaving her husband Marty (Dan Hedaya), the picture of a man in deep shit and the owner of a bar named the Neon Boot in rural Texas, driven by one of his bartenders, Ray (John Getz), in a driving rain. The mood is tense, few words are spoken as they decide what to do. Abby tells Ray that her first anniversary gift from Marty was a small, pearl-handled .38 revolver, thinking she better leave before using it on him, where neither one is much interested in revisiting her marital troubles, instead taking refuge from the storm in a motel where they end up having sex. The next morning the phone rings in the motel room, where the caller is an openly suspicious jealous husband who wants them to know they’re not fooling anybody. We learn afterwards that Marty had them followed by a private investigator, a particularly disreputable lowlife named Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh, never better, as he is the epitome of sleaze) a large, sweaty man in an oversized cowboy hat who seems to exist on the same moral plane as a sewer rat, going above and beyond what he was hired to do, providing photographs of the couple in the motel, then taking apparent glee by telling him they went at it like rabbits, only stopping occasionally before starting over again. Disgusted, Ray dismisses him angrily as the investigator scoops up his specially engraved Elks Man of the Year lighter off the counter, an image the camera lingers on, before telling him, “Don’t come by here any more. If I need you again, I’ll know which rock to turn over.”

Shots from inside the bar convey a darkness illuminated by neon signs, where the bar is actually part strip club, as male patrons are used to ogling the women for pleasure, while Marty has a two-way mirror installed in his office allowing him to watch his customers and the girls without ever being detected. This is emblematic of the voyeurism associated with the film, not only in the expressive look, but also the disturbing way Visser secretly observes others behind the scenes, with the two-sided mirror standing for the owner’s double cross, while also expressing how he blatantly hides his real intentions. When Ray returns back to the bar to request his final paycheck, Marty refuses to give it to him, calling his wife “an expensive piece of ass” before threatening to shoot him if he ever sets foot on his property again. This sequence is preceded by a slow-moving camera shot that moves along the length of the bar, elevating itself to climb over a drunk passed out on the counter, before settling back to the counter position. The discussion, however, takes place outside the back door, with a view of an incinerator burning not far away, where the crackle of the fire mixes with the sharp snaps associated with an electrical bug zapper, Marty’s face lit by the neon blue light, while the sounds are exaggerated to account for Marty’s internalized hatred turning into hysteria. What follows afterwards is a kind of dance of emotional disconnection, where this three-way ménage a trois only grows more distrustful. Abby removes some of her stuff from Marty’s home and moves in with Ray, not the brightest guy on the block, but seemingly dependable, yet ends up sleeping on the couch, as both are unsure of the other’s real intentions, where each is quick to think the other may already have another sexual partner, where this arrangement could be interrupting something, while Marty spends all night sitting on a chair in his office wondering what to do next. Neither Abby or Marty can sleep, where the camera cross-cuts between them, with an outside light shining on Abby’s face as she lies in a restless state on the sofa, yet there are shadows from foliage or tree branches marking her face, eventually getting up in her nightgown like a sleepwalker and moving into the room with Ray, yet the camera holds the outside light from the window which eventually turns into the next morning. Quite unexpectedly, a slow tracking shot reveals the presence of Marty’s dog in the living room, where his hand is on her throat with dishonorable intentions before she has a chance to figure anything out. With the camera focused upon a gun falling out of her purse, Marty pulls her in the opposite direction, crudely taunting her, eventually dragging her out the door, but before he has a chance to act on his perverted impulses, she kicks him hard in the groin, breaking one of his fingers in the process. The quick cuts and hand-held close-ups only accentuate the confusion of the moment, but Marty is left totally out of sorts afterwards, running to his car, squealing his tires as he makes a quick getaway, only to have to turn around at the dead end and zoom by once again. This dead end motif is hilariously used several times for humor, cutting the edge off scenes that may otherwise display inordinate violence. What’s perhaps most surprising about the film is the extraordinary amount of pitch black humor, perfectly balancing the darkness of the otherwise bleak subject matter.

A short time later, Marty is seen meeting Visser on a bluff overlooking the river, a kind of lover’s lane outside town where Visser is seen trying to pick up a teenage girl before they sit down for business in the front seat of his undersized Volkswagen Beetle.

Marty: I got a job for you.

Private Detective Visser: Uh, well, if the pay’s right, and it’s legal, I’ll do it.

Marty: It’s not strictly legal.

Private Detective Visser: [Thinks for a second] Well, if the pay’s right, I’ll do it.

While not exactly “the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” where Marty’s forced to listen to Visser’s commentary on the test of true love, Blood Simple - Test of True Love - YouTube (48 seconds), it’s hard to tell which of these two vile characters is actually more contemptible, but Marty offers him $10,000 dollars for the murder of them both, no questions asked, as Visser suggests Marty leave town for a few days on a fishing trip to Corpus Christi while he attends to the matter, giving him a call when the deed is done. Marty reminds him of the incinerator behind the bar, urging him to make sure the bodies are never discovered. This only disgusts Visser, whose growing contempt for the man is never more evident. That night Abby wakes up terrified, thinking Marty is somewhere inside Ray’s house, but he calmly reassures her the house is locked. The camera holds its position while the two talk momentarily, as the neurotically chatty Abby discusses her husband’s psychiatric peculiarities, claiming he took her to see a psychiatrist to help calm her down, but the psychiatrist revealed she was the healthiest person he’d ever spoken to, before summing up her views on the reticence of either one of them to communicate much, “He’s like you, he doesn’t say much. When he doesn’t say things, they’re usually nasty. When you don’t, they’re usually nice.” When she rolls over, the audience can see her body was blocking a view out the window of Visser’s Volkswagen parked outside, using the camera once again to amp up the tension in an otherwise tender moment, much like Hitchcock in REAR WINDOW (1954). Visser quietly fumbles with the front door lock before entering the house, removing Abby’s gun from her purse, noticing there are three bullets in the chamber, while creeping throughout the house, moving in and out of the shadows to the bedroom, but then exits unexpectedly. Instead he walks to the outdoor bedroom window and peers in, taking a photograph of the sleeping couple. Visser calls Marty from a pay phone, meeting him again in his office at the bar, slapping his monogrammed lighter on the counter while Marty dumps four dead fish on the desk, temporarily obscuring the lighter, before showing him a doctored photograph of the couple that resembles our last look in the bedroom, though blood has been edited into the photograph so it appears they have been shot by multiple bullet wounds. As Marty moves to the safe to get the money, with a brilliant shade of blazing red as the hellish backdrop behind a close-up of his head, sliding in one of the incriminating photos for protection while at the same time telling Visser they have to learn to trust each other, he hands him a bundle of cash, telling him to count it. Visser accordingly responds with “Nah, I trust you” before shooting him in the chest with Abby’s gun, throwing it on the floor afterwards while Marty’s body, still sitting in his chair, turns stiff immediately, registering no expression on his face as blood can be seen trickling down his hands hanging at his side, yet Visser can’t help but remind him afterwards, “Who looks stupid now?” Blood Simple (5/11) Movie CLIP - Who Looks Stupid Now? (1984) HD YouTube (4:05). While the camera reveals the lighter left on Marty’s desk, time seems to stop momentarily as Visser exists, where the audience is left with the whoosh of an overhead shot of a revolving ceiling fan heard spinning endlessly.

Later that night long after closing, Ray returns to the bar seeking his unpaid money from Marty, but finds the cash register empty. His eyes move to the light coming out of the closed door frame of the office, moving slowly and carefully inside where he finds Marty sitting at his desk, his back to the door. As he cautiously investigates, with no answer coming from Marty, he accidentally steps on Abby’s gun which fires off a shot, a startling reflex moment that is sure to make nearly everyone in the theater jump out of their seats, yet it’s the kind of accomplished filmmaking that endears audiences to the Coen brothers, as clearly they know what they’re doing. With Abby’s gun and a dead husband, Ray assumes she murdered him and instinctively tries to protect her by wiping up the blood with his own jacket and disposing of the body, placing him in the back seat of his car with the gun in his jacket, throwing accumulated clean-up materials into the incinerator while driving him out into the empty Texas countryside in the dead of night. But he’s startled to hear sounds coming from the back seat, momentarily scaring him half to death, stopping the car and running out into an open dirt field. In a brilliant “body disposal” scene that lasts just over 13 minutes, no words are spoken, only the lonely sounds of Spanish music coming from the car radio, which includes “Anahi” by Argentinian singer Maria Luisa Buchino and her Llameros, Anahi - YouTube (2:08). By the time he returns to the car, the body is gone, seen slowly crawling up the highway at a snail’s pace. Pulling a shovel out of the trunk, with the sound of the shovel eerily heard as he drags it along the highway, he’s unable to use it, instead spotting approaching headlights from an oncoming truck off in the distance, where he has to pull Marty back inside the car just seconds before the truck races by. Next we hear the sound of the shovel, as Ray is digging a shallow grave by the light of his car, pushing Marty in the hole and throwing dirt on him while deafening moaning is coming from Marty, who pulls the gun out of the pocket and points it at Ray with his broken finger, firing two shots, but both are empty chambers. Ray grabs the gun out of his hand and finishes the job of burying him alive, a moment of terror and sheer horror, pounding the soil with the shovel afterwards, as if that should finish him off. By the light of day, Ray is leaning next to his car smoking a cigarette, while an aerial shot shows the car tire tracks leaving a perfect trail through a newly ploughed dirt field. Once he attempts to start his car, it fails to ignite, forced to try again, where only the Coen brothers can find dark humor in bringing the audience directly into the absurdity of this panicked situation, mirrored by a repeating piano theme that eloquently dominates the film, providing grace and tenderness in agonizing moments of accumulated dread and fear. Thankfully, he is able to escape, calling Abby to remind her that he loves her, thinking he’s saved her from some horrible fate, while she accordingly expresses her thanks, as if they are both on the same page. Returning later to Abby’s new apartment, Ray assures her that everything’s been taken care of, if they can just keep their heads, but Abby has no idea what he’s talking about, as she has no knowledge of Marty’s death.

Meanwhile, Visser burns the photographs, but discovers one is missing, assuming Marty must have locked it in the bar’s safe, while at the same time realizing he left his lighter in Marty’s office, so he returns to the bar as well, breaking into the back door and realizing the body is missing, retrieving anything that could be associated with him while taking a hammer to break open the safe, but hides when he is interrupted by a visit from Abby, hoping to explain Ray’s strange behavior, finding the bar ransacked and bloodstained, thinking Ray and Marty must have gotten into a fight, which would explain the mess. Particularly effective are the dual visits to the bar by Ray and Abby on subsequent nights, where he discovers an attempted murder and assumes she did it, while she finds an attempted burglary and assumes he did it. Equally jaw-dropping is a transitional shot expressing that confusion in a single shot that compresses time and space, as from the bar, Abby falls backwards but lands into her bed at home, only to find herself obsessed by a dream sequence that resurrects the spirit of Marty warning her about Ray, suggesting he is somehow involved in her husband’s disappearance, where for the audience anyway, it’s conceivable Marty might have risen from the grave, but then she wakes up in a fright. Confronting Ray at his home, he is no longer trusting anyone, as he’s busy packing his belongings, where she admits there must have been trouble between him and Marty. Ray explains he found her gun at the bar and even confesses he buried Marty alive, something she finds incomprehensible, having received assurances from another bartender that he’s still alive, while Ray’s heart skipped a beat of disbelief when she mentioned receiving a call from Marty, where Ray starts believing she may be setting him up for the murder. Returning back to the bar, Ray finds in the safe the fake photo of the couple lying in bed, returning to Abby’s apartment, sensing she may be in danger. Instead, he realizes he’s being tailed by a Volkswagen, but thinks he successfully loses it yet waits in the dark at Abby’s apartment staring out the window. When she arrives, she flips on the lights, failing to comprehend his instructions to keep the lights off as somebody may be watching them. Consequences ensue. With an extraordinary build-up, Abby believes it is Marty, or an avenging ghost of Marty, stalking her in the film’s final sequence, like the advancing steps of the merciless killer Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007), establishing a curious contrast between Visser’s vulnerability in the lit bathroom and Abby’s safety in the darkness next door, with Abby remaining in the dark throughout, completely unaware of the truth, where the devil himself may as well have the last laugh, a voice of the damned, doomed to suffer into perpetuity. Taking its laceratingly dark tone from Detour (1945), the film is an operatic ballet of miscommunication, with the audience clearly knowing what is explicitly missing to the characters onscreen, just ordinary people who are inevitably making the wrong choices or assumptions, leading to a mind-bending communications breakdown with dire consequences, like something out of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974), Klute (1971), or one of the legendary 70’s paranoia thrillers. Staking their claim on sustaining a palpable fear throughout, Carter Burwell’s eerily repetitious and hauntingly simple piano score aptly conveys the insidious tension that builds throughout, Blood Simple - Blood Simple YouTube (3:35), as the Coen’s remind viewers at every turn that a sinister presence lurks just under the surface, ready to leap out at any given moment, while windows, suggestive of the openness of innocence, are always exposed, never covered with curtains, allowing depraved unseen eyes entrance into the most private personal space, where the audience is invested in these hapless characters, riveted by the off-beat humor that infects this strange new world. A decade later in Fargo (1996), the Coen’s would add a more humane and caring figure in McDormand as a kindly police detective, finally placing this Macbethian rampage in context, but at the outset of their careers, the Brothers were much more ruthless.

Time Out Tom Milne

Hugely enjoyable film noir in which a Texan bar-owner hires a seedy private eye, first to spy on his wife, then to kill her and her lover. Instead, the eye (a marvellous performance from Walsh), having collected his fee, executes a variation on the contract. Whereupon things take off in a maelstrom of misunderstanding that spreads guilt and fear like a plague through the characters, and escalates a nightmarish terror (premature burial, murder by battery, crucifying impalement) that owes some debt to the horror comic. A remarkably assured debut for Coen, formerly assistant editor on The Evil Dead.

Joel and Ethan Coen burst onto the independent film scene in 1984 with their first release, BLOOD SIMPLE. Richard Corliss of Time magazine described it best by saying, “A debut as scarifyingly assured as any since Orson Welles.” After a thirtyplus year career with some twentyodd entries, it still ranks among their best works. BLOOD SIMPLE’s brilliance lies in its straightforwardness. Although shot on a very small budget and with a relatively unknown cast at the time (including the proficient Frances McDormand in her very first role), the film outperforms its modest inception, elevating itself with sophisticated nuance and the Coens' technical and writing savvy. As with many of their films, the storyline is rather simple; a woman runs off from her husband with another man; revenge is sought and goes very wrong. The sublime editing, which has become a Coen trademark by now, allows each scene to flow into the next effortlessly. BLOOD SIMPLE is an astonishingly strong debut film by two of the greatest independent film directors of our time; it’s a neonoir that is as enthralling as it is nightmarish.

10 Things: Blood Simple. (1984) | Nitehawk Cinema

Leave it to the ever-contrary Coen Brothers to produce the first "director’s cut" that’s actually shorter than the original. Though the 1984 original was released just as Joel and Ethan wanted it, they decided looking back the movie needed a little pepping-up before it hit theaters again, so a few lines have been snipped and a few shots shortened, but by and large, this Blood Simple is the same as when it was first released. The Coens’ first feature takes its title from Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, but its tone is closer to Hammett’s less-reputable pulp cousins. (Harvest, along with Hammett’s The Glass Key, was also the source for much of the plot of the Coens’ Miller’s Crossing.) Dan Hedaya plays a cuckolded Texas bar owner who hires private eye M. Emmet Walsh to exact revenge on his two-timing wife (Frances McDormand) and her lover (John Getz, the weak spot in an otherwise exceptional cast). Double-crosses and multiple murders — one character is "killed" at least three times — follow, and the titular fluid flows dark and thick. Simple borrows too much from the Coens’ mentor Sam Raimi, and in the light of their later work, the film often seems like a dry run for techniques they’d come to perfect. But it’s amazing how early on the Coens knew exactly what they were aiming at, if not how to get there; the morbid humor and escalating atmospherics have been at the center of everything else they’ve done. The film’s justly celebrated climax, a textbook example of how to achieve extraordinary effects with next-to-no money, and Walsh’s sly-mouthed, dead-eyed performance is a masterpiece of timing. Two notes: One, despite the directorial trimming, the reissue’s running time is exactly the same as the original’s 97 minutes, due to an added introduction by a pompous Robert Osborne-type who credits the film with "ushering in the era of independent cinema," but cautions viewers that at the time, "filmographic techniques were in their infancy." And two, this version differs significantly from the video in one area; due to inadequate legal clearance, several music cues from the original had to be replaced on the video version. Here, they’re restored, including the deafeningly ironic use of the Four Tops’ "It’s the Same Old Song."

Blood Simple Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

Elvis is still alive. Turns out he's been living incognito in a West Memphis trailer park since August 1977, emerging from seclusion only for the occasional late-night convenience store run. It's been a happy, blessedly peaceful existence, apart from that Michael Jackson business a while back. But late last week, the King, feeling a mite nostalgic, popped a copy of The Complete Sun Sessions into the ol' CD player...only to find himself appalled and embarrassed by his uneven performance of "That's All Right (Mama)." Why, any fool could hear evidence of a suppressed cough midway through the line "Papa done told me too"! Accordingly, he'll be rerecording portions of the vocal track at a forthcoming session (to be televised live on pay-per-view), and all future pressings of the Sun material will feature the new, improved version of the tune.

Okay, so you're not buying it. Yet the basic scenario—excluding the whole icon-escapes-the-grave bit, I mean—isn't as ridiculous as it may appear. This Friday, Joel and Ethan Coen's first feature, Blood Simple (1984), returns to theaters, in what's being touted as the director's cut—a phrase that inevitably suggests that the material was wrested from its makers' hands by some evil, faceless corporation, and has now been lovingly restored to its original, untrammeled state. But while some elements of the film have genuinely been restored, others have been retroactively reconfigured, and I'm both surprised and dismayed to find that nobody seems to object, or even care.

Actually, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. There is, after all a precedent: Three years ago, George Lucas added state-of-the-art special effects to the original Star Wars trilogy, populating the backgrounds of various scenes with brand-new computer-generated critters. Or so I understand, at least—I refused to see the damn things, preferring to stage a one-man ideological boycott. (It wasn't much of a sacrifice, to be honest; of the three, Empire is the only one that really sends me.)

Incredulous friends pointed out that Lucas himself had authorized—hell, instigated—the alterations, and argued that he had every right to revise his own work if he so desired. But movies aren't merely creative endeavors—once released, they're also historical artifacts, and monkeying with them seems to me uncomfortably Orwellian, even when it's the original artisan doing the deed. Elvis is a deliberately silly example...but if, say, Bob Dylan were to rerecord his early harmonica solos, on the grounds that they weren't freewheelin' enough, arguing that his facility with the mouth organ has much improved since those days (this is a hypothetical situation, you understand), music aficionados would be up in arms. What makes the movies exempt from such aesthetic protectionism?

Ironically, Blood Simple didn't need much in the way of tweaking, as it was already a masterpiece of tight plotting and low-budget atmosphere. A noir-inflected tale of adultery and murder, it's distinguished by a conceit unusual for the genre: While most noirs withhold key information from the audience, Blood Simple withholds it from each of the four main characters, putting the viewer in a privileged position. Indeed, almost every significant narrative event is the result of somebody's unfortunate (but understandable) misinterpretation of something (s)he's seen or heard—it's like The Postman Always Rings Twice restructured as a typical episode of Three's Company. Eager to make a splash, the boys indulge in a fair amount of cinematic grandstanding—sending the camera floating over the head of an unconscious barfly; filling the screen with the ominously sweeping blades of a ceiling fan—but their self-conscious technique perfectly complements the deliciously outsize performances they elicit from their principal cast (John Getz, Dan Hedaya, M. Emmet Walsh, and future Oscar winner Frances McDormand). Carter Burwell, meanwhile, contributes the first in his apparently endless series of brilliant scores (see also Fargo, Being John Malkovich, The Spanish Prisoner), evoking a palpable sense of dread with just a couple of piano keys.

So, what's different about this version? In truth, very little, apart from the obvious and overwhelming contrast between a shoddy video transfer and a newly mastered 35mm print. The Coens have re-edited the film slightly—"We've taken out some of the boring parts," explains Ethan in the press notes—and their handiwork is likely to be invisible to those who've seen the movie once or twice before. (Those who, like myself, have seen it a dozen times or more should be prepared to wince occasionally.) Do the cuts improve the pacing, as the filmmakers claim? Possibly. Most of the scenes that have been trimmed involve a minor character, Meurice, played by an actor named Samm-Art Williams. Williams, who's appeared in only two other feature films over the past 16 years, may be the least talented thespian in the entire Coen oeuvre, and reducing his presence to a bare minimum arguably qualifies as an act of mercy. But the proper time to make that decision was during Reagan's first presidential term.

Still, despite my misgivings, I can't quite bring myself to discourage you from running out to see the movie—especially if you've never seen it before, or have only seen it on video. Like many mid-'80s filmmakers, the Coens were unable to license the home-video rights for some of their source music (the video industry being somewhat inchoate at the time), and so every VHS and laserdisc copy of Blood Simple features, in no fewer than three separate scenes, a lackluster version of Neil Diamond's "I'm a Believer." On celluloid, you'll hear the tune that the Coens originally selected, a Motown hit; the profound difference in mood realized by what is truly a negligible change—I mean, it's not as if a Bee Gees anthem had been replaced by a Nick Cave dirge or anything—serves as an object lesson in music's uncanny ability to inflect images with meaning.

Oh, and the name of that transformative Motown classic? The Four Tops' "It's the Same Old Song." I wish.

Peter Reiher

I hope that those of you who have been reading my reviews will agree that I don't tend to be overly enthusiastic about most movies. I try to keep a film's achievements in perspective. Keeping this in mind, here is my advice about Blood Simple: whatever your plans are, drop them. Whatever was supposed to get done, postpone it. Whoever you promised something, fob them off with the best excuse you can think of. In fact, stop reading this review, log out, and proceed immediately to see Blood Simple. Don't let small considerations like ticket prices, several hour drives, or the difficulty of getting babysitters deter you. See this movie at once.

Most of you may be unable to follow this advice immediately, as I suspect that Blood Simple is playing only in Los Angeles and maybe New York. In that case, I suppose you'll have to wait until it opens somewhere near you; you have my profound sympathy. But whatever you do, don't forget this movie!

For those still with me, a few words about Blood Simple. It is an independently made film directed by Joel Coen and produced by his brother Ethan. The two of them also wrote the screenplay. Blood Simple is a film noire, but with far more humor than is expected from that genre. The story concerns a woman leaving her jealous husband, the employee of her husband's she runs away with, and a sleazy private detective. To say any more would ruin at least some of the fun. Suffice it to say that the plot twists and turns like a snake and is unpredictable from start to end.

Just what category to fit Blood Simple into is difficult to say. The film generates incredible suspense, but also has some hilarious moments. It can't truly be called a comedy, though, not even a black one, as its view of the world, presented in a Texan microcosm, is so nasty. There's a lot of blood and some very gory moments, but it certainly isn't a slasher film. Blood Simple is a true original. I've seen a lot of films, but I've never seen anything like it.

The script is excellent, but the real accolades must go to Joel Coen. I'll go way out on a limb and say that Blood Simple is the most promising American directorial debut since Citizen Kane. Coen is unbelievably proficient with the camera. He knows precisely how to stage a shot for maximum impact, more impact than less imaginative folks (like me) would ever have dreamed possible. The editing is beautifully tight, and the editor certainly deserves much credit, as does Barry Sonnenfeld, the cinematographer, who delivers the best looking low budget American film I've ever seen. None the less, Coen obviously deserves the lion's share of the credit. The cinematographer and editor were merely talented assistants; Coen's was the inspiration.

Coen's virtuosity with the camera is incredible, rivaling such masters as Hitchcock and Welles, and yet it is also stunningly original. Unlike DePalma, Coen doesn't try to imitate Hitchcock's camera style, and yet his results are far and away better than DePalma's. In fact, DePalma might as well give up on being the heir apparent to Hitchcock as master of suspense. With one film, Joel Coen effortlessly snatches the title that DePalma couldn't touch with half a dozen pictures and total budgets over 100 times that of Blood Simple. Blood Simple isn't a film that Hitchcock could ever have made, but he surely would have loved it.

What's even more astonishing is that Coen can not only shoot suspense, he can also shoot comedy. Coen actually succeeds in getting a big laugh just with a camera move! No funny props in the shot, no punch line, no mugging or slapstick in the background, just the camera move! This guy is *good*.

Complementing the superlative direction and first rate technical work (and an eerie, effective score from Carter Burwell) are excellent performances. The Coen brothers cast no name stars in Blood Simple, partially because of budget, but also because it gives the audience no handle on who is the "good guy". Many of the faces are a little familiar, but none are so familiar that we feel sure that they may not be disposed of in the next frame. We never know who's safe, which heightens the suspense. John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, and Samm-Art Williams are all wonderful in their roles, but the real honors go to M. Emmet Walsh, as the private eye. Walsh has made a career playing slimy, dishonest country types, but this is his masterpiece. We never doubt that his character is both capable and willing to do anything for money, no matter how nasty, undisturbed by the least suggestion of a scruple.

In my opinion, Blood Simple is the best new American film I've seen in the 80s, and for a considerable stretch back into the 70s. It certainly blows any of this year's Acadamy Award nominees off the screen. I recommend it for all adults. (I wouldn't want to admit to my children, if I had any, that the adult world can be quite as treacherous and rotten as Blood Simple demonstrates, even if it is true.) Those who dislike large quantities of blood and explicit violence may have some bad moments at Blood Simple, but it will be worth it. The gore of Blood Simple is not gratuitous. Every drop of blood, every bullet, every sinister sharp object and blunt instrument has a precise purpose, and the film would be less without them.

I expect that some people will disagree with me on this film, especially those who think of films like Tootsie and Kramer vs. Kramer as the pinnacle of cinematic achievement ("and in such good taste, too, don't you think so, Buffy?"). Some people like only tame films, which won't jump out and bite you with originality. Well, Blood Simple will leave you with more toothmarks than wrestling with a tiger, but the wounds won't be mortal and they'll certainly wake you up. Put in simplest terms, Blood Simple must not be missed.

1. A Thriller of Misconceptions and Bad Hunches
Only the viewer gets the full picture in what’s going on between sleazy bar owner Marty (Dan Hedaya), his adulterous wife Abby (Frances McDormand, in her first film) and her dopey new good ol’ boy squeeze Ray (John Getz). The characters read their situation the best way they know how, and they almost always make the wrong choice or make the wrong assumption.

2. Great posters, this movie.
All sleaze and sex and violence.

3. I goddamn love M. Emmet Walsh.
He’s the joker card in Blood Simple, the element in the deck that can throw things out of balance when accidentally dealt. As scummy P.I. Loren Visser, Walsh embodies sleaze in that gross, puke-yellow leisure suit and that grubby little Volkswagon. There’s a calculated brutality beneath his carefree swagger, and something off-putting about his lazy, high-pitched voice matched against that large frame. He also hits on teenagers, the patented move of the scumbag baller.

4. Whoosh Whoosh Whoosh Whoosh
With the whoosh of a ceiling fan, the flip/flop of windshield wipers, the thump of a dog’s tail, the sound design here almost becomes part of the score. There’s always some kind of hum or drone going on in the background, giving everything a kind of rumbling sense of dread.

5. Dan Hedaya.
Hairy man.

6. Masculine Repression
Abby sums it up pretty nicely: “When [Marty] doesn’t say things, they’re usually nasty. When you [Ray] don’t, they’re usually nice.” Both Marty and Ray’s get screwed because of their inability to communicate, and both men express love through violent action.

Marty’s too much of an angry shit to express to Abby that he actually loves her, which is why she runs off with a total schmuck. He’d rather kill Abby than stand seeing her with another man. Ray kills a man not out of vengeance, but to protect the woman he loves. His motivations are purer, but they still end up at the same ugly place.

7. No Easy Fixes
Ray tossing the towel over his blood soaked backseat is a pretty clever visual metaphor. It conceals the crime just long enough for him to get rid of a concerned friend, but it doesn’t take long for the blood to start soaking through.

8. Pauline Kael
I always assume that everyone likes Blood Simple, but Pauline Kael definitely didn’t. In her lengthy takedown of the film (review starts on page two, after her Witness review, which she didn’t like much either), she admires the Coens’ ability to craft a shot, but dismisses their attempt to elevate the genre and takes a few shots at the young directors’ ability to work with actors. She also takes a backhanded jab at Night of the Living Dead, so what the hell does Pauline Kael know?

9. Good dog.
Though, Kael is definitely right about Marty’s dog disappearing half-way through the movie. Who’s taking care of that German Shepherd? Everyone seems to like the dog, he jumps through car windows like nobody’s business, classic good dog behavior, but eventually nobody even thinks twice about it. Who’s feeding the dog?!

10. It’s the same old song
“It’s The Same Old Song” pops up a few times in Blood Simple. A classic upbeat song that’s sadder than it sounds, it’s about a man whose woman leaves him and now whenever he hears their song on the radio he finds that the happiness he once associated with it has festered, leaving him feeling cold and sad.

Blood Simple is a story of broken hearts. Marty loved Abby until she ran off with Ray. Abby loved Ray until she thinks he’s killed someone. Ray loved Abby until he suspects she’s framing him for murder. All of them yearn for happier times with one or the other, but those happy memories have become poisonous. It’s the same old song with a different meaning. Get it?

Coleman's Corner in Cinema...: Blood Simple (1984) Alexander Coleman

“He'll Kill You, Too:” How Blood Simple uses slasher movie techniques ... Top Shelf Movies

PLAIN AND SIMPLE - The New Yorker Pauline Kael, simply missing the point, February 25, 1985

The Directors Series - The Coen Brothers [4.1] on Vimeo Cameron Beyl video essay from Raccord, May 20, 2016, also 24-Minute Video Essay Breaks Down The Murder & Mania Of The Coens’ ‘Blood Simple’ & ‘Raising Arizona’ posted by Ryan Oliver from The Playlist, June 18, 2016, seen here: 24-Minute Video Essay Breaks Down The Murder & Mania Of The ...

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Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Blood Simple (1984) Anna Mitchell from Kamera.co.uk

Film Intuition Jen Johans

Ruthless Reviews [Plexico Gingrich] (potentially offensive)

Edinburgh U Film Society [Ben Stephens]

Film Analysis by Jugu Abraham Movies That Make You Think

click here for Blood Simple (Director's Cut) review MaryAnn Johanson from Flick Filosopher

Blood Simple script by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen - Daily Script

Blood Simple | Variety

The Observer profile: The Coen brothers | Film | The Guardian Andrew Anthony, January 13, 2008

Boston Phoenix [Peter Keough]

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

San Francisco Examiner [Wesley Morris]

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] in 1985

Blood Simple Movie Review & Film Summary (1985) | Roger Ebert 15th anniversary review in 2000

Blood Simple - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blood Simple Blu-ray Frances McDormand - DVDBeaver.com Gary W. Tooze

RAISING ARIZONA

USA (94 mi) 1987

Geoff Andrew from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

The Coen brothers’ enormously inventive second feature abandoned the noir mood of Blood Simple (1984) for this larger-than-life (but likewise intricately plotted) comedy featuring cartoon style caricature. Nicolas Cage is the convenience store robber, forever in and out of jail, who falls for and weds prison-officer Holly Hunter; their somewhat improbably blissful trailer-park marriage is blighted when they find she’s infertile and, to keep her happy, he kidnaps one of the quintuplets born to a local unpainted-furniture tycoon. As if it weren’t bad enough that the father hires the biker from hell (Randall “Tex” Cobb) to bring back his baby and wreak vengeance on the abductors, Cage’s fortune takes a turn for the even worse. Much to his wife’s anger, he is visited by escaped former cellmates John Goodman and William Forsythe, who have plans of their own for the famously missing infant.

The farcical improbabilities of Raising Arizona are as nothing to the absurdly overpoetic voiceover the Coens brilliantly concoct for their hapless and, despite his highfalutin turns of phrase, none-too-bright hero. The film is as fervently and intelligently in love with tacky excess as anything dreamed up by Preston Sturges. Indeed, some of the camera pyrtotechnics may actually distract attention away from the deliciously witty dialogue, but overall the aura of heady hysteria is sustained with considerable expertise, not the least in the perfectly pitched performances.

Time Out Geoff Andrew

The superbly labyrinthine plotting of Blood Simple must have been a hard act to follow; praise be, then, to the Brothers Coen for confounding all expectations with this fervently inventive comedy. Sublimely incompetent convenience-store robber Hi McDonnough (Cage, at his best yet) seems doomed to return repeatedly to the same penitentiary until true love hoves in view in the form of prison officer Edwina (Hunter). Spliced in a trice, the frustratedly infertile couple kidnap one (surely he won't be missed?) of the celebrated Arizona quintuplets, heirs to an unpainted-furniture fortune. But happiness being evanescent, complications ensue when a pair of Hi's old cellmates turn up in search of sanctuary; and then there's the problem of a rabbit-shooting biker of hellish hue, hired by Arizona Senior to find his missing brat. What makes this hectic farce so fresh and funny is the sheer fertility of the writing, while the lives and times of Hi, Ed and friends are painted in splendidly seedy colours, turning Arizona into a mythical haven for a memorable gaggle of no-hopers, halfwits and has-beens. Starting from a point of delirious excess, the film leaps into dark and virtually uncharted territory to soar like a comet.

House Next Door (Matt Zoller Seitz)

Raising Arizona isn't a film the world really needs one more review of, but here goes. Before the Coens wanted to make serious dramas but after their stylish noir debut Blood Simple, the Coens went mainstream with their top-grossing film until Fargo, a good-natured screwball comedy that's quite funny and not only earned money but a cult following in the bargain. What's weird is that, while many people who like the film have gone on to admire other Coen Bros. films, many love the film and seem to have no idea that the Coens made any other films, or don't care, and would certainly be surprised if they saw, say, Miller's Crossing.

Have no fear though; the film is no aberration. It marked the beginning of the Coens' penchant for showing off oddball types and the lazier elements of society, as well as their condescension to their characters. However, the film lacks the out and out fear of their rustic characters in Fargo, and the Coens seem to be kinda fond of them in a sort of "Ain't that cute?" way. It fits, though; screwball comedies were never about showing off authentic characterizations of real folks. The film also introduced John Goodman as a member of the Coens' stock cast, and gave Joel's wife Frances McDormand a small part which she handles very well; she's gone on to some of her best work in their Fargo.

Raising Arizona is the story of H.I. "Hi" McDonnaugh (a terrific pre-action movie Nicolas Cage), a repeat offender with a fondness for knocking off conveniance stores, and his bride Ed (Holly Hunter, who reprised her role as a tart, demanding wife in O Brother, Where Art Thou?), who are so happy in their marriage they decide to have them a critter. Owing to Ed being infertile, and on hearing about a rich couple who recently had quintuplets, Hi and Ed decide to get themselves one of the babies. Subsequent complications involve loudmouth brother-in-law Glen (Sam McMurray, who in one of the film's funniest films proposes wife swapping), escaped convicts John Goodman (excellent as usual) and William Forsythe ("We felt the institution no longer had anything to offer us"), and bounty hunter of the apocalypse Leonard Smalls (ex-boxer Randall 'Tex' Cobb).

In its smallest moments, Raising Arizona is consistently absorbing and well-acted; in the biggest scenes, including an astounding and hilarious chase/robbery of diapers, it reaches comic greatness. Nonetheless, it's a triumph of style over substance, a terrific caricature from college graduates imagining what trailer park life should be like. And though the Coens sometimes try too hard to be bizarre, for the most part it's a terrifically entertaining, though slightly insubstantial film that was majorly reworked and improved upon in the Coens' best, O Brother. I'm not at a loss to explain the cult following, but it seems a bit undeserved, great quotable lines aside. Still, much worse films have gained bigger followings, and Raising Arizona delivers on its promise to be the last great screwball comedy. It's certainly not Utah.

Raising Arizona Peter Reiher

I was a big fan of Joel and Ethan Coen's first film, Blood Simple. I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that their new film, Raising Arizona, is precisely a disappointment, but it certainly isn't at all what I expected, and I didn't really like it. Raising Arizona is such a peculiar movie that I find it difficult to analyze my own feelings about it. In some sense, that itself is a sort of recommendation, since I'm a believer in trying to have unusual film experiences, but I can't help but come back to the fact that I didn't really like it.

The story is moderately peculiar, to begin with. A lower class Arizona couple discover that they can't have a baby. Adoption is out, as the husband is a five or six time loser, specializing in robbing convenience stores with an unloaded gun. When they hear of the birth of a set of quintuplets, they set out to steal one of them for their own. Raising Arizona just starts from here, throwing in vast numbers of complicating factors and extraneous vignettes. It's safe to say that the screenplay is rather different from the run-of- the-mill Hollywood script, or any other type of script that actually gets made.

The Coen brothers (who wrote the script, and then split directing and producing chores, Joel doing the former, Ethan the latter) have taken this odd substrate and layered on further levels of weirdness. The characters are strange, the direction is unusual, the cinematography gratuitously inventive, and the overall effect more stupefying than anything else. I'm not really sure if Raising Arizona came out the way the Coen brothers intended, but it certainly doesn't work. Perhaps the plan was to create an overall atmosphere so bizarre as to carry the film on that basis alone. Unfortunately, the different elements tend to work against each other, rather than demonstrating the internal consistency necessary to carry such a plan off.

Not to say that Raising Arizona is without its merits. There are several funny moments, a nicely choreographed chase scene, and Nicholas Cage, playing the husband (known as H.I., pronounced just as you would expect), gives an excellent performance. His character is a dimwitted rube who's not very strong on honesty, but Cage makes him lovable, rather like a large, stupid dog whose misdeeds are so inept as to make you feel sorry for him. Cage's greatest achievement is that he makes H.I. seem like a real person, a feat beyond the rest of the cast. Everyone else is a caricature, and somehow Raising Arizona needed more of a foot in the real world. More realistic portrayals might have overcome the sense that the Coens view not just these characters, but the whole level of society they represent, with condecension and contempt.

Particularly unfortunate is Holly Hunter's shrill and shallow performance as the wife. If both of the leading characters had been real people, then supporting them with a cast of stick figures might have worked out. But Hunter brings very little to her part, other than a few good line readings. In particular, she doesn't show a strong enough maternal instinct to convince us of the necessity of all the random mayhem that follows. Randall Tex Cobb stands out among the supporting cast, as an extremely nasty bounty hunter. And the babies (of course) are very cute.

The cinematography, by Barry Sonnenfield, is breathtaking, yet inappropriate. In Blood Simple, every flashy camera move reinforced the scene. Here, the wild antics of the camera seem beside the point, as if they were created almost without regard for what is going on in the film. They are worth seeing simply because they're so audacious, but they add little to the film. Carter Burwell's music, on the other hand, does seem to capture some of the tone that the film strives for.

If there's one thing wrong with Raising Arizona, it's a lack of sympathy. The Coens don't seem to care about any of their characters, except as the butts of jokes. Really effective slapstick depends on the audience caring about the disaster befalling the characters, but if the filmmakers don't care about them, the audience won't, either. The Coens made Raising Arizona with too much brains, and too little heart. Blood Simple was all thought and no emotion, too, but the thriller genre is inherently more cerebral than comedy. Good comedy comes from the gut and the heart, only secondarily from the brain.

Given its immense uncertainty of tone, I'd have to rate Raising Arizona as a failure, overall. But it is a very different type of failure than the typical film. Raising Arizona is an imaginative failure, a failure caused by an attempt to do more than the filmmakers really knew how to do. That may not be the same thing as success, but it's more interesting than some films that achieve everything they set out to do. For those looking for something different than the average film, Raising Arizona is worth seeing.

Sync: The Regent Journal of Film and Video (Timothy Wright) Hope in the Midst of the Nuclear Threat: A Critical Examination of the Imagery in Raising Arizona, essay by Timothy Wright

Bright Lights Film Journal Robert Castle

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Elysian Fields Of Film review Jester Vicar

DVD Verdict Sean Fitzgibbons

filmcritic.com Eric Meyerson

eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry)

The Digital Bits Todd Doogan

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

EyeForFilm.co.uk Gator MacReady

Edinburgh U Film Society [Sarah Woolner]

Washington Post (Rita Kempley)

eFilmCritic Chef ADogg

Siskel & Ebert (video)

Edinburgh U Film Society [Breandan Goodall]

MILLER’S CROSSING A- 93

USA (115 mi) 1990

Adapted by the Coens from Dashiell Hammett’s 1930’s novels Glass Key and Red Harvest, with a nod towards Kurosawa’s legendary Toshirô Mifune samurai western YOJIMBO (1961), which features a lone man setting rival factions against one another, this film features a brilliant script, set during the prohibition era, and tongue twistingly magnificent Irish gangster dialogue spoken by the likes of Gabriel Byrne as Tom Reagan, a young thug too smart for his own good, but whose brains provide the sheer breadth and scope of this film. Adding to the intrigue is what may be the best performance in Marcia Gay Harden’s career as femme fatale Verna, Irish gang boss Leo’s (Albert Finney) mistress who’s also sweet on his right hand man, Tom Reagan, the brains behind the operation, but also a sucker for the horses, bad bets, Irish whisky, and somebody else’s woman. While the scene is set for an all out crime war, Jon Polito as Italian boss Johnny Caspar makes the case to Leo for killing Verna’s brother Bernie (John Turturro), a lowlife double crosser that no one likes, using the argument that “friendship, character, and ethics” matter in their business, and those that don’t abide by the rules need to be rubbed out. But Leo protects him, as he’s sleeping with his sister, despite Tommy’s warnings that the price is too high, as all hell will break loose because Caspar has gotten too powerful and Bernie’s access to inside tips are cutting into Caspar’s profits. This begins the saga of plenty of gangland violence and turf wars, treachery, double crossings, infightings, speakeasy’s, bought and paid for police and political protections, and lurid romance.

What sets this apart from other gangland dramas is the authenticity of character that runs throughout, as this cast inhabits the Dashiell Hammett dialogue which is the core of the film, intelligent and vital throughout, to the authentic look of the 1930’s in some unnamed location, most likely New Jersey, to the Irish music by Carter Burwell on the soundtrack, but especially eye-opening is the use of William Preston Robertson singing “Danny Boy” while an attempted hit takes place on Leo’s life, a skillful ballet of violence and agility, beautifully shot by Barry Sonnenfeld capturing the James Cagney era of 30’s gangster films, especially the element of fanaticism and winner take all attitude. The film is more about Tom, however, and his wily ability to figure things out ahead of time and anticipate the motives of others, giving him a leg up on his competition. But when he moves in on his boss’s girl, that’s treading dangerous territory, so he has to cover his tracks to stay alive, which requires major deception and a radical shift on his part. This descent into immorality without a good reason leaves his usually solid air of detachment shattered and possibly broken, where his whole reason for being undergoes a radical shift as well. This film asks unanswered questions about why an intelligent man would get mixed up in this line of business, how he could survive long term where his life would depend on the behavior of thugs and lunatics who would just as soon kill a man than back down. Miller’s Crossing becomes the Coen Brother’s Thin Red Line, the moral line drawn “between the sane and the mad,” where even when surrounded by madness, each one must make their own separate choice about the kind of life they intend to live.

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Like Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, this works both as a crime thriller and as an ironic commentary on that genre. With fast, sharp, witty dialogue and Byzantine plotting, it charts the gang war between Leo (Finney) and Caspar (Polito) in an American city during Prohibition. Tom (Byrne), Leo's loyal right-hand man, is the lover of Leo's mistress (Harden), whose brother (Turturro) Caspar wants killed. Exactly how this and other complications are sorted out forms the hugely inventive, enjoyable narrative core of the film. But it is also a tribute to the crime literature (notably Hammett) and movies of the '30s, artfully poised between 'realism' and a subtle acknowledgment of its own artifice. And there's yet another level, since it is composed - visually, verbally and structurally - as a series of variations on the themes of 'Friendship, character, ethics'. At times the criss-crossing of abstract motifs recalls the formal complexity of a Greenaway film. It's arguably the US mainstream's first art movie since Days of Heaven; and quite wonderful.

Miller's Crossing is a wonderfully suspenseful film set in gangster-ridden city during the prohibition era filled with moments of deadpan violence and the darkly comic. Tom Reagan (Gabriel Bryne) is an amoral illegitimate son with habits for picking the wrong horse, the wrong woman and for upsetting all the wrong people. Tom is the lieutenant and close friend of the city's head boss and unofficial mayor Leo (Albert Finney). Life is good or could be except that a gang war is about to erupt over Leo's fatal love for the femme Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) and his protection of Verna's vile brother Bernie (John Turturro). Tom tries to save Leo from himself only to end up isolated and in the middle of the war. Surviving by his wit and nerve Tom becomes a loose cannon whose only real loyalty is to his hat.

Gabriel Byrne gives perhaps his most definitive performance as Tom Reagan, shades of which he brought to his character in The Usual Suspects. It says a lot for Gabriel's performance that his heartless and arrogant Tom comes across as likeable and charming. Albert Finney is also in fine form playing Leo and very nearly steals the film in a memorable cigar set piece. The cast as a whole is brilliant, each character appears vivid and credible and is notable for a pre-Reservoir Dogs appearance by Steve Buscemi as well as cameos from Sam Raimi and Frances McDormand.

The visuals used in the film are superb. The grimy city is contrasts with the leafy beauty of Miller's Crossing and yet both settings are coloured from the same restrictive palette. The scripts focus on characterisation is matched by the camera with each scene's principal character becoming the focus as the intermediate action takes place in the background or hinted at off-camera.

Miller's Crossing is arguably the most enjoyable of the early Coen brother's films as well as modern classic.

Big House Film (Roger Westcombe)

What else would you expect from a Princeton philosophy grad teamed with his equally pulp-loving cineaste brother than an exploration of the ‘mind/body’ split, articulated through 1930s Hollywood gangster imagery?

Whatever brutalities or sordid corruption they engaged in, it was "always for a reason", Gabriel Byrne’s Tom Reagan, the increasingly isolated and independent underworld protagonist keeps reminding his more instinctive (read: violent) and less reflective confederates throughout Miller’s Crossing. What it earns him is an increasingly gratuitous series of beatings, from which he emerges with little more damage than a bloody lip, his philosophies intact.

Although Tom‘s alliances rotate with kaleidoscopic dizziness through this criminal milieu, his strongest bonds, and thus the film’s central duality, are with local mob kingpin, Leo, an ageing pug perfectly nuanced in a brilliant performance by Albert Finney. The naturalness of their easy bond is subtly underscored by the restrained Celtic brogue each brings to the table, a table as often as not stocked with a tumbler of whiskey.

As always with the Coen Bros. the black comedy in Miller’s Crossing crackles, and here even crunches at times, as it extends to a droll physicality. It’s one of the ways the film works to critique the gangster genre, satirising its denizens and their overly healthy self-images.

Of course it’s a loving portrait by a couple of fans, elaborated to baroque but loving parody such as showing the machine guns lighting up the frame after tearing up a mansion with parallel perforations that send the whole place up in flames.

Nevertheless there’s a chill at the heart of Miller’s Crossing that rebuffs affection, unlike their best films, Barton Fink (1991) and Fargo (1996). Perhaps this is a by-product of the screenplay’s two-stage creation, as they were forced to abandon it halfway through, finding themselves hopelessly stalled and incapable of resolving the plot complexities. (Presumably its uncredited basis, Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key was no help.) Only after switching to convey a writer with writer’s block in Barton Fink were they able to return and unkink their own. By that second half the Cartesian duality in Miller’s Crossing has itself ‘taken a powder’ (the deployment of 30s slang in Miller’s Crossing is supoib throughout) in favor of an increasingly byzantine spider’s web, itself a genre stereotype.

A striking feature of Miller’s Crossing is its incongruous, by the standards of a gangster flick, deployment of beautifully serene, autumnal outdoor settings in the eponymous location outside of town which the film’s structure continually brings it back to. Views looking up to the forest canopy gliding peacefully by underline the contrast with the grimy urban environment of violence, sleaze and corruption which harbors and even normalises most of the action. Importantly the settings determine how differently the conflicts will be resolved: in the forest it’s by recourse to the spirit, as the merciful sparing of one life exemplifies, in contrast to the rule of lead justice repeatedly seen in the harsh, garish city settings. Echoing the naturalness of Tom and Leo’s friendship, only in the wild can humanity peak through.

In this visual strategy the film evokes an unusual association with the America-phile film noir of France’s Jean-Pierre Melville, particularly his Le Circle Rouge (Red Circle - 1970), whose similarly wintry scenes of masculine showdown in the muted space of quiet woods evokes a strong resonance.

If that seems a long bow to stretch, consider the bridge between Miller’s Crossing and Melville’s brilliant black and white gangster thriller Le Doulos (1963), which ends with the gangster protagonist’s final fate underlined wistfully by the shot of his fedora coming to rest, alone in the frame, in the dirt of the forest floor, in anticipation of the (likely) homage with which the Coens open their title sequence here, a fedora being blown off its bed of fallen leaves in the forest of their imaginary America.

Jeeem's Cinepad [Jim Emerson]

When I wrote the review below in 1990 (which I've reworked a bit here), I said that the Coen brothers' third feature, Miller's Crossing, might be the first great film of the new decade. Eight years later, I don't think it even has any competition as the greatest film of the 90s so far. Movies this rich and complex (in theme, story, visuals, performances), that reveal their insights into the human heart with such exquisite nuance and timing -- well, they just don't come along all that often. First off, the picture is so gorgeous you want to climb into it -- but it's not superfluous beauty; it sets a tone, a mood, that haunts you long before you quite know why. The Coens always create a world with each new film, but for this one they practically came up with a new language, too -- a kind of deliciously snappy hardboiled gangster slang (worthy of Billy Wilder) that you instantly understand and want to adopt, even though it's never existed outside of this movie.

One more thing: Every scene in Miller's Crossing is essential so that all the pieces may fall into place in the last shot. But although you might think that the film's crucial moment is the one in the ads -- and the one you see here, the climactic execution at the crossing in the woods -- there's actually a very brief earlier scene (the only appearance of Steve Buscemi as a weasley fellow named Mink, excerpted at right) that off-handedly sets up the entire picture. It seems like a throwaway, a chance encounter as Tom is on his way to meet someone else, but so much information is packed into this brief exchange that the mind boggles in retrospect. In depth of feeling, plotting, character, and texture, Miller's Crossing is the Coens' masterpiece, a movie people will still be watching and loving and studying decades from now.

"Friendship's got nothing to do with it," says Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), "... You do things for a reason." Tom, a cool-as-ice Irish gangster, prides himself on his stylish air of emotional detachment and his ability to size up all the angles in any treacherous situation.

And in Joel and Ethan Coen's chilly masterwork, the perversely funny, moving and intelligent Miller's Crossing, everyone has his or her secret reasons for what they do. But the wisdom of Miller's Crossing -- a uniquely exhilarating sort of gangster melodrama/movie parody/character study/whodunnit -- is that it understands that the human heart sometimes keeps those reasons a mystery -- not only from others, but occasionally from itself as well.

Tom, around whose glacial features the events of Miller's Crossing revolve, is so temperamentally tamped-down and emotionally frigid that he's virtually unreadable -- especially when he conceals/encases himself in his black overcoat and pulls down his dark fedora (the movie's resonant central image) over his eyes. He's a tough nut to crack and he likes it that way; he's a survivor.

This loner with the deep-sunken eyes (are they sad or just glassy?) is either the most armored, guarded, isolated soul imaginable -- a man whose instincts for self-protection and self-preservation have become almost superhumanly strong -- or else he's perversely self-destructive, an emotional causualty who's grown so much scar tissue around his heart that no one can touch it. Or maybe he's a bit of both.

Byrne imbues Tom with just enough black-Irish charisma to keep him from coming across as a stiff, but the guy is all business. Tom will not allow his personal feelings to have any effect on his cool, rational business decisions. The more punches, beatings and falls he suffers during the course of the picture -- while hardly sustaining a scratch or a bruise (Tom's apparent indestructability becomes one of the movie's sly, genre-based running gags) -- the more he seems determined, by sheer force of will, not to let anything, or any one, hurt him. Or even get close enough to where they would have the opportunity.

The movie begins with a lecture about ethics -- delivered with sputtering rage by a gangster named Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), who is using this argument to convince his rival mob boss Leo (Albert Finney), Tom's friend and employer, to let him kill Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), because the guy is a crooked operator. Ironically (and the Coen brothers are masters of wicked irony), the themes Caspar outlines in this stunner of an opening speech (much of it delivered straight into the camera, like the opening of The Godfather) lay the groundwork for the treacherous moral universe that Miller's Crossing explores. For as obviously corrupt as Caspar is, he's absolutely right about Bernie -- or, "the Shmatte," as everyone calls him. The guy is not exactly a straight shooter.

The intricate world of big-city organized crime is constructed upon rigid customs (liked fixed fights) and codes of proper behavior. Bernie has blatantly (amorally?) chosen to violate those rules. Therefore, according to the gangster's code, Bernie deserves to die. Against his own better judgement -- and the counsel of his right-hand man, Tom -- Leo refuses to grant Caspar permission to rub out Bernie. Not for business reasons, as it turns out, but for personal ones. Tom fears that Leo is going "soft."

And that's when the mobsters' warped but precariously maintained moral/ethical structure -- the operating construct that allows them to continue to "do business" -- begins to collapse. (If you can't trust a fixed fight, what can you trust?" sputters Caspar, as if he were a beacon of moral rectitude in a dark and degenerate universe..)

So, Tom has a falling out with Leo over Verna (whom Leo has also been seeing). Further complicating matters is the fact that Bernie is Verna's brother, and she has vowed to do whatever is necessary (including sleeping with Leo) to protect him. By the time Caspar coerces Tom into shooting Bernie in an isolated, woodsy spot known as Miller's Crossing, personal and professional alliances, loyalties, betrayals and deceptions have become provocatively, enigmatically tangled and confused.

At heart, Miller's Crossing is a movie about honor (and loyalty, and even love) among thieves. Two relatively minor events set things in motion: Leo's refusal to grant Caspar permission to kill Bernie; and the puzzling killing of a balding henchman named Rug Daniels, who's found lying in an alley without his toupee. One suspicion rebounds from another, implicating Bernie and drawing Tom into the fray.

Eventually, like the exterminating angel of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, Tom becomes the architect of a convoluted web of killings and double-crosses that escalate into a bloody war for control of the city (and the mayor and the police) between Leo and Johnny Caspar. As Tom maneuvers between them, playing all sides against each other, we're kept guessing about how thoroughly he has planned his moves and where his loyalties (if he has any) really lie.

The movie's haunting, enigmatic final images echo a recurring dream of Tom's in which he watches his hat blow through the woods but he doesn't chase after it because, as he tells Verna: "There's nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat." By the quietly shattering coda (again set in those eerily hushed woods of Tom's dream and the fatal Crossing) Tom stubbornly, bitterly refuses to chase his hat -- to go after the object of his desire, letting it slip away from him as if blown by the wind.

"Do you always know why you do things...?" Tom asks, contradicting his earlier statement. And suddenly we're compelled to go over all the events of the movie and ask: How much did Tom know and when did he know it? How much of Tom's behavior was premeditated and how much was simply reactive? Just who was he protecting? And how clearly did he forsee the long-term consequences of his actions? Gratifyingly, the Coens (as they would later with the Mystery Box in Barton Fink) provide us with no easy answers. A person's motives, intentions, emotions, actions -- they're not always so easily understood, even by himself.

Like the Coen's previous pictures, Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing is an exuberantly stylized movie. On the surface, it's also a kind of film-school parody of its genre -- a collection of long coats and wide-brimmed hats, highballs and machine guns, all assembled with meticulous attention to crisp period detail.

The gangsters speak in a delicious fantasy tough-guy patois ("What's the rumpus?") that you'd just love to wrap your tongue around. But the clever gangster-movie trappings don't trivialize or obscure the movie's deeper, melancholy (even tragic) resonances -- which are reflected in the wintry/autumnal tones of its color scheme: forest green, overcast grey, black-and-blue, burnished mahogany.

The movie's unexpectedly magnificent and revealing closing moments leave no doubt that Miller's Crossing is the Coen's most mature, emotionally resonant, fully realized work. These guys aren't just playing with kiddie toys any more. Miller's Crossing is their Godfather -- an indelible film about betrayal and self-destruction -- and perhaps the first great movie of the '90s.

Senses of Cinema (Paul Coughlin)

Reel.com [Jim Emerson] another review on a different website

Reel.com DVD review [Sarah Chauncey]

DVD Verdict Bill Gibron

E.J. Winner From Dashiell Hammett’s Glass Key (1942) to Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing (1996)

Raging Bull Vanes Naldi and Mike Lorefice

Movie Vault [Andrew Pilz]

review Jester Vicar from Elysian Fields of Film

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray)

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg)

AboutFilm.com (Alison Tweedie-Perry) listed as the #3 Film of the 90’s

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers] also reviewing BARTON FINK

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing BARTON FINK

The Digital Bits Rob Hale, also reviewing BARTON FINK

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] reviewing BARTON FINK

BARTON FINK B 85

USA Great Britain (116 mi) 1991

A decidedly off-beat work, one that never really grabs hold of its audience, as a newly crowned Broadway theater director, the shy and highly introverted Barton Fink (John Turturro), decides to sell his soul to the Hollywood movie industry, to cash in on his success and write scripts for motion pictures for awhile. But from the outset, the tone is strange and ambiguous, as Barton himself is so meek and gutless that it’s hard to believe he’s the driving force behind a new American theater movement targeting the importance of the working man, while all around him are larger-than-life, even buffoon-like caricatures that represent soulless men that bear no resemblance to the common man. Torturro, in fact, is so tragically lifeless and downbeat that it’s easy to forget about him altogether and enjoy the secondary characters, even though he’s supposedly the main attraction. But when he arrives at the seedy Hotel Earle outside Hollywood, so far outside no one’s ever heard of it, the building resembles the gothic empty mansions portrayed in haunted house stories, where the desk clerk Chet (Steve Buscemi) actually crawls out of a hole in the floor to operate the front desk. Alone at last with his typewriter, his mind wanders everywhere except to the empty page that stares back at him, seemingly forever, but it turns out it’s only a week or so. One would think we’d get flashback or fantasy sequences that play out in his mind, all induced by a simple postcard style photo on the wall of a girl at the beach, where we initially hear the sound of waves, but it never leans in that direction. Instead, Barton is bewildered by all the strange noises and actually calls the front desk to complain, which prompts a loud knock on his door. In walks the always good-for-nothing John Goodman, big as life, as Charlie Meadows, a smooth talking insurance salesman who carries a needed flask in his back pocket where the two toss down a few to get acquainted, soon becoming fast friends.

Barton remains lifelessly disconnected from his own picture, while the constant interruptions from various secondary characters holds the interest here, especially Goodman, who is mysteriously intriguing as Barton’s alter ego/best friend. While Barton talks a big game about listening to the voice of the common man, he doesn’t actually listen at all, as he’s too wrapped up in his own warped abstractions to see or hear much of anything and feels totally isolated in Los Angeles, to the point of feeling imprisoned. Set before the outbreak of war in 1941, bandied between the arrogant studio boss (Michael Lerner) that likes him for his headlines grabbing reputation and the shallow, overworked producer (Tony Shaloub) who could care less who he is, all he knows is that he’s instructed to write a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery, but he can’t get past the opening paragraph, hitting a writer’s block for days on end. Out of strange fortune, he runs into a fellow writer (John Mahoney, supposedly based on William Faulkner) and immediately solicits advice, but he’s surprised to discover the great Southern novelist has become such a raging drunk that Barton fears for the safety of his lover and so-called secretary, Audrey (Judy Davis). When they actually meet, he thinks Barton is a pretentious buffoon before ambling down the street, bottle in hand, singing “Old Black Joe.” Desperate to come up with something, when in fact he has nothing, where he opens a Gideon’s Bible and it opens with his same single paragraph, Barton doesn’t know where to turn, at which point the rest of the movie is entirely ambiguous, as it may all play out in his head, or it may have actually happened. More than likely, however, he’s become imprisoned in his own head and can’t escape, where Hollywood is seen as a surreal Hellish purgatory that writers can’t escape from, forced to deal with their own inner demons, expressed as selling their souls to the devil, all given a highly stylized, surrealistic flourish at the end.

Time Out Geoff Andrew

In 1941, the well-meaning, vaguely leftist Broadway playwright of the title (Turturro) tries to settle into a rancid Hollywood hotel room to write his first script for eccentric mogul Jack Lipnick (Lerner). Trouble is, it's a Wallace Beery wrestling pic, and he develops a severe case of writer's block. His only hope, it seems, is to take inspiration from a fellow writer's 'secretary' (Davis) and from his insurance salesman neighbour (Goodman), welcomed by Fink as a living paradigm of the 'Common Man'. The tortuous narrative twists that have always marked the Coens' work here inform the entire structure of the movie. As it suddenly shifts gear from its bizarre blend of brooding psychodrama and screwball satire, the film accelerates into a Gothic fantasy as outrageous as it is terrifying. Somehow everything coheres, thanks to the Coens' superb writing and assured direction, and a roster of marvellous performances. The result works on numerous levels, thrilling the mind, ears and eyes, and racking the nerves.

Barton Fink  Terrence Rafferty from the New Yorker

The Coen brothers' macabre comedy about a blocked writer in 1941 Hollywood is densely packed with allusions, clever dialogue, ingenious visual jokes, startling plot twists, and imaginative atmospheric effects, yet it feels thin. It's an empty tour de force, and what's dismaying about the picture is that the filmmakers (Joel Coen directed, Ethan Coen produced, and they wrote the script together) seem inordinately pleased with its hermetic meaninglessness. Fink (John Turturro), the protagonist, is a left-wing New York playwright—obviously based on Clifford Odets—who signs a contract to write screenplays in Hollywood. His first assignment is a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery. He can't get started on it: he sits in his seedy, depressing hotel room, stares at the typewriter, and feels defeated. The Coens treat this emblematic figure of thirties culture with merciless contempt. They quickly expose him as a phony, a buffoon, and a talentless hack, and then spend the rest of the movie punishing him. The picture is designed to visit even more grotesque indignities on a character who's pitiful from the outset; there's not much fun in that. And there's no fun at all in Turturro's hyperactive performance. He gapes and blinks and stammers and contorts his body into ungainly poses, and his mouth never seems to close: the way he plays this leftist intellectual, the movie might as well have been called "The Nutty Pinko." The Coens' interests are purely academic, and their prankish formalism becomes very irritating in the course of the picture. There's nothing at stake in the filmmakers' systematic dismantling of their hero and all he stands for—except, perhaps, their desire to demonstrate their superiority to the ethics and aesthetics of an earlier time. The Coens appear to be taking their lack of seriousness seriously: they're nihilist showoffs. Also with John Goodman, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, Judy Davis, and Tony Shalhoub. The movie won awards for best picture, best director, and best actor (Turturro) at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival.

Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle A. Westphal

Expectations were so high for BARTON FINK upon its stateside release that Roger Ebert felt the need to caution his readers that the Coens' latest, good as it was, did not quite merit a place among the greatest films ever made. Every filmmaker should be so lucky. On the occasion of its Cannes debut the previous spring, BARTON FINK had won an unprecedented three awards—the Palme d'Or, Best Director, and Best Actor—and capped a threeyear run of American independent films clinching the top prize. (In the first documented case of BARTON Backlash, subsequent Cannes juries would be forced to spread the wealth more equitably.) And reception on the other side of the Atlantic was indeed chillier. American critics with more intimate knowledge of the film's early '40s Hollywood milieu, such as Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum, complained of the unflattering and uninformed portrayals of Clifford Odets and William Faulkner. Characters loosely inspired by both men appear in BARTON FINK, but rote factchecking misses the point. With hindsight, we can now appreciate BARTON FINK as the first of many Coen films that lean on a deeplyresearched milieu, only to turn around and gleefully tarnish that fastidiousness by presenting heavily fictionalized, perhaps libelous, renditions of the real people that inhabited that world. The consistency of this Coen formula should vitiate the usual charge of mere clumsiness or adolescent flippery. Barton Fink is no more Clifford Odets than Llewyn Davis is Dave von Ronk or HAIL, CAESAR!'s Eddie Mannix is MGM's Eddie Mannix. The Coens specialize in shadow histories that quietly grow into speculative moral inquiries: under these exasperating circumstances, what would some other schlemiel have done? In the case of BARTON FINK, the critique of Hollywood priorities is undeniably trite, but the characters still linger, especially John Goodman's Charlie Meadows. A grossly underappreciated actor who, in a more just world, would have three or four Oscars by now (including one for his preternatural resemblance to Fred Flintstone), Goodman probably delivers his finest performance in BARTON FINK, revising his working class schlub from TRUE STORIES and Roseanne into a terrifying mass of smiling fury. It's a beautifully modulated turn, luxuriating in the period slang and affect with ease before turning the proverbial screws. A textbook rendition of the beleaguered "common man" of Barton Fink's socially conscious imagination, Meadows is the ultimate unruly creation—an overripe vision of working class manhood that could only be cooked up by someone with no real contact with it. Meadows feels especially relevant in our current political climate. With pundits ceaselessly rationalizing the "antiestablishment rage" of the Trump voter as a natural reaction to economic dislocation in the Rust Belt, an uncomfortable truth bears repeating: some people are really just fascists, fullstop.

Jeeem's Cinepad [Jim Emerson]

"What don't I understand?" asks an exasperated Barton Fink (John Turturro) -- a young, idealistic and hopelessly bewildered New York playwright who comes to Hollywood and finds himself in a seedy room at the Hotel Earle, struggling to write a Wallace Beery wrestling picture for Capitol Pictures. Barton's question -- like a lot of things in Joel and Ethan Coen's delectably funny and unsettling Barton Fink -- is left tantalizingly unanswered.

The scene ends seconds later, and the joke is on Barton: There's just so much this clueless fellow doesn't understand that the lack of an answer is itself an answer. Barton Fink is packed full of intentionally unexplained riddles, visual puns, potently punchy language and all sorts of oddly suggestive, creepy-funny sights (peeling wallpaper and oozing paste, ) and sounds (the hollow whoosh whenever Barton's hotel room door opens, the infernal buzz of a mosquito above his bed, groaning pipes, muffled voices from adjacent rooms).

Watching Barton Fink, you realize how thinly, how two-dimensionally, most movies are conceived. It's as if your average filmmaker is able to draw on 30 percent of his brain and his senses when making a movie, whereas the Coens are closer to invoking 90 percent. As you watch this movie, its themes -- empathy and understanding vs. pity and disgust; the life of the body vs. the life of the mind; loneliness and isolation; the link between sex and violence; and so on -- start coming together in patterns as intricately interwoven as the wallpaper of the Hotel Earle that appears beneath the opening and closing credits.

The story is bent, but simple: Flush with success in New York, Barton travels to Hollywood with his head full of grandiose, highfalutin' (but smugly patronizing) dreams of establishing a theater for and about the Common Man. But first, he's gonna write a movie to pay some bills. Of course, Barton is such an insulated egghead he has no idea that he's reduced The Common Man to an intellectual abstraction. Barton has sealed himself off from humanity, incapable of relating to or understanding his fellows, common or otherwise.

At the exquisitely seedy Hotel Earle, Barton encounters the personification of his common man in the bulky form of his gregarious next door neighbor, a sweaty insurance salesman named Charlie Meadows (John Goodman). And despite Charlie's repeated assertions that I could tell you some stories..., Barton doesn't think to listen.

Barton's panic and frustration mount as his deadline for finishing a treatment approaches. Not knowing what's expected of him -- and unaware that if there was ever a Theater of the Common Man, it's the movies -- he solicits the advice of another studio writer, acclaimed Southern novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-souse W.P. Bill Mayhew (John Mahoney), a character based on William Faulkner, and his lover/secretary Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis).

He's alternately bullied and fawned over by loquacious studio boss Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), treated dismissively by tough-talking producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shaloub), patronized by his sophisticated agent Garland Stanford (David Warrilow) and cheerfully accomodated at home by Chet (Steve Buscemi), the low-rent Hotel Earle's pale, elfish bellboy.

Barton talks about the pain and loneliness of his struggle with the life of the mind, but he's oblivious to the pain of those around him -- whether it's the physical torture of Charlie's ear infection or the pain that sends Bill into drunken rages. "Empathy requires understanding," longsuffering Audrey tells him. And empathy is beyond Barton's emotional range. Charlie, on the other hand, experiences empathy to such an extent that... well, it drives him to some rather extreme behaviors.

Barton views most of the people around him as incomprehensible grotesques because they're so much coarser, so much more animated and alive than he is. They curse, they drink, they sweat, they spit, they vomit, they have sex -- but Barton is so repressed that he's become completely disconnected, not only from others but from his own body. So, he sits behind his typewriter, imprisoned in his own head and his own room, and stares dully at a framed tinted photo of a beautiful girl gazing out over the ocean at a sky as blank as the paper in Barton's typewriter. Barton's life of the mind is composed of nothing but barren abstractions. It takes Charlie to bring Barton crashing into the real, physical world.

The delight the Coens display in showcasing their characters' quirky behavior, in weaving resonant patterns of visual/verbal imagery, and in just playing gleefully with the sensual and kinetic properies of motion pictures, is contagious. The dialog is so rich you can almost sense the actors' salivating to bite into it. Each character has his or her
own distinctively peculiar syntax and way with words: Lipnick's non-stop bluster, Audrey's brittle drawl, Bill's ornately formal Southern Southern imagery, Geisler's aggressive crudeness, the hostile Abbott-and-Costello interrogation techniques of Detective Mastrionotti (Richard Portnow) and Detective Deutsch (Christopher Murney), Charlie's common-man patter, and Barton's cerebral, self- absorbed monologues.

Listen for all the talk about keeping or losing one's head, having a good head on one's shoulders, and such. Notice how Barton's wallpaper begins peeling just after Charlie has invaded his private sanctum -- or the way the oozing wallpaper paste not only resembles the pus that flows from Charlie's infected ear, but is also linked to semen, the sounds of the couple making love in the next room, and Barton's sexual repression...

There's all sorts of intriguing stuff like that in this picture. Does it all add up? Yes and no. Barton Fink can be interpreted any number of ways, but doesn't limit itself to any one, definitive reading. That may bug some literalists, who want everything spelled out for them, but Barton Fink is alive to the perverse and paradoxical mysteries that are all around -- and within -- us. Besides, it's much more fun to just sit back, watch the movie, and pick up on the many provocative little clues (or red herrings) that the movie is riddled with.

For example: In one shot, Barton and Charlie, sitting on the bed and putting on their accidentally swapped shoes at the same time, become mirror images of each other, hinting that perhaps the two could be seen as complementary sides of a single personality. There are also suggestions that the sickly, claustrophobic, yellow-green corridors of the Hotel Earle, which seems to contain only Barton and Charlie as tenants, could be viewed as a projection of either (or both) man's troubled psyche. There's a wealth of detail to pore over -- and chortle over -- in Barton Fink, although much of it which can't be touched upon until after you've been put through the movie's wringer and witnessed its surprises.

But even if you feel the Coens are being too playfully elusive, they still give you plenty to enjoy. The performances -- all of them astonishingly vivid -- are so exquisitely wrought, choreographed with such colorful gestures, inflections and other mannerisms, that they're almost like works of music or dance. The clever, evocative production design is filled with peculiar details, from the rotting banana trees in the Hotel Earle lobby to the Capitol Pictures statues in Lipnick's office. And the prowling, creeping, occasionally soaring camerawork is consistently dazzling.

So, I'm proud to report that Barton Fink really does have "that Barton Fink feeling" that Capitol Pictures is looking for -- even if his Wallace Beery wrestling picture (was that Big Men in Tights?) does not. Roman Polanski was the head of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival that awarded this movie the Palme d'Or, and you can see why -- it's an eerily distorted comedy (not unlike Polanski's own The Tenant) that Polanski himself would have been proud to make. And unlike most of today's one-joke, surface-level movies, Barton Fink not only holds up under repeated viewings, it actually gets funnier, grows more tantalizingly twisted and intriguing, every time you see it.

That Barton Fink Feeling: An Interview With the Coen Brothers by Jim Emerson shortly before the release of the film

AboutFilm Jeff Vorndam

Dave Cowen

DVD Times Nat Tunbridge

DVD Verdict [Daryl Loomis]

eFilmCritic.com (Matt Mulcahey)

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Kevin Patterson

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Barton Fink Jeffrey Overstreet from Looking Closer

The Tech (MIT) (Brian Rose & Roy Cantu)

Edinburgh U Film Society (Iain Lang)

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers] also reviewing MILLER’S CROSSING

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing MILLER’S CROSSING

The Digital Bits Rob Hale, also reviewing MILLER’S CROSSING

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] reviewing MILLER’S CROSSING

Washington Post (Rita Kempley)

Washington Post (Desson Howe)

Siskel & Ebert (video)

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY

USA Great Britain Germany (111 mi) 1994

Time Out Geoff Andrew

New Year's Eve, 1958, Norville Barnes (Robbins) climbs on to a window-ledge of the Hudsucker Industries skyscraper in snowy Manhattan. We flash back a month: company chairman Waring Hudsucker (Durning) shocks board members by plunging 45 floors to the sidewalk below - at the moment young Norville, a hayseed business graduate from Indiana, first enters the building to take a post in the mail room. Norville didn't, however, expect immediate promotion to company boss, a move plotted by vice-chairman Sidney Mussburger (Newman); with an idiot pawn in charge, stock will plummet and Sid can take over. Or he could, if only hard-bitten hack Amy Archer (Leigh) hadn't smelt a rat and gone undercover as Norville's secretary. Directed by Joel Coen, produced by Ethan Coen, and scripted by both brothers (plus Sam Raimi), this is a notably well-executed, very funny and very well-acted movie: a quirky, sardonic take on '50s faddishness, fame, power, friendship, character and ethics. A minor work, but confirmation of the Coens' position among America's most ambitious, able and exciting film-makers.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

When the president of Hudsucker Industries commits suicide by taking a running jump through the forty-fourth floor boardroom window, his executive staff panics. But chairman of the board Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman) finds a way to turn the situation to his advantage by concocting a devious stock manipulation that will devalue the Hudsucker holdings and allow him and his cronies to buy them up cheaply. All he has to do is hire a total moron to run the company and let nature take its course. Mussburger finds the perfect patsy in Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), a bumbling mailroom employee. Due to a strange twist of fate, Norville's idea for a children's toy - the Hula Hoop - ultimately reverses the company's poor financial situation and sabotages Mussburger's master plan.

Easily the most ambitious film to date for the Coen Brothers, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) was also their biggest commercial flop; it cost $25 million to make and only grossed $3 million at the box office. Part of the expense was due to the spectacular special effects and the elaborate set design (by Dennis Gassner) which should have won an Oscar®. The entire film is an affectionate throwback to another era of Hollywood filmmaking and is loaded with classic movie references: Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance as fast-talking reporter Amy Archer seems modeled on the Hildy Johnson character (played by Rosalind Russell) in His Girl Friday (1940); the massive, inner workings of the giant mechanical clock look like something out of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926); and the angel who saves Norville from a skyscraper high dive could have been inspired by the heavenly messenger in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

It was reported that Winona Ryder had auditioned for the Amy Archer role and was very disappointed when she didn't get it. It's doubtful her presence would have improved The Hudsucker Proxy's performance at the box office because the film was just too stylized and eccentric to appeal to mainstream audiences. Coen Brothers fans won't be disappointed, however, and there are plenty of hilarious bits sprinkled throughout the film from the fake hula hoop newsreel footage to Peter Gallagher's cameo as a flashy lounge singer in the Dean Martin mode.

The Hudsucker Proxy went on to receive a nomination for the prestigious Golden Palm award at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and to win the Best Production Design award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

"David Cowen"

Edinburgh U Film Society [Scott M. Keir]

DVD Verdict Mike Jackson

DVD Review Guido Henkel

Serdar Yegulalp

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

The Hudsucker Proxy Jeffrey Overstreet from Looking Closer

JackassCritics.com (Tom Blain)

Washington Post [Joe Brown]

The New York Times (Caryn James)

FARGO A 97

USA Great Britain (98 mi) 1996

I'm not sure I agree with you 100% on your policework, there, Lou.

I guess that was your accomplice, in the wood chipper?

— Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand)

This is as vivid a picture of the Midwest heartland as you’re going to find, described by the Coens as “Siberia with family restaurants,” an overly polite and friendly place with cheerful faces but also plenty of weary and downbeat souls, desperate people who feel the weight of the world upon them. This good and evil saga concerns one such person in plenty of trouble, William H. Macy as car salesman Jerry Lundergaard, living and working under the thumb of his much more successful father-in-law, Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell), who owns the car dealership. Powerless and feeling like a squashed ant in his life and within his own family, Jerry has gotten himself into a heap of financial difficulties just trying to stand on his own two feet, but he’s up to his neck in debt and forged loans that his father-in-law is about to discover sooner or later, so he makes a Faustian bargain with two guys on the wrong side of the tracks, the anxiously talkative blabbermouth Steve Buscemi as Carl Showalter and the stoic, elusively quiet, pancake loving Peter Stormare as Gaear Grimsrud, the kind of criminally reckless imbeciles you hope to never do business with. The calm serenity of the opening sequence is literally rhapsodic, a white coated screen bathed in snow, with just the bare outlines of a road coming into view, as headlights from a car can be seen in the distance slowly creeping towards the motionless camera. Carter Burwell’s mournful music feels elegiac, like something played out on the Civil War battlegrounds, as it carries plenty of weight but couldn’t be more hauntingly beautiful. This is as gorgeous an opening as any film you can find, out of which comes the principle characters, Jerry and the two numbskulls sitting in a bar in Fargo, North Dakota hashing out their agreed-upon plans where Jerry will pay them $80,000 to kidnap his own wife (Kristin Rudrüd), believing her father will foot the bill in ransom payments. Lundergaard, of course, weasel that he is, gets a little greedy and tries to embezzle a million dollars, the kind of money that would make anyone nervous, and he’s as fidgety and uptight as they come.

After spending a little time with these three morons, the camera opens in the tranquility of a couple’s bedroom, where painted hunting decoys rest peacefully on desktops before we find a couple sleeping in bed, Marge and Norm Gunderson, the Best Actress winning Frances McDormand in her absolutely best performance ever and the implacably calm John Carroll Lynch. Their polite and orderly world is a complete contrast from the chaotic, crime ridden opening, as a 7-month pregnant police chief is awakened with notification of a triple homicide, but her husband still has time to fix her some eggs for breakfast. Her thorough investigation of the scene of the crime is a thing of beauty Fargo - I'm not so sure I agree 100% with your policework there Lou .. YouTube (4:02), peppered with small-town banter, where the crunch of the snow can be heard under her feet, and the endlessly snowy landscape is exactly the same looking in all directions. Again the contrast between the amateurish local police investigation and her more professional instincts are stunning, especially as she recreates in her mind exactly what happened out there the night before, identifying her suspects based on footprints left in the snow as the big fella and the little fella. This is a film that put independent filmmaking back on the map, as the Coens wrote, directed, edited, and produced their own movies, always having final cut, making a film packed with picturesque sequences and charming characters that exude local color, where many may think speech is being exaggerated, but some of the characters needed no dialect coaches, including the two local girls (“Go Bears!”) interviewed by Marge who couldn’t be more irresistibly authentic Fargo Hookers - YouTube (1:16). It’s this exquisite treatment of northern flavor that endears this film for time immemorial, as the Coen Brothers grew up in a suburb outside Minneapolis and are certainly familiar with all the pertinent details. Most endearing, however, is the close-knit relationship between Norm and Marge, living a kind of calm that represents the moral center of the movie.

People are often seen as tiny ants overwhelmed by an immense landscape that all but engulfs them, where the abundance of snow in the picture, used to such chillingly effect by cinematographer Roger Deakins, reflects the barren interior world of Jerry Lundergaard, a wayward soul who’s lost in the wilderness and can’t find his way back home. The puzzled expression on his face reflects his disconnection to the world around him, where his job and his family mean so little to him, always left wanting more. William H. Macy, of course, is brilliant as the wormy creature who’s in over his head, caught in the many traps he’s set for himself. But it’s Frances McDormand as Marge who steals the thunder, one of the most beloved and well developed characters throughout the entire Coen repertoire, a tenacious small town girl who relies on cunning and common sense to help keep her grounded through this depraved moral abyss, where the entire cast is exceptional and the Coens won an Oscar for the Best Original Screenplay. Technically, this may be the Coen’s best directed film, as the virtuosity on display is impressively restrained, yet clearly all the assembled pieces beautifully fit together, where the supposed ease and simplicity of the crime only veers further and further out of control, perfectly captured by the eerie moodiness of Peter Stormare’s veiled brutality, entangling each of the hapless men in their own bloody madness. A film where decent and ordinary people are caught up in extraordinary circumstances, what’s especially memorable is the brilliance of the nuanced Midwest characterizations expressed throughout, where we see hostesses, barmaids, hotel receptionists, and waitresses all gush with friendly smiles while just below the surface a murky world of evil lurks unsuspectingly. Despite the icy visualization, this remains one of the warmest, most tender works the Coens ever made, filled with a kind of understated humility that is simply indescribable, as after solving the crime of the century from their neck of the woods, Marge offers no words for herself but thinks only of her husband, a truly exceptional work that retains a power all of its own, something you won’t find anywhere else. Siskel & Ebert both listed the film as their #1 film of the year, SISKEL & EBERT MOVIE REVIEW -- "FARGO" (1996) YouTube (6:33).

Angela Errigo from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

“I guess that was your accomplice, in the wood chipper?” One specialty of sibling partners Joel and Ethan Coen is twisting time-honored Hollywood genres—noir thriller, screwball comedy, gangster drama, or the fugitive-from-a-chain-gang flick—into flamboyant, contemporary delights. The foremost filmmakers to emerge from America in the 1980’s, their best films still look great, and the devilishly clever Fargo is among their very best. It’s a wicked tale (as ever, cowritten by the brothers, produced by Ethan, directed by Joel) which provokes gasps of admiration and rapt shock along with belly laughs. Embezzlement, abduction, deceit, misunderstanding, and murder are all in the frame, as is another regular feature of the Coenesque experience—a crime that gets totally out of control.

Fargo takes place in North Dakota, where oppressed car salesman Jerry Lundergaard (William H. Macy in the anxious performance that lifted him from the ever-useful characters actor to eagerly sought character actor) arranges a meeting with the two ex-cons he hires to abduct his wife. But most of the film, impishly introduced as a true story in the first of its macabre deceptions, is set in the austere, snowy landscapes of the Coens’s native Minnesota (where the exaggerated regional dialect amusingly employed in hilariously banal chitchat is a flat, singsong relic of the era’s Scandinavian pioneers, and at absurd odds with the heinous goings-on).

The desperately in debt Lundergaard cuts a supposedly simple, “no rough stuff” deal. His wife’s ransom is to be paid by her rich, bullying father (Harve Presnell) and split between hubby and his hired thugs, with the woman going free none the wiser. Only things go horribly and grotesquely awry in the hands of the psychopath (Peter Stormare’s Grimsrud) with a craving for pancakes, and the agitated bungler (“funny lookin’ little fella” Steve Buscemi’s Showalter) who can’t control him or events. Enter Frances McDormand (Mrs. Joel Coen), absolutely fantastic as the very pregnant, comically ordinary but sharp small-town police chief, Marge Gunderson. Resolutely conducting her first triple homicide investigation with unhurried waddle and droll aplomb, Marge is easily the most engaging character ever conceived by the Coens (along with later, Jeff Bridge’s “The Dude” Lebowski).

The Coens’s witty expertise results in a quirky, bizarre tragi-comedy that manages to be wildly funny and violently distressing by neatly accomplished turns, the essential innocence and simplicity of some characters contrasted effectively with the depravity of others. Hapless criminals and victims are there not to be empathized with but to be cruelly toyed with for our wincing pleasure. That cold, malevolent streak that has occurred in much of their work is what prompted one detractor famously to dub them “arty nuisances.” But it does not diminish their flagrant talent to dazzle, bemuse, and amuse. Against its icy visuals, Fargo contains some of their warmest work, full of signature Coen brothers’ set pieces and running jokes but also the surprisingly redemptive comfort of simple, straightforward decency. McDormand and the Coens’s screenplay won Oscars for breaking the mold in a unique case of murder.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

If BLOOD SIMPLE is the Coens’ crazed, sultry summer film, then FARGO is its quirky winter compliment. The story is a further riff on a common theme in the brothers’ works: what should be a simple grift goes horribly wrong and everyone is left scrambling to pick up the pieces. Fans of the Coens are rewarded by selfreferential homages to their own films; taking familiar elements only to turn them on their heads. Characters dominate over narrative here, amusingly evidenced by the broad Minnesotanice accent that nearly everyone has. The bumbling, smalltown yokel archetype the brothers’ have been cultivating up to this point in their careers reaches a certain refinement in this film. Frances McDormand’s Margie shows a developing depth in character; she is someone who has seen it all and is unfazed, a richness in the role that is unprecedented in the Coens’ films but that is a natural progression of her roles in their previous works—a spiritual successor to past iterations. The dark humor blends well with the film’s bleak tone and even bleaker setting—which itself is an apt metaphor for the coldness that resides in people’s hearts.

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (Macy) hires low-lifes Carl and Gaear (Buscemi and Stormare) to kidnap his wife, hoping that her wealthy father will pay a ransom from which Jerry can creama share. The abduction goes according to plan, but the kidnappers commit three murdersas they drive by night through the snowyMinnesota wastes. Police chief Marge Gunderson (McDormand), a slow-talkin', smart-thinkin', pregnant housewife, investigates. Joel and Ethan Coen's beguiling film is both very funny and, finally, very moving. Performed to perfection by an imaginatively assembled cast, it displays the customary Coen virtues, at the same time providing a robust emotional core unaffected by the taint of mere technical virtuosity. The talk is more leisurely than usual, the camera largely static, the focus firmly on relationships, character, ethics. However banal the lives and aspirations of the leading figures, there's nothing condescending about the humour. Marge and her husband are genuinely good, ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events of, to them, unfathomable evil. Suspense, satire, mystery, horror, comedy and keen (if faintly surreal) social observation combine to prove yet again that (bar very few) the Coens remain effortlessly ahead of the American field.

One of the great things about Hollywood, as a melting pot, is that people arrive there from somewhere else. Of course everywhere in the world is exotic, if not necessarily beautiful, and so when Joel and Ethan Coen arrive from Minnesota...gee whiz, next thing the big screen is filled with Joel's spectacular polar snowscapes, well meaning yokels, imbecilic shadows of gangsters, evil car salesmen, Hardee's roast beef, and giddy accents saying "twin cities" as if they think that Rome and Paris exist side by side. Much of the action takes place in a town that bills itself as the home of Paul Bunyan and, of course, Paul Bunyan isn't real. What's real is the story, and what's at least as real is the human strangeness it represents. If you were a political zealot, how would you classify William H. Macy, the crooked car dealer who wants to kidnap his own wife so that he can extort his father in-law? As a raving capitalist you would no doubt declare him a "socialist" as he's trying to obtain money that he hasn't earned, and all capitalist zealots understand that's the main thing that socialists do. A long-eared socialist (with glasses) would surely pronounced him a "capitalist," as his only interest in life is cold cash, just like the rest of the mutated breed. It's not like there aren't any heroes, how else could you describe Frances McDormand the pregnant cop? It's the performance of a lifetime, utterly philosophical in its simplicity, beguiling in its subtle strategies (so subtle in fact that you might be inclined to say that there aren't any at all, but that would be wrong)...her credibility is such that towards the end, driving through five feet of snow with the sun glaring off it, when she says it's a great day the initial response is to believe her. Because she obviously means it, and she's good. The acting is all offbeat to the point of wondering if there's a beat at all. We've seen Steve Buscemi as the dweebie street sludge before, but what genius saw McDormand in her role? Or Peter Stormare as the devil's dumbest helper? Carter Burwell's stark musical snowscapes are piled in all the right corners, so much a part of the film that they're difficult to bring out with you. The Coen brothers say it's a true story so, you know, it must be true, unless that's just part of the movie.

Fargo is a 1996 crime comedy/drama by the always interesting Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan. The story concerns one Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), a Minnesota car salesman so deeply in debt he conspires to have his wife Jean (Kristin Rudrüd) kidnapped in order to collect a ransom from her wealthy father Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell.) He hires two hardened criminals to carry out the kidnapping, the irritable Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and the cold-blooded Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare.) When the thugs kill three people while passing through the small town of Brainerd, Minnesota, an investigation is undertaken by a very pregnant local police chief, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand.)

As with all of the Coen brothers' projects, Fargo is populated with colorful, memorable characters. And like their best efforts, the film has a beginning, a middle, an end, and an honest-to-goodness moral subtext. Fargo is about the mundane nature of evil, the nasty things people do out of desperation, and the nastier things some are willing to do for money. It's the tragedy of Jerry Lundegaard (Macy), whose unspecified but significant debt coupled with his innate cowardice lead him to drastic but inept criminal action. Unable to admit he's in financial trouble, he builds "solutions" that unravel as quickly as he constructs them—he never intends for anyone to get hurt, but his actions ultimately cause the deaths of six people.

Fargo is a beautiful film—its vast white stretches of snow-covered Minnesota land echo the conspirators' coldness and provide a perfect canvas for the Coens' vision. Every shot is well-composed, with some memorable visuals—a wide shot of Showalter and Grimsrud's stolen car nearly lost against an empty horizon, an overhead image of a depressed Lundegaard trudging to his car across a trackless parking lot. It's also a near-perfectly constructed script—there are no holes, no tricks, though there are surprises of many kinds, and the dialogue is hilarious in its understated way.

The film is brought to life by a uniformly excellent cast. William H. Macy gives a daring, naked performance as the nervous, frightened, amoral Lundegaard. Frances McDormand is quietly commanding as her investigation expands, with a sharp head for police work under her "you betcha" Minnesota accent. The role of Carl Showalter is a perfect showcase for Steve Buscemi's brand of cynical shiftlessness, and Harve Presnell is great to watch as the stern, bullheaded Wade Gustafson. All of the performances seem tuned into Planet Coen, and they bring a lot of heart, humor and relevance to the film.

Fargo is about greed, stupidity and deception, not redemption, with an unfailing moral compass in the character of Marge Gunderson. Full of visual poetry and dark comedy, it's equal parts Garrison Keillor and William Shakespeare—a cautionary tale in the Minnesota vernacular, exceedingly well told.

DVD Times [Raphael Pour-Hashemi]

"I wouldn't live there if you paid me."
David Byrne (Talking Heads)
"The Big Country"

Caveat: I've never had all that much use for the Coen brothers.

There. I've said it. Of their previous pictures, I like Miller's Crossing the best, with Raising Arizona trailing behind -- but then the bottom falls out. Blood Simple looked to me like a whole lot of stylish murk, and I thought the self-consciously bizarre Barton Fink had put me off their films for good (I stayed away from The Hudsucker Proxy and almost forgot it existed).

And then comes Fargo, which looked like it couldn't possibly miss its mark, from the snowy concept embodied in the so-perfect title to the deadpan Minnesota wit punctuating a fashionably grisly crime drama (the wit is yours courtesy the Coens, who hail from Minneapolis). But not more than 10 to 15 minutes into the movie, I got that sinking feeling -- I'm not having a good time.

Of course, everybody else in the theater was having the gasping, chuckling time of their lives, which only suggests that your mileage may vary. For me, the basic (and ostensibly "true") storyline of Fargo is just about enough drama to carry an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The rest of the movie is kept afloat by that famous Coen wit, which this time consists of a repetitive joke about Midwesterners of Scandinavian descent leading more or less idyllic lives, eating Hardee's burgers, and saying "you betcha" a lot. When the joke works -- and it's to the credit of stars Frances McDormand and William H. Macy that it works as many times as it does -- it's a pretty funny joke, but it wears a little thin.

Something's rotten in Denmark, er, I mean Brainerd, the home of Paul Bunyan, when a state trooper and two other victims are found dead in the snow alongside a lonely stretch of Minnesota highway. It falls to very pregnant local policewoman Marge Gunderson (McDormand) to investigate the crime, but the audience already knows exactly what happened. It all has to do with car salesman Jerry Lundegaard, who's got himself in a bit of an unspecified financial fix. In order to make money fast, he schemes to hire a couple of thugs to kidnap his wife and extort a sizable ransom from his loaded father-in-law. Poor typecast Steve Buscemi plays Carl Showalter, the "smart" thug, and Peter Stormare is the strong, silent type. Their shenanigans, played against Macy's cold sweats, account for the black part of the comedy.

As police procedurals go, they don't get any more laid back than this one. In one of Fargo's two really good sequences (the other one shows you what finally happens to that ransom), McDormand rather matter-of-factly recreates the triple-homicide situation that planted the bodies in the snow. McDormand has some kind of comic talent, but since Marge's ensuing investigation is fairly rote (her one good clue puts her on the right track) it's a relief to cut back to the criminals, since at least things start to happen again. But just when the situation gets a little tense -- that is, when the Coens juice it up a little and the movie starts working -- we cut right back to the cops, shouting "Yah!" at each other. The humor is obviously meant as a chaser for the increasingly gruesome goings-on, but over and over again?

Overall, the movie is weirdly yet comfortably detached. Fargo's heart starts pounding a little harder when Jerry realizes that Marge may be onto him, but he's rendered impotent by the eventual turn of events. For all Macy's admirable work at bringing the character to an apex of bland desperation, we're unable to participate in his misery. The level-headed Marge gains our sympathy right away, but she's never in danger, or party to a real conflict. And while you might expect that the crime drama and the comedy would sync up in some wildly unlikely denouement, you'd be wrong. The most outrageous image in the whole film should be either horrifying or hilarious, and the way the Coens set it up, it looks like it's going to be both. In fact, it's neither.

If Fargo could make up its mind what kind of movie it wanted to be, it might find meaning in its tangle of surface caricatures and impeccable technical stylistics. At movie's end Marge, who's relaxing in bed with her husband, sighs contentedly: "Heck, Norm, we're doing pretty good." That line begs the question of how the Coens really feel about these characters. They hedge it enough that it's hard to be sure, and I'll bet that if you asked, they'd tell you that gosh, they really like these people. They're from this territory, after all, and it's possible that they find Marge's lucky naivete charming, even if it's not something they personally aspire to.

But the Fargo of the title is less someplace you'd find on a map than a mythical American landscape -- a la Terry Gilliam's Brazil, it's sort of a state of mind. The impeccable cinematography portrays Jerry as a man freezing in the snowy barrens of his own inner existence, a wretch who cares little for his family and who can't clear the ice off his windshield without popping a vein somewhere in his brain. In this movie, middle America -- the pleasant but bland existence -- is part of the metaphor for everything that's wrong with his life. Presumably the Coens used to live there, they know the lay of the land, and they're never going back.

Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Castle] Kubrick and the Coen Brothers Again, The Shining and Fargo, by Robert Castle, November 2003

Salon.com [Laura Miller] The Banality of Virtue

Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US films Tim Dirks

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs, also seen here: Cynthia Fuchs (c/o inforM Women's Studies) and here: Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs)

DVD Journal Dawn Taylor, Special Edition

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) Special Edition

Reel.com DVD review: Special Edition [Franny French]

DVD Times [Richard Booth]

DVD Verdict Mike Jackson

The Digital Bits Adam Jahnke

Reel.com DVD review [Betsy Bozdech]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

DVD Town - Special Edition [John J. Puccio]

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit)

The Projectionist's Review

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

DVD Review Guido Henkel

DVD Verdict (Michael Rankins) Special Edition

A Macresarf1 Epinions Review.

filmcritic.com visits Fargo and loves it Christopher Null

Mike D'Angelo a grumpy New York critic

Kamera.co.uk Monika Maurer

Kevin Patterson

Gods of Filmmaking review of Fargo

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Rita Kempley from the Washington Post

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert in 1996

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert in 2001

James Berardinelli's ReelViews Janet Maslin

Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]

THE BIG LEBOWSKI A- 94

USA Great Britain (117 mi) 1998

“This isn't 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.” —Walter Sobchak (John Goodman)

A zany, constantly inventive, laid back charmer that features witty dialogue, madcap characters, drugs, sex, and plenty of profanity, not to mention terrific use of music that intrudes almost like a Greek chorus as the voice of one’s conscience. Perhaps the greatest tribute to bowling ever committed to celluloid, this is a film about a perfectly relaxed and ordinary stoner guy, Jeff Bridges known as “The Dude,” who likes to hang out with his friends, drink white Russians and bowl at nights. However, trouble ensues, interrupting his mellow slacker’s life, when the Dude (aka Jeff Lebowski) gets mistaken for the “big” Lebowski, a high society Lionel Barrymore type who claims to have millions, who apparently owes some gangsters a shitload of money and they’ve come for a collection, showing they mean business by peeing on his rug before they realize it’s a case of mistaken identity. But clearly irritated by that rug incident, the Dude decides to hit the real Lebowski up for a little replacement rug money, but instead he gets wrapped up in the middle of a kidnapping-gone-wrong caper, as Lebowski’s young porn starlet girlfriend turns up missing. Wacko Vietnam vet John Goodman plays his best friend Walter, a big man who has an opinion on just about everything, where at least in his view, everything in life is related to Vietnam, usually setting off his hair-trigger temper leading to a stark raving mad rant, but then he tones it back down to fine and mellow. John Buscemi plays Donny, always late in entering a conversation, where Walter inevitably barks at him: “Shut the fuck up, Donny.”

The film is basically a non-stop, run-on conversation between Walter and The Dude, as despite being best friends, they also continually get on each other’s nerves. There’s actually a cowboy tumbleweed introduction by an offscreen character known as The Stranger (Sam Elliott), who places the setting in Los Angeles and proceeds to deconstruct the whole Raymond Chandler romantic view of the City of Lights, as this dark and constantly frustrating view of the city is meant to be discouraging, where things are never what they seem. However, from the luminous interior glow of the bowling alleys, you’d think the city cherished bowling as much as they do movie emporiums. While not a private eye movie, the Dude is thrust into the middle of one volatile situation after another with a myriad of goofball characters that requires a certain amount of self-reflection to continually find his way out of dead ends. From high flying feminist artist Julianne Moore, real daughter of the “big” Lebowski, who triggers nudist expression, procreation, along with key plot revelations, or John Turturro who has an all-too brief appearance as a trash talking bowler named Jesus Quintana dressed in color coordinated lavender, who goes through sexual gyrations and a good luck kiss as he delivers the ball, to the three Nihilists who are easily the mosty bizarrely dysfunctional kidnapping team, as they continue to demand ransom money even after they’ve lost the kidnapped girl, while suave and debonair Ben Gazzara, porn producer supreme, relies on old-school methods and traditional heavies to get his point across.

With surrealistic Busby Berkeley bowling dream images that occasionally flood the screen to the music of Kenny Rodgers and the First Edition singing “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” Big Lebowski Dream Part - YouTube (3:18), including a bowling ball-cam that only sees out of the rotating holes as it rolls down the lane, the pace of the film is pure anarchy where anything goes, where the Dude just goes with the flow, ocasionally arguing with Walter over each other’s strange interpretations, but each new set of circumstances is central to the film having the feel of a mysterious road movie, where the Dude’s car gets a workout following one ridiculous journey after another. Like an apparition, The Stranger shows up in the middle of a bowling sequence, expanding on his narrative observations directly to the camera even as the Dude is embroiled in his next adventure, where he’s heard near the end proclaiming “The Dude abides.” John Goodman, however, is the true revelation in this film, as he’s just a giant lug of a man who insists on being the Dude’s right hand protection, a guy who lays it all on the line out of true friendship wherever he goes, where he’s just as likely to fuck things up as save the day. But what matters is that they’re a team, where the ultimate insult is to threaten quitting the bowling team. To these guys, that’s heresy. An exquisitely heartfelt live performance of Townes Van Zandt singing “Dead Flowers” Townes van zandt - Dead Flowers - YouTube (4:48) brings down the curtain to the final end credits. This is the Coens delivering sheer lunacy.

Time Out Geoff Andrew

This comic update of the world crystallised by Raymond Chandler charts the disastrous involvement of laidback dopehead Jeff 'the Dude' Lebowski (Bridges) in a kidnapping case involving the wife of his millionaire namesake (Huddleston). The Dude is hired as bagman and of course finds himself increasingly at risk as he makes his way about an LA populated by the rich, strange and dangerous. Nor do his bowling buddies help: Donny (Buscemi) is frankly several pins short of a strike; while Walter (Goodman), a crazed, irascible Viet vet, is so determined to stand his (and the Dude's) ground that he causes more trouble than he solves. Immensely inventive and entertaining, the film may not have the enigmatic elegance or emotional resonance of Barton Fink or Fargo, but it's still a prime example of the Coens' effortless brand of stylistic and storytelling brilliance. Thanks to Roger Deakins' gleaming camerawork, T-Bone Burnett's eclectic soundtrack selection and the Coens' typically pithy dialogue, it looks and sounds wonderful. Moreover, far from being shallow pastiche, it's actually about something: what it means to be a man, to be a friend, and to be a 'hero' for a particular time and place.

The Big Lebowski Daphne Merkin from the New Yorker

After the mysteriously affecting "Fargo," the Coen brothers have reverted to their studied pose of cynical disengagement with a movie that—insofar as it's about anything—is about the interface of bowling and Orthodox Judaism. Set in Los Angeles, this irritatingly antic caper stars Jeff Bridges as the Dude, a carefree seventies-style dropout who hangs out at the local bowling alley with his buddies Walter (John Goodman), a chronically irate Nam vet, and Donny (Steve Buscemi), the trio's sweet but dim verbal foil. Although his laid-back existence is interrupted by at least three extortion and kidnapping plots, all of which revolve around an elderly millionaire in a wheelchair (David Huddleston), the Dude—who's not only amiable but infinitely resilient—comes out smiling, like Popeye. The clever dialogue, seductive camera work, and beautiful production design (the lavish dream sequences look like Busby Berkeley on Ecstasy) almost make you forget the vacancy at the movie's core, but in the end there's no escaping the feeling that the Coens are speaking a secret language. With Julianne Moore and John Turturro.

It's a lot easier to think that you can write something this gloriously freewheelin' than actually do it. For some reason those who know that they can't write a decent romance or a mystery invariably think that they could put something down that would be loose and entertaining. They can't. You have to live it first, it's one of the rarest gifts of all. The Coen brothers' characters all absolutely reek of authenticity. Not because they're exact, or accurate, or precisely on point or whatever you want to call it, but because they surely exist in the societal nether worlds depicted, in some sense that is spiritually represented. The true sense. Jeff Bridges is absolutely brilliant as the centerpiece, in that understated manner of brilliance that is undetectable to the (over-) trained eye, but about halfway through John Goodman just takes over the show. You just can't wait for him to start ranting about anything, and his three phrase analysis of Iraqi military might is enough to make any veteran proud. So it's Jeff making his own rules, Goodman determinedly living by the rules that he's entirely certain he's figured out what they are, and when the two greats come together they contemplate no achievement greater than a bowling team. As you can see, Shakespeare's observation that "greatness" may be "thrust" upon one is considered, in some of the finer circles, to be something of a threat. Goodman is so great at doing the Midwestern bloke bit that it's easy to forget how versatile he really is. Babe Ruth, King of England, this guy...it's probably his finest performance, and that's saying something. John Turturro does an unbelievable amount with way fewer lines and virtually no screen time. He's, at once, brilliant and formidable and disgusting and cheesy and cheap. I'm ready to cast him as anything. Brilliant. Joel Coen paces it perfectly, it feels almost like one of those early '70s movies. No, not because of the knowing stoner jokes (settle in, my reactionary friends, the weed will be with us forever, and that one's not going away), but because it's so loose, and possessed with that sense of infinite and immediate possibility that once threatened to go mainstream. Steve Buscemi is perfect, too, and David Huddleston, and Tara Reid. Flea is cast against type, obviously, as a German nihilist. It's a brilliant representation of something that...not so much refuses to attain or be quantified as brilliant...but...more had somethin' else goin' on at the time and forgot (to put it diplomatically) to notice.

Boston Phoenix [Gary Susman]

NEW YORK -- Don't expect to find deep meaning in the utterances of the Coen Brothers, any more than you would expect to find it in their films.

Sure, if you ask about the inspiration behind The Big Lebowski, Ethan will explain, "The narrative is suggested by Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels. It's this episodic narrative about a character who's not a private eye in this case, just a layabout pothead who works his way through LA society trying to unravel this mystery."

And if you ask Joel why the characters are obsessed with bowling, he'll say, "We like the design aspects of bowling. The sort of retro aspects of it seemed like the right fit for the characters. One of the people this is loosely based on was in an amateur softball league in LA that really took up a lot of his time. We changed that to bowling because bowling seemed more compelling from a visual point of view." He adds, "It's the only thing that calls itself a sport where you can smoke and drink beer."

But mostly, the brothers (Joel is credited as director and Ethan as producer, but both direct, write, produce, and edit) have no trenchant explanation for any of their weirdness. Asked why they made Vietnam vet Walter (John Goodman) an observant Jew, Ethan replies, "What's the point of any of the characterization? It's a peg to hang a few gags on him. There's something about the incongruity of a Vietnam vet, gun buff, military fanatic being also a devout converted Jew that was appealing to us."

So you make a point of going for what will make the weirdest character? "Weird isn't the right word," says Ethan. "The most vivid character. Yeah, sure."

In fact, when asked at last month's film festival in Berlin whether the movie had any point at all, beyond laughing at German nihilists and Latino pederasts, Joel said, "I guess you hit the nail on the head."

Jeff Bridges, who plays the film's stoner hero, the Dude, insists that the movie does have a moral dimension, though he's hard pressed to explain it. "I think it's a film about grace, how amazing it is that we're all allowed to stay alive on this speck hurled out into space, being as screwed up as they all are.

"Like, Fargo had a moral resonance to it. This one, I think, does as well. It may not be apparent to most people at first. But working in it, kind of bathing in this thing, it rang for me. It's not a real clear thing that you can say, 'That's what it means.' It's a little different."

How did the Coens justify the film's quirks to him? "They kind of laughed. It's their style to have these weird things, like that Oriental guy in Fargo with that Fargo accent. Where does that go? It doesn't go anywhere. Or [in Lebowski] the dancing landlord. Why are you here? It's kind of lifelike. It rings true somehow."

Neither did the Coens explain much to Julianne Moore, who plays Maude, an aristocratic artist who mystifies and ensnares the Dude. "They don't really talk a lot, which I love. I don't like to talk a lot when I'm working. It gets in the way. They do seem to communicate in some symbiotic way. I really loved it because you have this duality that becomes the vision on the set. You get a larger breadth of artistic vision. There's always an eye there. Which I really enjoyed."

So if you have any questions, you can go to either one of them? "Yeah. Which I thought was extremely odd. I didn't discover that until the first day on the set, when Ethan came over, and the line was 'Jeffrey, tell me a little about yourself,' and Ethan said, 'Lose the "little," ' and he never told Joel, 'I told Julie to do this,' which would take obviously an incredible amount of time. That's when you realize that they just do that. But Joel will come over and say something, and they just balance it that way."

Moore, however, is a trouper who doesn't question the strangeness, whether she has to dance in a dream sequence in a Valkyrie costume with bowling-ball breastplates or swoop across a room, spattering paint onto a canvas on the floor, while suspended naked in a harness. "I had no idea what they were going to do," she says of that scene. "I assumed I was going to be upright. I didn't know I was going to be like Superman. That was terrifying. And I was pregnant, and it was three in the morning, and I was 30 feet in the air, and they had to bring me up really fast. It was really strange, but it was worth it in the end."

Deep Focus [Bryant Frazer]

In Jeff Bridges, the Coens have finally found a performer whose offhand presence is a perfect foil for their own loping eccentricity. As one Jeffrey Lebowski, Bridges conjures up the laid-back California counterpart to the uptight shock jock he played in The Fisher King. More solipsist than narcissist this time around, Lebowski is a casual ne'erdowell who describes himself in the mythic third person as "the Dude."

It sounds like another precious Coen brothers gimmick, but in Bridges' hands it becomes a hysterical running joke. Bridges and his co-stars -- including John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, and Julianne Moore -- are basically handed a bunch of cliches, running the gamut from artsy, overreaching feminist to psycho Vietnam vet, and asked to run with them. In this case, it works. Laced with stunning visuals, a winning sense of the absurd, and the occasionally hysterical set piece, The Big Lebowski is a left-handed marvel. By refusing to take any of this seriously, the Coens shake the self-importance that dogged Barton Fink and Fargo and, to a lesser extent, Blood Simple. At the same time, this is serious filmmaking -- scrupulous in cinematography, pacing, and performance. The whole adds up to something less than do the showpiece parts, but The Big Lebowski is as artful a feature as we're likely to see all year. At its best, it comes tantalizingly close to brilliance.

There's a crime drama lurking in here somewhere, and the noirish plotline is satisfying enough. Early on, Lebowski, or "the Dude," is visited by a pair of thugs who shove his head in the toilet and demand that he pay a debt owed by his wife, Bunny. The unmarried Dude (the toilet seat is up, he points out) insists that they've got the wrong Lebowski. The thugs realize their mistake and leave, but not before one of them urinates on the Dude's rug. Chagrined at the loss of his rug ("it anchored the place"), the Dude visits Pasadena millionaire Jeff Lebowski (the "big" Lebowski), an aging, wheelchair-bound philanthropist (David Huddleston) with a foundation for underprivileged children. The reason for this meeting? The Dude demands that the stranger, whose debt the two thugs were trying to collect, replace his rug. No sympathy is forthcoming, but the Dude winds up embroiled in a plot involving a kidnapping, a lost suitcase of money, and a trio of nihilists threatening to cut off his "johnson."

The Dude's powerful sidekick throughout the dangerous proceedings is his friend Walter (John Goodman), an ex-soldier (and unlikely Jew) with an attitude problem who packs a pistol at the bowling alley. Harry and the Dude are joined in league play by Donny (Steve Buscemi), who tries hard to know what to say but is most often cut off at the knees by Harry's thunderous "Shut the fuck up, Donny." Their nemesis at the lanes is a lanky, bowling ball-licking, purple-clad, anally fixated hotshot named Jesus (John Turturro).

It sounds a little tedious on paper, but it's raucously entertaining. Goodman and Bridges play exceptionally well off each other, delivering the Coens' studiously casual banter with grace and precise comic timing. Ace cinematographer Roger Deakins (Fargo, Kundun) shoots a bowling lane the way Martin Scorsese shot pool tables in The Color of Money. It's a paean to middle American pastimes as only the Coens can imagine them, and for once, it succeeds in making everyday rituals seem almost mythic. In the latter half of the movie, when the Dude is slipped a NyQuil cocktail, he falls into a dream patterned after the opening sequence of a flamboyant softcore porn/bowling movie musical (Gutterballs, it's called) set to the tune of "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)". It's ludicrous and it's giddy and it's totally uncalled for in this context. It brings the movie to a screeching halt, and it's one of the best things I've seen on the screen in ages. If you've seen the trailers, you know this sequence is coming, but it's still a delight to watch it unfold in all its jaw-dropping glory. (Best bit that you're unlikely to see anywhere else: the shot from inside the bowling ball looking out.)

Outside of the bowling world, the cast of characters includes Julianne Moore as Maude, unlikely stepdaughter to the young Bunny, and Ben Gazzara as Bunny's chief creditor, a playboy pornographer named Jackie Treehorn. (Celebrity spotters take note that Flea of Red-Hot-Chili-Peppers fame gets to play one of the nihilists, and singer Aimee Mann cameos as a digit donor.) Unfortunately, the mannered performances of these folks -- especially Huddleston and Philip Seymour Hoffman as his right-hand man -- are more typical of what's irksome about Coen films rather than what's magical about them. To boot, there's little to no internal clarity of character or motive, which means the film has to get by on jokes, visuals, and idiosyncracies. I dislike some of Lebowski's more deliberate quirks, such as the grizzled cowboy (Sam Elliot) who appears out of nowhere to narrate the tale, or the whole vagina thing (no further comment), since they add dead weight to what's at heart a very slender comedy. On the other hand, I wouldn't give up the musical number for anything, so who's to say which digressions are expendable? Still, at 90 minutes, Lebowski could have been the kind of flick that takes you by surprise and leaves your head spinning. At 117 minutes, well, it feels even longer.

The difference between The Big Lebowski and Fargo -- two movies about largely innocent characters who learn how to play and win against the wicked -- must, to some degree, reflect the Coens' views on the big city and on the Midwest. (Example: Fargo's wood chipper left me cold, but the ferret-in-the-bathtub bit from Lebowski had me convulsing with laughter. (Or was it a marmot?)) Watching Fargo, I couldn't shake the feeling that the film was relying on its super-cool "irony" to avoid dealing with real people. Marge Gunderson may have been a memorable comic creation, but I could never believe in her as a thinking, breathing human being, which I thought the rather limp story could have used, especially if it wanted us to believe that the Coens really envied her worldview.

I don't believe in the Dude, either, but I think he helps close up the ironic distance between the Coens and their material. As Bridges conceives him, he's genuinely funny, even wonkily admirable in his tongue-tied, laissez faire attitude toward the world. He's also a seen-it-all denizen of Los Angeles, the real world in which the Coens ply their decidedly unreal trade. There's some stuff in the screenplay that invites further analysis, but I'm going to leave all that alone because I want badly to believe that this film really is a lark. I'll continue to believe that Lebowski is like After Hours as scripted by Raymond Chandler. It's about using people, getting used by them, and trying to figure out which is which. It spends less time getting its geographic bearings on some abstractly snowy landscape and more time happily observing assorted lives bouncing off one another in the chilly Los Angeles night. And it's really, really funny. That's the main thing.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

The Incredible World of Bowling Noir William Preston Robertson excerpted from The Big Lebowski: The Making of the Coen Brothers Film

The Making of a Coen Brothers Film more from William Preston Robertson

FILM; You're Entering a World of Lebowski David Edelstein from The New York Times, August 8, 2004

Dude, let's go bowling Will Hodgkinson from The Guardian, May 11, 2005

Bowling, Gender and Emasculation in The Big Lebowski Lisa Donald, May 22, 2006

Get with the Dude's vibe Liz Hoggard from The Observer, July 22, 2007

The Independent - "Hey Dude: The Lebowski Festival" Will Russell from The Independent, August 15, 2007

Sleeping and Severed Toes: Ethan Coen & Joel Coen on the Art of Screenwriting William Preston Robertson from Film in Focus, August 29, 2008

The Dude Abides: The Cult of The Big Lebowski Jason Guerrasio from Film in Focus, September 5, 2008

"Is The Big Lebowski a cultural milestone?" Finlo Rohrer from BBC News magazine, October 10, 2008

"The Decade of the Dude": A 10-Year retrospective article on "The Big Lebowski" Andy Greene from Rolling Stone magazine, September 4, 2008

Celebrating a Decade Of The Big Lebowski John Doran from the Quietus, September 30, 2008

White Russians Arise, This Time at a Bowling Alley Steven Kurutz from The New York Times, December 2, 2008

A Music Maker Happy to Be Just a Conduit Billy Altman from The New York Times, February 24, 2009

AV Club - The New Cult Canon - The Big Lebowski Scott Tobias from The Onion A.V Club, May 14, 2009

'The Big Lebowski' spawns its own subculture - The Boston Globe Joan Anderman from The Boston Globe, September 15, 2009

A Cubist Coen Comedy Andrew Sarris from The Observer

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DVD Times Mark Boydell

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Film Freak Central Bill Chambers

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The Prescient Politics of The Big Lebowski David Haglund from Slate, September 11, 2008

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The Cult 25: The Essential Left-Field Movie Hits Since '83 Entertainment Weekly, September 3, 2008

"The 25 best L.A. films of the last 25 years LA Times, August 31, 2008

DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin, March 6, 1998

FILM; Down Mean Alleys With John Goodman Franz Lidz interviews John Goodman for The New York Times, March 8, 1998

For the Turturro Troupe, Acting Is a Family Outing Franz Lidz interviews John Turturro for The New York Times, August 1, 1999

WATCHING MOVIES WITH/Julianne Moore; Discovering The Devil Is In the Details Rick Lyman interviews Julianne Moore for The New York Times, June 15, 2001

Laid-Back Jeff Bridges, Going Where the Spirit Takes Him Annie Thompson interviews Jeff Bridges for The New York Times, June 28, 2004

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O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? A 95

USA Great Britain France (107 mi) 2000 “Scope

O Muse,

Sing in me, and through me tell the story

Of that man skilled in all the ways of contending

A wanderer, harried for years on end…

Writing, directing, producing, and editing their own films, this series of FARGO (1996), THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998), and O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? may be the peak of the Coen Brother invention and creativity. Originating in the mind of Preston Sturges from the great American classic Sullivan's Travels (1941), this Coen Brothers manic romp through the American South plays like a double bill, stealing the title from the film Sullivan originally wanted to make about the Great Depression, returning to the era of the 1930’s. While the film is a wildly exaggerated comical farce throughout, creating a mythical landscape filled with colorful characters that all resemble Southern stereotypes, similarly evolving through a series of surrealist, Odysseus-like misadventures, turning into a meandering heroic journey of self-discovery, overcoming plenty of “ob-stack-les” along the way. While this doesn’t have the heft of the original, where madcap comedy is mixed with rare dramatic realism, creating an underlying core of poverty-laden bleakness, the Coens are instead content to maintain a subversive tone of screwball comedy throughout, where much like Sullivan’s conversion at the end of his travails, he just wanted to make a tribute to comedy. Who better than the Coens to make a mockery of some rather grand Southern traditions, yet in doing so, they retain something essentially American in the process, where free speech is one of our founding principles. Opening with a prison break, 3 escapees from the Mississippi Parchman Farm chain gang become our anointed heroes on the journey, the slick-haired, sharp-tongued George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill, the ringleader of the pack, with John Turturro as Pete, the eternally pessimistic and constantly complaining sidekick, and the ever loveable Tim Blake Nelson as the sweetly generous and overly optimistic but “dumb as rocks” Delmar. Chained together in prison garb, they create quite a sight, but the clue to their success is their constant, congenial banter, where Ulysses is always philosophizing about some nonsense, with Pete his constant foil and nemesis, with Delmar always dreaming about something else entirely. Adding to the film’s massive appeal is the eclectic country music soundtrack produced by T-Bone Burnett, including spirituals, gospel, delta blues, country, a capella, folk music, and swing, becoming a major component of the film, winning the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2001 GRAMMY® Album of the Year for 2001, O Brother, Where Art Thou ..., where the movie is single-handedly responsible for a bluegrass revival in America.

Adding a digitally enhanced sepia tone, the cinematography by Roger Deakins captures that dusty look of endless dirt roads and golden hue’d crops, where the prison breakout music used is “Big Rock Candy Mountain” BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAINS - Harry Mac McClintock ... - YouTube (2:29), adding an element of fantasy and colorful hobo storytelling, where the period-specific music continues to be part of the story. With the bloodhounds after them, almost immediately we’re immersed in the mythical aspect of the tale, where a blind black man drives a railway handcar that they hoist themselves onto for a getaway, where he mystifyingly foretells their future in exact detail, a reference to Homer, the ancient blind Greek author of The Odyssey. After a brief incident with the law, where Ulysses can continually be heard muttering “Damn! We're in a tight spot!” a little kid gets them out of a jam with his reckless driving, exactly as in the Sturges film, where we discover Ulysses has a thing for Dapper Dan hair gel, leaving a trail of empty tin cans behind. Despite their continuing series of misadventures, discovering sexually promiscuous sirens at a riverbank The Sirens - O Brother, Where Art Thou? (5/10) Movie ... - YouTube (3:30), picking up Tommy, a young black guitarist (Chris Thomas King) at a crossroads who sold his soul to the Devil, a reference to Delta blues great Robert Johnson who wrote the song “Cross Road Blues” Robert Johnson CrossRoads - Cross Road Blues ... YouTube (2:29), making a brief appearance at a rural radio station where as the Soggy Bottom Boys they cut a record that becomes an instant hit across the South (even to Mobile, Alabama!), O Brother Where Art Though - The Soggy Bottom Boys - I ... - YouTube (3:29), a bullet-filled run-in with Pretty Boy Floyd on a bank robbery spree, where they never appear far from the chain gang, who continually reappear throughout the film. Again mirroring a scene from the original, but with a slightly demented twist, Ulysses is in a movie theater with Delmar discussing the unavoidable untrustworthiness of women in general when sheriffs appear with rifles at both exits and the movie stops. Thinking they are in another tight spot about to be apprehended, the sheriffs usher the chain gang into the theater, as they are granted permission to watch the movies.

Cultural references abound in this film, where in several instances the screen visualization is a reference to Eudora Welty WPA photographs, where a remote broken down shack matches the boyhood home of Ulysses, MWP Welty Gallery: Home with Bottle-trees (photograph), while earlier we saw two young kids carrying large blocks of ice down a country road, Carrying the Ice Home for Sunday Dinner « AZ SOAP. A corrupt governor’s race becomes part of the background, with all the hick populist mannerisms and good ‘ol boy jokes, where the song “You Are My Sunshine” was the theme song of Louisiana’s two-term “Singing Governor” Jimmie Davis Jimmie Davis You Are My Sunshine - YouTube (2:54), and where Ulysses’ long unseen wife Penelope (Holly Hunter) is being courted by the campaign manager of the reform candidate, promising more of a stable future than Ulysses can offer, leaving him moping about his rotten luck. In what is easily the most controversial sequence, in a film that features remarkable set pieces, our heroes have an accidental run-in with a Klu Klux Klan rally, which is choreographed like a Busby Berkeley musical, yet resembles the menace of the flying monkeys marching in formation in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939). Our heroes are honor bound to crash the lynching party to rescue Tommy, where the Grand Wizard is, of course, one of the gubernatorial candidates who is seen later getting run out of town on a rail. Escaping under cover of Marx Brothers style mayhem and pandemonium, this is all part of the Coen Brothers whimsical comic madness, where the entire film is a series of setbacks, disasters, escapes and near misses, where death is always close at hand. Yet through it all, these lead characters maintain their essential goodness through their flair for comic goofiness and unending naiveté. George Clooney apparently rehearsed for weeks to sing the signature song “A Man of Constant Sorrow,” ultimately sung by Dan Tyminski, a member of the band Alison Krauss and Union Station, but he does get credit for his own on-stage moves, a kind of Appalachian chicken dance that the choreographers hated but always made the Coens laugh, O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU - Constant ... YouTube (7:05). A film literally steeped in popular culture, it shows America at its best, warts and all, where folksy, down to earth humor literally rules the day. It was Sullivan who had a change of heart and decided even the most wretched and troublesome souls facing a lifetime in prison could be moved by the joy of laughter, where humanity universally has a soft spot for comedy.

Karen Krizanovich from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Titled after a fictitious film mentioned by the hero of Preston Sturges’s 1941 classic, Sullivan’s Travels, and based loosely on Homer’s Odyssey, Joel and Ethan Coen’s arch period comedy is a journey through the marvels and the madness of America’s Deep South during the Great Depression.

Overarticulate, vain ex-convict Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) breaks out of a prison chain gang with Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) and Pete (John Turturro) in tow. Tracked by a lawman who seems to be the devil himself, their journey to find McGill’s hidden bankroll takes them to a back-country recording studio. The trio hook up with a young guitarist (blues musician Chris Thomas King), who sold his soul to Satan; befriend manic-depressive (and real-life) bankrobber Babyface Nelson (Michael Badalucco); and have some terrifying encounters with the law, the devil, the Ku Klux Klan, and the one-eyed bible salesman (John Goodman).

Making the most threatening situation look ridiculous, some of the most emotive elements of the Depression Era mutate here into folksy humor. At its heart, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a surreal and sincere romp that brings with it a wealth of folk music from the American 1920’s and 30’s. The soundtrack, a blend of bluegrass and spirituals, proved so popular that it single-handedly spawned a full-blown country music revival.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum derides the film

After making what are still probably their two best features, the Coen brothers came up with their worst (2000), a piece of pop nihilism about three convicts (George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Turturro) on the run. Fargo dealt with their home state (Minnesota) and the present and The Big Lebowski with LA at the time of the gulf war. But when it comes to Mississippi and the Depression, the Coens are so contemptuous they can't even come up with characters. What they really seem to care about are yuppie collectibles, like Robert Johnson albums. A movie's in trouble when its best sequence is a whimsical musical number featuring the Ku Klux Klan--which the Coens seem to regard as yet another antique. With John Goodman, Holly Hunter, and Charles Durning. 106 min.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? Review. Movie Reviews ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

The title alludes to Preston Sturges and evokes the engagingly anarchic, almost throwaway tone and setting of the Coens' shaggy Deep South Depression-era semi-musical road-comedy. The story, however, as announced with gleeful idiocy (but honesty!) in the opening credits, is loosely 'Based on Homer's Odyssey'. Clooney is perfectly cast as Everett Ulysses McGill, a somewhat vainglorious Mississippi charmer who breaks from a chain gang, dragging two none-too-bright buddies (Turturro and Nelson) in his wake, purportedly to retrieve his booty, but actually to try to tempt his less than faithful Penelope (Hunter) away from her new suitor. En route, there are adventures with latter-day lotus eaters, sirens, a Bible-bashing Polyphemus (Goodman), a Robert Johnson-like bluesman, a public enemy, corrupt politicians and the Klan, accompanied by a wealth of terrific blues, bluegrass and gospel music. Great dialogue, superb 'Scope camerawork from Roger Deakins, and a genuinely wondrous deus ex machina are among the delights.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? | Movie Review | Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman rates the film an F

Set in 1930s Mississippi, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the latest misanthropic flimflam from the Coen brothers, is like an extended Three Stooges episode featuring an even stupider version of the cast of Hee Haw. The Coens may be the only filmmakers in history perverse enough to make a movie that's essentially one long goony-obvious dumb-cracker routine and to give that movie the sunstruck luminosity of an Andrew Wyeth painting. The ravishing, wide-open look of O Brother, Where Art Thou? is an achievement; so is the magnificent country-blues song, ''I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow,'' that's pivotal to the plot. To Joel and Ethan Coen, however, even the occasional dab of beauty is all just part of the joke: The characters are wandering through a back-country paradise, and they're such thick-skulled hayseeds that they don't even know it.

As Everett, the leader of a trio of chain-gang escapees, George Clooney is leeched of his charisma, but then, with a few notable exceptions (Fargo, Blood Simple), turning actors into blustery automatons is what the Coen brothers do. In O Brother, a redneck kitsch burlesque, they pile on gags about hair pomade, Bible-thumpin' prophecy, even the Ku Klux Klan, yet there's such an anvil-heavy archness to the whole affair that the effect is stultifying. A riddle for cinema scholars: Why would filmmakers with this much talent work this hard to thumb their noses at everything they put on screen?

Nitrate Online (Joe Barlow)

In Joel and Ethan Coen's joyous musical comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the endless parlor game of "Name That Allusion" starts with the title, a reference to Preston Sturges' 1942 classic Sullivan's Travels. In that film, a popular director of escapist Hollywood fare announces his plans to make an earnest American epic, "a true canvas of the suffering of humanity." To research the project, he dresses up like a hobo and tries to blend in with the great unwashed, finding about as much success as yuppie Albert Brooks does "touching Indians" in Lost In America. Sturges' potent satire mocks the folly of artists who pretend to understand how the other half lives but can't truly know their experience, a lesson the Coens have clearly taken to heart. Had the Coens attempted any kind of verisimilitude in their depiction of the Depression-era South, O Brother would have been as authentic and meaningful as Barton Fink's crying fishmongers. Instead, they've crafted something far richer and more entertaining: a loving homage to '30s Americana assembled from popular icons and artifacts, and told with the intoxicating energy of a Warner Brothers cartoon. Swimming with references to literature, movies, and especially the evocative bluegrass and country music of the period—superbly arranged by T-Bone Burnett—the film cross-pollinates Clark Gable, Robert Johnson, Busby Berkeley, The Wizard Of Oz, and the KKK. And that's just in one bravura sequence. To add another layer to the mix, the story is based in part on Homer's The Odyssey, casting George Clooney as an escaped Mississippi convict whose long journey home to his wife (Holly Hunter) includes run-ins with a blind soothsayer, a trio of sirens, and a Cyclops (John Goodman). Joining him in chains are fellow escapees John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson, who are drawn by the promise of splitting Clooney's buried treasure. Meanwhile, the state is in the midst of a heated gubernatorial race between listless incumbent Charles Durning and a candidate (Wayne Duvall) who claims to be a sweeping reformer and "a friend to the little people," meaning he travels with a midget and a broom. O Brother moves along the same loose, ramshackle narrative lines the Coens mastered with The Big Lebowski, which risk falling into flat and disjointed episodes but instead hold boundless possibilities. Pleasure can be gleaned from every aspect of the production—the Soggy Bottom Boys' performance of "I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow" is a particular highlight—but the Coens are serious about their hero's salvation and sincere in their affection for the period. Coming from filmmakers many dismiss as condescending smart-alecks, O Brother's warmth is a disarming surprise.

O Brother is a dazzling and brilliant mélange of historical reinterpretation, biting satire and a marvelous sense of adventure. 2001: A Southern Odyssey?

That's not the subtitle of Joel and Ethan Coen's latest film, but it might as well be. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is arguably the most peculiar film that's yet come from a duo renowned for making peculiar films, and that's not intended as a criticism. The Coen Brothers, the creators of such eccentric cinematic delights as Fargo and Raising Arizona, have made quirky off-beat characters their personal trademark, and their latest offering continues their formula of placing bizarrely likeable people in hysterical (and often hopeless) circumstances. This time around the brothers find inspiration in one of literature's greatest works, and their daring reinterpretation of a classic story has resulted in a fiercely entertaining -- and often visionary -- comedy.

Ostensibly a retelling of Homer's The Odyssey, O Brother draws much of its inspiration from the poem's premise, rather than the narrative itself. Set during the Great Depression, the film chronicles the adventures of three Southern fugitives and their search for a cache of buried treasure stashed away by their leader, Ulysses (a magnificent George Clooney), shortly before his incarceration. Along the way, the trio will vanquish a fearsome cyclops (in the form of John Goodman, who turns in an entertaining performance as a one-eyed lawman), succumb to the charm of three beautiful sirens (three Southern belles, who croon while washing their laundry in the river), and attempt to stop Ulysses's wife, Penelope (Holly Hunter), from marrying another man. It's a staggeringly fresh twist on one of the world's oldest stories, and the resulting film has a great deal to recommend it. By taking a much-beloved literary classic and imbuing it with their own unique style, the Coens have created a spirited, lively adventure/comedy that will delight audiences, regardless of their knowledge of Homer's poem.

Like the best travel stories, O Brother's structure is episodic in nature, meaning that the film is comprised of a chain of cinematic short stories, each complete in itself. Each incident flows smoothly into the next, with the proceedings getting steadily more bizarre with each passing moment. During one amusing subplot, for instance, the trio passes itself off as a band of traveling musicians. When pressed to perform live at a local radio station, the non-musicians reluctantly agree... and their tune immediately becomes a monster hit. This type of satire is very common of O Brother, and reveals the lengths that the Coens, who collaborated on the screenplay, will go to in order to get a reaction from their audience.

Much has been written of George Clooney's performance here, and justly so; it's hard to believe that this is the same man who left TV's ER because he no longer found it "dignified enough." As Ulysses Everett McGill, Clooney loses himself in a Southern persona outrageous enough to suit the story's equally outrageous sense of the South--you Simpsons fans might prefer to think of Clooney's Ulysses as a real-life version of Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel--but the caricature contains no malice. Although Ulysses's Southern roots are wildly exaggerated (I'm from the South, y'all, and we don't really talk like that), the performance is quite appropriate to the movie. It's all in good fun, and sensitive Southern viewers will do well to place their tongues firmly in cheek before entering the theater.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?, is, if not the funniest film to emerge in the past twelve months, certainly one of the most inventive. A dazzling and hysterical reinterpretation of one of the world's most famous tales, the movie succeeds on multiple levels, losing itself in biting satire and, perhaps most impressively, its own marvelous sense of adventure. It's a significant film for the Coens, re-establishing them as two of America's most insightful observers of human nature, and once again proving their complete mastery of filmmaking to the world at large; indeed, only the Coen Brothers could "update" The Odyssey by setting it eighty years in America's past.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

“O Brother, Where Art Thou?” - Salon.com Charles Taylor

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: O Brother, Where Art Thou ... Kevin Jackson, October 2000

O Brother, Where Art Thou? | Senses of Cinema Michael Cohen, December 2000

Homer and Joyce return in the Coen's O' Brother | The University News Justin Thompson, January 25, 2001

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin]

O Brother, Where Art Thou? - Turner Classic Movies Sean Axmaker

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) - Culturevulture.net Tom Block

O Brother, Where Art Thou? - Philadelphia City Paper Sam Adams

No Depression - Page 1 - Movies - Minneapolis - City Pages Rob Nelson

Review: The Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, reviewed ... Danyel Fisher from Strange Horizons, January 15, 2001

PopMatters Lucas Hilderbrand

...read the complete O Brother movie review at Bryant Frazer's Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer)

Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young

Film Freak Central Travis Hoover

DVD Times Richard Booth

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2-Disc Special Edition) Raphael Pour-Hashemi from DVD Times

O Brother, What Art Thou?: postmodern pranksterism, or parody with ... Tracy Seeley from Post Script, at High Beam (excerpt only), January 1, 2008

CultureCartel.com (Jeremiah Kipp)

filmcritic.com says O Brother Pete Croatto

DVD Verdict Mike Jackson

Plume Noire Anji Milanovic

REVIEW: Coen Brothers' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" a ... - Indiewire Patrick Z. McGavin

Film Monthly (Jon Bastian)

Reel.com DVD review [James Plath]

Movie Vault [Paul Twomey]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Jiminy Critic Reviews "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Political Film Review Michael Haas

eFilmCritic.com Py Thomas

hybridmagazine.com Roxanne Bogucka

The Digital Bits Greg Suarez

The Trades (Jonathan Sudduth)

New York Magazine (Peter Rainer)

Epinions.com review by Christopher J. Jarmick co-author of The Glass Cocoon

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman] a tepid gumbo of Deep South clichés

James Bowman upset by the patronizing attitude of the filmmakers towards the idiot yokels

Images (David Ng) forgettable comic fluff

Jerry Saravia the most lifeless, laughless comedy seen in years

Soundtrack.net musical review

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) also seen here: Anchorage Press [Marc Savlov]

The Boston Phoenix Gary Susman

O Brother, Where Art Thou? - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE A- 93

USA Great Britain (116 mi) 2001

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Set in post-war California and shot by Roger Deakins in ravishing, steely b/w, the Coens' predictably unpredictable crime movie - about an impassive, deeply internalised, reluctant barber whose doubts about his wife's fidelity lead him into a perilous realm of blackmail, homicide and obsessive feelings for a customer's teenage daughter - may be inspired in part by Cain, but it's neither noir nor thriller. Though it's touched by typically absurd or surreal moments of humour, it's otherwise quite meditative and arty. It's a brave and largely successful attempt to explore the inner workings of someone who simply doesn't feel the way most of us do. Indeed, he doesn't feel very much at all, and when he does, he doesn't get it. In this the Coens' sly script is helped no end by Billy Bob Thornton's supremely eloquent performance as the taciturn tonsor, lent terrific support from Frances McDormand as the wife.

Billy Bob Thornton’s Ed Crane, a barber who blackmails his wife’s lover into giving him $10,000, is exactly as the film’s title would suggest—a man who’s become removed from the reality around him. THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE is modern take on the classic American noir; it’s an homage to various films by Samuel Fuller, Billy Wilder, and Robert Siodmak. Chainsmoking, elongated shadows, and closeup shots are pervasive tropes used in an effort to match the authenticity of the era the film sets out to emulate. Eschewing the elaborate transitions and editing of previous films, the Coens’ here stick to more traditional noir techniques. There is a pulpy feel throughout, augmented by the protagonist’s voiceover narration which lends itself to the film’s gritty aesthetic. All of these elements add up to a film with a strikingly detached mood. This ambience serves a dual purpose: on one hand, it numbs the viewer to the questionable choices made by the central characters and thereby removes the guilt that should be felt; on the other, it brings to mind how people take for granted the securities they enjoy in life, both in the film’s period as well as in our own recentpast pre9/11 world. THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE doesn’t reinvent film noir, but it does show that in the hands of the right directors it is still a fruitful genre for contemporary times.

The Nation [Stuart Klawans] (page 3)

Department of Rorschach Testing: Like quite a few moviegoers, I had a good time watching the Coen brothers' new picture, The Man Who Wasn't There. But as I look back on it, blinking my mind's eye, I keep seeing something that seems to be going unmentioned.

As you may know, The Man Who Wasn't There is an imitation film noir, set in a small California city in the late 1940s. Billy Bob Thornton plays a taciturn barber, who makes a single, clumsy attempt to escape from his quiet desperation and so sets off a chain of fatal consequences. Everyone seems to agree that as an exercise in style, the movie is first-rate. What's missing from the discussion, I think, is any mention of the subject matter.

When a character introduces himself by saying he doesn't talk much; when he keeps his lip buttoned throughout the movie; when he concludes by remarking that in a better world he'll say things for which he's never had the words in this life, I have to wonder: What can't he talk about? So I begin to catalogue the barber's strange behavior. He goes to visit a gay man in a cheap hotel, because he can't stop thinking about...dry cleaning. He visits the in-laws with his heavy-drinking wife and hears the classic question, Why haven't you two ever had children? He runs into a high school girl to whom he's formed a sentimental attachment and turns shy--not to her, but to her boyfriend. These may be some of the reasons why, twice in the picture, people shout at the barber, "What kind of a man are you?"

I believe The Man Who Wasn't There is about a deeply closeted gay man, living in a time and place when it was hard to admit such desires, even to oneself. That's why I like the picture so much: It's perfectly, elegantly reticent about its subject matter, as suits both the theme and the tradition of film noir (a type of filmmaking that thrives on unstated motives). Of course, when I pick up on these clues, I may be Rorschaching; but I still think there's a there in The Man Who Wasn't There.

The Man Who Wasn't There is the best adaptation of James M. Cain's gritty noir hellscapes as I've ever seen, and never mind that Cain had nothing to do with it. Shot on color film and then processed into stark-as-nightmares black-and-white by cinematographer Roger Deakins, this is the most visually striking of all the Coen Brothers' films to date. Blacks as dark as midnight collide with rich grays and subtle variations of shading, imbuing the whole film with the kind of psychological chiaroscuro not seen since the heyday of film noir, and before that, German film expressionists such as Lang and Murnau. It's that beautiful. The story, too, is rife with the Coens' ripe ambivalence, a black seriocomic opera of fouled-up American dreams, and a meditation on ambivalence that is itself at times as ambiguous as the emotional meanderings of its protagonist, the small-town barber Ed Crane (Thornton), a chain-smoking, taciturn chimney of a man who deduces that his wife Doris (McDormand) is playing the late-night fiddle-dee-dee with her boss, Big Dave (Gandolfini), and then does nothing for a long time. Eventually, blackmail crosses Ed's frame of reference (it's 1949, and blackmail was, to judge from other noir films of the time, very, very in), and before you can say “John Garfield,” Big Dave is now Big Dead Dave, Doris is in jail, and poor Ed is obsessing over a teenage piano prodigy with an animated sex drive. Of course, it wouldn't be a Coen Brothers film without an appearance from pudgy squawker Jon Polito, who arrives here as traveling salesman Creighton Tolliver, a fellow with a greasy hairpiece and a dream (“Dry cleaning! Think of it!”), and who wants to cut Ed in on a piece of the proverbial pie. Tony Shalhoub pops up as gustatory attorney Freddy Riendenschneider, too, to add flavor to the Coens' already overpacked mix, and Michael Badalucco is one long running gag as Ed's boss-in-snips Frank, who yammers on, endlessly debating the finer points of not very much at all. The film belongs to Thornton, completely and without reservation. With Ed Crane, he has created a character who is almost pure shadow, the archetypal “common man” who is so common that he threatens to cease existing at all. Thornton's barely there take on Ed is excruciatingly subtle; even when he's feeding us information in the film's Forties-era voiceover, Ed sounds as though he's about to drift off to sleep, or the nearest bar, or somewhere, anywhere, but where he actually is. Which, by the way, is the sleepy little burg of Santa Rosa, California, which fans of Thornton Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock will recognize as home base to Shadow of a Doubt's perverse Uncle Charlie. The Coens often have the complaint leveled at them that their films don't take things very seriously, and the same can be said of The Man Who Wasn't There. Despite the semi-grim subject matter, there's always a grin -- a smirk, really -- just out of sight in the background, that lends the whole affair a preciousness that detracts slightly from the film's weighty visuals and sordid tone. Still, it's the best-looking film of the year, hands down, and Thornton is dazzling, a dull diamond in the gutter rough.

AboutFilm [Jeff Vorndam]

In terms of style, the new film from Joel and Ethan Coen is the opposite of their previous movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Where that film was ultra-colorful, both in its photography and its acting, The Man Who Wasn't There is muted and deadpan (which isn't to say that it is humorless, this is still a Coen brothers film). Both films were shot in color, but O Brother's colors were enriched and saturated via digital wizardry. The Man Who Wasn't There had its color drained, leaving it resembling a black-and-white film. The absence of vibrancy is important to The Man Who Wasn't There, because it's a film about a man who loses everything he has, including, perhaps, his soul.

The Man Who Wasn't There utilizes the conventions of film noir more expressly than any Coen brothers film since Blood Simple. Most obviously, its black and white palette is manipulated by the technique of chiaroscuro to create foreboding shadows and ribbons of light that intersect the frame in bizarre and unsettling ways, which belie the normalcy of the film's setting. That setting is Santa Rosa, California, in 1949. (The town may be familiar to film buffs as the locale for Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt.) In this seemingly innocuous, jerkwater burg resides a barber named Ed Crane (played by Billy Bob Thornton, who in black-and-white looks like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and James Mason). "I never thought of myself as a barber," croaks Crane in the film's first line, a deadpan voice-over that accompanies the rest of the movie in a typically fatalistic noir fashion. In the film's opening words we learn what our protagonist is not. Negation is a theme in the film; characters are defined by what they didn't do, effort is revealed to be useless, and introspection and investigation fruitless tasks.

Ed Crane is a man of few words. When he does speak, he takes his time and makes every word count. Naturally, all his acquaintances are motor mouths, their logorrhea a constant hum that overtakes him, and makes him a nonentity in any social situation. His partner at the barbershop is his garrulous brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco), a man for whom no thought is too insignificant to expound upon verbally. Frank's sister, Ed's wife, is as loud and assertive as Ed is quiet and reserved. She is played by Coen brothers stalwart Frances McDormand in a brassy manner that implies sexual freedom, and indeed, she is cheating on Ed with Big Dave Brewster (James Gandolfini), the owner of a local department store with the great name Nirdlingers. Ed is aware of her infidelity, but it's not until a chance encounter with a sweaty, bewigged entrepreneur (Jon Polito) that Ed gets the idea of blackmail into his head.

In most film noir, the protagonist is a basically decent fellow who gets into trouble due either to a checkered past that comes back to haunt him, or a single unwise decision, usually motivated by greed or lust. In Ed's case, it's the latter, and his plan to blackmail Big Dave for $10,000 goes horribly, inevitably wrong. The disaster is out of proportion to the sin that precipitated it, and hence the noir hero's despairing feeling of the whole world out to get him. The rest of the film follows Ed's attempts to wriggle free from this mess, but like a beast stuck in a tar pit, his actions prove futile. The ineffectuality of action is a recurring theme in the film. Ed's profession as a barber is the primary example. As Ed states, no matter how much hair he cuts, it always grows back. Where does it come from? What mark does he leave on the world? This question is posed in the film's grimly ironic finale, by which time everything Ed has attempted has been nullified by an opposite circumstance. The film gets its title by rendering Ed Crane ultimately as the embodiment of the Superfluous Man, without purpose or direction.

Crane's plans for himself fail in every arena, with every other character in the film. His lawyer, a fast-talking big shot from Sacramento named Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shaloub, exhibiting the same barking-loon style that earned Michael Lerner an Oscar Nomination for Barton Fink), strains to provide reasonable doubt by applying Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, but he never gets a chance because Ed's brother-in-law shortfuses the trial. Ed's pipe dream of becoming the manager for the singing career of Birdy (Scarlett Johansson, calling to mind Lauren Bacall) is waylaid by her lack of talent, and a beauty of a car accident. The only thing Ed does accomplish is a lot of cigarette smoking. (This film contains the most smoking since Out of the Past. In homage to that definitive film noir, the Coens reprise the joke where one character offers another a cigarette and the other responds by holding up the smoke he is already enjoying.)

Smoke looks great in black-and-white of course, and praise must be given to director of photography Roger Deakins, who once again makes the Coen film its year's most distinctive looking. Black-and-white films that have been made in the last few years all look great. [I'm too young to remember when they were the standard, and most of the older black-and-white films have decayed or worn so much that they appear as to be artifacts rather than art (though color fares even worse over time).] This film's clear, untarnished image highlights the repressed passion that courses beneath the impassive exterior of Ed Crane. Its crispness contrasts placidity with angst and defeat. It's a must-see in a dark theater, where the shadows can blend into the black on the screen, and the film's world becomes your world.

Images (David Ng)

Film Freak Central Walter Chaw

DVD Times [Raphael Pour-Hashemi]

“Pansies don't float”– gay representability, film noir, and The Man Who Wasn’t There Vincent Brook and Allan Campbell from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

hybridmagazine.com Nicholas Schager

indieWIRE Patrick Z. McGavin

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Terri Sutton

Kamera.co.uk Hannah Patterson

DVD Verdict Dan Mancini

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

The Man Who Wasn't There Gerald Peary

The Mag review (***) of "The Man Who Wasn't There" [Dan Lybarger]

The Man Who Wasn't There Glenn Kenny from Premiere magazine

Jerry Saravia an about face from his pan of their last film

Nitrate Online (KJ Doughton) so impenetrable and detached are the leads in The Hudsucker Proxy, Barton Fink, and this latest effort that there’s no emotional empathy or identification

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) a perverse attempt to drain the life out of film noir archetypes

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] the most elusive, puzzling movie they’ve ever made

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Scott Van Doviak, they simply seem to be going through the motions

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh, this is such an inadequate work

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] a frustrating experience even by Coen standards

Long Pauses Darren Hughes, in the end, their cynicism and this film just feel hollow

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] of noir’s style, it’s a great pastiche, of its substance, a great travesty

Reel.com [Pam Grady] it doesn’t have a soul and comes up empty

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) also seen here: Erik Childress (Chicago Film Critics Association) Movie Review (* *) doesn’t have any life, not an ounce of energy or charisma

Movie Vault [Vadim Rizov] alternately dour and smirking, the Coens can't seem to figure out the purpose of this whole exercise

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray, even the Coen Bros cannot stimulate interest in a guy who has switched the lights off inside his head

The Digital Bits Dan Kelly

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg)

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) Special Edition

CineScene.com (Don Larsson)

Jiminy Critic Reviews "The Man Who Wasn't There" Ben Delbanco

Reel.com DVD review [Jeffrey Wachs]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Guide to Film Review: Man Who Wasn't There

Plume Noire Fred Thom

VideoVista Ellen Cheshire

Beyond Hollywood Nix

DVDBeaver Kevin Parent

INTOLERABLE CRUELTY B 86

USA (100 mi) 2003

Catherine Zeta-Jones and George Clooney have terrific screen chemistry, both are underrated comedic talents, and this is a throwback to those screwball comedies of the 30's where looks and timing are everything, the first two-thirds of this film has plenty of wit and hilarity, but when they get married, the film just sort of dies a slow death. I did love Big Bill Broonzy singing "The Glory of Love" over the credits as well as some of the earlier Simon and Garfunkel songs.

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Hitherto, notwithstanding the odd lift from Sturges and Capra, Hammett and Homer, the Coen Brothers have always worked from their own material. Here, however, they've taken and tampered with what could have been a reasonable, if fairly standard script for one of those Hawksian screwball romances where the love impulse is expressed through conflict. Some have been unimpressed by the result, which is admittedly broader than the the brother' finest work, but the movie still has that Coen feeling - in spades. As hotshot Beverly Hills divorce lawyer Miles Massey (Clooney) and gold-digging divorcee Marylin Rexroth (Zeta-Jones) lock horns in a thoroughly amoral battle of wills, wealth, deceit and desire, the Coens provide a distinctively wacky series of variations on generic themes, not only by seasoning the script with typically over-ornate and/or absurd dialogue ('Objection, your honour - he's strangling the witness!'), but by hyping up the Hollywood clichés with deliciously ironic over-the-top direction. Far from striking a note of redemption, for example, Massey's 'Changed Man' speech (sappy, horrendously attenuated hogwash from start to finish) is simply the clearest example of the movie's refusal to entertain the idea of including even a single second of heartfelt emotion. The leads strike just the right note of callow glamour, and receive admirable support from Rush's daytime TV sleazebag, Cedric the Entertainer's ass-nailer, and Thornton's ineffably boring Doyle of Doyle Oil. Those unable to appreciate the unashamedly absolute cynicism will almost certainly include Simon and Garfunkel fans, but I for one found it inventive and hilarious.

Forget for a moment the title, which is reminiscent of late-night cablecore, and the above-the-title star wattage. This is a Coen brothers movie. The snappy screwball patter, the cinemacrobatics of cameraman Roger Deakins, the gently satirical poking of Beverly Hills bourgeoisie, the loopy farcical tone – consider this a companion piece to 1998’s The Big Lebowski. There’s even a standout oddball, comparable to John Turturro’s scene-stealing turn as "Jesus": Here, it’s Heinz, the Baron Krauss von Espy (Jonathan Hadary), a mincing, malapropian concierge with a Pomeranian lapdog (uncredited) and his own trumpet flourishes in Carter Burwell’s score. Like Lebowski, Cruelty doesn’t have the epic reach of the Coens’ very best work; it doesn’t have the moral gravity of Fargo or Miller’s Crossing, for example, or even the dear heart beating inside Raising Arizona. But it is wonderful for what it is: a delightful, thoroughly satisfying comedy of modern manners. Clooney plays ace divorce attorney Miles Massey – confident, successful, and bored. Enter Marylin Rexroth (Zeta-Jones), a gorgeous professional divorcée who almost, almost takes Massey’s hapless client (Herrmann) to the cleaners. Yet cynical Miles is charmed by his lovely adversary. Can he win her – even after she takes up with a lunatic oil baron (Thornton, obviously enjoying himself) and weds him in a garden ceremony with a singing priest (Colin Linden) and no pre-nup? I’ll say no more about the plot, except that it spins a convoluted web involving a giant poodle, barbecue sauce, Caesar’s Palace, and a breathless hit man named Wheezy Joe. Sounds Coenesque, doesn’t it? That’s not even half of it. The comic details are great fun. But *Cruelty works because it’s an actors’ movie at heart, and Clooney and Zeta-Jones are beautifully matched. You’d never guess the script (originally conceived by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, who are co-credited here) had been rattling around Hollywood for a decade with everyone and her brother attached. Clooney seems at home in the Coens’ wacky milieu, but he’s every bit a leading man just the same – rakishly energetic enough to growl, almost bellow, "You fascinate me!" to his calculating, wicked lady love. There’s genuine, gaga heat in how he pants after Zeta-Jones, who is her usual silkily patrician self. She’s the human equivalent of a Michel Cluizel chocolate bar; you can’t help but imagine her melting in Clooney’s priapic grasp in the goofy, round satin-topped bed at Caesar’s. The lovers’ chemistry lends a welcome carnality to the film, balancing out the filmmakers’ more arch, quixotic tendencies. Who knew the Coens could be so … well … hot?

hybridmagazine.com Roxanne Bogucka

When aspiring writers approach hybridmagazine.com, they must audition by submitting a sample review of a Coen Brothers movie, any Coen Brothers movie. I want to see that they can write passable English, but mainly I want to see whether they “get” movies. No points off for their opinions of the movie they choose. What better filmmakers to audition on than the Coens, whose many projects have all been quite varied and yet quite unmistakably Coen at the same time. Intolerable Cruelty will be the movie that breaks the tradition.

Intolerable Cruelty has its blackly comic moments, but fails to take us to that loony-toons Coen universe of, say, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, or even The Man Who Wasn’t There. Partly, the trouble lies in the Coens’ having to work with material not wholly theirs. They share screenwriting credit with Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, who also wrote middle-mind fare such as Big Trouble and Life. Another problem probably lies in the Coens’ crush on George Clooney. Hell, I’m hot for him myself, but that’s no reason to make a movie, you know? That liking may have caused them to jump unwisely at the opportunity to work with Clooney again. They are good at playing off of Clooney’s rep for being oh-so-aware of his good looks and charm by fetishizing some aspect of his vanity. In O Brother, Where Art Thou? they made sport of his preoccupation with his coiffure; here they poke fun at his pearly whites.

Clooney plays a lawyer, Miles Massey, whose specialities are ironclad prenups and fantastic divorce settlements. He is a charmingly glib, heartless bastard who falls like a sack of hammers for Marilyn Rexroth (Zeta-Jones), who is pursuing a career in serial monogamy among the very rich. When Massey euchres Marilyn out of a divorce settlement, despite the fact that her husband Rex (Herrmann) was caught in flagrante delicto, she decides to take this man down a notch. There are various twists and turns on the way to the resolution—of course the path of true love ne’er runs smooth—but none of them elicit that surprised gasp that is the Coens’ stock in trade. Usually these guys are like the Fleischer Brothers would have been if they’d worked with actors instead of cartoons—you just hang on for the wild ride while wondering, “What the hell were they smoking?” In Intolerable Cruelty, you’ll be able to see around nearly every hairpin turn from a mile off.

This is a pretty darn broad comedy, one that takes easy shots at LA matrons whose lives are ruled by plastic surgeries, quack anti-aging treatments, shopping, and general cultural wackiness of the sort that has only just recently netted them the governor they so richly deserve. And Miles is apparently president-for-life of N.O.M.A.N., the National Organization of Matrimonial Attorneys, Nationwide. Their slogan—“let N.O.M.A.N. put asunder…”—and other rather obvious jokes like this land with little thuds throughout the movie. The Coens also indulge their fondness for certain stock moments. They like for characters to look straight in each other’s faces and yell “AHHHH!” Clooney and Adelstein, who plays his sidekick Wrigley, do so here, much as Forsythe and Goodman did in Raising Arizona. And in fact, the only genuine love here would seem to be between Clooney and Wrigley, who wants to be Miles only slightly less than Smithers wants to be (or be with) Mr. Burns.

There are some excellent performances here. Edward Herrmann is ideal casting for the risible rich guy who’s married a golddigger; he’s just the sort to wear garters with his socks. Here, with his big goofy baby face and sputtering outrage, he channels Edward Everett Horton to a T. When Billy Bob Thornton shows up, we get the only real return to the trademark Coen dialogue lunacy in the movie. And there’s a thoroughly creepy turn by some centenarian-looking actor whose performance evokes Citizen Kane’s Mr. Bernstein. On the other hand, Cedric the Entertainer and Geoffrey Rush are pretty much wasted. Miles Massey, moral relativist and divorce litigator extraordinaire, is a role tailor-made for Clooney, whose career can only benefit from stepping away from the ultra-cool leading man thing for roles that allow him to be both sexy and ridiculous. He is well matched by Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose attractions are equally devastating. Together they present a picture almost too blindingly dazzling to look at. But coasting on pretty people, no matter how considerable their charms, doesn’t make a movie. And in a Coen Brothers project, it’s just shocking.

Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on surprising their audience, but there's no surprise in their new Intolerable Cruelty that can match the opening credits, particularly the one that reads: 'Story by Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone and John Romano, Written by Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone and Joel Coen & Ethan Coen.' Can it be -- two filmmakers whose one name is synonymous with 'idiosyncrasy' helming a picture whose convoluted writing credits rival a summer blockbuster's? And getting bottom billing to boot?

It's enough to strike fear deep into the hearts of the Coens' admirers (and maybe bring a smile to their detractors' tightly pursed lips). The flames of doubt were fanned by Universal's insipid trailers, which accomplished perfectly the job of making Intolerable Cruelty look like a tedious, run-of-the-mill rom-com; one of the Coens went so far as to say he wanted to try something different, which is what filmmakers usually say while holding their artistic consciences face down in a rain barrel.

Now that those fears have been proven baseless, I don't mind admitting to a gnawing trepidation that would blossom into full-grown dread every time that awful trailer flickered onto the screen. (Critics don't often get a chance to see trailers, but this one seemed to fling itself at me like a rabid bat.) But if those fears were inaccurate, they weren't unfounded -- it's just that everything that should have been wrong about Intolerable Cruelty is what's right about it.

According to published reports, the original script for Intolerable Cruelty had been kicking around Hollywood for seven or eight years before producer Brian Grazer (facilitator of such highbrow fare as the Nutty Professor movies) hit up the Coens for its (at least) second rewrite. Thinking that it would be either easy money or a welcome diversion or some combination of both, the Coens obliged, but with no idea of directing it themselves. The result is a story that, while hardly free of Coenisms -- indeed, after watching Intolerable Cruelty, it's impossible to imagine anyone else knowing what to do with it -- is the most streamlined, coherent and unified thing they've written since Fargo.

Said story involves a classically barbed screwball romance between inhumanly self-assured divorce attorney Miles Massey (George Clooney) and aspiring husband-bilker Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones), though it should be pointed out that Rexroth is just the most recent in an ever-lengthening string of surnames. Miles has Clooney's stock-in-trade cockiness, the overcompensating charm he made a meal of on ER. But where a movie like Out of Sight or O Brother, Where Art Thou? trusts Clooney's charm will remain intact no matter how much they chip away at it, Intolerable Cruelty declines to endorse Clooney's high opinion of himself. Miles Massey is, not to put too fine a point on it, a vain, preening boob, seizing every spare moment to polish his teeth (the soundtrack makes little squeak-squeak noises when he rubs at them) while eagerly -- and successfully -- promoting a system in which romantic love is merely an excuse for two people to get close enough to stick their hands in each others' pockets.

Intolerable Cruelty is the kind of movie in which a cuckolded TV producer (Geoffrey Rush) gets stabbed in the butt with his daytime TV lifetime achievement award within the first five minutes, which is to say there's not an excess of dignity to go around. The Coens, of course, give most of the dignity to the story's most venal character: Marylin, who as the sun rises is suing her adulterous, and very rich, husband (Edward Herrmann) for divorce. Unfortunately for her, Miles takes the case on behalf of her husband, and makes short work of her in court, but not before he's become entranced by her cold-blooded machinations. No wronged wife she: As Jonathan Hadary's absurdly louche concierge reveals in court, Marylin deliberately sought out a man she could sue for divorce inside of six months, a wealthy man of loose morals and little brain. As Miles falls progressively deeper under her spell, it may dawn on you that her ex-husband is hardly the only man in the movie who fits that description.

In classic screwball fashion, the man and the woman hurl knife-edge remarks at each other for nine-tenths of the movie, then inevitably fall into each others' arms at the end. So it is with Intolerable Cruelty, except for the inevitable part. We're not sure that Miles and Marylin will end up together, or even that we want them to. Partly, it's that it's so much fun to watch the characters suppressing or ignoring their passions that it's hard to enjoy it as much when they finally give in to them; the movie ends on a weak, inconsequential joke, more of a misdirection while the Coens sneak out the back before the lights come up.

Given that, for all his faults, Miles Massey still looks like George Clooney, it may take you a while to realize what an arid, sterile life he leads. Understandably skeptical about romance, he seems to have no interest in the opposite sex at all until Marylin comes into his life, as powerful as he and a whole lot shapelier, and shows him that sex and power make splendid bedfellows. What Intolerable Cruelty ends up proposing is nothing more modest than the reintroduction of love into the sex-as-money discourse of the moment. If the Coens mean it, even just a little, it's a beautiful thing.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Intolerable Cruelty (2003) Ben Walters, November 2003

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Intolerable Cruelty Gary Couzens from DVD Times

DVDTimes Noel Megahey

Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert

Going Mainstream Gregory Avery from Nitrate Online (2 reviews), also Conceptual Experiment by Nicholas Schager

Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp

Film Freak Central Walter Chaw

Film Threat [Chris Barsanti]

CineScene.com (James Snapko)

stylusmagazine.com (Josh Timmermann)

The Man Who Wasn't There Glenn Kenny from Premiere magazine

Kamera.co.uk Jon Ashton

here Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

IMDb Staff Review [Keith Simanton]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Arthur Lazere

Talking Pictures (UK) Martyn Bamber

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

Reel.com [Franny French]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Jared Sapolin

Dreamlogic.net Chris Nelson and Kris Kobayashi-Nelson

Gods of Filmmaking review of Intolerable Cruelty

Jerry Saravia back to deriding the Coens again

Washington Post (Michael O'Sullivan)

The Boston Phoenix Gary Susman

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

THE LADYKILLERS C 70

USA (104 mi) 2004

Despite some terrific gospel music, some of which includes footage of the performers, also a grandiose performance by Irma P Hall, that’s not enough to drown out the stench of this stinker, the only Coen Brothers film I haven’t liked. Tom Hanks attempts to accentuate Southern blueblood in overdressed, overexaggerated, tic-laden manners and diction, but ends up needing a pie in his face, as he’s like a wind-up doll that won’t shut up. The language is unnecessarily foul-mouthed and profane, instead of witty and funny, and the situations are all sitcom setups, each more predictable than the next. I never laughed once, found most of the material obnoxious and down-right dull, and found the Coens have worn out their Southern welcome with this overdone material.

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Relocating Mackendrick's black comedy to the Mississippi Delta is just one of several dramatic changes made to the Ealing classic. The dialogue is almost entirely new, and it pours out maybe too freely, as it's sometimes hard to keep up with the ornate lingo and wham-bam gags. The characters, while distantly echoing the original little old lady and the posse of disguised thieves who rehearse music in her boarding house, are drastically redrawn (probably the funniest new inventions being Pancake and his beloved Mountain Girl). And the tone is not so much bone-dry, as broad and somewhat scatologically moist. Hanks isn't a patch on Guinness, and sometimes it all falls a little flat. But at other times it's very funny indeed, and while being far from the Coens' finest hour, it remains more intelligent and ambitious than most of what currently passes for Hollywood mainstream comedy. And the cat is great.

The Coen brothers’ newest is an odd amalgam of tics and stutters that plays like something of a greatest-hits reel but never seems to jell into a real comedy. That may have something to do with the fact that the film is also a liberal remake of the great Ealing Studios comedy of the same name, released in 1955 with a cast that still makes you tremble with anticipation: Alec Guinness, Herbert Lom, and Peter Sellers, the latter fresh from The Goon Show. As in the original, the Coens’ film revolves around a gang of crooks who utilize the household of a prim old widow (here played by Irma P. Hall) to loot a nearby riverboat casino. Led by Hanks’ studious professor G.H. Dorr (in the role originally created by Guinness) the ragtag quintet derives, fittingly, in a hearse, under the guise of chamber musicians eager to practice in Miss Marva Munson’s earthen-walled basement. The Coens have transposed the film’s locale to the American Deep South in lieu of South London, and so the fact that this particular crew is made up of a multicultural mélange – foul-mouthed firebrand and inside-man Gawain MacSam (Wayans), a Buddhist criminal mastermind called the General (Ma), demolitions expert Garth Pancake (Simmons), musclebound Lump (Hurst), and the floridly extemporaneous professor Dorr – is somewhat less problematic than it would have been in post-war London. Still, The Ladykillers exists in that odd, precise universe the Coens have been exploring for years; it’s the only one I’ve seen in which the sweat stains on workingmen’s overalls are so obviously costume-designed to within an inch of their very lives, or where the sheer precision of a shot of a garbage scow can be as artistically rendered as a Vermeer painting. The Ladykillers is frequently funny, but the comedy doesn’t arrive from the situations in which the characters find themselves, as it did in, say, The Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona, but instead is thrust at the audience in a sort of "Look, Ma! No hands!" self-aware showiness that ends up grating by midfilm. It’s the Coens being flashy instead of truly funny, and much of the problem stems from Hanks’ bizarrely over-the-top performance as professor Dorr. Clad in what looks like Samuel Clemens’ wardrobe, with matching facial hair and orthodontics, he speaks his convoluted lines around what sounds like a mouthful of razors, so precise is his diction. It’s a role informed by everything from Burgess Meredith’s old Batman nemesis the Penguin to the self-conscious acting style you’d expect to find in a high school version of The Music Man, and while it’s frequently hilarious, it’s also just as frequently annoying; it draws you out of the picture’s studied art via its sheer artifice. His recitation of Edgar Allan Poe’s "To Helen" is a masterwork of salivary control, but the real comedy comes from Irma P. Hall, who can only ask "Who’s Helen?" Hall is The Ladykillers’ saving grace and then some. Big-bosomed and homespun to the point of macramé, the Coens, for a change, choose not to make fun of her prim Southern ways and instead make her the heart and soul of what would otherwise be a soulless exercise in craft. It’s not quite enough to raise the film to a par with the directors’ past triumphs in style meeting substance in equal measure (such as The Hudsucker Proxy), but it comes delightfully close.

The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]

A motley gang of thieves, unconvincingly disguised as amateur classical musicians, are confounded in their caper by the daft old lady who rents their criminal mastermind his room. Produced in 1955 at Britain's old Ealing Studios, Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers was eccentric, deft, and extremely funny. The Coen brothers' remake is none of these things: The opening image of a gargoyle watching a garbage scow is more or less a metaphor for this movie, which can't even honestly be called The Timekiller.

Transposed from suburban London to a version of Biloxi, Mississippi, The Lady- killers pits a far less sinister mastermind, the grandiloquent Goldthwait Higginson Dorr (Tom Hanks) against a far more obviously formidable landlady. God-fearing Marva Munson (Soul Food matriarch Irma P. Hall) is an irascible widow who complains to the cops about "hippity-hop" music and is so clueless that she takes pride in tithing herself to support Bob Jones University. (Like George W. Bush, she's supposed to be oblivious to the bible school's racist history.) Suspicious as Mrs. Munson is, it's a minor miracle that she tolerates the unctuous Dorr for a minute—let alone his band of losers.

Playing a role that allowed Alec Guinness, tricked out with repulsively long teeth, to exude a certain wicked charm while seeming as creepy as silent-screen contortionist Lon Chaney, Hanks is at once strenuously laid back and bizarrely Shakespearean, given to mellifluously highfalutin raps and a wheezy giggle. The role affords him a chance to stretch, but it's hardly a Meryl Streep-style tour de force. For all his satanic glower, Hanks is not the slightest bit menacing. As the gang's inside man and resident motormouth, TV star Marlon Wayans brings a bit of sitcom sambo geste to the proceedings, particularly when mixing it up with J.K. Simmons's idiotic handyman. Tzi Ma's volatile, if taciturn, former Vietnamese general and Ryan Hurst's brain-damaged former football player round out the miscreant crew but add little to the mix. Basically, this is a character comedy without characters.

The original Ladykillers spoofed a then current cycle of Hollywood heists and movies wherein honest citizens were terrorized by dangerous hoodlums. Its originality lay in its capacity to increase the laughs as the body count mounted. Perhaps queasy about a situation that involves white men and their minstrel assistant attempting to do away with an elderly black woman, the Coens are uncharacteristically restrained. Indeed, given that the crime comedy is their preferred genre, The Ladykillers is remarkable mainly for its timidity. (That the movie has already been announced as part of the official selection at Cannes does not bode well for the festival.)

The Coen version feels more than a bit desperate in its padded backstories and tediously distended caper details—not to mention its halfhearted yet insistent attempt to woo the audience with lame castration and diarrhea gags. (It's not the lady that's murdered, but The Ladykillers.) Because the plot takes forever to get in gear, the balletic aspect of the war between the old lady and the gang that gave the Mackendrick original its offbeat timing is completely lost. Instead, there's the mind-numbing oompah rhythm of every gag telegraphed and every joke pounded into the ground. In the visual equivalent of a laugh track, the Coens use the portrait of the late Mr. Munson to comment on each new misadventure.

The flat expanse of Coen-land is intermittently enlivened with a few rousing gospel interludes. There's not even the ersatz regionalism of O Brother Where Art Thou?, but the strategic deployment of incidental music ranging from Blind Willie Johnson to Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers suggests that the filmmakers' real investment is in the soundtrack CD.

Coen Bros: The Ladykillers : Todd Alcott

Coming just five months after Intolerable Cruelty, Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ladykillers has the feel of a rush job. But even when the Coens get sloppy, they’re sophisticated about it. If anything, Ladykillers -- adapted from the 1955 Ealing Studios comedy written by William Rose and directed by Alexander Mackendrick -- is even glossier and more stylized than the Coens’ last film. But where Intolerable’s vapid splendor matched its characters’ lust for luxe, it hardly fits Ladykillers’ venal, self-deluding thieves, or the film’s small-town Mississippi setting. It seems like a holdover, as if the Coens didn’t cleanse their palate between courses.

All that remains of the original Ladykillers is its premise: five would-be robbers rent a room from a old woman to plot their crime, then consider doing her in when she stumbles on their scheme. That Katie Johnson's prim dowager has been replaced with Irma Hall's handbag-swinging Baptist tells you everything you need to know about the Coens' all-in approach. Characters who reveal themselves slowly are, to be sure, not the Coens' strong suit, so it's not surprising that Hall's Marva Munson, far from being a shy little old lady, is an imposing widow whose dead husband stares down sternly from a portrait above the fireplace. Floral print stretched over her padded-out frame, Hall looks more like an angry sofa than an easy target for half-baked con artists.

Beginning with The Big Lebowski, the Coens have been increasingly (if not consistently) drawn to the episodic and the picaresque -- which is to say they seem to view a feature-length film as an opportunity to stage a series of small, almost self-contained gags. The Ladykillers' five would-be felons don't just represent different walks of life (as in the original); they seem to have wandered in from completely different movies. The rapid-fire scenes that introduce them are so skewed they feel like a parody of those introducing-the-band montages from Ocean's Eleven or any Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

It seems to be the characters' very disparity that engages the Coens, as if the entire movie were no more than a plate-spinning act. With the spiked hair of a pickaninny doll, Marlon Wayans' booty-lusting, gun-toting loudmouth is relieved from caricature only by his left-field moniker: Gawain MacSam. (The characters' names often seem as if they were conceived on a bet: Weemack Funthes, Fernand Gudge and a woman named -- not just called -- Mountain Girl.) The "inside man" at the riverboat casino they plan to rob, Gawain bristles at the restrictions of his janitorial job, particularly butting heads with The General (The Quiet American's Tzi Ma), a former North Vietnamese tunnel digger who smokes more than he speaks. The "muscle" of the outfit, Lump (Ryan Hurst), is similarly taciturn, a permanently concussed football casualty who utters rare monosyllables in a voice that could warn ships from shore. Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons) has a moustache droopy enough to qualify him for a remake of Zulu, not to mention a way with explosives and -- lest we forget -- irritable bowel syndrome. And then, there's the ringmaster: Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D (tom Hanks). In a white three-piece suit and matching cape, with a soft Southern drawl and neatly trimmed goatee, he's a satanic Foghorn Leghorn, saved from damnation by his own incompetence.

The Ladykillers' press kit touts the good professor as Hanks' "return to comedy," a description no less contrived than the performance itself. G.H. (to his friends) is not a "return" to anything; apart from the occasional Saturday Night Live stint, Hanks has never been as purely strange as he is here, never strayed so far from his basic nice-guy persona (a constant even across his shift from comedy to "serious" roles). As they freed George Clooney, and his eyebrows, from the strictures of stardom in Intolerable Cruelty, so the Coens liberate Hanks to give a performance of unrestrained (but not unshaped) silliness, saddling his poor fool of a character with a snuffling laugh that sounds like a pig hunting for truffles. Whether his Ph.D. is fraudulent or not, G.H. spews words in torrents -- he calls Lump "a gorilla, an ape, a physical brute" -- and Hanks savors every last polysyllable. Unfortunately, there's no movie to wrap his character around. He's doing the backstroke in an empty pool.

From its opening shot, The Ladykillers gestures towards the battle between good and evil, but it only exists in aesthetic terms: dark and light, earth and sky. The Coens' frequently use gospel (selected by O Brother archivist T Bone Burnett) to invoke divine justice -- and a dreadful Nappy Roots song to suggest earthly temptations -- but ultimately evil is only punished because the story requires it; the movie's too haphazard to believe in anything at all. Marva Munson's fellow churchgoers (not to mention their choir director with his Little Richard pompadour) look like they're having a lot more fun than the plodding plotters in her basement, but why establish her religiosity by the fact that she regularly sends money to Bob Jones University, a religious school best known for its long history of forbidding interracial dating? (That the latter fact is unacknowledged only makes the joke seem nastier.) It's depressing but revealing that Intolerable Cruelty, the best movie the Coens have made in almost a decade, was written on assignment, for someone else to direct. It's as if the Coens have grown so fond of their own eccentricities that it takes the prospect of work-for-hire to curb their excesses. The Ladykillers isn't sloppily made, but it's fundamentally lazy, unchallenging to the Coens or their audience. They've made it before, and done it better.

30 Years of Coens: The Ladykillers - The Atlantic David Orr, September 22, 2014

Take Two #14: The Ladykillers (1955) & The Ladykillers (2004) | The ... John Lingan from Slant, March 3, 2011

The Ladykillers (2004) Iain Boulton

DVD Times Mark Boydell

eFilmCritic Reviews Collin Souter

eFilmCritic [Scott Weinberg]

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Jonny Lieberman

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs, also seen here: Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) wrongly considered the worst of the Coen filmography

Chris Jarmick Ladykillers is the Coen Brothers worst movie

Salon.com [Charles Taylor] part of the problem is that the vulgarity feels so premeditated

Slant Magazine [Jeremiah Kipp] too trifling to be taken seriously, and too routine to inspire hilarity

CineScene [Chris Knipp] less appealing and less enjoyable than earlier efforts

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager] the stench of a good thing gone sour

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) Nick Davis, everyone in it looks as though they're punching a timecard at the end of the shooting day

filmcritic.com Sean O’Connell, jokes typically pander to the lowest common denominator

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce, the movie is a near-complete botch of everything that made the original memorable

The Ladykillers - New York Magazine Movie Review Peter Rainer, both lowdown and effete, a jamboree of whoopee jokes and sick wit

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) instead of enjoying a funny film, we’re being lightly bullied into finding fun where precious little exists

Movie Views [Ryan Cracknell] felt like Hollywood execs are trying to get the Coen brothers to cash in on formulas that have proven profitable rather than letting them play and try out new things

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) it's like a Coen's comedy for the Bruckheimer crowd

Reel.com [Sarah Chauncey] there's no character that the audience can invest in emotionally

stylusmagazine.com (Dave Micevic) the lack of plausibility is only surpassed by an intolerable absence of wit and humor

DVD Town [John J. Puccio] not only is the profanity not funny, it ruins the entire tone of the picture

IMDb Staff Review [Mark Englehart] the results are surprisingly flat, with no discernible highs anywhere

DVD Verdict Diane Wild, another departure from top form

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Arthur Lazere, droopy pacing and shortage of wit drag it down to irremediable sluggishness

Foster on Film Why was Marlon Wayans hired to play a foul-mouthed stereotype suitable only for a raunchy, teen comedy?

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] most of the gags are repeated from old time sources, and they're repeated over and over again

d+kaz . intelligent movie reviews [Daniel Kasman] rates a D+

Is It Just Me... Or Is The Coen Brothers' The Ladykillers underrated ... Simon Kinnear from Games Radar, November 18, 2012

Movie Vault [Mark Chua]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

The Ladykillers | Variety

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

The Ladykillers Movie Review & Film Summary (2004) | Roger Ebert

Los Angeles Times [Manohla Dargis]

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN A- 94

USA (122 mi) 2007 ‘Scope

Not as much fun as Blood Simple (1984), which was far more amusing, but this is tense, brilliantly paced and has the same spare tone with a sense of age weariness, people who are tired of it all, set in motion by an introductory monologue from Tommie Lee Jones who describes himself as coming from a generation of lawmen, many of whom never used to wear a gun, finding its use more of a bother than useful. Lawmen use their keen wits, their knowledge of the arid landscape of West Texas, and their ability to size up a situation and the people who tend to get themselves in trouble. He recalls a young 14-year old boy who murdered his girlfriend, not for any motive really other than to kill her, claiming he always knew this would happen sooner or later, offering not an ounce of remorse. This opens up the floodgates for the modern portrait of the cold hearted men who inhabit the landscape today. Adapting the even bleaker Cormac McCarthy novel, the Coens veer into rural Texas much like they did Minnesota in Fargo (1996), and while it hasn’t the profound wit or charm of Frances McDormand’s brilliant pregnant detective, it does have the same love for detail, the dialect and phrases that just roll off the tongue, the sage loners that live in abject poverty in order to maintain their independence, or kind hearted strangers or store clerks who maintain a sense of decency in their everyday lives even as the world around them seems to have moments when it just goes to hell. This film is about the arrival of just that kind of hell and the impact it has on a few people’s lives that are unfortunate enough to feel its presence.

The story is simple enough, Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a hunter stalking antelope in the isolation of the desert who stumbles across the remains of a shootout, with dead bodies and even attack dogs strewn across the landscape, many still holding their weapons guarding a stash of heroin, where following the traces of blood he’s able to track a lone man sitting under a shade tree with a briefcase full of money (supposedly $2 million), which he retrieves from a bloody, lifeless corpse. This sets into motion a series of events all spelling more trouble, renegade Mexicans who wish to steal the drugs, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic killer who’s sent to recover the money, a man whose weapon of choice is lugging around tanks of compressed air normally used to instantly slaughter livestock, Woody Harrelson as a cocky hired gun who’s needed to reel in the out of control killer, and Tommie Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell, a man who knows Llewellyn Moss and his wife Carla (Kelly Macdonald), whose job it seems is to assess the damage littered all over the western parts of Texas. For some reason, Moss seems to think he can get away with stealing the loot, despite the rising body count that suggests otherwise, as his life and his family are swarmed upon from all directions. There’s some light-hearted dialogue that connects all this together, the best coming from the Tommie Lee Jones, one of the best scene stealers in the business, especially on his own home turf of Texas, but mostly we dread the inevitable, as the awesome destruction of the killer is like a cyclone laying waste to everything it touches for miles. Yet unlike other psychopaths, this man is not stewing in his own venom, filled with anxious, profanity-laden episodes that reveal some hidden childhood character flaw, this man never raises his voice or shows any sense of urgency. He always threatens by tracking his prey with such measured and calm proficiency that he enjoys watching the other guy sweat, continually applying more heat to the already sweltering southwestern landscape.

While the film is an excellent character study, interweaving the perspective of various points of view, it’s also a concise, well written thriller that thrives in wordless tension, always leading with a sense of foreboding where the law remains two steps behind, and where prevailing wisdom comes during the pauses in the action, sometimes over a cup of coffee while reading the morning paper, or two sheriffs having a meal together finding just the right tone, where it’s hard to define when this overriding sense of apathy began to take hold of us, where the horrors even in our own midst are disregarded as easily as spitting out our morning toothpaste. As the body count rises, so does our declining interest to even witness the fatalities, as we already know what to expect, and a killer with this degree of precision does not disappoint. This growing weariness with death is not conducive to the typical Coen brother’s wise-cracking amusement with genre mixing, even when laced with clever dialogue, making this profusely uncomfortable, just as it must have been for the lawmen whose job it was to clean up this kind of sordid mess. The point being: it’s never cleaned up. We just don’t have to look at it when someone else does the dirty work for us. This kind of killing is all too antiseptic, out of sight out of mind, like wars fought overseas that leave a bitter aftertaste only when it affects someone inside your own family, but it’s peculiar when other families next door or across the street remain entirely unscathed. How are people to address one another in those circumstances? How does one show respect or try to put it all behind us? Instead, there seems to be no escape, where the prevailing sense of apathy only increases the horror of the events, as if disregarding the dead is to our own detriment, a parallel to what we know about history and the current slaughter of innocents abroad, which we as a nation continue to ignore at our own peril.

Mike D'Angelo back in New York, with initial thoughts forming earlier at Cannes: Screengrab

You know the Coen Brothers are back on top of their game when they somehow derive maximum tension from the banal image of a candy wrapper slowly uncrinkling on a dusty countertop. No Country for Old Men may be the boys' first literary adaptation — most of its distinctive, prolix dialogue ("I think we're lookin' at more than one fracas"), I was surprised to find, comes straight from Cormac McCarthy's source novel — but it's also as close as they've yet come to recapturing Blood Simple's virtuoso atmosphere of indolent mayhem. The film is essentially just one long chase sequence, as impulsive outlaw Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who's stumbled onto a briefcase full of drug money, hotfoots it across rural Texas, with stone psychopath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in ice-cold pursuit. But the story's simplicity finds a thrilling counterpoint in a series of wordless, impossibly tense set pieces, conceived and directed with sadistic precision and bone-dry wit. This is the rare movie so moment-to-moment riveting that you're sometimes in danger of forgetting to breathe.

For most of its two-hour running time, No Country for Old Men jangles your nerves so expertly that there's no time to consider what the film might actually be about. But adapting any novel involves making sacrifices, and that's doubly true in the case of an author as philsophically inclined as McCarthy. To their credit, the Coens make a concerted effort to preserve some of the novel's bone-weary pessimism, most of which derives from the narration of a passive third character, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (played here by Tommy Lee Jones). In the end, though, I suspect that it's just too deeply encoded in McCarthy's eloquent prose to survive the transition. The film's abrupt, deliberately unresolved ending, which is quite faithful to the book, comes across less here as an elegy for civilization than as a mere failure of imagination. In a way, Joel and Ethan have succeeded all too well — they've made such a twisted corker of a suspense movie that their belated stab at profundity feels ad hoc, as if imposed from without. But it's not as if we're drowning in corkers at the moment, so let's not be overly demanding.

Screen International Allan Hunter from Cannes

On paper the combination of the Coen brothers and the tough, sinewy prose of Pulitzer Prize-winner Cormac McCarthy should be the stuff of cinematic legend. The reality is a more ambiguous proposition; a bleak, Biblical saga of crime and retribution that by the sheer nature of its execution frustrates expectations of tidy resolutions and happy endings.

The elegiac evocation of a changing American heartland in moral meltdown is deftly handled but there are reservations about pacing and balance that prevent the film from achieving the greatness that sometimes seems within its grasp. It is almost as if the Coen brothers had been overawed by the source material and there is a kind of reverence and emotional chill that may limit the viability of the film for mainstream audiences. No Country For Old Men is guaranteed to attract a healthy audience on the basis of the track record of those involved, respect for the novel and critical support which will combine to create the potential for a more commercially rewarding Coen brothers venture than recent comedies Intolerable Cruelty or The Ladykillers.

No Country For Old Men finds its soul in Roger Deakins striking images of the desolate landscapes around the Tex-Mex border that are filled with blinding light, brooding skies and dark foreboding. The novel was set in 1980 but the film is never so explicit, setting a mood that is poised between the fatalism of post-World War Two film noir and the dusty, end-of-an-era feeling that permeates the best films of Sam Peckinpah.

The story follows the fate of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a man who does the wrong thing for all the right reasons. Stumbling across the bloody aftermath of a drugs deal, he finds himself in the possession of over $2million in cash. He believes he can use the money to provide a better future for his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) if they live long enough to spend it. His fate lies in the hands of two men. Remorseless psychopath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) recognises no moral boundaries and will stop at nothing to get his man or his money. He will decide if someone lives or dies on the toss of a coin. The side of the angels is represented by weary sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a man baffled by a world that seems to have lost all regard for decency and compassion.

Adapting the novel to accommodate the demands of the screen, the Coens tip the balance towards the narrative conventions of a chase thriller and slightly away from the moral battleground that lent the book such power and resonance. There are ample moments of tension and suspense but also more opportunity to perceive some of the conveniences and contrivances.

There is a positively chilling performance from Javier Bardem as an embodiment of human evil to match Dennis Hopper's memorable turn in Blue Velvet. The film is marbled with shocking violence and bone dry black humour not least in the nicely observed eccentricities of the bit part characters who populate the fringes of the story. Bardem's dominant performance ensures that the devil has all the best moments in No Country and perhaps that is the point. Tommy Lee Jones is perfectly cast as the weary, puzzled representative of civil duty and the human instinct to do the right thing but he is absent for long stretches of the story, weakening his status as the moral balance to Chigurh.

There also seems insufficient space for the concept of love and the strength of the relationship between the fugitive Llewelyn and his beloved Carla Jean. A surprise piece of cast, Scots actress Kelly Macdonald is effective as Texas gal Carla Jean and brings a warmth and personality to the part that makes the most of her relatively brief screen time. A little more of that humanity might have engaged the heart as well the mind and lent a greater emotional impact to a film that sometimes drifts when it should grip and leaves the viewer pensive rather than completely satisfied by what it has achieved.

DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich] also here: DVD Talk - DVD release [Jamie S. Rich]

There is a dread that lingers long after No Country for Old Men has gone through its closing credits. Long after Tommy Lee Jones speaks his final lines, long after you've realized that this movie is not about what you thought it was, but about something else entirely. That dread is what another character, the El Paso sheriff that shares a meal and some wisdom with Jones, calls "the tide." It's not one thing that changes the world for the bad, he says, but the whole tide of things that will overwhelm you.

No Country for Old Men is adapted from the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy. It has been brought to the screen by the Coen Brothers, and despite the fact that they worked with their long-time cinematographer Roger Deakins, it doesn't really look like a Coen Bros. movie. It doesn't feel like one either, it doesn't move like one. In fact, had you played me this movie cold and told me nothing about who was involved, I wouldn't have guessed in a million years. I'm a big fan, too. I even liked The Ladykillers, which most people rip on pretty freely. It's been three years since that movie was released, and No Country for Old Men suggests that the famous filmmaking duo thought long and hard about how they would return to the Cineplex after that failure. For two guys whose early reputation grew fat on stylistic innovation, this quiet reinvention of what they are about is no less than astounding. Gone are the visual tricks and the hyperactive cameras, and in their place is something mannered, complex, and foreboding.

The plot of No Country for Old Men revolves around a satchel of money. While out in the Texas desert hunting, straight-laced welder Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) happens upon the remnants of a drug deal gone bad. He finds the $2 million in cash that was intended to be the buy money and makes a rash decision to take it home, leaving the lone survivor of the bloodbath to die on his own. Feeling guilty, he returns to the scene in the middle of the night, only to be spotted by bad guys who want their money back. Barely escaping alive, Llewellyn sends his wife (Kelly Macdonald) off to her mother's and goes on the run.

Too bad for him his pursuer is a one-stop death machine. Anton Chigurh, played with a seething menace by Javier Bardem, started his killing spree before he even got to the mess in the desert, so Llewellyn is just going to be another notch in his belt. The simple act of filling up his stolen car with gas is like an existential exercise in flexing his muscles. There is nothing Anton does that won't end in someone bleeding out on the floor.

Add to the mix Tommy Lee Jones as the local sheriff and you have the three main ingredients in this Texmex recipe. Though no one would blame you for thinking Jones is once again playing the same role he's been playing for the last ten years, it's been a long time since he's been this good. His take on Sheriff Bell could have been just another run-through of the actor's good humored cynicism and cornfed homilies, but Jones rightly sensed that he was the true emotional center of No Country for Old Men, the spiritual avatar of its deeper themes; as a result, he sheds the skin of easy comfort that he's worn through most of his recent films and let's his soul back out. Just as the Coen Bros. appear to be blazing new trails for themselves, dropping their old tricks for serious storytelling, so Jones seems to have wearied of his homespun image and has decided to put that weariness on film.

Essentially, No Country for Old Men is a four-pronged chase picture. Bardem is on the trail of Brolin, the money men and dealers team up to chase them both, and Jones is chasing all three. When they do catch up with one another at different times in the picture, the results are unexpected and harrowing. Yet, each twist of the plot strides in on a very comfortable gait. The Coens don't rush it when it doesn't need to be rushed, and they never inject a scene with an inflated sense of peril. There is time enough to get where they are all going.

Or so it would seem. The ironic thing about the pacing of No Country for Old Men is that ultimately, despite the lack of panic, time is running out. It's a eulogy for a particular way of life, a lament for dying values. Anton Chigurh, with a name that sounds like the sweetest confection, is a force of nature that has come seemingly out of nowhere, and he represents the future less than he represents the divide. He twice lets his victims gamble on their life, the call of a flipped coin determining if they win or die. The old sheriff is heads, a thinker who follows a code and predetermined ideas, whereas Llewellyn Moss is tails, running on instinct, making choices that his counterpart would never make.

Even with all the dead bodies that litter the road these men travel, the most devastating part of No Country for Old Men has nothing to do with blood, guns, or any of that stuff. Those are not the things that linger. Hell, most of the more surprising bends in that road (and there are several near the end) eschew those elements altogether. The true brutality is the passage of time, in our awareness of it, and in the inevitability of the countdown. Like Chigurh, it can't be stopped. Not by pure stubborn action, not even by the capriciousness of chance. Perhaps it's better to be like Llewellyn and try to remain ignorant of what lies ahead, because when it's all down to the wire, there is no comfort in acceptance.

No Country For Old Men: Review by Jessica Winter - Cinema Scope

I saw No Country for Old Men twice in three days, partly because I sort of missed it the first time. The usually peaceable art-house cinema where we went for Round 1 had on this particular evening turned into a multimedia feedlot, all the punters searching through their popcorn or their gallon bags of Frito-Lays for their chirruping cell phones; one resourceful gentleman spent part of the film pouring ice cubes down his throat with one hand and BlackBerrying with the other. Then there was the curmudgeonly baritone a row ahead of us, who stank of rum and looked a lot like Don Imus, and whose commentary ran along the lines of “Just kill him already!” and “Crapola!” and outbursts of ersatz sobs. The real distraction, though, was the woman sitting next to Imus, his wife or girlfriend. She would shrink slightly away from him when he hissed wetly in her ear or knocked his skull against her shoulder, but her head never turned from the screen, and she didn’t utter a word. For entire stretches of No Country, I could not stop thinking about this woman. What was going through her mind during those two hours? And—how did she and Imus get together? Is he an alcoholic, or just a bad drunk? Would he apologize for his behaviour the next morning? Does this happen every time they go to the movies? What do they talk about at dinner, and what does she think of their sex life, and what do her friends think of him? No Country’s expertly calibrated plot mechanics and stunning border landscapes couldn’t compete with the speculative movie I was helplessly projecting onto the blank screen of a stranger, dimly glimpsed in quarter-profile.

I was still thinking about that woman when I returned to No Country a second time. Maybe it was because my chance non-encounter with her was precisely the kind of emotional immersion in a foreign psyche that the Coen brothers tend to avoid. While their renderings of stock characters are often highly affectionate—see the McDunnoughs in Raising Arizona (1987), the Gundersons in Fargo (1996), and the Dude in The Big Lebowski (1998)—they are rarely affective or empathetic. The only headspace their films delve into is that of the conjoined Coen brain trust, its neurons firing verbal and visual signals from the cinema, literature, and pop-cult history they were raised on. A Coen movie is a hermetically sealed taxidermy shop of well-worn tales and genres; one can hardly imagine any of their cloned creatures escaping in search of a life of its own. Their hyper-referential pastiche style, at turns icy and strenuously madcap, has been showing signs of strains at least since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)—and so No Country for Old Men, in which they reach uncharacteristic depths of characterization and efface their natural attraction toward the glib and grotesque, is a revelation, and hopefully a turning point.

Adapting Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, the filmmakers are still trafficking in archetypes: Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), the young buck who stumbles on a Pandora’s box of treasure; Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), the quasi-human ruthless killer on Moss’ trail; and Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the aging, salt-of-the-earth sheriff who’s little more than a bystander as the body count piles up across his jurisdiction. The Coens are also returning to the gore-stained, scrub-and-asphalt landscape of their neo-noir debut, Blood Simple (1984), which assembled the hard-boiled tropes of Hammett, Chandler, and Cain and relocated them to hottest Texas.

But Blood Simple was a black comedy in which the Coens delighted in tormenting their wretched schemers and double-crossers; No Country is just as brutal and fatalistic, but the brothers’ approach to the three protagonists and toward the story’s inevitably woeful conclusion is contemplative, respectful, even sombre. The camera is a sniper, lying in wait for characters before they enter the frame or tracking them silently as they calculate their steps, and yet the filmmakers regard both Bell and Moss with the inquisitive esteem that can only be granted in three dimensions: These two men may look like types, but they’re in fact where types come from. (Chigurh, meanwhile, is a force of nature: the Angel of Death in a Prince Violent haircut, carrying not a scythe but a pneumatic cattle gun.) Reining in some of their usual proclivities (for macabre farce and name-the-classic quotation), the Coens mute their usual allusive enthusiasms yet still reveal natural affinities: The pulsating street lights and submerged rumble of the sound design in the nocturnal driving scenes, not to mention the revolving door of bemused, glassy-eyed service-industry drones who provide Moss and Chigurh with their motel rooms and gas, are straight out of David Lynch.

It could have gone wrong. The filmmakers might have been tempted to turn Llewellyn into a bumbling sap (indeed, they cordially leave out his biggest D’oh! moment in the book), or poke fun at Bell’s Greatest Generation bloviating on how the world has gone to hell, or pick out every verbless sentence in the novel and recruit Sam Elliott to provide the intonations. (“Dull and gray above the floodplain along the east shore of the river. God’s own distance to the far side.”) No Country is the Coens’ first fully-fledged literary adaptation to reach the screen, and while it’s faithful to the book’s contours, it’s also a master seminar in line-editing. The Coens cut Bell’s fogeyish ramblings down to taciturn skin and bone (while preserving echoes of Marge Gunderson’s wounded morality in Fargo). Jones brings a puzzled decorum and, improbably, a sweetness to the role: Bell seems not to pontificate, exactly, but rather to think out loud, with the questioning cadence and light irony of a self-aware man who knows he is not articulating himself properly.

The screenwriters admittedly do stumble here and there: A suggestive dissolve before a key character’s death throws the narrative momentum off course, and a few crucial plot twists are whittled down so severely as to become subliminal. But although the Coens adore the ricocheting dialogue of ’30s screwball and ’40s noir, it turns out that their most emotionally and psychologically rich film to date is also their most laconic.

There are times when No Country almost seems the sum of its erasures: They often deny a doomed character—and perhaps, too, an audience hungry for sensation—a blaze of glory via an onscreen death. Perhaps the nimblest elision comes when Chigurh has his predestined appointment with Moss’ wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), who has gradually emerged as the film’s linchpin. In a small but significant departure from the text, she refuses the principled psychopath’s offer to call a life-or-death coin toss, thus becoming the only character in the film to place a grain of doubt inside his insane logic. The tension in this late scene derives not from the push toward its only possible outcome, but in whether or not Carla Jean can maintain the dignity of her knowingly futile appeal, which is more to reason than to mercy. Here the Coens and Macdonald transform the hand-wringing wife, the kind of part that the phrase “thankless role” was invented for, into a figure of courage and moral clarity—attributes that might have actually served some purpose had the cosmic coin toss gone the other way. I’ve never walked out of a Coens movie before feeling like I knew someone new, or wishing I’d known her better. One could even imagine going to the movies with her, and wondering what was going on inside her head.

No Country for Old Men Emmanuel Levy at Cannes

Brilliant from first frame to last, Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men," a mesmerizing adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Cormac McCarthy, is their best film to date, an undisputed masterpiece that impresses on any number of levels. As of Day 4, it's easily the best film in the festival's main competition.

After a whole decade of making disappointing features, including the goofy and trivial "O Brother Where Art Thou?" the unwatchable Tom Hanks-starring remake "The Ladykillers," and the silly screwball divorce comedy "Intolerable Cruelty," the Coen brothers have smartly gone back to their roots and to what they do best, as manifest in their "smaller," more regional films, such as "Blood Simple" (1985) and "Fargo" (1996), arguably their last great work.

In many ways, the 2003 novel represents a perfect match between McCarthy's uniquely American literary sensibility and the Coens' uniquely American cinematic sensibility, resulting in the helmers' most mature and poignant work to date, a contemporary Western that is effective both as a suspenseful thriller and as a philosophical meditation about the roots and nature of violence as an integral part of the American Way of Life.

In this and other respects, "No Country for Old Men" is the Coens' least movieish work, one that is self-reflexive without being self-conscious, a film that is based on strong literary material rather than old Hollywood movies. Each of the Coens' films up until now paid a tribute, or was inspired by, or was homage to a particular Hollywood genre and often a specific film. For example, the stylish black-and-white noir "The Man Who Wasn't There" (2001) was more of a tribute to "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and countless classic noirs of the 1940s than a movie that had life and identity of its own.

In contrast, "No Country for Old Men" seems to be deceptively simple but is actually highly ambitious in its intellectual and metaphysical concerns, yet amazingly without being at all pretentious or overreaching.

The book (and the film's plot) is set in 1980, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners, and small towns have become free-fire zones. However, as a movie, "No Country for Old Men," like most good Westerns, transcends its particular historical time and geographical locale.

Anchored by three terrific lead performances, from Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, and Javier Bardem, and three supporting ones, by Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald, and Tess Harper, "No Country for Old Men," displays meticulous attention to detail, from the precise mise-en-scene to the calibrated tone to the visual look and ominous sound.

Visually striking, the first reel consists of two or three sequences that are nothing short of brilliant. A crime suspect, whose identity is unclear at this point, is arrested by an officer, but as soon as they arrive in the station, the suspect strangles his captor to death in the most primitive way--with his handcuffs. He then kills an innocent driver to get a car, using a gun made for slaughtering cattle. From that point on, the criminal-- Chigurh (Javier Bardem)--walks around with one or two of these huge guns, often evoking nervous laughter just by his sheer appearance and serious way he goes about his "job."

Story proper begins when hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds a pickup truck surrounded by a sentry of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. Later that night, when Moss returns to the scene of the crime (with a bottle of water for the one wounded man who's still alive), he's chased and shot by Chigurh. Missing his target, Chigurh unleashes his nasty dogs into a nasty chase that continues in the water. The river scene, with Moss trying to escape the swimming dogs behind him, is so powerful and outrageous scene that it inevitably evokes laughter and cathartic release when the dogs get shot in a close-up!

When Moss takes the money out of impulse, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–embodied by the aging and disillusioned Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones)--can contain. A single, random act of theft thus ricochets in many unforeseen and unpredictable directions, affecting the lives of numerous people along the way, with a carnage ratio seldom seen in an American movie (and that would include works by Tarantino and Rodriguez).
Moss' decision to lift the money posits a moral dilemma for us as viewers, asking us to take stance, namely, given the situation, could we resist the temptation of doing the same thing? Would we have gone to the police to report about the cash?

As Moss tries to evade his pursuers-–in particular the mysterious mastermind Chigurh who flips coins for human lives--the film simultaneously strips down the American crime drama, broadening its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as contemporary as headlines torn from today's newspapers.

Like the book, "No Country for Old Men" features a visceral, multi-layered and contemporary saga, a sinewy, suspenseful, humor-spiked thriller that revolves around an honest American man who happens upon $2 million in cash on the Texas borderlands. Also like the novel, the movie offers a provocative meditation on good and evil in the modern American West, a place that has grown into a land more violent and lawless than the mythic frontier of yore.

Set in West Texas, the film is brilliantly shot by the Coens' regular cinematographer Roger Deakins, who captures the austere and rugged landscape in stunning tableaux that match perfectly the spare dialogue and somber tone of the film. (According to the press notes, the movie was shot in New Mexico).

The film's first hour is almost silent, with little dialogue and almost no music, depicting Chigurh chasing Moss, and then the Sheriff bringing up the tail. As co-writers and co-directors, the Coens emphasize the darkly humorous and humanly revealing interplay between Llewelyn Moss, after discovering the money in the wreckage of drug deal gone wrong, and the two antithetical men who are tracking him: the chilling psychopath Chigurh on the one extreme, and the town’s profoundly decent Sheriff Bell on the other.

"No Country for Old Men" is the closest the Coens have ever come to making an action feature, in which most of the screening time is taken by numerous chases, of different kinds and lengths. Nonetheless, as usual, the Coens play with genre conventions and subvert genre expectations. For starters, the movie dispenses with simplistic psychology and dramatic motivation. There is no attempt to explain or to understand the behavior of the psychopathic killer Chigurh, or, for that matter, that of the good old American cowboy Moss, who not only risks his own life, but also the lives of his naive country wife (beautifully played by Scottish Kelly Macdonald), whom he clearly loves, and those around her, including her mother.

The movie is all about physical details, and quite impressively, the Coens don't "cheat" in what they show or don't show, or trick the viewers in any manipulative way, as the helmers have done in former films. Through bravura crosscutting and parallel montages, we get to see the "resourceful" ways in which Moss and Chigurh go about their business: How Chigurh kills in cold-blood after "chatting" with his victims, how he takes care of his endless wounds, how Moss hides the cash in one motel after another, how they almost meet or miss each other.

What adds considerable color—and humor—to the proceedings—is the gallery of men and women the hunter and hunted meet along the way, from gas station attendants to store owners to motel managers to innocent teenagers and children, all of whom become crucial players in the labyrinth-like plot that continues to surprise up to the very end. Two or three sequences in which youngsters are involved across the border, with Chigurh and Moss negotiating (separately) for a shirt or another item are mesmerizing to watch, not least due to the cultural differences they accentuate.

The dialogue, most of which is sharp and crispy, conveys in brief strokes what we need to know about the characters, and then comes the last reel, in which Tommy Lee Jones (who was born to play the sheriff's role) delivers a metaphysical speech about good and evil and basic mores of the American Way of Life. The very ending is quite poignant, but might upset some viewers since it's abrupt and, once again, defies genre expectations.

Like Peter Bogdanovich's elegiac (but not nostalgic) "The Last Picture Show," based on Larry McMurtry's seminal novel about life in Texas at the end of the 1940s, "No Country for Old Men" is at heart a story about the fast-approaching end of an entire way of Western life. The movie deals with the last stand of honor and justice against what's become a broken world; the ongoing human struggle against the sinister; the dark comedy and violence of post-modern times; and the interplay of temptation, survival, and sacrifice.

The movie is very dark and extremely violent—even by standards of the Coen brothers---but it's a rather faithful adaptation of McCarthy's novel, its distinctly American themes, its rapid-fire pace, and its inky black comic tone. The Coens are able with their distinctive skills to transform McCarthy's rich, wry, resonant, and often humorous storytelling into a bravura movie, based on striking images, spare dialogue, darkly humorous tone, and splendid acting from all around. (This review is already 1900 words, thus I will analyze the acting in another column)

It's hard to imagine a better match for the dusky wit and stark humanity of McCarthy’s characters than the Coens. Watching "No Country for Old Men" inevitably brings to mind Billy Bob Thornton's failed rendition of another McCarthy seminal novel "All the Pretty Horses," several years ago. If memory serves, McCarthy has written about ten novels, and there is no reason why they should not provide fertile stories for other gifted filmmakers like the Coen brothers.

At the Movies Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, February 21, 2008

The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]

indieWIRE (Michael Koresky)

Reverse Shot [Michael Joshua Rowin]

Click here to read Andrew Tracy's "Reverse Shot" on No Country for Old Men

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) and a longer piece: here

The House Next Door (Matt Zoller Seitz)

Erik Childress (eFilmCritic.com)

PopMatters [Bill Gibron]

Reel.com DVD review [Chris Cabin]

Flipside Movie Emporium [Rob Vaux]

The New York Sun [Nicolas Rapold]

Paste Magazine [Jesse Jarnow]

CineScene [Howard Schumann]

eFilmCritic [David Cornelius]

DVD Outsider Camus

No Country For Old Men a flustered Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

World Socialist Web Site Emanuele Saccarelli

No Country For Old Men Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Chiranjit Goswami] a lengthy review

Richard Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

d+kaz [Daniel Kasman]

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane)

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Rob Nelson at Cannes

Movie Vault [LaRae Meadows]

Electric Sheep Magazine Sean Price

Plume Noire Moland Fengkov

Slate (Dana Stevens)

The IFC Blog [Alison Willmore]

cinemattraction (Martin Tsai)

BeyondHollywood.com Movie Review Gopal

Twitch [Kurt Halfyard]

Twitch Canfield

Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men portrait by Mike D’Angelo from Esquire magazine

Xan Brooks at Cannes from the Guardian

Kenneth Turan at Cannes from the LA Times

Boston Globe Ty Burr

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W Tooze]

DVDBeaver.com - Blu-ray DVD Review [Leonard Norwitz]

BURN AFTER READING B+ 91

USA France Great Britain (96 mi) 2008

“Report back to me when it makes sense.” —J.K. Simmons (CIA Superior)

All right, so they’ve taken all the blatantly alarmist paranoia surrounding national security and turned it into a Jerry Lewis comedy, just to remind us, in case we forgot, that we’ve got a bunch of Looney Tunes idiots running the White House. The Coens remain among the best in the business, as they have been for quite some time. In their lifetime, they have made one misstep, and that was a film they didn't write, a remake of an earlier Alec Guinness British comedy THE LADYKILLERS (2004). Other than that, the stuff they write is infinitely smarter, funnier and more socially relevant than anyone else with their longevity in the business who repeatedly churn out film after film using very black satire, much of which is so dark it just sails over people's heads. But the Coens are able to say things and take on subjects that no one else will. They're the only non-animated politically subversive comedy writers in America, as the others are The Simpsons and South Park, but the Coens have always been much more than that, terrific craftsmen as well, making excellent use of a history of cinema at their disposal doing genre riffs, utilizing some of the best actors in the business who obviously love working with them. They are an iconic American voice for which there is no substitute. This film is a demented riff on the missteps of the intelligence community, which when mixed with the idiocy of a cult-like following public that believes for certain that they’ve seen the latest UFO sighting or a Weekly World News mentality that characterizes a thrill seeking public gone mad at the thought of uncovering the latest conspiracy theory, all of which creates a toxic recipe for disaster. The public and the intelligence community each continually misreads the other with amazing consistency, creating a virtual universe of dimwitted government in action that doesn’t actually exist, yet it has to because the national security team has spent millions creating it, keeping records, maintaining files, developing a special unit to investigate it, and of course sends an undercover guy to follow up every lead, where they can’t say for certain what it is they’re examining until the report is in, and when it comes, they conceal the contents, claiming it’s classified information.

This is another classic comedy of errors scenario where John Malkovitch is fired from his relatively low post at an obscure CIA desk for an alleged drinking problem, where he quips “You're a Mormon – next to you, we all have a drinking problem,” demoted to even greater nonexistence, basically banished from having any security clearance whatsoever where he can do the agency any harm, leading him to quit out of pride, learning quickly life on the outside is no picnic, where he is immediately bored with drinking martinis and watching Family Feud re-runs. His wife, Tilda Swinton, couldn’t be less sympathetic playing another ball busting ice queen who is secretly intending to divorce him while having an affair with Federal Marshall George Clooney, a man with a gun whose post-sex ritual is to proclaim “Maybe I could get a good run in.” His wife (Elizabeth Marvel) on the other hand writes children’s books and spends most of the film on tour, apparently galavanting with a nameless nonchalant gentlemen. Meanwhile Frances McDormand is a frumpy middle aged office worker at the Hardbodies fitness center who has energy to burn but is convinced she needs every available plastic surgery just to keep her abreast with the modern age era of Internet dating, as otherwise life will simply pass her by. Brad Pitt plays a dorky fitness instructor wearing earplugs, obviously dancing to the beat of his own drum, a guy with a few screws loose who gets along perfectly with the loopy Frances, a woman who always looks for the silver lining. Somehow, don’t ask how, this entire group is brought together under surreptitious circumstances, or just plain bad luck, as intelligence reports gather secret information where they can’t surmise the motive behind this oddball connection of characters coming together, yet still feels compelled to put a tail on everyone just in case.

When the janitor at the fitness center finds a computer disk lying on the floor of the gym (“just lying there”) which can be traced to the foul-mouthed Malkovitch, the brain challenged couple of McDormand and Pitt immediately conclude it contains the world’s intelligence secrets coded in binary language, something somebody would pay a lot of money for, possibly the answer to Francis’s surgery problems. When they try to blackmail Malkovitch, he insults them claiming “You’re part of a league of morons,” so they take their business to the Russian Embassy, a perfect drab, non-descript building that looks like a cement bunker, where behind the desk lies a portrait of Putin. This raises red flags at the intelligence division, as why would anyone go to the Russians? Better keep a watchful eye on them. One thing leads to another, serial adulterer Clooney meets McDormand through a very reputable computer dating service, and he introduces her to his latest invention which he keeps concealed from his wife in the basement, perhaps the world’s largest sex toy. But like all good conspiracy theories this one eventually flies apart at the seams, as everything else in this film does simultaneously as it comes crashing to a close in a giant crescendo of horrible mistakes gone wrong covered up in confidential reports. Like the best Coen comedies, this zany film moves along at a crisp pace with superb editing and brilliant ensemble acting, and terrific music choices by Carter Burwell, not the least of which is The Fugs sounding like Zappa singing over the end credits.

Who can squash republics like bananas

If they do not like their social manners?

Who can train guerillas by the dozen

Send them out to kill their untrained cousins?

Fuckin' A, man

C.I.A. man.

—Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, “CIA Man,” The Fugs

[http://www.amazon.com/CIA-Man/dp/B000QZFNZG/ref=sr_f2_1?ie=UTF8&s= dmusic&qid=1221977177&sr=102-1]

Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [4/6]

How to follow ‘No Country for Old Men’, a favourite at last year's Cannes and this year’s winner of the Oscar for Best Picture? The Coen brothers’s answer is to make a film as far removed from their dark Cormac McCarthy adaptation as possible.

Well, partly removed: the laughs are certainly more frivolous in their new film, ‘Burn After Reading’ which had its world premiere at the Venice film festival, and the Coens have allowed themselves to go to town with creating one laughable, larger-than-life character after another with a screwball script that's so playful it verges on the silly. But the cheeky, knowing, black comic edge of 'No Country' and so many of their films, from 'Fargo' to 'The Big Lebowski' is still detectable in this light affair about monied Washington spooks whose home lives are disastrous and professional lives aren't half as exciting as the average Joe might imagine.

And lo and behold, the Coens deliver us not just an average Joe but an everyday Josephine as well: Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) are both staff at Hardbodies Gym in Washington. Chad is an exercise bunny, all blonde highlights and misplaced enthusiasm; Linda is smiling and resilient but lacks love and searches the internet for the right guy while trying to raise the funds for the plastic surgery she craves.

Unlikely as it is, the pair scratch the surface of the spy world when Linda meets married, philandering Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a CIA accountant, on a dating site and Chad finds a computer disc of 'information' that relates to ex-CIA stooge Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), whose 'cold, stuck-up bitch' wife (Tilda Swinton) is secretly wanting to divorce him and having an affair with Pfarrer on the side.The characters verge on cartoons - Clooney has a problem with a cheese allergy; Pitt goes to town with playing dumb - but that entirely suits the screwball momentum of the film. Moreover, there's an attention to detail even in the frivolous that makes 'Burn After Reading' a joy to watch even if you struggle to find much in the way of meaning beyond a deliberately mundane spin on the sort of spy stories that are everyday fodder in Hollywood.

The big joke is that while the plot of 'Burn After Reading' keeps turning in on itself, with ludicrous reveals and several surprises, nothing much really happens that relates to what we know - from cinema mainly – of spies, state secrets and global conspiracies. Mostly, everything comes back to infidelity and divorce, not blueprints and code reds. The Coens mess around with the tics of a paranoid thriller - the concrete building chosen as the Russian embassy is priceless - but there's little to be paranoid about.

Everyone's too busy with the everyday of their personal lives - which turn out to be as humdrum as everybody else's. Unwittingly, the Coens have delivered the most convincing argument I've heard yet against 9/11 being a US government conspiracy - and there are a lot more laughs here than in your average neocon documentary. All in all, it's a treat to see such a good cast messing around with comedy material that's both goofy and insightful.

Austin Chronicle [Josh Rosenblatt]

Burn After Reading, the new film from the Coen brothers, won’t be mistaken for Fargo anytime soon. Or Barton Fink or The Man Who Wasn’t There. Those films were black comedy done to perfection: They coerced viewers into laughing out loud at murder and moral decay and the vast emptiness of an uncaring universe and thereby made them complicit in all the nastiness unfolding onscreen. Burn After Reading is something different and something less – something new, possibly, and definitely something only the Coens would attempt in this day and age: screwball black comedy. Not since Arsenic and Old Lace has there been a movie that brushes so flippantly over the worst kind of human behavior and disposes of its characters with such antic indifference. Rant or rave about Quentin Tarantino all you want: He’s got nothing on the Coen brothers when it comes to the casual snuffing-out of human life. Burn After Reading is a convoluted yet light-as-air farce about the dangers of misguided ambition and the contagiousness of paranoia. Osborne Cox (Malkovich) is a lifelong CIA analyst who is fired from his position at the Balkan desk when his love of alcohol becomes too much for the agency to abide. “You’re a Mormon!” he reminds one of his accusers. “Compared to you, everyone has a drinking problem.” Newly unemployed and indignant, Cox decides to write a memoir about his time with the agency but ends up instead on the wrong end of a blackmail scheme after his wife, Katie (Swinton), misplaces copies of his computer files she burned in anticipation of her divorce suit. Those files end up in the hands of a bumbling duo, Linda Litzke (McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Pitt), two likable middle-aged losers who think they’ve stumbled upon classified government documents and figure they’ll make a little money selling them to the highest bidder, be he Cox, the cultural attaché at the Russian Embassy, or any other shady figure who might be interested. Litzke and Feldheimer are a classic ditzy comedy pair, and their pathological dopiness allows the Coens to mock the conventions of spy movies in a way only they can (“Is this a secure line?” Litzke asks one potential co-conspirator over the phone, sounding as if she just got through watching an I Spy marathon). But they’re also the movie’s Achilles' heel: heroes whose bulging-eyed broadness descends quickly into burlesque, meaning the increasingly depraved and dangerous consequences of their actions affect us less and less the longer the movie goes on. Say what you will about the cinematic joys of extortion, infidelity, espionage, paranoia, and random acts of graphic violence; if they’re performed by cartoons and not people, it’s going to be hard to get the people sitting in the theatre to care. The Coen brothers may be masters of black comedy, but there are times when there’s no point in taking them seriously.

Review: Burn After Reading Ray Pride from New City

Or, “No Country for White Men.” It’s almost a sure bet that the Coen brothers share a chuckle when they’re not taken seriously. My first infuriation came with “The Hudsucker Proxy,” which set me off in a couple of ways, writing something to the effect that they’d finally crossed the thin but all-defining line between wise guys and assholes. But, if I were to slip it in tonight, I’d likely find some levels or elements that eluded me oh so many years ago. Seeing “The Big Lebowski” a few weeks before its release and interviewing the Coens as well, much of what I admire about it now eluded me. (If I’d only known that my then-girlfriend who I saw it with was a secret stoner: illumination might have been had on the spot.) “Lebowski”’s become an ur-text in the decade since. Not only is the Dude’s behavior based on a real friend of the Coens, the ubiquitous producer’s rep Jeff Dowd, but also his political background. The Dude abides no lies. There’s also an undercurrent of the idea of masculinity’s reaction to generational displacement that’s as telling as anything in Eustache’s Euro-epic “The Mother and the Whore.” Similar things are at work in the genially splenetic “Burn After Reading,” which ends with the brothers’ fuck-you production company logo, but accompanies its end credits with a live performance by the Fugs, of Tuli Kupferberg singing, “Fuckin’ Amen” (the last line of the movie is “Tuli!”), a 1960s song about the CIA and CIA “men.” (”Who can squash republics like bananas because they don’t like their social manners? The CIA can.”) “Burn After Reading”’s Coen of the realm is critiquing the alabaster reach of the high white reaches of American power. Their latest boobarama is populated with white people filled with black lies and dumb-ass dreams, white-on-white on blue sky. Whiter than Tilda Swinton’s complexion under her bright red bob, whiter than milk in snow. J. K. Simmons, a comic god of the present moment, takes honors as a high-high-up in the agency who listens to reports from fixer David Rasche about the workaholic knuckleheads, dreamers of low intelligence and limited imagination, wreaking havoc in their backyard with screw-you calm and fuck-you dispatch. His final line, a weary obscenity-blasphemy heard in variations throughout the movie, is perfect, especially with the shot that follows. Very Rumsfeldian. A profane snowflake. And explain it to me when it makes sense. As the disenfranchised CIA analyst whose troubles set the plot to pinwheeling, Malkovich plays to his Steppenwolf-style strengths as a Punchinello of verbal fuckery, and the image of this fabulous fop in carpet slippers and a dressing gown rampaging down the streets of Brooklyn (doubling for Georgetown) with a hatchet in his hand and murder on his lips is inspired. Still, McDormand’s Linda Litzke is the true anti-heroine, a resilient employee of Hardbodies Gym, of high spirits and ready frustration who wants only for four cosmetic surgeries, and like Linda Tripp, is prepared to spend any potential ill-gotten gains from blackmail on it. Simple! Focused! Brad Pitt’s turn as Chad, her goggle-eyed, ever-hydrating boob-in-arms, is better seen than described, although his blond skunk pompadour may be the first and last cinematic homage to his tresses in the forgotten “Johnny Suede.” George Clooney’s Treasury guy? The biggest idiot he’s ever played, and his sexual compulsion knows no bounds. If only he could get a run in… Dry and deadly, “Burn After Reading” is savage, cynical, sarcastic vaudeville about the powers that be. The only notable figure of color is an apparently Latino cleaning man who finds the CD that sets the story in motion on the locker room floor; presumably named after the premium brand of shoes favored by the Secretary of State.

National Post review [3.5/4] Read Before Viewing, Vanessa Farquharson, September 11, 2008

Burn After Reading will make any semi-intellectual viewer laugh, but it will also make him or her inwardly weep with frustration. By the end of the film, it's horribly clear that the people who really need to see this have probably never heard of the Coen brothers and are instead throwing popcorn at the screen showing Bangkok Dangerous next door; and, even if said mouthbreathers did somehow find themselves watching it, they probably just wouldn't get it.

Is this an elitist attitude? No, it's the logical response to a film in which every character belongs to that ever-growing plague of absent-minded narcissists with important jobs who may seem harmless at first but gradually reveal the extent of their idiocy with time - whether it's in a blind acceptance of the world, the way they never ask questions about anyone or anything, or perhaps just the funny way their over-highlighted hair puts the odds at 20:1 that they have no idea how to use an apostrophe when spelling it's versus its.

Exhibit A: Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), who is rarely seen without a maw full of gum and perfectly swooped hair, even when he's jogging on the treadmill. He's not above using profanity and knows - well, sort of - about things like the Good Samaritan law. He also takes cycling a little too seriously and refuses to drink tap water.

Exhibit B: Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), who works with Chad at the gym. She's more self-aware than Chad but in a superficial sense, her sole focus being to raise enough money for several cosmetic-surgery procedures. Linda uses phrases such as, "It comes from a place of humour," without any trace of irony and spends her free time trawling internet dating sites and going to the movies, specifically romantic comedies such as Coming Up Daisy, starring Rupert Everett and Claire Danes (no, this doesn't actually exist, although Everett makes a nice self-mocking cameo in the film-within-a-film).

You get the point. The characters themselves aren't entirely bad or even reprehensible, but the modern culture of vapidity and the twisted value system they represent definitely are.

Normally, watching this demographic bumble around on-screen would be nothing more than a misanthropic reminder of our hopeless stupidity, but in the Oscar-winning hands of the Coen brothers, it somehow turns out funny.

In contrast to the filmmakers' previous work, the violent yet sombre thriller No Country for Old Men - which won best director and best picture at the Academy Awards last year - Burn After Reading feels remarkably quick, clever and light. With its amateur blackmail schemes that rely upon an assistant cultural attaché at the Russian embassy, interrogation sessions that culminate in the question, "PC or Mac?", nebbish divorce attorneys loitering in dark sedans, rocking-chair-turned-sex-toy inventions and an ongoing refrain of "What the f---?!", this is 96 minutes of pure ridiculousness.

The characters are all killing people for no apparent reason, nothing seems to be at stake, tip-offs lead nowhere and the highly classified information at the center of it all is actually just a CD-ROM of a former CIA agent's as-yet-unpublished memoir (or "memwah" as the wonderfully sinister John Malkovich pronounces it).

Perhaps it's the head of the CIA (J.K. Simmons) who says it best: "Report back to me when it makes sense."

Sadly, it never will make sense, but regardless of the story's many logistical paradoxes, audiences will at least get the very straightforward benefit of watching critically acclaimed actors bring years' worth of expertise to utterly foolish roles.

George Clooney, not surprisingly, nails the part of a twitchy serial adulterer with an unspecified gig at the Treasury department, a former job in "PP" (personal protection) and a bizarre appreciation for hardwood floors. Malkovich, as the bitter memwah-ist with a potty mouth and a mission to exterminate all signs of incompetence in the world, is also perfectly cast, and Tilda Swinton as his conniving, humourless wife Katie is arguably even colder than the White Witch she plays in The Chronicles of Narnia.

At a recent Toronto filmfest press conference for Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers said they didn't offer much direction to the actors, nor was there much improvisation on set; but at some point before shooting they instructed the cast to "channel their inner knucklehead."

These instructions, clearly, were followed.

Around the mid-way point of the film, Malkovich's character - almost like a high-strung Dude from The Big Lebowski - stumbles around in his robe with a scotch in one hand and a revolver in the other, tangling himself up in a verbal matrix of accusations and rants. One memorable speech to the gym manager involves a breakdown of all that's wrong with "the idiocy of today" and its "league of morons."

Unfortunately, neither Malkovich nor the Coen brothers ever solves the problem of modern ignorance. But by jabbing at it repeatedly with a sardonic, ironic and altogether cheeky brand of intellectualism, it's at least kept at bay for as long as it takes Rupert Everett to make another romantic comedy.

The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review

The Onion A.V. Club review Keith Phipps

Reel.com review [3/4] Bill Gibron

Time Out New York (David Fear) review [2/6]

Screen International review Lee Marshall

Burn After Reading | The Coen Brothers: From Blood to Burn, and ... brief synopsis of each film by Nick Dawson from Film in Focus, August 27, 2008

Sleeping and Severed Toes: Ethan Coen & Joel Coen on the Art of Screenwriting William Preston Robertson from Film in Focus, August 29, 2008

Brad Pitt Brad Pitt Has Multiple Personalities, by Nisha Gopalan from Film in Focus, September 10, 2008

Laughter is the Worst Medicine Mikita Brottman from Film in Focus, September 16, 2008

Carter Burwell Scott Macaulay from Film in Focus, September 19, 2008

Genesis of a Poster Andrew Percival at Mojo House from Film in Focus, September 25, 2008

Man on Wire and Burn After Reading zunguzungu, October 4, 2008

Independent.co.uk [Geoffrey Macnab]

The Globe and Mail (Rick Groen) review [2.5/4]

San Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review [3/4]

Boston Globe review [2/4] Ty Burr

Time Out Online (Dave Calhoun) review [4/6]

The New York Times review Manohla Dargis

A SERIOUS MAN B 86

USA (105 mi) 2009

“No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture.”

A darkly comedic yet also miserablist parable of the modern world as seen through the eyes of an ordinary man, but in this case, it’s all wrapped up in Jewish traditions and lore, where like the Old Testament character of Job a man is challenged at every step along the way but still tries to find a meaningful significance to it all, to be a serious man, someone whose moral values remain intact and where God still has a place in his life. The Coens seem to enjoy pestering this man along the way, but they seem intimately qualified to tell this story, filled with traditional Jewish signs and symbols, even an opening two hundred year old prelude sequence which is spoken only in Yiddish, all of which suggests man is cursed. The absurdist image in this film that sticks in my mind is of the professor standing in front of a blackboard filled to every inch with immensely difficult and complex equations, all proving what? That the one thing we’re sure of is that we can’t be sure of anything. “Accept the mystery.” For the most part, the movie is filled with an unfamiliar cast, as there are no stars, but Michael Stuhlbarg is Larry Gopnik, a Midwest university physics professor who has reached the decisive moment in his career where the school is determining whether they will grant tenure, but whose life falls apart and becomes embroiled in his own personal turmoil. Set in the 60’s which was itself a turbulent time, there are only musical cues offered as evidence, as the Jefferson Airplane (“Somebody to Love” and “Today”) and Jimi Hendrix (“Machine Gun”) are featured prominently, also a boatload of pot to help develop a skewed religious irreverence.

This film is so jam packed with Jewish references that the viewing public will likely miss nearly all of them, but no matter, they’ll still see the big picture, the difficulties of maintaining traditional faith which provides few answers in an everchanging modern world. While Gopnik is basically a decent guy who tries to be decent to others, traps are invariably set in his path, and just because the directors are having fun poking fun at their lead character, reliving their past by offering a series of insurpassable obstacles set in the bleakest most miserable of environments doesn’t necessarily translate to amusement onscreen, as much of this was just misery overkill. Their kids are aloof and distant, as if living on other planets, where their son Danny (Aaron Wolff) continually has to outrun a local bully to keep from getting beat up every day, but no one asks any questions, while their daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) steals money from her parents in order to save up for a nose job, not to mention the sibling warfare between the two. The neighbors on one side of their spotless suburban subdivision home are hard core survivalists with a heavy trace of xenophobia, while on the other side is Amy Landecker smoking pot and discreetly sunbathing in the nude. Meanwhile his wife (Sari Lennick) asks for a get (a what?), a Hebrew divorce and insists he move out of the house because she’s become smitten with another guy, Sy Ableman (Fred Malamed), a serious man who she feels is more esteemed and worthy, largely because he’s a pompous ass and that’s what he thinks about himself. In other words, he’s forced to move to the unpretentious surroundings of the Jolly Rodger motel, along with his unemployable, borderline insane brother Arthur (Richard Kind), who appears to be trouble for everyone he meets, occasionally returned home after various encounters with the police.

Gopnik’s way of dealing with these problems, which are just beginning by the way, is to make a series of obligatory visits to three different Rabbi’s, each of which asks him to take a good look at himself and try to find his own answers from within, suggesting individual perspective is everything, basically shirking any responsibility. As he works his way up the Rabbi seniority scale, one would think the wisdom imparted would become more sage, but that is hardly the case, perhaps the opposite, as the older the Rabbi’s become, the less accessible they become to society and the less they have in common with ordinary people. Perhaps most stunning is the goy’s teeth story where a dentist finds strange Hebrew letters inside a patient’s mouth which has a surrealistic quality all of its own, set to the incendiary guitar riffs of Jimi Hendrix no less, all of which leads us to the brink of astonishment when we realize, like the equations on the chalkboard, that we don’t really know what’s going on, and that the point of it is we’ll never really know. Strange mystical stuff, all shrouded in a little known uncertainty principle, which may as well be that curse referenced in the opening segment. By the time Gopnik’s son finally meets the high Rabbi, who’s too busy lost in religious thought to meet with the father and has time to meet only with newly graduated bar mitzvah boys, through the haze of marijuana he offers the satirically sage advice that one might expect from a Mad magazine comic rendition of a Dalai Lama perched atop the highest peak in Shangri-La from THE LOST HORIZON (1937). The Coens are skilled formalists who can squeeze a joke out of any dire situation, but here they seem to be having more fun than the audience by belittling the authority figures of their youth and finding life as demoralizing as The Divine Comedy entranceway to Dante’s Hell: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

Something about the theatrical screening, there was a bus from a Jewish senior center where about a dozen of these old Jewish ladies all carrying canes or walkers were talking loudly to one another throughout the entire picture, an annoyance that felt as if on cue, (by the way, which is worse, lit up cell phones or patrons loudly talking?). Based on the drug use, nudity, and continual sarcasm, one might think they would find it irreverent to say the least, but they all loved it, offering nothing but high praise afterwards. The Coen brothers would have loved their reaction.

Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.

Justice the founder of my fabric mov’d:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.

Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.

Such characters in colour dim I mark’d
Over a portal’s lofty arch inscrib’d:
Whereat I thus: Master, these words import.

—Dante Alighieri from The Divine Comedy, (H.F. Cary translation) circa 1306 to 1321

The Coens return to the source for this 1960s-set, low-key comedy of Jewish manners and suburban paranoia – a film so willfully non-populist in tone, compared to its predecessors ‘Burn After Reading’ and ‘No Country for Old Men’, that it opens with a prologue set in a nineteenth-century, eastern European shtetl and spoken entirely in Yiddish. Larry (Stuhlbarg, who heads a cast of relative unknowns) is a physics professor at a Midwestern university and he’s having a hard time: his job is on the line, his wife is about to leave him, his neighbours are causing problems and even the local rabbi doesn’t want to know. The comic sadism provokes both claustrophobia and delight.

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [5/6]

Always the cruel gods of their movies, the brothers now turn to religious desperation—a perfect match—and, obliquely, to their own Jewish boyhood in late-’60s suburban Minneapolis. A Serious Man, like their shaggy masterpiece The Big Lebowski, justifies the loftiest expectations, both highly controlled and uncommonly exposed. The Gopniks are an unstable clan: Anxious Larry (Stuhlbarg) uncertainly pursues tenure as a math prof while one of his students blackmails him for a better grade. His wife is leaving him for an orotund patronizer (the outstanding Melamed); Larry’s oily brother (Kind) won’t vacate the bathroom; his daughter wants a nose job; and his son alternates bar mitzvah prep with habitual toking.

These are not the caricatures of Barton Fink. Though often funny, Larry unravels with enormous pathos, crying in his lawyer’s office and seeking a rabbinic wisdom that might not exist. (Arthur, the brother, has his own breakdown, wailing in the night: “Ha-shem hasn’t given me shit.”) Perhaps informed by Cormac McCarthy’s fatalism, the Coens have used their own personal memories to shift toward a grander inquiry, best expressed in a piece of rock music that sneaks up on you with its aptness: Don’t you want somebody to love?

A stoned, lonely neighbor lures Larry with the “new freedoms,” but all he really desires is answers from his holy men. One junior rabbi can only enthuse about the parking lot, another waxes mystically about “the goy’s teeth” (this sequence, set to Hendrix, is easily the Coens’ most stunning). Maybe there is no one to love, or love us back; on the horizon is oblivion. See this film immediately.

filmcritic.com (Rob Vaux) review [4.5/5]

For all their stylization and genre playfulness, the Coen Brothers have always made very personal films. But never more so than in A Serious Man, which appears to reflect on the filmmakers' experiences growing up in a Jewish family of academics in a suburb of Minneapolis, presenting us with a world which one rarely sees in the movies. It draws inspiration from the story of Job, reincarnated here as a Midwestern Jewish professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) whose life appears to be falling apart in countless ways. Judaism plays a huge role in the proceedings, as does the notion of an outsiders' community and what happens when the people you depend on suddenly prove incapable of support. Like many Coen films, it has a huge streak of shaggy dog to it -- working far better as thematic exploration than as a movie unto itself -- but this time, we can sense how profoundly it all matters to the duo.

And despite trademark bursts of absurdity, it remains deeply plausible. On the surface, Stuhlarg's Larry Gopnik has a great deal going for him: a loving wife, a good job, a couple of unruly but basically decent kids, and a sense of stability in his 1960s Minnesota home. Though surrounded by Gentiles, he has enough of his fellows nearby to feel that he belongs, and when troubles come he knows whom to turn to for support. That's before his wife dumps him for the smarmy Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), his mooching brother (Richard Kind) moves in with no sign of leaving, and a student (David Kang) failing his course begins dabbling in bribery and blackmail. Gopnik does his best to roll with the punches, but his innate sense of decency keeps tripping him up. How can he do the right thing when the universe seems intent on draining his every resource dry?

The Coens present this dilemma without offering any solutions, suggesting that when life gets tough, we have little recourse but to stand firm and take it. They mine humor from the sheer preposterousness of Gopnik's tasks; if he could just be a little more of a prick, many of his problems would vanish. But he simply isn't selfish enough. Attaining righteousness may be hard in itself, but the road doesn't get any easier once you do.

A Serious Man wouldn't convey that so effectively, however, were it not so firmly rooted in time and place. The Coens have always used their settings as characters unto themselves; here it reflects the world of their childhood, a suburban landscape of synagogues and chintzy motels deep in the heart of Lutheran Land. Simple, throwaway details -- augmented by an unknown cast consisting largely of Midwestern Jews themselves -- lend the film a palpable sense of reality, which raises the stakes in a way few Coen films ever have.

The movie's Judaic overtones add further seasoning to the mix, eschewing pat answers for an inscrutable gaze into life's abyss ("aided" by a trio of rabbis whose most profound bit of wisdom is cribbed from Jefferson Airplane). Happy moments crop up periodically as Gopnik flails around for answers, and the Coens focus on them as reverently as they do the scourges which threaten to overwhelm their hero. The ambiguous ending doesn't bode well for reliable box office, but it stays true to the film's overall tone, reminding us that the journey doesn't end just because things start looking up. A Serious Man isn't an easy film to enjoy -- but that's kind of the point..

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review

"A Serious Man," the new movie from Joel and Ethan Coen, opens with a gnomic injunction: "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." Since this is a Coen Brothers movie, the first question we must ask is, "Are they kidding?"

What follows is one of the nastier entries in the Coen Brothers' oeuvre, and I don't mean this entirely disparagingly. With the Coens, nastiness is a given. What really matters is how artful and funny and cosmic it all is. The same filmmakers who gave us "The Ladykillers," that unleavened slice of sourdough, also made the shattering "No Country for Old Men."

"A Serious Man" begins with a prologue, a Yiddish folk tale the brothers cooked up, about a ghost (or is he?) who sets upon a married couple in a Polish shtetl. (Yiddish is spoken throughout.) This intro, a cross between Isaac Bashevis Singer and Rod Serling, doesn't make much sense with the rest of the movie – except that, since the movie is about the senselessness of fate, it fits right in. Following this prologue the film jumps ahead a century to suburban 1967 Minnesota and the travails of one Larry Gopnik (the marvelous Michael Stuhlbarg, mostly known for his stage work), a physics professor with the requisite nerd costume of short-sleeved dress shirt and pocket protector.

He is, he thinks, happy. He's up for tenure at the local university and comfortably married, with two teenagers. But in this movie, being happy is like walking around with a bull's-eye on your back. In short order Larry discovers that his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) wants to divorce him for Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) a self-righteous, oleaginous family friend; his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is a pothead shirking his bar mitzvah lessons; his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is stealing from him to pay for a nose job; his unemployable layabout brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is camping out on his sofa; a student is both bribing Larry to change a failing grade and suing him for defamation. As a bonus, someone is sending incendiary anonymous letters about Larry to the tenure committee.

The Coens have said in interviews that "the fun of the story for us was inventing new ways to torture Larry." Since Larry is just about the only person in the movie who isn't malicious, stoned, or deranged, the effect at times is like watching children pull the wings off flies for almost two hours.

The Coens also stereotype this Jewish milieu to a fare-thee-well, and the stereotypes seem to function for them as a form of Yiddish theater. As the Jewish material in such films as "Barton Fink" and "Miller's Crossing" already demonstrates, the Coens don't run from ethnic clichés. Quite the opposite. They embrace them. It's true that many of the Jews on view here are venal and grasping, but so are most of the non-Jews, including that failing student, who is Korean, and Larry's neighbor, a gun-toting survivalist type. Since the Coens have always been deeply misanthropic, it's not enough to say that "A Serious Man" makes fun of Jews. The Coens make nasty fun of everybody. This is what they do.

I would argue that "A Serious Man" is one of the Coens' most "personal" movies. They grew up Jewish in the Midwest, and some of the sequences, such as Danny's Hebrew school lessons, with the dozy students shocked into wakefulness by their testy, Old Europe instructor, have the affectionate tang of remembered experience. Larry's seeking out of rabbis for guidance is likewise affectionately tinged. And Larry himself is in a long line of holy fools in the Yiddish tradition.

The Coens may play around with that tradition, they may disparage it or mock it. But they are irrevocably a part of it, and that's all to the good. In its own smart-alecky way, "A Serious Man" adds to the ancient storehouse of Jewish black humor that takes off from the question, "What did I do wrong?" The big cosmic joke here is that Larry, who lives with the clarities of mathematics and physics, can find no clarity in the universe.

IFC.com [Sam Adams]

Joel and Ethan Coen have an almost chronic aversion to being taken seriously. Their darkest movies are nevertheless laced with black humor, and in interviews, they tend to rebuff the idea that their work is about anything other than what appears on the surface. Even to the actors who have worked with them, their intentions are frequently opaque. One need only glance at "Barton Fink"'s withering portrait of an Odets-ian playwright nattering on about his designs for proletarian theater to see what the Coens think of artists who advertise their themes.

The title of "A Serious Man," then, can only be ironic -- and indeed, the Coens make it nearly impossible to take anyone in the film seriously. Their unlucky protagonist, physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), is an affable bumbler on whom misfortunes rain like in an unceasing torrent. In short order, he's asked for a divorce, threatened by the father of a student who attempted to bribe him and informed that his impending tenure at the university has been jeopardized by a series of anonymous defamatory letters. There are minor indignities as well: the fact that that his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) only shows any interest in his father when he needs better reception on "F Troop," and the nagging calls from the Columbia Record Club, which arrive with such persistence that they begin to feel vaguely sinister.

Unable to fathom why this succession of woes should befall him, Larry turns to his rabbi, or rather, a series of them, gradually working his way up to the elusive Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell), a decrepit specimen who will soon be presiding over Danny's bar mitzvah. The first (Simon Helberg) offers vague analogies which somehow involve an empty parking lot; the second (George Wyner) a breezy, long-winded tale he calls "The Story of the Goy's Teeth." Like the movie's Yiddish-language prologue, in which a woman in a dank shtetl shack murders a stranger she takes to be a shape-changing dybbuk, thereby bringing a curse down on her (and presumably Larry's) family, the rabbi's parable hints at deeper significance without actually divulging it. It might mean something, or it might not.

The Coens play the same game, on a larger scale, with "A Serious Man." A stylized, slow-speed farce, the movie is frequently absurd and occasionally silly, but it also touches on profound moral and spiritual quandaries, the kinds of things the Coens would never be caught dead addressing directly. Only in retrospect do key lines extricate themselves from the innocuous interactions in which they've been hidden: Larry's warning to a student, "Actions have consequences, and not just in physics"; his insistence to the record-club rep that "I didn't do anything" when he protests having ordering Santana's "Abraxas"; the father who employs contradictory tactics to muscle Larry into changing his son's grade, and then counsels him to "accept the mystery."

Although it's nowhere near as foreboding as "No Country for Old Men," "A Serious Man" is just as bleak. Larry, who seems to have lived an exemplary moral life (if also a particularly dull one), looks to the heavens for guidance and finds only gathering clouds. He turns his power of logic on his own situation, to no avail. (His wastrel brother, played by Richard Kind, goes even further, spending his days on an illegible scrawl called the Mentaculus, an equation which will some day make the world's probabilities entirely foreseeable.) If actions have consequences, does it follow that you only get what you deserve?

The Coens based "A Serious Man"'s setting on the Jewish community in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park where they grew up, and although the movie is not in any intelligible way autobiographical, the complexity of its tone and the depth of its humor suggest something that has been gestating for a long time. One can imagine the prepubescent Coens going from Hebrew school to "F Troop" and back again, forging an aesthetic midway between the two. That the movie is cast almost entirely with unfamiliar faces only increases the Coens' presence. It's hardly a film à clef, but it's as close as we're ever likely to get.

The Humor in Gloom | Manhattan, New York, NY | News - NY Press Armond White, October 1, 2009

"we're jews. we have that well of tradition to draw on," larry gopnik's cousin consoles him in a serious man. larry (michael stuhlbarg), a minnesota physics teacher, endures a progression of miseries in the coen brothers' ironic new comedy. disaster affects larry's sense of identity as teacher, husband, father, brother, tribesman. a student blackmails him, his wife asks for a divorce, his wasp neighbor unnerves him, plus other travails. yet the film itself is so sharp-witted that every irony makes life vivid rather than despairing. any critic's suggestion that a film as lovingly, emotionally precise as a serious man typifies jewish self-hatred is ridiculous.

larry seeks answers about his life from three rabbis and these sessions give a serious man the structure of a vaudeville routine or a legendary ethnic joke. that's also the coens' well of tradition-unsentimentalized.

the coens admit their own jewishness the way their best recent films (the man who wasn't there, the ladykillers, the big lebowski) admit americanness: with genuine feeling for the complexities, abundance and absurd conventions that give us our identity. more than social satirists, the coens' extraordinary film craft (cinematography by roger deakins, sound design by skip lievsay) gift wraps their genuine soulfulness. once again, their heartfelt plot makes adventure of a character's ethical struggle: larry's attempt to appease his troubled conscience.

each rabbi session frustrates larry (one tea-dunking sage drones, "something like this, it's never a good time."), but he's also brought deeper inside the tradition he inherited-which is the coens' way of clarifying both jewishness and americanness. starting with a 10-minute yiddish prologue set in fin de siècle poland (it's the most audacious movie prologue since wes anderson's hotel chevalier intro to the darjeeling limited), the coens saturate viewers in cultural memory. it's like a parody of fiddler on the roof, embracing ethnic superstition and critiquing it simultaneously. the same double vision occurs when the film flashes forward to larry's 1967 setting where the coens lay out the paradox of pop revolution (the jefferson airplane blaring through the earphone of a transistor radio) alongside larry's modest portion of the american dream (the straitened luxe of middle-class suburbia).

contrasting larry's physics theorems with hebrew letters on a blackboard and larry's medical exam with his son's hebrew lessons, condenses jewish social transition more cleverly than the mysticism of darren aronofsky's overbearing pi. the first english dialogue heard characterizes this ethnic-immigrant progress in the language of professionalism-a detail as telling as any conceived by bernard malamud, bruce jay friedman, saul bellow or philip roth. the major difference from those literary jewish popular artists is that the coens' self-consciousness is guiltless. even their rashi quotation ("receive with simplicity everything that happens to you") contains such a sense of irony that it applies to the range of american experience. consider that the film's most symbolic image (larry fixing the tv antenna on his roof) recalls warren beatty tending his rooftop weather vane in the wasp conscience comedy town and country.

by situating larry in a world of jewish extremes (the needy brother, the solicitous head of his tenure committee, a rabbi decoding jefferson airplane as proverb or the overly intimate sy ableman whose self-righteousness gives the film its title), the coens "accept the mystery." they creditably ponder what's left of faith in secular jewish life. "how does god speak to us?" is larry's basic query. a rabbi's regret-"i, too, have forgotten how to see him in the world"-speaks to the absurdity larry cannot comprehend. (it could also have been the moral of the coens' brilliant, cosmic burn after reading.)

a serious man opens concurrently with the criterion dvd release of david mamet's 1991 film homicide. it's an instructive coincidence given the brazenness of the coens producing what may be the most overtly jewish movie ever made by a modern hollywood studio and mamet's quasi-cop movie, which primarily examines the issue of jewish guilt-it's mamet's bid to be a serious man of jewish cinema. through bobby gold (joe mantegna), a homicide detective who stumbles upon an american underground running guns to israel, mamet internalizes the jewish persecution complex as a sense of masculine (existential) failure. it's not a progressive view, plus it's humorless. but when it premiered at the 1991 new york film festival, homicide was taken very seriously even though mamet's plot had recklessly mishmashed contemporary urban tensions between jews and blacks. (homicide is a pale variation on his excellent play edmond.) mamet's key trope, "it never stops/against the jews," typifies an essentially political paranoia that has recently been refined and complicated in munich; paranoia that the coens now transcend.

a serious man rejects the bland jewishness of judd apatow films; it's similar to the black filmmakers' project in next day air, in which social stereotypes get burlesqued, yet are used to reveal an essentially moral exercise.

integrity shows in the clean, airy light the coens cast on larry's confused world and the parochialism they chide at the end of a wild tangent about "the goy's mouth." the coens' inimitable ability to portray the delusions of modern sophisticates shows definitively when a sexy neighbor asks larry, "do you take advantage of the new freedoms?" their post-coital, marijuana high is accompanied by the sound of a phonograph needle stuck in a groove. it's the coens proving that the groove of identity politics can also be a rut-yet they remain unstuck.

The New Republic (Christopher Orr) review

Pajiba (Drew Morton) review

Some Came Running (Glenn Kenny) review

The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review

CBC.ca Arts review Martin Morrow

Paste Magazine Festival Report [Robert Davis]

Slant Magazine review Fernando F. Croce

seanax.com [Sean Axmaker]

The Onion A.V. Club review [A-] Noel Murray

not coming to a theater near you review Mike D’Angelo

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

Hammer to Nail [Brandon Harris]

Critic's Notebook [Robert Levin]

Cinematical (Monika Bartyzel) review

Film Monthly (Matt Fagerholm) review

The Auteurs [Daniel Kasman]

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [A]

Screen International (Jan Stuart) review

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]

eFilmCritic.com (William Goss) review [5/5]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3.5/5] Matthew Sorrento

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B+] also seen here: CompuServe [Harvey Karten] and here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

Village Voice (Ella Taylor) review

Film Freak Central review Ian Pugh

The Baltimore Sun (Michael Sragow) review

How the Coen Brothers Turned Stuhlbarg Into a Leading Man Stuhlbarg’s Crossing, by Eric Kohn from NY magazine, September 25, 2009

The Hollywood Reporter review Kirk Honeycutt

Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Todd McCarthy) review

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [4/4]

Divine Comedy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

TRUE GRIT A- 93

USA (110 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

One of the highpoints of the holiday releases and a true pleasure to watch, especially on a big screen. Though some may maintain an allegiance for the original and John Wayne's iconic performance, not to mention some of the most photographically oustanding uses of location in American westerns, what the Coens have done is take what was in my view a fairly standard, stereotypical 60's western that focused its attention on John Wayne in a memorable and Oscar winning role and improve upon the original in every respect, streamlining the excesses, discovering an original talent in the young heroine (who is the leading actress, no longer a supportive role), and changing the tone, turning it instead into a much more mournful drama where there are literally no heroes, as that element of the Western mythical saga is buried and long forgotten, only heroic characters who pay a heavy price for their bravery.

In the original version directed by Henry Hathaway, the title refers to the grizzled John Wayne character of Rooster Cogburn, a self-parodying role for which he won an Academy Award as a one-eyed, mean-tempered, hard-drinking U.S. marshal who is long since past his prime, going on to make a sequel 6 years later called ROOSTER COGBURN (1975). Wayne was a sentimental favorite in 1969, by then a stalwart Vietnam War supporter and cancer survivor beating out counterculture actor Dustin Hoffman in perhaps the performance of his career as Ratso Rizzo in MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969). However in the Coen Brothers remake, the title more likely belongs to the ferocious, breakout performance by the young heroine, Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, the eloquent, booksmart, overly precocious 14-year old farm girl from Arkansas who hires the marshal to track down the man who murdered her father and whose steadfast persistence and refusal to be deterred literally anchors the film. Jeff Bridges admirably fills the shoes of Cogburn, introduced in a memorable courtroom scene that is filled with wonderfully descriptive first hand testimony where Cogburn obviously relishes his own home grown turns of phrases as he describes the shooting of several men in self defense. Mattie Ross was in that courtroom and the story is told from her point of view. What’s significantly different here is the rosy use of formalized language from the highly educated Ms. Ross, which contrasts nicely from the grunts and moans and earthy profanity that constitutes regular talk from inebriated men on the frontier. This shift is closer in tone to the Charles Portis novel, which uses Mattie as the narrator, and where she offers the final elegiac wisdom instead of Cogburn.

The lilting melancholic piano variations of the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” immediately take the viewers back to the Ken Burns Civil War documentary, offering a historic glimpse into our nation’s bloody history. If Cogburn’s courtroom testimony reveals anything, it’s that tracking down outlaws in the still raw and primitive West was a savagely brutal business as these were cold-blooded killers, where every manner of lie, deception, doublecross, and chicanery would be used against any lawman trying to bring them in. Mattie brings a steady journalistic eye into these peculiarly eccentric times, adding an air of civility into the lawlessness and mayhem, establishing her true colors immediately when she amusingly outnegotiates a horse trader, an irritable scoundrel calling himself Col. Stonehill (Dakin Matthews) in resolving her deceased father’s financial affairs. Cogburn on the other hand is a steely sort of impregnable force who shoots first and asks questions later, whose brain is trained to recognize the face and voices of outlaws, who has no use for small talk unless it’s hearing the sound of his own voice, where he goes on whisky inspired rants that are all day long recollections of his life and times, spouting to the wind and the mountains, lost in a drunken haze of life in better times. But from this stupor, the man is firmly accountable when called upon, where he seems to gather his wits at the first threat of danger, where he instinctually knows exactly what to do even when the odds aren’t in his favor. The odd man out in this movie is the presence of the young and honorable Texas Ranger (Matt Damon) who is something of a chatterbox boy scout tracking down this same man for a crime committed in Texas, whose description of life on the range reads out of a dimestore novel, all etched in the exaggerated lore of how much a man can stand.

Despite the strength of the superb performances, what hoists this film to another level is the awesome cinematography by Roger Deakins, who’s been shooting Coen Brother movies since BARTON FINK (1991). The Wild West has been recreated with relish and loving detail, shot mostly in Texas and New Mexico, always surrounded by the awesome beauty of the natural world around them, where humans are tiny specks in the landscape, which is evident even as the mindnumbing cruelty and senseless violence continues to wreak havoc with the human condition. But those on the side of the law have to remain above it all, dutifully moral in an immoral landscape, where their journey feels timeless as they tread ever so slowly into the vast unknown of the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. While the three continuously bicker about methods and strategies, occasionally parting ways, it’s also evident that Mattie earns Cogburn’s respect by not flinching at the first sign of danger, by keeping a cool head, and by remaining optimistic about the outcome. Unlike the original version, the Coens never resort to stereotypes, but craft an intelligent film with well defined characters that grow more appealing over time, as this kind of battered and weather beaten frontier country forces them to shed all but the barebones essentials, where their chiseled exteriors wear down exposing vulnerable yet heroic souls underneath, absorbing a heavy cost to help discover the fragile beginnings of a civilized and educated nation.

Time Out New York [David Fear]

Watch the 1969 adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel and you’ll see a puny coup of counterprogramming slipped in among the ’60s hippie-revisionist Westerns. (A colleague pointed out that this last-gasp anachronism opened one week before The Wild Bunch. Hello, cultural disparity!) Never mind the presence of New Hollywood stalwarts Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall; this was your father’s horse opera, jury-rigged to net genre godhead John Wayne a sentimental-favorite Oscar.

So claiming that Joel and Ethan Coen’s update is superior to the Duke’s starchy star vehicle isn’t high praise; that they’ve restored Portis’s poetically arch turns of phrase to the dialogue gives it the edge by default. The triumph is that the duo has hewed close to the source material while still making an unmistakable Coen brothers movie. The tongue-twisting banter between teen heroine Mattie Ross (Steinfeld) and a Texas ranger (Damon) would make both Edwina McDunnough and Tom Reagan proud; you expect kid-kicking, one-eyed sumbitch lawman Rooster Cogburn (Bridges, who now owns the role) to ask “What’s the rumpus?” The directors’ propensity for verbiage and ironic violence fits the story like a fringed suede glove. Welcome to the first stoic screwball Western.

There are dim, brutal men on the plains and a demented dentist straight out of Blood Meridian, but unlike the Coens’ similar pulp-lit flick No Country for Old Men, the gravitas needed to give True Grit an aura of foreboding frontier justice is largely AWOL. Even Carter Burwell’s elegiac score and a biblical starkness settling over the proceedings can’t shake the sense that it’s a bit of a mannered, if endlessly entertaining, lark. To make a Western now is in itself a subversive act. Improving, embellishing and reclaiming an old-fashioned oater from the vintage studio-cheese bin with such humor and vigor seems truly, truly ballsy.

Sound On Sight Justine Smith

If in some way, No Country for Old Men was about an innocence lost that never existed to begin with, the Coen Brothers’ newest film, True Grit, champions childhood ideals that do exist and are unfortunately compromised by age and experience. The rigid faith that Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) has in justice is consistently undermined by the failures of selfish and idiotic adults. Though she is not naive enough to believe that most people act without keeping their best interest at heart, she holds a sustained belief in a higher moral and administrative power.

Like most great modern westerns, the frontier era of American history is emphasized as a fleeting moment. One decade’s Gods are side-shows for the next generation to debase as relics of cheap entertainment. Even in the time period where most of the film’s events take place, men like Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) are being de-mystified in the American court system as drunks and murderers. The need for bounty hunters is waning as “civilization” spreads and institutions grow in power. It is quickly evident, though now old and fat, Cogburn had never been an empowering figure. This is, however, minimized, as the oppressing force of a society that created men like him, only to disregard them as outsiders once their role was complete lingers over the film.

This disposability of human life is reflected very deeply at the heart of Mattie Ross’ quest to avenge her father’s death. She understands that in a town where no one knew her father, his death would go unnoticed. It has had irreversible changes on her own and she has a strong desire to convey that to the people she meets, but most especially Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the man who shot her father in the back. She never quite correlates the institutions she has such powerful faith in with her father’s demise. Though it is folly to believe that one can live a life without money, the power of the dollar trumps any and all morality in this film. Even when Chaney is eventually found, he is not threatened with death but with not getting paid. This sends him into a confused and angry diatribe.

Mattie’s faith in the world is very much real in spite of the many obstacles that challenge it. It has a redemptive quality and though she is never able to change the nature of man, her strength and composure suggests a possibility for a stronger tomorrow. Her intelligence, inquisitiveness and incredible confidence in herself hint at the virtues of a bureaucratic system sustained by a collective desire for order and fairness and motivated by an individual’s pursuit for self-improvement.

The “seriousness” of the film is undermined by the typical Coen wit, and they exploit the colourful characters of the Western genre in order to emphasize the absurdity of this birthing nation. The film is more a comedy than a drama, in spite of its occasionally heavy material. Though quite beautiful, the Coens seem to consciously skirt iconography, undermining or humourizing nostalgic and patriotic imagery for the old West. It is only one sequence, in the film’s final act, which can only be properly compared to the river sequence in The Night of the Hunter, where the film’s imagery is allowed to achieve a moment of dreamy transcendence.

As can be expected, the film is beautifully acted, and though obviously cast for type, each performances offer unexpected moments of depth and surprise. Though not quite on the same level as the Coens’ best work, it is nonetheless a great film and one of the year’s best. It speaks for the incredible quality of their output that this does not rank among their top couple of films, as many filmmakers would only hope to make a film half as good as this. The Coens once again demonstrate why they are among the very few American filmmakers worth anticipating and they hardly disappoint.

The House Next Door [Robert Tumas]

“You must pay for everything in this world, one way and another. There is nothing free except the grace of God.” – Mattie Ross, True Grit

In a film bubbling with humor and adventure yet shot through with a bracing melancholy, Joel and Ethan Coen have perfectly captured Charles Portis’ beloved novel True Grit while still making a film uniquely their own. The Coen stamp is subtler than it is with their original creations, but it is readily apparent and most welcome – a perfect fit for the material. Those who are only familiar with their body of work might be surprised to find that they have made a family film, while those who only know the story through the 1969 John Wayne movie might be surprised by the novel’s dark streak. That somber cast remains intact in the film translation and it is this quietly dawning sobriety that elevates True Grit from simple entertainment into something more substantial.

Mattie Ross is a prim, determined young Arkansan with a confidence that belies her 14 years. She has traveled to the frontier outpost of Fort Smith to claim the body of her murdered father and to see his killer Tom Chaney brought to justice. Chaney has fled the jurisdiction of local law enforcement so Mattie turns to the meanest, toughest Deputy US Marshal she can find: a grizzled, big-talking, drunkard named Rooster Cogburn with one eye and two trigger fingers. With the promise of reward, and perhaps because he takes a shine to this spunky little girl, Rooster agrees to track Chaney into dangerous Indian Territory. Making the unlikely pair an even unlikelier trio is La Boeuf, an arrogant young Texas Ranger who has been tracking Chaney himself for the murder of a US senator back home.

The key to True Grit is newcomer Hailee Steinfeld who stars as Mattie and appears in just about every scene. 13 at the time of filming, Steinfeld perfectly registers the innocence befitting Mattie’s age, but also a poise born both of Mattie’s confidence in her own ability and a naivety about the very real dangers she’s in. Steinfeld is as convincing riding a horse, shooting a gun or sparring with her elders as she is when her eyes tear up with frustration, sadness or shock at the horrors of the world. There’s a little bit of Fargo’s Marge Gunderson in her. She’s tough and smart, but it’s a hard world outside of her civilized bubble and venturing into that world changes her in fundamental ways. She comes away wiser, but also a little bit sadder. It’s a complex character and Steinfeld makes her believable. She has a self-possession you don’t expect from a little girl that calls to mind a young Jodie Foster.

Perhaps most importantly, Steinfeld is a natural with the Coens’ trademark stylized dialogue. It’s toned down here some and is more reflective of the odd almost biblical formality of the novel’s language than it is the usual Coen flights of linguistic fancy, but it’s still unnatural and it takes a special actor who gets it. Steinfeld is definitely that actor. Delivering her lines rapid fire and without hesitation, she rattles off her dialogue as though it’s normal modern conversation while still allowing the vitality of the music behind the words to shine through. There’s a rhythm and a spare poetry to the conversations and Steinfeld executes her readings with the skill of seasoned professional.

We already know that Jeff Bridges gets Coen-speak based on his iconic performance in The Big Lebowski, but the question on everyone’s mind is whether The Dude can match The Duke as Rooster Cogburn. Rightly or wrongly, this is John Wayne’s Oscar-winning performance and comparisons are inevitable. Well, forget about them. While taking nothing away from Wayne, Jeff Bridges makes Cogburn his own. This is a characterization much closer to Portis and less reliant on a famous actor’s iconic status. In the novel, Cogburn is dirty, sleazy and more than a little disreputable and Bridges wallows gleefully in this human muck. Regarding the world through one blurry, steel gray eye, he’s a broken down mess of a man to whom you would not entrust your child for a trip to the drugstore let alone into Indian Territory, but in him Mattie sees her best chance at finding retribution. It turns out there’s still a fire and a humanity in him and both are rekindled by this tough young girl. In him she finds the retribution she seeks and in her he finds a kind of redemption he didn’t know he needed.

Though Steinfeld and Bridges are terrific on their own, there is also a fantastic chemistry between them. Their characters are complete opposites, yet they need and seem to like each other even as they find the other infuriating. Whether it’s Mattie rolling Cogburn’s cigarette as she might have for her own father or Cogburn taking a stand to protect Mattie from danger, there are lots of little character moments that show their growing bond and it’s not hard to imagine the camaraderie between the characters existing between the actors as well.

Rounding out the main cast is Matt Damon as the cocky Texas Ranger La Boeuf. Damon has already proven through his work in Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! and the Ocean’s films that he has a knack for patter and a gift for comedy that makes him a perfect Coen actor. It’s only surprising it has taken him this long to get a role in one of their projects. With a quick temper and an ego to match his oversized spurs, his La Boeuf almost feels like a boy playing at being a cowboy. In a way, he has a lot more in common with Mattie than he’d like to admit. He’s a good shot, but something of a dandy and he naturally clashes with the more worldly Cogburn whose stories may be gilded with exaggeration but are rooted in hard experience. Much of the film’s humor in fact comes from Damon and Bridges whittling each other with an exasperated Mattie caught between them. It is this conflicting trio of personalities ultimately that gives the story its drive and the film lives or dies based on the performances. Steinfeld, Bridges and Damon make True Grit sing.

Technically, True Grit is everything you could expect from the Coens and their crew of familiar faces including cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Carter Burwell. Deakins for the most part is fairly restrained as he works with a muted palette that suits the starkness of the narrative. There’s a hallucinatory nighttime sequence during the climax where he really gets to show his stuff, but mostly his contributions are subtle. Burwell meanwhile perfectly compliments the cinematography and the general tone of the film with a simple score that supports the emotion of each scene without ever forcing it. Though often warmer than they’re given credit for, the Coens are not overly sentimental filmmakers. They never overplay the emotions in True Grit and the contributions of Deakins and Burwell strike just the right note.

While a family-friendly western might seem like an odd choice for the Coen Brothers, a closer examination fits it perfectly within their canon. This is the work of mature filmmakers who have the confidence they can thrive in any genre wherever they find a good character-based story. They’ve found such a story in True Grit and while they never lose sight of it as straightforward entertainment value, they also get at the meat of the original novel in ways the first film version never even attempted.

"True Grit": A ferocious heroine in a classic western Andrew O’Hehir from Salon

Harry says the Coens' TRUE GRIT is the - Ain't It Cool News: The ... Harry Knowles

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones]

True Grit - Theatrical review (1 of 2) Christopher Long from DVD Town

The Coen brothers' new Western, True Grit, with Jeff Bridges and ... Dana Stevens from Slate

True Grit Nicolas Rapold from Film Comment, January/February, 2011

The House Next Door [The Conversations] [Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard]

"also-true 'Grit'" Richard T. Jameson from Queen Ann News, December 22, 2010

A Love of Decency Does Not Abide in You Bill R, December 24, 2010

Cinema Viewfinder: Movie Review: True Grit (2010) Tony Dayoub, December 29, 2010

Film review: True Grit Ben Walters from Sight and Sound, February 2011

True Grit – By Faithfully Adapting The Novel The Coen Brothers ... Sheldeon A. Wiebe from Eclipse magazine

True Grit Review: Trading the Dude for the Duke - TIME Richard Corliss from Time magazine

Edward Copeland on Film (VenetianBlond)

IC Places [Chris Knipp]

"True Grit: Voids and Trajectories" Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Armond White reviews Coen Brothers' True Grit NY Press

True Grit, The Illusionist, Somewhere, Gulliver's Travels | Film ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal

Movie Review - True Grit (2010) - eFilmCritic Rob Gonsalves

Filmcritic.com Norm Schrager

True Grit | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps

David Edelstein on 'The Tempest,' 'True Grit,' 'How Do You Know ... David Edelstein from New York magazine

True Grit: movie review - CSMonitor.com Peter Rainer

The Reel Bits [Sarah Ward and Richard Gray]

True Grit Review | You Give Out Very Little Sugar With Your ... Daniel Carlson from Pajiba

'True Grit': The Coen Brothers' Fine But Middling John Wayne ... Christopher Orr from The Atlantic

ReelTalk [Jeffrey Chen]

Critic After Dark [Noel Vera]

DVDTalk - Theatrical [Tyler Foster]

Movie Review - True Grit (2010) - eFilmCritic Jay Seaver

Mark Reviews Movies: TRUE GRIT (2010) Mark Dujsik

Movie Review: True Grit (2010) – RopeofSilicon.com Movie News ... Brad Brevet

Does the '69 Version of 'True Grit' Even Compare to the Coens ... Brad Brevet from Rope of Silicon

DVD Talk [Brian Orndorf] also seen here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

DAILY FILM DOSE: A Daily Film Appreciation and Review Blog: True Grit Alan Bacchus

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]

True Grit - Cinema Crazed Felix Vasquez Jr.

'True Grit' Review: The Coen Bros. Remake is Comfortably Old ... Erik Davis from Cinematical

Film-Forward.com Adam Schartoff

A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity [Adam Lippe]

DCist [Ian Buckwalter}

Compuserve [Harvey Karten]

World Socialist Web Site [Hiram Lee] also seen here: True Grit, a revenge tale from the Coen brothers

tonymacklin.net [Tony Macklin]

Row Three [Andrew James]

exclaim! [James Keast]

Boxoffice Magazine [Pete Hammond]

True Grit – review | Xan Brooks | Film | The Guardian

True Grit | Movies | EW.com Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly

Variety [Peter Debruge]

True Grit: Flavourful language and flying bullets - The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey

With True Grit, the Coens have given the western back its teeth John Patterson from The Guardian, January 8, 2011

Review: True Grit (2010) - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

In 'True Grit' remake, Jeff Bridges refashions Rooster Cogburn ... Gary Thompson from the Philadelphia Daily News

'True Grit,' the Coens' wry biblical western | Philadelphia ... Steven Rea from The Philadelphia Inquirer

Movie review: True Great. The Coen Brothers give us a poignant ... Chris Hewitt from the St. Paul Pioneer Press

True Grit (A-) | Dallas-Fort Worth Entertainment News and Reviews ... Chris Vognar

Movie review: 'True Grit' - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis, December 21, 2010

True Grit, Odd Wit: And Fame? No, Thanks Charles McGrath from The New York Times, December 19, 2010

Film: The Coen Brothers, Shooting Straight David Carr from The New York Times, December 10, 2010

True to ‘True Grit’ Carlo Rotella from The New York Times, December 10, 2010

Coen Brothers Saddle Up a Revenge Story (or Two) Michael Cieply from The New York Times, December 3, 2010

Movie Review: 'True Grit' (1969) Vincent Canby from The New York Times, July 4, 1969

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS B 88

USA France (105 mi) 2012 Official site

An oddly melancholic film set in the early Greenwich Village folk music era of 1961, when musicians with guitars played at coffee shops and folk clubs, mostly singing traditional folk songs set to their own arrangements, where some are still overly clean cut, like holdovers from the 50’s, while others click with the audience, developing an instant rapport, while a few like Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) hold their audiences pretty much in contempt, thinking they know squat about music, as they listen to such crappy musical groups that are all copying the songs and style of more successful groups. While Llewyn is able to give heartfelt performances, where there are many songs sprinkled throughout the film that reek of soulful authenticity, he doesn’t have the overriding trust in himself or the needed ambition to get him over the hump. Described by Ethan Coen as “An odyssey where the main character doesn’t go anywhere,” Llewyn is constantly in motion, but it feels like he’s moving in circles where he remains stuck in a state of suspended animation, constantly trying to get into somebody’s door, where a recurring motif is looking for a sofa to sleep on for the night. With no place to call home, he’s constantly lugging his guitar around with him on the subway, hoping to catch a lucky break somewhere. When we meet his agent Mel (Jerry Grayson, in his last role before he died earlier this year), we know immediately that this guy isn’t getting him anywhere, yet he sticks with him, perhaps only because Mel is perceived to be somebody “in the business.” Perhaps it’s no accident that the Coen brothers grew up outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, about three hours from Hibbing, Minnesota where a young Bob Dylan grew up as Robert Zimmerman. Both moved to New York City to eventual fame and fortune, but this film imagines someone who wasn’t so fortunate. The question the movie asks is if the 60’s era conservatism is all that interesting, as it’s been completely overshadowed by the late decade’s more violent Vietnam anti-war protest movements that ushered in a new focus on Civil Rights, Global Ecology, and the Women’s movements. This film takes place before Roger Maris hit 61 home runs, during the idealism of a new era from newly elected President Kennedy, the first Catholic to win the White House, with a youthful vigor and fashionable wife that swept the nation, whose era of Camelot was considered a visionary time filled with a promise for the future.

While this has a familiar ring with David Chase’s Not Fade Away (2012), teenage kids from Jersey forming a rock ‘n’ roll band in the late 60’s playing covers of songs admired by the Rolling Stones, where they were confident they would hit it big, but never did, much to their personal dismay. Dylan describes the difference between rock ‘n’ roll and folk music in a Cameron Crowe interview contained in the liner notes to the 1985 multi-album Biograph:

The thing about rock ‘n’ roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough ... There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms ... but the songs weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.

There is no question that from the opening number in the Gaslight Café, “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” (Daniel Rossen version) Daniel Rossen - Hang Me, Oh Hang Me (Dave Van Ronk cover) YouTube (3:22), Llewyn is a very talented young man, more authentic and not so much a copycat as the other groups seen, but as we soon learn, he has major character flaws that alienate him from just about everybody. Opening and closing at the same point, the film is a brief flashback in time representing the travails of a few harrowing days in the life of folksinger Llewyn Davis. While the film is a time capsule of the era, where the Coens love to make authentic period pieces, what’s missing performance-wise are the Beat poets that often introduce the music in the early 60’s, and the beginnings of free form jazz from musicians like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, often playing in the nearby Village Vanguard. But it is Dave Van Ronk's 2005 memoir Mayor of MacDougal Street that inspired the Coen Brothers' latest film, as he performed in Greenwich Village for five decades beginning in the 50’s, where three of his songs are heard, and the title comes from Van Ronk’s 1963 album Inside Dave Van Ronk. Other autobiographical Van Ronk tidbits making their way into the film are spending time in the Merchant Marines (as did Jack Kerouac), taking a trip to Chicago to unsuccessfully audition for owner/manager Albert Grossman at the Gate of Horn, refusing to join a Peter, Paul, and Mary-style folk trio, and complaining to his record company that he was so broke he couldn’t afford a winter coat. But Van Ronk was more of an established musician, where according to Elijah Wald, who co-wrote the memoirs, “People slept on his couch — he didn't sleep on theirs. And the reason Dave became who he was in the Village was the way he welcomed anyone who cared about the music. Llewyn is clearly not that guy.

While authenticity is paramount, the Coens love to get the details right, including the placement of Van Ronk’s collection of primitive art from New Guinea and the Pacific Northwest into the homes of some of Llewyn’s wealthier academic friends. Especially significant is the film’s setting in the dead of winter, somewhat reminiscent of the 1963 cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, where Dylan’s presence lurks in the shadows, as he transformed the folk scene’s focus from traditional songs to original compositions, leaving performers like Llewyn out in the cold. What was more interesting to the Coens was the period that came just before this happened, where there were so many more that didn’t make it in the music business. The film is an unsparing look at one such performer who, unlike many of his contemporaries, can’t overcome his character flaws and remake himself in the image of someone else. Instead he’s stuck with who he is, a somewhat gloomy guy with a flair for bad taste that eventually ticks off everyone he meets. Often beleaguered at his status at the bottom of the food chain, where despite his talent, he has nothing to show for it, where he’s forced to live a hand-to-mouth existence, yet he feels he deserves better. To his credit, his sincerity is something he wears proudly on his lapel, but he chooses to lead a miserable life, continually forcing others to contend with his misfortune. The problem with the film is Llewyn is a particularly loathsome character, where there’s little emotional connection to what happens to him. He fails to establish even basic level relationships with friends and family, leaving him a loner, unable to pull himself out of his predicament. Onscreen throughout the entire picture, it’s one of the more extensive character developments in any recent Coen brothers movie. It’s only when he takes a road trip to Chicago that we learn a portion of his past that continues to haunt him, that leaves him feeling like damaged goods, where he can’t help but repeat the same mistakes from the past, which only further isolates him.

That surreal road trip, something of a hilarious satire of Kerouac’s On the Road, where Chicago has never been used to gloomier effect, includes two of the best secondary characters in the film, John Goodman, terrific as always, playing a highbrow jazz aficionado who sarcastically thinks of folk musicians as social misfits that can’t do anything else, while his driver is Garrett Hedlund as Johnny Five, completely silent for the first 800 miles or so until he launches into free form Beat poetry in the middle of the night from behind the wheel. These two guys add edge, completely lost in their own self-contained worlds, where Llewyn is a nobody in their eyes. It’s the perfect lead-in for his existential journey to nowhere, having burned all his bridges and alienated everyone around him. Only familiar with the old songs, where the appeal is drying up even for Llewyn, he’s starting to hate folk music and everything it represents, “If it’s never been new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song,” where he can be heard screaming at one point “I hate fuckin’ folk music!” When his sister Joy (Jeanine Serralles) asks if he might consider a life outside of folk singing, Llewyn replies, “What, quit? Just exist?” to which she responds, “Exist? Is that what we do outside of show business?” Spending a good portion of the film carrying and/or chasing after a cat named Ulysses, even on the subway, a journey unto itself, expressed in a long and beautiful ride through the heart of New York showing Llewyn lost in thought while the camera captures a reflection of the cat’s ponderous stare in the window, the film has no structured narrative, but simply provides an impressionistic mosaic of all the things Llewyn does wrong, how he blows every opportunity, blaming everyone but himself, alienating all his friends with his abrasive personality, never able to successfully channel his mania for music, where he seems doomed to wander like a Sisyphus character, waiting for a future that never arrives, becoming another one of the classic anti-heroes in the Coen mythology, where over the end credits an uncredited Dave Van Ronk can be heard singing The Late, Great Dave Van Ronk: "Green Green Rocky Road" YouTube (5:54). Somehow, the film took the second prize with the Grand Prix Award at Cannes. Unlike O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), which featured a musical soundtrack that lead to a revival of bluegrass country music, folk music is slower and more seriously downbeat, much of it a reflection of the hard years of the Great Depression, where its era 50 years ago before the violent student demonstrations of the late 60’s and before the influence of urban hip hop rhythms is not likely to experience a similar rebirth, where the Coen’s parody of the boring verse repetition in “500 Miles” Peter Paul and Mary, 500 Miles YouTube (2:53) with a hootenanny audience obediently singing along suggests it would simply not be tolerated by today’s more restlessly uptempo youth.

Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle A. Westphal

When CBS Films acquired INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS out of Cannes in 2013, the upstart distributor presumed that it could ride the Coen Express to Oscar glory and demonstrate its expertise in handling testy auteur cinema. Their dreams were largely dashed, though not before going down in the record books as the first awards campaign nearly derailed by the unauthorized appropriation of a tweet. These details don't necessarily have anything to do with this movie's long range stature as art, though it's hardly inappropriate that this ridiculously uncommercial venture about a sneeringly arrogant artiste choked outside the confines of the critic's club. It's a Coen project through and through, continuing a hitherto successful formula, exceedingly precise craft applied to caricatures not far removed from the walls of a junior high school toilet stall. (I can't recall another movie where the plot turns on the question of whether a cat possesses a scrotum.) The period details are unusually rich and suggestive, the novelty song "Please Mr. Kennedy," the conditional sympathy of a nascent academic folk fan base, the altogether unexpected elevation of Akron, OH to American Promised Land. What ultimately distinguishes INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, though, is its sectarian specificity: it's a movie about the moment when folk music morphed into the folk revival, aimed at a very specialized connoisseur audience fiercely secure in its judgment that cleancut phonies like the Kingston Trio ruined f*cking everything. The critic Leo Braudy has complained that INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS neglects the folk scene's radical politics. Such a position ignores Llewyn's unstated but unmistakable disgust with troubadour naïf Troy Nelson and the very idea of a folk singer nurtured by a sojourn in the military industrial complex. This is a movie of private ideals wasted on a world in ashen withdrawal, an irascible oldworld sensibility kicked to the curb by musical gentrification. (Need I mention, too, that the Coens have coolly predicted that this will be their last 35mm production? [Their subsequent film, HAIL, CAESAR!, also wound up being photographed on 35mm Ed.] The results, with DP Bruno Delbonnel subbing for Coen regular Roger Deakins, are lovely and a little disconcerting, as if the film stock itself met condensation at the foot of a noisy Manhattan radiator.) Even if you find nothing ominous in the rise of Peter, Paul, and Mary, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS remains a compelling portrait of an artist whose sense of musicianship is so refined that it leaves no room for the audience. It also manages to describe poverty in the most straightforward and useful terms, an improvised existence without the latitude to act in a socalled 'economically rational' manner. Like a record with the needle stuck in the groove, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS is an enclosed tragedy.

The House Next Door [Elise Naknikian]

No such romanticism can be found in Joel & Ethan Coen’s new film Inside Llewyn Davis beyond the anti-corporatist, no-compromise notions the titular struggling folk singer (Oscar Isaac) spouts off at certain moments. Seeing the weariness with which he struggles with his own day-to-day living, however, one can’t help but wonder if even he believes in those notions anymore.

The America of the early 1960s may have been bursting with idealism, but Davis's own youthful beliefs are standing on its last legs, to the point that he doesn't even seem to have much passion for music-making anymore. For an artist, that is surely tragic—but does Davis, in some ways, hasten the demise of his career? He doesn’t demand royalties after a backing gig, thinking only about money in the moment; he misses a golden opportunity to make crucial industry connections in Chicago when a fellow singer invites him to accompany him there, dismissing it simply because he can't imagine leaving New York; he refuses to become part of a band because—after the suicide of his former band-mate Mike Timlin—he’s “done” working with partners. Inside Llewyn Davis is, in the Coens’ usual defiantly unsentimental way, clear-eyed about the line at which Davis's lack of willingness to compromise crosses over to mere foolishness.

That is not to say the Coens lack sympathy, however. There's a mournful quality to Inside Llewyn Davis that, for this viewer at least, short-circuits any sense of superiority towards its main character (and thankfully, this film doesn't have the same distancing turns toward surrealism that characterize Barton Fink, another Coens film about a struggling artist of a different breed). Bruno Delbonnel’s cinematography, swimming in chilly interiors and monochrome colors, reinforces the film’s dirge-like feel; there's no bright light to be found anywhere in this world. The only light to be found in Inside Llewyn Davis, really, is in the music-making—those precious moments where Davis finally, beautifully indulges in his passion. Even for an artist like Davis who wears his sensitivity on his sleeve, sheer passion is, finally, not quite enough to keep him going; in an environment of small victories, however, at least he manages to end things on his own terms, open to where life will take him next.

"An odyssey where the main character doesn't go anywhere," as Ethan Coen put it in the Q&A after the New York Film Festival press screening of the film, Inside Llewyn Davis begins at the Gaslight Café, a fictional Greenwich Village coffeehouse, in 1961. After watching the title character (a mesmerizing Oscar Isaac) perform a soulful interpretation of an old folk song and then get beaten up in an inky back alley, we circle back in time to follow him as he couch-surfs his way around New York, hitches rides to Chicago and back, and visits, you suspect, just about everyone he loves or needs something from: his enraged ex-lover, Jean (Carey Mulligan); his sister (Jeanine Serralles), whose patience is fraying fast; his impossible-to-please father (Stan Carp), who's wasting away in a nursing home; his deceptively abusive, apparently avuncular agent, Mel (Jerry Grayson); and the kind, middle-aged couple (Ethan Phillips and Robin Bartlett) whose comfortably bohemian-ish apartment is the closest thing Llewyn has to a home base.

Over the two days covered in the movie, Llewyn gets two chances at a big break. He performs T Bone Burnett's arrangements beautifully both times, but that doesn't matter: Like so many other genuinely talented people who just never get lucky, he winds up like the movie, back where he began. Hyper-attentive to telling details as it anatomizes a particular place and time, and studded with comically exaggerated characters that never feel less than fully human, Inside Llewyn Davis dances along the line between tribute and (loving) satire, like Philippe Petit between the Twin Towers. Just as you start to snicker at the self-serious young beatniks smoking soulfully in the audience, or at the quartet in fishermen's sweaters who sing nasal Irish folk songs, lingering a little too long on their consonants, here comes Llewyn, seducing us with his soulful sincerity and the spare beauty of the songs that he sings. Even the light is intense when he's on stage, broad rays of blinding white fighting their way through shrouds of cigarette smoke to illuminate his big brown eyes.

Like the folk scene it immerses us in, Inside Llewyn Davis is intrigued by authenticity—what it's worth, what defines it, and the irony of thinking you can find your true self by fitting into the narrow constructs of a soon-to-fade fad. It also has lots of points to score, in a roundabout, masse-shot kind of way, about the charming narcissism of youth and the extent to which professional performers are obsessed with creating and honing their images—like the rest of us, only times 10.

All those points hit home only because the Coens and their collaborators get the look and the feel and the sound of things so right. You sense it in your bones when Llewyn slips off a shoe in a diner to give his sodden sock a chance to dry out, or gets beaten in an alley by a man who emerges from the shadows to hit him like a piledriver. And the album covers the filmmakers created for their fictional musicians are so perfectly evocative of the time and place and sensibility they've resurrecting here that you don't know whether to laugh or cry as they strain to be "real."

Village Voice [Alan Scherstuhl]

You may wonder, as you relish their stridently un-nostalgic re-creation of the Greenwich Village folk scene, just when Joel and Ethan Coen became so intimate with failure. Film after film, they give us bums, schlubs, and the occasional upright cop who can't always eye-of-the-tiger themselves into the triumphs that the leads in splashy Hollywood entertainments are supposed to. While often funny and alive with winning performances, Inside Llewyn Davis finds the brothers in a dark mood, exploring the near-inevitable disappointment that faces artists too sincere to compromise--disappointments that the Coens, to their credit, have made a career out of dodging. The result is their most affecting film since the masterful A Serious Man.

This time around, their ne'er-do-well/punching bag is a talented folksinger Llewyn Davis, played by Oscar Isaac with an intense, only slightly needy charisma, and the strained, sunken eyes of Lenny Bruce. Isaac's singing is strong, and we hear lots of it--traditional tunes in the bluesy, impassioned style of Dave Van Ronk, the Village star from whom Bob Dylan nicked an arrangement of "House of the Rising Sun." There's something simultaneously reverent and aloof about about Davis's treatment of a song like "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me"--he seems not to be singing to the crowd at the Gaslight but to archivists at the Smithsonian. Whether mere music fans feel something like enjoyment seems beside the point.

Of course, principled asceticism is hardly the route to fame and fortune. While he waits for his ship to come in, Davis bounds from couch to couch and borough to borough. The Coens, always adept at bringing audiences up to speed through smartly chosen visual detail, quickly hip us to the particulars of his career, but they leave compelling mysteries: He has an album out, Inside Llewyn Davis, that the label owner--Jerry Grayson, one of those great Coen faces--insists has yielded no royalties. He recorded another a few years before as part of a duo, but though his partner, Mike, is no longer around, the record, meanwhile, is, and Davis schleps a box of remaindered LPs about with him as he trudges along, homeless in winter. The New York he slumps through is gorgeous, each shot like an outtake from the slushed-streets photo shoot that yielded the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

Dylan, though, had Suze Rotolo to cling to. Davis doesn't even have a winter coat, and the one woman in the movie with whom he has any chemistry detests him. (She's Jean, well played by Carey Mulligan as a furious spitfire offstage but a placid harmonist in performance.) Worse, he also lacks that Dylanesque will to create and destroy and then create again--he just wants to be an excellent folksinger, and with each setback he becomes increasingly prickly.

Davis suffers with steely composure for a while. The world's indifference to sincere young artists is always taken, at first, by sincere young artists as a badge of honor. But as his situation becomes more desperate, he gets scrappier, angrier, Isaac's performance growing more moving as the character becomes less likable. A last-ditch roadtrip to Chicago to meet a famed producer played by F. Murray Abraham proves a miserable highlight: The Coens achieve frightening beauty with headlights, windshield, and precipitation. (They're also great with subway rides, fleeing cats, the absurdly cramped hallways that lead to New York apartments, bad dinner parties, and the grim chilliness of winter puddles.) When, ever, does an entertainer finally find that elusive success by fleeing New York (or L.A.) for Chicago? I mean, besides improv comics?

There are comic gifts here, too. The Coens offer up a recording of a first-rate novelty number (produced, like all the excellent music here, by T-Bone Burnett), a quick parody of those strenuously Irish balladeers The Clancy Brothers, some high-weird monologues from John Goodman as a Doc Pomus–like jazzman, and Mulligan has killer insults to expectorate at Isaac. But the film is slight in its narrative--folksinger has a bad week and considers chucking his dreams for life as a sailor--while gently profound in its implications. With surprising compassion, the Coens have torn open not just a long-gone historical moment but also a true and painful and personal one that will forever recur: when someone dedicated to living for art faces the fact that art might not be enough. How many filmmakers who have achieved such success still remember so well what it's like to have none at all?

PopMatters Bill Gibron

It’s a question all performers face at one time or another: would it be worse to have sudden, indescribable fame, only to eventually lose it all, or simply struggle, day in and day out, to achieve a level of notoriety that really never comes? In other words, would you rather be a forgotten former superstar or a half-known never was? Since all celebrity is fleeting, it’s a given that, with rare exception, the former is the typical path. But what about the latter? What about the decent, hardworking journey-man or woman who trots through the avenues of their various mediums of expression, only to locate limited returns and constant rejection. Llewyn Davis (a terrific Oscar Isaac) easily fits into this confused category. At one time in his career, he was on the brink. A previous partnership produced a modest hit. Now, drowning in a circuit that seems poised to pounce on the “next big thing,” our hero is obviously not “it.” After meeting him, it’s not hard to see why.

As yet another brilliant example of the Coen Brothers period expertise, Inside Llewyn Davis captures the near-dawn of the Dylan Greenwich Village folk scene with all the accuracy of a half-remembered dream. It looks the part, and even plays it at time, but this isn’t a movie about how Americana came to define a pre-Beatlemania music scene. Instead, it’s a study in pointless purpose, of how one man with an obvious talent can’t find the forum to advance his career and is, instead, labeled a loser by all around him - even those who choose to help support him. At his best, Llewyn can deliver a traditional tune with utmost conviction and poise. At his worst, he’s a miserable man who can’t do or say anything right, and is actually defiantly proud to wear that label. Even his name seems strange - not quite Lou, not really Llewellyn.

We first meet up with the troubled troubadour as he is having his ass handed to him by a stranger in a back alley. A less than enthusiastic reception for his set has led to more self-loathing, a couple of bruises, and another stint on the coach of his college professor friend Mitch Gorfein (Ethan Phillips). On his way out, he lets the cat escape, turning the musician into a feline foster parent. A trip to his ex-girlfriend Jean Berkey’s (Carey Mulligan) apartment brings about some shocking news - she is pregnant and she’s not sure if its Lleywn’s or her current husband, Jim’s (Justin Timberlake). She needs money for an abortion and want to hide the situation from her spouse.

Hoping to earn a bit of cash, Llewyn tries to find work around town. He gets a session on a nutty novelty song. He then hitchhikes to Chicago. Along the way, he meets up with a rather odd man (John Goodman) who has his own particular bias against folk singers. When an audition in the Windy City for club promoter Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) goes badly, Llewyn heads back to NYC. There, he realizes that nothing he does will be successful, even as it appear the scene is about to skyrocket into the social consciousness.

Overflowing with timeless folk tunes and performances that present then with heartfelt emotion, Inside Llewyn Davis is one of the Coen Brothers more perplexing films. It’s not really a drama since the things that happen to our lead legitimize a sarcastic laugh or two. But it’s not really a comedy either, especially when viewed through the gloom and anger of our main character. Llewyn Davis is classic Coens, but he’s also unfiltered Coens. He doesn’t have Barton Fink’s arrogance, Tom Reagan’s street smarts, H.I. McDunnough’s naive charms, Ulysses Everett McGill’s gift of gab, or the Dude’s laid back life view. Instead, he is all mensch and melancholy, complaining about things he is clearly responsible for but wants to avoiding copping to. His only saving grace is his music, but even that is getting lost in the wave of wannabe artists flooding the Lower East Side.

Isaac, bearded and beleaguered by a mop of dark curly hair, tries his best to bring some humanity to this inhuman ideal, but every step of the way, the Coens countermand this. Take the stuff with the cat(s). At first, we appreciate that Llewyn cares for the critter. But then, as it becomes clear that he’s less an animal lover and more a self-involved a-hole who wants to guarantee a place on the Gorfein’s couch, we see his darker, more disturbing side. This is really emphasized during a distressing scene along the side of the road. The Coens see Llewyn as his own worst enemy, and later, when he’s harassing a poor old country woman with an autoharp, we see just how deep his loathing goes. He’s willing to burn every bridge he has to make sure no one supplants his sense of worthlessness.

There’s some basis for this in the backstory he’s given. Llewyn’s father is apparently the kind of militant Merchant Marine who, even in semi-catatonic retirement, frightens his unsure and sullen son. His sister is equally strident, though she cares about her brother. Jean has reduced Llewyn down to mere dirt, and when you consider that the Coens keep hinting that he somehow had a hand in his late partner’s suicide, you begin to see the cinematic big picture. When he sits in the spotlight spilling his soul out in easy to grasp sing-along stanzas, Llewyn Davis is a pure spirit. He’s channeling the past in a way that’s prescient for the present. But the minute he puts down the guitar and picks up a bottle or a burning cigarette, he’s a horrible human being, a collection of convictions that have little to do with the folk ideal and more to do with his lack of pride and a legitimate living.

As with their last original screenplay, A Serious Man, this is intricate Coens (especially the last minute “twist”) that demands repeat viewings and strict attention. It’s not instantly accessible and reveals its many layers only upon subsequent revisits. Some may consider it a minor effort in the brothers’ legacy, but when you consider the monumental achievements over the entire career, it’s hard to classify anything they do as “lesser.” Instead, Inside Llewyn Davis delves deeply into a somewhat forgotten facet of the 1960s while staying completely true to the Coens’ vision of human frailty and personal difficulty. One can only imagine what Llewyn would be like if he struck the kind of artistic gold that was waiting for Dylan, Seeger, The Kingston Trio, and others from the scene. In his case, he will clearly become a never-was…and perhaps, that’s the way it should be. It’s what Llewyn Davis, the man, deserves.

Meet the Folk Singer Who Inspired 'Inside Llewyn Davis David Browne from Rolling Stone

Read an Essay on the Coen Brothers' Search for Authenticity Robert Christgau from Rolling Stone

First look: The Coens' marvelous folk-music odyssey Andrew O’Hehir at Cannes, May 19, 2013, also seen here: Salon [Andrew O'Hehir]

Cannes Festival's Latest Films Coen's 'Inside Llewyn Davis,' Toback’s 'Seduced and Abandoned,' by Richard Porton from The Daily Beast, May 20, 2013

Inside Llewyn Davis Is the Best Film Ever Made About the Maligned, Misunderstood Folk Revival Jack Hamilton from Slate, December 2013

Dave Van Ronk's Ex-Wife Takes Us Inside Inside Llewyn Davis Terri Thal from The Village Voice, December 13, 2013

Great Soundtrack Aside, 'Inside Llewyn Davis' Hits A Sour Note - Npr David Edelstein from NPR

David Edelstein on 'Inside Llewyn Davis' -- New York Magazine ...

Village Voice [Stephaine Zacharek]

The House Next Door [Jordan Cronk]

SBS Film [Lisa Nesselson]

Anthony Lane: “Inside Llewyn Davis,” “Frozen ... - The New Yorker

The Digital Fix [Nick Chen]

Slant [Elise Nakhnikian]

Review: The Coen Bros do for folk music with Inside Llewyn Davis ... Drew McWeeny from Hit Fix

The Atlantic [Jon Frosch]

Inside Llewyn Davis / The Dissolve Keith Phipps

Inside Llewyn Davis' prickly soul and soulful prick / The Dissolve conversation between Nathan Rabin, Tasha Robinson, and Scott Tobias

Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes from The Playlist

Alt Film Guide [Mark Keizer]

Inside Llewyn Davis Tom Grierson at Cannes from Screendaily, also seen here: Tim Grierson

Collider [Matt Goldberg]

Eric Kohn at indieWIRE

Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from Press Play

David Jenkins at Cannes from Little White Lies

Guy Lodge at Cannes from Hit Fix

Richard Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine

Jordan Hoffman at Cannes from Film.com

Cinema Blend [Kristy Puchko]

Paste Magazine Jonah Flicker

PopMatters Chris Barsanti

theartsdesk.com [Nick Hasted]

Inside Llewyn Davis Is More Depressing Than You Might Think ... Richard Lawson from Vanity Fair

Cannes 2013, Day Four: The Coen brothers return to the festival with a folk-rock flashback Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club

Inside Llewyn Davis - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

NPR [Ian Buckwalter]

Twitch [Ryland Aldrich]

Tom Christie at Cannes from Thompson on Hollywood

Kyle Buchanan Cannes: Justin Timberlake and Adam Driver Recorded a Song Together, You Guys, from The Vulture, May 18, 2013

The Critics Love the Inside Llewyn Davis Cat -- Vulture Anna Silman, December 6, 2013

Matt Singer The 2013 Cannes Review Report: 'Inside Llewyn Davis,' Cannes Twitter reports at Critic Wire from indieWIRE, May 18. 2013

Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]

Daily | Cannes 2013 | Joel and Ethan Coen’s INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS David Hudson at Fandor, May 18, 2013

Interview: Oscar Isaac of Inside Llewyn Davis - Page ... - Village Voice Amy Nicholson interview from The Village Voice, December 4, 2013

Owen Gleiberman at Cannes from Entertainment Weekly

Inside Llewyn Davis: Cannes Review Todd McCarthy at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter

Scott Foundas at Cannes from Variety

Inside Llewyn Davis Keith Uhlich at Cannes from Time Out New York

Inside Llewyn Davis Dave Calhoun at Cannes from Time Out London, also seen here: Dave Calhoun

Cannes 2013: Inside Llewyn Davis - first look review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2013, also seen here: The Guardian [Peter Bradshaw]

Cannes 2013: Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis on song for Palme d'Or Charlotte Higgins at Cannes from The Guardian, May 19, 2013

Daily Telegraph [Robbie Collins]

Irish Times [Donald Clarke]

Isaac turned to musical skills for 'Inside Llewyn Davis' James Reed from The Boston Globe

Inside Llewyn Davis Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Glenn Kenny

Rainy Day Blues: Cannes Report: May 18, 2013 ... - Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres

'Inside Llewyn Davis,' Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen - NYTimes ... A.O. Scott, December 5, 2013

AO Scott's Top Movies of 2013 The New York Times, December 15, 2013

Manohla Dargis's Top Films of 2013 - NYTimes.com December 15, 2013

Manohla Dargis at Cannes from The New York Times, May 20, 2013

Making 'Llewyn Davis' and Crowning Sorrentino The New York Times, December 9, 2013

The Coen Brothers Look Wryly at Their Films - NYTimes.com September 4, 2013

"Inside Llewyn Davis" Tops New York Times List of Year's Best Movies Nonesuch, December 11, 2013

Inside Llewyn Davis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HAIL, CAESAR! C+ 79

USA Great Britain (106 mi) 2016 Universal Pictures [United States]

A zany parody of the Hollywood studio system that features a terrific cast, though many just make brief appearances, but ends up being something of a stinker, where it’s just not that funny, and is not among the Coen’s best efforts, despite a screwball comedy style wreaking havoc with the mayhem that develops behind the scenes. More of a nostalgia piece, where the Coens look back fondly with memories of old Hollywood, a simpler time when studio heads were gods that ruled the earth, whose exponential power was unrivaled and indisputable, where the world turned on the decisions made by these men—at least according to moviegoers and the movie moguls that controlled the Hollywood industry. While they affectionately take us backstage with many tributes to earlier times, we see Scarlett Johansson as DeeAnna Moran dressed in her Esther Williams swimsuit diving off of elaborate Busby Berkeley designed platforms into a pool filled with synchronized swimmers, taking a fantasy approach to the world around us. The postwar Hollywood era of 1951 was filled with behind-the-scenes recriminations, with the Red Scare and the Hollywood blacklist, where the industry was uncovering communists from under every rock and the paranoia of the Cold War was in full force. Into this insulated, self-contained yet totalitarian system is an idealized fictional hero, Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the head of production for Capitol pictures, a guy known as a fixer for all manner of things that could and do go wrong. He’s the guy that wanders from set to set, hailed by all the actors, extras and crew as a swell guy, a kind of father figure that they can turn to for help or commiserate with over a drink after hours, where his job never ends, as he’s busy 24 hours a day solving the various problems of the industry, like heading off scandals before they become public. Hovering around the studio like locusts during a plague are rival gossip columnists Thora and Thessaly Thacker (both played by Tilda Swinton), twin sisters that loath one other, think they are world renowned investigative reporters, and would stoop to any lengths to get the dirt before the other. In this case, word has it that unmarried DeeAnna has become pregnant, though the humor is the crude street language coming out of her mouth in a thick Brooklyn accent, where her scintillating sensuality in water is undercut by a chain-smoking, foul-mouthed dame straight out of a gangster picture. Mannix, with his secretary Natalie (Heather Goldenhersh) always in tow close behind, clipboard in hand, spends the rest of the film trying to keep this story under wraps.

While he greases the palms of afterhours policemen for looking the other way, Mannix rescues his damsels in distress, pulling them out of compromising situations before word gets out, then rearranging the facts like a Hollywood script to fly under the radar, allowing his productions to stay on schedule with as few interruptions as possible. Simultaneous to these incidents, he meets on the sly in some unnamed Chinese restaurant to discuss the latest offer from Lockheed Corporation for an executive position that would allow him to sit pretty for the rest of his career, where he could live a country club lifestyle of ease without all the headaches associated with running a studio. Spending a moment or two at breakfast with his wife (Alison Pill) and kids, who barely know what he does for a living, he’s out the door and back on the job. In a tribute to Hollywood epics like QUO VADIS (1951) and BEN-HUR (1959), the studio has all their money behind a mammoth sword and sandals spectacle set in ancient Rome called HAIL, CAESAR! A TALE OF CHRIST, starring George Clooney as Baird Whitlock, the face of the studio, playing a Roman general who begins to see the light while standing below Christ at his crucifixion. Slipped a mickey into his drink during a shot by one of the extras, he passes out stepping out of his trailer and is quickly abducted, whisked off to some remote oceanside villa down the coast. Shortly afterwards Mannix receives a ransom note from a Marxist group calling themselves “The Future” claiming they’ve got his star, demanding $100,000 for his release. Pulling the money out of petty cash, stuffing it into a briefcase, he awaits further instructions. When Thora arrives ready to release her incendiary story that will light all of Hollywood on fire, he’s happily surprised to discover she knows nothing about the kidnapping, that instead she’s dragging up old rumors about how one of the studio stars slept his way into stardom. Enter Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), revising one of those all-male dance numbers from the Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra sailor comedies like ANCHORS AWAY (1945) or ON THE TOWN (1949), embodying everything the rumor suggests, as does the director in question, the urbane director of drawing room comedies of manner, Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes), who may as well be wearing a silk Hugh Hefner smoking jacket on the set, as he exudes elegance, savoir faire, and sophisticated sleaze, as if he’s slept with every young boy on the set.

Not to be forgotten is rising star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), a singing cowboy in the manner of a young Roy Rogers or Gene Autry, who may be the studio hope of the future, whose bronco-buster accent is part of his boyish charm. Mannix, however, has him playing a male romantic role in one of Laurentz’s lurid melodramas, hair slicked back and dressed in a suit, where he has trouble saying a single line without that Western slur. Laurentz works with him personally, taking the time to rehearse his entry line, but he remains tongue-tied, where he can’t even remember how to pronounce the director’s name properly. Due to their evident dismay, little by little they whittle his lines down, so when we see the finished product, it’s actually one of the few jokes that works in the film. Later we see him go out on a studio-sponsored date for his movie premiere with Carlotta Valdez, played by Venezuelan actress Veronica Osorio in an exotic Carmen Miranda-style, where they’re sure to draw attention. As they go party hopping afterwards, Doyle recognizes the belt Mannix borrowed from him to wrap around the suitcase with all the money. So on a hunch, he follows the suitcase. Simultaneous to this, the nearly unrecognizable Francis McDormand as film editor C.C. Calhoun also has a brief but memorable scene, cigarette in hand, where she suffers a Buster Keaton moment in the editing room. Meanwhile, Whitlock wakes up and is surrounded by an eclectic group of Marxists all claiming the Hollywood machine is only good for reinforcing its own capitalistic interests, namely making money for all the executives in Hollywood, with little regard for anything else, hoping that with his kidnapping they can coerce the industry to make movies with a skewed poltical content that is more working class friendly. To suggest the industry would capitulate in an era of McCarthyism, which was a right-wing wet dream, is outlandishly naïve, as is much of the rest of the film, and while it veers into a level of farce, a paranoid fever-dream where perhaps the industry’s worst fears are imagined, it doesn’t really go anywhere, feels overly slight, and never rises to the level it seeks. Instead of nonstop hilarity, which is the stamp of screwball comedy, there are instead only occasional outbursts of laughter, where most of the sequences die a slow death that simply chokes the life out of the film. Lockheed tries to lure Mannix with insider pictures of the A-bomb explosion, suggesting this is the power of the industry, but it all just goes up in smoke without really generating much of an impact. While it features a great cast, most all of whom are terrific, the large majority appear in brief cameo roles, where they barely register a dent in the overall effect. It turns out to be a film that sounds funnier than it is, as it’s a clever set-up, but we keep waiting for a punch line that never comes.

Six Sweet Hours of Arabian Nights, and Other News Dan Piepenbring from The Paris Review

The Coen brothers are back with Hail, Caesar!, which, as you’ve probably heard, is about a brutish studio fixer in the golden age of Hollywood. Richard Brody sees it as a meditation on faith: “The Coen brothers are into belief systems—big and seemingly backward ideas that overcome contradictions with a leap of faith—and Hail, Caesar! is full of them … The Coens see the absurdity and the narrowness in the grandeur of the Hollywood mythology on which they were raised. Movies are different now because the people who make them don’t—and can’t—exercise the same sort of plenipotentiary power; because studio heads are no longer godlike; because studios as such, with their closed complexes of soundstages and paternalistic control over actors’ lives, no longer exist. Yet the Coens look back upon those movies with a specific nostalgia for a lost faith. The religion that the Coens grew up with wasn’t Christianity, but it was the American religion—Hollywood.”

How Hail, Caesar! handles Hollywood history Kyle Westphal from The Chicago Reader

Poor Hail, Caesar! The latest Coen Brothers film has had a tepid response from critics and its box office returns have been disappointing so far. The survey firm Cinemascore, typically generous to films, determined that opening-night audiences rated Hail, Caesar! a "C-"—dregs usually reserved for artsy action movies like Haywire or Killing Them Softly that tend to alienate their core audience. What accounts for this lukewarm reception?

Not since the Coens' last feature, Inside Llewyn Davis, has there been an American film that presumes so much foreknowledge on the part of the audience. Hail, Caesar! might be a quotidian Coen brothers comedy for general audiences, but it's catnip for connoisseurs of Hollywood history and the American left.

As with Inside Llewyn Davis, attention to detail is of secondary, if any, concern to the Coens; instead, major incidents and people have been refracted through the historical record so that they're tilted sideways and upside down. The characters simultaneously do and do not function as stand-ins for Dave Van Ronk, Albert Grossman, Phil Ochs, Eddie Mannix, or Hedda Hopper—they're historical figures inextricably bound up with the tall tales surrounding them. I'd argue that the liberties the Coens take with blacklist-era Hollywood in Hail, Caesar! could come only from filmmakers thoroughly steeped in its history. (Spoilers follow.)

The Future, the group of communist screenwriters who meet at a luxury beachfront property to discuss dialectics and smuggle political content into Hollywood movies, has some basis in fact. Such meetings were organized by the screenwriter John Howard Lawson, who often admonished his fellow writers for a lack of ideological commitment. (One filmmaker who cracked under the pressure, Elia Kazan, later cited Lawson's scathing critiques as one reason he left the Communist Party.)

Pinko song-and-dance man Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) is obviously a riff on Gene Kelly—a figure whose own political activity demonstrates the subtle ideological gradation of the era. Neither Kelly nor his wife, Betsy Blair, were ever members of the Communist Party, but both served as emissaries to progressive Hollywood. (Blair's party application was rejected in part because her stature as the wife of a prominent Hollywood liberal made her more useful as an outsider who could raise money for communist causes like the Henry Wallace presidential campaign or the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee.) It was Kelly who spoke out against The House Un-American Activities Committee under the guise of the Committee for the First Amendment, but it was Blair who was ultimately blacklisted after appearing publicly with prominent communists Gale Sondergaard and Lloyd Gough.

When Blair petitioned MGM boss Louis B. Mayer to reinstate her, she was met with a torrent of paternalistic claptrap. "I had to speak to Spence [Tracy] and Kate [Hepburn], too," lamented Mayer. "What's wrong with you people? This is the greatest country in the world." "It went on and on," recalled Blair, "with him expounding on marriage and life and pointing to photographs of him with the pope, with Roosevelt, with the king of England."

There's a similar scene in Hail, Caesar! where studio fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) upbraids witless hunk Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) for getting seduced by the Reds. The "communist dupe"—the actor who unwittingly supports the Communist Party through an innocuous front group or simply doesn't understand the implications of political revolution—appears again and again during the HUAC era, with prominent stars repeatedly disclaiming their own intelligence and political acumen. The most prominent case is probably that of Humphrey Bogart, who publicly recanted his own role in organizing a Committee for the First Amendment rally in a letter to the New York Daily Mirror: "The trip was ill-advised, even foolish, I am very ready to admit. At the time it seemed the thing to do. I have absolutely no use for Communism nor for anyone who serves that philosophy. I am an American. And very likely, like a good many of the rest of you, sometimes a foolish and impetuous American."

Though these events occurred more than six decades ago, the political implications of the blacklist are still contested. Right-wing scholars have attempted to rehabilitate HUAC, charging Hollywood with complicity in a communist conspiracy. Because Hail, Caesar! revolves around such a conspiracy, some observers have complained that it validates or excuses the blacklist. I'm sympathetic to that claim, but ultimately the film is so studied, so immersed in the tropes that it tweaks, that I think something else is going on here. Hail, Caesar! is a fever dream of the Red-baiting right, an all-too-literal imagining of a commie nightmare that quickly renders those fears absurd. Not even HUAC believed that Hollywood's elite screenwriters could make contact with a Soviet submarine off the coast of Malibu, as happens toward the end of Hail, Caesar! For the Coens, the blacklist was a tragedy, but also a joke.

Deep Focus: Hail, Caesar! - Film Comment Michael Sragow, February 4, 2016

Laughs arrive in Hail, Caesar! like the periodic whoosh of intermittent wipers. Whenever hazy ideas and half-fermented humor fog up the screen, a blast of hilarity whisks them away. But as anyone stuck on a freeway during a rainstorm can testify, that on-and-off rhythm can get old quickly during an hour-and-45-minute ride. The Coen Brothers’ surprisingly perfunctory burlesque of Hollywood takes place in the early 1950s, when the movies had already lost regular customers to television and studios were no longer formidable trusts. As the Coens guide us through a fictional dream factory, “Capitol Pictures” (also featured in their condescending and morose Barton Fink), nostalgic fantasy and frivolous satire create a peculiar glow, then cancel each other out.

This movie frequently resembles a mash-up of second-tier Mel Brooks spoofs. The action flits in and out of Capitol’s alleys and corridors and onto the sets of the singing cowboy Western Lazy Ol’ Moon, the sailors’ shore-leave musical No Dames, the urbane farce Merrily We Dance, an aquatic spectacle echoing Neptune’s Daughter, and the Roman epic Hail, Caesar!

It’s as if the Coens were desperately trying to fill out a thin premise—the kidnapping of Capitol’s biggest star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), while he’s playing a Roman officer in Hail, Caesar!—with every fond notion or parody they hatched watching Golden Age movies on TV. Too often, though, they simply re-create bits and pieces of outlandish genres and do them just a tad more broadly, hoping exaggeration alone would do the trick.

Channing Tatum has mastered the athletic leaps and lifts he needs to be persuasive as Burt Gurney, Capitol’s version of Gene Kelly. But the choice moments in his tap dance—the high points of the movie—devolve into disposable homoerotic jokes, like framing Gurney’s head above the crotch and between the legs of an upside-down male partner. And the Coen Brothers’ mock Esther Williams musical pales before the Busby Berkeley–choreographed insanity of the real thing. Scarlett Johansson is sensational as Capitol’s earthy, pregnant, currently unmarried swimsuit queen. It’s too bad that her role peaks when she mouths double-entendres to Jonah Hill as the studio’s most reliable go-to guy—or fall guy.

The movie’s unlikely hero is a fictional, idealized version of Eddie Mannix, the top executive troubleshooter at MGM who coddled and disciplined studio talents, negotiated with unions, and, with the help of publicity chief Howard Strickling, controlled celebrity scandals. The real Mannix, a Jersey boy who started at MGM as a bodyguard for its New York–based president, Nick Schenck, was tough, connected, hard-drinking, twice-married, and much-bedded. “Eddie had the manners of a police chief,” screenwriter Millard Kaufman recalled, “superficially jovial, but turn around and he could put a bullet in your ass. He was phenomenal in making the most of any situation.”

Allen Coulter’s Hollywoodland (06) presented Mannix as a man who was conceivably harsh enough to order the murder of George Reeves (TV’s Superman) at the request of his second wife Toni, who had been Reeves’s longtime mistress. (It’s one of several theories that Hollywoodland puts forward to account for Reeves’s gunshot death, officially ruled a suicide.) Nothing salacious sticks to Mannix in Hail, Caesar! The Coens transform him into a mid-century paragon—devoted husband and father, devout Roman Catholic, and 24-hour-a-day crusader for Capitol Studios and his unseen boss Nick Schenck. Josh Brolin plays Mannix with gravelly aplomb. Though he’s the straight man for the rest of the movie, he doesn’t settle for deadpan. He assumes a dogged, heightened normality that gives off an amiable buzz as he performs outlandish tasks. These include ordering a cultivated director (Ralph Fiennes) to accept a cowboy star (Alden Ehrenreich) as the lead in a drawing-room comedy and asking a multi-faith group of religious leaders to sign off on the script for Hail, Caesar!—a movie that looks like Quo Vadis but plays like Ben-Hur and carries the same subtitle: “A Tale of the Christ.”

By now, the Coen Brothers are reflexively called “quirky.” The only perverse thing about this movie, though, is that it salutes a company man. Brolin has told interviewers that the Coens’ Hail, Caesar!, not Capitol Pictures’, is the real tale of the Christ, with Mannix as Christ and Schenck as the unseen God-the-Father who commands him. (Viewing Schenck as the Old Testament deity makes him the one Jewish force in the movie.) Even so, this Christ doesn’t preach turning cheeks, but slapping them. With his open hand Mannix hits starlets as small as Gloria DeLamour (Natasha Bassett), for posing for French postcards, and stars as big as Clooney’s Whitlock—a cross between Clark Gable and Robert Taylor—for disrespecting Schenck. To my eyes, Mannix is more like the converse of another favorite Coen character, the Wizard of Oz. No one thinks he’s a wizard, but he is. Without anyone recognizing his sorcery, he forces compromises on filmmakers that work like magic, and he cajoles his stars into relationships that make them seem more virtuous or glamorous.

How wondrous strange! The Coen Brothers lionize a manipulative executive while depicting artists and entertainers as if they were children who need to be kept in line. Is that how they see themselves, or their peers? Even the Hollywood Communists are juvenile, cartoon narcissists. They’re convinced that the capitalist (or Capitolist) system is exploiting them, though it pays them lavishly, and they’re inordinately proud that they’ve smuggled Marxist messages (or so they think) into little-guy-against-the-system movies. The Coens’ irreverence can be refreshing: the Communist study group is periodically droll, especially when David Krumholtz spews out an anti-capitalist epithet like “parasite.” (It’s ludicrously flagrant, even for a travesty like this one, that an academic named Professor Marcuse, as in Herbert, advocates revolutionary action.) But the Coens are too proud of this kind of silliness. Godard called the generation he chronicled in Masculin Feminin “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” In this cartoon mode, the Coens are the children of Marshall McLuhan and Dr. Pepper. They confuse media-saturated frivolity with wild, creative individualism. Too frequently, all they achieve is an unleavened levity.

The Coens and their production team, including master cinematographer Roger Deakins, meticulously reconstruct the look of Quo Vadis. But the kidnap farce they come up with doesn’t equal the real movie’s tragicomic preproduction story. When John Huston fought with Louis B. Mayer about his vision for Quo Vadis, he wasn’t merely being temperamental. Huston, as he wrote in his memoir, An Open Book, wanted to portray “Nero and his fanatical determination to eliminate the Christians in much the same manner as his historic counterpart and fellow madman, Adolf Hitler, tried to destroy the Jews two thousand years later.” Of course, Mervyn LeRoy, not Huston, ended up making Quo Vadis in the manner of Hail, Caesar! (“A dreadful spectacle,” Huston muttered.) Huston’s conflict with Mayer has greater satirical potential than any argument that finds its way into the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! Huston described Mannix as “a bull of a man known for his terrible rages,” then commented, insultingly, he “was known as the minister without portfolio—a description [Mannix] never understood.” The Coens ignore independent-minded filmmakers like Huston and instead bow down to Mannix. Yet the movies they quote as they flesh out Mannix’s saga—classics like Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep and Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest—were made by maverick auteurs, not studio hacks.

The Coens keep a clownish distance from their material. Their take on Golden Age Hollywood—the era that propelled Neal Gabler to write “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood”—turns out to be their most deracinated movie. In reality, Jewish studio heads like Mayer vetted Biblical movies with Christian authorities partly because the moguls feared the reaction of censors who already thought they were, in the words of Production Code chief Joseph Breen, “probably, the scum of the earth.” But in the Coens’ movie, Judaism and anti-Semitism aren’t an issue. All we see is the religion-obsessed Catholic, Mannix, meeting with Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish clergymen. It’s a funny colloquy—Mannix expects notes on Jesus, but the Eastern Orthodox priest immediately suggests strengthening the chariot race. The rabbi declares that his religion forbids any visual representation of “the godhead,” then decides it doesn’t matter because Jews don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus anyway. (The Coens love the “godhead” gag so much that they play it again in the final credits.) But the scene doesn’t dig any deeper than many jokes that begin, “A priest, a rabbi, and a pastor walk into a bar….”

The moviegoing kids that live within the sardonic hides of the Coen Brothers must enjoy the clever simplifications and tidiness of high-end studio product from the ’30s and ’40s. That’s what they emulate—disastrously, I think—in their reductive screenplays for Unbroken and especially Bridge of Spies, with its repeated references to a parable about an indomitable man, or “standing man,” and its strained comic catchphrase, “Would it help?” (“Aren’t you worried?” “Would it help?”). In Hail, Caesar! the Coens laud Mannix’s just-get-the-job done ethos and creative short-cuts as if they really were means to artistic ends. It’s an earthbound whimsy, and not even the Coens can make it float.

In this cockeyed yet conventional vision, the simplest characters come off best. Frances McDormand is brilliant in her one-scene role as a film editor whose dedication is almost suicidal. (She’s like a latter-day Dickensian caricature.) Tilda Swinton brings glittering high style to the low antics of twin sisters who are also rabid, rival gossip-hounds. Fiennes is uproariously subtle as a British director consumed by sophisticated craft—and Ehrenreich tops him as the earnest singing cowboy who becomes his reluctant drawing-room star. Ehrenreich is witty enough to emphasize the razor-sharp instincts and wiliness of his Wild West innocent, as well as his clumsiness. He also clicks with Veronica Osorio, who is charming as a youthful Carmen Miranda type—they’re a match made in Pop heaven. Only Clooney is disappointing: his comic attitude is forced as Whitlock, a born true believer just as willing to spout Marxist dogma off-screen as he is to voice Christian faith onscreen.

Even when it’s pleasant to watch, Hail, Caesar! is forgettable. I guess it’s hard to make a work of genius when you set out to genuflect before “the genius of the system.”

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The Coen brothers' Hail, Caesar reviewed. - Slate David Ehrlich, February 3, 2016

“Hail, Caesar!”: The Coens' hilarious yarn of '50s ... - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, February 3, 2016

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Hail, Caesar! is an overcrowded ode to Old Hollywood | The Verge Tasha Robinson

Sight & Sound [J.M. Tyree and Ben Walters] March 14, 2016

Movie Review: Hail, Caesar! -- Vulture David Edelstein

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Hey Hey In The Hayloft: The Preston Sturges Whirl Of “Hail ... Ray Pride from New City

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Hail, Caesar! It's screwball comedy – who cares what really happened ... Alex von Tunzelmann from The Guardian

Hail, Caesar! review – George Clooney bigger ... - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

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Hail, Caesar! - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hail, Caesar! Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Glenn Kenny

New York Times [Manohla Dargis] also seen here: Review: In 'Hail, Caesar!' the Coens Revisit Old Hollywood - The New ...

Coffey, Scott

ADULT WORLD C+ 77

USA (97 mi) 2013

Another film about the Me Generation, the children of privilege, an entire generation that feels something is owed to them simply because they think they deserve it, not because they’ve done anything to earn it. Here we see a whiny Emma Roberts as Amy, a fiercely driven young girl (there isn’t an ounce of grown up woman about her) just out of college who is so positive she has the makings of a poet that she invests everything she has, much to her parent’s dismay, in sending off packages of poems to publishers, and then feels disappointed when her parents can’t afford to subsidize her poetry career anymore. In her eyes, it’s an investment in her future, while her parents think she ought to go out and get a real job. A girl that sleeps with a poster of Sylvia Plath over her bed, in the opening scene, she replicates Plath’s suicide, plotting out exactly how she would asphyxiate herself from her gas oven, actually going through the motions, yet the tone of the film is an absurd comedy, so right off the bat we realize this is going for demented territory. The film backtracks one year earlier when she’s in bed with a sleazeball about to have sex with a guy who’s obviously only interested in himself, yet tells her all the things he thinks a girl wants to hear, only to discover a film crew hiding in the closet shooting the whole thing, eventually running out of there in a state of undress and abject humiliation. A closer inspection reveals Amy is a broken record, a walking advertisement for herself, continually spewing the same mantra of how it’s only a matter of time before she gets published, how she’s so close and on the verge, reminding everyone how her career is about to take off, yet at present, she has nothing to show for it. Driven to desperation, she relies upon fate, and a Help Wanted sign in a window, where she walks in brimming with confidence and is all smiles until she realizes it’s an adult porn store, running out in a state of panic and hysteria, as if she’d been attacked by a swarm of killer bees. Apparently, after the unpleasant incident, she still has a near psychotic aversion to sex.

With her tail between her legs, she sheepishly returns back to the store, discovering it’s run by an old couple still madly in love (Cloris Leachman and John Cullum), where they’re not the least bit ashamed to use the names of sex toys and adult store vernacular in completed sentences, something she finds terrifying and revolting at the same time, so she’s a perfect fit for the store. The store manager, Evan Peters as Alex, couldn’t be more friendly and helpful at every turn (and is the real life fiancé of Emma Roberts), yet he’s zeroville in her eyes, as she’s only slumming before the day of the big publishing event. Roberts appears schooled in the Rosanna Arquette style of comedy, appearing to be one and the same at times, except she’s younger, more girlish, more of an airhead, despite her repeated claims that she was a straight A student, and much more aggravating. While she’s cute and has a flair for humor, her wretched need to put herself first all the time in a continuous “look at me” syndrome reveals the surface level of superficiality where she operates, never having a reflective moment, which makes the premise of being a writer so absurdly ridiculous. Yet she perseveres, butting to the front of the line of a book signing of her chosen poet du jour, Rat Billings (John Cusack), something of a washed up has been, a former punk poet who is in town to teach a course at the local university. While he quickly escapes her outright stalking maneuvers, she finds out where he lives and plants herself on his doorstep, demanding that he read some of her poetry and offer criticism poet to poet. Her credentials are that she “really feels a lot” and “wants to speak for all the people that suffer.” Ingratiating herself to him, she’s willing to provide unpaid maid service while calling herself a protégé to her poet mentor. While nobody really buys any of this, yet she continues to delude herself in a mad rush of youthful exhilaration that she identifies as budding genius.

Cusack channels Bill Murray in his downbeat sarcasm, underplaying every scene, hoping for a moment of sanity in the enveloping madness, with Alex continually gushing that his work “speaks to an entire generation,” to which he can only answer “No, no it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean anything.” While initially he playfully and somewhat scornfully calls her “Suburbia,” by the end he’s describing her as “this generation’s Black Plague,” where he’s forced to remind her “not everyone is talented.” In a movie like this, the focus would have to be on a character named Rat, where Cusack does all he can with the role, much of which seems to resemble himself, as if he’s used to fending off the adulation of complete strangers who are positively bonkers in their outright expressed enthusiasm. The film throws in handfuls of secondary characters, mostly for comic relief, but all of them are mere stops on the road of her meandering journey to success and fame. While much of this resembles the more impressive work of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001) or David Chase’s Not Fade Away (2012), this film doesn’t belong in the same category, as it’s more of a cheap, comedic imitator, a pretender to something it’s not, which is social relevancy. Other than the obvious, where the film attempts to comment upon the privileged and the entitled, the film shows little insight, where writers like Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (2011) or Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012) have their pulse on middle class disillusionment, using more realistic characters to reflect the unique problems dealing with the emptiness and boredom. This film has a few laughs and a few comic barbs, but Emma Roberts is such a loathsome, self-centered character that it’s easier to laugh at her rather than identify with her and the culture she represents, suggesting that tonally the director has mostly missed the mark, unless he simply wanted to make a goofy movie that will ultimately be forgettable.

ADULT WORLD Facets Mult Media

Amy is naïve, awkward and anxious to get her poetry career off of the ground in a post-grad existence that is going nowhere. Living with her parents in a seemingly bland upstate New York town and desperate for income, she begrudgingly accepts a job at Adult World, the local, wood-paneled sex shop. Owned by a frisky elderly couple and staffed by diva transvestite Rubio and local boy Alex, Amy balances her work among the pornography and sex toys by fiercely pursuing a surefire kick start for her success: a mentorship with reclusive (as well as crusty and alcoholic) writer Rat Billings, played by a hilarious John Cusack. Slowly, Amy’s world begins to meld with that of her co-workers, most affectingly as she and Alex strike up a flirty relationship.

Adult World takes its audience on a charming, nostalgic ride back to a time in young adulthood when you think you have all of the answers to a happy existence. Headstrong and defiant, Amy stumbles through her new life, surprised to find that not only can the people you trust break your heart but, more importantly, that inspiration and support can be found in the most improbable places as vibrators and confessional poetry collide in this sexy comedy.

TimeOut Chicago Keith Uhlich

Budding poet and cloistered suburbanite Amy (Emma Roberts) is about to go the way of her idol Sylvia Plath, though death by gas oven doesn’t seem quite right. Maybe suffocation by plastic bag will do. What could possibly have led our heroine to this terrible state? Scott Coffey’s refreshingly sharp-edged (except when it isn’t) black comedy quickly flashes back a year to the time when our protagonist, fresh out of college and $90,000 in student-loan debt, started pursuing a career in verse.

She has her sights set on a mentor, the washed-up Rat Billings (a brilliantly smug John Cusack), but cash isn’t exactly flowing in. Thank heavens for that help wanted sign in an adult-video store window, wherein Amy—after fending off a vibrator-in-the-face greeting from property owner Cloris Leachman—will learn some much-needed life lessons from adorable manager Alex (Evan Peters).

The story beats are as familiar as they come, and there are a few halfhearted stabs at redeeming Roberts’s clueless character when it would have been better to push her feeble-mindedness to Anna Faris–esque extremes. Coffey still keeps things moving at a fleet pace and gets consistently good work out of his performers, especially Armando Riesco as Amy’s transgender bestie who hilariously refuses to get pulled into the privileged girl’s discombobulated orbit.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

An often-exquisite mess, Scott Coffey’s “Adult World” capably captures the pretensions and confusions of a certain age, in both fond and satirical fashion. Punchy and screwloose, his small satire follows Emma Roberts as virginal twenty-two-year-old college student Amy Anderson, modeling herself after Sylvia Plath, who seeks employment at a beat-down adult bookstore in Syracuse, while pursuing a mentor in the form of a beat-up punk poet played by John Cusack. “You can’t be a wunderkind after twenty-two,” Amy frets aloud.“Adult World” goes all kinds of satisfying places and the lowercase niceties begin with knowing how to use Emma Roberts’ eyes, and their bright, darting gaze, which can flick from irritation to consternation to fury just like one-two-three. Playing the small hurts and large hopes of Amy, she’s tactile and sensitive to touch, a clumsy grownup-in-progress. Cusack plays middle-aged, way-down-on-his-luck unreformed punk poet Rat Billings with rare comic knowingness, at least in his recent roles. I’m fond of Cusack’s commedia dell’arte turn as Richard Nixon in “The Butler,” but while comic, with Rat, he’s captured the dull bruise of a man who’s all but given up, and all but been given up on by society. In one sweet flicker, “Do I look like a doodler?” Rat says to Amy, thinking he’s trilling with condescension, but coming off as the unfinished child he remains, superior but still incomplete. The rough edges of the script, weirdly, add to the charm. The characters say clever things, but also dumb ones, and also horrifying awful and terrifying and true ones. (Amy is extravagant in her self-regard: she’s an ass, but Coffey and Roberts make her a complex one.) Coffey and his cinematographer James Laxton have described their approach to shooting in a small city (on digital with 1970s lenses) as influenced by movies like “Wonder Boys,” “Harold and Maude” and “Margot at the Wedding,” and “Adult World” wears that inspiration lightly and well. On the street and in interiors, “Adult World” feels fresh on screen, but familiar in terms of walking down a small-town street and up stairs into someone’s place. It’s one of the unsung gifts of the shifts in filmmaking technology: so many streets can be traveled with ease in the years and movies to come. With Cloris Leachman, Evan Peters, Armando Riesco. 93m.

In Review Online [Drew Hunt]

In the opening scene of Adult World, aimless college grad Amy (Emma Roberts), after scrawling “To be published posthumously” on a disheveled manuscript, sets about finding the ideal way to kill herself, weighing her options in the bored, disinterested manner of someone picking out breakfast cereal at a grocery store. It might be funny if suicide wasn’t utterly serious, but such a dichotomy seems lost on director Scott Coffey. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the film unfolds in similar fashion. Too self-serious for comedy, too absurd for drama, Adult World spends its 90 minutes in a sort of generic purgatory, reasserting and reorganizing its conflicting moods with little sense of structure or pacing.

Flashing back a year, we see how Amy arrived at this sorry state. An aspiring poet, she’s stuck in a typical post-college rut, jobless yet convinced of her own genius, spending what little money she has on literary submissions that are ultimately rejected. She reluctantly takes a job at an adult bookstore, where she meets all sorts of kooky characters—among them a woefully caricatured trans woman, played with stereotypical gusto by Armando Riesco—and befriends her favorite writer, the brooding Rat Billings (John Cusack). The film unfolds in a series of contrived life lessons for our wayward heroine, and writer Andy Cochran conceives supercilious solutions for each of her various non-problems.

Though her plight is apparently enough to warrant suicide, Coffey is determined to undermine the gravity of the situation by constantly reminding us that Adult World is actually a comedy. He aims for cheap laughs at the expense of the aforementioned trans character, and the porn-store milieu offers opportunities for plenty of dick jokes (“What’s a ‘sticky video return policy?’ ” Amy, a virgin, asks with genuine curiosity), exactly none of them funny. Before long, any discernible reason to care about these characters, themes or situations is all but absent; by the time we arrive back at the opening scene, a lack of stakes turns the whole thing into an awkward charade.

Coffey bills the film as a satire, and though it occasionally pokes holes in poetic language (the characters are prone to such paradoxical quips as “You’re dumb, but you’re not stupid,” which may or may not signify critique), Adult World isn’t in the business of ridicule. If anything, the film is a sort of half-satire of the career of John Cusack, who, in films as recent as High Fidelity (1999), played the same self-pitying, faux-intellectual, overconfident naïf as Amy. It’s curious, and even a bit exhilarating, to see him play against type. Billings is the sort of guy who would rail against Cusack’s most notable characters; he’d take Say Anything’s Lloyd Dobler by the collar and tell him to grow a pair, that life was about heartbreak and pain, that he should put down the boom box and let it go. This is, in fact, basically what he tells Amy, although he also hints that she should take care of that weird virginity thing, lest she go through life a square.

Admittedly, the curmudgeonly, gloomy old-timer is as much a cliche as the bitter post-adolescent, but what else should we expect from Cusack at this stage in his career? He occupies the role naturally, and Coffey is well-tuned to his quirks, so much so that he quickly becomes the least uninteresting stock character in a movie filled with nothing but stock characters—and stock themes, and stock plots and so forth.

Acidemic Journal of Film and Media [Erich Kuersten]

Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

Adult World Review: Emma Roberts' Sexy Post ... - Pajiba Amanda Mae Meyncke

Movie Mezzanine [Lauren Wilford]

Think You're Special? See Adult World | Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek

Review: 'Adult World' - Film.com Jenni Miller

The House Next Door [Zeba Blay]

Adult World | Film Review | Spectrum Culture Katherine Springer

The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]

Film Racket [Jesse Hassenger]

The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo

1NFLUX Magazine [Jason Howard]

Tribeca 2013 Review: ADULT WORLD, An ... - Twitch Christopher Bourne

[Tribeca Review] Adult World - The Film Stage John Fink

Adult World - Film School Rejects Kate Erbland

Film Journal Intl David Noh

1NFLUX Magazine [Rob Rector]

Adult World: Tribeca Review - The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck

Variety Ronnie Scheib

The Oregonian [Jamie S. Rich]

Los Angeles Times Barry Goldstein

Chicago Sun-Times Bruce Ingram

New York Times Stephen Holden

Cogitore, Clément

THE WAKHAN FRONT (Ni le ciel, ni la terre)

France (99 mi) 2015

Cannes 2015 – The Wakhan Front (Clément Cogitore) Marc van de Klashorst from The International Cinephile Society

The only French film in the Critics’ Week competition, war drama The Wakhan Front focuses on a small squad of French soldiers assigned to control a remote valley in the Wakhan Corridor in Northern Afghanistan. Captain Antarès Bonassieu (Jérémie Renier) and his men see very little action, other than dealing with the slightly hostile villagers that they have to protect. One night, however, two of the men stationed in an outpost outside of the camp disappear without a trace. This gets Bonassieu and the rest of the men on edge, and when a third man vanishes as well, the captain starts to slowly unravel. When a local warlord named Sultan shows up demanding the return of missing fighters from his side, it is clear that mysterious forces are at work. Will Bonassieu be able to hold things together, or go totally off the deep end?

The Wakhan Front is a slow-burn war thriller that takes its time to cook up the mystery. Still, built on a strong performance by Renier (by far the biggest name in the cast), the little drops of information and plot dropped in by director Clément Cogitore in his feature debut manage to hold the audience’s interest for well over an hour of its running time. The problem is that Cogitore himself doesn’t seem to know what happened to the missing soldiers when he tries to wrap up the proceedings and solve the mystery. A link to a Qur’an verse is thrown in for good measure, and for a while that seems to be the right path, if somewhat implausible. This thread is then suddenly abandoned to create an even bigger mess, making for a very confusing and unsatisfactory ending of the film.

And it’s a shame, because for a good while The Wakhan Front is an enjoyable film, with strong performances and powerful cinematography that ups the tension through frequent use of night-vision camera work. Cogitore shows that he can direct an action sequence and hold an audience. It’s just the screenplay that fails him in the last hour, a screenplay Cogitore himself was also co-responsible for, so he takes part of the blame. The core of the story is Bonassieu slowly going mad as the situation spins out of control, but it would be nice to have an idea what is driving the action. A little ambiguity never hurts, but neither does a little bit of grounding. Nor is it very believable that a trained soldier like Bonassieu obviously is would let himself be taken to such a point. Applying logic when the going gets tough certainly isn’t his strong suit, and one has to wonder how he made it to the rank of captain.

Ultimately, The Wakhan Front is a film that has much promise, but eventually fails to reach a satisfying end. A promising start too for the director, but perhaps next time he should let somebody else write the script.

'The Wakhan Front': Review - Screen Daily Jonathan Romney

You’ve never seen a war film quite like The Wakhan Front. A strange mixture of the military, the metaphysical and the downright mysterious, this debut feature by French director Clément Cogitore has a highly suggestive philosophical agenda, but at the same time functions as a gripping, subtly eerie drama which keeps you guessing even while it maintains its supernatural (or theological) undertow simmering beneath the surface.

Cogitore musters an eerie mood that gradually erodes the prevalent masculine rationalism to suggest the encroachment of unearthly forces.

With a strong lead from Jérémie Renier, the film’s commercial prospects may be mitigated by Cogitore’s refusal of a conventionally satisfying narrative payoff. Then there’s the fact that the film is uncategorisable in standard terms - anyone expecting this Afghanistan-set drama to remotely resemble, say, The Hurt Locker is in for a surprise. But carefully handled by distributors, this could find a crossover following between the upmarket and the cult.

The setting is a desolate, rocky region in Wakhan Province in Afghanistan in 2014, near the Pakistan border (the film was actually shot in Morocco). A detachment of French troops, headed by Captain Antarès Bonassieu (Renier), is patrolling a valley inhabited by a village of shepherds and frequented by local Taliban. At the start, local relations are tense but under firm control, and the level-headed, competent Bonassieu seems to be running things smoothly. Then the inexplicable happens: two French soldiers disappear without trace. Then there are further disappearances, among the Taliban too, and no-one can account for what’s going on in this landlocked Bermuda Triangle.

As matters escape Bonassieu’s control and understanding, the officer’s psyche begins to frazzle. Cogitore - writing with sometime Jacques Audiard collaborator and Cowboys director Thomas Bidegain - musters an eerie mood that gradually erodes the prevalent masculine rationalism to suggest the encroachment of unearthly forces.

The use of military tech visuals - including heat-sensitive imaging and night vision - is in striking contrast to the increasing strangeness that creeps in, creating a mood akin to the elusive creepiness of, say, The Blair Witch Project. But rather than merely providing chills, Cogitore has more philosophical themes in mind, and the story’s upshot is that humanity’s constant warring has finally prompted the natural (or divine) order of things to take an apocalyptic turn.

A distinctive score takes in grinding techno and classical pieces on the viola da gamba, and the theme of visibility and invisibility is brilliantly played out throughout in visuals that show the khaki-clad men constantly disapppearing into (or suddenly surging from) a singularly inhospitable, colourless landscape.

The Wakhan Front : The invisible enemy - Cineuropa Fabien Lemercier

Clément Cogitore's first feature film is an astonishing and highly original piece of young French cinema about a platoon of soldiers in Afghanistan

"Southern Post to Northern Post", "civilian in sight", warnings, patrols, long periods of waiting around, sudden exchanges of fire which pierce the silence that quickly settles in again afterwards: Clément Cogitore ventures into military territory with his first feature film, The Wakhan Front, which is being screened in competition in Critics' Week at the 68^thCannes Film Festival. A subject which has been touched on very little in French film, here the army is portrayed in a way which is all the more original for the fact that the storyline plays out in Afghanistan, centering around the inexplicable disappearance of soliders in an environment characterised by rocky ground, heat and isolation. The setting is reconstructed realistically and cleverly by the director, known for his talent as a visual artist, who clearly knows how to create atmosphere and works on the border between genres (war/fantasy; thriller/action) and areas of interest (realism/mysticism).

"Blessings are for the dead! You need a cool head if you want to return home in one piece." Captain Antarès Bonnassieu (played by the intense Jérémie Renier) firmly leads his platoon on a surveillance mission into a valley in the middle of the Afghan mountains, not far from the border with Pakistan. With the exception of minor skirmishes with the Taliban and diplomatic/stormy neighbourly relations with the local villagers, all goes to plan. From blockhouses, the soldiers observe their surroundings, on the lookout for the unexpected day and night, exchanging stories over the radio or at their camp of their memories of Kabul, of the bodies of soldiers that were blown into a thousand pieces and then sent home in sealed coffins filled with earth. But this routine comes to an abrupt halt with the inexplicable disappearance of two soliders who seem to have vanished into thin air. After holding a fruitless inquiry fraught with accusations and threats (from his own soldiers and then the villagers), and increasing security measures, another disappearance moves Antarès to take action and enter into talks with the Taliban rebels, as they are also looking for men who seem to have fallen off the face of the Earth. What's going on in this place? Why are the men having the same disturbing dreams about the disappeared men being in a cave somewhere? Antarès tries to find rational explanations to it all whilst fears that metaphysical forces are at work mount...

Filmed using a shoulder-mounted camera, The Wakhan Front paints a highly realistic portrait of daily life in the army and perfectly uses the scale of its natural setting and technology such as thermal imaging and infra-red sight to thrust the viewer (in an elegantly unique way) into the shoes of the soldiers. With a rhythm not unlike that of The Desert of the Tartars, the director skilfully creates a threatening atmosphere for a group of men (solidly portrayed, most notably by Kevin Azaïs and Sâm Mirhosseini) straying dangerously close to the edge of the abyss as if suffering from dizziness, torn between beliefs and worlds (western and eastern) that are just too different. Built on the principle of "the less you say the better", the film (the storyline for which was written by Clément Cogitore with the collaboration of Thomas Bidegain) showcases a filmmaker who, despite unfortunately going astray during the home straight of the film with an excess of mysticism and metaphors, is not afraid of being bold.

Produced by Kazak Productions and co-produced by Belgian production company Tarantula, The Wakhan Front will be distributed in French theatres by Diaphana, and international sales will be taken care of by Indie Sales.

'The Wakhan Front' ('Ni le ciel ni la terre'): Cannes Review ... Jordan Mintzer from The Hollywood Reporter

Cannes Film Review: 'The Wakhan Front' Guy Lodge from Variety

Cohen, Benoît

OUR PRECIOUS CHILDREN (Nos enfants chéris) C 73

France (83 mi) 2003

Annoying little comedy about the "me generation," following a group of friends who are always thinking of themselves first, even when they have small children, and try to continue to live their lives as they did when they had no responsibilities at all, always on the make, staying up late partying, drinking excessively, spending as little time as possible with their own children, who could just as well be total strangers. The children, when seen in this light, actually get in the way of their precious lives. This is the kind of story written by people who don't have children, as children are always seen as the enemies of freedom, or of our own free will. There are humorous moments in this film, which would probably look good on TV, but mostly it projects stereotypes of indulgent, unlikable people and is wretchedly unrealistic. However, critics would probably love this film, as it features that French loquaciousness at its best.

Cohen, Jem

CHAIN

USA Germany (99 mi) 2004

Chain Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Chain is a film that professes to have something to say about the pernicious homogeneity and economic injustice (not to mention soul-crushing boredom) promoted by the "malling of America" and the rest of the developed world. Everywhere you go, another Starbucks, another Eckerd Drugs, another Hot Dog on a Stick. Chain is also, on an aesthetic level, about really trying to examine the "non-spaces" of commercialized suburbs and their strip shopping centers, the "groves" of trees that line parking lots, the areas under highway overpasses where only sign-wielding panhandlers dare to venture on foot. Even though the point of Chain is nothing particularly revelatory ("some people say that bowling alleys all look the same"), there is certainly room for a clear-eyed landscape study willing to fully imbibe the loneliness of the big-box experience. Cohen, however, unwittingly replicates the very nowhere-aesthetics he seems to want to critique. Some of the most interesting images in Chain are shot inside shopping malls, and the low angle (as well as our foreknowledge about mall security) indicates that these images were made secretly with a concealed camera. But if you really examine these shots, what do they tell us? For one thing Cohen never holds any one image very long, and this abbreviated shot length mirrors the flash-frame consciousness of mall hypnosis. Why is it that everywhere Cohen points his furtive camera, there's a beautiful, well-lit image for the taking? The mall, in a sense, has gotten there before him. It is scientifically designed to create a picture-world for commodities, one we can walk around in. Photographing this world is not only verboten; it's a bit redundant. Granted, a penetrating eye, willing to stare until defamiliarization occurs, could still show us something about how we live in these non-spaces, could actually approximate an Atget for our times. (This is the sort of work James Benning has performed in many of his best films.) But Cohen prefers the glance, moving quickly from scene to scene as if the very architecture were moving him around. (Hint: it is. For the best explication of this argument, I direct you to Anne Friedberg's book Window Shopping.) Cohen tries to complicate matters by infusing the documentary character of Chain with a minimal narrative diptych, to mixed results. His story of "Amanda," a young homeless squatter who at first hangs out in the mall, and then becomes assimilated into its low-wage Borg-world, is just banal enough to compel interest. (For most of the film I was unsure whether this material was comprised of real interviews, and this is certainly to the credit of actress Mira Billotte.) There is a palpable sadness to Amanda, both fully individual and starkly typical of her class position, and although this thread doesn't ameliorate Cohen's formal missteps, it indicates one tack for holding Chain together more convincingly. On the other hand, the story of Tamiko (Miho Nikaido) is probably Cohen's single most inexcusable gaffe. Tamiko is a Japanese businesswoman in the U.S. to do research and meet investors for a shopping mall / amusement park complex. She is 31, unmarried, practices her English by reciting the company's mission statement over and over, and waits in vain for her beloved company to call. Eventually she is a forgotten field agent, possibly laid off without even knowing it. When the company credit card is declined, she charges the hotel room to her personal account. Her loyalty, her complete libidinal investment in the Company-as-lover (they're just not that into her) is a cheap, cruel stereotype of both Japanese-ness and middle-aged career women, proving that there are a lot of things more pedestrian (and more in need of immediate critique) than the sameness of the world's carpet stores. Granted, the end credits reveal that Cohen has in fact engineered a noteworthy coup de cinéma, subtly employing "creative geography" on geographical arrangements whose planning has consciously drained them of their creativity. But the final hour of Chain could quite productively be replaced by taking a drive (or even a walk) of your own.

Jem Cohen, Present and Adrift - Harvard Film Archive Brittany Gravely

Partly influenced by the work of photographers such as Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt, Walker Evans and Eugène Atget, Jem Cohen (b. 1962) entered into filmmaking at street level, documenting the discarded objects, invisible people, accidental art and oddly beautiful moments hard to spot if one is not looking for them. He meditatively investigates the uncategorized spaces, grey areas, hidden undersides and accidental messages that may not be often recorded for posterity but may contain the essence of places and people and this modern, hybrid existence where plastic and concrete are as likely to form a visual poem as a bird in a tree. Recording and privately ordering these abandoned, forgotten remnants somehow reverses the commercial food chain. By removing the sign from its original economic purpose, Cohen manages to uncommodify the commodified.

Cohen’s work is deeply political and inherently compassionate in its observation and selection, yet his gaze remains unsentimental and nondidactic. His films are born from the particular freedom experienced by working in the margins with a small or nonexistent crew—not allowing commercial interests or industry standards to dictate his work. Instead, he explains, “I just like to roam and shoot with the guiding principle being to look and to listen. Don’t feel you have to pre-decide what you’re making; let the world itself tell you what you’re making.” A Cohen film may not seem too constrained by any narrative, medium or industry concerns, yet it does appear bound by an endless fascination with this mortal plane and its material creations. Whether a portrait of an individual or a “city symphony,” his films impart a sense of rambling, wandering, looking and listening, being present. Naturally, his films take shape in a genre less territory—usually a mix of documentary, narrative, essay, poem—and occasionally manifest in a non traditional theatrical format: a multi channel gallery installation, visuals accompanying a concert, or as newsreels of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, played before features at the IFC Center in New York.

Both celebrated and critiqued, cities are often in Cohen’s watchful crosshairs, for they “are always on, more or less, and they’re also places where notions of democracy or the lack of it are readily tested in very visible, public ways.” He scours the city streets, malls, museums, parking lots, plazas, airports, often shooting in places without permits, literally testing and challenging the idea of public and private as he is making a film. In 2005, his film was confiscated by police when he was simply filming landscapes from a train. Afterwards, he wrote an open letter imploring filmmakers and artists to carry on regardless of “national security concerns.” “I believe that it is the work and responsibility of artists to create such a record, so that we can better understand, and future generations can know, how we lived, what we build, what changes and what disappears.”

If his city symphonies seem more like collaborations with his environment, Cohen’s portraits of individuals or groups usually involve the participants in the making of the film, as with Fugazi and the diaristic documentary Instrument. And when working with musicians or actors, it is an intimate, organic, evolving relationship between equals. Museum Hours was half-scripted and half-improvised, with some dialogue written after spontaneous events had occurred. Drawn to people, places and sounds that do not fit easily into a commercial category or elegant algorithm, Cohen respectfully introduces those who are fiercely independent, radical, passionate and distinctly uncooptable, like Fugazi, Patti Smith or Benjamin of Benjamin Smoke, into his living cinematic anthology—on and off screen.

“It’s all work that asks viewers to find their own way, their own themes, their own anchors, work that refuses to separate the thing made, the making, and the world itself.” Cohen’s lyrical dérives are ultimately reclamations of space, land, objects, ideas from the alienated corporate monolith. Without overtly stating it, his films call for a deeper engagement and presence in the world. Leaving a Cohen film, your eyes don’t need to adjust to reality; it is as if you can see reality more clearly: the wonder, the beauty, the strangeness, the sacredness, the ugliness, and all of those difficult-to-name areas in between.

Jem Cohen Biography – Jem Cohen on artnet

Visible Language Reading the City: Writing and the Construction of Urban Space in Jem Cohen’s Lost Book Found, by Mark Owens

NONFICTION — Adam Klein

A Filmmaker Expands on Our Shrinking World - Washington Post Ann Hornaday, November 10, 2005

MUSEUM HOURS B+ 92

USA Austria (106 mi) 2013 museumhoursfilm.com

Jem Cohen is an American independent filmmaker from New York most known for making short experimental films, Super 8 film essays, shooting a Polaroid diary of New York, newsreels of the occupy Wall Street movement, and music documentaries, often blending video with Super 8 and 16mm. Here he shoots a film entirely in Austria, using a completely different style than the contemporary Austrian filmmakers whose precise detail and sterile cleanliness show Austria as a nation that prides itself in picking up their own garbage leaving the streets immaculately clean. Cohen, on the other hand, shows graffiti on the walls, littered beer cans, cigarette stubs, and a host of other lost items just laying on the streets. Shot during the Christmas season, the city of Vienna is shrouded in a relentless gray color, often battered by either rain or snow, giving it a less than accommodating feel throughout, especially to strangers who don’t know their way around. The film, however, written, directed, produced, co-shot (with Peter Roehsler), and co-edited by Cohen, shooting exteriors on 16mm and interiors on two types of digital cameras, begins in an art museum, where one of the guards narrates his thoughts about what it’s like to be a museum guard at the prestigious Kunsthistorisches Art Museum, backtracking a bit about his own life, a lifelong lover of heavy metal, where he used to manage punk bands and be something of a rebel. However, after experiencing all that “noise” early in his life, it’s only appropriate that now in his later years he balances it with “quiet.” While he may be about age 60, we see him walk between the rooms of the museum, pointing out various habits of many that visit the art museum, as often people return, intrigued by certain works, which perks up his interest in his job, as he feels a connection to his surroundings. He notices one woman return, where she also seems to be lost studying a map, where he helps offer her directions in English and even future assistance, if need be, should language present a problem. She takes him up on his offer, and the two develop an ongoing friendship.

She is Anne, Mary Margaret O’Hara (1980‘s singer and sister to Canadian actress Catherine O’Hara), a vistor from Montreal, while the museum guard is Johann, Bobby Sommer, a nonprofessional who works for the Vienna International Film Festival, who actually has a past in the music business. The two share naturalistic scenes that alternate with Johann’s thoughtful voiceovers. She is there to visit her cousin, who she hasn’t seen in years, now lying in a coma in a nearby Vienna hospital. Johann, who initially thinks she’s Austrian by the green color of her coat, apparently quite prevalent in his country, helps her obtain a museum pass and helpfully calls the doctor from time to time to get the latest health updates, and at least on one occasion he accompanies her to the hospital. It’s a poignant moment, as anyone who’s visited a coma patient realizes how challenging it is, because you’re not sure if they actually comprehend anything you say, making no response, yet doctors encourage communication. Anne asks Johann to describe some paintings in the museum, which he does brilliantly, where Cohen shows interspersed images of paintings and various works of art throughout the film. The intimate knowledge he shares about various works of art actually has a healing power that can be felt even by the viewers, as such personal insight is rarely revealed, offering a glimpse into multiple worlds, where art history becomes personalized and associated with such a depth of humanity. Described to a coma patient, this is simply a chilling moment, but it solidifies their friendship, as this is an unforgettable shared experience. They spend more time together on the streets of Vienna, where he shows her the sights, actually reacquainting himself with much of what he’s always admired about the city. Each are also shown separately, as Johann always returns to his job at the museum, while Anne rummages through open air flea markets on the downtown streets, while also making daily visits to the hospital.

The film takes the viewer somewhat by surprise, as the stream of gorgeous images of artworks is stunning and hypnotically mesmerizing, requiring a certain amount of contemplation, where the director actually engages in an ongoing conversation with the audience, using a flow of still images, often evoking a sense of wonder, mixed with conversations describing various feelings about the artworks, but also hauntingly beautiful outdoor landscape images, capturing the emptiness of the trees, while the two characters themselves are engaged in their own conversations. It’s an extremely slow but reflective style of filmmaking, where Cohen takes us into the Pieter Bruegel (the elder) room, the most popular destination in the museum and the site of more of this artist’s works than any other museum, where we interestingly share a visiting art professor’s tour of the paintings. Like Johann earlier, to hear one’s personal reflections elucidated so clearly and eloquently is an extraordinary experience, and one that contrasts with the droning commentary that patrons are forced to listen to on the earphones provided, which simply don’t capture the immediacy of the moment. The guest lecturer, Ela Piplits, brings the works to life, pointing out often overlooked details about the subversive nature of his works, a 16^th century Dutch artist where even painting ordinary peasant behavior was frowned upon during his lifetime, as paintings belonged exclusively to the rich. As there were no museums, which originated with the Louvre in Paris during the French Revolution (1789 – 1799), establishing the first collection of artworks open to the public, Bruegel had a tendency to rub the noses of the wealthy aristocracy in graphic unpleasantries, which often shared religious compositions, but he was also one of the first to originate landscape paintings. According to the professor, Bruegel’s paintings “are not sentimental, nor do they judge.” Also of interest, Cohen is one of the few directors to set his cameras inside nearby pubs, showing life in the beerhalls of Vienna, a slice of everyday life that is extremely lively and decorative. Again, this offers quite a contrast to the moments of solitude in the hospital when Anne is alone with her cousin, quietly breaking out into song at one point, expressing infinite sorrow and tenderness. The film is a modernist, free form meditation on how art and the human spirit coincide, concerned with language, images, and history, vividly expressed through an endless stream of art images that challenge our way of looking at the world around us.

Block Cinema: Museum Hours

In one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, director Jem Cohen has realized a beautiful and emotional story about two strangers who connect through the power of art. Anne has traveled to Vienna to visit an ailing distant relative; Johann is a guard at the famed Kunsthistorisches Museum. They strike up an unlikely friendship and through their conversations and the timeless qualities of art as a catalyst for reflection and transformation, dormant truths emerge. Cohen’s film is a subtle yet powerful celebration of the restorative power of art and the importance of human connection. “Quietly amazing.”—The New York Times

Museum Hours | Chicago Reader JR Jones

A Montreal woman (Mary Margaret O'Hara) journeys to Vienna to watch over a comatose cousin and, left to her own devices in a foreign city, strikes up a friendship with an elderly guard (Bobby Sommer) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Their friendship plays out largely in the museum galleries, against canvases by Rembrandt and Bruegel, and a lengthy monologue about the latter, delivered by a docent at the movie's midpoint, underlines how deeply writer-director Jem Cohen (Benjamin Smoke) has internalized Breugel's fascination with seemingly trivial but sharply idiosyncratic characters. The two leads contribute fresh, genuine performances, and what might have been a musty academic exercise gains in tension from Cohen's deft juxtaposing of vocal narration, character detail, and majestic artwork. In English and subtitled German.

Museum Hours : The New Yorker Anthony Lane

A Canadian woman, Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara), flies from her home town of Montreal to Vienna—her first trip to the place, and only her second to Europe. She is there to visit a cousin, who lies in a coma, in a hospital; duty keeps Anne from leaving, yet she has little to do, and money is scarce, so she wanders the wet winter city and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. There she meets a security guard, Johann (Bobby Sommer), a wry fellow who used to manage rock bands and looks a little like Václav Havel, and who takes Anne gently under his wing. Jem Cohen’s movie is barely a story at all, and he seldom lets slip a chance to digress, whether into voice-overs by Johann, lectures by a curator, or surveys of junk on the sunless streets outside; what matters as much as the mild, middle-aged friendship are the Old Masters on the walls of the gallery—notably Bruegel, whose paintings, hung together, form one of the great rooms of the world. The camera inspects them, often in closeup, always at leisure, and no one could begrudge the movie such tranquillity. It finds the time to look at looking, and to offer a slow revelation: to the lonely and the stranded, it is art that feels like home. In English and German.

Although Museum Hours is technically Jem Cohen's first narrative effort, having the backbone of a very slight storyline, it doesn't stray far from his previous non-fiction efforts, possessing the intimate feel of a diary and an acutely observant knack for appreciating subtleties and atmosphere.

The setting — Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Art Museum — is the main character, as narrated by Johann (Robert Sommer), a museum guard that watches and assesses those that pass through, bringing their histories and motivations to a place lined with works from around the world with an ever-shifting cultural context.

A chance meeting between Johann and Anne (Mary Margaret O'Hara), a Canadian in Austria to settle up the affairs of a dying cousin, forces the story outside of his head when he extends his company, sensing her discomfort and feelings of isolation. Having a similar sense of alienation and curiosity about his surroundings, they bond over career paths and musical choices, discussing who they were and now are, sharing stories of loss — Robert's lover died years prior — and disappointment.

These candid conversations are framed by the majestic architecture of the Kunsthistorisches and its surroundings, whether coffee shops, modern asphalt jungles or the hospital where Anne's cousin lives out her last days. But this unlikely bond and almost incidental, albeit thematically appropriate, connection is only one aspect of Museum Hours. Beyond the Mindmaze or Before Sunrise discussions are the many voiceovers where Robert discusses the various types of people that enter the gallery, whether they self-consciously look around to see how to behave or pull out cellphones, bored by, and uninterested in, the history of the art lining the walls around them.

The transience plays as a sort of protagonist, with the guard being in the middle of it all, mostly ignored, asked for bathroom directions and contemplating the perspectives of those that pass through his life and the museum. He considers the assertion by one ex-colleague — a young art student and self-professed punk — who sees the museum as a joke, a commodity glorifying Dutch still-life work created to capture decadence; pieces he asserts that are the equivalent of a modern day picture of a big screen TV or a pile of jewellery.

Examinations of perspectives and the notion that the works on display — some of which sold for obscene amounts of money, while others remained unnoticed in their time — have a transformative sense, meaning something different to those in different times and places, are as much the focus as the characters.

There's even an extended diversion with a museum guide discussing the influence and interpretation of the works of Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel, asserting beliefs about his intentions while capturing the peasant life and landscape in 16th Century Netherlands, noting that no one person is the focus, even in depictions of The New Testament, where Jesus is a background figure. Her tour group rejects her subversive, but schooled, interpretation, having more of a literal response to the titles and images, which in turn leads to a defensive, almost patronizing reaction, thus reinforcing some of the central themes of art as an individual experience made fluid by time and space.

Cohen doesn't allow his film to cohere into a single idea, whether architectural worship or the fleeting nature of life and memory. It's a discussion piece that's as much a testament to fine art as it is a languid, contemplative effort of ideas, inspiring the audience to consider how they interpret and appreciate their space and the history behind it.

The Lumière Reader [Tim Wong]

Thomas Bernhard's novel Old Masters takes place mostly within the confines of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, on one particular bench in its Bordone Room. This is a place of focused contemplation for the aging critic Reger, who spends his days staring at Tintoretto's White Bearded Man lost in thought, the painting calling up old memories, conflicts, and obsessions. For Bernhard, this descent into artistic reverie represents a state of total disengagement, with the museum functioning as a closed-off world defined by an indulgent fascination with a lifeless past. He writes that "no matter how many great spirits and how many Old Masters we take as companions, they can't replace any people."

Set in a few different corners of that same museum, Jem Cohen's masterful Museum Hours espouses an alternate but related viewpoint. Artistic examination still can't replace human connection, but even as a substitution it has its uses, connecting the viewer to vanished worlds which they can only begin to understand, a state that parallels our inherently incomplete engagement with our own world. This is a film that pushes beyond absolutes of past and present, understanding human lives as a composite of both states, full of buildings, objects, and people which, even when they seem familiar, contain so much more than we could ever understand.

Exploring these heady ideas, the film locates its emotional and narrative center in Johann (Bobby Sommer), a museum attendant who begins a chance friendship with a Canadian visitor, Anne (Mary Margaret O'Hara), in town to tend to her ailing cousin. As we find him, Johann has settled down into a late-middle-aged existence of monkish quietude, playing online poker and sitting alone at cafés, his closet friend a brother living in Dusseldorf, a city he can't bear to visit. Anne is a part-time singer who depends on friends for steady employment, and who's experienced some sort of unspecified estrangement from her cousin, who now lies in a coma.

The combination of these two characters seems to promise a narrative predicated on resurgence, with the newcomer offering the old-timer an excuse to emerge from his isolated flâneur lifestyle, with the rebound effect of Johann's inherent goodness inspiring Anne to accept her cousin's illness and her own fractured existence. These basic plot points do occur in some sense, but in no such black-and-white terms, and by the time they do, the film has pushed far beyond its initial narrative structure, growing into something much more universal and unique.

In this context, Johann's rediscovering of parts of his city he'd forgotten doesn't just represent internal revival, it serves as a reminder of the ever-shifting vastness of these places, all the different meanings they contain. As the two tour the city, Johann imparts bits of history and lore, the camera gently gliding away from an exclusive contemplation of its two subjects, wandering off to examine the walls of an old church, background figures in a painting, or shaggy flea-market tchotchkes, affording each minute detail a brief moment of close-up portraiture. Gradually, the real story here comes into focus, with our two protagonists positioned within a massive tapestry of humanity, which continues to expand as the film progresses.

Subverting the usual progress of narrative development via a macro study of individuals' relationship to the times and places they inhabit, Museum Hours mostly bypasses rising action or conflict, finding its most salient tension in the fraught relationship between known and unknown objects. We know Anne and Johann, to some small extent, but their relationship never edges beyond polite distance and warm conversation, carried out over pints of beer. Two people who come from, and in most ways remain in, very different worlds, they embrace these gulfs rather than bemoan them, sharing stories and anecdotes and little more. Imagine an ascetic, much wiser version of Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, without any of the jagged concessions toward standard Hollywood plotting.

In some sense, the difference between Museum Hours and most films is the difference between a standing tree and an uprooted one; this is a story with the roots exposed, so that our focus expands beyond living objects to the sources of that life, to its imminent fragility and beyond. If Cohen's work has a focal point it's the comatose cousin, who's condition is stable yet shifts slowly toward the state of unbeing that characterizes so much of this ancient city and the contents of its old museum.

There's pain and sadness in the fact that all things will fade, but Cohen invites us to appreciate the bittersweet ripples left behind, from a self portrait of an aged Rembrandt in rags to an old toy abandoned in a junk shop. One long section delves into a few of Brueghel's pastoral paintings, which, despite their ostensible focus on religious figures, place those figures within grand, documentary panoramas of everyday life, the size and spectacle of which dwarf all the individuals within them. Museum Hours has that same sort of impact, and while the story at its core is lovely, it's the delicate treatment of that story, and the deftness exhibited in incorporating a purposefully small narrative within an achingly expansive context, that makes the film a masterpiece.

Wandering in Vienna: Jem Cohen and the Adventure of Museum Hours Robert Koehler from Cinema Scope, also seen here: Wandering in Vienna: Jem Cohen and the Adventure ... - Cinema Scope

Museum Hours Makes Art of Waiting - Page 1 - Movies - New York ... Calum Marsh from The Village Voice

World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh] also seen here: Museum Hours and The Artist and the Model: In defense of art and the artistic personality

Review: How Jem Cohen's 'Museum Hours' Blends Fine Art - Indiewire Eric Kohn from indieWIRE, also seen here: IndieWire.com [Eric Kohn]

theartsdesk.com [Graham Fuller]

In Review Online [John Oursler]

Film Review: ‘Museum Hours’ poetically melds life, death and art Hans Morganstern from Indie Ethos

Paste Magazine [Tim Grierson]

Movie Mezzanine [Anna Tatarska]

TIME AND THE CITY Jem Cohen's Museum Hours - The Brooklyn Rail Paul Dallas

Museum Hours | Reviews | Screen - Screen International Dan Fainaru

God is in the Details | Museum Hours – Rachel Helen Smith

Museum Hours Damaris Film Blog Discussion Guide - Culturewatch ... Rachel Helen Smith, also seen here: Museum Hours | Discussion Guide – Rachel Helen Smith

Film Threat [Jenni Lee]

Film-Forward.com [Matthew Wollin]

Movie Review - 'Museum Hours' - In Vienna, A Gallery Of ... - NPR Mark Jenkins

Museum Hours · The A.V. Club Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]

Tiny Mix Tapes [Paul Bower]

Writing Without Paper: Jem Cohen's 'Museum Hours'

Enthusiastic US Reviews on Museum Hours - Austrian Film ... Austrian Film Commission

An interview with Jem Cohen, director of Museum Hours David Walsh interview from The World Socialist Web Site, May 24, 2013

HollyoodReporter.com [Stephen Dalton]

Variety [Jay Weissberg]

Museum Hours: movie review | review, synopsis, book tickets ... David Fear from Time Out New York

Museum Hours – review | Film | The Guardian Mike McCahill

Movie review: 'Museum Hours' hears secret harmonies - Movies ... Mark Feeney from The Boston Globe

Museum Hours: Lovely but Lulling :: :: Philadelphia City Paper Sam Adams

'Museum Hours,' an exhilarating journey through art and life ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

Review: A visual tapestry unfolds during 'Museum Hours' - Los ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

Movie Review | ‘Museum Hours’: Old Masters, Sweet Mysteries A.O. Scott from The New York Times

'Museum Hours' Tours Through Art and Human Ties - The New York ... Nicolas Rapold from The New York Times

Cohen, Larry

Larry Cohen Tony Williams from Senses of Cinema

BONE B+ 90

aka: Beverly Hills Nightmare, or Dial Rat for Terror, or Housewife

USA (92 mi) 1972

A highly provocative, outrageously funny, dark comedy about class and racism in America, which in itself is highly unusual, but it also contains terrific insight which holds up 25 years later, as race relations were, and are, stagnant in time, as blacks remain to this day an easy scapegoat, a constant target of blame for all the troubles aggravating white people. His debut feature, Cohen went on to make a few cult classics life IT’S ALIVE, GOD TOLD ME TO, and Q. This film was conceived during the dawning of blaxploitation films, one year after SHAFT, who is really the target of this film, a spoof of Richard Roundtree’s legendary character of an intelligent, sharp dressing, stylish, ultra-cool black private detective who knows how to please the ladies, which includes his own infamous theme song, “Bone,” written by Isaac Hayes.

Yaphet Kotto plays Bone, a working class thief and rapist, wearing jeans and a blue work shirt, whose sexual performance as a rapist is affected by the changing, more liberal white attitudes towards the black community, leaving him with sexual difficulties in the performance of his rape, revealed as he attempts to terrorize a wealthy, white Beverly Hills couple, Andrew Duggan and Joyce Van Patten, that actually show some sympathy for him, which completely knocks him off his game. Bad Day in Beverly Hills.

IT’S ALIVE!

USA (91 mi) 1974

It's Alive! Josh Vasquez from Slant magazine

The proudly independent Larry Cohen finally struck it rich in the mainstream with this unnerving tale of a monstrous baby that puts a novel twist on the concept of being brought into the world kicking and screaming. As the marketing campaign for the film declared, the only thing wrong with Frank and Lenore Davies's second child is that it's alive, and, after being received with horror by the rest of the world, it does not hesitate to defend that life to the utmost. One part allegory on familial tensions and one part commentary on environmental and biological poisoning, It's Alive is a multi-layered work that is at the same time starkly clear and chillingly precise in its observations. Cohen's reference to James Whale's Frankenstein in titling his film is not only a cheeky in-joke but a realization of the fundamental theme underlying both works, the primeval gore of birth anxiety coupled with the notion of culpability in creating, or of evidencing some compromising relationship with, abnormality. Ultimately, however, the disquieting aspects of It's Alive are to be found in Cohen's very blurring of the lines between what is normal and what is not and what it is to love a child unconditionally. By turns frightening and heartbreaking, an aspect particularly reflected in John P. Ryan's tormented performance as the baby's father, the film is not only perhaps one of Cohen's best films but one of the finest American horror films of the last 30 years.

It’s Alive (Larry Cohen, 1974) Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled

From its opening shot depicting what look like hard-nosed sperm with searchlights, Larry Cohen’s first non-blaxploitation feature should’ve initiated a fresh new illicit trend: Roe v. Wadesploitation. The coochie-coochie horror flick It’s Alive is as awesomely ridiculous in conception (in every sense of the word) as it is dependably, self-consciously true to Cohen’s warped ambitions. Seriously, how many movies do you get to see four cops aiming their pistols point blank on a quizzical-eyed toddler? (His follow-up film, the astonishing God Told Me To, throws St. Patrick’s Cathedral Catholic iconography in with this earlier film’s birth anxiety resulting in one of the most unique premises in movie history… it could’ve been titled He Is Risen because Sylvia Sydney Magdalene didn’t kill Him when she should’ve.) At the film’s open, fresh-faced Sharon Ferrell informs her husband (John P. Ryan, seemingly directed by Cohen to let his testosterone guide his performance) that she’s ready to give birth, her face showing no sign of contractions and her voice resembling that of a kid at a minute past midnight on Christmas morning. But as soon as they’ve dropped their until-impendingly-only son with his creepy, pedo-cryptic uncle and Dad has retired to the expectant fathers’ waiting room to wax environmental-sophic about the amount of chemicals floating around in today’s atmosphere, the miracle of birth has tragically turned into the agony of delivering a malformed child. One that bloodily dispatches an entire delivery room staff in a matter of seconds. But Mom shows no post-partum depression at all; in fact, she’s bat-shit maternal, secretly harboring her murderous offspring while impatiently waiting for Dad to accept his parental role. Cohen’s allegorical implications are thankfully as sloppy as his gore effects and his (possibly intentional) haphazard cinematography, and the demon spawn’s symbolic purpose bends and morphs so often that I can almost imagine a few confused right-to-lifers taking the film to their bosum. Because, the underlying (and, when the fanged tyke is shown weeping in a dingy sewer, completely heartwrenching) message that all children deserve to be loved aside, the movie is both hysterically anti-procreation and a social re-enactment of a couple besieged by a representative abortion that went uncontrollably public. The film’s double barrels of horror imagery and emphatic allegorical winkery allow It’s Alive (and a number of other horror films of the era) to address social taboos in an outrageously candid forum. To wit: the parents’ names go out on a radio bulletin the very night of the hospital room massacre, and when Dad calls Son-They-Allowed-To-Live (and, thus, a figure occasionally presented as the “aborted” fetus’s immortal enemy) with news of the birth, he says “the baby’s… sick… everything’s a mess right now.” One cop tells another cop “folks who don’t have children don’t know how lucky they are.” An ice cream truck is branded with the rainbow-decal homily: “Stop children.” Mom’s beside nurse tries to trick her mother into admitting on tape what horrific act she committed with some anti-abortion rhetoric, badgering: “Did you see it? Surely you must’ve gotten one glimpse. They say it has teeth and claws.” I mean, even some of Bernard Herrmann’s music cues are aborted (like when Dad flips on a light switch to end the building atmosphere of terror). But, like all of Cohen’s high concept, low execution films, It’s Alive is unfailingly true to its outlandish design (try the shots that quote Nosferatu and The Passion of Joan of Arc for size). But I don’t know what it would feel like to be one of Cohen’s kids.

GOD TOLD ME TO

aka: Demon

USA (87 mi) 1975

A delirious mix of sci-fi, pseudo-religious fantasy and horror detective thriller, with Lo Bianco as the perfect existential anti-hero - a New York cop and closet Catholic, guiltily trapped between wife and mistress. His investigations into a bizarre spate of mass murders lead right to the top: Jesus Christ, no less, is provoking innocent citizens to go on a murderous rampage. The wonderfully insane plot - involving spaceships, genetics and police corruption - builds to an ambiguous climax: a 'gay' confrontation which suggests an outrageous alternative to anal intercourse. God Told Me To overflows with such perverse and subversive notions that no amount of shoddy editing and substandard camerawork can conceal the film's unusual qualities. Digging deep into the psyche of American manhood, it lays bare the guilt-ridden oppressions of a soulless society.

God Told Me To - perhaps better known by its alternative title Demon - is a headspinningly bizarre and baffling policier with a startling theological twist. It's set in a mid-seventies Manhattan in which ordinary citizens are going on kill-crazy rampages, then citing divine "inspiration" when quizzed by the cop in charge of the investigation, Peter Nicholas (Tony LoBianco). But as Nicholas delves further into events, he finds answers which hit extremely close to home... Cohen proves a bad fit to bring his own delirious screenplay to the screen: his direction is perfunctory at best, amateur-hour at worst, with a tendency to amp up the score so that the dialogue (which is often annoyingly quietly-spoken) is almost drowned out. And that's quite a problem when the story is already convoluted and confusing. Several set-pieces retain our interest - especially the one-scene cameos by Richard Lynch and Sylvia Sidney - but by the end Cohen has spiralled off into the realms of hokey self-indulgence, leaving us distinctly nonplussed behind.

An off-the-wall alien abduction saga that skewers mankind’s fundamental behavioral and belief systems, Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To never quite lives up to its bravura opening, in which detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) investigates a series of random slayings perpetrated by ordinary people (including a young Andy Kaufman as a crazed cop) who all claim, on their death beds, that they were carrying out the will of God. Such assertions hit home for Nicholas, a devout Catholic who attends church every morning and, though involved with a serious girlfriend, maintains a relationship with the estranged wife (Sandy Dennis) his faith won’t allow him to divorce. As Nicholas pries deeper into the mysterious crimes, what he uncovers is a secret cabal of corporate bigwigs working at the behest of a glowing hermaphroditic deity named Bernard (Richard Lynch) who seems to have been the product of an artificially inseminated virgin birth orchestrated by space invaders – an origin shared by none other than Nicholas himself! As usual, Cohen’s grittily shot, continuity-challenged film is beset by roiling social tensions, with the masses so gripped by a disgust for the devout, the elderly, and hippies – as well as for the unborn, in a theme reminiscent of It’s Alive – that they hardly seems to need divine guidance to enact violence. Yet disappointingly, his intriguing but exasperatingly uneven film loses cohesiveness at the moment it should be congealing, proving partly unsure of how to fluidly synthesis its Christian symbolism, jumbled socio-religious critique, and X-Files-ish conspiracy theories about extraterrestrial Almighties.

Turner Classic Movies Brian Cady

A detective investigates a series of religiously inspired mass murders. The powers behind these events turn out to be extraterrestrials involved in the abduction and impregnating of Earth women. A group of powerful men head a conspiracy that work with the aliens. Finally the detective discovers that he may have been personally connected to this alien invasion all along. It sounds like the plot of the TV show The X-Files, but it is actually God Told Me To (1976), a low-budget but outrageous horror thriller written and directed by Larry Cohen two decades before.

Cohen got his start as a television writer in the early 1960's but an early sign of the direction his career would take was his creation of The Invaders (1967-1968), the first serious science-fiction television series about an alien takeover. In the early 1970's Cohen began directing his own scripts, specializing in low-budget exploitation movies intended for drive-ins and inner-city cinemas. Despite his lack of money and audiences that required him to show a brutal murder or nudity every few minutes, Cohen infused his films with highbrow ideas and classic Hollywood techniques. Black Caesar (1973) took the style of an early 1930's Warner Brothers gangster movie and updated it for the blacksploitation era. It's Alive (1974) may have been about a killer mutant baby, but the creature was mostly kept off screen in imitation of the style of Val Lewton's classy horror films of the 1940's.

In God Told Me To, Cohen took this intelligent exploitation formula as far as it could go. A series of seemingly stable individuals suddenly snap and begin killing everyone around them. When asked why, their only reply is "God told me to." New York homicide detective Peter Nicholas, a religious Catholic, begins to suspect that whoever is behind these horrible acts might actually be God, or at least a creature with powers so great, He could make the assassins believe they were getting orders from the almighty.

The story was partially inspired by such popular books of the early 1970's as Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Daniken that proposed religious belief might have its genesis in extraterrestrial contact. Using this idea as his starting point, Cohen presented one of the most shockingly blasphemous movies ever made, all while sticking to a low budget and delivering the horrific shocks his audience expected. His under-the-radar approach was probably what kept the film from being met by the mass protests that greeted The Last Temptation Of Christ (1988). Fears of such reaction may have been the reason the movie's distributors retitled the film Demon in many parts of the U.S.

As with many of Larry Cohen's movies, the cast was filled with excellent character actors seen in larger-budget Hollywood pictures. Tony Lo Bianco from The French Connection (1971) played the detective, his mother was played by 1930's star Sylvia Sidney, and his wife by Sandy Dennis of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Eccentric comedian Andy Kaufman, whose life story would be told in Man On The Moon (1999), had his first movie role as one of the killers. Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane, Psycho) was to have composed the music score, but he died the day after he was first shown the film. God Told Me To is dedicated to him.

A sizeable cult audience has grown around this movie despite the rarity of screenings over the last twenty-five years. Now that audience can have its fill thanks to an excellent DVD presentation. Blue Underground has released a very high quality print of the film in letterbox and 16 by 9 formats with soundtracks in mono, Dolby Surround 2.0 and 5.1 and 6.1 digital sound. Director Cohen provides a movie length commentary and the extras include theatrical and television trailers, stills and television advertisements. Cohen's God Told Me To is an excellent example of how an independent movie made with little money and no expensive computer effects can still tackle the biggest subject of all.

Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp

Monsters At Play Lawrence P. Raffel

DVD Verdict Rob Lineberger

Cohen, Rebecca Richman

WAR DON DON B 87

USA (83 mi) 2010 Official site

When I was giving my opening statement, I can remember looking directly at Issa Sesay. I didn’t see anything. It’s the first time in my life that I actually looked into the eyes of a human being and realized they have no soul. The hairs on the back of my neck actually bristled. From my point of view it was almost a religious experience. —David Crane, Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court in Sierre Leone

Opening with quotations from Dante’s Inferno to describe the pure evil of an alleged war criminal from the Sierre Leone 11-year Civil War from 1991 to 2001 that left 75,000 dead and many mutilated with missing limbs, the judge interjects Chief Prosecutor David Crane, asking that counsel restrict himself to the facts at hand. When we actually hear the testimony from the alleged war criminal himself, the most senior military leader left alive from the rebel forces known as the RUF, he’s nearly illiterate and seems like he’s just a kid. When prosecutors and the judge insist that he clearly understands what a senior military commander means, it’s clear to the viewer that he doesn’t have a clue what this means, but he openly acknowledges that he was one of many military commanders. As it turns out, Issa Sesay was just a 13-year old kid who dropped out of school looking for work when he was lured by an older man into what he believed was a job at a restaurant in Burkina Faso, but this is how he was deceptively recruited into the rebel forces by the founder Foday Sankoh, where upon threat of death for those attempting to escape, he was trained to be a soldier. Sesay eventually recruited other children, becoming a veteran fighter, which was really the only world that he ever knew. Like victims of abuse, he became an abuser, but none of this was ever mentioned at his trial, nor was there any mention of the prolific drug use among rebel soldiers. Instead, because of his high ranking affiliation with a disreputable and now nonexistent military organization, which included a mix of freedom fighters, thugs, and common criminals, the court uses a broad brush to link him to all of the atrocities committed, even without evidence linking him to a single atrocity. When the prosecutors question a military general from neighboring Liberia who helped train Sesay and other rebel fighters, there is a huge difference in maturity, stature, and intelligence between the general who defends himself admirably from the badgering questions, and Sesay, who in his early 30’s still resembles a naive illiterate adolescent. Ironically, the nation has Sesay to thank for stopping the war, as under no immunity agreement with authorities, he brought in his rebel forces voluntarily and surrendered all their arms, which effectively ended the Civil War. He was arrested a year later and brought up on war criminal charges.

One thinks of Kate Winslet’s role in THE READER (2008), an unusual film in that it develops sympathies for a Nazi prison guard, here this film actually sympathizes with a potential war criminal. Much of the film is told through the point of view of his defense counsel, Wayne Jordash, a British attorney whose job, apparently, is defending suspected war criminals. He must be the court appointed attorney, otherwise known as the public defender, because he’s highly ineffectual in his job, a point that becomes clear in no time. His female co-counsel Sareta Ashraph, however, is excellent in explaining to the camera how highly fractured the RUF rebel forces actually were, using a map to show how they were a dozen or more independent units, each with little to no communication to the other units spread all over the country, yet Sesay, labeled the senior ranking military officer, is being held responsible for the atrocities commited by all of the units. In other words, the Western judges, all white, and all from outside Sierre Leone, appointed by the United Nations for this Special Court, are using the Western military model without understanding what’s so unique about African culture. We never see Ashraph argue before the court, however, as it seems to be an all male affair. The court itself cost $250 million dollars, paid for by American and British interests, which included paying off witnesses for the prosecution, including some previously imprisoned soldiers who spoke on camera about how lucrative the salary was compared to other jobs. The Prosecutor David Crane worked in the Pentagon before this assignment, while Stephen Rapp, one of the judges who spoke to the camera, was hand chosen by President Obama. Jordash indicated that with that much money invested, the outcome was predetermined, so the trial was just for show.

While it’s clear that the rebel movement arose out of joblessness and poverty, and a ruthless one party dictatorship rule, the Civil War itself attracted mercenaries from many neighboring countries, as a soldier’s income was considered a good paying job, perhaps more than they could earn in their own countries. The muddied picture that the court had no interest investigating, apparently due to the world wide implications, was that with such a fractured rebel command structure, many rogue units simply grew out of control and were unmanageable. The worst scenario usually involved the conscription of young children being kidnapped by warlords or local militias and sent off to the front, usually hopped up on drugs carrying AK-47 assault rifles, raping and enslaving women, chopping off the limbs of any surviving adult males, oftentimes never seeing their families again, whose villages may have been burned during the many massacres. One of the more controversial books written on the Sierre Leone Civil War was written by a child soldier who was abducted at age 13 and is called A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, though many have questioned the historical accuracy of his recollections. Nonetheless, the highly detailed picture of the horrors involved are haunting, yet the Special Court was not a Truth Commission and never examined the root causes of the Civil War itself, only the symptoms, pinning the crimes on the most senior surviving rebel officers, considered “those most responsible,” regardless of their direct hand in any of the horrors. Foday Sankoh, the rebel founder, died in prison before his trial, leaving Sesay to take the rap for all of his actions as well. The film never details specific atrocities, or features victims pointing out Sesay as the perpetrator or killer of their fathers or uncles, instead it shows shots of adult amputees playing soccer on a dirt field, where it’s clear someone had to pay the price for this country’s nightmare.

User reviews from imdb Author: JustCuriosity from United States

War Don Don screened this week at SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX, where it was well well-received and won an award. War Don Don is an excellent examination of how a country that has gone through a horrifying Civil War attempts to reconcile with its past by putting the perpetrators on trial. In this case, the film focuses on the trial Issa Sesay, a one-time battlefield leader of Revolutionary United Front (RUF), before the Special Court of Sierra Leone for crimes against humanity and other horrendous war crimes – rape, murder, amputation, and the use of child soldiers among others. The documentary presents a reasonably fair examination of the trial through interviews with both Sesay's supporters and critics without really taking sides.

The film raises profound questions about what should be considered a crime in the context of war and who should be held responsible for the acts of barbarity that occur during most wars. Sierra Leone's approach seems to be moving the country forward although one is left to consider other alternatives; for example, South Africa adopted the less punitive approach of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The film also implicitly raises questions about the role of foreign nationals in the judicial process and the financial cost of such an expensive process for a desperately poor country. The combination of well-edited interviews and footage of the aftereffects of war is quit powerful and evocative. Some of the most powerful shots are those of amputees playing soccer that seem to symbolize the struggle of a wounded country to keep on struggling to rebuild. This powerful film could serve as useful educational tool and I hope that many more people have the opportunity to view it.

Chicago Tribune

Without eliding the grim human cost of the crimes and criminals involved, producer-director Rebecca Richman Cohen's unusually lucid documentary plays against type: It dares to see the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel leader Issa Sesay as something like human, rather than an embodiment of pure evil.

Yet there's no facile exoneration to be found. Across a miserably bloody decade (1991-2001) the RUF left a trail of rape, dismemberment and slaughter in its attempt to overthrow the Sierra Leone government. At a cost of $200 million a United Nations-sanctioned special court tried some of its worst war criminals. Sesay was among the most vicious.

Filmmaker Cohen is hardly a nonpartisan in this legal sphere; the Harvard graduate interned on the defense team of another accused Sierra Leone war criminal. She then returned to the West African nation to make "War Don Don" (which means "the war is over" in the Krio language). The film, already broadcast and available on-demand on HBO, tells one story very well, fanning out to deal with the implications and effects of that story.

Sesay's defense attorney Wayne Jordash argues before the camera that his client is getting a raw deal, that "there's little prospect you're going to get close to the truth" in any war-crimes trial. He describes his client as "intelligent, charming, at times bad-tempered." Elsewhere we hear from the president of the Sierra Leone Amputee Football Association, whose life is surrounded by evidence of what went on in the name of rebellion. Any loosely defined collection of thugs willing to embrace a terror agenda called "Operation No Living Thing," also known as "Operation Spare No Soul," can bring nothing but grief to a country's citizenry. Yet Cohen's camera pays attention to survivors of the war who are determined to forgive, right or wrong.

Harvard Law Record Rebecca Agule

Filmmaker and Harvard Law School graduate Rebecca Richman Cohen ‘07 first observed Issa Sesay in 2006, through the bullet proof glass of the gallery at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. While assigned to a different defence team for her 2L summer, Cohen felt drawn to the trial of the former Interim Leader of the Revolutionary United Front, the rebel army that had waged and lost a decade-long civil war against the government of Sierra Leone.

Four years later, as the Court concludes its cases, the first major war crimes tribunal to do so since the Trials at Nuremberg over sixty years ago, Cohen presents "War Don Don", the jarring product of her legal education and three years of filmmaking. In Krio, the lingua franca of Sierra Leone, "war don don" means "the war is over", and Cohen's film offers an insider's nuanced examination of the role played by international criminal justice once hostilities have formally ceased.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the South by Southwest Festival, "War Don Don" forces its audience to challenge preconceived notions of righteousness, justice and retribution. Even the seemingly secure concept of truth is quickly muddied, creating the most satisfying intellectual and emotional discomfort.

"War Don Don" opens with the Special Court itself, a fortified structure surrounded by the ubiquitous blue-helmeted United Nations guards. With every act, the film shifts its focus, never allowing the viewer to simply take a passive role. Harrowing images war's casualties, including the dead, the maimed and the child soldier, as well as graphic victim testimony and the vehemence of Chief Prosecutor David Crane make Sesay's guilt a seemingly foregone conclusion.

For Crane, only the Devil himself could have created Sesay and his co-defendants. "These dogs of war, these hounds from hell…These were the leaders, the commanders of an army of evil, a corps of destroyers and a brigade of executioners bent on the criminal takeover of Sierra Leone, once the Athens of West Africa," he says "Today, due to these indictees, a sodden backwater, marred and broken, lapping against the shores of civilization."

But, just as the most dovish of viewer considers tying the noose herself, Cohen opens the backstage door to the justice system at play, and all such assumptions begin to splinter.

Despite representing a man described by Crane as soulless, the Sesay team managed to avoid caricaturing itself with criminal defence stereotypes. Instead, Lead Defence Council Wayne Jordash and Co-Counsel Sareta Ashraph humanize Sesay, re-introducing him as a relatively moderate soldier, trapped first by horrific circumstance, and then by the inappropriate application of strict conceptions regarding military structure and command responsibility.

Perhaps Sesay himself throws the most eloquent wrench into any simplistic notions international criminal justice. "Just because I'm an RUF commander, that's what I'm convicted for," he says. "If I was to be judged as an individual, I think they would not convict me on many things."

This lack of consensus regarding Sesay, specifically, and justice, generally, is not confined to the Court. Cohen's crew follows the Court's Outreach Team as it meets the with communities throughout Sierra Leone, speaking to many who lack basic necessitates such as water, shelter and food, about the Court's mandate to provide truth, not aid. The millions of dollars expended to fund the Court locate these words somewhere between ironic and cruel.

The film's aesthetic, simultaneously stunning and disturbing, matches the tenor of the issues at hand. Refraining from voiceover and allowing the war, the court and Sierra Leone itself to serve as much of the soundtrack, Cohen deftly removes herself from the film. Instead, she elegantly allows the violence, the individuals involved, and, in the end, the lingering questions to haunt the viewer.

Slant Magazine Elise Nakhnikian

How does a nation cope when a civil war? How does it heal? There are way too many examples we could study to answer that question these days. War Don Don looks at one of the newer methods: holding an internationally sanctioned war crimes trial to create an official record and to punish those judged to have borne "the greatest responsibility."

The title means "war is over" in Sierra Leone's Krio language, but Rebecca Richman Cohen's documentary shows how tenuous the truce is in a country where, just a few years earlier, people were enslaving, raping, and amputating body parts from their neighbors, if not killing them outright. It also looks at how hard it can be to distinguish between victim and victimizer, especially when most of the soldiers who committed the atrocities were conscripted as children and brainwashed/terrorized into becoming brutish outlaws.

War Don Don revolves around the trial of Issa Hassan Sesay, the second in command of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), in an international court that convened in Sierra Leone almost immediately after the end of the war. The RUF fomented civil war for a decade starting in 1991. Its initial aim was to free the people from corrupt one-party rule (or so it claimed), but it soon degenerated into its own nightmare version of corruption and abuse. In league with Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, the RUF became a scourge rather than a savior for the people of Sierra Leone.

The documentary's drama doesn't emerge from whether Sesay will be found guilty; we hear his sentence at the start of the movie and then at intervals throughout, as we watch different people react to the news. The dramatic arc is the change in our own reactions to the verdict. The first time I heard it, I felt like the amputee who says he feels vindicated every time the word "guilty" is applied to one of the perpetrators. But as Cohen knit together a 360-degree view of Sesay, it became harder for me to see his sentence as a simple triumph of justice.

First-time director Cohen trained with Michael Moore (she was an intern on Bowling for Columbine and an assistant editor on Fahrenheit 9/11), but she doesn't seem to have absorbed any of his trademark methods. This somber doc carefully avoids editorializing, giving equal time to a wide variety of opinions and leaving it up to us to make up our own minds. Even questions about Sesay's essential nature are left open. Is he, as one of the court's chief prosecutors is convinced, literally soulless? Or is he the "intelligent and charming" person the lead counsel for the defense describes as "a man I've come to like a lot, actually."

The real question is how much responsibility Sesay bears for the atrocities committed by RUF troops. As his lead counsel puts it: "Was it a criminal organization or was it an organization that contained a huge number of criminals?" The prosecutor is convinced that the RUF's leaders ordered the mayhem, even reveled in it. "As the rule of law slipped down the gutter and into the drain, they did it because they could," he says. "It was Mad Max Thunderdome. They just had fun doing it." But Sesay's lawyers are convinced the guerillas were too disorganized to have been controlled like an official military. They argue that Sesay had no idea about many of the things many "thugs" were doing under him, in a system of which he too was a victim.

What's never in doubt is the nature of the crimes. Diamond-hard facts are read into the record, and evidence is written on the bodies of survivors. Cohen interviews the head of an amputee soccer league, showing us one member balancing on crutches to kick with his one remaining leg. She gathers man-on-the-street opinions about Sesay's guilt and how best to handle it from people like a man shopping for produce with hooks and a beautiful young woman with a bandaged stub where one hand used to be. And she draws out one heartbreaking moment in the trial when a woman testifying about having been forced to laugh at a pile of severed heads breaks down when she recalls seeing her own child among the dead.

Cohen may leave things a little too open. The film barely touches on some of the issues it raises, like the cost of the international court and what else that money might have been used for, the ethics of convicting some war criminals on the testimony of others who go free, and the hidden workings of the court itself. But when it comes to the sticky question of what to do about the people who get sucked into the maws of 21st-century killing machines not as victims but as killers, War Don Don gives us plenty to chew on.

Steady Diet of Film [Erin Donovan]

War Don Don Louis Proyect, August 26, 2010

Pajiba ("TK") review

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]

'War Don Don': Issa Sesay Glamorized - Movie On Special Court ... The Torchlight, September 9, 2010

Cinematical Christopher Campbell

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

Film-Forward.com Nora Lee Mandel

WAR DON DON Facets Multi Media

SXSW '10 | Rebecca Richman Cohen Justifies Her Law School Tuition ... Interview with the director from indieWIRE, March 16, 2010

Filmjournal: director inteview War crimes and punishment: Rebecca Richman Cohen's 'War Don Don' dissects the U.N. Special Court, including a Maria Garcia interview, June 10, 2010

TimeOut Chicago Hank Sartin

Boston Globe

Issa Sesay - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BBC NEWS | Africa | Sierra Leone accused in court BBC News, March 15, 2003

Inside the RUF: at last the child soldiers of Sierra Leone have ... Hannah Strange from The Sunday Times, June 16, 2008

"S Leone trio guilty of war crimes" BBC News, February 25, 2009

Sierra Leone verdict warns world's warlords - CSMonitor.com Scott Baldauf, February 27, 2009

Senior rebels sentenced to long prison terms in Sierra Leone ... Amnesty International, April 9, 2009

“The Fundamental Right of Issa Sesay Was Denied”:…his Lawyer ... Bintu A. Sesay from Awareness Times, April 14, 2009

Issa Sesay exposes UN support to RUF Rachel Horner from The Daily IIJ, July 9, 2010

allAfrica.com: Liberia: Issa Sesay Disputes Prosecution Evidence ... Alpha Sesay, from All Africa, August 2, 2010

Former rebel chief Issa Sesay quizzed by prosecution about Sierra ... Alpha Sesay, from The Sierre Leone Daily Mail, August 16, 2010

As Issa Sesay Concludes His Testimony, He Apologises to the People ... Visit Sierre Leone. August 28, 2010

As Issa Sesay Concludes His Testimony, Liberian Radio Operator ... Alpha Sesay from The Charles Taylor Trial

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Wikipedia, the free ...

The feud over Ishmael Beah's child-soldier memoir, A Long Way Gone. - By Gabriel Sherman - Slate Magazine Gabriel Sherman from Slate, March 6, 2008

Coimbra, Fernando

A WOLF AT THE DOOR (O Lobo atrás da Porta) B+ 90

Brazil (100 mi) 2014 Official site

Easily the best child abduction movie of late has been Erick Zonca’s JULIA (2008), featuring a whirlwind performance by Tilda Swinton as the kidnapper, a social realist film that turns into a psychotic road movie through the American Southwest before taking a strange turn into the back alleys of seedy, gang-infested neighborhoods of Tijuana, Mexico, where the changing landscape beautifully reflects the altered mindset of her character. Others that come to mind are Akira Kurosawa’s superbly rendered HIGH AND LOW (1963), Clint Eastwood’s MYSTIC RIVER (2003), Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone (2007), and more recently Denis Villenueve’s Prisoners (2013). This Brazilian film is closer to the Zonca version, loosely based on events in real life, though without the brilliant use of landscapes, as what stands out is the remarkably versatile performance by the kidnapper Rosa (Leandra Leal), who starts out non-existent, but ends up narrating the final portion of the film, where she emerges as the central character. The film is a fictionalized reimagining of an actual event that took place in 1960, where the kidnapper was Neide Maria Maia Lopes, known as “The Beast of Penha” in a case that shocked the Brazilian nation, eventually sentenced to 33 years in prison. The incident inspired a 1965 Brazilian film, CRIME DE AMOR, various television movies, and a handful of books. What makes this film interesting is the film noir way it is told by a first-time director, starting out as a kidnapping story, where in the opening few seconds of the film a child is missing, reportedly abducted from a school by someone she knew and felt familiar with, seemingly a friend, leading to the intervention of the police. But instead of a police procedural where the audience tries to figure out whodunit, the kidnapper is revealed early on, yet the film continues to reveal surprises, using a flashback structure to get into the mindset and motivation behind the scenes. Shot in Rio de Janeiro by cinematographer Lula Carvalho, the film has a gritty, social realist style, where to its credit, things slow down considerably once the featured players are identified, where the director seems to relish withholding essential information, giving out small bits of information at a time, spending much more time developing the characters and their relationship to one another. This is an extremely effective technique, as the stunning climax is all the more shocking knowing the details.

Sylvia (Fabíula Nascimento) thinks this is just another day and is horrified to learn that her six-year-old daughter Clarinha (Isabelle Ribas) has earlier been picked up at school by an unknown woman who claimed to be a neighbor. In a state of shock, the police are called along with her husband Bernardo (Milhem Cortaz), who believes he knows who is responsible, confessing to the police that he’s been having an affair with a younger woman named Rosa (Leal) who he feels is trying to get back at him. Yet when Rosa is called in for questioning, she implicates Sylvia, claiming she’s the one trying to cover up her own secret affair. When this is proven false, Rosa offers another supposedly truer version of events, where the audience is never sure if any of this actually happened, but we’re quickly lured into a story filled with such salacious detail, initially meeting Bernardo at a train stop, where a schoolboy flirtation leads to a passionate affair where the two can’t keep their hands to themselves, resulting in a steamy sexual affair where the two are inextricably linked to one another, continuing to meet secretly over an extended period of time. But the dynamic of their relationship changes as she demands more and more of his time, creating an anxious tension in his life, made even worse when she calls in the middle of the night when he’s in bed with his wife and he refuses to answer, drawing even more suspicion to himself when he cradles his phone near his body, not allowing Sylvia to see who it is, all but implicating himself in some scandal. While obviously guilty of callous behavior that grows more maliciously abusive, bullying, and even devious over time, Bernardo is seen as the weak link in the film, a morally pathetic figure, where his mindset is simplistic and all too obvious, becoming easily manipulated, as his machismo attributes seem childishly self-centered and narcissistic, while Rosa’s character (and Leal’s brilliant performance) is much more psychologically complex. Perhaps the key to understanding her interior world is seeing her at home, which is one of the strangest of all home environments, where she seems like a complete stranger, living with elderly people that never speak, who may or may not be her parents, that move around like zombies in the night, exhibiting not even a hint of emotion. This has to reflect upon an insatiable need to get out of there, where sinking her hooks into Bernardo feels like the best pathway out.

In the midst of a frenetic affair that takes a darker turn after Rosa learns Bernardo has lied by carefully concealing his marriage, another storyline develops that is perhaps the creepiest of all, where Rosa ingratiates herself in a friendly manner to Sylvia, making it appear completely innocent, as if she happens to live nearby, where the two often chat over coffee or while supervising Clarinha’s play activity, even to the point of bringing presents to her daughter, where she becomes identified as a surrogate aunt. None of this is with Bernardo’s knowledge, but it’s only in this narrative that Sylvia comes to light, as she’s open, welcoming, and extremely generous, where she hasn’t a clue that the woman sitting across from her is a stalker. Fearful that Bernardo might be getting away from her, Rosa’s tactics reveal her growing desperation, where her behavior borders on obsession. When Rosa announces she’s pregnant, Bernardo feels like a cornered animal that will instinctively stoop to anything to escape. Only when the cards are all on the table does it become apparent that the director’s early revelation of the kidnapper is such a masterful device, as it creates such a cleverly unique situation, with the audience clearly on the edge of their seats with each subsequent move Rosa takes endearing herself to that unsuspecting child. Moving directly into the horror genre, Coimbra makes no false moves, using a handheld camera to capture the fluidity of the situation when Rosa actually comes to pick up Clarinha early from school, who greets her with genuine enthusiasm before taking her by the hand and dispassionately leading her to that long, ill-fated walk that seems to take forever. It’s a calculated, cold-blooded act that shows no mercy whatsoever, yet to actress Leandra Leal’s credit, the audience clearly has more sympathy for her than the cheating husband. Up until the last second, it was at least possible Rosa might have had something else in mind, but it was not to be. The reasons underlying her utter hatred for Bernardo are beautifully captured in a single act of betrayal, where she is tricked into believing he needs a blood test to establish paternity, but is instead involuntarily anaesthetized at the doctor’s office where she is subject to a forced abortion, cruelly taking away her own child against her will, where in her mind, already disgusted by the power men hold over women’s bodies, there is only one equal act of retribution. It’s a harrowing turn of events that recalls the Greek tragedy of Medea, one of the most tragic of all human dramas.

A Wolf At The Door / The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo

The Brazilian kidnapping drama A Wolf At The Door wastes no time in getting the ball rolling. About three minutes into the movie, Sylvia (Fabiula Nascimento) arrives to pick up her 6-year-old daughter, Clara, at daycare. But Clara has already left in the company of another woman, who claimed Sylvia was sick. By minute four, the police are investigating the crime. As it turns out, however, this breakneck opening constitutes the last time A Wolf In The Door will be in any hurry. Loosely based on the real-life 1960 case of Neide Maria Maia Lopes, a.k.a. “The Beast Of Penha,” the film is mostly one long stalling tactic, indulging in unreliable flashbacks and narrative wheel-spinning to expand the details of its tragic scenario to feature-length. When it finally gets to what happened, though, prepare to cringe.

For the lead investigator (Antonio Saboia), the first order of business is to establish who might have had a motive. Clara’s father, Bernardo (Milhem Cortaz), quickly confesses that he recently ended a yearlong affair with a young woman named Rosa (Leandra Leal), who’s brought in for questioning. Rosa denies any involvement, but an employee of the daycare center positively identifies her. At that point, Rosa confesses, but claims she was acting at another woman’s behest, and delivered Clara to her. This story (depicted in flashback) doesn’t hold water, though, especially since Clara was seen to greet Rosa with an affectionate hug—why would she know her father’s secret lover? Threatened with violence (police brutality appears to be a given), Rosa agrees to tell the inspector the whole truth, kicking off another extended flashback that reveals the history of her affair with Bernardo, as well as her decision, after she belatedly learns that Bernardo is married, to pose as a forgotten acquaintance (also named Silvia, but with an “i”) and become besties with Sylvia. But what happened to the little girl, who’s still missing?

Arguably, writer-director Fernando Coimbra would have done better to simply reveal Clara’s fate at the outset, as his interest lies primarily in what drove Rosa to do what she did. (It’s possible that a Brazilian audience would already know where the narrative is headed, as the Beast Of Penha case was fairly notorious; it previously inspired a 1965 film, Crime De Amor, as well as several books and TV movies.) Instead, the film squanders a great deal of its running time on Rosa’s pointless lies before finally digging into her separate relationships with Bernardo and Sylvia, through which Coimbra attempts to humanize a woman (or at least her contemporary fictional likeness) who was widely perceived as a monster. One especially disturbing element of his account appears to have no basis in fact, but it feels like something that could have happened, and that still sometimes happens today, albeit in less brutal form. (For more concrete, spoileriffic details, see The Reveal.) Leal’s performance holds the movie together; she makes Rosa such a warm, likable presence—at least until she finally feels cornered—that it’s possible to hope against hope for a happy ending. Fair warning: None is forthcoming.

Film-Forward.com [Daniel Glenn]

Every parent’s nightmare takes place in this searing Brazilian drama, which has a Greek flavor in the way it makes children pay for the sins of the father and a Japanese influence in its Rashomon-like structure.

When Sylvia (Fabiula Nascimento) arrives to pick up her six-year-old daughter, Clara, from school, she is told by the bemused teacher that she just missed the girl. Per Sylvia’s instruction, Clara was picked up by a family friend. As the story gets teased out in a police station, it becomes clear that someone posing as Sylvia called the school, giving permission for Clara to go home with another woman. But she wasn’t a stranger, the teacher insists; Clara was excited and gave this person a hug.

At the police station, Bernardo (Milhem Cortaz), Clara’s father, admits to the interrogating inspector that he has been having an affair and suspects his mistress, Rosa, must be have taken Clara as a joke. But Rosa (Leandra Leal), once brought to the station, claims ignorance of the whole situation, at first. Not until the adulterers offer an alternate telling of their affair are the layers of fiction peeled away from the truth. (The plot’s based on an incident that occurred in the 1960s.)

The story is compelling and ultimately shocking, supported by top-notch filmmaking. Lula Carvalho’s cinematography is full of shadows, increasingly appropriate as the lies begin to pile up, and when the camera doesn’t cut away from Sylvia during her interrogation, for instance, it makes her seem that much more alone.

Long takes are also used to illustrate the spectrum of sex and violence in Bernardo and Rosa’s affair. First, they generate real heat together without the aid of flashy edits or a steamy score. Later, in a terrifying scene, Bernardo exercises physical and emotional power over Rosa, and the lack of an edit makes the moment painfully relentless.

It’s a good thing the sex is hot, because no other reason is given for the lovers to be so explosively and inextricably connected to each other. There’s little character development in their initial meetings, and the dialogue is (appropriately) full of the dopey things people say when trying to be sexy. There’s never evidence of genuine compatibility between them, and we must believe the physical passion is enough to turn what started as a lark into a poisonous pas de deux. Just when the film risks turning into a knockoff Fatal Attraction, a twist sends the plot into its own, uniquely pitch-black place.

A Wolf at the Door is wicked entertainment, with the grim justice of a fairy tale and the lingering unease of a good ghost story.

She Blogged By Night [Stacia Kissick Jones]

It’s a warm and sunny day in Rio de Janeiro when six-year-old Clara (Isabelle Ribas) goes missing from her school. Her panicked mother Sylvia (Fabiula Nascimento) reports it to the police. During questioning, the girl’s teacher explains that a family friend named Sheila came to get the girl, but Sylvia has no idea who this Sheila could be. Then the teacher drops a bombshell: the girl knew who the woman was, because she ran to her as soon as she saw her. When the girl’s father Bernardo (Milhem Cortaz) arrives at the station, he has a bombshell of his own: he knows a woman named Rosa (Leandra Leal) has taken Clara to get back at him in some way. Bernardo won’t readily admit to who Rosa is, but the detective (Juliano Cazarre) has already figured out that she’s his mistress.

A Wolf at the Door (O Lobo atrás da Porta, 2013), writer-director Fernando Coimbra’s first feature-length film, is a taut, well-paced thriller that many critics have likened to Fatal Attraction (1987). With its slight police procedural feel, it’s also reminiscent of Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), albeit with a non-linear timeline and never any serious talk about ransom for the little girl. And Wolf at the Door is no scorned woman flick for the paranoid males among us, anyway, but a harrowing look at the costs of extramarital affairs in a society where the risks a woman takes are far greater than the man’s.

When brought in by the police, Rosa’s first story is that she got caught up in a convoluted mess involving Sylvia cheating on Bernardo. Rosa finally admits either the truth or her version of it, we’re never sure. It’s a complicated and chilling story involving abuse and accidental pregnancy and multiple false identities, and on one level, Rosa’s desire for revenge after what Bernardo put her through is understandable, at least for an audience who has the luxury of regarding these events at an emotional distance. But Rosa’s revenge always involves using women and children to her own ends. It’s human nature for people who are (or feel) oppressed to attack those who are on the same level or below them rather than risk attacking someone stronger, either physically or socially, but as Bernardo says in one of the earliest scenes, Rosa thinks taking Clara is a game. Any right-thinking person knows otherwise, and slowly we learn just why Rosa isn’t thinking clearly.

For the first half, the film quietly forgets that Clara’s mother even exists. It’s only when Rosa enters her life posing as someone she isn’t that Sylvia comes into view. She’s a warm and engaging woman, and it feels a bit like the film isn’t playing fair when it allows her to so easily be taken in by Rosa’s lies. Bernardo knew full well what he was doing when he took up with Rosa and brought her (tangentially) into the family, but Sylvia was hookwinked, and the film seems to have little or no sympathy for her. It’s not so much out of contempt for the character, though, but because Wolf at the Door believes Rosa is more interesting.

Some of this is intentional, of course, and Coimbra has some fun with it, such as in the steamy sex scenes which remind us with tight shots of Bernardo’s goofy teeth and Rosa’s furrowed brow that what feels good when doing it doesn’t necessarily look good when watching it. Coimbra is purposely denying the audience their clandestine jollies, and at the same time pointing out, at least for anyone paying attention, that Rosa isn’t always enjoying the one thing Bernardo wants her for. Yet there is never a scene with even a fraction of that kind of emotional revelation for Sylvia. She’s little more than a plot device, and by failing to allow Sylvia much motivation or action, the film essentially caters to the old trope that a psycho scorned she-bitch is always more interesting than someone’s mom.

Despite this, Wolf at the Door is an engaging and intense film. The deliberate pace turns relentless by the harrowing if inevitable conclusion. Rosa is an unreliable narrator, but her story is the only solution to the mystery of the missing girl that we’ll ever get, even if it’s not a wholly satisfying one; we’re on shaky ground, just like Rosa was, thus as desperate for closure as she is. With a tight plot and confident direction, A Wolf at the Door shows Fernando Coimbra is a director well worth watching.

A Wolf at the Door Louis Proyect

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Facets : Cinematheque Schedule: A Wolf at the Door

A Wolf at the Door | Chicago Reader Ben Sachs

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San Sebastian Film Review: 'A Wolf at the Door' - Variety Jay Weissberg

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

Review: 'A Wolf at the Door' - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A Wolf at the Door Movie Review (2015) | Roger Ebert Pable Villaça

Review: In 'A Wolf at the Door,' a Fiery Affair Turns Rancid ... New York Times, also seen here: New York Times

A Wolf at the Door (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Coiro, Kat

AND WHILE WE WERE HERE C 73

USA (83 mi) 2012

Apparently this film went through several transformations, as many of the reviews indicate the film was screened in Black and White, but at least in Chicago it was seen in vivid color. Written and directed by Kat Coiro, this is what is commonly called a woman’s picture, where the disintegration of a marriage unravels in the picturesque location of Naples in Italy, all seen through the eyes of the wife Jane (Kate Bosworth), who spends her time listening to audio tapes she made interviewing her British grandmother (the voice of Claire Bloom) before she died, listening to her talk about how she survived two world wars. In this manner, she completely avoids her husband Leonard (Iddo Goldberg), a studious introvert who professionally plays the viola for an orchestra that is spending two weeks touring in Naples. Fortunately, this leaves him conveniently out of the picture for most of the film, where they only see one another in passing, often wordlessly, like ships passing in the night. This leaves Jane plenty of free time, which she spends sightseeing. If this reminds you of another film, it bears a great similarity to Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954) about another bored couple, Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, with their marriage similarly on the rocks. While they unfold differently, Rossellini provides a historical travelogue of the Italian cities of Naples, Capri, and Pompeii while also accentuating the spaces that exist between couples, but both films provide a virtual no man’s zone where neither care to venture, leaving instead a cavernous emptiness of unspoken thoughts. While this appears to be a studied examination of the nuances of marriage, unlike Bergman’s magnificent effort, none of the performances show even the slightest degree of nuance, where the biggest letdown is the utter lack of chemistry between characters, where none of them can act a whit.

While Jane is attempting to write a book about her grandmother, she hasn’t figured out yet how to present the material, how to see the war from an entirely new vantage point, so she goes on long sightseeing walks, eventually taking a ferry to nearby Ischia island, one of many islands in the Gulf of Naples. The on site locations are superb, as Jane runs into a young 19-year old American, Caleb (Jamie Blackley), who immediately starts paying Jane the kind of attention that the more dispassionate Leonard is simply incapable of providing. The youthful Caleb is much more fun and playful, but there’s more than a decade’s worth of difference between them, and Caleb is still just a kid. Still, all attempts to find passion in her marriage is met with resistance, as Leonard simply avoids the subject by drowning himself in his work. While they remain overly polite, what sex they have is dreadfully dull and boring, especially when there’s a young prospective lover waiting impatiently in the wings. Jane decides to take the plunge, turning this into a fairly stereotypical midlife crisis, where the cloistered and heavily repressed middle aged wife suddenly lets her hair down (literally), where the director fills the screen with a montage of idyllic sunsets over the beach, wine drenched romantic meals overlooking the glistening bay, pictures of the lovers embraced, waking up in each other’s arms by morning, and then conveniently arriving back at her hotel just as her husband is leaving for work.

When Jane insists they need to talk, Leonard politely avoids all confrontation, but she asserts he’s lost all curiosity about her and no longer “sees” her anymore, as if she’s become the invisible woman. What we do learn, however, is that they’re both traumatized after losing a baby, as neither has fully recovered afterwards, where despite the love that remains, the intimacy has simply disappeared. The film never really takes the husband’s concerns seriously, as all efforts to communicate are doomed from the cold and sterile opening images. In stark contrast, it’s a sunny and picturesque, yet somewhat over-romanticized affair in Italy, where typically if it’s a man having the affair he’s considered contemptible, while if it’s a woman, it supposedly opens the doors to an entirely new world. Despite dominating the screen time and receiving the upper hand in nearly every verbal encounter, the film interestingly withholds sympathy for Jane throughout, as even though the affair feels badly needed, it never gets too serious. Any offerings of hope, however, get a dose of cold water at the end, as over the end credits Jennifer Warnes rapturously sings Leonard Cohen’s perpetually downbeat “Famous Blue Raincoat” JENNIFER WARNES ~ Famous Blue Raincoat ~ - YouTube (5:34).

AND WHILE WE WERE HERE Facets Multi Media

In this tightly crafted relationship drama, Jane (Kate Bosworth) accompanies her husband Leonard (Iddo Goldberg) on a business trip to Naples. She is a writer who is also searching for something more from her life, as the uncomfortable silence between them is growing in their troubled marriage. Jane, left alone most days, wanders the streets listening to tapes she made of interviews with her grandmother, seeking inspiration to finish a memoir based on the old recordings (voiced by Claire Bloom). Facing writer's block, she takes a day trip to stunning Ischia, where she meets Caleb (Jamie Blackley), a young American leading a hermetic life on the island. As the two embark on an unlikely emotional affair, Jane must decide where her passions will take her.

Writer/director Kat Coiro (Life Happens) draws out brilliant performances from her cast and the vibrant color of And While We Were Here imbues the film with a rich sense of both nostalgia and honesty, in this affecting romance about a woman caught between two worlds.

Paste Magazine Michael Dunaway

While We Here is, on the one hand, utterly romantic and traditional. Entirely in black and white and set on the island of Ischia in Italy, Kat Coiro’s second feature film stars Kate Bosworth as Jane, a woman in the midst of a difficult marriage and an exciting affair. While paying homage to early cinema, Coiro also takes many unconventional risks in the storyline, where the conflict of the piece centers on Jane’s relationship with herself and a personal project she has been unable to complete for years. The love affair with a barely legal American (played by Jamie Blackley) and the marriage to her loving, but detached husband (Iddo Goldberg) are almost secondary, although they provide the meat of the film and the—for lack of a better phrase—absolute sexiness. Blackley provides the drama’s comic relief, and Goldberg aptly delivers the intensity of an artist and husband who, like Bosworth’s character, has not quite found himself. Visually enticing and well grounded in its plot (as the title implies, the film does not attempt to deal with much more than this one very specific moment in the protagonist’s life), While We Here reminds us of Bosworth’s capabilities and introduces us to the new, exciting talent of her co-stars. Perhaps most importantly, its depiction of womanhood, particularly as it does and does not relate to the romantic male counterpart, establishes Coiro’s presence as a new, potent voice in filmmaking.

Sun-streaked and Meditative, And While We Were ... - Village Voice Chris Klimek

And While We Were Here, writer-director Kat Coiro's sun-dappled, largely handheld meditation on fidelity, sometimes recalls Richard Linklater's celebrated Before trilogy—specifically its middle entry, Before Sunset, wherein the fact that Ethan Hawke's Jesse has a wife and kid back home in the States hangs over everything. The married couple that Coiro follows to Italy, Jane and Leonard (Kate Bosworth and Iddo Goldberg), isn't nearly as chatty as Linklater's young/youngish/middle-aged lovers, and we infer quickly that the silence between them is a problem. He's a professional viola player in town for a big concert; she's a freelance writer working on a book about her grandmother's experiences in England during the two world wars. (Throughout the film she listens back to her recorded conversations with grandma, which have an uncanny way of commenting upon her present circumstances.) On a solo day trip to the romantic island of Ischia, Jane allows herself to be charmed by a 19-year-old American boy (Jamie Blackley, livelier than anything else in the film) who showers her with the adoration her kind but distant husband has long denied her. Coiro stabs at profundity by making Leonard surprisingly forgiving and Jane surprisingly cruel when at last they argue, but then squanders the insight she's eked out with an overwrought climax that drives home the impossibility of love by playing Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" on the soundtrack. It's a bummer that the movie settles for such an oft-mined vein of bummed-outedness—for a few minutes, Coiro really had me going.

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

It's hard to know how Kat Coiro's While We Were Here would play under optimal conditions (still not well, I'm guessing), but the programmers of the Tribeca Film Festival did the picture no favors by slotting it anywhere near the same vicinity as Sarah Polley's Take this Waltz, a film that, like this one, deals with a marriage on the verge of rupture due to a wife's attraction to a younger, more exciting man. I saw Waltz first; While We Were Here never stood a chance. Everything that was gutsy and nuanced in Waltz is flat and obvious here, and all of the complexities that made that picture so authentic are altogether absent. Godard once said that the best way to criticize a film was to make another one, and while I realize that it's logistically impossible for Take this Waltz to have been a rebuke to While We Were Here, there are times where it sure as hell plays like one.

Married couple Jane (Kate Bosworth) and Leonard (Iddo Goldberg) are spending two weeks in Naples. She's a freelance writer; he's an esteemed violist. "I think it's gonna be good, us being here," she tells him as they arrive, and they hold hands stiffly. There's an unspoken discomfort between them, later revealed: they wed because she was pregnant, but she subsequently miscarried. They're traveling for his work (he's playing with a local orchestra), but they're also looking to revive the dormant union.

One day, while he's rehearsing, she takes an impromptu ride over to Ischia, where she has a chance encounter with a young, chatty America named Caleb (Jamie Blackley). The 19-year-old ends up tagging along with her for the day; there's a little bit of a spark, a little bit of a connection, but it's more than that. Jane clearly recognizes in him a little piece of the carefree youth that is no longer inside her. When she returns to Leonard, the contrast between the free-spirited kid and her fuddy-duddy hubby becomes clearer.

Too clear, frankly. The trouble with the picture (the primary trouble, anyway) is that, because Leonard is such a sour and unappealing twit, the actual triangle isn't terribly interesting. This is what Polley got so right, and that Cairo gets so wrong: the husband in Waltz is a genuinely warm and tender guy, and what the man on the side offers is less the remedy for a loveless marriage than, simply, the draw of something new. While We Were Here's Caleb offers the same, and that's a dynamic worth looking into. But Cairo stacks the deck by also making Leonard such an unfeeling, uncaring drip, and by making his interactions with Jane such one-the-nose dramatizations of overworked married dissatisfaction. Thus, if Jane has to choose, there's no tension, or real question of audience sympathy; the pedestrian writing of the husband character and the overall situation makes it comically easy for her.

To be fair, when Bosworth finally gets something substantial to play (this comes very late in the film), she's game, and Blackley has a nice, sideways manner of delivering his lines that gives the picture a much-needed shot of energy whenever he appears. Also, the black-and-white photography is luminous, and the Italian locations are (expectedly) to die for. It's all quite lovely to look at, but once you get past the arty cinematography and deliberate pace, While We Were Here is little more than Eat Pray Love for the festival circuit.

Review: 'And While We Were Here' Delivers The Sensuality Of The ... Gabe Toro from The Playlist

Slant Magazine [Wes Greene]

While We Were Here (2012) Movie Review from Eye for Film Anne-Katrin Titze

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Shared Darkness: And While We Were Here Brent Simon

Director interview indieWIRE interview, April 7, 2012

While We Were Here: Tribeca Review - The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck

Variety [John Anderson]

Los Angeles Times [Annlee Ellingson]

And While We Were Here - Movies - The New York Times Stephen Holden

Coixet, Isabel

MY LIFE WITHOUT ME B+ 92

Spain Canada (106 mi) 2003 Official website [United States]

You see things clearly now. You see all these borrowed lives, borrowed voices, Milli Vanilli everywhere. You look at all the things you can’t buy – now you don’t even want to buy – all the things that will still be here after you’re gone, when you’re dead. And then you realize that all the things in the bright window displays: all the models and catalogues, all the colors, all the special offers, all the Martha Stewart recipes, all the piles of greasy food, it’s just all there to try to keep us away from death, and it doesn’t work.

—Ann (Sarah Polley)

This is a fragile, but intricately powerful and poetic film about dying, but one which insists upon losing the morbidity and self-pity, believing that doesn’t serve anyone’s best interests. Relying upon a beautifully unsentimentalized performance from Sarah Polley, completely unglamorized, wearing little to no make up, this is a bittersweet and highly personalized journey of the last two months in a woman’s life. Very similar to Gus van Sant’s Restless (van Sant) (2011), this is another film about terminal illness which has seriously divided audiences, where some actually have contempt for the film, calling the protagonist immature and utterly selfish for *not* telling her family or loved ones that she’s dying (a change made by the director from the original story), where their loathing for her personal choice about the way she wants to die undermines their appreciation for the film, where certainly part of this knee-jerk reaction is undoubtedly the fixed ideas that exist in our heads about approaching death, where many are as rigid and solemn as long-held religious views. Instead, much like suicide, the argument goes, the inevitable finale leaves the family in a state of turmoil, unable to say goodbye or share their final thoughts before death. If you want that film, where everyone does the responsible thing, watch Debra Winger in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983), perhaps the ultimate weeper, a film nearly guaranteed to make you cry. Not taking anything away from that movie, this is simply not that film. Adapted by the director from Florida-born author Nanci Kincaid's short story Pretending the Bed is a Raft, where the prevailing theme might best be expressed by a mother as she writes to her daughter, “Women always know more about the facts of life because most of the facts happen to women.” Though the overriding theme is death, what’s equally significant is coming to terms with one’s mortality, where the singlemost driving force of the film is refusing to live a single last breath without love.

In a story that appears to have been written for Sarah Polley (who lost her own mother to cancer at age 11), she literally inhabits the role of Ann, a young twentysomething mother of two young girls (Jessica Amlee and Kenya Jo Kennedy) with a perpetually unemployed but extremely likeable high school sweetheart husband Don, Scott Speedman, who actually went to high school together in real life with Sarah Polley, ironically working the night shift as a janitor mopping the floors and cleaning the hallways of a university that symbolizes kids with a brighter future, with an unnamed and disgraced father in prison, while living in a cramped trailer in her harried mother’s (Deborah Harry) backyard just outside Vancouver. Clouded in an everpresent palette of layers upon layers of grey, with a hovering mist of rain throughout, this is an unusual film filled with melancholy and sadness, but also small moments that are so perfectly etched into our imaginations with a kind of effortless naturalism, where Polley is onscreen for nearly every shot, filled with beauty and grace, where the storyline becomes synonymous with her interior frame of mind. In this film, selflessness defines the woman, as she is literally viewed as collateral damage, the price paid for someone elses victory. With little time to actually sleep, Ann is the kind of working woman we take for granted in our society because of the immense role they play in our lives, as they sacrifice all to take care of others, having little time for themselves, exhibiting a kind of maternal force that’s been providing for us since the dawn of time, all with a kind of noble silence, never asking for or taking credit. It is this overriding and relentless sense of dedication to others that can become an unbearable weight, always having to do for others, continuing to do what’s expected. When Ann realizes she has so little time left, her immediate response is to spare her family the unwelcome sight of death, where visits to the hospital with the inevitable ghastly horrors would be their final shared memories. True to her nature, she prefers another way.

While the film is set in poverty, where living in a trailer is a fact of life for this family, it is barely noticeable in this film and not referred to again, as there is no pulling on the heartstrings due to her lowly position, it's just a part of who Ann is. When she writes out a list of 10 things to do before you die, in keeping with her character, her choices are surprisingly modest. Filmed in subdued colors, there are moments of surprising simplicity and power, occasionally dipping into surreal thoughts, like a quick daydream, where all the shoppers in a supermarket suddenly break out into dance My Life Without Me (scene) - YouTube (1:05), a sequence completely improvised on the set, or Ann’s heartfelt decision to record birthday messages for both daughters for every year up until age 18. Film critic Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] found this choice particularly nauseating, claiming if he was one of those kids “I would burn the goddamn tapes” in anger at his mother’s “stupidity.” This is a common view held by someone who never had children. Speaking as someone who actually raised two children that lost their mother at an early age, they would have killed for those tapes, or anything else that could help remind them of their mother, as they felt so guilty in forgetting her memory, like not remembering the sound of her voice. In one of the best scenes of the film, she visits her imprisoned father (the uncredited Alfred Molina), where a children’s choir hauntingly sings “God Only Knows” The Langley School Project : God only knows (3:05) to the empty corridors, where his thoughts reverberate, “Some of us just can't live the kind of life that other people want us to live. No matter how hard you try, you just can't do it.” Ann also meets and has an affair with a fellow alienated soul, Mark Ruffalo as Lee, a guy living in an empty apartment with no furniture, only piles of books, where he may as well be living in limbo. Their first and last kisses, with supremely inventive music used in between, couldn’t be more memorable, or any less romantic than Eastwood standing in the rain during THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (1995). Isabel Coixet is from Barcelona, adding a female sense of elegance that might otherwise have been lost, using a brilliant ensemble cast and one of the most perfectly chosen musical soundtracks that simply elevates this material into unforeseen heights. Often using slo mo and fast motion changes of speed to reflect internalized thoughts, Polley’s intoxicating opening inner narration couldn’t be more poetically perfect "This is you..." First scene from " My life Without Me " - YouTube (1:31).

Exclaim! [Erin Oke]

My Life Without Me is a bleak little film set in the grey, rainy climbs of Vancouver about Ann (Sarah Polley), a 23-year-old mother of two with an unemployed husband (Scott Speedman), an incarcerated father and a night time janitorial job at a university, who lives in a trailer in her difficult mother's (Deborah Harry) backyard.

Things go from mundane to excruciating in Ann's life when she learns that she has a terminal illness and a few short months to live. Ann keeps the information to herself, but begins to prepare for her demise by really living for the first time. Among other things, she starts an affair with an oddball loner named Lee (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously, this isn't the cheeriest film, but unlike so many similarly themed stories, it remains to its last refreshingly unsentimental.

The dialogue is sparse and effective, save for some first-person voiceover monologues, which are a tad overwritten. Director Isabel Coixet shows the material world surrounding Ann to be cold, often antiseptic and always unrelentingly dismal. However, the people portrayed in the film contrast this with their warmth and humanity, even in the most undesirable situations.

Sarah Polley does a good job of remaining tough and determined in the lead role and the supporting cast are universally talented, especially Blondie's Deborah Harry in the role of Ann's embittered mother, and Julian Richings as Ann's quirky doctor.

When people approach the end of their lives, death tends to set the agenda, not the other way around. For those few who are given a timetable, like Sarah Polley in My Life Without Me, the remaining days are not just a precious opportunity to squeeze the last drops of pleasure out of life, but also a chance for loved ones to get a jump on the mourning process. Given two months to live, Polley chooses to die quietly and on her own terms, so she refuses to confide in her family and friends, as though she was quitting a job without giving notice. Fortunately for her, death is on its best behavior, gently asserting itself with a few jags of nausea while still allowing her to tick off all the items on her "To Do" list. Writer-director Isabel Coixet, armed with reams of adolescent poetry in her narration and imagery, wants her heroine to leave a beautiful corpse, eased sweetly and gracefully into the soil. Yet no matter how squarely everything works out in the end, Polley's secrecy is unforgivable, because it selfishly denies her loved ones their rightful place in the process, with no thought to the emotional wreckage left behind. A better movie might have considered the negative consequences, but Coixet turns inward right along with Polley, orchestrating a death that works out nicely for everyone involved, as though Coixet were dictating an uncommonly generous will. Any lingering sympathies for the deceased are entirely due to Polley's typically thoughtful lead performance, which at least makes her character appear more caring than her actions suggest. A 24-year-old who lives in a trailer behind her mother Deborah Harry's house with husband Scott Speedman and their two young girls, Polley works nights mopping up the halls at a local university–a crudely ironic sign that life has passed her by. After she's diagnosed with terminal cancer, Polley seizes the chance to sow her wild oats as she privately sets her family's affairs in order. Looking for the experience she sacrificed by getting pregnant at 17 and marrying her high-school sweetheart, Polley has an affair with Mark Ruffalo, a rumpled loner who falls in love, oblivious to her condition. It would be one thing if Coixet were commenting on how death can make a person selfish or solipsistic, but My Life Without Me asks for sympathy for deplorable behavior: Claiming that "lies are [her] only company," Polley betrays her husband and misleads her lover, albeit with great sensitivity. If her final days weren't meticulously scripted (and whose final days ever are?), all would not be so easily forgiven.

Jon Popick

Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet's My Life Without Me, which she adapted from Nanci Kincaid's short story Pretending the Bed is a Raft, is a lot like I Am Sam in that both films feature a ridiculously hokey premise carefully and thoughtfully made into shockingly compelling cinema. Reactions will probably be quite similar as well, with some viewers unable to look past the maudlin subject matter that seems better suited for a Lifetime Network movie-of-the-week than one of a handful of highlights from 2003's Toronto International Film Festival.

Me stars a dark-haired Sarah Polley (The Claim) as Ann, a 23-year-old who seems surprisingly happy despite having a life many would consider sad, or at least about as far from glamorous as you might be able to get. She has two daughters, a perpetually unemployed husband and a job with the third-shift janitorial crew at the local university picking up the garbage created by people of a similar age but with much brighter futures. Ann's immediate family is very close, though, both literally and figuratively, as her husband Don (Scott Speedman, Underworld) and their two kids (Jessica Amlee and Kenya Jo Kennedy) live in a cramped trailer in her mother's backyard just outside Vancouver.

When Don announces he's landed a semi-long-term gig installing pools, Ann takes a moment to reflect and says, "I've got a good feeling about this." And anyone who heard Sharon say the same thing at the beginning of the second season of The Osbournes knows making such a statement is guaranteed to turn your life upside-down. Before you know it, Ann is doubled over in pain and is told by a nervous hospital doctor (Julian Richings, Open Range) that she has only a couple of months to live, courtesy of inoperable cancer spreading faster than Internet gossip about the third Matrix film.

I think a lot of people might have a hard time accepting Ann's reaction to the diagnosis, but that's because they're programmed to think films about people dying have to be button-pushers like Life as a House, Sweet November or Stepmom - the sort of mawkish movies that take the easy way out by sticking to a boring formula which seems intent on generating a set amount of tears at predetermined moments. The ones with big stars wearing lots of gray makeup hungrily leaping at the chance to fake a dignified yet agonizing death while secretly dreaming of an Oscar. The ones I'm so tired of seeing.

You won't get any of that in the Pedro Almodóvar-produced Me because Ann decides not to tell anyone about her illness, which eliminates virtually all self-pity from the film. Instead, Ann calmly makes a list of things she wants to do before she dies. Her goals are very down to earth (unlike, say, Homer Simpson's similar attempt) and don't include things like "Backpack through Europe" or "Sleep with the singer from matchbox twenty." Some are fiercely maternal (she wants to make birthday recordings for little Penny and Patsy for every year until they turn 18), while others seek closure (she wants to reconcile with her jailed father, played by Identity's Alfred Molina). Some are incredibly generous (she wants to find a new wife for Don), while others are a bit selfish (she wants to make another man fall in love with her, because Don is the only guy she's ever kissed).

There are a couple of clunky moments (the worst involve Maria de Medeiros and Milli Vanilli), but Coixet's first English-language film is blessed by Polley's best performance to date and the recurring use of The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows." There is amazing chemistry between Polley and Speedman (they went to high school together in real life), as well as both actors and their on-screen children. Scenes between Polley and Windtalkers' Mark Ruffalo (he plays Ann's romantic conquest) aren't quite are powerful, though they're better than most films, and they also happen to feature the best kiss and supermarket dance sequence since Punch Drunk Love.

“You see things clearly now. You see all these borrowed lives, borrowed voices, Milli Vanilli everywhere. You look at all the things you can’t buy – now you don’t even want to buy – all the things that will still be here after you’re gone, when you’re dead. And then you realize that all the things in the bright window displays: all the models and catalogues, all the colors, all the special offers, all the Martha Stewart recipes, all the piles of greasy food, it’s just all there to try to keep us away from death, and it doesn’t work” – Ann

Isabel Coixet’s films deal with people whose future has been severely damaged if not outright robbed by health problems. The Secret Life of Words features a Sarah Polley as deaf nurse caring for a severely burned oil rig worker, while Elegy ultimately has Penelope Cruz dealing with the impending loss of her breast. This earlier movie features an equally introspective Polley as Ann, a 23-year-old dying of inoperable ovarian cancer. All her mom’s dreams never transpired, and Ann made her life decisions so early, marrying her first boyfriend and delivering their first child at 17, that she never had a chance to dream.

Coixet is one of the best directors of actors because she doesn’t put her performers at the mercy of the script. Rather than simply asking them to spell everything out, she focuses her efforts on allowing them to be the character so they can indirectly tell us all we need to know.

One of the specialties of Coixet’s sensitive work is allowing her characters to have some sort of inner life, thus providing an alternative to the usual strict character to character to relationship where they share their thoughts and feelings - the desires and fears of their very personal little world - with the audience. Due to this, Coixet’s work comes across as being more personal and poetic than most of the other artists.

Coixet’s films are so effective because this inner world not only speaks to us, but also asks us to reflect on our own. And really, that’s the success of Coixet’s films that, regardless of their strengths and weaknesses and caring less about whether we agree with the decisions and morality, they are still able to make us contemplate so many aspects of our own existence.

The basic problem with My Life Without Me is not so much the film, but the way the audience is sure to interact with it. No matter how intriguing the premise, it’s hard not to get distracted by whether Ann sparing her family the burden of knowing and instead telling them her terminal illness is merely anemia is the logical or proper thing to do. Her logic is to maintain the accustomed sense of normalcy of everyone around her for as long as possible. I think I’d definitely prefer to know the truth then suddenly have massive regrets for typically neglecting someone I’ll never see again, but the value of a movie doesn’t lie in characters doing either the obvious or what you would do, but rather in making the audience understand their decisions enough to consider, contemplate, and debate them.

What makes My Life Without Me worthwhile is we are not only allowed to see the world through Ann’s eyes, but forced to asked to free ourselves from our own perspective to consider hers. Even if she sometimes aspires to be, Ann is hardly a model of selflessness and maturity. That said, even if the film seems to waver between criticizing the emptiness of western consumerist lifestyle and creating a profound sympathy for all of it that she’ll miss, Ann’s story is not only interesting, but credible if for no other reason than Sarah Polley is a great actress whose belief in her character is apparent at every turn. Granted Polley could make almost any tripe seem honest, but at her best, as she certainly is here, we completely forget we are just watching an actress. Perhaps she’s even better in this role because she lost her own mother to cancer at age 11. Mark Ruffalo doesn’t exactly break new ground with his performance here as lonely thoughtful man traumatized by the failure of his previous relationship, but his melancholy turn as the man Ann gets to fall in love with her is nonetheless a wonderful understated one that holds its own next to Polley’s great work.

While I disagree with some of Ann’s choices in principle, I think the movie works because Ann simply accepts her death rather than trying to ignore the inevitable by putting all her energy into enjoying every last second. This isn’t the typical movie about a trying to go out with a bang. Granted, the typical movie heroine is magically well off rather than a poor sap living in a trailer next to her mom (Deborah Harry), so Ann not wanting to put her family in an even greater financial bind is certainly a factor, but the important thing aspects are Ann is going out on her own terms, and the discovery of what they are, corny as some may be, allows her impending death to actually be her awakening.

I appreciated the laid back manner in which My Life Without Me is was presented, with each character having their own problems and adding some interesting observations on life, many of which are rendered ironic due to Ann’s (and our) knowledge of her impending doom. The film is very strong emotionally, but not in the expected tear jerking manner. Instead, it aims to interact with you rather than elicit a certain reaction.

Coixet’s cinema is one of mood and emotion, largely determined by the cast rather than the technique. She conveys her themes through seemingly meaningless everyday incidents, with a few off the wall comments to spice things up. That said, unlike most entertainment where the characters are so obviously being goofballs for our enjoyment, the little quirks and obsessions of the supporting characters makes them seem more like real individuals and less like the usual clowns. We remember Maria de Medieros’ spirited defense of the artistic merit of Milli Vanilli not because it’s so laughable or contrary to the truth, but rather because real people are often remembered for whatever belief or opinion runs so contrary to the accepted that it becomes their defining characteristic. Instead of reminding me of a sitcom character, she makes me think of my friend who endlessly tried to prove that Brian Brennan was better than Jerry Rice even though anyone who had ever watched a football game knew they weren’t even remotely comparable.

I wouldn’t describe My Life Without Me as realistic, I mean this is a world where Siamese Twins can somehow not be the same sex, but I guess I like that it has the maturity to be immature. Ann’s mostly selfish top 10 list of things to do before she dies is never presented as any sort of universal answer. We know it’s jokey from the moment we see the final the commandment is get false nails and do something with her hair.

Most movies would try to justify the heroine having an affair by making the husband an inattentive abusive drunkard, but Don (Scott Speedman) is, if anything, too noble and good. His character could have some more depth and dimension to be certain, but in a sense he works because we see how excluded he is from the whole process. We wonder how he’ll feel when he realizes Ann never gave him the chance to take care of her in her dying days, know he’d be shattered if he found out she spent them making a new man love her more, and figure he’d rebel if it struck him that she set up their neighbor Ann (Leonor Watling) to be her replacement. If the film addressed any of this, it would be preachy and dull, but it doesn’t need to because it’s set up so Ann’s dialogue with the audience isn’t merely a monologue. We obviously won’t change her decisions, but we are encouraged to come to our own rather than blindly follow in her footsteps.

Three Weeks to Live-What Would You Do? Andrew Sarris from NY Observer

“My Life Without Me” - Salon.com Charles Taylor

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

My Life Without Me | Literary Mama Caroline M. Grant from Literary Mama

Infidelity Week: My Life Without Me - A Bright Wall in a Dark Room Erika U.

Sunday Classics: 'My Life Without Me' | AtTheCinema.net Sarah Ward

DVD Times Michael Mackenzie

DVD Verdict Diane Wild

Dirty Shame - Cinescene Les Phillips

kamera.co.uk - film review - My Life Without Me - Tim Smedley

Offoffoff -- The Guide to Alternative New York Joshua Tanzer

My Life Without Me - Movie-Vault.com Le Apprenti

kamera.co.uk - film review - My Life Without Me - Ann Lee

About World Film Marcy Dermansky

Xiibaro Reviews: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World ... David Perry

My Life Without Me | Film Blather Eugene Novikov

my life without me - review at videovista.net Gary Couzens

hoopla.nu - My Life Without Me Mark and Stuart Wilson

Steve Rhodes

JoBlo's Movie Reviews: New Releases, DVD reviews ... - JoBlo.com Berge Garabedian

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

My Life Without Me - Talking Pictures Howard Schumann

My Life Without Me Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London

An Interview With Sarah Polley - Kamera.co.uk Ann Lee interview with actress Sarah Polley

News & Features | Scott free - Boston Phoenix Tamara Wider interview with actor Scott Speedman, October 10 – 16, 2003

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

Paradoxes of a beautiful life Craig Taylor examines the complicated life of Sarah Polley from The Guardian, October 24, 2003

My Life Without Me | Film | guardian.co.uk Xan Brooks

Movies | MY LIFE WITHOUT ME - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

My Life Without Me - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

'My Life' goes out of its way to jerk tears - Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

My Life Without Me - community.seattletimes.nwsource.com Erik Lundergaard from The Seattle Times

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

My Life Without Me - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS

Spain (115 mi) 2005

Unsmiling, pathologically private, and all but wordless, deaf factory girl Hanna (Sarah Polley) uses an enforced vacation to volunteer as a nurse on an oil rig in the Irish Sea, where she tends to Josef (Tim Robbins), a badly burned worker with enough fight left in him to flirt with his enigmatic attendant and try to coax her out of her strategic silence. Spanish writer-director Isabel Coixet appears to have made a close study of Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves: What pleasure there is to be wrung from the exceptionally banal. The Secret Life of Words lies in the harsh, unforgiving beauty and wonderfully strange social life of the isolated rig. In due course skeletons will march out of closets, but the movie yields up its secrets with slow reluctance. Which is just as well, since the nagging voices in Hanna and Josef's heads force their way out to reveal inner lives as attenuated and silly as those in Coixet's 2003 My Life Without Me, which made similarly scant use of Polley's prodigious talent.

Like Anna Karina's Sweater: Speak, Memory FilmBrain from Like Anna Karina’s Sweater

Though her films have been nominated and awarded prizes at festivals all over Europe, Spanish writer/director Isabel Coixet remains relatively unknown here in the US. Her English language debut, the wonderful Things I Never Told You (1996), came and went without much notice. A real shame, for this feminist variation on the quirky relationship dramedy that was all the rage in 90s indie cinema boasts a magnificent screenplay, and a great lead performance by Lili Taylor. (Plus, where else can you find Debi Mazar playing a post-op transsexual?)

2003's My Life Without Me, which featured Sarah Polley as a young woman who chooses not to tell her family that she's dying of terminal cancer, received some decent critical recognition, but did little at the box office. Though not a perfect film, there's much to admire in its direction, screenplay, and lead performance. As moving as it is, it doesn't begin to approach the gut-wrenching power of her latest film, The Secret Life of Words.

Opening in Northern Ireland, we meet Hanna (Sarah Polley), a hearing-impaired factory worker with an indeterminate accent who keeps to herself and exhibits OCD-like behavior. Her sparsely decorated flat mirrors her stoic nature, and more often than not she shuts off her hearing aid to silence the world around her. Ordered to take vacation by her boss, Hanna winds up (owing to coincidence) on an offshore oil rig, working as a nurse for Josef (Tim Robbins), a burn victim left temporarily blind from an accident. In a relationship built on multiple layers of trust, the pair will forge an unusual intimacy where truth and lies are interwoven, and secrets are revealed that will change them forever. Hanna, for whom silence was something of a weapon, will allow words to break down her defenses.

Coixet presents the rig as a multicultural microcosm, full of characters whose physical isolation from the rest of the world parallels Hanna's emotional one. There's a chef from Spain who dreams of his own restaurant, an English oceanographer who counts waves, and a Norwegian captain who has little use for life on land. Though only minor characters, Coixet has crafted them with as much detail as Hanna and Josef.

From the film's outset, there are some unavoidable parallels to Lars von Trier. Hanna as a sensory-deprived immigrant factory worker calls to mind Bjork's Selma from Dancer in the Dark, while the shaky, hand-held camera work and oil rig on the North Sea is right out of Breaking the Waves. However, the similarities end there. Coixet's humanism is the antipode to von Trier's misanthropy (and, as some would claim, misogyny). Still, the image of Hanna as the lone woman amongst a group of lonely, isolated men is eerily disquieting. (Fortunately, Udo Kier is nowhere to be found.)

Coixet reveals very little about Hanna until late in the film – a decision that has less to do with narrative structure (i.e., a simple reveal) than it does with the film's larger message. It works tremendously, and delivers a kick to the sternum with a force that few films have been able to achieve. Polley (for whom the role was written) delivers a praise- and award-worthy performance that elevates her to "great actress" stature.

The direction here feels more intimate than her previous films, which no doubt has as much to do with the limited physical space (on the rig) as with the subject matter at hand. As in her previous films, her use of music is outstanding (right up there with Scorsese and Claire Denis), and she's managed to cull a selection of tracks that work incredibly well – including songs by Tom Waits, Antony and the Johnsons, Clem Snide, Paolo Conte and Blood, Sweat, and Tears. Her use of David Byrne's Tiny Apocalypse over the end credits is spine tingling.

Well deserving of its four Goya Awards (including best film, best director, and best screenplay), The Secret Life of Words is without question a political film, but one that transcends its subject matter to address something far more universal. It isn't Coixet's intention to shame us, but the film is a harsh reminder of how some horrors are glossed over, or never rightfully acknowledged in the first place. This is a deeply humanist work, and its optimistic ending (a sticking point with some) reveals a rare and genuine sense of hope, free from maudlin sentimentality. That in itself is quite a feat.

Reel.com DVD review [Sarah Keech]

stylusmagazine.com (Nancy Keefe Rhodes)

The Lumière Reader Jacob Powell

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver)

european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij

The New York Sun (Steve Dollar)

Greencine [Erin Donovan]

Nerve.com [Bilge Ebiri]

DVD Verdict [Brendan Babish]

Ferdy on Films [Kathryn Ware]

filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Los Angeles Times [Lael Loewenstein]

Time Out London (Trevor Johnston) review [3/6]

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

ELEGY A- 94

USA (108 mi) 2008

My favorite comment about this film comes from someone who didn’t even see it (from Chris Knipp below):

A somber, contemplative work about love, mortality and missed opportunities told completely in flashback mode recalling a torrid, all-consuming affair eight years earlier that might best be described as a rainy day movie, it’s a fascinating mixture of cultures at work here, from an adaptation of American author Philip Roth’s frank and unsparingly sexist book, female Spanish director Coixet’s beautiful direction, especially of Penélope Cruz in perhaps her most dramatically understated performance to date, and a host of other quality actors the likes of which are rarely seen working together, from the superbly detached, perfectly cast Ben Kingsley as the aging professor to Patricia Clarkson, his sultry mistress of twenty years, Dennis Hopper as his fellow poet and best friend, crude below the belt while remaining loyal to a fault, Debbie Harry has a brief turn as Hopper’s ex-wife, and Peter Sarsgaard as Kingsley’s morally outraged adult son who is still offended by his father’s actions twenty years ago when he left his wife and family, yet is undergoing a similar midlife crisis himself. There is outstanding work by cinematographer Jean-Claude Larrieu and Coixet again as the musical supervisor, as their work together is among the best collaborations of the year, especially the choice to use Erik Satie’s hauntingly sensuous piano music, the “Gnossiennes No. 3 and 4,” as the musical link between the lovers, also a perfect moment for Arvo Pärt’s icily spare “Spiegel em Spiegel.” The sound and feeling is simply effortless. Kingsley is absolutely superb as the Casanova of the literature department, a distinguished man of letters who uses his position as a cultural critic, lecturer, and professor at Columbia University to have sex with his more attractive students, a man who is acutely aware of his age, perplexed that it may finally be getting the best of him:

"Can you imagine old age? Of course you can't. I didn't. I couldn't. I had no idea what it was like. Not even a false image --- no image. And nobody wants anything else. Nobody wants to face any of this before he has to. How is it all going to turn out? Obtuseness is de rigueur."

As he recollects the events, Penélope Cruz walks into his class and beguiles him, paralyzing him with her voluptuous beauty, striking a lethal blow in his heart as he succumbs as any younger man would do, instantly wishing that he never has to take his eyes off her again. But he has a crippling flaw that he can’t control, an unsavory jealousy where he thinks about her day and night, always envisioning her falling for a younger man, where his fear is that she will find a younger version of himself. While Kingsley has lived his life as a serial seducer where sex is the only reality of living a life without pretense, where love and attachment are minor considerations that become inconveniences to avoid, Cruz approaches the relationship differently and finds his ways infantile, as they bring him no lasting meaning or happiness. She drives him batty asking how she will figure into his future, a question that leaves him baffled, as he is a brooding introvert who hides much of his life from her as well as his true feelings which he keeps even from himself, as otherwise he might discover he’s a shallow, self-centered man of indulgence and pretense, and a future with Cruz truly does frighten him, overly alarmed by their age difference and the more frightening thought that she’d have to “mean” something to him. Cruz is a match for his intellect in every respect, as she is utterly unpretentious and in every way the full figure of a woman who leaves him breathless with desire, so he worships her to her unending delight. In his eyes, she is Goya’s “Maja,” both clothed and nude (see: The Nude Maja (La maja desnuda). Coixet offers tasteful images of a nude Cruz, whose exposed breasts become synonymous for Kingsley with beauty, openness, art and truth.

Despite their intense affair, Kingsley remains firmly detached and noncommittal. When she insists that after more than a year and a half together that he come to a party in her home and meet her family, he has visions of embarrassment and ridicule due to their age difference. Only after he is finally persuaded to come does she feel like a breakthrough has occurred where he’s willing to acknowledge her publicly. Interspersed between their visits are Kingsley’s visits to Hopper, his only friend, who has cynically doused the flames of their relationship from the outset, claiming it’s only a matter of time before she leaves him. The two of them subscribe to the same theory of realism through debauchery and personal liberation, claiming their marriages were the worst mistakes they ever made, leaving them free to explore the pursuit of happiness. Many note that the tone of the film does match the graphic explicitness of the book, where the age crisis leaves him filled with a bitter rage, leaving Roth free to rant at will, which is not the focus of the film, which may not be as laceratingly single-minded but instead offers a much more subdued experience that is marked by the lonely isolation of dark, interior rooms or images of solitary figures staring vacuously out windows during a steady stream of rain. When Kingsley and Cruz are together, their intimacy is unquestioned, but there’s also a crushing claustrophobia surrounding their every move, as if they are caged creatures. It’s actually Cruz who wants to break out of the cage and live freely and Kingsley who wants to keep her there, like a prized possession, or like a book that he can place neatly and perfectly on the shelf. The film is punctuated by the interior thoughts of analysis and self-loathing by Kingsley which are read like solemn passages of a book that inevitably feel shrouded in doom. Kingsley is not left unscathed in this film, as life takes its toil and he gets his comeuppance, but that’s precisely why this film is worth seeing, as we all face mortality uniquely, but this one offers a different revelatory path of a man’s world searingly undone by the influence of a woman, bravely interpreted by the female Spanish duo of Cruz and Coixet, that throughout strikes a subtle note of introspection, elegance and grace.

William Butler Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium The poem from which Roth titled his book, which bears a strange resemblance to a certain Coen brothers film as well

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Men grow old, but do they really ever grow up? That’s the question posed by this astute adaptation of Philip Roth’s ‘The Dying Animal’, in which Ben Kingsley’s suave professor and all-round cultural guru preys on his female class members, but only after they’ve finished their courses with him so as to avoid harassment suits. While businesswoman Patricia Clarkson offers regular sexual companionship, the latest notch on this divorcee’s bed post is graduate student Penélope Cruz, whose beauty leaves him acting like a jealous teenager… not exactly what she’s expecting from the relationship.

Spanish director Isabel Coixet provides elegant Ivy League settings, but what’s most striking is the way she takes a male-dominated story about unashamedly sexist attitudes and turns it on its head to show textbook intellectual Kingsley undone by his underdeveloped emotional insights. Kingsley’s performance does better by the character’s self-satisfied over-confidence than the pain of unexpected vulnerability (in contrast to a less showy but telling turn from academic colleague Dennis Hopper, piercing in its resignation), yet it’s Cruz who’s the fulcrum of the piece.

Credible as an impressionable student under her tutor’s sway, she’s also a complex, exposed presence prompting both Kingsley (and, by extension, the audience) to look beyond the alluring surface and see the multi-faceted individual within. Overall, though, the film falls just short, due in no small part to unimaginative music selections (the same old Erik Satie and Arvo Pärt piano pieces again), which drain its individuality in favour of mere generic arthouse melancholia.

Film Journal International (Chris Barsanti) review

Some years ago, it may have seemed the kiss of death to cast Ben Kingsley in a film based on a Philip Roth novel. Fortunately, in Isabel Coixet’s Elegy—a just-tasteful-enough version of Roth’s The Dying Animal—we are seeing Kingsley in his more liberated later period, an actor of impeccable manner who can downshift into the basest emotions without skipping a beat. Without him, this perfectly competent film might have lapsed into indolent literary respectability, something the world could well do without.

Professor David Kepesh (Kingsley) is one of those well-feted literary lights, flogging his newest book on PBS when he’s not teaching at a Columbia-esque New York college. Trim and smartly turned out, Kepesh has an easy time seducing the adoring women who throng his classroom—though, as he points out in the sly voiceover, he never beds any until they’ve gotten their grades, all the better to avoid lawsuits. A dirty-minded man of letters with a sharp eye for beauty, Kepesh is an immediately engaging character and Kingsley’s well-tuned portrayal of this intellectual satyr and inveterate seducer is quite easy to buy into.

Elegy—penned by former Star Trek sequel scribe Nicholas Meyer, who already adapted (more roughly) Roth’s The Human Stain—begins with Kepesh starting his newest student-body conquest, the smart and mysterious Cuban knockout Consuela (Penélope Cruz, rarely better), who falls for his charms in little time. Giving the story some immediate grit is Kepesh’s quickly developing and quite (to him) surprising insecurity over his relationship with Consuela. Even though he refuses to allow her into other parts of his perfectly locked-off life, Kepesh nevertheless descends into immature jealousy and possessiveness, though of course not stopping any of his own sleeping around. A late-developing twist in their relationship makes him reevaluate everything.

Serving as the clear-headed chorus reminding him of just how childish he’s being is Kepesh’s best friend, poet George O’Hearn, played with a delightful and audience-winning freshness by Dennis Hopper, no doubt pleased to be in a film that doesn’t require him to wave a gun and laugh like a maniac. Also providing a sensible amount of ballast to Kepesh’s life (though he hardly seems to recognize it) is the admirably pragmatic Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson, in fine form), with whom he has had a longstanding series of no-strings rendezvous and seemingly the only woman he sleeps with who is near his own age. Also popping into Kepesh’s solipsistic universe is his estranged son Kenneth, played by Peter Sarsgaard as a stifled and resentful head-case, the collateral damage of Kepesh’s wandering ways.

There’s not a moment in Elegy where the actors seem at all insincere, and given the number of stock situations (teary death-bed moments, fraught discussions of sex and infidelity), that makes the accomplishment of Coixet and her top-notch cast all the more impressive. While the mostly interior plot seems to drift in its later sections—it’s hard to shake the idea that any of these people are more than figments of Kepesh’s imagination—Elegy ultimately holds together as a smart meditation on mortality and love that uses its literary genesis as more of a boost than limitation.

Elegy is a spare, melancholy film that is so far in spirit from its source, Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal, that I’m tempted to say we should abandon altogether the idea of adapting Roth. (I’d suggest Charlie Kaufman take a stab, except he made us watch him jump through hoops over Susan Orlean …) It’s not that Roth’s novels are too solipsistic; it’s that their solipsism is a Versailles-size hall of mirrors—endlessly doubling back and endlessly refracted. The Dying Animal—the third book to feature David Kepesh, who first appeared in The Professor of Desire (1977)—is a brief (for Roth) masterpiece that for all its twists and flashbacks and cultural musings reads as if it’s coming out in one urgent breath. The narrator has fancied himself carnality incarnate, with sex his revenge against the America of his youth (still in a Puritan stranglehold) and against death. (He is that explicit.) Now, in his sixties, his body failing, his sex drive more fierce than ever, he’s going back in his mind, to the anti-puritanical 1960s, when he asserted his freedom by ditching his wife and son and taking student lover after student lover. His latest, Consuela, might be his last—in any case, she’s the first he’s terrified of losing before he gets her into the sack.

Roth’s title brings something else to mind. Dying animals should be approached warily. They snap. They bite. The change to Elegy is sadly appropriate. Directed by Isabel Coixet from a screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, this is another winter-solstice-of-life picture, a slightly more risqué Away From Her. It’s Philip Roth, Canadian style. (Vancouver stands in, unconvincingly, for New York.) In the book, Kepesh extols the virtues of classical music—quintets, sonatas—as a way station between deep conversation and bed. Here it’s just classical music. Late in the film, Kepesh and Consuela walk along a beach, the sea the same gray as the sky. The soundtrack is Satie. The animalism, the bite, it’s now so much chin music.

Ben Kingsley is Kepesh. He wouldn’t be the first actor I’d cast (any more than I’d have cast Sir Anthony Hopkins as a closeted black man in The Human Stain), but I liked him. Sir Ben has lately been getting a lot of nookie onscreen. In The Wackness, he had his tongue down Mary-Kate Olsen’s throat. Now he’s making the beast with two backs with Penélope Cruz (as Consuela). He’s better looking than in his youth: still beaky, but his chest is built up and he radiates sexual confidence. He no longer makes you think of Gandhi. (The real Gandhi, of course, got a lot of nookie, but not Sir Ben’s.) Cruz does a hilarious turn as a hellcat in Woody Allen’s upcoming Vicky Cristina Barcelona, so you can’t blame her (or Kingsley) for the glacial pacing of her scenes. When Kingsley showed her the metronome on his piano, I wanted to reach into the screen and set it faster.

In between his scenes with Cruz, Kingsley plays squash and talks about sex with Dennis Hopper as his best friend, a poet. Even though their encounters have a slightly stale feel (it’s metronomical: one scene with Cruz, one scene with Hopper to talk about Cruz), the actors have a tender rapport. Roth has said in interviews that he expected age to bring the death of his parents, but no one told him how devastating it would be to lose dear friends. That pain comes through here. And in a film that’s partially about the emotional fallout of 1960s freedoms, Hopper’s aged visage has resonance. (So does the brief appearance of Deborah Harry, surprisingly vivid as his wife.)

Reading back, I see this is a rather harsh review of a movie made with intelligence and taste. But taste—at least when it’s this refined—is an obstacle to getting at the explosive hunger in every line of The Dying Animal. Satie … empty beaches … I scanned the surf in vain, hoping for something messy, jarring, with the reek of death. Where is the Montauk Monster when you need him?

User comments from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

The Spanish woman director Isabel Coixet is responsible for this adaptation of a short novel by Philip Roth called 'The Dying Animal,' about a 62-year-old professor of literature who beds a 24-year-old student. I asked a woman friend to watch this movie with me and she emailed back, "I have limited patience for old men's fantasies about affairs with young women. Roth is obsessed with this - so is Coetzee and some others." I went to see Elegy alone.

Certainly such things, "fantasies," if you will, which include sex, beauty, aging, male performance, seduction, and more sex, indeed are very much an obsession of Roth's. And the degree to which the egotism blocks out anything else that might make life worth living is stifling. How such concerns gibe with those of a Spanish lady director isn't certain, but judging by Coixet's previous 'My Life without Me,' she is drawn to themes of terminal illness. Her involvement may explain the presence of Penelope Cruz playing Consuela, the young woman. The ubiquitous Ben Kingsley plays the professor and "cultural critic," David Kepesh, the latest of Roth's recurrent alter egos--he was the protagonist of two of Roth's other recent novels.

Words like "joyless" and "hushed" are used about this movie. Indeed it isn't fun. As if to emphasize that, there's Penelope Cruz--who has such a wild good time acting crazy and fighting with Javier Bardem in Woody Allen's current overseas venture, 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona.' She's sweet and luscious this time, which leaves her talents underused by a mile. It's hard not to feel that she is being humiliated, as Consuela is. In both films, she gets to make out in a photographic darkroom. In 'Vicky Cristina,' she's in charge there; this time, she's just a silly idiot being charmed by a monomaniac. As for Kingsley, there is more of him here than in the currently showing 'The Wackness' and 'Transsiberian,' and less. His Kepesh is a minor media darling. He has a book review show and does TV appearances. He's recently been interviewed by Charlie Rose about a new book. The scene with the real Charlie falls flat. It has no spark. Coixet has not found a tone. Kepesh also teaches his class in literary criticism, which begins with incredibly banal remarks about reading, before a large classroom with stadium seating; Consuela is in front, of course.

The casting of supporting roles is interesting but not happy. Patricia Clarkson plays Carolyn, Kepesh's lover for twenty years. Suave, shapely, and trim for her age, Clarkson too often gets to play a buttoned down sophisticate who ultimately is just a nice hairdo with fading skin. But she deserves better. As Kepesh's best friend George, we find that Dennis Hopper has lost his old intensity; all that's left is the ability to laugh a little too hard. Debbie Harry as George's wife is admirable, but gets only a few minutes.

There is no chemistry between Kingsley and Cruz. This is partly because Kingsley is trying throughout the picture to imitate a large hook-nosed piece of granite. Cruz has lovely breasts, hair, mouth, skin. This time she gets to show them all. It's voyeuristic, but they do all look great, and Kepesh's fixation upon them, which Consuela is absurdly happy to accept as of true value, is essential to the plot. Of course Cruz isn't 24; she's 34, and that isn't good.

Peter Sarsgaard, as Kenny, Kepesh's 35-year-old or "nearly forty" doctor son (the script wavers) who hates his father for leaving his mother, is shrill and pouting. He seems gay, but probably isn't meant to be in this macho heterosexual tale, since he is happily married but then falls heir to the Philip Roth plot rules by having an affair, despite himself.

The Kepesh of 'Elegy' has a perfect apartment, plays very creditable Bach on his excellent piano, and when away from there performs successfully in his various roles as public intellectual, but his existence is a shambles. He's a hollow man. The big thing that's missing from this movie other than more convincing evidence of Kepesh's intellectual accomplishments, is more sex--of the most down and dirty kind--which the discreet Ms. Coixet perhaps could not handle. The story as Roth conceives it--but not in the film--is finally about Kepesh's quest for some epiphanic bridge between sex and romance. Though we see Kepesh and Consuela and Carolyn in bed, there's not a lot of activity, whereas Roth's novel is graphic and brutal and his Kepesh sought to prove that sex was the thing that gave life meaning. In the Coixet-Nicholas Meyer adaptation, that essential element is lacking. This is just an obsessive affair--without anything to justify it but Cruz's beautiful boobs. The ending is fuzzy and fudged, a couple on the beach--signifying nothing.

The looks of the movie don't help anything. Jean-Claude Larrieu's cinematography is excessively dark and distractingly pretty. At certain arbitrary moments, he uses a hand-held camera and deliberately jiggles it around, like an amateur scribbling on a painting to make it look old. This is a posh, glossy, terrible movie. Though Benton's 'The Human Stain' left a lot out of the novel and Anthony Hopkins was wrong in the lead role, that Roth adaptation was a masterpiece compared to this. A good contrast is another recent film about a Jewish intellectual involved in a May-December romance, 'Starting Out in the Evening.' Frank Langella is a bit stiff in that, but still much more complex and believable.

indieWIRE review Nick Pinkertson from Reverse Shot

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

The New York Sun (Meghan Keane) review

The Onion A.V. Club review Keith Phipps

Elegy and Vicky Cristina Barcelona Andrea Gronvall from the Reader

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [2/5]

Reel.com [Brie Beazley]

Time Out New York (Ben Kenigsberg) review [3/6]

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Rick Groen

Los Angeles Times (Mark Olsen) review

The Dying Animal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Salon.com Books | "The Dying Animal" by Philip Roth Charles Taylor, May 18, 2001

"Alter Alter Ego: Philip Roth brings back David Kepesh, formerly a breast" A.O. Scott from The New York Times, May 27, 2001

Flak Magazine: Review of The Dying Animal, 5.31.01 Clay Risen, May 31, 2001

"The sexual licence fee: Philip Roth's narrative drive suffers in this coda to his great works, The Dying Animal" book review by Adam Mars-Jones from The Observer, July 1, 2001

"The Animal in Man Roth returns to introspection and the Id. The Dying Animal" The Dying Animal, by Philip Roth (156 pages), reviewed by Lucas Hanft from The Yale Review of Books, Fall 2001

Bookreporter.com - THE DYING ANIMAL by Philip Roth Mei-Ling Fong, which includes a passage: Read an Excerpt

review John Gardner’s book review of “The Breast” (Part I of the trilogy) by Philip Roth, from The New York Times, September 17, 1972

MAP OF THE SOUNDS OF TOKYO

Spain (106 mi) 2009

Map of the Sounds of Tokyo Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

A designer noir-romance with a designer title and designer emotions, Isabel Coixet’s follow-up to Elegy is as empty as a shiny new Prada handbag on a boutique shelf. Scripted for style and atmosphere rather than for substance, this lushly shot and scored Tokyo-set bauble with its dirge like pacing features unlikely couple Sergi Lopez and Rinko Kikuchi in an affair that seems dictated more by their star status than their chemistry, which is notably lacking.

Map’s slick production values, trendy global-fusion ambience, glossy melancholia and raunchy but female-oriented sex scenes seem calculated to make this extended jazz-pop video a commercially viable date movie for couples looking for a bit of upmarket lust, but the critical reception at Cannes has been cool.

After a Tokyo-by-night credit sequence things start promisingly with a striking restaurant scene where a group of deal-clinching Japanese and Western businessmen eat sushi off naked models’ bodies. But the feast is soured when senior executive Nagara (Nakahara) gets a call telling him his daughter has committed suicide; she had been in a relationship with Spanish wine shop owner David (Lopez), whom Nagara blames for her death – so like any grieving father, he asks his faithful assistant Ishida (Sakaki) to find a hitman to whack David.

The hitman turns out to be a hitwoman , Ryu (Kikuchi), a solemn loner who works nights at the fish market. Her only real friend is an elderly sound recordist (Tanaka), whose elegaic voiceovers seem to serve little purpose than to give away the ending from the start and compensate for Kikuchi’s one-note performance as Ryu by filling us in on her dark, enigmatic, under-developed character .

Sound recording can mine a rich narrative seam, as The Conversation and The Lives of Others demonstrated; here, though, it has no bearing on the story and seems chosen purely because it’s a cool and quirky job for the narrator to have.

Somewhat predictably, Ryu falls for the man she was sent to erase, and they begin a series of sexual encounters in a Parisian-themed love hotel, that carry distant echoes of Intimacy and Last Tango in Paris. By turns steamy and tender, these tastefully explicit scenes work fine within the confines of the themed room the couple always book, but they don’t make us believe in
the connection between the two lovers. It doesn’t help that their wooden English dialogue sounds at times like an outtake from a language class; but the main problem is that neither lead really seems to have found a way into their role, and Lopez in particular gives one of his most soulless performances in years.

Jean-Claude Larrieu’s rich close-up camerawork has undeniable style, caressing surfaces and textures in classy, slightly desaturated colour. A sparingly used soundtrack mixes urban jazz and bossanova themes with indie rock ballads – but its pretensions are exposed in an unintentionally hilarious scene towards the end when an angst-filled David sings along to Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence in a karaoke bar (Lopez impressively delivers dialogue in Japanese, English and Catalan). Nouvelle cinematic fusion food was rarely so insubstantial and unsatisfying.

Cannes '09: Day Ten Mike D’Angelo at Cannes, May 23, 2009

Cannes. "Map of the Sounds of Tokyo" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 23, 2009

Leslie Felperin at Cannes from Variety, May 22, 2009

Collet-Serra, Jaume

UNKNOWN C+ 79

USA Great Britain Germany France Canada Japan (113 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

The film opens with a rush of energy that surprisingly gets you into the thick of the action right away, where Liam Neeson gets separated from his wife at a posh Berlin hotel once he realizes he left an important briefcase behind at the airport, heading back in a taxi without even letting her know. Out of cell phone range and in a traffic jam, an impatient Neeson urges the driver to take alternative methods, sending a jolt of energy through the audience when the taxi spins out of control and heads over a bridge into the icy waters of the River Spree, where the driver (Diane Kruger) ingeniously manages to free herself and rescue her unconscious passenger before disappearing anonymously into the crowded city streets. 4 days later, Neeson awakes from a coma in a hospital, still forgetful of details but desperately needing to find his wife (January Jones), though she’s left no word that she’s looking for him. When he bolts from the hospital to attend an international pharmaceutical convention at the upscale hotel where he was expected to deliver a speech, his wife doesn’t recognize him and another man (Aidan Quinn) has assumed his identity as her husband. Leaving him the odd man out, none of this makes sense, yet he has no way of explaining who he is with little money and no identification, and even Google searches for his name and position have been replaced by photos of Quinn. Who is this guy, and why all of a sudden does he suspect men are following him?

This relatively young Spanish director does have an energetic flourish with speed and pace, accentuating the desperate straits of a man who has had his identity stolen from him, yet still has the smarts to pursue all the missing angles he can find, where a nurse at the hospital slips him the name of an underground former East German Stasi figure (Bruno Ganz) who has a way of finding people. Ganz is terrific in the role and is easily the man of interest in this movie, as his home is lined with old Army photos and a wall filled with commendations. He adds a well needed coherent literacy to the script about a man who is living in a muddled state of confusion. When Neeson tracks down the taxi driver, who reluctantly agrees to help despite being an illegal Serbian worker who relentlessly avoids the cops, the paranoid mood escalates when two contract killers arrive unexpectedly at her doorstep which leads to a thrilling sequence where Neeson and the girl have to fight their way out of certain death. At this point, the two are linked, where despite not knowing why they’ve been targeted, they are in the thick of it, followed immediately by a hair-raising car chase sequence right through the middle of Berlin’s crowded downtown streets, past historical relics such as the Victory Column and the Brandenberg Gate that leaves nothing but panic and destruction in their wake.

Like Jason Bourne from THE BOURNE IDENTITY (2002 – 2007) trilogy, Neeson continually has flashbacks, which are the only clues to his previous existence, reminders of a life he once knew, and the film is thrilling while Neeson attempts to make sense out of who he is, as Ganz pushes unorthodox secret buttons behind the scenes, but becomes all too predictable once he figures it out, where it’s literally handed to him on a platter of belated clues and explanations that really undermine the whole fun of the picture. When it eventually comes down to just good guys against bad guys, that’s a whole lot less interesting than a throwback to the Cold War era style film presented in shattered pieces with fragmented images and delusional thoughts about a missing identity, where Neeson is constantly besieged by threats against his life while also trying to put together the missing mosaic of his apparently stolen life. By the time Frank Langella arrives on the scene, the ending is deflated and all too contrived, like letting the air out of a balloon, but there’s plenty of fun while Neeson’s life is in turmoil, also excellent use of shots in the snow as well as ice flowing in the river. Perhaps the thrill factor for the audience might never have diminished had the character been left “unknown” and in the dark, which also leaves open the possibility of a sequel, a concept the director has already embraced.

Had it ended after 80 or 90 minutes, Unknown might have been a fine updating of the classic Hitchcock “wrong man” story—too gimmicky by half, but supported by solid craft, a strong center in Liam Neeson, and plenty of first-rate character actors, including Diane Kruger, Bruno Ganz, Aidan Quinn, and Frank Langella. Then it twists, then twists a second and third time, until finally an already-suspect mistaken-identity plot goes completely haywire, and the credibility (and dignity) it so carefully establishes quickly evaporates. Director Jaume Collet-Serra pulled the same funny business in his last feature, the outrageous bad-seed shocker Orphan, but the third-act shenanigans there felt appropriately gonzo. Tacked onto a perfectly respectable thriller, Unknown’s mass of unlikely turns and implausible reveals make the whole film seem retroactively less sophisticated.

On the heels of Taken, Clash Of The Titans, and The A-Team, Neeson continues to embrace his late-career calling as an action hero, and once again outclasses the shoddy vehicle that surrounds him. Sent to Berlin with his wife (January Jones) for an important biotechnology conference, Neeson and his Serbian cab driver (Kruger) get in an accident that leaves Neeson comatose for four days. When he regains consciousness, his memory lags considerably, and his uncertainty about his identity isn’t helped by his lack of documentation. When he goes back to the conference to find his wife, she not only fails to recognize him, but appears with another husband (Quinn) bearing his name. Is he crazy, or is there a conspiracy afoot?

Like most films about amnesia, Unknown plays the condition for narrative convenience, allowing enough memories to move the story forward while holding back on the whoppers. In the early stages, when Neeson is still picking up the pieces, he and Kruger have great chemistry together, helped along by Ganz’s wonderfully hammy turn as a former Stasi officer who comes to their aid. Collet-Serra does his best to incorporate modern action beats into a Hitchcock template—Jones’ Tippi Hedren look is the only thing that accounts for her casting—but he loses control when it counts. Over time, it becomes embarrassingly obvious that Unknown was acting a lot smarter than it turned out to be.

FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [Kathryn Schroeder]

Liam Neeson has made a career of losing things on screen, from Jews (Schindler's List) to his precious daughter (Taken), but his struggle to reclaim them has never felt so artificial, listless, and meaningless as it does in Unknown. Starring as Martin Harris, a doctor who travels to Berlin for a biotechnology convention, Neeson awakens after a car accident to discover that his wife (January Jones) no longer recognizes him and calls another man (Aidan Quinn) her husband. With the help of the illegal Bosnian taxi driver (Diane Kruger) who saved his life, Martin struggles to prove his identity, and also rid the world of the type of globetrotting goons that haven't been en vogue since the Cold War.

Early on, as Martin and his Barbie Doll of a wife arrive in Berlin, making it through customs and traveling to their hotel while planning their extra-curricular activities, Unknown sells itself with the same fake artistic sophistication of the last dozen cans of compressed air gussied up for audiences as George Clooney films. But around the time the couple passes Berlin's Golden Angel, director Juame Collet-Serra seems to tire of the self-serious advertorial dithering, settling for the more anonymous artistic banality of Salt, which makes sense insofar as Mark, in between flashbacks that look as if they were ghost-directed by Tony Scott, finds himself reliving Angelina Jolie's nightmare from the Phillip Noyce film.

Given that neither Jason Statham nor Luc Besson had anything to do with Unknown, it's no surprise that the film barely pops. (Even the smartest scene, in which Martin meets his wife inside a museum hosting an exhibition of close-ups of different faces, is a too-literal articulation of the protagonist's crisis.) As in Salt, there's one excitingly improbable car chase, and as these things usually go, you're interested in seeing how Martin resolves crisis even as you remain doubtful that the pieces will fall into place in a way that you haven't seen before. That Unknown offers nothing new doesn't come as a shock, but given that Martin's struggle is one with identity, that the film doesn't so much as have the man grapple with the moral implications of what he discovers about himself means this is a more thuggish and cavalier entertainment than Salt.

For grownup kids like Noyce and Collet-Serra, films like Salt and Unknown fulfill a fantasy of mixing current geopolitical drama with old-school spy games. That desire is made explicit in a scene from Unknown when the shady Rodney Cole (Frank Langella, in creepy Box mode) visits an ex-Stasi-turned-private eye, Ernst Jurgen (Bruno Ganz, free-reigning over the film with such bizarre gusto you'd think he and Betty White shared an agent), the former drooling over the latter's Cold War mementos, remarking that his grandson would love them. The point seems to be that they don't make them like they used to, but if you're going to resuscitate a retrograde genre, why not aspire to the artistic and moral sophistication of John Frankenheimer's '60s political thrillers? In the end, Unknown isn't even half as smart or fun as the worst 007 spy caper.

Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) awakens after a car accident in Berlin to discover that his wife (January Jones) suddenly doesn't recognize him and another man (Aidan Quinn) has assumed his identity. Ignored by disbelieving authorities and hunted by assassins, he finds himself alone, tired, and on the run. On his own in a strange country, Martin seeks aid from an unlikely and reluctant source (Diane Kruger) as he plunges headlong into a deadly mystery that will force him to question his sanity, his identity, and just how far he's willing to go to uncover the truth.

When Dr. Martin Harris wakes up from a brief 4-day coma he suffers from slight memory loss. His wife is not with him and everything he believes to be true is contradicting itself. Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) is having a really bad trip to Berlin, and it is about to get worse. Set-up as a mystery thriller more than an action film, Unknown develops it's story around what the viewer knows briefly from the beginning of the film (pre-amnesia) and then concocts a web of mystery over whether anything you saw was true. At one point in the film Martin asks his doctor if he "knows what it is like to lose your mind"...this is the basis for the entire story of Unknown. Martin must solve the mystery of who he is and why his life has been erased; or has it? The suspense consistently builds throughout as new pieces of the puzzle are revealed and valuable information uncovered in Martin's own memories for he is the key to understanding everything. Martin finds help with an illegal immigrant Gina (Diane Kruger), as well as a former Eastern Germany Stasi member who is very good with "details". Between the three characters there is coverage befitting a mystery, with a few good car chases and fights to keep your blood pumping. The film does suffer from multiple ending syndrome but it can easily be forgiven when the (actual) finale takes place as it is an excitable thrill to find out who Martin actually is, and the fates of all involved in this twisted conspiracy.

Liam Neeson is the unlikeliest of action hero's. He wears sweater vests and has the soft look of a father when he smiles. He is not all muscles and bulk. His english is spoken clearly and without the use of slang terminology or improper grammar. He actually has a neck, and no tattoos are clearly visible. He has impeccable manners and carries himself like a simpler, less complicated, one-woman Bond. For all of these reasons, and more, Liam Neeson should not be playing an action hero; but he is, and he does it exceptionally well because of the aforementioned attributes. There is also his fantastic ability to drive recklessly, fight the good fight with his bare hands, find resources where none could be found, and do what needs to be done to be successful at the task at hand. Neeson is the gentleman's action hero and his character Dr. Martin Harris in Unknown only cements this conclusion. As a man desperate to reclaim his life and solve the mystery that has turned it completely upside down he is frenetic but also extremely cool and composed. Martin is intelligent and does not need to rely on his brawn to keep the story interesting and thrilling but he can throw a punch better than anyone expected. Neeson carries Unknown because of his genuine appeal and our desire to see him find his happy ending, or at least figure out why his beautiful wife would ever deny knowing such a gentile but sexy man such as our gentleman Bond. Now if only we could do something about Diane Kruger's (Gina) spastic accent and January Jones' (Elizabeth Harris) soporific performance. (Good thing Dr. Martin Harris outshines them all.)

The Village Voice [Nick Schager]

Unknown reviewed: Liam Neeson is a gentle, hulking, and lovable ... Dana Stevens from Slate

Unknown (2011) Ian Pugh from Film Freak Central

'Unknown' Review: Pulpy and Absurd But Utterly Watchable Todd Gilchrist from Cinematical

DVD Verdict Review - Unknown Daniel MacDonald

"Unknown" Review Rebecca Murray from About.com, also including an interview: Liam Neeson and January Jones Discuss "Unknown"

Unknown | Review | Screen John Hazelton from Screendaily

Filmcritic.com Sean O’Connell

ReelTalk [Diana Saenger]

James Berardinelli - Reelviews Movie Reviews

movie review: Unknown > Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy

Movie Review: Unknown (2011) – RopeofSilicon.com Movie News ... Brad Brevet

UNKNOWN Frank Swietek from One Guy’s Opinion

Unknown (2011) : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Tyler Foster from DVD Talk

Unknown (2011) : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Brian Orndorf from DVD Talk

Unknown Jeffrey M. Anderson from Combustible Celluloid

Unknown (2011) — Inside Movies Since 1920 Amy Nicholson from Box Office magazine

Unknown | Movies | EW.com Lisa Schwartzbaum from Entertainment Weekly

Unknown: A conspiracy plot more baffling than thrilling - The ... Liam Lacey from The Globe and the Mail

Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]

Unknown movie review -- Unknown showtimes - The Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Neeson wakes up 'Unknown' | Philadelphia Inquirer | 02/18/2011 Steven Rea

Liam Neeson stumbles through 'Unknown' | Philadelphia Daily News ... Gary Thompson

Washington Post [Ann Hornaday]

Review: At last! A suspense drama that's dramatic and suspenseful ... Chris Hewitt from the St. Paul Pioneer Press

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle] also here: 'Unknown' review: Stolen identity fuels thriller

'Unknown': Movie review - latimes.com Kenneth Turan

The Village Voice [Nicolas Rapold]

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis, February 17, 2011

Collins, Cathryn

VLAST (Power) B 88

USA (88 mi) 2010 Official site

This has always been a fascinating story of a behind-the-scenes secret service power to extinguish or detain individuals considered of interest to the absolute power of the State. Earlier in this decade, two stories held the world’s attention, the 2003 arrest of billionaire oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who overstayed his welcome in Russia, and the 2006 London poisoning death of a former KGB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, who was living in political asylum, having written two books accusing the KGB of using acts of terrorism to bring Vladimir Putin to power. The question is whether this film could actually add anything to these already widely covered news stories. Choosing to deal exclusively with the rise and fall of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, he was the head of the Russian oligarchy, a tiny group of new business entrepreneurs who exploited the disintegration of the Soviet Union to loot and/or earn mass quantities of wealth, hundreds of billions of dollars from the suddenly wide open oil markets in Russia, signing highly lucrative contracts with the government to acquire newly privatized industries, which consolidated power under the corporate name of Yukos. Khodorkovsky, however, was not only interested in becoming a successful businessman, suddenly finding himself the richest man in Russia, but also a social reformer interested in democracy, transparency, and opening up the Russian markets, where just months before announcing a deal that would have opened Yukos, a formerly State-controlled oil industry, to investments by Western corporations, including U.S. corporations, he and his partners were arrested and jailed for trumped up charges of fraud and tax evasion, where he’s been confined behind bars now for nearly a decade.

What was a brief dream of democracy under the first elected Russian President Boris Yeltsin suddenly disappeared, replaced by former KGB agent Vladimir Putin as President, who returned Russia to the days of ruthless, totalitarian control run by a police state, once more under the command of the FSB, Federal Security Service, replacing in name only what was the KGB secret police. Before becoming President, Putin was interestingly the Party head responsible for the foreign property of the State and organized the transfer of former assets from the Communist Party and the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation. Most all Westerners believe Putin’s incarceration of Khodorkovsky is largely a case of political suppression, as he was viewed as a likely candidate to run against Putin, or at least back certain reform movements in the upcoming elections prior to his arrest, now he is not likely to ever see the light of day so long as Putin remains in power. Before his initial sentence could expire, additional charges were brought against Khodorkovsky, namely embezzlement, suggesting every dime he earned was embezzled, where his initial 9-year sentence was increased to 14 years, and Khodorkovsky was later transferred to another prison in an undisclosed location to serve out the remainder of his sentence.

While this is an examination of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, it’s also a disturbing portrait of what has happened to the fading hopes of a blindsided and obliterated democratic movement inside Russia. The filmmaker chooses excellent speakers, including Russian expert economists from The Financial Times and The Economist who provide remarkably lucid commentary, also Khodorkovsky’s mother, who has seen and heard all about this side of Russia before, having lived through the Stalinist purges of the 30’s and the era of gulags, along with his U.S. educated son, now exiled from Russia and living in America. What this film makes clear is the full extent of the current purge, as Russia seized the entire Yukos enterprise and sold it off publicly to the highest bidder, though only one person apparently met the criteria, and that was a former friend of Putin’s from the KGB, who consolidated the business with another Putin ally, so now Putin has control over the entire Russian oil industry, just as if it was nationalized, but under the ownership of his friends and allies who have done exactly as the oligarchs, but remain under government protection. Meanwhile Putin has arrested over 200 former employees of Yukos, sent them all to jail, along with the lawyers and law firms that in any way represented the company, dissolving those businesses as well. Along with the arrests, there have been multiple home searches, oftentimes several, where one imprisoned company executive indicated this is how they do it in Russia nowadays, that formerly they used firing squads.

A lawyer indicated there is less justice today in Russia under Putin than there was in the former Soviet Union thirty or forty years ago. This portrait of a fraud democracy, where all democratic parties disappear and only one party appears on the ballet, where Putin and his minions run unopposed, where the secret police continues to play havoc with its own citizens, ruling with an imperial iron fist, controlling the state authorized news, just like in the days of Stalin. After the fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of democratic movements, including a series of judicial reforms, no one would believe they could go backwards in time so thoroughly where they are back to an autocratic rule. One of the most impressive voices in the film is a historic archivist, Arseny Roginsky, who served four years in a gulag during the 1980’s for attempting to write a truthful account of history. After Khodorkovsky was slammed by the Russian press for being an enemy of the state, pictured as a traitor willing to sell off Russian assets to the United States, their historic arch rival and enemy, Roginsky surmised Khodorkovsky, who could have fled at any moment prior to the arrest, chose to serve his punishment as a way of resurrecting his image, by standing up to the Kremlin, continuing to have faith in the democratic reforms that have all but been abolished in Russia during his incarceration. While incarcerated, he has remained defiant, denunciating what has happened as a series of outright lies and secret service cover ups, where there is no evidence of any crime committed, yet all the courts now bow down to Putin, creating a Shakespearean Richard III style power grab.

Speaking of which, Cathryn Collins's debut feature, Power (Vlast), twins the collapse of railroaded oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Russian democracy—with Putin to blame for both. Collins, who sides with robber-baron-turned-transparency-advocate Mikhail, makes the government's threat personally palpable—and '90s Russia just as mind-bogglingly up for grabs as you feared—through wall-to-wall interviews with principals, including Khodorkovsky's personal lawyer, a son, and journalists naming bleeped-out names. Through the nightmare of phony democracy, this chronicle of an ugly open secret only underlines the importance and fragility of community.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

Cathryn Collins’ first feature, “Power” (Vlast), is the kind of well-tooled, informed documentary that makes you realize the question is not, “What is this world coming to?” but, “What has this world become and when did it become this?” Heavy on the talking heads, “Power” is nonetheless powerful in its detailed assembly of facts and figures about how the former Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev’s Russia, is an increasingly lawless gangster state run, as the previous regimes, by “brutal secret police.” The more things change… Collins’ central figure is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil baron, part of the 1990s’ emerging power structure, who fell out of favor and was prosecuted for alleged tax evasion, stripped of his Yukos oil empire, and sentenced to years in prison. The panoply of articulate experts will gratify students of power, oligarchy run riot and political junkies on hand. 88m.

VLAST(Power) Facets Multi Media

In 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's wealthiest man, was arrested at gunpoint on a Siberian runway. Having openly challenged President Vladimir Putin, Khodorkovsky was convicted, his oil company, YUKOS, seized, and his pro-democracy efforts curtailed. He remains defiantly imprisoned and in unprecedented interviews with Khodorkovsky's family, his associates, and prominent politicians and journalists, director Cathryn Collins reveals how liberty and the rule of law have become casualties in modern Russia. This film also highlights the unchecked idealism characterizing a small group of the earliest generation of "new Russians", young people who came of age with the fall of the Berlin Wall, inspired by prospects of democracy and an open society. Vlast (Power) takes an unvarnished look at the consolidation of power in an oil-dependent Russia, revealing a frightening picture of repression and retribution reminiscent of Stalin's regime.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

First-time documentary makers rarely tackle a subject as dense with intrigue as the one Cathryn Collins has chosen for her debut feature: the rise and fall of Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Born to a modest family, Khodorkovsky gained wealth and power as chairman and CEO of the privatized oil company Yukos, and like a sort of Russian Bill Gates, he became a philanthropist and a champion of the democratizing power of education. In 2003 he was arrested and charged with fraud and tax evasion, and in 2005 he was sentenced to nine years in prison. But as some witnesses allege in the film, President Vladimir Putin targeted Khodorkovsky because the oil man was contriving to forge an international partnership between Yukos and a Western petroleum giant like Texaco or ExxonMobil. Collins never quite makes her way through that thicket of conspiracy, but her film is fascinating anyway for its tale of young capitalist buccaneers grabbing for resources in the postcommunist era and becoming independent power centers in a Russia still rooted to its Stalinist past.

Power Robert Koehler from Variety

Valuable as a for-the-record account of the overthrow of Russian capitalist oligarchs by the KGB-dominated interests of the autocratic-minded Vladimir Putin, "Power" is far less effective as cinema. Pic is filled to bursting with an endless parade of talking heads, verbal testimony and analysis that lends itself more to the tube than to the bigscreen. Scribe-director Cathryn Collins and co-writer Shannon Kennedy focus on the rise and fall of Yukos oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky to illustrate how totally political force has shifted in Russia's past decade. Cablers should come calling.

Collins deploys recent Financial Times Moscow correspondents Catherine Belton, Chrystia Freeland and Neil Buckley to provide the broad strokes of how Khodorkovsky and his generation of businessmen took advantage of post-Soviet disarray to consolidate and privatize public industries for immense personal profit. Putin and his fellow KGB vets are viewed here as wily reactors to the oligarch's moves, while Khodorkovsky's friends and colleagues provide behind-the-scenes details of his growing resistance to Putin's heavy-handed attempts to chop away at their holdings, climaxing in trumped-up charges of fraud and embezzlement that led to the tycoon's 2003 arrest.

Camera (color, DV), David Scott (U.K.), Richard Numeroff (U.S.), Alexander Dzhaparidze, John Kluver, Victor Anatolevich (Russia); editor, Kennedy; music, Sophie Solomon; research, Suzanne Bronski, Litia Perta. Reviewed at Los Angeles Film Festival (competing), June 22, 2010. Running time: 88 MIN.

"The Oligarchs"; Former Knesset Member Uri Avnery on how Berezovsky et al. amassed their wealth Uri Avnery from Counter Currents, August 2, 2004

Director interview indieWIRE, June 15, 2010

Mikhail Khodorkovsky - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yukos police raid prompts oil threat Nick Paton Walsh from The Guardian, July 12, 2003

Yukos looks overseas The Guardian, September 29, 2003

Russia's richest man hits out after orphanage raid Nick Paton Walsh from The Guardian, October 7, 2003

The billionaire oligarchs The Guardian, October 31, 2003

Arrest opens way for Russian state to renationalise Yukos Conal Walsh from The Observer, November 2, 2003

Yukos head quits The Guardian, November 3, 2003

Moscow court says tycoon must stay in jail Nick Paton Walsh from The Guardian, January 16, 2004

Yukos looks for Kremlin deal Nick Paton Walsh from The Guardian, February 17, 2004

Russia goes public with Yukos charges Nick Paton Walsh from The Guardian, April 2, 2004

Open trial for Russia's richest man Nick Paton Walsh from The Guardian, June 9, 2004

Khodorkovsky offers to sell his Yukos shares Mark Tran from The Guardian, July 7, 2004

Yukos chief defiant in courtroom cage Maria Danilova from The Guardian, July 17, 2004

Oligarch's prosecution may be more cock-up than conspiracy Simon Tisdall from The Guardian, May 18, 2005

A student of capitalism Mark Oliver from The Guardian, May 31, 2005

Russian oligarch jailed for nine years Nick Paton Walsh from The Guardian, June 1, 2005

Prisoner Khodorkovsky unveils his grand plan Nick Paton Walsh from The Guardian, November 12, 2005

Russian prosecutors move to seize oil tycoon's family home Tom Parfitt from The Guardian, August 1, 2006

Tycoon on trial - along with Russia's legal system Luke Harding from The Guardian, March 4, 2009

Former Russian oligarch calls for oil theft charge to be dismissed Luke Harding from The Guardian, April 6, 2010

Russian Court Drops Charges Against Yukos Exec Associated Press, June 24, 2010

Behind Bars, Russian Tycoon Makes Bid for Freedom David Greene for NPR, July 8, 2010

Khodorkovsky's trial statement The Fate of Every Citizen Is Being Decided, by Mikhail Khodorkovsky from The New York Times, November 2, 2010, also seen here: Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Closing Statement at His Trial in Moscow

Unyielding, an Oligarch vs. Putin Joe Nocera for The New York Times, November 5, 2010

Panel discussion about Khodorkovsky and VLAST (POWER) at Red River Theatres private screening December 3, 2010

New Yorker: Khodorkovsky Gulag Lite, by David Remnick from The New Yorker, December 20, 2010, also seen here: Gulag Lite

Russia lashes out at western critics of Khodorkovsky trial Tom Parfitt from The Guardian, December 28, 2010

Mikhail Khodorkovsky sentenced to 14 years in prison Tom Parfitt from The Guardian, December 30, 2010

BBC News - Profile: Mikhail Khodorkovsky December 30, 2010

Russian Judge Extends Term for Tycoon by 6 Years Clifford J. Levy for The New York Times, December 30, 2010

A Chilling Tale of Justice in Russia Kathy Lally for The Washington Post, January 9, 2011

The Concealed Battle to Run Russia Amy Knight for The New York Review of Books, January 13, 2011

BP-Rosneft deal is separate from Khodorkovsky's fate, minister says Tim Webb from The Guardian, January 20, 2011

Mikhail Khodorkovsky verdict ordered from above, claims judge's assistant Miriam Elder from The Guardian, February 14, 2011

Khodorkovsky – the unexpected Berlin film festival hit Helen Pidd from The Guardian, February 15, 2011

Lyudmila Ulitskaya: why I'm not afraid of Vladimir Putin Elizabeth Day from The Observer, April 17, 2011

NYT: Russian justice Joe Nocera from The New York Times, May 23, 2011

Angry Words From Mikhail Khodorkovsky After Losing His Appeal ... Luisa Kroll from Forbes, May 24, 2011

Moscow court upholds conviction of oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky The Guardian, May 24, 2011

Jailed Russian billionaire scorns court hearing appeal The Guardian, May 24, 2011

Russian Businessmen Declared Prisoners of Conscience After Convictions Are Upheld Amnesty International Press Release, May 24, 2011

Russia's trial of oil magnate Khodorkovsky not political, court rules The Guardian, May 31, 2011

European Court ruling European Court Partially Backs Kremlin in Khodorkovsky’s Prosecution, by Michael Schwirtz from The New York Times, May 31, 2011

Khodorkovsky 'sent to north Russian prison camp' June 15, 2011

Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Litvinenko affair: Murder most opaque The Economist, December 13, 2006

From Russia with lies Michael Mainville from Salon, December 14, 2006

"The Moscow plot"; Excerpt from the book The Litvinenko File by former BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith Excerpt from The Litvinenko File, by Martin Sixsmith from The London Times, April 1, 2007

"The Laboratory 12 poison plot"; Another excerpt from the same book Another excerpt from The Litvinenko File, by Martin Sixsmith from The London Times, April 8, 2007

Excerpt from the book "Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB" Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko from Salon, June 7, 2007

Another excerpt from the same book Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko from Salon, June 8, 2007

Excerpt from "The Terminal Spy: A True story of Espionage, Betrayal, and Murder" Alan S. Cowell from USA Today, August 14, 2008

Peter Pomerantsev · Putin's Rasputin · LRB 20 ... Peter Pomerantsev from The London Review of Books, October 20, 2011

Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky: One Man's ... The Wrath of Putin, by Masha Gessen from Vanity Fair, April 2012

Putin's address – the key topics covered Shaun Walker from The Guardian, December 19, 2013

From Pussy Riot to Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Putin has been underrated Geoffrey Wheatcroft from The Guardian, December 20, 2013

Mikhail Khodorkovsky freed as Vladimir Putin pardons jailed tycoon Shaun Walker from The Guardian, December 20, 2013

Mikhail Khodorkovsky's statement after release from prison – in full The Guardian, December 20, 2013

Mikhail Khodorkovsky 'exhausted but happy to be free' - The Guardian Shaun Walker and Philip Oltermann from The Guardian, December 20, 2013

Mikhail Khodorkovsky: how the Yukos tycoon became Russia's richest man Terry Macalister from The Guardian, December 20, 2013

Mikhail Khodorkovsky and new Russian justice David Remnick from The New Yorker, December 20, 2013

Why Putin Freed Kremlin Opponent and Oligarch Khodorkovsky ... What's Behind the Khodorkovsky Pardon? by Christian Neef and Matthias Schepp, from Der Spiegel, December 20, 2013

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is greeted by German hospitality and gingerbread Ben Knight from The Observer, December 21, 2013

BBC News - Freed Russian tycoon Khodorkovsky reunited with family BBC News, December 21, 2013

Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky speaks out - CNN.com Holly Yan and Dan Wright from CNN News, December 22, 2013

Collyer, Laurie

SHERRYBABY B 86

USA (96 mi) 2006

A film with an authentic, edgy, down and out look, that still feels like it’s from the Sundance Indie Filmmaker’s Lab, this is largely a no holds barred vehicle for 28-year old actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is the focus of every scene of the film. In fact, the film is so much about a single character that the rest of the film suffers from lack of development, as everyone else is presented through her eyes. A recovering heroin addict, Sherry is released to a women’s half-way house after serving 3 years in prison, which becomes suffocatingly intense, so despite her requirements to go by the rules, she deviates from regulations and improvises every chance she gets, offering sex in exchange for what she wants and maintaining an emotional instability that leaves everyone around her suspicious, from her parole officer (Giancarlo Esposito), who’s seen it all before, to her kind-hearted brother (Brad William Henke) and his more skeptical, uptight, wife (Bridget Barkan), who isn’t so eager to relinquish custody of Sherry’s 6-year old daughter (Ryan Simpkins), who’s been in her care most of her life. Expecting that she’ll pick up with her daughter as soon as she gets out, Sherry becomes furious when things don’t go so easily and starts blaming all those around her, regressing into all those familiar behavior patterns that got her into trouble in the first place.

A free-fall from one disaster to the next, the film becomes at times unbearable watching so many anticipated accidents happen before our eyes, a woman with a hair-trigger temper, she frustratingly blows off many of her initial opportunities, but does find a stable guy in the recovery program, Danny Trejo, a tattooed Indian who has 5 kids of his own in another state that he rarely gets to see. He recognizes her problem the instant he sees someone talking to her, “She can’t hear you man, she’s got too much on her mind.” While the film accurately offers a subterranean feel, it barely scratches the surface, instead focusing on the indulgences and detours that leave this woman an emotional mess, highlighted by a birthday party from hell, which exposes an incredible amount of damage in a short period of time. It’s clear recovery is not something attained overnight, but the process of healing is a highly volatile and extremely individualized journey, where learning not to focus so much on yourself and thinking more of others at least gives you a break from literally driving yourself crazy.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Sherrybaby (2006) Hannah Patterson from Sight and Sound, August, 2007

Colombani, Florence

FOREIGNER (L’étrangère) D+ 64

France (78 mi) 2006

An ambitious first film that fails to hit the mark, attempting to intertwine the love story in Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier with the character of Isabel from Henry James’s novel “Portrait of a Lady,” mixing real life with mixed genres of staged opera and the theater, starring Sarah Pratt as a hopelessly repressed American in Paris, a stranger to herself in a foreign land, whose submissive behavior recalls Irm Hermann in Fassbinder films, but Pratt’s acting is flat throughout, as is the overall tone of the film which fails to connect to anyone onscreen. Making it worse is the Milli Vanilli lip-synching to opera, which is atrociously poor in this film. Think back to Benoît Jacquot’s 2001 production of TOSCA that utilized real life opera singers, featured stunning art direction, and was a ravishingly beautiful film. This is the spared down version that never for a single moment works, though it does offer us a glimpse of life in the behind the scenes costume rooms. Unfortunately, Almodóvar already covered that with greater artistic insight in ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER.

Always feeling empty and overly pretentious, we’re to believe that an opera singer’s assistant, who is nearly invisible in her role, eventually grows emotionally from private acting rehearsals exploring the heroine of Henry James. (I’m thinking ESTHER KAHN). But she is hopelessly outclassed in the role, never for a moment identifies or comprehends, and is instead fixated on the rapturous Der Rosenkavalier music from the sacrificial scene of the aging Marschallin offering his recommendation for marriage of a younger couple, even though he is in love with the girl, allowing true love to blossom. And we’re to believe that the young American girl who meets a young man in an art museum (no, this is not Angie Dickenson in De Palma’s DRESSED TO KILL) is given the same permission from her boss, who performs one of the roles in the scene she is fixated on, and allows her to move on with her life. Unfortunately, we’re left with a big so what? This production gives us little reason to care.

Columbus, Chris

HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE B 83

Great Britian USA (152 mi) 2001 ‘Scope

The first of the series when Harry is initially delivered to suburban Muggleworld as a baby and then on his 11^th birthday discovers he’s an infamous wizard of great renown, rescued by Hagrid from his miserable existence in his closet underneath the stairs and brought to Hogwarts where he’s an instant celebrity. What’s particularly charming in this first Harry Potter movie is the endearing youth of the three stars, Harry, Ron, and Hermione, whose curiosity sets them apart from the other students which eventually enjoins them together as lifelong friends. With Richard Harris as Dumbledore, there’s a special connection with Harry that feels believable, who along with Hagrid are like guardian angels assuming the role of his deceased parents providing love from a distance. The first film sets the tone for how Hogwarts is presented, filled with a world of magical wonder where staircases move, hats talk and decide children’s fates, candles sit aloft in midair, ghosts fly around the premises, and students must communicate with paintings when presenting security passwords. One must give credit to the casting director, as the initial choices were all good ones, where Emma Watson as Hermione proves just the right balance of being a smart as a tack know-it-all but also a girl whose charms don’t necessarily win her friends or admiration, or Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley is hilarious in his role of being just an ordinary kid who loves to eat chocolates, joke around and have fun, willing to take up a dare, but also, it turns out, risk his life for his friends, while Daniel Radcliffe as Harry is initially a short kid who’s shy about his notoriety, yet eager to prove himself in the eyes of others, to live up to his reputation, and probably more than anyone else there, be accepted in this wizard community. It would be impossible not to mention the charms of Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid, whose giant-sized heart, particularly toward children and animals of all kinds matches his mammoth physique, or Alan Rickman as the Potions but wanna be Dark Arts Professor Snape, always dressed in black, whose seething anger beneath his perfect

speech and diction is worth the price of admission, where each word is measured is if it were a lethal weapon and he certainly wants to get his shots in.

One has a fondness for the beginning of such an elongated series, as there’s a touch of sweetness in the otherwise draconian Muggle world, and that sweetness lies in Harry who has hopes for a better world. He’s just a kid, but one has a special affection for any kid who’s been denied his childhood and his family connections, who has to leave the protected womb of Muggleword and make an adventure of his life as a wizard. In this first film, the challenges are rather meager, learning to play Quidditch, save Hermione’s life against a giant Troll, face up to Malfoy and Professor Snape, survive his first encounter with Voldemort on his own as a young adult, and earn the love and respect of Dumbledore, all of which he achieves with flying colors. The set design of the chess game was memorable and Voldemort’s appearance was necessarily creepy and filled with horror. But there’s never a sense that anyone’s ever in any real danger, the story feels overly predictable, and the school staff, except for Snape, show a blatant favoritism for Harry and his team. The entire story is set in feverish artificiality, where the camaraderie between the characters is real and becomes the highpoint of the film, but the world at Hogwarts is never truly dark or mysterious enough, as these 11-year olds figure things out in no time. There was never a tense moment when the audience jumped out of their seats. It’s all appealing and entertaining, but lacking a certain element of danger and depth, where the film is more amusing and charming than intriguing or suspense-driven.

BFI Screenonline [Jan Murray]

Orphaned Harry (Radcliffe) is billeted in the suburbs with his cruel aunt and uncle until a blizzard of letters arrives from Hogwarts School offering a chance to study wizardry. He is yet to learn that he bears a famous name in that skill, and that the lightning-flash scar on his forehead was the result of a clash with the Most Evil One, Voldemort, in babyhood. Harry goes from deprivation to elevation in true fairytale style, school career benignly supervised by headmaster Dumbledore (Harris), the assistant head (Smith) and the kindly, hulking Keeper of Keys and Grounds, Hagrid (Coltrane), but threatened by sneering contemporary Draco Malfoy (Felton) and malevolent Professor Snape (Rickman). All the boarding school stuff is terrific, and the lessons quick and funny. Harry's pals are Ron Weasley (Grint) and Hermione Granger (Watson), both jumps ahead of the Children's Film Foundation. The game of Quidditch, the most eagerly awaited visualisation from JK Rowling's first book, is as fast as Top Gun, but then becomes incomprehensible. What a feast for children! Long, and engrossing. Kids will love it! Wizard!

Introducing 11 year-old Harry Potter and the adventures that befall him and his friends during his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was possibly one of the most eagerly awaited films of all time. Released in December 2001, the film broke just about every film record on its opening weekend, taking £16m at the box office and smashing the record previously held by Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace (US, d. George Lucas, 1999).

Directed by Chris Columbus, Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone was adapted from the much loved book by J.K. Rowling. Although the action is packed into just two and a half hours, attention to detail and superb sets, such as the banqueting hall and the moving staircases, recreate the magic of the book. The film also makes use of the effects company Industrial Light and Magic - also used in the Star Wars films - to create impressive visual effects, including the realistic facial expressions of the goblins in Gringotts Bank. Since this is the first in the Potter series, there is a great deal of 'scene-setting', particularly in the introduction to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The growth of the Potter phenomenon happened through word of mouth, through the popularity of the books amongst children and not as the result of any great marketing plan. As such, the film fed on the popularity of the books and would not have required a huge marketing budget. But there was money to be made from merchandising - the sale of associated products, such as clothes, posters and mugs - which meant the film was marketed on a big scale.

Despite the fact that this is largely an American movie (with the $150 million budget to prove it), Rowling insisted the film be thoroughly British. Eleven-year-old British actor Daniel Radcliffe beat off thousands of hopefuls in auditions to win the part of Harry Potter and Alan Rickman plays a mean Professor Snape.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone also captured critical acclaim, with Guardian film reviewer Peter Bradshaw calling it "the quickest, zappiest two and a half hours you'll spend in the cinema."

Reel.com DVD review [Mary Kalin-Casey]

Bucking broomsticks, talking pictures, peripatetic staircases: Everything is just as you might expect in Chris Columbus's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." Potter-philes are sure to get what they want – if what they want is, in fact, an exacting version of J.K. Rowling's charming children's fantasy. If it's enchantment they are after, that's quite another matter.

Columbus knows his spells as well as Harry's brainy crony Hermione (Emma Watson), but he doesn't quite have the little wizard's knack for making magic. Although the director has lovingly re-created the wondrous world of the novel, in the process its whimsy, immediacy and warmth have gone poof.

After vowing to remain true to Rowling's vision, perhaps he and writer Steve Kloves ("Wonder Boys") were loath to tinker with the book. Or perhaps with Rowling prowling around the set, they didn't dare. In any case, the filmmakers haven't reshaped the story to suit the dramatic needs of the new medium. They didn't write a screenplay so much as cautiously string the book's chapters together like imitation pearls.

Although Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) confronts all manner of exotic demons over the movie's 2 1/2 hours, he defeats the cruelest of these within the first 90 minutes. Not even the final battle between the hero and the arch-villain, Lord Voldemort, can live up to Harry's earlier escape from his callous Aunt Petunia (Fiona Shaw), his bullying Uncle Vernon (Richard Griffiths) and his bratty cousin (Harry Melling).

The family of "muggles" (Potterspeak for the magically disinclined) reluctantly took in the infant Harry after his mother and father, both wizards, were murdered by Voldemort. The demonic sorcerer tried to kill Harry, too, but succeeded only in branding a lightning-bolt-shape scar onto the tot's forehead.

Oliver Twist had it better than the world's best-loved wiz kid, who grows up sleeping in a cubbyhole under the closet, doing all the chores and enduring his relatives' verbal abuse. Petunia and Vernon are not only downright ornery, they never tell him about his true origins.

Then on Harry's 11th birthday, he learns that he is unlike any other boy in the whole wide world. Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane), a gentle, very hairy giant, delivers the good news along with a letter of acceptance to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Then it's off to the Dickensian delights of London's out-of-the-way Diagon Alley, where he is fitted for a wand, and thence schlepped to Platform 9 3/4 to catch the express train for Hogwarts.

Once there, Harry hooks up with the headstrong Hermione Granger and the puckish Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), fellow first-year students who join the hero's various escapades. The chief of these, and sadly the dullest, is to foil the theft of the Sorcerer's Stone, a big old red totem that could treble Voldemort's waning powers.

Hagrid assures them that no one can get past the ferocious Fluffy, the slobbering three-headed dog charged with guarding the precious stone. The wizards-in-training, being as curious as Sherlock Holmes, can't help investigating the matter on their own.

After ruling out the shy, stuttering Professor Quirrell (Ian Hart), Nearly Headless Nick (John Cleese) and the rest of the otherworldlies hanging about, the children decide that the sinister Severus Snape (sneaky, sneery Alan Rickman) is the mastermind behind the plot. He might even be in league with Voldemort, who has recently been seen sipping unicorn blood in the Forbidden Forest flanking the campus.

Columbus, best known for comic treats like "Mrs. Doubtfire" and the "Home Alone" movies, cut his teeth writing heartwarming scripts for John Hughes. So it's not surprising that he doesn't know how to direct the many action sequences that form the last half of the movie. One scene blurs into the next, the changes in mood and rhythm signaled only by John Williams's maddeningly overwrought score.

If the tension starts to build, the moviemakers stand back to admire Stuart Craig's splendid, spooky sets: the magnificent medieval castle that houses Hogwarts; the grand hall lighted by a nebula of candles floating overhead; the haunted corridors attended by the silent vigil of coats of arms.

And then there are the bewitching costumes and the many special effects. The moviemakers are especially taken by the computer-generated Quidditch match (a field game played on flying broomsticks). Unfortunately, the video game-like sports event stops the movie in its tracks, and it never quite recovers its momentum.

Though the young actors are appealing, competent and well cast, they haven't enough oomph to make light work of the long journey toward the final credits. Despite the formidable supporting cast, the kids are mostly on their own as the story struggles toward its climax.

When they're on hand, however, the supporting cast of British stalwarts brings its own charisma to the setting. Many of them, like Cleese as Nick, John Hurt as the wandmaker, Julie Walters as Ron's mom – vanish in a wink. Coltrane's big old bear of a guardian angel is the most memorable of the lot. However, Richard Harris and Maggie Smith have the biggest of the grown-ups' share as the wise, if imperious, headmaster and deputy headmistress of Hogwarts.

As crowded as the castle is, some characters inevitably are given short shrift. If they weren't, the movie might never have ended. Of course, as witches and wizards well know, you can't expect perfection from muggles.

PopMatters Todd R. Ramlow

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has, at long last, finally arrived. Few other films in recent memory have been as eagerly anticipated, both by the millions of Potter fans desperate to see how the filmmakers' vision matches (or fails to) their own imaginings of Harry's fantasy world, as well as for those of us interested in whether the film could ever live up to its international hype. Harry Potter's most recent kin, in terms of widespread buzz (and storyline), was Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and the film is both as good and as bad as that Star Wars prequel. This is to say that even if the film may not be all that "great," for reasons I will get into below, its success is guaranteed and its cinematic shortcomings won't matter a whit to the die-hard Potter fans who have been chewing their nails off since the project was announced.

For those of you who might have been living under a rock for the past few years, a bit of Potter history is in order. And for those of you all too familiar with Pottermania, a few of the craze's factoids might bear recalling. The film is based on Book One of J.K. Rowling's runaway young-adult fiction series. The Harry Potter books have outsold any other book or series in publishing history. Book Four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, had the single largest initial printing in history. The books have been translated into 46 languages and published in over 200 countries worldwide. And, as reported on Katie Couric's special, "Harry Potter: Behind the Magic," an estimated two-thirds of the children in America have read at least one Potter book. Moreover, the film, which cost roughly $150 million, has already taken in more than that amount in franchising rights: Coca-Cola alone shelled out $100 million for the right to use Harry Potter images to shill its soda pop, Hi-C, and Minute Maid fruit drinks.

The fact that millions of children worldwide (and, admittedly, adults -- I for one have read all four books) are so taken in and fascinated by the travails of Harry at the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry has cultural commentators, politicians, and celebrities of all sorts across the United States (and presumably elsewhere in the world) officiously applauding the fact that the books have "gotten children interested in reading again."

Two things have annoyed me about this celebration of Pottermania's returning kids to reading. First, it privileges only one certain type of reading and one type of reading material. Apparently, "reading" only counts (and for what is never explained) when one is reading "literary" texts. Never mind that visual texts demand complex interpretations, analyses, and reading abilities. Nor that kids read all sorts of texts that make sense of the world around them and their place in it, like comic books, magazines, and cartoons. We only ever look to these largely visual media and declare that they are limiting children's imaginations and stultifying their minds.

The second problem is that this return to reading presumes that before reading the Potter books, children were stupid. Or rather, "we" have presumed children were stupid because they wouldn't or couldn't read "properly." Still, we fear that our children's newfound interest is imminently fragile. Katie Couric expressed collective adult misgivings about the film when she asked director Chris Columbus, in effect, "Why did you make this movie? We just got kids reading again and you come along to ruin it all."

This slavish dedication to literature as the only "true" site of reading, and to the text and only the text as the locus of creativity and imagination has been largely detrimental for the film version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Rowling has retained an amazing amount of control over the franchise and exerted great influence over the film's production. She rejected several directors, including Steven Spielberg, for fear that they would take too many liberties with the story. She refused to allow American child actors (like Haley Joel Osment) to be cast, favoring instead "real" British kids.

Neither of these is necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is surely better without either Spielberg or Osment. What is unfortunate is that this attempt to stay so close to the original book leaves the film feeling as if it is desperately trying to get in all the requisite moments, characters, and scenes, even if some could have been easily, and beneficially, left out.

One of the nice things about Rowling's books is that they are rather sprawling affairs. Not a one is under 300 pages, Book Four stretching beyond 700. This gives Rowling plenty of time to craft relatively complex stories, to develop characters who will help Harry and his pals solve their various mysteries, and to take little sidetracks into things like the history of her magical school, interracial relations (in this case, the racial politics of Wizard-House Elf relations), and the strategies of Quidditch. This doesn't translate well to the temporal limits of major release films, especially those made for children. To do the justice to the text that Rowling seems to have demanded would take far longer than a mere two and half hours.

And so, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone moves along rather herkily-jerkily, bouncing from one special effect to another, from one character or scene to another, with seemingly little connection between them. This is most obvious with the character Nearly Headless Nick (John Cleese), a ghost who haunts the Hogwarts school. In the books, he is a returning character, and over the course of the series, we come to know a great deal about his life and death, and his place in ghostly hierarchies. In the film, we see him for about twenty seconds: Nick has nothing to do here, other than occasion Cleese's cameo. The film is filled with such clutter, and unless you have read the book, it probably won't make a whole heck of a lot of sense to you. Then again, the filmmakers are banking on the fact that so very many people have read the books, so that the confusion of those Luddites who haven't read them matters very little.

The other problem with trying to shove so many details from the book into the film is that some aspects are left woefully underdeveloped. This is most disappointing in the character of Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), one of Harry's classmates. In the books, Hermione suffers because she is smarter than everyone else is. She's unpopular and just a little bit physically awkward, not the most positive characteristics for a pre-pubescent girl. Granted, she sometimes flaunts her knowledge, but it is her resourcefulness and intellect that invariably save the day, and Harry and Ron's butts, to boot. In the film, however, she is reduced to an insufferable know-it-all. It's unfortunate, because for me, Hermione is by far the most enjoyable part of the books, and even more so as the series progresses and Hermione, Ron and Harry start to do things like go to school dances and develop crushes. She's brainy, independent, and she saves the day. Go on girls, don't be afraid to outsmart the boys! That's one of the best "lessons" in Rowling's books. And I have to wonder how jettisoning this is in any way "staying true" to the original story?

Harry Potter Stefan Herrmann, January 18, 2001

Reel.com [Tor Thorsen]

AboutFilm [Carlo Cavagna]

DVD Times Raphael Pour-Hashemi

Images Movie Journal Gary Johnson

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone Gary Couzens

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Free market, branded imagination—Harry Potter and the commercialization of children’s culture Jyotsna Kapur from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

Nitrate Online (KJ Doughton)

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Dan Heaton

New York Magazine (Peter Rainer)

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "introducing..... Roald Dahl's Jedi !" (6/10)

Film Freak Central Walter Chaw

iofilm.co.uk Brian Pendreigh

CineScene.com (Shari L. Rosenblum)

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Filmcritic.com Norm Schrager

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

VideoVista Christopher Geary

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson

Movie Magazine International [Heather Clisby]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS C- 67

Great Britain USA Germany (161 mi) 2002 ‘Scope

The news from Hogwarts? After many adventures our brave, clearly older young knight Harry slays the dragon. The franchise is safe! Columbus' second alchemical movie ups the thrill quotient to satisfy the faithful. There's more action, and it's scarier. Although it's true that the director and scriptwriter Steve Kloves' faithful translation reproduces the interminable length of the book, this witches' brew is eminently drinkable. Those of us who regard the source books as literary junk shops also forget how colourful, varied and mustily reassuring they can be. And anything author JK Rowling can steal, Columbus can steal better. The Weasleys' rescue of Harry from the dreaded Dursleys in a flying Ford Anglia, for instance, is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang out of Jurassic Park. Much is marvellous. New CGI character Dobby, the green-eyed house elf who conspires to keep Harry, is 'umbler than Uriah Heep. The human actors are as good, each doing their turn with aplomb. Branagh's preening Gilderoy Lockhart, the new Dark Arts professor, is near-camp joy; but Jason Isaacs takes the honours as the hissable villain Lucius Malfoy. His disdain and evil gaze are worth the ticket price alone.

Like its predecessor, Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone, Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets works perfectly well as a cinematic corollary to J.K. Rowling's adored children's fantasy series. Quidditch, self-loathing house elves, and basilisks all make it to the screen intact, a well-chosen cast helps make the wild notions convincing, and director Chris Columbus presents it all in an attractive, thoroughly watchable package. But try imagining a universe in which the Harry Potter series existed only in film form. Would audiences still find themselves transported by such thinly drawn characters? Would the imaginations still leap for the nonstop assault of impressively realized but creatively pedestrian special effects? And would the two-and-a-half-hours-plus trek toward an unmasking straight out of Scooby Doo seem quite so satisfying? So far, the series has relied on viewers' familiarity with Rowling's characters to fill in blanks that other movies would have to fill for themselves. As before, Daniel Radcliffe gives an assured performance in the lead, but he's given so little time away from after-hours sleuthing and confrontations with bugaboos that he's mostly a sympathetic character because he's playing Harry Potter, not because of any moment within the movie itself. It doesn't help that Chamber is pretty much all business from the opening shot, trading in Stone's sometimes-clunky exposition for full-steam-ahead action that whisks Radcliffe back to Hogwarts for another year of intrigue and spellcasting with scarcely a moment to collect his syllabi. In the space between the scenes of kids screaming amid special effects, the grownups have the best moments. Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, Alan Rickman, and the late Richard Harris all reprise roles from the previous film, and Kenneth Branagh has a funny part as a self-obsessed celebrity charlatan. The movie could use more of him, and of droll touches like John Cleese's unfailingly polite, nearly headless ghost, but overall, Chamber is very much in the spirit of John Williams' score: a succession of irritatingly familiar swooping climaxes hammered out at double fortissimo. It's enough to make viewers of a certain temperament want to curl up with a good book.

BFI Screenonline [Jan Murray]

After the huge success of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (US/UK, d. Chris Columbus, 2002), the film adaptation of J K Rowling's second book had a lot to live up to. Released in November 2002, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets fulfils director Chris Columbus' promise of a "darker and scarier" film - just like the book itself.

Having established the characters in the first film, Columbus could do away with the long introduction and increase the pace of the plot. That said, at 162 minutes it is still a lengthy film and Columbus packs in as much action from the book as possible.

Disappointed with the some of the effects used in the earlier film, particularly the jerkiness of the famous Quidditch scene, Columbus concentrated on the special effects. The house elf Dobby is completely computer-generated and much more lifelike than similar digitally-animated characters (such as Jar-Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace, US, d. George Lucas, 1999). Some of the special effects - such as the paintings that come alive and the potted plants that shriek when uprooted - are fantastic. Even more eye-catching effects include the army of giant spiders in the forbidden forest.

The improved special effects and the switch to a more action/adventure-based plot were welcomed.by audience and critics. New characters such as Kenneth Branagh's Gilderoy Lockhart have also been praised. However, some critics felt there was a lack of magic in the second film. The Observer's Philip French writes that: "The true absence is wonder, as well as surprise. The mysterious gothic beauty of Hogwarts, as first encountered and explored in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, is now familiar."

With production of Chamber of Secrets following almost immediately from the release of the first film, the marketing of the film could almost look after itself. There is a subtle difference, however, in that the darker nature of the story, and scarier special effects, have meant that the film seems to be aimed at older teens as well as the young audience targeted in The Philosopher's Stone. The promotional posters for this film show a more intense Harry Potter, holding a sword and looking more like a warrior than a child magician.

The second Harry Potter film is better than the first, not because it is true to the book's story, but because it is true to the book's atmosphere.

The first Harry Potter movie was very good, but it stayed so close to the book that it spread itself too thin trying to get at every single detail. This adaptation of Joanne Rowling's second book (which I think is the weakest among the entire series) does indeed have all the good parts but focuses primarily on the main storyline. The film skips a lot of the background details, which makes for effective pacing, while taking liberties with the story to fit the big screen.

Here Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliff) and his friends, Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) once again encounter Voldemort (Christian Coulson) as a memory that has the power to become real. Voldemort opens the Chamber of Secrets freeing a fearsome Basilisk, an Alien-like snake that can kill with a glance. The snake's attacks threaten to close down Hogwarts School and Harry must stop them or be sent home to live with his foster parents (you can understand his motivation when you meet them at the introduction of every book/film).

The film is darker than the first, with scenes that are definitely creepy: Harry's encounter with a strange hand in Diagon Alley, Ron and Harry getting stuck in a willow tree that attacks them with its branches, Harry and Ron escaping from the giant spiders, and Harry's final battle with the Basilisk. There are also some Orwellian themes touched upon here, including Dobby the Elf's masochism and slavery, the ideal of some of the "Purebloods" to cleanse Hogwarts of the "Mudbloods".

The familiar high-profile cast do a fine job, with the newcomers, Kenneth Branagh as the pompous (and hilarious) new Dark Arts teacher Gilderoy Lockhart, and Jason Isaacs as an evil-oozing Lucius Malfoy, particularly standing out. While the child actors carry their roles well, some of them do tend to overact. The score does a great highlighting the suspense, which there exists a lot of.

The set design and accompanying cinematography and production deserves a paragraph of its own. The integration of computer generated images and the actors is very seamless. The Hogwarts school, the surrounding countryside, and the brief Quidditch match are all rendered with amazing reality.

If the first film was the setup, this one's definitely the payoff. Even though I know what happens next, I can't wait to see it.

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Second term at boarding school is better than the first, because you know your way around and those scary teachers aren't so scary anymore and your classmates have grown accustomed to your face. It's the same with Harry Potter. His second year at Hogwarts feels less of a showcase and more of a story.

Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint have bedded in nicely. They are friends now, not just actors pretending to be friends. Coming back for The Chamber Of Secrets is not an excuse to be rude about American director Chris Columbus and his obsession with special effects. It's quite sentimental. You keep seeing people you know. Hi Hagrid! There's Snape, looking malevolent, as per. Nearly Headless Nick floats past, greeting the late comers. Malfoy glowers and Dumbledore smiles wisely from behind his beard.

The formula remains the same. Harry (Radcliffe) is at home in the outer suburbs with Uncle Vernon (Richard Griffiths) and Aunt Petunia (Fiona Shaw) and their horrible son. He is treated like an unpaid servant and locked in his room. His owl isn't allowed out and then Dobby turns up. He's a house elf, who has come to warn Harry not to return to Hogwarts: "Terrible things will happen." Harry doesn't know what to think, because Dobby's behaving in such an odd way.

After Uncle Vernon has riveted bars across Harry's window, Ron Weasley (Grint) and his brothers arrive in their father's flying car to free him. And then they go to the Weasley house (scruffy and cosy and magic). And then they go to Di-whatever-it's-called Alley (funny shops and wizardy people). And then they go to the station to run through the wall to the secret platform and catch The Hogwarts Express at 11 o'clock - except Harry and Ron can't, because the wall won't let them through, and they have to fly the car, with catastrophic results.

There is no need to explain how things work at school any more, which is a relief. Harry, Ron and Hermione (Watson) are relaxed and at ease with each other and their friendship is more natural now. Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) is less centre stage, although still an important ingredient. Dumbledore (Richard Harris, in his final role) and McGonagall (Maggie Smith) have become established figures, rather than eccentric oddities. Snape (Alan Rickman) takes a back seat and Sprout (Miriam Margolyes), who teaches deadly plants and how to handle them, is a welcome addition. The famous author and wizard, Gilderoy Lockhart (Kenneth Branagh), has joined the staff. Flamboyant and vain, it is obvious from the start that he is a fool.

In the book, J K Rowling takes time to infuse tension into what reads like a schoolboy adventure, but once the mystery of The Chamber emerges, excitement runs wild through scenes of inspired imagination. The film has a steady pace, never tiring, except for a brief period in the middle, always moving forward towards the ultimate terror, which is the monster that guards the Secrets. Where, in the first film, Harry appeared uncertain in the role of hero, here he takes the initiative with fearless endeavour. He knows his strengths and is beginning to discover who he really is.

The complexity of the story, which involves a diary with invisible writing, belonging to a prefect 50 years ago, who was witness to the last time the Chamber was opened, and the possible closing of Hogwarts forever, because of pupils - and Argus Filch's cat - who have been petrified by something or someone unknown is cleverly adapted by scriptwriter Steven Kloves. Although the terror of the denouement is eased by the cutting of longer scenes, it remains impressive.

Columbus uses his effects with discretion and they are magnificently done. Even the Quidditch match makes more sense. A huge asset to the cast is Moaning Myrtle, a ghost who haunts the girls' lav. Played by Shirley Henderson, she is a comic delight. One of the flaws in The Philosopher's Stone was its lack of humour, considering how funny Rowling can be in print. This is taken care of this time and jokes are liberally sprinkled throughout.

Branagh is miscast as the elegant phoney Lockhart. Like Jason Isaacs, as Malfoy's father, he overacts in a panto style, which Henderson, Margolyes and Julie Walters, as Mrs Weasley, do not. What gives The Chamber Of Secrets its strength are the performances of the three lead players. Radcliffe has genuine authority and Grint has stopped making faces (almost). Hermione, being a girl, is supposed to be hyper-clever and a bit bossy. Watson has gained in confidence and is too attractive to be a knowall - an annoying one, anyway.

Is it familiarity that makes the heart grow fonder? Or magic?

DVD Times Eamonn McCusker

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Gary Couzens from DVD Times

Film Freak Central review [Walter Chaw]

Hollywood Product KJ Doughton from Nitrate Online

Darker Cynthia Fuchs from Nitrate Online

Reel.com DVD review [Tor Thorsen]

Movie Vault [Le Apprenti]

PopMatters Todd R. Ramlow

Movie Shark Deblore [debbie lynn elias] a true fangirl

Erik Childress (Chicago Film Critics Association/Online Film Critics Society)

Free market, branded imagination—Harry Potter and the commercialization of children’s culture Jyotsna Kapur from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

The Flick Filosopher [MaryAnn Johanson]

eFilmCritic.com (Collin Souter)

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

DVDTown [John J. Puccio] also here: DVDTown - HD DVD Edition [John J. Puccio]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio & Dean Winkelspecht) Blu-Ray Version

Reel.com [Mary Kalin-Casey]

eFilmCritic Reviews Brian McKay

DVD Verdict Michael Stailey

New York Magazine (Peter Rainer)

Filmcritic.com Christopher Null

Foster on Film - Fantasy

The Village Voice [Ed Park]

VideoVista Debbie Moon

hybridmagazine.com Woodrow Bogucki

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez, not really troubling himself with this review

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Guardian/Observer [Lizzie Rusbridger]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]

The Boston Phoenix Carolyn Clay

Chicago Tribune [Mark Caro]

Condon, Bill

GODS AND MONSTERS

USA (106 mi) 1998

Gods And Monsters Gerald Peary

An old-time director reminiscing about his bygone career makes a fine nostalgic read. Yet Ed Wood as the sublime exception, bio-pics about real-life filmmakers have been dramatic duds, from the woeful 1957 The Buster Keaton Story, featuring Donald O'Connor, to the gaseous Robert Downey, Jr.-starring 1992 Chaplin. At recent international film festivals, I've encountered new bio-pics spotlighting the lives of Nanook of the North's Robert Flaherty and Zero de Conduit's Jean Vigo. More losers.

Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters tries again, a screen bio of James Whale (b.1896), a lumpen, crudely educated British lad who, arrived in Hollywood, succeeded brilliantly as the elegant filmmaker of the original Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Whale's the one who ingeniously cast Boris Karloff as Dr.Frankenstein's unfortunate creation, and froze that gentlemanly actor forever in the world's mind as The Monster. Whale's stylish resume also included The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and Show Boat (1936). But in the early 40s, his career halted abruptly. In 1957, he was discovered dead, Sunset Boulevard fashion, in his California swimming pool.

One thing known certainly about Whale: he was flamboyantly homosexual in the severely closeted 1930s Hollywood, and he lived openly there for many years with producer David Lewis. Although his last couple of films were box-office disasters, and might have factored into his dismissal, Whale was probably a Hollywood firing because of his unhidden gayness. At least that's what film historians surmise, such as The Celluloid Closet's Vito Russo.

As for his death, nobody knows much. He might just have died swimming, or maybe Whale was a suicide because his then-forgotten career. Or were there "other factors"?

Gods and Monsters tries to fill in those last days, basing its speculations on Christopher Bram's novel, Father of Frankenstein. We are given Whale ( a white-haired, dandyish Ian McKlellan) at home, waited on hand-and-foot by his religious servant (an ever-flustered Lynn Redgrave). Suddenly, he becomes enamored of his new yard man (George of the Jungle's Brendan Fraser, awkward as a Lady Chatterly's Lover-like object of desire). Whale would love to bed down his muscle-bound employee, but young Clayton assures the horny old man that he's straight. So instead, they talk. And talk. And talk.

And the James Whale of this movie proves to be a dotty bore. Enough already of those self-pitying stories about his unfortunate childhood, about his lover lost in the Great War, about his jealousy against Hollywood's establishment gay director, George Cukor! Filmmaker Condon reinforces Whale's tiresome complaints with lugubrious flashbacks to post-Dickensian England and to the trenches in World War I. As for Cukor, Condon invents an unpersuasive Hollywood party where a semi-gate crasher Whale dishes his director arch-enemy.

And Whale's Hollywood horror hits? Gods and Monsters goes along with the perhaps too-cozy Freudian line that the director's Otherness came out in his freaky, condemned, bruised creatures. Condon cuts quite obviously between scenes from the Frankenstein pictures, where Karloff cries out to be loved, and poor, forlorn James Whale.

However, there is one great sequence in Gods and Monsters: a recreation of the Universal Pictures 1935 shooting of The Bride of Frankenstein. We see a portion of the filming of the immortal scene where an adult female is created for the Monster and where, coming to consciousness, she shrieks with abhorrence when she actually sees her would-be husband. Filmdom's all-time most potent Castrating Glance!

Condon gets his day on the set just right, with his modern-day actors as the perfect broken-mirror counterparts of that wonderfully loopy original cast. As Condon also demonstrates, James Whale must have been in queer heaven on The Bride of Frankenstein, with Elsa Lanchester, wife of gay actor Charles Laughton, as the reluctant bride, and Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Praetorius played, respectively, by Colin Clive and Ernest Thesiger, two of his homosexual pals.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Gods and Monsters (1998) Kevin Jackson from Sight and Sound, April 1999

Kinsey B- 81

USA (118 mi) 2004

Told in the familiar Hollywood style, like A BEAUTIFUL MIND, with overreaching music that, at least in my view, takes the heart out of the authenticity that has been meticulously established by the work of the actors, in this case, the brilliant, dead-on performance of Liam Neeson playing real life science professor/sex researcher Alfred Kinzie, Laura Linney as his wife, complimented, once again, by the always-amazing Peter Sarsgaard, who plays one of his research assistants, much of what is portrayed onscreen rings true. What this man attempted and in fact did do, when nothing of its kind existed before him, was truly remarkable, writing in 1948 “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” and in 1953 “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” but this film only hints at how he managed it, emphasizing his earlier years where he transformed himself from a bug specialist to a sex expert, surveying human behavior with an objective, scientific detachment, one person at a time. As vitally important today, an era of returned religious sexual repression, very much like the McCarthyist days of Kinsey himself, the film examines the contradictions of what a society is crying out for in the way of basic human sex information, and what it’s likely to get instead, which is an airbrushed cover up wrapped in the hocus pocus philosophy of religious abstinence. The message of the film is clear and unambiguous, that science and not politics should prevail in our search for knowledge. Unfortunately, despite the first rate performances, this remains a somewhat superficial glimpse of the man, as so much was left out at the end in the way of basic information about his life. I felt the writers just ran out of gas, as if they didn’t really know how to end this film, very much like another recent film biography RAY. I was fully expecting inter-titles explaining his accomplishments, but they never came. Instead, it just ended.

Kinsey (Bill Condon, US). Cinema Scope Magazine Online Richard Porton, October 19, 2006

Near the opening of Where the Boys Are (1960), an exasperated Dolores Hart reprimands her sex-education teacher for assigning an outdated textbook and blurts out, “What about Dr. Kinsey?” The prim instructor can only reply, “This course is about interpersonal relationships, not Dr. Kinsey!” Pert Ms. Hart (who tellingly plays a character named “Merritt”) gets the last laugh by interjecting, “What’s more interpersonal than backseat bingo?”—slang for “heavy petting” in the Mesozoic era of teen comedies. This far from Wildean banter provides ample evidence that, 12 years after the publication of Alfred C. Kinsey’s highly influential Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the man affectionately christened “Dr. Sex” by his students already had become a pop icon.

Curiously enough, as some of us rub our wounds after the seeming victory of fundamentalist “values” in the recent US election (at least that’s what the media pundits tell us), it’s clear that the late Dr. Kinsey was a quintessentially American figure. As Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy observes in his lively biography of the great man, “America is at once the most licentious culture since Rome and the most puritan country in the world.” The British biographer then adds that “it is the evidence of the latter that astonishes the transient visitor,” informing his international readership that near Indiana University, where Kinsey started his crusade for sexual enlightenment,“[T]here is an entire channel devoted to preachers…the Christian Right, just as it was in Kinsey’s day, is against sex in all of its manifestations.” This cultural schizophrenia is reflected in the very way Kinsey, Bill Condon’s new biopic, is distributed worldwide. New York–based journalists attended screenings at a building where Fox News blares out broadcasts that regularly cheer on the newly re-coronated (or newly born again, if you like) G.W. Bush at the entrance, while upstairs Twentieth Century Fox’s boutique distributor, Fox Searchlight, screens left-liberal or risqué films such as Kinsey and I Heart Huckabees.

Of course, some commentators might claim that Kinsey, despite its humane intentions, is compromised at the outset by its status as a star-studded biopic. The biopic is, after all, one of the stodgiest of the old Hollywood genres; complex and contradictory men and women are regularly turned into stick figures through the formulaic machinery of the biographical film. Condon circumvents (without thoroughly vanquishing) some of the biopic’s impediments by fracturing chronology in a supremely viewer-friendly fashion. To a certain extent, Kinsey’s life unfurls in Bildungsroman-like fashion; the insecure son of a raving fundamentalist lunatic (played by John Lithgow in an unusually restrained performance) gradually sheds his inhibitions and becomes an avuncular dispenser of sexual wisdom. This kind of linear movement, a monotonous aspect of almost every biopic, is partially deflected by Condon’s ingenious decision to frame his narrative with re-enactments of the famous (or notorious, for the prudes who still assail the scientist’s legacy) Kinsey sexual histories. The sex histories were essentially in-depth interviews, administered by either Kinsey or his associates, which employed a standard set of questions designed to quantify the vicissitudes of sexual behaviour. Foregrounding these interviews allows Condon to employ a strategic frontality: Liam Neeson as Kinsey, the zoologist/entomologist turned sexologist, is positioned as a looming presence who benevolently peers down on his subjects, benighted individuals plagued by sexual repression.

Unlike subsequent, more jaundiced European avatars of sexual freedom (Foucault comes to mind, although he was too dour to endorse anything as affirmative as the American sexologist’s anti-puritanical agenda), Kinsey combined a wide-eyed veneration for science with a kind of pantheism that corresponds to his endorsement of pansexuality— and has its roots in both Rousseau and American Transcendentalism’s optimistic appreciation of the natural world. The Rousseausitic/Transcendentalist origins of Kinsey’s gospel of sexual freedom become clear in the early scenes featuring the scientist’s courtship of his future wife, Clara Bracken (née McMillen, hence her nickname “Mac,” and played by Laura Linney with her usual ebullience), against various Midwestern pastoral backdrops. At one point in the film, Condon hits on a brilliant visual modus operandi for encapsulating Kinsey’s aspiration to be the Johnny Appleseed of sex. To illustrate Kinsey’s success in convincing Americans to talk more openly about sex, Kinsey superimposes a number of randy talking heads on a map of the United States. The general effect is that of a priapic version of the WPA travel guides or a Whitmanesque vision of sexual chatter: I hear America screwing, if you will.

Curiously enough, despite the fact that Condon is gay, the film’s exploration of Kinsey’s bisexuality is more timid and riddled with melodramatic contrivances. Condon is consistently scrupulous in reflecting the various crises of Kinsey’s career, but, in a rather standard Hollywood manoeuvre, he chooses to focus on the inevitable (although surprisingly temporary) marital crisis that comes to the fore when the philandering professor confides to his shocked wife that he has been fooling around with Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his trusty sex researchers. (As Gathorne-Hardy himself pointed out in a letter to The New York Times, “all biopics have to condense, to let one character do the work of two or three and so on…What is unusual about Bill Condon’s film is how accurate it is.”) Yet, rather than becoming mired in the familiar terrain of marital dysfunction, it might have been more amusing for Condon to have included some scenes exploring Kinsey’s friendship with Kenneth Anger (the conversations between the square Midwesterner and Anger, the impish Aleister Crowley disciple, must have been a hoot), or the patient scientist’s determination to record the sexual histories of the entire cast of the stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

There’s also a rather bland, if well-intentioned, earnestness in Condon’s decision to give Lynn Redgrave a plum cameo towards the end of the film as a lesbian who feels eternally grateful to Kinsey for making her feel less of an outcast. Despite the theoretical chasm between Kinsey and Foucault, both the upbeat American and the skeptical Frenchman believed that there are only heterosexual and homosexual acts, not essences. But Condon demonstrates these precepts with a dutifulness that might have erupted into enlivening comic brio if the script had been tweaked slightly.

Fortunately, a refreshingly comic tone leavens all of the contingent earnestness in the scenes highlighting Kinsey’s rise to fame during his tenure at staid Indiana University. Kinsey’s battles with his conservative critics are no less generic; the scandal generated by Kinsey’s sexcapades is not that much different from the outrage that greets Henry Fonda’s reading of a letter written by the martyred anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti to his college class in Elliot Nugent’s The Male Animal (1942). In any case, the spectacle of the adoring students who throng to Kinsey’s classes, as well as the prissy academics and bureaucrats who denounce his work, resembles the media whirlwind that envelops our current academic superstars. In addition, Condon displays a certain satirical finesse in casting the enjoyably hammy Tim Curry as Thurman Rice, Kinsey’s primary antagonist on his home turf.

It goes without saying that any biographical film relies inordinately on a strong lead performance. Liam Neeson delivers the goods; his impersonation of the fabled professor’s oscillation between gung-ho enthusiasm and anguished self-doubt (the, I suppose, obligatory scene featuring Kinsey’s penchant for sexual self-mutilation is blessedly short) is conveyed with near pitch-perfect aplomb. Nevertheless, there’s an almost unavoidable disparity between the suave actor’s own persona (however much he tries to conceal it) and the man with the crooked grin and bad haircut who appeared on the cover of Time in the 50s. Movie magic can only do so much, but for a film that studiously challenges nearly every sexual shibboleth that G.W. and his right-wing supporters cherish, we could do far worse.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Kinsey (2004) Leslie Felperin from Sight and Sound, March 2005

DREAMGIRLS B- 80

USA (131 mi) 2006 ‘Scope

DREAMGIRLS is a Christmas release, a high energy morsel chock full of entertainment, including black stars like Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover, and Beyoncé Knowles, all of whom are recognized stars. Mentioned last in the credits is Jennifer Hudson, the girl Simon Cowell said had no talent and was kicked off the popular TV show American Idol, but here, elevated to this stage, she simply blows everybody away. Without her impressive debut, the rest if the film is mediocre and forgettable, as Hudson steals each and every scene she is in and just sizzles with energy and emotion. Her singing persona is remarkably pure and her glorious voice sounds like it comes from a star. The interest in this story is that she is the star who never was, as the backstabbing, moneygrubbing nature of the music business regrettable leaves her behind, a footnote perhaps only to real music buffs who have to search through the dust bins to find anything she ever recorded. Murphy is very funny as an original soul singer in the 50’s R & B mold, Mr. Excitement on stage, the one everyone else copies in their acts, but who remains stuck in the chitlin circuit making a fat nothing until opportunity comes knocking at his door asking him to modify his style, in other words, be less conspicuously black. And this is what’s interesting about this film. It’s basically a montage of video clips of actors dressed up as singers lip-synching to the music – whoopee, and most of the music without Hudson isn’t all that interesting, including some of the worst synchronized lip-synching on record. But in between photographed set pieces, the film attempts to make a few statements, and a few actually work.

Set in Detroit, ripping off the story of the Motown group the Supremes, the first all female group to be packaged as glamorous and beautiful, always elegantly dressed, their hair, or wigs, perfectly in place, as they come to personify sophistication and style. They became hugely successful and made a lot of money for...someone else. And that fat cat was Barry Gordy, the founder of Motown records, who signed under contract the likes of Smoky Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye, to name a few. Gordy is played as Curtis Taylor by Jamie Foxx, who is just not large enough for this role, as he never for a second is believable as a man who commands this much money and power, not to mention his incredible instincts for discovering talent. Instead the film focuses on his despicable nature as a business man, a soulless snake who uses women as interchangeable commodities that can be sold to the highest bidder in the marketplace, an old school entrepeneur in the Carnegie mold who believed in forging untouchable business monopolies.

From the outset, however, we are introduced to the three glamor girls, led by Jennifer Hudson’s Effie, who can outsing anybody, who is second to no one, an undiscovered “Queen of Soul” who never gives anything less than an inspirational performance, known then as the Dreamettes, readying themselves to sing in a talent contest which is fixed before they even get onstage. But Taylor has his eye on Effie and immediately signs them to sing back up to Eddie Murphy’s James Thunder Early, where they’re an instant success, but only in black markets, much of which is greased by payola, paying off all the DJ’s to play their record. When the opportunity comes to open into the major markets, the group is beset by friction. Unbeknownst to the rest, Effie is carrying Taylor’s child, and is subject to mood swings and health issues, not to mention she’s pleasingly plump, but still a fox. The moment of truth comes when she is replaced by Beyoncé’s Deena as the lead singer, as she is more sleek and slender, can’t sing nearly as well but is seen as more cosmetically attractive to the teeming millions, while Effie is a large size specialty number in men’s taste. In one of the more dramatic moments in the film, Effie walks out on a show, calls out Taylor for now sleeping with Deena, and in a huff storms outside, where, incredibly, a race riot is going on, as Detroit is on the verge of burning to the ground after the assassination of Martin Luther King. This is about as much attention as real social issues get in this movie.

Eventually, Taylor replaces Effie altogether and brings in a new girl to take her place in a New Year’s performance. This was never communicated to Effie who is jolted by the news, but this is the lead in to her signature number, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” by now a standard black anthem of soulfulness and hurt, which Hudson simply kills in her peformance, eventually singing to an empty nightclub, the picture image of her chances for stardom. Effie fades away into the night to have her baby in obscurity, barely able to find work after that while the group becomes Deena and the Dreams, a gigantic success. The film does an excellent job at revealing the artificalilty of stardom, how the ones that become successful aren’t the ones with the most talent or ability, but they’re packaged well. Also, the corruption and thievery of other people’s songs is rampant in this film, hilariously expressed when a white group blandly sings one of James Thunder Early’s soul records and turns it into a folk tune. But despite a few touches of reality, this is a Beyoncé vehicle, clearly glamorized, given cover girl status, elevated to the lead role, but except for one song near the end called “Listen,” she is clearly outclassed the entire way by a little known American Idol reject who brings the house down with every performance. Let’s hope she finally gets the money and contract that she deserves, because she’s certainly earned every penny of it here, literally carrying the film on her back.

The schlocky appeal of Dreamgirls. - By Dana Stevens - Slate Magazine

For all its flaws, Dreamgirls is what this holiday season needs. It's a big, fat, luscious movie in which no one is tortured, murdered, or mutilated (honestly, how many recent films can you say that about?), as well as a heartfelt paean to the transformative power of singing (even if the songs themselves are kind of meh). Despite its schlocky score and slack pacing, I predict this film will be wildly successful, for two reasons: One, because it makes audiences feel good. And two, because in the figure of Jennifer Hudson, who was unexpectedly voted off American Idol in season three, Americans can finally experience the completion of the collective star-making fantasy we've nurtured for four years now on that show.

Though the beloved stage musical that the movie is based on predated Idol by two decades, the Dreamgirls ethos is of a piece with that of the hit reality show, where "being a diva" and "finding your voice" constitute the performer's supreme good. Dreamgirls is the story of a woman who does exactly that. Well, three women, actually: Deena Jones, the Diana Ross-like singer played by Beyoncé Knowles; Effie White, the soulful belter played by Jennifer Hudson; and the ditzy but loyal Lorrell (Anika Noni Rose) all do their share of voice-finding and diva-being over the course of the movie's 15-year time span. But the fact that even Beyoncé—a gifted and charismatic performer whose cheekbones alone are an argument for the existence of God—takes a backseat to Hudson throughout the movie is a measure of how star-making Hudson's supporting role is.

Dreamgirls takes off with a bang in a snappy opening sequence, as the titular trio, billed as The Dreamettes, compete in an amateur talent show in Detroit. Like Hudson in the third season of Idol, they lose the contest, but soon move on to bigger things: A slick car dealer named Curtis Taylor (Jamie Foxx) offers to manage their careers and becomes Effie's man in the process. Soon the girls are singing back-up for a James Brown-style soul showman named James Thunder Early (played with career-remaking brio by Eddie Murphy). When the girls land a gig of their own at a lily-white Miami club, Curtis decides to revamp the look and sound of the group: He changes their name to The Dreams, relegates Effie to backup, and has the whiter-looking and -sounding Deena sing lead. When Effie gives him attitude about this turn of events, Curtis summarily replaces her with a skinnier, more compliant backup singer (Sharon Leal) and starts an affair with the glamorous Deena.

Understandably furious, Effie launches into her big ballad, an abject plea that could be the theme, not only of every rejected lover, but of every showbiz wannabe (I predict it shows up next season on American Idol). After this showstopper, the show does, indeed, stop, or at least slow to a pace that never picks up momentum again. The second half of the movie descends into standard biopic rhythm, punctuating the Dreams' rise to superstardom with ever more expository and less moving songs. (My personal low point was when Foxx crooned his passion for Beyoncé over a montage of her increasingly outré fashion spreads, a number I like to call "Baby, I Love Your Photo Shoot.")

It only takes a short list of Supremes song titles—"Where Did Our Love Go?", "Please Mr. Postman", "Baby Love"—to point out the difference between genuine Motown and the Dreamgirls score. Were you able to read any of those titles without hearing the hook in your head? By contrast, the songs in Dreamgirls, even the big Effie number cited above, leave you walking out of the theater with nary a toe a-tappin'. I'll leave it to my colleague Jody Rosen to more explicitly discuss the score, but suffice it to say that, though the songs range from the agreeably banal to the watch-consultingly dull, not a single melody will remain in your head the day after.

Still, watching Dreamgirls on the big screen feels like an event somehow. Maybe it's the conviction and passion that the actors bring to their roles. Unlike the film version of Chicago (scripted by this film's director, Bill Condon), Dreamgirls doesn't feel synthetic and dead onscreen. It uses theatrical conventions to capture some of the energy of live theater; for example, a clever curtain-call-style credit sequence gives the audience a chance to cheer for the actors one by one as we revisit the highlights of each performance. The audience I saw Dreamgirls with went crazy for the whole cast, but especially Hudson, who's a pure delight to watch whether she's shaking her copious rack at the talent-show audience, storming out of a recording session, or telling off her rival. Hudson's climactic plea in her big song—"You're gonna love me"—seems to have done its job: We do. I'd say she has a lock on a Best Supporting Actress nomination, if not a win. Whatever happens next in Hudson's career, the journey from talent-show reject to this year's discovery is a Cinderella comeback worthy of Effie White herself.

The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]

It is said that a great actor or actress can "bring down the house," but before I saw (and heard) the 25-year-old American Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson in the film version of the 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls, I can't recall the last time I truly feared for the architectural stability of a movie theater. When Hudson, who is making her film debut, sings the end-of-first-act showstopper "And I Am Telling You I Am Not Going," it's as if some spiritual force has taken hold of her entire being: Her body trembles with each passing note, her wide brown eyes seem to speak the lyrics before they arrive at her lips, and the voice that erupts out of her hardly sounds human—it's the kind of thunderous, soul-stirring bellow that a wronged goddess might make upon learning that she had been betrayed for a mere mortal. And so she has. At that moment in the film, Hudson, who plays one member of a 1960s all-girl r&b trio called the Dreams, is confronting her manager/ex-lover (Jamie Foxx) over his decision to oust her from the group in favor of a less gifted, less temperamental, and less full-figured replacement. But really, she's singing about her need to be loved—not just by anyone, but by the very man who has callously betrayed her. And so acute is her agony that mere words aren't enough to express it. Like all of the most joyous and tragic moments in movie musicals, it can only be sung.

With a star turn like that at its center, a movie doesn't need too much more, but Dreamgirls has plenty to go around. Its sense of showmanship is overflowing, from the opening talent-contest revue in which Detroit teenagers Deena (Beyoncé Knowles), Lorrell (Anika Noni Rose), and Effie (Hudson) are picked to sing backup for the glitter-outfitted James "Thunder" Early (Eddie Murphy, cannily cast as a onetime legend whose best moves have been stolen by younger performers), through to their farewell concert as the Dreams a decade later. The director, Bill Condon, who also adapted Dreamgirls for the screen, has the disposition of a vaudeville entertainer—he wants to give you your money's worth and then some.

Most, I suspect, will not go home unhappy. Arriving in a renaissance period for the big-budget Hollywood musical, Dreamgirls is by far the best of a crop that includes the Oscar-winning Chicago, which Condon himself penned. Among that picture's many failings, it seemed vaguely embarrassed to even be a musical in the first place, relegating its production numbers to fantasy sequences set inside its characters' heads and otherwise making sure to give the audience fair warning: "OK. Don't be frightened. We're going to sing Dreamgirls, despite being similarly set in a theatrical milieu, feels no such compunction. Its characters don't just sing directly to one another, in the real world, but when they do, what they're singing about actually moves the story forward.

So it pains me to say that, on some crucial level, Dreamgirls falls short of expectations. Largely, the source material is at fault: Written by Tom Eyen (with music by Henry Krieger) and staged by the legendary director-choreographer Michael Bennett, the Broadway version of Dreamgirls drew much attention for its thinly-veiled fictionalization of Berry Gordy Jr.'s Motown Records and the behind-the-scenes drama of Gordy's girl-group phenom the Supremes. But by now, so much of Dreamgirls' real estate has been overdeveloped by the rash of Broadway and big-screen music biographies (Ray, Walk the Line, Jersey Boys) that it's tough to get too worked up over yet more scenes of naive young vocalists hearing their song on the radio for the first time, encountering the ugly face of racism, and discovering that fame isn't all it's cracked up to be. And as both play and film, Dreamgirls takes a kid-gloves approach to its most intriguing subject: the way that black music moguls like Gordy systematically watered down grinding soul rhythms with vanilla pop melodies in the name of "crossing over" black artists to the pop charts.

It's only logical, then, that Dreamgirls should prove more absorbing in its second half, when Effie comes to dominate the story and when the movie itself becomes less about the path to stardom and more about what happens after you've made it (or haven't). That's also when Condon, who occasionally seems overwhelmed by the sheer bigness of the production, stops trying to wow us with one high-energy production number after another and recaptures in a few key scenes the exquisite intimacy of his two nonmusical biopics, Kinsey and Gods and Monsters. It's then that Condon grasps what has eluded most of his contemporaries: Anyone can give us the old razzle-dazzle, but what makes a movie musical soar is nothing more or less than the quiet exhilaration of two individuals on the screen, enraptured by song.

New York Press - ARMOND WHITE - Time to Get Going Armond White writes a Grinch review just before Christmas

“And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going”—realistically understood as “The Stalker’s Anthem”—is the show-stopping number from Dreamgirls in which a woman begs and threatens a man to love her. Despite its ostentatious build-up, “And I Am Telling You” has not entered the Broadway canon: It’s a number white actresses don’t/won’t attempt because it’s culturally stigmatized. The song is so wildly humiliating that it can only be rationalized as a cartoonish black stereotype—the anguish of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin thoughtlessly jumbled and coarsened into a hebephrenic climax.

All this is worth pointing out in order to understand that the hype surrounding the gaudy movie version of Dreamgirls is unacceptable. The film’s makers mindlessly reproduce the stage show’s inauthenticity. The media have conceded to this nonsense, as if it were all in good fun. But this “fun” is dubious, typecasting black American behavior and culture into shrillness and frivolity. The essential silliness of Dreamgirls was brilliantly captured in the little-seen indie Camp when a white teenage girl sang the showstopper to a pipsqueak black boy. It flipped the show’s own stereotypes and exposed the song’s inane sentimentality while demonstrating that it only functions as a theatrical device: Aunt Jemima Ex Machina.

Sure, Dreamgirls is basically a confection, but its core is soul-rotting. It trivializes black American pop music’s mid-20th century development into a world-conquering force, reducing the amazing, irresistible Girl Group phenomenon into pop of a lower order—camp. A dreadful betrayal takes place in the show’s oft-reprised title song: “We’re your dreamgirls/Boys, we’ll make you happy/Dreams that will never leave you.” That’s not just an adolescent paean—at heart, it’s gay fandom. But the very real subject of androgynous identification (black girls in white drag) gets obscured; it deserves better than this trashy roman à clef.

Critics generally accept that Dreamgirls recreates the story of Detroit’s black-owned Motown Records and how entrepreneur Berry Gordy chose Diana Ross to be the leader of The Supremes, prompting the demotion of the late Florence Ballard. But this fable is historically inaccurate, the plot an inane excuse for melodramatic hysteria. What Dreamgirls gets wrong—everything from the music to history to the misunderstood cultural iconography—is more damaging than any entertainment it offers. Dreamgirls threatens to leave audiences ignorant of how showbiz operates, how black artists and hustlers compromise, how American pop culture thrives.

In place of the awesome reality of Motown’s ’60s cultural revolution, Dreamgirls-the-movie becomes a plasticized emblem of today’s soulless Celebrity. Director/screenwriter Bill Condon follows the synthetic example of Chicago, replacing that film’s showbiz cynicism with an ethnically degrading naiveté. The members of the Girl Group known as The Dreams (Beyoncé Knowles, Jennifer Hudson, Anika Noni Rose), wear bubble wigs to match their bubbleheads.

They’re not playing icons but ghetto-to-glamour clichés. Condon’s fast-pace style doesn’t hide the insipidness because his cast is left playing stereotypes, not characters. Jamie Foxx’s hard-hearted hustler Curtis Taylor Jr. shows no affection for the girls or for deal making; he never grasps that Gordy’s passion for success expressed a bold, new African-American will.

Condon zips past the styles of the era without feeling (characters step out of a recording studio into—uh, oh—a race riot). This stupid compression also negates Eddie Murphy’s characterization of James Thunder Early, the soul-man star who features The Dreams as his backup singers. It was a conceptual catastrophe to cast Murphy, a hilarious mimic, in a role that is nothing more than an impersonator’s amalgam. James Thunder Early, with his turd-like pompadour, ruinously resembles Murphy’s “SNL” parodies of James Brown and Little Richard; mocking their triumphs and shrinking their genius to drug-addict tragedy. Yet, the spectacle of Murphy’s own career-comeback has taken the place of real drama. The same substitute realism affects Beyoncé’s performance as Deena; her colorless, unmotivated ambition turns into the spectacle of watching Beyoncé be Beyoncé: not the disarming, sexpot prodigy but the Celebrity—which Condon offensively equates to Diana Ross’s fame.

These two villains reveal Dreamgirls’ fakery. Condon disrespects the complex struggles of black pop artists. By tilting the aura of “genuineness” to Jennifer Hudson’s caterwauling Effie, the overweight belter who loses her man and her group to the superficial Deena, Dreamgirls insults the true legacy of black pop. Taylor’s Rainbow Records is an insipid version of Motown, and the treatment of race history is as glancing as in The Five Heartbeats.

All this was more faithfully rendered in the 1976 film Sparkle (now available on DVD). Dreamgirls ripped-off the Girl Group story of Sparkle, a genuine cult classic—forgotten by white Americans but fondly remembered by black moviegoers who responded to Curtis Mayfield’s suite of songs (ranging from teen pop to female torch) and screenwriter Joel Schumacher’s affection for the gospel-based strivings of R&B. Director Sam O’Steen’s dark imagery of Harlem stage shows had tactile sensuality, and Lonette McKee, in the central role as the doomed lead vocalist of Sister and the Sisters, paid homage to those great talents who never made it beyond the Apollo. McKee’s ripe voice and luminous narcissism were scorching. Hollywood’s failure to embrace McKee after that stunning debut puts all this folderol about Jennifer Hudson in perspective.

Hudson sings in the non-threatening, impersonal style of most “American Idol” contestants. Her version of Dreamgirls’ aria is loud, not moving. She isn’t actress enough to make the song’s loony emotions believable. Besides, it isn’t as durable as other Broadway arias; it worked only through Jennifer Holliday’s unbridled melisma and psychodrama. Holliday’s interpretation became a (black radio) classic; the inauthentic show itself never did. You don’t have to dull your taste with Dreamgirls; there’s always Sparkle.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Dreamgirls (2006) Linda Ruth Williams from Sight and Sound, March 2007

The Offense of Dreamgirls Andrew Chan from Movie Love

New York Sun [Grady Hendrix]

The New Yorker (David Denby)

Review: Dreamgirls -- James' Take - Cinematical James Rocchi from Cinematical

Dreamgirls: The Critics May, Actually, Be Going - Cinematical Karina Longworth from Cinematical

New York Magazine (David Edelstein)

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

CineScene [Chris Knipp]

DVD Talk - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich] another DVD review here: DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) Special Edition

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) HD TV Special Edition

DVD Verdict - Two-Disc Showstopper Edition [Daniel MacDonald]

DVD Verdict - Two-Disc Showstopper Edition (HD DVD) [Ryan Keefer]

eFilmCritic [David Cornelius]

PopMatters [Iquo B. Essien]

Reel.com DVD review [Gary Goldstein]

Political Film Review Michael Haas

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Dreamgirls (2006) vs. Jersey Boys (the musical), by Emily S. Mendel

Newyork.timeout.com [Keith Uhlich]

DVDBeaver Yunda Eddie Feng

Connor, Bruce

MARILYN TIMES FIVE

USA (14 mi) 1973

User Reviews from imdb Author: F. V. from United States

Marilyn Times Five, otherwise known as "The Apple-Knockers, and Coke" was purported to have been recorded in the mid to late 1940s and was NOT Marilyn Monroe, but rather a Monroe contemporary and Playboy's Miss August 1954, Arline Hunter (sometimes credited as Arlene Hunter). She bears a striking resemblance to a young Monroe, but alas has a chipped front tooth and much larger breasts. It is sometimes hard for people to believe it is not Marilyn, for Miss Hunter does a great impersonation indeed. Not much is known about Arline Hunter except that she was a popular pin-up in the late 1940s through the early 1960s, always close to a dead ringer for Monroe. She recorded various B-films throughout the 1950s including "Sex Kittens Go To College" also starring Mamie Van Doren and others like "The Angry Red Planet" and "Big Daddy". Perhaps her biggest B-film was Ron Ormond's "White Lightnin' Road" in 1965.

As far as Marilyn Times Five is concerned, it is an amazing piece of American "cinema" which both fooled and fascinated many for quite a long time. Hunter has the innocence of a young Monroe and the looks to back it up, if only her anatomy was not so exaggerated. Bottom Line: Marilyn Times Five is a propaganda film with an underground lookalike.

User Reviews from imdb Author: Thomas Plante (TJ1380@gmail.com) from United States

I saw this in a film class yesterday and really didn't know what to think of it. Somehow it managed to be intriguing to me, so I decided to look it up on this site just for the hell of it. Since nobody else has commented on it, I figured I would make the first (and probably only) comment.

Basically, this very avant-garde consists of very repetitive footage of Marilyn Monroe from a stag film she made before she was famous set to what seems to be a continuous loop of the song "I'm Through with Love" from "Some Like it Hot." That's pretty much it. No plot, no dialog, just brief glimpses of a nearly-naked Marilyn Monroe (I say "brief glimpses" because the screen is, more often than not, black) and a song that is repeated so many times it's guaranteed to drive anyone completely insane. In a way, it's almost an anti-porn film; Marilyn Monroe is still considered to be one of the most beautiful and sexy women in the history of Hollywood, so I would imagine a lot of guys would've loved to see her naked. Needless to say, that's exactly what we get here, yet it's's presented in a fashion that is so mind-numbingly repetitive and devoid of all other content that after awhile I just wanted it to end. As sexy as Monroe was, this movie ceases to be sexy before too long, and I think that's what is supposed to happen.

This is indeed a very strange and almost maddening film, but I can definitely see what the filmmaker was trying to do.

Seeing through cinema verité Wanda and Marilyn Times Five, by Chuck Kleinhans from Jump Cut

HIS EYE IS ON THE SPARROW

USA (5 mi) 2006

2006 New York Film Festival "Views from the Avant-Garde" Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack (viewed 10/08)

Much more so than Conner's previous video Luke, His Eye on the Sparrow really does fall right in line with the filmmaker's signature style, and it's gratifying to see. Sparrow sets the title song to rich, resonant black-and-white images of the African-American South, resulting in a piece situated somewhere between the music-video style of Mongoloid and America is Waiting and the relaxed pace and melancholic tone of Take the 5:10 to Dreamland and Valse Triste. If it has any flaw at all -- and calling it a "flaw" seems churlish, really -- it's that sound and image meld so well. There's no critical edge or sly commentary; it's just Bruce Conner, In a Gospel Mood. It's a lovely but minor work, intended to be part of a longer project although it's hard to imagine where else it could go. It just seems utterly complete.

Connery, Sean – actor

The Man Who Would be King: Sean Connery - Film Comment Kathleen Murphy from Film Comment, May/June 1997 (condensed for online version)

Just back from the Crusades after twenty years, Sean Connery’s Robin Hood peers up at an abbey window to espy his onetime Maid Marian (Audrey Hepburn) decked out in nun's habit. “What,” demands her scruffy swain, “are you doing in that costume?” “Living it,” she retorts. In Robin and Marian, Richard Lester’s superb deconstruction of sustaining, fatal legend, Robin is a player past his prime, so taken by his own heroic mask he would choose to die under its weight. In fashioning one of his finest performances, Sean Connery must have called upon something of his own struggle with a devouring fiction, the near-loss of his own face to a single fixed expression of heroism.

In forty years of filmmaking, Sean Connery has climbed into a remarkable variety of cinematic costume: suits from Savile Row, uniforms of every stripe, American West gear, exotic regalia from loincloth to kilt to Spanish grandee’s piratical splendor, the robes of a Benedictine monk, the sturdy tweeds of an elderly British archaeologist, and the slightly seedy duds of a boozy publisher. He’s been spy, soldier, scientist, submarine captain, cop, poet, miner, thief, messiah, sheikh, fertility god, and dragon. No matter the clothes, period, or genre, Connery displays the sang-froid of an instinctively naturalized citizen, at home from Sekandergul to Oz.

In the business of wearing fictions, projecting assumed identities, Connery has been more creatively calculating than most about the masks he tries on. Willing, with uncommon pleasure, to expose himself body and soul, but simultaneously conserving, he keeps some core of self away from the light. Almost from the beginning, he’s taken a strong hand in shaping the way his often exotic personae look, move, and speak. Offering himself to the consuming, carnal gaze of the camera, this extraordinarily centered star has quietly chosen to “live” costumes on his own terms. The off-screen Connery is adamantly reticent, opting for self-possession and privacy. He refuses to “reveal his soul to complete strangers” or to “screw in public”—past metaphors for unhappy relations with the press.

There’s room for mystery here: it lies between mask and man, between this actor’s gift for generous—though carefully curated—exhibitionism and the guarded ground where Connery lives as privately and mundanely as can be. He applies to the dangerously seductive art of movie masquerade Jimmy Malone’s first rule of law enforcement in The Untouchables: “When your shift is over, make sure you go home alive.” After his shift, Sean Connery, near-casualty of Bondmania in his 30s and People magazine’s “sexiest man alive” at 60, shuts up shop and goes home —to longtime monogamy and the serious game of golf.

Alec Baldwin, his costar in Hunt for Red October, calls Connery “the most physically beautiful man to stand in front of a camera.” Pauline Kael remarked his absolute “confidence in himself as a man. I don’t know any man since Cary Grant that men have wanted to be so much.” Snapshots of the 22-year-old Scot as nearly nude art model and cocksure Mr. Universe contestant show the kind of easy, arrogant physicality few men can muster, even movie stars B.A. (Before Androgyny). In early films, Connery is a heated presence, oozing testosterone. As the drunken sailor who assaults Martine Carol in Action of the Tiger (57) and a truck-driver in chunky turtleneck who literally snatches up a passing woman for a dance in Hell Drivers (58), he’s all thick, dark machismo, a Caliban on the way up. (Carol suggested he should have replaced washed-out wimp Van Johnson in Action’s tough-guy lead.)

That excess of unfocussed energy is a bit much for the frame to hold; you fear Connery might bust out all over. Discovered singing—“My darling Irish girl”—and scything in Darby O’Gill’s magical outdoors, our Celtic Pan levels one grand, unthreatening grin after another at his pretty colleen. But as she skips prettily away with a parting sally, his “Aren’t you a clever girl?” has the germ of something hard and dangerous in it.

Unrepressed, that tone would grow into the grating, edged nasality with which James Bond, Connery’s civilized savage, aimed his hardball double-entendres. “[He succeeded] on-screen because of the promise of force behind the smile —that’s what made the smile knowing. As a young man, especially without the ‘wink’ of his mustache, he had a hard, menacing quality. He was like Jack Dempsey in a tuxedo · his integrity as natural and quick as the grin.” Writer-critic David Thomson catches Sean—boy and man—to a T … except he’s actually pegging Clark Gable, the former “King of Hollywood” whom Connery most recalls. Particularly as young men, the two share a signature expression: Amused, they cock heavy, dark brows, accents ague and grave respectively, to up the ante of the eyes’ level, suggestive gaze. Deep furrows —vertical dimples —bracket a sensualist’s smile, variously cruel and charming. Blue-collar boys, both parlayed every kind of silver-screen roguery into gold, though Gable had only John Huston’s The Misfits to crown his later years, while even mediocre movies fail to tarnish Connery’s ever-increasing majesty.

If Huston had gotten Gable, as he had hoped, for Danny Dravot in The Man Who Would Be King, the actor might have dispensed —as deftly as Connery —the sweet charm of a confidence-man taken in by his own grift. But would he have caught Danny’s deep, natural nobility as a former British soldier and scam-artist aspiring to “civilize” Kafiristan? Connery, master of bodily signature, makes us literally see gravity weight his lighthearted “Tommy” into a second Alexander, possessed by dreams of empire and justice. And it’s hard to imagine that Gable could have achieved the brave boyishness with which Connery endows his big man’s final moments: his fears of losing the affections of his brother-in-arms (Michael Caine) allayed, another Huston player whose reach has exceeded his grasp sings his way to death, gaily cashing in his chips.

But check out 30-year-old Gable’s hardcase chauffeur—sans mustache—in William Wellman’s Night Nurse; beating up on Barbara Stanwyck, he conjures a blacker, low-class James Bond, whose license to kill is not yet sheathed in elegance. Similarly, in his sociopathic charm, brutality, and dissociation, Bond is like a great sleek wolf who’s slipped into a perfectly tailored Homo sapiens suit. But the predator’s mouth and aimed gaze give away the game. The thinner upper lip may signal good taste and control, but the lower pushes outward in sensual, animal appetite. Bond’s smirk of superiority —targeting men and women alike —can expand into a killer grin, white teeth bared, lips as avid as the skinned-back gums of a hungry beast. During his hi-tech hunts, 007’s sense of humor runs to estranging sarcasm and innuendo, private puns that mark out prey—for sex and/or death. It is the antithesis of Connery’s later twinkling wit and irony. A matter of private pleasure and public service, his seasoned smile enlarges and enlivens community.

Considine, Paddy

TYRANNOSAUR B 88

Great Britain (91 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

This is another punishing film where it may take some time to recover afterwards, written and directed by English actor Paddy Considine in his first feature, starring Peter Mullan in another one of his dramatically heavy, wounded soul roles, playing Joseph, a tragically damaged loner subject to excessive drink and violent mood swings, where in the opening few moments we already think of him as one of the most despicable characters we’ve seen onscreen for awhile. His profanity-laden invectives hurled at anyone happening to be in the vicinity are his norm, where he’s apt to call anyone he doesn’t like a “cunt,” and there’s barely anyone, including himself, that he likes, so the man is at it all the time. In his rough and tumble neighborhood, occasionally people strike back, blindsiding him, threatening him, hitting him harder than any man can bear, but he grins and bears it, refusing anyone’s help. In this film, however, he meets his match in Hannah (Olivia Colman, a revelation), a Christian woman working in a used clothing shop, a complete stranger who offers to pray for Joseph, and then gets down on her knees to pray, which is like being tapped on the shoulder by the Angel Gabriel and reminded of the coming apocalypse, as there’s no place else he’s heading. Joseph finds her naively pathetic and rails against her wealthy upbringing, the kind with all the advantages leaving the rest of the poor sots to deal with the real troubles in the world—another typical Joseph rant filled with cruelty and more profanity. But after another wretched night that leaves him battered and bloodied, he wakes up on her doorstep the next morning, but by now she’s heard enough of his ravings and is not in the mood for more.

Unraveling much like a play, the lives of these two couldn’t be more radically different, where Joseph wears his troubles on his sleeve like a badge of honor while her equally pathetic world is hidden from everyone except her abusive husband James (Eddie Marsan), the one inflicting the blows, an unsightly picture of a hateful man that her family thinks is perfect, all happening inside the comfortable confines of their perfectly manicured middle class home. When a black eye arouses suspicions, Joseph is the only one who notices, but he’s not the kind of guy to get involved in other’s affairs as he has enough battles to contend with, including a hot-headed neighbor with a vicious pit bull that he keeps threatening to let loose on him. Joseph sees enough abuse right across the street when his mother’s boyfriend allows his prized pit bull to continually terrorize her son Samuel, Samuel Bottomley, a young kid who spends his entire life outdoors playing on the curb as a result, where he couldn’t be more pleasant and communicative with all the neighbors, hating it each time he’s called into his home to face that monster of a dog. So all Joseph can do is offer Hannah a drink, where inside an empty bar on some quaint afternoon, she looks around and views “his world,” not much to look at, but filled with plenty of unexpected surprises when a friend or two of Joseph drop in, all using the exact same expletive riddled profanity that is barely understandable to anyone else but makes perfect sense to them. So while Hannah gets a glimpse of Joseph’s world, where it appears he’s not such a bad sort, her troubles behind closed doors only escalate into the most vicious kind of human savagery that defies knowledge and human understanding, where she’s done nothing to provoke this kind of madness, the man is simply a beast.

While Mullan and Colman are putting on a masterclass of acting, where the theme of rage and helplessness appear to be intertwined, Joseph is also paying visits to his terminally ill father who is on his death bed, another brutal man who regularly beat Joseph’s sister Marie (Sally Carman), something she never lets her brother forget as he never came to her rescue. His wake is the high point of the film, as everyone lets loose, where there is singing and dancing along with endless rounds of drink, where all the disturbances of the world seem to be a distant memory, at least for that one wonderful moment, until they have to walk out that door and face the world all over again. Joseph knows he’s too far gone to be of any use for anyone, “No one’s safe around me,” and Hannah is just too far gone, where the intensity of their human dysfunction is resounding, where the turbulence of her supposedly sheltered world only escalates, as does the frenzied violence right outside his front door. This is a film that examines the wreckage of human devastation, where every act is a response to violence or the threat of violence, an endless series of catastrophes that seem to define human existence as a kind of barbaric and prehistoric world, as we have barely evolved since the days dinosaurs walked the face of the earth, still roaring and thundering as we go, filled with a silent rage at the endless futility of it all, as if God stopped listening, something we all have to face in our seemingly pathetic lifetimes. This may be more than some can bear, as it’s a kind of gloomy endurance test, but it’s also a reminder that just when you think you’ve got it bad, someone else has got it far worse.

British actor Paddy Considine makes an impressive directorial debut with this unflinching drama about a violence-prone widower (Peter Mullan) who befriends a thrift-shop clerk (Olivia Colman) with an abusive husband (Eddie Marsan). The film opens on a grim note—a mortally wounded dog—and only gets grimmer (canines do not fare well). Yet what’s surprising is how warm Tyrannosaur feels despite its bleakness; even a midfilm funeral scene is surprisingly full of life. Both Mullan and Marsan are expectedly stellar, but it’s Colman, a performer better known for TV comedies, who gives the film its deeply moving soul.

Atthecinema.net [Julian Buckeridge]

Actor Paddy Considine makes his feature directorial debut with the mindblowingly hard-hitting Tyrannosaur, making full use of his regular collaborators and acting troupe. Essentially a two-hander between hard-bastard Joseph (Peter Mullan, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows) and abused Christian op-shop owner Hannah (Olivia Coleman, Hot Fuzz), who meet when a distraught Joseph takes refuge in her shop. As their lives become inextricably bound together, their respective self-destructive cycles reveal aspects of themselves, of their dark pasts and what they are both capable of. The performances at the heart of the film are phenomenal, with Mullan pouring every line and wrinkle of experience on his face into Joseph, who is both a tragic figure and an “right cunt”, as he is fond of self-proclaiming. Audiences may be familiar with Coleman through her TV appearances in sketch-comedy shows That Mitchell and Webb Look and Peep Show, but her fine dramatic turn of a character smiling on the outside but almost completely destroyed in every other aspect is Award-worthy. Violent and sometimes difficult to watch, Tyrannosaur is wholly captivating.

exclaim! [Bjorn Olson]

Tyrannosaur is a grim, bleak film about grief, abuse, pain and the loss of hope. It focuses on the interaction between two people: Joseph (Peter Mullan), an angry, bitter drunk dealing with the aftermath of the loss of his wife, the cancer diagnosis of his best friend and the brutal end of his pet dog at his own hands, and Hannah (Olivia Colman), a deeply religious woman caught in a loveless, abusive marriage. Tyrannosaur doesn't romanticize its subjects, nor does it pull any punches. It is a film about depressing circumstances, but it is far from a depressing experience. On the contrary, Tyrannosaur is one of the very best movies of the year.

The directorial debut of excellent English character actor Paddy Considine, Tyrannosaur is a film so sharply observed and deeply concerned about its characters that any reservations over the bleakness of the subject matter are washed away by Considine's assured writing and direction. Similar to, and influenced by, the directorial debut of pal Gary Oldman, Nil By Mouth, Tyrannosaur seems crafted from the actor's practice of revealing the nuances of human interactions.

Mullan (who also directed the similarly gritty Non-Educated Delinquents earlier this year) turns in one of his finest performances. There is complexity to Joseph beyond his rage and Mullan brings the exact right amount of vulnerability when it's called for. Mullan has carved out a reputation as one of the screen's most riveting actors and his work here is up to his typical high standards.

On the other hand, Colman (previously best known for her work on the Brit-coms Peep Show and Look Around You) is a revelation. Her vulnerability is absolutely palpable throughout and her emotional breakdown in dealing with two violent men ― Joseph and husband James (Eddie Marsan) ― is heartbreaking. She delivers an extraordinary performance, one that singes itself into your psyche.

Tyrannosaur is an often-brutal film, but it's also brilliant and emotionally gutting. Considine has proven to be an unpredictable, but reliable character actor, the kind of presence it's impossible to cast your eyes away from, but Tyrannosaur boldly suggests that his best work may yet come.

Drawing upon his 2007 short Dog Altogether, director Paddy Considine makes a powerful feature debut with Tyrannosaur, a visceral and harrowing film that is not an easy watch. While most of the violence occurs off-screen, Considine’s uncompromising story and astonishing performances from Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman make this all the more sad and real.

Joseph (Mullan) lives a life controlled by rage. A tormented working-class man, he is driven to self-destruction and a cycle of brutality. After a violent incident, Joseph flees into a Christian charity shop run by Hannah (Colman) but when she tries to help him, Joseph dismisses and criticises her for knowing nothing of his harsh existence. While initially perceivable that Hannah might be the one to save him, the audience quickly learns that her life is anything but perfect, as she is constantly abused by her husband, James (Eddie Marsan). Both question their ability to help the other and struggle to rise out of being the villain and victim.

The two are overwhelmed by the growing storm circling them, with a dying friend and an egotistical dog-owning neighbour adding to Joseph’s problems. The film journeys through problems of ordinary people and the commonality of spousal abuse. The relationship between Hannah and Joseph is volatile but slowly moves toward a caring and understanding one. There is a hopeful message to be found in this harrowing tale about the strength of human resilience.

Considine never allows his bleak feature to turn gratuitous and it’s his impressive combination of dark compassion and genuine humour that offers the viewer more amidst the horrific narrative. The revelations in Tyrannosaur, however, are the outstanding performances by both Mullan and Colman. Mullan is at his best as the embittered and aggressive Joseph, both brutal and haunted. Even more impressive is Colman. Known mainly as a comedic actor, starring in Peep Show, Hot Fuzz and Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, Colman here is a conflicted and battered woman, remarkably capturing a tragic figure found in such a simple character.

Tyrannosaur was one of my most anticipated features at the festival and it did not disappoint. While Considine never fully answers Hannah’s Christianity or Joseph’s rage, much more is revealed through the performances and impressive employment of the widescreen scope. A bleak, harrowing – yet ultimately redemptive – feature, Tyrannosaur is an accomplished directorial debut.

Tyrannosaur – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, October 6, 2011

Six years ago, Paddy Considine gave an interview to the Observer in which he talked about Dog Altogether, the short film he was developing with Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman; it was to be the starting point for this debut feature. Considine used an expression that was new to me: saying his lead character "goes out on the rage for the day". Not on the booze, or on the pull, but on the rage. Rage is not merely a boiling inner inferno, but a socially created habit, a taste, an addiction, something to be indulged or kept under control like drink: an addiction that erodes the spirit the way chronic bulimia rots the teeth. More than this, rage is a poisonous way of managing or regulating your relationship with the world. For many, particularly those lowest in the food chain, rage is the last pleasure left, or the last respite from unpleasure, and the last source of anything resembling self-respect. For those with no voice, it is a kind of language, but one that distorts and obscures and locks the user into his own unhappy world. And rage is the subject of this powerful, painful and very serious film. Tyrannosaur draws on the work of film-makers such as Ken Loach and Shane Meadows, but establishes Considine as a serious and important director in his own right.

Mullan plays an ageing, greying guy living out a sad endgame of a life. Perhaps in homage to the role Mullan played for Loach in My Name Is Joe, his character has the same name. Joe is a widower, alone in the world; he joylessly drinks and bets, and the aftermath of both futile activities is shown in the unwatchably brutal opening sequence, which demonstrates one of the great truths about angry and violent men: they are forever taking their anger out on someone or something else – someone or something weaker.

One day, to escape from a violent fiasco of his own making, Joe seeks refuge in a charity shop and finds himself being befriended by the shop's manager Hannah, superbly played by Colman. She is a committed Christian who, with a telling mixture of timidity and defiance, insists on attempting to talk to Joe, perhaps to save his soul for Christ. Intensely aware of the grotesque humiliation in being helped by such a person, Joe lavishes terrifying abuse and insults on Hannah, who with a trembling lower lip and eyes brimming with tears, just soaks it up. It is a kind of sado-masochistic relationship between two people drawn together in a symbiosis of misery.

As their relationship continues, and softens, Considine shows this is not simply a sentimental tale of two lonely, damaged souls finding love. Each finds in the other the ghost of someone else. Hannah is in a terrible situation with her unspeakable husband James – a chilling portrayal by Eddie Marsan. And Considine gradually reveals a terrible implication about Joe's past, in doing so disclosing the origin of the film's title, and the awful irony of Joe failing to understand its real meaning.

Part of the film's powerful sadness – and it really is a tough watch – lies in the way it shows how Hannah's whole martyred existence is a self-created mythology she has built up around her to explain away the shame of tolerating abuse. Her earnest volunteering at the charity shop, her putting up with things, even her faith itself, is all a way of giving meaning to her humiliation and pain. The Christianity could simply be a delusional sham, part of the abuse and co-dependency, and a sham in which even James himself sickeningly participates. Colman's Hannah has created a gravitational aura of self-harm, that draws Joe in. But their relationship may still create a kind of escape for them both, even a redemption. And it develops in a very unexpected way.

I have heard Tyrannosaur criticised as a movie that comes too close to miserablist cliche, but that isn't true: it's a visceral, considered dissection of abuse and rage and the dysfunctional relationships that rage creates, which, in turn, perpetuate that rage, and an examination of people who create their own eco-system of anger and unhappiness. The performances of Mullan, Colman and Marsan are excellent and create a compelling human drama. Tyrannosaur is far from a love story, but it is not a simply a hate story, either; it is certainly a very impressive debut from Considine.

Slant Magazine [Simon Abrams]

The House Next Door [Nick Schager]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]

20/20 Filmsight [David O'Connell]

Obsessedwithfilm.com [Oliver Pfeiffer]

'Tyrannosaur' Review: Like a Boot to the Head - The Moviefone Blog Jenni Miller

IFC.com [Matt Singer]

Indiewire.com [Eric Kohn]

Screendaily.com [Mark Adams]

Hollywood-elsewhere.com [Jeffrey Wells]

SLUG Magazine [Jimmy Martin]

Screencrave [Tom von Logue Newth]

Quickflix [Simon Miraudo]

Movie Moxie [Shannon Ridler]

Twitchfilm.com [Aaron Krasnov]

Film Dilettante [Kay Durbin]

Filmthreat.com [Scott Knopf]

Vanityfair.com [John Lopez] at Sundance

Filmschoolrejects.com [Benji Carver]

Film-Forward.com Yana Litovsky

The Village Voice [Nicolas Rapold] an interview with the director, March 23, 2011

Tyrannosaur – review Philip French from The Observer, October 8, 2011

Is Tyrannosaur 'poverty porn'? Natalie Haynes and Jason Solomons from The Observer, October 15, 2011

Conway, Jack

All-Movie Guide

A stage actor who entered films in 1909, Hugh Ryan Conway assisted D.W. Griffith and turned to directing in 1913. He acted in his silent features Restless Souls, The Killer, and The Lure of the Orient, but thereafter restricted himself to directing. In the 1930s and '40s he was a reliable craftsman at MGM, moving easily from the historical drama A Tale of Two Cities to the romantic comedy Libeled Lady; he was equally at ease with rugged actioners such as Viva Villa! (which he took over from Howard Hawks) and Boom Town. Conway also directed the final film appearances of Lon Chaney (The Unholy Three) and Jean Harlow (Saratoga).

TCMDB Profile from Turner Classic Movies

Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)

RED-HEADED WOMAN

USA (79 mi) 1932

In that she was the original Hollywood platinum-haired bombshell, it is a surprise that in the first movie Jean Harlow carried she was "The Red-Headed Woman." This 1932 movie, in which she plays a gold-digger who gets what she wants (men and money) and "Red Dust" also released in 1932 in which Harlow played a happy, likeable prostitute are two of the movies that outraged moralists who soon (mid-1934) were able to prevent any pictures in which "vice" was not punished from being made (let alone exhibited in what bills itself as "the land of the free" but is still dominated by the allegedly "Christian" right).

The contrived script for "The Red-Headed Woman." was written by Anita Loos, most famous for writing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (which had already been filmed once, in 1928 as a silent movie), and who wrote another tale of gold-digger success (post-censorship, as a professional virgin) for Harlow, the 1934 "The Girl from Missouri."

Lil, the red-headed woman, is totally calculating about sleeping her way to the top, discarding one besotted male when one with more money and status appears. The men are such fools that they don't garner much sympathy for being seduced, bilked, and then abandoned. Lil starts in the secretarial pool and goes after her boss Bill Legrande (Chester Morris), son of the company's owner. That Bill is (1) married and (2) genuinely in love with his wife Irene (Lelia Hymans) matter not in the least to Lil (/Loos).

Irene divorces her philandering husband and Lil gets Bill to marry her, but is infuriated that his social set went with the wife and will have nothing to do with her. She proceeds to ensnare an old family friend (Henry Stephenson) to help her gain social acceptance. He fails locally and Lil decides to pursue him to New York. He proposed marriage, but Bill shows him pictures of his chauffeur (a very young Charles Boyer) and Lil has to settle for a small payoff. At the end, she is continuing to separate rich old men from some of their money in Paris, being driven by the same chauffeur who is presumably still her lover.

Watching what seems like a sort of "Reefer Madness" with Harlow playing the weed, I'm not sure how much of what is funny was intended to be funny. That the screenplay was written by Loos suggests that what might seem to be creaky melodrama was intended to be funny. Harlow seductive and Harlow vexed are both so over-the-top that I had to laugh at them and at the stupidity of the men who go ga-ga for her (and are far more vicious than she could be).

As amazing as Harlow's brassy vamping is here, I think she was funnier in the even more contrived "The Girl from Missouri" in which she fiercely guards her virginity (though as a means to achieving the same end as seducing men in "Red-Headed" was). And funniest of all in "Bombshell" as the exploited movie star Lola Burns...

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On the unpunished open sexuality of women on screen before the Production Code was enforced, see Mick LaSalle's book Complicated Women (and a TCM documentary based on it). Mae West was another of the openly sexual women in comedies that outraged the puritains in such films as I'm No Angel, though the dramas and melodramas with women as sexually independent seem to have alarmed the moral entrepreneurs more than Harlow and West manipulating and marrying rich male quarries.

Turner Classic Movies Rob Nixon

It seems like an odd title for a film starring the Platinum Blonde icon of the 1930s, but Red-Headed Woman didn't start its life earmarked specifically for Jean Harlow. And for that matter, when she was cast in the lead, she was not yet the famous blonde sex symbol she would become shortly after its release.

A popular conception for many years was that red hair on a woman was the sign of a wild spirit and a freewheeling, often aggressive sexuality. Redheads in films were also often loose-moraled femmes fatales with dangerous intentions. Lil Andrews, the central character of this deliciously wicked pre-Code film, is a little bit of all those things. Lil makes a play for her boss, Bill Legendre, who becomes so obsessed with the seductive stenographer's sensuality, he divorces his wife and marries her. But wedded bliss isn't in store for the couple. Lil resents being looked down on by her husband's high-society crowd and carries on affairs with two other men, one of them her French chauffeur. Legendre is almost killed by Lil when he confronts her and her lovers, and soon he returns to his forgiving first wife. The end for Lil? Not quite. Years later on a trip abroad, the Legendres come upon the home wrecker again, successfully playing higher stakes (and dallying with more than one man) in a new elite crowd.

Based on a story by popular "wicked-lady" novelist Katherine Brush, Red-Headed Woman had all the makings of either a lurid morality tale or dreary tragic soap opera. In fact, that's exactly what it might have been if left in the hands of its original adapter, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The premier chronicler of the Jazz Age was, by the early 30s, already heavily into the bad drinking problem that would eventually kill him and no longer a hot commodity in the publishing industry. He had been working as a screenwriter for several years, although not with great success, and his script for this picture did nothing to advance his fortunes or reputation. According to writer Anita Loos in her 1974 autobiography Kiss Hollywood Goodbye, MGM production chief Irving Thalberg brought her onto the project because, he said, "Scott tried to turn the silly book into a tone poem!" and he wanted her to have fun with the sexual element of the story, as she did in her hit 1920s play Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Loos set about crafting a saucy, candid comedy from the material.

The big question, then, was who to cast? To make the whole thing fly, they needed an actress who could be convincingly sexy and scheming while having enough comic appeal to keep the audience from hissing her off the screen as an evil villain. Every actress on the MGM lot had been briefly considered for the role and rejected. Garbo was too languid and continental, Joan Crawford too hard-edged and intelligent. Although a champion of the project, Thalberg wasn't about to assign his wife, Norma Shearer, to such an unsympathetic role, and newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst took the same position when it came to his mistress and protégé, Marion Davies. (The story goes that even big, homely comic actress Marie Dressler donned a red wig and jokingly demanded a test.) Clara Bow, the free-spirited, red-haired flapper of the 20s was briefly considered, but her career was on the wane. That left Thalberg with the young starlet being pushed by his colleague Paul Bern Jean Harlow.

Harlow had attracted some notice in blonde bombshell roles in Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930) and The Public Enemy (1931) but without exciting much enthusiasm, particularly among critics. The acclaimed playwright Robert Sherwood, who was then a film reviewer for Life magazine, called Harlow "an obstreperously alluring young lady...of whom not much is likely to be heard." But what Bern and Harlow knew was that she had a gift for comedy and an ambition to stretch beyond the usual femme fatale roles. Her work in Red-Headed Woman proved them right. Upon its release, it immediately catapulted her into stardom. Vanity Fair magazine chose it film of the year, and it was reported that the royal family of England had their own personal copy for entertaining dinner guests.

The movie, and Harlow, achieved another kind of notoriety as well. Guardians of public morals throughout the country were incensed not only by the film's frank treatment of sexuality but even more by the fact that Lil, an irredeemably bad girl who selfishly wrecks the lives of everyone around her, doesn't get any kind of comeuppance or learn her lesson by the end of the story. Rather, she ends up rich, happy and accepted by high society without ever having to pay for her sins. Because of this, Red-Headed Woman is often cited as one of the motion pictures that brought about more stringent censorship under the Production Code, ushering in an era of enforced "morality" and coy dodges around sex for decades to come.

There's another future star to watch for in this movie. The brief but key role of the chauffeur was assigned to Charles Boyer, then a young French actor on a six-month option to MGM. The studio didn't know how to use him because his accent was too thick to be understood, they said. With only a couple of weeks left on his option, they threw him into the picture and dropped him immediately afterward. But as Loos observed, "his actions were a lot more understandable than words." Audiences agreed wholeheartedly. In previews, the studio found so many pantingly appreciative comments from female viewers, Boyer was immediately called back from Paris and offered a contract at ten times the rate he had been paid on option.

Classic Film Guide

DVD Times - Forbidden Hollywood Collection Volume One Gary Couzens

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also reviewing the Forbidden Hollywood Collection (Volume One)

DVD Verdict-Forbidden Hollywood Collection (Volume One) [Rob Lineberger]

Monsters And Critics [Frankie Dees] also reviewing the Forbidden Hollywood Collection (Volume One)

The New York Times L.N.

LIBELED LADY

USA (98 mi) 1936

More intriguing for behind-the-scenes gossip than its rather familiar screwball comedy machinations, Libeled Lady pairs that debonair fast-talking duo from the Thin Man films (William Powell and Myrna Loy) so they can engage in what they do best: sly innuendo, sarcastic digs, and verbose lovemaking. Thrown into the mix as another romantic foil for the lucky Mr. Powell is blond sex symbol Jean Harlow. In real life, Powell and Loy were acting partners that sung each other's praises in print through an entire run of increasingly lousy Thin Man films, and their onscreen chemistry passes as professional respect. Powell and Harlow were engaged, and much has been made of their pensive love affair until her surprise illness and death only one year later.

There are some curious reflections from real life in the otherwise goofy and convoluted plot of Libeled Lady. Nefarious newspaper editor Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy) lives for his job, even going so far as to stall his marriage to lovely Gladys (Harlow) because of his full-time pressures. When the paper is sued for $5 million by heiress Connie Allenbury (Loy) for having printed that she's a runaway bride, Warren turns to sly old friend Bill Chandler (Powell) for help. He organizes a marriage between Bill and Gladys, intended to be unconsummated, then tries to hook up Bill and Connie. The goal: Connie is caught alone with a married man, and she'll drop the lawsuit. The filmmakers march through the narrative with speed, efficiency, and the invisibility of hack craftsmanship.

It's merely an excuse for Powell to spar lovingly with Loy, which audiences were well familiar with. They coast through the material effortlessly and charmingly, if completely unsurprisingly. But the Harlow-Powell scenes, where their fake marriage morphs into playing house, then friendship, then dare I say romance, gives Libeled Lady its much-needed suspense (and that bizarre real life parallel). Clearly hoping the dim-bulb but cutesy Harlow doesn't end up with a piggish lout like Spencer Tracy, viewers are divided between rooting for Powell-Loy and Powell-Harlow. If the movie were really any good, the two women might give the unscathed, sweetly befuddled Powell a piece of their minds for stringing them along until the cows come home—but Libeled Lady is too lazy to follow through on its moral dilemma. The climax is rushed, so as to avoid the conflict that would've made it messy but interesting.

But it's not so bad watching Powell, Loy, and Harlow coast along on roles they were well familiar with. Powell enjoyed many good parts in his career, and was a strong enough comic actor to liven up mundane films such as this one. He remains an actor who's interesting to watch even as he leaves no lasting impression. Loy and Harlow lean on their diverse variations of sex appeal, with Harlow coming out ahead because she's given more elaborate onscreen business. Spencer Tracy, as always, was a master craftsman but never particularly exciting. He's well used here, though, as a dumb thug contrasted against Powell's eloquence. It's a laid-back actor's showcase where they remain kind of charming, kind of fun—even when the movie surrounding them is just kind of lukewarm.

SARATOGA

USA (92 mi) 1937

New York Press [Armond White]

SARATOGA is Harlow and Gable's 6th and finale romantic collaboration and it shows. Their comfort with each other and obvious sexual chemistry make this rather average tale of love and deception at the racetrack more fun than it should be. Walter Pidgeon plays the rich businessman who tries to come between them. Romantic comedies only work if the path to true love is filled with roadblocks and this film finds many amusing ways of keeping our couple apart. Mostly due to Harlow's stubbornness and pride, which only makes her more endearing when Gable cuts her down to size. Harlow's character, Carol Clayton, is attempting to escape her life on the family horse farm and move up in society. She meets Hartley Madison (Pidgeon) on an extended trip to Europe and fully intends on marrying him.

Her father's ill health brings her back to Saratoga, with fiancée in tow, just in time to watch him die of a heart attack. This is when she learns that her father's best friend and big time local bookie Duke Bradley (Gable) holds the deed to her family's farm. She loathes him for taking advantage of her father (though his debts were equal to the amount of the property) and vows she's going to payback every cent to retrieve the deed to Brookvale. Duke is amused by her vehemence, keeping his true intentions – to win her heart and the farm – from her. Being an independent woman, she refuses to accept financial help from her wealthy fiancée and thus, is forced to earn the money the only way a young woman could in a many horse town – win it at the track.

Duke is also running his own scheme to get the farm in the clear, though his method is a little less honorable. He intends to set them up for life by reigniting Hartley's love of gambling, which only makes Carol more angry with him. Hartley falls right into Duke's trap since all he wants to do is help the woman he loves. The backstabbing and double crosses begin to pile up about two-thirds of the way through, but they're not complicated enough to cause anyone to get lost. The last big race is the one that will make or break everyone involved – except Hartley because he's loaded. Though Carol tries her best to ruin Duke, the best horse (man) wins out in the end. While not the most memorable of their onscreen pairings, this film will please most fans of the genre. The script is tight, filled with witty banter, romantic moments and some outright silliness thanks to Morgan and Barrymore.

The setting is the only unusual thing about the plot, but that goes a long way, keeping the machinations fresh. This was Harlow's last film and she died before it was completed. Apparently, a voice and body double were used to fill in during some scenes necessary to finish the film. I don't know what it says about me, but I didn't notice. Though she doesn't seem to have her usual vivacity in certain sections, she's a presence to be reckoned with and one that will have you glued to the screen. The script allows her to show more of her comic side here, though she provides enough va-va-voom to rattle the male chains. The dress she wears to an outdoor horse auction is so out of place it borders on the ridiculous, yet she pulls it off with grace, style and burning sex appeal. Gable is his usual charming self, playing a warm-hearted gambler everybody loves. His character must be the only likable bookie to ever make it onto the big screen.

Filmed after the Production Code was installed, he couldn't stay a bookie since that's an evil and worthless profession, profiting from the weakness and sins of others. So, in order to get the girl, he needs to become respectable. Of course, those in charge of the Code saw no problem in him bilking Hartley to get his nest egg. Hartley only worked to get it, but hey, he's rich. He'll survive and if he has to suffer a little, so be it. (This was the Depression years after all.) Pidgeon may be the loser in this game of love, but he's no sap. His character is smart enough to know when he's been beaten and gracious enough to walk away without creating a scene. He provides admirable competition for Harlow's heart, even though it's clear from Page 1 in whose arms she belongs. An affable, clever and occasionally romantic flick that showcases why Gable and Harlow will never be forgotten. While not their best, it's still a fun way to pass the time.

Turner Classic Movies Mary Ann Melear

Coogler, Ryan

FRUITVALE STATION B+ 90

USA (90 mi) 2013

Coming on the heels of the Trayvon Martin shooting Shooting of Trayvon Martin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, many Americans view any young black kid as a threat and a thug, where some believe there is no value in his life at all and he likely got what he deserved, judging him instantly through racial perceptions, where they might be surprised he had never been arrested and never had any criminal record, yet there are literally millions who simply refuse to see Trayvon’s potential as making the least bit of difference in their lives. Then a film like this comes along, offering rare insight into the complexity of a young black man’s life, yet what’s perhaps most troubling is it touches on perceptions already racially etched in stone, becoming a parable on race in America, a eulogy on the offspring of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. This is a film one can approach through a variety of different pathways, each of which might blur the vision of other viewpoints, where viewers tend to see what they want to see in projects like this one, based on a real life incident where an unarmed young black man was shot and killed after being detained by white BART subway police in Oakland, California, where coming into the theater people already have formed views and opinions about the subject matter, especially this one, which typifies everything that is wrong in America. While on the surface it deals with troubling realities that tend to be sensationalized in the media—young, black, unemployed, hair-trigger temper, criminal history, blighted neighborhood, unmarried with child—all of which fit the profile of how America views “high crime,” barely batting an eye when the news spews out reports of daily shootings and killings, where life seems to matter less in racially segregated, crime infested neighborhoods, but this film digs beneath the surface and examines the day to day complexities faced by residents living there. It’s perhaps too easy but altogether necessary to cast a racially incendiary slant on the story, where all too often white cops end up murdering black youth.

Blacks are arrested at nearly 3 times the rate of other Americans, where the rate is even higher for murder (6 times) and robbery (8 times), while the likelihood of black males going to prison in their lifetime is 28% compared to 4% of white males and 16% of Hispanic males, and if that black male drops out of high school, the number skyrockets to 50%. Matters have only been made worse by the War on Drugs, where in the past decade, the Department of Homeland Security has funneled $7.1 billion dollars in grants to local police departments, which have been used to provide local departments with military hardware, including tanks and armored vehicles, spying facilities and technology, access to national databases and infrastructure, and equipment for use against political protests. While supposedly combating “terrorism,” the intended target tends to be urban areas with a large and highly condensed minority population, the regular sites for drug raids and arrests, where blacks in particular have a higher sentencing rate than other Americans, even for identical crimes. So while this bias is built into the criminal justice system, it also reflects the mindset of local cops on the beat, where at the moment it is estimated that the police kill a black man, woman, or child every 28 hours, which is an increase from a few years ago when it was every 36 hours. Nearly half have no weapon on them, or anything resembling a weapon when they were killed, though in more than a third of the cases the police allege the victims displayed a weapon, often disputed by witnesses on the scene, as only 18% (less than one in five) are actually armed. Even though women are less likely to be killed, in a glaring way they are included in a troubling number of these deaths, as 20% result from women initiating a distress call to police for domestic violence issues, where rather then removing the agitated offender, he is shot and killed.

While one may not know the exact statistics, most are familiar with an overall racial disparity *before* they see the movie, so many bring their pre-conceived perceptions with them into the theater, which the filmmaker addresses immediately, as the opening few shots of the film are readily available and already viewed by millions on TV or YouTube through blurry cell phone camera footage of Bay Area Rapid Transit cops beating Oscar Grant and his friends on a subway platform just after 2 am in Oakland, California on New Year’s Day, 2009, ending with a gunshot YouTube Oscar Grant Clearest Video Of Shooting Post it!!! - YouTube (1:59). Oscar had already been detained and is lying on his stomach, head to the pavement, as one policeman tries to cuff him while another has his knee in his back, when inexplicably one of them draws his service revolver and shoots him in the back POLICE SHOOTING AT BART STATION - OSCAR GRANT - YouTube (3:28). Since this is based on a real life incident, the outcome is already known by the opening shot of the film. The filmmaker then takes us back into the preceding 24 hours leading up to that moment, shot in a cinéma vérité style using a handheld camera, where the life of the victim is the actual subject of the film, and based on the dramatic power of the performances, which are considerable, his life is not only memorialized, but humanized, where the film puts a face behind the heavy stream of statistics by asking us to spend a day walking in someone else’s shoes that may be unfamiliar to a majority of viewers.

The movie has already won significant awards, including the Best Dramatic Film and the U.S. Audience Choice Award at Sundance, while also winning the Best First Film in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, where it received a rousing two-minute standing ovation. In some ways, this film resembles BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991), another character driven depiction of the everyday violence that consumes so many lives in South Central Los Angeles, but that film focuses on senseless gang violence. While some may find this film to be a jolt of social realism that finally attempts to address the issue of racial injustice in America, including crimes against black men, but there isn’t a hint of police involvement in this film until the actual incident, as whatever trouble Oscar had previously with the law, which included two brief stints in prison for drug dealing, he has only himself to blame for getting himself into those situations. Since he does nothing to provoke the officer, some insist this is a blatant execution, seen in strictly black and white racial terms, but it’s difficult to understand an intentional murder in front of so many witnesses, though the police do significantly overreact, especially on an evening that is already filled with overly rowdy, high or inebriated New Years revelers, where the outcome of this particular occurrence feels more like a tragic accident inflicted by an amateur cop. The incident led to marches and protest demonstrations, even riots expressing a furious outrage at the crime.

Rather than address the social conditions that precede this incident, where the music and movie industry both go to great extremes to accentuate black stereotypes, including a thug culture that promotes street credibility, where prison time produces bragging rights among gangsta rap artists, which sells more records, the director cleverly assumes the audience is already familiar with all that. So rather than a piercing piece of social criticism, Coogler chooses a simpler more minimalist route, where Michael B. Jordan plays Oscar with convincing believability as we follow the mundane details of his daily routine, including flashbacks years earlier when he was in San Quentin prison (where his mother’s visit is one of the most riveting scenes in the film), as we watch how he handles the various pressures of the day. While he’s butted heads with a variety of people, he’s already walking on thin ice with his beautiful wife Sophina (Melonie Diaz), who recently caught him with another woman, has left a traumatized impression for being away so long with his adoring 4-year old daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal), and he’s hiding the fact he’s been fired by his boss for coming in late so often, while his mother (Octavia Spencer) watches him like a hawk, having had her heart broken once or twice already.

This is largely a day-in-the-life film, where Oscar awakes promising to make a fresh start on the New Year, where the drama unfolds through his personal relationships with friends, family and various acquaintances, where much of the day is spent attempting to make amends. Oscar is in nearly every scene, where the film’s authenticity is constructed by a build-up of low key sequences given a near documentary look, where because of the nuanced, understated subtlety involved, a major complaint could be registered against the way he is portrayed by the filmmaker, where the contrived goodness of his character is overemphasized, optimistically making him larger than life in the few brief hours he has left, almost as if he’s finally seen the light, which certainly has a manipulative feel to it, especially knowing the eventual outcome. But rather than go overboard with scathing negativity, as some critics have done, one might simply conclude the filmmaker intended to express a view that Oscar, like Trayvon Martin, had the potential to do good. The true power of the film, however, comes from the amazing performances that literally “make” the film, as the leads are quite simply astonishing, where the lasting mental impression is how articulate and fully developed several characters become in such brief screen time, as Octavia Spencer and Melonie Diaz literally nail their scenes. But it’s Michael B. Jordan’s film and he deserves plenty of credit, rising to the occasion and ultimately making this film matter, providing the dramatic heft the film needs to expose the senseless tragedy of what has become an all-too-often, everyday occurrence.

UPTOWN Magazine 5 Things You Didn't Know About Oscar Grant ... Myeisha Essex from Uptown magazine, June 10, 2013

1. At the time of his death, Grant was working as a butcher at Farmer Joe’s Marketplace. He had served two state prison terms and was committed to living a lawful life for his family and future.

2. His uncle Cephus “Bobby” Johnson texted his nephew around the time he was shot and killed. It read, “Happy New Year … I love you.” Grant was never able to reply.

3. Grant was the father of a 4-year-old daughter. He also left behind his mother Wanda Johnson and girlfriend Sophina Mesa.

4. BART officer Johannes Mehserle was eventually sentenced to two years in prison for involuntary manslaughter. He was released after serving one year.

5. He was known by his friends as a peacemaker. During the tragic altercation the BART station, several witness said Grant was trying to calm down his friends as well as the officers.

Fruitvale Station: movie review | review, synopsis, book ... - Time Out Sam Adams

On January 1, 2009, an unarmed black man named Oscar Grant was fatally shot by an Oakland transit cop while lying facedown on a subway platform. Whether or not the officer thought he was firing a Taser instead of a handgun (as he later testified), such a death is intolerable to a just society. Does it matter that Oscar Grant was kind to animals, loved his daughter, helped strangers? Set largely on the last day of Grant’s life, Ryan Coogler’s first feature answers that question with a heartfelt and emphatic yes. Mundane encounters take on tragic resonance, aided by the audience’s knowledge and heavyweight foreshadowing, e.g., Grant (Friday Night Lights’ Michael B. Jordan) cradling a dying dog as a BART train—the one he’ll later be pulled off of—rumbles by in the background.

Unfortunately, Coogler isn’t content to leave it at that. He crams Grant’s day full of symbolic encounters meant to show us the guy’s good heart and sadly truncated potential, from helping a skittish white lady in the grocery store he works at (by calling his grandmother for a recipe!) to flushing his stash down the toilet. Coogler, who grew up in the same neighborhoods as Grant, evokes a tangible sense of place, and his staging of the climactic incident hits like a fist in the gut. It’s not enough to wipe out his reduction of this real-life figure into a composite-character martyr or the lukewarm filmmaking that’s come before, even if you’re left shaken all the same.

Young Black males rarely get such a smoothly beautiful portrait as in Fruitvale Station. Actor Michael B. Jordan (who was the Obama-like candidate for Student Council President in last year’s Chronicle) gives this year’s most powerfully affecting performance in Fruitvale Station. From making love to his girl Sophina (Melonie Diaz), beaming at his toddler daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal) to respectfully addressing his mother Wanda (Octavia Spencer), Oscar is first seen as tender and naturally charismatic, an irresistible character study–and a star turn–until he gets “normalized” into a mysterious, disturbing memorial to a real-life tragedy.

The little goatee growing on Jordan’s baby-fat chin marks him at an indeterminate stage of manhood when responsibility and social pressure descend upon him. At 22-years-old, Oscar is an awkward age for social-protest cinema that customarily prefers statistical victim protagonists (as in the adolescent dramas Boyz N the Hood, Fresh, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Precious, Menace II Society, et al). Oscar already has a jail record but suppresses his worldliness and is ready to give up selling pot; yet his temper attests his intellectual as well as physical reflex to deal with harsh experience. Jordan conveys multiple feelings in Oscar’s eyes and voice: his feral and jovial moods, his hair-trigger anger and ardent affection.

At this level, Fruitvale Station represents the triumph of a young actor’s handsome vibrancy representing those young men who remain enigmas on 24-hour-news-networks. But you cannot write a character like this–as director-writer Ryan Coogler’s superficial screenplay unwittingly demonstrates. Coogler was fortunate to find Jordan who makes better sense of Oscar’s imperfect character than can the sociological sentimentality of this victim story.

Fruitvale Station is named for the subway stop of the Bay Area Rapid Transit where Oscar Grant was killed during a stop-and-frisk police procedure in 2008. Set in Oakland, Calif. (memorably the setting of Mario and Melvin Van Peebles’ extraordinary Panther, a dramatic history of the Black Panthers), it doesn’t recreate the tragedy with political consciousness like the Van Peebles; Coogler’s softer approach settles on sorrow, the stuff of folk legend.

Coogler makes Oscar an existential casualty (as suggested in the overly symbolic scene where he helps a stray dog after a hit-and-run accident) which might be even worse than analyzing another infuriating municipal accident. Jordan’s marvelous characterization is betrayed by this concept. In the end, Oscar’s recognizable urban personality and frustrated ambitions are all angled to fit a sociological profile. The subway sequence where Oscar and Sophina celebrate with New Year’s Eve passengers seems specifically West Coast geniality. But this surprising bonhomie is conveyed with a suspicious fake-documentary distance. At times Coogler steps back from his tale as if creating Bressonian distance through mismatched cuts, empty station shots and rough cell-phone imagery. These dubious esthetics smack of Sundance patronization (where Fruitvale Station took the Grand Prize). It misses the reality of Black urban consciousness–such as “The Black Book of Survival” that community activists used to hand out around Brooklyn’s Borough Hall warning young men: “When the police approach you CALM DOWN. They want to kill you.”

Condescending to young men like Oscar may let Sundance swag-baggers feel better about themselves but reducing Oscar to a social statistic ruins the crucial moments when his behavior and fate need to be seen as clearly, unhurriedly and precisely as possible. It would imprint the life force that Jordan makes so attractive.

Twitch [Sean Smithson]

When I first heard that a film based on the shooting of Fruitvale resident Oscar Grant had been made and was coming to Sundance, it sent up an explosion of hopes and concerns for me. You see, I have a very close connection with the East Oakland neighborhood, having grown up there myself, kicking around those streets from my pre-teen years into my early 20's. Was this going to be an angry diatribe against The Man (in this case, a team of BART police, BART being the Bay Area Rapid Transit, our version of the subway), and a one dimensional rendering of "Da' Hood" like so many other films have been?

Thankfully, no.

First and foremost, even before the legal and potentially racial issue Fruitvale ultimately addresses, this first feature by young director Ryan Coogler is a love story. Love between Oscar (Michael B. Jordon, The Wire, Chronicle), and his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz, Be Kind Rewind,Nip/Tuck), love between Oscar and his little daughter Tatiana (played by the wonderful newcomer Ariana Neal), love between Oscar and his mother Wanda (Octavia Spencer, The Help, the up-coming Snowpiercer), and the love between Oscar and his community, which underpins the entire drive of Fruitvale.

Taking place the last day of 2008, Oscar is struggling to keep his life together, as he attempts to get his supermarket job back after being fired for tardiness, scrambles to get supplies for his mother's birthday that evening, and to find a sitter for Tatiana so he can take his lady Sophina out for a New Years Eve celebration. Money is tight, and rent is due, but rather than go back to selling weed, Oscar decides to dump the ounce he is holding into the bay instead of chancing a bust, returning to jail, and not being there to father his child. This is a young man who seems to be committed to doing things right and not repeating past mistakes. As Oscar tells Sophina in a confessional moment of the film "I'm tired. I can't do it anymore".

Anyone who has ever been poor, and lived in an area where you can make your way doing some shady shit, is going to know exactly where Oscar's head is at here. Anyone who hasn't? Director Coogler and his lead will indeed take you there. There are not a lot of ways out of the socioeconomic confines of the hood, and it's wearing beyond words. The mere act of truly deciding to start the ascension out of that type of situation is in itself an act of Herculean proportions.

Small moments of Oscar's quiet heroism and determined optimism pop up throughout Fruitvale, from when he calls his Grandma Bonnie to when he instruct a young white woman on how to properly do a fish fry, or when he pulls a dog hit by a car from the street and attempts to comfort it as it dies, ultimately being forced to leave it where it lays. The moments we share with him as he plays with his daughter, confides in his girlfriend, or protects his mother from racial slurs help to fully define Oscar.

It being about the subject it is, I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying the film ends in tragedy, it's spelled out from the cellphone footage that opens Fruitvale. Returning home from partying in The City (that's San Francisco, people!), Oscar ends up in an altercation with someone from his past, and fate is not kind. That said, the earlier scenes with him, Sophina, and his friends getting on BART to head to S.F. rang so damned true to me as a longtime resident I almost started bawling in the theater. When everyone is still in transit and it's about to hit midnight, somebody busts out an iPod and another dude busts out some speakers and an impromptu dance party breaks out on the train, as the ghostly lights of the trans-bay tunnel magically whiz by, people get down in the aisles, sharing their booze and blunts, as 2009 approaches, minutes away.

One thing about living in the bay, and in particular, neighborhoods like Fruitvale that are so often glossed over in films, is the multicultural environment, which is incredibly large and diverse. An Aztec mural splashes across the outside wall of a Southern style soul food joint. A group of Cambodian hip-hop fans crowd the taco wagon, ordering up carnitas and menudo. A white dude leafs through boxes outside the long-standing, neighborhood record shop looking for Ray Charles vinyl. Teenagers mill around the alternative study center they attend, even on a Saturday, to play Foosball, or work on a project. This is the stuff you see in areas like Fruitvale, more than thugs balling out sacks of drugs, or bums beating each other down for that last swig of T-Bird. They are communities that many times are islands unto themselves, and very easy to feel intensely connected to once you've established yourself and become part of their flow, their "body" if you will. Director Coogler nails the hell out of this.

The two small critiques I have of Fruitvale would be the opening in which the words "Hayward, California" splash across the screen, which may lead viewers to think Fruitvale is in Hayward. It's not. It's, again, an East Oakland neighborhood, and the place I claim as home. Bay Area residents can tell you, they are two completely different worlds.

Also, having had my own run in's with both Oakland Police and BART cops, I can say firsthand there are major differences in those two branches of gun toting thugs (oops did I say that out loud?...if the shoes fit while kicking people in the face they must be worn). While there is more transparency to the corruption rampant in the Oakland PD, where good cops are shot by bad cops, and the old vigilante team known as The Night Riders, were straight out of the old Dirty Harry flick Magnum Force, the BART cops are an entirely different creature. Part man-in-blue (or woman), part security-gaurd, their standards and procedures have been known to be even more shadowy, and if you are brought down by one it's been my experience you don't have the recourse you do with a regular police officer. There are also holding cells inside BART stations (which have been denied as to existing but do....oh how they do) where detainees have been beaten and held without the opportunity to inform friends and family where they are. Knowing this adds wrinkles to the Oscar Grant case for me.

Either way, concerning the actual events following the shooting and death of Oscar, Oakland citizens who stood up at protests and rallies are to be applauded. There was only a minimum of misdirected rioting and looting, and most of the pro-active behavior seems to have been clearly focused and responsibly carried out. Come to think of it I would have liked to have seen that illustrated a bit in the film too, if anything as an example to others who may find themselves waiving a sign or banner someday over an injustice.

Back to the film itself. After last night, word of mouth in many circles is that Fruitvale is this years Beasts Of The Southern Wild. Having really liked Fruitvale as a piece of cinematic work, regardless of personal nostalgia, and plot, and Beasts being one of my favorite films of this last season, this is great news. Let's be honest though, Sundance is by and large comprised of a lot of privileged, mainly white, people. You can't sit on a committee or be a die-hard participant year after year without a little coin in your pocket, or being subsidized somehow. I really really REALLY hope the comparisons aren't stemming from the fact that both films feature black casts. The story of Beasts for example could be told with characters of any ethnicity, and was more a live action Miyazaki film to me than anything else. As well, Fruitvale is also a lot more than a film with a black cast. Again, it illustrates the truth of ethnic diversity in the economically challenged areas of the big cities. To draw comparisons to these two films simply because they are cast with black actors would be, well, ghettoizing them.

Fruitvale, to me, is for anybody who believes in community, love, and being able to better yourself through the advent of those attributes. To see a film named after, and in many ways about that very area, where I myself learned these things? It was a little magical.

Highly recommended, and I see a bright future for director Ryan Coogler. Here's hoping I can snag a few words with him after the hoopla, and dig a little deeper into the issues in the film. Fruitvale certainly warrants it.

Mourning in America: Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station - Cinema Scope Adam Nayman

Pulling into a gas station to fill up after a morning spent doing errands, Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan) witnesses a speeding car barrels over a stray dog hanging out on the curb. Startled and enraged, he chases the car halfway down the block before turning his attentions to the victim. Looking down at the mortally wounded animal, the young man’s expression is one of compassion, but also communion. Newly unemployed and further strapped for cash after dumping a quad into the Pacific Ocean, Oscar sees in this helpless, blindsided creature an eerie portent of his own fate.

Jordan, whose next-big-thing status belies the subtlety of his talent, ensures that this is a beautifully acted moment. The question is whether his excellence can redeem the pushy symbolism of the sequence, and so it goes for Fruitvale Station as a whole. Assiduously based on the true story of Oscar Grant III’s murder at the hands of BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) officers on New Years’ Day 2009 after a fight broke out in a crowded train compartment, Ryan Coogler’s Sundance-feted debut opens with grainy cellphone footage of the incident—a veritable certificate of authenticity—and then doubles back to reconstruct the last day of its subject’s life. In doing so, the movie means to transform Grant back from a symbol of police brutality towards African-American youths—which he unmistakably became in the wake of community protests that turned into violent riots, and a court verdict that saw the officer responsible for the killing charged only with involuntary manslaughter—into a complex, fully-rounded human being. This is both a worthy and a timely aspiration, but it is the filmmakers’ overweening consciousness of that worthiness that throws Fruitvale Station off-balance. In trying to make us see that Oscar Grant was more than a statistic, Coogler unfortunately contrives to turn him into a saint.

The opening credits unfold under audio of Oscar and his girlfriend Sophia (Melonie Diaz) talking about New Year’s resolutions, a clear indicator that this formerly wayward young man is trying to make a change. When the pair’s adorable daughter Tatyana (Ariana Neal) toddles into view and interrupts their nookie session, Oscar switches uncomplainingly into World’s Greatest Dad mode (which he stays in for the remainder of the movie, with the aid of some lyrical slow-mo to really hammer the point home from time to time). These early scenes briskly inventory Oscar’s flaws and foibles—his inability to hold downa job, his inflammatory temper, his criminal record—mostly so we can see how he’s trying to get them under control. Fruitvale Station is being praised for eliding ’hood-movie clichés, but that’s not quite true: it’s more accurate to say that it introduces them more or less on cue and one after the other, so that we can marvel at Oscar’s agility in sidestepping them. A meeting with a low-end drug dealer, an encounter with a cute (white) chick at the grocery store, a confessional showdown with Sophia: all of these go better than we might expect, and, it’s implied, give us a hero worth rooting for.

The deceptively peripheral character played by Ahna O’Reilly is a case in point here. Her Katie is the aforementioned Caucasian who Oscar chats up while he’s buying ingredients for a New Year’s Eve dinner at his mother’s house. When Oscar overhears Katie fretting over the best recipe for fried fish, he phones up his grandmother to supply some advice. The point of the exchange, which is too patiently developed to simply be a naturalistic longeur, is how easily Oscar melts this reluctant and slightly stunned young woman’s defenses. And sure enough, Katie’s real part in the film’s design is confirmed during the sequence in Fruitvale station, where she turns up as a passenger on the train. Having previously witnessed Oscar’s (surprising, to her) decency, she now takes up her cellphone to capture images of his death. Because the film emphasizes her presence at the end, it’s pushing us to connect her shock and horror to her (and our) earlier experience with Oscar; this outraged, camera-wielding spectator becomes a mirror for the movie’s audience, and it’s a very flattering (self-)image.

It’s less certain that we’re supposed to see ourselves in Oscar, who is in nearly every shot of the movie yet remains at arm’s length throughout. Despite an awkwardly integrated flashback to his stint in prison for selling drugs, we never really get inside his head. This is definitely not Michael B. Jordan’s fault, however. Reviewing Fruitvale Station in The Hollywood Reporter, Todd McCarthy wrote that the actor (who was terrific in last year’s psycho-superhero thriller Chronicle and indelible as Wallace on The Wire) reminded him of “a young Denzel Washington.” Not only is McCarthy being lazy by choosing to so obviously compare two black actors (I guess the other option was Will Smith?), he’s also wrong. Even in his early attention-getting roles in Cry Freedom (1987) and Glory (1989), Washington always made a conspicuous show of his gifts; Jordan, by contrast (and perhaps as a byproduct of his lengthy yeoman’s service in supporting parts) pursues more elusive effects. If Fruitvale Station stops short of canonizing Oscar Grant, it is only because Jordan is too nervy and alert an actor to permit such an easy characterization.

When Oscar pleads his case with his uninterested boss and suddenly threatens him with bodily harm, it’s genuinely startling, but it doesn’t come out of nowhere, as Jordan has already suggested the deep reservoirs of anxious energy underwriting all of the character’s reflexively placating gestures— his need to smooth things over actually speaks to how wildly he’s churning inside. Where Washington’s specialty is circumspect sternness (which is why he’s dependably bad in roles that call for flamboyance, as in American Gangster [2007] or Training Day [2001]), Jordan does one of the hardest things an actor can do, and does it remarkably well: he can seem utterly, guilelessly delighted by his interactions with other people onscreen, such that it’s genuinely enjoyable to watch him enjoying someone else’s company.

That Jordan manages to fully inhabit his dead-man-walking role and give it signs of life is undoubtedly impressive. Yet it’s also frustrating, because the star’s natural likeability ends up justifying his director’s questionable approach to the material. The infuriating facts of what happened to Oscar Grant—that an unarmed man was handcuffed, beaten, and shot in the back, in full view of an entire subway train’s worth of witnesses, no less—would have been no less so if the victim hadn’t been on a self-improvement kick, or if he hadn’t spent the previous day reckoning with his past sins. For Coogler, however, it’s not enough that Grant was innocent of any wrongdoing in the events surrounding his death; and while the intention may not be to suggest that Grant’s death was extra-tragic because he had set himself firmly on the path towards redemption, nevertheless the true crux of the issue is lost.

Then there is the way that Coogler traffics in dread. Some critics were deeply offended when Gus Van Sant styled the first half of Elephant (2003) as a sort of horror-movie prelude, lining up a bevy of beautiful teenagers and emphasizing their obliviousness to the threat that he (and we) knew was lurking just down the next hallway. Those criticisms still stand, but Elephant is plainly an exercise in perspective, of Van Sant’s serene omniscience versus the tunnel vision of the characters, who are no blinder to the killer in their midst than the culprit’s own father. Elephant also problematizes the docudrama format with a variety of self-reflexive gestures: I’ve often wondered about the little interlude where the photographer slowly rotates a canister filled with emulsion fluid over and over, as if to demonstrate the process of mediation that occurs between any event and its photographic (and here cinematic) representation. By contrast, Coogler’s lingering shot late in Fruitvale Station of a deserted subway platform, held just long enough to alert us to its significance, is ominous for its own sake.

Later, when Oscar’s mother (Octavia Spencer) looks at her fallen son through hospital glass and whispers through tears “I told him to take the train,” it’s a powerful moment. There’s also something shameless about it—the sort of actorly grandstanding that might be more readily called out in a movie that wasn’t based on a true story. By bracketing itself with grainy documentary sequences of Grant’s death and his memorial service, Fruitvale Station underlines the “docu” in “docudrama” and insists on its own veracity. And so any of the things in the movie that might ring false—an italicized exchange between Oscar and an older man, who tells him that there’s no time like the present to turn his life around; a scene where Tatyana complains that the New Year’s fireworks sound like gunfire and begs her daddy not to go out into the night; that damned pieta with the smooshed pooch—are effortlessly recouped in the bargain.

Some have argued that the simplifications in Fruitvale Station serve a larger purpose, especially in a post-Trayvon Martin era; that whatever its flaws, the film draws attention to the way that young black men in America are summarily judged based on their appearance, and how often times those snap verdicts can prove fatal. This is all true, and, in its ownway, commendable. But it shouldn’t be sufficient for a movie to simply place itself on the side of the angels. In the case of Fruitvale Station, one might suggest the problem is that it buys into such elevated ideas in the first place. Its Oscar Grant may be a tarnished angel, but he’s an angel all the same.

“Fruitvale Station” and “Blue Jasmine.” David Denby from The New Yorker

'Fruitvale Station' Is Not Only A Eulogy To Oscar Grant, It's A Eulogy ... Michael Jones from indieWIRE Shadow and Act, July 23, 2013

'Fruitvale Station' Captures a Dissolving Life In a Cell ... - PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

The Story Behind Fruitvale Station Aisha Harris from Slate, May 13, 2013

How Accurate Is Fruitvale Station? Aisha Harris from Slate, July 12, 2013

Colorlines Julianne Hing from Colorlines, July 8, 2013

A Shivery, Understated Tension Runs Through Fruitvale Station ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice

Fruitvale Station, reviewed. - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens

Critiquing Critical Perspectives on “Fruitvale Station” « Oakland Local Eric K. Arnold from Oakland Local, July 17, 2013

Film-Forward.com [Christopher Bourne]

Paste Magazine [Tim Grierson]

The Atlantic [Jason Bailey]

Introducing Oscar Grant, The Man Behind The Headlines David Edelstein from NPR

Review: 'Fruitvale Station' Starring Michael B. Jordan & Octavia ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist

Sound On Sight [Lane Scarberry]

New film: “Fruitvale Station”: An American tragedy | The Economist

Indiewire [Eric Kohn]

Short Takes: Fruitvale Station | Film Comment | Film Society of ... Nicolas Rapold

Review: The train misses a few stops in well-acted but phony ... - HitFix Guy Lodge

Film Threat [Erik Childress]

Sound On Sight [Edgar Chaput]

HitFix [Kristopher Tapley]

Fruitvale Station / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

Film.com [Amanda Mae Meyncke]

REVIEW: 'Fruitvale Station' Is a Slight Take on a Hefty Subject | Pure ... James Killbough from Pure Film Creative

Fruitvale Station - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Fruitvale Station Review: A Powerful Story That, Like the ... - Pajiba Caspar Salmon

Shockya.com [Abe Fried-Tanzer]

Collider.com [Matt Goldberg]

The Film Stage [Sam Fragoso]

Fruitvale Station's success a 'surprise' for first-time director Ryan Coogler Rory Carroll interview from The Guardian, July 30, 2013

Variety [Geoff Berkshire]

Read Xan Brooks review of Fruitvale Station Xan Crooks from The Guardian, May 17, 2013

Fruitvale Station: film based on 2008 killing echoes Trayvon Martin case Ben Child from The Guardian, July 15, 2012

Fruitvale Station pair set to make Rocky spinoff Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, July 25, 2012

The Huffington Post [John Lopez]

Incarceration in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

'Fruitvale Station' review: Oscar Grant's last day - San Francisco ... Mick LaSalle from The San Francisco Chronicle, July 12, 2013

Oscar Grant film renews family's pain - SFGate Justin Berton, June 26, 2013

Film about Oscar Grant's slaying evokes mother's pain, vital message Amy Kaufman from The LA Times, June 28, 2013

Fruitvale Station Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Steven Boone

'Fruitvale Station' Is Based on the Story of Oscar Grant III - NYTimes ... Stephen Holden, July 11, 2013

Project America: Crime: Prison Population: Prison Population by Race

Race and crime in the United States

Racial inequality in the American criminal justice system

U.S. incarceration rates by race | Prison Policy Initiative

BART Police shooting of Oscar Grant - Wikipedia, the free ...

Killed by the Cops - COLORLINES Jeff Kelly Lowenstein from Colorlines, November 4, 2007

Oscar Grant Killer Found Semi-Guilty Kevin Drum from Mother Jones, July 8, 2010

When Police Shoot And Kill Unarmed Men | Mother Jones Titiana Kumeh from Mother Jones, July 14, 2010

US cops: armed and dangerous? | Jennifer Abel | UK news ... Jennifer Abel from The Guardian, August 16, 2010

Tasers have killed at least 500 Americans — RT USA February 16, 2012

Daily Kos: SHOOT THE INNOCENT "SUSPECT" is Growing Police ... The Daily Kos, March 24, 2012

Killings by local police jump sharply - Los Angeles Times Joel Rubin and Sarah Ardalani from The LA Times, June 10, 2012

Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the Extrajudicial ... July, 2012

Every 36 Hours: Report on the Extrajudicial Killing ... - People's Justice July 16, 2012

Half of People Shot by Police Are Mentally Ill, Investigation Finds ... Natasha Lennard from AlterNet, December 11, 2012

Killings highlight epidemic of police violence in US - World Socialist ... Tom Carter from The World Socialist Web Site, December 19, 2012

Police shootings of unarmed people of color - Dispatches from the ... Rania Khalek, December 21, 2012

Daily Kos: Before Trayvon Martin, there was Oscar Grant Denise Oliver Velez from The Daily Kos, July 7, 2013

Before Trayvon Martin, there was Oscar Grant - Salon.com Hrag Vartanian from Salon, July 21, 2013

Cook, Brian W.

COLOR ME KUBRICK: A TRUE…ISH STORY C+ 77

Great Britain France (86) 2005

An amusing light-toned film starring John Malkovich in the role of a real-life Stanley Kubrick poseur, Alan Conway, a man who bore no resemblance at all to the married and reclusive Kubrick, a man who instead dove headfirst into the lower working class gay bars in England, gaining people’s confidence by inspiring their would-be fantasies about themselves, promising to deliver them into a part in one of his upcoming films, a confidence man that always left his credit cards behind and needed other people’s cash to bail him out of a jam. From the opening moments, featuring the music of CLOCKWORK ORANGE, two punkish looking thugs are searching for Stanley, as he skipped out on his bill the other night, but the homes where he allegedly resides are inhabited by other rich persons, which comes as a bit of a surprise for all, leaving behind a trail of unhappy, disgruntled customers. The Kubrickian musical cues are always amusing, as is Malkovich’s continually changing persona, finding a different accent and voice inflection for every new scam, each one more obnoxious than the last. For Malkovich, this role is like working in an Actor’s Fantasy Pee Wee’s Playhouse, where he can go over the top and be as crazy as he wants to be, a freedom he obviously relishes.

The film, written by Anthony Frewin, directed by Brian Cook, both previous collaborators as personal assistant and cameraman with the real Stanley Kubrick before he died, offer little insight into the background behind the imposter, such as how long he kept this up, or what his real motives may have been. Kubrick initially assigned them to dig up what they could about this man, hoping to legally put an end to his shenanigans, but it became difficult, as fleeced individuals are not usually forthcoming in a court of law, as they prefer to keep their shame and embarrassment out of the headlines. It’s clear Conway knew little to nothing about Kubrick’s actual career, but instead enjoyed spinning these elaborate yarns, each more far-fetched than the last, which served as his fictionalized creative universe that he could climb into and be soothed by the outpouring of affection and money from non-suspecting people. Many times he is nearly caught, and other times he actually is caught red-handed, yet he continues to rely upon the good graces of other people’s gullibility, pleading insanity at one point to remain away from the long arm of the law. As I watched this con artist pander to willing gay suspects, I was reminded of a much better British film, Duncan Roy’s 2002 AKA, an autobiographical film describing how the director was kicked out of his home at 18 due to a sexually abusive stepfather, leaving him to fend for himself while searching for his own gay identity, eventually entering the world of privilege by assuming the identity of a young, fictitious, very upper class gay lord. But while that is a scorching, emotionally anguishing, yet realistic look at class differences, where he is eventually outed for the imposter that he is, COLOR ME KUBRICK lacks an emotional connection to the audience, leaving us little to actually care about afterwards, relying instead on its imposter’s carnivalesque performance to carry the show, relying on his ability to morph into ever more outrageous versions of his already flamboyant, near mythical onscreen presence, becoming whatever twisted fantasy he could manipulate others into believing.

Cinemattraction.com [Phillip Piggott]

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” – Charles Caleb Colton

We’ve all wanted to be someone else at some point in our lives. Some of us desire fame, recognition, or the glamour and glitz of celebrity. Very few of us would steal someone else’s identity to get it though. Charles Caleb Colton may have been right, but he hadn’t met Alan Conway.

Anthony Frewin, a long time friend and collaborator of Stanley Kubrick’s, and Brian W. Cook, who worked as a first assistant director on many movies including “Eyes Wide Shut”, have joined forces to tell the “true…ish” story of the man who would be Stanley Kubrick.

Conway, here played by John Malkovich, is an alcoholic homosexual living in London in the late 1990s. He never has any money, and exists from one bottle of vodka to the next by scamming people for cash. He achieves this by dressing in the most outrageously camp outfits the 1970s ever had to offer, and passing himself off as the celebrated film director Kubrick.

Those around him – including a string of young, gay lovers, artists, businessmen, rock bands, and a melodramatically tearful wine-bar entrepreneur played by Richard E. Grant – all fall under his spell. They believe in him and his false “genie in the bottle” promises. He offers to grant their wishes, lives off their generosity, then disappears into the night. Conway starts to rack up enemies faster than an overzealous film critic, and soon attracts the attention of the media. The fact that he looks nothing like the revered Kubrick seems to have no bearing on anyone’s judgement.

This is a joy for Kubrick fans. The references to his films come thick and fast, and the music is utilized to particular comic effect. Using “Also Sprach Zarathustra” to accompany Alan’s short walk to the laundrette is a particular highlight, but perhaps the moment of genius is the opening scene in which two punks – one wearing a bowler hat – amble along a high-class street to the plucky flutes of “The Thieving Magpie by” Rossini.

Malkovich is in exceptional comedic form, camping it up beyond common sense, and employing some of the most ridiculous accents since Kenneth Branagh attempted to be American in “Dead Again”. The supporting cast is also a constant joy, as British favorites are unveiled one after another: Leslie Phillips, Honor Blackman and Peter Bowles to name but three.

The real scene-stealer though is a completely unexpected appearance by comedian Jim Davidson as gay northern entertainer Lee Pratt. His entrance is the golden moment of the movie, and not to be missed. It is both hilarious and cringe-worthy in equal amounts.

The only real criticism that can be levelled at “Color Me Kubrick” is that it is, by its very nature, a one-shot deal. In other words, once you’ve seen the punch line - that this man is pretending to be Kubrick - you’ve already got the gag. Then you’ll be handed the same punch line again, and again, and again.

The majority of the characters in the movie are little more than sketches of real people, and there are stereotypes spinning around like space stations. Many of the scenes play like skits in a comedy show, disconnected from the rest of the action. But fortunately Malkovich is there to hold it all together. It is his over-the-top performance and liberal application of color to his wardrobe that will be remembered.

This movie is kitsch, camp, funny and tragic. Perhaps a little off the beaten track for a mainstream audience, but it does raise the intriguing question of what life might be like to be someone else. Imagine being John Malkovich … Oh well, we can but dream.

FilmStew.com [Commentary]

John Malkovitch was certainly out there as Humma Kavala, the alien cleric in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie. But his turn as real-life con man Alan Conway in the camp British comedy Color Me Kubrick (opening in U.S. theaters March 23rd and releasing on DVD March 27th) fearlessly takes hammy acting to a whole new level of bacon bits.

Imagine a co-mingling of Marlon Brando on CNN’s Larry King Live, Tom Courtenay in The Dresser, Macaulay Culkin as Party Monster’s Michael Alig and William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider-Woman. Then add a dash of Eddie Izzard and a pinch of Divine. OK; you’re about halfway there now in visualizing how Malkovich essays the tale of a gay man who, prior to his death in 1998, successfully passed himself off as Kubrick to both veterans and novices of the business.

The scene where Malkovitch - as Conway, as Kubrick - discusses the relative talent and box office appeal of an American actor by the name of John Malkovitch (for the sequel project 3001: A Space Odyssey) is worth the price of admission alone. And the wardrobe! Ken Russell’s daughter Victoria (dad has a cameo in the film) deserves a medal as Color Me Kubrick’s costume designer, for trolling London’s vintage clothing shops on a budget and coming up with Malkovich’s most important co-star. Conway’s garish get-ups, from fishnet to just plain fishy, goofily remind us throughout that the line separating the esthetic of the near-homeless from that of those with countless homes can be very fine indeed. Something Conway is only too well aware of.

While screenwriter Anthony Frewin and director Brian W. Cook each worked for decades with Kubrick, as respectively personal assistant and cameraman, as far as I can tell it is only co-star Jim Davidson (who plays a tricked up version of his British TV personality self) who can claim to have met the real Alan Conway in full con man mode. So the story goes, Davidson bought Conway dinner at a hotel in Devon and listened attentively to his Full Metal Jacket anecdotes.

Folks in the audience when I saw Color Me Kubrick were laughing heartily at the film’s various wink-wink visual snippet recreations of the titular subject’s celebrated movies, everything from A Clockwork Orange to 2001 to Eyes Wide Shut. And there are other fascinating flourishes, like soundtrack music from Bryan Adams and a producer credit for French maestro Luc Besson.

If someone starts impersonating David Lynch on this side of the Atlantic, and then Lynch himself makes a movie about it starring Chris Isaak in the title role, maybe then we’ll then have something to stand alongside the uniquely weird house-of-mirrors stylings of Color Me Kubrick. Until then, this upcoming Magnolia Pictures release is about as spacey an odyssey as you’re likely to encounter this year.

Slant Magazine [Robert Keser]

Imposters make good movie protagonists because their slipping from one colorful identity to another keeps suspense high about possible exposure (witness Tony Curtis in the shamefully neglected The Great Imposter or Leonardo Di Caprio in Catch Me If you Can). But when the con man barely bothers to go through the motions, when unmasking threatens few consequences, and when the script evinces no interest in his psychology, then it's hard to deny that the filmmakers have squandered a good subject. Such is the sorry lesson of this insight-starved collection of vignettes about Alan Conway, a flamboyant queen who persuaded gullible denizens of London's gay underbelly that he was Stanley Kubrick slumming, all this despite Conway's utter lack of resemblance to the director of A Clockwork Orange and the latter's resolutely straight identity.

Coyly styling itself as "a true-ish story"—though with Conway's demise (a mere three months before Kubrick's), the filmmakers seem answerable to no one for the story's truth—the script soon lets any tension go slack while it dithers over a narrative viewpoint, trying face-the-camera narration from a journalist, then a letter spoken aloud by a disillusioned victim, yet returning to scenes that could only be known by Conway. The scattershot screenplay never digs below the surface to search out Conway's hidden history (imprisonment in South Africa, deserting his wife for a male lover, the latter then succumbing to AIDS) and never risks addressing his class status, lack of education, or pathological absence of guilt, nor his internalized streak of vodka-fueled self-loathing worthy of The Boys in the Band (though without the catharsis or the cultural challenge of Matt Crowley's 1968 play and its 1970 movie adaptation).

Anthony Frewin's unsubtle screenwriting goes full frontal with lines like "Conway wrecks people's lives and has no moral conscience" or Conway's mocking self-diagnosis ("I'm trying to escape myself. That's why I pretend to be someone else"), but the film offers nothing more profound, refusing to take its subject seriously, granting him none of the human sympathy granted to any man. Director Cook and screenwriter Frewin (both veteran assistants to Kubrick on numerous projects) are in no position to point a critical finger at Conway either since their own film recycles the Zarathustra fanfare and Strauss waltz from 2001: A Space Odyssey solely for cheap laughs.

A long way from his arthouse work with Raul Ruiz and Manoel de Oliveira, John Malkovich practically spits glitter as he throws himself into a grating gay impersonation, tottering about in high heels and mesh stockings, extending a paw for the most effete of handshakes, and batting his mascara-laden lashes. While the entire production looks fussily overcostumed in whimsical kitsch, it is the star who preens and prances in double-knotted ascots, floral print wrappers, champagne satin pants, pink anklets, and fluffy-fun furs, with novelty charm bracelets to set off his red nail polish. Unable to delve into Conway's inner life, the actor can only play the character from the outside, fitting him with surface posturing and bizarrely random accents, ranging from breathy murmuring to Texas drawling to broad Bronx braying as he delivers bitchy one-liners ("The trouble with Marlon is he thinks he's Brando") and sub-Mae West double entendres ("I've never felt feelings so big inside me"). Of course, Malkovich is far too sophisticated an actor not to vary his tones, moving from dainty to jaded to cagey to desperate, but with no strong narrative impetus it all becomes pointless shading unmoored in psychological development.

In a third-act attempt to spark some friction, the sitcom-thin caricatures (laddish punk rockers and rent boys with a heart of gold) turn still thinner as the script introduces a Tom Jones-like entertainer, all gold medallions and designer jumpsuits, and his lowbrow housewife fan-girl, neatly managing to be condescending to gays and straights alike. Kubrick himself never appears (nor does the script give any indication that Conway caused the director more than a flyspeck of concern), but the production boasts cameos by vintage players like Honor Blackman (Goldfinger's Pussy Galore) and Marisa Berenson (Barry Lyndon's inamorata), not to mention a stunt appearance by Ken Russell, who enjoys a few seconds of screen time as a gibbering mental patient. Neither the light-hearted bonbon it aspires to be nor a credible critique of celebrity culture, the trivialized Color Me Kubrick tastes more like a brackish lollipop, after which audiences may well crave a few hours with Full Metal Jacket to cleanse the palate.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Jenny Jediny]

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir]

Being There Ellen Rosner Feig

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden

Cooke, Matthew

HOW TO MAKE MONEY SELLING DRUGS C 71

USA (100 mi) 2012

Eventually feeling like little more than a libertarian fantasy, where the film has the snarky tone of reality TV where they’re constantly “selling” something, playing fast and loose with the facts, which are in no way even a factor in this film, so pretty much anything sounding “on message” passes for reality, even if it’s blatantly untrue, such as the allegation that 90% of the inmates in prison are there due to alcohol-related crimes, where a quick fact check, Crime and Alcohol - Alcoholism - About.com, reveals it’s actually less than half that, closer to 40%. But not to worry, reality TV is mythically inaccurate as well, so this simply meets the “anything goes” test, where the entire film is largely a propaganda campaign to legalize drugs, as the moral of the story, from the film’s point of view, is Americans should have the freedom to do what they please without the government infringing upon that right. The argument is made that alcohol and cigarettes are responsible for more deaths than drugs, yet the government instead pours money into the drug wars, filling the prisons with drug-related offenders, where Americans are just 5 percent of the world’s population, yet we comprise nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population, almost exclusively black and Latino, as those are the targeted neighborhoods for making arrests, many receiving stiffer sentences than murderers. One of the worse cases was a black mother of two children who left the city of New York looking for a better life due to living in such a dangerous neighborhood and moved with relatives in the Midwest, who happened to be selling drugs out of their home, which ended up getting the mother arrested and sentenced to 27 years in prison, even though she had nothing to do with drugs. The severity of the sentencing matches the politicians decree to get tough on drugs, but it in no way matches the non-violent, uninvolvement of the accused, who posed no threat to anyone, yet must languish away inside a prison somewhere while her children grow up without her.

The film is more of a bait and switch style, reeling in the viewer’s interest by suggesting anyone, even children, can make money selling drugs, witness the many young parentless teenagers who, having no other options due to no fault of their own, are suddenly thrust into the situation, always surprised at how many regular customers they can count on for selling drugs, outlining how to carry out each stage of the operation from local street vendor to running a drug cartel, where there are plenty of people willing to testify how easy it can be, as the first half of the film is an overly sensationalist owner’s manual guide that offers a get rich quick scheme to interested viewers. But of course, while they’re reeling off information on how easy it is, they’re ignoring all moral concerns, figuring anyone who’s interested in the drug game would have to be criminally enterprising, ignoring any and all consequences in the event you do get caught, not to mention the effect this would have on your family. Instead the mantra for making money, “It’s so easy even a child can do it,” is presented much like the high pressure techniques used for selling timeshares in Boca. While it’s presented in a slickly packaged, overly satirical manner up front, literally making a mockery of the lucrative nature of the drug business, where no educational diploma is needed and the profits can even outweigh the potential jail terms if caught, as the money will be waiting for you when you get out afterwards, the tongue-in-cheek manner is a veiled cover for the real reason the film is being made, shifting gears midway through as the focus shifts to who’s really profiting, as it’s not the guy down the street who inevitably gets arrested, but cops, DEA agents, lawyers, judges, and prison guards, where the United States government is awash with billions of dollars of anti-drug enforcement money sent to various law enforcement agencies across the land, expected to reach $19 billion by 2014, where local police departments suddenly have money to upgrade their equipment, buy more sophisticated, high-powered weapons, add military vehicles as part of their standard operations, even aircraft, and then the government keeps feeding these budgets so long as statistics can verify substantial drug arrests have been made.

All of this feeds the idea that you can arrest your way out of the drug problem, filling the prisons with mostly non-white offenders, where by 2011, 48% of all federal inmates were there for drug crimes, while only 8% were for violent crimes. And while whites and blacks have virtually identical rates of drug use, blacks are ten times more likely to get arrested for pot, where the racial disparity is worse with crack cocaine, where blacks comprise over 80% of federal crack cocaine defendants, while whites are less than 7%. While there are many more whites both buying and selling drugs in America, blacks are 4 times more likely to get arrested, where 90% of those convicted of drug charges are blacks or Latino, where more than 80% are for low level possession, where at least a half a million individuals are serving time for minor drug offenses, more than ten times the number in 1980, where in 1981 the government spent $1.5 million on the drug wars, while in 2012 the number was $25 billion. While much of these fast and furious statistics have a way of overwhelming the viewer, as they continue to be spewed out throughout the film, better documentation is presented in Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow The New Jim Crow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, suggesting the War on Drugs is largely a tool for enforcing legalized racial discrimination, creating a prison-state apartheid policy that is largely invisible to the middle class, as a majority of young black men in large American cities are warehoused in prisons, labeled felons, often trapped in a second class status of American citizen with most of their rights stripped from them. While Alexander views the behavior as racial injustice, this film has no sense of racial outrage, but only uses the numbers as they help favorably make their case for legalizing drugs, viewed as similar to cigarettes and the once prohibited alcohol, both of which pose a greater danger to society, worse than all the illegal drugs put together. To demonstrate the absurdity of how out of control the drug policy has become, the police are viewed as little more than the Keystone Cops, where there is such a rush to arrest people that wrong-address break-ins occur on average at least twice weekly by overeager, trigger happy SWAT teams that break doors down in the middle of the night for suspected non-violent drug crimes, where innocent people are also shot on a regular basis during these often horrific confrontations, as these are, after all, imperfect, often insufficiently trained humans conducting these operations. The film suggests this is like an unstoppable train racing dangerously down the tracks at our own peril, where we’ve spent billions of dollars transforming police departments into armed anti-terror squads that *will* come visit us in the middle of the night.

HOW TO MAKE MONEY SELLING DRUGS Facets Multi Media

A shockingly candid examination of how a street dealer can rise to cartel lord with relative ease, How to Make Money Selling Drugs is an insider's guide to the violent but extremely lucrative drug industry. Told from the perspective of former drug dealers, and featuring interviews with rights advocates Russell Simmons, Susan Sarandon, and David Simon (creator of The Wire), the film gives you the lessons you need to start your own drug empire while exposing the corruption behind the "war on drugs."

Chicago Reader JR Jones

As a critique of the U.S. drug war, this zippy documentary by Matthew Cooke can't compare to Eugene Jarecki's tragic and masterful The House I Live In (2012), though Cooke's gimmicky conception may prove more accessible to casual viewers. This really is structured as a how-to lesson, beginning at the bottom of the economic food chain and moving upward through the various levels of entrepreneurship (from pawn to private retailer to domestic distributor to international smuggler to drug kingpin to cartel lord). Along the way, Cooke supplies a considerable degree of political context, showing how such misbegotten law enforcement strategies as mandatory-minimum sentencing and wholesale property seizure have deformed the drug war into a giant payday for cops and prisons and a waking nightmare for the rest of us. Among the talking heads are Woody Harrelson, Susan Sarandon, 50 Cent, Eminem, Russell Simmons, and journalist David Simon (creator of The Wire).

TimeOut Chicago Sam Adams

The question posed by the title of Matthew Cooke’s documentary seems to have a simple answer: Sell drugs. Lots of them. But this dope dealers’ DIY manifesto isn’t quite the illustrated instruction manual it sardonically promises to be, as Cooke talks to many a former pusher, from legendary kingpin “Freeway” Rick Ross to small-timer 50 Cent. When clips from The Wire and pointed commentary from the show’s creator, David Simon, start popping up, it’s clear the film is trying to examine the allure of illicit commerce rather than exploit it—or at least a little of both.

As he works his way up the ladder from street-corner slinger to cartel king, Cooke uncovers a structural evolution that parallels the development of multinational corporations, a world where menial laborers take the most risks and bosses run games on both sides. Mandatory minimums trap small fish and innocent bystanders behind bars, while their employers trade accumulated knowledge for reduced charges. Perhaps the greatest illustration of the drug war’s lunacy is Barry Cooper, a former narcotics interdiction officer who grew disillusioned with staging violent “no-knock” raids based on flimsy pretexts; he now works to trip up cops who cross the line, and has a series of videos called Never Get Busted! His existence is a gift to the movie. In a more sensible world, he wouldn’t exist at all.

How to Make Money Selling Drugs Cracks on the ... - Village Voice Ernest Hardy

The first act of writer-director Matthew Cooke's documentary How to Make Money Selling Drugs is smooth, seductive, and almost glib as it eases viewers into the big business world of doing just what its title promises, on a global scale. It almost seems intended to court, uncritically, the folks who have made Scarface a cultural bible and the documentary Cocaine Cowboys a lifestyle guide, especially as it appears to share with certain fans of those touchstones a willingness to turn a blind eye to those narratives' cautionary aspects. Tricked out with video-game graphics and sound effects, kicking off with 50 Cent once again burnishing his mythology as he recounts his childhood days selling drugs, and running on the giddy energy—the high, if you will—that comes with outwitting "the man," the frequently hilarious film is, initially, appalling and magnetic and a little dangerous. That's part of a shrewd strategy.

Produced by Bert Marcus and actor and activist Adrian Grenier, How hawks decadent possibility—underscoring its allure for those who come from places of struggle—before settling into a historically grounded, wide-reaching critique of America's disastrous drug war, with an emphasis on its racist and classist policies. The desire for power, cheap glamour, and seemingly endless money and sex for the men profiled (50 Cent as well as current and former dealers of all races) is almost always rooted in childhoods marked by violence, economic struggle, or loss—or all of the above. That's not to play the violin for criminality, but it does underscore the fact that most players in the drug game—especially the low-level dealers—are driven by genuine need and a lack of other options.

As it progresses, the film becomes somber without sacrificing its droll humor or righteous indignation, although viewers will feel some deflation at the loss of its frenetic energy. The trade-off is a lesson on the evolution of attitudes toward drugs in America and the bigoted (both racist and homophobic) propaganda employed to rile the masses against drug use. Between scenes from classic Hollywood films and industrial shorts, experts rip the Rockefeller laws while explaining the double standards that see blacks and Latinos imprisoned at higher rates and with harsher sentences than whites. David Simon (The Wire) elucidates the disastrous effects of the drug war and its funding on the processes and procedures of police work. The origins of crack and the magnitude of its devastation are laid out by "Freeway" Ricky Ross, the man "credited" with the creation of the drug and its introduction into the 'hood. The global impact of the war is brought home through gruesome footage from Mexico.

This is unapologetically the work of "Hollywood liberals" (Susan Sarandon and Woody Harrelson even pop up for fairly innocuous commentary). It argues for a radical, compassionate rethinking of the country's approach not only to the drug war but to addiction itself. It's a smart, funny, tough-minded film crammed with data and personal anecdotes, each illuminating the other, each sketching in the staggering costs—and not just financial—of the ways authorities in this country have shaped the drug issue. It's far from glib.

Film School Rejects [Christopher Campbell]

For a documentary to get noticed these days, it helps to have a fresh angle. But being creative with the form doesn’t necessarily result in an effective film, especially when it’s tackling a serious issue. Stunts occasionally work (see Super Size Me), as do innovative narrative devices (see 1965 Oscar-winner The War Game), but most docs with a gimmick unfortunately seem to hold that stylistic choice in front of the subject at hand. There’s no denying that How to Make Money Selling Drugs is a clever work of nonfiction, but we’re left thinking about the structure more than the film’s point.

The real problem, however, might be that the film’s point is not even too clear anyway. Written, directed and heavily narrated by Matthew Cooke, the doc takes the form of, as the title suggests, an actual How-To guide to making money selling drugs. For a while it seems like an amusing piece of ironic satire, as former dealers including rapper 50 Cent and legendary trafficker “Freeway” Rick Ross favorably talk of making big money at very young ages. Then Cooke’s focus veers towards the problems of the Drug War and the prison industrial system and NYC’s Rockefeller laws, and it’s apparent that he may in fact be endorsing the occupation.

I was quickly reminded of my first job when I was 16. No, it wasn’t selling drugs. It was working part time at one of the major office supply stores. On my first day I had to watch the usual training videos, and one of them was very memorable, as it basically illustrated all the ways that a person could steal from this store, whether as a customer, an employee or a straight robber. This loss prevention tape was intended to show us what to look out for, and yet for some it must have been a great, negative inspiration. That’s what How to Make Money Selling Drugs is like (if it even means to discourage the job of dealing in the first place); in spite of all the drug trade workers interviewed for the film no longer being in the game, they still make their old job seem pretty appealing.

In addition to the guidebook structure, the doc is also formatted to mimic a video game. Each section, marked by flashy motion graphics, is both like a chapter and a level. Tips flash on the screen. So do special bonuses and warnings, as we’re led through the pyramid like we’re advancing up and up until we get to the big boss, which is the leader of a drug cartel. Yet the viewer isn’t supposed to identify as a narcotics officer or anyone else looking to defeat these level bosses. The goal of the game is to achieve the status of each figure. Some of it is definitely more tongue in cheek than the rest. Obviously none of us, no matter how much we’re taught and no matter how easy it looks on Breaking Bad, is going to get our own massive drug operation.

Speaking of TV dramas, they’ve been far more clever and witty about America’s drug culture in recent years than you’re going to find here. Breaking Bad and Weeds are together already the satire on the anybody can do it concept while The Wire went through every nook and cranny of the truly absurd and hypocritical world of drugs in this country, and that show even went for its own creative hypothetical in its “Hamsterdam” season. How to Make Money Selling Drugs features The Wire creator David Simon on screen relaying some of what he’s seen and knows about the drug war. But if you’ve watched his work, this appearance provides nothing he hasn’t already communicated better through fictional drama. Cooke’s use of certain clips from the show as visual aid even proves this.

It’s not a worthless documentary, however. There’s room for all kinds, especially when it comes to the issue of drugs. Last year Eugene Jarecki gave us a look at many of the very same problems in The House I Live In, and that documentary is far more effective because it takes the issues seriously, sincerely and personally. That’s one way to do it. Cooke tried it another, and while he’s less likely to influence his (expectantly younger) audience of anything, he does provide some fascinating characters and stories. Never mind the names like 50 Cent, Susan Sarandon, Woody Harrelson and Eminem, who headlines a chapter on addiction. There’s the ex-dealer named Brian O’Dea, whose story is like a true episode of Miami Vice. There’s the very colorful, often profane and always brilliantly spoken lawyer, Eric Sterling, as vivid an expert talking head as you could ever want.

Most compelling is Barry Cooper, a former narc who was like a superhero on the force who now turns his experience and knowledge in the favor of people facing drug charges. He exposes corrupt cops and evidence planting and serves as an expert witness in drug trials, and he formerly had a hit video series called “Never Get Busted,” which sounds like a literal predecessor or appendix to this documentary (he leads a chapter of the film that is about not getting busted). His is an astonishing story deserving of his own movie, nonfiction or dramatic, especially now that since appearing in this film he’s become a fugitive (he believes the police are out to get him) and has fled to South America.

If only Cooke simply let these people and their fellow interviewees just tell their stories and still chronicled the drug war from the perspectives of these players, it would be a pretty decent documentary. The hip style he goes for overpowers and does a disservice to the cause, and the contrived method, which doesn’t always fit every side issue he wants to bring in, is worse, coming off as borderline self-mockery. How to Make Money Selling Drugs may give you some help in achieving what it’s title says it will, but it’s really even more a lesson of how to not make a film about an important subject.

The Upside: Fascinating stories of drug dealers and others involved in the culture; Eric Sterling is one of the most enjoyable lawyers you’ll ever meet

The Downside: Style and structural conceit are too dominant, obscuring the point and the important issues; most of the famous talking heads are briefly used and unnecessary, clearly kept in just for their stardom; might actually encourage kids to make money selling drugs

On the Side: One of the producers of How to Make Money Selling Drugs is actor/filmmaker Adrian Grenier; Cooke previously produced, shot and edited Grenier’s own documentary feature, Teenage Paparazzo. Also from that film’s team is the other producer of How to Make Money Selling Drugs, Bert Marcus. C+

Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

Huffington Post Arianna Huffington

Review: 'How To Make Money Selling Drugs ... - Indiewire Blogs Erik McClannahan from The Playlist

NPR Linda Holmes

Slant Magazine [Rob Humanick]

Screen Daily Tim Grierson

Review: HOW TO MAKE MONEY SELLING DRUGS Reframes - Twitch Todd Brown

Blackflix.com: Reviews Samantha Ofole-Prince

Exclaim! [Daniel Pratt]

Film Pulse [Adam Patterson]

[Tribeca Review] How to Make Money Selling Drugs - The Film Stage John Fink

My Filmviews [Nostra] also reviewing THE HOUSE I LIVE IN

How to Make Money Selling Drugs: Tribeca Review - The Hollywood ... John DeFore from The Hollywood Reporter

How to Make Money Selling Drugs - The Globe and Mail Geoff Pevere

Examiner.com [Rick Marianetti]

Los Angeles Times Gary Goldstein

How to Make Money Selling Drugs - Movies - The New York Times

Cooper, Merian C.

All-Movie Guide: Cooper bio from Sandra Brennan

All-Movie Guide: Schoedsack bio from Hal Erickson

TCMDB: Cooper biography from Turner Classic Movies

TCMDB: Schoedsack biography from Turner Classic Movies

Film Reference: Schoedsack Linda J. Obalil

Cinerama Adventure Feature

Cooper & Schoedsack They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)

KING KONG A 96

USA (100 mi) 1933 co-director: Ernest B. Schoedsack

And the Prophet said, ‘And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.
—Old Arabian Proverb quoted at the opening

The ultimate special effects movie, often copied, never equalled, an enduring masterpiece that touts nothing less than the Eighth Wonder of the World!! Fay Wray stars as the platinum blond goddess who’s kidnapped by the natives of Skull Island to appease a towering 50-foot ape. What would Sigmund Freud have had to say about this monstrous sexual fantasy, perhaps the ultimate anxiety dream? The film’s epic climax, in which the giant beast battles fighter planes from atop the Empire State Building is fondly remembered as one of the most exciting moments in cinema screen history. Few films can compete with the longevity of this film, as popular today as when it was released, and then re-released like Disney films for each successive generation in 1938, 1942, 1946, 1952, and 1956 when the film was eventually sold to television, where it had to contend with different cuts of the film as various scenes had been cut out of the original prints, as stricter censorship practices existed following the 1933 release. However an uncensored 16mm print was found in Philadelphia in 1969, restoring the original running time to 100 minutes. Today a digital restoration was completed by Warner Brothers in 2005 adding a 4-minute overture. The film has had a revolutionary impact on the making of movies, where ironically, like Buster Keaton’s SHERLOCK JR. (1924), it’s also one of the earliest films about making a movie, one of the first where the director will stop at nothing and foolishly do whatever it takes to get the picture he wants, even endanger his lead actress and crew. In fact, Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) is so humorously over-the-top as the movie’s reckless adventure filmmaker, he wants to make the most extravagant picture ever made, “It’s money and adventure and fame! It’s the thrill of a lifetime!” According to Peter Jackson, who made a remake of the film in 2005, “I think as a film, [Kong] inspired more people to become filmmakers than any other film ever made. I’m absolutely certain of that fact.” It may be this film that we have to blame for opening the Pandora’s Box of special effect movies in Hollywood, but at the time, released in the heart of the Depression, it went on to break all previous box office records and saved RKO from certain bankruptcy, where without Kong, there would have been no CITIZEN KANE (1941).

According to an old Mike Royko article (King Kong Confounds Freud . - Google News), Freud might have speculated the movie represents a myth about aboriginal man living in small hordes, where the strongest male had as many wives as he could, jealously guarding and protecting them from other men. Freud’s oedipal complex explains how the sons left the horde at an early age, only to return at a later date to kill their patriarch father, inheriting his clan. Members of the clan might be upset about their slain leader, so to insure the spirit does not seek retribution, some animal was chosen as a tribute, where the animal’s life would be protected and treated as sacred. Eventually both the animal and father would become enjoined as a tribal god, enduring long afterwards through an inseparable myth. On Skull Island, native women become human sacrifices to the god. Once Kong reaches Manhattan Island, however, the god son becomes the sacrificial object himself, whose martyrdom is meant to atone for the original collective sin against the father. In death, he reveals mankind’s relationship to the primal father and the evolution of his religion. In this evaluation, Kong represents at different times the primal father, the substitute totem animal, and finally the son, where multi-faceted symbolism is typical in mythology, where King Kong becomes fable, dream, and religious allegory. Based on a book called King Kong Cometh by Paul A Woods, there are multiple psycho-literary essays on the Freudian resonances of the film. One chapter depicts Kong as climbing “the tallest penile structure in the city … straddling its tower and placing Ann within the silver pouch inside its foreskin.” Kong, we are told, is a manifestation of the id in us all. Or, other views suggest he exemplifies “all the contradictory erotic, ecstatic, destructive, pathetic and cathartic buried impulses of ‘civilized’ man.” King Kong is a colossal prehistoric freak of nature who can pick a man up off the sidewalk and chew on him as if he were an hors d’oeuvres. The original Kong may be naughty, but never evil, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau understood that the savage creature, unlike the civilized men who attack him, is just being true to himself.

While the origins of Kong may have originated in Paul Du Chaillu’s book Equatorial Africa about a hunt for a wild gorilla in Africa, directors Cooper and Schoedsack befriended one another during World War I, both sharing a passion for nature and adventure, exactly like Denham, while traveling the globe shooting nature documentaries, usually facing the dangers of wild animals and an uncertain reception from natives. While this idea stemmed from Cooper’s obsession with the book, meeting visual special effects pioneer Willis O’Brien in 1931 sealed the deal, as RKO combined O’Brien’s unfunded project called CREATION about a shipwrecked crew landing on an island full of dinosaurs with Cooper’s giant gorilla movie. While the screenplay was written by Schoedsack’s wife, Ruth Rose, who fell in love with Schoedsack aboard a ship, just like the Driscoll-Darrow affair she would write about, they used the massive jungle sets from THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (1932). But the real genius behind Kong was the visual conception of O’Brien, whose stop-action animation techniques were first developed for his earlier film THE LOST WORLD (1925). Cooper realized that by using O'Brien's techniques, Kong could be made without costly location shooting in Africa, where the majority of the work would be provided by stop-motion puppets, some 18-inches for jungle scenes, while others were 24-inches for city scenes. The puppets were made of a steel, ball-and-socket skeletal framework covered with a sheet of latex rubber and bear fur. They were also equipped with wires to control facial expressions, and an inflatable diaphragm to simulate breathing, where he could express emotion and react to the situation around him, becoming the first feature film to use stop-motion to create a continuous character. When you watch Kong, he appears more lifelike when his hair is bristling throughout the film, an unintentional side effect of O’Brien moving the puppet around. The process of animating Kong one frame at a time was a labor intensive operation, where at a work rate of 10 frames an hour, requiring 1,440 frames for every minute of film, it would take animators 150 hours just to get a minute of film. Several methods were used to combine the stop-motion Kong footage with the live-action shots of the actors, which included shooting on the same piece of film twice, but only exposing different portions of it, loading two strips of film into the camera at once, combining a montage of images, and it’s the first ever use of miniature rear projection, projecting live footage into miniature settings. According to Martin Scorsese, “There’s something about the way the special effects work in King Kong himself, the way he moves, that made him very life-like, and still for me, of course I’m older, but I still prefer that movie over the digital movies. It gave him a soul.” While O’Brien never received the credit he was due, his invention was revolutionary in the movie business, sparking the interest of a young special effect wizard named Ray Harryhausen who contacted O’Brien after seeing the film at age 13, eventually becoming partners, working together on MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), while Harryhausen’s own legendary works include JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963) and CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981).

While the film takes awhile to get going, many young children won’t have the patience to stick through the relatively slow paced opening, as it’s a Depression era movie where a ship sits in New York Harbor ready to leave on a mysterious adventure, where the director Carl Denham is famous for shooting pictures in exotic locations, but for this film, he needs a girl, suggesting “If this picture had romance, it would gross twice as much.” He scours the city hoping to find the right girl, searching the Mission district, happening upon Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), a poor woman wandering the streets caught stealing an apple, which opens the door to a new world, offered a job described by Denham as the adventure of a lifetime, but first and foremost it’s a job, something to get her out of her depressed existence, with the hope that it might even bring her fame. Heading out into the high seas, the destination is so top secret that even the captain and crew are not told where they’re going. Adding to the monotony is the flat, one-dimensional character of the first mate Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot in a wooden Charlton Heston style role) who openly tells Ann there’s no place for women onboard as they just get in the way. Of course, he soon becomes her love interest, especially when intrigue builds from the curiosity surrounding cases of dangerous bombs contained in the cargo deck and a photoshoot on deck where Denham eerily rehearses Ann with the chilling instructions, “Throw your arms across your eyes and scream, Ann. Scream for your life!” These blood curdling screams have become synonymous with actress Fay Wray, as at this point she still had no idea what to expect. When the ominous destination is revealed to be the mysterious, fog enshrouded Skull Island, where some large, prehistoric beast is believed to be living there, the entire look of the film suddenly turns into an exploration of the exotic. When the sound of native drumbeats can be heard from the ship, piquing the curiosity of Denham and his men, they immediately bring their cameras onshore and discover a native dance ceremony in progress, “Holy mackerel, what a show!” where Denham’s brazen attitude is to throw caution to the winds, immediately exposing the crew. When the chief confronts them, what draws his attention is Ann, the only white woman they’ve ever seen, where he offers to exchange six black women for her. When this doesn’t work, the natives wait until nightfall and kidnap Ann off her own ship, and sacrifice her to a giant beast living on the other side of a massive security wall. Denham and his team arrive too late, but when King Kong, a 50-foot ape sees Ann, who is screaming to the high heavens, both hands tied to giant columns, he doesn’t eat her, but instead brings her back to his mountaintop perch with Denham and his men in hot pursuit.

While this section of the movie was all shot on a studio lot, the exotic backdrop is dripping with intense atmosphere that couldn’t be more riveting, as Kong encounters other prehistoric dinosaurs and is forced to set the screaming Ann gently down to the ground on a safe spot while he faces mortal enemies in battles to the death. Denham and Driscoll follow the giant footprints left behind and soon realize other giant creatures inhabit the island, where initially they encounter an enraged Stegosaurus, emptying their rifles, but despite killing the enormous dinosaur, in this world humans are seen as powerless and puny creatures compared to the giant Kong, little more than annoying gnats who can be swept away with one simple gesture. The real interest is watching Kong in his fanatical quest to save Ann while fending off other dangerously terrifying creatures that try to attack her, including hand-to-hand combat with a Tyrannosaurus Rex which is nothing less than enthralling, eventually retreating to a cave at the summit of Skull Mountain with a panoramic view overlooking the entire island. The visual splendor of a Lost Paradise is largely unparalleled, where this exotic jungle landscape feels like a time warp and conjures up memories that stick with the viewer for a lifetime. Despite losing the entire rescue team except for Denham and Driscoll, the you-are-there intimacy provided by Cooper and Schoedsack is precisely what Denham hoped he could capture, where this little escapade into another world feels like a film within a film, where the viewer’s sympathies soon turn to Kong, who is so protective of Ann and obviously means her no harm. When he playfully tickles her with his massive fingers, it’s a genuinely tender moment, where the romanticism in an action picture is again exactly as Denham hoped. Driscoll’s perseverance is heroic, rescuing Ann at the summit, where a dive into the river far below gives them time to escape back to the village, where now its Kong in pursuit hoping to retrieve his prize. Despite closing the massive gates to keep the creature out, Kong is able to break through sending the villagers into chaos. Despite the loss of his men and barely getting back alive, Denham is not done and recklessly pursues what he came for, hurling a gas bomb at Kong, temporarily knocking him out, where his response is to shout victoriously, “We’re millionaires, boys! I’ll share it with all of you! Why, in a few months, his name will be up in lights on Broadway! Kong! The Eighth Wonder of the World!”

Nothing is quite as captivatingly spectacular as the action on the island, but the return to New York with Denham’s prized possession in tow turns into a display of arrogance, greed, and human hubris. Showcasing this mighty animal held in chains to be ogled by Western audiences for high priced tickets at a spectacular formal dress gala event turns into a freak show at the circus, where one has to question who is the real freak of nature? When the curtains open and the photographer’s blinding flashbulbs create a furor similar to an attack, Kong becomes enraged, despite being shackled, especially at the sight of seeing Ann again, believing she may be threatened, where he breaks free and rampages through the city streets in search of her, leaving nothing but utter mayhem in his wake. Anyone who has seen the GODZILLA (1954) movies from the last 50 years (ironically inspired by a fictional character created by animator Ray Harryhausen in the 1953 sci-fi movie THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS) or even the SPIDER-MAN (2002, 2004, 2007) series has seen a similar emphasis on panic and pandemonium, where mass destruction in a heavily populated urban environment leads to chaos on an unprecedented scale. The human instinct to kill and destroy this creature feels a bit overwhelming, but it’s a response to hysteria and confusion. Kong’s instinct, on the other hand, is to climb the highest skyscraper, where inside Ann sighs with relief in her hotel apartment believing she has escaped the beast, where her fiancé Driscoll portentously exclaims “We’re safe now, dear.” At that very moment, who’s giant face should appear out the window in a macabre game of peek-a-boo, but Kong’s, adding a delirious touch of humor when he smashes his fist inside, knocking out Driscoll, and grabbing his love interest Ann, carrying her safely while climbing to the top of the Empire State Building in an iconic image that’s pretty hard to top as one of the great and enduring moments in cinema. A squadron of military biplanes is ordered to shoot him off the ledge with machine gun fire, so long as they could get off a shot without endangering the girl, but little thought is given to the impact a giant 50-foot creature would cause falling to the ground. Setting Ann down to safety, Kong manages to knock one of the planes out of midair, but the others are too much for him, with Cooper as the pilot and Schoedsack as the gunner who ultimately shoots Kong down, knocking him off his perch in a devastating moment when he tumbles down to his sad and tragic death, where a cynical policeman can be heard saying “Well, Denham, the airplanes got him,” but the film ends with Denham’s famous reply, “Oh, no, it wasn’t airplanes…it was Beauty killed the Beast.”

One of the first mythic films in history, King Kong can be seen as a parable of modernism, specifically a look at humanity handed down by its nineteenth century intellectual forefathers, born of scientific rationalism, conscious deliberation, and cold philosophical abstraction, where Kong climbs to the top of the Empire State Building, only recently completed just two years earlier when this film was originally released, a Babel-like tower that represents the edge of heaven, much like Kong’s high throne on Skull Island, where he is literally a god in his world, but unlike his home island, his natural world has been replaced by materialism, where instead of flying Pterodactyls there are fighter planes, where the power and destruction of man-made flying machines triumph his natural strength and mythical godliness. It’s interesting that we are allowed both a sympathetic view of Kong as a noble beast, a special effects character capable of carrying the entire film with its performance, but also an unsympathetic portrayal, where Kong is exhibited much like Sarah Baartman, the Hottentot Venus who was nakedly placed on public display throughout Europe in the early 19^th century as an example of a savage black race, supposed scientific proof that the white race was superior, an example of racial prejudice and exploitation colonialism, as portrayed by Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus (Vénus noire) (2010). While the film resembles a B-movie, the actual cost was $672,254.75, where Fay Wray was paid $10,000 for her 10-week shoot, black actors and extras were paid half as much as their white counterparts, and no Academy Awards were awarded to this film, as there was no Special Effects category until 1939. The sound department headed by Murray Spivak ran dozens of tests to find the right sound coming out of Kong, one that was unlike any other creature on earth, where his roar was a combination of lion and tiger sounds slowed down and played backwards, where the tone was designed to match the musical soundtrack. The film is also one of the first times an entire musical score was written for a movie, where composer Max Steiner synchronized his music with the action. Wray recorded all her screams in one afternoon session during post-production. On the film’s 50th anniversary in 1983, one New York theater held a Fay Wray scream-alike contest in its lobby,while two days after her death on August 8, 2004, the lights of the Empire State Building were dimmed for 15 minutes in her memory. It was Wray who humorously quipped “Mr. Cooper (one of the directors) said to me that he had an idea for a film in mind. The only thing he’d tell me was that I was going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood. Naturally, I thought of Clark Gable.”

Joshua Klein from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

The undisputed champ of all monster movies—and an early Hollywood high-water mark for special-effects work—King Kong remains one of the most lasting and beloved motion-picture masterpieces. Essentially a simian take on the Beauty and the Beast fable, told without the transformative happy ending and on a gargantuan scale, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s film fuses groundbreaking model work and emotional resonance to a degree rarely replicated by the literally hundreds of imitators that inevitably followed in its wake.

The story essentially plays out like that age-old conflict between city and nature. An expedition team arrives on the ominously named Skull Island, attracted by the promise that a giant prehistoric gorilla, feared and worshipped by the natives, might be brought home to New York and exploited as a must-see attraction. But mighty Kong doesn’t take well to being caged and escapes on a destructive spree through the Big Apple.

The scenes set on Skull Island remain impressive to this day, from Kong’s magnificent first appearance to the number of other prehistoric creatures he and the expedition face in protecting or seeking, respectively, the abducted Ann Darrow (Fay Wray). Indeed, Kong is intimidated by Ann’s beauty, and when he inevitably flees captivity and roams through New York City, the first thing he does is capture the young woman and retain her as his prisoner of love. Straddling the Empire State Building and swatting away pesky airplanes, King would ultimately rather sacrifice his won life than hurt Ann, which gives the film its famous , touching sign-off: “Twas beauty killed the beast.”

That the giant ape shifts from feared antagonist to sympathetic protagonist, with the former of course the perspective of his pursuers, shows the success of Willis O’Brien’s intricate and expressive stop-animation work (future stop-animation savant Ray Harryhausen worked as his assistant). Although it is a B-movie at heart, King Kong set Hollywood’s special-effect fetish on fast forward, and a case could be made that thanks to Kong many of today’s films focus far more on flash than story. But unlike contemporary special-effects exercises, the majesty of Kong is destined to endure, thanks in no small part to the “performance” of its giant lead.

Reverse Shot [Elbert Ventura]

If this glorious pile of horror-fantasy hokum has lost none of its power to move, excite and sadden, it is in no small measure due to the remarkable technical achievements of Willis O'Brien's animation work, and the superbly matched score of Max Steiner. The masterstroke was, of course, to delay the great ape's entrance by a shipboard sequence of such humorous banality and risible dialogue that Kong can emerge unchallenged as the most fully realised character in the film. Thankfully Wray is not required to act, merely to scream; but what a perfect victim she makes. The throbbing heart of the film lies in the creation of the semi-human simian himself, an immortal tribute to the Hollywood dream factory's ability to fashion a symbol that can express all the contradictory erotic, ecstatic, destructive, pathetic and cathartic buried impulses of 'civilised' man.

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

According to advance reports, Peter Jackson's upcoming remake of King Kong will be nearly three hours long and cost over $200 million, which seems like a lot of time and money to squander on a movie about a mad monkey. But done right—the way writer/producer/director Merian C. Cooper and his partner Ernest B. Schoedsack did it in 1933—Kong's well worth it. The image of a giant gorilla swatting at airplanes with one hand while clutching a pretty girl with the other has become so ingrained into the popular culture that even people who've never seen King Kong think they know what the movie's about. They're usually wrong. Yes, a monster runs amok in King Kong, but only at the climax of a multi-faceted, subtly poetic study of vanity.

The long-awaited double-disc King Kong DVD focuses more on the spectacle than the subtext, which is fine, given that the movie itself leans heavy on scenes of Kong kicking ass. Disc two's three-and-a-half-hours worth of documentaries cover the life of showman-adventurer Cooper, as well the groundbreaking effects work that went into bringing Kong to life. The chief draw is a Jackson-supervised reconstruction of a lost sequence where men fall into a giant "spider-pit" and are eaten by creepy-crawlies. It should thrill those who look to King Kong as the precursor to the modern special effects extravaganza, though the featurettes also point out that effects artist Willis O'Brien made Kong into a character, not some hyper-realistic zoo attraction. As for the Cooper hagiography, it's way overdone, especially when the commentators talk about how Cooper and his other partner John Ford liked to make uplifting movies in which "reality doesn't intrude," and then show a clip from Ford's harrowing The Searchers as an example.

The best tidbit in all the DVD set's special features is a mention that Cooper based King Kong's story on an anecdote about an entrepreneur who imported Komodo Dragons for public display, only to find that the change in climate and the grasping hands of tourists did the creatures in. King Kong is in part a cutting piece of self-criticism, with Robert Armstrong starring as a version of Cooper: a fearless entertainment impresario arrogantly convinced that he can bend nature to his will. On the other end of the same spectrum lies Kong, an enormous beast who commands the fear and respect of every living creature on his island, but can't withstand mere civilization.

Betwixt Armstrong and Kong, there's Fay Wray, as an aspiring actress who signs on to Armstrong's theatrical adventure looking to become a star, and ends up becoming the nearly naked love object of a wild animal. (Would real stardom have been much different?) It's a weird love triangle, and a commentary on how arrogance and desire makes animals of us all. It's a portrait that takes a big canvas.

King Kong - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... - Film Reference Linda J. Obalil

Few films can compete with the longevity of King Kong . The film is as popular today, on television and in revival theaters, as it first was in its initial release in 1933. Ironically, the film's contemporary setting of 1933 has now made it a period piece, though the ideas and themes have never aged.

The story was conceived by producer/director Merian C. Cooper and inspired by his trips to Africa and Southeast Asia to shoot documentary films. Cooper imagined setting a primitive giant ape against the civilization of a modern New York City. This vision was eventually realized on the screen with the aid and collaboration of special visual effects artist and innovator, Willis H. O'Brien.

The special visual techniques developed for King Kong were numerous. One of the more important technical advances was the development of a safe (cellulose-acetate) rear-projection screen by Sidney Saunders. Although earlier films had used a more primitive glass rear-projection screen (which, if accidently broken, could cause serious injuries to actors and crew), the cellulose-acetate screen allowed King Kong to be the first film to use large-scale rear projection. Another innovation was the invention and use of the optical printer by Vernon Walker and Linwood Dunn. The optical printer presented a new way of combining optical mattes that was superior to the old, and more complex, Dunning process. The enormous amount of matte work in the film (used to combine the special effects with the live action) would not have been feasible without the help of the printer.

Although stop-motion animation had been used previously in other films (such as O'Brien's The Lost World in 1925), King Kong was the first feature film to use stop-motion to create a continuous character. The model of King Kong was constructed by artist Marcel Delgado out of metal, rubber, cotton and rabbit fur, yet it was truly an "actor." He could express emotions and react logically to the situation around him.

The making of King Kong also presented a problem in the area of sound effects. Kong had to sound believable, yet unlike any other creature on earth. The sound department at RKO, headed by Murray Spivak, ran dozens of new and innovative experiments to create the right soundtrack. Kong's roar was a combination of lion and tiger sounds slowed down and played backwards. The music is still another example of the film's originality. Many films in the early 1930s used classical music as background accompaniment. King Kong was one of the first films for which an entire score was created. Composer Max Steiner carefully plotted out each scene in the film so that he could synchronize his music with the action.

The technical innovations found in King Kong are not the only reasons for its success; every good film must start with a good story. King Kong has a universal appeal, making it one of the most popular and well-known American films.

King Kong (1933) | The Film Spectrum Jason Fraley

Of Monsters and Myths: Colonial Representations in King Kong ... Bryan McKay from Blog Critics

King Kong, the White Woman, and 2005: Appropriating Racism J.C. Morley

Senses of Cinema – King Kong John McGowan-Hartmann, December 2003

SCIENCE FICTION UNIVERSITY:Of Gorillas and Gods: Darwin ... Charlie W. Starr, originally published on Republibat, October 27, 2009

King Kong A speculation, the historicity of King Kong, by Gerald Peary from Jump Cut, 1974

King Kong Race, Sex, and Rebellion, by David N. Rosen from Jump Cut, 1975

King Kong King King meets Exxon, a look at the $25 million new Dino De Laurentis version by Ernest Larsen from Jump Cut, 1977

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]

Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture Cynthia Marie Erb (pdf format)

King Kong (1933) Tim Dirks, also seen here: The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film

And You Thought It Was Safe(?) [David DeMoss]

A Mythical Monkey Writes About The Movies

DVD Times DJ Nock, Collector’s Edition

King Kong (1933). Giant Ape. Directors - Merian C. Cooper ... Richard Scheib from Moria

Critic After Dark Noel Vera

Movie Vault [Mel Valentin]

Magnificent Animal Adrian Martin from Rouge, 2006

King Kong (1933) - Notes - TCM.com

King Kong (1933) - Turner Classic Movies Vicky Lee, Mike Tandecki, and Jeremy Geltzer

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

New York Sun [Bruce Bennett]

100 films Lucas McNelly

sci-fi movie page pick: king kong James O’Ehley from The Sci-Fi Movie Page

Popcorn Pictures [Andrew Smith]

Oh, the Horror! [Brett Gallman]

Feoamante.com [E.C.McMullen Jr.]

DVDTOWN - Blu-ray Edition [John J. Puccio]

King Kong (1933) – Film & DVD Review | Cinefantastique ... Steve Biodrowski from Cinefantastique Online, Special Edition, 2-disc

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson, Special Edition, 2-disc

Two-Disc Special Edition, DVD Town [John J. Puccio] Movie Metropolis, Special Edition, 2-disc

HorrorTalk Sham, Special Edition, 2-disc

HK and Cult Film News [porfle] Special Edition, 2-disc

DVD Monsters and Critics [Andy McKeague] Special Edition, 2-disc

Cinescape Brian Thomas, Special Edition, 2-disc

KQEK.com [Mark R. Hasan] Blu-Ray

High-Def Digest [M. Enois Duarte] Blu-Ray

King Kong (1933) (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Stuart Galbraith IV

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [David Johnson]

Dread Central [Uncle Creepy] Blu-ray DVD

DoBlu.com (Blu-ray) [Matt Paprocki]

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Movieman's Guide to the Movies Brian Oliver, Blu-Ray

Journeys in Classic Film [Kristen Lopez]

Film Monthly Alan Rode

The Nighthawk Awards: 1932-33 [Erik Beck]

Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath] reviewing the 1933 and 2005 versions

The City Review [Carter B. Horsley] reviewing the 1933 and 1976 versions

The Lumière Reader Sam Kelly and Shahir Daud review 3 Kong movies, 1933, 1976, and 2005

Foster on Film - Giant Monsters

Sound on Sight An Examination of Great Monsters of the Screen, by Derek Godin

Classic Horror Campaign [Richard Gladman]

Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson] (Jan. 2009)

Best-Horror-Movies [John Strand]

Beauty killed the beast [Jerry Saravia]

At the Cinema [Sarah Ward]

A Full Tank of Gas... [Richard Cross]

Exclaim! James Keast

EyeForFilm.co.uk Gary Duncan

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

Classic Film Guide epic photo

MUBI [Adrian Curry] Best Movie Posters

BBCi - Films (DVD review) Almar Halflidason

The 10 best last lines - in pictures Philip French #4 from The Observer, January 28, 2012

King Kong Confounds Freud . - Google News Mike Royko from The Miami News, December 21, 1976 (pdf format)

King Kong - primitive sexuality, or just a cool giant monkey ... Bee Wilson from The Telegraph, November 27, 2005

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Charles Cassady, Jr.]

Baltimore City Paper Gary Dowell

New York Times (registration req'd) Mordaunt Hall’s 1933 review, also seen here: The New York Times

King Kong (1933 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

King Kong (film by Cooper and Schoedsack [1933]) -- Encyclopedia ...

Is “King Kong” a racist movie? - Yahoo Answers

Can You Make A Movie With King Kong Without Perpetuating Racial Undertones? Gene Demby from NPR, March 11, 2017

King Kong trivia - Movie Mistakes

Cooper, Scott

CRAZY HEART B+ 91

USA (111 mi) 2009

A gentle reminder about the heartfelt appeal of a small story that doesn’t have to go overboard and attempt too much, but can stay within character limitations and still create raw, genuine emotions. Jeff Bridges as down and out country singer Bad Blake is the Micky Rourke performance of the year, as in THE WRESTLER (2008), as he simply inhabits every small nuance of who this guy really is and is remarkably believable in this wrenching performance of a man fighting all his demons and failing at most. Into his life falls a reporter from Santa Fe, Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jean, a single mom raising her 4-year old son alone who wants to interview him for a small newspaper and grows fond of how genuine he is, even if a high risk for some of the reprehensible choices he’s made in his life. This is no feel good drama, but a sincere effort to show country singers on the circuit who live their lives in motels and cheap bars, playing music half drunk and paid next to nothing. Amazingly, Bridges does all his singing and guitar playing, which is outstanding, including the song “The Weary Kind,” which may as well be the theme of the movie. While the film is conventional and plays no tricks, what works is how low key it remains throughout, where the tone is so authentic and allows Bridges to simply live and breath within his character. Gyllenhaal is equally masterful at finding the right key to the small moments, no one ever going over the top, but remaining simple and true.

Blake is a Kris Kristofferson look-alike with a drinking problem, a guy with a reputation for writing terrific songs, but that was all in the past somewhere, as he’s been caught in the rut of drinking so much that none of it really matters anymore. Bridges doesn’t push it and never goes overboard, as he’s a drunk who can still perform and get to his concerts on time, he’s just numb to the world, which just seems to be passing him by. Gyllenhaal brings out the best in him, as she keeps him real and tells him what she really thinks without catering to his business or his manhood, as she’s got a family of her own to tend to. But they make a great couple, largely due to how beautifully they underplay each other. There’s plenty of music, all of it excellent, and the performance sequences are the genuine article. Even Colin Farrell shows up in this picture as Tommy Sweet, now a country sensation drawing in the crowds with his pretty boy face, but Blake can’t really stand him because he taught him everything he knows, gave him his own songs to sing, and, and it was Sweet’s career that took off like a rocket while he’s still forced to sing in dives. Farrell also sings his own songs, which are fine, as they even sing a duet together, but there’s a touch of Beyoncé’s character in DREAM GIRLS (2006) supplanting Jennifer Hudson due to her good looks, as it’s plain Sweet’s success is due to marketing and popular advertising instead of his talent. All of this may sound formulaic and cliché’d, which is what every country western song sounds like, but here what rings true is the authenticity of the performances and the songs, and the real life situations that people are in, which are not very complicated, they just seem complicated when you’re fucked up all the time.

Of course there are traces of Robert Duvall’s character in TENDER MERCIES (1983), and here he shows up as Blake’s friend and father figure, another genuine article, a down home straight talking man who offers Blake no excuses or pity, but he’s a guy in his life who’s obviously been there before and knows a thing or two about a good country song. The real difference between the two movies is TENDER MERCIES focuses more on a country singer’s journey to recovery, much of it anonymous, before his past fame becomes known to the audience, while this film only shows a glimpse of that at the very end, instead revealing how alcoholics can continue to function in their downward spiral and be charming as hell as they continue to destroy themselves and those around them. Bridges couldn’t be more appealing even while he’s puking backstage before returning for the song’s final chorus because he’s never for one second insincere. That’s his real charm, and the guy could charm his way to an Academy Award with this performance, perfectly nuanced, and in front of the camera in every scene of the movie, while his song, one of the best in years, may win as well.

The Onion A.V. Club review [B+] Nathan Rabin

The lives of great country singers tend to be on the messy side, to put it mildly. They wear their scars proudly, brandishing hardscrabble upbringings, bouts with drugs and alcohol abuse, acrimonious divorces, family troubles, and haphazardly squandered fortunes as rites of passage and badges of authenticity. Consequently, Bad Blake, the self-destructive veteran country singer played by Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart could have been inspired by about a hundred different country icons (though physically he bears an uncanny resemblance to the supremely grizzled Kris Kristofferson). He’s a gifted singer-songwriter in the midst of a long, seemingly permanent personal and professional freefall.

Bridges plays a bloated, depressed musician whose former sideman (Colin Farrell) has rocketed to superstardom while his own fortunes sank into an alcoholic haze of grubby honky-tonks and meaningless one-night stands. Bridges’ luck improves when a journalist and single mother (Maggie Gyllenhaal) takes a more-than-professional interest in him and he’s offered an opportunity to open for Farrell and write songs for his next album. Robert Duvall, who previously traversed this bittersweet terrain in Tender Mercies, produces and co-stars as one of Bridges’ best friends, a barkeep whose a cappella rendition of Billy Joe Shaver’s “Live Forever” provides a melancholy highlight.

The world can be cruel to crusty old veterans like Bridges’ character, but the universe smiles on him here: Farrell doesn’t let his former boss’ resentment of his success keep him from lending a helping hand, Duvall is loyal and true, and Gyllenhaal and her adorable son offer him a lifeline to happiness as he staggers out of an endless funk. Bridges brings a battered, weary dignity and a suitably weathered voice to the juicy role of a survivor learning to value himself and his gifts after decades of neglect and abuse. Crazy Heart could use more rough edges, but while it’s a little too sentimental and tidy, Bridges’ humane, deeply empathetic lead performance makes it easy to root for one man’s redemption.

User reviews from imdb Author: Clayton Davis (Claytondavis@awardscircuit.com) from New Jersey

In his directorial debut, Scott Cooper adapts Thomas Cobb's Crazy Heart, the story of Bad Blake, a washed-up country star with an alcohol addiction. The film stars Jeff Bridges, in the lead role, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jean, a young reporter is taken in by Blake's heartache and pain.

Cooper's direction is of subtle greatness. The film is quiet, slow-paced, but works. It's never meant to be loud or over-the-top, which some may be expecting; it's a beautiful written song about life thrust into a two-hour sympathy riot. Bridges, who will surely receive Oscar attention, is reserved, charismatic, and raw. Bridges' 58-year-old Blake is one of the better performances of the year. There are obvious comparisons to Robert Duvall's performance Tender Mercies, with critics believing a possibly similarity to Mickey Rourke's work in The Wrestler, which is certainly not the case, this is unique in its own way. Bridges doesn't overcook the role which would have been easy, he's effortless and sings quite well.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Oscar snubbed for her works in Sherrybaby and World Trade Center, is nearly average in her work. She's coy with Jean and underplays her, but unlike Bad Blake, her role doesn't call for it. Jean is a bruised, kindhearted, and devoted mother to her four-year old son Buddy (Jack Nation, as cute as can be), but uneven in narrative forming.

Robert Duvall is brief, and nearly ineffectual. As the bar owner Wayne, he offers a humanity for Blake outside of woman, which is needed in the film, but in the end is unmemorable. Also sharing this boat is the talented Colin Farrell, who's both likable and adequate, but upstaged by scenes with Bridges.

The only thing more beautiful than Bridges' performance is the song "The Weary Kind," which is submission for Best Original Song for the Academy Awards. This is one of the best songs written for a film in the last ten years. Delightful lyrics and exquisitely executed, the song one of the rare occasions of the perfect song for a perfect film, given the film's nature.

While Crazy Heart doesn't offer anything insightful to the realm of cinema, it's simple, uncomplicated, and honest, which you can't appreciate. For a first time out, Cooper does an admirable job.

Village Voice (Nick Pinkerton) review

"Crazy Heart" is blessed with so many marvelous moments, lovely lines and vivid characters that it's hard to know where to begin, but let's start with an encounter in a tacky Santa Fe motel room. Bad Blake, a ruined legend of a country musician played by Jeff Bridges, is being interviewed by Maggie Gyllenhaal's Jean, a single mother who writes about music for a local newspaper. When she asks what he wants to talk about, he looks into her radiant face and replies, in a booze-fraught baritone, "I want to talk about how bad you make this room look."

Well, I want to talk about how bad this debut feature makes most of the past movie year look. It was written and directed by Scott Cooper (he adapted the script from a novel by Thomas Cobb) with an unerring instinct for intimacy and a flawless sense of proportion, whether in the big moments or the small ones. It's a conventional film—that newspaper interview is only one of several well-worn plot devices—but one that wears its conventions gracefully. It's a film that recalls such classics of the genre as "Tender Mercies" (though it's less subdued); "Payday" (though it's more sweet-spirited) and "Songwriter" (though it's more sincere), but one that takes a place of honor among them.

And it revels in the glory of Mr. Bridges. Everyone has a favorite Jeff Bridges movie. For many it's the Coen brothers' "The Big Lebowski," and who can argue with that? For me it's Steve Kloves's heartbreakingly beautiful "The Fabulous Baker Boys," in which he plays a self-loathing pianist on the downswing. Bad Blake may not loathe himself, but he certainly deplores what his life has come to, and he's running on empty as he drives his battered 1978 Chevy Suburban from one crummy gig to another. Yet there's a difference between Bad Blake and Jack Baker. Bad was once a star—"I used to be somebody," he sings, "now I am somebody else"—and Mr. Bridges fills his emptiness with quirky humor, dangerous anger, an urgent yearning for redemption and a gift for evoking a better time in a voice that's plenty good enough for this one. It's a performance on a scale with the West's wide-open spaces.

T Bone Burnett and the late Texas songwriter Stephen Bruton wrote Bad's songs; they provide the movie's rock-solid foundation. When the script says that Bad has written a particularly wonderful song, our ears confirm the judgment. (The one in question, "The Weary Kind," was the work of Mr. Burnett and Ryan Bingham.) And music isn't just the pretext for drama, it's part of the text. One deliciously instructive sequence pits Bad, in all his seedy shrewdness, against an equally shrewd veteran sound man whose allegiance is to the concert's younger star, Tommy Sweet, not to Bad, who's merely opening the show.

Tommy is played by Colin Farrell. The relationship between the two men is an interesting one—Bad taught Tommy everything he knows—and Mr. Farrell's performance is an interesting reflection of generational contrasts. Rather than play Tommy for charm, Mr. Farrell gives him an almost sullen coolness that makes Bad's raunchy bearishness all the more affecting. There's nothing cool, though, about Ms. Gyllenhaal's performance—it's the finest, fullest work of her career. Jean and Bad aren't a natural match, and not only because of the difference in age. Someone else might see him as a sinkhole surrounded by DayGlo danger signs (if he weren't played by Jeff Bridges, that is), but Jean is so open and tender—and so touchingly needy—that all of her decisions make fateful sense.

The cast includes Robert Duvall, who was the prime mover in getting the film produced (and who played another broken-down country singer in "Tender Mercies"). He has a small role—a barkeep friend of Bad's—but he does get to sing, in a manner of speaking, during a delicate interlude when the two men go fishing on a placid lake. A crucial role is played by Barry Markowitz's cinematography, which complements the movie's intrinsic modesty with casual grandeur.

Yesterday's honky-tonk hero, Bad Blake, arrives at a Clovis, New Mexico, bowling alley. It's another in a string of low-paying, low-turnout gigs with pickup bands half his age, grinding the Greatest Hits out of an old Fender Tremolux, including his breakout—with the chorus, "Funny how falling feels like flying . . . for a little while." Bad's not flying these days; he's dying slowly on a bourbon diet, holed up in motels watching Spanish-language smut.

Actor turned writer-director Scott Cooper adapted Crazy Heart from Thomas Cobb's 1987 novel (the title is a Hank Williams B-Side). Cobb wanted Waylon Jennings for Bad Blake; Jeff Bridges finally got the part, though the now deceased Waylon and Bad's other inspirations hang over it. Jennings's "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way" gets soundtrack play; Bad's shabby-romantic look recalls Kris Kristofferson, his perpetual hangover, "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down." The movie never specifies but seems to take place around '87, before cell phones eliminated distance, with the sad orneriness of country music more evident than it is today. It's easy to forget, as Billboard's Country charts fill with faintly twangy pop and lazy paeans to dogs and trucks, that this music has an atavistic darkness. Cobb wrote while Jennings was just detoxing from decades of storied self-abuse and Johnny Paycheck was serving time for a barroom shooting.

Bad has just about bottomed out when a small-time journalist, Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), meets him for a rare interview—and sticks around. Crazy Heart follows the slow recovery of atrophied emotional responses that starts when Bad gets involved with Jean and her young son.

Cooper knows exactly when a scene's over, fills his movie's margins with distinct bit players (Beth Grant's middle-aged groupie, Rick Dial's pudgy part-time keyboardist), and is a smart custodian to Bridges's Bad Blake. The part is a vindication of Bridges's unaffected talent and is his best in years. He's as good a reactor as actor, so patient and sedentary that his performance's quiet ache sneaks up on you when he's doing nothing more dramatic than settling onto a barstool. Bad recites his age as a refrain—"I'm 57 years old"—and it seems Bridges has lived them all. It's in the habitual gestures, the way he negotiates with a mic stand and passes a drink from his chest to the bedside table with a coil of the wrist—for Bad is usually sprawled and splayed.

The physical effects of Bad's drinking are almost luridly seen, lingering over his dry heaves, the soft, pale torso, his gut spilling out of his often unbuckled pants. The spiritual attrition feels harsher, as Cooper contrasts huddled, dank interiors with the big sky outdoors, and shows that the saddest thing about being a drunk is the memories that go missing. Jean worries she'll disappear in a blackout, too. Gyllenhaal, usually badly used and badly lit, doesn't make a false move here. Their June-November relationship works because of her lucidity and Bridges's easy-come charm. (An improbably virile career alcoholic, Bad is used to drifting into women and doesn't have to bully.)

Bad's other love—estranged—is Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), a former sideman, protégé, and surrogate son who has eclipsed his old boss's fame, selling out amphitheatres. You expect a showbiz grotesque, but when they reunite, Sweet is deferential toward Bad, embarrassed by their switched fortunes and maybe what the old man thinks of his cheesy-rakish Nashville makeover (he rather daringly wears a pair of dangly earrings). The duet, a spiritual-conversational tradition in country music, gives them one great, anxious scene. Having hired Bad as an opener, Tommy sneaks onstage to sing with him. He thinks he's supporting the old man; Bad resents having the biggest stage he's seen in a while being stolen and hates himself for envying the younger man. No one says any of this. It's all implicit in their exchange of glances, and epitomizes the movie's double-sided look at the relationship between private feelings and public performance.

In its attention to stage dynamics, Bad's dickering with sound guys, and the distinct personalities of his different pickup bands, Crazy Heart shows a rare knowledge and respect for real, played music. Robert Duvall's interest in country is long-standing—his first directorial outing, We're Not the Jet Set, was named after a George Jones–Tammy Wynette song. He plays Bad's hometown bartender and confessor with casual perfection, and is among the producers. Another is T-Bone Burnett, who wrote and arranged the film's songs with Stephen Bruton, a longtime Kristofferson collaborator who died this year. They sound like feasible hits; Bridges and Farrell sing their own parts—and well.

Made with Country Music Television money, Crazy Heart's winding road to Sundance avoided the superficial novelty of the "indie" market. The subject, rehabilitation, is old and resonant. (Says Waylon: "We've been the same way for years/We need to change.") No scene feels obligatory, and Crazy Heart shows a pragmatic but tender understanding of the relationship between physical breakdown and the discovery of morality. It's merely a well-done, adult American movie—that is to say, a rarity.

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

DVD Talk (Jason Bailey) review [4/5]

Pajiba (Brian Prisco) review

filmcritic.com (Blake French) review [4.5/5]

Movie Shark Deblore [debbie lynn elias]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/4]

Screen International (Mike Goodridge) review

Slant Magazine review [2/4] Nick Schager

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B-]

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review [Theatrical Version]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B-]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [2.5/4] also seen here: Common Sense Media

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Hollywood Reporter review Kirk Honeycutt

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]

OUT OF THE FURNACE B- 81

USA Great Britain (116 mi) 2013 ‘Scope

Having only made two films, it’s hard not to compare, as Cooper’s first feature CRAZY HEART (2009) took the cinema world by storm, a small gem of a story about the hard life on the country music circuit told with an aching authenticity, winning a Best Actor award for Jeff Bridges, who also sings the Oscar winning Best Song. Changing directions here, a more grim and downbeat story, Cooper has chosen a distinctly working class American mill town in Pennsylvania steel country, where jobs are scarce and sympathy is non-existent. Everybody does what they can in this environment, receiving few accolades or rewards in life. Reminiscent of films like TWICE IN A LIFETIME (1985) or THE DEER HUNTER (1978), which Cooper pays a distinct homage to, these films have a connection to the land upon which they’re based, where untold stories of hardship speak to settings like Braddock, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, an area that was part of an economic boom in the 50’s and 60’s when American steel mills were at their peak. But today the population is around 2100, where the dual economic downturns of the 80’s when the blast furnaces closed and then again in 2009 when the foreclosure disaster took the life blood out of these towns, leaving boarded-up houses, vacant lots, and enormous rusted out and decaying mill structures still standing, now seen as eyesores on the desolate urban landscape. While there is a closing credit, This film was shot entirely and proudly on Kodak film, it’s been strangely transformed to digital, giving it a grainy and processed look instead of something more natural, as if the humanity has been squeezed right out of the film itself. Opening and closing to Eddie Vedder singing Pearl Jam songs, which you’d think would be a perfect blue collar fit for a modern era ghost town, but the director indicated he felt Vedder’s voice could be overpowering, taking the focus away from what’s presented onscreen, so he chose Tindersticks’ guitarist Dickon Hinchliffe to score the film.

Almost like chapter sequences, one by one the main characters are introduced, including Woody Harrelson as Harlan DeGroat, an out of control, hillbilly shitkicker who’s always hopped up on crystal meth, Christian Bale as Russell Baze, one of the men working in the mill, and his brother Rodney (Casey Affleck), who refuses to go anywhere near the place, choosing any other way to make a living, an Army veteran serving several tour of duties in Iraq. Russell has a happy relationship going with a local grade school teacher Lena, Zoë Soldana, while also helping to look after his elderly and seriously ill father, along with his Uncle Red, Sam Shepard. This close family unit and deranged outsider are destined to meet at some point, but not until much later in the film. Bale’s Russell couldn’t be more understated, a man of few words, but loyal and outwardly friendly, where he’s seen as a good man that bad things happen to, one of the victims of the economic crunch, where he’s continually bailing out his brother’s debts to the local bookie, Willem DaFoe as John Petty, who keeps an office in the back of the local saloon. It’s after having a drink with Petty that Russell has a deadly car accident killing several people, including a small boy, sending him off to several years in prison (in the gothic confines of the West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville, operating from 1867 to 1995). Lena refuses to experience the grim prison reality, but Rodney keeps his brother appraised of life on the outside, including the eventual death of his father. By the time he gets out, Lena has left him for the local police chief (Forest Whitaker), leaving an emptiness in his life that seemingly can’t be filled. But he doesn’t go get drunk or do something drastic, he just feels the solitude of being alone, where he remains emotionally imprisoned even though he’s back on the outside. This is perhaps best expressed in a deer hunting scene where he and Uncle Red head out into the forest, where he quietly comes upon a male buck, but hesitates to shoot, as he hasn’t the heart to kill anymore after killing two innocent people.

Meanwhile, Rodney does under-the-table, bare knuckle fights (instead of Christopher Walken’s Russian roulette), which is how he pays off some of his debts to Petty, a kind of repugnant way of making a buck, often returning battered and bruised, reminiscent of the excellent Walter Hill Depression movie with Charles Bronson, HARD TIMES (1975), who makes a living the same way. Tired of nickel and dime fights, however, Rodney demands some real action from Petty, something that will pay off his entire debt and actually get him somewhere. Warned repeatedly about how savage these men are up in the Appalachians, described as “inbred mountain folk from Jersey,” some of whom never come down off that mountain, nonetheless Rodney forces his hand. The parallel aerial views of the drives to the fight scene and the deer hunt are carefully choreographed, leaving no question that the hunt is on, one animal and the other human, both equally barbaric and ferocious when seen from the view of the one being hunted. These primitive practices stand at the center of what was once a proud and thriving city, now economically stripped to the bone where savagery rules. It’s here that Masanobu Takayanagi’s darkened, washed out cinematography becomes truly hideous, as Harlan DeGroat represents the scum of the earth, the very worst of America, where violence is a blood sport, with bodies left buried somewhere in the woods never to be seen again, with the police nowhere to be found. When Rodney turns up missing, this pits Russell against the police chief, the guy who stole his girl, further angered at the apparent inaction of the police, where there’s a moral void at the center of the absence of responsibility. It’s not just the ominous music of the Tindersticks that this film shares, but also the bleak, atmospheric portrait of an isolated, mountain society from Debra Granik’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Winter's Bone (2010), which shows us part of the closed-off economic devastation we rarely see. Despite the influence of Leonardo DiCaprio and Ridley Scott as high-priced producers, and superb performances from the leads, what’s missing is a more closely observed script, co-written by Cooper and Brad Ingelsby, completely lacking the focus and meticulous detail of Granik’s backwoods portrait of rural America, which utilized locals in the cast. Instead what we get is a weary and worn out America, tired of sacrificing so much for this country, and getting so little back in return, as Eddie Vedder sings an updated version of Pearl Jam’s “Release” Pearl Jam - Release from the dvd "The kids are twenty" - YouTube (4:44) over the end credits.

Georgia Straight [John Lekich]

Out of the Furnace details the comings and goings of several low-key, blue-collar Pennsylvania-based characters, with the narrative eventually following one such figure, Christian Bale's Russell Baze, as he attempts to track down his wayward brother (Casey Affleck's Rodney). It's ultimately clear that Out of the Furnace fares best in its engrossing first half, as filmmaker Scott Cooper initially offers up an unpredictable narrative that keeps the viewer guessing at almost every turn - with the writer/director's emphasis on the exploits of various periphery figures perpetuating the movie's appealingly nonconventional atmosphere. The gritty, intense vibe is, for the most part, heightened by the efforts of a stellar supporting cast that includes Willem Dafoe, Forest Whitaker, and Woody Harrelson, with, in particular, the latter turning in an especially engrossing performance as the film's short-tempered and prone-to-violence central antagonist. And although Cooper has littered the proceedings with several engaging sequences (eg an unexpectedly emotional moment between Baze and Zoe Saldana's Lena Taylor), Out of the Furnace, once it passes a certain point, adopts an increasingly straight-forward feel that proves to be far less compelling or interesting than that which came before - with the less-than-surprising atmosphere diminishing the impact of the movie's admittedly striking final stretch. It's finally clear that Cooper, between this and Crazy Heart, possesses a great deal of promise as an up-and-coming director, and yet it's equally obvious that the filmmaker remains unable to craft a narrative that's as well-defined as the atmosphere and performances within his endeavors.

Out of the Furnace focuses on two brothers struggling to cope with life in a dying Pennsylvania steel town. Rodney (Casey Affleck) is an emotionally unstable veteran who’s fighting a losing battle with his inner demons after four tours in Iraq. Russell (Christian Bale) is a gentle, sweet-tempered soul who works double shifts at the local mill to try and pay off his brother’s gambling debts.

The brothers are devoted to each other, which is just about the only thing they have going for them. While Rodney is losing his grip, Russell is trying to rebound from a strange twist of fate that earned him a stint in prison. The love of his life (Zoe Saldana) has left him for the town police chief (Forest Whitaker), and it looks like the steel mill—the town’s only real source of employment—is going to be shut down.

Things get even more complicated when Rodney tries to ease his financial burdens by boxing on the underground bare-knuckle circuit. Along the way, he gets entangled with a psychotic gangster (a genuinely scary Woody Harrelson). The consequences are tragic for Rodney. But they also have a grim effect on Russell, who gets drawn into his brother’s dark world.

In less talented hands, the plot could easily veer into a blue-collar version of Death Wish. Thankfully, cowriter and director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) has loftier ambitions. It’s hard to believe this is only Cooper’s second feature as a director. Although the backdrop here is uncompromisingly bleak, he lights our way with a thin thread of hope. What ultimately emerges is a remarkably subtle study in love, loss, and regret.

The cast is in top form. Casey Affleck turns in an Oscar-worthy performance as a young man who clings to his brother’s love as if it were a kind of lifeline. But it’s Christian Bale who treats us to what just might be the performance of his career. There’s nothing particularly showy about his approach. But it’s the sort of portrayal that insists on staying with you long after the lights come up.

Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]

“…a film photographed and shot as grimly as its subject matter.”

Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace concerns the heavy topics of veteran-neglect and trying to readapt to the normalcy of home and work after you’ve just seen things that are profoundly abnormal. There are few opportunities for veterans returning home from their service, and even fewer opportunities for people stuck in working class/working poor areas and that’s a depressing thing to note in the proclaimed “greatest country in the world.”

The film concerns mill-worker Russell (Christian Bale) and Iraqi vet Rodney Baze (Casey Affleck), two brothers living in the economically-broken land of the Rust Belt, an area still heavy in industrialization lying off the east coast. When Russell lands himself a stint in prison, Rodney becomes involved in ruthlessly violent, bare-knuckles boxing games that give him quick money but scar him physically and mentally even quicker. Rodney soon spirals deeper into the madness, involving himself with a lawless mountain-man named Curtis DeGroat (Woody Harrelson in one of the most ominous and frightening performances in his career), who we see abusing a woman and eventually nearly beating to death another man at a drive-in movie during the opening scene of the film. Upon being released from prison, Russell believes he needs to make an attempt at saving his brother from certain doom, but can only do that by etching himself into the sick world.

Here is a film photographed and shot as grimly as its subject matter. The film’s gray and black color patterns, shown while photographing dingy, dilapidated housing in this low-income neighborhood far too many people inhabit, are only germane to its central storyline. When Out of the Furnace gives us a glimpse at the drug problems in the area is when this depiction comes full circle. We see how disgusting the area already is and we see how the manufacturing and solicitation of drugs has contributed to the murky, decrepit landscape that is the working poor sector of the United States.

Christian Bale does some fine work as Russell, a man working in a tolerable job at a mill, much like his father. Bale will be seen playing a slick, confident hustler later this month in American Hustle (in a film, I presume, will be seen by many more people in addition) but we see that even with roles under his belt showcasing a polished, brasher individual he can still function well inhabiting the characteristics of an uncertain and disillusioned one.

Casey Affleck, however, should no longer have to live in the quieter light of his brother. Affleck has gone onto make gripping dramas in his life, from Gerry and Gone Baby Gone, but has seemingly been shortchanged while his brother’s films go on to gross huge money and achieve Oscar-status. Affleck’s performance here is terrific; perhaps one would be able to call it a tour-de-force of sorts. He fearlessly inhabits the role of a character who has been cheated and abused by an unjust system that doesn’t seem to value his risks and accomplishments.

Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography and Cooper’s writing (written alongside Brad Ingelsby) made me recollect on last year’s stroll down the road of melancholy Killing Them Softly. The film, which was released during this time last year, modeled its themes around the death of the American Dream and the slow, painful demise of the organized crime world. It painted its landscape in a crisp light, despite its depressing images that seemed to offer no hope whatsoever to those involved with either the crime world or the working class life. However, the film was bogged down by relentlessly meaningless dialog, that felt like its main purpose was to extend the film to feature-length status. Out of the Furnace manages to provide these characters with more of a human focus, rather than provide them with questionably relevant dialog and tediously-paced sequences.

This is a miserable movie, however. One that offers no really points of optimism or enthusiasm. It’s as bleak as the lives many live who are stuck in these seemingly hopeless situations, and anyone who uses the words “depressing” or “melancholic” to criticize Out of the Furnace‘s depiction of this reality should not even be reviewing the film in the first place. They need to research or live the reality.

Gray and gritty, Out of the Furnace's visual finish suggests the final cut was dragged through the dirt of the movie's Rust Belt setting, and that's just one layer of a very shrewd aesthetic. No longer playing second fiddle to a show-stealer like Jeff Bridges, the Oscar-winning star of his debut feature, Crazy Heart, director Scott Cooper is given ample room to prove his filmmaking mettle with this rough-hewn follow-up, a thriller whose strategic, exposition-dodging design proceeds with near-total effortlessness. A canny visual storyteller, Cooper lets his imagery do the talking, and it's ultimately fitting that the movie kicks off with a bloody bang at a drive-in. Not only does the oddball opener introduce the sociopathy of antagonist Curtis DeGroat (Woody Harrelson), who beats his date and a bystander while watching the 2008 adaptation of Clive Barker's The Midnight Meat Train, it emphasizes Cooper's old-school respect for the viewer experience of careful, collective looking, pulling back to show the outdoor screen within the screen, and the spectators ogling it like motorists at church.

Most of the hard-hitting revelations and resonant themes in Out of the Furnace come via Cooper's visual clues, compositional echoes, and keen instinct for when and how to release information for maximum effect. Who the characters are, what they mean to each other, where they've been, and even where they live is all disclosed thanks to a tattoo, a police-cruiser's decal, a passing mention of a death, or a condemned storefront. We only learn that feral, volcanic Rodney Baze (a career-best Casey Affleck) is ex-military when he casually leaves a room after donning his uniform, and we don't learn when he served—or when this all takes place—until a background news broadcast shows Ted Kennedy endorsing Obama's first election (Rodney is also later seen with "Operation Iraqi Freedom" inked on his flesh). Likewise, the fact that a tragic first-act incident lands Rodney's brother Russell (Christian Bale) in prison is only unveiled through a sly and sparing series of shots: Already established as a steel worker, Russell is shown toiling in a mill-like factory before a few abrupt cuts depict where he truly is, displaying the prison's yard, and then its walls, and then its gates. The montage is capped off with the brothers seated together in a visiting area, which is also photographed tight before a wider view shows that it's encaged.

Though Cooper consistently uses formal parallelism to link the brothers' dual narratives, this last shot may be Out of the Furnace's most telling, as it speaks to the prison that is the Baze boys' daily lives, whether behind bars or outside of them, on the front lines or at home. Without ever forcing a schmaltzy PTSD agenda, or worse, a redundant commentary on that there economy, Cooper's backwoods yarn, co-written by Brad Ingelsby, smartly and objectively explores justice on the macro level before whittling its way down to the micro. The movie highlights society's shortcomings in taking continuing care of its servicemen and its rehabilitated, but also the potentially damning choices those same folks can make, particularly in desperate lands of lesser opportunity. Rodney served his time (and only fleetingly reveals the horrors that scarred him), but he feels he deserves more than his family's quotidian millwork, instead earning fast cash in underground fights for crime boss John Petty (Willem Dafoe). Russell served his, too, but he's still screwed upon release, learning his mill may go under thanks to Chinese outsourcing, and that Lena (Zoe Saldana), the ex he hoped to regain, is pregnant by Wesley (Forest Whitaker), a man she doesn't love, and trapped in her own cage.

Just as Cooper uses grace when mirroring frames to underscore the home and prison connections (the staging of Russell's wrenching encounter with Lena is a copy of that of a grueling prison fight), he never flaunts the incredible cast at his disposal. Conversely, he tasks his actors to work in tandem with Out of the Furnace's flow of info, their characters trickling in when utterly necessary, and serving each other, and the story, in ways both unexpected and enriching (a barely spoken hatchet-burying between Russell and Wesley, a local cop, is an especially elegant encounter, illustrating the painful, yet necessary, closing of a love triangle).

But what this movie finally boils down to is a deceptively simple tale of two brothers, and of being one's brother's keeper, and of seeking justice on the crudest of fronts. When a deal involving crazed cinema-goer DeGroat turns sour, Out of the Furnace turns into a barebones tale of vigilantism, which, in plumbing a subculture that's already functionally anti-establishment (DeGroat and his goons are Jersey's finest untouchable "inbreds"), gives its antiheroes a yet more primal form of the agency long denied them. Cooper doesn't clinch the whole of his technique, and there are sequences, specifically a lengthy bit of crosscutting involving predator and prey, that betray the film with their obviousness and manipulation. Nevertheless, if taken as a sign of where this director is headed, Out of the Furnace is a highly promising, exacting work of gruffness and delicacy.

Out of the Furnace - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

'Out of the Furnace' Review: Boiling Points - Pajiba Daniel Carlson

Out Of The Furnace / The Dissolve Nathan Rabin

Somber Drama Out of the Furnace Is Earnest to a Fault - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek

Decaying steel town gets movie star turn in 'Out of the Furnace ... Eric Kelsey from Reuters

Movie Mezzanine [Dan Schindel]

Film-Forward.com [Ted Metrakas]

Review: Christian Bale and Casey Affleck get brutally dark in ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Film Racket [Chris Barsanti]

The Film Stage [Danny King]

Twitch [Jim Tudor]

Review: Powerful & Confused 'Out Of The Furnace' Starring ... Charlie Schmidlin from The Playlist

Out Of The Furnace | Reviews | Screen - Screen International Lee Marshall

Movie Review - 'Out of the Furnace' - A Blaze Fueled By ... - NPR Mark Jenkins

HitFix [Kristopher Tapley]

Film Pulse [Kevin Rakestraw]

Den of Geek [Gabe Toro]

Screen Rant [Kofi Outlaw]

Christian Bale reduces inner fire to ashes for 'Out of the Furnace ... Gina McIntyre interview with Christian Bale from The LA Times, December 4, 2013

Christian Bale talks BatKid and the resilience of Out of the Furnace ... Drew McWeeny interviews Christian Bale from Hit Fix, November 29, 2013

'Out of the Furnace': Christian Bale on not calling 'action' - latimes.com Oliver Gettell interviews the director and cast members from The LA Times, November 20, 2013

TheHollywoodReporter [Todd McCarthy]

Variety [Scott Foundas]

Examiner.com [Adam Patterson]

'Out of the Furnace' movie review: Bale, Affleck ... - Washington Post Ann Hornaday

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Grace Snyder]

Academy of Achievement Biography

Good cast can't save overheated 'Furnace' - SFGate Mick LaSalle

Review: 'Out of the Furnace' beautifully captures bare-knuckle lives ... Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times

Out of the Furnace Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz

Movie Review: 'Out of the Furnace' - Video - NYTimes.com Manohla Dargis

Coppola, Francis Ford

Film Reference Gene D. Phillips

Francis Ford Coppola became the first major American film director to emerge from a university degree program in filmmaking. He received his Master of Cinema degree from UCLA in 1968, after submitting his first film of consequence, You're a Big Boy Now (1967), a free-wheeling comedy about a young man on the brink of manhood, to the university as his master's thesis.

The Rain People (1969), based on an original scenario of his own, followed in due course. The plot of this tragic drama concerns a depressed housewife who impulsively decides to walk out on her family one rainy morning to make a cross-country trek in her station wagon, in the hope of getting some perspective on her life. For the first time Coppola's overriding theme, which centers on the importance of the role of a family spirit in people's lives, is clearly delineated in one of his films.

Coppola's preoccupation with the importance of family in modern society is brought into relief in his Godfather films, which depict an American family over a period of more than seventy years. Indeed, the thing that most attracted him to the project in the first place was the fact that the best-selling book on which the films are based is really the story of a family. It is about "this father and his sons," he says, "and questions of power and succession." In essence, The Godfather (1972) offers a chilling depiction of the way in which young Michael Corleone's loyalty to his flesh-and-blood family gradually turns into an allegiance to the larger Mafia family to which they in turn belong—a devotion that in the end renders him a cruel and ruthless mass murderer. With this film Coppola definitely hit his stride as a filmmaker, and the picture was an enormous critical and popular success.

The Godfather II (1974) treats events that happened before and after the action covered in the first film. The second Godfather movie not only chronicles Michael's subsequent career as head of the "family business," but also presents, in flashback, the early life of his father in Sicily, as well as his rise to power in the Mafia in New York City's Little Italy. The Godfather II, like The Godfather, was a success both with the critics and the public, and Coppola won Oscars for directing the film, co-authoring the screenplay, and co-producing the best picture of the year. In 1990 he made his third Godfather film. This trilogy of movies, taken together, represents one of the supreme achievements of the cinematic art.

In contrast to epic films like the Godfather series, The Outsiders was conceived on a smaller scale; it revolves around a gang of underprivileged teenage boys growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1960s. The Outsiders was a box-office hit, as was Peggy Sue Got Married, a remarkable fantasy. The title character is a woman approaching middle age who passes out at a high-school reunion and wakes up back in high school in 1960. But she brings with her on her trip down memory lane a forty-two-year-old mind, and hence views things from a more mature perspective than she possessed the first time around.

Coppola has made two films about the Vietnam War. Apocalypse Now, the first major motion picture about the war, is a king-sized epic shot on location in the Philippines; and it contains some of the most extraordinary combat footage ever filmed. But there are no such stunning battle sequences in its companion film, Gardens of Stone, since it takes place state-side, and is concerned with the homefront during the same period.

His next subject was a biographical film about Preston Tucker, a maverick automobile designer, titled Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Coppola contends that Tucker developed plans for a car that was way ahead of its time in terms of engineering; yet the auto industry at large stubbornly resisted his ideas. Unfortunately, Coppola comments, creative people do not always get a chance to exercise their creativity.

Coppola demonstrated once more that he had mastered his craft in making Bram Stoker's Dracula. In it he created a more faithful rendering of the Stoker novel than had been the case with previous film versions of the celebrated horror tale, and the film turned out to be a huge critical and popular success. Francis Coppola is one creative person who has continued to exercise his considerable talent throughout his career. Admittedly, he has had his occasional failure, such as the off-center teen movie Rumble Fish (1983). But the majority of the films he has directed over the years have demonstrated that he is one of the most gifted directors to come across the Hollywood horizon since Stanley Kubrick.

Coppola himself observes that he looks upon the movies he has directed in the past as providing him with the sort of experience that will help him to make better films in the future. So the only thing for a filmmaker to do, he concludes, is to just keep going.

Brief Encounters: Francis Ford Coppolla - Film Comment Harlan Jacobson interview, January/February 2008

He’s Francis Ford Coppola, 68, born in 1939 in Detroit, where they made Fords, the people’s car. It’s impossible to think of American filmmaking without him, because his great films were the moral center of art’s engagement with society. A man of appetite and balance and struggle, he owned a studio with nine stages that he lost after the debacle of One from the Heart. So he went to the vineyard to fortify himself—and bought it. In vino veritas.

His latest film, Youth Without Youth, based on Mircea Eliade’s novel, is unquestionably a personal film. Its central character, Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), is an elderly Romanian scholar who is magically restored to youth after being struck by lightning in 1938. He devotes himself to asking the itchy questions maybe only a Coppola would pose on screen anymore: What’s time? What’s the root of language? What’s the soul? What’s love in a mad world? It’s pure Coppola at 66, or as he says, “50-16.”

When one thinks of your Seventies work, it’s about hypocrisy, about the gap between what a society says it’s all about and the way it actually behaves. Why was it so important for people in our generation to take on the questions of hypocrisy?

Francis Ford Coppola: There’s a line in Conrad that he can’t abide the stench of a lie. The lie is such a dangerous idea, because if you’re able to say one thing and do another, then there’s no way for a society to get traction, no way for the human species to grow and improve. I was impressed with that line when I was working on Apocalypse Now, because you understood if you could have a war that was being fought to do good but was doing bad, hope was almost lost. How do you ever get the benefits of all our human gifts, if you just lie about what you’re doing?

When John Milius wrote the script, the line that was so important to him. “We teach the boys to drop fire into peoples’ homes but won’t let them write the word ‘fuck’ on their airplanes.” The idea that morality could be so misused is what makes wars possible. Who wants to send someone to do something bad? And both sides are praying to their God, and their soldiers are blessed because they’re ostensibly going to do something good. That can only happen because someone’s lying, or they’re all lying.

As the Seventies came to a close, and after Apocalypse Now, there was a gestalt shift inside of you, and you started asking the next set of questions. Ones that a mature man asks: not what I’m against, but what I’m for. Aside from financial motivations in making your decisions, starting with the S.E. Hinton stuff, you were no longer going to take the national pulse and regard it as your mission to explain America to itself.

Well, indeed your interests do change. As young man I was interested in cars and girls. That’s all I could think about, obsessively. After some years, you stop thinking that way. In the last 15 years I’ve become much more of a reader than I ever was. I used to read because I had to write that paper on A Winter’s Tale, or whatever. Today I’m always reading a book, and when I go to bed it’s pleasurable because I know a book is waiting for me. It’s like a companion, and I read and I fall asleep.

My mind isn’t on money or success or fame. Also, I’ve been a well-known person since I was 29 or before, so I’ve kind of had that, and it’s not particularly attractive to me anymore.

Are you reading for any particular thing, are you focused, or eclectic?

I’m somewhat focused. I’ve been reading a lot of Latin American authors, because arguably in the last 70 years, that’s the news. It’s the Chileans. The last group of books was this guy Roberto Bolaño [The Savage Detectives / b: 1953—d: 2003]—ever hear of him? Within the group of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Cortázar, he’s the new one. Also poets. I never had a talent to truly enjoy it, so I‘ve made a real effort—Octavio Paz, volumes of poetry.

Right now, I’m reading The Red and the Black. I tend to read great books because I figure if I’ve got the time I should read The Red and the Black [arches his eyebrows], or something that’s important to our culture, which makes it hard for me to read contemporary authors. The South Americans are contemporary . . . but they represent a movement.

Have your thoughts about America changed over time?

[long pause] Well, you know as a little kid, I was raised in an Italian-American family, and my mother said to me, “Francis, you’re so lucky you’re an American. America is the greatest country in the world.” And my father said, “Yes, but you’re also Italian, and Italy produced some of the greatest painters, musicians—the greatest culture in the world.” So we always thought we were really lucky being both.

I am extremely positive about the future of America. Because we are an immigrant country, and we continue to make use of our immigrant [tradition]. And today more than ever with Hispanic immigrants, Oriental immigrants, we are constantly refreshed by immigrants who come here with their dreams for a better life but ultimately transform America. That’s what makes America still the most exciting country in the world, that we are the only country that is an immigrant country. I heard that Gonzalez is the third most frequent name, and that Rodriguez beats out Turner [laughs]. So we’re constantly being remade, and I still have this childlike belief that we’re the good guys.

But the reality of our behavior—not only recently but back through the Cold War and in Latin America and all over the world is very disconcerting. The problems we have today aren’t going to be solved by this [Bush] administration but by the next one. So hopefully whoever wins this presidential election will make good decisions, not based on ideology or constituency.

Now, in my heart, I really want to see an independent be president. I’m very negative toward all these campaign contributions. I don’t believe that millions of dollars are given to candidates that are not called back. In California, I saw—and oddly enough it was the Democrats—what that whole system of donating election money does. And famously, the Gallo family, when Ernesto died, because of its generosity to the party got from the state of California a one-day reprieve on estate taxes—called the Gallo Law—so that none of their billions of dollars would be taxed. Our tax laws are riddled with loopholes, which all come from campaign financing.

So in answer to your question, which I realize I haven’t answered, I feel more harsh toward the practices that are accepted and would love to see a political system that can attract the talented people that have become involved in political leadership.

Is it harder to function in the wine business than in the film business? Is it harder to break in? Is it more or less honest?

My timing was pretty incredible. I fell in love with the cinema in the Fifties and Sixties. When I was in college, I was a drama major and started the Hofstra Cinema Workshop and three people came. There wasn’t this fascination with the movies. And then I go to film school, and suddenly everyone around me is interested in cinema, and you go out and young people are on dates, and it’s “What did you think of The Graduate?” Suddenly there were programs about movies, and you could see magazines and special shows about movies on TV. And I realized the movies were a hit with my generation, everybody was talking about movies and fortunes were being made by critics.

Then I went off in the wine business and I bought this gargantuan estate in the Napa Valley for the price of a house in Beverly Hills—Rutherford, 2,000 acres. And suddenly everyone is talking about the health benefits of wine, and everyone’s drinking wine. And just as the movie business was, suddenly it’s the business.

It was nothing other than being Italian-American and my family always drank wine, and there was always something romantic about living in vineyards . . . I just lucked out. And now wine consumption—I don’t know the statistic—but it’s gone from something like 6 percent to 8.5 percent, but 8.5 percent of a population this size [rolls his eyes]—there aren‘t enough grapes to go around anymore.

Then I go buy a little dumb hideaway in Belize, because I sorta enjoyed being in the Philippines making Apocalypse Now and I had little boys. So I go to Belize and buy this $40,000 place, where there’s no electricity, no nothing, and my wife wants me to get rid of it and I have to hire someone to take care of it because it’s so remote. The next thing I’m in the resort business and suddenly the travel business is the hottest thing on earth.

So I don’t know what to say, it’s not that I’m smart. I sorta follow my heart, and get involved in things that I love, and then the timing is similar for other people and they happen to love them, too. And oddly enough I became very wealthy doing things that in a million years I never thought I’d be involved with.

This is all because you were born in 1939. I have a brother who was born in 1939 and the guy stumbles into the closet and it’s full of money.

Is it the year that does it? That’s what it is, we’re there a few years early… I’ve often thought, what irony, I make One from the Heart, it’s a disaster, I lose everything. Who would’ve thought in a million years that 10 years later I’d make a fortune in the wine business? And that I’d be back doing movies like Youth Without Youth, self-financed again? It’s part luck, it’s part being born in 1939.

One of the projects you’ve wanted to get off the ground was Megalopolis. The concept was that the parallels between Imperial Rome and America are inescapable. Do you still want to explore that?

I felt that Republican Rome was the historical counterpart of America. It had the big Cold War, it defeated Carthage. They were great engineers and road builders and Americans were talented but a practical talent with can-do Yankee ingenuity. And Rome itself was New York. Cicero was like Mayor Koch, I always thought.

I wanted to make a movie about utopia. And I settled on a little-known footnote in history, the Conspiracy of Catiline. Cicero, who was the consul then, defeated this aristocrat, Catiline, who was going to take over the city and burn it. And I thought, what if he wasn’t going to destroy it but make it into a new society? So I began a Catiline Conspiracy with a character like Robert Moses, but an enlightened Robert Moses, more like an Ayn Rand. And it was a political fantasy with the premise that maybe human beings are so creative and talented they can make a world where the priorities are all positive, that would be good for everybody.

And, of course, right while I was working on it and even shooting second unit, the World Trade Towers tragedy happened. Oddly enough, the original story had an old clunky Soviet satellite on its last legs fall out of the sky and destroy a section of downtown New York. And the issue was what are you going to build in that space? The Ayn Rand character wanted to build a city within New York that was the model of what a city could be. For an architect, the first question is what are the people going to do there? So I said the people of the future are only going to be concerned with a few areas, because they’re not going to work anymore: to create, to learn, to perfect—to physically perfect—and to celebrate by having parties and festivals. So the city should be designed to accommodate those things. So in that vague Rome-America setting, the struggle was about how to make that happen.

In the writing of that script, I realized the truth, that we are capable of doing that. The problem is that the people in power don’t want it to be that, because today they gain their power from hatred, disagreement, and conflict. When you talk about the Middle East, the people today—they don’t want peace. The people on top, they like it the way it is.

Do you think you’ll make that film?

[Shrugs] It’s not in my thinking. I’m making another film [Tetro] in Argentina starting shortly. It’s much more personal. It’s much more like Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill trying to understand what’s going on in my own house. It’s not autobiographical, but it’s based on a family with a lot of creative people.

I rewatched Godfather Part III, and it struck me that it was about the futility of trying to protect your children. What does having children do to the creative life?

I was always [creative] as a kid—maybe because I had polio and was quarantined from other kids, plus my father moved a lot so I never really had friends. But when I was 17 or 18 I suddenly came a little bit into my own in the drama department in high school. I used to work as a drama counselor… in some camps in upstate New York. And I’d do the plays with the six and seven year olds, and at the end of the year I’d do plays with all the different camps combined. And I always loved being with children, and I think I was a really good counselor. I had a bunk with nine little boys, and I’d read them books and go on treasure hunts and just have a fun time. They’re all now hedge fund operators [snickers].

I was married and had kids pretty young, at 23, and by the time I made Godfather, I had three kids. And I just enjoyed my children. It’s always a shock for me to see how old the men are today before they get around to having kids. I had a 20-year-old son (Gian-Carlo) when I was 42. And now his daughter is 21, so I’m in line to someday be a great-grandfather, which is a thrill.

My children were always a delight to me, so much so that I always brought them with me, which is something I picked up from my father, though I don’t think he did it for the reason I did. If I was a movie director and going off to the Philippines or the Dominican Republic and the kids had to stay in school, I’m sure I would’ve lost the sense of . . . God knows, if I’d even be married. So as a rule I always took my family with me, and as a result my kids were all raised around movie sets and are all now in the movie business. I also had many nieces and nephews, and at Napa we’d have them in the summer, and I’d say, “Awright, this is gonna be one-act play summer.” And everyone would go [mimics] “Aww, we donwanna do one-act plays, we wanna go fishing, it’s summer.” But little by little, they all did one-act plays.

So out of those summers, all these talented kids came. Sofia. Jason Schwartzman. They blossomed out of the experience of doing shows when they were 16, 17. So the young generation being creative seems natural to me. That’s the real pleasure of life, to pursue creative work. And my wife as a visual artist believed the same and brought them to see far-out artistic exhibits that I always scoffed at.

My parents always went, “You didn’t do well, you’re never going to amount to anything.” Well when a parent tells that to a kid it’s like God [cowers in his seat] telling them that. We used to tell Sofia, “You’re Superwoman, you can do anything!” And she’s fearless, that girl. And she’s tiny, you know. So I feel that living close with the children has been the real strength of our family.

In Godfather III, when Michael [Al Pacino] loses his daughter [played by Sofia], it ages him before his time, and he collapses and dies. So I thought that you were addressing something personal. How did you deal with losing your son? Did it change your worldview, your attitude toward work?

Well that movie [stabs the air for emphasis] . . . I never wanted to make a third Godfather. I never wanted to make a second Godfather. I didn’t think The Godfather was a serial-type story. To me the first Godfather was the Godfather, and everything else is greed.

The third Godfather happened so late. It helped put me over the top getting out of my financial hole and getting my career started again. Mario [Puzo] and I wanted to call it The Death of Michael Corleone, since that was what we were setting out to do. But for Michael just to die for his sins—it’s gotta be worse than that. Worse than that would be to put some innocent kid in the position of being the hope of the family and going on and having a beautiful future—the death of a daughter would be a far worse punishment for him.

Few people, thank God, go through the experience of losing a child . . . or even in some instances in war of losing more, which is unthinkable. You know [pauses] . . . it’s not an experience you get over. Especially in my case. It was my first son. He was 22. Imagine losing a baby [cradles his arms and rocks]—heartbreaking, a baby. To lose someone who has become such a vital part of your family—and in my case my life, because he more than just a son, he was my collaborator and my partner. You don’t get over it, you can’t get over it, you’ll never get over it. And at its worst, I think of it as the loss that keeps on losing: there isn’t a day that goes by that you don’t say, “Gee, what would he be contributing?”

I remember when he died we were in the lowest of the low financial condition, broke, yet we were living in this beautiful mansion in Napa that was in trouble. He never took that we were broke so seriously—we still had a lot of fun. And I think, Roman got to be a director, and Sofia got to be a director, and I think, What would Gian-Carlo be doing?

Whenever I read about someone [I know] losing a child, I always write to them because I know what’s happened. First of all, it means 10 years of waking up and that’s the first thing you think of. You wake up and think, Oh, no, it is true, it is true, he is gone. That goes on about seven years. Every morning, the first thing is the horror. And then after seven years, you wake up and realize you didn’t think of it first. And that’s the beginning of what nature ultimately does for you, it allows you to get past it on that level. But it’s not something you get over.

Looking at some of the films you made then in the Nineties, you were in them, but Youth Without Youth is the first really, truly personal picture. It has a spiritual quality, it deals with rebirth. Dominic is not someone who goes seeking youth, but has youth thrust upon him and ends up trying to find meaning out of a second chance. Your work has changed. Youth Without Youth reflects that change within you—what the meaning of life is, what the meaning of the work is versus the choices one has to make. It seems very close to a post-Gian-Carlo world for you.

Well, Gian-Carlo would very much have approved. He liked this kind of filming. When we lost the studio in L.A. [after One from the Heart], and all the equipment was locked up, he broke in one night and stole the lenses we made Rumble Fishwith. [grins] Because the lenses were the jewels. And we still have them to this day. So he’s very much involved in the spirit of this filmmaking, and the way we did it. It was very ingenious. It isn’t a little film. We had lots of production demands, costumes, Nazis, hair, age makeup. It wasn’t a low-budget art film where you have three people, like Baby Doll, which was one of the best Tennesee Williams movies ever made. This new period of my life is very much part of Gian-Carlo’s philosophy.

You know when I lost my son [voice waivers, pauses] . . . Nature puts you in shock. So I wrote to him, believing that if I wrote a letter and put a stamp [on it] and it got sent to a mailbox in California that he would . . . get it. So over 21 years, I have had an enormous correspondence with him. Of course what it turned out to be is a reflection of what I’m facing, or what I’m thinking about in my life, but I never lost touch with him. And even in my madness I believe. When Sofia was making her first picture, The Virgin Suicides and then Lost in Translation, I’m saying to him [whispers to Gian-Carlo], “Go there. Be sure you’re there so they treat her well.” I always did that with her and with [Roman], but I never did that for myself. When my films open, it’s okay, but he was there, protecting Sofia…

[shrugs] So I feel he would love the new lenses we bought, the way we handle the technology. And I’ve even discovered his spirit . . . I have this young Japanese-American assistant from Wesleyan who helps me in some of those areas that my son helped me with. I remember once Keanu Reeves was living in our house and came down from the attic, where Gio used to live, and at eight in the morning had a beer and a donut—it was like a reincarnation. So I see lots of evidence of him, which is a positive thing.

So I’ve now decided I’m going to make one movie after another as long as I can. I’m going to write them, and they’re going to be original scripts. Youth Without Youth was an adaptation that got me to this place. That’s why I don’t think of Megalopolis so much. I can pretty much finance a movie under [waves] $15, $17 million a year and lose . . . all of it. I can’t do it for [waves bigger] $80 or $100 million. [pauses] Or maybe I can.

But my son would approve of this style. It’s quasi-guerrilla filmmaking, very advanced technologically. The look of it is beautiful, but it’s all done in a new way. It’s not film, it’s all hi def.

And the language you used to show those interior voices and inner consciousness…

All we did was we shot him [Tim Roth] and had him look right to left, left to right playing the same scene. When you cut it [together], it’s like he’s talking to someone.

It’s very much out of Abel Gance—those triptych panels from Napoleon…

At first I didn’t know how to do it, I looked at ways that were all more elaborate. And then I thought, I’m just going to do it with screen direction.

But really what I’m saying to you is that my son, whom I’ve definitely kept in touch with, has blessed this direction [I’ve taken]. All my kids are very tight with this. Sofia is a personal filmmaker. She made Marie Antoinette the way she wanted to. And speaking of Abel Gance, she was criticized because she didn’t take Marie past her youth to the guillotine and the whole French Revolution. Neither did Abel Gance take Napoleon to the second half. He planned to.

Roman is really a personal filmmaker, even to the point that he’s very innovative. So I feel very blessed not only by having my children but that they approve very, very, very much with the direction [I’m taking]. They’re happy that I’m not going to just, you know . . . What is the formula for an A-list director? If you want to remain one, you have studios develop three or four projects that you pick and they pay millions of dollars for screenwriters, and then you make a $150 million movie and get a $10 million fee. The other scripts get done by other people, and you’re the executive producer. That’s how it’s done.

Having worked on this picture and read Mircea Eliade, what do you think time is? Has your thinking about time changed?

Time does not exist in the way the human being conceptualizes it. We’re able to conceptualize the future. Well, the future doesn’t exist. Nor the past. They’re concepts. We’re always in the present. There is only the present. But we have such a sophisticated consciousness that we’re able to deal with these ideas and actually live with them, and they might be useful. But for sure there is no such thing as time.

I’ve always had the sense, even as a child, that things are not as they appear. We live in a very orderly, Western, Kantian, practical world. Up and down, black and white, good and evil, male and female. The Oriental mind thinks those things are all the same thing—when viewed from a certain perspective.

So it was a struggling with time and consciousness that got me to give my Megalopolis script to Wendy Doniger, the Eliade scholar I had known as a kid, and she sent me some quotes about time from Youth Without Youth. I went, Wow, this is interesting, it’s helpful, why don’t I read this story? And when I read it, I thought, I want to make this, because it’s such a Twilight Zone , science-fiction love story. It had everything that I wanted it to have.

So what is your definition of a life well spent?

I have a building in San Francisco that’s been Zoetrope’s headquarters, and I have the top floor. And I have a key that enables me to go right down to the first floor and it doesn’t stop anywhere else. Which is a great luxury of owning a building. And for some screwy reason I played this game: I’m on eight and I push one—it’s not a minute even. And as I see the numbers, 7,6,5,4 . . . I started to pretend that I’m gonna die when I get to zero. So I’m going down and thinking, Gee, I got to have such an interesting life. I had a father who played the flute, a mother, got to be married and have these beautiful kids and have a nice wife, I got to be in the movie business. I got to be a success, and not be a success, and be a success again, and I got to be in the wine business . . . and as I’m thinking all this stuff, it suddenly comes to zero and the door opens. And I don’t die.

My feeling is that if I have the privilege of knowing I’m going to die, that’s what I’m gonna do. A happy death is that I will be so lost in all the wonderful things I’ve gotten to do in my life that when I die, I’m not going to notice it. It’s going to be an interruption. You gotta admit, I’ve had a very colorful life. And have been blessed.

And even tragedy, that’s the price of admission to being a human being. No one is immune to a tragedy. God hope that it’s not children, or a child, but you’re going to lose someone you love, certainly your parents, your grandparents. That’s the price you pay to be a human, which is a privilege. You don’t want to be a rock. You don’t want to have no feelings. Of course, it’s heartbreaking.

All-Movie Guide bio from Jason Ankeny

Filmbug Biography

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

A Biography by Jon Matthew quite extensive

Francis Ford Coppola • Director profile • Senses of Cinema Brian Dauth from Senses of Cinema, May 5, 2006

American Zoetrope

Salon Feature by Michael Sragow from Salon, October 19, 1999 (5 page essay)

Altman and Coppola in the Seventies: Power and the People Robert C. Cumbow from 24LiesASecond, November 26, 2005

Coppola, Francis Ford They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

1980's BBC Interview by Christopher Frayling

BBC Audio Interview (1983) from BBC 4

Guardian Unlimited Interview (2002) by Geoffrey Macnab from the Guardian, September 27, 2002

Time Interview (2006) by Rebecca Winters Keegan, August 14, 2006

Francis Ford Coppola on his most personal film yet Xan Brooks interviews Coppola at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2009

Francis Ford Coppola Discusses His Career Allan Tong interview from Filmmaker magazine, September 14, 2011

The 17th Most Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker Poll)

New York Film Academy's 20 Great Movie Directors

Akira Kurosawa directs Suntory Time commercials with Francis Coppola on YouTube (3:40)

NEBO ZOVYOT

aka: Battle Beyond the Sun

Russia (77 mi) 1960 co-directors: Mikhail Karzhukov and Aleksandr Kozyr, Coppola (as Thomas Colchart) provided new footage in a re-cut U.S. version (64 mi)

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! Liz Kingsley

Synopsis: After an atomic war, the Earth is divided into two regions, North Hemis and South Hemis, which are still in conflict. The space program of South Hemis has developed a rocket ship in which the first trip to Mars will be attempted. Project director Dr Albert Gordon and his astronauts Paul Clinton and Craig Matthews travel to the space station where the rocket ship Mercury has been built. The day before the launch, a rocket from North Hemis approaches the space station. Its crew, Captain Torrens and Dr Martin, radio for permission to land and repair their rocket, which is granted. The South Hemis scientists are friendly towards their visitors, entertaining them and even revealing their plans for the Mercury. When Torrens hears of the planned flight to Mars, he becomes obsessed with winning the race to the planet. Although his superiors forbid him to take the risk, Torrens tells Martin that they have been given permission to attempt the flight to Mars. They take off, and Paul Clinton is injured by their blast; his place on the Mercury is taken by Craig Matthews. The South Hemis launch is successful. Meanwhile, the North Hemis rocket is in extreme danger, being drawn into the sun. Torrens radios for help. Gordon and Matthews decide they must try to rescue their rivals. They succeed, but their rocket runs out of fuel. They are forced to land on Angkor, a satellite of Mars, and can only wait as risky rescue attempts are mounted by their colleagues on Earth.

Comments: During the sixties, Roger Corman purchased two Russian science fiction films, Niebo Zowiet (1959) and Planeta Burg (1962), and handed them to some of his talented proteges with instructions to recut them for American consumption. In the case of Niebo Zowiet, the project was given to Francis Ford Coppola, who accepted an associate producer’s credit, but hid the rest of his involvement behind the pseudonym "Thomas Colchart".

One of the things Coppola was unable to alter was probably the best part of the original film anyway, the production design. While some of the film’s space effects are shaky, the interiors of the headquarters of the space program on Earth and of the space platform in orbit, and the exteriors of the rocky satellite planet, Angkor, are quite interesting. The space platform, in particular, seems to have been a kind of self-contained world. The presence on board of vegetable life is reminiscent of Silent Running (1971); one of the plants, a climber gone berserk, looks like a first cousin to Katharine Hepburn’s potplant in Desk Set (1957).

Of all the changes made to the Russian film, the tampering with the identities of the original characters is the most revealing. Niebo Zowiet concerned a group of gallant Russian astronauts involved in a race to Mars against some evil Americans, who they unselfishly rescue when the Americans’ greed and incompetence lands them in trouble. Obviously, this plotline had to go. The denizens of the Southern Hemisphere (i.e. the Russians) now mysteriously rejoice in names like "Paul Clinton" and "Craig Matthews". Except for this role reversal, the rest of the plot is left more or less intact. (Intact too is a very clear indication that this film wasn’t made in America: there are far too many women involved in the space program, even, horror of horrors, in positions of authority.) Executive producer Corman clearly felt that this just wasn’t exciting enough, so other changes were made.

The film’s original title translated as "The Heavens Call"; its new one was probably felt to be more of a draw, and apart from the fact that the film doesn’t take place beyond the sun, and that there’s no battle in it, it’s a great title. Russian lip movements, it turns out, are even harder to dub than Japanese ones, and many sentences run on way after their supposed speakers have stopped talking.

Obvious attempts were made to lighten up the product by altering the intended tone of the script, but facetious American dialogue emanating from solemn Russian lips fools no-one. Finally - and it is for this that Battle Beyond The Sun is now best known - Coppola was ordered to edit in some monsters. He did, and they’re a couple of beauties, the creatures in question being a penis-monster and a vulva-monster. Yeah, okay, they aren’t actually called that; but it doesn’t take an overly dirty mind to see what game Coppola was playing here. The latter, in fact, is a particularly nasty specimen of vagina dentata, and when its (her?) fatal wounding of one of the astronauts occurs offscreen, you hardly know whether to be glad or sorry.

User comments from imdb Author: Steven Nyland (Squonkamatic) from Syracuse, NY USA

I'm giving this movie a 5/5 because it's impossible to judge as it exists today.

NEBO ZOYOT is the proper name for a pioneering 1959 movie made in the Soviet Union as an official state-sponsored arts project under the direction of Mikhail Karzhukov & Aleksandr Kozyr. By all accounts it was a breathtaking, visually intimidating project dominated by special effects work the likes of which had not been seen before. Roughly telling the story of a Russian space crew sent to find out the fate of an earlier mission to intercept an alien probe on collision with earth, the movie combined DR. STRANGELOVE anticipating interior sets, functional looking science fiction props & space wear, and miniature model effects that make the George Pal & Captain Video oriented Americanized science fiction of the day look like laughable kitsch. Even the trend-setting science fiction work of Italian director Antonio Margheriti looks klunky and flimsy alongside of what is left of the movie.

There are reports of the original film running over 2 hours, a grand celebration of the forward thinking ideals of Soviet Russia where technology, human ingenuity, and tightly controlled communist propaganda promised a brave new world. Fortunately or not, Roger Corman anticipated the fall of the Eastern Bloc, managed to catch a screening of the film, and was talented enough to realize that nothing of it's like had ever been seen in the west before. Corman wasn't necessarily a "good" filmmaker but he had an eye for talent and bought the North American distribution rights for the film, determined to wow audiences with a science fiction spectacle the likes had never been seen.

Bringing in a young director/editor of promise named Francis Coppola, Corman oversaw a "redefinition" of NEBO ZOVYOT into a standardized American-ish Sci Fi potboiler about an astronaut crew sent into space to do battle with various space monsters. Corman had Coppola jettison half of the film's somewhat ponderous setup depicting the preparation & departure of the alien probe from it's home world -- one of the most visually striking sequences ever filmed -- opting instead for "new" inserted footage depicting the space monsters doing battle on the hull of our heroic space ship.

Sigh ... the result is more than a bit of a mess that manages to water down the impact of the original material, complete with an illogical story arc that is mostly explained in voice-over narration & awkwardly dubbed English dialog concocted from whole cloth and edited in to fit the on screen action (more or less). The monsters are absurd: One looks like a giant disembodied vulva bedecked with a row of razor sharp teeth, and the looped footage of space suit wearing astronauts standing around -- apparently under the influence of 1g gravity -- does little but elicit snickers of laughter from viewers who get enough pure oxygen every day. Somehow he made this movie look stupid.

Yet there are segments where the original Russian made vision shines through: The opening launch sequences have a kind of majesty to them that Gerry Anderson would never be able to quite achieve with his THUNDERBIRDS creations, the interiors of the space ships all look spot on real enough for Mercury program era technology, and the Russian segments of the film have a texture to them that is mesmerizing ... And make the inserted Coppola-made footage seem all the more absurd. Today it seems hard to understand why Mr. Corman would have advocated trying to fix what ain't broke in such a hamfisted manner, but that's 1962 for you, and fortunately the visual power of the surviving Russian segments worked to cement the film with a fervent cult following that allowed even some of it to survive for forty-five years.

Hopefully with a 50th anniversary of the original film soon coming a restoration effort can be made to show the film with only it's original Russian segments & appropriate language subtitles, like has recently been done with FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS and Pavel Klushantsev's PLANETA BUR, both of which have turned up on excellent DVDs that show the movies without Mr. Corman's interference. Retromedia shows the film under it's Americanized title BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN on a double movie DVD with the Italian space operetta STAR PILOT, and while contemporary audiences may not "get" the funky 60s approach to science fiction I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

DVD Drive-In George R. Reis

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also reviewing STAR PILOT, also seen here: Turner Classic Movies

THE BELLBOY AND THE PLAYGIRLS

aka: The Playgirls and the Bellboy

USA Germany (94 mi) 1962 directors: Fritz Umgelter, also new footage from Coppola and Jack Hill

Shock Cinema [Steven Puchalski]

Francis Coppola's 1962 overhaul of Fritz Umgelter's 1958 West German sex comedy Mit Eva Fing die Sunde. Four years before Peter Bogdanovich's Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women and Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily?, which employed similar procedures, Coppola redubbed an original black-and-white movie, giving it new dialogue and adding voice-overs and new 3-D color segments, which featured June Wilkinson and other topless starlets.

User comments from imdb Author: rompata from United States

Here's the outline: the bellboy wants to be a private investigator so he's reading a book about it, and decides to practice on hotel guests. A group of women check in that represent a lingerie manufacturer. The bellboy poses as a buyer to "investigate" them. The girls model their wares, with special attention to how easily they can be removed. Lots of T&A and not much else.

When released in the '60s, this was the sort of thing shown in "adults only" movie theaters full of cigarette smoke and men wearing raincoats. In fact, the contents are pretty tame by today's standards - you could almost show it on PBS if it had any intellectual pretensions at all.

The only copy I've seen was an '80s VHS release. Being an unimportant movie in German, the audio is dubbed, and dubbed poorly. Video quality suggests a really old print or perhaps even 16mm.

Gods of Filmmaking

TONIGHT FOR SURE

USA (69 mi) 1962

User comments from imdb Author: Jens Kofoed-Pihl from Copenhagen, Denmark

Yes, it's true, Coppola made "Nudie Cutie" before "Dementia 13"! It's no worse or better than other skinflicks of the late 50's/early 60's but it's certainly ain't no "Immoral Mr. Teas" or "Kiss Me Quick". This western angle is interesting cuz Russ Meyer made "Wild Girls Of The Naked West" the same year! B-movie god, Jack Hill ("Spider Baby", "Big Doll House", "Coffy" etc.), helped Francis with this one. Ah, nothing is funnier than diggin' up major directors' "well buried" skeletons. He shouldn't be ashamed, though, cuz at least it's better than the pathetic "Jack"!!

Now that Francis Coppola has turned into a total hack, with studio slop like JACK, I figured it was time to reach back into his shadowy past and pluck out this sexploitation comedy that he helmed at the tender age of 22, when his mind was clearly on baser human instincts -- namely, nekkid women and making a quick buck. Clocking in at just over 60 minutes, this clinker is both boring and utterly undistinguished, without a hint of experimentation which might've made the outing unique. And believe it or not, viewing it is almost as painful as Coppola's stupefying "Life Without Zoe" segment of NEW YORK STORIES (one of my grimmest moments of moviewatching in the last decade)... Set on the Sunset Strip, this is the inane tale of two moralistic males who decide to fight against the increasing tide of vice by blowing up a nudie nightclub. One's a western bumpkin who rides into town on a burro, the other's a city slicker, and as their time bomb ticks away, they sit in the nightclub and exchange stories about the evils of sin and lewd women (of course, while they're gabbing, the burlesque babes are strutting their stuff on stage behind 'em). The cowboy explains how one friend had terrifying delusions that every woman around him was naked (if only I could have such terrifying delusions). The other is a closet lecher who preaches morality as an excuse to play voyeur with a nude model. No subtlety here, folks! The men are slobbering fools, the women are busty fleshpots, the attempts at humor are deadening, and the entire budget is less than what Coppola spends nowadays on a week's worth of cannolis... On a positive note, Francis at least found some attractive young women to play the scenery and lingers appreciably on their wares. But down deep, this is just another middling example of "Here's the film, where's my goddamned paycheck?" sexploitation, which was good for a quick playoff to the raincoat brigade. Starring Karl Schanzer and Donald Kenney, with feeble photography by director-to-be Jack Hill (FOXY BROWN) and music by "Carmen" Coppola.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

THE TERROR

USA (81 mi) 1963 director: Roger Corman, uncredited help from Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Jack Nicholson

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Notable mainly for being the film that was screened at the drive-in in Bogdanovich's Targets, this is the real dud of Corman's Poe cycle, largely because he said, 'I had the weekend off before the last week of shooting The Raven; I was going to play tennis and it rained'. Not wanting to waste the set he'd had built, he embarked upon an almost incomprehensible tale of an officer in Napoleon's army (Nicholson) who falls for a woman who keeps disappearing; it turns out she's the long dead wife of Mad Baron Karloff. The film, despite its elements of necrophilia, has nothing whatsoever to do with Poe, and the fact that it was directed by about five different people (including Coppola, Monte Hellman and Nicholson himself) hardly makes for coherence. There are, however, a few strikingly moody images that make effective use of the California coastline, and the general air of chaotic improvisation is not altogether without its own special charm.

Roger Corman finished shooting The Raven, and still had Boris Karloff under contract for three days. Delighted with his good fortune, he rushed home and wrote a "script" overnight. He may have, in fact, looking at the result, "written" it in five minutes. Jack Nicholson showed up to star, Boris was apparently too tired to do much, and Corman (or occasionally sidekick co-producer, uncredited sometimes-director Francis Ford Coppola) yelled "action," and improvisation ran wild. The Raven sets are, it has to be said, very cool, and this film more funny than frightening, but more than that-engaging. I mean, here's definitive proof that either (1) Jack Nicholson was not a born actor, or (2) Jack had such extraordinary insight into what Corman was doing that he (Jack) was already running parenthetical circles around it. Jack delivers his lines with affected haughty disdain, as if he was drunk and making fun of John Malkovich, and demands things "in the name of the government of France." He wears a single epaulet, and narrows his eyes as a reflex to the camera being aimed at him. He is (insists on being?) out-acted in every scene by Karloff (who only occasionally-but very suddenly-gains interest in the plot, often in mid-sentence), and Dick Miller. Only Sandra Knight plays to Jack's level, perhaps because he has impregnated her (in real life), or is about to (I forget which). Just when you're satisfied that the proceedings are under hand, as they head down the home stretch, they get to the part where Corman actually wrote some plot, which has confused reviewers throughout the ages. For the record, the plot does so make sense. What doesn't make sense is people insisting that a plot about witches and ghosts make sense.

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)

More famous for the story behind its making than for the story it actually tells, THE TERROR stars a young Jack Nicholson as Andre Duvalier, a Napoleonic officer who wakes up on the Baltic Coast and sees the figure of a woman, who then disappears. After seeing her several more times, he follows her trail to the castle of Baron Von Leppe (Boris Karloff), where he spots a portrait of the woman on the wall. It turns out that she is Helene (Sandra Knight), Leppe's long-dead wife. Refusing to believe this, Duvalier searches the house for the woman and learns from Leppe's servant (Dick Miller) that the baron isn't really the baron, but a man who killed the real baron years ago and took his place. After much confusion the bogus baron is drowned when the sea invades the castle, and Duvalier rescues Helene, who ends up falling apart in his arms, for she is nothing more than a rotting corpse.

Perhaps the most legendary film in Roger Corman's entire career, THE TERROR began as a brainstorm the director had while finishing THE RAVEN. Hating to see the massive RAVEN set go to waste, Corman decided to shoot another picture on the set during the five days remaining before it was to be dismantled. With only a vague idea of a story, Corman had writer Leo Gordon write some scenes for Karloff and Nicholson, both of whom agreed to hang around for a few days after completion of THE RAVEN. Corman shot their scenes, then became involved with another project, so he had his assistant, Francis Ford Coppola, finish the film. Coppola took Nicholson and Knight to Big Sur and shot some more scenes, then he got an offer from producer Ray Stark and also left the picture. Several other directors helped finish the film, including Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, Dennis Jacob, and Nicholson himself. Months later, Corman sifted through the footage and realized the story didn't make any sense, so he called Nicholson and Miller back to shoot another scene, one in which an angry Duvalier forces the baron's servant to tell him what's going on. Thus Miller explains the confusing plot to Nicholson--and the audience. AIP got even more mileage out of the RAVEN set when clips from the Karloff-Nicholson scenes of THE TERROR ended up four years later in Peter Bogdanovich's TARGETS as the film being shown at a drive-in during the climax.

The Bad Movie Report

Turner Classic Movies Richard Harland Smith, also seen here: Turner Classic Movies

Classic-Horror Eric Miller

DVD Drive-In [Christopher Dietrich]

Foster on Film - Ghost Stories

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar)

Oh, the Horror! [Brett H.]

DEMENTIA 13

aka: The Haunted and the Hunted

USA (75 mi) 1963

Time Out Tony Rayns

Produced by Roger Corman, and evidently made under his presiding spirit, this runs briskly through one of those family reunion plots in which the challenge is to guess which seemingly benign member of the family is the mad axe-murderer who's steadily picking off the rest. The location (an Irish castle) is used imaginatively, the Gothic atmosphere is suitably potent, and there's a wonderfully sharp cameo from Patrick Magee as the family doctor.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The whole thing pivots on tawny, ruthless Luana Anders stripping down to bra and panties for her swampside ax dismemberment, sketched out of Cocteau, Psycho, Scream of Fear, and the young Francis Ford Coppola's own early apprenticeship in The Bellhop and the Playgirls. Coppola pitched it to Roger Corman during the production of The Young Racers, the story goes, and was given the Irish set with the same cast and crew to try out the directorial waters. The rowboat at midnight is the first of its dry jokes, with Peter Read virtually forcing himself into a heart attack and pushed by his wife (Anders) into his aquatic grave, a tiny radio still squawking rockabilly while following him into the depths. The family fortune now within reach, Anders flies off to Ireland to meet with the rest of the clan yet finds dark secrets and omens, plaster bodies in the bottom of a pond, a drowned moppet's spirit shackling the gothic manor to a muddy past. Coppola is like Welles with his first toys, one of them is a wind-up doll wielding a hatchet to anticipate the gold-digger's demise; other playthings include William Campbell as a moody sculptor engaged to Yankee ingénue Mary Mitchell and Bart Batton replaying his little sister's death in his head, every one of them subtly keyed to Poe. The Godfather is anticipated, inevitably -- the ghost of Patrick Magee's hammily baleful doc certainly hangs over Brando's Corleone makeup, yet the fragile dinosaur here is ailing matriarch Eithne Dunne, equally doomed by tradition. Predictably dismissed as drive-in fodder, this is really an upstart's precocious proposal on artistry, independence, and the business of family, or vice-versa. With Karl Schanzer, and Ron Perry. In black and white.

Cinema Laser (Derek M. Germano)

Starring William Campbell, Luana Anders, Bart Patton, and Mary Mitchel. Cinematography by Charles Hannawalt. Edited by Stuart O’Brien and Morton Tubor. Produced by Roger Corman. Written by Francis Coppola and Jack Hill. Directed by Francis Coppola.

John Haloran (played by Peter Read) has suffered a heart attack and died. His widow, Louise (played by Luana Andres), fears that without his presence she will not be included in Jack’s share of the Haloran fortune. She ships off to Castle Haloran with a forged letter stating that John has stayed behind on business and starts to look for loopholes that could earn her some money.

At the castle she finds Jack’s family still suffering from the grief at their lost of their daughter (played by Barbara Dowling) seven years before. With the family all gathered together, an axe murder strangely and suddenly appears to start dismembering the group one by one.

Francis Ford Coppola first began to working with Roger Corman when Corman hired him to help “Americanize” Nebo Zowet, a Russian sci-fi film that Corman had purchased the rights to. The professional relationship continued over a number of Corman’s “Z-movie” projects with Coppola acting as everything from a sound recordist to a second unit director. Coppola eventually pitched his own idea for a horror film to Corman, one that would involve an axe murderer.

Corman approved the project as long as Coppola would be sure to amplify the sex and violence as much as possible. He also wanted to make sure that Coppola named the picture “Dementia”; an indication of madness. But when it was discovered that John Parker had directed a film by that name in 1955, Corman added a meaningless “13” to avoid confusion. With a few thousand bucks and a small crew of nine, Coppola headed off to Ireland to shoot his directorial debut.

Principle photography was shot on location in less than four weeks for Dementia 13. When Corman finally saw the picture he was enraged about how senseless it was. After an argument, Coppola convinced Corman to allow him a few additional sequences to tie together the plot. He shot the scenes, but Corman was still unsatisfied.

Unbeknownst to Coppola, Corman went on to hire Jack Hill to shoot more violent and sexual footage that was used in the final cut. Coppola and Corman would work on a couple more projects together, but this was the beginning of the end of their professional relationship. When Dementia 13 was finally released it did decent business.

As a gimmick to intrigue the audience, some theaters would administer a “D-13 Shock Test” that was meant to prevent potentially unstable viewers from viewing the film. Dementia 13 is exceedingly mild by today’s standards and still suffers from a nearly incomprehensible plot. But if you’re a fan of Roger Corman’s work, you will most likely get a kick out of the picture.

not coming to a theater near you Thomas Scalzo

Turner Classic Movies John M. Miller

The Tomb of Anubis

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353 Haiku Movie Review the entire film may be seen here

YOU’RE A BIG BOY NOW

USA (96 mi) 1966

Time Out Tom Milne

Coppola's second feature, a free-wheeling comedy about a young man (Kastner) and his frenzied efforts to rid himself of sexual and other inhibitions inculcated by smugly protective/possessive parents (Torn and Page). Though boarded out with a neurotically strait-laced landlady (Harris) whose brief is to keep him pure, he nevertheless contrives to be pursued by a nice girl who loves him (Black), while he perversely lusts after an all-too available actress (Hartman), only to be let down by his rebellious member. Very much of its time (i.e influenced by Godard, Dick Lester and the whole dropout thing), it now looks archly dated rather than spontaneous. But Coppola's style had healthy roots in the screwball comedies of the '30s, and the glorious performances litter the film with moments to treasure (like Julie Harris' anguished cry when locked into a library vault with the innocent Torn: 'Trapped in the pornography collection of a fiend!').

Read the complete review for You'Re A Big Boy Now TV Guide

YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW is significant as an early example of the developing talent of one of the most important (if not the most important) American directors of the 1970s. Coppola scripted and directed this whimsical look at coming of age in the 1960s as part of his graduate thesis at UCLA. Though not his first film, it revealed a willingness to experiment with technique and themes that would continue throughout his career. As in both RUMBLE FISH and THE OUTSIDERS, made by Coppola nearly two decades later, his subject here is a teenager's passage into manhood. The tone in this film is much less serious, though, more appropriate for the 1960s, when a laid-back attitude toward drama in general was prevalent, and deep messages lurked beneath surfaces. But unlike the work of either Jean-Luc Godard or Richard Lester (both obvious influences on Coppola at this point in his career), YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW fails to have much impact beyond its lightheartedness. It is as if Coppola were too concerned with creating a style to put much effort into the implications of his material.

User comments from imdb Author: davidbenedictus from United Kingdom

I wrote the novel upon which this film was based, I worked on the various scripts with Francis, and I was present throughout the filming in New York. An amazing experience. Coppola had been working for a year with MGM writing scripts for them (he had got this job as a result of winning a nationwide literary competition) and had scripted Is Paris Burning? and Patton Lust For Glory, both of which Gore Vidal was supposed to be writing but Coppola travelled to Paris to help get scripts out of him. He had also written the screenplay of This Property Is Condemned, based on a Tennessee Williams short story, and (apart from the magnificent helicopter shot which starts the film) thought very little of it.

For full details of the filming of this first real Coppola movie see my memoirs Dropping Names which is available from my website www.davidbenedictus.com. Oh and by the way clips of Dementia 13 which Coppola filmed in a couple of weeks in Ireland (he mentioned to me some nudie films which he may or may not have directed but Dementia 13 is probably his first acknowledged work) are used several times throughout You're A Big Boy Now (I imagine he didn't have to pay copyright on them!) and they look powerful to me.

A sad memory is that Elizabeth Hartman who plays the sexy man-hater with great precision and style was to have a serious nervous breakdown after the end of her marriage and threw herself out of a window to her death. She was some actress and you may have seen her in The Group and A Patch Of Blue (opposite Sydney Poitier)

That Cow [Andrew Bradford]

Francis Ford Coppola put together an odd little experimental film, from the point of view of a young man just entering college and being on his own for the first time. The world he enters is pretty typical for the mid-sixties, a clash between old conservatism and a liberal attitude toward sex and other such things.

This world falls somewhere short of a mass of confusion for young Bernard, whose energy and honesty puts him into almost constant conflict with it. As a drama, this would have been hard to watch, but the comedic sense of the film leads to a manic reality to which we can easily relate.

"I stink, therefore I am" - just a sample of the dialog in the movie, which would probably be left out of any modern production for fear of it appearing in a review. No, it doesn't stink, but the idea of using it for the irony, as well as the commentary on the current state of the industry, is just too appealing.

What a forward-thinking film, exploring such imagery as dwarves, wooden legs, and the Gutenberg Bible well before they came into vogue. Some of the experiments don't work, such as cuts that repeat a few seconds of what just happened with a different take. The titling of different sequences seems a little irrelevant as well, but that's pretty minor.

This sort of film can be a riot to watch, but the approach means it also doesn't reach too far. When it came out there was a certain social relevance to it, which hasn't completely dulled with time, yet You're a Big Boy Now also wasn't the first to the punch there.

All Movie Guide [Craig Butler]

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FINIAN’S RAINBOW

USA (141 mi) 1968 ‘Scope

Time Out Tom Milne

An underrated musical, admittedly a little dated in the social comment (on labour exploitation and race relations) which probably seemed quite daring on the original's Broadway debut in 1947. But Burton Lane's score - intact save for the curious omission of the marvellous 'Necessity' - is still first rate, and Coppola steers his motley cast through it with an instinct for rhythm and movement which shows that the choreographic preoccupation which surfaced in his work starting with 'One From The Heart' was nothing new. Certainly the best of the latter-day musicals in the tradition of Minnelli and MGM.

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

An Irishman comes to the small town of Rainbow Valley to bury a pot of gold (stolen from a leprachaun) near Fort Knox, in the hope that it will produce more gold. He ends up having to contend with his nemesis, the leprechaun who wants his pot of gold back and is slowly turning mortal, and a corrupt senator who is trying to seize the land in the town.

This movie was based on a 1947 Broadway musical that took twenty years to finally make it to the silver screen; this was due to the fact that those studios who were interested in adapting it to the screen wanted to make changes to the story (the themes of racism were ahead of their time and considered too hot to handle), but the writers held out until a faithful version could be made. By the time the movie was made, the themes were no longer controversial, but time had also rendered some of it quaint and a little dated.

Nevertheless, I found the movie thoroughly enjoyable. The opening scenes in which Fred Astaire and Petula Clark are seen walking against a backdrop of beautiful landscapes and famous sites (including the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore) are a form of cinematic magic that fires the imagination and prepares one for the magical events that follow. Fred Astaire was in his late sixties at the time, and even though he keeps his dancing quite simple, he still remains light on his feet and engaging throughout. The movie is also filled with top-notch songs and people who can actually sing (two things that DOCTOR DOLITTLE could have used), with Petula Clark and Don Francks performing beautifully, but Tommy Steele (as the leprechaun) doesn't always manage to keep on the right side of annoying. Barbara Hancock is wonderful as a deaf and dumb girl (who communicates through dance, an appropriate conceit for a musical). Keenan Wynn almost steals the movie (he would have if Fred Astaire hadn't been present) as the racist, pompous Senator who is turned black to learn the other side of his racist ways; unfortunately, his makeup is not particularly convincing in many of the scenes. The use of language is stunning in this movie; you can hear the music of the Irish lilt, and it is loaded with memorable lines. It's a bit too long, though, and the plot gets confused at times, but there's a lot of real magic here, and it's become one of my favorite movie musicals.

Gods of Filmmaking

Starring Fred Astaire, Petula Clark, Tommy Steele, and Don Francks. Cinematography by Philip Lathrop. Edited by Melvin Shapiro. Produced by Joseph Landon. Written by E.Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Finian McLonergan (played by Fred Astaire) and his daughter Sharon (played by Petula Clark) have left Ireland, their beloved motherland, and traveled across the ocean to end up in the small town of Rainbow Valley, Missitucky. Unbeknownst to anyone (even Sharon) Finian has brought with him a crock of gold that he intends to plant in the earth and watch it multiply well beyond his wildest imagination. But on the night of the burial he is confronted by Og (played by Tommy Steele), an angry leprechaun who rightfully owns the gold. Meanwhile, the community of Rainbow Valley is struggling financially. Their watershed product, a mentholated tobacco, has yet to leave the developmental stages and time is running out with their creditors.

Now a hot, young Hollywood filmmaker, Francis Ford Coppola suddenly found himself to be a prized commodity for movie studios in need of a director. Once such contact came from Warner Brothers who offered him a job helming a musical they had already scripted and cast called Finian’s Rainbow. Being a lifelong fan of musicals Coppola eagerly agreed, but working within the studio system would prove to be more difficult than he anticipated.

Based on a 1947 play by E.Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy, Finian’s Rainbow was by far the largest and most ambitious project that Coppola had yet undertaken. It would also be the first time that Coppola would be forced to deal with inflated Hollywood personalities, both on screen and off. But despite his best efforts, and the bonus of bringing the film in under its modest budget, Finian’s Rainbow was bust at the box office.

The singing and dancing sequences, which should have been the film’s highlight, were not well received, and the runtime, which clocks in at almost two and half hours, far exceeds the needs of the story. Film legend Fred Astaire eventually referred to the project, which would unfortunately end up being his last musical, as “a disappointment”.

Perhaps the most significant event to come out of the production of Finian’s Rainbow was the introduction it provided for Coppola and a young film school graduate named George Lucas. Lucas had won a Warner Brothers sponsored filmmaking contest, earning himself a job in their animation department. But their animation department had been recently shut down and so rather than send him packing, he was made an administrative assistant to Coppola on Finian’s Rainbow.

The two men got along swimmingly; so well, in fact, that Coppola offered him a job as a production assistant on his next picture, The Rain People. The friendship turned into a partnership that over the next decade would result in such significant films as THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Apocalypse Now. Lucas would also play a crucial role in the early stages of Coppola’s failed filmmaking utopia, American Zoetrope.

Turner Classic Movies Eleanor Quin

The unforgettable saga of the Corleone family played out in The Godfather trilogy. A surveillance expert became a victim of his own voyeurism in The Conversation (1974). The damaging psychological effects of war on men was explored in Apocalypse Now (1979). But what about the story of an Irishman who steals a pot of gold from a leprechaun and then buries it in America so it can grow into a bigger treasure? Not quite what you think of when you recall the films of Francis Ford Coppola. But hey, you have to start somewhere.

The film was Finian's Rainbow (1968), starring Fred Astaire in his last screen musical. It marked the first major studio feature for Coppola, who up until this point had directed B-movies like The Playgirls and the Bellboy (1962) and Dementia 13 (1963). Coppola maintains that it was not his talent that landed him the job, but his age: he states in Francis Ford Coppola, A Filmmaker's Life, "The only reason I got the job was because I was young. Warner's had this creaky old property lying around, and they wanted a young director to modernize it. It was between me and Billy Friedkin." The creaky old property was actually a huge Broadway success twenty years earlier, and this was the first attempt to bring it to the silver screen. Theories explaining its delay ranged from writer E. Y. Harburg's steep asking price to hesitation surrounding the story's controversial racial tolerance subtext. Regardless of the reason for its late arrival to film, Finian's Rainbow was rushed into production at the behest of Warner Brothers; they wanted to capitalize on the recent success of The Sound of Music (1965), so time was of the essence. Given only a fraction of other film musicals' budgets, Coppola was regulated to the Warner's lot to shoot the movie. To cut costs even more, the studio reused the forest sets from Camelot (1967).

Astaire signed on to the film, agreeing to part from his usual dapper persona to play a rough and tumble type of character. In the original script, Finian did not dance and barely sang; Astaire expanded the role to include his talents onscreen. The dancing in the film became a point of contention. Astaire had insisted on the hiring of his favorite collaborator Hermes Pan as choreographer but Coppola disliked the man's work and fired him halfway through production, leaving only himself to map out the dance sequences. Largely employing improvisation techniques, Coppola managed to eke out the action, but admitted its shortcomings: "There was no planning, no set choreography. It was a matter of doing what seemed right at the time."

Astaire's co-star was Petula Clark, a British pop star best known for her top forty hit "Downtown." Curiously, both actors were apprehensive about working with the other: Clark was too intimidated to dance with the legendary performer, and Astaire fretted about singing with Clark. The tension dissipated when, after the first recording session, Astaire jumped about and shouted, "I sang with her! I sang with her!" Nonetheless, it was an odd pairing; industry speculation alluded to Clark's contract with the Warner's music division as a cost-effective motive. Another Brit pop star whose singing career had peaked in the late fifties was cast as the leprechaun - Tommy Steele. But his over-the-top performance wavered wildly out of Coppola's control. As the director explained later, "I felt the leprechaun should be more shy and timid and bewildered. . . And at my insistence Tommy started to do just that in rehearsal, and he was really good at it. . . Somehow during the actual shooting, little by little, he slipped back into his familiar character. . . He eluded me." Rounding out the supporting cast were Keenan Wynn, son of vaudevillian legend Ed Wynn, and Don Francks, a Canadian TV star and lounge singer.

Frustrated by the film's problems, Coppola sped through production, completing the film in twelve weeks. "Everyone at Warner's thought Finian's Rainbow was going to be a big hit; they were just wild about it. They decided to blow the picture up to 70 - from its original 35mm specifications - and make it a road show picture. And when they did that, they blew the feet off Fred Astaire when he was dancing. No one had calculated the top and bottom of the frame. I just wanted to be done with it, but I was upset thinking that this thing might be an enormous success."

Coppola had nothing to worry about: the film flopped almost immediately at the box office and marked the beginning of the end for big budget movie musicals with few exceptions. Finian's Rainbow earned vicious reviews, such as the one from Time: "The movie might have survived were it not for the ham-handed direction of Francis Ford Coppola." But there were also some fans; The Saturday Review lauded, "They have kept it just the lovely show it always wasn't tuneful, well-intended, occasionally funny, always appealing." Finian's Rainbow picked up two Oscar nominations for Best Sound and Best Score, but perhaps the most rewarding outcome of the film was off-screen. Coppola hired an unknown film student named George Lucas to be a production assistant. Working on the film together would form the foundation for their lifelong friendship, lasting long after the final credits rolled on Finian's Rainbow.

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THE RAIN PEOPLE

USA (101 mi) 1969

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

Francis Ford Coppola's 1969 study of an alienated American wife (Shirley Knight), filmed on the run and largely improvised. Like its main character, the movie hits the road with no final destination in mind, and the manic inventiveness that sustains the early passages becomes strained and weird by the end. Coppola's style is too flashy by half, and his determination to do things "new" is what dates the film most firmly now. Still, this is the first statement of Coppola's perennial theme--crippling loneliness within a failed family. With Robert Duvall and James Caan.

User comments from imdb Author: lewgin-1 from Oklahoma

I have a letter from Ms. Knight, who went to college with my older sister. In it, she tells of the hardships of making this film. She, herself, was pregnant--an interesting conjunction with the movie's plot--and the novice director was unsure, fairly green, and having great difficulties with all the decisions, logistics, etc. They were on the move all the time, and it was a very difficult shoot.

The film, however, with a strong debut for James Caan, remains effective and affecting. It's a great showcase for the talent that Ms. Knight has demonstrated her entire career--on television, in movies and on the stage, where she won the Tony for "Kennedy's Children."

This film has aged well.

Time Out Tom Milne

Coppola's fourth feature, a fascinating early road movie made entirely on location with a minimal crew and a constantly evolving script. Never very popular by comparison with Easy Rider probably because it suggested that dropping out was mere escapism, it has far greater depth and complexity to its curious admixture of feminist tract and pure thriller. Knight is outstanding (in a superb cast) as the pregnant woman who runs away in quest of the identity she feels she has lost as a Long Island housewife, and finds herself increasingly tangled in the snares of responsibility through her encounters with a football player left mindless by an accident (Caan) and a darkly amorous traffic cop (Duvall). Symbolism rumbles beneath the characterisations (Caan as the baby she is running from and with, Duvall as the sexuality and domination she is trying to deny) but it is never facile; and the rhythms of the road movie (leading through wonderfully bizarre locations to a resonantly melodramatic finale) confirm that Coppola's prime talent lies in choreographing movement.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Away from the studio for the New Hollywood -- Francis Ford Coppola heads to the open spaces for a feminine version of Dennis Hopper's biker-cowboy wandering that same year. Where Easy Rider found open-air escape in fatalist dropping out, Coppola's pensive heroine (Shirley Knight), a Long Island housewife impulsively ditching family and home, has to do with pushy flashbacks, motel rooms and unrealized affairs. So displaced she frequently takes to referring to herself in the third person, Knight is repressed from the start, awake in bed under snoozing hubby's heavy arm as garbage trucks noiselessly prowl gray suburbia outside. A morning shower, a visit to her folks, and she's outta there to sort things out, one roadside stop at a time -- "I got you all wrong... I got me all wrong" is an emblematic lament. Tentative trekking in front and back of the camera, for this is Coppola shorn of the maestro's twirling cape, on the road with handheld equipment and improvised scenario, as exposed and vulnerable as his protagonist. Ambivalence toward family is already in place, however, Italian wedding rammed oppressively against the lens before a tunnel ride segues into a blinding white fade: nesting or roaming, domesticity or independence, going back home or contemplating a quickie with buff hitchhiker James Caan? From sensual to maternal, since Caan's a footballer made helpless from gridiron pummeling and a plate in his head, thus a dry-run for the baby forming inside her, and reminder of, rather than escape from, home. Hothead motorcycle cop Robert Duvall completes the triangulation, bound to end in tragedy since, as Caan stammers, "when the Rain People cry, they disappear altogether" -- like mirror reflections turned prismatic and caged critters, add-water metaphors for the film-school graduate. Self-consciously sensitive, Coppola charts a perilous new freedom, both in people's lives and in the industry, the emotional inquiry scored delicately to the traffic sounds outside a phone booth and attuned to Knight's selfish-scared-neurotic-luminous traveler, looking to break connections only to find, in a randy widower's trailer park, the inescapability of responsibility. With Marya Zimmet, Tom Aldredge, Laurie Crews, Margaret Fairchild, and Andrew Duncan.

User comments from imdb Author: Filmjack3 from United States

In some scenes in the Rain People, Francis Ford Coppola's precursor to his hey-day of the seventies, there is the mark of a similar situation to 1969's Easy Rider, but not exactly in the same reference frame. Here we have a drama about disconnected people from society, in some ways alienated by the choices or by limits imposed by one mean or another. It's one of those rare original dramas where some scenes stand alone as total knockouts. Even with such a low-string budget and a very freewheeling, so to speak, attitude about filming the movie, Coppola is able to capture everything that needs to be said through these clearly defined characters and the curved, unexpected degrees of one character versus the helplessness of another, or vice versa, or both. And, as one might be inclined seeing as how it is very much about the cutaways of suburban life of the 1960s, it has that escapism of the film mentioned before, but of a more concrete, near timeless quality with the drama and the underlying issues. In a way, if Bergman were on route as a quasi-guerrilla 20-something filmmaker out to get the strange truths of everyday outsiders, this might be it.

But along with all of the very direct and sometimes self-conscious photography (though also with a more documentary approach at times, akin with its indeterminable characters), the actors all fit into place. Shirley Knight, an actress I'm not too familiar with, has a complex, diverging role as a pregnant wife running off in a sort of existentialist conundrum of what life is there to have. There are moments of some awe-inspiring acting by her, and one of my favorites (if not my favorite) is when she is on the telephone calling her husband the first time. Such a tense scene on both ends, and in every small gesture and inflection of a word so much about her is spoken with so little. It's extraordinary in ways that mirror others in Coppola's films. Then comes in the character of 'killer' played by James Caan. This, too, is a dangerous character to take on, as it is a mix of childish bewilderment and amusement with scarred memories. Think Forrest Gump if he didn't make it past the football and wit. It's one of his best, actually, by being the most minimalist- for a guy who's usually playing tough guys in movies, here's one that also is part of the crux of the story and of Knight's character. Also very good in a supporting role is Robert Duvall as a cop with a rough side and rather checkered past; kind of an early sample of other defected characters he would play later on in his career.

So the characters, and what Coppola risks in having an uneasiness running in them, are really what make up the film, as whatever story there is it is definitely not resolved in the usual way you might think or expect. The last ten or so minutes are like others in Coppola's work, where the specific tragedies on all sides are undercut by the emotional- and psychological- implications this will leave on the principles are amplified to the sublime and sad. This is, for its time, brave on the part of what is trying to be represented (in both the freedom as well as the flaws and ambiguities) in the subject matter. And the style of the picture adds a fragmented kind of view onto it all with quick flashbacks that are graphic and self-contained in a contrast with the longer shots in some crucial scenes. It's a road movie of its period, but its also got a lot more working than it would under another filmmaker with less chances to take on the nature of these outcast characters. One of the best films of 1969.

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THE GODFATHER

USA (175 mi) 1972 The Godfather - Official site from Paramount Pictures

Time Out Geoff Andrew

An everyday story of Mafia folk, incorporating a severed horse's head in the bed and a number of heartwarming family occasions, as well as pointers on how not to behave in your local trattoria (i.e. blasting the brains of your co-diners out all over their fettuccini). Mario Puzo's novel was brought to the screen in bravura style by Coppola, who was here trying out for the first time that piano/fortissimo style of crosscutting between religious ritual and bloody machine-gun massacre that was later to resurface in a watered-down version in The Cotton Club. See Brando with a mouthful of orange peel. Watch Pacino's cheek muscles twitch in incipiently psychotic fashion. Trace his rise from white sheep of the family to budding don and fully-fledged bad guy. Singalong to Nino Rota's irritatingly catchy theme tune. Its soap operatics should never have been presented separately from Part II.

In the opening scene Francis Ford Coppola offers up a challenge: the mafia can protect the citizenry where the government does not, the mafia demands less for that protection, where the government offers effete bureacracy the mafia offers justice. Somewhere between there and the final scene the mafia, like the government before it, goes terribly wrong by responding in seemingly sensible manners to unavoidable issues. The glamour, the elegance, the mystique, the intrigue...some reviewers compared the mafia to a corporation after this film, but I don't see any corporations vaguely like this. Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert Duvall have never been better, and that's really saying something. James Caan plays on an entirely different level from the rest of his career. Diane Keaton, Talia Shire are tremendous. More than all that though, the big guns are given the opportunity to roar by so many great actors in small places setting things up-Abe Vigoda and Simonetta Stefanelli are perfect-so many brilliant underlit shots in strange and sensual places with an accent on distance and the absence of distance. There has never been a more powerful four minutes of cinema than the montage trilogy of assassinations, baptism, and the renunciation of evil by The Godfather. The Nino Rota score is brilliant, but the theme was never fully developed until Slash got ahold of it twenty years later in the Hippodrome, Paris.

Rarely can it be said that a film has defined a genre, but never is that more true than in the case of The Godfather. Since the release of the 1972 epic (which garnered ten Academy Award nominations and was named Best Picture), all "gangster movies" have been judged by the standards of this one (unfair as the comparison may be). If a film is about Jewish mobsters, it's a "Jewish Godfather"; if it's about the Chinese underworld, it's an "Oriental Godfather"; if it takes place in contemporary times, it's a "modern day Godfather."

If The Godfather was only about gun-toting Mafia types, it would never have garnered as many accolades. The characteristic that sets this film apart from so many of its predecessors and successors is its ability to weave the often-disparate layers of story into a cohesive whole. Any of the individual issues explored by The Godfather are strong enough to form the foundation of a movie. Here, however, bolstered by so many complimentary themes, each is given added resonance. The picture is a series of mini-climaxes, all building to the devastating, definitive conclusion.

Rarely does a film tell as many diverse-yet-interconnected stories. Strong performances, solid directing, and a tightly-plotted script all contribute to The Godfather's success. This motion picture was not slapped together to satiate the appetite of the masses; it was carefully and painstakingly crafted. Every major character - and more than a few minor ones - is molded into a distinct, complex individual. Stereotypes did not influence Coppola's film, although certain ones were formed as a result of it.

The film opens in the study of Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), the Godfather, who is holding court. It is the wedding of his daughter Connie (Talia Shire), and no Sicilian can refuse a request on that day. So the supplicants come, each wanting something different - revenge, a husband for their daughter, a part in a movie.

The family has gathered for the event. Michael (Al Pacino), Don Vito's youngest son and a second world war hero, is back home in the company of a new girlfriend (Diane Keaton). The two older boys, Sonny (James Caan) and Fredo (John Cazale), are there as well, along with their "adopted" brother, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), the don's right-hand man.

With the end of the war, the times are changing, and as much as Don Vito seems in control at the wedding, his power is beginning to erode. By the standards of some, his views on the importance of family, loyalty, and respect are antiquated. Even his heir apparent, Sonny, disagrees with his refusal to get into the drug business. Gambling and alcohol are forces of the past and present; narcotics are the future. But Don Vito will not compromise, even when a powerful drug supplier named Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) arrives with promises of high profits for those who back him.

Don Vito's refusal to do business with Sollozzo strikes the first sparks of a war that will last for years and cost many lives. Each of the five major mob families in New York will be gouged by the bloodshed, and a new order will emerge. Betrayals will take place, and the Corleone family will be shaken to its roots by treachery from both within and without.

The Corleone with the most screen time is Michael (it's therefore odd that Al Pacino received a Best Supporting Actor nomination), and his tale, because of its scope and breadth, is marginally dominant. His transformation from "innocent" bystander to central manipulator is the stuff of a Shakespearean tragedy. By the end, this man who claimed to be different from the rest of his family has become more ruthless than Don Vito ever was.

Despite the likes of Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Scarface, ...And Justice for All, and Scent of a Woman on his resume, Pacino is best remembered for the role he created in The Godfather (and subsequently reprised in two sequels). While this is not his most demonstrative performance - indeed, he is exceptionally restrained - the quality of the script makes Michael Corleone notable.

Next to Humphrey Bogart's Rick from Casablanca, Oscar winner Marlon Brando's Don Vito may be the most imitated character in screen history. The line "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse" has attained legendary status, as has the entire performance. With his raspy voice, deliberate movements, and penetrating stare, Brando has created a personae that will be recalled for as long as motion pictures exist.

Don Vito is a most complicated gangster. In his own words, he is not a killer, and he never mixes business with personal matters. He puts family first ("A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man") and despises displays of weakness. He understands the burden of power, and his wordless sympathy for Michael when he is forced to assume the "throne", is one of The Godfather's most revealing moments (about both father and son).

The Godfather had three Best Supporting Actor nominees, all well-deserved. The first was Pacino (who probably should have been nominated alongside Brando in the Best Actor category). The other two were James Caan and Robert Duvall. In a way, it's surprising that Duvall wasn't passed over. His presence in The Godfather isn't flashy or attention-arresting. Like his character of Tom Hagen, he is steady, reliable, and stays in the background. Not so for Caan's Sonny, whose demonstrative and volatile personality can't be overlooked.

Family responsibility. A father's legacy. The need to earn respect. The corrupting influence of power. These are some of the ingredients combined in Francis Ford Coppola's cinematic blender. They are themes which have intrigued the greatest authors of every medium through the centuries.

Although the issues presented in The Godfather are universal in scope, the characters and setting are decidedly ethnic. Even to this day, there is an odd romanticism associated with New York's Italian crime families. The word "Mafia" conjures up images of the sinister and mysterious - scenes of the sort where Luca Brasi meets his fate. Francis Ford Coppola has tapped into this fascination and woven it as yet another element of the many that make his motion picture a compelling experience.

We come to The Godfather like Kay Adams - outsiders uncertain in our expectations - but it doesn't take long for us to be captivated by this intricate, violent world. The film can be viewed on many levels, with equal satisfaction awaiting those who just want a good story, and those who demand much more. The Godfather is long, yes - but it is one-hundred seventy minutes well-spent. When the closing credits roll, only a portion of the story has been told. Yet that last haunting image (Kay's shock of recognition), coupled with Nino Rota's mournful score, leaves a crater-like impression that The Godfather Part II only deepens.

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Reel.com DVD review [Ken Dubois]

The Godfather‘s Epigrammatic Accumulation zunguzungu, October 8, 2008

Read the complete review for The Godfather TV Guide magazine

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The Godfather DVD Collection Alexander Larman from DVD Times (5 DVD set)

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DVD review: 'The Godfather Collection' Glenn Abel from DVD Spin Doctor (5 DVD set)

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] The Godfather Trilogy (5 DVD set)

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THE GODFATHER: Scene Locations

The Godfathers' Stats

"Doing the impossible - Part 1 - The Godfather" - - Art and the Zen of Design

Michael Herr for Vanity Fair Stanley Kubrick comments on THE GODFATHER in Section III, 13th paragraph (1999)

The Godfather - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert in 1972

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THE CONVERSATION A 96

USA (113 mi) 1974

Nestled in-between the first two THE GODFATHER (1972, 1974) movies, both of which won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, among others, with Coppola winning Best Director for the second one, is this mysteriously quiet and introspective film that may as well come from a different universe altogether, as it’s nothing at all like an operatic gangster picture, but is instead a stylishly tense and suspenseful character study of a surveillance expert, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), more along the lines of Jane Fonda in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), both dominated by powerful performances, arguably the best in each of their respective careers. While Hackman is more showy and entertaining in other pictures, winning the Best Actor award for THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) and Best Supporting Actor award for UNFORGIVEN (1992), this film is calibrated down considerably, where the viewer is intrigued by every nuance and inflection of Hackman’s understated performance, a loner, keeping to himself, barely uttering a word to anyone, feeling uncomfortable in social situations, literally locking himself into his supposedly impenetrable room most of the time, which remains locked up tight like a bank vault. While there are elements of the script (written by Coppola himself) that leave Harry inexplicably exposed, something you’d never dream he’d allow, the gist of it is the man is coming completely unraveled by the internalized pressure of the case he is working on, suspecting something horrible is about to happen, where as a devout Catholic he feels guilty just from the toxic atmosphere surrounding his work, recalling how it led to several deaths in the past, leaving inner scars that have never healed. The entire film takes place within the enveloping trauma slowly building inside, like a pressure cooker, where he remains closed, hermetically sealed, yet continually feeds off his own anxieties and fears, always suspecting the worst. In this way, the viewer remains on high alert, suspicious of any and all activities, and while Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966) was a key influence on the film, trying to make sense of random collected material, it feels more similar to the work of Michael Haneke in CACHÉ (2005), where the two films feel interrelated, both drawing on moral themes of collective guilt and memory.

Winner of the 1974 Palme d’Or (1^st Place) at Cannes, then called the Grand Prix (from 1964 to 1974), also a special mention Ecumenical prize, the film finds Coppola at the height of his powers, dialed down considerably, where this is a more ambiguous puzzle piece, brilliantly edited with ominous ramifications. Listed among the best 70’s paranoia films, which would have to include Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN (1974), Sydney Pollack’s THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy” of Klute (1971), THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974) and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976), these are films that rose from the ashes of the 1960’s assassinations, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, where television images flooded the nation reinforcing a government that had lost control, released just days before the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed 42 tapes from the Oval Office where President Richard Nixon had secretly been recording conversations with his immediate staff, leading to jail sentences for some and the President’s subsequent resignation a few months later. These films exemplified a growing sense of despair from extreme governmental mistrust, which they viewed as a threat to their democracy, often feeling powerless to do anything about it. Running throughout the film is an underlying cover-up of unseen criminal actions, suggesting events beyond our control, where the film is imbued with an alarming sense of fatalism, including a surreal dream sequence in the fog worthy of a psychoanalytic Bergman film, where Harry is heard to mutter under his breath, “I’m not afraid of death, but I am afraid of murder,” suggesting that throughout the film a murderer is in the midst. Given an almost Kafka-like sense of absurd authoritarianism, Harry is hired by a wealthy business executive known anonymously as the Director (Robert Duvall), shielded by heavy security at the front door, a wall of telephone screenings, and underlings apparently willing to risk their lives on his behalf, making it extremely difficult to contact him, where they are like mirror images of one another, each intensely private individuals leading solitary lives hidden behind heavily protected fortifications. Harry us supposedly the best in the business, owner of a small electronic surveillance company in San Francisco, where he designs his own exclusive products, which are for his use only and not for public usage.

At the outset, the only sequence shot by heralded cinematographer Haskell Wexler, the camera uses an aerial shot zooming down onto Union Square in downtown San Francisco, with a crowd mulling around, including the omnipresent figure of a mime who is constantly interacting with the crowd. Mimicking the walking mannerisms of others, he slides up next to Harry before we even realize who he is, a ubiquitous man in a trench coat blending in anonymously with the crowd, while there are other menacing signs reminiscent of some of the more disturbing 70’s conspiracy films. This sets the mood for finding a needle in a haystack, as within this mass congestion of humanity lies an important piece of evidence that has yet to be ascertained, as Harry is on the case collecting streams of evidence using hidden recording devices, following a young couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) as they continually encircle the square. We hear bits and pieces of their conversation, often cut off by the loud sounds of music playing nearby and elevated street noises. It all sounds relatively banal, where nothing stands out, but they are obviously very much in love, yet attempting to remain discreet, where it’s easy to develop a special affection for them, as they’re going to great lengths to remain secretive. A man with a bag (Michael Higgins) is following them around, arousing suspicion when he’s been identified, so he deftly moves away, meeting Harry and his partner Stan (John Cazale) in a van parked nearby which is filled to the brim with eavesdropping equipment. We don’t really get a sense of what we’re dealing with until Harry gets home, requiring several keys to unlock his door, yet a birthday gift has been left inside, apparently by the landlord, which peeves Harry to no end, incensed that someone had access inside, making an immediate call, where he can be heard voicing his displeasure, “I would be perfectly happy to have all my personal things burn up in a fire because I don’t have anything personal. Nothing of value. Nothing personal except my keys!” Immediately we sense Harry is inordinately protective of his privacy, bordering on a manic obsession with the details of his perfectionism, as the man is an expert at remaining anonymous and not being detected or found.

The film is a master class of interior character development, as Harry Caul undergoes a personal transformation of epic proportions. Used to spying on others with the latest, state-of-the-art equipment, offering a detached, passionless, and non-judgmental view of the people affected by his work, in this film the tables are turned on Harry, where he is subject to extraordinary scrutiny, where the spier becomes the spied upon, yet what gets Harry is the completely invisible network surrounding him, literally closing in on him, all without his knowledge, where if truth be told, it all may be completely imagined on his part, enveloping him with a paranoiac sense of fear, but real or not, he finally starts feeling the effects of being the target of one of his own surveillance operations. Once he realizes there may be hidden motives behind his assignment, where he is tested by one of the Director’s assistants (Harrison Ford) to hand in the work to him, though he was specifically instructed to give his work to no one other than the Director, which sends him into a panic, as if he was being used and set up, further exacerbated when he recognizes the subjects of his assignment are working in the same building. Examining the contents of his recordings more closely afterwards, he’s able to detect words that were muffled before, where he is clearly able to distinguish the words, “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” Bending his mind over that phrase haunts him, sending him to church where he offers a confession, “I’ve been involved in some work that I think will be used to hurt these two young people. This happened to me before. People were hurt because of my work. I’m afraid it could happen again.” This sends him spiraling through a moral crisis, as he wonders if he can in some way prevent it, knowing that he’s only the messenger, that once he delivers his work, it’s out of his hands. In the early part of the film Harry subordinated his own personal thoughts by accentuating the professionalism and expertise of his work. In this way he avoided any troubling existential crisis. But circumstances change, where he becomes the subject of some unknown, secret investigation, which sends him into a fever dream of anguish, exemplified by an elaborate dream sequence where he attempts to reach out to this unsuspecting young couple and offer his help and assistance, but to no avail, as they are lost in the fog, leaving him alone in a purgatory of powerlessness and helplessness.

As the story unravels, it’s told in a moody, atmospheric, completely absorbing style accentuating an interior mindset, beautifully expressed by jazzy piano music written by David Shire that evokes a quiet tenderness in brief interludes, literally providing the pulse of the film. While playing on the audience’s expectations, what’s so unique about the subject is the timing, released when the government was resorting to the exact same methods shown onscreen, then lying about it afterwards, covering up their involvement, where surveillance technology, specifically wiretapping, was a weapon that could just as easily topple a President as protect him. The Watergate scandal was a moral crisis that played out onscreen, where the film raises ethical questions about spying on others without their knowledge and consent, which only elevates to greater heights when it’s the government performing the secret operations. The idea of spying on citizens was shown to great effect in THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006), a film that openly describes the brazen methods used by the East German Stasi secret police on its own citizens, threatening immediate arrest, literally extorting them for favors and information on others, where no one was safe, as Stasi operatives themselves were watched. This is the scenario that plays out in this film, as Harry has to come to terms with the consequences of what he’s done, willingly or not, revealing just how inept he is in affecting the final outcome, as he’s a lone citizen, completely powerless against a larger, better organized and well-financed operation whose motives remain unknown. When the hunter becomes the hunted, the film reveals the dire psychological implications, where one’s vulnerability is exposed and laid bare before higher powers that remain safely protected behind invisible walls. Yet Harry becomes obsessed with how they bugged his apartment, as he’s the master of their methods, so if anyone could figure it out, it would be him, stripping the walls and floorboards, checking the electrical wiring, literally tearing apart what was previously a completely ordered and tidy apartment, with everything perfectly in place, now stripped bare, turned into a demolition zone where pure anarchy reigns supreme. Of note, the character of Harry Caul was inspired by surveillance technology expert Martin Kaiser (whose work station certainly resembles Harry’s), FBI Vendetta Against Martin L. Kaiser Martin L. Kaiser, Inc. - Marty Kaiser, who later wrote a book, Odyssey of an Eavesdropper: My Life in Electronic Countermeasures and My Battle Against the FBI, and also served as a technical consultant on the film.

The Conversation | The Cinematheque

Coppola’s 1974 Palme d’Or winner, an exemplar of the 1970s paranoid conspiracy thriller, arrived at the height of Watergate. Gene Hackman is repressed, guilt-ridden Harry Caul, a San Francisco surveillance expert known as “the best bugger on the West Coast.” Hired by a mysterious businessman (Robert Duvall) to eavesdrop on a young couple (Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams), Harry records what may or may not be evidence of a murder plot. Harrison Ford, John Cazale, and Terri Garr also appear. Inspired by Antonioni’s Blow Up (as was De Palma’s Blow Out), The Conversation stands as one of Coppola’s finest works — and one of the great films of the 1970s — but remains overshadowed by the director’s first two Godfather films and Apocalypse Now. Coppola, busy with his next project, allowed editor and soundman Walter Murch to oversee postproduction. Murch’s magnificent, multi-layered sound design, integral to the film’s brilliance, is a cinema landmark.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Gene Hackman rides the city bus and tells people he doesn't have a phone. No one seems to think this unusual and he keeps it in a drawer. Then his life changes when he eavesdrops on Laverne & Shirley (ok, just Shirley and some guy). He feels somewhat guilty about how his work enables people to commit murder so he confesses to a priest who says nothing. It's all put together very nicely; Francis Ford Coppola's script is very coherent considering that it's willfully incomplete and appears to be largely comprised of perhaps unlinked ruminations regarding the Kennedy assassination and contemporary political problems. The domestic intelligence units have a very high gloss seediness to them that feels right.

The Conversation, directed by Francis Coppola | Film review - Time Out Tom Milne

An inner rather than outer-directed film about the threat of electronic surveillance, conceived well before the Watergate affair broke. Acknowledged as the king of the buggers, Hackman'ssurveillance expert is an intensely private man. Living alone in a scrupulously anonymous flat, paying functional visits to a mistress who plays no other part in his life, he is himself a machine; and the point Coppola makes is that this very private man only acquires something to be private about through the exercise of his skill as a voyeur. Projecting his own lonely isolation on to a conversation he painstakingly pieces together (mesmerising stuff as he obsessively plays the tapes over and over, adjusting sound levels until words begin to emerge from the crowd noises), he begins to imagine a story of terror and impending tragedy, and feels impelled to try to circumvent it. In a splendidly Hitchcockian denouement, a tragedy duly takes place, but not the one he foresaw; and he is left shattered not only by the realisation that his soul has been exposed, but by the conviction that someone must have planted a bug on him which he simply cannot find. A bleak and devastatingly brilliant film.

Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian

After 28 years, Coppola's cerebral classic of paranoia and surveillance still looks outstanding, and more relevant than ever in the age of CCTV. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a private bugging operative engaged by the shadowy chief of an unnamed corporation to listen in on the conversation of a man and woman. This Caul does, using hi-tech techniques to refine and clarify the recording over virtually the entire movie - removing the echoing, whispering, weird buzzing harmonics - so that every enigmatic word is audible.

The resulting tape is the focus of a Kafkaesque tale laden with suspicion and fear, and also becomes a symbol of Caul's own loneliness and inability to form relationships. It is an extraordinary premonition of Watergate - though Lyndon Johnson tape-recorded White House conversations in the 60s, giving Nixon the idea. The plot finally turns on the exact emphasis and intonation of two words on the tape. Audiences are entitled to wonder: could those really be made to sound different through audio glitches? Or did Coppola's sound designer, Walter Murch, cheat by recording two different versions? It doesn't matter. This is a severe and gripping masterpiece.

The Conversation - Philip Brophy

In his commentary for this rerelease of his 1974 film, Francis Ford Coppola talks about how he started out wanting to make "personal films," ones which he both wrote and directed, and the adaptations which became his stock in trade starting with The Godfather were meant to be a sideline. It’s an odd comment considering that in the 25 years since, Coppola fulfilled that goal exactly thrice. But no matter: The Conversation stands as Coppola’s best writing effort by far, and his greatest movie apart from Apocalypse Now. Gene Hackman (also in one of his finest performances) stars as Harry Caul, a retiring, paranoid surveillance expert who becomes obsessed with deciphering the seemingly innocuous conversation (between Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) he’s been paid to record. Shot with eerie restraint — editor and sound designer Walter Murch says in his commentary that the intent was to mimic the movements of security cameras — the film holds back more the further the noose tightens around Harry’s neck. (Incidentally, Murch’s commentary is by far the more informative of the two, revealing that huge chunks of the film were transposed in editing, and that many of its most memorable moments were only conceived in post-production.) The closer we get to uncovering the motives of Harrison Ford’s unctuous but slyly venomous aide (and his nearly unseen boss, played finally by an uncredited Robert Duvall), the more we want the camera to break loose from its moorings, but it never does. Released the same year as The Godfather, Part II (and eventually losing the Best Picture Oscar to it), The Conversation is in many ways the superior film (though it still loses out to Apocalypse Now overall). Its claustrophobic intensity packs more of an emotional punch than Godfather II’s epic sprawl; while Godfather II goes for the knockout every time, The Conversation sneaks under your guard and floors you with a well-placed jab.

eFilmCritic Reviews Paulapalooza

Before he did things which can only be marginally regarded as entertainment such as JACK (reputedly a favorite of HBS' own Slyder), Francis Ford Coppola was, for a time, maybe the most accomplished filmmaker on the planet. No one questions of the genius of THE GODFATHER and its sequel, and APOCALYPSE NOW is rightly canonized as the most profound exploration of the human condition filtered through wartime yet committed to film. So why, in this age where human identity and rights to privacy are more and more compromised, is THE CONVERSATION not dissected and praised with the same breaths as the former? Probably because it doesn't have a semi-"hunky" lead, as Sheen or Pacino COULD be described (but not by me, sheesh, I don't like men THAT way). It has Gene Hackman, an understated actor, in one of his most understated roles, but one so complex as to be absolutely chilling.

Hackman's Harry Caul is the best damn Orkin man on the planet, meaning he can bug anybody, anytime, anywhere. He's also paranoid and desperately unhappy, recognizing, at least subconsciusly, how tenuous that privacy truly is since he takes it from people for money every day. His conscience begins to get the best of him, however, when he overhears a line said by his newest target..."He'd kill us if he got the chance." Determined to act to prevent his work from causing someone's death, Harry gets involved, destroying his professional code and his psychological stability.

Hackman is dead-solid perfect as Caul, and the rest of the small cast (Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, the lamented John Cazale, and Teri Garr among them) hits every right note to counterpoint Hackman's pronounced silences. Harrison Ford strikes an imposing sense of impending menace in a rare bad guy turn, and the uncredited Robert Duvall is excellent and appropriately mysterious in his brief appearance. Since every film Coppola makes with Duvall is damn good, one has to wonder why Francis doesn't get Robert soused with the family wine and sneak a contract in front of Colonel Kilgore's alcohol-impaired writing hand every time the funding comes through.

Besides the deft plotting of Coppola's original screenplay and the excellent acting, Coppola puts this one over the top with an ingenious use of, appropriately enough, sound. Nat Boxer, Walter Murch, and Art Rochester, the production's sound team, reveal layers of meaning as sound is recorded, re-recorded, and understood during the course of the film. It's a skillful use of a technical narrative device to entrench the audience in the world of the protagonist, and it was nominated for an Oscar for its achievement.

After musing over this film for a short time, it's obvious how much Coppola owes Hitchcock (though to be fair, doesn't every thriller with ambiguous characterizations and adroit storytelling get labeled as "Hitchcockian"?).From the tortured anti-hero to the alluring femme fatale to the shockingly twisty climax and the cold, ironic denouement, THE CONVERSATION is a thriller of the first order and a horror film fit for our modern society. We're a codependent bunch, we are, and the sight of Harry Caul alone in his apartment should hackle a set of heebie jeebies up the spine of anyone prone to self-analysis. It could be that few people discuss THE CONVERSATION because it's so incisive in its view of our fears that, like an unpleasant thought, we ignore it and hope that the difficult questions it represents will fade away and do us no harm.

This flick was later viewed by Jerry Bruckheimer, who thought, "If I added some explosions, wiseass hackers, and Will Smith running down the street in his underwear, it'd be SO money!"

The Conversation - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

Somewhere between the twin peaks career achievements of The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), director Francis Ford Coppola took time off to work on a small scale, personal film he had been contemplating for years. "I wanted to make a film about privacy," Coppola stated (in the biography Gene Hackman by Allan Hunter), "using the motif of eavesdropping and wiretapping, and centering on the personal and psychological life of the eavesdropper rather than his victims. It was to be a modern horror film, with a construction based on repetition rather than exposition, like a piece of music. And it would expose a tacky, subterranean world of wiretappers: their vanities and ethics..." The resulting film, The Conversation (1974), went into production prior to the media's exposure of Watergate but was released just after the incident became public knowledge. While this might have seemed like a welcome publicity coup at the time, it didn't really improve the film's commercial prospects and the film was barely noticed by American moviegoers. Many critics, however, consider The Conversation to be Coppola's masterpiece despite its deceptively modest design and the film went on to win the Golden Palm as Best Film at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. Now, The Conversation is more timely than ever with the implications of the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 sanctions on our personal privacy and freedom.

In a plot that bears similarities to Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) except that the focus is on sound recording and not photography, a reclusive surveillance expert named Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) stumbles across what he believes to be a murder plot. It begins when he is hired by a client (Robert Duvall) to record a conversation between a young couple and through repeated playbacks of their dialogue suspects they may be in great danger. Then the tapes are stolen and Harry, feeling guilty over what he has uncovered, becomes increasingly obsessed with the couple (played by Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest). Should he warn them? Should he try to intervene somehow? As Harry's paranoia escalates he is driven to investigate a reference to room 773 at the Jack Tar Hotel, the site of a planned murder. His discovery of the truth leads to a shocking denouement and the realization that he has become a victim of his own profession.

According to Coppola, "he first conceived the idea for The Conversation in the mid-1960s while listening to director Irvin Kershner (The Flim Flam Man, 1967) discuss espionage and state-of-the-art surveillance tactics...He told Coppola about long-distance "shotgun" microphones that looked like rifles. They were so powerful that when they were aimed at the mouth of each speaker they could actually record a conversation between two individuals, even in the midst of a crowd." (from Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola by Gene D. Phillips). This particular detail so fascinated Coppola that it became a key element in the elaborate opening sequence in The Conversation in which Harry records a couple's conversation in a crowded public park in downtown San Francisco.

In developing the central character of Harry Caul, Coppola read extensively on wiretapping and surveillance experts such as Bernard Spindel, a legend in his field, and Hal Lipset, a San Francisco native, who was eventually recruited as a technical consultant on the film. The director also incorporated some autobiographical details into Caul's background; in high school, Coppola was a science geek and president of the radio club. One time he even planted hidden microphones around his own home so he could eavesdrop on family conversations. He envisioned Caul as someone who was an oddball in his youth, always tinkering with gadgets like himself. Even the character's name reinforced his hermetic nature. "I called him Harry Call," Coppola said "but she [the transcriber] had typed Caul. When I saw what she had typed, I decided to keep the spelling, since I knew what a caul is. It is the membrane that surrounds a fetus until it is born. Through most of the movie, Coppola continues, Harry wears a translucent plastic raincoat, a visual symbol that he is still insulated inside a caul." (from Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola by Gene D. Phillips).

Gene Hackman was Coppola's first choice for the role of Harry. "He's ideal because he's so ordinary, so unexceptional in appearance," Coppola said. "The man he plays is in his forties, and has been doing this strange job for years." Despite Hackman's brilliant performance in the role, it wasn't a pleasurable experience for him. "He was really a constipated character," Hackman recalled, "It was a difficult role to play because it was so low key." This, of course, was a challenge to Coppola as well - how to make a taut, compelling film with such a cerebral character at the center?

The one person who helped Coppola transform The Conversation from a static portrait of a loner into a riveting, Hitchcock-like thriller was Walter Murch, an ingenious sound engineer who had previously worked with him on The Rain People (1969) and American Graffiti (1973). The director stated "although the film was about privacy, sound would be the core element in it. So I suggested that he [Murch] edit the picture as well, which he hadn't really done before and didn't think of as his specialty. He agreed. And that was when I got to know Walter as a filmmaker..." As a result, the sound in The Conversation adds a disturbing and disorienting texture to the movie that gives it tension and a constant edge. Murch points out, for example, "you don't know what the point of view is at the opening. It's clear only that you are high up looking down on Union Square in San Francisco, hearing those soft, billowy sounds of the city at lunchtime. Then, like a jagged red line right across the view, comes this distorted - you don't know what it is - this digital racket...you will learn what it is soon enough, and you will learn that what you assumed was a neutral God's-eye point of view is in fact the point of view of a secret tape recorder that is recording all of this, picking up these distorted sounds that are the imperfectly recorded voices of the targets, the young couple's conversation sometimes muffled by the sounds of the square."

Initially Haskell Wexler was hired as the cinematographer on The Conversation but became so combatant and opinionated over how the film should be shot he was fired and replaced with Bill Butler who had worked with Coppola once before on You're A Big Boy Now (1966). Wexler's Union Square sequence, however, which was extremely difficult to shoot, remains in the film and sets the appropriate tone of paranoia that runs throughout the film. Other than the Wexler incident The Conversation was a harmonious production. Coppola was able to shoot the film in his hometown of San Francisco (the warehouse used for Harry's workspace in the film was only five blocks from the director's American Zoetrope studio) and work with his own repertoire of actors, many of them on the verge of major career breakthroughs - Harrison Ford, Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, John Cazale, and Teri Garr. Robert Duvall, who was already a well-established character actor and Best Supporting Actor nominee (for The Godfather), agreed to appear in an important but unbilled cameo.

Though dwarfed by the success of the two Godfather pictures, The Conversation still managed to attract the attention of the Academy voters and garnered three Oscar® nominations including Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Sound. It deserved more and certainly Gene Hackman should have been nominated. But the critics definitely took notice with Time magazine stating, "For Hackman, Caul presents a substantial challenge. It is a largely interiorized role in contrast to the action parts in which he has recently built his career. He responds with the most substantial screen performance he has done." Newsweek proclaimed the film "brilliantly original in its basic style and mood and prophetically American in its vision of a monitored society," while The Hollywood Reporter noted "a film of triumphant style and overwhelming passion, white hot with American anguish." And The Conversation is no less relevant today.

Interview: Gene Hackman - Film Comment Beverly Walker interview in 1988

If recent films are an indication, Gene Hackman is entering a whole new phase of his already remarkable career—as a late-blooming romantic leading man.

The most riveting scenes in three of his upcoming films are with women—even in such an unlikely vehicle as Mississippi Burning, the searing drama directed by Alan Parker in which he and Willem Dafoe play FBI agents investigating the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. Hackman’s gallant approach to Frances McDormand, who, as wife to the deputy sheriff, knows, literally, where the bodies are buried, is something to behold—tender, warm, and subtly sexual.

In Full Moon in Blue Water he plays a moping widower who is simply lost without a woman by his side, and in Woody Allen’s Another Woman, opposte Gene Rowalnds, his juicy, masculine charm is palpable. The surest sign we’re given of Rowlands’ character’s misguided life is her rejection of Hackman.

No other American actor is doing this kind of work. Indeed, civilized relations between the sexes have been largely absent from our films for 15 years—lost to the youth craze, buddy movies, and confusions brought on by women’s emergence from the kitchen and into society at large.

All the more remarkable, then, to find need, caring, and delicate sensuality embodied in an actor who in 1971 became a veritable icon of blue-collar machismo with his Oscar-winning portrayal of the obsesses narcotics cop, Popeye Doyle, in The French Connection. Not that Hackman has been totally confined to working-class trenches. He was a surveillance expert in The Conversation, a skydiver in Gypsy Moths, and a labor organizer in Reds. He did brilliant comic turns in Young Frankenstein and the Superman movies, and in the Eighties has risen to white-collar ranks, playing an arrogant defense secretary in No Way Out, a ruthlessly effective campaign manager in the underrated—and prescient—Power, and a confident, privilged foreign correspondent in Under Fire. In Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka, he combined marginal man with tycoon, as a gold prospector who strikes it rich and becomes a megalomaniacal island potentate.

But all of these films required Hackman to play the quintessential man’s man for whom women were mostly a diversion—often a troublesome one—if they were even around at all.

Director Arthur Penn thinks the roots of this metamorphosis may be seen in Night Moves, the 1975 thriller they made together where Hackman has tough, sexy scenes with Jennifer Warren. Perhaps. Certainly by the time of Under Fire (1983) in which he endures humiliation rather than relinquish a woman he loves to another man; Twice in a Lifetime (1985) where his steelworker agonizingly terminates a 30-year marriage for a woman of his wife’s generation (Ellen Burstyn and Ann-Margret co-starred); Hoosiers (1986) and his ardent wooing of Barbara Hershey; and even in No Way Out where carnality and male pride lead to murder, it was obvious that something fresh and potent was emerging.

Eugene Alden Hackman was born January 30, 1931 in San Bernardino, California. His father, a newspaper pressman, moved the family to Danville, Illinois—abandoning them when Hacjman was just 13. At 16, he lied about his age and joined the Marines, servining in China, Japan, and Hawaii. He got his first taste of show business in Armed Forces Radio, as a deejay and newscaster.

He briefly studied journalism at the University of Illinois (his grandfather had been a veteran journalist) and then hitchhiked to New York to attend the School of Radio Technique under the GI Bill. He worked in radio stations around the country for a few years and then returned to his birth state to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. Fellow classmates included Dustin Hoffman and Ruth Buzzi.

Returning to New York in 1956, he got work relatively quickly in summer stock, off-Broadway, and live television. A turning point came in 1963 when he won the Clarence Derwent Award for Irwin Shaw’s Children at Their Games, a production which lasted all of one night.

The hit comedy Any Wednesday, in which he co-starred opposite Sandy Dennis in 1964, established his Broadway reputation. Shortly thereafter, he won his first substantial film role, in Lilith, which starred Warren Beatty, who was responsible for Hackman’s being cast as his brother in Bonnie and Clyde. It was the first of three films he made for Penn (Night Moves, and Target in 1985), and earned him his first Oscar nomination in the supporting category. The second came two years later for I Never Sang For My Father, and two years later came The French Connection.

Altogether, Hackman has made an even 50 films, and though many have been routine, his contribution has always been of the highest order. “He is incapable of bad work,” says his Mississippi Burning director, Alan Parker. “Every direct has a short list of actors he’d die to work with, and I’ll bet Gene’s on every one.”

“He is an extraordinarily truthful actor,” comments Arthur Penn, “and he has the skill to tap into hidden emotions that many of us cover over or hide—and it’s not just skill but courage.”

The range of raw emotion, feeling, states of being and conflict Hackman can convey is remarkable. His face is a great instrument. His body still as a statue, we watch his face, the interplay between his mouth and eyes. He allows us inside; we are really with him, we see the decision process and thus are prepared for the final thrust of his action.

This great gift is of particular importance when he acts with women, because often the action there is internal rather than external, which is why he has been tapped for some of these recent roles.

“American movies have always had certain kinds of self-styled actors who shouldn’t be stars but are,” notes Penn, “and Gene is in the company of Bogart, Tracy, and Cagney.” The director agrees that Hackman is more than ready to bust loose of his average-Joe trappings and do something on a grand scale—a modern-day Coriolanus or Lear.

Two projects are already set for next year. In The Package, directed by Andy Davis for Orion Pictures, he plays a career master sergeant inadvertently implicated in a conspiracy. Then Hackman makes his directorial debut with Thomas Harris’ best-selling novel, The Silence of the Lambs, also for Orion.

There is an ageless quality to Hackman; he has changed little in 14 years and is more at ease with himself than ever. He attributes the new dimensions of his artistry to conscious acting choices rather than to an altered states as a person. “In a way, something is just beginning for him,” says Penn.

This is an exceptionally active period for you as an actor, and you have lots of choice. Why Mississippi Burning?

I suppose I see myself as a serious artist, and it felt right to do something of historical import. It was an extremely intense experience, both the content of the film and the making of it in Mississippi. I was dubious about shooting it there, but Alan thought it would be a cop-out not to, and he kept an edge on the project that was very valuable. As it turned out, we didn’t have much trouble, but there is, of course, still sensitivity.

Didn’t the original script center almost totally on the relationship between the two FBI agents?

Yes, and I had some initial reservations, fearing an exploitation of the incident. Before I accepted the project, much of that was fixed. It’s really the story of how two guys from totally different backgrounds work out their relationship in the process of solving a problem—in this instance the violation of civil rights, and murder. I suppose it’s the difference between a right-wing Republican and a fairly liberal Democrat—though we never discussed politics. My character is a former sheriff from Mississippi and Dafoe’s is more Northeastern oriented and academic.

It’s possible to see your character two ways—with racist tinges, or as someone who has risen above it but who understands and has compassion for these people and the problems of the region.

The FBI man in charge of the actual case was from Mississippi, which may have provided the movie parallel. My character did understand the regional attitudes, but he was definitely not a racist.

How much of the character’s background was in the script, and how much did you create for yourself?

There are just a few biographical type lines. One builds the rest along with the director. As an actor, you hope that you make the character come to life and understandable, without resorting to a lot of exposition, which can be boring.

I read everything I could get my hands on about that period and the incident, including the book Three Lives for Mississippi. In a curious way, I got a lot of insight from a book called The Selling of Marcus Dupree, which paralleled the life of a black football player born on or near the day of the murders. It was done in such a way as to imply that the civil rights workers’ deaths were not in vain: They died so that he could live.

There was a woman there who fought for years to get the case before the proper authorities, and she ended up losing most of what she owned. They froze her out. Everything I learned helped me shape the character in small and subtle ways. I didn’t spend much time on the accent because I did not want it too strong—country rather than Southern. Otherwise it would get in the way.

There’s a certain ambiguity in your relationship with the deputy sheriff’s wife (actress Frances McDormand). Was your character coming on to her just to get information, or was he attracted as well?

Originally, Alan wanted me to make love to her right then, on the floor of her house. I felt that was excessive and would distract from her as a human being and from her courage in terms of what has just revealed. She didn’t do it because she wanted to make love to me but because she thought it was right.

We finally agreed that the lovemaking would be left out, but perhaps the ambiguity comes from Parker’s wanting some of that feeling to remain. I never quite resolved the conflict in my own head. I felt he did care for her a lot, and in the end made a decision to just let her be, not to complicate her life further.

How do you play what I’ll call a double action like that? You’re sweet-talking this woman, and though you may like her, you’re really there to solicit information. There’s something similar in The French Connection, when you publicly rough up a black guy who is actually your informant.

You cannot play a lie. You must play some kind of truth, and if you make the right choice, the audience will read it right.

You mean you count on the film’s montage to give the right information?

Yes.

That takes a lot of single-mindedness, doesn’t it?

That’s right, and trust. That’s why it takes most actors at least ten years to have a maturity about what they do. You have to keep separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, to know what’s important and what isn’t, to understand certain physicality and energy.

It’s interesting she would say that because I think it is one of the most crucially important things to know about yourself. But most actors don’t want to deal with that—it’s too out front. They feel they should deal with what’s inside. That the intellectual side of acting shouldn’t exist, that it should all be right-brain function. But I’m a great believer in using both sides of the brain in approaching any art…painting or music…because the left-brain gives you the classical sense.

Referring to your beginnings at the Pasadena Playhouse, it is preposterous that you can Dustin Hoffman were considered “least likely to succeed.” It must’ve had something to do with your unconventional looks rather than with any lack of ability.

I think it did. Dustin was thought of as amusing and strange. He was called a “beatnik” because he wore a leather vest and sandals, which was outrageous then. I’d been in the Marine Corps for five years and was married—an equally unlikely candidate for movie stardom. I think that’s what drew us together. We became very close, and he lived with my wife and me for a while after coming to New York.

Neither Dustin nor myself looked like the leading men of that era, especially Dusty because he wasn’t tall. We were constantly told by acting teachers and casting directors that we were “character” actors. The world “character” denotes something less than attractive. This was drummed into us. I accepted the limitation, of always being the third or fourth guy down, and my goals were tiny. But I still wanted to be an actor.

It took guts to move forward toward an acting career at age 30-plus, with a wife but without encouragement. You must’ve had some kind of inner confidence or perhaps inner need that overwhelmed everything—your own fear and the stereotyping of others.

I had a little of both. Once I met the acting teacher I got the most from, George Morrison, and I started working twice a week with him on scene study, I got over a certain kind of terror. I started realizing that what I was saying to the other actor was very important, not only to them but to me as well. I don’t mean that I personally felt important. But at that moment of interaction there was a very concentrated sense of energy, and of connection, that felt great. I didn’t know if it was acting…I didn’t know what it was but it was thrilling. And I didn’t want to touch it, to examine it too closely—just to do it.

So it was finding that sense of brimming over with the life force that did it for you?

Yes. Actors tend to be shy people. There is perhaps a component of hostility in that shyness, and to reach a point where you don’t deal with others in a hostile or angry way, you choose this medium for yourself.

A surrogate personality.

Absolutely. Then you can express yourself and get this wonderful feedback.

In previous interviews, you’ve indicated that you were headed for the stage rather than films or TV. Why?

In the theater you can play characters totally different from your persona with the aid of make-up, costumes, and so on. In films, you’re pretty much limited to your type. In recognizing what was exploitable about myself, what would get me a job, I chose theater. I was still thinking in terms of conventional leading men in films. Brando had made his mark, so there was something of a groundswell about men who didn’t have conventionally handsome faces, but it hadn’t totally happened.

But it has by today, hasn’t it?

Yes. Conventional handsomeness is almost a deterrent now.

The French Connection was the real springboard for your career. Did you have any idea it would become such a hit?

No, no one did, including 20^th Century-Fox.

I’ve read you were quite conflicted during the filming because you found it difficult to play the violence.

That’s so. We shot in continuity, and on the second day I caught a black pusher in the alley and had to pop him in the face. The scene was originally shot in a squad car, with Roy Scheider and myself taking turns hitting him. I’d never had to do anything like that before. True, I’d done my share of fighting as a kid and I’d been in the Marine Corps, but as an actor I’d been taught that relaxation was of utmost importance, and I was not relaxing during that scene. In fact, I felt terrible, and the scene was no good. That night, I told Billy Friedkin he should consider replacing me. It was naïve of me to propose such an idea, but I was serious.

And what happened?

Billy said we’d talk about it later and continued to shoot. About the end of the first week, something clicked in my mind which brought the whole character to life for me and ended the conflict. I’d seen Eddie Egan, the real-life cop the character is based on, dipping a cruller into a cup of coffee and then pitching it over his head. There was something in his attitude that made everything very clear: This guy doesn’t give a shit about anything except his work; he is totally directed.

During the last week of filming, we re-shot the earlier scene except, we did it in an alley. By then I understood my character and could do the action with a certain fullness. When you do it like that, you communicate something to the other actor—Alan Weeks, a dancer—which is that you’re acting and not really hurting him. It was like magic.

And have you subsequently had problems portraying violence?

Always. I always have to find a way to do it. I listen to stunt guys, and I’m very careful; I insist it be totally choreographed. Still, it’s always hard for me, perhaps because there’s such a contradiction between fighting and the craft of acting. If you really fight somebody in a scene, it negates your craft. And since I’m only interested in my craft, it has to be resolved anew each time.

How’d you get that hat you wear throughout The French Connection?

Oh, I saw it in wardrobe one day and put it on.

It was way too small for you.

Oh, yes. That was why I liked it.

When you made I Never Sang for My Father, was your personal relationship with Melvyn Douglas affected by your mutual fictional roles of warring father and son?

The opposite. I had admired Melvyn so much as an actor, but he didn’t like me. During the filming, I inadvertently found out that he had actually warned someone else. This hurt me, but it certainly added to the tension in the film. We kept away from each other, rarely spoke.

The character I played was actually similar to my own father who, as opposed to Melvyn’s character, was not a real strong guy. So it was strange. At a tribute last month in Las Vegas, I avoided looking at a clip from the picture.

What considerations go into accepting or rejecting a given project?

The overall screenplay first, then the character proposed to me, and after that the director and other actors—almost always in that order. Of course, in the Seventies I took a couple of pictures because of the locale….

Full Moon in Blue Water has some extremely funny sequences. You and Teri Garr work well together.

It was worth doing the whole picture for just one scene I have with Teri, a big argument where I chased her around and called her a “whoor.” I loved it!

How do you manage to work at such a pitch, both in terms of quantity and quality?

I have a terrible need to excel at this thing I’ve chosen to do, and I keep wanting further challenges. Unfortunately, in film one is cast so close to type, and I keep getting offered similar roles. But within that context I try to find a way to do something a little different.

Tell me more about this influential acting teacher, George Morrison.

I was introduced to him by Ulu Grosbard, who directed me in my first summer stock production, A View from the Bridge. They’d been at Yale together, and Morrison was already teaching. He was very important for me. He was extremely sensitive and saw in me…something. He never said anything, like, “Gene, you’re a great talent,” but I had a sense he cared. Of course, he gave this caring to others as well, but for some reason I took it personally. His teaching was simple and understandable, something I could get my teeth into.

Will you describe your technique?

[Smiling indulgently, it seems] I do the same thing now was when I was just starting, I ask myself a few questions: How is this character like me? How is he unlike me? In the difference between these two, what is important? What choices can I make which will further the author’s intent? I ask myself where, when, why—real simple questions. I do an atmospheric kind of thing by dealing with objects such as where I’ve been when I come into a room, where I’m going when I leave it. Before every scene, I still do the same relaxation exercises George taught me 20-odd years ago. First-year acting tasks. Those work for me.

Of course, you can’t do just that. You have to make good choices and do a lot of technical things, too. It took ten years for me to fill up as a person, but once I became mature all of that kicked in in a simple, direct way.

Arthur Penn has spoken of the surprises you bring as an actor. He mentioned your death scene in Bonnie and Clyde, when he had suggested an image of a dying bull. How did you work with that image, and have you worked with other images?

I had seen some bullfights. In my motel room, I worked on all fours, trying to emulate the movements of a bull that had been wounded in the back of the neck and is dying.

I love animal images, but I’m so often cast as a working man, and when have we seen a working man who is, for example, a tiger?

How do you feel about other actors who try to physically inhabit a character? Like De Niro putting on weight for Raging Bull?

I love Bobby De Niro for taking those kinds of chances. It’s hard to describe the pressure of being on a movie set with ten million dollars or more riding on your performance. It’s terrible for an actor to have to deal with that, but it’s a reality and you know it. For De Niro to take on that kind of a character problem is very exciting for most actors. I can’t imagine anyone saying he was over the top or whatever. It was brilliant. I’d love to be given a role with that kind of challenge.

You’d be willing to do something like that?

Yeah. [smiling] I don’t have any problem gaining weight.

You’ve said in previous interviews that The Conversation was an important film for you, as was its director, Francis Coppola.

I’m always asked about Francis, and I always say it was one of the most interesting working relationships I’ve ever had. But in thinking back about it, I can’t remember anything in particular he ever said. He created ambience which is very good for an actor, the most important thing. You never have a sense he’s dissatisfied or that what you’ve done is not enough, or is too much…He’s just there.

Did you ever have a sense there was an autobiographical component to the film for him? Maybe not factual so much as spiritual and emotional. In The Conversation, the wiretapper lived his life “voyeuristically,” talks about being paralyzed by polio, left in the bath by his mother, and nearly drowning. Coppola may not have experienced all those things, but he did have polio….

There did seem to be something special about his relationship to the film, but I assumed it was just the way he typically worked. And I’ve never done a film with him since, though he has asked me a couple of times and we couldn’t work it out.

Coppola is a very mysterious man—extremely sensitive and yet with a certain kind of bluntness, possessing a great joy of life, but there is a dark side, too.

I could tell the film was very important to him. But when the shooting was over he walked away from it like it was a piece of dead meat. He had to be in New York to start Godfather II.

At the time, I recall hearing that major restructuring work was done in the editing room. Was the finished film very different from the script?

No. I think what people talked about was moments.

Are other actors important to you?

Very. It’s almost everything, once you’re on the set. The people in a scene together have to create an atmosphere to make it work. Today the hardest thing for me is to be patient with younger actors. I tend to forget I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and some of it is very easy for me. Being there, hitting marks.

Is it the technical part you’re impatient with?

I catch myself wanting to say—though I’ve never said it—“Try it another way…turn it upside down…do a 180 on it,” or whatever it takes. I watch actors in a real funk because they can’t make something work. I know how to make it happen for them, but I can’t say anything because it’s not my place. It’s a directorial prerogative, which is what I’m going to go on to now.

How important is a director to you? I’ve read that you like to direct yourself.

Yes, I do. Since I didn’t have a strong father, I don’t have any authority problem and I cannot stand to have someone tell me how to modulate a scene. I’d rather a director say, “Can you find another way to do this—louder or softer or funnier?” If someone comes over to me and says—especially if I think he’s conning me—“I’m wondering if you should go over there to that chair, or not?” it sets me off. Since I’m in a performance state, I don’t want to have to deal with a lot of politics about whether or not I should go to a chair. I’d much rather the guy say, ‘It doesn’t work for us, can we try something else?’

You prefer to make the choice yourself?

Yes, then I can immediately see what the problem is and do something about it, as opposed to having to deal with some kind of diplomacy which I don’t think has a place in art. I understand the necessity of being courteous, but when your energy is real high and you’re trying to capture something, you don’t want someone dealing with you on another level. That’s usually where I have most of my problems with directors.

It’s difficult for a director to know what words they can say to an actor, especially if the scene’s not working and he’s a little defensive. You feel, probably because of ego, that you want to fix it yourself. It’s a very strange atmosphere to work in, and [laughing ruefully] I pity directors who work with me. I do try very hard to get along, however.

They must know by now what to expect.

I guess the word is out, yes….

You’ve made three with Arthur Penn—what makes the two of you such a good combo?

I think it’s because we both came out of theater, even though I haven’t been back in a long time. Our approach is theatrical in terms of a concern for how the overall price works. And we both have a lot of energy. I like to come on the set when I’m not in the scene just to watch him work, to see the kind of energy and enthusiasm he puts into his side of it.

I made a list of your films that stick out in terms of having a lasting impact. Most are from the early phase of your career because we can already see their place: Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection, I Never Sang For My Father, The Conversation, Superman I and II, and possibly Under Fire and Night Moves. Twice in a Lifetime got significant new life in TV syndication and videocassettes and is increasingly written about.

I tend to agree with you, but actors have moments in films less commercially successful which they love. I had a scene with Candice Bergen in Bite the Bullet which is one of my favorites. I was telling her about my ex-wife, while standing around a waterhole in the middle of the desert. I played it on horseback.

I think some of my best work was in The French Connection, Part II—the withdrawal scene. I saw a lot of films on drug addiction and withdrawal, and I chose a specific pain for myself. Frankenheimer allowed me time to prepare for that kind of work in a class, when you’re in a protected situation, and another on asset where you’re incredibly limited by time and other restraints—it’s four in the morning and the crew has been there since six the previous morning, and people thin you’re being difficult because you need time to make the scene really come alive. The best actors can do it, though. An actor has to have a terrible toughness and sensitivity side by side.

Do you have a favorite movie in terms of your performance?

Yes, Scarecrow. It’s the only film I’ve ever made in absolute continuity, and that allowed me to take all kinds of chances and really build my character.

In the process of just living, most of us scar over—we almost have to. But if an actor allows that, it profoundly limits his artistry. Have you consciously kept yourself sensitive and vulnerable for the sake of your acting?

Most definitely. It’s one of the most difficult things an actor has to do, to keep himself sensitive, to watch behavior in others, to shut down the defense one has to have in the business end and shift immediately into the creative process.

How do you do it?

It’s a matter of concentration. I’ve developed it; most actors do. I can be incredibly angry about some business aspect of filmmaking and within 30 seconds be performing in a scene, having totally blocked it out.

The very process of acting is often one of regurgitating pain—how do you deal with that?

That’s the pleasure of the work. When you’re operating at your fullest as an actor, emotionally full—the scene is working, tears are flowing, and there’s a certain kind of warmth that suffuses you—nothing feels better!

When a painful scene is over, what do you do with yourself?

Well, there are a lot of practical considerations which you immediately have to think of. If you know that take was the one, and it’s over, you feel great. But there’s a beat when you say, “Do I have to do it again—maybe a close-up or a reverse angle?” If so, you must keep yourself contained. You find a little spot for yourself while they’re re-setting the camera. Stay close. And you do it again. If it felt really right the first time, it never feels as good the second.

How often do you feel your best take makes it to the screen?

I don’t bother myself with that. I decided long ago not to worry about other people’s taste in post-production.

You’ve said an actor can become better and fuller if he can give up a certain sense of his masculinity.

Yes. One of the attractive things in males is how much femininity they have in them—if they can reach it and deal with it.

Has that part of yourself become more available to you in recent years?

I think so, yes. I don’t think I’ve become more sensitive, but I’ve become more aware of what’s important. It’s really a matter of choice, as opposed to what’s available to me [from inside myself]. It’s a mellowness, a letting down of a macho idea.

There’s been a change in you that is reflected strongly in your face—many more layers of awareness and feeling and states of being, that you are now willing to reveal.

I think that’s why actors like Jimmy Dean and Laird Cregar were so amazing: they had all those layers, and yet they were so young. [Note: Laird Cregar was a physically imposing actor who died at the age of 28, having made an indelible mark in This Gun for Hire, Heaven Can Wait, and The Lodger.]

I do feel I’m getting better as an actor, but the clock is also running…Still, look at Ralph Richardson. In his last picture, Greystroke, he was so brilliant. He was always a wonderful actor, but there’s a difference between being wonderful and being great.

Marlon Brando. What is it about Brando?

He is our most sensitive actor and uses more of the feminine side of himself than anyone. Yet, he has tremendous masculinity.

Never have you been more warm, tender, sensuous, and male than in Another Woman. Every female I know who has seen it is talking about that!

I haven’t seen it. I didn’t read the script. Woody only sent me a few pages of dialogue.

Did you like that?

I did, surprisingly. There was no great responsibility. He just told me I was to play a writer from Santa Fe, and this woman—Gena Rowlands—was my ex-girlfriend. At the time, he didn’t know I was living in Santa Fe.

The Conversation • Senses of Cinema Brenda Austin-Smith, April 10, 2001

Notes on The Conversation • Senses of Cinema Megan Ratner from Senses of Cinema, April 10, 2001

'The Conversation': Francis Ford Coppola Paranoid Classic Dan Schneider from Alt Film Guide, also seen here: Dan Schneider on The Conversation - Cosmoetica

Listening to Coppola's The Conversation - Film - Identity Theory David C. Ryan, March 10, 2012

The Quietus | Film | Film Features | Snowden-der: Coppola's The ... Robert Bright, April 11, 2015

"He'd Kill Us If He Had The Chance": Coppola's The Conversation and ... Evan from The Seventh Art, February 11, 2008

World Cinema Review: Francis Ford Coppola | The Conversation Douglas Messerli, August 6, 2015

With The Conversation, Walter Murch made the editor the author / The ... Charles Bramesco from The Dissolve, April 23, 2015

Illumined Illusions-Seeing Cinema in a New Light [Ian C. Bloom] 4-page essay (pdf)

Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US films Tim Dirks thorough and expert analysis, also seen here: The Conversation (1974) - Filmsite

The Conversation Review - Pajiba Drew Morton

BFI | Sight & Sound | DVD: The Conversation (1974) Michael Brooke, December 20, 2011

Coppola's 'The Conversation': A Love Letter to the Process of Making ... Sean Murphy from Pop Matters, September 7, 2010

The Conversation - Joyless Creatures Benjamin Voigt, June 27, 2014

Gerald Peary - essays - The Conversation essay by Gerald Peary from Movie Classics Magazine, Fall 2000, who claims no more intense film exists in the Coppola canon

Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 wiretap masterpiece. - Slate Benjamin Strong, March 9, 2006

Review: The Conversation - Parallax View Rick Hermann, originally published in Movietone News 32, June 1974

The Conversation - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications: Philip Kemp from Film Reference

DoctorofMovies.com [Duncan McLean]

Why The Conversation Should Be Required Viewing at the NSA - The ... Alexander Huls from The Atlantic, April 7, 2014

Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation": How Cinematography ... Meghan Gilligan from Screen Prism, April 28, 2016

Images - The Conversation Jennifer M. Wood

The Village Voice [Andrew Sarris], Pt. 1 June 6, 1974 (pdf)

The Village Voice [Andrew Sarris] June 13, 1974 (pdf)

The Village Voice [Andrew Sarris], Pt. 3 June 20, 1974 (pdf)

New York Magazine [Judith Crist] April 8, 1974 (pdf)

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1974 [Erik Beck]

Radiator Heaven [J.D.] J.D. Lafrance

AboutFilm.com - The Conversation (1974) Frances Nicole Rogers

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale

Screen Slate [Cosmo Bjorkenheim]

“The Conversation” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, February 6, 2001

Thoughts From Cinema's Fringes Evan Popplestone

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Film @ The Digital Fix - The Conversation Mike Sutton

The DVD Journal: The Conversation D.K. Holm

The Conversation | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Budd Wilkins

dOc DVD Review: The Conversation (1974) - Digitally Obsessed Justin Stephen

DVD Movie Central Michael Jacobson

FRR [Michael Pattison] Front Row Reviews

DVDActive.com [Marcus Doidge]

Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

The Conversation Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Joshua Zyber, also seen here: High-Def Digest [Joshua Zyber]

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] Blu-Ray, also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

DVDActive.com [Gabriel Powers] Blu-Ray

DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray with Pictures Luke Bonnano, -film collection, Blu-Ray

DVD Talk [William Harrison] 5-film collection, Blu-Ray

The Conversation about The Wire zunguzungu, October 27, 2009

Francis Ford Coppola: The Conversation – The Mookse and the Gripes

The Conversation Score Review - PopOptiq Clare Nina Norelli, January 10, 2011

Pulling Focus: The Conversation (1974) « Taste of Cinema - Movie ... Shane Scott-Travis

Movie Farm [Naomi Barnwell]

At the Cinema [Sarah Ward]

Cindy Williams, William F. Buckley, and The-Conversation | National ... Michael Potemra from The National Review, September 13, 2015

5 Things You Might Not Know About 'The Conversation' | IndieWire Kevin Jagernauth, April 9, 2012

A Bright Wall in a Dark Room [Chad Perman]

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Theo Alexander]

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark)

CineVue [Daniel Gumble]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz

Through The Shattered Lens [Lisa Marie Bowman]

The Conversation | Chicago Reader Don Druker

Francis Ford Coppola Discusses 'The Conversation,' 'The Godfather ... Edward Davis on a Q & A between TCM host Ben Mankiewicz and Francis Ford Coppola, from The Playlist, June 3, 2015

The Conversation - Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com

Variety

BBC - Films - review - The Conversation Nick Hilditch

My favourite Cannes winner: The Conversation | Film | The Guardian Catherine Shoard, April 22, 2015

The Conversation | Film | The Guardian Philip French

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1974

The Conversation Movie Review (1974) | Roger Ebert in 2001

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) also seen here: Movie Review - - A Haunting 'Conversation':'Conversation' - NYTimes ...

DVDBeaver - Full Graphic Review [Dev Ramcharan]

The Conversation - Wikipedia

The Conversation (Film) - TV Tropes

THE GODFATHER: PART II

USA (200 mi) 1974

Time Out Geoff Andrew

Coppola's superior sequel to his own very fine Mafia epic extends the original film's timeframe both backwards (to Vito Corleone's arrival and struggles to get by in New York at the start of the 20th century) and forwards (to his son Michael's ruthless protection of his own power as capo during a post-war period of expanded influence into Vegas, Cuba and elsewhere). The two strands alternate in Coppola's elliptical and elegantly orchestrated narrative, so that the seemingly inexorable progress from petty to corporate crime, from survival instinct to a steely obsession with power for power's sake, is charted with a terrifying lucidity. True, the film is so entranced by the dynastic dazzle that it neglects to show the Mob's baleful influence on America at large - the only people visibly harmed are either rival mafiosi or corrupt authority figures - but the performances, Gordon Willis' memorably gloomy camerawork, the stately pace and the sheer scale of the story's sweep render everything engrossing and so, well, plausible that our ideas of organised crime in America will forever be marked by this movie.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Robert Duvall is, if it's possible, even better than in the original. Robert De Niro is at least brilliant, he is the master of silent and invisible unrestrained psychological terror broiling beneath. Al Pacino is credible in a role that no one else could play better, despite being dealt a few situations that defy belief. Francis Ford Coppola shoots incredible scenes, and even more somehow manages to shoot the internal decay of elegance. The incidental music is tremendous, and the original theme still efffective when occasionally referenced. But...as good as many of the individual scenes were the flashing back and forward and telling two stories at once, just because the father and son characters are the same age apparently, just didn't work for me. Where the brilliant leads were surrounded by often equally brilliant actors in the original the support here is only good. The tale continues to be impressive and scary, and draws sympathy in increasing abundance, but there's nothing left of that intangible characteristic that invoked utter awe. Coppola isn't following a formula, but he's breaking out a lot of familiar elements (most notably Catholocism and violence, and the effort to once again deliver a closing montage of historic power and a terrible violent beauty).

A companion piece in the truest sense of the term, The Godfather Part II garnered as much adulation as its predecessor, if not more. Receiving twelve Academy Award nominations, and again winning Best Picture (and this time Best Director for Coppola as well), the second installment has been rightfully hailed as the best sequel of all time.

The Godfather Part II is a more ambitious production than the original since it attempts not only to tell a pair of completely disconnected stories, but to do so in parallel. The less time consuming of the two presents the early life of Vito Corleone (played by Robert DeNiro) in Sicily and New York, and shows how he came into power. The other tale picks up approximately a decade after the conclusion of The Godfather, and shows the means by which Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), now secure in his position, attempts to expand the family empire into Las Vegas and Cuba.

Michael lives his life and runs his business by two of his father's creeds: "A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man" and "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." There are times, however, when those precepts fail as guiding principles, such as when a betrayal occurs from within the family. Broken trust arising from so intimate a source can be devastating.

In The Godfather, family was more important than anything to Don Vito Corleone. Michael has inherited his father's values and as Part II opens, he is surrounded by the Corleone clan as they gather for his son's first communion. A symmetry between the first and second films is established here - both open with a family assemblage, and each quickly establishes where the power lies as the don "holds court."

The Corleones no longer live in New York. They have moved to Nevada where they are amassing influence with the nebulous goal of some day becoming "legitimate." But the affairs of the East Coast are about to interfere as Frankie Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo) arrives to request the don's acquiescence to a hit. Michael cannot agree because such a killing would ruin certain business dealings currently in progress with the powerful and influential Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg).

Plot and counterplot develop, and Michael becomes the focal point of a web of betrayal and deceit, turned against by those he had sought to protect. Assassination attempts and government probes target Michael, but he fights back using every scintilla of ingenuity he possesses and sacrificing much of his humanity in the process.

For a man constantly battling to keep his family together, a mournful irony of The Godfather Part II is that Michael's efforts succeed only in fragmenting it. If the end of the first film was numbing, this one is shattering. The flashback preceding the final scene presents a stark differentiation of how things once were from what they have become.

A more comprehensive contrast emerges through the lengthy sequences detailing Vito Corleone's rise from obscurity. Showing his arrival at Ellis Island, his early relationship with Clemenza (Bruno Kirby), and his confrontation with Don Fanucci (Gastone Moschin), these segments stand in contradiction to Michael's scenes. Expansion is replaced by slow disintegration, energy and success by pain and failure. If young Vito's era is the Corleone's dawn, Michael's is the approaching twilight.

The danger in interweaving the early twentieth century story with the one from 1958 is that the momentum of either - or both - could be curtailed. While this occasionally happens (most notably in the first shift back to 1917, shortly after the assassination attempt on Michael), Coppola handles the transitions adroitly, keeping the pace consistent enough to limit any sense of jarring or disorientation.

The traditional elements of the Tragedy introduced in The Godfather reach their maturity in Part II. Much of the humanity remaining to Michael at the outset is leeched from him with each deception and setback. Late scenes with a resentful Fredo (John Cazale) and a bitter Kay (Diane Keaton) emphasize the price for Michael of continuing his father's dominion. His flaw is his imperceptiveness and, as is the case for any hero in a story of this nature, its effects are crippling.

Primarily due to the scope of events, Part II is not as tightly-scripted as Part I. While most of the first film takes place in New York (with a few excursions elsewhere), here the settings vary: Sicily, Ellis Island, New York, Nevada, Cuba, Miami, Washington DC. In letting their characters escape the confines of the "old neighborhood", Coppola and Puzo lessen the intimacy of certain interpersonal conflicts.

Visually, many of Michael's scenes have a more gloomy appearance this time around. Especially during the latter portions of the film, the don is shown in severely underexposed settings, appearing as a silhouette. His is a voice from the darkness - a photographic mirror of what's happening beneath the surface.

As the beginning of Part II echoes the opening of The Godfather, so too does the end. Because of the manner in which circumstances are handled and considering the people involved, the impact here is more forceful. The tragic flaw has accomplished its poisonous, inevitable designs. Coppola punctuates both movies with a gut-twisting exclamation point.

Combined, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II represent the apex of American movie-making and the ultimate gangster story. Few sequels have expanded upon the original with the faithfulness and detail of this one. Beneath the surface veneer of an ethnic period piece, The Godfather is not so much about crime lords as it is about prices paid in the currency of the soul for decisions made and avoided. It is that quality which establishes this saga as timeless.

Turner Classic Movies Lorraine LoBianco

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit)

Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks thorough and expert analysis

The Godfather , part II A deal Coppola couldn't refuse, by John Hess from Jump Cut

eFilmCritic Slyder

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

DVD Verdict - 2005 Release [Lacey Worrell]

The Godfather Part II James Brundage, also reviewing Pt I: filmcritic.com pays its respects and Pt III: The Godfather Part III

100 films Lucas Mcnelly

Marcresarf1- Epinions Review

Max Scheinin

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest)

DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr reviews The Godfather Collection (5 DVD set)

The Digital Bits Todd Doogan reviews The Godfather Collection (5 DVD set)

The Film Desk (James Kendrick) reviews The Godfather Collection (5 DVD set)

Reel.com DVD review [James Plath] The Godfather Collection (5 DVD set)

The Godfather DVD Collection Alexander Larman from DVD Times (5 DVD set)

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle reviews The Godfather Collection (5 DVD set)

DVD review: 'The Godfather Collection' Glenn Abel from DVD Spin Doctor (5 DVD set)

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] The Godfather Trilogy (5 DVD set)

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini]-The Complete Dossier

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

APOCALYPSE NOW A 100

USA (153 mi) 1979 ‘Scope

APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX A+ 100+

Redux Director’s Cut (202 mi) 2001 ‘Scope

Powerful stuff, one of the most amazing film experiences ever, unbelievably intense, film and sound composition are perfect, and the film is truly representative of all the conflicting elements of that 60’s Vietnam era, which still happens to be the single most significant event in my life, and this film reveals why, with utterly convincing graphic revelations, as the consequences of the nightmarish journey from colonialism to Cambodia abroad certainly helped unite the anti-war and civil rights movements at home, where a government’s lies and deceptions to their own people, even to their own soldiers, eventually lost a war and brought down their own house.

In my mind, there is no question which is the better version of APOCALYPSE NOW, simply none at all. From start to finish, this is a fuller, more complete experience, and there isn’t a single shot which doesn’t “add” something. The length absolutely adds dimension, as near the end when Kurtz indicates it’s been centuries since he was in the Special Forces, we realize it’s been light years from Kilgore’s dawn attack with Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” to the eerie silence of death that greets Willard in Cambodia. As Willard gets further up river, he discovers camps with no commanding officers, soldiers on their own sent like lambs for the slaughter, without a clue how they got there or how to get out of there, which includes the mindless rantings of the Playboy bunnies who are just more grist from the same mill, corporate money, expressed by trading a couple of cans of oil for the Playmate of the Year, exploited in much the same way the land is exploited. The French Plantation sequence adds a series of mixed confusion and purpose, eerily sensing an initial danger, to what on earth are they doing there, looking like some kind of morbid Disneyland trip which includes the expression of pleasure for the sake of sheer pleasure, as represented by this truly gluttonous last supper sequence, which is followed by the wonderfully sensuous Aurore Clement, showing indications of a family in charge, so in charge with being in charge that they are willing to sacrifice their own family members to claim as their own something that doesn’t even belong to them. Doesn’t the USA still have a Navy Base on the island of Cuba? Here we have the representation of commanding officers who would rather die, and let everyone around them die, rather than admit they’re wrong. And finally we have Kurtz, the commanding officer who is in command of nothing but madness, who has grown to accept death with no emotion or remorse, but as little more than swatting a fly. So the trip up river contrasts the anarchy of no authority to the paranoid insanity of the authority-mad mentality which led to the Cambodian killing fields where the Cambodians murdered something like 25% of their own population, actions which certainly question the moral parameters of our encursion into Vietnam in the first place. I believe each sequence only enhances the final ending, which, very Tarkovsky-like, just ends with the cleansing sound of rain which will likely never wash all the blood away.

Since I started rating films, this is only the 2nd film I’d rate 100+, the other being Tarkovsky’s ANDREI RUBLEV. Also what was interesting to me was the very beginning, with the napalm blasts in the jungle over the Door’s “The End,” as this was the ending sequence over the credits in the initial version which I liked the best where Willard orders a complete destruction of the compound in a DR. STRANGELOVE-like finale. It works perfectly here, as this film picks up right where that film left off. I would also like to say that it was an absolute pleasure to see a film without any credits, that it enhances the power and beauty of this film as a work of art, not just a film or a movie. As I felt this film nearing the end, I couldn’t believe someone actually thought all this up, that it came out of someone’s head. Despite film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s view that Coppola’s cinematically lush depiction of war is visual pornography, there really aren’t words to describe how overwhelmingly special this film feels.

Apocalypse Now Redux Anthony Lane on Redux from the New Yorker

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the jungle . . . Francis Ford Coppola's steaming, misshapen epic, now twenty-two years old, is with us once more, and it feels madder and more necessary than ever: an all but unanswerable rebuke to the cinematic flimsiness of the interim. With the editorial support of Walter Murch, Coppola has revisited the scene of his movie and recut from the original dailies, adding, along the way, some forty-nine minutes of excised footage. This includes, you will be charmed to discover, more sex: a dinner party and postprandial seduction scene on a French plantation, and the dreamy, sorrowful coupling of soldiers and Playboy models in the cockpit of a grounded helicopter. Whether we need this stuff remains arguable, but it certainly thickens the surfeit of half-satisfied desires that were already boiling away inside the movie. For good measure, there is also our first sight of Brando in broad daylight, mocking the imprisoned Martin Sheen. The new print is ripe and lustrous, and the sound recording—of river whispers as much as of music—could have come straight from a hypnotist's handbook.

Apocalypse Now Mike D’Angelo on Redux version from Time Out New York

Charlie don't surf!" bellows Colonel Kilgore (Duvall) in one of Apocalypse Now's most memorable sequences. Only now, however, some 22 years after Coppola's hallucinatory Vietnam masterpiece premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, do we finally discover that Kilgore don't surf either—primarily because Captain Willard (Sheen) has impishly swiped the colonel's prize board. What's more, this incident is merely the first, and hardly the most significant or memorable, of several major, mood-altering additions to the film, totaling roughly 45 minutes of additional footage. Few movies have suffered so turbulent a production history, or have spawned so many alternate versions (with or without onscreen credits? with or without the destruction of the Kurtz compound?); Apocalypse New, as I like to call it, assembled by Coppola and original coeditor Walter Murch, purports to be the definitive cut—the movie as it was originally intended. Some may quibble (and I'm about to), but there's no denying the cathartic thrill of seeing these legendary lost scenes in a pristine 35mm print.

The movie proper, loosely adapted from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and offering the medium's most lucid (and, not coincidentally, its least rational) take on the insanity of war, surely requires no introduction. (If by some chance you've never seen it before, nothing short of an irreversible coma should keep you away.) Does Redux constitute an improvement? No. While some of the new material adds texture or clarifies previously obscure narrative threads—a brief scene in which Kurtz (Brando) reads Willard excerpts from Time's coverage of the war makes Kurtz seem less wacko and the entire movie seem more pointed—most of it was cut for a reason. An erotic extension of the patrol crew's encounter with some Playboy bunnies proves both clumsy and reductive, and feels embarrassingly dated to boot; the fabled French-plantation sequence grinds the picture to a didactic, expository halt just as it's heading toward its climax. More than anything else, Redux confirms that Coppola and Murch knew what they were doing back in '79.

Still, I'm not gonna pretend that I wasn't drooling in anticipation of the extra goodies, even if I'd rather see them as a supplement on a DVD release. And it's awe-inspiring, as ever, to see this movie on the big screen, where the napalm blasts nearly singe your retinas and Sheen sounds as if he's murmuring Willard's narration into your ear from an adjacent seat. That Coppola's bold vision makes contemporary Hollywood look wan and trivial by comparison only gives the film's title a bit of extra resonance.

Apocalypse Now Redux | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez, Redux

Rock music rose from the burning embers of the '50s and early '60s, pushed by a generation of youth roused to action by the socio-cultural ineptitude of their political leaders. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), in one of the many hopeless monologues that characterize Francis Ford Coppola's seminal Apocalypse Now, suggests that rock 'n roll already had one foot in the grave when he and his men sailed into Cambodia on their way to kill Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). It's no wonder then that The Doors' Oedipal "The End" feels like the most cunning and ironic song ever incorporated into a film. Carmine Coppola's synth-laden score gives the film the tenor of a horror flick, and the rock anthems sporadically heard throughout suggest desperate gasps fighting to be heard through tides of change.

The Roman wilderness of pain that Jim Morrison sung about could have been Vietnam, and the king's highway could be seen as the current Willard navigates to destroy a fellow comrade who's taken insanity as a lover. Morrison never fought in Vietnam, but his generation of hippies and draft-dodgers joined their crippled freedom-fighting counterparts as the walking wounded of a politicized generation. Not only does Apocalypse Now's feverishly decaying finale precisely synch up to the musical breakdown that highlights the latter half of "The End," Kurtz, with his penchant for elliptical verbiage ("I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor"), recalls the self-destruction that befell Morrison during his tragic final years.

The sex that was understated in Apocalypse Now is elaborated in Redux with the addition of female-centric footage. Consensual objectification pillaged by ungodly violence gives an unflinching dimension to female pain in the Playboy Bunnies sequence. More importantly, though, is the addition of the infamous French plantation scene. Willard's boat descends upon the Cambodian abode, which is populated by a misguided community of cultural academics with Asians for servants (or, possibly, slaves). As much as the scene slows the film's pace, it extrapolates on the complex colonialist themes at the center of the film, providing Willard with a romantic tryst and a home should he desire to return after his encounter with Kurtz. Roxanne Sarrault (Aurore Clement) is a Scarlett O'Hara's French proxy, a grand belle refusing to give up her Tara despite the chaos that threatens to destroy it.

Apocalypse Now is the definitive war-as-hell statement, a frenzied, free-based ode to the anguished soldier and the need-to-numb that crests over him in the face and wake of war. With no offense to Terrence Malick's existential The Thin Red Line and its singular concern for the plight of the everyman, no war film has matched Coppola's madly overcooked polemic. With its view of Vietnam as a colonial mud pit being raped by a post-rock generation, it's as aimless as it is prescient. Coppola's subjective use of technology (pathologically integrating operatic image and sound) evokes war as a psychedelic fugue state: timeless, horrifying, and affecting us all.

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) Redux

The hallucinogenic chuk-chuk-chuk of an unseen gunship's rotors is the first sound you hear in Coppola's masterpiece. For filmgoers of a certain age it's a thrilling, heart-quickening sound; no other film I know of can elicit such a palpable reaction in its first several seconds with just a snatch of foley work. Then come the flames, the Doors, and 196 minutes of some of the finest filmmaking seen before or since. Francis, man, what happened to you? No matter. The filmic fossil record is testament to the man's former -- and, sporadically, current -- greatness. In this 54-minute-longer “redux” version we're treated to several key scenes that were cut from the original release for various reasons (chiefly in order to abbreviate the film's overlong running time). If you've never seen Apocalypse Now, I'll just say that it skews the Vietnam experience through Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and leave it at that. Since its release in 1979, the film has achieved a legendary, almost mytho-poetic glaze. The epic struggle to complete the project in the first place is a hellacious "man vs. nature vs. studio" tale, which only girdled the (semi-) finished product in multiple layers of time-impermeable and well-deserved hype. Few, if any, American films so accurately capture the numbing and entropic mindlessness of life during wartime. The real triumph of Apocalypse Now is that, after all these years, it's still the best, most lyrical war film out there. It not only blows your mind, it is a blown mind: the end result of so many lunatic, behind-the-scenes mental typhoons that the existing wealth of stories, books, and anecdotes haven't even scratched the surface (as Coppola himself has frequently stated). So that's that. What about the Redux? Three main segments have been added to this already tumescent film, which -- depending on what mood you're in when you see it -- either ends up making the whole thing even more bloated and unwieldy, or expands upon and clarifies the original's highly personal vision. The main addition, in which Captain Willard (Sheen) and the PBR crew encounter an enclave of French colonials living in a battered, rotting manse far past the spastic contortions of the embattled Dho Lhung bridge, is an eerie set-piece that could be straight out of some Southern Gothic. Holed up between the jungle and the river, the Frenchmen (and one woman) appear out of a silent, impenetrable mist like so many ghosts. And then the effect is ruined by what is essentially a 20-minute history lesson, complete with table-banging epithets on the French occupation of Indo-China, with assorted tangents that are historically interesting yet contextually dull. The sequence, beautifully shot by Vittorio Storaro though it may be, stops the film dead in its tracks. The forward motion of both Chief's (Hall) scuzzball PBR and Willard's unholy mission comes to a full stop, while Willard samples some opium with a Frenchman's daughter and much is made of very little. You can see why the sequence was cut. Ditto for the other two major tweaks here, including a second, far more profitable encounter with Bill Graham's Playboy Bunnies, and Lt. Col. "Charlie Don't Surf" Kilgore's hang-time wahooing. The latter is the strongest addition to the film -- anything that brings in more Robert Duvall is a good thing in my book. Do the additions (and in a few very minor instances) subtractions to and from the original detract from the film's greatness? Not a lot. They're unnecessary, sure, but no less fascinating, and they certainly add to the film's iconography. Such gorgeous explosions, such a terrible vision, such an amazing work of art. Go. Now.

Apocalypse Now - TCM.com Roger Fristoe, original version

"Apocalypse Now is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam," writer-director Francis Ford Coppola said of his infamous war epic in 1979, the year of the film's original release. "And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We had access to too much money, too much equipment; and little by little we went insane."

After a trouble-plagued production described as a "nightmare" by its participants, and despite charges of overreaching self-indulgence on the part of its creator, Coppola's film is considered by many to be one of the greatest -- if not the greatest -- of all anti-war movies. Inspired by Joseph Conrad's 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, it depicts war as a descent into madness, as the anguished Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is assigned to find and execute Lt. Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), an AWOL Special Forces officer who has set himself up as an all-powerful avenging angel among head-hunting villagers in a Cambodian jungle. As he heads upriver in his search, Willard encounters various horrors of combat, not the least of which is the supermacho, semi-psychotic Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall).

One of several movies about Vietnam released in the late 1970s, Apocalypse Now has a sense of extravagance and daring unusual even for that decade of dynamic filmmaking. In retrospect, its dark vision and polarizing effect among viewers make it one of the most emblematic works of its era.

The project began with George Lucas's plans to direct a script written by John Milius in 1969 entitled The Psychedelic Soldier, with Coppola as executive producer. Lucas had planned to shoot his film as a faux documentary on location in South Vietnam while the war was still underway. But a production deal with Warner Bros. fell through, and Coppola moved on to co-write and direct The Godfather (1972). The huge success of this Oscar®-winning film gave him the clout to reintroduce the idea of Apocalypse Now, which would be filmed by Coppola's own American Zoetrope Studios for United Artists, on location in the Philippines.

By this time Saigon had fallen, making the idea of a "documentary" approach obsolete and redefining the story as a reflection on what many saw as the futility and horror of the Vietnam War, as well as Coppola's own conflicted emotions. Screenwriter Milius had no desire to direct the film himself, and Lucas, busy now with Star Wars (1977), gave Coppola his blessing to direct Apocalypse Now.

Orson Welles had been Coppola's first choice to play Col. Kurtz, and while Brando vacillated about doing the film, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, and Al Pacino were considered for his role. The latter two were also on Coppola's list of possibilities to play Capt. Willard, a role that already had been turned down by Steve McQueen. In declining the captain's role, Pacino was said to have told Coppola, "You're going to be up there in a helicopter telling me what to do, and I'm gonna be down there in the swamp for five months."

Eventually, Harvey Keitel was cast as Willard, but two weeks into filming Coppola replaced him with Sheen, feeling that Keitel's "feverish" intensity was wrong for an essentially passive character. The director had wanted James Caan as Col. Lucas, a general's aide, but Caan's salary demands were deemed too high for a relatively minor role. Harrison Ford, although then emerging as a major star thanks to the first Star Wars movie, accepted the role for a smaller fee.

After planning a six-week shoot on a $12 million budget, Coppola would end up with a 238-day shooting schedule, spread over 16 months, expenses in excess of $31 million (requiring him to dip into his own private funds) and more than 200 hours of raw footage. The human cost of the production also was high; along with the discomfort, stress and diseases suffered by the company during what seemed like endless filming in the jungle, Coppola came close to nervous collapse, made threats of suicide and reportedly lost 100 pounds. Sheen suffered a life-altering heart attack. Drug use was rampant on the set.

Other causes for the frequent delays in the Philippines were such natural disasters as an earthquake and a typhoon that destroyed several elaborate sets; plus the ever-evolving script and Coppola's overwhelming sense of perfectionism.

The actors created considerable crises of their own. Coppola had been led to believe that Brando, who had been paid $1 million in advance on his $3 million salary, had studied Heart of Darkness and prepared his role in advance of filming. The director was appalled when his star arrived to reveal that he had never read the novel, did not know his lines and had become hugely fat, weighing in at 285 pounds -- even though Kurtz had been written as emaciated because he is infected with malaria.

After his initial dismay, Coppola proceeded by reading the novel aloud to Brando on the set and making plans to photograph him in close-ups and deep shadows to hide his bulk. After many arguments, Brando refused to deliver his lines as written and rewrote or ad-libbed them. Coppola reportedly became so angry with the actor that he turned over the filming of Brando's scenes to assistant director Jerry Ziesmer.

Sheen, at Coppola's urging, stayed drunk for two days as he improvised the scene early in the film when Willard becomes distraught and crashes his hand into a mirror. (The first of these days was his 36th birthday.) The emotional state, shattered mirror and bloody hand were all real, leading Ziesmer to ponder, "Should we have pushed and prodded Marty to the extent we did for a performance in a motion picture? Did the ends justify the means?" Sheen, who failed to win an Oscar® nomination for his performance, has since enjoyed a very successful career but never again threw himself into a project with this kind of reckless commitment.

Also in the cast are Dennis Hopper as a spaced-out journalist, Frederic Forrest as an ill-fated grunt, G.D. Spradlin as the general who sends Willard on his mission, and Albert Hall as a soldier whose disciplined behavior seems unique in the surroundings. Laurence Fishburne, then billed as "Larry" and cast as a member of Willard's crew, was only 14 when filming began!

Coppola had sought the Pentagon's support in making the movie, but Army officials, after reading a draft of the script, promptly refused to cooperate in any way. This led to arrangements with Ferdinand Marcos, then president of the Philippines, to rent American-made helicopters and military equipment. Real-life mountain tribesmen appeared as the natives at Kurtz's compound who have turned him into a god. For Coppola's climactic scene, they performed the actual ritual slaying of a water buffalo.

No mention of Heart of Darkness as the literary source of Apocalypse Now is included in the film's credits, even though the script follows the outline of the novella (which was set in the Belgian Congo of the 1890s), and the name "Kurtz" is retained for the Brando character. Significantly, the Oscar® nomination for the script was in the category of best screenplay based on another medium. The real-life model for the updated Kurtz was Col. Robert Rheault, a commanding officer of U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam who was court-martialed in 1969 for the murder of a Vietnamese guide he suspected of being a double agent. The charges against Rheault eventually were dropped, but his career had been ruined by what the press called "the Green Beret murder case." Official documents had described the killing of the suspected agent as "termination with extreme prejudice" -- a phrase repeated in the film.

After an additional nine months of editing, Coppola released Apocalypse Now to mixed reviews. Even those who found Brando's section to be pretentious and/or incomprehensible, however, were impressed by the extraordinary combat footage and Storaro's consistently brilliant cinematography. The film, shown as a work in progress at the Cannes Film Festival, won that group's prestigious Grand Prize.

The film won eight nominations, including those for Best Picture and Director, and captured two Oscar®s, for Vittorio Storaro's magnificent cinematography and Best Sound. (Apocalypse Now was the first major motion picture to utilize Dolby Stereo Surround technology.) Despite several brilliant performances, the only acting nomination went to Duvall for his role as the ruthless, dandified, surf-and-Wagner-loving Col. Kilgore, who delivers one of the most-quoted lines in film history: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning... It smells like victory."

The movie's reputation has grown over the years; it was voted as "Best Picture of the Last 25 Years" by the Dutch magazine Skrien and placed as No. 30 on the American Film Institute's list of Greatest Movies of All Time. British TV's Film4 puts Apocalypse Now at No. 1 on its list of "50 Films To See Before You Die."

Eleanor Coppola, the director's wife, kept a diary during filming and published it with her husband's permission in 1979 as Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now. At his suggestion, she also worked on a promotional film for the United Artists Publicity Department. This idea eventually was abandoned, but Eleanor turned over her footage to Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper for their feature-length, Emmy-winning documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991).

In 2001, Coppola introduced Apocalypse Now Redux, his revised and extended version of the film created with editor Walter Murch. This re-edit includes 49 minutes of new material, clarifies some story points and emphasizes the movie's surreal atmosphere.

Apocalypse Now: Heart Transplant - Film Comment Brooks Riley

“He was very little more than a voice.” —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Little could Joseph Conrad have guessed, when he wrote his novella-length encounter between a man and a myth, that nearly 70 years later Heart of Darkness would engender more myths on its way to the screen than have ever proliferated around a single other film. The Conrad story not only serves as the basis for Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now, it could also stand as a parable for the production itself, with Coppola playing both Marlowe and Kurtz—man on his way to myth over the impossible terrain of a wild continent.

Too much is known of Coppola's own voyage into the heart of darkness, his encounters with “the horror,” and the exasperations of finally realizing a work that would transcend the myths. Too little is know about the genesis of the film—its transformation from a script by John Milius to a film by Coppola.

A reading of Milius's first-draft script—dated December 5, 1969—dispels another myth: that Coppola completely rewrote the Milius work, an assumption promoted by Milius himself in his interview in FILM COMMENT (July/August 1976).

If the film strayed from the first draft, it was not so much away from Milius's conception as it was towards Milius's own source, the Conrad novel; and the final result is far from what Milius contemptuously referred to as “an anti-war movie.” But Milius seems to have had his own preoccupation with Heart of Darkness, which had more to do with his identification with and of Kurtz as a “rotting god” and “legend to a primitive culture.” Combining his own professed desire to “lord it over the monkeys” with his apolitical obsession with war as the ultimate expression of “man's inherent bestiality,” Milius fashioned a script that structured itself in general terms after the Conrad work, but which incorporated many references to his own interests. These were represented most clearly by Kilgore (named Kharnage in the first draft), a surfing major whose own god-like resistance to fear is matched only by his Patton-like lust for napalm's “smell of victory.” The Kilgore section of the original draft, though appropriately shortened by a few pages, stands otherwise untouched and remains the most recognizably Milius element in the final film.

In fact, it's surprising, after all the talk of rift, how much Milius's original script shows up in the final cut. Two major scenes that don't—an overnight stop at a French rubber plantation and an encounter with stranded Playboy bunnies—were filmed by Coppola and only excised later at the editing table.

Although Coppola has adhered to Milius's structure and much of his dialogue, several revisions are significant:

1. Milius begins the film at the Kurtz compound, allowing us a fleeting glimpse of the god-monster before Willard is sent to “terminate his command.” A colleague felt this was a wiser beginning to a film whose focal point is reached so late, but in fact, the scene violates the very principals of myth set up in the Conrad narrative. Kurtz's absence from the screen throughout most of the film is the very thing that nurtures the mythical proportions of his identity, just as it does in the Conrad novel. The myth of Kurtz is a Willard-Marlowe fabrication out of bits of information that formulate a personage so preposterous that, when he more than lives up to those intimations within Marlowe/Willard, we are forced to face a creature as much of Willard's making as his own. To have shown us Kurtz first, only to abandon him for the next two-thirds of the film, would have proved an unforgivable betrayal of the character and a dilution of the film's carefully planned unveiling of the man behind, under, or above the myth.

2. The Climactic confrontation between Kurtz and Willard has undergone a complete transformation. In Milius's first draft, Willard is met by Kurtz as he arrives at the compound. He is then taken on a guided tour by Kurtz, who describes the compound and its Montagnard inhabitants like a Westerner fascinated but unchanged by the fatalistic philosophy of the East. The tour is cut short by preparations for a north Vietnamese Army attack on the compound, an attack in which Kurtz is killed. As the attack ends, American helicopters approach—and Willard, suddenly assuming Kurtz's schizophrenia, shoots directly at them.

(In a subsequent draft, excerpted in the FILM COMMENT/Milius interview, Kurtz forcefully articulates his philosophy to the captured Willard: “Up here is the truth. How much truth can you take, Captain? I've made sense of this war—war as you've never known it. We revel in our own blood; we fight for glory, for land that's under our feet, gold that's in our hands, women that worship the power in our loins. I summon fire from the sky. Do you know what it is to be a white man who can summon fire from the sky? What it means? You can live and die for these things—not silly ideals that are always betrayed. What do you fight for, Captain?” Willard replies, “Because it feels so good.” A bit later, he challenged Kurtz to “Untie me. See if you can face that truth.”)

The final film, which confronts Kurtz's madness in less concrete displays of military bravado, prefers to suggest “the horror” with the presence of severed bodies and pools of blood, and to sublimate the seduction of Willard by that madness. Where the first draft had plunged directly into battle after a few fatuous speeches by Kurtz, the final film rests its case on the more thought-provoking ramblings of a beast at rest.

This contras also represents a return to Conrad's depiction of Kurtz as a brilliant, exceptional man. The Milius Kurtz is described as a mediocre commanding officer gone bonkers with his white man's power over the Montagnards. The final Kurtz is intelligent enough to recognize his madness, and to go the distance by allowing himself to be killed as the only rational solution left. This Kurtz sees the horror in himself, whereas the early Kurtz is just a trigger-happy, circumstantial god, given power by his radio contact with the people who can bring air strikes against whichever side he deems fit to call enemy on any given day.

3. The most significant addition to the film came after shooting was completed, in the form of Willard's voiceover narration, written not by Milius but by Michael Herr, author of Dispatches. With it, a far more meaningful character interaction between Kurtz and Willard is made possible, as in the Conrad novel, long before the two meet face to face. Through it, we are privy to Willard's changing attitudes toward Kurtz and the consequent changes in himself. As in the Conrad novel, Willard, as narrator, has so prepared us for Kurtz that the latter hardly needs to establish himself except with a few verbal footnotes that detail the source of his derangement.

Coppola plays down the importance of Heart of Darkness as a point of reference in his film, possibly because he has sought to fashion a more complicated amorality tale from the Conrad narrative. Coppola's Kurtz fashions evil out of truth, from an utter abomination of duplicity, the very game Conrad's protagonist plays best. Morally or philosophically, Conrad and Coppola are both correct according to their own visions. Col. Kurtz is true to his bestiality. Mr. Kurtz is true to his dual nature as both beast and god.

But to carry Conrad one or several steps further required, paradoxically, a return to the work itself. The following list of direct references to Conrad did not appear in Milius's first draft:

1. The shower of arrows onto the boat just prior to its arrival at the Kurtz compound directly corresponds to a scene in the book, including the spear death of the helmsman.

2. A report written by Mr. Kurtz for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs has scrawled across the last page, “Exterminate all the brutes.” Scrawled across Col. Kurtz's unidentified typewritten manuscript are the words: “Drop the bombs. Exterminate them all.”

3. Willard refers to himself as the “caretaker of Kurtz's memory.” In the book, Marlowe says: “I was to have the care of his memory.”

4. The Dennis Hopper character, a flipped-out photo-journalist and “press agent” for Col. Kurtz, is not only strikingly similar to the Russian sailor in the novel, but also quotes verbatim from the character: “You don't talk with the man—you listen to him”; “This man has enlarged my mind”; “He made me see things.”

5. Marlowe's discussion with a manager about Mr. Kurtz's “unsound methods” (a phrase first used in the General's appraisal of Kurtz in the film) also includes Willard's very answer to Col. Kurtz, “No method at all.”

6. Both Kurtzes now utter the same, now famous last words: “The horror, the horror.”

The film's “fidelity” to Heart of Darkness, however, does not extend to Marlowe's return to Europe and visit to Kurtz's fiancée, although Coppola is said to have considered shooting a visit by Willard to Kurtz's widow. With Coppola and Milius both unavailable for comment, it is difficult to determine just who put the Conrad back into Apocalypse Now. But it's clear that the intelligence and stark pessimism of the final film owe much to the darkness suggested by Conrad, the darkness lurking deep within the enlightened man.

Just one of those ends Michael Wood examines all aspects from The London Review of Books, December 13, 2001

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh, Redux

Deconstructing Francis: Apocalypse Now and the End of the '70s Darren Haber, original version from Images

Film as Art [Danél Griffin] original version

Senses of Cinema (Maria San Filippo) Redux

Now and Then [on APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX] | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, Redux from the Chicago Reader, August 17, 2001

BFI | Sight & Sound | Casualties Of War Philip Horne in a Redux review from Sight and Sound, November 2001

Apocalypse Now (1979) - Alternate Ending : Alternate Ending Tim Brayton

Francis Ford Coppola: Apocalypse Now Derek Malcolm, original version from the Guardian

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson, original version

The Legendary Rough Cut Glenn Erickson on the legendary 6-hour rough cut from DVD Savant

Apocalypse Now Coppola’s American Way, by B. Ruby Rich, original version from Jump Cut

Apocalypse Now Apocalypse Now. The Deer Hunter. The Lies Aren’t Over, by Rachel Kranz, original version from Jump Cut

The Deerhunter. Apocalypse Now The Absence of History, by Michael Klein, original version from Jump Cut

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) original version

Sridhar Prasad original version

Reel.com DVD review [Robert Payne] original version, with three endings

DVD Verdict Dean Roddey, original version

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon, original version

DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr, original version

Salon (Michael Sragow) original version

DVDTown [John J. Puccio] original version

DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng) original version

George Chabot's Review of Apocalypse Now original version

All Movie Guide [Mark Deming] original version

Gods of Filmmaking original version

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks reviews both versions extensively

DVD Outsider Slarek, it should be noted that this third release, "The Complete Dossier," does not include the compound destruction footage, the theatrical trailer or the re-release trailer, so Apocalypse Now completists will want to hang onto those first two DVDs

CultureCartel.com (Chris Barsanti) The Complete Dossier

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] The Complete Dossier

DVD Talk - The Complete Dossier (Preston Jones)

digitallyOBSESSED.com [Jon Danziger] The Complete Dossier

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) The Complete Dossier

The Onion A.V. Club: The Complete Dossier [Noel Murray]

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) The Complete Dossier

Home Theater Info DVD Review (The Complete Dossier)

Apocalypse Now Redux Max Messier from filmcritic on The Complete Dossier

About.com - The Complete Dossier DVD Review [Ivana Redwine]

Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson reviews The Complete Dossier

Salon.com [Jeff Stark] REDUX POSITIVE GROUP

Nitrate Online (Gianni Truzzi) Redux

Epinions.com [Steven Flores] (Redux Version)

Film Freak Central Walter Chaw, Redux

PopMatters Tobias Peterson, Redux

digitallyOBSESSED.com [Jesse Shanks] Redux

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Peter S. Scholtes, Redux

another review by Cynthia Fuchs Pop Matters, Redux

DVD Journal (Redux) D.K. Holm

eFilmCritic.com (Jason Whyte) Redux

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson, Redux

eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) Redux

Harvey S. Karten Redux

Movie Vault [Timotei Centea] Redux

iofilm.co.uk The Wolf, Redux

Film Monthly (Jon Bastian) Redux

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray, Redux

Dave's Other Movie Log Review of Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) Dave Clayton

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) Redux

Read the full review Ryan Cracknell from Apollo Guide, Redux

Edwin Jahiel Redux

Slate [David Edelstein] REDUX NEGATIVE GROUP

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] Redux

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Redux

James Berardinelli's ReelViews reviews both versions but calls Redux a dud

Reel.com [Tor Thorsen] Redux

eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) Redux

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) Redux

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) Redux

Salon.com [Allen Barra] Redux

The Digital Bits Greg Suaraz, Redux

Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott] Redux

Jiminy Critic Reviews "Apocalypse Now Redux"

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) Redux

Turner Classic Movies Redux restoration article

Francis Ford Coppola Brilliant Careers, by Michael Sragow from Salon, October 19, 1999 (5 page essay)

Salon (Michael Sgarow) The Sound of Vietnam, a conversation with Walter Murch, April 27, 2000

Newsweek (David Ansen) Transition: Dancer in the Darkness, thoughts on Redux and Pauline Kael’s passing, September 17, 2001

original novel the entire story online, The Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

DVDBeaver.com Full Graphic Review [Ramcharan]

Time Out in 1979

Time Out Geoff Andrew Redux in 2001

Washington Post [Desson Howe] Redux

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough, Redux

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold, Redux

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert’s 1979 review

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert’s 1999 review

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert’s 2001 Redux review

The New York Times (Vincent Canby) August 15, 1979

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) Redux review August 3, 2001, also seen here: Movie Review - - CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Aching Heart Of Darkness ...

The New York Times (David Thomson) 'Apocalypse' Then, and Now, May 13, 2001

ONE FROM THE HEART

USA (107 mi) 1982

If Heaven's Gate (1980) killed the age of the director, Francis Ford Coppola's 1982 romance brought flowers to the funeral. Understandably shell-shocked from Apocalypse Now, Coppola devised a form of "electronic cinema" that would give the director total control, letting him hole up in an Airstream trailer dubbed the "Silverfish" while directing from afar. The result is as beautiful as a plastic rose, and just as fake. Shot entirely on the stages of the fledgling Zoetrope studios (whose future was ended by One From the Heart's failure), the film's Las Vegas is flamboyantly artificial, from Dean Tavoularis' dollhouse sets to Vittorio Storaro's limpid lighting. But there's too much soap in Coppola's opera. As down-and-out lovers who split up for separate nights on the town, Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest seem so mismatched you can't understand why they were together in the first place. When Garr hooks up with Raul Julia's piano-playing waiter and they share a lusty, graceful tango, you think, "Good, someone she can have fun with." Forrest, horribly miscast, is more lump than lumpen, his mopey naturalism pooling listlessly in the movie's corners.

Its revolutionary techniques -- which included precursors to the now-commonplace video assist and online editing -- notwithstanding, One From the Heart seems more theatrical than cinematic: The Vegas street becomes a lighted disco floor; opposing scenes play out on either side of a translucent scrim. So it's fitting that it's been re-released in the old-fashioned 1:33 aspect ratio, even if that means glimpses of things we presumably weren't meant to see (a studio ceiling, Lainie Kazan's bandaged wrist). For a movie whose only virtues are its excesses, more is indeed more.

In 1982, after the morass of "Apocalypse Now," Francis Coppola put the resources of his Zoetrope studio into a lighthearted lark.

"One From the Heart," a nostalgic re-creation of the studio-bound musicals of yesteryear in contemporary dress, became a revolutionary achievement in modern filmmaking technology. His visionary money-saving innovations are standard now, but his toys pushed the production far over budget. The film flopped and sank the fledgling studio it was supposed to save.

In revival more than 20 years later, "One From the Heart" looks simultaneously ahead of its time and delightfully quaint, a simple romantic comedy that revels in the dreamy artifice of a meticulously re-created fantasy Las Vegas.

On their five-year anniversary, after an evening of true confessions, longtime lovers and live-in partners Frannie (Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest) split and flee to the glitter and neon glow of the Vegas strip.

Travel agent Frannie, who yearns for Bora Bora and romantic getaways, falls into the arms of a singer (a smooth Raul Julia) who waits tables between songs. Junkyard owner Hank (Forrest), who only wants a family and a fixer-upper on the outskirts of town, woos an exotic acrobat (a kittenish Nastassja Kinski), whose sequins and greasepaint hide a stifling existence.

Think of it as Technicolor escapism for a working-class quartet who re-imagine their world as a movie set, where the seams show in a sky painted in the colors of a Michael Powell fantasy. The score of Tom Waits songs is the perfect complement, his gravelly voice of smoky bars melding with the angelic sweetness of Crystal Gayle. Like Frannie and Hank, the opposites make beautiful music in their duet.

"One From the Heart" is at its best when Coppola uses the exhilaration of style and ingenious theatrical effects to reveal the dreams and desires of Frannie and Hank. The dialogue is often clunky and the earnest ordinariness of the lovers denies them much dimension.

But as Coppola's camera glides through the crowds to trace the criss-crossing trajectories of the frustrated romantics, walls separating lovers all but disappear with the dimming of a light, and a desert junkyard glows like the ghost of Vegas glitz. We're in the realm of magic.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers)

If any film from the 1980s needs to be re-examined, it's Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart.

To put things in perspective, One from the Heart came after Coppola's huge ordeal filming Apocalypse Now in the Philippines.

The way the media saw it, Coppola returned half-mad from that experience, locked himself away in a trailer packed with new-fangled video equipment, and made a highly stylized, but very impersonal, musical without ever speaking to the actors in person.

So, not surprisingly, the film was already dead in the water when it opened. Critics turned up their noses and audiences stayed away in droves.

And yet, One from the Heart turns out to be a hugely personal film, a technological wonder years ahead of its time. It deserves to rank alongside The Conversation as one of Coppola's major achievements.

Shot entirely on a studio set, the film takes place in a quasi-glamorous Las Vegas where pudgy, uncouth Hank (Frederic Forrest) and awkward, dreamy Frannie (Teri Garr) celebrate their fifth anniversary as boyfriend and girlfriend.

Unfortunately, they fight and each heads out into the night, each accidentally meeting new and enticing lovers: a singer, Ray (Raul Julia) for Frannie and a circus girl, Leila (Nastassja Kinski) for Hank.

Admittedly, it's not much of a plot, and the exciting climax -- in which Hank races to the airport to stop Frannie from flying off with Ray -- has certainly been done to death by now (see Love Actually).

In addition, Harry Dean Stanton and Lainie Kazan play the goofy "best friend" characters that are now standard issue in romantic films.

But, Coppola is more interested in the emotional content and how it ties in with the astonishing visuals. Even the actors serve a certain visual ideal.

Neither Hank nor Frannie will ever win a beauty contest. Their relationship evokes the popular 1955 film Marty, in which two less-than-attractive people find love. Las Vegas provides a perfect foil for them, glitzy, alluring, based on greed and vice, but not without its beauties and sad realities. Meanwhile, the exotic new lovers are part of a fantasy world.

For the film's centerpiece, Coppola stages a huge dance number in the middle of the Vegas strip. All four lovers cross paths at one point. Each character takes stock of the situation, casting glances at the other three, sizing up the situation. In the midst of this singing and dancing, everyone decides on glamour rather than reality.

Though the film is steeped entirely in artifice, Coppola makes sure that Hank and Frannie's home is the most realistic set in the film. It's just a bit run down but very homey. When they're together in the house, everything's fine. It's when they go out into the night, onto the strip, that trouble starts.

Likewise, Frannie clutches onto Ray far longer than Hank does with Leila. Leila is presented as a magical force who can simply disappear, while Coppola slyly reveals that Ray doesn't exactly sing and play piano for a living; he's also a waiter. This dose of reality makes him more appealing to Frannie. It's like having a bit of Hank attached to her fantasy object.

The great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro -- who mostly worked with Bernardo Bertolucci -- provided the film's bold, saturated color pattern, and Dean Tavoularis built the amazing sets, including a kind of junkyard that Hank frequents "just to think." The filmmakers also play an amusing game with scrims, revealing one character thinking about another with the flick of a light.

Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle provide the finishing touches, warbling and wailing brokenhearted tunes from above and giving the film a more timeless, more universal appeal.

MTV launched its first videos that same year, and it wouldn't be until 20 years later that Moulin Rouge and Chicago attracted audiences with the same kind of façade filmmaking. Even if One from the Heart had come out years later, it still would have failed because its grown-up story doesn't really appeal to teens.

Nevertheless, it's clear now how deeply felt this story is, like the saddest of sad songs, the aching pang of loneliness. Coppola sent it to us in 1982 from his heart and we scorned it. Now, two decades later, perhaps he can finally mend.

DVD Details: For this cut, Coppola has slightly re-edited the film and returned it to its original beautiful color scheme. This extraordinary two-disc set from Fantoma Films boasts a beautiful, restored transfer of the film remastered in 5.1 Dolby and presented in Coppola's preferred 1-to-1.33 format. Coppola provides an entertaining and insightful commentary track. The second disc contains a treasure trove of found gems: the original and the new re-release trailer, a featurette on Tom Waits and the film's music, alternate versions of said music, rehearsal footage, deleted scenes, a featurette on the "new" electronic cinema, and an all-new "making of" documentary.

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Turner Classic Movies Jay S. Steinberg

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson

VideoVista Amy Harlib

CineScene.com (Pat Padua)

Mondo Digital review

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

DVD Verdict [Ryan Keefer] - The Complete Novel

eFilmCritic Reviews Charles Tatum

THE OUTSIDERS B+ 90

USA (91 mi) 1983 ‘Scope Director’s Cut (114 mi) 2005 Official site

He’s just a kid

Apparently the film has been expanded and rescored on DVD, I’ve only seen the original release, a small experimental film by Coppola that feels like an expressionist color-lit ode to youth, a tone poem highlighting the impressionistic and changeable nature of teens, filled with offscreen sounds of train whistles, dogs barking, and the sounds of kids at play, with gang rumbles that resemble choreographed ballet, and a social milieu of the rich privileged kids called the socs continually set against the rag tag group of outsiders, the greasers, who come from the poor side of town, told from the vantage point of a few of the outsiders. Both sides taunt and degrade one another with a frequency and regularity that reflects their own unease and lack of self esteem. It’s easy to take reckless risks and target others when your opinions about yourself are pretty close to feeling worthless.

The mood of the film swings back and forth between the forces of violence and revenge and the forces of reason and humanity. While it completely overstates its case, with an overemphasis on pulling individuals out of the pack where they have cathartic moments of realization and tears, and overreaches with highly stylized, exaggerated musical orchestration from Carmine Coppola, its simple poetry accurately reflects the changeable nature of the world of kids, and the strong performances from all the kids, especially Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, and C. Thomas Howell, are a stark revelation from the typical teen material. This is an impressive off-the-wall risk, a unique blend of realism and teen fantasia, that pulls us into their world with humor and an appealing brand of friendship, notable from the opening moments of the film scored to Van Morrison’s “Gloria,” which breathes energy and life into the images of kids joking around with one another, smoking, and simply walking down the street in packs, as well as an authentic back and forth banter between the sexes, such as the scenes at the drive-in where some kids are just obnoxious, while others surprise the hell out of you with a natural ease about themselves. It attempts to show kids being kids, and succeeds brilliantly, adapted from the S.E. Hinton novel, who herself plays a small role in the film as a nurse in the hospital.

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

—Robert Frost, from New Hampshire, 1923

Time Out original version

Like the Corleones, like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, and like Hank and Frannie in One From the Heart, the kids in The Outsiders (adapted from SE Hinton's novel) are looking for a better world. The street life of teenage Tulsa is divided into the 'socs' (pronounced soches) who go to college and wear Brut, and the greasers from the other side of the tracks, who don't. When a soc is knifed, three greasers go on the run to a rural idyll, turn tragic heroes, and finally return to try to cement a tenuous truce: like so much teenage Americana, it's about the rites of passage from adolescence to adulthood. Surprisingly for Coppola, it's a modest, prosaic, rather puritan drama with a MORAL, which, if you want to be uncharitable, is a last-ditch attempt to prove he can turn in a well-crafted piece without contracting elephantiasis of the budget. Lightly likeable, but the kids at whom it's aimed would probably rather be leaping in the aisles to Duran Duran, while their parents would opt for a rerun of Rebel Without a Cause.

PopMatters Michael Christopher on The Complete Novel (Director’s Cut 2005)

Rarely does a director's cut reflect a vision "truer" to a source text. Typically, it's a case of ego (see most of the bloated Oliver Stone cuts), or a response to the stifling state of technology at the time of the original release (any of the recent Star Wars re-releases). But, like most everything else surrounding the picture, The Outsiders: The Complete Novel is quite an anomaly.

It was one of few bright spots at the start of a career slump for director Francis Ford Coppola. He had been skewered by the press for the disastrous One from the Heart (1982), and his American Zoetrope studio was nearly bankrupt. Along came a petition signed by the Lone Star Junior High School class in Fresno, fans of the S.E. Hinton book who thought Coppola would be a good choice to bring the book to the big screen after seeing The Black Stallion (1979), which Coppola had previously produced. Touched and with nothing to lose, Coppola took on the project. He removed a script doctor in favor of cutting and pasting dialogue directly from the text and went about casting the story of the underprivileged (Greasers) and the elite (Socs).

With young, mostly unknown actors, including Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, and C. Thomas Howell, The Outsiders was a launching pad for most to greater box office paydays. Matt Dillon, as Greaser Dallas Winston, shines in particular. With his Elvis-like swagger and coolness, Dillon's "Let's do it for Johnny!" is still the most often quoted from a film loaded with catchphrases.

Including 22 minutes of restored footage, the DVD expands characters and depicts a stronger bond among the Curtis brothers (played by Swayze, Howell, and Rob Lowe), whose emotional performances were largely left on the cutting room floor when the film debuted. As a result, an almost maudlin feeling replaces the darkness, especially at Dallas's death, which originally signified the end of the film but now gives way to a more poignant finale about a family on a journey rather than a race towards destruction.

This new upbeat version is furthered in the fresh scoring. Gone is Carmine Coppola's moody original score, replaced with the highly touted "rousing new rock 'n' roll soundtrack," which, surprisingly is more than merely a marketing gimmick. With the addition of 10 tracks, including Jerry Lee Lewis' "Real Wild One" and six Elvis Presley tunes, a new sense of adventure permeates the movie. When Pony Boy and Johnny jump a freight train to escape the unavoidable police inquiry into the death of a Soc Johnny stabbed, the strains of "Mystery Train" make it more of a getaway than a desperate runaway. The new songs are the same ones Coppola had played for the cast to get them jacked up for a scene.

To facilitate a revealing cast commentary, Coppola invited Macchio, Howell, Swayze, and Lane to his home for a meal, wine, and reminiscing before sitting them down for their first viewing of the cut the studio vetoed in 1983, mainly because of length. Dillon and Lowe's additional observations, separately recorded, are deftly mixed in. All the commentary is interesting, whether pointing out bloopers or referencing Dillon and Lane's romance. The participants recall how cold the fight scene in the rain was, the gymnastic courses Coppola insisted the cast take before filming began, and how little interest Dillon had in the other young male actors. There is even a taste of bitterness during the few scenes with Tom Cruise, where his over the top competitive nature is brought up, though Lowe happily concedes they all knew he was going to make it big.

The special features offer more of the same, albeit in sometimes too short doses. Admittedly, a film from the early '80s isn't going to have a ton of extras available. The Outsiders relies largely on archival footage from the period and present day commentary that sometimes comes off a bit too wistful, so perhaps Coppola is on to something by keeping the entirety of extras to little more than one hour.

An integral extra feature is the NBC News Today piece from 1983, focusing on the students who started the petition. They loved the book enough to write to a famous director, and that director found it inside of himself to entertain their plea. More telling is footage of Swayze and Howell meeting with the students, thanking them for giving the actors careers with The Outsiders. S.E. Hinton herself provides a brief featurette, walking around her hometown of Tulsa, where the book was set and the film shot, playing the part of tour guide. The Greasers' house is still standing, as is the drive-in theater that to this day occasionally shows The Outsiders.

A "casting call" feature reveals how all the young stars in Hollywood wanted in on the picture, including Anthony Michael Hall (shown), Val Kilmer, and Mickey Rourke. As we see in a making-of documentary, Coppola built up a real life rivalry between the actors in the different social groups of the story. While the Greasers were given their scripts in a plastic three-ring binder, the Socs received theirs bound in leather. During cast soccer games set up by the director, Greasers were given canvas running shoes, sweatpants, and t-shirts with their affiliation emblazoned on them, the Soc actors got top of the line new track outfits and leather sneakers. These incidents made the enmity onscreen that much more "real."

By 1983, Hinton's book had become something of a rite of passage for students high school age and below. It's a classic tale of cliques and their separatism bleeding into an outside world in a harsh and violent way. The film is often overly sentimental, and the fact that Coppola was admittedly going for "a teen Gone with the Wind," only adds to the impression. But as the story still applies, and always will, The Outsiders is one of those unique cases where the schmaltz is nothing if not acceptable. As a package, this new DVD confirms this, with the director, author, and actors gushing over the film, mainly because it came at a central point in all of their lives. From Hinton, who needed a big adaptation, Coppola, who desperately needed a hit, and the young actors who were scratching and clawing to make it in an unforgiving town, this sentiment is real, and it carried over into the soul of the picture. Nothing seems manufactured. The DVD -- even with the juiced-up soundtrack and near-over-the-top commentaries -- can't compete with The Outsiders' realism. Instead, these extras only enhance the film in brilliant new ways.

DVD Times Gary Couzens reviews The Complete Novel

The House Next Door [Sarah D. Bunting] The Complete Novel

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviews The Complete Novel, also seen here: Turner Classic Movies

filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti reviews The Complete Novel

"The Complete Novel," DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

DVD Talk - The Complete Novel [Preston Jones]

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw] The Complete Novel

Rolling Stone Peter Travers reviews The Complete Novel

Film Journal International (Lewis Beale) The Complete Novel

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] The Complete Novel, also reviewing RUMBLE FISH

DVDTown [John J. Puccio] original version

Crazy for Cinema Lisa Skrzyniarz, original version

eFilmCritic Thom, original version

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Chester from Iowa, original version

The Outsiders Bernadette McCallion from All Movie, original version

Gods of Filmmaking original version

ZOETROPE.COM Production information

S.E. Hinton website

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert in 1983

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) The Complete Novel, September 9, 2005

YouTube - The Outsiders - Gang Fighting for Johnny (2:15)

YouTube - the outsiders (2:43)

The Outsiders- Stay Gold (3:50)

The Outsiders - Fields of Gold (4:53)

The Outsiders (7:11)

The Outsiders- Favorite Scenes (9:54)

The Outsiders (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Outsiders (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

RUMBLE FISH

USA (94 mi) 1983

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Harral]

Shot back-to-back with The Outsiders, similarly based on a novel by SE Hinton, and signalled by Coppola as 'Camus for kids', Rumble Fish does indeed have a hero figure (Rourke) who belongs to a former age of existential 'outsiders', coasting through the world in an insulated state of deafness and colour blindness from too many rumbles. His kid brother (Dillon) idolises him, but is too stupid to see the damage done to all concerned by the continuous gang-fights of frightful violence but no importance. All of which is all very well; but Coppola's recent viewing seems to have been German silent films of the '20s, so he has decided to coat the whole enterprise in a startling Expressionist style, which is very arresting but hardly appropriate to the matter in hand. As with The Outsiders' it's very hard to picture the audience at which the film is aimed.

Coppola's second adaptation of an S.E. Hinton novel revolves around Rusty-James, a mouthy, teenage gang member (Matt Dillon) whose life is devoted to emulating the past exploits of his older brother; the legendary Motorcycle Boy.

Rumble Fish is big on style, the story sometimes seeming secondary to the look of the film. Shot entirely in black and white except for the fighting fish of the title, it is full of beautifully photographed scenes, the stylistic devices employed by Coppola, such as the almost Expressionistic lighting generating a strange, dreamlike, floating atmosphere which somehow makes the whole film seem unreal.

The director's flair for the coordination of movement is shown to great effect in the gorgeously choreographed warehouse scenes of gang warfare: areas of bright light and deep shadow combining with arcing chains and switchblades in a savagely beautiful passage of aesthetic violence. Apart from being an extremely good looking film, Rumble Fish boasts a cast which would look more impressive today than it did in 1984. Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourkee and Dennis Hopper aside, it doesn't take long to pick out Chris Penn, Nicholas Cage and Tom Waits, all of whom have since proceeded to greater prominence. Rumble Fish is strangely attractive and makes up for in style what it lacks in plot.

Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Surrealist Cinematic Liberation Army of Brooklyn, Oklahoma. or anywhere. Shadows and percussion division, man. S. E. Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola have written three characters so huge, so post-humanistic, that it's impossible to figure who could possibly fill any of them. Well, actually, no, Dennis Hopper could do one of them, because he does. Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke are impressive in the other two, and if some of the moments feel slightly baggy it's more a credit to the spectacular vision and ambition of the writers than any failure on the part of the actors. People are going to get very different things out of this film, and some might argue that it isn't particularly surrealist, there being a readily identifiable plot and all. Aw, come on! The plot doesn't have anything to do with it! Well, it does, but only in the way that springs have something to do with an acrobat trampoline trombonist. Cinema techs will no doubt think they're getting the most out of it, what with Coppola flashing brilliance in every frame, in a manner more inclined towards repressed fury than showing off. I don't know, though, I mean, yeah, the technical virtuosity is more than springs, but maybe it's just the air around it. Mickey and Matt frequent only the finest pool rooms, and battle only the most delinquent gangs, to the background of a Stewart Copeland soundtrack so brilliant that it's impossible not to come to the conclusion that Sting was holding him back. Doesn't matter, he got out, and he's probably swimming around some nice river somewhere. Peripheral performances by Tom Waits, Diane Lane and Nicolas Cage show flashes of perfection, but there are some fish, too, who never opportune to flout their flourish, and yes, so often they do so together. It's a film about brothers, and the addictive nature of danger, and fear of the open road, and Biblical recitations on the non-atavistic nature of sin, and eight balls, and broken clocks, and lurid fire escapes.

read more TV Guide magazine

If THE OUTSIDERS was a GODFATHER for teens, RUMBLE FISH was APOCALYPSE NOW. Filmed in dreamy black-and-white with an occasional dab of color, RUMBLE FISH is an unabashed art film. Deliriously expressionistic visually and aurally, it owes at least as much to the work of Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, and F.W. Murnau as to the juvenile delinquent sagas of the 1950s. Set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, RUMBLE FISH tells of a somewhat slow-witted but charismatic teenager, Rusty James (Dillon), who idolizes his elder brother, the Motorcycle Boy (Rourke). The Motorcycle Boy has repudiated his gang-leader past and disapproves of Rusty's fighting but really has no practical advice to offer his sibling. He's intelligent enough to know that he has done nothing admirable to earn his local notoriety; he's just a very cool dude in a way that his hot-headed and increasingly dopey younger brother can never hope to match. Rusty, though, is too blinded by hero-worship and addled by injury-induced deliriums and booze to see things clearly. The person most annoyed by the former gang leader's lofty reputation is Officer Patterson (Smith) who ominously watches the Motorcycle Boy from behind his jet black shades.

Coppola has never made a more beautiful film. The rumble sequence alone is a rousingly choreographed frenzy that deserves to be studied by generations of film students. Hinton collaborated with the director in adaptating her eccentric but profoundly moving novel for the screen. The resulting film is an amazingly sensitive recreation of the sensibility of the literary work. Burum's black-and-white cinematography utilizes deep focus and time-lapse effects to reflect the peculiar point-of-view of the protagonists. The fighting fish to which the title refers are in color though they float in a black-and-white pet shop window. The innovative score from Copeland (formerly drummer for The Police) plays a major part in creating mood, blending perfectly with Coppola's striking images. Often it sounds like ticking clocks, thereby heightening the sense that time is running out for these characters. Clocks are also a recurring visual motif.

RUMBLE FISH also contains some truly outstanding performances. Rourke gives what may be his most satisfying performance as the impossibly cool Motorcycle Boy. One never knows whether he is truly insane, as several characters assert, or just suffers from what his father calls "acuteness of the senses." Dillon shines through with a heartbreaking portrayal of a vulnerable teen increasingly lost in a mental fog. Lane is quite touching and believable as Rusty's long-suffering girlfriend, and Spano shows great range in an atypical role as Rusty's nerdy pal. Hopper is likewise superb, his ravaged but still beautiful face suggesting a fallen angel.

This is not a film for all audiences; indeed it is difficult to imagine to what audience it is targeted. Some wags even had the temerity to christen this minor masterpiece as "Mumble Fish." Give it a try. It might change your life.

User Reviews from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

Rumble Fish is a strange and hypnotic film that follows the character of Rusty James, a young punk growing up in a small sleepy mid-western town, shackled to a drunken father, a group of fickle friends, and continually in the shadow of his enigmatic brother, The Motorcycle Boy. The film, although seemingly set in the present day, uses the style of the old 50's melodramas to great effect, referencing the likes of Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One with it's stark, stylised black and white photography and it's bizarre compositions, whilst director Francis Ford Coppola uses a number of audio and visual effects familiar from his previous films, most notably, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart, to give the film a strange, hypnotic and dreamlike quality that lingers throughout the film.

As with many of the other films that it references, the plot to Rumble Fish is quite simple, with Coppola building the film around the enigma of The Motorcycle Boy and around the ideas of family ties, small-town ennui and personal redemption. Although Rusty James is the film's central character, he is constantly overshadowed by his mysterious brother, who seems almost shell-shocked by whatever it is that he's witnessed during his years away from home. He is certainly one of the most interesting characters from any of Coppola's greater films, and is perfectly brought to life by Mickey Rourke in what is possibly his greatest performance ever (although, I think he's equally spellbinding in both Angel Heart and Year of the Dragon). Here, Rourke possess all the cool and feckless attitude of Brando and James Dean, but he also brings that damaged, somewhat alienated quality to role, which suggests so much about the characters and his past and also, about the possible future of the younger Rusty James.

The cinematic style of the film is exquisite, with Coppola invoking a real period feel through the use of photography and production design, which jars beautifully against Stuart Copeland's very 80's, very anachronistic score. The percussion suits the staccato editing style that Coppola uses in the first few scenes (which highlights the escalating boredom of the characters), whilst the use of time-lapse photography (inspired by the film Koyaanisqatsi, which Coppola produced) works perfectly in demonstrating the idea of time frittering away. The black and white photography works well, conveying the literally "black and white" view point of Rusty James, whilst the titular rumble fish (glimpsed through the window of the local pet store) are the only objects in the film that appear in colour (a nice metaphor). The sound design is purposely muddy, attempting to convey along with the images that skewed, slightly alienated view of the world that these characters possess, whilst Copeland's music also merges with the sound design to heighten the overall atmosphere of the film.

The acting is strong throughout, with Rourke coming across as the real standout, although the performance of Matt Dillon as the hotheaded and arrogant Rusty James is also impressive. The supporting cast features a wide array of cult performers and (then) unknowns that have now gone on to greater things, notably Dennis Hopper, Diane Lane, William Smith, Laurence Fishburne, Nicolas Cage, Tom Waits and Chris Penn. After Rumble Fish, Coppola would produce the problematic Cotton Club (possibly underrated), before cementing his reputation as something of a has-been with the third Godfather film, and throwaways like Jack, Peggy Sue Got Married and The Rainmaker. Because of this, Rumble Fish stands as something of a relic to the time when he was one of the most interesting American directors of his era... and is probably a film to rival the greatness of The Godfather, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now.

Matt Dillon and Diane Lane on Surrealism in Rumble Fish Criterion essay, May 01, 2017

Rumble Fish: Lose Yourself Criterion essay by Glenn Kenny, April 25, 2017

Rumble Fish (1983) - The Criterion Collection

Nick's Flick Picks [Nick Davis]

Film School Rejects [Chris Coffel] The Tao of Nicholas Cage: Rumble Fish

Radiator Heaven [J.D.]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Movies [Tom von Logue Newth]

Doug Pratt's DVD Review

AFI.com [Hans Morgenstern]

DVD Verdict [Brett Cullum] Special Edition

DVD Talk [Preston Jones] Special Edition

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) Special Edition

DVD Clinic [Scott Weinberg] Special Edition

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] also reviewing THE OUTSIDERS, The Complete Novel

Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel] Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray

Kinnemaniac [Simon Kinnear] Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray

Electric Sheep [John Bleasdale] Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray

Blu-ray.com - Region A [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Blu-Ray

CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Blu-Ray

CutPrintFilm [Chris Evangelista] Blu-ray Criterion Blu-Ray

Home Theater Info DVD Review Doug McLaren, Criterion Blu-Ray

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Theo Alexander]

The Movie Scene [Andy Webb]

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Harral]

Rumble Fish (novel) - Wikipedia

Rumble Fish - Wikipedia

THE COTTON CLUB

USA (127 mi) 1984

Apollo Movie Guide [Ryan Cracknell]

The misconception that sinks this often handsome confection is that revivalism will spread evenly over separate cultures, turning the Prohibition gangsters and backstage romances and old jazz into a winning hand of iconographic flash-cards for the camera. What neck! Neither Ellington's music nor the black dancers will hold still, of course, and fatally detain the emotions while the lovers do not. Gere, with masher's taz and major hair-oil, phones in his performance from the wardrobe department. Hines, his black opposite number, does better with less. Of the hoods, only Hoskins and Fred Gwynne rise above the mundane mayhem, spinning headlines and general dis-dat-doze. The narrative is a mess despite the simplistic twinning of tales, and - worse yet - keeps interrupting the heart-stopping hoofing.

Read the complete review for The Cotton Club TV Guide magazine

Lavish, interesting, evocative but strained and self-conscious, THE COTTON CLUB is all watchable curiosity. Film doctor Coppola came in at the last minute to salvage a troubled production, but couldn't give it a clear storyline with incisive character motivation. This marriage of gangsters and musicals has many elements of genius, but its biggest flaws are its leads. Gere does his own cornet solos, but his hair oil defines his character. Lane, who can only point to LONESOME DOVE in a career full of big chances, walks right through this one, like she's distracted by a flashing traffic light. Hines does what he can without much material to create around, but Hoskins and Gwynne are terrific gangsters and McKee's rendition of "Ill Wind" is a revelation, defining her own lack of career chances and the ill-fated luck of this production.

The mix of fact and fiction, the show-stopping Ellington music, the heady, poisonous aroma of sinister glamour---COTTON CLUB has much to recommend it before it comes up empty-handed. Yet what success it can muster is discolored by might-have-beens. No doubt a behind-the-scenes documentary would have been wildly successful.

Not quite Godfather: The Musical, The Cotton Club is director Francis Ford Coppola’s hyper-stylized look at the battle for control in prohibition-era Harlem. The Cotton Club is the place to be, where jazz is the sound of choice and glitz and glamour are all the rage. Behind the scenes, things are much uglier. Mobsters run the joint, using it as a cover for bootlegging, numbers running and all sorts of no good, but highly profitable activities.

Dixie (Richard Gere) is a slick cornet player who inadvertently saves Dutch (James Remar), a hated mob boss, from an untimely demise. Without any choice, Dixie suddenly finds himself employed in a job that he doesn’t altogether want. In another thread, a tap dancing phenom, Sandman Williams (Gregory Hines), struggles realize his dream of becoming a Cotton Club dancer. He’s a black man in a world run by whites. He knows his place, but he wants out of it.

As high-status and glittering as the Cotton Club may be, Coppola exposes it as a den of evil, where innocence is corrupted. Once both Dixie and Sandman are in, they cannot escape. Even those around them become infected. The day after Dutch hires Dixie, Dixie’s younger brother (Nicholas Cage) finds his way onto the gangster’s payroll as a professional goon.

It all comes down to money and respect at the Cotton Club. Those with the money get the respect and all of its benefits: free drinks, women, and handshakes with celebrities. Coppola makes us wonder how far people will go to make money and gain respect. Morals are compromised; beliefs are forgotten. For Sandman, respect is even more difficult to gain, because of his skin colour. He’s proud to be black, but he’s automatically excluded from many opportunities. Sandman just has to work that much harder.

To the eye, The Cotton Club is certainly pleasing. The establishment comes alive with raucous singing, live music and free-flowing drinks. Waitresses’ costumes shimmer in the bright spotlights. Men are dapper in expensive suits. The dancers can step and the musicians can wail. Coppola combines them all with a gritty underworld appeal in a post-modern take on the gangster film. While not exactly a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, the tunes continue throughout as part of the narrative, making for an unlikely pairing of genres.

Whereas the style consistently shines, there are several points where the narrative tends to stutter, especially when it comes to Dixie. He is introduced early on as the story’s major player before disappearing for most of the second act and a good portion of the third. While the multiple narratives work, a little more overlap might have given both stories better definition without adding another 30 minutes to the length.

The Cotton Club is a welcome break from the typical gangster film. Coppola’s claustrophobic fall from Eden is both fascinating and beautiful to watch.

DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Mark Zimmer

The Qnetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]

DVD Verdict Terry Coli

VideoVista Debbie Moon

filmcritic.com plays The Cotton Club Christopher Null

PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED

USA (103 mi) 1986

More relaxed - sloppy, even - than any of Coppola's usual busy films, this explores that universal fantasy of getting a second chance at your youth: a 40-year-old Turner faints at her high school reunion, and wakes 20 years earlier in 1960 during her last schooldays. The crux of her return is to sort out what later became a less-than-successful marriage to her feckless husband (Cage in endearingly dopey form). The movie is unfortunately bound to be compared with the much slicker Back to the Future. Ignore the ridiculous happy ending of this film, and you have a much more fatalistic exercise in which Coppola eschews easy laughs in favour of the exposure of feeling and the fact that these people's lives, however empty, matter to them. Turner is in the Oscar class.

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest)

Peggy Sue Bodell is a forty three year old housewife with an unfaithful husband. One day she decides that enough is enough and breaks up the marriage. She attends her twenty fifth high school reunion with her daughter as her date. When she sees Charlie, her soon to be ex-husband, enter the room she faints. When Peggy Sue finally comes to she is suddenly a teenager again. She is back living with her parents, going to high school, and dating her future husband. The irony is that she still has her forty three year old mind in tack and is now able to rethink the difficult decisions she was presented with as a kid.

Times were tough for Francis Ford Coppola. After basically owning 1970’s cinema, the 80’s had brought him a handful of critical and financial disasters that hurt him professionally. With his seemingly endless ambition he has purchased an entire film studio only to see it sold five years later. He had strived to present new material with experimental techniques, but in the end he was left questioning his future in the movie business. What he needed was a fresh project to get him back on his feet, and after years of staying on the cutting edge of filmmaking, he found unlikely success in a simple and intimate story. Coppola was the third director behind Jonathan Demme and Penny Marshall to be involved with Peggy Sue Got Married (the title of which is lifted from a Buddy Holly song), but he turned out to be the perfect compliment to the already well written film.

The production of Peggy Sue Got Married started in the late summer of 1985 and lasted eight weeks. To help reestablish his reputation Coppola strived to keep the project on time and under budget. When the film was released in the later part of 1986, it was difficult to not link it with the similarly themed project Back to the Future, which was released the year before. And while it may have only found a fraction of Back to the Future’s financial successes, Peggy Sue Got Married still earned a healthy profit and was even reviewed by some critics more favorably than its predecessor. The film still holds strong today and may even prove to be more powerful to audiences who are able to see it during different stages of their lives. Peggy Sue Got Married turned out to be Coppola’s biggest hit of the decade and lit a fire under the career that he was trying to rekindle.

Peggy Sue Got Married Bob Bartosch from Jump Cut

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Washington Post [Paul Attanasio]

GARDENS OF STONE

USA (111 mi) 1987

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Brian Calhoun)

Coppola's oblique, muted and curiously revisionist drama of life on the home front during the Vietnam war. Sgt Hazard (Caan), a battle-seasoned veteran frustrated by his present role in the 'toy soldier' regiment guarding the Arlington military cemetery, is shaken out of his self-pitying cynicism by his love affair with an anti-war journalist (Huston) and a spiky father/son relationship with a gung-ho rookie (Sweeney). Caan is against the war - 'It's not even a war. There's nothing to win, and no way to win it' - but for the military; he won't go back to Vietnam, but desperately wants a transfer to Fort Benning, where he can train young recruits to die valiantly. Meanwhile, the bodies arrive daily, to be boxed up and buried with full military honours. While Ronald Bass' subtly understated dialogue, Coppola's meticulous direction, and some exceptional acting (especially from Caan) never fail to rivet the attention, there's a pervasive and worrying sense of the central issues being gently but undeniably fudged.

I strongly believe that Francis Ford Coppola is responsible for not only the best film about the war in Vietnam, but also one of the finest motion pictures ever created. No, I am not talking about Gardens of Stone, but Apocalypse Now. It is somewhat surprising that Coppola decided to make another movie about Vietnam after putting himself through hell during the shooting of that film. Yet, unlike Apocalypse, Gardens of Stone sheds violent combat for a more quiet focus on the internal struggles of those indirectly affected by the war. It is a noble effort from a talented filmmaker, but since the creation of Apocalypse, I feel as if Coppola has taken a much more relaxed approach to filmmaking, almost as if he knows it is not possible to top his earlier masterpieces. Gardens of Stone is not a terrible film, but it is extremely disjointed, and worst of all, lacks emotion.

The film honors the soldiers who tend to the graves at Arlington National Cemetery. At the time of the Vietnam War, these men were endlessly busy staging funerals and burying the dead, which were chillingly referred to as "drops." James Caan plays Clell Hazard, an army sergeant who, after serving two tours, views the war in Vietnam as futile. He becomes attached to training a young recruit named Jackie Willow (D.B. Sweeney), who has an opposing view of the war. One scene shows Willow telling his girlfriend, Rachael (Mary Stuart Masterson), "A soldier in the right place and right time can change the world." Through their differences, the two men form an uncommon bond.

Much of the problem with Gardens of Stone is that it focuses too intently on the wrong relationships. The romance between Clell and Washington Post reporter, Samantha Davis (Anjelica Huston), is important to the overall picture, but the time spent on these characters greatly detracts from the pivotal relationship between Hazard and Willow. All too often, events happen to characters we hardly know or have not even met; it is difficult to feel sympathy towards characters we do not know. I did not become emotionally attached to any of the characters due to the fact that they were underwritten and misdirected.

If I did not know better, I would swear this was a completely different Coppola from the master who directed The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. He pieces the film together in a random method that makes me believe he truly did not know where its strengths lie. The entire film spends its lengthy running time in all the wrong places. The irrelevant portions are slow and plodding, while the pertinent scenes are hurried and underdeveloped. Such an interesting and important subject could have been turned into a thought-provoking story, but this film gave me nothing to ponder. The lead actors do the best they can with the meager material, but it is obvious that they are struggling. Many of the less significant performances are so horrendous that I am amazed Coppola actually let them by.

Coppola once again used his father and Apocalypse Now composer, Carmine Coppola, to score this film. I was not terribly impressed with the majority of the music in Apocalypse Now, but it felt suitable. The music for Gardens of Stone is so bad that it severely undermines the impact of the film. It sounds like a mix between the music of a 1940s B movie and an episode of Gomer Pyle. I admire the fact that he wanted to pay respect to his dear old Dad, but Coppola really should have had a heart to heart talk with the man before deciding to plague his film with this irritating score.

I typically find any subject revolving around the Vietnam War fascinating, but I found Gardens of Stone dreadfully tiresome. I did not learn anything, nor did I feel moved by the experience. The best films tend to stay with me, resonating through my mind again and again. One week from now, I would not be surprised if I barely remember watching Gardens of Stone.

DVD Verdict Michael Rankins

DVDTalk.com [Holly Ordway]

Modamag.com [Kage Alan]

Siskel & Ebert (video)

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

THE GODFATHER: PART III

USA (162 mi) 1990

Time Out Geoff Andrew

The chief impression is of déjà vu: extravagant ceremonies, parties, shady meetings behind closed doors. The implausible story doesn't help: Michael Corleone (Pacino), grey and bowed in 1979, misses his ex-wife (Keaton) and kids so much that he decides to abandon crime and make the family business legitimate. If it's nicely ironic that bastard nephew Vincent (Garcia), Michael's right-hand man, is almost psycopathically violent, this strand is weakened when Michael objects to daughter Mary's falling for Vincent. And the unwise insertion of elements from real life - the laundering of money through the Vatican - founders because so many details are skated over that the exact implications of Michael's brush with Old World power-brokers are often obscured. Plot apart - much of which concerns Michael's struggles to defend both his empire and his intergrity against Mafia peers - it often looks like Coppola is going through the motions. The acting is merely passable, several characters are given nothing to do, and Michael's paranoid self-pity lends the film an absurd morality: Coppola expects us to sympathise with the semblance of virtue.

"Every family has bad memories!" This may be one for the Coppola family, although Sofia's contribution to the mediocrity of (all but the last 40 minutes) this film has been vastly overrated. Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo obviously understood that a corporate religiously respectable Don isn't going to be as fun to work with as a street shooter, but that doesn't entirely excuse the preoccupation with the Catholic hierarchy, or the ultra-lame incest thread. Andy Garcia has enough fireworks to be James Caan's son so long as he's threatening to shoot people or doing so, but his love dialogues with Ms. Coppola are absolutely painful-they're like fifth graders having to read from "Romeo and Juliet" against their will, though the lines owe more to "The Bold and the Beautiful" than they do to the favourite son of Stratford-upon-Avon. Even Al Pacino has difficulty getting near his previous heights as Michael Corleone, there's no one decent around to have a scene with. George Hamilton is probably the best part of the first two-thirds of the film as some kind of a caricature of a corporate lawyer, but he'd have been most effectively paired with Leslie Nielsen. Of course they can't let it go out that way, and don't. Having already utilized the Catholic/violence montage somewhere near the opening credits, Coppola shakes things up and out comes a tremendous beautiful prodigious vainglorious worthy appropriately volcanic and canoli saturated opera and violence montage finale. After the film I was tempted to start bitching about how silly and strange all the corporate banking Vatican and mob linking was, then I realized that one of the things I really liked about the film is how well they developed the milieu of strange and powerful currents that swirled around the papacy of Pope John Paul I.

Eighteen years after the first screenings of The Godfather, the long-awaited third and final chapter reached theaters. That it proved unable to fulfill expectations was a predictable - if somewhat disheartening - result, given the sixteen year buildupThe Godfather Part III is a good movie, with moments of rare power, but it is not a great one - a reason why many fans of the series have voiced their disappointment.

Oscar nominations for this film were probably based more on the Godfather name and reputation than on the particular merits of this production. Part III became the first Godfather not to take best picture and, despite a deserving performance, Al Pacino's efforts were not acknowledged. The lack of awards enthusiasm perhaps reflected a general opinion.

The story opens in 1979 New York, some twenty years after Michael Corleone (Pacino) gave the order to have his older brother killed. His children Mary (Sofia Coppola) and Anthony (Franc D'Ambrosio) are now grown. Mary is devoted to her father; Anthony is more wary. He loves Michael, but wants nothing to do with "the business", even though all illegal investments have been divested. The Corleone family is legitimate.

As with the other two movies, this one begins with a family gathering. The occasion is the presentation to Michael of the Order of St. Sebastian - the highest honor the Catholic Church can bestow upon a layman. For a Corleone to receive it is the ultimate mark of respectability.

Michael is not so easily free of his former underworld allies, however. When he makes a $600 million play for the international conglomerate Immobiliare, they want a piece of the cake, seeing an opportunity to launder their money. Michael's refusal at a meeting of dons stings more than a few of his old friends, and brings down a bloody retribution.

The next Don Corleone - Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), Sonny Corleone's boy - is awaiting his opportunity. He possesses a ruthlessness and taste for violence that Michael has long since lost, and as the Immobiliare stakes escalate, the old head of the family recognizes the need for youth and strength. The passing of the baton, however, carries with it a tragic price.

One of the most obvious problems with The Godfather Part III is that it covers little new territory. The plot is highly derivative of the original. This time, Michael fills Vito's role, and Vincent stands in for Michael. This method of too-obvious parallelism might have been more effective had Vincent's character been better developed. That isn't the case, however, because Michael is still the focal point.

As always, Pacino is a delight to watch. The third time around, he brings a mournful weariness to Michael Corleone. This is a man who has paid for all the wrong choices. Memories haunt him like ghosts that can never be exorcised. The emotional toll is shown in the stoop of his shoulders and the thickness of his voice.

Family, as has ever been the case, is crucial to Michael. His children are his reason for living. In his words, "The only wealth in this world is children. More than all the money and power on Earth, [they] are my treasure." He says to Mary that he would burn in hell to keep her safe. It is a prophetic statement.

Robert Duvall is missed. It's impossible not to feel the vacuum created by his absence. George Hamilton's B.J. Barrison is a one-dimensional necessity of plot, not a "real" character. At least the decision was made not to replicate Tom Hagen in Barrison. Hamilton is given little more to do than stand in the background and speak a few lines.

Another unfortunate casting decision was the choice of Sofia (daughter of Francis) Coppola as Mary (Winona Ryder, the director's preference, was prevented by fatigue from appearing). Coppola is pleasant enough to look at, but her range is limited, and that lack of ability diminishes several emotionally-charged scenes. This is the first Godfather to have a major role defined by a poor performance.

One thing that is not inferior, however, is Francis Ford Coppola's directorial flair. The final half-hour, with its interweaving of diverse-yet-related plot lines, is choreographed with the skill of a master. There are moments of The Godfather Part III that shine with the brilliance of the previous two films.

Despite its missteps, The Godfather Part III packs enough of a punch to deserve a place alongside its predecessors. This is no poorly-conceived curiosity. Not only does the film bring Michael Corleone's story to a conclusion, but it remains faithful to the form and style of parts I and II. Taken as one grand epic, with this chapter included, the Godfather movies represent one of the most solid, emotionally-rich tales ever committed to film.

Peter Reiher

eFilmCritic Slyder

DVD Verdict - 2005 Release [Steve Evans]

Movie Vault [John Ulmer]

The Projection Booth [Rob Humanick]

Marcresarf1- Epinions Review

Alex Ioshpe

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest)

DVD Talk [Preston Jones]

filmcritic.com retires The Godfather Christopher Null

DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr reviews The Godfather Collection (5 DVD set)

The Digital Bits Todd Doogan reviews The Godfather Collection (5 DVD set)

The Film Desk (James Kendrick) reviews The Godfather Collection (5 DVD set)

Reel.com DVD review [James Plath] The Godfather Collection (5 DVD set)

The Godfather DVD Collection Alexander Larman from DVD Times (5 DVD set)

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle reviews The Godfather Collection (5 DVD set)

DVD review: 'The Godfather Collection' Glenn Abel from DVD Spin Doctor (5 DVD set)

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] The Godfather Trilogy (5 DVD set)

The Godfather Part III - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA

USA (126 mi) 1992

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

From the moment Dracula (Oldman) trails a bloodied razor across his tongue with a look of ecstasy, you know that this version, going back to source in Stoker's novel, isn't going to offer a silver-tongued bloodsucker hovering over swooning damsels. In the opening sequences, Dracula's soul-mate Elisabeta (Ryder) commits suicide in the mistaken belief that he had died in battle. Forsaking God, he seems doomed to an endless existence of guilt and loneliness, until lawyer Jonathan Harker (Reeves) shows him a picture of his fiancée, who just happens to be the spitting image of Elisabeta. A gorgeous, stylised adaptation, full of visual tricks and dazzling camerawork, this places the emphasis firmly on perverse, rampant eroticism. Equally forceful is Oldman's extraordinary performance, especially in his older guise, complete with bouffant hairdo and elongated fingers. In contrast to Hopkins' aggressive performance as vampire-hunter Van Helsing, a stupefied Reeves puts in a hopeless show of defiance. This lack of a convincing central dynamic leads to the occasional sense that the film is little more than a spectacular edifice, but you'll be too spellbound to resist seduction.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula Terrence Rafferty from the New Yorker

The filmmakers can't put this fiasco off on poor Stoker. What makes the picture so peerlessly ridiculous is the style, not the story. The screenplay, by James V. Hart (co-author of "Hook"), embellishes a simple, classic tale with killer-diller thrills and special-effects opportunities; and the director, Francis Ford Coppola, executes every dreadful idea with ferocious, near-fanatical enthusiasm. The movie is an orgy of fake blood, opera-house décor, and delirious film-lab wizardry, and it sustains a hysterical tone for an ungodly two hours and ten minutes. It's conceived as a vampire saga in the modern, eroticized manner—horror to make women swoon like Victorian maidens—but it isn't very scary, and it isn't romantic. Gary Oldman, who plays Dracula, is perfectly opaque and remote in the seduction scenes: he has no sex appeal. (As the old Dracula, leering wrinkedly beneath a crullerlike coiffure, Oldman has his moments, though.) The picture just keeps coming at us indefatigably, unstoppably, as if it were pursuing us through eternity, and it leaves us feeling mysteriously drained. This is no ordinary movie: it has the appalling persistence of the undead. Also with Anthony Hopkins, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Sadie Frost, and Tom Waits.

Francis Ford Coppola busts out a credible alternative to an all-time classic, but the only thing that you can positively identify as better in this version is Tom Waits' nearly perfect Renfield. It could have been a lot better, but for horribly miscast Keanu Reeves (who fails to do a good impression of a British accent, all the while apparently believing that gentlemen have no psychological gears other than “soft”) and Winona Ryder (who always appears to suffer in dramatic roles even more than her characters). To complicate matters, much of the early going to relates to Reeves and Ryder, so you've got a film with a few wheels stuck in the muck from the onset. Anthony Hopkins' entrance is so brilliant and flamboyant that you think he's out to save the film, but he gets more sidetracked than messianic. He's good a lot of the time, though, and that's something. So is Sadie Frost as the infected girl-it doesn't sound like much of a role, but she does an impressive job. I wouldn't even begin to know how to look like that, and I guess doing so is part of the curse. Well done, Sadie. All the while Coppola is gunning up these incredible action sequences against a background that looks like Dracula should. Tremendous stuff, not enough to make you forget about Tod Browning's stuff, but a tremendous scientific update considering the inherent limitations of color. Coppola makes no visual errors, but the best scenes tend to come out of nowhere, but not in a positive way. The pacing is scattered, like the performances (good heavens, man! They're dealing with an eternal curse! yeah, but...). Gary Oldman is most effective as the count when he's a young man about town, strolling the streets of London in psychedelic sunglasses. I remember thinking that he invoked Axl Rose somehow, not a bad reference. Against everything that came before, Ryder puts it together for the climactic scene, and things finish up with a bang, as they should. Well, Coppola, I mean, you knew he was never going to allow this many stars to stand around in the same scene without some of ‘em gettin' hit.

Reel.com DVD review [Jim Hemphill] Collector’s Edition

Director Francis Ford Coppola was coming off of a film he once said he would never make—The Godfather, Part III—when he chose to take on another for-hire studio assignment, an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Doing these films, followed by Jack and The Rainmaker, was Coppola's way of achieving financial independence after the crushing debts he incurred in the 1980s. He ended up taking his revenue from these unabashedly crowd-pleasing films and investing it his numerous ventures (like his winery) that were successful enough to allow the director to self-finance his upcoming film Youth Without Youth, and to become, at the age of 67, what he always wanted to be: an amateur. Coppola has claimed that he will continue to make idiosyncratic, personal independent films with his own money and leave the studio system behind—which is promising (given the pleasures of Coppola's previous passion projects like The Conversation and Rumble Fish), yet a little disappointing. For among many other things, Francis Ford Coppola is one of the greatest studio craftsmen who ever lived.

In fact, one of the ironies of Coppola's career is that some of his best movies—certainly the original The Godfather, which was turned down by dozens of directors before it got to him—have been ostensibly impersonal Hollywood assignments. Coppola is almost alone among his peers in his ability to infuse material that he does for money, or convenience, or out of contractual obligation, with his own preoccupations and visual artistry. Whereas Scorsese and De Palma's for-hire gigs are often far less intensely personal than their other films, Coppola seems genetically incapable of making a film without investing his entire soul in it. A case in point is Bram Stoker's Dracula, which, while not one of Coppola's greatest works (the performances are a bit too inconsistent for that), is certainly one of the most visually stunning and unabashedly emotional horror films of the 1990s. Reworking Stoker's novel as a tragic love story, Coppola takes note of the fact that the book takes place at around the same time as the birth of the movies, and uses this coincidence to justify a highly audacious decision: to shoot all the special effects using techniques from the beginning of the 20th century. Aided in this endeavor by his son Roman, who serves as second-unit director, Coppola creates a film that is permeated by love—not only the operatic love between Count Dracula and the woman he longs for for centuries, but Coppola's own love for the cinema itself and the sensual power that can be conveyed by a careful intersection of movement, light, color, and music. The upshot is that Bram Stoker's Dracula has a timeless quality (it has already aged better than many other studio releases of its era), and a profound sense of romance that has largely been lost in films of the digital age.

As is usually the case with Coppola's special edition DVDs, the new version of Bram Stoker's Dracula comes packed with entertaining and insightful supplementary features. The director provides an engaging introduction and a superb commentary track for the movie, during which he is thoughtful and candid about the film and its place in his career. Coppola is an expert at this kind of audio narration by now, and he masterfully modulates his comments so that they're accessible to the casual viewer while still holding value for more serious film scholars and aspiring directors. A second DVD contains four documentaries that are essential viewing for Coppola fans as well as anyone interested in the visual components of filmmaking. The 28-minute "The Blood is Life" is a fascinating look at the genesis of the project as well as Coppola's approach to performance, as it includes not only interviews with key collaborators but rehearsal footage similar to that included on the director's Rainmaker DVD. Eiko Ishioka's dazzling (and Academy Award winning) costumes are given their just attention in "The Costumes Are the Sets," a 14-minute featurette on the wardrobe and its relationship to production design in the film. Roman Coppola's primitive but beautiful special effects take center stage in "In Camera—The Naïve Visual Effects of Dracula," which packs an astonishing amount of interesting technical information into its 19 minutes. Finally, "Method and Madness—Visualizing Dracula" covers both the film's myriad visual influences and Coppola's innovative method of storyboarding the movie. The DVD also includes a couple of original trailers for the film, as well as a teaser trailer for Youth Without Youth, and nearly a half-hour's worth of deleted and extended scenes. Like the Rainmaker special edition that came out a month or so, the disc is pure oxygen for cinephiles.

Classic-Horror Eric Miller

Nick's Flick Picks (Capsule Review) Nick Davis

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

filmcritic.com Jay Antani

Alex Ioshpe

Edinburgh U Film Society [Mark Radice]

Mike Bracken

Gods of Filmmaking

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Collector’s Edition

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Collector’s Edition

Fulvue Drive-in Nicholas Sheffo, Collector’s Edition

PopMatters (Adam Besenyodi) Collector’s Edition

DVD Verdict - Collector's Edition [Brett Cullum]

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Ryan Keefer]

DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) Blu-Ray version

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) Superbit version

The Digital Bits Greg Suarez, original and Superbit versions

Variety (Todd McCarthy)

Austin Chronicle [Raoul Hernandez]

Cynthia Fuchs (c/o infor Women's Studies) originally from Philadelphia City Paper

Washington Post [Hal Hinson]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

DVDBeaver.com - Blu-ray-DVD Review [Luiz R.]

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH C+ 77

USA Germany Italy France Romania (124 mi) 2007 ‘Scope

One must give Francis Ford Coppola plenty of leeway on this one, as by this time in his life (age 68), he’s earned the right to do pretty much whatever he wants to do. This is a weird film that seems to exist almost entirely in one man’s imagination, adapted for the movie by Coppola as well as the novella’s religious historian author Mircae Eliade, shot in Romania, with subtle references to other films that are barely noticeable, but probably gave the director plenty to chuckle about. Coppola takes a turn out of Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE (2006) in a film that feels adrift from a series of dreams, that has a strange fascination with cramming as much knowledge as is humanly possible into one man’s lifetime, which is revealed in what resembles a flashback, but is instead the miracle of time traveling. Tim Roth plays Dominic Matei, an aging Romanian professor of linguistics whose life is a disappointment. On the verge of committing suicide in 1938, he is zapped by a lightning bolt and suddenly discovers he’s forty years younger with a knowledge of the future, where the Nazi’s take a distinct interest in his discovery of youth and his seemingly unlimited powers of knowledge as well. He is protected, however, by his hospital physician Professor Stanciulescu (Bruno Ganz), who realizes what a prized possession has suddenly turned up on his doorstep, who values a patient who has complete familiarity with both the past and the future, including events that have yet to occur. His knowledge is limitless, as he is able to grasp the contents of entire books simply by holding them in his hand. Dominic is unwittingly seduced by a Gestapo spy (Alexandra Pirici) who has a swastika sewn into her undergarments, so he is whisked out of the country beyond the grasp of the Third Reich who want to use him for their Frankenstein-like electrical experiments hoping to rediscover the secrets of youth, eventually followed to Vienna where a highly visualized cinematic reference recalls the shadowy streets from THE THIRD MAN (1949).

During his escape, he realizes he has a double, as well as a connection to his past, which he has an opportunity to reconnect with by already knowing the outcome, including the now deceased former love of his life, Romanian actress Alexandra Maria Lara in a duel role, who he knows marries someone else. But there is at least an element of suspense when we discover she is briefly in the same parallel universe with Dominic, apparently another lightning victim, who in her dreams spouts early languages going back to the origins of communication, but which take a horrible toll on her, againg her rapidly with every trip backwards in time until eventually Dominic must set her free to allow her back into her own path. At one point, Dominic summons representatives from the Vatican to verify the authenticity of her ravings in foreign tongues that no one else understands, which has the resemblance of LOST HORIZON (1937) as she is flown into a mysterious mountainside and returned to a remote Biblical location with the hopes of uncovering a clue to the language’s origins, which it turns out was written inside a hidden cave that she immediately recognizes.

While the production values are excellent, cinematography by Mihai Malaimare Jr, the story is advanced by a seemingly neverending inner narrative from Dominic that just sucks the life right out of the picture, that spends so much time at the mercy of its own words that the audience’s attention is bound to drift elsewhere, even with several upside down vantage points. The professor attempts to document his discoveries by writing a book on the origins of language and human consciousness, much of which is verbalized to the audience in a scientific monotone, especially in the beginning as we are getting familiarized with the story. All of this gets lost with so little dramatic connection to the audience, as the film seems to flow at an old man’s pace, as if one is napping, occasionally waking with a few pertinent memories, before returning back into the safety of sleep. While an uncredited Matt Damon appears out of nowhere as an interested correspondent from Life magazine who is interested in the professor’s story, also 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS & 2 DAYS (2007) actress Anamaria Marinca makes a brief appearance as a hotel desk clerk, it was difficult to catch hold of a central theme or pattern of ideas that really mattered in this film, as there’s little emotional connection to any of the characters, so much of this has an uneven hit or miss feel to it.

Ten years after his last film, the work-for-hire adaptation of John Grisham's "The Rainmaker," Francis Ford Coppola gets behind the camera for a modest labor of love.

"Youth Without Youth" (adapted from novella by Mircea Eliade) is the story of an aging linguist (Tim Roth) in 1938 Hungary who is bestowed with (eternal?) youth and abilities that border on the supernatural. After being struck by lightning, he absorbs books and reads minds with the wave of a hand.

The film effortlessly evokes "Faust," the fountain of youth, "The Picture of Dorian Gray," and even "Frankenstein"-- spinning tales of reincarnation and estrangement without finding its own identity.

Roth's Dominic dodges the Nazis (who think he's the key to engineering the master race) in a storybook reimagining of World War II Europe, meets another lightning survivor (Alexandra Maria Lara) who channels ancient souls and dead languages, and spars with his alter ego, who pushes him to complete his life's work into the origins of language. "All that matters is knowledge," the doppelganger in the mirror tells the lonely young man.

It's hard not to think of "Youth Without Youth" as Coppola's attempt to recapture the cinema rapture of his youth with the grace of age and experience. There is a joy in his simple but rich imagery and vibrant filmmaking. He has returned to simple, practical techniques to create his fantastic imagery, only discreetly resorting to digital touches. It's gorgeous.

Yet it's a bit disappointing to find that after 10 years, Coppola really doesn't have much to say. The philosophical struggle between reason and emotion has all the resonance of a late-night bull session, and Coppola isn't as invested in the ideas as he is in their cinematic expression. "Youth Without Youth" is more pleasurable for its joyous filmmaking than for its perspicacity of storytelling.

Francis Ford Coppola spent much of the past decade working on his dream project Megalopolis. Having failed to bring it to fruition, he now delivers Youth Without Youth, a dreamy, impressionistic indie in which "genius" Romanian professor Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) struggles mightily to complete his life's one great work, a book on "the origin of language and human consciousness." The parallels between creator and creation are clear, but Coppola's first effort since 1997's The Rainmaker nonetheless finds the director still woefully adrift, casting about for inspiration in a herky-jerky fashion that results in embarrassment more often than triumph. Based on a novella by Mircea Eliade, whose writing focused on the philosophy of religion and myths, the film is a deliberately oblique rumination on transmigration, the cruel nature of time, and the folly of ego, all topics addressed in such a clunky and/or silly fashion that it's hard to comprehend exactly what the filmmaker is going for. Part period piece, science fiction fantasy, metaphysical head-trip, and homage to classic Italian cinema (via its sweeping score, its rear projection effects, and its old-school credit sequence), it's a heady swirl of genres, tones, and theories that—like the opening montage, full of spinning clock hands and gears, strands of hair, heavy breathing, and a skull in a hand—is predominantly awkward and misguided.

Planning to commit suicide in 1938 Romania on the eve of WWII, 70-year-old Matei is suddenly struck by lightning, a freak occurrence with an even freakier outcome: Matei awakens to find himself 40 again. This astounds his doctor, Stanciulescu (Bruno Ganz), who attempts to keep his miraculous patient out of the hands of the Nazis, who seek to harness his fountain-of-youth faculties for nefarious means. Things get wackier once Matei discovers that he also has all sorts of supernatural abilities—he can read a book without opening it, and he can force a Nazi villain to shoot himself—as well as a Hyde-ish double, who represents his more scientific and greedy half and compels Matei to complete his inquiry into the "proto-language," which existed at "the inarticulate moment of the beginning." It's a wacko pulpy premise that Coppola treats with reflective somberness, and this is his gravest mistake, as the seriousness of tone and the increasing ludicrousness of his material never mesh. This problem becomes more pronounced once Matei rediscovers his long-lost (and now deceased) love, Laura (Alexandra Maria Lara), in the person of Veronica (also Lara), who suffers a similar lightening-bolt attack and consequently transforms into a rapidly aging, foreign language-muttering medium for an ancient Indian woman named Raffini who's traveling back in time.

Though shot on a low budget in Romania and Bulgaria, Youth Without Youth—photographed and scored by Mihai Malaimare Jr. and Osvaldo Golijov, respectively—is aesthetically luxurious, with Coppola's widescreen compositions boasting an entrancing richness and tenderness. Tackling issues of memory, time, and the relationship between dreams and reality, the director treats his material as if it were Last Year at Marienbad, yet his story's particulars are too goofy and too incompatible to result in something haunting or beguiling. Accordingly, what he winds up with is mere ungainly inscrutability. Sizzling electricity flashes accompany Matei's paranormal powers and Veronica reenacts The Exorcist by sweating and speaking ancient languages while in bed, merely two of many bizarre narrative elements that leave Roth stranded, valiantly but unsuccessfully trying to retain a glimmer of affecting humanity in Matei. Coppola so doggedly seeks to create a level of romantic/spiritual contemplativeness via formal experimentation that his reckless abandon—the plethora of repeated motifs, the oblique references, the deliberate artifice—does generate a modicum of intrigue and admiration. However, given his general failure to synthesize his ideas into either a compelling dramatic whole or an impressionistic conceptual treatise, the film principally stands as a great director's blast-off into crazy.

Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola's self-financed return to the fray, is a curious project—well-crafted, personal, and movie-movie old-fashioned even in its vanguard aspirations. Simply put, it's a Faustian romance about the reversal of time and transmigration of souls which, shot mainly in Romania, adds a soupçon of Balkan chic and anti-Nazi iconography to its rich stew of twaddle.

Coppola's source is a novella by the historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907–1986). A more scholarly sort of Joseph Campbell, long ensconced at the University of Chicago, Eliade provided what might have been footnotes to Marvel comics Thor and Dr. Strange; back in the day, his The Sacred and the Profane and The Myth of the Eternal Return were earnestly pondered by academic acid-heads like myself. But the professor had a second life, composing fictions akin to Borgesian brain-twisters.

Youth Without Youth, which Eliade wrote late in life, is one of these. Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) is an aging professor of linguistics and a self-described failure. It's Easter Day 1938 with "War Clouds Over Romani," per the newspaper headline. The weather is freakish. Dominic is actually planning to kill himself—when he's struck by lightning. "A man who survives being struck by lighting is completely changed," Eliade observed in an account of Siberian shamans. "He is a new man." So it is with Dominic. He suffers massive burns, yet his hair grows back luxuriantly and his rotting teeth are replaced by new ones.

Inexplicably younger and immeasurably smarter, the old linguist is about to have his second chance. He learns Chinese in a flash, the mystery of his newfound abilities abetted by intoxicating cimbalom music. Meanwhile, his doctor (Bruno Ganz) ponders not only this unique medical case but the international situation: "France is abandoning us to the Nazis." Romanian secret police are after Dominic and, after infiltrating a medical exam, the Nazis are too. The Gestapo plants a seductive agent (Alexandra Pirici) in the room next-door; a treacherous hottie, she's got a swastika on her garter and a copy of Mein Kampf beneath the sheets.

Coppola has made no secret that he takes Youth Without Youth personally. "I'm really a lot like the man in the movie," he eagerly told A.O. Scott in the Times. The filmmaker might as well have compared himself to Eliade, whose spiritual autobiography he's appropriated. At 70, Dominic is virtually the same age as Eliade was when he wrote the novel, which revisits the period of his flirtation with fascism. The young Eliade admired Mussolini and the local Iron Guard, calling for "a nationalist Romania, frenzied and chauvinistic, armed and vigorous." During the war, he served as a cultural attaché in Portugal (celebrating its dictator Salazar as a mystical savior).

These political indiscretions, which might have provided the basis for another sort of thriller, became widely known only after Eliade's death—and Coppola alludes to them in an oblique fashion. Whether out of a desire to protect the writer or admiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark, he ramps up the story's anti-Nazi credentials. Once it becomes known that Hitler himself is interested in "the most valuable human specimen today on the face of the earth," Dominic is spirited to neutral Switzerland, where an uncredited Matt Damon materializes as a helpful American agent, and there our hero ponders his fate: "The war rages around me. . . . My Romanian homeland has made a pact with the devil [and] I am a strange superman of the future." Indeed, this superman appears to turn the tide of war in favor of the Allies by an act of will.

A decade later, lightning strikes again—and again. The ever-young octogenarian is hiking through the Alps when he encounters a new incarnation of his long-lost student love in the form of the young Swiss tourist Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara, who played Hitler's secretary in Downfall). The sky darkens and a thunderbolt leaves her babbling in Sanskrit. Apparently, she's possessed by the soul of a seventh-century Indian princess, which doesn't impede their going off to Malta for a bit of happy canoodling. But miracles are capricious. Veronica's changes are not the same as Dominic's. She begins aging. . . .

Second childhood or old man's folly? Coppola has made more than his share of bombastic melodramas. But for all its fussy lighting, upside-down camera angles, and overwrought impressionism, Youth Without Youth is essentially playful. It's also pleasantly meandering in its largely faked locations, and drolly matter-of-fact about its mystic visions ("That stranger in your dream was probably Shiva"). Heading a dubbed Romanian cast, Roth manages the illusion of taking it all seriously—making up in conviction what he lacks in charisma.

From its charmingly retro credits through its Third Man atmospherics to its bingo-bongo decade-collapsing climax, Youth Without Youth is a cinematic time machine—at once sillier and more desperate in its convictions than such kindred trips to the mystic East as Bertolucci's Little Buddha or Scorsese's Kundun. Variety has predicted that Youth Without Youth will translate to "cinemas without audiences," as if that were the point. This is hardly Coppola's greatest movie, but it's far from his worst—its bid for a new beginning is one from the heart.

Vancouver Voice [D. K. Holm]

Screen International Allan Hunter

[Cahiers du cinéma] Jean-Michel Frodon

The Reeler [Keith Uhlich]

Between Productions [Robert Cashill]

"Coppola's Youth Movement" S.T. VanAirsdale from The Reeler

EyeForFilm.co.uk Jeff Robson

cinemattraction (Robert Levin)

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

TETRO

USA Argentina Spain Italy (127 mi) 2009

Missives from Cannes: "Tetro" (Coppola) Daniel Kasman from The Auteur’s Notebook

Tetro sees an artist coming out of his hibernation; still groggy and a little stiff in the joints, we can nonetheless recognize a welcome return of an American cinema of characters, of adults, and of maturity in no way pitched towards an ironic, alternative “independent” crowd. Stepping over the indulgence of Francis Ford Coppola’s official return to filmmaking, Youth without Youth, his new film has three major things going for it: it stars Vincent Gallo, is set in Argentina, and is shot in black and white (though digitally) by a filmmaker who clearly is watching great foreign films of the 60s, not to mention his American brethern of the 70s, rather than the television of the last decade. It may hinge almost entirely upon a quizzically under developed background of family turmoil and trauma (“ancient themes” as Gallo reflexively mentions), but the spirit of a filmmaker is definitely here.

This unconvincing backdrop makes the film more awkward and inconsistent than it should be, but the ingredients are right. The actors chosen and their performances —bodily, and beautifully elastic in the women (Maribel Verdú and Leticia Brédice), facial, sleepy and nursing in the men (Gallo and Alden Ehrenreich)— are inspired, even as Tetro moves superficially around them.

When people talk about a film being a glimpse of what movies used to be like, they usually mean old Hollywood; but Tetro, understandably and with welcome, makes one think of past movies—of the new Hollywood of the 1970s. Emphasis on characters and the character of the space they live in catches us off guard because it makes us realize what has been missing from much of American cinema, which has moved on to other things in Coppola’s (and others) absence. What we sense here is real effort—though an effort couched in a George Lucas-esque feeling of an insulated production cut off from the present and the influence of collaborators. But still. This is a proper return, a strong connection to the past and a very hopeful indication of the future.

Neither Misfire Nor Return To Form: Coppola’s Competent “Tetro” Eric Kohn from indieWIRE, May 14, 2009

Neither complete misfire nor triumphant return to form, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Tetro” works as a competent family drama right up until the messy final act. If a first-time filmmaker had directed this stylish black-and-white-and-sometimes-color melodrama, it might gain some notice for suggesting great things to come. Instead, on its own terms, the movie is only a mildly interesting entry in Coppola’s thirty-plus years of work.

At the same time, the plot resonates in context. Based around the troubles of an Italian-American family living in Argentina, “Tetro” stars Vincent Gallo as the titular character, a wannabe writer estranged from his family and living aimlessly with his supportive wife (Maribel Verdu). In the first scene, Tetro—whose real name is Angelo Tetrocini—gets an unwanted visit from his eager young sibling, Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), a navy reject interested in reconnecting with his black sheep brother. Bennie desperately probes Tetro to share details about their family. Tetro, however, feeling responsibility for the death of his mother in a car crash and resentment for the apathy of his famous composer father, refuses to open up.

When Bennie discovers that Tetro has privately written a play about their family history, he decides to try finishing it. Tetro protests, of course, based on his closeness to the material. As the brothers continue to battle over the future of the project (and their relationship), the plot arrives at a twist that’s both strained and completely unnecessary, considering the solid storytelling preceding it. The creative fire shared by brothers and father alike also provide an easy entry point for understanding the movie’s autobiographical traits. The Coppola family’s multi-generational big screen accomplishments, coupled with their Italian heritage, obviously parallel the set up on a rudimentary level. “Nothing in the story happened, but everything is true,” Coppola claimed during a Q&A following the first screening at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight sidebar.

But there’s more to it than that: The dialogue contains frequent insights into the way the filmmaker, now working on miniscule budgets and relying on self-distribution, feels about his sense of responsibility to his movies. “How do you walk away from your work?” Bennie asks Tetro. “Doesn’t it follow you?” Clearly, it does: Coppola hints at the dissatisfaction he felt over taking too many studio gigs when Tetro’s wife nimbly breaks down his ubiquitous rage. “He’s like a genius without that many accomplishments,” she says.

Tetro Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

A melodramatic family drama set in a Buenos Aires where even innocent passers-by seem consumed by jealousy and passion, Tetro offers glimpses of a golden-age Francis Ford Coppola in his first original script since The Conversation (1974). Although it feels at times like a vanity project, some strong performances – most notably by Spanish actress Maribel Verdu (Y tu mama tambien), but also Vincent Gallo in the title role and newcomer Alden Ehrenreich – save all but Tetro’s most cringeworthy lines.

Tetro goes out domestically on June 11 through Coppola’s American Zoetrope releasing, where its more linear storyline should attract more viewers than Youth Without Youth. Ultimately, Tetro looks likely to become what the French call a succes d’estime in the international marketplace (although audiences in Argentina may react poorly to the film’s tourist trip through their complex social and cultural drives).

Mihai Malaimare’s moody black and white photography, an atmospheric score by Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov and long time Coppola collaborator Walter Murch’s editing and sound work help to lift a story that seems at times almost a parody of the dark male family dramas that Coppola’s creativity has always fed on. Indeed, the plot has something of the melodramatic sweep and overwrought tone of an opera libretto.

Ehrenreich plays Bennie, a fresh-faced 17-year-old cruise ship waiter who turns up in Buenos Aires one day in search of his estranged brother Angelo (Gallo). Angelo is a gloomy, broodingly dark poet and playwright who now goes by the name of Tetro (an abbreviation of the family surname Tetrocini, but also an adjective meaning ‘gloomy’ and ‘broodingly dark’ in Italian).

Bennie and Tetro’s father Carlo (Brandauer) is a musician from an Italian émigré family in Argentina, who moved to the States where he is now a famous conductor. He’s also a domineering tyrant whom Tetro despise because of past events which are revealed in a series of flashbacks filmed in colour which rank among the film’s absurder moments.

Tetro, who first appears with his leg in a cast, has given up writing plays and resents the intrusion of his fresh-faced young brother. But, with the help of Tetro’s fiery but kind girlfriend Miranda (Verdu), Bennie decides to help his brother by secretly completing one of his unfinished plays and sending it off to a famous critic called Alone (Maura), a media superstar (Maura plays her as a cross between Oprah Winfrey and Barry Humphries).

A series of expressionistic touches - ballet inserts, clips from Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann – build towards a cathartic third-act sequence (set among the glaciers of Patagonia) which does, finally, possess a sort of weird power. But it’s a long stretch to get there.

Cannes '09: Day Three Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 15, 2009

Tetro: Coppola Returns to Cannes Mary and Richard Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 2009

David Bourgeois at Cannes from Movieline, May 15, 2009

Patrick Z McGavin at Cannes from Stop Smiling magazine, May 16, 2009

Scott Foundas Dreaming in Film: At Cannes and Its Renegade Festivals, at Cannes from LA magazine, May 20, 2009

Coppola: Auteur Aspiring to be an Amateur Robin Sanders at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 16, 2009

Cannes. "Tetro" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 14, 2009

Kirk Honeycutt at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 14, 2009

Hollywood Reporter Coppola interview May 13, 2009

Francis Ford Coppola on his most personal film yet Xan Brooks interviews Coppolla at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2009

Michael Martin Interview magazine speaks to actor Alden Ahrenreich

Todd McCarthy from Variety

Dennis Lim Francis Ford Coppola gets personal, from The LA Times, May 20, 2009

Coppola, Gia

PALO ALTO B 86

USA (100 mi) 2013

Gia Coppola is the latest edition of the Coppola Film Factory, much like the exiled Makhmalbaf’s from Iran, currently living in Paris, or the infamous Barrymore family from the days of early Hollywood, all descended from cinema royalty. Gia is the daughter of Gian-Carlo Coppola (who died in a speedboating accident at the age of 22), the oldest of Francis Ford Coppola’s three children, which makes Francis her grandfather, while Sofia Coppola is her aunt. Stylewise, Gia graduated from Bard College with a fine arts degree in photography, where her moody visualization is much closer to Aunt Sofia, a mere 25-years old when it was shot, a year or two younger than Sofia when she shot her first feature, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999), painting her own impressionistic portrait of rich, overly indulgent high school kids by adapting James Franco’s Palo Alto: Stories, a collection of 11 short stories taking place in his upscale Northern California hometown. Like Robert Altman adapting nine Raymond Carver short stories (and a poem) into the ensemble piece SHORT CUTS (1993), Coppola also blends several of the stories into a composite whole, mostly centered on four main characters. As Gia is herself a California child of privilege, it’s interesting to get her take on today’s youth, which is looking younger than ever, but still plagued by sex, social cliques, infatuations, getting stoned, drunken parties, and boredom. Parents are largely absent or unseen, while kids have their own cars, and marijuana is the drug of choice for both teens and parents alike. The casting is inspired, keeping it in an extended Hollywood movie family, where Emma Roberts (daughter of Eric, niece of Julia, and something of a stretch at age 23) plays April, a shy and sweet-natured girl caught up in the enveloping trouble surrounding her, reminiscent of Jamie Lee Curtis in HALLOWEEN (1978), though perhaps not as resilient, while Jack Kilmer, son of Val, who appears as April’s perpetually stoned stepfather in the film, is something of a revelation as Teddy, a stoner kid with artistic tendencies, looking very much the part of a River Phoenix reincarnation from a Gus van Sant film, like My Own Private Idaho (1991). April and Teddy are drawn to one another, but they’re teenagers that don’t know how to express it, so instead we get a series of longing looks from afar, where they instantly cover up any hurt feelings by getting involved in some other mischief.

The near plotless but largely entertaining film is a swirling choreography of kids making typical high school mistakes, where the most troubled kid is Teddy’s friend Fred (Natt Wolff), an obnoxious, overly aggressive jerk that spends most of his time putting everybody else down, making fun of the world around him, taking nothing seriously, getting high as often as he can, pretending he’s the life of the party, but in truth he’s the most hurt and alone. Challenging him for low self-esteem is Emily, Zoe Levin from Beneath the Harvest Sky (2013), the girl who will have sex with anyone, thinking it will fill the emotional abyss she has to live with every day. The delicacy she brings to the character is part of what makes this film matter, as we’ve seen all these kids before, perhaps in better movies, but their exquisite performances stand out in what is otherwise stereotypical territory. It’s hard to care about rich kids that don’t care about themselves, who abuse their time on earth, economically privileged children who have it all, but despite their advantages, they’d rather toss their lives away, where we’ve already seen the spoiled and wasted kids in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) or Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012, which actually stars James Franco, by the way), where we can’t help but think—why should I care? But then we get the painfully honest teen portrayals in The Spectacular Now (2013) or The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), where it’s hard not to share in the heartbreak of adolescent growing pains. Coppola attempts to draw us into this disturbing teenage quagmire by reminding us how alienated kids are from themselves and one another, portraying them as collisions waiting to happen, where they have to continually pretend life doesn’t hurt, and nothing matters, while deep down they are wounded disaffected souls with no words to express their pain and anguish. While we’ve all been there, hopefully most of us survived intact, but this film is a painful reminder of a time in our lives when we often could barely tell the difference between right and wrong, where often impaired judgment was held together by a slender thread of common sense and luck. If one was not so fortunate, many adult lives have been ruined or destroyed by the regrettable actions of one’s youth. While we’re watching the rebellious antics of so many needlessly discarded teenagers, who are treated like so many disposable parts, it’s hard not to think of how they might end up.

Initially the focus is on April’s secret crush for Teddy, but Fred continually gets in the way with his annoying behavior, claiming Teddy as his best buddy, usually plying him with dope or alcohol or bad ideas, where the two are seen as drifting knuckleheads with an air of indifference about the consequences of having no boundaries to speak of. While Teddy would walk away from trouble under normal circumstances, exhibiting better sense, in Fred’s company he acts just as screwed up. One of the highlights of their young lives is attending raging, out of control parties with absent parents, where the kids are free to do anything they want with no restrictions. Coppola has a knack for creating a naturalistic setting, allowing her hand-held camera to wander in and out of rooms, shot by Autumn Cheyenne Durald, where it’s not unusual for characters to be seen puking in the bushes. Teddy draws April’s attention, eventually disappearing and wandering off with another girl, where he’s too blitzed to drive, but that doesn’t stop him from getting into a car accident, compounded by leaving the scene of the crime. With the police waiting for him by the time he gets home, he avoids worse punishment by involuntary community service in a sentence handed down by the court, where amusingly the dispassionate offscreen voice of the judge is unmistakably that of Francis Ford Coppola in full lecture mode. James Franco plays Mr. B, a high school soccer coach for a rather lackadaisical girl’s team, where instead of winning he keeps his eye on the young girls, veering into the uncomfortable territory where adults take advantage of the vulnerabilities of the young, where his persuasive charm couldn’t be more revolting as he clearly has a thing for teenage girls, yet April is the regular babysitter for his young son Michael (Micah Nelson), making her an easy target. It’s quite a mood swing to go from showing the obviously excited young kid something he’s not allowed to watch on TV, the legendary Phoebe Cates bathing suit sequence baring it all in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982), to Mr. B seducing April on the same couch. Her guilt afterwards is punishingly acute, as she has absolutely no one she can share her thoughts with, as her patronizing and overly complacent mother (played amusingly enough by the director’s own mother, Jacqui Getty) is too wrapped up in her own self-help mindset to know or care. The depiction of aimless and often confused teenagers is not the lurid sensationalism one has come to expect, but is instead a tender and often poetic introspection of the moods and anxieties that thrive within the teenage community. Consider this the director’s LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003) as she makes her way through the emotional minefields and marijuana haze of high school.

In Review Online [Drew Hunt]

Palo Alto is yet another story of disaffected teenage privilege, but unlike (say) the horrid brats in The Bling Ring, its characters inhabit a world of wounded psyches and wasted potential. The film feels, at first, like a misbegotten combination of Harmony Korine and Todd Solondz, with its luridly oversexed teenagers and skeevy soccer coaches. But writer-director Gia Coppola — yes, part of the tribe — gradually gets closer to her protagonists, and finds a trio of sad, insecure kids trying to make it out of high school without getting too badly hurt.

The movie remains a little Solondz-y, though I think that may be the fault of the source material (a series of short stories by none other than James Franco, who also plays the skeevy soccer coach). A gangbang rape related through voiceover as an afterthought is a low point. But Coppola has a way of plausibly sketching complicated, sympathetic characters, most notably a motor-mouthed bully played by Nat Wolff. Coppola’s dialogue and Wolff’s fantastic performance show both the hurt and discomfort the boy is desperately trying to mask, and the abusive, manipulative man he is well on his way to becoming.

Gia Coppola—granddaughter to Francis Ford, niece to Sofia, second cousin to Nicolas Cage—is the latest member of her family to wade into cinema’s waters, and if her assured debut feature Palo Alto—adapted from James Franco's short-story collection of the same name—is any indication, she’s next in a long line of great filmmakers. Elements of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, Larry Clark’s Kids, and even her aunt’s The Virgin Suicides are found in this story of angst-filled, sexually charged teens, but even if aspects of the film seem familiar, Coppola’s attuned, sensitive style, nascent as it is, enlivens the potentially rote material.

Immediately evident is Coppola’s fine direction of actors, most apparent in a film-anchoring performance by the increasingly reliable Emma Roberts. She plays April, a high school senior whose self-loathing and existential discontent is reflected in her classmates, including the wayward Teddy (Jack Kilmer), his sociopathic friend Fred (Nat Wolff), and a flock of sex-obsessed girls. The plot circles around these characters at a dreamy, episodic pace and never stays on one subject too long, though the conflict given the most attention involves April and her soccer coach Mr. B (Franco), a single father who considers students dating material. This somewhat pedestrian thread occasionally feels lifted from a Lifetime original television movie, but those are the only false notes in an otherwise surprisingly resonant canvas.

The film adheres to the jilted yet strangely methodical structure of a chapter book; it also mimics the impulsive, meandering psyche of the American teen, whose moods and attitudes fluctuate with each new status update. Each scene seems to be a retune of sorts, with multiple characters floating in and out and story lines stopping and starting again. The characters are suitably inscrutable, prone to contradiction yet completely sympathetic. Gia, much like Sofia, never judges her characters—the younger ones, at least. Adults, as they were in Elephant, Kids and The Virgin Suicides, aren’t exempt from harsh treatment, whether it’s the passive moms, enabling dads, indifferent teachers, or Franco’s pervy coach. Coppola doesn’t go so far as to propose that authority figures are inherently untrustworthy; instead, by adopting the perspective of the teenage characters, the film graciously illustrates the impressionable air of adolescence. And when it comes to those adolescents, Coppola's ability to slip between male and female perspectives—thereby subverting gender roles by painting guys and girls as equally neurotic, horny, cynical and oblivious—is deeply refreshing.

Too often, movies about teens fall under the general coming-of-age banner; errant youths learn tough lessons and grow as individuals. It’s a nice thought, but real life isn’t quite that tidy, a harsh truth Coppola admirably refuses to sugarcoat. Thus, just as Coppola avoids didacticism, she also avoids easy answers. The film doesn’t end so much as it simply runs out of steam, unable to carry the weight of these anguished teens any longer, though we don’t get the sense that she’s in any way abandoning them. If anything, the film’s lack of climax is Coppola’s way of granting her characters their imperfections, and by that same token, their dignity. Palo Alto may not reinvent the wheel as far as the stories it tells goes, but then again, it doesn’t have to. Sometimes, it’s enough to simply let screw-ups be screw-ups.

Review: Palo Alto | Film Comment Chris Norris

A brief hiccup early in Palo Alto resonates throughout Gia Coppola’s debut film, at least for habitués of American teen-angst classics. High-school virgin April (a luminous Emma Roberts, daughter of Eric, niece of Julia) is babysitting for her ominously hunky soccer coach Mr. B (James Franco), watching TV with his young son. The Cars’ “Moving in Stereo” emanates from the speakers, heralding that primal scene of late-century premium cable: Phoebe Cates’s slo-mo breast-baring in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But Eros yields to the Uncanny as we discern a sequence with identical mise en scène but a not-quite-Cates and a tinny cover version of the song. Why this near-perfect re-cast, re-shot, re-recorded, and fine-tuned 10-second simulacrum? And why are our minds drifting to ponder the intricacies of music royalty law in the midst of a sexually charged youth drama?

Such moments of metatextual drift may simply be the baggage that comes with being Gia Coppola, a filmmaker theoretically capable of developing a sure feel for the medium with reference only to films made by family members. Her grandfather, Francis Coppola, enlisted his offspring to appear in his films upon birth; her big-sister aunt, Sofia, just 16 years older, did more to launch Gia’s career than enlist her as costume supervisor for Somewhere. In Lost in Translation, characters, scenario, and setting aligned with a cohering aesthetic of romantic languor and disconnect to produce such bliss it would soften the hearts of all but the most committed haters of the Coppola dynasty.

Palo Alto promises greatness as it opens. Two tousle-haired teenagers ruminate in the front of a car moored at the edge of a dark suburban parking lot, faces lit by cold fluorescent streetlamps and the intermittent glow of a blazing joint. Dark, twitchy Fred (Natt Wolff) is behind the wheel, shaggy blond Teddy (Jack Kilmer, son of Val) is slumped beside him, as their brief Beavis and Butt-head dialectic on time travel peters out into an exchange of halfhearted insults and fuck-yous.

Then, seized by an impulse, Fred (who could be Ferris Bueller’s id) shouts, “I’m the king round these parts” and, with a rebel yell, stomps the gas to go out in a blaze of glory. Coppola cuts to a wide-shot reveal of the car roaring forward three feet into a wall to the distant sound of Fred’s triumphant cackles—concluding this brisk invocation of the impotent closed-loop rebellion of the ’burbs.

Several other high-performance sight gags follow as the often more than familiar coming-of-age tale unfolds. Drawing from Franco’s loosely connected short stories about his posh Northern California hometown, Palo Alto renders moneyed angst and ennui in vogueish hues: woozy camerawork, fractured dialogue, lo-fi indie-pop, perilous drug use, and long takes of kohl-eyed, clear-skinned faces brooding, sulking, and puking into bushes. The material is Fast Times and The Virgin Suicides shot through a Larry Clark/Van Sant filter, as performed by scions of Hollywood royalty. At the decadent house party that begins things, April exchanges furtive glances with Teddy, failing to connect and spinning out of the party with the rest of the characters down various well-trodden sordid paths. Teddy gets bullied into self-harming rebellion by Fred, April falls prey to the irrepressible Franco’s corruptor of young girls, and pretty Emily (Zoe Levin) gives blow jobs like handshakes. The fragmented dialogue sounds authentically adolescent in some scenes, in others like place-holding boilerplate awaiting a rewrite.

Parents are mostly absent, stoned, or sinister; the kids are left to play with fire; Jack Kilmer is styled and shot like a mid-Nineties River Phoenix; Francis Ford Coppola supplies the voice of an off-screen judge. This family affair is so faithful to Gia’s inspirations that it often feels like an exquisite visual essay on the cinema of dreamy troubled youth. Whether this is homage or undigested source material, we stay at one remove from human feeling.

I suspect that part of what made Lost in Translation soar as it did was how closely its surreal lives aligned with the director’s, how its specificity let it breathe universal air. A quick scan of Gia’s star-crossed bio indicates that she knows a far richer, sadder world than anything in the angsty-affluent teenage film canon. Raised in Los Angeles and points north, Coppola may, like her aunt, regard traffic the way Wordsworth regarded daffodils, since the most promising visual poetry in Palo Alto is the kind that begins and ends Sofia’s Somewhere—vehicular renditions of psychic and existential states. But I hear more pathos in April’s exchange with her stepdad (Val Kilmer in a David Foster Wallace headband). Stoned and sprawled out at his writer’s desk, he hands back a school paper his daughter has asked him to clean up, exhaling a hydroponic cloud. “You could have just corrected it,” she says. “You didn’t have to rewrite the whole thing.” The moment broke my heart, but I probably read too much into these things.

Gia Coppola's Palo Alto Summons Up the Timeless, for Today Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice

Film.com [David Ehrlich]

Review: Gia Coppolas Palo Alto is a sad and lovely ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Next Projection Soheil Rezayazda

Movie Mezzanine [Jake Cole]

Palo Alto / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

Palo Alto :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Tom Meek

Palo Alto - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

jdbrecords [Justin Lockwood]

Movie Mezzanine [Adriana Floridia]

Film Racket [Jesse Hassenger]

And So it Begins... [Alex Withrow]

Digital Spy [Zeba Blay]

Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]

Dork Shelf [Dave Voigt]

Variety [Peter de Bruge]

Palo Alto - Los Angeles Times Mark Olsen

Palo Alto Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert Sheila O’Malley

'Palo Alto,' About Adolescents Stumbling Toward Adulthood ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

Coppola, Sofia

All-Movie Guide bio from Michael Hastings

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Sofia Coppola and Marie Antoinette have a lot in common. Queen Bees, by Dana Stevens from Slate, October 19, 2006

A Place for “Somewhere” Richard Brody from The New Yorker, December 17, 2010

You either love Sofia Coppola or hate her. Here's why. Nathan Heller from Slate, December 28, 2010

Conspicuous Production Richard Brody from The New Yorker, January 4, 2011

A Response to The New Yorker's Richard Brody, on Sofia Coppola Nathan Heller from Brow Beat, January 5, 2011

Coppola, Sofia They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Combustible Celluloid Interview by Jefferey M. Anderson, March 30, 2000

indieWIRE Interview by Wendy Mitchell (2003)

Guardian Interview (2003) by Ella Taylor, October 13, 2003

IGN Interview (2006) by Todd Gilchrist, October 17, 2006

Women in Hollywood: Sofia Coppola Interview by Brooke Hauser from Premiere magazine, October 2006

VIRGIN SUICIDES C 75

USA (97 mi) 1999

A film that never rises to the mystery or poetry of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975), though it features lush visuals, instead languishing in its own self-inflated ennui.

This extremely assured directorial debut from Sofia Coppola finds an unexpected perspective on what should by rights be difficult subject matter - teenage suicide. Adapting Jeffrey Eugenides' best-seller, Francis Coppola's daughter tells the story of the Lisbon sisters - five delicious blondes who set teenage hormones raging in Grosse Point, Michigan, some 20-odd years ago. On her second suicide attempt, Cecilia impales herself on the railings outside the house. In the ensuing months, the remaining (older) sisters cast a troubling shadow over the neighbourhood, especially for the boys at school. Kept on a tight leash by their religious parents (Turner and Woods, both cast against type and underplaying effectively), the girls come to represent the intangible mysteries and sorrows of all women. As a rule of thumb, one should approach any movie constructed around a metaphor with caution. Nevertheless, Coppola casts quite a spell. She has a deft sense of composition and a great ear for music (particularly an original ambient score by Air). The tone of wistful regret and longing doesn't preclude a good deal of gentle humour. It's a restrained, subtly suggestive piece which disintegrates if you try to get a fix on it.

Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, from the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, has a strange and slightly unwholesome intensity, one part sophomoric mawkishness to four parts humid adolescent longing.

It is told from the point of view of four local boys in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in the 70s who become obsessed with five beautiful sisters, the unlikely fruit of a maths teacher and his uptight religious wife (discreetly and sympathetically played by James Woods and Kathleen Turner). They gain a glimmering insight of "the imprisonment of being a girl" when the youngest sister commits suicide, and the tender and erotic mystery of the surviving four attains an unbearable piquancy.

Something in the narrative is perhaps a little thin and unrealised, and the tragic ending is arguably excessive, but Coppola's direction engagingly avoids the coming-of-age cliches and the film boasts an excellent performance from Kirsten Dunst as Lux, the tearaway oldest sister.

Based on Jeffrey Eugenides' popular novel, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides is an investigation into the unknowable, narrated from the combined memory of men with many years' distance from the events they're describing. Since the title confesses the ending, the atmosphere hangs with a feeling of dread that's at once eerily remote and curiously inscrutable, as if the entire story takes place in a hermetic bubble that can't be punctured by any psychological insight. Coppola stays true to the unique voice of the novel, which is narrated in a collective "we" by a group of boys infatuated with the five Lisbon sisters, a mysterious cabal of pretty adolescent girls living in an affluent Detroit suburb in the mid-'70s. In a severe response to the period's loosened moral climate, the girls' parents (James Woods and Kathleen Turner) keep them under tight watch, especially after the youngest is successful in her second suicide attempt. But when the most promiscuous of the remaining four (Kirsten Dunst) breaks curfew, they're abruptly pulled out of school and nearly imprisoned in their own home. The Virgin Suicides is frequently talked about as a tale of innocence lost but, really, the reverse is true: The tragedy of the Lisbon sisters is that their innocence was so well preserved that it couldn't make a healthy transition into womanhood. Though Giovanni Ribisi's ever-present narration laments the impossibility of explaining the suicides, it's patently obvious that the girls' stunted growth had more than a little to do with it. Aided immeasurably by a beautiful score by the French techno duo Air, Coppola creates an atmosphere that's hypnotic, unsettling, and evocative in design. But she never gets inside the heads of her characters—individually or as a group—so nothing substantial is learned about them over the course of the film. As a rare anti-coming-of-age story, The Virgin Suicides has a distinct allure, but in depicting the "imprisonment of being a girl," it remains separated by the bars.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

It makes sense that the décor inside the Lisbon home is so bland. It's never garish in that kitschy '70s kind of way (like Allison Janney's living room in The Ice Storm). Much like Frances McDormand's doting mother from Cameron Crowe's overrated Almost Famous, Mrs. Lisbon (Kathleen Turner) desperately tries to find a scapegoat for the adolescent angst festering inside of her home, placing blame on the popular music that her daughters listen to. Director Sofia Coppola doesn't portray her character as some fanatical conservative though one can blame the death of the woman's daughters on her obsessive notions of familial security. Throughout the film, she hovers quietly in the background—her watchful gaze more menacing than her actual actions imply. The fact that Mrs. Lisbon believes that her dead daughters "never lacked in love" suggests a woman completely blinded by the nature of her maternal instinct. The Virgin Suicides is narrated omnisciently by a group of men who knew the Lisbon girls 25 years ago. After the suicides, the boys made it a mission to collect scattered items from the girls' lives. Once Lux Lisbon (Kirsten Dunst) abandons curfew, the four living Lisbon girls (the fifth sister, Cecilia, killed herself one year earlier) are imprisoned inside their house by their mother (Turner, in post-therapy Serial Mom mode) and their pussy-whipped father (James Woods). The doting dad is so burdened by grief that he speaks to plants about their photosynthetic processes. The performance (arguably the actor's best) is sad yet brimming with life, much like the film itself. The film's narrators are forced to entertain the girls by providing them with their restricted pleasures. The boys call the girls on the telephone, letting them listen to the music that plays on their stereo. But as much as the boys desperately try to understand these girls, the girls remain but a distant memory. Although Edward Lachman's gorgeous cinematography contributes to the film's nostalgic glam, Coppola's dreamy paean to stilted adolescence has a universal appeal. Gracefully surreal, the film says as much about the mysteries of female sexuality as it does about what lies behind troubled picket fences. Coppola waxes poetic on female subjectivity, dreamily detailing the imprisonment of girls whose boys desperately try to understand them. The narrator speaks of youth as if it existed and still exists in a near-fugue state. In this respect, the film is as much a relevant view of adolescence and male/female relations as it is an act of remembrance. Scenes from the film (first kisses, gossiping about neighbors) are sinewy in nature and seem lifted from the pages of a lost photo album.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Death And The Maidens Graham Fuller from Sight and Sound, April 2000

Philadelphia City Paper review by Cindy Fuchs also seen here: PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) and here: Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs)

Cinematical [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Sight and Sound Mark Olsen

PopMatters Todd R. Ramlow

Images (Crissa-Jean Chappell)

eFilmCritic Paul Zimmerman from iF magazine

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson

Epinions Review - [Macresarf1]

culturevulture.net Bob Aulert

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

filmcritic.com - interviews director Sofia Coppola Athan Bezaitis

Murali Krishnan

Reel.com [Kasia Anderson]

Salon (Jeff Stark)

DVD Talk [Gil Jawetz]

Bill Chambers, Movie & DVD review

Chris Dashiell at CineScene

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Kevin Clemons)

Combustible Celluloid Interview by Jefferey M. Anderson, March 30, 2000

Variety.com [Emanuel Levy]

Austin Chronicle (Sarah Hepola)

Anchorage Press [Brenda Sokolowski]

LOST IN TRANSLATION A- 93

USA Japan (102 mi) 2002

Extremely understated portrait of two "accidental tourists," both lost amidst the fast-paced and seemingly unintelligible, neon-lit world of Tokyo, truly a pleasure to watch this small gem of a film slowly unravel before our eyes, as it's all mood and atmosphere, beautifully photographed and nicely paced, with incredible performances by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, whose performances, really, ARE this film.

Personally, I think all the hype about this film is well deserved, though it amazed me how much it reminded me of the earlier film, THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST at the end, transplant William Hurt and Geena Davis. Again, it's just a melancholic mood piece, but some of us were infatuated by that mood, particularly the rapturous depiction of the elegance of spaces, interspersed with the likes of Johansson and Murray, who give two of the best performances of the year, it felt zany and funny, somewhat improvised, and it was also a terrific love story.

Contemporary Tokyo, and Bob Harris (Murray) is having an out-of-body experience. Nothing says disconnection so much as giant billboards of yourself commending Suntory whisky to a foreign audience when the shoot behind the ads leaves you stranded in a sterile hotel bar nursing your loneliness over several glasses of the same. That's when he meets Charlotte (Johansson), a soul-searching young New Yorker idling time while her photographer husband disappears on assignment. She recognises a fellow castaway, and soon the two are trading quips and confidences. A comedy of dislocation framing a love story bound up in an expression of existential melancholy, Sofia Coppola's film is a deft, manifold delight. Johansson again impresses as an old head on young shoulders, but it's Murray's infinitely modulated performance that underpins the film. Riffing on his own image, he gives a sweet-sad study of a man lost inside himself, resigned to the likelihood that it's for life. Certainly the film has the ring of experience. The anomie of international living, the push-pull of shirking home. Admittedly it makes life easier on itself by camping up Japan's way-out culture (an irrepressible chat show host and a voluble photo director are particular standouts), but that's in keeping with its alienation principle. So far as the central relationship goes, the film is almost European in its subtlety and nuance. Cinematic cherry blossom.

In Lost In Translation's most memorable scene, Bill Murray sings a karaoke version of Roxy Music's "More Than This." As a cast member of Saturday Night Live, Murray perfected the wacky-lounge-singer shtick, but there's not a trace of condescension in his rendition of a song that has become a modern standard. On the contrary, the scene derives much of its power from Murray's implicit understanding that beneath its celebratory surface, "More Than This" is achingly sad, an acknowledgement that transcendent moments fade away, while mundane ones linger on and on. That truism informs all of Lost In Translation, an audacious dramatic comedy—the second effort of The Virgin Suicides writer-director Sofia Coppola—suffused with the bittersweet melancholy that gave the similarly themed Rushmore its enduring resonance. In a role that draws equally on Murray's remarkable turn as a depressed millionaire in Rushmore and his iconic career as one of America's most beloved comic actors, Murray stars as a Bill Murray-like superstar who travels to Japan to make a quick two million bucks endorsing a brand of whiskey. Alone in a luxury hotel, he finds a kindred spirit in Scarlett Johansson, a winsome, fiercely intelligent newlywed whose husband (Giovanni Ribisi) leaves for a business trip. United in their ennui, Murray and Johansson find solace in a relationship that defies easy categorization, hovering giddily and uneasily between friendship and romance. The disorienting culture of Tokyo plays a major role in Lost In Translation: It doesn't cause the leads' alienation, but its foreignness heightens it, giving those feelings a surreal quality as it tightens Murray and Johansson's ephemeral but strong connection to each other. Like Rushmore, Lost In Translation revolves around the complicated bond between a frustrated middle-aged man, whose material riches do little to salve his emotional wounds, and a young upstart who breaks through his brittle exterior. Coppola doesn't share Wes Anderson's gift for crafting richly developed supporting characters, who tend to be as broadly drawn as her leads are exquisitely crafted. That would be a problem if Translation's leads didn't have such electric chemistry, and if Coppola didn't have such a strong mastery of tone. Gorgeously shot by Lance Acord, who makes Toyko a gaudy dreamscape that's both seductive and frightening, Lost In Translation washes away memories of Godfather III, establishing Coppola as a major filmmaker in her own right, and reconfirming Johansson and Murray as actors of startling depth and power.

Senses of Cinema (Wendy Haslem)

Bill Murray startles awake in the back of a limo. His face has that wide-eyed, just-woken-up alertness as he blinks his sleep away and takes in the wonderland of blinking lights and animated billboards and architectural elegance of Tokyo -- looking every bit a "Blade Runner" cityscape without the airborne traffic or dystopian gloom -- with a dazed curiosity, as if trying to figure out just where he woke up.

And then he sees his face staring back at him with a cocky nonchalance, and blinks again.

Murray's middle-age Bob Harris, a former action movie star and minor film icon in town to shoot a whisky campaign (for which he'll earn more than he's seen in many a movie) is more alienated than awed by Tokyo's overwhelming urban crunch.

His trademark barbs, tossed around during the commercial shoots to an audience that can't understand a word he says, become his armor to cover up his discomfort and sense of aloneness.

Young Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is delighted by the place and wanders the streets to drink in the bustle and busy play of the urban wonderland, but frustrated by her boyish husband (Giovanni Ribbis), a shaggy photographer at ease in the meaningless chit-chat with ditzy celebrities that bores Charlotte silly.

Both are ensconced in an aggressively austere modern hotel, a cocoon of hushed color and lonely hallways, the two insomniacs (Bob and Charlotte) cross paths in their nocturnal wanderings, trade quips in the "New York" bar, and accidentally end up unlikely buddies at a time they both need a friend.

Sofia Coppola's sophomore film (following the gently assured "The Virgin Suicides") is another exploration of delicate relationships and uncommunicated frustrations, this one in a beautifully composed atmosphere of isolation.

Her eye for Tokyo is inspired, finding views that look like New York twisted through the "Twilight Zone" -- almost familiar, and all the more unnerving for the differences -- and the cushion of loneliness she creates suspends the characters in a state of ennui.

If there's a hint of romantic longing when Bob watches Charlotte during a night of karaoke with her Tokyo pals, the possibilities feel more wrapped up in the broken communication and awkward talks than in the marriage problems both are going through.

"Lost in Translation" isn't about a May-December romance or a brief encounter in a faraway place. It's about being alone in a crowd and the power of unexpected friendships.

THE HIGH HAT | NITRATE: Lost in Translation George Wu

The stunning Lost in Translation marks a tremendous leap for Sofia Coppola after the admirable but flawed Virgin Suicides, her writing-directing feature debut of three years ago. With Translation, she puts herself on a reputable par with husband Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), and if she has a few more of these in her, she could someday seriously rival father Francis (Apocalypse Now, The Godfathers).

Like Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, Lost in Translation is about two people trying to suppress their extramarital attraction to each other. While Coppola’s film possesses Wong’s wistfulness and poetic imagery, it has less of his artsy oppressiveness and emotional distancing. An A-list world-weary actor named Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is in Tokyo making a fast and luxurious buck by doing Santori whiskey ads (Hollywood’s biggest names do lucrative commercials in Japan all the time without facing the humility of doing the same at home). Recent Yale philosophy grad Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is the young wife of on-assignment fashion photographer John (Giovanni Ribisi). Having been married for two years, John is still in love with Charlotte but is nevertheless always away at work. The third major character is Tokyo itself, all-enveloping in its infinitely receding horizon yet impenetrable beyond the surface.

Her feelings of abandonment exacerbated by her cultural isolation in Tokyo, Charlotte finally finds relief in the companionship of Bob, himself alienated by the language barrier and by his family life, particularly wife of 25 years Lydia, who only exists as a discordant phone voice nagging him about banal domestic concerns back in the States. The film follows Bob and Charlotte’s progression from strangers to chance-encounter acquaintances to friends who desire to be something more. But in addition to being married, Bob and Charlotte’s age difference of 30-plus years help keep their growing romantic attraction at bay.

While touted in some reviews as a Brief Encounter-like romance, Lost in Translation is much more than that, including an examination of aging — the confusion met upon reaching adulthood, the staleness of married life, and the aloofness of being past your prime. The emotional stand-in for all of this is the characters’ relationship with Tokyo. With the city’s vibrant arcades, colorful pachinko parlors, loony talk shows and bizarre adult entertainment, Coppola presents Asian culture as an alien landscape to most Western eyes. This is the most visceral screen presentation of Japan since Edward Yang’s Yi Yi three years ago. Sitting before her high-rise Hyatt hotel window, Charlotte looks like she’s floating above the city. The shot is an eloquent metaphor — she’s immersed in Tokyo yet separate from it. At first, Bob ridicules what he cannot understand, but gradually, his derision grows more affectionate. He and Charlotte’s rapport with the city evolves simultaneous to their own relationship.

Coppola makes a reference to La Dolce Vita, which Bob and Charlotte watch on television one night. Tokyo may not be Rome, but both cities offer the same futile pleasures to their protagonists. In La Dolce Vita, it’s because the characters are only going through the motions seeking to hide their essential emptiness. In Translation, it’s because they cannot breach the culture gap for any real understanding. For all of Charlotte’s intellectual background, she cannot connect with the spiritualism she observes behind a religious temple ceremony. The end is another nod to Fellini with Charlotte replacing Marcello’s seaside girl as a glimmer of hope.

Luckily, Coppola doesn’t supply a romantic sense of destiny that the two belong together, and were it not for the happenstance of their emotional isolation, they would not likely have become even friends. In one scene, Bob and Charlotte sing karaoke at a party with Bob engaging in Roxy Music’s “More Than This.” Rarely has the use of a song to carry thematic weight felt so moving. The lyrics, “More than this — there is nothing,” sounds a note of existential desolation that gives way to acceptance and finally affirmation. Charlotte is a random encounter in the wilderness, but connecting with her is enough.

Bob and Charlotte as played by Murray and Johansson certainly make an odd couple. Murray’s pock-marked face starkly contrasts with Johansson’s unblemished skin and pursed lips. What is most remarkable about their performances is how perfectly normal they come off. Murray mostly avoids his customary hangdog mannerisms aside from some slapstick on an exercise machine. When he does adopt star persona familiarity, it feels appropriate to his character, who is after all, a big Hollywood movie star. Of late, Murray has pursued artier roles in the works of Wes Anderson, Michael Almereyda and now Coppola, but he’s always had a streak in him that transcended his “Saturday Night Live” comic roots. Don’t forget that in 1984, he starred in and co-wrote a remake of Razor’s Edge, which is about nothing less than the search for the meaning of life. As for Johansson, if Ghost World and The Man Who Wasn’t There set up Johansson’s promise, Translation confirms it. As an 18-year-old, she is remarkably convincing as a woman nearing her mid-20s.

On the surface of the movie, Japanese culture seems to get some condescension from Coppola, especially in the presentation of a Japanese “masseuse,” a not-too competent translator and the commercial director who wants superficial Rat Pack and Roger Moore impressions. At the same time, however, Bob’s contemptuous responses feel overblown and uncharitable. Coppola can at least point to one scene that reveals her sleight of hand. Bob sits next to a minuscule Japanese man, and at first the point seems to be a joke at the diminutive man’s expense, but in the background, two Japanese women watch him trying to communicate with Bob and they can’t stop laughing over Bob’s bumbling attempts to understand him. Even as we’re laughing at perceived Japanese eccentricities, they too are laughing at us and ours. “Us” gets some more thumping with Kelly (Anna Faris, most recently seen in The Hot Chick), a spoof of “if-Britney Spears-were-an-actress.” It’s spot-on and scathing without feeling like Coppola is relishing it (too much, anyway).

With all of the directorial talent on display, it’s easy to forget how observant a writer Coppola is. Certainly a lot of it plays to her strength — the knowing look at celebrity (how they are coddled, how strangers hesitantly approach them), the commercial shoot, the absurd talk show circuit. But what works best in the movie is her quiet study of human nature — how Bob and Charlotte react to the people and circumstances around them and to each other. Their platonic conversation in bed is one of the movie’s highlights. They ask “Where are you from?” questions and proceed to feel out their comfort zones of intimacy. Bob’s final move is to place his hand over her foot, a casual move that is anything but casual. The end is composed of two great scenes, one heartbreaking, the other joyously bittersweet in its fleetingness, but both are elucidated with a cinematic verve that makes Sofia Coppola a talent to look forward to in the years to come.

Tokyo Story Anne Thompson from Filmmakers magazine, Fall 2003

reverse shot : online : year in review Michael Koresky #2 Film of the Year from Reverse Shot

CultureCartel.com (Keith Uhlich)

DVDTimes Noel Megahey

stylusmagazine.com (Akiva Gottlieb)

indieWIRE Peter Brunette

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

eFilmCritic Reviews Jason Whyte

Reverse Shot Karen Wilson

Kinocite - Review Beth Gilligan

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

Nitrate Online - reviews Offering two reviews, one by Elias Savada Poignant, and one by Cynthia Fuchs Want

Lost in Translation Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Newsweek (David Ansen)

The Lumière Reader David Levinson

filmcritic.com Rachel Gordon

here Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge, updated review here: Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson] her #2 Film of the Year

PopMatters (Sharon Mizota and Oliver Wang)

Movie Vault [J. Alan Terzino]

The Digital Bits Bill Hunt

Political Film Review Michael Haas

Culture Wars [Josie Appleton]

hybridmagazine.com Roxanne Bogucka

Macresarf1 Epinions Review.

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Leslie Katz

Lost in Translation Matt Day from DVD Times

DVD Verdict - HD DVD [Ryan Keefer]

MovieMartyr.com [Jeremy Heilman]

DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) HD DVD

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) HD DVD

eFilmCritic [Scott Weinberg]

Lost in Translation Richard Booth from DVD Times

Plume-Noire.com Film Review [Fred Thom]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Culture Wars [Toby Marshall]

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Jonny Lieberman

eFilmCritic [Jack Sommersby] overpraised film with too many cliché’s

CineScene.com (Shari L. Rosenblum)

Kamera.co.uk Laurence Boyce

Reel.com DVD review [Elaine Spooner]

Sofia Coppola Talks About 'Lost in Translation', Her Love Story That's Not 'Nerdy' Interview by Wendy Mitchell from indieWIRE (2003)

Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones)

A yen for romance Joe Queenan from The Guardian, January 10, 2004

The odd Coppola Philip French from The Observer, January 11, 2004

Lost in Translation: No 17 best romantic film of all time Jane Graham from The Guardian, October 16, 2010

The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt)

Washington Post (Stephen Hunter)

DVDBeaver - HD DVD review [Yunda Eddie Feng]

MARIE ANTOINETTE C 76

USA France Japan (123 mi) 2006

The problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure

An exposé of superficiality that is significant in the size and sheer magnitude of the excess, and equally important, in the complete indifference to history. While there is something to be said for capturing the ludicrous nature of the French royal court of the 1770’s, with servants waiting on other servants, a gluttonous hierarchy that sadly falls from the weight of its own dysfunctional indulgences, and in capturing the blasé ennui of the spoiled and pampered rich, a generation that has everything handed to them through inheritance, where ingratitude comes completely naturally for them, this film never rises to anything more than surfaces and appearances. Shot on location, what we see is a sumptuously beautiful stockpile of wealth on display, capturing the ornate splendor of the Palace of Versailles in what amounts to a virtual costume drama with a cast that is impeccably dressed in exquisitely detailed royal fashion, from layered wigs, flowered hats with feathers to resplendent form-fitting gowns for every occasion, usually color coordinated to match the furniture of the palatial decor, all of which resembles the world inside a music box, that once opened, reveals a majestic beauty of music and intricate miniature design that can take one’s breath away. This entire film represents the perfection of that art design, which, despite the luxurious wealth, is a story of transparent emptiness.

Kirsten Dunst plays Marie Antoinette, an Austrian teen who is married off to the French prince at age 14, becoming heirs to the French throne as a means of joining political alliances, as France needs an ally against England and other would be powers. What better way to join forces than through royalty? Dunst has always been a respectable actress, but nothing more, never better than as Spider Man’s girl friend, where the light-hearted comic book tone fit her perfectly. But not here, where she is surrounded by an authentic French location, which elevates the historical significance considerably, much like allowing a foreign director access to film in the American White House. This film never lives up to one’s expectations other than the continuous display of superficiality. Jason Schwartzman as the young French prince who would be King, is even worse, and could even be described as pathetic.

Initially, along with the contemporary musical choices, this oddly dissonant combination brings smiles and a certain joy due to the absurdity of it all, but this quickly fades as the film offers nothing more, yet it continues to churn out scene after scene of such disaffecting indulgent boredom that it soon evolves into the arena of pure irrelevance. Asia Argento is terrific, one of the only players with any blood running through her veins, as the King’s mistress who is always staring daggers through the pretentious Marie, but there are no other performances of note. One might expect a variation on the music of Les Miserables to rise out of the crowd noise, but there is no mention at all of Marie’s fate, instead the French Revolution is a mere afterthought that isn’t even allowed to intrude on this audaciously empty assault to the senses.

Peter Bradshaw on Marie Antoinette at Cannes from The Guardian, May 25, 2006, also here: Marie Antoinette

An awful lot of cake gets eaten, appropriately enough, in Sofia Coppola's dreamily gorgeous anachro-period drama about Marie Antoinette, loosely based on Antonia Fraser's biography. It playfully mixes authentic 18th-century costumes with authentic 20th-century punk classics on the soundtrack.

Marie was the Austrian-born Queen of France, whose rumoured extravagances inflamed the French Revolution. The movie itself indulges the sensual pleasures of privilege: the magnificent clothes, the exquisite fabrics, the incomparable wines and delicious sweetmeats, the languorous caresses from court favourites. There is every sensation save that of cold, sharp steel. Insouciantly, provocatively, Coppola ends her story before the tumbrils sound.

Kirsten Dunst plays the Queen the way she plays every role: intelligent, mature, even-tempered and sweet-natured. She leaves the Austrian court under the guidance of an avuncular ambassador (a droll performance from Steve Coogan) to be introduced to her new father-in-law - a scene-stealer from Rip Torn - and of course her new husband. As played by Jason Schwartzman, the Dauphin's doe-eyed, periwigged presence put me in mind of Woody Allen's cod period piece Love and Death - though sadly without the gags.

The King's untimely death introduces them early to the burdens of power. "We are too young to rule!" moans the new Louis XVI, but this anthem to doomed monarchical youth makes ruling France look like one long party. Coppola is superb at controlling wordless mood and space, in fascinating sequences and tableaux vivants. Her movie is sympathetic towards Marie Antoinette, even making her notorious milkmaid fantasies at Le Petit Trianon look rather charming. This is a courtier's-eye-view of the Queen, and the mob put in an appearance only at the end, and the guillotine is absent.

Ultimately, it makes for a baffling and historically obtuse film, in which the inner lives of Marie and Louis remain opaque. But it is carried off with tremendous visual and dramatic style: a movie that shimmers like a beguiling mirage.

The mere existence of a Marie Antoinette biopic directed by the inventive Sofia Coppola, following up the terrific Lost In Translation, promises a historical costume drama the likes of which has never been seen. For roughly three minutes, Marie Antoinette delivers on that promise. Gang Of Four's "Natural's Not In It" plays against the bump of Sex Pistols-inspired titles, culminating in an image of Kirsten Dunst, Coppola's Antoinette, resplendent in the kind of starched-and-powdered 18th-century luxury that keeps anything remotely natural at arm's length. It's a thrilling introduction. Then the film begins.

Beautifully shot with nods to late-18th-century art and the icy formality of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, Coppola draws on Antonia Fraser's sympathetic bio Marie Antoinette: The Journey, letting Dunst play the queen as a nice, naïve Austrian girl thrust into a strange land and an arranged marriage by politics she doesn't understand. She's shaped by fame and lofty expectations, but never turned into the monster that history made her to be. Dunst and her Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) mostly live in isolation at Versailles. They host parties and attend to domestic affairs (and later, for Dunst, love affairs) in a hurricane's eye that keeps a growing storm at bay, at least for a while.

It's a daring move, focusing on the isolated splendor and interior dramas, and letting the politics remain at most a distant rumble; Coppola deserves credit for offering a different, and probably truer, perspective on life as a royal. But the perspective rarely lends itself to compelling filmmaking. When Marie Antoinette does settle into the business of plot, it scares up some nice moments, bringing dry humor into Schwartzman's all-too-public inability to consummate his marriage, much less produce an heir. And the film takes time to explore fascinating details, such as the servant charged with wiping off the eggs at a country retreat so Dunst's daughter can gather them. Elsewhere, Rip Torn and Asia Argento bring some much-needed earthiness to the airless proceedings as Louis XV and his uncouth mistress Madame du Barry.

But for all its invention, Marie Antoinette ultimately falls into the same traps as other historical dramas. It has to check off history's highlights—Louis XV's death, du Barry's expulsion, the American Revolution, "Let them eat cake!"—as it chugs toward the inevitable. The mostly post-punk and new-wave soundtrack feels shoehorned in, and Dunst's flat line-readings do little to squelch the notion that the film's insights don't go much further than the costumes and famous locations. It's history written with truffles.

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Sofia Coppola's third feature opens on a title card of pink diagonals, like a slapdash punk-pop album. From there, we meet Marie (Kirsten Dunst) lounging among platters of cakes and sweets while a handmaid fidgets with her exquisite shoes. She turns to the camera and smiles.

That smile opens up a wide range of possibilities; it breaks the rules, and Marie Antoinette goes on breaking them. Uprooted from Austria and sent to France to become its new dauphine, this Marie doesn't speak French or affect a "European" accent. Nor does she adhere to any ancient, stilted, stuffy dialogue. The costumes alone are enough to inspire the desired conduct.

Coppola avoids telling us who Marie was, preferring instead to show how she behaves. (There's no concrete story.) At first, Marie attempts to fit in with her opulent new environment, sitting squarely in her silken folds, as if afraid to upset the magnificent composition of the room (with its carefully placed flowers, furniture, sculptures, moldings, food and orchestras).

Marie's biggest problem is her duffer of a husband, Louis-Auguste (Jason Schwartzman), so dull and lumpish that he can't be bothered to make love to her. She gets the blame for their failure to conceive an heir. When the nasty gadfly buzzing becomes too much, Marie shuts herself in her chamber and sobs, while Coppola's camera moves close to her face, blocking out the room's distracting opulence for a human touch.

Soon Marie grows bored, and Coppola's camera joins her, becoming more playful and moving about more freely (the film has the best hand-held cinematography in years). Tasty pop music (New Order, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc.) blasts as she begins shopping, gambling and snacking, enjoying her privilege, even while France crumbles around her. Breathless runners occasionally charge into the scene and inform the royals of the latest bad news, but these are merely interruptions in the revelry. (As for the famous "Let them eat cake" line, Marie dismisses it as a misquote by the press: "I would never say that!" she says, amused.)

Mainly, Marie Antoinette is a film about fetish. It's about taking in all the pink cookies, pink shoes and pink wigs and finding them wonderful, even erotic. There's a freedom here that can be intoxicating. Even if many viewers will resist, preferring the kind of safe, secure structure of an important, dusty novel, Coppola has broken new ground here, reaching the same general neighborhood as Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975).

The Queen Is Dead Stuart Klawans from the Nation

The honor of France was at stake last spring when Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette premiered at Cannes to a continuous accompaniment of hoots and whistles--"a welcome," Le Monde reported, "even colder than the one reserved for The Da Vinci Code." Note that "reserved." The festival audience, ripe tomatoes at the ready, surely knew that decades earlier, in Si Versailles m'était conté, Sacha Guitry had given the French monarchy a storybook treatment no more fanciful than Coppola's pop-rock approach. But Guitry had looked at French history from within; Coppola was doing it from without.

That's why I'm glad to have watched Marie Antoinette not at Cannes but at the New York Film Festival, where an estrangement from eighteenth-century France could be perceived as the movie's point instead of its problem.

Even before the Cure and Bow Wow Wow had drowned out Rameau on the soundtrack--before a pair of sneakers had shown up amid the heroine's piles of footwear, or Asia Argento (as Du Barry) had complained, in fluent Brooklynese, that "Nobuddy treats me like a lady heah"--Coppola had estimated the gap between Marie's era and our own and gauged it, correctly, as unbridgeable. The unit of measurement: Kirsten Dunst's gaze. In the opening scene--filmed as a single emblematic shot--Dunst is discovered reclining in a lavender boudoir in which she turns her head and looks knowingly into the camera. This playful, simulated eye contact makes Marie seem to acknowledge her audience across a distance of centuries, while in the same gesture it exposes Dunst as a film actress--a modern counterfeit, posed within the semi-authentic trappings of Versailles.

When Marie Antoinette works (which is about two-thirds of the time, I'd guess), it tilts slightly toward this admission of imposture. Geopolitical maneuverings, court etiquette, the entirely public nature of the royal marriage bed: These French historical realities remain timebound and factual in Coppola's film, rather than being converted into metaphors for some present-day situation in another part of the world. But the actors who pretend to live out the events--principally Dunst as Marie and Jason Schwartzman as the beamish boy fated to be Louis XVI--are emphatically Anglo-American and contemporary. Dunst remains Peter Parker's romantic ideal, the unaffected, scrub-faced girl next door; and Schwartzman is still the slacker who wears a distracted expression, as if worried that someone will ask him a question he can't answer. To see these two dancing together--grace hand in hand with self-consciousness--is a lovely joke in itself. To see them impersonating Marie and Louis is a minor revelation, showing how people like them (and us) can barely comprehend the life of Versailles.

Guitry's droll pageantry is probably the wrong point of reference for this effect; and so, too, is the Modernist rigor of Roberto Rossellini's history films. Coppola's tone is more like that of Manoel de Oliveira's deadpan renditions of nineteenth-century novels, but lighter and sweeter, as befits a queen who was fond of meringue.

That said, the concoction goes a little flat. Like most stories that entail rising and falling action, Marie Antoinette loses energy as the characters stumble toward their end; and Coppola, at this point in her career, is not enough of a screenwriter to have overcome the problem. As a supplier of dialogue, she can be precise and surprising. As a director, she's a natural. (The wedding ceremony of Louis and Marie has all the sex that their marriage lacks. Marie winces, as if deflowered, when the ring is nudged onto her finger. Her bridal contract, blotted with ink, becomes the surrogate for a blood-stained sheet.) But when it comes to shaping the narrative, Coppola can think of nothing better than to follow a straight line, starting with Marie's departure from Austria in 1770 and shlepping on to her impending departure from this world.

I missed the deeper poignancy that Marie's later scenes might have evoked had a master such as Oliveira directed them. But the tired businessman in me enjoyed every joke, musical number and costume change in Marie Antoinette, while the critic could feel grateful for Coppola's intelligence, which let Marie be herself and not, say, a forerunner of the Bush twins.

France still has its honor; and so too, I think, does the New York Film Festival.

Creative Loafing Atlanta [Felicia Feaster]

World Socialist Web Site Emanuele Saccarelli

Bright Lights Film Journal review Fashion and Dunst, The Substance of Marie Antoinette, by Lesley Chow

Marie Antoinette Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]

Sofia Coppola and Marie Antoinette have a lot in common. Queen Bees, by Dana Stevens from Slate, October 19, 2006

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Jenny Jediny]

stylusmagazine.com (Nancy Keefe Rhodes) review

Premiere Magazine [Glenn Kenny]

The Stranger Song [Rob Humanick]

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Rob Nelson

Bright Lights Film Journal review Hating Marie, Why the French Still Don't Like Her, by Deirdre Gilfedder

The Cinematheque [Kevyn Knox]

New York Sun [Andrew Stuttaford]

d+kaz [Daniel Kasman]

PopMatters [Jake Meaney]

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] at Cannes

DVD Talk - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

CineScene [Chris Knipp]

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review

Marie Antoinette Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily

Reel.com DVD review [Brie Beazley]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Les Wright

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Nerve.com [Bilge Ebiri]

filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

sneersnipe (Julie Faveur) review

The Lumière Reader Tim Wong

Political Film Review Michael Haas

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips Jr.] (capsule)

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale

MovieMartyr.com [Jeremy Heilman]

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune review Colin Covert

Film School Rejects [Neil Miller]

Plume Noire Film Review (Fred Thom) Frédéric Flament

DVDTown [James Plath]

Martin Tsai's Blog

Monsters and Critics [April MacIntyre]

Movie Shark Deblore [debbie lynn elias]

Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review

Coppola film booed Mark Brown from The Guardian, May 25, 2006

Bring on the guillotine Xan Brooks from The Guardian, May 25, 2006

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

Chicago Tribune [Jessica Reaves]

Marie Antoinette (2006 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New York Times (registration req'd) A Lonely Petit Four of a Queen, by A.O. Scott, October 13, 2006

Dunst Poses As Marie Antoinette in Vogue May 3, 2006

'Marie Antoinette': Best or Worst of Times? - New York Times Cannes Journal by Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott from The New York Times, May 25, 2006

Women in Hollywood: Sofia Coppola Interview by Brooke Hauser from Premiere magazine, October 2006

SOMEWHERE B+ 91

USA (97 mi) 2010 Somewhere Movie Trailer Official (HD)

Feeling very much like an autobiographical work, this quirky expressionistic portrait of aimless characters drifting through the superficiality and ennui of the ultra rich resonates with the director, whose millionaire parents had separation issues during the middle of her childhood sending her into an emotional free for all. From being cast as Candy Darling in I SHOT ANDY WARHOL (1996), Stephen Dorff shows up here as Johnny Marco, a man who supposedly has everything money can buy, but hasn’t a clue how to find love. Instead he lives in an upscale luxury hotel, Chateau Marmont of West Hollywood, and pays pole dancers to entertain him whenever he’s bored, or drops into the rooms of seductive single women who give him that look of availability and interest. Driving a late model Ferrari, he is accustomed to getting what he wants. When we get a glimpse behind the veneer, however, we discover his life is really empty and rather pathetic.

When his 11-year old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) drops by, they play video games together or sit around the pool while the soundtrack plays The Strokes - I'll Try Anything Once (3:18) that includes an underwater sequence where they pretend to have a tea party, or swim in the pool in their own private suite, but he barely knows her, not even realizing she’s been taking ice-skating lessons for the past three years, seen skating beautifully to Gwen Stefani’s “Cool,” becoming a graceful and attractive young woman. This reminded me of the opening of John Cassavetes’ Love Streams (1984), where Cassavetes was sleeping with an entire household of call girls while regularly drinking multiple bottles of champagne every day, leading a life of alcoholism and debauchery, taking responsibility for no one, not even himself, none of which brings him anywhere close to being in love. For the most part, this is the theme of the film, as Johnny is a self-indulgent movie star who lives the part of a playboy with women throwing themselves at him, and these short term flings constitute his life. While not exactly flamboyant, it’s indulgent as hell, leaving gaping holes where his reality should be.

Cleo, however, is adorable the way she skips from room to room, fixes him breakfast in the mornings, twirls around performing ballet swirls, and is generally a smart, well adjusted girl who’s also used to having everything handed to her and getting whatever she wants. She’s sweet natured and fun to be around, but she falls apart when her mom inexplicably dumps her on Johnny’s doorstep and never indicates when or if she’s coming back. So he takes her to Italy with him for a press junket promoting a movie, where they fly first class and get transported by a police escorted stretch limousine while receiving luxury accommodations in the finest hotels. You’d think this would be the life, any kid’s dream, but this so much resembles the sheltered life that she’s used to that it quickly gets tiring, almost immediately retreating back home. When Johnny takes her in a helicopter ride after a night playing craps in Las Vegas where they meet a waiting taxicab to take her to summer camp, it borders on the ridiculous. Some kids just have all the advantages.

Largely a plotless melancholic mood piece that is a breakout role for Elle Fanning, it’s like her coming out party, as her fresh energy really carries the film. While many will call this a trifle, not really about anything, reality light, or we should have such problems, but Coppola has a deft hand interspersing small moments of realism with her own sense of experimentation and pitch perfect Indie music that really does feel unique, as her use of music is simply outstanding. The film is pretty much what we see in the two-minute trailer sequence, which is remarkably inventive and features the best songs from the film. The ensemble acting is genuine, with Chris Pontius as Johnny’s lifelong friend really standing out, feeling very much like improvised scenes, while the measured camerawork by Harris Savides creates an intimate warmth with each character, but the icing on the cake remains the exquisitely chosen musical selections and the original music by Phoenix, where over the end credits we hear Love like a sunset part II by Phoenix Music Video (1:57) and smoke gets in your eyes,bryan ferry (3:04), unique takes on familiar themes.

Somewhere Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London David Jenkins

Playing it more low key and less brash than in ‘Marie Antoinette’, Sofia Coppola is back in another rarefied world for her fourth feature and her first on home turf since ‘The Virgin Suicides’. This time she swaps Versailles for Sunset Boulevard and the French queen for Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), a movie star living in limbo in a Hollywood hotel. Not any lodging house either, but the Chateau Marmont, a haven for upscale decadence where one is likely, as Johnny does, to bump into the likes of Benicio del Toro in the lift (a nod to Scarlett Johansson’s joke that she had a steamy encounter with him in one of the hotel’s elevators).

Johnny does little apart from feel like a spare part at his own parties, lie in bed watching strippers slide down poles as he recovers from a broken arm and occasionally obey orders to attend press conferences. The only constant in his life, beyond room service, is his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning). Even then, this smiling, smart girl’s visits feel like an awkward duty. It’s only when Cleo’s mother leaves her with him for longer than usual that Johnny hangs out with her, takes her to Italy and enjoys the warmth of a father-daughter relationship, even if they’re not doing much more than playing tennis on Wii Sports and sharing ice cream.

The upscale hotel location, the character in limbo and on the cusp of recovery or reawakening and the tenderness between two unlikely characters are all familiar from ‘Lost in Translation’, and there’s a sense of treading old ground. At the same time, for all the familiarity, the difference is that this is a film about Hollywood, the place as well as the ideal, and there’s a hint of the sinister side of celebrity in the anonymous, nasty texts Johnny receives and his paranoia that he’s being followed by paparazzi wherever he goes.

That said, the film’s notes on fame are gentle and wry, never damning or deep, so questions from journalists don’t reach the satirical levels of ‘8 1/2’ or even the reality of ‘Don’t Look Back’. Some gags – of which there’s only a sprinkling – are surprisingly broad: Johnny goes to bed with someone and falls asleep between her legs; his masseur alarms him by preferring to work in the nude; crude Italian models swamp him at an awards ceremony.

Coppola is more comfortable with the quieter, more moody and dominant side of her film. She opens as Johnny drives a sports car round and round a track at length. Later, he motors across the country en route to a suggested personal epiphany, to which Coppola is too cool to get too close, meaning that the film fades out weakly. She prefers to look, not touch: standout scenes include Chloe skating around a rink as her father looks on and another in which Johnny has a mould made of his head, leaving us feeling claustrophobic and him strangely free as he sits in silence and encased. Coppola works with Gus Van Sant’s cinematographer Harris Savides and the link with Van Sant shows in a use of natural light, stillness and a search for the essential in quiet scenes.

For all the knowing Hollywood face of ‘Somewhere’, it’s the non-celebrity, Chloe, who is the film’s soul. Her age, moving from child to teens, means her interaction with her dad and other adults is oddly ambiguous and Coppola again shows how keen she is to show cosseted young girls and women struggling with their place in the world. The rapport between Dorff and Fanning is fun and tender, especially when she shoots him daggers when he brings a woman to breakfast in Italy, but while it’s Johnny’s life we see the most of, it’s Chloe’s which ends up being the most intriguing.

Somewhere Mirriam Bale from Slant magazine

What is Sofia Coppola's latest film, Somewhere? It's a Hollywood film about Hollywood that completely ignores the rules of traditional narrative filmmaking, of indie filmmaking too: The one (false start of a) montage consists of only one shot, the film willfully crosses "the line" just once, and it also has just one jarring jump cut. These choices are so subtle and deliberate that they don't call attention to the radical and specific choices Coppola has made throughout. This experimental pop film stands on its own, peerless and without precedent, at least in the movies.

It's only in relationship to music that I can position the film. With its sugar-pop harmonies created out of flowing waves of dissonance, Somewhere is like Nowhere, the 1990 album from the British band Ride that was a key work in the shoegaze movement (also known as "the scene that celebrates itself," not unlike the criticisms often unfairly hurled at Coppola). The film kicks in with a hum; a low sound, like the sound of a car's revving engine, rides underneath the rock song that accompanies the opening credits, enveloping and overwhelming the viewer till he is disarmed.

That use of gorgeously subtle sound design and perfectly timed credits is a Sofia Coppola signature that she seems to have bettered through simplification in this film. So many Coppola themes and settings, in fact, return here: hotel hallways, banal small talk, banal movie-industry talk, the shifting light from a car window, and all the things left unsaid—but here she gets them just right. The story feels familiar to her worldview as well. Johnny Marco, a name meant to be a type as much as a character, is a '90s throwback in a Sub Pop shirt (as played by '90s throwback Stephen Dorff), an action star and absent father who's becoming, as the director described it, "the old guy at the club." The film about his reconnection with his daughter doesn't follow a traditional story arc though. Instead, it's tightly divided into three sections in which Dorff successfully plays three different men.

The first, almost wordless section is all abstraction, as the viewer watches Dorff watching everything from a jaded, disconnected distance. This doubled distance leads to extended shots of bodies simply moving which are almost experimental films in themselves. Particularly of note here are the two scenes of twin strippers who arrive at his Chateau Marmont hotel room with collapsible poles, and don't quite dance but move to music ceaselessly. These scenes bookend a scene of Dorff's daughter (Elle Fanning) ice-skating, also not quite dancing and not quite posing, but somewhere in between. No filmmaker observes women's bodies moving with as much attention as Coppola. It's a reminder that women's bodies in other films are quickly presented as either flawless or flawed, but here every shape and every stretch is fascinating for minutes at a time. With the aid of real film and natural light, Coppola also lingers on the textures of these different bodies: the familiar Los Angeles flash of gold jewelry, gray sweats, highlighted gold hair, and a frappachino in hand; Italian skin in white eyelet or shimmery gold fabric; and artificially tanned bouncing buttocks contrasted with candy-striped pink cotton.

In the second section, Dorff relearns how to participate, as he watches with surprise, glee, and disorientation how his daughter is becoming a woman. It's as if in seeing her beauty through a desexualized lens, he finally sees women as women, not groupies, and he awakens to his new role as protector, not consumer. The film shows masculinity from an objective distance, with details (the bedside table decorated with beer bottles and pills, the apple box he has to stand on for a photo op with a tall actress, and groans of pleasure cut short when he falls asleep during cunnilingus) that perhaps only a woman would note. To emphasize this objective yet stubbornly female gaze, the stationary camera remains low throughout (from the same low height that the short Chantal Ackerman filmed Jeanne Dielman, a film Ackerman said was literally from her own point of view, and which DP Harris Savides screened for Coppola before shooting this film) so that characters have to duck into the frame or have their heads cut off, a little.

Then there is the final section, which is in some ways a repeat of the settings of the first section, but in which Dorff is now humanized. This particular evolution is inevitable, of course, but presented in a style and structure that's quietly revolutionary and totally assured. Most interesting is the distillation, but not complete absence of, overwrought dialogue. When the Dorff character does finally try to reveal his inner turmoil through words, it simply falls flat.

Don't distinguish what he feels with the word existential. It has nothing to do with philosophy. He believes he's nothing, and it appears he's correct. This is called depression, but it may simply be a realistic view of the situation.

Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) sits in a suite of the Chateau Marmont, that little hotel for generations of Hollywood hideouts, and finds himself a hollow man. He is a movie star. With that comes such options as money, fame, sex, drugs. Fame is a joke because he gets nothing from it. Sex involves mechanical manipulations of the genitals. He drinks and takes drugs and gets a little wound up but pleasure doesn't seem to be involved.

On two occasions, he hires twin blond strippers to come to his room, set up their portable equipment and do choreographed pole dances. No sex is involved. He is demonstrating the truth that if you stare long enough at a wall, it will break the monotony if blond twins do pole dances in front of it.

Sofia Coppola's film “Somewhere” involves, as did her “Lost in Translation” (2003), a man separated from his family and sitting alone in a hotel room. Its opening resembles Vincent Gallo's “The Brown Bunny” (2003): a long shot of a vehicle tearing around a track. A man racing madly to nowhere. In “Lost in Translation,” Bill Murray's Bob makes dutiful but cheerless phone calls home from Japan. Dorff's Johnny spends dutiful time with his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning). Neither seems meaningfully connected.

Because so much of “Somewhere” is set at the Chateau Marmont, it might be useful to discuss it. It isn't cheap, but nobody goes there to indulge in conspicuous consumption. What it offers above all is a management that minds its own business. What happens at the Chateau Marmont stays at the Chateau Marmont. It's often linked with another semiresidential legend a few blocks away, the Sunset Marquis. The Chateau, I sense, is more useful for clients who want not so much privacy as retreat. There's a scene where Johnny nods to Benicio del Toro in the elevator. I'll bet you del Toro was actually staying there at the time. They are both simply waiting for their floors.

The notion of a star sinking into seclusion and depression isn't new. Gus Van Sant's “Last Days” (2005) starred Michael Pitt as a character unmistakably inspired by Kurt Cobain. What distinguishes Coppola's film is the detail in her portrait of celebrity life. Remember that she was a little girl and later a young actress on the sets of her father's movies. Now that we see how observant she is, we can only speculate about what she understood right from the start. She played Michael Corleone's baby.

“Somewhere,” which won the Golden Lion at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, has, for example, an unusually accurate portrait of how publicists work from the client's point of view. Some become friends, some remain employees, but during work, they function as parents and guardians. The star's contract requires him to do some press. The phone rings, and the publicist tells the star where to go and what to do. He takes on a certain passivity. The car is there, he takes the car. The press is there, he talks to the press. Some stars are more interested and interesting. Not Johnny. He flies to Milan to accept an award, and the event plays like a bus ride with a jacuzzi.

He seems to suffer from anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. Perhaps he hardly feels anything. The film only indirectly suggests some of the reasons he got this way. It is not a diagnosis, still less a prescription. Johnny stares at the wall and the film stares back.

This is more interesting than it may sound. Coppola watches this world. The familiar strangers on the hotel staff are on a first-name basis because a star's world has become reduced to his support. Hookers and sex partners come and go. There are parties filled with strangers, most of them not excited to see a star because they see stars constantly.

Then his daughter. What led to the divorce Cleo probably knows better than he does. The child of an actor, she has learned to play a star. She observes his drinking, his detached attempts at fatherhood, the woman he makes no attempt to explain at breakfast. Why does a man like this inflict partial custody on a blameless child?

Coppola is a fascinating director. She sees, and we see exactly what she sees. There is little attempt here to observe a plot. All the attention is on the handful of characters, on Johnny. He has attained success in his chosen field, and lost track of the ability to experience it. Perhaps you can stimulate yourself so much for so long that your sensitivity wears out. If Johnny has no inner life and his outer life no longer matters, then he's right: He's nothing.

"Somewhere": Sofia Coppola's smart, stylish celebrity takedown Andrew O’Hehir from Salon

IC Places [Chris Knipp]

Sound On Sight John McEntee

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Somewhere | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps

Review: Somewhere Has a Point - Film.com Laremy Legel

Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, with Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning, reviewed. Dana Stevens from Slate, December 22, 2010

A Place for “Somewhere” Richard Brody from The New Yorker, December 17, 2010

You either love Sofia Coppola or hate her. Here's why. Nathan Heller from Slate, December 28, 2010

Conspicuous Production Richard Brody from The New Yorker, January 4, 2011

A Response to The New Yorker's Richard Brody, on Sofia Coppola Nathan Heller from Brow Beat, January 5, 2011

CBC News - Film - Review: Somewhere Lee Ferguson

indieWire.com [Todd McCarthy]

Movies: Sofia Coppola's 'Somewhere' - Newsweek David Ansen

Life with Daughter - ReelTalk Movie Reviews Jeffrey Chen

Armond White reviews Sofia Coppola's Somewhere -- NYPress

Eye for Film : Somewhere Movie Review (2010) Andrew Grant

Somewhere Review :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Sean Gandert

Somewhere - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Cinepassion,org [Fernando F. Croce]

True Grit, The Illusionist, Somewhere, Gulliver's Travels | Film ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal

filmsoundoff [Alex Roberts]

Somewhere (2010) — Inside Movies Since 1920 Sara Maria Vizcarrondo from Box Office magazine

Somewhere review | Screenjabber Justin Bateman

Somewhere : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]

Somewhere Review | Empire Ian Freer from Empire UK

Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]

I Heart The Talkies

Movie Review - Somewhere - eFilmCritic Mel Valentin

Movie Review - Somewhere - eFilmCritic Rob Gonsalves

Somewhere: movie review - CSMonitor.com Peter Rainer

Somewhere (B) Brad Brevet from Rope of Silicon

n:zone [L.Shoquist]

film review: SOMEWHERE > Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy - indieWIRE

Ersatz Antonioni... - ShowReview Frank Swietek from One Man’s Opinion

DVD Talk [Brian Orndorf] and here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

Somewhere Sawyer J. Lahr from Film Monthly

Little White Lies Magazine [Elliot V. Kotek]

The Reel Bits [Sarah Ward]

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

The Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]

Sofia Coppola: 'Is this psychoanalysis?' | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw interview from The Guardian, December 1, 2010

Stephen Dorff's journey down the dumper … and out again Damon Wise interview from The Guardian, December 11, 2010

Sofia Coppola: Not just for girls Sam Adams interview from Salon, December 23, 2010

Variety.com [Justin Chang]

Time Out New York [David Fear]

Somewhere | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, September 3, 2010

Somewhere – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Badshaw, December 9, 2010

Rich, famous and depressed: Coppola's second take on celebrity life Mark Brown from The Guardian, September 3, 2010

Sofia Coppola wins Venice film festival's top award for Somewhere The Guardian, September 11, 2010

Somewhere – review | Film | The Observer Philp French

Somewhere: Maybe she should have called it Lost Somewhere - The ... Liam Lacey from The Globe and the Mail

First Night: Somewhere, Venice Film Festival - Reviews, Films ... Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent

Somewhere, review - Telegraph Tim Robey

Somewhere movie review -- Somewhere showtimes - The Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Review : Somewhere - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

'Somewhere' review : A story that goes nowhere | NJ.com Stephen Whitty from The Star-Ledger

'Something' happens in 'Somewhere' | Philadelphia Daily News | 01 ... Gary Thompson

Moody tale of dad and daughter - Philly.com Steven Rea from The Philadelphia Inquirer

Somewhere - Page 1 - Movies - Minneapolis - City Pages Melissa Anderson, January 5, 2011, also seen here: The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]

Sofia Coppola's journey to Somewhere Karina Longworth from City Pages, December 29, 2010

Review: Sofia Coppola runs well on empty - TwinCities.com Chris Hewitt from St. Paul Pioneer Press, January 6, 2011

Movie review: 'Somewhere' - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott, December 21, 2010, also heard discussing the movie on YouTube here (3:31): Anatomy of a Scene: 'Somewhere'

It’s What She Knows: The Luxe Life Dennis Lim from The New York Times, December 10, 2010

THE BLING RING C+ 78

USA (90 mi) 2013

Super rich kids with nothing but fake friends. —Frank Ocean, “Super Rich Kids” Frank Ocean - Super Rich Kids on Vimeo YouTube (5:05)

Once again, Sofia Coppola zeroes in on the vacuous and empty-headed lives of spoiled and pampered, overly rich white kids from Hollywood whose parents are nearly absent from their lives, so they are literally consumed by the very public lives of the fabulously wealthy, impressed by their jewelry, fashion taste, magazine spreads, celebrity television and movie appearances, and how they love to party in the upscale club scene, constantly seeing the faces of other young stars in all the tabloids and magazines, continually wondering why it can’t be them? Adapted by the director from real life occurrences that were reported in an article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” by Nancy Jo Sales from Vanity Fair, March 2010 about a group of Hollywood teens who burglarized the homes of their idols, stealing their clothes and jewellery, not to mention large wads of cash, while spending their money at the same clubs where their favorite stars hung out. Surprised that the homes were so easy to break into, as usually sliding glass doors were left open, or keys left under the doormat, it was easy to Google their addresses and find out what celebrities were out of town for a special event, leaving their homes vacant. While stealing over $3 million worth of jewelry, high end clothes, Rolex watches, fashionable shoes, perfume, makeup, artworks, and stashes of various social drugs and cash from the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, Megan Fox, Rachel Bilson, and Audrina Patridge, their favorite house turned out to be Paris Hilton, returning repeatedly, stealing $2 million dollars alone from the stuff taken from her home. Paris Hilton wasn’t even aware anything was missing until months later, as the group’s undoing came by foolishly posting photos of themselves on Facebook wearing these newly acquired items, which served as easy evidence of stolen merchandise for the police once they caught on.

While Coppola has an appealing experimental style that works best in a non-narrative, stream-of-conscious style, the very lack of definition suits her highly impressionist form, as her use of music to help fill empty spaces is usually nothing less than superb. Using the talent of ace cinematographer Harris Savides in his final film (dedicated to his memory), they combine to show what architectural beauty can be expressed by shooting a robbery in progress through a glass house, where the perpetrators are seen as little more than a movement of shadows, but visually it’s a captivating moment. Coppola is hampered here by the repetitive storyline, reflecting the bored lives of the typically screwed up teenagers who continually return to the same activity like a drug, often seen bragging about their exploits afterwards in upscale clubs, obviously trying to impress others, where they are seen as little more than opportunists in waiting. Inflating one’s view of oneself is a constant in this film, reflecting the adoring approval received by their parents who wouldn’t think of reprimanding them, allowing them to do whatever they want, as these kids are continually taking photos of themselves with their phones and posting them on their Facebook pages. This dysfunctional group includes Katie Chang as Rebecca, something of the ringleader, and her adoring follower Marc, Israel Broussard, a not so great looking guy that loves fashion design, so fits right into this culture. Their best friends include sisters Nicki (Emma Watson) and Sam (Taissa Farmiga with a leopard-skin infatuation), both home-schooled by their clueless mother on how to look their best and think positively, given Adderall every morning for God knows how long, while they’re best friends with the more stoic Chloe (Claire Julien). All they ever talk about is what people are wearing, as that’s all that seems to matter to them. This film pales in comparison to Not Fade Away (2012), for instance, a much better written David Chase film featuring teenagers from the 60’s that just knew they would eventually be discovered as rock stars, as they were only waiting for someone to discover them. Similarly, this group already thinks of themselves as stars simply because they so completely identify with the Hollywood culture of attractiveness and glamour, getting their faces plastered over all the tabloids, and then using that to build a career. It’s interesting that the choices of who to rob comes from the faces they routinely see in the tabloids and celebrity news TV programs.

Celebrity worship is nothing new, but this may be the first time kids feel so entitled to be included among the celebrities simply because they can copy their fashion sense and be seen in the same public places. It’s hard to fathom, but this group has delusions of grandeur, where they feel as if it’s their right to steal clothes from the stars, as emulating their lifestyle is how they’ll be discovered. What’s missing is any likeable person among the bunch, as all are so hung up on themselves that nobody else matters. In truth, these are thoroughly detestable people that haven’t a clue what matters in life, as all they’ve learned is to think exclusively about themselves. They have such a high opinion of themselves that their egos take the place of sex, which is also missing in these young kid’s lives. The idea of communicating with others doesn’t even occur to them, as all they want to do is see themselves in the mirror. This human contempt grows tiresome after awhile, as there’s little reason why anyone should care about any of the subjects in this film, a similar reaction to Coppola’s earlier candy-colored walk through history with a young empty-headed MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006). The character of Nicki is actually based upon Alexis Neiers, her younger sister Gabby, and an adopted sister Tess Taylor, all pursuing modeling careers managed by their mother, Andrea Arlington, a former Playboy playmate who claims she modeled lingerie with Cindy Crawford in the 80’s. They were all subjects of a short-lived Reality TV show Pretty Wild, which aired for two months on the E! Network in the spring of 2010. Unfortunately, Alexis was arrested by the first episode, becoming a convicted felon, where her melodramatic Diva Queen personality was so overly self-indulgent that its claim to fame may be that it challenges for the worst show to ever air on TV (Pretty Wild Might Be the Worst Television Show Ever Made - Gawker). Why all of this should appeal to the director, or a viewing audience, is an open question, as whatever satiric slant may have been intended runs thin, where it plays out more as an absurdist caricature of people that just don’t care, where it appears that celebrity culture is already too over-exposed and doesn’t need any more public screen time, as their lives are simply too pathetically empty to be taken seriously. The question is: does this film raise a larger issue? If this is supposed to represent a cultural phenomenon about narcissistic kids growing up today who are simply too infatuated with themselves, showing no interest in the lives of others, there is too much evidence to suggest otherwise, as students and the youth vote played a large part in electing and re-electing the first black President Barack Obama, while children of the elite comprise much of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Coppola has always sympathized with kids, much like herself, raised in a bubble who are simply too bored to care, emblematic of their celebrity heroes that show the same vacuous superficiality, but this time she’s hit a wall, never unlocking any revelatory secrets or exposing a social critique that actually matters.

There’s little that’s smart about Sofia Coppola’s off-putting, based-on-actual-events ode to the rich and clueless, The Bling Ring. The young, troubled Los Angeleno protagonists (including former Hermione Granger Emma Watson) are all wealthy enough that they can pop Adderall, gain easy access to nightclubs and be home-schooled by parents whose bible is Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. But they long for more privilege, specifically the Rolex and Alexander McQueen-branded lifestyle that TMZ and its gossiping ilk posit as the provenance of celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. A quick Google search gives the group a home address, and it’s not long before they’re inside Paris’s walk-in closet, lifting leather purses, fuck-me pumps and other high-living accouterments for their own transient pleasure.

There are consequences, of course, and as in Marie Antoinette (2006), Coppola takes pains to lend the copious montages of designer fashions, as well as the characters’ laze-about libertinism, a consistently sickly pallor to suggest that the piper must eventually be paid. Here, though, the repercussive point never emerges—probably the difference between having a controversial French monarch and a group of Vanity Fair-profiled spoiled brats as your subjects. (Only Israel Broussard, as the male sad sack of the group, gets beyond oh-like-hey-whatever caricature.) At the very least, The Bling Ring allows us a last chance to bask in the work of recently deceased co-cinematographer Harris Savides, whose vision here of a vapidly sun-baked City of Angels is a more-than-fitting epitaph to a vital career.

MonstersandCritics [Anne Brodie]

The rich brats in Sofia Coppola’s smoothly shot social-studies comedy think of themselves not as criminals but as celebrities-in-waiting. With their parents “in the biz”, and living in the wealthy foothills near L.A., they figure the only real difference between them and TMZ staples like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton is the amount of brand-name gear they possess. I mean, like, it couldn’t be talent, right? So at least some of them are bound to turn all socialistic when it comes to the redistribution of Rolexes.

The film is based on the real-life case documented by Nancy Jo Sales in Vanity Fair, and Coppola is close enough to that milieu to view it without too much irony. Its biggest dose of sincerity comes from Israel Broussard as Marc, the lone boy in a pack of miniskirted lionesses. The instigator is Rebecca (Katie Chang), the daiquiri-cool beauty who starts with parked Ferraris and is soon rifling through Megan Fox’s underwear drawer. Marc follows, along with a few others, but he seems more interested in Paris Hilton’s shoe collection.

Marc’s sexuality is unaddressed by the film, but the flailing of his unformed persona—yearning to be something more than what’s already been doled out—is probably the real subject here. If blingleader Rebecca is morally oblivious, someone positioned to turn larkish larceny into tabloid gold is her Facebook-minded friend Nicki (Emma Watson), who puts a greedy spin on the New Age affirmations force-fed her by her smiling mom (Leslie Mann).

Played by Watson with sharklike determination (and an awesome accent), Nicki exudes fiercely ignorant opportunism—much like Nicole Kidman’s murderous weather girl in To Die For, but with even less ambition. But these are easy targets, of course, and there’s more dark laughter than deep insight in Coppola’s shiny Ring thing.

The Bling Ring is a group of celebrity-obsessed LA teens who won notoriety in 2009 when they were convicted of breaking into at least fifty homes including those of Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Megan Fox, Orlando Bloom and Paris Hilton, and stealing $3M dollars in clothes, shoes, jewels, cash and handbags.

Katie Chang, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson, Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga and Carlos Miranda play the teenaged hit squad that preyed on B list stars Coppola’s smart and nuanced film that raises worrisome issues about life in certain circles.

The so-called “Hollywood Hills Burglars” were allegedly “typical” highschoolers in the Valley, smoking pot, partying on the beach, lusting after top brand name goods and watching every move made by celebrities. They began tracking stars on gossip and news sites, learning when they’d be away and Googling their home addresses.

The robbery habit grew on the ringleader’s momentary urge for a thrill. She started on unlocked cars and moved to luxury homes. Soon she was joined by five or six others and they would go to a stars empty home to “shop”.

Coppola stages a robbery in a glass home, shooting two Blingers from the top of a nearby hill. She shoots wide as they enter the house and switch on the lights, ransack the house, and get in and out in a few minutes, all in one take. It is unsettling, as security measures fail to kick in and they leave loaded down with booty. Shows how quick and easy it is for even a casual thief to get in and score.

Coppola spends time on the mothers of the teens. One girl was homeschooled on The Secret” method, another may have been neglected by his single father, another spoiled and wealthy, etcetera. Lax parenting and abuse triggered risk taking behaviors seem to be key factors.

The bigger picture is a grim one. Young girls and boys are peppered with images of what it is to be a successful person - rich, beautiful, well dressed, in the latest shoes and bag, and they want to be part of it. Given the limitation of their lives, it wouldn’t be possible on their own, so they built a fantasy world in which they shop the stars’ closets for things rightfully theirs.

There is no remorse or guilt until the police interviews and it is patently fake. Coppola does a solid job of telling the story and introducing contributing factors without ever resorting to the sensational. It feels like a personal, intimate drama between a few friends which is what it must have been like for the real life bling ring. Just another experience. That’s what makes Coppola’s work so moving. It is natural and organic and the thing grows on its own time table.

There are a few funs cameos. Gavin Rossdale plays a smarmy petty criminal; there is news footage of the star victims and even a celeb house walk on. Paris Hilton’s actual home, built in nightclub and all, plays itself.

Review: The Bling Ring - Film Comment Kent Jones from Film Comment

Sofia Coppola is uncommonly gifted at the articulation of something so fleeting and ephemeral that it seems to be on the verge of evaporating on contact with her hovering, deadpan, infinitely patient camera eye. In her three best films—Lost in Translation (03), the wildly underrated Somewhere (10), and The Bling Ring, based on the true story of a pack of roving Adderalled teenagers who sauntered in and out of the homes of multiple celebrity-culture superstars for a few months in 2011 and made off with millions in cash, jewelry, and haute couture—she has given us rare glimpses of people as they discover, almost by chance, that their existences are utterly absurd. The fact that this is a dilemma of the rich has not gone unnoticed—most of the complaints about her films have been class-based, of the “why should we care about these people?” variety. But Coppola’s films are so specific and carefully observed that they incorporate class. It’s not so much a question of being asked to identify with the plight of the wealthy (as in something like This Is 40), as it is of being confronted with the raw facts of this kind of absurdity and this kind of sadness under these particular circumstances, which the director herself knows in minute detail. If you wanted to get pithy about it, you could call her a neorealist of hyper-materialist life.

The Bling Ring, like all of Coppola’s films, has less of a plot than a setting, in the musical sense. As in Marie Antoinette (06) and Somewhere, we are placed in the orbit of a character who appears to see himself as a cipher—in this case, Marc (Israel Broussard), a lonely, hyper-medicated teenager in Calabasas. Marc is drawn into the orbit of Rebecca (Katie Chang), who befriends him for no particular reason and who, just because she can, breaks into cars (most of them unlocked) and steals wallets stashed in the glove compartments or under front seats. The air of indeterminacy and fuzzy motivations—every action seems to be on the verge of not occurring—is carefully nurtured and cultivated, and before long raiding the homes of the stars becomes the favorite activity of the two teenagers and an ever-growing pack of friends. “Let’s go shopping!” is the texted rallying cry. The shoppers include Nicki (another good Emma Watson performance) and her sister Sam (Taissa Farmiga). Their blissed-out mother Laurie (the ineffable Leslie Mann) prompts them to recite their morning verses from the church of The Secret and administers their daily antidepressants like communion wafers.

Like Somewhere, The Bling Ring sneaks up on you. Somewhere during the first visit to Paris Hilton’s house (if it isn’t the real thing, it could just as well be), you might find yourself, as I did, alternately charmed, mesmerized, and horrified by the lives of the characters and the homes they enter. Halfway through the film, Marc and Rebecca wander through what is supposedly Orlando Bloom’s open-plan house at night, viewed from an exquisite remove several tiers above in the Hollywood hills, the sounds of howling coyotes and wailing police sirens quietly echoing in the distance—a suspended spell of uncanny beauty, and one of the most beautifully lyrical stretches I’ve seen in a movie in ages.

I’m not sure if Coppola’s film ends as satisfactorily as it might have—resolving a narrative about characters who lead unmotivated lives does present its dramatic problems—but I don’t think it matters all that much. Unlike Spring Breakers, with which the film will inevitably be compared (alongside Schrader’s The Canyons), The Bling Ring goes about its business quietly but with a tremendous purity of focus. The film casts such a lovely spell that its full force may hit only after the lights come up.

“The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” Nancy Jo Sales from Vanity Fair, March 2010

Inside the Pretty Wild true story behind the Bling Ring movie Starcasm, June 23, 2013

Slaves to the Lifestyle: The Bling Ring, Kanye West, and Celebrity ... Kerensa Cadenas from Bitch Media, June 20, 2013

The Bling Ring: Nancy Jo Sales talks us through the crime timeline Jessica Goldstein from The Washington Post, June 14, 2013

Emma Watson Prepared For Her Pretty Wild Role In The Bling Ring ... Perez Hilton, May 30, 2013

Where Are They Now? The pretty and wild girls of Pretty ... - Starcasm Darren O. from Starcasm, March 8, 2011

Pretty Wild Might Be the Worst Television Show Ever Made - Gawker Richard Lawson, March 29, 2010

Author Nancy Jo Sales Dishes on the Bling Ring. Rebecca Sacks Q & A with Nancy Jo Sales from Vanity Fair, February 5, 2010

Brad Pitt, 'World War Z,' and 'The Bling Ring' - Grantland Wesley Morris, June 20, 2013

The Bling Ring Is Gorgeous, If Sometimes Absent ... - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek

Film.com [David Ehrlich]

The House Next Door [Jordan Cronk]

Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]

Wylie Writes [Addison Wylie]

The Bling Ring Review: Costume Jewelry - Pajiba Daniel Carlson

Film Summer Guide: Club-going Teens Turn Celebrity Burglars in Coppola's The Bling Ring Aaron Hillis from The Village Voice

'The Bling Ring' - When Fame-Obsessed Teens Go Rogue - NPR Tomas Hachard

Artifice and Real Life: Cannes Report, May 16, 2013 Barbara Scharres at Cannes from the Ebert Blog

Guy Lodge at Cannes from Hit Fix, May 16, 2013

David Jenkins at Cannes from Little White Lies, May 16, 2013

jdbrecords [Jeffery Berg]

DVDizzy.com [Luke Bonanno]

Bling Ring, The - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

What Becca Wants, Becca Gets, One Way or Another ... - PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

This Is the End and The Bling Ring, reviewed. - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens

Cannes Review: Sofia Coppola's 'The Bling Ring' A Mostly Empty ... Kevin Jagernauth from The Playlist

EFilmCritic.com [Brett Gallman]

'Bling Ring' is one of the essential films of 2013 - New York NY ... Mike Cavalier from The Examiner

The Bling Ring Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily

PlumeNoire.com [Moland Fengkov]

The Bling Ring : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Jeff Nelson

'The Bling Ring': Celebrity Culture And Its Little Monsters John Powers from NPR

Twitch [Ryland Aldrich]

Vanity Fair [Graham Fuller]

Sound On Sight Justine Smith

The Film Stage [Shanshan Chen]

SBS Film [Fiona Williams]

Screen Rant [Ben Kendrick]

Critical Women On Film Journal [Prairie Miller]

Digital Spy [Ben Rawson-Jones]

Combustible Celluloid Review - The Bling Ring (2013), Sofia ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

Digital Journal [Sarah Gopaul]

All The Songs In 'The Bling Ring' Including Phoenix, Kanye West ...

Cannes 2013, Day One: Sofia Coppola offers the first misfire of the festival Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club

The Bling Ring : The New Yorker David Denby (capsule review)

Daily | Cannes 2013 | Sofia Coppola’s THE BLING RING David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 16, 2013

Sofia Coppola talks about her new movie, ‘The Bling Ring’ Ann Hornaday interview with author Nancy Jo Sales from The Washington Post, June 14, 2013

'The Bling Ring' comes full circle for Alexis Neiers - Los Angeles Times Amy Kaufman interviews Alexis Neiers from The LA Times, May 24, 2013

Nancy Jo Sales on Her New Book, The Bling Ring, and Why the Band of Teenage Thieves Stole Miranda Kerr's ... Alyssa Bereznak interviews author Nancy Jo Sales from Vanity Fair, May 14, 2013

Stephen Galloway Sofia Coppola: The Trials, Tears and Talent, a profile of Sofia Coppola from The Hollywood Reporter, May 8, 2013

Emma Watson in 'transforming' role as Coppola's Bling Ring thief Ryan Gilbey interviews actress Emma Watson from The Guardian, May 8, 2013

The Bling Ring: Cannes Review Todd McCarthy at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter

Scott Foundas at Cannes from Variety

The A.V. Club [Ben Kenigsberg]

Robbie Collin at Cannes from The Telegraph, May 16, 2013

Kaleem Aftab at Cannes from The Independent, May 16, 2013

Emma Watson hopes to weave real magic with Bling Ring role Charlotte Higgins at Cannes from The Guardian, May 16, 2013

The Bling Ring 'trashy and inaccurate', says real-life burglary gang member Ben Child from The Guardian, April 30, 2013

'The Bling Ring': To live and steal in LA - The Boston Globe Ty Burr

The Bling Ring - Collections - Washington Post Ann Hornaday

'The Bling Ring' review: All that glitters not fully told Chris Hewitt from Twin Cities Pioneer Press

Willamette Week [Curtis Woloschuk]

Review: Sofia Coppola's 'Bling Ring' a pretty, empty Hollywood tale Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times

Circling 'The Bling Ring' hot (or not) spots around Los Angeles Amy Kaufman from The LA Times

The Bling Ring Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

The Bling Ring (Movie);Bling Ring, The - Movies - The New York ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times, also seen here: A. O. Scott

Pretty Wild - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Copti, Scandar and Yaron Shani

AJAMI A- 93

Israel Germany (120 mi) 2009

A riveting piece of social realism told with an unsparing eye as we view life on the narrow and confining streets of Jaffa, an old Tel Aviv neighborhood of mixed cultures, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian, all violently suspicious of the other, where life is portrayed as a neverending series of tragedies that are rooted in the generational hostilities that affect those growing up in this part of the world. For each tragedy, there is no answer, only an unending pain and suffering from which there is no outlet, even in revenge, as the gist of this larger societal problem is families losing their children to the senseless violence, as they’re the ones, like pawns, sent in to do damage control and only end up as casualties. The more emphatically they hate, the quicker they are gunned down, all generating a kind of societal hysteria that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. One might sense a touch of melodramatic overreaction here, especially considering the non-professional cast, but this hysterical overreaction to every loss accurately portrays the way families respond to their grief publicly and openly as their children are shot down on the streets, as captured by so many news reports. What this film does amazingly well is provide context through a rich fabric of background detail, as each of these eventual victims comes from a family, sometimes as a child, a brother, an uncle, a father, where our growing familiarity with them has an impact, but one commonality is that these families are all in turmoil even before we see the shattering effects of their eventual fate. Families routinely send away children who they suspect to be in grave trouble, which is a similar tactic used when confronting inner city American gang problems. But the long reach of violence and hate-based revenge has a way of finding them.

Written by Israeli co-directors, one Arab (Scandar Copti) and one Jew (Yaron Shani), supposedly seven years in the making, one of the best choices the filmmakers made was embracing the idea of immersing the audience directly into the experience of day to day life in Jaffa, finding that unique pattern of life that exists there and there only, using interweaving narrative threads that are told out of time, challenging the audience’s perceptions of the unfolding events, but also allowing a greater appreciation for some of the characters, who in most instances are quite different than we are first lead to believe. The second time around when we see the same events from a different light it significantly alters our perception of the events. The film is narrated by a young Arab boy Nasri (Fouad Habash) who idolizes his older brother Omar (Shahir Kabaha), a young man who despises cowards and refuses to flee in the face of life threatening danger after his uncle killed a man he thought was a robber, but turns out to be a henchman from one of the neighborhood warlords who now vows revenge. In the Middle East where guns are so widespread and killings are so commonplace, we have rarely seen the portrayal of neighborhood protection rackets, run like the mafia where the heads of the families work out their own truce agreements among themselves in order to maintain protection from their avowed enemies, usually for large sums of money, and in this way, everyone is either protected, punished, or heavily compensated through a kind of street justice, an extremely hierarchical structure which takes on the look of Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), with those young, adolescent hotheads at the bottom continually killing each other off while protecting the family bosses behind the scenes.

Told out of sequence in chapter format keeping the audience continually offguard, this completely absorbing film also highlights the difficulties of maintaining long-term relationships, even friendships, as family traditions ultimately conflict with more modern views, where the kids have found a way to cross culturally mix, which is the face of the future in a modernized world, but families continue to insist on outdated practices that kids should only mix and marry within their “own kind.” Even one of the directors (Copti) plays the role of a narcissistic, coke consuming Arab playboy who runs around with his Jewish princess on his arm, where sleeping with the enemy leaves his friends in a state of abject moral disgust. When they all go to school together, participate in activities and neighborhood events together, this mandated separation seems ridiculously impossible, yet parents unwaveringly continue to insist on maintaining separation, only fanning the flames of built up tensions that continue to dot the landscape. Over time, we see the build up of inconsolable family grief and despair which comes to represent the societal state of mind, leaving in its wake a kind of unwanted paralysis that hangs over the land where nearly everyone is mourning over someone’s untimely death. The film does an excellent job revealing how the sins of one family member is eventually paid for by another, where the innocent are mowed down with perhaps greater frequency, as they never expect it coming. To the film’s credit, it remains thoroughly credible, a gritty and unsentimentalized view of neighborhoods in chaos, where the social fabric holding it all together has broken down ages ago, and all that’s left is a cloud of utter hopelessness and despair.

my understanding of the ending: From the IMDb Message Boards by haifakid (Tue Feb 2 2010 15:29:21) (Major Spoilers)

We were supposed to assume all along the film that :
1. The drug dealer (Binj) was murdered by other gangsters (no, he overdosed)
2. after realizing that they were detectives (not gangsters), we thought they were corrupt when Malik recognized one of them in the drug deal (no, they were just searching his appartment after his brother stabbed the neighbour to death)
3. That Binj was a major drug dealer (no, the drugs were'nt his, it was his brother's. He was just a party guy that was about to move-in with his GF)
4. Malik got killed (no, the shot came from the kid brother)
5. The drug deal was driven by nasty gangsters, then assumed corrupt cops (no, it was a police undercover operation)
6. Dando the police officer seeked random revenge for his murdered brother (no, he just randomly happened to be there)
7. That the restaurant owner would soften in the end (like in every crappy hollywood movie) and let his daughter hook up with Omar (no, he "sold him" to the cops with hope that they will lock him up for a long time)

All loose ends gets binded.
Oh... the irony. The storyteller is dead in the end (A young kid shot from a close range by a 9mm - not a good prognosis at all).
The Officer (Dando) gets also shot, both Omar and Malik are actually unharmed.

None of us saw it coming.

Time Out Online (Trevor Johnston) review [4/5]

Arabs, Christians and Jews live side by side in the Israeli city of Jaffa, where the urgent political realities underlie the individual dilemmas in this taut ensemble drama. Tribal feuds within the Arab community create their own violent trail, as does the drugs trade which crosses the religious divide, while the predominantly Jewish police force struggle to maintain neutrality when some of their officers are operating on their own embittered agenda. Absorbing in its complexity, increasingly gripping as we grasp the myriad connections ensnaring the put-upon characters, this joint venture between Israeli and Palestinian co-directors is impeccable in its balance, but razor sharp in its insights. Recommended.

The Wall Street Journal (John Anderson) review

If a movie can ever be perfect, it may be so only in its particular moment. This is "Ajami"'s moment. An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, this Arab-Israeli drama set on the mean streets of Jaffa is an urgent, immediate, jarring-but-fluid, multicharacter portrayal of Arab life in an Israel ghetto (the 'hood of the title), where a drive-by killing provides the overture to a city-wide opera of revenge, death, drugs and star-crossed love. The co-directors/co-writers, Palestinian Scandar Copti and Israeli Yaron Shani, possess a Tarantino-esque blitheness about startling violence, and employ a "Pulp Fiction" approach to narrative-as-mosaic. But they also advance the technique of fracturing time, using the backward glances into their sad, sad stories as a way of revealing details that enrich and alter the viewer's perspective on what's happening among the movie's largely Arabic population. While the disposability of life on screen mirrors the disposability of life on the Ajami streets, one's immediate impulse is to describe the film as apolitical: Its conflicts, after all, are largely tribal, insular and produced by the Arabs' own pressure-cooker mentality. But, of course, nothing could be more political.

User reviews from imdb Author: dromasca from Herzlya, Israel

'Ajami', the Israeli entry for the Oscar this year is very different from the successful films that represented the country in the previous years. Directed by two newcomers on the cinema scene Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, it is acted most of the time in Arabic and deals with a world that many Israelis know only from the news - the crime and poverty dominated Arab districts at the periphery of the Israeli big cities.The name of the film is of one of these areas, in Jaffo, south and close to the shining lights of the Tel Aviv metropolis.

Playing a little on the violent suburbs genre that was successful in other off-mainstream cinema schools 'Ajami' a complex crime story, involving a few characters who seem to be doomed for tragedy. An Israeli Muslim Arab finds himself in the middle of a families feud that turns into violence, murder and revenge. An illegal Palestinian worker badly needs money to help his ailing mother. Both will need the protection of a rich restaurant owner who is also a kind of local authority beyond and above police and law enforcement. Both will become involved in a drug deal which ends in shootings. Police seems unable to control the area and fits badly in the landscape, its appearance seems just to generate more conflict and violence than law and order. One of the policemen lives his own tragedy, his brother soldier brother disappears and is found later in Palestinian territory, probably kidnapped and murdered by terrorists. All these disparate threads come nicely together towards the end and the intelligent script writing is the best part of the film.

It is not a pleasant film to see, and not designed to be so. The story is told from the perspective of the different characters, it requires attention to follow, and even if it has logic and all pieces of the puzzle eventually fit well, the different angles and the jumps in time make the film difficult or at least demanding to see. Actors are directed towards a very natural way of acting, improvisation and living the character seems to be the rule rather than careful rehearsal of the role - this gives a feeling of natural and chaos of life, but it asks the viewer rather than the director to fill in with meaning what happens on screen. Last, the colors and landscape is in many cases desolate and soulless, dirty and brutal, as the world the characters live in.

This realistic piece of cinema succeeds to be both direct in its mode of expression and sophisticated in its story-telling. The average Israeli viewer is impacted by the image of a part of the country and social life that is close and far at the same time. The final off-screen words belong to one of the characters, a child of the neighborhood who draws the comics representation of the story all along the film, to become part of the drama in the final. 'Do not close your eyes' - this message may be part of the whole society, as Ajami is part of the same world we all live in.

Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [4/5]

"I know I can feel what is about to happen," declares 13-year-old Nasri (Fouad Habash), as he sketches in pencil a picture of a man changing a car tyre. "I felt it two weeks ago."

We cut to a fortnight earlier, and see the actual man changing the actual tyre in a street of Ajami, a tough, multicultural neighbourhood of Jaffa. Moments later, the man is gunned down by a pair of Bedouin gangsters on a moped. They were out to avenge the shooting of a fellow gangster by Nasri's uncle, and have just, in an awful case of mistaken identity, killed an innocent neighbour who they believed was Nasri's older brother Omar (Shahir Kabaha). Now, two weeks later, Omar is desperately trying to pay off compensation to the Bedouins, in a face- (and life-)saving deal brokered by local Christian Arab benefactor Abu-Elias (Youssef Sahwani), who has not yet realised that Omar and his own daughter Hadir (Ranin Karim) have secretly been conducting an affair. Meanwhile Nasri is experiencing another premonition that "something bad is going to happen".

This is just the first of five chapters that make up Ajami – all tightly interwoven with little regard for conventional chronological order, all rooted in misunderstandings and partial perceptions and all chronicles of a death (or several) foretold. Along the way we meet Malek (Ibrahim Frege), a Palestinian 'illegal' from Nablus, who is working for Abu-Elias to pay off his mother's medical bills – and Dando (Eran Naim), an Israeli policeman distraught at the disappearance without trace of his conscripted brother – and Binj (Scandar Copti, who also co-wrote and co-directed), an apolitical, hedonistic Arab despised by his friends for having a Jewish girlfriend and harassed by the Israeli police for the crimes of his drug-dealing brother.

Indeed, all the principal players in Ajami are drawn into their respective brothers' problems, and it is always the innocent who pay for the sins of the guilty. There are hints at the sort of collective punishment so often rained down by Palestinians and Israelis upon one another, but really there are far broader concerns here in what is, in effect, a drama of divisions, set largely in an Israeli Arab community populated by Christians, Jews and Muslims.

In other words, there are plenty of incendiary tensions to go round in Ajami, and they fuel one another in unexpected ways, as the personal and the political become horrifically confused. Filmmakers Copti and Shani present their characters (played by local non-professionals) in domestic settings or amid family crises, so that they are always humanised within their escalating situations, and so that their intentions are entirely understandable from one scene to the next, no matter how catastrophic the unforeseen outcomes of their actions. After all, as Dando puts it: "Until it affects you personally, it's just a story in the news." Here, instead, we get credible, flesh-and-blood stories in the street, all told with a spiralling multi-dimensionality that matches their inherent complexity.

As the characters' paths and narratives criss-cross each other in a chaotic manner reminiscent of Paul Haggis' Crash (2004) or anything directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, gradually a bigger picture emerges that allows us to reassess our initial impression of disastrous future events only half-glimpsed, so that everything eventually becomes less confusing, if all the more depressing.

For here, as in a Sophoclean tragedy, wisdom does not bring profit to the wise, fate cannot be eluded, and the blind lead the blind. Yet Ajami is an Israeli-German co-production, resulting from the fruitful collaboration of a Palestinian and a Jew, with its credits - and much of the dialogue - in both Arabic and Hebrew, as though the film's harmonious production background were itself a corrective to the bleak themes of social volatility presented on-screen. That may seem only a scrap of hope, but after the impact of this film's ending has hit you head-on and left you to pick up the pieces alone in the dark of the cinema, you will be desperate to clutch onto anything or anyone for comfort.

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5]

User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

The Onion A.V. Club review [B+] Noel Murray

Cinematical [Eric D. Snider] also seen in a shortened version here: The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B+]

The NYC Movie Guru [Avi Offer]

Screen International (Dan Fainaru) review at Cannes

Global Comment [Mark Farnsworth]

Big Picture Big Sound [David Kempler]

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman

The Hollywood Reporter review Eric Monder

Cannes. "Ajami" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 23, 2009

Jay Weissberg at Cannes from Variety, May 22, 2009

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [4/5]

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review also seen here (Page 2): Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

Sources of Hope, Amid a Divide Joan Dupont spoke with both directors from The New York Times, May 21, 2009

Corbijn, Anton

CONTROL B+ 92

Great Britain USA (119 mi) 2007 ‘Scope

A harrowingly bleak but gorgeous looking film, balancing the extraordinary black & white ‘Scope cinematography by Martin Ruhe with a brilliant lead performance by Sam Riley as the late Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis, who tragically committed suicide in 1980 at age 23. After the suicide, the remaining band members renamed the band New Order, having successful careers themselves, and also contributed music on this soundtrack. Filmmaker Corbijn was a still photographer for the British rock magazine NME and photographed Joy Division in the late 70’s, so he is intimately familiar with their work, and has also filmed Depeche Mode and U2 music videos. The screenplay is adapted from Touching from a Distance, the memoirs of Curtis’s widow, Deborah, who is also one of the producers of the film. This connection to the commercial success of the film may have influenced or even prejudiced the final film version, as the only real “name” actor that appears in the film is Samantha Morton as Deborah, and especially towards the end, the film becomes overly sympathetic to her position, suggesting perhaps Curtis’s inability to reconcile their failing marriage was a huge contributor to his taking his life. An uncannily realist portrayal, exposing early 1970’s roots from the economically deprived town of Macclesfield in Manchester, Curtis’s interest in Lou Reed, David Bowie and the poetry of Wordsworth may have been his ticket out of there, catching the initial wave of the British punk music revolution that included the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, and the Clash, all of whom had successful tours in the United States. But Curtis had difficulty with the idea of success and with meeting the all-consuming expectations of adoring fans, feeling they were bleeding him dry. So unlike previous film portraits of other musicians, Kurt Cobain, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and even Sid Vicious come to mind, Curtis never achieved that kind of acclaim during his lifetime, instead he remained a fringe artist whose career exploded and fizzled out all at the same time.

Marrying his wife during his teens, they were among the first to witness a Sex Pistols concert where all of about forty people showed up, which led him to join a band originally named Warsaw, changed to Joy Divison in 1978, named after a German concentration camp brothel. Curtis had a big echoing voice that sounded like Jim Morrison, in marked contrast to his shy, intoverted persona that Riley captures early on, initially feeling his way with a microphone, ultimately becoming a fascinating onstage presence, visually extremely energetic, resembling the awkward yet mesmerizing physicality of David Byrne from Talking Heads. As they were not afraid to do slower songs, usually introduced by a blaring bass beat, slowly building to a frenetic punk energy, the group has commonly been associated with post-punk even though they were clearly at the beginning of the punk era, but a little ahead of their time. Personal problems prevailed, as his wife got pregnant and had a baby, isolating her from his developing career on the road. In addition to being an all but worthless father, he developed symptoms of epilepsy, actually collapsing onstage once with a seizure, which led to a hospital evaluation and prescribed drugs, but they never alleviated his symptoms, causing him considerable anguish and personal grief, especially having to face the idea of going back onstage. As we see this drama unfold, where he develops a psychotic fear of appearing onstage, yet due to his band’s rising popularity he is all but forced to perform, the sinking feeling in our gut matches the train wreck of anticipated horrors we ultimately dread in ELEPHANT, where we can’t stop the world from spiraling out of control even as we continue barreling ahead in that direction. At the same time, he develops a mad crush on one of his admirers, his Belgium girlfriend and part time journalist Annik Honoré, played by beautiful Romanian actress Alexandra Maria Lara. He could never grasp why he couldn’t love both women, but when it became evident he couldn’t, he took his life on the eve of his first American tour.

This is a killer soundtrack, prominently featuring powerfully visualized performances that really build throughout the film, where the lyrics and voracious energy level are nothing less than superb, beautifully intertwined to reflect Curtis’s personal history, but at the end, just as his musical career is taking off, the pace of the film slows to a complete crawl as the film questionably finds itself suddenly grasping for meaning and explanation, when that’s exactly what the film had subtly been doing all along through the song selections, through his curiosity with suicide, and by the way he could see no end to his dilemma. He was a man who was afraid to hold his own baby in his arms because of the thought of causing harm, as he might fall at any time from a seizure. He was a shy, quiet guy, perhaps inwardly oversensitized, who may have quite literally scared himself to death.

A similar, though less complicated, feat of biographical possession is achieved by Control's Sam Riley, whose uncanny resemblance to late Joy Division singer Ian Curtis was verified by Grant Gee's solid band doc (titled, natch, Joy Division). Anton Corbijn, who photographed the band in its short-lived prime, shoots the streets of Thatcherite Manchester in wide-screen black and white, a perfect analogue to the barren landscapes of Unknown Pleasures. Although a trifle heavy-handed with his music cues ("Love Will Tear Us Apart" follows a marital spat), Corbijn ably re-creates the desperate frenzy of the band's live shows, although nothing can match the intensity of the documentary's real-deal excerpts.

Although there's substantial overlap, the differences between the two movies are fascinating. Control, which credits the autobiography of Curtis' wife, Deborah, as its source, dwells at length on the excruciating breakup of their marriage, consummated when both were in their teens, and spends nearly half its length foreshadowing Curtis' suicide. Joy Division, by contrast, does not number Deborah Curtis among its on-camera subjects, although printed excerpts from the book are used in her place, and alludes only vaguely to the couple's fatal dissolution. Still, nothing in Control sums up the band's significance as one subject's remark that Joy Division turned punk's "fuck you" into the more poignant "I'm fucked."

Control Jonathan Romney from Screendaily at Cannes

A rare music biopic that refuses to be cowed by myth, Control casts an insightful, poignant and very human light on a British rock legend, the late Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. The debut feature by former music press photographer Anton Corbijn - who took some of the iconic portraits of Curtis - the film, with its early 60s rather than 70s look, is set firmly in a tradition of British black-and-white Northern realism.

It takes the forbidding, poetic figure of Curtis and shows him as he apparently was - a vulnerable young man with an armful of personal problems. Based on a memoir by his widow Deborah Curtis, one of the film's co-producers, Control may offer a partial view of the man's life and suicide, but it's an immensely affecting, intelligent study.

The film should be healthily exportable as well as a respectable cult success in the UK, while festivals will go a bomb on it (it enjoyed a strong reaction in Cannes where it opened Directors' Fortnight).

The main setting is Curtis's hometown of Macclesfield, Manchester in the early 1970s, where the teenage Curtis (Riley) is an intelligent loner with literary aspirations and a love of David Bowie and Lou Reed.

When he meets Deborah (Morton), she's instantly bowled over by Curtis's cocky, Wordsworth-quoting sensitivity, and the couple marry young. Then the punk revolution happens, and Curtis joins a local band Warsaw, soon to be renamed Joy Division.

Local celebrity Tony Wilson signs them to his record label Factory (he's played by Craig Parkinson, droll but considerably less broad than Steve Coogan's impersonation in 24 Hour Party People) and the band become a major cult, while still living hand to mouth.

Meanwhile Curtis becomes the father of a baby girl, develops epilepsy and starts an affair with Belgian fan Annik Honore (Lara). While the film is essentially Ian's story, the focuses shifts subtly in the second part to Deborah, as she copes with the fall-out from her husband's traumas.

While Martin Ruhe's sombre black-and-white photography echoes Corbijn's famous 1980s shots, which established the band's industrial anti-glamour, Control presents the band's rise in a kitchen-sink mode at odds with Joy Division's otherworldy aesthetic.

The film portrays a mundane world of pub backrooms and Transit vans, and a domestic life embodied by the proverbial pram in the hall. A restrained, tender Morton intelligently embodies the reality factor that Curtis is increasingly unable to handle.

Striking new discovery Riley brings a touch of young Tom Courtenay to his role, and proves an uncanny reincarnation of Curtis on stage, in all his febrile, elbow-swinging glory.

Other members of the band - notably James Anthony Pearson, as cocky, earnest guitarist Bernard Sumner - are excellent, and whip up a storm in their convincing recreation of Joy Division's performances.

Matt Greenhalgh's intelligent script eschews the making-of-a-legend cliches, starkly demystifying Curtis to make his a vividly human tragedy.

Charlotte Higgins from the Guardian

There was a palpable buzz on the Croisette today as Control, Anton Corbijn's film about Joy Division, was given its premiere - to immediate critical acclaim.

The young British actors who play the band members are all unknown names. A star seems to have been born in Sam Riley, who plays Ian Curtis - pulling off, audiences agreed, an uncannily accurate and charismatic portrayal. He had been working in a warehouse in Leeds before being chosen to play Curtis. The only "name" in the film is Samantha Morton, who plays Curtis's wife Deborah

Control, which charts Curtis's extraordinary creative flowering and eventual suicide 27 years ago tomorrow, is one of the few films at Cannes this year that has any claim to being a UK production. For all that, it failed to find significant British funding.

According to its producer, the £3m costs for the low-budget film were eventually met by a combination of the director's own money, private equity, and Warner Music. East Midlands Media, a regional film development agency, also came in with some funds, meaning the film was shot largely in Nottingham rather than in Curtis's home town of Macclesfield.

"That was kind of hard," said Corbijn, "but it was my first movie, and people are often frightened of that. But it is a very English story, and it would have seemed appropriate to get funding from England."

Last night, amid rumours and counter-rumours that they had split, the three remaining members of New Order, to which Joy Division changed its name after Curtis's death, flew in to support the film. According to Corbijn, "New Order hardly agree on anything, but all agree that they love the film."

The same could not quite be said of the two women who dominate the film. Control is based on the book Touching From a Distance by Deborah Curtis, but according to Corbijn, "the film is about Ian and the book is about Debbie, so I extended the research and talked to everyone who was around at the time."

The film takes a sensitive look at the Curtis marriage; and at the relationship between Curtis and Annick Honoré, the young Belgian journalist whom he also loved. His conflicted feelings about these two women, as well as the pressures of performance and the strain caused by his epilepsy, are shown to have contributed to his decision to commit suicide.

"Both Annick and Debbie have seen the film," said Corbijn. "I am not sure they are happy with it, but they are fine with it. If anyone is emotionally tied up with this film [then] it is them, and it is hard for them to watch. I can't say that they are happy with it, because that's a big statement, you would have to ask them."

Life appeared to be imitating art at the Control press conference today, with Riley and the young Romanian-born actor Alexandra Maria Lara, who plays Annick, none too discreetly holding hands as they flanked the director on the platform.

Riley, 27, is a former member of the band Ten Thousand Things, which was signed to the label Polydor for four years - though he admitted they had done little to trouble the charts. He has done a little acting on TV, playing Ray Winstone's son in the 2000 ITV drama Tough Love.

He also appeared as Mark E Smith of the Fall in Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People - giving rise to a small irony in Control. When Curtis recovers from his first epileptic fit, his manager, Rob Gretton tells him: "It could be worse; at least you're not the lead singer of the Fall."

He prepared for the role, he said, by looking at "as much original footage as I could find. I went to the National Society for Epilepsy to study the effects of epilepsy. And I spent a lot of time in the mirror doing dance moves."

Corbijn said: "I was initially looking at actors I knew, because that is the way one would usually work. But I when I saw Sam at a casting and I met him I realised we had an incredible chance to have an actor who not only resembled Ian Curtis but also had the innocence and freshness that I was hoping for but never thought I would find.

"When I first met Joy Division in 1979 in Manchester, it was quite a shock - the poverty there. People were rather underdressed, wearing thin coats, shivering in the cold, and smoking. I first met Sam in the winter and he was totally the same. It absolutely brought me back to when I first met them."

This is the first feature by the Dutch-born Corbijn, 51. As a stills photographer, who worked for NME from 1979, he photographed Joy Division repeatedly, and known for his grainy, poised, black-and-white shots. He also shot the video for the 1988 re-release of Atmosphere.

Control is also shot in black and white. He said: "When you think of Joy Division your memories are in black and white, because there is no colour footage of them. The album covers were black and white, and they dressed in shades of grey quite often. Black and white felt right for this project."

Bits of News - Control: A Biopic of Ian Curtis Henry Midgley

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij)

not coming to a theater near you Francis Cruz

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Edinburgh Film Festival report

The Guardian [Peter Bradshaw]

Film, reissues pull Joy Division's Curtis from shadowy myth ... Greg Kot from The Chicago Tribune

The Times of London [Stephen Dalton]

THE AMERICAN B 85

USA (105 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

I don’t think God is interested in me, Father. —Jack, Edward, Mr. Butterfly (George Clooney)

Not nearly as interesting or as good as his original film, nonetheless this is an unusually unglamorized, non-commercial effort that features the most commercial face in show business, George Clooney as an international hitman and black market gun merchant, in a film that’s simply called THE AMERICAN, which is pretty pathetic. So there’s a mixed bag here, set in an extremely gloomy tone, where plenty happens even before the opening credits which gives us a sense of what’s to come. Look carefully or you’ll miss Finnish actress Irina Björklund, whose sizzling performances in RESTLESS (2000) and ME AND MORRISON (2001) became arthouse legend. To its credit, the film is beautifully composed using luxurious shots of rolling hills and small towns in Italy, shot by Martin Ruhe who perfectly captured an equally remarkable look in CONTROL (2007), both shot in ‘Scope, while this is a more meditative work where there are large chunks of quiet or even wordless sequences, but unfortunately, music does eventually cover some of the silences. Not sure who the target audience for this is, as Clooney fans will be clamoring for more action, while lovers of art films won’t appreciate seeing Clooney in nearly every shot wearing clothes designed by Ermenegildo Zegna. So it’s something of an enigma, with a mesmerizing sense of restraint to the quiet and controlled pace of the film. What I found unintentionally hilarious was the musical score by Herbert Grönemeyer, who was ridiculed in such a scathing manner for being so mainstream in Maren Ade’s EVERYONE ELSE (2009). Sure enough, Grönemeyer does sing a cheesy ballad over the final credits, something completely out of character from the rest of the film, as if sung by a crooner like Gérard Depardieu. Now perhaps this was attempting to resemble the cool jazzy undertone of Charles Aznavour in Truffaut’s SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (1960), which helped establish the thoroughly detached mood, but this was a bit laughable in comparison. Also amusing was a short sequence in a coffee café where they were showing on TV Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WILD, WILD WEST (1973), where we could hear the wispy notes of that hauntingly melancholic harmonica theme. So there was some tongue in cheek humor here, but mostly it’s an overly somber mood piece, perhaps attempting to resuscitate the 1970’s paranoid atmosphere of Sydney Pollack’s THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), but in that attempt as well it falls flat.

What’s immediately obvious is that Clooney can’t establish a connection to anyone, which is the point of the film, as friendships lead to vulnerability and the ability to sabotage him when he least expects it, but there’s also little to no chemistry between Clooney and any of the characters onscreen, even with scantily clad beautiful women involved, which is as sensually incendiary as it gets, but Clooney remains aloof, emotionally detached, and completely uninvolved, as he’s supposed to exist undetected by the international underworld. While he’s supposed to be a loner, spending much of his time isolated from others, protecting his cover, it’s also quite clear that the bad guys continually know where he is. There’s an interesting subplot between Clooney and a small town priest, Paolo Bonacelli, where both have an intimately confessional way of relating to one another, as the priest is quite observant in his own way, where there’s a continuing battle for human salvation at work. And in a scene right out of Fellini’s LA STRADA (1954) or NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957), there’s a Catholic street procession that plays prominently into the theme. But this film deals more with existential anguish, where Clooney spends a good deal of time alone in his hotel room, or sitting in empty café’s sipping coffee. In the meantime, one ice lady, Thekla Reuten, needs a weapon of assassination, and their picnic in the woods where she and George can take a little tarrrr-get practice is priceless, though she’s no Rita Hayworth in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947). Then a gorgeous young prostitute, Violante Placido, becomes a regular item in his life, where her vivacious nature is such a contrast to his ultra cool and detached demeanor. When he takes her into the woods she immediately strips naked, where her youthful personality recalls Simonetta Stefanelli’s alluring innocence in THE GODFATHER (1972), who it turns out is her real life mother, all of which makes one wonder about Clooney’s real life, living in a luxurious villa on Lake Como with Italian girlfriend Elisabetta Canalis, which does resemble Michael Corleone’s Sicilian retreat into the rural comforts of the home country. While it was probably easy for Clooney to make this movie, traveling a short distance to commute, he never feels like he’s actually invested in the project, as there’s a lot working here, but he’s not part of it.

The Onion A.V. Club review [B] Scott Tobias

Adapted from Martin Booth’s 1990 novel A Very Private Gentleman, Anton Corbijn’s slow-burning thriller The American has been given an appropriately nondescript title. For the few who encounter George Clooney’s mysterious character, his nationality is the only thing they really know about him; the audience doesn’t get to learn much more, even after spending every minute of the movie with him. This may sound like a weakness, but Corbijn and his screenwriter, Rowan Joffe, play coy for a reason; it’s the nature of their hero’s mercenary occupation, as a craftsman of weapons for assassins, that he reveals as little about himself as possible. The American’s muted pleasures rest heavily on the sustained air of mystery around Clooney, and Corbijn, a pristine stylist, keeps the atmosphere nice and thick.

After dodging an assassination attempt in remote Sweden, Clooney resettles in an idyllic village in the Italian countryside, where he’s agreed to take one last job before an uncertain retirement. Tasked with creating a weapon with the long-range precision of a rifle and the rapid firepower of a sub-machine gun, Clooney quietly sets to work on the project, but he can’t hide under the cloak of anonymity for long. A local priest (Paolo Bonacelli) questions his cover as a travel photographer, and his relationship with prostitute Violante Placido (the absurdly beautiful daughter of Simonetta Stefanelli, best known for playing Michael Corleone’s Sicilian first wife in The Godfather) slips from professional to personal. He also has to worry about his client (Thekla Reuten) and some shifty types he sees on the streets.

With its focus on the fascinating minutiae of carrying out an assassination, The American partly resembles the fine 1973 thriller The Day Of The Jackal, about an attempt on Charles de Gaulle’s life, though it’s much sparer, and completely apolitical. Corbijn and Joffe aren’t interested in the real-world ramifications of Clooney’s work so much as the erosion of his soul, and Clooney plays the role with typical understatement. The strengths and weaknesses of The American are similar to those of Corbijn’s Joy Division biopic Control. He’s a patient, fastidious filmmaker with a great eye—ideal for his subject here—but his austerity doesn’t entirely erase the suspicion that he doesn’t have much on his mind. His film is a triumph, but it may be a triumph of style over substance.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3/4]

Imagine a spy movie, or a hitman movie, with hardly any dialogue, and no shaky-cam. Imagine, also, that it's shot in Europe, and that it moves slowly enough that you can get a real sense of the surroundings and atmosphere. Such a movie would most likely have been made in France in the 1960s, right? Something like Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967)? Nope. Here's an actual Hollywood movie -- with a big time Hollywood movie star -- that does all those things. (Admittedly, it does have a Dutch director in Anton Corbijn.)

I like The American for those reasons alone, but I wish it could have been more. It attempts to paint George Clooney's "Jack," as a stoic cipher, much like Alain Delon in Le Samourai. Unfortunately, he's also supposed to be a romantic lead, falling in love with a "hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold" character named Clara (Violante Placido). Clara looks at him longingly and lovingly, and he responds with a cold glare, and we're supposed to buy this as a genuine connection. He is George Clooney, after all, and so we can assume that she'd be drawn to him, but this character needs something more.

Likewise, there's the plot. Jack makes a living building specialized guns for hitmen and assassins; he travels, lays low, stays out of sight, doesn't speak to anyone (not terribly unlike his character in Up in the Air). This movie, of course, doesn't focus on just any job, though. This is his last job, the last big one before he retires. And, of course, he has been set up and there are killers after him. Why can't moviemakers realize that this guy's life is pretty interesting all by itself, without throwing in all those stale thriller turns? I won't even mention the ending, which any reasonable moviegoer will be able to peg at least a reel in advance. Nor will I go very deeply into the movie's "butterfly" metaphor, which is frankly pretty silly.

However, I enjoyed, and am recommending The American as a victory of style over substance. Clooney -- who also co-produced -- gets a lot of credit for being able to get something un-commercial like this greenlit; recall, also, the stillness of Solaris (2002) or the black-and-white of Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). And Corbijn is one of the few directors that really knows how to luxuriate in a widescreen frame; see also his 2007 film Control, a black-and-white biopic about the band Joy Division. Corbijn uses cobblestone streets, buildings, courtyards, streams, cars, and other spaces and objects as characters, as interesting and immovable as Clooney himself. When a lady assassin decides to set up a target in the middle of a field, Corbijn takes the time to watch her walk out, set up the target, and walk all the way back to where Jack waits with the gun.

This type of patience and careful watching usually doesn't fly in American movies, and I suspect that this movie will disappear quietly, especially given the poster image that suggests plenty of action and is setting up audiences for disappointment. But despite all these troubles, The American is a real rarity and I'm happy it's around.

The Village Voice [Mark Olsen]

Sometimes you feel bad for movie marketers, tasked with connecting any given film to an audience as large as possible. Take, for example, The American. Judging by the film's trailers and advertisements, it's a fast-paced Euro-stylish thriller starring George Clooney as a dashing, conflicted hero. Yet it quickly becomes apparent once the actual movie starts that The American is more an abstraction of such a notion, a deconstructed action picture in which not much happens (until it does). "Bourne meets Antonioni!" is not a marketer's dream tagline.

Directed by Anton Corbijn from Rowan Joffe's adaptation of Martin Booth's novel A Very Private Gentleman, the film stars Clooney as Jack, an occasional assassin, but more often armer of assassins, building custom firearms to exacting specifications. In quick order, Jack is flushed out of his cozy lakeside hideaway somewhere in snowy Sweden and set on the run, landing in a remote mountainside town in Italy. Full of cobblestone stairways and mysterious doorways that bring to mind the mad shadows and hard angles of Giorgio De Chirico paintings, the place would be picturesque and even romantic were it not so spooky and isolated. Jack kills time there with a local prostitute (Violante Placido) while waiting for his contact (Thekla Reuten), a woman of unknown motivation and an uncanny ability to change her appearance. Even as he fastidiously goes about his work, Jack becomes increasingly certain that someone is after him—and getting closer.

Corbijn's previous feature, the black-and-white Control, told of the rise and tragic fall of Ian Curtis and his post-punk band Joy Division—and was more obviously in line with the director's work as a rock-and-roll photographer. His cover art and band photos, most notably for U2 at their most myth-making, are at once iconic and diffuse, carefully composed to seem subtly off-balance. This aesthetic is also present in The American, which, though shot in color by Control cinematographer Martin Ruhe, is easy to imagine in black-and-white, with its lonely cafés and barren spaces. Here, as in his previous work, Corbijn seems more interested in creating specific landscapes of feeling than in storytelling in the usual terms.

By slowing down the pace of what would more conventionally be a pulse-pounding chase thriller, the director successfully creates a feeling of unease, an on-the-leash tautness that pulls the genre into his own orbit. Jack is trapped in his own purgatory, caught between here and there. Well before he meets his contact for a last handoff in a dusty parking lot that brings to mind the courtyard where Jack Nicholson meets his final fate in The Passenger, Clooney's character has given over fully to existential dread. The American becomes less about assassins and targets than about the tension between Jack's external placidity and internal tumult, the biggest adventure the one playing out inside his head.

Corbijn's tonal achievement has its downside: This rather odd insistence on pushing viewers away at every turn, keeping even the most committed at arm's length, makes for an experience that can often be more frustrating than fulfilling. And by the time The American gears itself up to actually be the film that most people will have shown up expecting to see—one with footchases and gunfire—it is just as abruptly over.

Despite its director's disinterest in letting people in, there is nevertheless something exciting about a movie this uncompromised, in which the big change from the book to the screen actually toughens up the story instead of watering it down. That is, as long as you are not among the unfortunates trying to market this thing, trapped in their own purgatory, between the film they can easily sell and the bold, challenging one they have.

The Atlantic (Christopher Orr) review

The American is a beautiful and elegant movie that blends elements from many other movies, a movie that is old-fashioned and European. That's why it's called The American. George Clooney, not the debonair superstar but submerged into the role, is the only American on view. In this skillful adaptation by Rowan Joffe of Martin Booth's novel A Very Private Gentleman, Clooney's character, Jack a k a Edward Clark, is a mysterious professional assassin with elements of Delon's Samourai in Melville's Sixties film, or Isaak De Bankoé's sphinx-like traveler in Jarmusch's Limits of Control. Mr. Butterfly, people call him, for a tattoo on the middle of his back.

Under orders from a grumpy boss called Pavel (Johan Leysen) whom he talks to only on pay phones, and hiding from the Swedes who have been trying to kill him, Mr. Butterfly picks up a blue Fiat near the Stazione Termini in Rome and winds up sojourning unobtrusively in a little town called Castel del Monte high up near Sulmona L'Aquila in the Abruzzo region (shot there right after the earthquake, though it is not mentioned). He's given an easy job: he doesn't even have to shoot the sniper rifle, only put it together to the specifications of a shape-shifting lady (Thekla Reuten) who meets with him in a wood by a river. Pavel has told him to make no friends -- he just had to kill one in Sweden -- but he chats with the local parish priest, Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli) and has hot sex with Clara (Violante Placido), who he meets in a brothel but who falls for him and begins meeting him elsewhere for real dates.

There is a subtext here, because having settled in Italy with a villa on Lake Como and Italian girlfriend Elisabetta Canalis, the actor has embraced and been embraced by Italy and is a "divo" there now. Though he doesn't give elaborate displays of his linguistic prowess, he clearly understands Italian and throws out the occasional well-placed phrase, especially when going around with the beautiful and warm Clara.

But who is she? Will he have to kill her? Will he have to kill Pavel, or the lady buying the rifle? Or will one of them kill him? Every cup of coffee, every walk across a sun-soaked courtyard, exudes a danger that the nicely understated music sometimes underlines. But mostly things are quiet and we, like Mr. Butterfly, are waiting.

Hot sex, a love affair, assassins chasing an assassin fed up with the trade, constant tension in the quiet streets of a mountainous town: but people are complaining that this is a movie about nothing. That's the "trouble" with style: it most flourishes when there is least happening. As in The Limits of Control, though its trajectory is different, the protagonist seems to live a life of methodical ritual. He does sit-ups, push-ups, and chin-ups (old-fashioned: the Army is dropping them from the training program for its out-of-shape and injury-prone recruits). He even has an improvised punching bag in his zen-like little provincial hotel room. He spends a lot of time assembling a rifle to order to specifications from the mysterious lady, and when he and she discuss those specifications, its evident they are both consummate pros. It must take several different kinds of bullets and combine the functions of a machine gun and a precision rifle while fitting disassembled in the hidden compartment of an attache case. A "car doctor" called Fabio (Filippo Timi ), whom he realizes is the illegitimate son of Padre Benedetto, gives him spare parts.

Between taking orders for and assembling and delivering the rifle and making love and chatting with Padre Benedetto, the unobtrusive assassin has no time for car chases or shootouts, though there is one or two. But the violence is spaced out, as in a Seventies movie. If you come to The American looking for Bourne action, you will be sorely disappointed. But the slow pace delivers a level of unease, of Antonioni-esque existential dread, that the Bourne films could never attain.

This is the second film by Anton Corbijn whose assured debut was Control, a handsome biopic in art-photo black and white about the mysterious Ian Curtis, doomed lead singer of the post-punk Eighties band Joy Division. This time the former still photographer, whose fresh eye and subtle sense of composition make every frame a pleasure to look at, has shifted to color in this film shot by Control cinematographer Martin Ruhe. The Aquila province, where most of the action takes place, is an important player, its austere, dramatic landscapes framed in long wide-screen shots that are both dramatic and understated. When the climaxes come, they too may seem understated, and quietly tragic, in the manner of Melville's Le samouraï and Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player. No mysteries are solved. Rather the fatalistic trajectory of all lone mercenaries is fulfilled and a symphony of style is brought to an appropriate close. This is a grownup thriller whose uncompromising manner withholds the easy pleasures of the usual product but delivers in spades the aesthetic and intellectual gratification of the thoughtful and the well-made.

The Parallax Review [Mark Dujsik]

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [B] lengthy

Salon.com [Sam Adams]

Cinematical (Todd Gilchrist) review

TIME Magazine (Mary Pols) review also here: (See TIME's 2008 cover story on George Clooney.)

Popdose [Robert Cashill]

CBC.ca Arts (Lee Ferguson) review

Slant Magazine (Bill Weber) review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/4]

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [4/5] Theatrical review

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C-]

About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [C]

Commentary Track [Helen Geib]

eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [3/5]

Movie House Commentary [Greg Wroblewski] Johnny Web

The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [4/4]

ReelTalk (Diana Saenger) review

DVD Talk [Brian Orndorf] also seen here: eFilmCritic.com (Brian Orndorf) review [4/5] and here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

vancouver Voice [D. K. Holm]

Boxoffice Magazine (Pam Grady) review [2.5/5]

RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [A-]

Daily Film Dose (Alan Bacchus) review

CHUD.com (Renn Brown) review

CineSnob.net (Kiko Martinez) review [C-]

Georgia Straight (Ken Eisner) review

ReelTalk (Betty Jo Tucker) review

Variety (Robert Koehler) review

exclaim! [Christine Estima]

The Hollywood Reporter review Kirk Honeycutt

Time Out New York review [3/5] Joshua Rothkopf

The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [2/4]

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

Boston Globe (Wesley Morris) review [2/4]

The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Mark Olsen) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [3/4]

Austin Chronicle review [2.5/5] Marjorie Baumgarten

Chicago Sun-Times also here: Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]

Speakeasy: Excerpt From the Novel On Which 'The American' Is Based Speakeasy, August 10, 2010

Cordier, Antony

COLD SHOWERS (Douches froides) B 83

France (102 mi) 2005

Using a near documentary, hyper-realistic style, this film very accurately depicts the disintegration in the life of a high school kid, Johan Libéreau, who is in his last year, apparently on top of the world, captain of his judo team where he excels, with a gorgeous, ultra sexy girl friend, Salomé Stévenin, but slowly, without him even knowing it, his world starts falling apart. Apparently this film started out as a school project, expanded into a judo documentary, before evolving into a fictionalized story, highlighted by close attention to detail both on the mat and in the locker room. There are apparent dark elements, never seen, only vaguely suggested, surrounding a rich sponsor that gets personally involved with the kids, maybe for the wrong reasons, making sure his own kid gets a break, throwing parties where there’s plenty of sex and alcohol, where they show a willingness to distribute sports drugs, when needed, all of which feels sordid and dirty, qualities one would not normally associate with this otherwise clean cut kid. The sponsor’s kid takes an interest in the girl friend, who’s open to experimenting with three-way sex, sending his own relationship with his girl friend into a tailspin, and before long, he doesn’t know what hit him. Despite the naturalistic vein of filmmaking, which is completely without pretense, vividly realized with an unusual sexual openness, it doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go. There’s no real likable characters in this film, no emotional connection to anyone, leaving a cold, vacuous void right through the heart of this picture.

Core, Ericson

INVINCIBLE C- 67

USA (108 mi) 2006

A formulaic Disney flick in the ROCKY-mode with one good actor, the aw-shucks, modest, soft-spoken Mark Wahlberg playing Vince Papale, a South Philly working class guy down on his luck, which perfectly parallels the travails of the losing Philadelphia Eagles football team in the late 1970’s. This was the same era where so many steel workers lost their jobs, so there were plenty of people feeling the same economic pain as Vince. In this over-calculated, fictionalized story, the film over-accentuates his wife walking out on him, losing his part time job as a substitute teacher, having money problems where he can’t pay his rent, borrowing from his father and friends, and working at a dead-end neighborhood bar where the only customers are the guys who collectively make up a raggedly football league team (no pads) where neighborhood bars play against each other, loser buys drinks all around.

Dick Vermeil was brought in as the new head coach for the Eagles, where the newspaper headlines read “Vermeil: Win or get out of town!” Vermeil, improbably played by Greg Kinnear, the abrasive 9-step program dad (“There are two kinds of people in this world, winners and losers. And winners don’t give up.”) from LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, is much more likeable here because he’s given an understanding wife who appreciates his effort and dedication, a key to enjoying this film. In this era of promoting the team, getting Philadelphia interested again, Vermeil calls for open workouts, where anyone can show up one Saturday morning and try to make the team. Many were called, but only one was chosen – Vince, who at age 30, still had a hard road to climb, as all of the other players shunned him. The movie leaves out why. The NFL actually went on strike back in the day, and the owners brought in replacement players, SCABS, to play in real live NFL games, which was a farce. The real-life Vince Papale was one of those players. But the image of a working class guy in a union town crossing the picket line to play football was just not the image Disney had in mind. Instead, they show guys losing their jobs left and right, with workers manning the picket lines, again establishing the feel of Philadelphia as a hard luck, blue collar town.

Add to this mix, they bring in a cute girl from New York to help tend bar where he works, and, what do you know, she’s a sports fanatic, grew up with 5 brothers, and is a New York Giants fan. Well, there’s instant chemistry, which is completely downplayed, as this guy is a Disney gentleman, so football comes before sex or even a relationship. Meanwhile, Vince has NFL speed and makes the team as a special teams player because Vermeil knows this guy’s “got heart.” After blowing a tackle in the opening game on the road, he turns things around in the home opener, changing the signals on the line of scrimmage to call his own number on a punt in the last minutes of a tied game, and becomes the lone punt coverage guy, causing a fumble and running it in for the winning touchdown. All of Philly is happy, the bar owner has a bar filled with customers again, so he’s happy, his neighborhood is happy, his friends and family are happy, his girl friend is happy, and all is right with the world again.

Corman, Roger

Film Reference Ed Lowry, updated by Robert J. Pardi

Grand master and patron saint of the American exploitation film, Roger Corman has forged a reputation for creative filmmaking on means so minimal as to seem absurd. He began his career in the mid-1950s producing and directing Westerns, gangster movies, mythological "spectacles," teen pictures, and sci-fi/horror films distinguished largely by their five-digit budgets and shooting schedules as short as three days. By the early 1960s his business savvy and understanding of the developing "youth" market had made him the most valuable commodity at American International Pictures, and his shrewd innovations in production and distribution contributed substantially to that company's pre-eminence in the exploitation market.

Backhandedly dubbed by critics "the King of Schlock" and "the Orson Welles of Z-Pictures," Corman has become a symbol of the creativity available to those willing to accept the economic limitations of working outside the mainstream. As a producer, he was able to provide decisive career breaks for a number of actors (Jack Nicholson, Ellen Burstyn, Robert De Niro, Cindy Williams), screenwriters (Robert Towne), and directors (Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme) who were to rise toward the upper echelons of the New Hollywood. Meanwhile, Corman insisted on maintaining his own kingdom on the fringes. When AIP's growing budgets and pretenses began to tighten studio control over individual projects, Corman left and, in 1970, established his own studio, New World Pictures, which quickly usurped AIP's place in the exploitation field. Corman did not direct at New World, but instead exerted a decisive influence as producer, cultivating the drive-in/inner-city audience by developing specialized sub-genres (women's prison pictures; soft-core nurse/teacher films; hard-core action and horror movies) and a strict formula, requiring given amounts of violence, nudity, humor, and social commentary. The social element not only reflected Corman's own attitudes (a self-characterized "liberal to radical" politically, he independently financed his anti-racist The Intruder when no studio would put up the money), but also an understanding of the politically disfranchised groups which comprised the New World audience. At the same time, Corman used the company to provide some of the first intelligent American marketing of foreign "art films," accruing respectable successes with Bergman's Cries and Whispers, Fellini's Amarcord, Truffaut's Adele H., and Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala. Yet it would not be quite fair to dismiss Corman, as Andrew Sarris did in 1968, as a producer "miscast" as a director. Admittedly, at that time Corman's most accomplished, complex, and disturbing film, Bloody Mama, was still to be made. But Corman had hit his artistic stride in the early 1960s with a series of seven flamboyantly artificial color horror films, loosely based on Poe and ranging in tone from slightly tongue-in-cheek to openly parodic. The cycle peaked with Masque of the Red Death, which made ingenious use of imagery borrowed from Bergman's Seventh Seal, to the disbelief of American critics and the delight of the Europeans, who have always seemed willing to take Corman fairly seriously. Indeed, even in the 1950s Corman had learned to make artistic virtue of low-budget tawdriness, which contributed greatly to the existential bleakness of such tortured morality plays as Teenage Doll and Sorority Girl, and to the essential minimalism of the definitive black comedies Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors. Yet, even if one is unwilling to recognize the philosophical despair of the moralist struggling against nihilism which underlies the straight-faced lunacy of It Conquered the World, the visionary metaphysics of X (The Man with the X-Ray Eyes), and even the Urbiker picture of the 1960s, The Wild Angels, Corman's audacious independence has at least earned him the right to symbolize the myriad contradictions between artistic ambition and fiscal responsibility which seem inherent to commercial filmmaking.

Circumstances caused Corman to put his directorial career in the deep freeze in 1971. A rare foray into TV with What's in It for Harry (1969) had resulted in a film rejected as too violent by ABC, which released the film theatrically without a Corman credit. Studio interference with his youth movement paean, Gas-s-s-s (1970), eased his break with long-term home-base AIP, but he fared even worse when United Artists slashed his pet World War I drama, Von Richthofen and Brown (1971), into unrecognizability. It was critical savagery of the latter that drove him to assume mogul status full-time by forming New World Pictures, where he served as mentor to Ron Howard, Jonathan Kaplan, John Sayles, and Joe Dante, among others.

After selling New World Pictures in 1983 and then suing the purchasers for reneging on a distribution agreement, Corman returned to the pre-sold production whirl with a new outfit, Concorde/New Horizons. Although Corman is still a vital, hands-on moviemaker and a godsend to untried auteurs, his current product is indistinguishable from other direct-to-video fodder. In addition to expanding into family escapism and sexploitation noirs, Corman has been remaking his AIP classics for Showtime, along with some cable-TV originals like Runaway Daughters and Suspect Device, but none of these Cormanized revamps and remakes demonstrates the verve of the compact originals.

Cleverly conceived and infused with an undertow of nostalgic tristesse, Corman's directorial comeback, Frankenstein Unbound, is truly a monster movie for the backward-glancing 1990s. Responsible for precipitating an apocalypse in the future through his unchecked experimentations, a scientist travels back to the nineteenth century, where he tries to bridle Victor Frankenstein's excesses as a mea culpa for his own God-complex.

A cinematic Victor Frankenstein, Corman goes on robbing genre graveyards to bring new life to exploitation filmmaking. While Corman is irreplaceable as a studio chief, his Frankenstein Unbound is idiosyncratic enough to raise hopes for an occasional slumming into personal expression. An unselfish artist with a healthy respect for profits, Corman genuinely gets gratification out of his hired guns' success stories, and this shining example of vicarious creativity may be the only producer in Hollywood history who could be considered a father figure. As a cinematic icon, Corman's cameo appearances in his protegee's blockbusters like Godfather: Part Two, Philadelphia, and Apollo 13 reveal a soft-spoken, mysterious man with immense powers of focus; he looks like the archetypical American loner who simply gets the job done.

All-Movie Guide bio from Bruce Eder

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Roger Corman • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Wheeler Winston Dixon from Senses of Cinema, February 7, 2006

Roger Corman on New World Pictures: An Interview from 1974 by Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal

Notes Toward a Lexicon of Roger Corman's New World Pictures by Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal

Dancing with Werewolves: John Sayles in Roger Corman's Hollywood by Robert Keser from Bright Lights Film Journal

Salon.com | People: Roger Corman an overview by Greg Villepique from Salon, June 13, 2000

LA Weekly Article (2006) by Scott Foundas from LA Weekly, August 23, 2006

Nearer My Corman to Thee: Roger Corman Remembers, and Roger Corman Remembered Damien Love from Bright Lights Film Journal

Revenge of the shlockmeister: Roger Corman gets his due Phelim O’Neill from The Guardian, November 25, 2009

Conversations with Corman, Romero, & Burnett ... - Senses of Cinema Nicholas Godfrey from Senses of Cinema, November 3, 2012

The Intruder, Roger Corman • Film Analysis - Senses of Cinema Wheeler Winston Dixon, May 12, 2013

The Wild Angels, Roger Corman • Film Analysis - Senses of Cinema Margaret Barton-Fumo, May 13, 2013

The Masque of the Red Death, Roger Corman ... - Senses of Cinema David Melville, May 13, 2013

The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, Roger Corman ... - Senses of Cinema Murray Pomerance, May 20, 2013

Corman, Roger They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Roger Corman on Blair Witch Project and Why Mean Streets Would Have Made a Great Blaxpoitation Film an interview by Andrew J. Rausch from Images

Legendary AIP Director Monsterizes AMC article and interview by John Rossi

Roger Corman interview by Nicky Fennell for FilmWest

Roger Corman in Europe interview by Steven Yates from Kinoeye

Age Article (2006) Schlok It Up, article and interview by Stephanie Bunbury from the Age, December 17, 2006

Telegraph Article (2007) King of the Killer B’s, article and interview by Strawberry Saroyan from the Telegraph, June 5, 2007

SORORITY GIRL

USA (61 mi) 1957

Fear and loathing on campus, distaff and 50s-style, in gleaming nightmarish monochrome: it's only a short hop from here to Corman's Poe-inspired tales of delirium and sociopathic madness. Instead of Vincent Price we have Susan Cabot (looks from certain angles like Liz Taylor; met a truly astonishing - and sad - real-life end) as spoilt-little-rich-girl Sabra, who delights in annoying, humiliating and exploiting her "sisters" at the University of Southern California. Sabra's bitchy/fiendish machinations bring her only further and further unhappiness: a grim spiral into mental illness which her haughty mama (Fay Baker) observes from afar with patrician disdain...

Ed Waters' script is rather bracing in its unflinching, first-person-narration-heavy examination of a tormented, tormenting mind - but is presented in somewhat drab, inert fashion by still-learning-the-ropes director Corman. Keen to stretch his flimsy material out as much as possible (i.e. to the hour-ish mark) Corman almost invariably has his actresses pause for a second before delivering their lines: the result is an inert drabness that's also rather unsettling.

Even more disturbing are Bill Martin's (wildly prolonged) opening credits - a series of very mid-fifties chalk-and-charcoal sketches which wouldn't look out of place introducing a gothic chiller in the Horror Hotel vein. They're the most memorable and vivid feature of a cheap-and-not-so-cheerful picture that's worth a look, without being no means anything out of the ordinary.

Oh, the Humanity! Review Rob

HOUSE OF USHER

aka: Fall of the House of Usher

USA (79 mi) 1960 ‘Scope

The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]

By far the best of Roger Corman's Poe-inspired films done for legendary B-movie outfit American International Pictures in the early Sixties, The Fall of the House of Usher takes the author's gloriously claustrophobic tale of mad Roderick Usher and his undead sister Madeline and fleshes it out into some sort of minor drive-in masterpiece. The urbane and epicurean Price is clearly having great fun with the role of the hypersensitive Usher, a man whose hearing is so painfully overattuned that the very scratching of the rats in the walls drives him to jittery distraction. When school chum Philip arrives unannounced one day (after a deliciously atmospheric approach through what is actually a California-wildfire-benighted stretch of skeletal forestry), the stage is primed for Price's scenery-chewing descent into utter insanity and a wealth of fantastic cinematic tricks from director of photography Floyd Crosby. Shot in screen-stretching CinemaScope with an effective score by longtime Corman collaborator Lex Baxter, the DVD arrives with an enlightening commentary track from Corman, who frequently references no less an authority than Freud when discussing the psychological tone of the film in between shooting anecdotes and a plethora of wry, often self-effacing observations. It's Price's show all the way, though the house itself spectral matte shots and a wealth of blood-red or deathly blue interiors everywhere is arguably the real star of the film, portions of which were used in various other Corman quickies, notably the Jack Nicholson/Boris Karloff thriller The Terror. Corman's legendary parsimony has rarely been so inobvious; House of Usher has the look and feel of a film made for far more than its tiny $200K budget (and on a tight, 15-day shooting schedule). Its authentically creepy dream-sequence all grasping hands and hazy blue-gelled fog swirls is a minor surrealist masterpiece by its own right. Sadly, it's true they don't make 'em like they used to: No one's ever replaced Price's sepulchral cadences, nor Corman's try-anything bravado. No wonder Tim Burton claims this as one of his all-time favorites.

Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]

Making a move toward respectability, Roger Corman convinced his drive-in distributors American International Pictures to give him a whole 15 days (50% more) and $270,000 for what would become the first of eight Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Along with the work of Hammer Studios and Mario Bava, Corman began popularizing a new genre with this Technicolor CinemaScope gothic horror. Morbid, moody, misty gloom with something of a surrealist bend and dramatic expressive coloring, particularly reds in this case. Corman is far more a director who has seen art movies than an artist in his own right, so the film is something of an uneven collection of influences. Sometimes you feel he knows a scene is cheesy, but lacks the resources to fix it. While far from a masterpiece, House of Usher is first rate low budget genre work, making us feel the desolation and isolation of the Usher house while we actually see very little of it. Corman's production designer Daniel Haller could do good work quickly and inexpensively, and his cinematographer Floyd Crosby was a F.W. Murnau alumni. Though Richard Matheson's expansion is considered faithful to Poe due to keeping his mood, almost all Edgar Allan's poetry is lost and the dynamics are totally different. Poe's narrator (Mark Damon) is sympathetic to sick friend Roderick Usher (Vincent Price) who asked him to the decaying mansion to comfort him. Matheson turns it romantic, making him the fiancé of Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey) come to claim her regardless of what her brother, who turns out to be overprotective, possessive, and incestuous, has to say. Poe crafted a tale of fear and mental illness. Isolation and claustrophobia may still breed insanity, but Corman makes it another of his generational battles with the outdated older generation trying to hold back the reasonable youth. Damon is the typical wooden pretty boy, his "acting" consisting of raising his voice once in a while to punish Roderick, but Price saves many flaws with his self- proclaimed finest role. He's totally convincing as a tortured man who believes the sins of his ancestors have manifest into a sentient house. Tormented by hyperesthesia, hypochondria, and acute anxiety, Price gives a sensitive portrayal - whispering his lines as that's all the volume his poor ears can withstand - that still conveys the man is on the verge of giving in to hysteria.

Turner Classic Movies John M. Miller

Fangoria Tom Weaver

DVD Times Eamonn McCusker

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

DVD Verdict Mike Jackson

Classic Horror Nate Yapp

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

The New York Times (Eugene Archer)

Mondo Digital also reviewing other Poe/Price/Corman Classics THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM and TALES OF TERROR

THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

USA (80 mi) 1961 ‘Scope

Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel)

Corman at his intoxicating best, drawing a seductive mesh of sexual motifs from Poe's story through a fine Richard Matheson script. Vincent Price is superbly tormented as the 16th century Spanish nobleman obsessed by the fear that his wife was entombed alive in his castle's torture chamber, a repetition of family history that entails his takeover by the personality of his dead father, the Inquisitor who built the fiendish dungeon. And Barbara Steele, as the faithless wife who faked her own death, embodies all the contradictions of Poe's quintessential female to perfection.

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Mark Zimmer

The Edgar Allan Poe movies of Roger Corman and Vincent Price are notorious for having only a tenuous connection to the author's original stories. This is more true with The Pit and the Pendulum than any of the others, mainly due to the fact that the Poe tale takes place in a single brief episode, most of which is in total blackness: not the most cinematically-friendly source material. Corman deftly dodges this by using the Poe tale as the springboard for the concluding act, and constructing a story out of a variety of Poe themes that makes for a decent pastiche.

Francis Barnard (John Kerr) comes to the castle of the Medina family in Spain to learn how his sister Elizabeth (Barbara Steele) died. Elizabeth's death is shrouded in mystery, with her husband, Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price), edgily fabricating stories about the event. Soon, however, it comes out (through manifestations of Elizabeth) that Nicholas fears that he may have buried her prematurely. Soon, matters devolve into complete insanity, with Nicholas seemingly possessed by the spirit of his mad Inquisitor father, Sebastian (also Price). Before long, torture is in the wind, and the title apparati come into suspenseful play.

Even though Roger Corman has a well-deserved reputation for making films cheaply and quickly, this is not as obvious here. More so than in House of Usher, his sets display an opulence in production value that is highly impressive. The Cinemascope screen is used very effectively, with characters and interesting detail filling the space much of the time and giving the picture a great deal of interest. The re-use of sets is disguised by creative camera angles and dolly shots, as well as distortions of various kinds. Intriguingly, he also uses unusual wipes and irises (including a rectangular iris that reduces the wide screen shape to a small feature, such as the eyes of a character). These all combine to make this seem like a much more expensive picture than it really was.

Price is right on the border of hamminess, but manages to make Nicholas a sympathetic character, even when he's in full torture mode. Barbara Steele is gorgeous as always, but she doesn't have a lot to do until nearly the end of the film; as Corman reveals in the commentary, the high billing was to capitalize on the popularity of Black Sunday, made the year before. The minor players are decent, though not outstanding. Price and the set design are really the focal points of interest here, and they carry the movie exceedingly well. Les Baxter's score is understated and effective, making the suspense palpable in the final act as the pendulum makes its terrifying appearance.

All in all, one of the most successful of the Poe/Price/Corman movies, and not to be missed by any horror fan. The concluding shot is unforgettable and makes for a highly gratifying climax.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson

Eccentric Cinema Lucas Micromatis

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Scifilm ("Dr. Mality")

Classic Horror Nate Yapp

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Joe Bob's Ultimate B Movie Guide (Joe Bob Briggs)

Mondo Digital also reviewing other Poe/Price/Corman Classics THE HOUSE OF USHER and TALES OF TERROR

THE INTRUDER

aka: I Hate Your Guts

USA (84 mi) 1962

The only Roger Corman film ever to lose money, a social drama about integration in the South, with William Shatner, in one of the best roles of his career, as a professional Ku Klux Klan-type rabblerouser who hits town trying to stir up resentment against integration, and the people cheering him on in the town square are actual bigots recruited for the scenes, but unaware that Shatner was a villain in the movie. When locals finally did get a look at the script, Corman had to flee with his crew. Released briefly under the title "I Hate Your Guts." With Frank Maxwell, Beverly Lunsford Robert Emhardt.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Tom Huddleston]

Raw-edged and startling, scripted by Charles Beaumont from his own novel based on real-life rabble-rouser John Kasper, Corman's film about Southern desegregation was shot on location in Missouri in a mere three weeks, with threats and obstruction from white locals mirroring the fictional action. Adam Cramer (Shatner, mesmerising) represents an organisation which seeks to stop the process of educational desegregation and thus frustrate plans of the 'Communist front headed by Jews' to 'mongrelise' society. Cramer is an insidious outsider whose impassioned speeches rouse the populace; the result is heightened Klu Klux Klan activity, attacks on black families and a liberal white newspaper editor, a near-hanging. Complex characterisation is sacrificed in the interests of representing the broad socio-political issues. Emotions intensify in accord with searing summer temperatures; visuals emphasise the economic disparities, memorably in shots of the black ghetto and of Cramer in his pristine white suit. Chilling, and especially at the moment Cramer delivers his battle-cry, 'This is just the beginning', painfully prophetic.

The Intruder (1962) Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary

Compulsory segregation, like states' rights and like 'The Southern Way of Life,' is an abstraction and, to a good many people, a neutral or sympathetic one. These riots, which [through television] were brought instantly, dramatically and literally home to the American people, showed what it means concretely. Here were grown men and women furiously confronting their enemy: two, three, a half dozen scrubbed, starched, scared and incredibly brave colored children. The moral bankruptcy, the shame of the thing, was evident.

Alexander Bickel, writing in 1962

Roger Corman's rather amazing low-budget drama The Intruder, shot on location and under rather dangerous conditions in the Deep South, captures exactly the ugly moment in history that Bickel writes about. Corman, a genre film-maker, never made more of a monster movie than this, and the monster is virtually the entire population of a a small Southern town, rising against the court-ordered integration of their high school. The rabble-rousing "intruder," played suavely by white-suited William Shatner (his best performance? certainly a great one) and based on the real-life racist activist John Kasper, only brings into action the nastiness that is already right on the surface.

The Intruder benefits enormously from its location shooting, even if it did put Corman's cast and crew in harm's way once the locals in the towns he used realized that this was a pro-integration movie. The filmmakers made off like bandits in the middle of the night once the shoot was done; Shatner describes the whole experience as "harrowing" ()but also notes that he would have paid Corman to play this part). The faces, the attitudes, the language of the many locals that Corman used as extras and in bit parts come across as extraordinarily genuine, un-self-conscious. The hair-raising references to "niggers," "coons," and "commie Jews" that come out of even sweet old landladies' mouths disturb us but were ordinary speech for them. Which is the issue, of course.

I found it interesting that my cat Claire, who usually "watches" movies with me, retired to another room in the apartment for the duration of The Intruder. I think what she meant to convey was, "I can't watch a movie about a nasty racist even if he is wearing a spiffy white suit!" In fact, the movie, although very impressive, is quite hard to take.

Some miscellaneous notes on this unusual film: It stars three science fiction writers in smaller roles -- Charles Beaumont, whose novel it is based on; George Clayton Johnson, like Beaumont (and Shatner) a repeat Twilight Zone contributor; and William F. Nolan, who co-wrote Logan's Run with Johnson...
John Kasper, the actual provocateur, was, like CIA legend James Jesus Angleton mentioned in an earlier post, a disciple and correspondent of poet and anti-semite Ezra Pound...Corman regular Leo Gordon, excellent as a traveling salesman, gets off a great line to his wife (whom Shatner seduces, and who is later revealed as a nymphomaniac): "Didn't make too many demands on you last night, did I?" The movie is racy as well as as politically controversial; Corman has more than a little of the provocateur in him, too.

DVD Drive-In George R. Reis

If you thought that Roger Corman only directed exploitation films, guess again. This tense social drama is really excellent, and definitely one of his finest efforts. Corman wanted so bad to do a film adaptation of Charles Beamont's novel, but no studio would touch the volatile subject matter, not even his old stomping grounds of AIP. So he and his brother Gene pulled their resources together to produce the project on a very low budget (something they're of course very used to). It turned out to be Corman's most acclaimed effort (winning awards in other countries), but at the same time, his only commercial failure.

William Shatner (who was only 30 at the time) stars as Adam Cramer, a representative of the "Patrick Henry Society" sent from Washington D.C. to a small southern town. With his neat white suit and cool shades, the well-groomed Cramer goes around claiming that he's a social worker, shaking peoples' hands and asking for their friendship. Desegregation in schools has now been instated by law, and ten black students are to attend a white school for the first time. Cramer's purpose of arrival is to put a stop to this and he easily convinces everyone in the town that segregation is right.

Cramer's message of hate quickly culminates when he gives a heated speech outside a civic building for most of the town's white population. Now they're all behind him, as Cramer drives through the black side of town with the local KKK, burning huge crosses on their property. An explosion is set off in a all-black chapel, killing a clergyman. Cramer is held responsible and thrown into jail, much to the protest of his loyal "fans" who hail him as a hero and demand that he be released. After he's bailed out, the town newspaper editor is beat half to death for escorting the black kids to school, and his daughter is then involved in the blackmailing of one them, falsely accusing him of rape.

Besides the stylish, moody direction by Corman, and the intelligent screenplay by "Twilight Zone" and AIP regular Beamont (based on his novel), THE INTRUDER has some really incredible performances. This is Shatner's finest hour, and though he's known in Hollywood to overact, he's really intense here as the sly young man who exhibits charm but embodies hate and cowardliness. Also excellent is Frank Maxwell (THE HAUNTED PALACE, THE WILD ANGELS) as the sensible newspaper man who tries to be virtuous, but get punished in the process.

Leo Gordon plays a great character, a brawny salesman whose nymphomaniac wife (Jeanne Cooper, Corbin Bernsen's mom and star of "The Young and the Restless") is seduced by the adulterating Cramer. Gordon appears to be obnoxious at first, but he turns out to be sober man who sees Shatner's character for the bigoted coward that he really is (the scene where they exchange gunpoint is priceless), and is instrumental in the film's powerful ending. You'll also recognize character actor Robert Emhardt as the town's rich fatcat who immediately takes to Cramer. When Cramer asks for his view on segregation, he replies, "That's a stupid question, young man. I'm a southerner." Most of the rest of the acting is by real locals, and Corman obviously picked the most "interesting-looking" ones to be Cramer's main cronies. Whether or not they realize that Cramer is really the film's villain is questionable!

THE INTRUDER has thankfully been released on DVD through Corman's own New Concorde label. Forty years after it was made, it hasn't dated one bit, given the time-frame that it takes place in, and it's more nerve-racking than any of the director's horror films. The transfer is letterboxed, and the film looks better than it ever did before. The print source has some considerable damage, but it's not too distracting, and the black & white image remains very sharp and distinct. Several brief scenes seem to have replacement footage from a vastly inferior print. The mono sound is OK, but there are some pops throughout the presentation.

The best extra on this Special Edition is an on-camera conversation with Corman and Shatner, who converse about the film for a good half-hour, without outside interference. After watching the film, you'll be captivated by this talk, and it's nice to see how proud they are of their fine work 40 years after the fact. Other extras include a Civil Rights Time-Line, bios for some of the actors and Corman, and trailers for other New Concorde releases.

The Intruder, Roger Corman • Film Analysis - Senses of Cinema Wheeler Winston Dixon, May 12, 2013

DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson

X

aka: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes

USA (79 mi) 1963

Film Court (Lawrence Russell)

Corman's intelligent sci-fi movie has a powerful performance from Milland as Dr Xavier, whose experiments with X-Ray eye-drops allow him to cheat at cards, diagnose patients' internal complaints, and see through women's clothing (fortunately for them, they're all standing with their naughty bits shielded by inexplicably opaque plants and pieces of furniture). As the treatment continues, however, Milland becomes terrified as he starts to see beyond the material world into the heart of the universe. The rudimentary special effects and cheapo production notwithstanding, this is an undoubted cult classic.

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Mark Zimmer

Once again, science meddles in Things That Man Is Not Meant to Know, and pays the price for it. This quickly and cheaply made sci-fi/horror classic has intriguing religious and metaphysical undertones, supported by a fine performance by Ray Milland as the title character.

Dr. James Xavier (Milland) is attempting to heighten the receptivity of the eyes to permit sight of the 90% of the spectrum that cannot be seen by humans. Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diane van der Vlis) represents the foundation that is funding Xavier's research. When he decides to test his formula on himself, and the results knock him unconscious, the foundation cuts off all funding. But Xavier does indeed gain X-ray vision with his formula, and uses it to unsuccessfully refute an associate's diagnosis of a heart patient. Becoming enraged in surgery, he slices the hand of the other surgeon (John Hoyt) and continues the operation himself. When the other surgeon threatens malpractice, the enraged Xavier, who apparently is also becoming mentally unstable, pushes another doctor (Harold J. Stone) out of a window to his death. Fleeing for his life, Xavier ends up as a sideshow performer, Dr. Mentallo, fronted by loudmouthed Crane (Don Rickles, already typecast in his first film role). Crane soon hits on the idea of making Mentallo into a faith healer to make a few bucks; when things go badly wrong, Xavier makes a trip to Las Vegas that culminates in disaster. The film concludes with an excellent car chase and a climax that is difficult to bear even for hardened horror fans like your reviewer.

Milland does a superb job as Dr. X (surely the stimulus for the Marvel Comics' X-Men led by Professor Xavier that appeared later in 1963). At first driven, he is soon tormented and finally in despair, having seen the center of the universe. Rickles is surprisingly excellent as well, giving Crane a fair amount of depth that one wouldn't expect from his standup shtick.

AIP advertised the film as being shot in 'Spectarama', a wholly fictitious process that does highlight the many special optical effects used in the movie. Much of it is fairly psychedelic in anticipation of the Stargate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The opening titles are equally wild. When Xavier first takes his formula, there is a classic shot sequence zooming into the back of his head, through his brain and eyes and out into the new world he sees in front of him. This bit is a complete tour de force that won't soon be forgotten.

In a nifty bit of wish fulfillment, although his initial motives are highly noble, Xavier soon falls victim to looking at women under their clothes and cheating at the slots and blackjack in Las Vegas. The power that he has-if not the formula itself-seems to derange him completely and drives Xavier to complete megalomania, a la The Invisible Man. He brags to the women he's looking at about what he sees, and to the blackjack dealers, setting him up for an inevitable downfall.

Although a bit short on running time, "X" (as the onscreen titles and trailer more simply name the film) is packed with interesting material. It's quite worthwhile and has a depth seldom seen in such movies.

The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, Roger Corman ... - Senses of Cinema Murray Pomerance, May 20, 2013

DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! (Liz Kingsley)

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Scifilm (Gerry Carpenter)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

DVD Talk (Adam Tyner)

THE TOMB OF LIGEIA

Great Britain (81 mi) 1964 ‘Scope

Austin Chronicle [Bud Simons]

After his long sequence of Poe movies filmed in various studio interiors, Corman decided that The Tomb of Ligeia demanded a change of style and emphasis. Consequently he shot it on a number of highly effective English locations, having commissioned Robert Towne (who subsequently wrote Chinatown) to script it. The result is one of the best in the whole series, an ambiguous, open-ended film which features one of Vincent Price's most decisive performances. There is a long early sequence involving a long monologue by Verden Fell (Price), juxtaposed against Rowena (Shepherd) climbing a gothic tower, which has a syntactic originality that has rarely been equalled in horror movies. But even more importantly, Corman - like Michael Reeves in Witchfinder General - utilised the English landscape in a way that Hammer had often neglected.

Of all the Corman/Poe films, Tomb of Ligea has stood the test of time most successfully, although a case can also be made for Masque of the Red Death. The standard elements of the other films in the series, the malignant and presumably dead wife, the tormented widower overwrought with melancholy, and the threatened innocent, are certainly present, but Corman plays Tomb of Ligea straight. This is likely due to the script by Robert Towne, whose characters are believably complex and compelling. Price is remarkably restrained as a romantic lead, given his over-the-top portrayals in the other Poe films, and Elizabeth Shepherd manages to strike exactly the right note in her role as Lady Rowena.

Thankfully, the laserdisc is letterboxed, preserving the outstanding compositions of cinematographer Arthur Grant, whose choice of muted tones is far better suited to the material than the garish colors which exist in most of the other Poe films. Corman even rises to the occasion in his direction, which is effective and inspired at moments. Tomb of Ligea remains essentially true to the spirit of Poe's work, and its remarkable and unique union of disparate talents makes it worth tracking down on laserdisc.

Eccentric Cinema Lyle Horowitz

In The Tomb Of Ligeia, Roger Corman's last collaboration with Vincent Price, the director made a conscious effort to move away from the look and feel of their previous Poe pictures. Rather than shoot the film entirely on a soundstage (as had been the practice), outdoor locations would be utilized. Corman would also rely less on heavy fog and vibrant colors. Many of the scenes would take place in bright sunlight. The tone and construction of the film would still be that of an old-fashioned horror tale, only less stylized and confined than what Corman had done before.

The film concerns an English country gentleman, Verden Fell, played by the immortal Vincent Price. Fell's mysterious raven-haired wife, Ligeia, has died; now Verden is all alone on his large estate except for his butler an an ominous black cat. Verden is a tortured man, still grieving over his wife's death. Then he meets Lady Rowena, a beautiful woman who resembles his late spouse. Despite his aloof manner and melancholy air she's attracted to him. Even with his misgivings for the future Fell falls in love with her and they eventually wed. Their marriage would even make Ike and Tina blush!

Fell is nowhere to be found most of the day. He spends most of his time in a desolate, ruined abbey, where his first wife's tomb is located. Once Rowena comes to live at the estate she is stalked by the menacing black cat and begins having horrible dreams. (The highlight of the film, these dream sequences are imaginative and horrific.) But Rowena isn't the only one with problems. Fell is quite sure he's going insane — either that or his new bride is being possessed by Ligeia's evil, undying spirit. What happens next is unexpected and shocking, but I won't give it away; you'll have to buy or rent the DVD.

Price delivers a brilliant performance in the role. Verden Fell is a somewhat different character from some of the others he played: creepy, but through no fault of his own, and quite sympathetic. (Although if I were to compare his portrayal with another one of his Poe characters it would be Roderick Usher from The Fall of the House of Usher). Elizabeth Shepherd is also quite good. Acting ability aside, she compliments Price in that she's a more mature actress than the typical ingenue... Since Fell is established as a tragic romantic figure it would've been silly to pair the middle-aged Price with some nubile twentysomething. Tomb Of Ligeia is my personal favorite Vincent Price horror film, and is a must-see for any fan with a passing interest in the genre.

On the flip-side of the DVD is a TV special from the early 1970s entitled An Evening Of Edgar Allan Poe. This is essentially a one-man stage play filmed for television. Vincent is by himself on the stage, in period costume, reading a selection of Poe stories to a small audience. The program truly showcases Price's talents as an actor. It demonstrates that he wasn't just a hammy horror film star but a highly skilled performer in even the most intimate of venues. The four segments in this 53-minute presentation are The Tell-Tale Heart, The Sphinx, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Pit and the Pendulum. Price fans should love it.

Turner Classic Movies John M. Miller

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Matt Bailey]

Classic-Horror Nate Yapp

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

The New York Times (Howard Thompson)

Turner Classic Movies DVD review (among others) by Lang Thompson

Corneau, Alain

FEAR AND TREMBLING (Stupeur et tremblements) B- 80

France (107 mi) 2003

In an adaptation of Amelie Northom’s autobiographical novel, this is largely a show-piece for the incomparable Sylvie Testud, playing a French-speaking Belgian who was actually born in Japan but moved to Europe at the age of 5, and returns as a young woman landing a 1-year contract as an Interpreter at a prestigious Japanese business firm. Testud has previously provided performances in French, German, and English, but here she speaks Japanese, while her humorous fantasy world inner narration speaks French. The first half is hilarious, as she’s immediately banned from using her Japanese language skills, as she embarrassed her boss by being a Westerner speaking perfect Japanese. She then writes a report for a co-worker when asked to help obtain a business contract from Belgium, for which both are chastised, as it was an uncustomary practice to offer a new employee such a prestigious opportunity. Slowly she gets demoted into more and more humiliating assignments. The film reaches its heights when she is allowed to go around the office and correct everyone’s calendar, climaxing with the change of month which she turns into a samurai spectacle. But when she must prove her worth through humiliation, assigned to cleaning bathrooms, suggesting a true Japanese would endure any humiliation rather than lose honor by resigning, the film loses its comic resonance. While it attempts to say something about the rigidity in Japan in accepting Western outsiders, this gets lost in disinterest. Testud is amazing throughout, and has an intriguing tug-of-war relationship with her boss, Kaori Tsuji, who she elevates in her imagination to empress status, suggesting near the end that one submitted oneself to royalty in ancient times with “fear and trembling,” but the last half of the film falls flat and is a serious let down.

Corra, Henry

SAME SEX AMERICA C 71

USA (90 mi) 2005

Despite the credited tributes to Joe Berlinger and David Maysles, two excellent documentarians, this seemed like a very rushed and forced attempt to throw information in our faces, following seven same sex couples in Massachusetts on the brink of the first state in America to legalize same sex marriages. We see the typical religious bigots who threaten to leave the state if this passes, as the concept is too hateful for them to stand, the dueling demonstrations of for and against which turn into sing-ins, to the stand-offish nature of the fathers who have a difficult time accepting gay sons, to the accepting siblings and children who are very much a part of the lives of these already established couples, who have to pick wedding dresses and rings and decide what kind of ceremony to hold, all the things that matter in any marriage. The film leaves the audience feeling like we’re at a dinner table where opinions are flying fast and furious, and all we can think about is – we’ve heard all this before, how do we get out of here? Nothing new really happens in this film, though it does capture the very moment where thousands of gay couples storm the Capitol building to be the first married on this allegedly historic occasion. Unfortunately, we hear how an ultimate domino effect will take hold and other states will follow, which is not likely to happen, yet people are caught up in this sense of liberation. One couple waited 49 years as a couple to finally be allowed to legally marry. The formula followed here is first the arguments, then view the legislature and the various political maneuvers to keep this from seeing the light of day, and then the ultimate joy and celebration of couples in the streets, dancing down the aisles and finally getting married. However, nothing felt natural, everything keeps feeling forced, as if cameras were always thrust in people’s faces asking what they think, leaving a very skewed impression of these events.

Corrigan, Lloyd and Laurence Schwab

FOLLOW THRU B- 81

USA (92 mi) 1930

Only the second all-talking, all-color feature produced by Paramount Studios, the first being the Jeanette MacDonald operetta THE VAGABOND KING (1930), a film that uses the early two-color Technicolor process, one of over 700 Paramount productions filmed between 1929 and 1949 that were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since. However, because of legal complications, apparently with rights issues associated with Laurence Schwab, this particular title was not included in the original television package and has never been televised. In fact, most have only seen it on poor quality VHS copies. It was a contractual stipulation that all Technicolor negatives would be housed on the company’s premises. In the mid 1950’s, with the two-color process completely obsolete, the company began systematically to destroy its negatives from the twenties and early thirties, yet for some reason this film was spared and eventually preserved in 1989 by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, where it can be seen exclusively in rare theater screenings, like the recent resurrection of the Northwest Chicago Film Society after nearly a year-long absence, finding a new home in the newly upgraded auditorium of Northeastern University, bringing in a new screen, sound system, and lugging their old projection equipment to this new venue that seats 400 people with stadium seating. Specializing in presenting rare and classic films in their original format, 16 mm or 35 mm prints, always opening with a comic short, the screenings spotlight the restoration efforts of archives, studios, and private collectors. By the mid 1920’s, thousands of musical shorts hit the screens, but sound was only available for the musical numbers, while the actors portrayed their characters just as they did in silent films, with no audible dialogue. While several earlier sound films did have dialogue, they all were all short films until Warner Brothers released the first feature-length part-talkie starring Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (1927), with the star performing six songs. The high production cost was a major gamble, as Harry Warner stopped taking a salary, pawned jewelry belonging to his wife, and moved his family into a smaller apartment. But the gamble paid off, developing into a major hit, demonstrating the profit potential for talking pictures. But immediately afterwards, only isolated sequences featured sound, usually the musical production numbers. It wasn’t until the second Jolson hit was released, The Singing Fool (1928), that theater owners scrambled to install sound equipment into their theaters, hiring Broadway composers to write musicals for the screen. The first all-talking feature, Lights of New York (1928), included a musical sequence in a night club, where the enthusiasm of audiences was so great that in less than a year all the major studios were making sound pictures exclusively. One of them was the most popular film in 1929, Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), which broke all box office records and remained the highest grossing film ever produced until 1939 when GONE WITH THE WIND broke attendance records everywhere. Suddenly the market became flooded with musicals, revues and operettas, where Hollywood released more than 100 musical films in 1930, but only 14 in 1931, as audiences had been oversaturated with musicals and studios were forced to cut the music from films that were then being released. It wasn’t until 1933 that Busby Berkeley revived an interest in musicals with his ingeniously choreographed routines, involving human bodies forming patterns like a kaleidoscope, literally transcending the reach of the actual stage in 42nd Street (1933) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), radically transforming the look of musical films forever.

So when was the last time you saw a golf musical? When this movie was released in September, 1930, music was commonly being stripped out of films, as audiences were staying away, so Paramount released the film with little fanfare, where it received so-so reviews and was quickly forgotten, surviving in a somewhat battered print and negative retained in the storage facilities of the Technicolor Corporation, only to emerge sixty years later in a restored and pristine condition, serving as an example of one of Hollywood’s earliest color films (List of early color feature films), and one of the breeziest and most lighthearted of the early musicals. Following the standard procedures of the times, Paramount bought the rights of a successful Broadway musical, using the same cast, but replacing the leads with their own studio stars, in this case matinee idol Charles “Buddy” Rogers, who starred opposite Clara Bow in the first Academy Award winning picture WINGS in 1927, and the beautiful and talented Nancy Carroll, almost forgotten today, a redhead who received the most fan mail of any star in the early 30’s, but was eventually released from the studio after earning a Diva reputation for recalcitrance and being uncooperative. You’d never know it here, playing one of America’s sweethearts, with that rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed smile conveniently shot in close up that’s liable to generate oohs and aahs for just how sweet she looks. Lacking the pace of the Broadway success, much of the uneven tempo can be attributed to an inexperienced first-time director, Lloyd Corrigan, who began his Hollywood career as a writer, including the first talking Fu Manchu movies starring Warner Oland as Charlie Chan. FOLLOW THRU was his first directing assignment, where Paramount added Laurence Schwab, the original writer of the Broadway show, as a co-director. Opening with an odd and rather dated sequence where Mac Moore (Claude King), a Scottish golf pro at a swank Southern California country club grows excited at the idea of teaching the game of golf to his newborn, but he’s disappointed to learn it’s a girl. Nonetheless, groomed to be a champion golfer from birth, with a golf ball dangled above her eyes in a baby carriage to teach her to keep her eyes on the ball, Lora Moore (Nancy Carroll) grows up to be an adorable and charming young golf protégée, seen early on in a tournament with Mrs. Van Horn (Thelma Todd), a snooty and domineering, wealthy widow from a rival country club who’s used to things going her way, heard coughing throughout the match just as Lora was about to putt, an underhanded tactic that irks Lora’s caddie, Angie Howard (Zelma O’Neal), more than it seems to bother Lora, whose eyes meet across the green with Jerry (Buddy Rogers), a former golf instructor of Mrs. Van Horn, who reminds him throughout the picture of how “closely” they worked together, always inviting him back to her private residence on Pebble Beach, where the golfing vernacular is put through the ringer in sexual innuendos. In no time, Lora, Angie, and Mrs. Van Horn are all vying for the young man’s attention, but Lora hires him on the spot for a few special putting tips that lead to several songs and early signs of romance.

In what is easily the strangest twist, and one of the weirdest things you’ll ever see, the film also introduces newcomer Jack Haley, the iconic Tin Man in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), as Jack Martin, the million dollar heir to his father’s department store chain, whose pathological shyness in front of women is revealed in a nervous eye and face twitch that shows him “getting excited.” While he’s embarrassed whenever this happens in public, always trying to hide it from girls, his stunning naiveté and portrayal of a millionaire weakling is equally bizarre, making him one of the more singularly peculiar characters in the history of cinema. However, his openness in talking about his “condition” is what you might call locker room conversation, as he speaks freely about it with Jerry, who he’s hired as his personal golfing instructor. Added to the mix is Eugene Pallette as J.C. Effingham, another wealthy country club member who made his millions selling women’s girdles, immediately recognizable with his broad humor and girth, as he has a Jackie Gleason quality about him. In one of the racier scenes of the film, Martin and Effingham disguise themselves (with gigantic moustaches) as plumbers in order to sneak into the women’s locker room where black hostesses in nurse attire walk around with trays serving cocktails, their purpose presumably to retrieve a family heirloom Jack gave away (to Angie) during one drunken outing, where the couple is seen together singing Button Up Your Overcoat. All the songs are staged as they were in the Broadway show, except one, sung by Angie as evening entertainment at a masquerade ball somewhere “out of the country,” turning into the wildest scene in the film, I WANT TO BE BAD (from FOLLOW THRU - 1930) - YouTube (5:46). After a devilish opening song and dance, complete with little child devils dressed in red, the film features dazzling visual effects where a group of winged chorus girls dressed in white arrive superimposed at the top of the screen, as if descending through the clouds from heaven, creating a Busby Berkeley choreographed style that turns into a hallucination, as after a thunder bolt, the costumes all turn red, with the wings replaced by little devil horns, where they work themselves into such a frenzied state, with the trumpets “breathing fire,” that they literally burst into flames, which doesn’t stop the dancers, who keep performing even while engulfed in a blazing inferno. Not to be deterred, heaven presses a fire alarm, sending down an angelic fire truck to extinguish the flames, restoring order in the universe once again. It’s easily the wackiest moment of a film that features fairly mediocre singing and plenty of hammed overacting. Nonetheless, it’s all in good fun, where in the innocence of the Hollywood universe, romantic attractions happen instantly, where everyone falls head over heels in love just at the sight of someone. It’s only a matter of time before they’re linked to wedding bells and everyone lives happily ever after. The film is silly fun and something of a weird delight, where anything resembling divorce or discontent is saved for another movie, as this one is all peaches and cream, where the romantic theme song written especially for the movie is reprised at the finale, “A Peach of a Pair.”

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs

If you haven't already, take a second to celebrate the fact that the Northwest Chicago Film Society has found a new home at which to continue their beloved weekly screening series. Are you jumping up and down? Moving all around? Good! That's the appropriate reaction to such news, as it's been more than a year since they held their last show at the Patio Theater. The digs may have changed, but even a cursory glance at the summer schedule reveals that their programming is as ambitious as ever. The Museum of Modern Art has dedicated a whole series to the centennial of Technicolor, while Chicago has yet to officially celebrate this important birthday--until now. For the first screening of their new series, NWCFS presents Laurence Schwab and Lloyd Corrigan's FOLLOW THRU, Paramount Picture's second all-Technicolor, all-talking feature. Based on the eponymous 1929 musical comedy, it's a "musical slice of country club life," as the show was aptly described during its successful Broadway run. Nancy Carroll plays Lora Moore, a beautiful young golfer who seeks lessons from Jerry Downes, played by "America's Boyfriend" Buddy Rogers, who himself is a successful golfer helping an eccentric trust fund kid with his...eh...stroke hole. ('Tin Man' Jack Haley's spoiled heir might remind one of a perverted Jimmy Fallon.) Zelma O'Neal steals the show as Angie, Lora's caddy and the object of Haley's unwieldy affection. She's also responsible for the film's most interesting musical number; her rendition of "I Want to Be Bad"--now a standard along with "Button Up Your Overcoat"--combines the best parts of emerging sound technology with all the lingering magic of the silent era. As for the Technicolor, what's now almost universally considered a wonder was once thought of as a hindrance by many; even here in the Second City, a critic for the Chicago Daily Tribune noted that the color "is sometimes effective and sometimes blurred and indefinite that you long to rest your optics on the good old black and white." (This is just one of many interesting tidbits that were laboriously compiled by James Layton and David Pierce for their book The Dawn of Technicolor: 1915-1935.) The film itself is small potatoes within the scope of film history; however, it's notable as an artifact because its original camera negative survived when many others did not. The film was preserved in 1989 by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and according to a paper by archivist Andrea Leigh, "for the Technicolor two-color reconstruction...the separation master positives achieved more accurate hues by printing the elements with color light optically before creating the Eastman color internegative." Film historian David Pierce will be present to introduce the film and sign copies of the aforementioned book, which will also be available for sale at the screening. It's a must-have for any cinephile, as beautiful as that which it details--and, oh, does it detail. Altogether, next Wednesday night will surely be one worth remembering, complete in all its Technicolor glory. Please come show your support for one of the Chicago cinema community's greatest treasures. If you don't show up, the show won't go on. (1930, 92 min, Restored 35mm Print)

On the Big Screen: FOLLOW THRU (1930) - Mondo 70 Samuel Wilson

Movies have always been capable of making art of its absences. Silent film is recognized now as a distinct style rather than the mere absence of speech. At its best, black and white cinematography was a positive artistic choice rather than the mere lack of color. Shouldn't this also be true of movies made in "two-strip" or "two-color" Technicolor, before the process was perfected and could capture the color blue? Watching these films -- either special scenes in otherwise monochrome pictures (e.g. the silent versions of Ben-Hur and The King of Kings) or else full-length features (e.g. Douglas Fairbanks' The Black Pirate) is like watching cartoons with an eccentric if not obsolete aesthetic sense. Hollywood was well aware of the limitations of the process and its pictures were art-directed accordingly until the world was turned red, green and brown. History has judged harshly, however, perhaps because the heyday of two-color was also the infancy of sound film, not to mention the epoch of the part-talkie, for which few artistic excuses can be made. Few of these early Technicolor films survive intact. Technicolor sequences or entire films survive only in black and white; some don't survive at all. Follow Thru is an exception: a full-length 1930 Technicolor musical that survives intact, though it was considered a lost film, like so many others, for a long time. Musical comedy seems like the ideal material for the two-color process, which highlights the essential, deliberate unreality of all the proceedings. Watching Follow Thru in 1930 may have been a little like watching an all-CGI picture today; you can tell it's not "real," but you weren't exactly looking for "real," were you? That Follow Thru is fantasy we can take for granted. That it's actually quite funny is what puts it over for posterity.

Follow Thru is about golf, sort of. At least that ensures a lot of green in the picture. The plot is typical musical comedy. Two female golf champions -- Nancy Carroll's the good girl, Thelma Todd the cheating villain -- are rivals for the affection of Jerry, a male golf pro (Charles "Buddy"Rogers). Jerry has been hired as a personal instructor for Jack Martin (Jack Haley), a girl-shy department-store heir. Jack goes into eyebrow-twitching seizures at the sight of pretty girls. Coincidentally, he once proposed drunkenly and gave a ring to Angie Howard (Zelma O'Neal), who happens to be the BFF of Nora, the good-girl golfer. Fearing girls, Jack wants to leave the country club where Nora and her rival are competing, but practically everyone contrives to make him stay so Jerry will. Acting as a facilitator, as far as his ability allows, is bra manufacturer "Effie" Effingham (Eugene Pallette), who's willing to help anyone out it gives him a better chance of having his bras sold in Jack's stores. Because the characters usually act from ulterior (ableit benign) motives, many misunderstandings result from eavesdropping or too-candid conversations, but everything's resolved in time for Jerry to coach Nora -- the film makes clear that her talent only requires moral support -- for her ultimate showdown with her nemesis.

All of the above is scaffolding on which Follow Thru hangs its showpieces. The show was a smash hit on Broadway, and at least one of its DeSylva, Brown & Henderson songs, "Button Up Your Overcoat" ("Take good care of yourself/You belong to me") has entered the "Great American Songbook." The odd thing is that all the best songs go to the comics, while the romantic leads are stuck with several reprises of the uninspiring "We'll Make a Peach of a Pair." Even the third-rate juvenile couple (Margaret Lee and Don Tompkins) get a funny number, "Then I'll Have Time For You." The comedy numbers bring this Roaring Twenties relic close to the spirit of Pre-Code, as when Tompkins sings, "Once I've ruined the figgers/Of a dozen gold diggers/Then I'll have time for you." Probably the ultimate expression of this is Zelma O'Neal's big number, "I Wanna Be Bad," which is also the film's cinematic highlight. As directed by Lloyd Corrigan and Laurence Schwab, the number crosses what we could call the Berkeley Boundary. Angie Howard is supposed to be singing an impromptu song at a costume party with a live jazz band, but the directors jazz things up with double exposures and other special effects to make the scene a more purely cinematic experience. Just as golf as a subject suits two-color Technicolor's peculiar palette, so the process's favoring of red encouraged filmmaker to imagine vivacious visions of Hell, even if Zelma can't call the place by name. At this point you may as well see this clip of Technicolor Temptation Triumphant.

It falls short of the Berkeleyan standard mainly because the camera itself doesn't cross the Berkeley Boundary to roam among the ranks of falling angels. The song is virtually a Pre-Code anthem, though I'd argue that the more authentic Pre-Code sentiment is "I've Gotta Be Bad!" Still, for 1930 it's a great movie moment that I'm grateful to have seen on the big screen during the Madison Theater's one-day Jazz Age festival.

Overall, Follow Thru succeeds as much as a comedy as it does as a musical. O'Neal and Haley are holdovers from the original Broadway cast and really know how to put over the comedy songs. In their hands "Button Up Your Overcoat" is more reciprocal bullying than love song. Once the future Tin Woodsman makes clear that he's got more going on than the thing with the eyebrows he really grows on you. His non-musical scenes with Pallette are also good, especially a bit that must be one of the first scenes in which men invade a women's locker room. The idea is that Jack must get in there to recover the ring he gave to Angie way back when while she's showering, so that he isn't disinherited for losing a family heirloom. This is a country-club locker room so cocktails are served by a black woman in a nurse's uniform. Pallette's idea is that the boys play plumbers, and in their fake moustaches I'll be damned if they aren't spitting images of Mario and Luigi, except for the derby Pallette sports. There's good farcical slapstick here, and to top it off the plumbers escape by mugging two women, stuffing them in lockers and stealing their clothes. After that the conclusive golf match can't help but be anticlimactic. The main romantic plot often seems like an afterthought, so overshadowed are the stars by the comedians, but Carroll and Rogers are pleasant enough not to be as unwelcome as, say, the musical leads in a Marx Bros. picture. They certainly do nothing to suppress the spirit of fun that prevails here. There's pathos, too, though you have to read that into a picture that was popular, according to reports, despite being obsolete in many ways the moment it appeared. There's a temptation to treat anything that survives from this brief, doomed moment as a treasure, even though much of what does survive is as bad, if not worse with age now, as it was thought to be then. Fortunately, with Follow Thru you don't have to resist that temptation too much -- and that's just how the film would want it

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Pick Yourself Up: Dorothy Fields and the American Musical Charlotte Greenspan (pdf format)

Northwest Chicago Film Society summer preview - Chicago ... Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune

Follow Thru | Chicago Reader | Movie Times & Reviews

Follow Thru (1930) - Lloyd Corrigan - film review Films de France

Follow Thru Review | TVGuide.com

New York Times JACK HALEY ON THE SCREEN; He Takes Honors in Talkie of "Follow Thru" at Paramount

Coscarelli, Don

BUBBA HO-TEP

USA (92 mi) 2002

Bubba Ho-Tep Henry Sheehan

Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-Tep is nominally a horror comedy about an aged Elvis Presley, alive in an East Texas nursing home, who, with the help of an equally elderly old man who claims to be JFK (despite his black skin), tangles with a soul-sucking mummy who stalks the night wearing a cowboy hat and boots.

But silly fun though it may be – and when it comes to laughs, it’s a blast – this strange movie operates on a myriad of mind-blowing levels. Far from a simple send-up of pop culture, it carefully avoids mere camp humor and ordinary parodies of Elvisania and horror conventions. Instead, it uses its gently bizarre sense of humor to plumb questions of identity, both as experienced personally by characters in the movie and then by members of the audience as participants in an on-going drama of popular culture. At the same time, and with equal sensitivity, it insists on treating the process of aging in a remarkably serious, if frequently hilarious, way. It can merge the laughs and poignancy because Coscarelli, (who besides directing, wrote the screenplay based on an award-winning short story by Joe R. Lansdale) knows that dismay over seeing life reduced to basic bodily functions goes hand-in-hand with sorrow over life’s missed chances.

The movie’s unique tone is set immediately by an opening tracking shot into the room where an overweight Elvis, a thinning pompadour still intact, lies in a semi-light that marks his institutional days. Right away, we hear Elvis on voice-over, a device that continues throughout the film. Normally a risky maneuver, it works here thanks to the screenplay and to Bruce Campbell who plays Elvis, not just with an effective impersonation, but as an authentic character. That voice is slowed and haunted, overtaken by sighs, its sentences hinged on regrets.

But funny. For Elvis’s musing on the vicissitudes of old age is focused on a penile growth that, somehow or another, is going to have to be flattened or cut in the near future. But serious. For those musings soon grow from the physical to the emotional, as the infirmity of his love-making equipment leads to recollections of the infirmities of his love, and his grief over the way he squandered the affections of his wife and daughter. But funny because, for soon the nurse shows up and… Well, you get the idea.

The horror plot spends most of its time on the back burner as Coscarelli opens with a long and playful investigation of identity. While we first assume that Elvis is Elvis, the nursing home staff insists that he’s Sebastian Haff, an Elvis impersonator who fell into a 20-year-coma after falling off a stage. Elvis has an explanation; fed up with his life of drugs and dissipation, he had sought out Haff and exchanged lives with him. Thanks to his voice-over and flashback scenes, we tend to believe him, despite whole volumes of modern cinema that instruct us to distrust narrators (see Godard’s Masculin/Feminin). But Coscarelli cleverly uses our need for the hero of his movie to be Elvis as bait. Whether we’re fans or just want to see a hero possess an identity he believes in, we seize upon the flashbacks as "proof," even though they’re mere narrative devices within a fiction.

This is only the beginning of the identity game. Elvis himself is skeptical of claims made by other residents. He declares the African-American JFK (Ossie Davis), to be "certifiable." While that case settles into a comfortable ambiguity, there’s a third peripheral character, an old man who now believes he’s a Lone Ranger-type character who everyone knew when he was just a nice old guy. Here we have three iconic identities in different stages of development. The movie, to be sure, nudging us towards judgments over their relative veracities, to the point where we can’t really say they’re all open-ended. But compared to the sealed, bonded narratives of the vast majority of most contemporary films, it’s a riotous masquerade.

Even then, Coscarelli – whose cinematic high-water mark had previously been the 1979 horror film Phantasm (and not the mediocre sequels) – has another layer to add. When Elvis is watching his movies on television, he comments on how bad they became as he stayed in Hollywood and how he should have fired his manager, Col. Parker. Of course, if he had stayed in Hollywood till his old age, he would have appeared in just the kind of cheesy horror film that would feature a cowboy mummy sucking souls at an old folks home in East Texas.

My, my.

Naturally, at some point Elvis and JFK have to go out there and drill that mummy, and they do. Nothing ever gets scary, of course. The final confrontation begins with Elvis marching behind his walker and JFK buzzing in his electric wheelchair, all duded up in their most well-known duds. Still, Coscarelli has spent enough time on the low-budget fright front that he knows what to do, and he does it. Jaws do gape, bandages do burn.

While Bubba Ho-Tep’s low budget look helps it to a certain extent, Coscarelli doesn’t fetishize it. His set-ups are intelligent and always angled to the emotional heart of the matter. What he’s come up with his one of the most improbable marriages of silliness and pop-cult introspection ever attempted and certainly ever accomplished.

What a blast.

190. BUBBA HO-TEP (2002) | 366 Weird Movies Gregory J. Smalley from 366 Weird Movies, also seen here: Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)

Why Bubba Ho-Tep May Be the Most Perfect B-Movie Ever Made Cheryl Eddy

Cult Classic Film Review: Bubba Ho-Tep - Elaine Macintyre

Bubba Ho-tep · Film Review Bubba Ho-tep · Movie ... - The AV Club Scott Tobias

Bubba Ho-Tep Movie Review & Film Summary (2003) | Roger Ebert

Bubba Ho-Tep - Wikipedia

Cosmatos, George P.

RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II

USA (97 mi) 1985 ‘Scope

VideoVista Stephen Lee

This is the second film of this DVD trilogy starring Sylvester Stallone wearing his Rocky II body, well directed by George Cosmatos, who has managed to catch all of the stallion's muscle definitions using a variety of well-staged action poses. Stallone, who co-writes with James Cameron, follows Rambo's adventure in First Blood, which was a far better movie, using the same character and includes his C.O. played once more by Richard Crenna.

This enjoyable yarn takes our all American hero with his Tarzan hairstyle out of prison and back to Vietnam for a mission to photograph POWs if he can find any. Quickly losing his camera he decides instead to re-fight the war by himself in comic book style. Rambo: First Blood II is about the veterans of the war who are lost, trying to find answers and some recognition as patriots. Stallone shows our hero used, abused and deceived by both sides before returning to the cheers of some while striking fear in others. John Rambo makes a speech on behalf of all disgruntled 'Nam-vets and walks off toward another sequel to the strains of 'It's a long road, when you're on your own.' But is that all?

Well, no, it's not - I believe the film means more to the Yanks than any of us can possibly imagine as we Brits just see it as another highly entertaining action adventure. While writing this, the news reports Clinton's visit to Vietnam for the first time (he dodged the draft so never fought in the war) as supreme chief of American armed forces - a contentious move in every respect as he's the only President in history to have had the army ordered to salute him. Would he bring up the issue of American service men missing in action? (MIA was the title of a rival movie about POWs, with Chuck Norris, made a year earlier - but Rambo is the better movie.)

Remember back in 1985, when this was made, some superstars (Coburn, Shatner, Eastward and Redford among them) reportedly funded a mission to find American POWs. Did Rambo prick the conscience of a nation? Watching the star interview in the special features section, it's clear this was Stallone's intention. It also appears to be the norm in this disc's extra features to show the same clip or item over and over under different headers. Very annoying when one expects much trivia.

My favourite moment is when he camouflages himself in a mud wall only to open his sly eyes to take out another bad guy.

filmcritic.com drops off Rambo [Jeremiah Kipp]

There are times when I get completely fed up with the arrogance of human beings, forever in their hurry to make money and be a-number one. Petty tyrants in offices preside over minute typographic errors then lash out with tirades against their minimum wage employees, cowering in their cubicles under paper-strewn desks. Sardines pile into the subways breathing each other’s coffee and dry animal sweat. It's enough to drive someone mad.

Instead of heading to your local gun shop (or, in NYC, the neighborhood park) to pick up a pair of high powered machine guns and mow a path through thy fellow man, I suppose temporary (if mind-numbing) release can be found through the stupid slaughter of Rambo: First Blood Part II. It’s ignorant, but certainly conforms to expectations. It’s the Bernie Goetz of Vietnam movies.

Former Green Beret John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, who originated the character in First Blood) is enlisted to bring our prisoners of war back home on a government-funded rescue mission, but who would trust shifty-eyed company man Murdock (Charles Napier) and his orders to “take pictures” of the POW camp? (Murdock later reveals his stupidity when pulling out his choppers before Rambo can escape Vietnam; Rambo defined “I’ll be back” revenge before The Terminator recreated his hop-on-cop violence). This leads to Rambo’s inevitable capture at the hands of the Viet Cong, followed by torture at the hands of a Mad Russian General (Steven Berkoff, Beverly Hills Cop).

Once Rambo gets loose, the bullets fly and the audience bloodlust is satiated -- they bear witness to dead Vietnamese, dead Commies, and humiliated U.S. government officials who don’t understand Rambo’s existential crisis. No one will ever confuse this for a quality film, that's for sure. It's a macho fantasy created to convince Americans that we could have won Vietnam if only we'd trusted John Rambo. This muscle-bound killer ties a red handkerchief round his sweaty brow, picks up his high-powered rifle (or missile launcher, or jumbo knife, or rack of lamb) and kills the enemy. Boy, do we feel better now!

Hey… I'd sell you a bridge, but Rambo already blew it up.

Followed by a final sequel, Rambo III.

Rambo enthusiasts will want to run -- don't walk -- to pick up the new four-disc DVD set of the three Rambo movies (plus a disc full of extras). Admittedly, this isn't The Godfather collection, but each film has been carefully restored and enhanced with Dolby Digital and DTS audio, as well as a commentary track. Various documentaries pepper the movie discs and of course the extras disc, offering close to a full 24 hours of entertainment. And in pure Rambo style, it's all wrapped up in an impressive book-like package and bound in a metal case. As John Rambo himself might say: "Auuugggggrrhh!"

Salon (David Lazarus)

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Brian Calhoun)

Rambo First Blood, Part II "I remember it differently," by Mike Felker from Jump Cut

EyeForFilm.co.uk Gator MacReady

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Erich Schulte

eFilmCritic [Jack Sommersby] reviewing the Rambo Trilogy

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] reviewing the Rambo Trilogy

DVD Verdict Joel Pearce reviewing the Rambo Trilogy

Mathew Tschirgi reviewing the Rambo Trilogy

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] reviewing the Rambo Trilogy

Bullets n Bloodshed Cannon

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley)

Read the New York Times Review » Vincent Canby

Costa, Pedro

Pedro Costa bio and filmography from The Auteur’s Notebook

Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader, also seen here: Cinema of the Future

Adventure: An Essay on Pedro Costa Shigehiko Hasumi from Rouge

A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing Pedro Costa from Rouge

COLOSSAL YOUTH (Juventude em Marcha) A- 94

Portugal France Switzerland (155 mi) 2006

It hurts to see these horrors that I don't want to see

An intensely challenging film with very little action, or even movement, most of it shot in near darkness with just the briefest glimpse of light, so that half of a face or just a portion of the screen is in the light, the rest remains engulfed in shadow or darkness, using a slow, funereal pace, beautifully shot by the filmmaker himself as well as cinematographer Leonardo Simões. Set in the dilapidated slums of a condemned Kieslowski-esque Fontaínhas housing project just outside Lisbon, we follow a group of people originally from the Cape Verde islands, now seemingly isolated, poor, and alone. Even their language is a mix that is not really Portuguese or a Cape Verdian dialect, but seems of a different world, which perfectly captures the essence of the people we see, who appear shadowy, ghost-like, as if they are apparitions outside the human realm. People here appear to be already dead and move at the pace of the undead, zombie-like, as if they’re barely alive. There’s an artificialized style throughout, where each frame is carefully composed maximizing the artistic, photogenic impact of every shot, usually starting with still figures, a man sitting outside a housing complex in a red chair, eventually rising to go inside, or a pitch black room with a small square of light, where a man instinctively moves toward the light, or opening in the golden hues of a dark stairway, where we hear voices from people’s lives offscreen, where a shadowy figure emerges from a silhouette in the darkness.

Ventura is the lead character, a former construction worker who describes the past in much the same manner as the present, making them indistinguishable, where he is seen from time to time wearing a head bandage from a scaffold injury that occurred sometime in the unknowable past, now a retired, severe looking, sixtyish black man dressed in a black suit wearing a white shirt throughout the film, who complains that his wife (or someone who resembled her, he’s really not sure) has left him after cutting him in a fight and destroying all his belongings (which are seen flung out a window in the opening scene), so he spends his time making the rounds of all the people he knows, calling many of them his “children,” a vague label that is vociferously denied by one but routinely accepted by others. Ventura’s visits include conversations that may at times be hauntingly poetic, but always remain overwhelmingly detached, people who have lost touch with the world, where Ventura resembles, though in a completely non-religious context, the role of a traveling priest listening to the various confessions of a hard to reach underclass who offer extended monologues, creating familiar scenes of stylized tableaux, revisiting the same people in the exact same rooms throughout the film, elevating their sense of dignity and worth by allowing intimate moments to be shared, giving voice to the voiceless though utilization of repetition and pace that leaves one drained and exhausted after awhile, reminiscent of the scene in Tarkovsky’s NOSTALGHIA (1983) where a man tries to walk the length of a dry swimming pool with a lit candle, returning to the beginning each time it goes out, starting all over again numerous times, where the length of the scene keeps getting extended and seems to drag on forever in one of the more exasperating sequences ever created. There is a recurring theme of a letter he has composed and memorized in an attempt to get his wife back, where the verses of the letter are repeated several times, each with a slightly varying ending and tone, always suggestive of yearning for and an absence of love. The film is so dreamlike that it barely resembles reality, instead it has a highly choreographed, stagy feel to it, yet the carefully constructed darkened images appear designed to capture the last flicker of light before being completely extinguished.

One of the themes is relocation, destruction of the old, construction of the new, as Ventura reluctantly makes the transition to leave his dilapidated slum world for a brand new “white room,” inventing the number of people in his family to increase the size of the room, thinking all his family can live there, much like a church constructs a building hoping to fill it with parishioners, yet Ventura’s white room remains strangely empty. There’s a beautiful moment midway through the film when Ventura plays a record, where all of a sudden there’s this vibrant energy in the air that wasn’t there before, where we are reminded just for a moment of something enjoyably familiar, before that too disappears, leaving us to rediscover life in the vacuum left in its wake. Purging the familiar, the recognizable from the film creates an eerie film where life as we know it has been stripped away, depriving the audience of any comfort factor other than the continually interesting film composition, which resembles the darkness in David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD (1977), yet this is filmed in color, where most of the color has been drained or bleached out of the frame. Even if much of the film is exasperating, Costa has found an original method to imprint his vision into our subconscious, literally keeping the mood of his images in our heads long after the film is over. Add to that the somber reality of the people who inhabit this human purgatory, where much of what we remember, particularly enhanced by the music that plays over the end credits, feels like an elegy or a requiem, providing an almost classical sense to this highly individualized and in many ways unpleasant journey.

Note — Ventura’s memorized letter is adapted from French surrealist poet Robert Desnos, who write to his wife while he was interned at a concentration camp for his work with the French resistance. He died of typhoid shortly after the camps were liberated. All the poems he wrote while a prisoner were destroyed, so this letter is one of the rare examples of his writings from this period, sometimes published in the form of a poem entitled "Letter to Youki." This is the original letter:

My love,

Our suffering would be unbearable if we couldn't think of it as a passing and sentimental illness. Our rediscoveries will adorn our life for at least thirty years. As for me, I'm taking a deep drink of youth, and I'll come back to you full of love and strength! During our separation a birthday, mine, was the occasion of a long fantasy about you. Will my letter reach you in time for your birthday? I would've liked to give you 100,000 American cigarettes, a dozen dresses from the great couturiers, an apartment on the rue Seine, a car, the cottage in the Compiègne forest, the one on Belle-Isle and a little four-sous bouquet. While I'm gone, keep flowers around all the time; I'll pay you back for them. All the rest, I promise it to you later.

But above all else, drink a bottle of good wine and think of me. I hope our friends won't forget to visit you that day. I thank them for their courage and devotion. About a week ago I got a package from JL Barrault. Kiss him for me, and Madeleine Renaud too; the package is proof my letter got through. I haven't gotten an answer; I'm waiting for one every day. Kiss everyone in the family, Lucienne, Aunt Juliet, Georges. If you run into Passeur's brother, give him my best and ask him if he knows anyone who can help you if you need it. What's happening with my books at the printer's? I've got a lot of ideas for poems and novels. I regret not having the freedom or the time to write them. But you can tell Gallimard that within three months after I get back he'll have the manuscript of a love story in an entirely new genre. I'm ending this letter for today.

Today, July 15th, I got four letters, from Barrault, Julia, Dr. Benet, and Daniel. Thank them and apologize for me for not answering. I'm allowed only one letter a month. Still no word from you, but they send me news of you; that will be for the next time. I hope that letter is our life to come. My love, I embrace you as tenderly as propriety allows in a letter which has to pass the censor. A thousand kisses. Have you gotten the little trunk I sent to the hotel in Compiègne?

Robert

Time Out

With ‘Colossal Youth’, cult hemler Pedro Costa continues his preoccupation with the rites and rituals of small town Portugal, the most widely seen example of which is his 1997 exercise in stark minimalism ‘Bones’. A bucolic reverie of the sort that seldom gets a mainstream cinematic release, the film prioritises rhythm and texture over any form of conventional narrative and Costa’s proficiency as a director is writ large in the deft way he stretches the film’s visibly meager budget. It’s a challenging 155 minutes, but it’s a film that you can easily drift too and from while retaining a clear sense of place, person and purpose. —David Jenkins

Colossal Youth Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

I wouldn't be surprised if the grade went up on a second viewing; since the final two reels were subtitled in French and my reading comprehension isn't what it should be, I'm hedging my bets with an 8. This is the second Costa film I've seen, and whereas Ossos seemed to make more dramatic use of Costa's penchant for stylization (or perhaps I should say, managed to harness it for more explicitly dramatic purposes), Colossal Youth elevates this style to the level of an epic tone poem, an extended visit to the slums that uses masterful lighting, framing, and modulated non-professional performances to allow us to see the urban underclass with fresh, radiant eyes. At first I found that Youth didn't look as striking as Ossos, or its own publicity stills for that matter. Costa uses grainy video to enter the world of the dilapidated Fontaínhas projects just prior to their demolition, and although I'm not sure what celluloid might have brought to the film, soon enough it's clear what video adds to it. Just as Colossal Youth is in large part about the location of beauty amid the anguish of slum life, the creative adaptation necessary for coping with a paucity of options, Costa's formal approach is first and foremost about adjusting our eyes to video, to its lack of definition and its strange registration of movement, so that we can eventually come to see its unique way of capturing low-light situations, or its advantages with respect to duration and shooting ratio. Costa's film implicitly asks us to give up certain seductive qualities of celluloid so that we can come to appreciate video's own special properties. Above all, video allows Costa to spend a lot of time in the company of Ventura, Vanda, and Lento, giving them the space to articulate their unique characters with minimal interruption. Ventura, for example, with his air of a depressive street patrician, given to pensive observation and (to the chagrin of the film's detractors) incantatory repetition, usually remains stock still in the frame, burning his luminous black frame into the pixels and impressing himself upon our consciousness. Over time, and through Costa's patient, insistent observation, Ventura "comes to presence," in the Heideggerian sense. He is allowed to transcend the categories that both well-intentioned liberal cinema and the social bureaucracies have slotted for him. Colossal Youth bathes him in shafts of almost heavenly light, bringing him forth and challenging the imposed, even ritualized invisibility that society has typically imposed. Likewise, Vanda, the garrulous single mother and former heroin addict, gets to launch into a manic monologue that, over time and through the cluttered verbiage, allows us to see who she might really be -- a scattered thinker, a loving but distracted mother, a fighter, an effortless comedienne. This isn't to say that Costa idealizes his subjects. We clearly perceive Vanda's mania, just as Ventura's endless repetitions of the poem following Clotilde's departure speak to his traumatized frailty. But Costa and his film embrace these contradictions as part of the human tapestry, and nothing to fear. (Likewise, Ventura's run-ins with the museum guard, himself a former slum-dweller, are socially charged, but Costa refrains from judging the guard's obligation to give Ventura the bum's rush.) Like Straub and Huillet before him, Costa practices a cinema of exacting materialist rigor, and this allows him to re-see the world for us in ways that have significant consequences for how we, his audience, might behave in the world. After all, as I watched Colossal Youth, I had to think about my own reactions and where they came from. I had to wonder why I was surprised when Lento dished up a plate of food and, instead of digging in, passed it over to Ventura. I had to remember that part of the reason that Costa's hieratic lighting effects were possible was the fact that his subjects were living with holes in their ceilings. They must let the rain come in, but Costa challenges us to remember that they let sunshine in as well.

[ADDENDUM 7/30/07 -- Although I have not yet had the opportunity to view Colossal Youth again, I have been able to catch up with one of Costa's earlier films, 1995's Casa de Lava. Unlike Youth, Lava features professional actors in its main roles, and mostly takes place on the island of Cape Verde rather than amidst the Cape Verdean community in Portugal The film certainly has its strong points, but it shows a youngish filmmaker still finding his way, and in terms of both cinematic craft and qualities of seduction, cannot compare with the other Costa efforts I've seen. (The quantum leap in confidence and approach between Lava and Ossos two years later is particularly striking.) At any rate, I mention Casa de Lava, because of two key moments in the film. First, Leão, the injured laborer played by Isaach de Bankolé, has an unsent letter in his pocket at the time of his accident. Later in the film, his nurse Mariana (Inês de Medeiros) reads the letter and, lo and behold, it is the exact same poem Ventura will endlessly recite in Colossal Youth -- "I wish I could give you a hundred thousand cigarettes, a dozen fancy dresses, a car, the little lava house you've always wanted . . ." And later in the film, young Tina (Sandra do Canto Brandão) is shown dancing in the street, at which point she exclaims, "Juventude em marcha!" (The subtitles translate the exclamation literally, as "Youth on the march!")

So, what does this all mean? Is Costa given to little intertextual drop-ins and remixes from previous works, or are these master tropes all worked out well in advance, intended to form a kind of private mythology? Perhaps, but this isn't nearly as precious at it might seem at first, and in fact serves a very deliberate aesthetic function, one I was unable to appreciate having only seen Ossos and Youth, not thinking in these terms at the time. The poem, it turns out, isn't really Ventura's, or Leão's, or even Costa's. [NOTE: In the moments after posting this, Chris Stults helpfully provided the actual reference -- Robert Desnos' "Letter to Youki." Costa, however, makes a few key changes to the text.] The poem, positioned in the film as heartfelt testimony, is partially that (Ventura's character expressing his feelings with the words of another), but partially something else -- a highly mannered, bardlike refrain, a poetry reading in the slums. In this regard, Costa subverts the presumed documentary / anthropological dimensions of his work in Fontainhas by giving it an artificial shape. What's more, this makes Ventura, Vanda, Lento and crew co-conspirators in generating a highly formalized work of cinema. To what end? Well, for one thing, this means that when I conjectured that Costa's shooting ratio allowed his performer-subjects to gradually reveal themselves, I was falling prey to the kind of liberal assumptions Costa and company are out to thwart. Colossal Youth is a movie, so why are Ventura or Vanda required or expected to provide any more of a glimpse of themselves as human beings than, say, Natalie Portman or Bill Paxton? Because they're poor? By channeling Ventura's seemingly genuine pain into a preexisting text that Costa used in it multiple films, the film actually finds the performer committed to obscuring his "true self" through artistic means. It's cinema, nothing more or less.

So part of what Colossal Youth accomplishes -- and what I now see as an integral component of Pedro Costa's project -- is the activation of faulty assumptions. Somehow, the very act of going into Fontainhas and collaborating with its residents to create a rarified aesthetic object -- something much more like Pickpocket or Mouchette than The Shame of the Cities or You Have Seen Their Faces -- feels wrong, and that feeling-wrong is precisely what is wrong. If we're ever to really understand who Ventura is, or who Vanda is, it is mandatory that we stop seeing them as derelict, as fringe-dwellers, as "the homeless." The political dimension of Costa's work, then, is inseparable from the aesthetic, because the transformation of subjects -- whose very being has been coded as a "political issue" -- into actors (in all senses of the word) affords them the necessary space to explore creation as a non-subsistence endeavor. Likewise, Colossal Youth asks its viewers to consider it and its performers beyond the base business of scratching out a living. (Costa affords his troupe the luxury of "wasting" our time! Ironically, the homeless and itinerant seem to have more time for matters of composition and painterly effects of light than their bustling, "productive" counterparts.) Costa's aesthetic, finally, is one that collides fits of Cassavetean performance with ritualized modernist poetics and the dense, vibrant colors and volumes of classical European painting, perhaps because all are equally "indulgent," "wasteful," "profligate," and stubbornly unwilling (rather than "constitutionally incapable"!) of getting to the point, harnessing their energies to the productive dictates of a purely communicative documentary art. The joke, of course, is that the "waste" Costa and his friends produce requires infinite patience and hard work. Likewise, as any drifter can tell you, you really have to bust your ass to live outside the official strictures of capital. Being a bum ain't what it used to be.

d+kaz [Daniel Kasman]

The world in Colossal Youth looks as if ash has blocked out the sun; not the sun that shines outside, although in the passages and alleys there too it is dim and festered, but rather it is the light on the inside that has turned to gloom. This is the light of the slums, and with the blindly, harsh whiteness of new lower-class State housing in Lisbon, Pedro Costa’s film is, first and foremost, a literal study of visual contrast. In front of the housing projects or inside their empty apartments the figure of Ventura (Ventura) is immense and imposing, his dark skin and black suit cutting angular shapes out of the rectilinear oppression. Back in the slums, he tends to blend into the decrepitude, into shadows that look and feel as if they have darkened the same corner for eons. Ventura still expresses the same weight, the same burdens of an unseen past, the same introspection and deep-set bewilderment, but this weight of character only seems to fit in when it wraps itself within the shadows of the shantytown. In a particularly memorable scene, Ventura and a daughter of his look off-screen and describe what seems to be the shapes, figures, and stories they see in the murk of the wall opposite, as someone could spot animals in clouds floating above. There is a social—and human—history so evident even off-screen in the slums, and one that possibly is in the process of literally being whited out by the future.

The film opens with Ventura’s wife—or, as he says, maybe a woman who is like her—throwing him and his belongings out of his room in the slums of Fontaínhas, an event that coincides with the old housing being torn down and its residents assigned apartments in the epically pristine State housing. From this point on the rest of the movie, like a darker, ghost story version of Ozu’s Tokyo Story, is a series of impromptu visits Ventura pays on his various children. If they are indeed his children (the precise relationships between nearly every character and Ventura are vague), than every one is by a different mother, and, at least at first, discombobulated by his homelessness and the rejection of his woman, Ventura can barely remember which one belongs to whom. The daughter he first talks to says he has the wrong house, the wrong daughter, and the second daughter he talks to (Vanda Duarte) reminds him that her mother has been dead for years. This sort of uncertainly about both space and time strictly in terms of personal, human history is continuous through Colossal Youth. For example, it often seems like Ventura is paying his children a visit for the first time in years (of, more poetically and radically, that his specter is more of a ghost than a living person), just as Costa’s cramped framing and disembodied apartments all seem like they are in the same vicinity but never connect up in a larger establishment of space. Everyone, everything, and every space seems to float there on its own, new and used or worn down through time. Ventura passes from space to space, person to person, past to past, with an aimless quality as if he were trying to add everything up by his mere presence, connecting the dots—his family, and from that himself—just by appearing on people’s doorsteps. The State offers Ventura (and his wife, in absentia) a new room in the projects, which Ventura impassively surveys and demands more rooms for his children. We do not know it yet, but this gathering under one roof will never happen. Back at the squalid shack of the friend that Ventura is staying with while he contacts his children and finds housing, the aging man composes a love letter to the distant wife of his temporarily roommate (Alberto Barros), but refuses to write it down and instead demands, through repetition, that his friend learn it learn it by heart. Emblematic of the film's cryptic temporality and spatial continuity, the scenes with the roommate seem to sometimes take place in flashback (to a time when Ventura was employed) but also perhaps on the islands of Cape Verde, as it is unclear whether workers from the islands are in the Fontaínhas slums or the other way around. The long remove of this heart rending recitation is the most moving of the film’s evocation of Ventura’s disconnection from his family, from a sense of home, and from his sense of self nurtured by his past and his kin.

Pedro Costa’s forlorn, austere film uses little camera movement, strict framing emphasizing small, enclosed living spaces, natural shadows, the texture of grain and darkness from his digital camera, silence, empty or still frames, and long, story-like monologues to express the desolation of Lisbon slums and the confused spiritual search of the film’s wayward, nearly passive protagonist. Almost invisibly blending documentary elements with fictional—as people like Ventura and Vanda Duarte were actual residents of the area, and many of the stories Ventura’s children tell are autobiographical—Costa lends a elegiac tone of monumentality, patience, and compassion to the banal and generally unseen or unexpressed lives of the slum residents, replete with drug addictions, haphazard work, distant and separated families, unpleasant pasts, and uncertain futures. Colossal Youth gives as much weight to the physical presence of its characters—be it the often-posed stoicness of Ventura, even while relaxing, or someone like Duarte’s sublimely natural inhabitation of her State apartment bedroom—as it does to the power of the children’s drawn-out stories and the camera’s emblematic, minimalist evocation of living spaces. Vanda Duarte’s epic story of the birth of her daughter, for instance, is amazing as it weaves between comedy, banality, suffering, fortitude, family resilience and love, but it is complimented by the strangeness of realizing that Ventura, listening periodically actively and impassively, does not know the story of his granddaughter’s birth, as well as Duarte’s bedroom interaction with her daughter and Ventura’s fidgety, uncomfortable position on her bed as she tells her tale. The contrast between her sparsely furnished and glaringly white bedroom of her State apartment and the personal detail and wavering emotional re-telling of her story forms yet another of the film’s masterful contrasts within its visual texture and human compassion, the struggle of people to hold themselves up and together despite their situation, a struggle Ventura faces throughout the film. From these kind of scenes Colossal Youth by and large successfully navigates away from the pretensions its formal monumentality can imply, and instead captures the living grandeur, weight, history, desolation, and ingrained, unspoken emotions of even the most everyday of things, people, and spaces.

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] - London Film Festival report

Falling through the air with minimal resistance : Colossal Youth

Repetitive, elliptical, gnomic episodes in the life of Ventura, a sixtyish gent living in an unspecified corner of an unspecified city. His wife Clotilde leaves him, destroying their furniture as she goes. Ventura, dejected, spends his time visiting his "children" (who call him 'Papa'). They talk. He listens. He talks. They listen. Conversations occasionally take place. Repetition and simplicity are crucial. Costa has gone on record that he intends certain sections of the audience to walk out at certain junctures: the film must therefore be seen in public, where the walkouts themselves become part of the experience.

The film is a contemplation of light on faces, buildings, furniture, walls, doors. The source and nature of the light is ambiguous: the street lights in this area seem unusually bright, lighting up the outsides of blocks of flats so that at midnight it seems bright as noon. The camera almost invariably stays fixed, at a certain distance above ground, looking up at the characters - all of whom are people in effect playing themselves. Ventura is a sculptural presence - perhaps in recognition of the English-language title (an album and track** by Welsh band Young Marble Giants: the 'giants' and 'colossi' being in turn a reference to the kouros sculptures from ancient Greece).

Is the dialogue written by Costa, or improvised by the participants? Impossible to tell: the 'characters' seem entirely natural and unforced, which is a minor miracle considering none of them are "actors" in the traditional sense. Their dialogue is often concerned with issues of family: their children, memories of past events involving other family members. Are these people actually related? Or are such terms as "papa" and "son" tokens of familiarity between neighbours/friends (as in Chinese films such as Taking Father Home?) There is no way of knowing, based solely on the information presented to us - so why simply not take things at face value?

Monologues abound - some of them unusually protracted. Duration is a significant element, but considerations of time become increasingly elastic - perhaps even irrelevant. A particular love-letter, written by Ventura for an illiterate friend (son?), is repeated throughout the film: the beginning is always the same (becomes in effect the picture's complex mantra) but the ending always changes - and the final reading is capped by a droll "punchline": the austerity of Costa's approach makes it seem unlikely, but a certain wry comedy can often be extracted from the picture's tough, seemingly unyielding meat.

Interiors and exteriors are shown; certain intersections of walls and ceilings take on particular significance. "It hurts to see these horrors, that I don't want to see." The camera is placed just so. The lighting is carefully arranged. Shadows are crucial. Aspects of horror, aspects of comedy. The strangeness proves compelling, even hypnotic: scenes are repeated with mild variation. A small number of locations is used, to which we return again and again in autistic fashion. The effect of the film is nothing if not cumulative.

Time loses its meaning. We navigate our way into the future by means of the reel changes: red pen marks on the side of a frame, every twenty minutes. The reel changes become epochal shifts; the squarish screen a hole in our reality through which further holes may be observed. Ventura, briefed on the many advantages of a small, spotlessly white flat in a brand new block, points his long arm, long finger towards the corner of the room: "It's full of spiders."

Only a fraction of the film's mysteries will yield themselves up to us, no matter how intently we address them. Colossal Youth is composed of the mysteries of a family's existence, their inter-relations, events from the past. But it is primarily a psychological portrait of Ventura: an impressionist map of fragments which can only make a partial sense to any observer. Colossal Youth is a different kind of cinematic experience: beyond slow, beyond difficult. Unforced and uninflected, a ritual in the dark, an incantation (the spell, the love-letter begins "nha creceu, my love...") The tone is one of elegant, bemused, resigned despair.

We squat in rooms of resigned, bemused melancholia, occupied by Ventura and his interlocutors. 'Youth' is invariably elswehere, just off-camera, just over the horizon into the past. Ventura's head is sometimes bandaged, sometimes not. A list of "do's and don'ts for residents" is mentioned. Colossal Youth demands a subjective response (colossal achievement? colossal bore?): it is painterly, philosophical, sculptural, emphatically cinematic. Ventura wears odd socks.

Cinema Scope Magazine (Mark Peranson)

“Why make it simple when you can make it complicated?”—Jacques Rivette, quoted by Pedro Costa

Equally misunderstood, Pedro Costa’s cryptic Colossal Youth has a similarly Rivettian narrative, with possible unmotivated flashbacks, probable ghosts, and drawn-out scenes that appear improvised (some may be, but considering that Costa rehearsed and re-rehearsed, then shot a total of 320 hours over 15 months, with each scene having as many as 30 takes, I expect that the words were carefully chosen). As opposed to Kelly, Costa lets these scenes play out very much in real time (a style noticeably lacking in most of the rest of the Competition, Ceylan aside). And he doesn’t try to connect them—the film is kind of like a Surrealist assemblage, where the pleasure is found in the coincidences between what appear to be random, unconnected episodes.

Want a plot summary? Don’t look to Variety. Colossal Youth is pretty hard to synopsize: the main character, the 50-ish Ventura, is new to Costa’s studio system. He was the victim of an accident that caused him to retire at an early age with a head injury; as the film begins, his wife Clothilde has left him and destroyed his belongings—maybe. Many of his friends, such as Vanda Duarte (now off the smack and with child), have been relocated from the demolished Fontaínhas neighbourhood to a housing block in Casal Boba, whose antiseptic spaces Costa shoots with ample headroom, deliberately juxtaposed to the remaining, cramped hovels, framed in expressionist angles and appearing like a run-down film set. Ventura, too, needs a new roof over his head, but is concerned that there will not be enough room in his apartment for his children, who, we come to realize, are either numerous or nonexistent. As he encounters them, he hears their deeply personal stories of struggle, and for one, who seeks to communicate with his family back home in Cape Verde, Ventura repeats an eloquent love letter he once wrote, exhorting his illiterate friend to memorize it. The past is in danger, and memory may be all that we have left.

The image, however, is very much present. A luminous glow caused by natural light reflecting from mirrors coats Ventura and his friends, revealing them as otherworldly presences, souls unable to find rest. Ventura’s haunted mien is that of the living dead; the zombies are walking again. The corporeal walkouts at Cannes, highly expected, began en masse during Vanda’s first scene, the camera unmoving in her doll’s house-like bedroom, as she engages Ventura in a seemingly endless conversation about diapers, or something; hacking up half a lung, she becomes trapped in some kind of loop (is it the methadone talking?), and to those not on her (or Costa’s) wavelength, I can easily see how it could be torture, especially on the ninth day of the festival. “That scene is in that place to get everyone out of the theatre who doesn’t want to be there, right?” I asked him. His answer: “Exactly.”

This is so out of the zeitgeist I don’t know where to begin—and defiantly political in a festival that has eschewed truly promoting Costa’s kind of cinema. (Even the Straubs settled for Un Certain Regard with Sicilia!.) Like Kelly, Costa says his film is made for the youth—who, in the film, are represented by Vanda’s young daughter—and it’s true, quite counterintuitively, that most of Costa’s supporters at Cannes turned out to be younger critics. Is the world changing? Maybe one way of looking at Costa’s domestic DV cinema is as a parallel to the worldwide trend of once-daring spectators retreating to the privacy of their own homes to watch films. In Vanda’s horrifyingly white room, the television is always blaring, sometimes Brazilian telenovelas, once, quite amusingly, a nature show—“No more Mr. Crocodile!” she cackles, as an animal (a cinema?) is engorged.

In Colossal Youth, as in In Vanda’s Room, Costa lets us hear the words, but the difference here is that they are clearly well-thought out, rehearsed, highly artistic presentations that are precise, penetrating, and overwhelming. The festival’s highlight occurs when one character, a homeless man named Paolo the Crutch, is in a hospital room for one of many operations on his leg, requiring a scaffold-like device to stand (immediately bringing to mind Ventura’s accident, where he fell from a scaffold). Lying curled up in the corner—the camera, of course, immobile—Paolo delivers an astonishing soliloquy to Ventura that explodes all of the prejudices any viewers might have about the poor, expressing his anguish at being unable to support himself financially (trained as a goldsmith, he’d love to work, but nobody will give him a job). He moves on to a heartbreaking story about the mother who refuses to have anything to do with him. All he wants now is the address of his daughter, who he hasn’t seen in 15 years—Paolo has heard on the streets that he’s a grandfather.

The other mother in this film primarily about fathers is, of course, Vanda, who, if you believe her kvetching, might not make it to the next Contracosta production. At one point Vanda proclaims she’s tired of suffering. Aren’t we all, I felt like yelling back, in what was another Cannes metaphor minute—not at this film, but at everything else that occupied time I could have spent writing, thinking, drinking, sunbathing, taking political action, anything. And the best thing about Cannes is that, despite it all, I take great solace in knowing that I’m not alone. I approached Costa on his way out of his typically eloquent press conference to congratulate him for his achievement, and even managed to get a smile. “So you saw the film already?” he asked, and I nodded. “No shit in there, is there?” No shit indeed.

The House Next Door [Kevin B. Lee]

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Life, Assembled One Room at a Time Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

NE CHANGE RIEN (Change Nothing) B 85

Portugal France (100 mi) 2009

France especially, with the familiar sound of the accordion heard throughout the streets of Paris, at least in the movies, is a musical city, and one whose culture thrives in the familiar art of the chansons, perhaps best depicted by Édith Piaf. One of the best film references is hearing Bernadette Lafont drown her sorrows by repeatedly listening to Piaf sing “Les Amants de Paris” (YouTube - La maman et la putain on YouTube 3:05), a 1948 recording in Eustache’s mammoth masterwork THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (1972). The tradition of actors that also have singing careers is hardly unique to France, as names that come to mind are Paul Robeson, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Panamanian salsa star Rubén Blades, or even Jennifer Lopez, while French popularity calls to mind Marlene Dietrich, Jacques Brel, Yves Montand, Charles Aznavour, Françoise Hardy, Anna Karina, hell, even Gérard Depardieu played an old broken down crooner in a recent film, while any number of current European actresses also have recording careers, as it’s a lucrative business. It might sound surprising to hear the name Jeanne Balibar mixed in with this group, as she’s considered a serious dramatic actress that works fairly regularly with Jacques Rivette, Olivier Assayas, or Arnaud Desplechin.

Nonetheless, here she is in a documentary as a singer being filmed mostly in the studio by Portuguese director Pedro Costa, no less, an intensely challenging artist, an experimenter and stark minimalist, as anti-commercial a director as there is working today, known for his lyrical yet near documentary sense of realism depicting socially downbeat subject matter. Typically in his films, nothing moves, as the director’s eye for film composition reveals everything the viewer needs to know. Here as well, shot entirely in Black and White by the director himself, the camera sits completely motionless as Balibar sits in a chair or stands at a mike with a cigarette, as there is barely any sign of movement. Amusingly a cat enters the picture midway through and provides more action than anything previously seen. However, each frame is carefully constructed, a blend of shadow and light where the prominent themes reflect feelings that live in the dark, songs of isolation and alienation, each one immersed in a melancholic wistfulness that sounds like a hushed quiet, as Balibar doesn’t sing so much as dramatically whisper or speak her songs.

Don’t expect Jonathan Demme here, as these are not completed works ready for the stage, instead this is a behind the scenes glimpse of the punishingly endless repetition required to get it stage ready. This is like listening to scales being played on the piano, where that’s all you get to hear, as the film is about the learning process, where guitarist/composer Rodolphe Burger seems like a driving musical force behind the operations, as the arrangements are stunning, all about tone and texture. Balibar bravely exposes herself in preliminary phases, where at times she flubs the words, or sings flat or off key, or in one particularly hypnotic number, the title number, doesn’t even sing at all, but just hums as she can’t find the natural rhythm of the piece, despite the musicians counting out the numbers of the beat, or hearing several playbacks which focus on a different musical instrument. Balibar’s timing does not reflect natural rhythm, as she’s continually off just a bit, which is why the endlessly repetitive rehearsal time is needed. For the viewer, however, this can get frustrating and may strain the limits and feel excessively monotonous, as we only hear individual sections, never the whole, so there were many walk outs during the screening, where entire rows disappeared. But the song, which we never hear in its entirety, is instead heard in various layers where either the voice or the musicians are isolated, experimenting and blending together different arrangements. My own personal favorite was the uncredited similarity to Curtis Mayfield - Superfly (on YouTube 3:53), accentuating the soul percussive intro and the funk horn arrangement, which they most likely tossed by the end.

What’s especially gratifying are the musical selections themselves, as they do reflect the imagination of a cinephile and a stage dramatist, including an eclectic grouping that ranges from the muted emptiness of Nico (Jeanne Balibar - These Days on YouTube 3:58) or the smoldering sexuality of Marlene Dietrich in heavily accented English (Jeanne Balibar - Torture on YouTube 3:11), where the all inclusive cigarette is her act as Balibar is nervous and not yet comfortable with her own rendition, to an operatic number from Offenbach’s La Périchole, where a voice coach never lets her get through more than a line or two without immediate criticisms and corrections, while also offering praise where indicated, but these constant interruptions go on through the entire song, which feels, from Balibar’s view, like it will never end. This is also shown in a live performance of some kind, but from a view behind the curtain of the piano player and a few of the singer’s backs. This was the closest we came to a finished product, as the hauntingly sad, socially relevant Brecht Mother Courage style lyrics were especially poignant. Perhaps the strangest choice was the eerie Peggy Lee theme to the film JOHNNY GUITAR (1954), barely recognizable in the film, offered here in an alternate take (not in the film, but on YouTube 4:07), Jeanne Balibar - Johnny Guitar, as opposed to previous versions Johnny Guitar (Title Song) sung by Peggy Lee (on YouTube 3:12), or an exotic instrumental here Johnny Guitar (on YouTube 3:17), or here Amaro Del - Johnny Guitar (on YouTube 3:20). For actual scenes from the film, Ne Change Rien (2005) [SHORT] 1/2 is on YouTube (6:30), where the opening song Rose (4:20) is in the film, while the rest is not. Unlike a YouTube rendition, however, nothing in the film ever feels that complete, but instead feels like the Basement Tapes rendition of scenes on the becoming of an artist. Never once do we feel Balibar is ready, but her quiet charm is effusive.

Review: Ne Change Rien Gerald Peary from The Boston Phoenix

The shadowy, low-key lighting is Wellesian, the fetishist close-ups are Sternbergian, and, says Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, the basic set-up of rehearsals of songs that are never witnessed in completion is inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's One Plus One. In that 1968 film, the Stones keep doing parts of "Sympathy for the Devil," and finally there's the entire song. Here we get more, as some numbers in this demanding black-and-white documentary play out start to finish. Ultimately, Costa manages an effective visual environment to showcase the startling versatility and formidable talents of French chanteuse Jeanne Balibar. She moves deftly from simulating Dietrich and Nico to singing Offenbach opera to offering a rocking, unexpected take on the unheralded theme song written by Peggy Lee and Victor Young for the cult 1954 Western Johnny Guitar.

Ne Change Rien : The New Yorker Richard Brody, October 12, 2009

The Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s documentary about the French actress Jeanne Balibar’s work toward a career as a singer is both a startling and lucid lesson in filming musical performance and a cinephilic marvel. Costa, who does his own camerawork, finds a good place for the camera and keeps it there until either the action or the film runs out. His sensual, velvety, high-contrast black-and-white images capture the exertions and exultations of music-making, and Costa eschews talking-head interviews and voice-overs in favor of trenchant depictions of technique, mood, and personal interactions. A fifteen-minute sequence of rehearsals, starting with vocalises and rhythm exercises and moving to lyrics and inflection, is a model of analytical wonder, and when Balibar sings Offenbach the shot aptly evokes pre-cinematic styles of photography and painting. But Costa is after bigger artistic game as well, starting with the title, which is part of a phrase, sampled in one of Balibar’s songs, that Jean-Luc Godard speaks in his video series “Histoire(s) du Cinéma.” Costa’s film was born under the virtual gaze of three artistic godfathers with original approaches to filming musical performances—Godard, Chris Marker, and Jean-Marie Straub—and, in the course of this bracing, fascinating feature, he conjures them all. In French.

Creative inspiration springs forth from endless repetition in Ne Change Rien, Pedro Costa’s non-fiction portrait of French singer/actress Jeanne Balibar. Shooting in luscious black and white and long, static takes, Costa opens on Balibar singing a sultry version of Kris Jensen’s “Torture” on stage before segueing to the recording studio, where endless rehearsals of the same few bars of a single song capture the artistic process in all its mundanity. Balibar’s vocal preparations for a forthcoming opera also fill out this reverential, non-chronological tribute to the toil that lies behind great performance, with the film interested in little more than intently gazing upon its deeply engaged subject. Ne Change Rien deliberately flirts with sleep-inducing sluggishness, trying its audience’s patience – and their interest in Balibar and her work – by fixating on the chanteuse’s over-and-over-again practices perfecting the ins and outs of a chorus or melody with her accompanying musicians. Nonetheless, the doc’s rigorousness can also be enthralling, thanks not only to Balibar's sumptuously smoky voice and sultry performances (her focused, passionate, exhausted countenance half-hidden in striking chiaroscuro), but also to accompanying visuals that have a dreamy, nightclub-inviting gorgeousness. Beautiful and somnambulistic, electric and enervating, it’s a film dreamily in love with the equally inspiring and tedious work of art.

Cannes 2009: Costa Brief ("Ne change rein," Costa) Daniel Kasman from The Auteur’s Notebook

Considering all his talk about work, the value of it as well as its humility, and especially how making movies is work too—good work, by ardent workers–it is hard to believe that Pedro Costa hasn’t made a movie about work until Ne change rein. Où gît votre sourire enfoui?, his documentary on the making of Straub-Huillet's Sicilia!, is about process, romance, and constestation—all elements of work, but this film is quite different. Spawned from a short documentaries he made with French actress Jeanne Balibar about her singing career, Ne change rein is a feature length dedication to Balibar’s alternative work (alternative to acting)—training, rehearsing, and performing music. Trading Sympathy for the Devil’s tracking shot studies of musical syncopation on film for Costa’s black and white digital shots of concrete zombie stoicism, Ne change rein sees nothing as straightforward as the glory of work, but instead miens the shadows for the poetry of bodies, voices, and faces trying again and again to produce sound—the right sound, and for it to be something transporting.

John Alton’s pools of light are in Costa’s claustrophobic film like a dawn Balibar is straining towards, being pulled by her wispy body and drawn face in languorous slow motion out of the dark of the studio, of the concert hall, out of this black chamber film of sound and vision that reverberates in closed spaces and does not escape—they are simply re-worked until perfected (if indeed this music can be perfected). In close-up like Dietrich under Sternberg’s lights, and in long shot like Christine Gordon in Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, Balibar’s efforts as a chanteuse, coaxed as they are by a vocal coach and a fellow musician in the studio, are a fragile thing, as unsure as the shadows and equally in danger of slipping into obscurity.

Missives from Cannes: There outta be a moonlight saving time ("Ne Change Rien," Costa) David Phelps from The Auteur’s Notebook

First, Ne change rien turns up the idea that most of Pedro Costa’s recent films are dress rehearsals. Where his major mentors, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, also film bodies possessed, there delivering fluent incantations of old times lost through stone-still poses, Costa’s characters, like Jacques Rivette’s, always seem to be looking for the incantation—the spell—the fix—to summon any sense of feeling, or inspiration in a deadened world (inspire, originally, meant to breathe). The difference between Costa and Rivette, then, would be that Rivette’s characters find it—a magic talisman usually, maybe a romance, a moment of creation or destruction—while Costa’s exiles fumble around with syringes, get up, and fall asleep (Ventura recollects and recites his past, but seems unable to even be moved by it himself). Even Costa’s documentary on Straub plays as dress rehearsal for moments of great artistic genius that only come through a lot of huffing, pacing, and muttered swearing, all on the part of Straub as the anti-Straubian hero. Straub-Huillet’s musical, Cronik Der Anna Magdalena Bach, shows Bach’s polished performances. Costa’s, Ne change rien, shows Jeanne Balibar trying bars and melodies and entire songs over and over, repeating phrases, getting cut-off by an off-screen instructor, trying to build energy and rhythm with the background music into one, united song. The whole thing’s a jam session.

It also turns out Costa’s been making something like concert films for years—Costa, similar to Straub, displacing the emotions of his statue-characters to the soundtrack, usually diffused bird songs and children’s yelps. Balibar’s ongoing concert’s not any different: a woman in a closed room, standing at a mike, looking as straight and still as Costa’s camera (as usual, left in place for minutes), while her voice and the music, piped in and out around her, do the emoting for her while she’s just hanging out and trying to find the beat. Still lives with music, almost.

But what’s different in Ne change rien, probably because it’s a documentary (though about as much a doc as Costa’s other recent films, which also show everyday life as staged by the people who live it), is the expressiveness of the actors, grinning when they find the mainline, hands flicking up and down on their knees. Costa lights bodies like solar flare lines and faces like half-moons, slight whites against pitch black backgrounds, so that a slight turn of the neck can reconfigure a face’s composition, bring new parts out from shadow; the look is almost charcoal. The result’s that players are only seen minimally—in silhouette with a hand waving back and forth, or just an eye and right curl of the mouth—so that the smallest gestures express maximally. The opening shot, the simplest shot from a stage right wing as the musicians come out and start, makes stage lights look like stars, the act a constellation. The movie’s just people jamming, superficially his Poor Little Rich Girl, but Costa, as usual, gives the most banal acts metaphysical weight: as in a dream—my dreams, anyway, half-awake—starting with a half-formed image and a montage of sounds and voices, building, that gradually find their bodies (and what's maybe most dream-like is the tangential realism: an off-screen voice correcting Balibar's "v"s and saying "I like consonants too").

Costa, of course, would say otherwise, that his job is just to be in service of his performers and let them express themselves totally. And Balibar, with her low, breathy wail she fades in and out like an organ, and lifts girlishly till it sounds like it’ll break—not a great singing voice, but a great voice—is the central mystery. Costa just accentuates it, through the light, through the editing, which seems arbitrary at first, but turns out to be cycling through the same scenes in new takes or further developments; as in his last few films, each scene is a permutation off the other, as Costa tapes Balibar singing all types of songs, to see how her voice shapes them all the same (as Hollywood directors used to dress Jennifer Jones up in all classes of dresses to try to find the same, central personality all of them fit equally well). Like almost all of Costa’s films, Ne change rien is about an exile’s search for self-expression.

All this posed hypothetically, as usual, a couple hours later.

Ne change rien | Reverse Shot Damon Smith, 2009

No mere documentary, Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s enthralling Ne change rien is a cinematic offering laid at the feet of its bewitching singer-star, Jeanne Balibar. She’s glimpsed at music rehearsals, live club performances, and in studio sessions, meticulously honing vocal phrases and adjusting tempo with exactly the same attention to precision that Costa brings to his own rigorously arranged compositions. The lithe, luminous actress has a robust career in France, where she’s appeared in films by Jacques Rivette (Va savoir) and Arnaud Desplechin (My Sex Life... ) as well as numerous theater productions. She also moonlights as a chanteuse (or perhaps it’s the other way around), fronting a crackerjack quartet whose whirring loops and effects-driven guitar textures create a coolly luxuriant cushion for her throaty songs of tortured love. An ardent cinephile, Costa has cited Godard’s One Plus One as an inspiration for his approach here, which eschews voiceover and interviews in favor of moody, atmospheric detail and abundant use of long takes. But he also applies the distinctive, low-light visual style he developed for In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth, a tack that aligns this sultry music doc as much with the mise-en-scène of classic cinema (Von Sternberg, Nick Ray) and T Magazine–style fashion portraiture as it does with Straub-Huillet (a salient touchstone for the auteurist director) or ultrahip band-in-the-studio genre artistry.

In 2005, Costa shot a 12-minute backstage rehearsal with Balibar for a short (later included on a Japanese box set), then expanded the material for this feature. Shot in high-contrast black-and-white on digital video, Ne change rien is a masterwork of chiaroscuro lighting, a study in the void between the visible and invisible: faces and objects, partially illuminated by conic rays and lambent moons from a single light source (a window, a keylight), gleam in the primordial darkness. The footage, captured entirely indoors, often in cramped spaces with low-angle fixed-camera shots, is bathed in nightfall, an immersive technique that makes spatial depth appear chasmic and the sonic textures that emerge from within it hard to resist. To call it a “concert film” is misleading, since the three live performances we do see in their gauzy, dreamlike entirety (a smoky rendition of “Torture” kicks off the film) comprise only a fraction of screen time. The film is instead an homage to the creative process of Balibar and her collaborators (French art-rock hero Rodolphe Burger, formerly of Kat Onoma, is the band’s guitarist and de facto music director) and a trancelike experiment in pure-cinema aesthetics.

Costa’s use of the long-take form in Ne change rien gives him ample room to foreground the role that repetition and variation play in the mysterious alchemy of music-making. Most of these process sequences center on Balibar’s attempts to master tempo, phrasing, breath control, and in one amusing interlude, the stern directives of an off-screen voice coach picking apart every syllable of her vocalizations as she rehearses for a stage production of Offenbach’s La Périchole. (“Make your consonants lighter, it’s not an elegy,” the older female instructor says, stopping every half-measure to correct her pitch and pronunciation until Balibar, exhausted, loses her patience and swears.) While it’s charming to watch Balibar, normally a model of sleek poise and Gallic sophistication, recoil from the absurdity of such self-disciplinary tedium, elsewhere she comes across as a committed artist who relishes the challenge of squaring her limited range as a soloist with the equally daunting demands of professional recording and songwriting.

Balibar and Costa are both perfectionists who aren’t willing to take short cuts (in his case, quite literally) in achieving their vision. In one marathon sequence that neatly defines their mutually compatible pace and artistic ambition, Balibar sits with Burger listening to a sample of Curtis Mayfield’s “Super Fly,” trying out a complicated, countermelodic vocal line over the funky, syncopated rhythm track. She repeats the da-de-dum riff countless times as the minutes tick by (Costa’s camera, locked in a medium shot, never moves), inducing a fugue state in anyone with the patience to sit and listen to the ensorcelling sound pattern, composed of a handful of notes that eventually form the bedrock of a vampy number. (This scene was the breaking point for several people who elected to flee an already sparsely attended press screening.) Costa’s high regard for Balibar is unmistakable, both in the way he lights her (a Dietrich-esque close-up in the sessions for “Cinéma”) and the glacial stretches of time he allows to pass while observing her at work. Paradoxically, given the music-doc’s almost built-in excitations (big personalities, dysfunctional band dynamics), Ne change rien is a quiet film with modest aims to match its stately, ultra-low-key vibe. Yet Costa’s ingenious command of light and shadow, as well as his intuitive grasp of the powers of duration and precise framing, is another grand testament to his innovative and uncompromising handicraft.

Ne change rien Chris Fujiwara

The Lumière Reader [Tim Wong]

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Georgia Straight [Mark Harris]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Stark Insider [Clinton Stark]

Cineaste Jared Rapfogel in Jeonju, South Korea, 2010

The House Next Door [Veronika Ferdman]

Cannes. "Ne change rien" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 16, 2009

Jay Weissberg at Cannes from Variety, May 16, 2009

New York Times (registration req'd) Matt Zoller Seitz

Jeanne Balibar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Costa-Gavras, Constantin

Costa-Gavras, Constantin from World Cinema

French director of Greek origin. A graduate of IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques), Costa-Gavras' first feature Compartiment tueurs / The Sleeping Car Murders (1965), based on Sébastien Japrisot's popular thriller, is usually considered routine. However, it already heralds two characteristics of his later work: gripping narrative and major stars (here Yves Montand and Simone Signoret). His greatest critical and popular success came with three of his next films, Z (1969), L'Aveu / The Confession (1970) and État de siège / State of Siege (1973). All three star Montand; all three combine the clarity, pace and drama of popular cinema with political issues (respectively Greek dictatorship, Communist totalitarianism and American imperialism) in the manner of the French film à thèse and the Italian "political cinema" of the time. As is often the case with "liberal" films, the ideological positions are clear-cut and unobjectionable. Nevertheless, the films exposed huge audiences to important topical issues. Costa-Gavras' subsequent career in France has been uneven, but in the 1980s he made successful Hollywood films, in particular Missing (1982), Betrayed (1988) and Music Box (1989). In contrast to the male world of his French films, these are movies distinguished by an emphasis on women. Costa-Gavras and his wife Michèle Ray are producers. Between 1982 and 1987 he was director of the Cinémathèque française. — Ginette Vincendeau, Encylopedia of European Cinema

All-Movie Guide Hal Erickson

Costa-Gavras gleaned his political activism literally from his father's knee. The senior Gavras was a Greek government functionary who performed heroically in the resistance movement against the occupying Nazi forces in World War II. At war's end, the outspoken Gavras found himself labeled a communist by the new regime. As a result, young Costa-Gavras was denied entrance to the U.S., where he hoped to study filmmaking. He moved instead to Paris, studying literature at the Sorbonne and working as an assistant to several of France's top directors. Costa-Gavras displayed both the techniques he'd learned from such masters as Renoir and Demy (and the tricks he'd picked up through incessant viewings of American films) in his first directorial effort, The Sleeping Car Murders (1966). It would be the last pure-entertainment effort in Costa-Gavras' career; once the Greek government was toppled in a military junta, the director concentrated all his energies in turning out fast-moving, entertaining cinematic tracts. Z, a 1969 indictment of the repressiveness of the Greek "Colonels," was an international smash (even yielding a hit soundtrack); it won multiple awards, including the "Best Foreign Language Film" Oscar. Most often in collaboration with his favorite actor Yves Montand, Costa-Gavras continued pouring out his hatred of political oppression in such subsequent films as The Confession, State of Siege and Special Section. His style was several degrees removed from subtlety, and his films drove home their messages with the force of a jackhammer. In his first American film, Missing (1982), Costa-Gavras casts Jack Lemmon in the role that Yves Montand might have played in other circumstances; the film (which won a "Best Screenplay Adaptation" Oscar for the director) was based on the true story of an American kidnapped in Chile, a tragic consequence of the American-backed dictatorial regime. Making films for his own edification and not for those of the "politically correct" elite, Costa-Gavras lost many of his adherents (and gained many others) with his pro-Palestinian Hanna K. (1983). In 1982, Costa-Gavras was appointed president of the Cinematheque Francaise. The Music Box (1989), an uncharacteristically restrained story of a respected naturalized American citizen (Armin Mueller-Stahl) accused of being a Nazi war criminal; was not a financial success, but did win the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival.

TCMDB bio from Turner Classic Movies

Film Reference profile by Rob Edelman

Costa-Gavras, Constantin They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Spliced Wire Interview October 20, 1997

BFI Interview (2003) an extensive interview by Ian Christie from BFI Screen Online, 2003

DGA Article article and interview by Mark Reynolds, March 2003

Underground Online Interview by Daniel Robert Epstein

Z

France Algeria (128 mi) 1969

More Zazie dans le Métro than All the President's Men, Constantin Costa-Gavras' 1969 political thriller has a good deal more energy and wit than you'd expect from a movie that's also so earnest, the result being that it excites your passions while also engaging your mind. Though ostensibly fictionalized, Z is unambiguously based on the 1963 assassination of Greek leftist Grigoris Lambrakis -- an opening title inverts the usual disclaimer, allowing that any resemblance between the film and actual events is "DELIBERATE." Though the country in which the film takes place is never named, ads in Greek can be seen hanging on tavern walls, and Mikis Theodorakis' music (adapted from existing pieces, since he had been exiled and was unable to compose new music) gives little doubt as to the location. Costa-Gavras' adherence to reality produces some unpleasant byproducts, like the depiction of the Lambrakis character's assassin as a raving homosexual maniac. (In his commentary, the director says he was constrained by the real-life assassin's homosexuality, but that doesn't explain why, apart from the philandering politician, he's the only sexualized character in the whole movie.) But the film's manic energy is energizing; even from the first scene, Raoul Coutard's camera shifts its focus from speechifying politicians to their mottled bald pates. As the embattled prosecutor challenged to sort out right-wing government complicity and left-wing rhetoric, Jean-Louis Trintignant marshals steely authority, and Yves Montand is all commitment and sex as the ex-Olympian turned pacifist. Economics being what they are, it's rare enough to see an intelligently political movie, let alone one that doesn't drown in its own sincerity.

Z is almost intolerably exciting - a political thriller that ... Pauline Kael from “Exiles

Z is almost intolerably exciting - a political thriller that builds up so much tension that you'll probably feel all knotted up by the time it's over. The young director Costa-Gavras, using everything be knows to drive home his points as effectively as possible, has made something very unusual in European films - a political film with a purpose and, at the same time, a thoroughly commercial film. Z is undoubtedly intended as a political act, but it never loses emotional contact with the audience. It derives not from the traditions of the French film but from American gangster movies and prison pictures and "anti-Fascist" melodramas of the forties (Cornered, Crossfire, Brute Force, All the King's Men, Edge of Darkness, The Cross of Lorraine, et al.), and, like those pictures, it has a basically simple point of view. America stopped making this kind of melodrama (melodrama was always the chief vehicle for political thought in our films) during the McCarthy era, so Costa-Gravas has-the advantage of bringing back a popular kind of movie and of bringing it back in modem movie style. Z has been photographed by Raoul Coutard, Godard's cameraman, in Eastmancolor used in a very strong, almost robust way, and although the photography is perhaps a little too self-consciously dynamic and, at times, not as hard-focused as it might be, the searching, active style doesn't allow you to get away. Remember when the movie ads used to say, "It will knock you out of your seat"? Well, Z damn near does.

There hasn't been an exciting anti-Fascist suspense film around for a long time, and the subject of Z is so good that the audience is not likely to resent the use of melodramatic excitement the way it would now if the film were anti-Communist, like those Hollywood films of the early fifties in which our boy Gregory Peck was ferreting out Communist rats. Z is based on the novel by the Greek exile Vassili Vassilikos about the assassination of Gregorios Lambraki, in Salonika, in May, 1963. Lambrakis, it may be recalled, was a professor of medicine at the University of Athens who was also a legislator and a spokesman for peace. He was struck down by a delivery truck as he left a peace meeting-- a murder planned to look like an accident. The investigation of his death uncovered such a scandalous network of corruption and illegality in the police and in the government that the leader of the opposition party, George Papandreou, became Premier. But in April, 1967, the military coup d'etat overturned the legal government. Z reenacts the murder and the investigation in an attempt to demonstrate how the mechanics of Fascist corruption may be hidden under the mask of law and order; it is a brief on the illegality of the present Greek government.

Jorge Semprun, the Spanish writer, who worked on the screenplay and wrote the dialogue, has said, "Let's not try to reassure ourselves: this type of thing doesn't only happen elsewhere, it happens everywhere." Maybe, but not necessarily in the same way, though some Americans are sure to take the conspiracy in Z as applying to our political assassinations, too. This movie has enough layers of reference without anyone's trying to fit the American political assassinations into it; our freaky loners, on the loose in a large, heterogeneous country, are part of a less tightly structured, more volatile situation. It's ironic that what apparently did happen in the Lambrakis affair should resemble the conspiracy fantasies of Mark Lane and other Americans about the death of President Kennedy. And to see how the network of crime and politics works to conceal the assassination in Z is aesthetically satisfying. One can easily recognize the psychological attraction, for both left and right, of spinning conspiratorial systems that make things grand and orderly. (Z opens with a witty treatment of right-wing paranoia.)

Z could not, of course, be made in Salonika; it was shot in Algeria, in French, as a French-Algerian co-production. The director, Costa-Gavras, is a Greek exile. (He was a leading ballet dancer in Greece before going to France, where be studied filmmaking and made his first picture, The Sleeping Car Murder.) The score, by Mikis Theodorakis, who is now under house arrest in Greece (where his music is banned), is said to have been smuggled out. Yves Montand, who is the Lambrakis figure here, was recently seen as the Spanish hero of La Guerre Est Finie, which Semprun, an exile from Spain, also wrote, and other actors from the Spanish setting turn up here, too. The Algerian locations, being the sites of actual tortures and demonstrations, add their own resonances; the hospital where injured men may be mistreated instead of treated plays its former role. The atmosphere is thus full of echoes, and the movie-consciously, I think-reactivates them. The subject touches off our recollections of Greece, of Algeria, of Spain, which combine to make us feel, "Yes - this is the way it happens," and to evoke images of and fears about all rightist terrorism.

On the one hand, there are the weak and corrupt and degenerate, the bullies and criminals-in a word, the Fascists. On the other, there are the gentle, intelligent, honorable pacifists-in a word, humanitarians. But Costa-Gavras gets by with most of this, because, despite our knowledge that he's leaning on us, he has cast the actors so astutely and kept them so busy that they miraculously escape being stereotypes. Some of them-particularly those who play the right-wing leaders, such as Pierre Dux in the role of a general-manage to suggest more than one notorious political figure. The cast of famous names and faces from the confused, combined past of many other movies forms a familiar, living background. I'm not sure exactly how Costa-Gavras has accomplished it, but in this movie-in contrast to so many other movies-the fact that we vaguely know these people works to his advantage, and enables him to tell the story very swiftly. It does not surprise us that Francois Perier, as the public prosecutor, is weak; that Renato Salvatori enjoys hitting people; that the magnificent Irene Papas is a suffering widow; that Charles Denner is half-Jewish; that JeanLouis Trintignant is civilized and intelligent; and so on. All their earlier make-believe characters have merged in our memories; by now, when we see these actors they seem like people we actually used to know. I have sometimes found myself nodding at someone on the street before I realized that that was no old friend, it was David Susskind. There is the same sort of acquaintance with these actors, whom we have come to take for granted, and the ambiance of known people seems to authenticate the case.

Not all the elements are convincing. The staging of the crowd at the peace rally and of the police lines surrounding it doesn't feel right; it's confusing that the leader who dies appears to be beaten less than a man who survives; the motives of one of the assassins, who turns himself in, are obscure. Marcel Bozzufi, the actor playing this assassin, gives the most flamboyant performance in the film; it's enjoyable, because the movie needs to be lifted out of its documentary style from time to time, yet you are as much aware of Bozzufi's performance-even though it's a good one-as you were in Open City when the Gestapo chief came on faggy. There are scenes, such as Georges Geret acting a shade too comic with an ice pack, and Magali Noel being excessively vicious as his vicious sister, that are too much in the standard Jules Dassin-Edward Dmytryk tradition. And, as in the Hollywood forties, the martyred man is such a perfect nondenominational Good Man-like Victor in Casablanca-that one never really understands his politics or why the police and the military want to get rid of him. This is an ironic element in the book, where a possible explanation is offered-that the Fascists were afraid not of the left but of liberals, like this man, who were beginning to cooperate with the Communists. In the movie, though, we get the impression that this pure peacenik-liberal and his friends are the left and that they are mistaken for Communists (who probably don't exist at all) by the paranoid right.

But the pace, the staccato editing, the strong sense of forward movement in the storytelling, and that old but almost unfailingly effective melodramatic technique of using loud music to build up the suspense for the violent sequences put so much pressure on you that these details don't detract much. There4 is a serious flaw at the end, however, where the wrap-up comes too fast. All the way through, Z stays so close to the action that it doesn't explain the larger context, and by the end we have been battered so much that we want to understand more, so that we won't have been riding this roller coaster just for the thrills. The explanations of what happened to whom and how this incident precipitated the change in government, and then the reversals of fortune after the military coup, go by at dizzying speed, and this is a psychological miscalculation. We have an almost physical need for synthesis from a movie as powerful as this. We want to know who was protected by the new rightist regime and who was sacrificed; we want to see the larger political meaning of the events. We don't want just to use the film masochistically, to feed our worst fears or to congratulate ourselves for being emotionally exhausted.

In a thriller, the director's job is to hold you in his grip and keep squeezing you to react the way be wants you to, and Costa-Gavras does his job efficiently - in fact, sensationally. Is it valid, morally, to turn actual political drama-in this case, political tragedy-into political melodrama, like Z? I honestly don't know. The techniques of melodrama are not those of art, but if we accept them when they're used on trivial, fabricated stories (robberies, spy rings, etc.) merely to excite us, bow can we reject them when the filmmakers attempt to use them to expose social evils and to dramatize political issues? Yet there is an aesthetic discrepancy when the methods are not worthy of the subject; when coercive, manipulative methods are used on serious subjects, we feel a discomfort that we don't feel when the subjects are trivial. It's one of the deep contradictions in movies that in what should be a great popular, democratic art form ideas of any kind seem to reach the mass audience only by squeezing it. I anticipate that some people may ask, "What's the problem? The movie is telling the truth." And others may say, "Whether it's accurate or not, it's convincing, and that's all a critic need fret about." Neither of these arguments clears away my basic uneasiness about the use of loaded melodramatic techniques, particularly now, when they can be so effectively blended with new semidocumentary methods to produce the illusion of current history caught by the camera. Given the genre, however, the men who made this film have been intelligent and restrained. I don't think Costa-Gavras ever uses violence except to make you hate violence, and such humanitarianism in filmmaking is becoming rare.

Melodrama works so well on the screen, and when it works against the present Greek military government it's bard to think ill of it. People will say of the moviemakers not that they're "laying it on" but that they're "laying it on the line." The truth is, they're doing both. Z is a hell of an exciting movie, and it carries you along, though when it's over and you've caught your breath you know perfectly well that its techniques of excitation could as easily be used by a smart Fascist filmmaker, if there were one (fortunately, there isn't), against the left or the center.

DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson

CineScene.com (Richard Doyle)

Monsters At Play Gregory S. Burkart

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null)

Boston Phoenix [Steve Vineberg]

THE CONFESSION (L’Aveu)

France Italy (139 mi) 1970

Costa-Gavras's "The Confession," which opened yesterday at the Beekman Theater, is not, I think, a better movie than his prize-winning "Z," with which it will inevitably be compared, not only by the critics but also by those members of the public who may look for a repeat performance. The earlier film was a nearly perfect topical thriller whose form pretty much defined the substance of its liberal politics.

However, because the subject of "The Confession" is much more complex, much more human, I find it vastly more interesting than "Z," even when one is aware of the way Costa-Gavras manipulates attention by the use of flashy cinematic devices that sometimes substitute for sustained drama. It is a horror story of the mind told almost entirely in factual and physical terms, which is something of a contradiction.

These are, however, the terms of which Costa-Gavras is a movie master, and in which Artur London originally wrote his book, adapted for the screen by Jorge Semprun, who also wrote the script for "Z."

"The Confession" is the real-life story of Artur London, a loyal Communist who certified his credentials by serving with the International Brigade in Spain and with the Communist anti-Nazi underground in France, and by a long term in a Nazi concentration camp. In 1949, Mr. London returned to his native Czechoslovakia from France to become Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the Communist Government of President Klement Gottwald. Two years later, along with 13 other leading Czech Communists (11 of whom were Jewish), Mr. London was arrested for treason and espionage and found guilty in what became known as .the "Slansky trial."

The Slansky trial, named for the secretary general of the Czech Communist party, who was also a defendant, was one of the last major gasps of the Stalinist purges that began with the Moscow trials in the 1930's. All of the Slansky defendants were found guilty and all but three, including Mr. London, were executed.

Mr. London lived not only to see the defendants rehabilitated and to write his book but also to return to Czechoslovakia on the day in August, 1968, when Soviet troops invaded his country to end the short Czech spring.

"The Confession," with Yves Montand playing Mr. London and Simone Signoret his wife Lise, is the story of a believer's ultimate betrayal by his belief, of intolerable physical torture and psychological harassment (London is urged to confess to crimes he did not commit to prove his loyalty to the party), and, finally, of survival.

It is a harrowing film of intellectual and emotional anguish, dramatized by the breathless devices of melodrama. Costa-Gavras employs abrupt jump cuts and flashes forward as well as back. He underscores the desperation of the meeting of some hunted men in a private apartment with the sounds of children roughhousing in the next room. It may, in fact, be one of the most aurally resonant movies I've ever seen. It is full of ordinary sounds made somehow ominous, like the slamming of doors (car, house, prison) and footsteps (on wood, brick, concrete).

Its color photography by Raoul Coutard is also fine (natural overhead light in all the interiors), even when resorting to the zoom, which can be a legitimate tool in melodrama. Beginning with Mr. Montand and Miss Signoret, it is perfectly cast. One really responds to the faces, the attitudes and gestures in a Costa-Gavras film, as when, during the trial, the trousers of one of the emaciated defendants fall to the floor and he turns to the court with an expression of hopeless, perfectly confused laughter and despair.

"The Confession" is a film of movement and sensation, as was "Z," but there is at its center a complex human being. Like the book, it is an anti-Stalinist rather than anti-Communist polemic (Mr. London has written that he is interested in putting "a human face" on national socialism). One tends to forget the context, of the Londons' experience—the totality of a belief that would prompt a wife to denounce a husband that she has loved for almost 20 years, simply because the Party had to be right.

You might not know it from the film, but the Londons are different from you and me—and from Arthur Koestler, whose disenchantment came earlier (1937) and was more complete. In a recent interview, Mr. Koestler recalled the blind party discipline that he eventually denied as he quoted André Malraux: "A life is worth nothing, but nothing is worth a life." Because this is also the essence of "The Confession," I liked it very much, even when its form is in combat with its substance.

STATE OF SIEGE (État de siege)

France Germany Italy (120 mi) 1972

Costa-Gavras's "State of Siege" is a riveting film and possibly an inflammatory one. It oversimplifies recent history, but raises so many complex and important moral questions that to attack it for oversimplification may be just a discreet form of rationalization, of looking the other way.

The screenplay by Franco Solinas, who wrote "The Battle of Algiers," is based on the kidnap and murder of Dan. A. Mitrione in August, 1970, in Montevideo, Uruguay. Mr. Mitrione, an Italian-born American, the father of nine children and a former police chief in Richmond, Ind., was an official of the United States Agency for International Development assigned as an adviser to the Uruguayan police. Officially he was an expert in traffic control and communications, and in this capacity he had earlier been an adviser to the police in Brazil and the Dominican Republic.

On July 31, 1970, Mr. Mitrione and the Brazilian consul in Montevideo were kidnapped by the Tupamaros, a group of Marxist-oriented, urban guerrillas who demanded the release of 150 political prisoners. The Uruguayan Government declined, and 10 days after his kidnapping, Mr. Mitrione was executed by the Tupamaros who, until then, had mostly refrained from violence in their efforts to discredit the Government and what they called its repressionist policies.

Much of the world was appalled, as it was by the Black September massacre at the Tel Aviv Airport, by the killing of the Israeli athletes in Munich and by the more recent murders in Khartoum.

After Mr. Mitrione's murder, information began to be published here and abroad that suggested that Mr. Mitrione's specialty was not necessarily traffic control and communication, but internal security, more specifically, antiguerrilla warfare, with close associations to those responsible for the systematic torture and liquidation of the revolutionary opposition.

Among the many questions raised by "State of Siege" is one relating to the film maker's responsibility to stick to the truth of an event even when it might be inconvenient. The Solinas screenplay changes the names of the principals (I suppose releases would be hard to get from those alive) and only indirectly alludes to the Uruguayan setting (the film was actually shot in Salvador Allende's Chile). It very carefully never puts the Mitrione character (named Philip Michael Santore in the film and played by Yves Montand) at the scene of any tortures, but the inference — very loud and very clear — is that Mitrione-Santore was a major architect of those policies.

Thus to the extent that Costa-Gavras and Solinas suggest that the A.I.D. man was secretly involved in the internal affairs of a foreign government, the film is a rationalization of a terrorist act. However, in its biased but elegantly cool way, it's much more than that. It's an examination of an event first, then of national policies that led to that event (including the United States' historical role as Big Daddy in Latin America through economic programs that help others to help themselves as well as our industry), and lines of responsibility.

Finally, it's an examination of our capacity to be shocked, a capacity that may have begun to run out with the disclosures about the Bay of Pigs, so that now, when we read the stories about the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation and Chile, we are as much inclined to laughter as we are to grief or even to surprise. We shrug and ask ourselves, in effect, what will they do next? Self-interest carried to the limit is no longer evil, or a matter for review by one's conscience, but a kind of dumbfounding rascality, a high form of scalawaggery.

What makes "State of Siege" so harrowing is not that it is all true (I'm not in a position to know), but that it could be true, and all of us could be responsible. This is more important, I think, than carping over details of the film, over the fact that no effort is made to define the inflationary economic conditions in Uruguay that first prompted the press censorship and other repressive measures that, in turn prompted the revolutionary opposition.

Strictly as an example of film-making, "State of Siege" is exceptionally shrewd. Although we have no doubt what the outcome of the narrative will be, Costa-Gavras and Solinas maintain our interest at what is sometimes called (in admitted desperation) a fever pitch. Through the kind of rapid cross-cutting made familiar in both "Z" and "The Confession," they manage to make straight exposition hugely dramatic.

Will or won't the police find the kidnapped officials? Cut to the Uruguayan legislature where a report is being read concerning the existence of "an uncontrollable and autonomous organization" within the national police. Cut to the rebels' interrogation of Montand, cut to . . . cut to. . . . The movie's pace is unrelenting, and it wasn't until I saw it the second time that I recognized the essential monotony of the techniques.

Most shrewd is the casting of Montand, who, because he is Montand, evokes sympathy for a character who remains at best sincerely wrongheaded, at worst a fuzzy villain. Were this American played by an American actor, the film might well be insupportably antagonizing.

"State of Siege," which opened yesterday at the Beekman, also raises the question about what the American Film Institute was up to when it first booked the film to open its new Washington theater at the Kennedy Center. It should have been apparent to anyone who had seen it that "State of Siege" would ruffle a lot of people in Washington, but then to cancel it, as was done last week, suggests incompetence of an order as scary as outright censorship.

MUSIC BOX

USA (124 mi) 1989 ‘Scope

Imagine for a moment that the father you have loved, respected and admired all your life is suddenly accused of some of history's most horrific atrocities—acts so brutal and unconscionable it's impossible to associate them with the parent you adore. Yet, as a highly regarded attorney, you are entrusted with his defense, and must weigh family ties against professional ethics as you seek to exonerate him. Do you defend him blindly or seek the truth, however painful it may be? Do you deny the facts, or twist them to fit your vision of a noble father? When do you stop being the devoted child and start being the tough-minded lawyer? Can you be both at the same time? Which one are you first?

Such are the dilemmas Ann Talbot (Jessica Lange) faces in Costa-Gavras' riveting drama, Music Box. And just as Ann must balance divided loyalties and emotions, Costa-Gavras performs his own cinematic juggling act, intertwining combative courtroom scenes with the subtle complexities of family relationships and the suspense of historical detective work. Despite the tall order, none of these elements are left dangling. Music Box succeeds on every level, thanks largely to Lange's intimate and gut-wrenching portrayal of an attorney who must question not only the integrity of her client, but also the inner soul of the man she has looked up to all of her life.

Written by Joe Eszterhas (his final film before Basic Instinct, million dollar salaries, and career-crippling egotism), Music Box follows Ann's quest to clear the name of her father, immigrant Mike Laszlo (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who is accused of joining a Hungarian death squad known as Arrowcross in the latter years of World War II. Organized by the Nazis, this militant group operated under the aegis of Hungary's national police and maintained order through systematic, cold-blooded terror. Yet for more than 35 years, Mike has lived an exemplary life in America. He built a successful business, dotes on his grandson and takes pride in his U.S. citizenship. At first, Ann laughs off the charges as a simple case of mistaken identity, but her outrage turns to denial and then dread, as tiny cracks in her father's case begin to shake her belief in his innocence. As prosecutor Jack Burke (Frederic Forrest) tells her, "You trust in your heart, it's going to get broken."

Costa-Gavras, whose previous work includes such similar—and equally successful—socio-political mysteries as Missing (1982) and Z (1969), lends the film a drab, gritty look, mirroring the characters' conflicts. A master of understatement, he wisely lets the story tell itself, brilliantly orchestrating the various elements, but refusing to bog down the narrative with clever directorial tricks. Still, he creates quiet, yet palpable, suspense. When he does indulge himself with an arty or symbolic shot, it's easy to miss—a glimpse of Lange in a three-way mirror speaks volumes about her character's predicament, split loyalties and search for self.

Lange received a well-deserved Academy Award® nomination for her portrayal. Her slow realization that her father may not be the man she thought he was—and something far worse than she could possibly imagine—is movingly rendered, and Lange handles her character's various guises (cocky advocate, loving daughter, ethical jurist, reluctant detective) with seamless skill. A fine foil, Mueller-Stahl keeps the audience guessing regarding his character's true nature, making it just as difficult for us to believe the charges against Laszlo as it is for Ann.

Complex, richly textured films featuring excellent performances, restrained direction and a tight, thought-provoking story are rare—and deserve more attention than they invariably get. The moods and themes of Music Box may not be haunting, but they certainly linger long after the film ends.

ToxicUniverse.com (Dan Callahan)

With its palette of sacred mauves and ruddy browns, the political mystery "Music Box" suggests the stains of long-spilled blood. There's tragedy in the hollow of Jessica Lange's huge eyes, and terror in the plentiful Hungarian wine, poured garnet into tumblers, then drained like the cheeks of the heroine. Her face as pale as the winter sun, Lange moves through the spooky landscape with the haunted urgency of the movie's Gypsy violins.

"Music Box" is an evocative courtroom drama, precisely crafted by Costa-Gavras, the master of message entertainment. It tells the story of a daughter's stubborn love for her father, a Hungarian refugee accused of heinous war crimes. A crafty Chicago attorney, one who has warmed her hands at the bonfire of the vanities, she systematically discredits the prosecution's witnesses -- Holocaust survivors -- in defense of her great bear of a father.

But the evidence is too compelling, and it penetrates even the thickest skin. Ann Talbot (Lange) is a wonderfully tough character, estranged from her Lake Forest husband (Ned Schmidtke), scion of a leatherbound legal dynasty. Her peasant's heritage reflected in her sturdy figure and the vaguely rustic look of her upscale wardrobe, she is an earthy woman, but never sexy. When her bathrobe falls open, she seems surprised to find that she has long beautiful legs.

Her career, her 11-year-old son Mikey (Lukas Haas) and her widowed father, Mike Laszlo (Armin Mueller-Stahl), are the world to her. Mike, a retired steelworker who immigrated from Hungary in the last days of World War II, is charged with lying to gain his U.S. citizenship. According to crusading federal prosecutor Jack Burke (Frederic Forrest), Mike was not the farmer he claimed to be but the leader of a Nazi-trained death squad, Arrowcross. "We are not speaking of the banality of evil ... we are speaking of evil incarnate," the prosecutor declares.Despite its potential for high melodrama, the movie never fails its actors or its material. If anything it is a bit too restrained, leaving all its anguish and doubts to the incredible fluency of Lange, Forrest and Mueller-Stahl -- and to the terrible revelations of the victims of Mishka, the ruthless young captain of Arrowcross. There are stories of families wired together and drowned in the Danube, of push-ups over bayonets, of gang rapes and cigarette burns, of the way Mishka and his men enjoyed their work. "It's not me. I am not a beast," shouts the accused in his thickly accented English. "I am a good American."

Mike or Mishka? The father she adores or the sadistic war criminal? At first Ann believes her father's claims that Hungarian Communists are behind the attempt to extradite him, but she becomes increasingly troubled as she uncovers a dubious past that only a devoted daughter would believe proof of innocence. Like the heroine of Costa-Gavras's last film, "Betrayed," she follows her heart, not her head, to become the devil's advocate.

Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, author not only of "Music Box" and "Betrayed" but also of "Jagged Edge," continues to test the duality of man against the naivete of woman. There's Debra Winger's G-woman duped by her Klansman lover, Glenn Close's lawyer falling for her wife-murderer client, and now Lange and her devoted poppa. Happily, here the heroine is befuddled not by her glandular responses but by her concept of family duty. If she accepts her father's guilt, then she becomes the child of evil incarnate.

How can a man nurture his own children and still slay another man's 7-year-old? The movie begs the question, one that seems to have no answer. It is but another warning from Eszterhas and Costa-Gavras, best articulated by Ann's father-in-law (Donald Moffat), a former espionage agent rumored to have drunk with Klaus Barbie. "Then you really did drink with those monsters?" she asks. "None of the men I knew were monsters. They were salt-of-the-earth types like your old man," he replies.

"Music Box" would be ham-fisted, would sit on your stomach, but neither Costa-Gavras nor Lange will allow it. His skill behind the camera and her romance with the lens sustain its terrible poignancy and grant it a power beyond the elementary.

DVD Verdict Adam Arseneau

The New York Times (Caryn James)

THE LITTLE APOCALYPSE (La Petite Apocalypse)

France Italy Poland (110 mi) 1993 ‘Scope

Mini Reviews Gerald Peary

A quarter century ago, France's Costa-Gavras was among the most important political filmmakers in the world, with Z (1969), his pulsating, heartbreaking recreation of the military takeover in Greece, and State of Seige (1973), his cogent insider's look at ultra-leftist brigands in Latin America. Since, Costa-Gavras has lost his way. The Music Box (1989), in which Jessica Lange's Chicago lawyer discovers that her beloved Hungarian father was a Nazi operative, is his only film in decades to engage an international audience.

The gloomy comedy of Le Petite Apocalypse (1992) reflects Costa-Gavras's twin pessimisms about the world moving rightward and about his aesthetic being passed by. The director-screenwriter is autobiographically evident in two hapless characters: Jacques (Andre Dussolier), a French revolutionary in 1968 who is now, by default, a spineless TV producer; and Stan (Czech filmmaker, Jiri Menzel), a Polish ex-Marxist literary personage who, monosyllabic and vaguely despondent, resides in a cubby-hole in the Paris apartment of his ex-wife and her French husband.

Kieslowski might have made something ironically interesting from this setup. Costa-Gavras concocts a vapid, unpersuasive farce about how Stan's pals, including Jacques, coax him to immolate himself in front of the Pope. That way, his literary work will become posthumously famous. Eventually, everyone travels to Rome, where a sitcom-level surprise ending at the Vatican is the final failure of a wearying, self-pitying movie.

AMEN B 85

France Germany USA Romania (132 mi) 2002

BFI | Sight & Sound | Amen. (2002) Geoffrey Macnab from Sight and Sound, August 2002

World War II. SS officer Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukor), a chemist who has been providing the German army with Zyclon B gas, discovers the gas is being used to kill Jews on the East European front. A committed Christian, he visits a senior Catholic priest who cold-shoulders him. Riccardo (Mathieu Kassovitz), a young Jesuit, overhears his claims and gets in contact to find out more.

Riccardo heads back to Rome where he hopes to alert the Pope. But the Catholic Church, Riccardo learns, approves of the Nazi stand against Communist Russia. Gerstein, meanwhile, is trying to lessen the killing by claiming that consignments of the gas are flawed.

Riccardo arranges for Gerstein to go to Rome in the hope he'll sway the Pope. As he arrives, the Nazis are rounding up Italian Jews. Riccardo implores the Pope to intervene; infuriated by the Pope's inaction, he joins the Jews at the station and is deported to a Nazi death camp.

Gerstein intervenes to save him by forging a letter from Himmler. He is caught out by his colleague, the doctor who's in charge at the camp. Riccardo is killed. By now, the Nazis are facing defeat. The doctor allows Gerstein to avoid arrest and travel back to Germany where he visits his family, who can't accept the war has turned against them. He falls into French hands, and tells his captors all he can about the logistics behind the Holocaust. He is found hanged in his cell. The doctor, meanwhile, receives protection from the Catholic dignitaries who'd ignored Gerstein and Riccardo.

Review

It's rare that a film is overshadowed by its poster, but that's exactly what happened to Costa-Gavras' Amen. The poster, designed by Oliviero Toscani (Benetton's erstwhile art director), shows a blood-red crucifix/swastika with the faces of a Nazi soldier and a Jesuit priest on either side of it. Many Christian groups were appalled but the image seems apt enough. It sums up the key themes of the film - the Catholic Church's shameful failure to speak out against the Holocaust and the martyrdom of the individuals like the (real-life) SS officer Kurt Gerstein and the (fictional) young priest Riccardo Fontana who had the courage to fight against it.

If its aim is to remind us of the moral cowardice and obtuseness of individuals and institutions in the face of the Nazi horrors, Amen. works well enough. It draws attention to the wartime failures of the Vatican and highlights the heroism of loners like Gerstein and Riccardo. However, as a piece of storytelling, the film is clumsy and predictable. There is little of the dynamism that characterised Costa-Gavras' Z, with its wit, riveting documentary-style cinematography by Raoul Coutard and livewire performances; instead, we're offered a handsomely shot but stolid drama.

In its evocation of Hitler-era Germany and Italy, Amen. shows a world familiar from countless other films, with psychopathic Nazis speaking English in heavy German accents who describe mass-murder in pseudo-scientific terms. The opening, in which we see Stephan Lux, a German-Jewish journalist, committing suicide in front of delegates at the League of Nations in 1936 in a desperate bid to alert the world to the persecution of the Jews, makes a point which the film repeats again and again. For whatever reasons, pastors, politicians, diplomats and soldiers chose to ignore evidence of the Holocaust.

The film-makers largely avoid imagery of the death camps, hinting instead at the atrocities in a more oblique way. Thus we're treated to endless, heavily symbolic shots of trains hurtling across the landscape. When they are empty with their doors open, we know their human cargo has now been disposed of; when the doors are shut, it's because more refugees are on their way to almost-certain death. The attempts at satire are heavy-handed. When Riccardo visits Rome, we see pampered, sybaritic priests and diplomats at the lunch table, grotesquely savouring their food as they defend their inaction with self-serving arguments (for instance, that trying to stop the massacres would hold back the Allied war effort.)

Arguably, the most disappointing aspect of Amen. is the portrayal of Gerstein himself. He was clearly a deeply contradictory character: a committed SS soldier as well as a devoted Christian. Rather than address this ambiguity, the film-makers present him as a one-dimensional hero, implying that he stayed in a senior army job to get closer to the evil he's fighting against. (Matthieu Kassovitz's Riccardo is similarly idealised, a doe-eyed young cleric in a plain black cassock with the same earnest intensity as the protagonist of Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest.) Gerstein's relationships with his father and wife - who don't comprehend or share his beliefs - are never examined in any detail, nor is much made of the irony that he was responsible for supplying the camps with Zyclon B gas.

Just occasionally, we're given hints that Gerstein (excellently played by Ulrich Tukur) is a tortured and complex figure. In one effective scene, an old friend from church days cowers after learning he's in the SS. Another mentions his desperate desire always to make himself popular, even with the fellow Nazis he ostensibly despises. "Your God will have a really hard time with you," the evil doctor tells him, but given that he's portrayed in such a heroic light, it's hard to see why.

Costanzo, Saverio

PRIVATE

Italy (90 mi) 2004

Loosely based on a real story, Private evokes a series of days in the life of an affluent Palestinian family whose home is taken hostage by Israeli soldiers who wish to use the house as a watchtower. The film's nameless locale, situated somewhere between a Palestinian village and Israeli settlements, is a purgatory that stinks of fear and looming death. "Shadows are not real," Mohammad (Mohammad Bakri) tells one of his children, sound fatherly advice that takes on great aesthetic and philosophical meaning when the Israelis come charging into his house in the middle of the night: Prohibited from using the upstairs part of the home, the family is confined to the shadows of their living room when the sun goes down. A horror film about the ongoing Israeli-Palestine occupation, Private is unlike anything I've ever seen: it looks and feels like Session 9 but it rattles the soul like The Gate of the Sun. This house is an allegory for the Israeli occupation, its inhabitants haunted and frustrated by the absurdity of their situation, and every action in the film represents a different strain on the body politic. While the stoic Mohammad looks to ride out the home invasion, his understandably angry children wish to revolt. Enticed by the white noise of the family's television set, one of Mohammad's sons rigs the greenhouse in the front yard with an explosive device; his daughter is equally daring, taking trips upstairs in order to hide in a hallway bureau and listen to the conversations between the Israeli soldiers. It's impossible to really explain the intensity of the girl's trips upstairs, the great allegorical import Costanzo's camera takes on when the girl closes (and opens) the door to the bureau, or the heart-stopping note of confidentiality the film chooses to end on. I'm not entirely comfortable with Private's lack of objectivity, but as a person interested in the farce of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, Costanzo shares my sympathies. Besides, the point of Private isn't to inspire Israeli resentment but to radically and experimentally dramatize the horror of the refugee experience and the strain it has on the human spirit. When asked by Commander Ofer (Lior Miller) why he and his family don't leave the house, Mohammad reminds the man that it's their home—when Mohammad turns around and asks the soldier the same question, there is no answer. It's a rudimentary exchange, but the truth is often simple, something this powerhouse of a film understands from beginning to end.

Costner, Kevin

DANCES WITH WOLVES

USA (180 mi) 1990 director’s cut (236 mi)

Slant Magazine Nick Schager

Early on in Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, a disturbed military bigwig tells Costner's Lt. John Dunbar, "I have just pissed in my pants, and nobody can do anything about it." The same can be said about Academy members in 1990, who famously screwed Martin Scorsese out of the Best Director statuette for Goodfellas in favor of Costner's proficient but overrated work; 13 years after its original release, the film remains nothing more than a well-polished but generic example of epic Hollywood filmmaking. The tale of Lt. Dunbar's spiritual journey from disenchanted Civil War soldier to revered member of the Great Plains' Sioux tribe is one that admirably forgoes demonization of the country's original inhabitants in favor of a compassionate portrait of indigenous people attempting to survive the encroaching hordes of American settlers.

Dunbar, electing to take a post in the middle of nowhere rather than continue to do battle with his fellow countrymen, finds himself surrounded by both the Sioux and Pawnee communities, neither of which is interested in accommodating white strangers—except, that is, for prescient Sioux holy man Kicking Bird (Graham Greene), who correctly surmises that a man stranded alone in the vast plains isn't looking for a fight. Soon, lonely Dunbar is accepted by the Native Americans, dubbed Dances with Wolves (for his friendship with a stray wolf) and falls in love with a white woman named Stands with a Fist (Mary McDonnell) who had been kidnapped and raised by Kicking Bird as a child.

Despite its empathy and respect for Native Americans, the film has very little going for it besides its admittedly majestic trappings. Working with cinematographer Dean Semler on location throughout the American West, Costner captures a dizzying array of gorgeous panoramic compositions that situate tiny silhouettes of humans amidst expansive stretches of green fields and blue skies. What the first-time director doesn't do, however, is infuse these images with any thematic weight or import—they are, in the end, just pretty landscape shots. Unlike legendary Western directors John Ford or Sergio Leone, Costner doesn't intend for these snapshots of sprawling vistas to symbolize much of anything (here, they're just transitional devices or mere filler material), and thus the size and scale of the film, although logistically quite immense, seems, in terms of emotional resonance, to shrink before our eyes.

If the film's visual splendor lacks profundity, Costner does provide a handful of transcendent moments, the most spellbinding of which is Dunbar's participation in a Sioux Buffalo hunt. And I'd be remiss in not congratulating the actor-director for taking a leisurely, contemplative approach to a story that could have functioned as mere pretense for extravagant and indulgent open-field battle sequences (a pitfall Mel Gibson would fail to avoid in 1995's ponderous Braveheart). It's a laudable adventure that neither redefines nor simply mimics the genre's storied conventions, a sturdy, mildly stirring revisionist cinematic portrayal of the West as a place where manifest destiny meant not only modernity's expansion, but also ancient cultures' decimation. But time hasn't changed the fact that Scorsese remains a victim of Grand Theft Oscar.

Turner Classic Movies Eleanor Quin

Leading man Kevin Costner made his directorial debut in 1990 with Dances with Wolves, the fictional tale of a despondent white man who regains his sense of purpose with a tribe of American Indians against the backdrop of the western frontier. The film was a hard sell: Westerns were not in vogue at the time, not to mention that Costner was insistent on keeping the running time at a potentially-lethal three hours as well as relying on the heavy use of subtitles. Accordingly, he was unable to secure any funding for the project through typical US channels, ultimately getting aid from a British investor and paying the rest out of his own pocket. The critics were kind but ultimately panned the offering as an exercise in self-indulgence: one remarked that Costner's Indian name would have been more accurate as "Obsesses with People Silhouetted Against Horizons." Concerns grew as budgets began to overflow and the shooting schedule continued to be extended; industry insiders tagged the project as "Kevin's Gate", referring to the infamous production catastrophe of Heaven's Gate (1980) ten years before. Despite all the ominous signs, Dances with Wolves opened to enthusiastic audiences, eventually grossing over 400 million in worldwide box office receipts. The film was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won seven, including Best Picture and Best Director for Costner, beating out the critics' darling Goodfellas (1990) and its director, Martin Scorsese.

The roots of Dances with Wolves were seeded 8 years earlier, with Costner's first screen credit, a largely forgettable offering titled Stacy's Knights (1983). The film's greatest contribution was the initial collaboration between Costner, the film's director, Jim Wilson, and the scriptwriter Michael Blake. In subsequent years, Wilson and Costner would create a production company and make seven films together, including Dances with Wilson in the producer's seat. Their continued friendship with Blake provided for an evening the writer spent at the Costner house several years later in which he first described the idea for Dances with Wolves in preparation for developing it as a screenplay. According to Blake from a 1990 Rolling Stone article, Costner was instantly attracted to the project but strongly urged the writer to write the story as a novel first versus a script. Blake obliged, producing a tome which thoroughly engaged Wilson and helped him visualize the story. Costner soon agreed, deeming the book, "the clearest idea of a movie I'd ever read." Although Blake always saw Costner in the director's chair, he had another actor in mind when writing the story: Viggo Mortensen, most recently of The Lord of the Rings trilogy fame. Blake explained, "I said, 'Kev, I don't know if anyone is going to really believe in you [in this part] after seeing your other movies.' And he said, 'Don't worry about it.' One thing I've learned about Kevin is that you do not bet against him, no matter what he's going to do. As it turns out, I think he's done some of his best acting work in this movie."

As a first-time director, Costner impressed many not only with the ambitiousness of the epic project but his ability to handily pull it off: the project spanned a five-month shoot schedule on location in South Dakota with over 700 cast members and extras with temperatures ranging from a boiling 115 in the height of the summer months down to 20 degrees as the chilliness of Autumn set in. In a marked departure from a typical shoot, almost every scene (save the opening Civil War ones) were filmed in sequence. This was done in order to ensure weather realism from scene to scene, since so much of the action takes place outdoors. A tremendous amount of time and resources were allocated to the learning and delivery of the Lakota Sioux dialect, making Dances the first major feature film to use authentic Indian language onscreen with subtitles. Costner defended his atypical decisions with passion: "You've got to want to do it because you believe in your story. People don't go into directing for power. They go in for the completion of something they want to see. Dances needed a tone. Somebody else might not have done subtitles. I wanted to see it in the Native American language. Somebody else might have made it shorter, because they don't think people can sit with this movie. I think they can." Despite his independent streak, Costner still knew when to ask for help: friend and director Kevin Reynolds helped him film the difficult buffalo hunt scene. Reynolds, who gave Costner one of his first breaks with Fandango (1985) would direct him again in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), as well as the disastrous Waterworld (1995).

Some little known buffalo facts: 3500 were used in the production, with two of the tamed ones belonging to rocker Neil Young. And how do you get a buffalo to charge on film? Tempt him with Oreo cookies.

While Costner was inarguably the star of the show both in front and behind the camera, the supporting cast of Dances with Wolves are not to be overlooked: Mary McDonnell played his love interest, Stands With A Fist. Bringing a 20-year stage history to the production, McDonnell gained celluloid notice with the film, spurring her breakthrough performance a few years later with John Sayles' Passion Fish (1992). She earned Oscar® nominations for both roles. Graham Greene as holy man Kicking Bird had memorable roles later with Val Kilmer in Thunderheart (1992) and Mel Gibson in Maverick (1994). Character actors Robert Pastorelli and Maury Chaykin also contribute to the solid featured cast, with Pastorelli best remembered as Murphy Brown's housepainter on the long-running television series, and Chaykin portraying detective Nero Wolfe on the popular series of television films. Costner's own daughter Annie, then six years old, makes a brief appearance in a flashback sequence. SNL diehards might spot Charles Rocket in a small part; the actor was featured on the sketch comedy show for one season. And Wes Studi, who plays the villainous Pawnee Indian in Dances later played the cunning, malevolent Huron Indian in the 1992 remake of The Last of the Mohicans.

Michael Blake on Dances With Wolves on the screenwriting adaptation

DVDTown - MGM Special Edition [John J. Puccio]

DVD Journal David Walker

Movierapture [Keith Allen]

DVD Verdict - Special Edition Eric Profancik

Variety.com [Jay Weissberg]

Côté, Denis

Viennale - Festival Scope: Festivals on Demand for Film ... brief bio from Vienale, October 21 – November 3, 2010

I Think We're Alone Now Adam Nayman from Moving Image Source, March 1, 2011

The New Auteurs: Denis Côté - Moving Image Source Moving Image Source, March 4 – 10, 2011

When Things Go Wrong: The Films of Denis Cote James Clark from Wonders in the Dark, March 30, 2011

CBC Arts Online [Matthew Hays] Matthew Hays interview from CBC, September 6, 2007

Video: Q/A with Denis Côté - Cinéma Parallèle Video interview from Cinéma Parallèle, May 29, 2010 (in French, no subtitles) (6:39)

10 Burning Questions for: Denis Côté, director of CURLING | NDNF John Wildman interview from New Directors, New Films, March 17, 2011

The Village Voice [Nicolas Rapold] Nicolas Rapold interview from The Village Voice, March 23, 2011

DRIFTING STATES (Les états nordiques)

Canada (91 mi) 2005

I Think We're Alone Now Adam Nayman from Moving Image Source, March 1, 2011 (excerpt)

A former film critic based in Montreal, Côté has never been drawn to the mainstream, whether in the cinema of others—when he was a writer, he used his platform to champion small, unconventional movies —or in his own artistic endeavors. In film after film, he has continued his own private drift towards the margins. "I feel small and uninspired in the city," Côté told me in 2008. "I don't own a car and I don't have a license so being [outside of the city] for me is like a dream, and is automatically inspiring. The countryside is like a myth for me, and therefore a place to conquer, a place that can 'be mine.'" It is in staking out such distant terrain that Côté has distinguished himself as perhaps the most interesting and idiosyncratic filmmaker to emerge from Canada over the past decade.

His searching sensibility was apparent from the very beginning of his first feature, Les états nordiques (Drifting States) (2005), a film that begins with an escape: Christian (Christian LeBlanc) is introduced in the process of euthanizing his terminally ill mother in her hospital room. It's a gesture that is legible as an act of mercy, but also as a spur to self-transformation. As if suddenly bereft of a great burden, Christian picks up and leaves Montreal for an out-of-the-way village on James Bay, where he finds work as a garbage collector.

The film's English-language title, Drifting States, is a metaphor for Christian's destabilized inner life. It's also a statement of aesthetic purpose on behalf of the director. The film ebbs and flows between the imperatives of documentary and drama. Although he shares a first name with his character, LeBlanc is a performer, not a subject, and Christian's arc from self-exile to gradual re-integration has been predetermined. But scenes of him interacting with the other inhabitants of Radisson, Quebec (population 400) have clearly been improvised. As the film goes on, Côté's interest seems to lie as much (if not more) with these incidental participants as it does with his protagonist, who remains a cipher.

Côté has said that he was after a kind of creative freedom while making Les états nordiques and while the film evinces liberation, it is finally deterministic: Christian's past literally catches up with him.

OUR PRIVATE LIVES (Nos Vies Privées)

Canada (82 mi) 2007

Movie Moxie [Shannon Ridler]

Impression: I really enjoyed this film and I think it's absolutely wild to know that it was written in English, translated to Bulgarian and the two actors are Bulgarian however it was shot in Quebec and the director doesn't speak Bulgarian. Would you know any of that by seeing it? Well, you'd pick up it's in Quebec and in Bulgarian but the rest I think not. I thought it was marvellously successful in showing various emotional stages of a long drawn out yet hyper speed relationship. You almost never saw what you would expect however it always felt 100% true. A brilliant film.

Eye Weekly [Adam Nayman]

Music critics like to call certain albums “growers.” Denis Côté's ballsy drama shoots roots into your brain only to bloom about a week later. That's how long it took me to reconcile my feelings about this micro-budget provocation, which starts (and, come to think of it, ends) very much like a Claire Denis picture. It's glancing and enigmatic and erotic. Two strangers who meet online (and who both claim Bulgarian heritage) meet up at a cabin in the wilds of Quebec. Intimacy, and then other, more stunning things ensue, all at an uncomfortably close (and beautifully maintained) proximity.

I Think We're Alone Now Adam Nayman from Moving Image Source, March 1, 2011 (excerpt)

Côté's remarkable follow-up, Nos vies privées (Our Private Lives) (2007) is thrillingly open-ended. The set-up is at once simple and probably without precedent in (Canadian) cinematic history: comely Bulgarian expatriate Milena (Anastassia Liutova) invites the Sofia-based photographer Philip (Penko Gospodinov) with whom she's been having an online affair to join her at a cabin in the wilds of Quebec—to meet in the flesh, as it were.

The subject here is intimacy, which the lovers initially hunger for and then retreat from. What makes the film remarkable is the way that Côté stages this detachment. Scenes of intense lovemaking (dexterously shot by the cinematographer Rafaël Ouellet) give way to a pair of episodes in which Milena and Philip each have a harrowing independent encounter—which they then proceed to hide from the other. These sequences threaten to unbalance the film by pushing the action towards genre conventions (neo-noir and monster movie, respectively) while simultaneously shoring up its conceptual coherence. While the focus on a couple as opposed to a lone-wolf differentiates it from its predecessor, Nos vies privées is an even more provocative treatise on isolation, suggesting that neither desire nor proximity is necessarily a salve for loneliness.

Variety.com [Alissa Simon]

ALL THAT SHE WANTS (Elle Veut le Chaos)

Canada (105 mi) 2008

I Think We're Alone Now Adam Nayman from Moving Image Source, March 1, 2011 (excerpt)

Instead of staying with a loner protagonist or sheltered couple, Elle veut le chaos (All That She Wants) (2008) sketches a small, vicious circle of down-and-out characters: Coralie (Eve Duranceau) who lives with her (step?) father Jacob (Normand Lévesque) in an Arcadian backwater; Pierrot (Laurent Lucas), an ex-con returning from a stint in prison; and Alain (Réjean Lefrançois) the aging gangster who lives next door and has designs on opening a brothel (leading to an uncomfortable interest in Coralie); the pair of sullen Eastern European girls he plans to pimp out; a feral pack of thugs whose leader, Spaz, lives up to his name.

A kind of French-Canadian rural Gothic shot in gorgeous, high-contrast black-and-white, Elle veut le chaos is seen by some as the odd title out in Côté's filmography. For one thing, it's got more of a plot than either Les états nordiques or Our Private Lives, even if it doesn't seem to be in a hurry to enact it. There is also an increased emphasis on camera placement and movement, as if the director were trying for the first time to showcase his formal chops. Les états nordiques and Nos vies privées evinced a singular sensibility without being locked into any sort of obvious stylistic program. Here, though, the style is "slow cinema" all the way, all complex friezes and hypnotic tracking shots. In scene after scene, Côté makes it clear that he's playing with duration, distending the action so that the drama seems to play out in slow motion. If Elle veut le chaos is a grueling experience, it's also an essential episode in Côté's development, as the increasing confidence of his mise-en-scène dovetails with an interest in the landscape—bleak, blasted, unforgiving—as an active character rather than a simple backdrop.

Eye Weekly [Jason Anderson]

Despite the fact its Anglicised title makes All That She Wants sound like the latest Matthew McConnaughey vehicle, with its long, slow takes, static atmosphere, slight narrative and black and white palette, Denis Cote’s film is a million miles from the multiplex.

Centring on the sort of backwater provincial town usually seen in the American arthouse, this is less the individual story of the trials of its central protagonist Coralie (Eve Duranceau), than a more general examination of isolation, both physical and spiritual.

Coralie is just about as alone as it is possible to be. Her mother has been sent to a mental institute – Coralie is not sure where – and she lives with Jacob (Normand Levesque), who is possibly her father, although nothing here is certain, save for the fact that the pair of them are allowed to scratch by purely on the indulgence of the gangster and his cohorts who live next door. As characters – an ex-con in love with Coralie, a pair of Russian prostitutes – come and go, Cote asks us to examine their futile boredom from which, it seems, at least initially, there is no respite, while at the same time exploring the notion of women in peril.

The black and white film perfectly evokes the sense of a place caught in aspic, while the use of ambient noise, rather than a soundtrack – except for the credits – adds to the air of disconnection with the outside world.

Cote’s framing is exquisite. From doorways right down to the leaves on a corn plant his scene composition is breathtakingly good, and he puts every inch of depth and width of each frame to good use.

Those looking for clear narrative plot points will find themselves frustrated by the shards of story poking up through the hauntingly realised images – this is wilfully arthouse, demanding that the viewer find their own direction with only the vaguest of story maps. But if you’re prepared to go with the vibe of quiet menace mixed with bone dry humour and a sense of melancholy that pervades, you will find as much pleasure in the texture of this film as the overall look.

Quiet Earth [Simon Read]

User reviews from imdb Author: richard_sleboe from Germany

CARCASSES

Canada (72 mi) 2009

The most audacious Canadian feature in many a moon, Denis Cote’s fourth effort attains a rare state of Herzogian weirdness. Opening as a quasi-doc portrait of Jean-Paul Colmor, the affable proprietor of an enormous junkyard in the backwoods of Quebec, Carcasses then shifts into a more flagrantly mythic mode as Colmor’s metal-strewn kingdom is invaded by teen marauders. That the latter group is played by actors with Down’s syndrome may cause some consternation but the proceedings’ air of quiet awe and spirit of playfulness make Carcasses something rare and wondrous.

exclaim! [Erene Stergiopoulos]

Some rides are quick and get you from starting point to final destination with no waiting in between. Others take it slower and lull you along the scenic route. French-Canadian director Denis Côté's latest film, Carcasses, is neither.

Carcasses is the kind of ride you don't really know what to make of. In fact, you might not even know why you got in the vehicle in the first place. The film is a strange hybrid of documentary and dramatic tableaux, focused on real-life 69-year-old Jean-Paul Colmor. Colmor is a bizarre elderly man who collects old stuff, tries to fix it and then sells it. He's got thousands of decrepit cars in his backyard and most of the film is spent watching Colmor as he cranks carburettors and drags the carcasses of cars around his yard.

Sparse dialogue, a minimal score and fixed shots of Colmor at work make for a film that's more about the art than it is about the story. Even at a slight 72 minutes, Carcasses requires a generous helping of patience.

But that's not to say it's bland. Where else would you watch a gang of rifle-wielding teenagers with Down syndrome raid a house? Or better yet, a sunset make-out scene between two of the offenders once the stash is in the bag? Carcasses is the kind of film that makes you think long and hard about all the things you consider normal. And by the end of it, you'll still be wondering.

Thought provoking and a testament to Côté's contribution to contemporary Quebec art cinema, Carcasses does exactly what it's supposed to. Even if you take a few naps in between.

I Think We're Alone Now Adam Nayman from Moving Image Source, March 1, 2011 (excerpt)

Carcasses (2009) takes this idea even further even as it circles back to the hybridized nature of Les états nordiques: it is Côté's most successful attempt at what the critic Robert Koehler has termed "cinema-of-in-betweenness." Shot in Saint-Amable Quebec (which was also the location for Nos vies privées) it focuses on another isolated figure: Jean-Paul Colmor, a 74-year old junkman whose sprawling property looks like the dumping ground for Western Civilization. Colmor's claim to fame lies in the 4,000 cars littering the fields around his house, but his personal space is even more spectacularly cluttered; the sheer assemblage of degraded objects—piled on shelves, scattered on the floor, and stuck to the ceiling—suggests an interior-design magazine layout shot by Edward Burtynsky.

Côté's static DV camera renders the detritus tactile in a series of striking, symmetrical tableaux, but it's hard to take our eyes off Colmor, who prowls the grounds like a solitary king. What begins as an austere portrait of a rugged individualist changes at the midway mark into something else, however. After being more or less alone for the whole film, Colmor receives some unexpected visitors—a quartet of teenagers with Down's syndrome, who appear to have wandered onto his property from the woods. Their mystifying appearance challenges Carcasses' claims to authenticity—we're no longer watching a documentary—even as it deepens the film's engagement with reality beyond the junkyard.

"I'd say Carcasses is a reversal of Drifting States," Côté told me. "This time, we use documentary as a way to access fiction. One is cannibalizing the other. I still have the strong impression that by blending documentary and fiction, you can achieve something cinematically surprising or, if you'll excuse the pretension, something 'new.' It has something to do with the following question: 'OK, here's reality, I don't want to change it, I must respect it, I mustn't re-create it, I mustn't alter it but... how can I control it?'" Carcasses is an exercise in control, but its underlying themes are wild and unruly. Colmor's retreat from society appears to be self-willed, but what about these intruders? Some critics opined that Côté was drawing an insulting parallel between these handicapped characters and the discarded automobiles littering Colmor's property. Less important than the youths' symbolic function (which the director has denied) is the simple fact of their appearance onscreen. Simply put, these are not people whom we're used to seeing in a movie—and even then, it's usually only ever in a journalistic or saccharine context. In this way, Carcasses reveals itself as a double-edged portrait of marginality.

Wylie Writes [Addison Wylie] June 21, 2010

Carcasses | Pacific Cinémathèque

User reviews from imdb Author: Benoît A. Racine (benoit-3) from Toronto, Ontario, Canada

CURLING

Canada (92 mi) 2010

Eye Weekly [Adam Nayman]

Denis Côté has long since staked out his territory as Canada’s most adventurous auteur. With Curling, he seeks to refine the terrain. A film about damaged individuals in a bleak landscape, it nevertheless has a sense of humour: a scene where an overprotective father and his sheltered daughter (Emmanuel and Philomène Bilodeau) listen to Tiffany chirp her way through “I Think We’re Alone Now” both establishes and makes fun of Côté’s preoccupation with isolation. And yet the film is, finally, concerned with the possibility, however faint, of community. How nice that Côté’s most accomplished film to date is also his most hopeful.

I Think We're Alone Now Adam Nayman from Moving Image Source, March 1, 2011 (excerpt)

With Curling, Côté has executed another about-face: away from the semi-documentary format and back into strictly narrative territory. Curling doesn't have very much in common with Carcasses, but it does connect strongly to all his other films, and in very specific ways. The isolated father/daughter dynamic has been borrowed—and dramatically refined from—Elle veut le chaos, as has the fact that Julyvonne's mother resides in an institution. And, as in Les états nordiques, Côté gives us a lead character whose inner psychology is utterly opaque. The difference is that this unknowability is actually the film's subject as opposed to a byproduct of an experimental production.

Played by Bilodeau with an unsettling, furtive delicacy, Jean-Francois (whose choice of facial hair has led to his being dubbed "Mr. Moustache" by his friends) is damaged goods. He holds down two jobs as a cleaner—one at a hotel, the other in a bowling alley that seems permanently stuck in the 1970s—and he is devoted to Julyvonne, but in problematic ways: he keeps her out of school and in the house most of the time. This over-protectiveness seems rooted in a fear of the outside world, yet as the film progresses, it's clear that he's stunting Julyvonne's growth by sheltering her. Freed for an afternoon at the bowling alley, her behaviour is more that of a delighted child than a girl on the verge of adolescence. The enforced closeness isn't healthy, but the real problem is the hidden emotional gulf that opens up in its wake—a motif of traumatic experiences withheld from a loved one rhymes strongly with Nos vies privées.

At a press conference in Locarno—where the film won two Leopards for Best Director and Best Actor—Côté responded to a journalist's questions about his "weirdo" protagonist by pointing out that people like Jean-Francois are hardly unusual. They live and work among us, and they do their level best to function despite difficult personal issues. The film doesn't condone Jean-Francois' erratic behavior, especially not his response after happening upon the aftermath of an accident. But there is no judgment, either. In the same way, Côté doesn't present Julyvonne as a victim. Some of her issues are inherited—like her father, she chooses to keep a horrific discovery private -but she's also impressively self-sufficient. And she has another possible role model: Isabelle (Sophie Desmarais) the young woman hired by the boss of Jean-Francois' bowling alley as eye candy. Her sexy goth-punk exterior—dyed red hair, stark makeup—implies an attempt to separate herself from her peers, yet she's friendly and open with her co-worker and his daughter (and suffers her superior's leering with bemused patience).

That Curling is beautifully made shouldn't come as a surprise. Côté's technical abilities have improved with each outing, and he's employed the excellent cinematographer Josée Deshaies, who has also shot films for Nicolas Klotz and Jacques Nolot (and who shot Elle veut le chaos). The frosty color palette, skillfully delineated interior spaces, and precisely managed silences are the works of a maturing filmmaker coming into his own.

What is surprising, though, is the sense of optimism that builds beneath the film's meticulously chilled surfaces. The title refers to an eccentric but beloved Canadian sport that is played on ice and requires close teamwork. Invited to participate, Jean-Francois demurs but remains fascinated, both by the physics—heavy stones are slid down the ice—and also the nomenclature, which speaks of "protecting the house:": keeping your opponents' stones from getting close to the center of the surface. Without ever overstating the point, or giving it too much screen time, Côté turns the sport into a plangent metaphor for Jean-Francois's longing for connection, and if he's too smart a filmmaker to fall into inspirational platitudes, he's also honest enough to allow his character the possibility of growth. Curling ends on what must be the most physically crowded shot of Côté's career: literally speaking, his characters are no longer alone. That sharp-eyed viewers will also catch an actual question mark tucked into the corner of the frame may simply be a coincidence of location shooting, or else a joke along the lines of that not-so incongruous Tiffany song. Or, best of all, an acknowledgment that this restless, adventurous director isn't interested in endings—he'd rather that you draw your own conclusions.

New Directors/New Films 2011: Curling Andrew Schenker from The House Next Door, March 24, 2011

The last several years have seen the influx of a number of films about characters shielding either themselves or their families from the alleged dangers of the world, confining their lives to a greater or lesser degree to the relative safety of the domestic fortress. Call it Shut-In Cinema. To Ursula Meier's Home, Anders Edström and C. W. Winter's The Anchorage, Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth, and Bong Joon-ho's segment in the anthology film Tokyo!, we can now add Denis Côté's Curling, making its New York debut at New Directors/New Films. Rivaling The Anchorage, the best of the above listed works, in its combination of utter precision of detail and overwhelming sense of mystery, Côté's film makes for instructive comparison with the movie it most superficially resembles, Lanthimos's celebrated tale of overprotective parenting gone bonkers.

In Dogtooth, the central couple confine their three children to the grounds of their suburban home, creating an alternate universe in which they control the very nature of their offspring's reality, going so far as to alter the meaning of everyday words. Positing a sinister world outside the borders of their hedged-in lawn, the parents keep their children in a state of terror in which they can assert seemingly unlimited control over their spawn. An open-ended allegory with a range of possible interpretations, Lanthimos's film is a skillful exercise in world creation, but ultimately a limited one: Dogtooth finally feels as constrained and meaningless as the children's bounded existence.

Curling, which takes place in the only slightly wider world of wintry, rural Quebec, is, by contrast, firmly grounded in the circumstances of a larger reality. Like the parents in Dogtooth, single father Jean-François Sauvageau (Emmanuel Bilodeau) keeps his daughter in a state of overweening isolation and, like the sinister pair in Lanthimos's film, his reasons are never explicitly made clear, though they're continually hinted at. For the patriarch of Côté's movie, the motives for holding 12-year-old Julyvonne (Philomène Bilodeau, Emmanuel's real-life daughter) out of school and away from other children have less to do with power and more to do with fear: of the outside world and, perhaps above all, of female sexuality.

Set against the foreboding and stunningly photographed snowscapes of Quebec (witness the marvelous scene of father and daughter walking down a deserted rural highway, wind wafting the banks of snow across the road), Curling is a psychological study that refuses to go deeper than what the naked eye can detect. "Something's wrong with my head," Jean-François eventually admits to his daughter, but that's about all we're given in the way of concrete explanations. Everything else is glimpsed in the man's behavior: his retiring demeanor, his terse outbursts when challenged by authority figures, his obvious discomfort and disapproval when his boss at the bowling alley where he works hires a sexy young female cashier.

Eventually, sinister suggestions and strange incidents begin to pile up. Hinting at a past episode that occurred at the bowling alley when Julyvonne was five ("It wasn't safe for her last time"), Jean-François parries his boss's suggestion that he bring his daughter along to work just as he rejects the man's repeated offers to set him up with women. Free to roam the snowy forests of the province while her father's at work, Julyvonne discovers a caged tiger and a pile of dead bodies, neither of which she reports. Similarly, Jean-François comes across a blood-soaked room in his second job as a motel janitor which he's instructed to ignore and, later, stumbles upon a dead boy by the side of the street which he takes into his car and stows in his garage.

The mysteries of the world—its brutality, its unsolved crimes—are mirrored by the mysteries of human behavior, but neither is presented as mere obscurantism. Each incident is precisely rendered in terms that are utterly coherent within individual scenes, even as they add up to a splintered view of the world, exciting in both what they reveal and what they conceal. It's, on a smaller scale, what Jacques Rivette says about the films of Alain Resnais: "The world is broken up, fragmented into a series of tiny pieces, and it has to be put back together again like a jigsaw." Aesthetically, Côté's cool, observational technique scarcely resembles the radical fissures employed by the director of Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Muriel, but the Curling auteur similarly presents his world as a series of glimpses that have to be fitted together in the viewer's mind in order to make sense of the situation he confronts them with.

Easing off on his restrictions as the film goes on, Jean-François moves from allowing his daughter no more entertainment than the chance to listen to Tiffany's dated cover of "I Think We're Alone Now" in the comfort of their home (the scene in Côté's movie that most recalls Dogtooth) to attending a birthday party for his boss at the bowling alley. As he engages the young cashier in conversation for the first time, his daughter runs off with other kids to bowl, having in the words of Jean-François's boss, "the time of her life." Is this the start of a new father-daughter dynamic?

Following a brief solo sojourn out into world, which includes sex with a prostitute and the film's one fantasy sequence (in brightly lit, dreamlike imagery, Jean-François imagines himself achieving a stunning success at the region's favorite sport, curling), the father returns shorn of his trademark mustache and seemingly ready to normalize his daughter's life. But given the film's overwhelming depiction of—and sense of awe at—the mysteries of individual behavior, the future remains as opaque as the film's barely hinted at past. Still, unlike Lanthimos's reduction of disconcerting human activity to cynical allegory, Côté is genuinely committed to plumbing the depths of these actions, even as he modestly acknowledges the limits of understanding that inevitably crop up when we set about to honestly explore what it means to be human.

Edward Champion New Directors, New Films, from Reluctant Habits, March 22, 2011

Quiet Earth [Marina Antunes]

The Village Voice [Nicolas Rapold] Nicolas Rapold interview from The Village Voice, March 23, 2011

Toronto Film Scene [Katarina Gligorijevic]

Georgia Straight [Mark Harris]

Criticize This! [Brian McKechnie]

User reviews from imdb Author: JvH48 from Netherlands

Denis Côté's 'Curling' has a rocklike impenetrability - The Globe ... Rick Groen from The Globe and the Mail

Canadian Denis Côté Named Best Director at Locarno for CURLING ... TIFF Reviews, August 15, 2010

BESTIAIRE B 87

Canada France (72 mi) 2012

This film is no fiction, obviously. However, if it were a documentary, there would be a “subject.” Also, to describe it as an “essay” would entail a polemic or partisan implication, corresponding to the proper literary term. Cinema has come to label this genre of proposition as “object.” I don’t know how to label it myself, and even better, if this film is difficult to subsume but poetic at the same time. I started out with a naive desire to explore certain energies and to observe the relations or maybe even the failed encounters between humans and animals. In the end, this film is about contemplation — and something else. Something indefinable, something more obscure which I hope to find out more about with the help of the audience.

—Denis Côté from the film’s press kit (press-bestiaire)

Midway between Plattsburgh, Vermont and the city of Montreal in Canada, a distance of 60 miles, lies Parc Safari (home - Parc Safari), an animal and amusement park founded in 1972, featuring both an African and Asian species of elephant, but none of those details matter in this visual essay, a wordless and minimalist work that refuses to explain anything, but instead simply observes without judgment, accumulating detail over time. Similar to Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) (2010), the camera wordlessly gazes upon a world largely unfamiliar to us, where at least part of the distinguishing attempt here is not to embellish or beautify what we see, or even allow preconceived knowledge or understandings to interfere with the director’s mission, which is to observe human behavior through the unpretentious eyes of animals, and vice versa, both seemingly on equal footing. A key factor in making the movie is to allow the mind to remain completely unpresumptuous throughout, where an unquestioned reality seeps through unfiltered, where neither species has an unfair advantage. Like the Cahiers du Cinéma magazine writers who became filmmakers during the 60’s French New Wave, Côté is himself a former film critic from Montreal. A champion of small and unconventional films, he redefines the viewing experience by infusing his films with a certain objective detachment. Opening in the dark with the sounds of pencil on a sketch canvas, we quickly see a handful of art students *studying* something that stands before them, each scrutinizing the subject, gazing intently, before they return to the canvas. What they’re eyeing is an artificially preserved deer, an example of the kind of wildlife you might see in national park visitor centers, mysteriously bringing the stuffed animal to life on canvas, where one would never know if the original subject the artist is rendering was real or imaginary, as it takes on new life in the eyes of the artist.

Unlike groundbreaking directors like Tarkovsky or Bresson, Côté is not looking to transform the art of cinema, but seems content to stake out his claim for something imprecise or undefined, as the director has radically argued his experimental film is not a documentary. Railing against the popular success of warmly humanized animal documentaries like WINGED MIGRATION (2001) or MARCH OF THE PENGUINS (2005), which create lovable subjects in the eyes of humans, turning animals into a form of human entertainment, much like soft, cuddly puppies, the director instead uses long-held, static camera shots gazing at animals as they often stand there gazing back at us. Other times the camera may find animals simply staring out into empty space. In each instance, no action is visibly happening onscreen to capture the attention of the viewer, but one grows curious about the surroundings, which are anything but natural. In what must be approaching feeding time, a lion in a cage compulsively bangs against the locked door, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, as if demanding that the door be opened bringing food, where the sound is heard even after the camera shifts elsewhere, but the film instead offers no explanation other than the sight of a lone zoo employee standing nearby ignoring the commotion. Initially the outdoor shots feature animals in the snow, like a small group of horses assembled together against a corrugated tin building, some only partially in the frame, moving about until there is only one staring directly at the camera, using no accompanying music, only natural sounds, as seen here: Bestiaire (Dir. Denis Côté) Trailer - YouTube (1:29). Only with the addition of more animals, like a small group of buffalo, does the audience realize this is a large scale zoo, mixing indoor and outdoor shots, mostly animals alone, many of them caged, where by spring, off in the distance with the grass suddenly turning green, a herd of elk may be seen running freely.

After a fade to black, the camera is suddenly in the cramped studio quarters of a group of working taxidermists, with stuffed animals scattered about, also pieces of animals hanging on the wall, like antlers or horns. One man is meticulously reconstructing a duck, which is a painstakingly slow process, where initially the animal isn’t even recognizable. It’s an odd comment on animals, suggesting a bizarre afterlife, but ultimately it seems to say more about humans than animals, as they have a need to preserve life after death, even in an artificial form. Obviously, in the more open outdoor space, thought is given to separate the caged predator cats and tigers from the zebras or impalas that roam free, but there’s no aesthetically designed space. Most of this resembles the disorganized look of a working farm, with rutted tire tracks everywhere, random objects stacked in piles, where off in the distance touring cars are seen driving through the grounds with the arrival of summer. With nothing resembling a carefully designed structure suitable for animal interaction, where they can move about hopping onto something resembling their natural habitat, instead we see a lone gorilla sitting on a dilapidated wooden structure, immobile, gazing at nothing until a couple with children walks into the frame, where the two have an animated discussion, even a kiss, where the viewing attention turns to them instead. Just as quickly, the presence of people completely disappears during a rainstorm, but zebras still delight in seemingly having the entire outdoor grounds all to themselves. There are no commercial shots of the concession stands or the children’s games, amusement rides, or the miniature golf, anything that reveals the mundane nature of the actual business operations. Instead it’s a more isolated, free associative and contemplative film, observing a lone giraffe standing up against another corrugated tin structure, or a solitary elephant walking through the vast landscape, a stark contrast to the prevailing view of elephants living in the harmony of tight-knit family groups, unfathomably dwarfed by the emptiness of the wide open spaces, somehow questioning the meaning of it all, much like the existential dilemma facing mankind.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

Denis Côté’s meditative “Bestiaire” scrutinizes animals in captivity at Parc Safari in Quebec, his camera gazing as dumbly as a cud-chewer could. Chilly? Cruel? Odd, acute frontal static frames picture the wary, sometimes anxious animals in their pens and cells, and the most disturbing moment is an unbroken take, a frame that includes the lower legs of a zebra kicking, bucking, kicking, bucking, a machine for reflecting hostility. (Côté jokes about near-conversion to “the Church of James Benning.”) An ostrich’s head, held in medium shot for a long time, provides as much anxiety as actorly windmilling like Bradley Cooper’s in “Silver Linings Playbook.” Largely, the collected beasts are objects to look upon, remaining themselves while repositories to fill with our own ambivalence, but resistant to anthropomorphism. The effect is simple, direct, and ultimately, poignant. “Today’s man gorges himself on YouTube,” Côté wrote recently for Cinema Scope magazine. “No need to dwell on the entertaining virtues—often real—of wet kittens in the sink. But can we not lament the harm done by this display of curiosities taken on the fly to the precision of gaze that others so desperately chase? At the other end of the spectrum lies the illustriousness of National Geographic, Animal Planet and other toadying televised inventions… The refusal of an inquiry or the inquiry of refusal, ‘Bestiaire’ is docile like an animal. It waits to be watched, named and placed within the confines where we want to place it.” 74m.

TimeOut Chicago A.A. Dowd

Likely to bore those weaned on the anthropomorphizing adventures of Disney nature docs, Denis Côté’s wordless Bestiaire applies the patiently observational methods of James Benning (13 Lakes) to the star attractions of a Quebec menagerie. Eschewing narrative and narration—the location isn’t even revealed until the end credits—the film unfolds as an endless succession of blankly staring bovines, restless big cats and other uncomfortably caged creatures. The subject here is our enduring fascination with fauna—a zoological interest that, typically and historically, has less-than-pleasant consequences for the objects of our curiosity. Opening shots of students sketching a stuffed deer, coupled with later scenes of taxidermists at work, serve as a potent reminder that human obsession with the animal kind extends beyond living specimens.

One could also read this artful if repetitive doc as a general study in voyeurism, especially given the way Côté intersperses the critter footage with shots of similarly dead-eyed zookeepers. Like a cinematic Rorschach test, Bestiaire accommodates multiple readings, allowing its audience to project theories about spectatorship and captivity onto its silent beasts of burden. The obliqueness muffles any sense of outrage; you won’t leave ready to cancel your zoo membership. If anything, the more playful moments evoke the joys of animal watching: An ostrich head floating into frame operates as a visual joke, while clumsy mammals stumble unexpectedly through Côté’s static compositions, like the photo-bombing cats of YouTube fame.

Slant Magazine Calum Marsh

As filmmaker Denis Côté himself inquired in the pages of Cinema Scope, "does the animal exist outside of its propensity for being put in the perspective of human destinies and behaviors?" Not when regarded by curious eyes: In motion or in repose, caged or free, the animal becomes in observation an icon of revered nobility, an unknowable primal force guided by instinct, or even some oblivious jester performing for our amusement. It becomes a symbol of our hopes and fears, ever in thrall to the whims of a higher order; our pet cats don't want for anything beyond food or affection when they meow at us, but the temptation to project more substantial moods and motivations to their blank, receptive faces makes us treat them like the relatable household companions we desire. In other words, we code animals as a kind of natural entertainment, readily calibrated to suit our dispositions, and we lap up their varying cuteness, ferocity, and grace like a child enamored with his or her favorite toy. But this tendency to see what we want in animals, fueled by an inability to understand or relate to them, prevents us from seeing them as they really are. In the words of Côté, we are blind to the animal as "simply a living, breathing organism who drools, moves about, and sleeps."

Bestiaire, Côté's passively observational documentary set in and around the Parc Safari in Hemmingford, Quebec, attempts with great clarity of vision to regard its animal subjects without prejudice or inflection, and its inability to ultimately do so might be the closest thing it has to a thesis. Like Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel's extraordinary Leviathan, Bestiaire submerges us within a rigorously organized commercial system while pointedly effacing the details of its daily operation, so that a doc ostensibly concerned with a sprawling outdoor zoo more closely resembles, in practice, an abstraction attuned to the rhythm of the environment rather than its functional mechanics. Its purpose isn't our edification: By the end of the film we understand how a place like this operates about as well as the lion understands why it's caged. Spectacle, instead, is an alternate recourse, and much of the film's running time is dedicated to the act of observing animals as they drool, move about, and sleep. The attended pleasures are simple but irresistible: a small deer steadily pacing in circles adopts the tenor of physical comedy; a handful of ponies meandering aimlessly emanate childlike innocence and warmth; and the hard stare of a bull, seeming to return our gaze, is oddly disarming.

But Bestiaire slowly gravitates from fenced-in pastures toward the Parc's steel-walled nerve center, and as the system's strictures narrow, one begins to suspect that these images are informed by more than a benign interest in detached observation. Cold chambers of control and confinement suddenly become, without commentary or coercion, a vision of ritualized cruelty, a hell of our own design. Two zebras rattling their shared, cramped quarters in anger and confusion might as well be the Irish prisoners of Steve McQueen's Hunger, smearing their own shit over the walls in protest, and the suggestion that we're ethically and morally culpable for permitting this ongoing violence hangs over the proceedings until the residual guilt is unbearable. That this increasingly difficult section of the film is immediately followed by a long, languorous detour into an overview of a taxidermist's laborious craft only furthers the sense that Bestiaire, despite operating from an apparent remove, is a clear indictment of a system that's quite obviously abhorrent. It argues persuasively without words, without resorting to visual cheap shots or reductive, Godfrey Reggio-style match cuts, making a case without explicating one at all.

Bestiaire's final passages offer some reprieve from the suffocating confines of wrought iron cages and bird-stuffing, set amid comparatively open spaces and less harried animals. A lion splayed across the top of an enclosed transparent walkway sleeps lazily, uninterested in the onlookers pointing up in awe beneath him, and for a moment we're back to gazing innocently at creatures who don't seem to care. But then the onlookers multiply: Bestiaire shifts its focus toward the middle-class tourists who are at the Parc, hunched over or craning their necks to gawk at the animals. Throngs of schoolchildren poke and prod baby deer as long lines of cars inch through "authentic" safari traffic in search of the perfect vacation snapshot. At first it seems like heavy-handed finger-wagging, a potshot aimed at schlubby tourists feeding a corrupt industry. But then there's the bull again, staring back at us rather than the tourists, and it becomes obvious that we're all the target. This is both criticism and self-criticism, undermining the impulse to elevate ourselves above easy targets; we're just as captivated by the spectacle of these animals, and even if we're gleaning some politicized import, we're guilty of submitting to the same intrusive curiosity. We want to watch animals and we want to understand them, explain them, know them. Our desire to impose ourselves on them is primal.

Village Voice Melissa Anderson

The House Next Door [Michal Oleszczyk]

Spectrum Culture [Trevor Link]

E-Film Blog [Michael Ewins]

Movies [Tom von Logue Newth] also seen here: FilmFracture [Tom von Logue Newth]

NPR Sam Stander

Screen-Space [Simon Foster]

Sound On Sight [Alex Moffatt]

Screen International [Lee Marshall]

Film School Rejects [Cole Abaius]

Bestiaire (2012) Movie Review from Eye for Film Amber Wilkinson

Berlinale 2012. Denis Côté's "Bestiaire" David Hudson from Mubi

here Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

BESTIAIRE Facets Multi Media

Cinema-Scope: director statement

Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]

Variety [Peter Debruge]

New York Times Manohla Dargis

Why we love zoos Diane Ackerman from The New York Times

VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR (Vic + Flo ont vu un ours) B+ 92

Canada (95 mi) 2013

With VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR, Denis Côté re-emphasizes what a talented and provocative filmmaker he is, one of the few artists working today where the word “radical” comes to mind, as it’s hard to find anyone else comparable, creating a deeply probing character study, yet at the conclusion of this film, audience members will be scratching their heads, searching for any explanatory information, as there are unanswered questions about what it all means. Typical of other Côté films, the director refuses to explain anything, and instead leaves out pertinent details in his film to make sure the questions remain unanswered. While some directors intentionally leave clues for the audience, helpful hints to whet their appetite, especially in mysteries, Côté on the other hand makes sure there are no clues whatsoever to guide the audience, where the less information the film provides, the more the viewer must discover on their own. It should be pointed out that the less you know going into this film, the greater the impact. In this manner, it is somewhat reminiscent of Rolf de Heer’s ALEXANDRA’S PROJECT (2003), another film that adds an underlying element of creepiness into what otherwise appears to be just another day. This film is equally unsettling, and not in ways the audience could possibly anticipate, incorporating menancing psychological shifts through the use of heavily percussive music by Melissa Lavergne, like primitive drumbeats suggesting trouble lies ahead, often using humor like a battering ram to keep the pernicious forces at bay. A former film critic from Montreal, certainly one of the director’s goals in all his films is to acutely observe unfiltered human behavior as objectively as possible, without rendering judgment, where what’s in store for the viewer is likely to be eye-opening. On this point alone, the director succeeds brilliantly in this film, winner of the 2013 Silver Bear (Alfred Bauer 3^rd Prize) at the Berlin Film Festival.

Like Gloria (2013), the Berlin film that won Best Actress, both films feature performances by characters in their 60’s, a rare occurrence in today’s youth oriented cinema, but Victoria (Pierrette Robitaille) as Vic couldn’t be more different, recently paroled from a life sentence for a crime that is never revealed, a woman with a hard edge to her character, who speaks directly and to the point, often using a biting sarcasm to undermine the authority of others. There’s a brief opening segment, like a story prelude, where she sits next to a young kid dressed in a boy scout uniform trying to play the trumpet where she informs him he’s not very good, and shouldn’t be asking for money when he doesn’t know how to play, but he quips “You could give me a little money, as encouragement.” It’s a strange moment that seems to foreshadow an unbalanced state of the world, as Vic is seen quickly walking down the road lugging her suitcase behind her, where the baggage she carries may as well be a past that continually haunts her. Finding a house in the woods, with an old man sitting paralyzed and mute in a wheelchair on the porch, she finds a shirtless teenage kid looking after him, apparently a neighbor boy named Charlot (Pier-Luc Funk), and informs him she’ll be moving in and looking after him, as the old man who used to run this “sugar shack” is her Uncle Émile (Georges Molnar). Content to sit idly on the premises and do nothing, she ridicules the prowling interests of her visiting parole officer Guillaume (Marc-André Grondin), who arrives unannounced and meticulously inspects the premises like a trained detective, asking probing questions that she contemptuously reflects back onto him, revealing as little as possible, yet she’s subject to this continued scrutiny where after each visit she’s forced to observe him sitting at the table writing notes, never revealing the contents of his observations. Like his earlier film Bestiaire (2012), where his camera wordlessly gazes upon penned animals, as his intent appears to be observing human behavior through the watchful eyes of animals, the director similarly observes penned-in characters here.

Adding to the mix is a sudden visit from Vic’s girlfriend, Florence (Romane Bohringer) as Flo, former cellmates who pick up where they left off under the sheets, where her presence adds a great degree of comfort for Vic, where the two of them openly defy the rest of mainstream society, but the bisexual Flo feels suffocated by the remote isolation, taking repeated side trips into town searching for men, leaving Vic disappointedly alone some nights, petrified that she will lose her. Part of the film’s unique strength is the significance of secondary characters, as Côté weaves them in and out of the tapestry of an evershifting storyline, bringing them prominently into play for a sudden outburst, often shattering any notion of equilibrium. One of the telling scenes of the film is when Flo meets the incensed neighbor next door (Olivier Aubin), a short, fat man with bulging eyes who initially scowls at her in a bar before revealing his profound resentment for Vic, “What’s a chick like you doing in that shack with that old hag?” Apparently this guy continues to hold a grudge against Vic for failing to take care of her paralyzed uncle all those years she was incarcerated, a gender bias that suggests instead of he and his son, this is a more appropriate role for women. His venomous outburst only adds to a perception that it’s these two lesbian lovers in the woods against the world, where any venture outside only points to potential trouble. Vic and Flo’s tenderness with each other is contrasted by their growing indifference towards everybody else, yet the hostile forces of the world outside have a way of penetrating into their secluded alliance, where Flo’s emotional ambivalence becomes even more threatening, opening the door for ill winds. A sudden shift in tone reveals the gruesome effects of unleashed hatred and horror, seemingly for no rhyme or reason, as the director provides no backstory to help explain this sudden eruption of jarring images, an aspect that may in fact resemble real life, where irrational hate crimes, for instance, are committed but police investigations often reveal no known motive. Part of the brilliance of Côté’s film is how meticulously constructed it is, creating complex and convincing characters caught up in an idyllic affair living on the edge of an enveloping wasteland, creating a perilous existential angst surrounded by cruel and sinister forces of primevil intensity that exist without explanation while showing no mercy, a grim and often unrelenting film where perhaps the cruelest joke is the return of the trumpet boy, whose playing has only slightly improved, yet he offers an emphatic punctuation to this unexpectedly horrifying and tragically absurd finale, infused with poetic resonance and a bewildering mystery, while the 80’s French electropop music of Marie Möör’s “Pretty Day” Marie Möör - Pretty Day (Official Cover) - YouTube (2:04) plays over the end credits and almost mockingly whispers “It’s a pretty way to die.”

The Chicago Reader: Drew Hunt

After experimenting with minimalistic documentary (Bestiaire), Quebec director Denis Côté returns to the eccentric character work of his best films (Curling, All That She Wants). Released from prison, sexagenarian Victoria (Pierrette Robitaille) moves into a house in the woods with her catatonic uncle, enduring visits from a parole officer; she also picks up with a former, much younger girlfriend, Florence (Romane Bohringer), whose sordid past forces Vic down the wrong path. Côté prevents the film from ever settling into a classifiable mood or genre. His work has a mischievous edge; characters aren't introduced but simply appear, seemingly coaxed from thin air, their significance unclear. He excels in subverting one's expectations—the gritty cinematography, for instance, dampens the idyllic, arboreal setting, and woven into the action are subtle strands of paranoia, passion, and malice. As Côté dives deeper into these moods, the film turns aggressive and impressionistic, moving from low-key drama to tragicomic fairy tale. In French with subtitles.

Senses of Cinema: Daniel Fairfax Berlin Film Festival, March 2013

More than Huppert or Deneuve, or even Binoche, the true stand-out French performances of the festival came from the decidedly less renowned figures of Pierrette Robitaille and Romane Bohringer in Denis Côté’s Quebecois film Vic+Flo ont vu un ours (Vic+Flo Saw a Bear). A return, for Côté, to the wry character-based humour of Curling, after the minimalist experimentation of Bestiaire, the film centres on a lesbian couple trying to refound their life after long bouts in prison (for crimes that are never fully explained), by holing up in a remote sugar plantation owned by Vic’s paralytic uncle. Their hopes of starting a new life, punctuated by visits from a fastidious parole officer, are cruelly dashed by the arrival of “Marina”, whose jovial façade masks the vicious vengeance she threatens to wreak on Flo for past misdeeds. Côté’s cinema is known for a certain mischievous streak, upending the spectator’s expectations, and here it is exemplified by his adroit guidance of the film from quirky comedy to suspenseful thriller, culminating in one of the most horrifying scenes of the festival.

Bears and Apes and Wolves, Oh My - Moving Image Source Adam Nayman, January 9, 2014

At this point, there’s nobody left to compare Denis Côté to except himself. Where the Montreal-based director has previously been likened to everyone from Werner Herzog to Lisandro Alonso, his Berlin-feted Vic + Flo Saw a Bear sends him into his second decade of filmmaking under a banner of his own handmade manufacture—a knight errant of a cinematic realm that’s grown from a mere niche to a veritable kingdom. The superb Pierette Robitaille stars as Vic(toria), a sexagenarian parolee who invades her aged uncle’s sugar shack in the Quebec wilderness and invites her lover Flo(rence) (Romane Bohringer) to live there happily ever—an optimistic set-up that’s thwarted by a formidable combination of internal and external forces.

Along with his adventurous spirit, Côté’s great talent is for regional atmosphere, and Vic + Flo is a uniquely breathable movie: its portrayal of a physically intimate and emotionally frayed same-sex relationship is refreshing even when it is depicted as suffocating. Like the director’s previous All She Wants is Chaos, Vic + Flo Saw a Bear gradually takes on certain qualities of a thriller, but there’s nothing generic about its plotting or, especially, its performances, which are uniformly spare and superb. If this ursine-monikered movie has a true spirit animal, it’s Marie Brassard’s scarily cherubic interloper Jackie, who belongs on any short list of great contemporary villainesses; when she sneers at Vic that “people like me don’t exist in real life,” it’s a taunt that at once solidifies and undermines the parable-like qualities of Cote’s storytelling.

Violence Begets Violence in Vic + Flo Saw a Bear ... - Village Voice Inkoo Kang

The tendency of violence to beget more violence has been the concern of artists since long before Aeschylus wrote about Orestes, who killed his mother for killing his father for killing his sister. Quebec–based Denis Côté's brutal fable Vic + Flo Saw a Bear is similarly preoccupied by violence's terrible fecundity, and this exceptional French-language film's strongest elements are borrowed from Greek tragedy. It's an ominous, claustrophobic, unhappily sapphic work whose thunderclap of a climax instills terror and awe of the fates' petty, whimsical cruelties.

Vic and Flo are Victoria (Pierrette Robitaille) and Florence (Romane Bohringer), a lesbian couple reunited after 61-year-old Vic's release from jail. (Her crime is never revealed, but she received a life sentence for it.) As part of her parole agreement, Vic moves in with her near-comatose uncle Émile (Georges Molnar) in a part of Canada so remote the villagers only drive golf carts on the rocky, narrow roads. "I'm old enough to know I hate people," she explains to fortysomething Flo, who finds an escape from the confines of small-town life and Vic's emotional dependence in bar hook-ups with men.

Lush as a rainforest yet nearly barren of hospitality, Vic and Flo's new environs teem with the promise of menace. Vic's assumption of the duties of caring for her uncle leads to an angry, drunken confrontation instigated by her unhinged, bug-eyed neighbor. She's intruded upon at unpredictable hours by her handsome but distant parole officer, Guillaume (Marc-André Grondin). Only a leather-jacket-clad gardener with a stylish shag cut (Marie Brassard) displays kindness, but she doesn't look like she belongs, either.

Not that Vic and Flo have the emotional energy to process the threats of impending trouble. The women are too busy breaking up as slowly as they can. Flo's feral defensiveness and Vic's gritted-teeth determination to enjoy her final years lead to a compellingly messy dissolution as preordained as Alka-Seltzer in water. Vic can forgive Flo's infidelity, but the younger woman chafes against the bonds of tranquil domesticity. After Flo suffers a serious injury, she even turns her doting girlfriend's massages in bed into a transgression. "You know you've been nicer since I've had my cast?" she accuses. As a former criminal, Flo wields distrust like a shield. Vic's newfound serenity is a betrayal and a handicap.

Vic + Flo's ravaging power comes from its last 15 minutes, soon after a friendly-eyed sadist declares, "Horrible people like me don't really exist," then chuckles grimly in anticipation of the suffering to come. The women are subject to a shocking old-school reckoning — they may deserve a comeuppance, but not to this unjust degree — that is as fancifully vicious and as strangely transcendent as the final twist in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy. (Here's a hint: The children's-book-like title works as a nasty joke.) The climax is the kind of plot development that might be entirely avoided if either Vic or Flo had a phone in her pocket, but they're so geographically isolated they might not get reception anyway. More to the point, it would be nothing but hubris, according to Côté, to believe any mortal can save herself. Violence's bloodlust will not be denied.

Film Comment: Dan Sullivan February 03, 2014

Having produced seven features and two shorts in a mere eight years, Quebecois filmmaker and former film critic Denis Côté has rapidly established himself as a fickle auteur whose signature is predicated upon overturning conventions and upsetting expectations. Working hastily as a matter of principle, he has annually rolled out a film that significantly revises his style while still preserving what makes his work unmistakably his. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t continuities across his oeuvre: his films are littered with solitary outsiders (such as in his last fiction feature, 2010’s Curling) and intelligently assembled glimpses of contemporary society’s unsettling and under-scrutinized byproducts (as with the frigid, unnatural menagerie in his last doc, Bestiaire, from 2012). His latest, Vic + Flo Saw a Bear, once again finds Côté attempting to take his artistry in new directions while also making room for the thematic and aesthetic concerns he has obsessively pursued since his debut, Drifting States (05).

The film opens with the arrival of sixty-something Vic (Pierrette Robitaille) at her new residence, her indisposed uncle’s inoperative sugar shack located in the densely forested boondocks of Quebec. Vic, it turns out, is free on parole from what was apparently a life sentence. (Spoiler: we never learn what she did to wind up in the joint.) Her parole officer, Guillaume (Marc-André Grondin), is a highly patient but strict customer who alternates between trusting her and sternly cracking down on her various half-truths and ex-con mishegas. Vic’s lover, Flo (Romane Bohringer), first appears as a giggling, writhing body beneath the covers with Vic—prison lovers reunited on the outside and picking up where they left off, though with radically different scenery. (Another spoiler: the reason for Flo’s incarceration is similarly elided, although her past makes its presence felt in a big way soon enough.)

Côté is not known for his prowess as a storyteller, but there are several compelling plotlines woven into the fabric of Vic + Flo: ornery Vic’s relationships with her uncle’s shirtless teenage caretaker (Pier-Luc Funk), who’s transfixed by his RC helicopter, and the boy’s scowling hulk of a father (Olivier Aubin wearing, yes, a Canadian tuxedo); restless Flo’s two-timing with various johns at the local dive; Vic and Flo’s half-assed investigations into Guillaume’s sexual orientation; and much more.

The plot quietly turns on a dime when Marina (Marie Brassard) arrives on the scene. Initially, she’s just a weird stranger asking permission to ride her ATV on Vic’s uncle’s property in exchange for gardening lessons. But the revelation of Marina’s true identity (a slow-burner that Côté unfolds with perverse patience) proves a means for the director to take the narrative somewhere else entirely, swapping the slightly offbeat, deadpan humor of the first half for a provocative reworking of the crime film tropes he appropriated in his earlier All That She Wants (08). Vic and Flo hurtle toward fates consonant with the lives they led before jail, and Côté reservedly unravels the narrative tapestry before abruptly tearing it to shreds.

The violence that fuels the film’s staggering gear-change is graphic, but its apparent severity is a function of its incongruity relative to everything preceding it. Far from trafficking in brutality for brutality’s sake, Côté plays it in a self-consciously sophisticated way but also makes no effort to conceal his giddiness about eliciting intensely visceral responses. With its rigorous visual style (strongly frontal medium-wide shots; long takes; mildly miraculous tracking shots; a palette consisting of blown-out whites and ice-cold blues) and its often Sphinx-like cast, Vic + Flo makes for a strange and affecting experience, albeit one that’s more admirable than likable. Even so, Côté and his collaborators have crafted an astounding movie that doesn’t care about being adored but that certainly demands to be dealt with.

VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

With French-Canadian director Denis Côté’s seventh film, it’s best to start with the title: “Vic + Flo Saw a Bear.” If you haven’t seen it, it sounds innocuous, even flippant. Once one has seen the film and knows what it refers to, it takes on a tragic dimension. This duality is central to Côté’s aesthetic. “Vic + Flo Saw a Bear” starts off as a love story but winds up in a brutal place. Yet as nasty as it gets, it remains true to the initial romance.

Upon release from jail, 61-year-old Vic (Pierrette Robitaille) moves into her dying uncle’s sugar shack in rural Quebec. Her partner Flo (Romane Bohringer), who’s also an ex-con, soon joins her. They attempt to enjoy a peaceful life among the trees. However, both women are on parole and must constantly deal with gay P.O. Guillaume (Marc-André Grondin) and a nosy neighbor (Marie Brassard), whose intrusions seem increasingly sinister, especially after she goes from helping Vic with her garden to lying about Flo running up a huge tab at a local bar.

Films about lesbians made by straight men tend to be voyeuristic — the recent debate around Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color” and its 10-minute lesbian sex scene would’ve been much different without that history. Refreshingly, “Vic + Flo Saw a Bear” avoids this tendency. It never shows explicit sex. Vic and Flo are middle-aged women, not “babes” in their 20s. If Lena Dunham is considered unattractive by narrow American standards of beauty, Robitaille and Bohringer would be way out of consideration for most heterosexual men’s fantasy lives.

Instead, the film’s homoerotic sensibility is oriented toward men, who are often shown shirtless. After seeing “Vic + Flo Saw a Bear,” I assumed Côté was gay and was surprised to learn he’s not. However, his original draft of this film’s screenplay was about a gay male couple, not two women.

Côté’s style of cinema is fiercely regional. While that has undoubtedly hurt his chances of getting US distribution — I had to travel to the Toronto Film Festival to see his first few films — it’s a testament to his uncompromising nature. (His 2010 film “Curling” was sold to a US distributor who, for some reason, never bothered to actually release it.) Although he lives in Montreal and is such an urbanite he doesn’t even know how to drive, most of his films are set in rural Quebec. They avoid the usual clichés about the countryside. In “Vic + Flo Saw a Bear,” rural Quebec is heavily policed, both by the actual cops and by freelance criminals. It promises freedom but does not deliver on it. The cinematography captures its blue and green colors, and even the costumes seem to draw on the same shades as the landscape.

As critic Melissa Anderson wrote, “Vic is terrified of losing Flo, setting in motion a push-pull between the two women that grows only more painful to witness.” Flo is bisexual, casually flirting with the local men. When I interviewed Côté, he told me that he made Guillaume gay as a way of avoiding the possibility of an affair between him and Flo. Up to a certain point, the dangers faced by Vic and Flo seem like an external version of the pressures confronted by every couple. Socially marginal, Vic doesn’t have much to look forward to in life besides her relationship with Flo. Flo may be on the verge of her 40s herself, but, more than two decades younger than Vic, she at least has time on her side.

“Vic + Flo Saw a Bear”’s style initially relies on naturalism, but its ending leans toward horror, if not exactly in the genre sense. These contradictions are familiar in Côté’s work. His previous film, “Bestiaire,” appeared to be a documentary about a zoo in Montreal, but the director admits he manipulated circumstances to make the zoo appear more oppressive toward animals than it actually is and reconstructed much of its soundtrack in the studio after the shoot. His latest film, which is about to premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, also flirts with documentary but includes a few professional actors among its subjects.

In the end, the genre-bending of “Vic + Flo Saw a Bear” makes way for a grim romanticism. Vic and Flo’s fate is simultaneously terrifying and achingly hopeful.

An Ursine Halfabet: Denis Côté's Vic+Flo ont vu un ours - Cinema Scope Michael Sicinski from Cinema Scope

In Denis Côté’s Bestiaire (2012), you might have really seen a bear. That’s because it took place in a zoo. As for his latest, au contraire; the grizzlies are not really there. The title’s both a metaphor and a clue: the phrasing, like a picture book, implies that we should take a look at what’s on screen with fresh, untutored eyes. Though N through Z we hath forsook, we presently propose a hook of silly alphabetical surprise.

A is for Alfred Bauer Prize. One of the many Silver Bears awarded at the Berlin Film Festival, the Alfred Bauer has come to be informally understood as a third-place prize, although the Berlinale’s award structure quite pointedly does not mirror that of Cannes. Alfred Bauer was the founder of the Berlinale, and, as per the festival’s own publicity materials, the prize is specifically “for a feature film that opens new perspectives.” Although there is no question that the Berlinale has improved dramatically in recent years, the idea that the film in competition singled out for innovation is semi-officially relegated to third place indicates that festival head Dieter Kosslick still has some work ahead of him, particularly when it comes to impanelling halfway decent juries. Denis Côté’s latest film, this year’s Alfred Bauer, stands proudly alongside last year’s second runner-up, Miguel Gomes’ Tabu; less august recipients (to say the least) include If Not Us Who (Andreas Veiel, 2011) and I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK (Park Chan-wook, 2006).

B is for Bookends. In the opening moments of Vic+Flo, Victoria (Pierrette Robitaille) is waiting at a bus stop. We find out later she has just been released from prison, but at this point we only know that she is a rather tired-looking, but not altogether dishevelled, woman of a certain age, pulling a black suitcase behind her. Two boys, one slightly older than the other, are waiting alongside her; they’re wearing scouting uniforms, and the younger lad is bleating out a series of ugly, quavering notes on a bugle. Victoria explains to them quite firmly that the boy is not very good, and has no business asking for money when he doesn’t know how to play. “You could give me a little money, as encouragement,” the boy suggests. Although at this point Côté cuts to a close-up of Victoria’s luggage rolling up a country road, it is implied that Vic felt no need to contribute to this young amateur’s “good feelings” fund. Much, much later, near the end of the film, when Victoria is in a compromised position, to put it mildly, the young scout with the bugle shows up again. His reappearance, of course, is a formal gag on Côté’s part, since we had all but forgotten about him by this point. He ambles up the forest path, his playing only slightly improved. Victoria, half-conscious, remarks on this but admits she has no money. The boy turns and walks away, playing a semi-competent rendition of a funeral march. Is this boy’s second appearance real, or Victoria’s hallucination? Ironically, if we treat Côté’s film as “naturalistic,” organized by likelihood rather than formalist ironies, then it’s most likely the latter. (The scene recalls the reappearance of the doddering room service waiter in Twin Peaks, after Agent Cooper has been shot.) But in a film that regards each male character as both an individual and a sort of male specimen—a facet, benign or malevolent, of prevalent male power—the boy would appear to be neither cruel nor kind; he is just nascent self-interest in its most unselfconscious form.

C is for Charlot. Upon first arriving at her uncle’s cabin, Victoria encounters a lurking, shirtless teenager who she had seen just moments ago down the road flying a remote-control plane. In fact, she and the viewer see the plane buzzing around the woods before we see the boy or his father. (The use of radio-controlled aircraft to describe ambiguous film space is a kind of micro-theme at this year’s Berlinale: it also plays a role in first-time director Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat. Animals and machines, mobility and agency residing everywhere except with humankind…) When Vic confronts the young man, we learn that he is Charlot (Pier-Luc Funk), the neighbour’s kid, who has been coming over to help take care of the cabin’s resident, Uncle Émile (Georges Molnar). He and Victoria strike up a hesitant but tentative rapport. She informs him that she’ll be moving in; he says that’s fine, since she’s family. His only misstep is mentioning to Vic that he will need to run this arrangement by his dad. For Victoria, this is an automatic foul, since the relatively demure young man has now shown himself to be an agent of patriarchal authority, or at least its minion. Victoria half-listens to Charlot’s instructions regarding Émile’s needs (admittedly, she has just returned home after being released from prison, and is dead tired), but what might have been a surrogate mother/son arrangement begins on the wrong foot and never recovers. From this point on, Charlot serves as a mostly silent sidekick to his aggressive, judgmental father. While Charlot is clearly a very minor character in the overall scheme of Vic+Flo, his placement in the margin of larger events is quite purposeful. Côté is providing a glimpse of male privilege in training, mostly as an ambivalent posture with no other available avenue.

D is for Drums. Vic+Flo does not have a very conventional soundtrack. Much of the film relies only on ambient, diegetic sound. However, at certain key tension points, particularly around the appearance of Jackie a.k.a. Marina (Marie Brassard), a mysterious and quite dangerous figure from Flo’s past, Côté introduces an accelerated drumbeat. A snare, with a little kettle and woodblock for additional emphasis, this percussion has a strange impact on the listener in the context of Vic+Flo. Its deployment is clearly meant to suggest anxiety or danger, and yet the skittering beat is rather awkward, resulting in an almost humorous half-approximation of “action music.” This unusual mode, which I can only describe as a form of sonic irony played straight, calls to mind similar music cues in films by Wes Anderson and Hal Hartley. And yet here, the percussion (much like the storybook title) seems to contribute to the hovering sense that we are involved in a fairy tale, a story to be conveyed in broad, simple strokes.

E is for Émile. Upon her arrival at the sugar shack, Victoria discovers her Uncle Émile immobile in an electric wheelchair. Charlot soon informs Vic that Émile has suffered a stroke and is paralyzed. He requires semi-constant care; he cannot feed or bathe himself, he must be taken to the toilet, and he must be mechanically reclined in his chair so that he can sleep. There is a degree of mistrust almost instantly between Vic and Charlot, but nothing compared to the outright distaste Charlot’s father, Nicolas (Olivier Aubin), feels for Victoria. A short, fat man with bulging eyes and a distinctly redneck demeanour, Nicolas clearly resents the fact that he and Charlot have been caring for Émile and Victoria has not. However, this resentment is notable in that it is not directed at Victoria’s brother Yvon (Guy Thauvette), who has apparently been coming to the sugar shack periodically to check on Émile, but not to live with his infirm uncle or make any sort of long-term assisted-care arrangements for him. What accounts for this radical difference in Nicolas and Charlot’s attitude? The obvious answer is gender. Upon discovering the existence of a female relative, the expectation is that she is the one who should have been the caregiver all along. Why wasn’t Victoria up at the sugar shack wiping the old man’s ass all this time? Once Flo (Romane Bohringer) arrives, taking up residence with Vic as her lover, the situation becomes all the more intolerable. The silent, immobile Émile becomes a problem, not only because the women don’t really know how to take care of him, but because, from the male neighbours’ perspective, the women’s lives together draw too sharp a contrast to Émile, parked like furniture in the corner. Vic and Flo, in basic terms, are flouting their duties to the patriarchy. Émile, rather sad and helpless, with his long, stringy white hair, calls to mind the title character of Donald Barthelme’s novel The Dead Father, a sentient being who functions chiefly as a manifestation of waning phallic prerogative. Although bossy little Nicolas obviously wants to make sure Émile is properly cared for, he is far more concerned with halting the intolerable vision of Vic and Flo’s indifference to him. Who do those bitches think they are?

F is for Flo. Romane Bohringer, who has long been a compelling screen presence in mostly second-tier European films such as The Accompanist (Claude Miller, 1992) and The King Is Alive (Kristian Levring, 2000), plays Victoria’s prison girlfriend Flo, who, having been released some time before the start of the film’s main action, comes to the sugar shack to reconnect with her lover upon Vic’s parole. The nosy, nasty Nicolas, upon running into Flo in the local bar, rather offensively asks her, “What is a woman like you doing with that old hag?” Nicolas, ever the voice of unfiltered patriarchy, channels society’s disapproval of the age difference between the two women, which is around 20 years. What people like Nicolas can’t see—in fact, what is visible only to Guillaume (Marc-André Grondin), Victoria’s parole officer—is that the women have an easy rapport despite differences. What will eventually cause trouble is Flo’s criminal past. We never learn specifics, but a dark spectre from her criminal days materializes quite suddenly in the woods that, up to that point, had been a safe haven from prior misdeeds. However, the fact that Flo is the one who brings trouble into the woods is not entirely surprising. She expresses continual ambivalence about holing up with Vic, wanting a life in the city, looking at apartments, as well as having an open relationship that permits her to act on her bisexual desires. Where Vic attempts to sever all outside ties, Flo “flows”: she is the conduit between the woods and the larger world. And as such, she has only so much control over who or what trails her back into her private enclave with Vic. Bad news tails her from the city; she has “let the wrong one in.”

G is for the Gaze. Nous avons parcouru un long chemin, bébé. Not so long ago, the very idea of a male director making a film about lesbians was offensive in and of itself. Since a man, regardless of his own sexual identity, can never understand what it’s like to be a woman, much less a lesbian, and since back in the benighted ’80s and ’90s identity and authentic experience were the benchmarks of political correctness, any representation of female sexuality (and especially female homosexuality) that originated from a male artist, even if it had been created with female collaborators, was fetishism tout court. Needless to say, the politics of that era were every bit as tedious as the previous sentence. (To this day, a notable film critic from that milieu condemns James Benning for allegedly spicing up the “boring” structuralism of 11 x 14 [1977] with hot girl-girl action. If the melancholy coupling of Benning’s film—Bob Dylan on the radio—looked like porn to the critic in question, I kind of feel sorry for her.) The film art of the time, at least that which abided by those stringent dictates, resembles well-intentioned but drab audiovisual pamphleteering. We are fortunate to be living in far more (small-c) catholic times, politically speaking. The structures and attitudes of the artwork itself are far more significant than the bona fides of the person who made it. Nevertheless, by any meaningful measure there is nothing in Côté’s film that approximates the dreaded “male gaze.” When we first encounter Vic and Flo as a couple, we see them in bed together, but they are romping and playing under the sheets, one big silly blanket lump. Thereafter, these rather unique, unconventional-looking women are presented quite matter-of-factly, their bodies and sexual lives portrayed within the overall fabric of their rather mundane day-to-day lives. The two women are just as “arousing” to the spectator, really, when they are barrelling down the dirt path on their golf cart. Moments of bliss amidst rural torpor are Vic+Flo’s “cheap thrills.”

H is for Heaven. Vic+Flo ends with many of the same motifs with which it began. Not long after the lousy-but-improving bugle boy wanders off, we see Charlot flying his radio-control plane again, Nicolas standing around, and a long shot down the dirt road from which Victoria first entered the scene at the start of the film, rolling her suitcase as she left prison with the plan of starting a new life. There are, of course, some significant differences. Men from the coroner’s office are loading body bags into the back of a van. Guillaume is looking on, confused and distraught. And as the van pulls away, we see the two women walk off down the road. The prison, I believe, was the other way. So where are they headed?

I is for Isolation. Uncle Émile’s sugar shack, much to Victoria’s relief (and Flo’s dismay), is in a wooded area off a dirt road, in the tiny Québec town of Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu (pop. 1,659). As Vic reassures Flo, “There’s a restaurant here.” Much of the film’s action takes place either in the woods or on the path just alongside those woods. Interestingly, the sugar shack is one of several other locales in Côté’s recent films that are characterized by being tucked away from the larger world. And, unlike Flo, other Côté protagonists seem to covet this distance from urban Canada, from the prying eyes of others, and from more conventional ways of living. Côté’s semi-documentary film Carcasses (2009) centres on a lone scrapper/collector (Jean-Paul Colmor) who dwells in an overstuffed cabin, pulling cars and machines apart and fabricating his own off-the-grid existence. (In some respects, he is a distant cousin to Jake Williams from Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea [2011].) Similarly, in Côté’s most recent fiction film Curling (2010), father J-F (Emmanuel Bilodeau) and his daughter (Philomène Bilodeau) live in a modest ranch house miles from anyone else, all the better for J-F to keep the girl away from worldly influence (and conceal his own secrets). Even Côté’s debut, Les états nordiques (2005), which is ultimately about a son discovering community following the death of his mother, drives the man into a small, tucked-away town. There is a particular tradition in Canadian art of seeking both solace and identity in vast, empty nature. The paintings of the Group of Seven emphasized this trek into the wilderness as endemic to the national character. However, Québecers have sometimes looked upon this trope with a degree of irony, they being the nagging itch at the core of any broader notion of Canadianess. Isolation is a promise that seldom delivers, and in Côté’s cinema, the desire to return to the land is a fundamental repression of social contradictions. As Freud teaches us, the repressed always returns with a vengeance.

J is for Jackie. “You have nothing to do with this,” Jackie tells Victoria, who has fallen victim to an unfathomably violent scheme designed primarily to punish Flo. “But I am a brute.” There is no clear explanation for the sudden appearance of Jackie, first outside the sugar shack at the side of the road, posing as Marina the flirty waterworks employee/gardening enthusiast, then eventually as the avenging demon from Flo’s unspecified past. As I note above, we can presume that she had been trailing Flo for quite a long time; the Tarantino-level acts of sadism Jackie perpetrates are very much in keeping with an obsessive (wo)manhunt. At the same time, Côté works to keep Jackie and her mostly silent assistant (Ramon Cespedes) functioning in the film as total free radicals. We know nothing about them, apart from the fact that Jackie seems to think Flo double-crossed her, and that Flo having done hard time does not represent adequate payback. Côté’s editing scheme, courtesy of Nicolas Roy (with whom the director worked on Bestiaire and Curling), tends to introduce Jackie with the suddenness of magic. Near the start of the final act, Vic, Flo, and Guillaume’s day trip is interrupted by an unmotivated edit of Jackie swinging on Vic’s hammock in the woods. And earlier, when we meet “Marina,” her benign first scene with Victoria discussing fertilizer is cut short with a shock-edit to a close-up of Nicolas Smith’s bulging, angry face. Jackie, then, is fashioned in the image of The Night of the Hunter’s Harry Powell, Cape Fear’s Max Cady, or No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh: embodiments of fury and nihilism that require no convincing motivation.

K is for Kid Brother. The very next day following Victoria’s release, she receives her first visit from Guillaume, her parole officer. He looks to be at least 35 years her junior, and his fastidious demeanour—pressed polo shirt, tight jeans, shaved head, sculpted facial hair, ever-present clipboard—instantly gives a very distinct impression. He is not a particularly seasoned officer, and as such is both a stickler for rules and, at first, a rather rote dispenser of official wisdom. “Take it step by step,” he tells Victoria. “You need to find hobbies, get out more,” etc. Naturally, the sardonic Vic and Flo take a certain delight in toying with this bureaucratic junior-achiever, mocking his officious concern and his stiff accordance with protocol. (For example, he dodges virtually every personal question Vic asks him, no matter how innocuous. “I ask the questions.”) As they are forced to spend more time with him, they discover a few things. First, Guillaume is a reasonably good sport, taking their teasing in stride, at least until Flo tries to get him to climb in a dumpster. Second, compared to the other men in their lives, Guillaume is pretty harmless, and actually does care about helping Victoria make it on the outside. Also, unlike the jealous, irritable Vic, Flo successfully picks up on the fact that Guillaume is gay. (The only personal information he ever divulges is to tell Flo that, yes, he has a boyfriend.) Even after he takes the ladies on a comically dull day trip to the aquarium and a train museum, they don’t let up on the teasing, but their affection for him is as firmly established as their antipathy toward most everyone else.

L is for Life Sentence. “Are you going to be coming around forever?” Flo asks Guillaume. At this point the parole officer explains that Victoria’s release is indeed highly conditional, as she received a life sentence. Côté drops this detail without offering any background, but it goes a long way toward explaining several key details of Vic+Flo’s plot. We can now piece together why Victoria is surprised to find Émile in a state of paralysis at the sugar shack, and why her reunion with her younger brother Yvon (Guy Thauvette) is bittersweet, the implication being that he never expected to see her again and that, despite his genuine affection for her, he intends to go on living the flashy, cars-and-girls existence he has built in her absence—a lifestyle that hasn’t got much room for an older sister in it. But most importantly, Guillaume’s mention of the life sentence seems at odds with the obvious concern he feels for his legal charge. She must have done something horrible, and yet Guillaume regards her with unnecessary solicitude and, eventually, admits to Flo in private that Vic reminds him of his mother. Was she wrongly convicted? Did she kill a man who battered her, or an abusive father? Was she a political prisoner? It is clear that there is more to Vic’s crime(s) than meets the eye, and that whatever she did, Côté wants it understood to be indicative of a frozen moment in history. Like Jackie, but in a very different register, Victoria is another inexplicable emanation from the unconscious.

M is for Maple Syrup. As a non-Canadian, I was admittedly confused by Vic+Flo’s reference to Émile’s place as the “sugar shack.” Granted, I could tell it was supposed to be a business of some sort, with the vending machines, jukebox, and random assembly of dining hall tables and chairs, but my only previous acquaintance with the term “sugar shack” was from the song by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs from 1963. (“There’s a crazy little shack beyond the tracks…”) So I learned something. “Sugar shacks” are rural tourist attractions and small-town dancehalls, mainly centred on the artisanal production of maple syrup. Along with the bottled syrup, the proprietors usually sell maple candy and other sweets. Sometimes they operate a diner out of the shack, the menu of course focusing on breakfast and lunch items that go well with the syrup. Whether Côté intended for this bit of local colour to have any greater significance is an open question. Victoria is gently encouraged, by both Guillaume and Jackie (as “Marina”), to reopen the sugar shack as a post-prison activity, as though all her sour disposition needed was a sweet sucrose infusion. But more broadly, the space of the sugar shack, historically, is one designed to bring the community together and to encourage those passing through to stop. Victoria wants to occupy this space as her own, not to be a charming hostess but to live in peace as a misanthrope. This is something that is difficult even for Flo to understand. And, as Côté shows us, being left alone proves almost impossible to achieve. From prison to the forests of Québec (and from Bestiaire to Vic+Flo), we find that this fairy tale has a rather dour (not to say Grimm) moral. If there’s always someone who can’t resist poking a bear in the zoo, then that someone is even more intent on trapping that bear in the woods.

Artforum: Melissa Anderson January 9, 2014

Reverse Shot: Benjamin Mercer February 7, 2014

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Anna Bielak]

Slant Magazine [Matthew Connolly]

Cinemablographer: Smarter Than the Average Bear Patrick Mullen from Cinemablographer

Movie Mezzanine [Dan Schindel]

Vic + Flo Saw a Bear | Film Review | Spectrum Culture Jake Cole

Film.com: Vadim Rizov

Paste Magazine Tim Grierson

Movies [Tom von Logue Newth]

[Review] Vic + Flo Saw a Bear - The Film Stage Jared Mobarak

Screen International [Lee Marshall]

In Review Online [Carson Lund]

SIFFBlog [Kathy Fennessy]

Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013) Movie Review from Eye for Film Amber Wilkinson

Film-Forward.com [Megan Fariello]

Review: Vic + Flo Saw A Bear | Newcity Film Ray Pride from New City

The Village Voice: Scott Foundas Berlin Film Festival, February 13, 2013

Floatation Suite [Sheila Seacroft]

Canadian Film Review [Alex Hutt]

The A.V. Club: Kiva Reardon

Fantastic Fest Review: VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR Has One ... Devin Faraci from Badass Digest

Movie Morlocks: R. Emmet Sweeney

MUBI's Notebook: Adam Cook February 11, 2013

Film Comment: Giovanni Marchini Camia Berlin Film Festival, February 12, 2013

Movie Morlocks: R. Emmet Sweeney

The House Next Door [Michael Pattison] also seen here: The House Next Door: Michael Pattison

The House Next Door [Joseph Pomp]

Fandor: Kevin B. Lee #9 of Top Ten Films of the Year, December 13, 2014

Letterboxd: Preston Wilder

Keyframe: Glenn Heath Jr.

Keyframe: David Hudson Fandor links

Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda] including an interview with the director November 13, 2013

Denis Coté interview Steven Erickson interview from Filmmaker magazine, February 4, 2014

Eye For Film: Denis Côté interview about Vic + Flo Saw A Bear Amber Wilkinson interview, February 7, 2014

Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]

Variety [Boyd van Hoeij]

Vic + Flo Saw a Bear: Ex-Cons Seek Refuge in the Woods Robert Horton from Seattle News

There Can Be Frightening Things in the Canadian Woods Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, also seen here: The New York Times: Manohla Dargis

Vic and Flo Saw a Bear - Wikipedia

JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING (Que ta joie demeure) B- 80

Canada (70 mi) 2014 official facebook page

The work place is the place where those arriving cross paths with those who are leaving early.

—Georges Courteline, (June 25, 1858 – June 25, 1929)

Denis Côté remains something of a radical, underground Québécois filmmaker championing the unfamiliar, including small and unconventional films, where his most recent film Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013) is perhaps his most accessible, through it remains provocatively disturbing, while this is closer to his earlier work Bestiaire (2012), a wordless and minimalist film essay shooting animals living in the closed quarters of an amusement park, observing human behavior through the unpretentious eyes of animals, and vice versa, both seemingly on equal footing. Côté is himself a former film critic from Montreal, and what he brings to his films is a certain objective detachment, where the key is observing without judgment. While this is a free associative and contemplative work that focuses upon the routine aspects of industrial work, accentuating machine operators in nine small factories in Montreal, he establishes a precise rhythm of noise and machine, where humans are simply intermediaries, but slowly introduces a fictional element that finalizes the film. While it may be completely unpretentious, it is quite different from the meticulously austere group of Austrian documentarians, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, OUR DAILY BREAD (2005), Michael Glawogger, WORKINGMAN’S DEATH (2005), SLUMMING (2006), and Whore's Glory (2012), Ruth Mader, STRUGGLE (2003), and Hubert Sauper, DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE (2004), which have a near mathematical precision to them. Instead it remains open ended and ambiguous, where the director intentionally makes no social comment, but simply shows various stages of people at work, including moments of absurdity when a union official, from an apparent approved distance where he is allowed to stand, yells slogans at the workers while they are working.

Initially viewers are greeted by the pounding rhythm of a machine press, including a montage of machines in close-up, while also subjected to a curious opening monologue asking for support, where the audience never sees who the comments are directed to, another worker or a machine (the director?). This schism between man and machine has been the subject of much conjecture since the advent of the industrial age, where the interplay has not always been compatible. As we hear the workers talk to one another, we discover one machine operates at a level of speed that most find dangerous, but that’s what attracts one particular worker to that machine, preferring it to all others, where he is able to utilize his own dexterity to achieve maximum results. Another grows disillusioned with the job, losing interest altogether, where he’s sitting around in a state of depression when he’s approached by a person that could easily be a ghost of the worker’s past, where another worker claims they’re ready to take his place, asking if he’s ready to relinquish his job. This visual sequence may simply be a passing thought in the course of the working day. While workers are routinely seen at their work stations, the presence of the camera in such close proximity would seem to be a distraction and highly intrusive, perhaps dangerously so, due to the precise nature of this kind of skilled work where machines are manipulated into exact positions, where the degree for error is minimal. Certainly one thought about what we see is that we never see the final result of their labor, but only the one piece of the puzzle that each worker is assigned to perform, creating a feeling of incompleteness, as while they are part of the whole, they never seem to be connected to the finished product.

For the filmmaker, he entered into this project without any written script, becoming an improvisational journey that reveals itself over time, an experimental alternative where we are taken on an observational tour of various factory settings—metal working, carpentry, industrial laundry, a garment shop, mattress factory, and coffee roasting. Alternating between people and machines as well as the raw materials that surround them, many toil in a kind of solitary silence, while others remain talkative and gregarious throughout with other staff. Côté catches many of them during their idle rest periods having a quick smoke, but also having extended conversations about their jobs, providing shop talk, including an amusing parable about a crooked employer, or comments about work fulfillment, where one changed workplaces as she was barely noticed at her previous job and felt invisible, but remains just as invisible here as well, offering views of alienation and a sense of demoralization, as they spend half their lives in this claustrophobic environment, while others find a kind of mystical satisfaction in the constant repetitiveness of their actions, as if it offers the opportunity to cleanse the mind. This kind of emptyheaded blankness balances with the focused concentration needed for the more intricate nature of some of the work performed, supplemented by an intriguing sound design by Frédéric Cloutier and Clovis Gouaillier. By introducing fictional characters, some seen offering prayers to their machines, Côté accentuates the kinds of thoughts that might come into play, while also introducing other significant images, where a partially constructed wooden piano is seen at one point, which later introduces the titular Bach chorale Myra Hess plays Bach/Hess "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" YouTube (3:41) heard somewhere off in the distance to the worker’s contemplative thoughts, where this musical reverie is perhaps the idealized sound of their completed work, a kind of sacred musical construction of perfection. What is perhaps missing is the feeling of any joy in the work, amusingly remedied in the final shot. Despite the multiple layers in play, the narrow scope never becomes particularly revelatory, where it doesn’t impress as much as some of the other work by this director.

Our guide to week two of the Chicago International Film Festival Drew Hunt

Following his remarkably offbeat drama Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013), the prolific Quebecois director Denis Côté returns to the documentary-essay style of his Carcasses (2009) and Bestiare (2012) with this meticulous and poetic study of industrial labor. Côté explores various factories, framing the workers and heavy machinery in fussily composed static shots that have a subtly menacing quality. He circles around a variety of ideas—man's alienation from machines, the demoralizing nature of manual labor, how francophone immigrants and Quebecois natives acculturate in the workplace—but doesn't offer any direct conclusions. Like Bestiare, whose imagery associates humans with animals, this is chiefly an experiential exercise; the amazing sound design, courtesy of Frédéric Cloutier and Clovis Gouaillier, turns the mechanical clang into arrhythmic music, making the toil seem like dancing. In French with subtitles.

Blackfish | Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center

After a sultry opening monologue from a mystery woman that resonates with a statement that ‘Everything has a price. Not always money’, Denis Côté’s latest erupts in an anxiety inducing symphony of rhythmic industrialization, the pounding and clanging increasing in both proximity and volume as the camera slowly dollies in on a montage of machinery in operation. It is this harsh repetitiveness of mechanization and it’s mixed relationship with the people that engage with it that Joy of Man’s Desiring manages to encapsulate, the human cost of mass consumer factory production.

Excluding the various to-camera portrait shots and lyrical anecdotes that are increasingly sprinkled throughout, much of the film feels akin to the output of the rising stars of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnology Lab. Mixing its focus of physical labor a-la Leviathan with the stringent observation of Manakamana and Sweetgrass, the film bathes the viewer in an aural wash of factory noise and casual on-duty conversation between various anonymous workers, but ultimately loses it’s authenticity by interjecting a playfully flaccid fictional coda that toys with the ‘need but don’t want’ relation most people have with their jobs. Breaking the spellbinding naturalistic tone, Côté drops a faux depressed laborer wanting out into the mix, while a woman on hand is more than willing to take his job.

Superfluous as the epilogue is, it makes its point. The majority of the workers found on screen look nothing short of bored and miserable, performing the same monotonous task over and over, followed by a break where they often sit and stare off in silence. Their glazed over gazes seem to be asking us to fill their heads with fantastical stories that take place anywhere but beside their assigned machine, and yet many vocally appreciate their mechanical jobs, knowing full well someone out there would be more than willing to replace them. They’ve found an enjoyable rhythm about their given tasks, and their lives outside of work are better for it. It is this delicate balance that Côté seems to be interested in, the relationship between man and machine that was birthed during the industrial revolution and as only become more widespread since. No matter how tedious the task, one must find some satisfaction in their jobs in order to maintain a sort of sanity amongst their co-workers.

As if part of the menagerie of caged animals of Bestiaire, Côté’s factory workers share a variety of gloomy, unadorned warehouse spaces, all dressed uniformly, each evoking the bitter-sweet conundrum of our blue collar lineage with only their devout physical presence and a blatant apathy about it all that repeatedly surfaces in observational portraiture and casual conversation alike. The gorgeous static framing and the overbearing aural violence of machinery running full-bore on the soundtrack flexes oppositionally with the ideas of humans being denigrated by their repetitive tasks while they literally dominate over their assigned equipment to better the lives of consumers outside of the factories’ walls. Occasionally, Côté overworks the subtle complexities of Joy of Man’s Desiring by unnecessarily adding stylized fictional passages, but when sticking to a straightforward meditation of humanity’s multifarious relationship with their life-sustaining work, there is much in the way of sapient sensorial indulgence to savor.

Movies [Tom Newth]

The cinema of Denis Côté is frequently concerned with banality, be it work, or the superficially drab existence of out-of-the-way communities, in the hotel-room cleaning of Tennessee (2005), the watching and waiting of Les lignes ennemies (2010), or the near-standstill slowness of life in rural Quebec in various features. The fascination, however, is in observing, in finding a way of looking that brings out the strange and, potentially, profound undercurrents. And so the off-season zoo of Bestiaire (2010) becomes a mysterious space full of animal parts and unreadable gazes, rather than an urge to anthropomorphism; the battened-down feelings and fears run deep beneath inexpressive surfaces in Curling (2010); and the junkyard of Carcasses (2009) takes on the air of some used-up science fiction setting.

The fact that we frequently have no idea at what kind of machines we are looking in Côté's latest, Que ta joie demeure (literally: "let your joy abide", the – almost – French title of Bach's Jesus bleibet meine Freude) produces a similar effect of slightly alternate reality, from an opening montage of shunting, Seuss-like contraptions and their mechanically musical soundtrack. Soon we see humans engaged in the wordless, repetitive work of operating, although cut briskly enough to avoid the easy allure of hypnosis.

For, ostensibly similar to Bestiare, this is an observational non-documentary look askance at an enclosed, normally unseen environment and its inhabitants. This time, however, Côté offers prompts to interpretation in a more explicit manner. We begin with a scripted prologue of teasing opacity, as a female worker talks over her shoulder in serious tones of the need for trust, how she is not a machine herself, and how her unseen listener may find "good times" if he succeeds "here". Who the listener might be is unclear – a new co-worker, possibly the viewer, although as the intimate tone suggests, perhaps even a lover. And in actual reality, of course, she is talking to the film-maker behind the camera.

She can indeed trust him. The camera style is unobtrusive (and careful in framing as ever), observing not only the work, from large machine shop to mattress factory, woodshop or coffee packers, but also the downtime: quotidian work tales, some stilted ribaldry, the indistinct burble of canteen conversation. We may wonder how much of the talk is strictly observational, however, as opposed to scripted, or indeed how many of these people are actual workers (Quebecois actors may not be easily recognizable on an international level, but some will recall the hangdog face of Olivier Aubin from various other Côté pictures). Around the 45-minute mark, set-ups have begun to take on the discreet air of staging – a rolled-up garage door acts as a raised curtain for the space we see from upstage, later to be the setting of the most theatrical of the film's few monologues. Even the shadow of a narrative emerges: a young woman changes workplace to be given something to do, to feel more fulfilled. Likewise, the downtime conversations increase in portent: a parable about a crooked employer; the question of who desires to work at the same machine for ten years; the floor-workers' attitude to the company as a whole. This in fact is one of the few moments wherein we get a real glimpse of the humanity at work in these inhuman settings but, depending on one's sympathy, it is either universalized or undercut by being repeated verbatim – each of two of the machine workers separately asserts that although they may seem not to care about the company, they do, for "this is half my life".

In fact, there is no real attention paid to the relationship between these bottom-rung workers and their management, a significant part of human experience under any working conditions; furthermore, whilst the effort to stay away from anthropomorphism in Bestiaire ended up suggesting a more intriguing sense of self for the animals, the uninvolved view here has an opposite effect, reducing the workers to repetitive drones and barely-scripted mouthpieces. One teasing semi-exception is a young man, seen usually on his own, repeating mantra-like the Reaganite slogan "hard work never killed anyone. Why take the risk?" We see him finally declaiming from a vantage point above the factory floor (we assume) but have no view, or clue, as to his listeners, nor the significance of his place within this film.

Thus, as the hand of the artist becomes more apparent, the near-mystical effect of framing and measured montage – Bestiaire's success story – starts to cede its power to more discernible manipulation. Some commentators suggest that Côté has fallen fatally between two stools, spoiling the uncanny effect of detached, askew observation, yet conjuring nothing from his more direct interventions. This is not entirely unfounded, but the whole is at last coherent in its gear towards tentative investigation and suggestion. We do notice what is missing, however: where is the workplace camaraderie, and where, indeed, is the joy? One worker is happy he works at his own machine rather than the dull one of the old man in the corner, but this feels like a very restricted and contextual form of happiness. Even the fulfillment that the displaced girl craves cannot help but feel ironic – she seeks "a job that gives me strength and courage", but ends up cleaning a ceiling sign for drinking water. The only thing like joy is found in the final sequence, as a child saws away at his violin, joyful only if one finds this more charming than aurally irksome.

As his career proceeds, Côté is increasingly careful not to lead us by the nose, but his gentle nudging here down various avenues of thought do not send us far. We may wonder about the nature (and the potential for fulfillment) of such manual labor, reliant entirely upon machines, as opposed to the moments of physical finesse like cloth-cutting and melamine-trimming (although here too, both are notably simple operations in traditionally hands-on crafts). Never mind wondering about the workers' lives and sense of self outside of the workplace, we may also wonder about the distinct implications of working exclusively in these artificially-lit, enclosed and metal-crowded spaces, as opposed to outdoor manual labor at a comparable level – the grunt work of construction, or crop-picking, for example. The scope of the film is too narrow to embrace any of these questions, and one cannot help but feel, therefore, that the subject has been exploited somewhat below its full potential.

MUBI [Michael Pattison]

Coulin, Delphine and Muriel

17 GIRLS (17 Filles)

France (91 mi) 2011

17 Girls Lisa Nesselson at Cannes from Screendaily

When one headstrong young woman in a French seaside community finds herself accidentally pregnant, over a dozen of her high school classmates deliberately decide to join her in 17 Girls (17 Filles). Anyone - male or female - who grew up when an out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy was as welcome as a nuclear attack will be slack-jawed in amazement as the title batch of 16-year-olds conclude that it’ll be federating and fun (as opposed to incredibly foolish and options-limiting) to raise their babies together in a sort of girl power commune whose logistics are never discussed in depth.

Taking inspiration from a real-life example in the US in 2008, sister writing and directing team of Delphine and Muriel Coulin have made an altogether French film populated with fresh-faced and energetic young women as stubborn and gung-ho as they are oblivious. Tailor-made for festivals, this feature debut (after five noteworthy shorts) marks the sisters as talents to watch.

A more down-to-earth and mundane 21st-century answer to Picnic At Hanging Rock, the film is a portrait of schoolgirls caught up in exceptional circumstances. In thrall to ultimately inexplicable forces, they are forever changed by one girl’s charisma.

With the screen completely black, a girl’s voice-over tells us that the Brittany town of Lorient was overrun with ladybugs that autumn. We then discover most of the youthful cast standing in a corridor in their panties and bras waiting to get a perfunctory check-up from the school nurse (Noemie Lvovsky).

At exam’s end, Camille (Louise Grinberg) announces she thinks she might be pregnant. Five days later when she informs her four closest girlfriends, she’s eight weeks along. Camille hasn’t told her single mom (Florence Thomassin) yet and isn’t at all sure she wants to abort the fetus, the result of a one-night stand with a handsome classmate to whom she seems indifferent.

The girls are all “good” kids - drug use and drinking are minimal. Cigarette smoking is as rebellious at it gets. Where a lot of movies would show embarrassed teens shoplifting a home pregnancy test, here a group of girls go to the pharmacy, ask if pregnancy tests are “re-usuable” and, learning they’re not, plunk down the cash for a dozen kits.

The young women set about getting knocked up. There’s no peer pressure in the traditional bullying sense. These young ladies genuinely seem to think that it’d be fun to have babies and raise them as a group. (Even a classroom showing of a yucky live-birth film doesn’t slow the march of twitching ovaries). Their town doesn’t have much to offer so the girls opt to skip the soul-searching and simply propel themselves into adulthood en masse. They’re exultant instead of panicked.

That their poorly defined project might squash their futures or lead to regrets doesn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind, although there ARE a fair number of wordless shots of individual girls sitting on their beds with far-off expressions closer to shell shock than bliss.

At least one character is willing to resort to subterfuge to be part of the pregnant clan, whose members are seen doing relaxation exercises together in a swimming pool with their bellies proudly protruding from the water.

Camille’s hard-working mother thinks her daughter’s an idiot to complete the pregnancy and points out she can’t even keep her room tidy let alone care for a child. Clementine’s (Yara Pilartz) parents are furious. Her father wants to confront the boy responsible. (In reality, Clem paid him to deflower her while fertile). Her mother says she still plays with stuffed animals and that her tiny build makes a pregnancy risky.

The school’s staff is baffled and unprepared for such an unprecedented epidemic of poor judgment with lasting consequences. An older female staffer offers comic relief when she posits this might be “progress” since unwed teen pregnancy used to be a catastrophic social blunder. The male gym teacher whines “I have a curriculum to follow - do I include the high jump or not?”

Non-French audiences may be surprised to learn that minors can decide whether to continue or abort a pregnancy without any parental jurisdiction. Some viewers may be even more surprised when the school nurse, unsettled, asks very-pregnant Camille “Mind if I smoke?” and lights up.

Camille is strong, self-possessed and pretty and other girls want to be like her. A sort of group mind takes hold, perhaps analogous to a bunch of underage male buddies signing up for the army together — not because of a draft but because it seems like an adventure they can share. Shooting in their home town of Lorient, the directors capture an ineffable sense of place against which universal emotions play out. The cast of mostly first-time young actresses is convincing across the board.

Coulter, Allen

HOLLYWOODLAND C+ 79

USA (126 mi) 2006

Truth, justice, and the American way

Another one of those “inspired by a real story” movies, this time mixing fact and fiction to suppose what might have happened to Hollywood actor George Reeves, the star of the Superman TV series, who at the age of 45 in 1959, according to the Los Angeles police, inexplicably walked up to his room one night and put a bullet through his head. This film, written by Paul Bernbaum, directed by one of the producers of the current TV series The Sopranos, supposes other murder theories, using several elaborate flashback sequences and the fictionalized investigative skills of Adrien Brody, supposedly hired by Reeves’s hard-as-rocks mother (Lois Smith), as a small-time private eye who has to mix it up with the big boys who make a living keeping stories out of the newspapers. Ben Affleck, the worst actor in Hollywood, in my view, couldn’t be more wooden and pathetic and out of his league, who you’d think might be appropriately cast in this film, as Reeves was a heavy drinker, disheartened that no one took him seriously as an actor, especially after his TV appearances as Superman, which in front of an audience of kids very much resembles Bozo the Clown, only he’s wearing a different costume. In a slightly exaggerated recreation, he’s shown at a preview screening of FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, where he initially had a bit part, but it was cut when the audience started snickering and laughing at seeing him, not the reaction the director was looking for in a serious drama. In reality, the performance itself generated the cuts.

Diane Lane is exquisite in her role as Toni Mannix, the glamorous wife of a ruthless multi-millionaire movie mogul, MGM executive Eddie Mannix, played by Bob Hoskins. The two have separate arrangements, as he has a mistress and other homes on the side, while she falls for the lovable face of George Reeves, buying him a home, among other lavish gifts. Their dinner together, the four of them, each with their outside lover, was so absurd, it was one of the better scenes in the movie. Other than that, Brody has a mouth that won’t shut up, except when he sticks a piece of gum in it, offering various theories to the news media, trying to keep the story alive for as long as possible, so he keeps running into thugs who want him out of the picture, very much in the CHINATOWN mode, which only makes him think there is a story, but he’s never able to put all the pieces together. Nonetheless we see several variations on what might have happened, shown in flashback from different perspectives, which leave us no closer to the truth than where we began, but it’s all effectively wrapped in vague stylization.

An interesting side story is the moody depression that haunts the lives of kids across America when they hear what happened to Superman, including Brody’s own son, who is already suffering from the anxiety of parental separation, which, given Brody’s profession, only exacerbates the problem. A variety of film modes are fully integrated into the storyline, from a movie theater presentation, to watching television at home, to the experience of witnessing family home movies, the latter used to the greatest emotional effect, as children are born with dreams that come crashing down by the weight of the world. Remembering those all-too rare moments of innocence have a special poignancy. Brody, Lane, and Hoskins, as well as the interweaving storyline are all of interest, but it doesn’t sufficiently compensate for the dull, overly safe, leaded feel of the film, weighted down by too many over-stylized, unhappy people, not the least of which was the painfully insufferable Affleck, who inexplicably went on to win the best actor award at the Venice Film festival.

Hollywoodland (2006) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

Cousins, Mark

A STORY OF CHILDREN AND FILM

Great Britain (101 mi) 2013

A Story Of Children And Film Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily

An engaging, heartfelt, thoughtful and occasionally insightful delve into how childhood and children haver influenced and inspired great cinema through the decades, Mark Cousins’ accessible and watchable documentary confirms what has long been suspected…that the many aspects of childhood bring out the best in some of the world’s greatest film-makers.

A Story Of Children And Film, which premiered in Cannes Classics, aims to be resolutely international in its presentation of children and cinema (its title is presented in 17 other languages as the film opens), and while its clip selection is designed to fits Cousin’s premise about how certain aspects of children are represented in cinema, there are some memorable sequences and some stunning visual moments in the breezy clip selection.

Cousins, whose epic 2011 documentary series The Story Of Film: An Odyssey played at film festivals around the world as well as selling to multiple broadcasters, uses as his starting point a visit to his Edinburgh flat by his young niece and nephew Laura and Ben. He sets up a static camera to record them playing, and uses the characteristics they display as a way of entering a series of different aspects of childhood depicted in film.

As they relax in front of the small camera he focuses on various traits – shyness, stroppiness, showing-off, story-telling and taking on parental duties – as a springboard to examine a series of film classics and show specific clips that exemplify these characteristics.

The films are many – and include the likes of E.T. - The Extra-terrestrial, Los Olvidados, The White Balloon, An Angel At My Table, The Night Of The Hunter, Yellow Earth, Kes, Children In The Wind, Fanny And Alexander, Crows, Meet Me In St Louis, Yaaba, Tomka And His Friends, Alyonka and Spirit Of The Beehive – with all of the clips used astutely and intelligently.

Cousins focuses on live-action films (though there is also a brief clip from animated television classic Tom And Jerry) and takes pleasure in rounding up a series of seldom seen or long forgotten films alongside some of the better known classics. The selection naturally reflects countries which have long been known to have developed strong cinema about children (Scandinavia and the former Eastern bloc countries), and while Hollywood receives some attention - in the form of E.T., The Night Of The Hunter (some wonderful clip extracts are used), Curly Top, The Kid and Meet Me In St Louis – there are some magical moments from Iran (especially The White Balloon), Poland, Africa, Japan, Denmark and even Albania.

Less successful is Cousins’ attempt at the start of the film to link Vincent van Gogh (who he claims “saw so much in a small space” and looked closely at small things) to cinema. “Here’s small things,” says Cousins in his voiceover, “…the visit of children..” Equally his final pay-off line that “movies are like kids, kids are like movies” feels a little like trying too hard to wrap up this enjoyable film with a profound comment.

A Story of Children and Film – review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 17, 2013

This has to be one of the most beguiling events at Cannes, appropriately presented in the Cannes Classics section. Mark Cousins's personal cine-essay about children on film is entirely distinctive, sometimes eccentric, always brilliant: a mosaic of clips, images and moments chosen with flair and grace, both from familiar sources and from the neglected riches of cinema around the world. Without condescension or cynicism, Cousins offers us his own humanist idealism, as refreshing as a glass of iced water.

He presents movie texts which illuminate and challenge what we imagine to be the "performance" presented to the camera by a child, what we take to be the nature of childhood and by implication the unexamined "adultness" of those grownups variously appearing in, making or watching the film. He suggests that as an artform, cinema has paid more attention to children than any other, perhaps because it is itself in its infancy. Using extracts from movies as diverse as ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table (1990), Yasujiro Ozu's An Inn in Tokyo (1935) and Ken Loach's Kes (1969) – and many more – Cousins creates light-flashes of insight by the hundred which amount to a pointilliste work of scholarship.

Just as in his colossal documentary TV series The Story of Film, Cousins takes ideas and runs with them, bobbing and weaving, hopping lightly from movie to movie, free-associating and bopping around but without ever seeming slick or glib. Cousins coolly repudiates parochial Anglo-Hollywood bias; he juxtaposes contemporary films with ones from the distant past, and places emphasis on cinema from Iran, India and Africa. Just as Puck put a girdle around the world in forty minutes, Cousins zooms happily around the circumference of world cinema in an hour and 40.

Taking as his starting point a meditation on the artistic gaze of Vincent van Gogh, and then artlessly showing us a film of his niece and nephew Ben and Laura mucking about with toys, he embarks on a subject whose impossible vastness never daunts him. His approach moves away from the conventional idea that movie kids are either horribly mannered, beribboned child stars or saintly simple souls, luminous with non-professional purity and authenticity. The truth is more complex: kids on screen are often wary, blank and guarded – it is their reserve which creates the electrical charge of drama. But they are often "performative" (as Cousins phrases it), simply showing off and acting out, and it is this entirely natural tendency which can be harnessed for the camera.

Elegantly, Cousins gives us a clip of Shirley Temple in Curly Top (1935), singing "When I grow up in a year or three …", and instead of taking the Graham Greene line of acidly knowing irony, he gently juxtaposes Temple with the theatrically minded children in Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1982) and then brings in Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St Louis (1944) and Judy Garland (so recently a child star) singing Under the Bamboo Tree with Margaret O'Brien, and suggests that O'Brien is believably out of tune and that this famous scene is very much like a wedding video. I'd never thought of it like that before.

Some of the most powerful or debatable moments are when Cousins shows us children under threat, or themselves offering a threat. In a rather remarkable-looking Polish film called Wrony, or Crows (1994), directed by Dorota Kedzierawska – another hidden gem which I now feel the need to experience in its entirety – a 10-year-old child is effectively kidnapped by an older child. Another type of film-maker in the Anglo-Saxon journalist tradition might have decided at this point to discuss the darker themes of exploitation, maybe bringing in the Bulger case (itself partly triggered by a horror movie called Child's Play 3). But this is not Mark Cousins's style. It arguably opens him to charges of naivete, but perhaps it is also that his affirmative insistence is a corrective to our 21st-century news-junkie reticence and fear.

Either way, this film is a treat. I have only one modest footnote to offer. Mark Cousins shows us his nephew Ben smashing things up and wonders if this is a boyish trait. Well, I wonder: Ben is squaring his shoulders and shoving his fists down into the ground in a very familiar way. Surely he is impersonating cinema's most destructive and brattish green child, the Incredible Hulk?

Covi, Tizza and Rainer Frimmel

THE LITTLE ONE (La Pivellina)

Italy Austria (100 mi) 2009

The Little One (La Pivellina) Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

A remarkable first foray into narrative filmmaking from an Italo-Austrian documentary duo, La Pivellina sets an affecting and naturalistic foundling story against the backdrop of an extended family of Rome-based circus folk.

Its grainy handheld aesthetic, Dogme-like use of available lighting and background sound, and a relatively flatline dramatic structure might suggest a festival career for this title – but there’s something so touching and human about the story and the performances that specialist theatrical action should not be ruled out.

We first see anxious middle-aged Patti (Gerardi), with her day-glo red hair, wandering around the scrappy streets and parks of an outer suburb of Rome looking in vain for her dog Hercules. What she does find is a two-year-old girl sitting abandoned on a swing, who says that her name is ‘Aia’ – or Asia. As there is no sign of her parents, Patti decides to take ‘la pivellina’ (the little squirt) home with her, to the trailer she lives in with her German companion Walter (Saabel).

It gradually emerges that Walter and Patti are circus performers; they live near another circus family whose teenage son, Tairo (Caroli), befriends the little girl and becomes inseparable from her. Walter is unhappy with the arrangement – he believes Patti should have taken Asia straight to the police – but he can’t quite bring himself to send the cute little tot away.

That’s pretty much it for the plot. Though the unsustainability of this de facto adoption lends a certain dramatic tension, what really keeps us watching is another sort of tension related to questions about who’s acting and how much of this is real. Because apart from one rather wooden exchange near the beginning, these non-professional actors (all from the travelling circus milieu they inhabit in the film) give performances of astonishing authenticity. And Asia herself is a delight: bright, cute, a little stubborn, and (perhaps a little worryingly) determined to stay with Patti rather than go home to mamma. As might be expected, some of the most graceful sequences are those that have little to do with the plot and appear entirely improvised – including a scene where Walter teaches Tairo to box (it helps that the very likeable Caroli is clearly a born actor).

Crews don’t come much more pared-back than this: the two directors managed the camera and sound themselves, with DoP Frimmel keeping up close to characters (who must have been used to his presence; even little Asia only glances at the camera once). The settings are far from the Rome of the tourist brochures: grimy makeshift encampments behind corrugated iron walls, unauthorised allotments under viaducts and anonymous high-rise condominiums. In fits and starts we also get a sense of the rigours of life for circus folk: work is scarce, people are suspicious, and even getting connected to the electric grid is a major headache.

Cowperthwaite, Gabriela

BLACKFISH B 84

USA (83 mi) 2013 Official site

It’s funny how mistreatment of animals often stirs up greater outrage than atrocities committed against human beings, where the cute and cuddly aspect of unprotected pets abandoned by fleeing families during the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina left many in such an uproar that they were willing to send money to save the animals, but wouldn’t lift a finger to help the homeless and displaced humans involved. And there is no question that animals in captivity, whether in zoos or SeaWorld, have limited space and spend much of their lives in cages or small areas of confinement, and even animals in the wild are facing the intrusion of human population encroaching into their dwindling territories, so they are more and more confined to restricted space, often reduced to areas where they are literally co-existing with humans. There’s even a short film called LOSING NEMO Losing Nemo on Vimeo (7:00), interestingly produced by The Black Fish (The Black Fish - A Growing Movement for the Oceans), that suggests if current fishing practices are not altered, oceans will be depleted of nearly all fish by the year 2048. So like any other problem of international scope, this is more complicated than it seems, finding a balance between corporate options and an ecological reality, as how the world looks in the future, from global warming, nuclear power, fossil fuel emissions, rain forests, to the growing extinction of plant and animal species, may be defined by actions that we make today. So ultimately it’s a question of business working in cooperation with science, with a challenge to the world community to find ways to co-exist with other species on the planet. With that in mind, the film’s opening is a harrowing sequence of how an orca killer whale is captured in Puget Sound, where a collection of boats drop bombs into the water, clanging iron, making as much noise as possible to literally herd them like horses and corral them into an isolated area from which they have no escape, targeting only the babies, separating them from their mothers and families, where we witness the mother literally crying in despair, which is a heartbreaking moment that introduces the theme of the film, whether or not these animals in captivity, who are then programmed to perform in front of adoring audiences, are traumatized by the condition of their capture and their limited, claustrophobic space at SeaWorlds that never allows them to “swim” again, as they’re stuck in a constricted pen for the rest of their lives.

What’s also immediately apparent is the magnificent grandeur these animals inspire, as they’re simply gorgeous creatures. And at 8,000 or 12,000 pounds, it’s simply awe inspiring to see them fly out of the water or do flips in midair. Even in mistreatment, assuming they are, allowing humans such close proximity to these amazing creatures can only enhance one’s interest in their general welfare, much like seeing cuddly koala bears or panda bears at a zoo, whose cuteness factor is off the charts, making them among the most popular attractions. Zoos and aquariums do serve a public interest, as children are routinely brought on educational excursions, but the question is at what price? Killer whales have been used for popular entertainment in water parks since the 1960’s, when it was realized they were highly intelligent and trainable, capable of performing tricks, which combined with their enormous size would attract literally millions of visitors. We learn Puget Sound banned SeaWorld from collecting whales in their vicinity, so they moved to the waters off Iceland, which is where Tilikum was captured when he was just two years old. The film follows the behavior patterns of several whales kept in captivity, and we hear the views of many of the SeaWorld trainers who felt it was a privilege to work with these animals. Nearly all of them claim they were young and naïve, having little training or qualifications in the first place, so they spewed the company line about how these animals “loved” to perform in front of audiences, hopping into the pool with them where trainers were bareback riding killer whales while waving to the audience, while others were jettisoned into the air by soaring whales, performing spectacular high dives. The shows are highly entertaining spectacles, but again the question is raised at what price? Cowperthwaite’s tireless research reveals Tilikum, for instance, now a 12,000 pound orca, the largest in captivity, was kept in a tiny covered pool for two years after his capture before being sold to a marine park in Canada, which shut down their business after he drowned a trainer. He was then sold to SeaWorld, supposedly for breeding purposes, where none of the trainers who worked there were ever told of Tilikum’s history. Of note, Tilikum is kept in a pen with two female orcas, a breed that is matriarchal dominated, so they have a history of continually attacking him during the night in the close quarters, raking his skin with their teeth, where unlike the wild, he can’t swim away. In this manner, another captive male in another park was literally killed in this fashion by bleeding to death.

SeaWorld features plenty of human interaction with the giant-sized orcas in water activities, where Cowperthwaite’s focus shifts to the human casualties that have resulted from trainer contact with killer whales, which often turn on their trainers and lunge at them in the water, where an orca is seen literally flying out of the water and landing directly on the trainer, who somehow survived this body slam, but not without broken bones and extensive internal injuries. To date Tilikum has killed three people, including a random stranger who illegally broke into the enclosure and crawled into the water with a killer whale, with portions of his body found on the whale the following morning. The most recent incident involved SeaWorld’s most experienced trainer, Dawn Brancheau on February 24, 2010, who was drowned after a “Dine with Shamu” show. To this date, the official company position is “Tilikum did not attack Dawn. All evidence indicates that Tilikum became interested in the novelty of Dawn's ponytail in his environment and, as a result, he grabbed it and pulled her into the water." While filmed evidence of the incident shows the whale grabbed her arm, not her hair, and plenty of earlier footage throughout her career showed her working in the water with a ponytail without incident, the gruesome footage was not shown, but the details reveal she was pulled into the water where she was quite literally maimed and eaten. This catastrophe has caused the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to take SeaWorld to court, claiming the conditions of employment violate extreme health and safety hazards, banning trainers from being in the water with killer whales, an order that remains under appeal by SeaWorld, where Tilikum continues to perform every day. Perhaps the most horrifying non-fatal footage shown is a San Diego whale named Kasatka grabbing the feet of their most experienced trainer, Ken Peters, where the whale continually pulls him under and holds him at the bottom of the tank, sometimes for over a minute before surfacing, allowing Peters to grab his breath, then repeating this behavior, at times grabbing the other foot. This went on for fifteen minutes, where the calm demeanor of Peters, who is also an expert scuba diver, seen practicing heavy breathing techniques at each surfacing, literally saved his life, as eventually the whale let him go and Peters was able to swim away to safety. These repeated occurrences certainly point out the dangers involved with these enormous animals, who obviously feel the effects of trauma and/or stress from their restricted confinement. Without making any attempt to be impartial, the filmmaker paints a very one-sided portrait of corporate greed, where SeaWorld protects their own interests by denying culpability and hiding these incidents from both the public and its own employees, reminiscent of an earlier Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott film THE CORPORATION (2003), which spells out in minute detail how corporations historically elevate their own self-interests above the interests of all others, including the public, which is how they survive in a Darwinian dog-eat-dog capitalist culture. While this may be an unpleasant fact of life, it is one every society must contend with, as it remains an open question whether humans will exclusively further their own self interests, even at other’s peril, or have the foresight to globally co-exist.

Many of us have experienced the excitement and awe of watching 8,000 pound orcas, or “killer whales,” soar out of the water and fly through the air at sea parks, as if in perfect harmony with their trainers. Yet, in our contemporary lore this mighty black and white mammal is like a two-faced Janus—beloved as a majestic, friendly giant yet infamous for its capacity to kill viciously. Blackfish unravels the complexities of this dichotomy, employing the story of notorious performing whale Tilikum, who—unlike any orca in the wild—has taken the lives of several people while in captivity. So what exactly went wrong?

Shocking, never before seen footage and riveting interviews with trainers and experts manifest the orca’s extraordinary nature, the species’ cruel treatment in captivity over the last four decades and the growing disillusionment of workers who were misled and endangered by the highly profitable sea-park industry. This emotionally wrenching, tautly structured story challenges us to consider our relationship to nature and reveals how little we humans have learned from these highly intelligent and enormously sentient fellow mammals.

'Blackfish' has SeaWorld in hot water - Los Angeles Times Amy Kaufman from The LA Times, January 25, 2013

PARK CITY, Utah — It was Samantha Berg's dream job: swimming with orcas.

But with only a bachelor's degree in animal science from Cornell University and no hands-on experience with whales, the then-22-year-old assumed she was not qualified to perform stunts in a SeaWorld pool with the powerful 8,000-pound animals.

Still, she decided to send her résumé to marine parks nationwide in the hopes that she might land a low-level gig and learn more about sea life. To her surprise, she was called in for an audition at SeaWorld's Orlando park, which asked her to prove her physical acumen by diving 25 feet underwater, picking up a weight, returning to the surface, carrying heavy fish buckets and then jumping up on stage even as she was struggling for breath.

"They're seeing if you're physically fit and if you look good in a wetsuit," she said.

She got the job in 1990, earning $7.50 an hour. But things at SeaWorld were not exactly as she had fantasized.

Berg, now 44, is one of eight former park employees who appear in "Blackfish," a documentary that received a strong reception when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last month and was quickly acquired by Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films. Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, the movie examines whales in captivity and one in particular, Tilikum — an orca that has killed three people, including veteran SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau in 2010.

The film, which will hit theaters this summer and debut on CNN later in the year, explores the psychology of Tilikum, who was born in the wild near Iceland in 1983, captured and sent to a marine park near Vancouver before coming to SeaWorld in Orlando. Separated from his family, he was bullied by other whales as a calf in captivity. Older female whales raked his skin constantly, and Tilikum ("friend" in Chinook) was kept in a small, dark tank for more than 14 hours at a time — factors the movie suggests may have contributed to his aggression later.

SeaWorld is already challenging the film. In a statement, the company said that based on a "very preliminary review" of "Blackfish," the movie "appears to repeat the same unfounded allegations made many times over the last several years by animal-rights activists."

"Importantly, the film fails to make the most important point about SeaWorld," the company said. "The company is dedicated in every respect to the safety of our staff and the welfare of animals."

Before "Blackfish," Cowperthwaite, 41, had made one documentary, about urban lacrosse, and knew little about orcas before learning of Brancheau's death in Florida. At the time, SeaWorld said the whale may have mistaken the 40-year-old trainer's ponytail for a toy.

The murky details of the incident confused Cowperthwaite, who had brought her children to the company's San Diego park. Clamoring for more information, she came across "The Killer in the Pool," a 2010 Outside magazine article about the incident written by Tim Zimmermann. The journalist had already spoken to a handful of former park trainers, and Cowperthwaite asked him to come on board as an associate producer to help her make a film about the topic.

"The trainers spoke in a way that was tangible to me," said the filmmaker, sitting beside Berg in Park City recently. "They were like my apostles. I got being 20 and wanting to take a fun job. They started out with that same bright-eyed approach to Sea World as I did."

But finding ex-employees willing to talk about their experiences at SeaWorld wasn't as easy as the filmmaker had anticipated. Once, she and her film crew flew to meet one man without even knowing his name, and after the group had set up their lights and were ready to begin filming, the subject backed out.

After Brancheau's death, Berg — who had left SeaWorld in the mid-1990s and is now an acupuncturist in Alaska — was sought after by the news media as a commentator. At first she defended the park's explanation but became more skeptical as the company cited trainer error as a factor in the death.

"I was shocked by it, but I was still buying into the party line," said Berg. "I was really deluded, and it's embarrassing for me to go back and look now at what I did."

Berg said she came to realize she told numerous things to park-goers that were not true — including that whales live longer in captivity than in the wild. (Orcas can live as long as 80 years in the wild, according to the Vancouver Aquarium.) When she was hired, she was also unaware of Tilikum's dangerous history or that orcas had injured dozens of trainers over the years.

Some of the most striking footage in "Blackfish" shows trainers being harmed in graphic detail in home videos shot by park attendees. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Cowperthwaite was able to obtain these as the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration sued SeaWorld after Brancheau's death.

In May 2012, a Florida judge ruled that SeaWorld killer whale trainers can no longer get into the water with orcas and must be protected by physical barriers. SeaWorld is appealing. Still, the park doesn't seem to be hurting much: In 2011, attendance at its three locations rose 5.2% to 12.1 million, from 11.5 million in 2010, according to the Themed Entertainment Assn.'s global attractions attendance report.

But other animal activists believe "Blackfish" may reduce attendance at SeaWorld. Louie Psihoyos, the director of the Oscar-winning 2009 documentary "The Cove," said that if his movie about dolphin slaughter in Japan "gave these guys a black eye, hopefully this will be a knockout punch to SeaWorld."

Cowperthwaite and Berg hope that SeaWorld will eliminate its orca shows and replace them with more educational exhibits, such as facilities where sick whales are rehabilitated for eventual release. Another option, they say, is for the company to keep whales in a sea pen — a cordoned-off portion of the ocean where whales can still feel the natural rhythms of the ocean but are not confined to a tank.

"Whales are special because you feel that they recognize you, and that small moment throttles you," said the director. "But we have to be comfortable with the fact that whales may not love us back in that way. I was a mom who took her kids to SeaWorld, lured by the iconic image of Shamu, and didn't feel quite right about it and didn't know why. I hope people who see this and still go to the park are at least making an active decision — throwing down that 100 bucks and knowing the truth — not making a passive decision like I was."

SeaWorld Is So Pissed Over the Blackfish Documentary - Gawker Rick Juzwiak

Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite recently told the New York Times that she approached her documentary Blackfish as a journalist with an open mind. The resulting film, which is about killer whales in captivity (specifically at SeaWorld and focusing on the 32-year-old orca Tilikum, who's killed three people), is nonetheless damning enough that it reads like animal liberation propaganda. We hear numerous testimonials from former SeaWorld trainers on the negative effects of keeping these giant, sensitive creatures penned. We see hidden-camera footage of SeaWorld guides feeding park guests incorrect information about orcas' lifespans and fins — the dorsal fins of captive killer routinely collapse, or flop to the side, which is rare in the wild. We see footage of brutal whale-on-human attacks. We hear nothing from SeaWorld itself.

(The corporation's general counsel told the Times that SeaWorld declined to be interviewed for the film "because they doubted the material would be used in good faith." SeaWorld also declined interviews for David Kirby's book Death at SeaWorld, which was released last year.)

The film is not all straightforward condemnation – it highlights the irony at the heart of the anti-captivity movement. If SeaWorld hadn't offered the general public an up-close look at these animals that were previously misunderstood as killing machines, killer whales wouldn't have captured the sympathy of so many humans. It was largely through orca captivity that humans learned just how harmful captivity can be. The film spends a lot of time on former trainers' accounts of bonding with these animals. Captivity may be widely denounced by scientists, and it may produce behavior that we just don't see in the wild. For example, there have been two recorded human attacks by killer whales in the wild; in 2006 ABC reported that there had been nearly two dozen in captivity. However, the human-whale shared experience is not without joy, and Blackfish reasonably documents that.

Last weekend, SeaWorld sent out an email blast to critics countering eight points raised in Blackfish. (Noticeably absent from their responses was the fact that SeaWorld employees lie about dorsal fin collapse to its visitors - in the film, we see hidden camera footage of a tour guide claiming that dorsal fin collapse occurs in "25 percent" of orcas. The figure for wild orcas is actually less than one percent, while almost all captive orcas exhibit it, particularly males. This is believed to occur as a result of their limited swim space and inability to work up to their natural speeds.) The filmmakers responded with counterarguments to SeaWorld's counterarguments. I wanted a sense of perspective from an expert, so I reached out to Debbie Giles, a research biologist who has studied orcas for about 20 years. Right now she is finishing her Ph.D. at the University of California-Davis. She's stationed at San Juan Island, off the coast of Washington.

Giles hadn't seen Blackfish when I spoke to her this week, and told me that she was just responding to my questions "with her gut." She is firmly anti-captivity and has protested at marine parks. She says that SeaWorld offered to fund her research, and that she turned them down, not wanting to be associated with the organization. I asked her generally why she is against killer whale captivity, and this was her response:

Killer whales are social animals [resident killer whales stay with their mothers for life]. That's a really, really important thing with killer whales because you don't see it with other animals. Maybe in some human societies you have both brother and sister staying with mother their entire life, but you don't see it in the wild, you don't see it in other animals. The social aspect of them is what I love to study here looking at these groups. To have a healthy individual it has to be allowed to be in its natural environment and the captive environment is so unnatural that it surpasses any benefit that we might get from having animals in captivity. We are changing their nature so dramatically in order for us to see a pretty thing, because really that's what that boils down to. We're not seeing the actual animal anymore when we see it in captivity, it's a different sort of beast. They're just too amazing, they're just too complex to sacrifice.

I asked Giles why we should be more alarmed at the captivity of orcas than of any other wild animal in a zoo.

"Well just by the nature as aquatic animals, to take them out of the aquatic environment and put them in essentially a terrestrial environment," she explained. "In that regard, I think you could make a hierarchy of which is the worst animal to have in captivity. There is also the social component, and then just the fact that these animals really do swim really far every day. They might be going back and forth but if you were to clock it, it would be miles. The whales in SeaWorld float. They might swim in a circle really fast to get speed up to breach or something, but that's not swimming. Something like a cheetah would be another incredibly sad animal to have a in a zoo. They run, that's what they do, that's what they were built to do."

I went through the rebuttals and rebuttals to the rebuttals – in every case, Giles agreed with the filmmakers. You can read all of those here. Select points that Giles' biological expertise helped expand are below:

SeaWorld Assertion 2: "The assertion that killer whales in the wild live more than twice as long as those living at SeaWorld. While research suggests that some wild killer whales can live as long as 60 or 70 years, their average lifespan is nowhere near that. Nor is it true that killer whales in captivity live only 25 to 35 years. Because we’ve been studying killer whales at places like SeaWorld for only 40 years or so, we don’t know what their lifespans might be—though we do know that SeaWorld currently has one killer whale in her late 40s and a number of others in their late 30s."

Film Response: "In the wild, average lifespan is 30 for males, 50 for females. Their estimated maximum life span is 60-70 years for males and 80-90 years for females. In captivity, most orcas die in their teens and 20s and only a handful have made it past 35.The annual mortality or death rate for orcas is 2.5 times higher in captivity than it is in the wild. These are not controversial data. In the film, we depict what seems to be a deliberate attempt by SeaWorld to misrepresent these well documented data to their visitors."

Giles adds: "Based on photographs we have a whale out here that is supposedly 102 years old. Even if she's not 102 years old, easily she's into her 80s, probably more like 90s. There is no reason to doubt the photo. We had a male die a couple of years ago, who was in his 60s."

SeaWorld Assertion 3: "The implication that unlike killer whales in the wild, killer whales in zoos or parks—and specifically Tilikum, the whale involved in Dawn Brancheau’s death—are routinely bullied by other whales. The word “bullying” is meaningless when applied to the behavior of an animal like a killer whale. Whales live in a social setting with a dominance hierarchy, both at SeaWorld and in the wild. They express dominance in a variety of ways, including using their teeth to 'rake' other whales, in the open ocean as well as in parks."

Film Response: "SW does not show an understanding of basic behavioral biology in this statement. It is true that social animals like orcas do have dominance hierarchies and they are maintained via behavioral interactions. The film asserts that in the wild, whales can also flee conflict. Whales at SeaWorld cannot escape from a negative social interaction and are therefore confronted with conflicts that have proven to be injurious and even fatal. Furthermore in the wild, these hierarchies are among family groups and are maintained with minimal aggression. In the wild, no orca has ever been known to seriously injure or kill another orca, inside or outside of their social group, in any interaction. Certainly minor injuries occur, and scars may remain (including nicks in dorsal fins and scratches on saddles), but no serious injury inflicted on one wild orca by another orca has ever been recorded, when observing live animals or in examining dead ones."

Giles adds: "You do see rake marks in the killer whales in the wild, but it's not repeated. When I've seen it, it heals very quickly. Until I started thinking about whales in captivity, I've never viewed rake marks in wild killer whales as being anything dangerous. It seems very superficial. You might see a rake mark in June when they come back in and by the end of that month you can't tell where the rake mark is. It's just very superficial like a scratch mark down an arm. What you see in captivity is nothing like that.

"The whole idea of putting whales into the tank with other eco-types of killer whales is very bizarre too to me. The idea of putting a naturally born mammal-eater in a tank with a fish-eater, you just never see those two groups intermingling in the wild. Right where I work, they have overlapping territories. You can occasionally see transients across the water and residents say, over here, so you can see them, but they never intermingle. And most of the time the transients actually leave the area when the residents whales come back in, which is interesting, because you think that they'd be top-of-the-food-chain or whatever, but there is no aggressive behavior between the two groups and there is no mating. It's like we're messing with something that we can't even begin to understand and then the whales have these interactions in captivity that are really unhealthy for them."

SeaWorld Assertion 4: "The accusation that SeaWorld callously breaks up killer whale families. SeaWorld does everything possible to support the social structures of all marine mammals, including killer whales. It moves killer whales only when doing so is in the interest of their long-term health and welfare. And despite the misleading footage in the film, the only time it separates unweaned killer whale calves from their mothers is when the mothers have rejected them."

Film Response: "The calf-mother separations that are mentioned in the film both involve two of the most responsible and bonded mothers in SeaWorld’s collection, both of whom have had multiple calves taken from them. The separations are said to be driven primarily by introducing new breeding options to other SeaWorld parks and by fulfilling entertainment and other husbandry needs. We are surprised that SeaWorld has brought up calf rejection, an issue the film does not address and a phenomenon that is extremely rare in wild orcas. In the wild, females generally have their first calf around 13-16 years of age. Because SeaWorld has bred their females as early as 5-6 years of age, these females have not learned proper social behavior, they have not learned how to mother a calf, and may ultimately reject and injure their calves."

Giles adds: "[SeaWorld's response] is nonsense — a mother at SeaWorld should have all of her offspring with her. And we know that's not true. And, let me respond one more thing, with regard to breeding, you would never have inbreeding the way that they do inbreeding with captive killer whales. You wouldn't see that in the wild where mothers and sons are breeding and producing offspring. You know what you end up seeing in the wild is females that are starting to approach that age or breeding, you tend to see them with a bunch of calves, like they'll take on this nanny position and they'll hang out with other females calves, which is probably a nice respite for the mom, so these females that are coming of age, it's documented, it's commonly known that's what ends up happening that they become the babysitters. And that's preparing them to be good moms."

SeaWorld Assertion 5: "The accusation that SeaWorld mistreats its killer whales with punishment-based training that’s designed to force them to learn unnatural behaviors. SeaWorld has never used punishment-based training on any of its animals, including Tilikum, only positive reinforcement. And the behaviors it reinforces are always within the killer whale’s natural range of behaviors."

Film Response: "Again, we are unsure whether SeaWorld has undertaken a careful review of Blackfish. The film never depicts SeaWorld as using punishment. We are confident the trainers would not acquiesce to such overt tactics. Yet although these accounts are not depicted in the film, multiple trainers are aware of incidents where animals may be fed substandard amounts of fish before VIP shows to encourage their cooperation or where a male killer whale might be put in with a group of whales who have been previously aggressive with him in order to encourage complicit behavior. We find the claim that SeaWorld killer whales perform behaviors 'within the killer whale’s natural range of behaviors,' to be false. Wild killer whales are never observed performing front flips or vertical jumps to touch objects, neither have they been observed to spin 360 degrees on land. A killer whale supporting a human who rides, 'surfs,' or leaps from the animal's rostrum does not fall within a wild killer whale’s repertoire either. These are unnatural, trained behaviors only observed in marine parks and reinforced by food."

Giles adds: "Killer whales in Argentina partially beach themselves to grab seals off of the beach, but they don't sit there and arch their back and beach themselves in the way that killer whales in captivity are made to do. It's got to be fairly uncomfortable for them to be out of the water like that, they're such huge animals, and the pressure of being out of water would be incredible, so now you're not going to see that."

Finally, I asked Giles if she knows any biologists who are pro-cap. Surprisingly, she told me that she does.

"I know probably a couple that would argue for it, but they would argue it from a research perspective," she explained. "I don't know if they would argue it from the perspective that it's educational, for example, to the general public. They would argue [that] to have beluga, dolphin, bottle nose dolphin, killer whale, etc., in captivity gives us an opportunity to study, I don't know, respiration or metabolism or pregnancy stuff or stuff like that. But it would be interesting to see if they were specifically asked about educating the public what their stance would be on that. They're able to parse it out, whereas to me, it doesn't matter what we learn from captive killer whales, it's not the same animal.

"You can study respiration rates in captive killer whales and it's going to be very different form what you see in wild killer whales. Even gestation, pregnancy stuff, is ultimately probably very different. How long they can hold their breath. You can't test a captive killer whale and say well killer whales can only hold their breath for this many minutes. Because that killer whale in captivity hasn't had to hold its breath for X amount of time. We aren't going to know anything about metabolism or food consumption, I don't think because the killer whales in captivity are being fed a very, very artificial diet and all the vitamins and everything that the captives have to have just to stay alive, you're not going to have that here. The only argument I've been able to make in my own mind is that [captivity] served a purpose at a time but we're past that now. Now we know that we don't have to fear that in the wild and we can stop shooting at them. Okay, so some killer whales had to die in captivity to get the general public to understand that, now we know that, now the time is done. We should be evolving past this."

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]

The Digital Fix [Nick Chen]

Blackfish / The Dissolve Tasha Robinson

Movie Review - 'Blackfish' - A 'Psychological Thriller' About ... - NPR Tomas Hachard

Review: 'Blackfish' Is A Heartbreaking & Effectively ... - Indiewire Blogs Kimber Myers from The Playlist

[Review] Blackfish - The Film Stage Jared Mobarak

Blackfish: the story of SeaWorld's murderous killer whale + reality ... Andy Dehnart from Reality Blurred

Addressing Some Criticism Of Blackfish | Tim Zimmermann

Sound On Sight [David Fiore]

'Blackfish' Swims with Killer Whales and the Company ... - PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs, July 19, 2013

Blackfish Movie Review : Shockya.com Brent Simon

Exclaim! [Daniel Pratt]

Movie Mezzanine [Dan Schindel]

'Blackfish' Is a Terrifying Whale of a Tale | PopMatters Bill Gibron, August 16, 2013

Paste Magazine [Jeremy Mathews]

theartsdesk.com [Jasper Rees]

Richard Schickel: 'Blackfish': What the Hell Is Sea World ... - Truthdig

Review: BLACKFISH Questions Morality Of Capturing Wild ... - Twitch Alex Koehne

Blackfish | Reviews | Screen Tim Grierson from Screendaily

Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]

Blackfish: Sundance Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

'Blackfish' Documentary Looks At Tilikum And SeaWorld's Other ... Natalie Rotman from The Huffington Post, July 24, 2013

Examiner.com [Kirk Haviland]

'Blackfish' movie review - The Washington Post

SF Weekly [Sherilyn Connelly]

'Blackfish,' other animal documentaries move far beyond the cuddly ... Mark Olsen from The LA Times, July 19, 2013

Review: 'Blackfish' and the thorny captivity of a killer whale - latimes ... Gary Goldstein from The LA Times, July 17, 2013

Blackfish Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz

Blackfish - Movies - The New York Times

SeaWorld found responsible in the case of trainer Dawn ... - Blogs Candace Calloway Whiting from Seattle Pi, May 30, 2012

David Kirby: SeaWorld Putting Orca Trainers Back in the Water David Kirby from The Huffington Post, July 30, 2012

Recent Photos Show Trainers Swimming with Orcas at SeaWorld ... Cetacean Inspiration, January 7, 2013

Stress drives orcas to kill trainers, according to research | The ... Jonathan Leake from The Sunday Times, June 16, 2013

Seaworld Lashes Back at the Film “Blackfish” Candace Calloway Whiting from Seattle Pi, July 13, 2013

“Losing Nemo” – Will the World Oceans be Devoid of Fish by 2048? This Film Says Yes, Unless We Change Policies Soon Candace Calloway Whiting from Seattle Pi, July 17, 2013

Cox, Alex

SID & NANCY

Great Britain USA (111 mi) 1986

As Cox has been at pains to point out, this is not the story of the Sex Pistols but a love story pure and simple. And since love is never simple and rarely pure, Cox follows his emetic pair, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, on their long downhill slide. From the coarse idiocies of the punk movement, through the permanent scrabble for any mind-frying drug, through the screeching knock-down rows to the final abandonment far from home in the Chelsea Hotel, New York, it's a long hard ride down a tunnel filthy with every kind of degradation. Why then should anyone of sane disposition wish to see the film? Because it is still a love story, and a very touching one at that; whether waiting for her in the rain, or ripping her stockings so he can suck on her toes, or simply kissing in an alley with garbage falling all around them, there never seems to be any doubt that Sid loves Nancy OK. Quite why is hard to explain; but the movie (like Sid, as portrayed by Oldman, not without a sense of humour) is shot through with an oblique feeling for the blacker absurdities of life. Not the least of which is that, nowadays, love is not stronger than death.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Mojo Lorwin

In SID AND NANCY, Alex Cox discovers an oft-imitated, never-equaled recipe for the rock biopic: two parts THIS IS SPINAL TAP and one part PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK. In retrospect, it took balls (or callous indifference) to make a slapstick parody out of the tragedy of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, whose bodies had hardly been in the ground for five years when production began. But Cox's tragicomedy is so good that it's hard to fault him for it. Besides, the video evidence suggests that the real Sid and Nancy were, if anything, more ridiculous and less charming (albeit much younger) than their brilliant portrayals by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb would suggest. Cox's film does not portray Sid as a serial abuser, nor does it explore the theory, which gained traction with 2009's WHO KILLED NANCY?, that Sid was actually innocent. Rather, it portrays him as a sort of unwitting agent of destruction, put here on this earth to destroy Nancy, himself, the Sex Pistols, and perhaps punk as a whole. In Cox's telling, Sid seems a sort of punk Zen master, too punk to actually play his instrument, just as some of the most celebrated Zen masters were too Zen to actually meditate. In the end, having achieved a higher state of consciousness through their complete indifference to their bodies, careers, and relationships, the couple severs their final attachment to this life—their bond to each other—and ascends to a heaven realm (or at least a happy limbo). Or maybe this reading is all wrong and Sid and Nancy are meant to embody the wasted revolutionary potential of punk. A methadone clinic worker's sobering speech in the middle of the film supports this interpretation: “You guys have no right to be strung out on that stuff. You could be selling healthy anarchy.” Does the film romanticize heroin addiction and murder/suicide or bemoan them? Celebrate punk or mock it? Both and both.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review

And you think you need a marriage counselor. Sex Pistol Sid Vicious fell head over heels for Nancy Spungen, a fiercely devoted groupie with the personality of a chihuahua. They rocked, rolled and then, just like Romeo and Juliet, the punk paramours met their senseless demise.

"Sid & Nancy," based on their ruined lives, finds a strange sweetness in the obsessive love affair of these Lotus-eaters. Though dark and harrowing, explicit and unsparing, the movie proves a riveting biography of these burnt-out icons and their iconoclastic half-decade.

Director Alex Cox of the cult comedy "Repo Man" outshines that first work with this compassionate and compelling romance, which also serves as his elegy for the era's energizing music.

Cox, with co-writer Abbe Wool and adventurous cinematographer Roger Deakins, winds back the Clockwork Orange that began ticking in the mid '70s -- the heyday of slam-dancers and safety-pin jewelry. Shocking and explicit, there hasn't been so devastating a picture of decadence since "Smithereens."

David Hayman plays punk entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren, who in 1977 invents a nasty band called the Sex Pistols to capitalize on the media's infatuation with things punk. London slum chums Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman) and Johnny Rotten (Drew Schofield) make instant headlines with their nihilistic monkeyshines. The group's rise and fall is chronicled in conjunction with Sid's deadly affair with Spungen (Chloe Webb).

Oldman and Webb, of the British and American stage, respectively, vividly portray the star-crossed couple, gaining sympathy for these irredeemable brats. Sid says "Sex is ugly, boring, hippie s--- ," till he finds Nancy, who turns him on, and turns him on to heroin. Soon he's addicted to both. Eventually he kills her, and later dies of an overdose.

Cox sees their story as a metaphor for what happened to their music, which never had a chance to grow old. It's no rock-u-drama, but Oldman performs his own vocals, as does the convincing Schofield, with former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock lovingly rerecording the old tracks. Incidental music (and a lot of thrashing around) is provided by the Pogues, Joe Strummer and Pray for Rain.

Most of the music occurs naturally in the Pistols' spitting, ear-splitting performances, but Cox indulges in the obtrusive (but requisite) video, with Sid singing a furious "My Way" to an audience he then symbolically massacres. Nancy comes back to life in Sid's fogged brain and he joins the figment in a taxi. Three black kids boogeying to hiphop, chase the ghostly cab, heirs to the next musical dynasty.

Symbolism aside, "Sid & Nancy" is an indelible drama of undying love and meaningless decline.

Rock biopics seem to be pretty fertile ground for filmmakers. There's Oliver Stone's The Doors. Brian Gibson's What's Love Got to Do With It. Mark Rydell's The Rose. Umm - VH1's The Monkees. Anyway, you see my point. Rock stars fascinate us because they hold a mythic, revered position in our culture. Music plays a vital part of our identities, especially during the teenage years, and rock stars thus directly impact our live, whether they know it or not. Their trials, triumphs, and breakdowns transform into the music that helps us get through our own problems. Into this genre comes Sid and Nancy, the award-winning film by Alex Cox that tries to make sense of one of rock's most unusual stories—the doomed romance of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.

Sid, guitarist in the punk band The Sex Pistols, has it all. He is a rock god, with all the sex, drugs, and fame he can handle. Of course, you can't live a life like that without consequences, and Sid is by far the most hard-living of his bandmates. He can barely play a coherent show, and he argues and fights with anyone who gets in his way, be he fan, bandmember, or manager. Into this life wanders Nancy. Nancy is much like Sid: she has little self-control, a problem relating to people, and an addiction to any drug that happens to be lying around. It is like the two were made for each other. Their problems match up; their psychoses compliment each other. They become constant companions, even after Sid is kicked out of the band. The film follows their downward spiral together, attempting to capture their fractured love for one another as realistically as possible.

Gary Oldman does some great work as Sid Vicious. I am not the biggest fan of The Sex Pistols, but I am familiar with their work, and like Val Kilmer's interpretation of Jim Morrison in The Doors, when I see Oldman as Sid, I find I have trouble picturing the real Sid. He doesn't seem to be performing; he seems to be channeling. Chloe Webb's work as Nancy is admirable as well, but I wasn't quite as impressed with her as I was with Oldman. She is fine in the softer scenes, but any scenes that had any kind of conflict just seemed way over the top. I got so tired of hearing her screeching "Sid!" I considered reaching for the mute button any time it seemed like something upsetting was going to happen. Supporting performances are all decent, but Sid and Nancy are the heart of the film, and no one else really matters.

Director Alex Cox has infused the film with an arresting visual style. There are a number of very memorable sequences, and all are a result of Cox's direction. For example, Sid's performance of My Way, already surreal and dreamlike, becomes an all-out trip when he attacks the audience, killing them in a stylized bloodbath. I also can't seem to forget the scene with Sid and Nancy kissing in the alley as garbage rains in all around them. The visual metaphor about the nature of their relationship is a striking one.

Despite the acting and directing, however, the film didn't totally work for me. The screenplay, co-written by Alex Cox, seemed to rush, skipping large portions of Sid and Nancy's relationship. I never bought that they were in love. Sid just seemed to be annoyed by Nancy all the time. I think if we'd been allowed to see the two fall for each other, it would've made more sense. Instead we go from Nancy not being able to tell Sid from singer Johnny Rotten to being Sid's almost constant companion. While their breakdown was handled effectively, I don't think that the final, climactic, and tragic scene was dealt with very well at all, despite Webb's best work in the film.

Sid and Nancy attempts to show us what was going on inside of one of the most tragic relationships in rock history. What drew these two people together? Why did they stay together, despite all the pain they caused each other? In the end, Sid and Nancy provides no easy answers, but maybe there aren't any. After all, who knows what makes you fall in love?

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review

Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Renshaw]

The Digital Bits dvd review [Criterion Collection] Frank Ortiz

Reel.com dvd review [3/4] Mary Kalin-Casey

eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] DarkHorse

DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [3/5]

Edinburgh U Film Society (Andrew Hesketh) review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]

Washington Post (Paul Attanasio) review

Siskel & Ebert (video)

All Movie Guide [Robert Firsching]

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

Craven, Wes

Film Reference profile by Kim Newman, updated by John McCarty

Of all the horror specialists who came to prominence during the 1970s, Wes Craven has had the least settled career. While Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter have had major creative slumps, George Romero and Larry Cohen have carved out their own areas of independent endeavour, and David Cronenberg and Brian De Palma have, with various levels of success, graduated to major studio projects, Craven has been bouncing between successes (The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street) and failures (Swamp Thing, Deadly Friend) with a manic energy, forced occasionally to take work on television to keep going. While his best work exhibits a canny grasp of genre and a disturbing understanding of the place of violence within society, and Elm Street—after a long and difficult gestation period—emerged as one of the most influential horror movies of the 1980s, his worst films literally flounder in the wake of his successes, frequently (as in The Hills Have Eyes, Part 2 and Shocker) resorting to self-plagiarism to tie together blatantly misconceived projects, suggesting a desperate intellect which too often tries to find a short cut.

Craven's first movie, Last House on the Left, a hard-gore remake of Bergman's The Virgin Spring, was an ultra-low-budget sleeper that hit the drive-ins well before The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre and served to drag the genre away from the then-tired mists of Hammer-style gothic towards the more fruitful modern fields of gritty psychosis and social unrest. As with the early films of Romero, Hooper, and Cohen, the focus of Last House is on the destructive potential of the family, as a group of homicidal maniacs torture a pair of innocent girls and are themselves slaughtered by the martyr heroine's "normal" parents. Filmed with a raw style and a sense of fascinated revulsion, Last House—still banned in the United Kingdom—is one of the strongest of horror pictures, and remains so tough that most audiences cannot take it, either when the maniacs are disembowelling their victims or the parents are fighting back. The Hills Have Eyes is a more expansive, more fantastically horrid re-run of the first movie, stirring in some black humour and a DC Comics-style set of inbred mutants as it replays the wagon train Western scenario out in the desert, where a vacationing family of normals clash with their degenerate mirror image. Although it tackles the same thematic territory as Last House, The Hills Have Eyes is a more approachable work and shows off Craven's special skills with simple action, even daring to turn the heroes' dog into a modern movie hero who relates to Rin-Tin-Tin much as Dirty Harry relates to George Dixon.

Despite these two powerful pictures, which at once demonstrated Craven's competence as a director and his flair for the intriguingly horrific, he then fell into a career hole of botched projects, including TV work and an interesting attempt to film David Morell's First Blood. Deadly Blessing, a hodge-podge of psychotic and demonology themes, is alarmingly inconsistent, featuring some of the best and the worst of Craven as it deals with a series of murders in a cleverly evoked Hittite community. Swamp Thing, an adaption of the DC comic, is a misconceived and childish superhero picture dragged under by ridiculous monster suits and an underdeveloped screenplay, although it has one memorably unchildish scene when Adrienne Barbeau takes a nude swim in the swamp. After this, it is easy to see how Craven could resort to making The Hills Have Eyes, Part 2, which contains an inordinate amount of flashback footage from the first film simply because the budget ran out before the movie was actually completed. Although Deadly Friend and Shocker are more expensively bad, the misconceived Hills 2 stands as Craven's worst film to date with its use of flashbacks upon flashbacks to the original film (so as to cut costs by re-using old footage?); even the recurring character of the dog gets to have a flashback!

However, Craven then turned his career round, dashing off the unexceptional but acceptable Invitation to Hell and Chiller and several pretty good Twilight Zone segments—including "Shatterday," a Harlan Ellison story with Bruce Willis, and the disorienting "Word Play"—before finally getting the green light on A Nightmare on Elm Street. Last House and Deadly Blessing had experimented with surreal, disorienting dream sequences—a bit of nightmare dentistry, and a spider-falling-into-mouth shock—but Elm Street is built around such moments, and features a dreamstalking bogeyman, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), who somehow became a cult hero through the course of four sequels—only one of which, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 3: Dream Warriors, did Craven have anything to do with, as a writer—and a TV series. The first Elm Street is a seamless stalk-and-scare horror movie that fully deserved its success for its clever reassembly of the elements of teenage horror established by Carpenter with Halloween and Stephen King in Carrie and Christine. However, it is a less rigorous, less satisfying movie than Craven's best early films, reducing their ambiguous culture clash to a simple conflict between an innocent heroine (Heather Langenkamp) and an unredeemable monster villain. Part of the disturbing quality of Last House and Hills comes from their occasionally sympathetic approaches to their villains, and in the way the heroes' violent revenge is seen to degrade them to the level of the monsters; Langenkamp's guerilla-style assault on Freddy, meanwhile, is simply a cheerable demonstration of American resourcefulness.

Leaving the Elm Street sequels, which had been set up by a fairly annoying last-minute logical lapse at the end of the first film, to other hands, Craven departed the independent sector for a pair of big studio projects—the execrable Deadly Friend, a cute-robot-cum-teen-zombie movie adapted from Diana Henstell's novel Friend, and The Serpent and the Rainbow, an interesting and seductive voodoo picture adapted from Wade Davis's nonfiction novel. Both films carry over the dream theme from Elm Street, in the first case to beef up a badly sagging storyline, and in the second as part of a bizarre and affecting cultural travelogue that develops the old Craven's fascination with magical and monstrous societies as opposed to individuals. However, following that experience, Craven returned to the independents, like John Carpenter before him, and produced another carbon copy of his own most successful work in Shocker, a failed attempt to come up with another franchise series that is nothing but an identikit of A Nightmare on Elm Street with more ideas than it can handle and severe lapses of script, characterisation, and tone to pull it down between its undeniably brilliant sequences (a grand guignol electrocution, a final chase through "television land"). Craven's entire career has been like Shocker, with moments of startling inspiration and genre craftsmanship let down by hurried scripts and just plain wrong decisions.

Craven bounced back from the erratic Shocker with The People under the Stairs. The film fuses the time-honored "wicked stepmother" concept with Craven's familiar predilections for home-style booby-traps and nightmare sequences. The house itself is one big booby-trap, wired with explosives and rigged with electronic doors of solid steel. It is also one big, bad Nightmare on Elm Street dream-scape, seemingly designed by the same deranged architect responsible for the labyrinthine yet claustrophobic cabin in Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead. Craven returned to Elm Street with the film-within-a-film Wes Craven's New Nightmare. The film brought back Freddy Krueger as well as some of the cast members of the original Elm Street as themselves, now victims of the horror series, which is mysteriously being acted out in "real life." Craven appears as himself in the film. Cynics viewed the film as a run-for-cover effort on Craven's part to renew the Freddy Krueger franchise following the lukewarm reception of People under the Stairs. Others viewed it as the ultimate Craven statement on dream psychology. It confused many, scared few, and was not a box-office winner. Craven then abandoned horror cinema's most famous street for equally tried and true genre territory with Vampire in Brooklyn. A mixture of comedy and splatter, it marked another attempt by former superstar Eddie Murphy to jumpstart his fading career—which he [Murphy] eventually did with his remake of The Nutty Professor.

Craven's persistent attempts to find another successful franchise finally hit paydirt with Scream, a throwback to the teenagers-in-jeopardy slasher genre of Friday the 13th and, of course, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Kevin Williamson's script, with its solid ear for Generation X slang, cast many knowing winks at past slasher films, particularly Elm Street, in its story of a masked killer on the loose in suburbia. It spawned two blockbuster sequels, Scream 2 and Scream 3, which Craven cleverly turned into films-within-the-film a là his Wes Craven's A New Nightmare, albeit this time successfully. In between Scream 2 and Scream 3, Craven also made the anomalous Music of the Heart, the true story of an indefatigable New York City music teacher played by Meryl Streep. He also found time to pen his first novel, Fountain Society, a conspiracy tale with futuristic elements.

The Official Site of Wes Craven, Filmmaker

Wes Craven Fanlisting

All-Movie Guide bio from Hal Erickson

Filmbug Biography

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Cinequest Article by Mark Rabehl

Wes Craven, Horror Maestro, Dies at 76 Duane Byrge from The Hollywood Reporter, August 30, 2015

Wes Craven Dead; Directed Scream, Nightmare on Elm ... Pat Saperstein from Variety, August 30, 2015

Wes Craven, horror maestro behind 'Nightmare on Elm Street' and 'Scream' films, dies at 76 Matt Hamilton and Lauren Raab from The LA Times, August 30 2015

Wes Craven Dies: Director Of 'Scream,' 'Nightmare On Elm ... Kinsey Lowe from Deadline, August 30, 2015

Wes Craven, Master Horror Movie Director, Dies At 76 - NPR Camila Domonoska from NPR, August 30, 2015

Wes Craven, RIP: The Mild-Mannered King Of Our Nightmares Tom Breihan from Deadspin, August 31, 2015

Wes Craven, US horror filmmaker, dies aged 76 Obituary from BBC, August 31, 2015

Remembering Wes Craven, Horror Maestro Who Died Aged ... Joe Leydon from IndieWIRE, August 31, 2015

6 Filmmaking Tips From Wes Craven - Film School Rejects Scott Beggs from Film School Rejects, August 31, 2015

Craven, Wes They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Film Monthly Interview (2005) by Paul Fischer, August 15, 2005

Twitch Interview (2005) August 18, 2005

Wes Craven interview by Clint Morris from Moviehole, November 9, 2005

Guardian Interview (2007) by John Patterson, April 2, 2007

Talk: The Horror of Being Wes Craven Andrew Goldman interview with Craven from The New York Times, April 15, 2011

Wes Craven - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT

USA (84 mi) 1972

Horror master Wes Craven's powerful debut was this controversial low-budget remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1959). One of the more brutal rape-revenge films, it is unflinchingly explicit in its depiction of the vicious abuse and slaughter of two teenage girls at the hands of a Mansonesque gang of criminals. The revenge segments are no less shocking, including a murder by bucksaw, a throat slashing, and an oral castration. The acting is amateurish and the cinematography is bargain-basement, but something in the almost documentary-like nature of the film makes it devastating nonetheless. Along with Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), it is one of the early classics of graphic horror.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Back in 1972, Wes Craven's feature-film debut The Last House on the Left pushed more than a few puritanical buttons, but it was a scene featuring a girl pissing on demand that seemed to spark the most controversy. Some 30 years after its original theatrical release, this schlocky extrapolation of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring is still the definitive horror-film-as-cautionary-tale. Dr. William Collingwood (Gaylord St. James) and his wife Estelle (Cynthia Carr) smother their daughter Mari (Sandra Cassel) with listen-young-lady care before the 17-year-old heads off to a Bloodlust concert with Manhattanite best friend Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham) in tow. Craven evokes the innocence of the love generation via hippie songs, a peace-sign necklace, and a carefree stroll through the woods (it's there that Mari and Phyllis compare cup sizes and discuss romantic love). When the girls go looking for marijuana, they're kidnapped, tortured, and killed by a group of Mansonesque escaped cons. It's the ultimate Vietnam allegory, except there's no room for peace here, just war. Craven heightens the dramatic tension by expertly cutting back and forth between the Collingwoods' happy suburban home and the Stillo gang's hike through the woods. Way before Drew Barrymore had her larynx cut in Scream, an irony-stoked Craven had the Stillo posse unintentionally making their way back to the Collingwood estate, and though this exploitation quickie's infamous promotional hook read "It's only a movie," it could have easily been "It can happen in your backyard."

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Indelibly scummy, Wes Craven's freshman shocker is less a rip-off of The Virgin Spring than a purposefully degraded update, with the medieval barbarism of the original cannily transplanted to Vietnam-era America. The plot's implacable arc remains the same: teenage birthday girl (Sandra Cassell) leaves the incubator security of her parents' home in the woods to attend a rock concert with more worldly pal (Lucy Grantham), and gets reeled into the pad of a gang of freaky pervs (presided over by David A. Hess) while trying to score some grass along the way. As the slimy quartet (which also includes Marc Sheffler, future porn don Fred Lincoln and skanky mother-hen Jeramie Rain) torture and slaughter the girls, Craven shifts the tone from John Waters raunchfest to Manson family gore-a-thon, his crosscutting pitilessly pushing the viewer's buttons -- the gutting of a torso and a protracted rape get intercut with the folks back home baking a cake and two Keystone deputies pratfalling off a chicken truck, a trope intellectually sadistic enough to suggest Michael Haneke. The crazies may get their jollies, but retribution's a bitch when they end up spending the night at the house of their young victim, whose parents (Gaylord St. James, Cynthia Carr), once clued in, turn into chainsaw-toting, throat-slashing, cock-biting avengers. As in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the decade's other seminal horror piece, the film shatters hippified complacency via the sledgehammer of a polluting horror all the more disturbing for being homegrown. The crudeness of Craven's mise en scène denies the moral sturdiness of the Bergman original -- for a respectfully middle-class family, it is only one step for the parents to equate and outdo the animalistic bloodlust of the killers, with only viscera and desolation (rather than a miracle) greeting them by the end. Produced by Sean S. Cunningham.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Teddy Blanks]

Wes Craven and Sean S. Cunningham, the director and producer of this gritty post-hippie slasher, are responsible, respectively and separately, for the two most iconic and longest running horror franchises in Hollywood. There is no supernatural Freddy or Jason in Last House on the Left, Craven’s debut feature. But in it he immediately and crudely establishes the themes — the temptations and risks of teenage sexuality and drug use, the loss of innocence and the preservation of the status quo — that would dominate his career, and serve as the template for a genre he would popularize. These early scenes are overt to the point of being laughable: there is a shot of a naked teenage girl in the shower, blurred by the glass. This girl, Mari Collingwood, emerges to chat with her parents before she heads out for a concert (for a band called Bloodlust) in the big city. Her dad asks, “hey, no bra?” and when she replies declaring that the way her generation deals with “tits” is better than the way her parents’ generation does, he says “what’s this tits business?” Mari meets up with a friend, who her mother regards as a bad influence, and they talk excitedly about their budding sexuality and wonder what it would be like to “make it with Bloodlust.” Because we now know the formula so well — that is, sexual-activity-leads-to-imminent-danger — it is clear from the start that Mari will be killed.

The plot is brain-dead simple: the girls try to score some ‘grass’ at the concert, as a result are kidnapped by a gang of escaped convicts who beat and rape them, drag them out to the woods for more humiliation, and kill them there. When the gang heads to the house nearest to their broken-down getaway car to lay low, the unassuming married couple that lives in it happens to be Mari’s parents. Quickly realizing the situation, they proceed to take revenge on their daughter’s killers, murdering each one. This story, loosely based on Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, is a transitory concern for Craven. He is more interested in the psychological implications of killing, which are more complex here than in any of his later, more tightly constructed pictures. In the film’s second set of murders — somehow more disturbing and bizarre than its first — the parents set up elaborate Home Alone-style booby traps, the mother seduces one of the killers only to bite his dick off, and the father chases the gang’s leader around the house with a chainsaw in an action that anticipates Tobe Hooper’s seminal horror film.

It’s difficult to know how to judge Last House on the Left. While many elements, such as the bumbling backwoods police duo and the innocent parents preparing their daughter’s 17th birthday cake, reprise the camp of the film’s opening, most of the torture and killing scenes have a tough realism. The soundtrack, all late 60s folk and classic rock, could be from Love Story or The Graduate. But this is only sometimes as funny as it sounds; the juxtaposition of a dirty, beaten teenager with the sounds of sensitive guitar balladry can be eerily poignant. Craven falters slightly in giving us villains we can’t really be afraid of. The ravenous psychopaths are introduced to us by way of a radio bulletin, heard by the girls in the car on the way to the concert. Their crimes, which include “child molesting, peeping tom-ism,” and “the slaying of a priest and two nuns,” seem to be merely the most evil ones Craven could come up with. Top it off with Krug (not Krueger), the leader of the gang, who has hooked his son on heroin so that Junior may better “control his life,” and you have a group of characters with no particular background or motivation other than being crazy and violent.

Why did Craven choose to make one of the killers female? Sadie, who once calls herself a dyke, is ‘one of the boys’ in the sickest way. She rejoices in the torture and rape of Mary and her friend, as does Krug and the rest of the gang. (Junior is alone in feeling any remorse for the girls—his plight is the film’s most multi-dimensional.) Is Sadie there just to offset the inherent misogyny in spending the bulk of the film’s second act with the grueling defilement and death of two young girls? Craven probably thinks: If a woman is present and participating, the killings become less male. The villains no longer hate women; they hate people. They are universally “evil.” But Sadie, like the other villains, is so bluntly drawn she can’t help but be anything other than a stand-in for another evil man, delighting in the other men’s monstrous behavior.

The drawn-out killing scenes, which are admittedly difficult to sit through, have elicited Last House on the Left comparisons to John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, another cheap-looking movie whose predominant obsession is filth rather than gore. Of the two films, though, Waters’ appears rougher, less interested with storytelling, more concerned with pointing a camera at its obsession and showing it to us, ad nauseam. Craven at least reveals a desire to master some of the basic tenets (character development, pacing) of moviemaking, and even creates a few tense, gripping moments that come more from good direction than from how disgusting whatever he’s showing us is. When, after stabbing one of the girls in the back, the killer says, “how’s your back baby?” Craven goes in close, and she spits blood in her assaulter’s face. It’s brutal.

Last House on the Left was a sleeper hit for its shock value; its unflinching, documentary-style spree of torture, rape, and murder was something audiences hadn’t seen before. But it also incited a heap of angry criticism, with many calling the film sadistic and perverse. Other than Larry Clark’s Kids, I can’t think of another film that spends so much time reveling in its debauchery, feigning an after-school-special morality to get out of jail free. After thirty-plus years and a recent resurgence of relentlessly explicit violence in horror, this little picture still shocks, disgusts, and disturbs, and I guess that was the point. Why, then, are we not allowed to delight in its mayhem as we might now with, say, Hostel or Saw? Well, we are, but only in the end. The revenge sequence, no more or less violent than the original killings, delivers real, fascinating terror—we’re into it. But the death of the girls — painfully long, slow, and depressing — is cinematic dead weight. We can’t take our eyes off of it, but it doesn’t make us jump out of our seats, either.

This contradiction, Craven’s insistence upon using one sequence to disgust and horrify and another to entertain and terrify, is what makes Last House on the Left so weird. We are left feeling a combination of campy delight, nervous excitement, and abhorrent shame. The movie is, at the same time, a moral disgrace, a horror masterpiece, shabbily made, and brilliantly manipulative.

DVD Times [Karl Wareham]

Kinocite K. H. Brown

ToxicUniverse.com (Mike Bracken)

DVD Talk [D.K. Holm]

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

Fangoria Michael Gingold

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Scifilm Review IronWolfe

Horror View Blackgloves

Classic-Horror Dana Gravesen

Mondo Digital also reviewing THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS

The New York Times (Howard Thompson)

THE HILLS HAVE EYES

USA (89 mi) 1977

Peter Sobczynski

Nowadays, Wes Craven is regarded as one of the great horror directors of all time thanks to such respectable hits as "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and the "Scream" series, so it is interesting to look back and discover that his earlier films were once damned as sick, disgusting trash by the same people who now routinely praise him. Although not as notorious as his debut, the still shocking "Last House on the Left", his 1977 follow-up "The Hills Have Eyes" still packs a hell of a punch but what is really surprising is to discover that there is a fairly thoughtful and substantial story lurking beneath the blood and weirdness.

Loosely based on the infamous Sawney Bean (look him up on the Internet-preferably not on a full stomach), the film follows a family (including future "E.T." mom Dee Wallace) who are trapped out in the middle of the desert with a malfunctioning station wagon. Immediately, they are plunged into a savage battle for survival with an inbred clan of cannibal psychos (led by the unforgettable Michael Berryman). What sets this apart from other horror films (and what probably put people off when it first came out) is that the villains, while monstrous (at one point even planning to eat the family’s baby), at least stay true to their perverse code and behavior while the "sophisticated" family seems surprisingly eager to descend to savagery to guarantee their survival. Whether you want to look at the film as an exploration of the innate brutality of man or simply as a stylish exercise in gore, fans of Craven’s later, more socially acceptable work should definitely check this one out.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

"Stay in the main road" is the warning ignored by most protagonists of the decade's shake-up "American Nightmare" horror period, and here it strands a camperful of middle-class folks in the middle of an arid Southwest wasteland, with a clan of inbred cannibals peeking from behind the rocks. Not nearly as confrontational in its audience-torturing nihilism as his Last House on the Left debut, Wes Craven's shoestring follow-up shares a similar interest in complacent suburbanites stripped off civilization and forced to face animalistic broken-mirror images, and with despairing patriarchs freeze-framed with sanguine hands. For all the guerilla shock tactics (gutted dogs, nightly attacks, the hanging threat of a baby turning into food), Craven's horror is in the awareness of how short a distance separates the two familial polar opposites -- as befits the picture's post-Romero tropes, the pelt-covered, misshapen brood (bestially lorded over by James Whitworth) carries hints of national traumas swept under the carpet and of oppressed Others (most notably Native-Americans), while the allegedly all-American white-breads are revealed as far from pure (the values extolled by docile matriarch Virginia Vincent are undercut by father Russ Grieve's racist drool). If any hope is to be found in the young generations, it's not before gallons of blood flow, and the bourgeois men (Robert Houston, Martin Speer) get acquainted with the barbarian within -- basically the primeval-killer philosophy from Straw Dogs, not getting any less vacuous. Next to the grueling transgression of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, its vise grip slackens and the intensity disperses as the plot grinds on, though Craven's eye remains as sardonically prankish as Tobe Hooper's -- Vincent's corpse gets propped on a lawn chair as mutant bait, and a camper raid pauses long enough for the snaggle-toothed intruder to snack on a parakeet. With Susan Lanier, Dee Wallace Stone, John Steadman, and Janus Blythe.

Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

Wes Craven's infamous schlocker The Last House on the Left was an exercise in pop culture-crashing perversity. It was a grindhouse blockbuster and, five years later, Craven returned with a film that went on to eclipse its reputation. The Hills Have Eyes is the grueling tale of a WASPy family that finds itself stranded in the American Southwest desert (and, most unfortunately, near a lair of retarded cannibals). This is very much Craven's attempt to capture the rural horror of Tobe Hooper's earlier The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Suffice it to say that while frequently effective, The Hills Have Eyes is no Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Because Craven goes to such great lengths to humanize the cannibal family by mirroring their actions with those of the straight-laced clan, he ends up diluting the terror of being confronted with the proverbial Other. The film culminates with a grand statement about our inherent need to kill, but these impulses are usually more devastating when the urges aren't necessarily in response to a life-or-death situation. Also, Craven indulges in his least terror-inducing motif: the MacGyver solution. Just as Nightmare on Elm Street's climax boiled down to an elaborate parade of Acme Inc. booby traps, The Hills Have Eyes stretches credibility in the final reel with a series of outlandish ambushes. In any case, Craven's latent sick streak gets a major workout here, and the rudest shocks seem to center around the "good" family's parental figures. The patriarch exits the picture in a blaze, tied to a burning tree. And the mother, who suffers a long, slow demise after being shot in the stomach, ends up being used by her own children as bait for the cannibals. (Craven himself was raised by fundamentalist parents, so it seems fairly reasonable that he was working through some major issues while writing the screenplay.) The major saving grace of The Hills Have Eyes is that it's better acted than probably any other film from Craven's early period. Because of his emotionally bare nature, Robert Houston's achingly implosive terror is more complex than your average male lead in a horror film.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Senses of Cinema [Steven Jay Schneider]

Kinocite K.H. Brown

Fangoria Michael Gingold

Reel.com DVD review [Sarah Chauncey]

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

ToxicUniverse.com (Mike Bracken)

The Onion A.V. Club Nathan Rabin

Monsters At Play Lawrence P. Raffel

Joe Bob's Drive-In Movie Review

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J. Wright]

Chris Jarmick

Eccentric Cinema Kevin Novinski

Scifilm Review IronWolfe

KQEK DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]

VideoVista Jeff Young

DVD Talk [Scott Weinberg]

Classic-Horror.com John W. Bowen

Best-Horror-Movies.com Don Sumner

SWAMP THING

USA (91 mi) 1982

ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)

Before Spider-Man's Sam Raimi revealed his comic book transformation talents on 1990's Darkman, Wes Craven showed he had the right stuff to apply a limited budget to a DC comic to create campy fun with his 93-minute Swamp Thing. Of course those were the early 80s—before box office riches of the Scream franchise turned the heads of producers. Early Wes Craven B-movies relied on creativity and subtle humor as they clunked along. Swamp Thing also sports a superior heroine and a classy villain, along with some great supporting location work by a South Carolina swamp.

As the camera pans over the lush swamp in the opening, a warning about how the creative genius of one man collides here with another's evil dream, creating a monster

Too powerful to be destroyed,
Too intelligent to be captured.
This being still pursues its savage dream.

A fitting prelude, and one that really doesn't give away the essence of the story. Immediately the camera switches overhead to a helicopter, where Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau) jokes about area restaurants that is equally countered with a remark about alligator snacks and a reference to Washington D.C. She appears to be flying in on government assignment, but we are left wondering about this as the camera then switches to a swamp militia going through mysterious maneuvers below. Whether they are good or evil will soon be resolved, though casting David Hess (from Last House on the Left) as militia leader is a pretty obvious clue.

Cable soon hooks up with idealistic Dr. Alec Holland (Ray Wise), a scientist desiring to cure world hunger who conducts his research in the swamp because “this is where the life is.” He has just come up with a luminescent lime-colored formula that gives aggressive animalistic behaviors to plants, causing them to grow at enormous rates—nearly as fast as he falls for Cable. No sooner are the results of the experiment known than the evil Dr. Antone Arcane (Louis Jordan) shows up on the scene with a gang of thugs. Holland spills the volatile formula all over himself, leading to a private “burning man festival” that continues like firecrackers when he jumps into the swamp.

That's when the real fireworks of the campy drama are set off. Barbeau shows her stuff (in more than one way) and is no mere damsel in distress. More along the lines of Alien's Sigourney Weaver, Barbeau outsmarts the adversaries most of the time or punches them out or kicks them in the balls when confronted. Watch out when they gang up on her—that's when her benevolent green swamp creature protector tosses the thugs aside like toothpicks.

OK, so it sounds hokey, but it's still fun. Monsters from classics predictably fall for the beautiful women—in The Creature from the Black Lagoon and King Kong, the beauties lead to their downfall. However, more recent cartoon super heroes like Spider-Man, Batman, and Darkman find that they must isolate themselves from mankind for one reason or another. What about the creature in Swamp Thing then? As a hybrid of the two, what fate lies ahead for him? If the box office had been larger, we might have seen sequels address this more than leave things as ambiguous as Craven does in this film, but that is one of its charms.

Scattered throughout are touches of unpretentious humor that tie the audience in with the characters. One of the funnier sequences occurs when the evil Arcane tests out the formula on one of his unsuspecting henchmen, and Craven uses non-professional actor Reggis Batts to comic perfection as Jude, a laid back African American teen. He has running commentaries for the confrontations he witnesses and cleverly times his, “There goes the neighborhood” quip when meeting the swamp creature.

It also contains some beautifully shot swamp scenes, and appropriately cartoonish editing wipes in the well-paced melodrama. Other cuts show remarkable artistry for such a low budget film—an early human scream transitions to another set of characters listening to screeching bird calls. Had Craven stuck with this style into the 90s, his hardcore legion of fans would continue to pay homage to his low-rent flicks, but there's no money in that. Still, those who can see the beauty of Swamp Thing realize that Craven can craft a masterfully entertaining film on a limited budget; in fact, some of his best work was done long before Hollywood dumped money on his projects.

Swamp Thing Raphael Pour-Hashemi from DVD Times

Movie House Commentary about the film and the rating controversy Tuna and

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Justin Stephen)

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross)

Eat My Brains Zombie Club review

NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET B+ 91

USA (91 mi) 1984

A follow up slasher film based on the heightened interest from the success from Carpenter’s 1978 film HALLOWEEN, employing many similarities that the viewers would recognize, this film introduces the world to Freddy Kreuger (Robert Englund), a former child murderer who was supposedly killed off years ago, but is now returning to haunt the dreams of pretty young suburban teenage high school girls, capable of reaching into real life from his hibernation place of dreams. Freddy wreaks havoc in one town, specifically targeting the dreams of Nancy ( Heather Langenkamp), whose father (John Saxon) is a police officer who fails to heed his daughter’s very graphic warnings. Meanwhile her mother (Ronee Blakely) had issues with Freddy before, but now drinks her troubles away and keeps suggesting that all her daughter needs is a good night’s sleep, this while Nancy keeps pumping herself full of pills to stay awake, dreading any moment Freddy can take his revenge.

The film carefully builds to a terrifying climax by seamlessly integrating reality with the dream state, which is barely indistinguishable to the viewers, perhaps only recognizable through the musical soundtrack which takes on a hysterical, high-pitched tone. Langencamp is excellent in the role, actually reading survivor books in order to learn how to protect herself. It’s the parents, as always, who are completely clueless. Blakely, especially, is fairly feeble in her role, hard to believe she raised that particular self-sufficient daughter. Like HALLOWEEN, the film does an excellent job of playing with the audience’s perceptions, giving them a sense of stability and calm before giving them another dose of Freddy’s medicine. His home in the “boiler room” is an unusually effective set design, and there’s a long, steady descent to get there.

Somewhat reminiscent of the 1982 film THE ENTITY, the film has some powerful images, not the least of which is a bathtub sequence, when a person is most vulnerable. This was Johnny Depp’s intro into movies, and he’s pretty forgettable as Nancy’s best friend who lives across the street. Interesting that EDWARD SCISSORSHANDS (1990) features a completely innocent version of a guy with razor-sharp metal hands, played by Depp, who is looked upon by the community as a Freddy-like freak. The idea of establishing a dangerous slasher film in the safe and sleepy confines of the suburbs was more fully realized by David Lynch in 1984 with BLUE VELVET, but Craven certainly challenged the whole notion of security through conformity.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]

Nightmare on Elm Street" is a genre movie through and through, but it's also one of the best, for this simple reason: like the original "Halloween" and "Hellraiser," "Nightmare" brought something new to the Slasher genre. Besides introducing Freddy Krueger into the American lexicon, "Nightmare" was one of the most frightening movies I had ever seen as a kid.

Now, as an adult (an assertion that's open to debate by intimate friends, natch), the whole premise of "Nightmare" still appeals to me. A serial killer that can stalk you in your dreams? The premise was horrifying. At least with a Michael or a Jason you had a chance – a small one, but a chance nonetheless – to defeat them. But how do you run from a killer that's just waiting for you to go to sleep? The answer: not very effectively! Especially in light of the fact that if you're killed in your dreams, you also die in real life!

Heather Langenkamp stars as Nancy Thompson, the Innocent Teen that has to battle Freddy Krueger. Because Nancy is the Innocent Teen (there is always one in a Slasher film, it's a Golden Rule or something), she has a boyfriend, but she isn't promiscuous. In fact, her promiscuous friend Tina (Amanda Wyss) is the first one Freddy visits and slaughters. (Ladies, remember, if you're in a Slasher movie, whatever you do don't (literally) screw around!)

You see, years ago Freddy was… Well, I won't spoil it for those who have yet to see the movie, but needless to say, ol Freddy has plenty of reasons to stalk the children of Elm Street. It's personal. Although the adults have all the answers (or at least the answers to Freddy's true identity), it's the kids, led by the independent and strong-willed Nancy, who must fight back. They have a big stake in the matter because Freddy is getting back at the adults through their kids!

Written and directed by Wes Craven, "Nightmare" is one of the most creative genre pictures to come down the pipe back in 1984; it's even more special now, with the sea of "Scream" carbon copies flooding the market. (Craven, incidentally, helped bring the whole cheapo Teen Slasher film back into fad with "Scream".) The whole concept of a bogeyman that can invade your dreams and kill you is a stroke of brilliance. The film spawn a string of sequels, with Heather Langenkamp returning for Part 3, then again in 1994's "New Nightmare."

"New Nightmare" took a very novel (and intriguing) approach by bringing back everyone, including Craven, Langenkamp, and franchise star Robert Englund (Freddy) to play themselves, as well as introducing a whole new angle to the Freddy mythos. The 1994 movie also brought back the horror element to the franchise, whereas the other sequels had journeyed into absurd and comedy territory. By the end of Part 3, Freddy seemed to have given up the whole notion of scaring the audience, and was preoccupied with making wince-inducing one-liners and bad puns.

There’s something about Nancy Thompson’s cry, midway through A Nightmare on Elm Street, that has just the right air of hysterical teenage petulance. Out of context, one might assume she was an ordinary high-school girl, given to late-night partying and backseat romps with her jock boyfriend, objecting to being sent to bed without supper or being mothered into getting an early night. But, of course, Nancy isn’t merely stamping her feet at being banned from watching the late-late show; she’s trying to keep from being slashed to death by the ghost of a long-dead child murderer who lives in her dreams and wears a jury-rigged razor-glove and a funny hat. Such are the tribulations of the girl next door—at least in horror movies of the 1980s.

Like many filmmakers working in genres maudits like horror or Westerns, Wes Craven was never, until recently, rated very highly for his wit and intelligence. It took a good quarter-century of work and a very colloquially “meta” film called Scream (made two years after his still more “meta” film, New Nightmare) for many to realize that Craven was actually quite self-conscious, cinematically thoughtful, and even rather funny. Scream proved a number of things about Craven to critics and audiences alike: that he knew a great deal about horror films, and how and why they work; that he knew how to manipulate and recycle generic mainstays and to use them to great effect in spite of their conventionality; and that all of this can be highly profitable and can spawn a seemingly endless chain of sequels. But in fact, Craven had already proved this with A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film that, when viewed today, may strike one as among the most originally unoriginal films ever made.

Craven knew the formula well. After The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, two monumentally unpleasant horror films that prey upon the social anxieties of the 1970s, Craven took up the mantle (and the playbook) of John Carpenter and Sean Cunningham. Their Halloween and Friday the 13th soon became the prototypes of the New Teen Horror that Craven effortlessly synthesizes in the original Nightmare: a gaggle of horny teenagers pitted against an iconic, semi-supernatural bogeyman. Toss in all the usual hang-ups about youth and suburban life — drugs, sex, and irresponsible, late-night behavior — and this cycle of films amounts to a critique of middle-class suburbia as arguably piquant as Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, exploiting the conservative jitters about animalistic urges lurking beneath the placid surface of the American Dream.

What’s so clever about Craven’s variation on teen-horror is what now seems so obvious about it: A Nightmare on Elm Street takes all of this fear of unmanageable desires and makes it explicitly, even bluntly Freudian. “What the hell are dreams anyway?” asks Nancy’s schnapps-swilling mother of the local sleep-disorder specialist. “Mysteries,” he replies, rather unconvincingly. “Incredible body hocus-pocus. The truth is we still don’t know what they are… or where they come from.” In this case, Craven knows exactly where they come from: puberty. All that pent-up sexual energy — personified here by Johnny Depp climbing through Nancy’s window in pajama pants and a cut-off t-shirt — is the sort of dangerous dream-fodder that will eventually get you killed in a horror movie. Witness the punishment visited upon Laurie’s slutty babysitter colleagues in Halloween, and the relative safety for the chaste Laurie herself. In Nightmare, Craven retains this moralistic schema with a slight variation: instead of a materialized super-ego (like Michael Myers) who comes to punish all id-like lust of the teens, Fred Krueger is a manifestation of the dream-world itself, returning to punish the very desires from which it supposedly arises. Krueger’s first victim (“Tiiiiiiiinaaaaaa…”) is slaughtered in a bloody bedroom bonanza following some voluble lovemaking with her boyfriend (improbably called “Rod”), and though Nancy is a good girl in this regard, Freddy attempts to invade her dreams to become her “boyfriend,” tongue-kissing her through her telephone. (This becomes doubly evident in the moments when the film cribs from a very similar [though less 80s] film about the terrors of promiscuity, Polanski’s Repulsion.) In this light, the death scene of Depp’s sexually frustrated Glenn — sucked into the middle of his mattress and then spit out into a ceiling-squirting geyser of blood — is the ultimate wet dream.

If the Freudian sledgehammer that is Fred Krueger functions as a return of the repressed, it is abundantly clear that he symbolizes something collective and not simply personally psychological. It is — as these things usually are — the fault of the parents themselves, who years ago burned the evil boiler-room child-murderer to death in an angry mob obviously redolent of a Frankenstein movie. “He’s dead, honey, because Mommy killed him,” Nancy’s boozy mother says soothingly. But in horror movies, where, by definition, things killed, suppressed, and submerged are always returning to terrorize us, such an explanation is hardly reassuring. This repression and return has, after all, formed Freddy Krueger’s (and Craven’s) legacy, with his undying iconicity and easily recognized green-and-red-striped branding, sustainable through innumerable sequels, rip-offs, homages, and — almost inevitably — remakes.

As perhaps the most influential horror film of the '80s (as well as one of the formative films of my youth), and yet consequently also the slasher flick most responsible for the genre's decade-long degradation into self-conscious camp, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a movie defined by its dual legacies. Wes Craven's gory tale of undead kiddie-killer Freddy Krueger and the teens he terrorizes via dreams was a slickly produced variation on Halloween's return-of-the-repressed conceit that boasted empathetic lambs for the slaughter, an iconic villain, and an overabundance of twisted, horrifyingly surreal sights that effectively tapped into the link between carnality and death. "This…is God," says Freddy (Robert Englund) while holding up his phallic finger razors during his first meeting with slutty Tina (Amanda Wyss), only to then perform faux-castration on his finger in order to let his internal yellow goo spurt—an instance of frighteningly sexualized imagery in tune with the slithering, cock-shaped sheet that strangles Lane (Jsu Garcia), the condom-like body bag that encases Tina during virgin Nancy's (Heather Langenkamp) classroom dream, and the geyser of blood that erupts from the dark, hungry (vaginal) hole in Glen's (Johnny Depp) bed.

Nightmare's skill wasn't that it invented such associations—which had already been thoroughly mined by its '70s predecessors—but that it refined them in uniquely disturbing ways, drenching itself in an atmosphere of unreality positioned somewhere between waking and slumbering states. It's an ambiance aided by Craven's deft editing, Charles Bernstein's hauntingly jarring score and musical cues, and the film's unforgettable children's rhyme ("One, two, Freddy's coming for you…"), and most convincingly realized during Nancy's unconscious trip through her high school hallways (replete with a chilling hall monitor Freddy) and into the type of fiery basement where, it's later revealed, Freddy the man was eradicated and Freddy the supernatural specter was born. Toss in the ultimate revelation that Freddy is really the byproduct of parental vigilantism—and thus akin to a demon scorned, determined to exact revenge against those who offed him—and the sense that Freddy's intrusions into his victim's nightmares are acts of subconsciously perpetrated rape, and Craven's classic has enough anti-sex, anti-parent, mass-psychosis undercurrents to keep it relevant for decades, even as time and scores of subsequent, inferior Freddy outings slowly chip away at its once shocking scares.

While Craven is only partially to blame for allowing the Nightmare franchise to fall into junky sequel disrepute—after disliking the studio-mandated request for a twist ending, he reportedly cut ties with its follow-up—Freddy's eventual transformation from malevolent monster to quip-spouting joke nonetheless irrevocably sullied the original's impact, its central fiend sapped of his terrifying deviance (epitomized by his perverted wagging tongue) by awareness of his forthcoming penchant for corny one-liners. In and of itself, this series devolution into goofiness was dispiriting. Worse, however, is that the success of Freddy's maiden voyage (which more or less single-handedly put neophyte New Line Cinema on the map) led to an unfortunate era of tongue-in-cheek mainstream horror films in which bad puns and wink-wink kills became the norm. And thus despite Nightmare's enduring portrait of believable teendom (from Langenkamp's feisty heroine to the debuting Depp's bland cuteness), its bizarre vision of adulthood (with John Saxon's standard-issue daddy cop overshadowed by Ronee Blakley's creepily spaced-out mom), and its resonant argument in favor of parent-child truthfulness, it also, regrettably, must be held responsible for amusing but distinctly un-horrifying trash like Child's Play and Dr. Giggles.

Celluloid Dreams Simon Hill

A Nightmare On Elm Street was a huge success in the eighties and provided an alternative to the standard stalk and hack franchises created by Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth. It also provided Wes Craven (as director) with major success and allowed him to go on and build a career in horror, he re-invented the stalker/slasher genre again later with Scream. In Nightmare he completely alters the parameters without breaking from the conventional horror film rules.

Nightmare tells the story of Nancy and her friends, the usual bunch of thick American teenagers. They live on Elm Street and are all experiencing the same frightening nightmares featuring this horribly burned, evil-looking man clad in a dirty red and green jumper, a brown fedora hat and with razor sharp knives protruding from the end of his right hand. The film opens with the villain, Fred (lovingly lengthened to Freddy) Krueger constructing his razor hand. It transpires that he worked as a janitor and liked to kill children in his spare time. Rather unsuprisingly the locals don´t take too kindly to this and so they douse him in petrol and burn him alive (hence the scarring). The twist and premise of this film, and the sequels, is that he can live in the dreamworld and is able to kill people while they sleep. He hunts the children of the locals who burned him.

Now it must be said that there are holes aplenty in this ridiculous story line but that is nothing new for horror and if you suspend your disbelief you should find this an enjoyable horror classic. One criticism you could possibly level at it, although it is more true of the sequels, is the fact that Freddy is allowed a comic character at times. Usually what they try to do in horror films is to dehumanise the killer (think of the completely silent Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers), this is in fact a common media reaction as well, instead of admitting the uncomfortable truth that some human beings do these type of things, they try to create monsters. The fact Freddy is a wisecracking killer made him more appealing to the audience, as the sequels spewed out he became more and more of a lovable rogue figure (but he is meant to be an evil child killer!). In the original he managed to be a scary figure but thereafter gradually descended into self parody. Although giving him a bit of a character made him more realistic, at first, it sometimes seems to lend legitimacy to what he is doing (or belittle the seriousness - although it should be remembered that films are for entertainment, if it offends you don´t watch it).

What is different about the Nightmare films is the creation of a dreamworld in which the killer operates which gives the makers a great deal more freedom, the death scenes can be that bit more imaginitive because they don't have to be realistic. At the same time most of the best scares in the film were very simple tricks that would have been cheap to do (eg tongue in the phone). The setting is very western suburbia and combines with the teenage cast to give you an idea of the target audience, Craven provides a potential threat (albeit a ridiculous one) to spice up suburban life for the viewer. The scares are fast and furious and it isn´t long before the deaths are piling up, can Nancy get anyone to believe her? Can she stop Freddy before he murders the lot of them? Will she have learned to act by the time she appears in a sequel?

The acting is the usual horror film standard, even an early appearance from Johnny Depp does not improve matters and what is he wearing? Heather Langenkamp plays Nancy (the heroine of the piece) and she is awful, spending most of the film crying, whining or running. Robert Englund plays Freddy and is now unable to play anything else, he looks even uglier without the make-up and although he is competent enough at scraping his knife fingers down things and delivering the odd one-liner I can´t see him getting offered too many serious parts. He did, however, make this role his own, creating a cackling evil laugh and a creepy way of stalking his prey.

The special effects and make-up are highly impressive, Krueger looks slimy and evil throughout and his razor fingers are enough to make you shiver. The best scene in terms of special effects has to be the post coital murder. After breaking the sex rule our young teen has no chance of survival but the manner of her death is extremely gruesome and well shot, an unforgettable murder scene. She is sliced up, apparently by no-one as her boyfriend looks on helplessly in horror. The soundtrack is unmemorable but the sound effects are brilliant, creepy whispering, metal scraping all designed to make you uneasy and add to the experience.

Craven also cleverly weaves into Nightmare the idea that every town has a myth about some evil murderer. The character of Kreuger sounds unfortunately plausible, at least until he pops up in the dreamworld. This gives the film more power, and is added to by the famous rhyme, "One Two Freddy´s coming for you" etc. The story is left fairly open in the first film, you could interpret it how you want, there was no attempt to explain Kreuger´s motivations. Later films deteriorated, part two was still trying to be scary but after that it went really bad and became a mix of poor comedy and poor acting. Scary jumps and painful to watch murders became cheesy one-liners and stupidly elaborate death scenes.

A huge history built up around the Kreuger character and he now has a firmly established place in horror character history squeezing in uncomfortably between the silent Michael Myers and the older villains Dracula and Frankenstein. The fact he makes it into this kind of company is a clue to how good a horror film Nightmare is and how much of an effect it had on those who watched it. It is flawed but genius nonetheless, Craven´s best work.

DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

DVDActive (Dustin McNeill)

DVD Verdict Mike Jackson

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Reel.com DVD review [D. Scott Apel]

The Film Desk [James Kendrick]

DVD Crypt [Mike Long]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Bob Mandel)

Classic-Horror Chrissy Derbyshire

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Ross Johnson)

Brian's Nightmare on Elm Street Page

Men, Women and Chainsaws and Hard Bodies Marian Jebb book review of Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, from Jump Cut, March 1996

Photo of the actual "Nightmare on Elm Street" house.

THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS

USA (102 mi) 1991

HorrorWatch Misfortune

In every neighborhood there is one house that adults whisper about and children cross the street to avoid.

Twelve year old Fool and his family are about to be evicted from the apartment building in the ghetto. His mother has cancer and can't pay the rent. The owners of the building want to tear the place down to build condo's, and they are the last family there. He is resigned to the fact until his sisters baby-daddy, Leroy comes up with a plan. He robbed a liquor store the night before and found out where the owners live because they own the store as well. He found a letter stating that they have a huge stash of gold coins in their house. Fool lets himself be talked into going in to help Leroy steal the coins and save his home.

Written and directed by Wes Craven, this is one of my favorites of his. I saw it years ago on VHS, and just recently found it again on DVD. This movie features the house from hell. No monsters, or poltergeists. Just two homicidal people ready to kill anyone who disrupts their "happy" home.

Happy is a relative term considering there are plenty of other people in the house, but they are all miserable. Almost immediatly after they break in, things go wrong. They become trapped inside with no place to go when "Mommy & Daddy" come back home. With Leroy quickly out of the way, Fool finds himself alone, until he meets some unusual allies.

Wes Craven went all out on this movie. The fortified house is full of booby traps, and surprises. The "Mommy & Daddy" are hilariously amusing, but never over the top. They are completely believeable in their insanity. Someone or something is always after Fool, whether it's Daddy, in a full leather bondage suit, or Prince, the huge, flesh-loving rottweiler. This movie does not slow down.

The makeup effects for the boys looked fantastic. Even the boys that were not featured prominently were done just as well as those that were. Craven did not skimp on anything for this movie. No nudity at all, but a good amount of gore, as can be expected.

While there was an outcry at the time of it's release, I do not see this movie as exploitative, which I think is the reason it took so long for Universal to put it out on DVD. I see it for what it is, a movie about a kid trying to help his family by any means necessary. This movie was released at a time when there was nothing but a cesspool of bad horror movies. I think that thats part of the reason I'm so fond of it. But mostly, it's because I cannot think of any other movie quite like it. It stands on it's own very well, even today.

eFilmCritic.com (David Hollands)

A young boy (Adams) from the black urban ghetto faces a dilemma. It's his thirteenth birthday, his family is being evicted from their tenement home by their voracious landlords and his mother is being eaten alive by a cancer that the family can't afford to treat. His name is Fool (after the Tarot cards his prostitute sister reads); he's a bookish boy who dreams of becoming a doctor. But when his sister's boyfriend dangles an opportunity to score a lot of money by burglarizing the home of Fool's rich white landlords (who own vast portions of the ghetto), Fool seizes the day. Bad idea. Once inside the house, Fool gets sucked into the bowels of a hell that can scarcely be imagined. Here reside the deranged landlords, Man and Woman, who are both husband and wife and brother and sister. (McGill and Robie will be familiar to viewers as another sick TV couple, Big Ed and Nadine from Twin Peaks). Their house is a veritable fortress, with impregnable exits, recessed passageways, collapsible staircases and hidden rabbit holes. Down one of the holes, Fool finds Alice, the daughter of the household, who has never been outside its confines. She's a sad, abused child who knows no reality beyond these walls. Then there's the reality that's going on behind the walls and under the stairs. Grand Guignol sickness seeps out of every crevice of this structure. This is the work of the Wes Craven we came to admire in The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, a director who, at his best, uses the horror genre to tap deep into the fissures of the American family unit. Behind the benign countenances, he finds the evil that lurks therein. The People Under the Stairs was inspired by a true story of a break-in and it's this movie's social underpinnings that give it its power. Propping up this story are a myriad of issues and themes that range from social injustice, racial prejudice, child abuse and community solidarity. It's a distinctly urban horror tale that looks at the sinister pathologies that go on behind closed doors. It's also wryly funny. When Woman exclaims “You children will be the death of me” or Man bellows at the noisemakers below “Don't make me have to come down there,” it's like some typical family portrait as seen through a refracting surface of parody. By the film's end, Craven begins to pull out all the stops and allows the action to leap wildly in unfocused directions that deflate some of the suspense with false endings and rely too heavily on insufficient explanations. So, while The People Under the Stairs may leave some horror fans unsatisfied and other horror detractors repulsed, it ought to satisfy those viewers who appreciate a thoughtful and visceral movie entertainment.

The People Under The Stairs Mark Davis from DVD Times

Monsters At Play Lawrence P. Raffel

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Absolute Horror

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Adam Balz]

DVD Talk (Mike Long)

Mike Bracken

Eat My Brains Zombie Club

Mondo Digital also reviewing LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT

Washington Post (Richard Harrington)

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Tom Huddleston]

NEW NIGHTMARE

aka: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 7

USA (112 mi) 1994

Washington Post [Desson Howe]

Are you ready for this? “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” is a great movie, easily the most brilliant of the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series. It’s witty, smart, funny, entertaining, and you’ll still like yourself in the morning for watching it.

You’re familiar, of course, with Freddy Krueger, the quasi-folkloric spectral killer with the steel claw, the melted face and the striped shirt. In seven “Nightmare” movies (counting this one), he has shown an irreversible penchant for entering the dreams of adolescents (at least those foolish enough to indulge their sexual impulses) and rendering them into human tuna. Each sequel, since 1984’s original “Nightmare on Elm Street,” promised us he would never return. But since New Line Cinema (the distribution company) turned such juicy profits on these bloody farewells, Freddy—miraculously—kept coming back.

In “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” set in the very real present, Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund (the stars of the original “Nightmare”), Craven (the creator of it all) and the executives of New Line Cinema all play themselves. It has been a few years since Langenkamp played the schoolgirl-heroine in the original. Now married to a special effects technician, she’s a parent (to 8-year-old Miko Hughes) and concerned about things like screen violence.

But since the series came to an official end, strange things have been happening. Langenkamp’s been getting scary phone calls, apparently from Freddy. Her son has been having disturbing dreams, the kind her character used to have. And things get even stranger when Bob Shaye, the head of New Line Cinema, makes Langenkamp an offer: another “Elm Street” movie, with Englund (who plays Freddy), to be written by Craven himself.

Craven, after launching the “Elm Street” phenomenon, left the sequels to the hacks. But he has been having weird dreams too. He’s back with a compelling reason to make another movie: The “Elm Street” movies, until this point, have kept Freddy’s evil within fictional boundaries. Now that the series is over, Freddy refuses to fade away. He’s starting to spill into real life. They’re going to have to keep making Freddy movies just to keep him imprisoned. If there’s a more inspired marketing concept than that, I haven’t heard it.

“Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” continues in this self-referential way, operating on several levels of reality and irony. By the way, in terms of mounting suspense, few do it better than Craven. The movie has all the scary trademarks too, from alarmingly shrill telephones to boo! effects to the usual, Dante-meets-MTV descent into hell. “New Nightmare” is designed to please just about everybody—from diehard “Elm Street” fans to the series’s most confirmed enemies. The good news is not that Freddy’s back. It’s that Craven is back.

The generic fallout from Wes Craven’s groundbreaking foray into post-modern horror has since been widely condemned. For a few years, it was all but impossible to see a scary American movie without sitting through a parade of in-jokes, references, and cultural asides designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Every character had to be named after a famous director, every death punctuated not just with a spicy bon mot, but with a knowing wink. Thank goodness J-horror slipped icily in through the back door and reminded us what it was like to be unironically scared shitless.

But Craven’s initial efforts remain rewarding. Scream is the undisputed highpoint, comic but still unsettling, a worthy father to bastard children. But before that came New Nightmare, Craven’s farewell to his most revered creation, and the first Freddy in a decade to warrant any kind of serious attention.

The plot is postmodernism by numbers. Heather Langenkamp plays Heather Langenkamp, indie horror actress, now happily married to a special effects tech and mother of a slightly creepy 9-year-old boy. But although the Nightmare On Elm Street series has ended, Heather is still suffering from terrifying dreams featuring Freddy Krueger, nightmares that soon begin to impinge on her real life. It turns out that Freddy is in fact the personification of some ancient evil, trapped temporarily in the character but now loose once more upon the world. The only way to prevent his achieving full corporeal form is to resurrect the series, and trap the demon once and for all…

All this is explained by Wes Craven playing himself, a neat little cameo in which he explains that he’s already started writing the new script, and that Heather is, in fact, the star. Pan across to Wes’s computer screen, and there’s the conversation they’ve just been having, followed by FADE TO BLACK, which the image obediently does. These crafty little tricks are all over New Nightmare. They could have made the film slightly ludicrous, the natural successor to those Bugs Bunny cartoons where he argues with the animator. But the constant self-reference actually succeeds in lending the proceedings an authentically creepy air. Craven’s avowed intent was to banish the memory of what Freddy had become, to get back to the grit and gore of his original film. Freddy’s no joker here, he’s a real monster, even the makeup has been rejigged to make him more inhuman. His attacks on Heather’s family are truly unpleasant, the death of her husband an obvious but effective plot surprise. And the cameos — from Craven, Robert Englund, even producer Bob Shaye — are more than just grist for the fans, they actually help to flesh out the ‘reality’ of this inverted world.

New Nightmare is a nifty experiment, compellingly blurring the line between surprisingly smart and predictably dumb. Craven isn’t half as clever as he thinks he is (he never was, frankly), but his dedication to scaring the audience pays off here—there are some authentically spooky scenes, and a few good jolts. It’s a fitting farewell to old pizza-face.

DVD Verdict Mike Jackson

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp

James Saravia

SCREAM B 87

USA (111 mi) 1996 ‘Scope

A different kind of horror film, one that slyly explains the rules of the genre as it goes along, that from the outset humorously pays homage to teen slasher films like FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) and the director’s own A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) where teens in supposedly safe suburbia are stalked by an unseen masked monster. This film, cleverly written by Kevin Williamson, has a tongue-in-cheek attitude about its witty dialogue where characters are spewing bits and pieces of camp movie dialogue while it’s being restaged in some form onscreen. Using the telephone as an instrument of menace, the surprises come fast and furious with Drew Barrymore (as a blond) in the opening sequence, where she is terrorized by the strange sounding voice on the phone, where the mood shifts from casual silliness to an overt catastrophe in split seconds, where the audience in their seats probably can’t stop from yelling instructions to her on the screen, but she disregards all common sense and is instead paralyzed in a shiver of fright. Paying homage to Hitchcock’s shocking treatment to Janet Leigh’s blond heroine in PSYCHO (1960), Barrymore makes an even quicker screen exit while in the background can be heard the faint strains of “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” a Blue Oyster Cult song prominently featured in John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978), perhaps the most perfect example of the teen horror genre, where Jamie Lee Curtis memorably claws her way to survival in that film, showing an uncommon amount of resilience and heady, split second thinking. In the hearts of many, she won a lifetime achievement award with that single performance, becoming a central theme of this film as well.

Neve Campbell is next, where she innocently mis-identifies the voice on the phone as that of a friend of hers, Randy (Jamie Kennedy), who works in a video store and his brain is obsessed with uttering movie references, where again the initial playfulness turns on a dime to something distinctly malevolent, where she fortunately survives a similar attack, an incident that leaves her traumatized, as her mother was killed in a similar incident nearly a year ago, where her testimony against the man she saw leaving the scene of the crime put him behind bars. Nonetheless, her boyfriend, Skeet Ulrich, a Johnny Depp clone, mysteriously crawls through her window shortly after the attack to make sexual overtures. At school the next day, who should be Campbell’s best friend, but the sexually promiscuous Rose McGowan, where similar to HALLOWEEN, the smart, virginal girl’s best friend is a sexual dynamo, one repressed and hung up on sex, the other free wheeling and wild. This friendship seems to represent the full range of sexual expression as seen by a typical teenage male. Quickly arriving on the scene is the unethical TV court reporter Courteney Cox, giving a Nicole Kidman TO DIE FOR (1995) performance, pushing other people aside to get what she wants, always abrasive yet catty, smug and wickedly bitchy, a woman who quickly receives a sock in the mouth from Campbell for writing a tabloid sleaze book alleging her mother’s murderer is innocent. Adding to the tabloid sensation is the presence of Deputy Dewey (David Arquette), where the onscreen sizzle with Cox is a prelude to their real-life eventual marriage. At this point, one has to acknowledge these young women onscreen are ravishingly beautiful, all in the prime of their careers, which may have contributed to the movie grossing over $100 million dollars at the box office.

When the laid back California action moves to an unsupervised teen drinking party in a giant mansion, where McGowan hopes Campbell can forget all her problems, the real absurdity of the premise takes over. It’s here that Randy offers the rules of the game as HALLOWEEN can be seen in the background playing on TV, claiming if you want to survive in a horror movie: 1.) You can never have sex (or you’ll be killed) 2.) You can never drink or do drugs (or you’ll be killed) 3.) Never under any circumstances say “I’ll be right back,” (because you won’t). Of course, all the rules are violated, which leads to outlandish circumstances where the stalker reeks mayhem, leading to a near surreal catastrophic finale, a bloodbath of killings and near misses which plays out in choreographed precision, like a funhouse of death using music, close ups, slow motion speed mixed with comic absurdity. Cox secretly places a video camera inside the party, but there’s a 30 second time gap between reality and what’s viewed onscreen, which allows plenty of confusion, as characters continue to get tripped up by unfortunate bad timing. Still, despite the graphic gore, the mystifyingly refreshing dialogue continues to amaze, beautifully capturing the Generation X mentality, continuing with nonstop references to past slasher films, where there’s a goofiness to it all, even as lives are at stake. But the clever tone wins out, openly making fun of itself, as the entire film plays out like a movie within a movie, where the horror genre itself becomes an identifiable character associated with the unseen stalker, adding personality and color to this darkly entertaining film. The one-liners are so quick and so perfectly embedded into the action that you may need to view this again, where you’ll get your chance, spawning not one, not two, but three Craven sequels so far. Drew Barrymore sarcastically streams the director’s thoughts on the phone while offering her insight about the numerous sequels to Craven’s A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, the film where the guy has knives for fingers, which the caller acknowledges was a scary movie. “Well, the first one was, but the rest sucked.”

Scream - Philadelphia City Paper Cindy Fuchs

Being a slasher film, Scream is about young people pursued by a psychokiller who tends to use large knives but will use automatic garage doors in a pinch. They're somewhere in California, where houses are pretty but far enough apart so that when you call for help on your cell phone, it's likely not to arrive quite in time. Good girl Sidney (Neve Campbell) is traumatized by her mother's murder a year before and always-gone-on-business dad, and currently pressured by her boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich) to sleep with him. Because she's a good girl, she makes a thoughtful decision that updates the Jamie Lee Curtis virgin queen character. The point is, the kids and the creeps are confused and angry (appropriate enough for the genre's target audience), from Sidney to her best friend Tatum (Rose McGowan) and Tatum's brother Deputy Dewey (David Arquette) to the lascivious principal (Henry Winkler) and way-too-ambitious tab TV reporter named Gale (Courtney Cox). But the movie is less concerned with explaining motivations than it is with dismantling the social mechanisms which produce them.

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Horror maestro Wes Craven has always had more to say than his contemporaries and imitators (who have often been one and the same), a fact he proves once again with this homage to/subversion of the slasher films that thrived in the 1980s. Scream concerns the attempts of a group of high-schoolers to avoid a serial killer in their midst. The catch: Both stalker and prey are fully aware of the conventions of the sort of film in which they appear. As in Wes Craven's New Nightmare, the director uses this awareness to comment cleverly on the genre, and unlike that film, which drastically shifted gears in its final act, Scream does not clumsily become the very thing it parodies. But don't be mistaken. Though Scream is a smart send-up, it also remains a finely crafted, tense, scary thriller from start to finish. And for a generation raised on the conventions it explores—titillation and violence are equated, and the fall from sexual purity inevitably means death—it could even be considered important. What was it that made the sight of half-naked women being sliced up so entertaining anyway? Scream would come off as an attempt at redemption for a decade of dark fantasies if it didn't find its source material so amusing. It's to the film's credit that its ironic ambivalence seems more mature than hypocritical.

Scream Marc Savlov from The Austin Chronicle

A triumphant return to form for Wes Craven, Scream is the kind of psychological slasher film for which horror fans have been waiting years. The stalk 'n' slash gorefests of the early to mid-Eighties may be a distant crimson glimmer in cinematic history, but most people who grew up with such unique also-rans as Terror Train, Happy Birthday to Me, Hell Night, and the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises will gleefully admit the role they played in their adolescence. Like a cultural watermark, those films (and many, many others) helped define teenagers in the Eighties just as surely as did Def Leppard, Stridex Pads, and pre-Jordan Nike footwear. They also prepped us for what not to do when being pursued by an axe-wielding maniac, but sadly, very few ever had the chance to put that knowledge to the test. Not so for the cast of Scream, Wes Craven's new horror film that playfully uses such movies of the past and their writ-in-stone lessons (never leave the house to check on a strange noise outside, never assume the psycho is really dead, never go in the basement if the lights have gone off, etc.) as pivot points in Craven's wonderfully self-reflexive plot. Neve Campbell plays Sidney, a young girl who, one year ago, lost her mother to a murderous maniac. Almost to the day, more body parts start popping up, but this time, it's her friends at Woodsboro High School who are the victims. The unnamed killer wears a cheap Halloween mask and queries his victims on horror-show etiquette via threatening phone calls before doing them in. It's up to Sidney and her clique of horror film buffs (among them the excellent Skeet Ulrich, looking very, very much like Johnny Depp in A Nightmare on Elm Street) to stay alive long enough to ID the madman before everyone's strung up and butchered like Yuletide hogs. That's the plot in a nutshell, but the real thrill in Scream comes from Craven's gleefully over-the-top plotting and nightmare psychology. One scene featuring a pair of small-town cops discussing the case out-Lynches David Lynch, and Craven's brilliant use of film-within-film-within-film is taken to new heights in the final reel as the surviving characters watch themselves watching John Carpenter's Halloween as they're being stalked, courtesy of a hidden video camera. Scream operates on so many levels at once that you could write a dissertation on it, but the real fun lies in the director's (and cast's) obvious love of the genre. Craven is obviously having a ball here, and it's impossible not to sit back and go grinning into this dark, gory ride.

At The Cinema [Sarah Ward]

The best fright fest of the ’90s, Wes Craven’s "Scream" playfully tweaks many of the horror/ slasher conventions in place since the arrival of "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" in the mid-’80s, but it does so with a fiendishly clever, complicated plot that makes it an instant classic, and not simply of the genre. Though it begins and ends with requisite bloody roughness, the film deftly mixes irony, self-reference and wry social commentary with chills and blood spills. And even to a veteran genre fan like myself, the ending was a genuine surprise.

Credit veteran director Craven and a newcomer, scriptwriter Kevin Williamson: Like the teen characters in "Scream," they are intimately familiar with genre conventions but are not slaves to them.

You get a sense of the wild ride ahead from the opening sequence in which a teenager (Drew Barrymore in the Jamie Lee Curtis "Halloween" mold) is tested over the phone -- at first chummily, then suddenly meanly -- by a phantom psycho caller who quizzes her about slasher movies. "If you answer correctly, you live," he warns. She doesn’t and Craven unleashes a living, knife-wielding nightmare who wears black robes and sports an Edvard Munch-"Scream"-like death mask that’s truly unsettling.

This little California town seems to be inhabited mostly by teenagers, including Sidney (Neve Campbell from "Party of Five"). Seems Sidney’s mom had been slashed to death a year ago, and her testimony had sent the killer to death row. Now Sidney’s on the killer’s kill waiting list. Soon after she survives an attack, who should come crawling in her bedroom window but boyfriend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich). Arrested by the police, Billy is simply the first of many suspects, including tabloid TV journalist Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), Deputy Dewey Reilly (David Arquette), belligerent teen rebel Stuart (Matthew Lillard) and video shop employee Randy (Jamie Kennedy). As always, the line between suspect and victim is membrane thin.

The irony of "Scream" is that all its characters seem conversant with slasher film conventions. "To successfully survive a horror movie, you have to abide by the rules," Randy reminds a group of teens gathered at an isolated farm house for a celluloid slasher fest. "You can never have sex: The minute you do, you’re as good as gone. Sex equals death. Never drink or do drugs: It’s an extension of the first. And never, ever say ‘I’ll be right back . . ..’ "

Bloody Deconstruction Bill Stamets from The Chicago Reader

The decay of culture is perhaps our most commonly cited fin de siecle cliche, and nearly everyone holds the entertainment industry at fault. In recent years horror directors John Carpenter and Wes Craven have confronted their genre's alleged role in debasing the masses--engaging the conservative's paranoia that Hollywood is a prime polluter of public morality--and in doing so they've both taken interesting risks with their formulas and fans.

Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (1995) is about a pulp novelist "who outsells Stephen King." The author's latest book drives readers to homicidal rages, and we're told the movie version will be coming out soon. Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) begins with a stock horror-movie scene that finishes with a director calling "cut" and the camera pulling back to reveal a movie set. In the film Craven, playing himself, writes a script that unmasks evil as an entity that seeks to be incarnated through movie sequels; later, actress Heather Langenkamp (who starred in Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street ten years earlier) reads the script to her young son as a bedtime story. Scream, Craven's latest movie, continues this ironic inquest of the horror genre, though this time he shifts his focus from the producers of these films to their teenage consumers. It opens with Drew Barrymore as a high schooler targeted by a killer who quizzes her on details from Carpenter's Halloween. Craven cuts from her grisly murder to Sidney (Neve Campbell), another teenager, pecking away at her personal computer. In light of Craven's recent self-referential shtick, I wondered if this over-the-top opening was in fact a creation of Sidney's. But it wasn't. As in so many horror movies, expectations are set up, and then subverted. Sidney's simply bummed out because it's the first anniversary of her mom's murder and her dad is going away on business.

A figure crawls through her bedroom window, but it's only her boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich), a semisensitive type who pressures Sidney for sex. He has a seemingly harmless habit of drawing parallels between life and the movies. His hyper pal Randy (Jamie Kennedy) works in a video store and brandishes an encyclopedic knowledge of scary movies brimming with dead teenagers. Soon enough, more teens fall prey to the masked slayer.

Writer Kevin Williamson peppers his script with clever lines. The high school students are all video savvy; they know how to use the freeze-frame to spot Tom Cruise's penis in a nude scene from All the Right Moves. The school principal (Henry Winkler) denounces two pranksters as "heartless, desensitized little shits" after they don the same mask used by the killer (based on the central figure in Edvard Munch's The Scream). A curfew is called, so naturally the kids head for an unchaperoned party in the country.

Courteney Cox plays a tabloid TV reporter. "People treat me like I'm the antichrist of television journalism," she half boasts. She gets her scoop by hiding a miniature camera under a TV. It captures the teens watching scary movies on a VCR while Randy treats his classmates to a full-blown deconstruction of the horror genre. Among his rules for survival in a horror movie: "Never, never, under any circumstances, say 'I'll be right back.'"

As Cox's cameraman monitors the living room from a van parked outside, Craven crafts a perfect mirror image; his own deconstruction figures into the plot. A teenager watching Halloween yells at the television, trying to alert Jamie Lee Curtis to "Look behind you." The cameraman helplessly yells those same words at his screen when a figure looms behind the teen. (The killers in Scream fault the local cops for not watching enough slasher flicks like Prom Night.) When Sidney finally faces the killers, she charges, "You've seen one too many movies." They reply, "Movies don't make psychos; movies make psychos more creative." What follows is an insightful aside on the role of motives in these movies--usually there are none. Killers without motives are far more scary. The killer even tells one of his victims that she can't reason her way out of her role: "You can't pick your genre." Scream's in-jokes may suggest that the genre has atrophied. In recent interviews Craven has expressed a desire to get out of the horror business. Maybe that's why he's set out to make more than a horror movie. He's contributing to a long tradition of reflexive films, going back as far as the turn of the century. Within a few years after the first public screenings, filmmakers were already spoofing the fledgling art form. And unlike the cartoonish lefty politics of John Carpenter's Escape From L.A., Craven offers a more nuanced take on Hollywood. Scream producers Cary Woods and Cathy Konrad have already betrayed their progressive leanings with last year's Kids and the upcoming abortion satire Citizen Ruth. "There's a tremendous temptation in this country to get up and pontificate," Craven told me at the Chicago International Film Festival two years ago. "It really is thought control coming from an overblown sense of righteousness."

Movies were a forbidden pleasure when Craven attended the religious Wheaton College. He saw his first film, To Kill a Mockingbird, in his senior year after breaking school rules and hitchhiking to a theater. Perhaps his resistance to the Wheaton authorities has resurfaced as a resistance to the strictures of the teen horror genre. He hasn't entirely forsaken his identification with adolescent rebellion. The final credits in Scream even give the finger to uncooperative authorities: "No thanks whatsoever to the Santa Rosa City School District Governing Board."

Scream - Deep Focus Bryant Frazer, also seen here: Bryant Frazer

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

notcoming.com | Scream Victoria Large from Not Coming to a Theater Near You

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! - Scream (1996) Liz Kingsley

DVD Times review [Michael Mackenzie]

Review of the film at Epinions.com Mike Bracken

Scream Mike D’Angelo

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

James Brundage

Kevin Patterson

a nineties-style teenage slasher movie with just enough tongue-in-cheek understanding of its own ... James Kendrick from Q Network Film Desk

DVD Verdict Sean McGinnis

High-Def Digest [M. Enois Duarte] Blu-Ray

Scream (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Michael Zupan

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Michael Rubino]

DoBlu.com (Blu-ray) [Matt Paprocki]

Digital Retribution [J.R. McNamara] Blu-Ray

EyeForFilm.co.uk Tony Sullivan

The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

Cinemaphile.org - Scream / *** (1996) David Keyes

Scream James Bowman

Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp

Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith H. Brown]

SBCCFilmReviews [William Conlin]

Scream Andrea Albin from Bloody Disgusting

A Nutshell Review Stefan S.

Foster on Film - Slashers

filmcritic.com loves Scream Christopher Null

Jamey Hughton takes a look at the Scream Trilogy

HorrorDigital.com [Jeremy] The Ultimate Collection, the Scream Trilogy

Movie Ram-blings Ram Samudrala takes a look at the Scream Trilogy

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson also looks at the Scream Trilogy

Scream (Collector's Series) : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Jeremy Kleinman from DVD Talk looks at the Scream Trilogy

Albuquerque Alibi [Devin D. O'Leary] which includes an interview with Craven, April 23, 1997

Variety.com [Leonard Klady]

Scream Time Out London

BBCi - Films Almar Haflidason

San Francisco Examiner [Bob Stephens]

San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Stack]

Craven's 'Scream' a Bravura Sendup of Horror Pictures - Los ... Kevin Thomas from The LA Times

Nashville Scene [Noel Murray]

MUSIC OF THE HEART

USA (124 mi) 1999

Slate [David Edelstein]

"A special smile ... a certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of Music of the Heart ... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari (played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster (her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders), Guaspari used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers."

Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray (A Walk on the Moon), has her students complain of her nastiness and perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the kindness of strangers.

Directors of violent genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be, they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in "ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc., we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.

When Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Peirce was asked recently why she felt the need to make a narrative film about Teena Brandon, whose experience was well-covered in the documentary The Brandon Teena Story, Peirce had a good response. She said she wanted to bring Brandon to life, so that audiences could see him as more than just pictures and transcripts in a police report. But why exactly did noted horror director Wes Craven decide to branch into conventional drama by adapting an Oscar-winning documentary, Small Wonders, into the big-budget feature Music of the Heart? The subject of Small Wonders, music teacher Roberta Guaspari, is fully alive in the original film--so much so that even the great Meryl Streep's interpretation of her is soft and lifeless by comparison.

What Craven offers, then, with the aid of a screenplay by A Walk on the Moon scribe Pamela Gray, is little more than explanations and motivations--a blueprint for everything about Guaspari that seemed unusual or difficult in Small Wonders. The documentary introduces Guaspari as the instructor for an innovative East Harlem music program that attempts to teach selected students how to play the violin. The story of both films is sparked by a cut in funding for the arts in public education, which leads to a big benefit concert at Carnegie Hall, where violin greats from Itzhak Perlman to Isaac Stern offer support for Roberta's kids.

I'm sure Craven wanted to adapt Small Wonders because he wanted to bring the stirring story to a wider audience. That's noble enough, and it is likely that people who haven't seen the earlier project will be suitably delighted and moved by Music of the Heart, which is fine. But it's unlikely they'll feel the connection to their own life experiences that Small Wonders offers.

Small Wonders is mostly about how to get to Carnegie Hall--which is, of course, practice, practice, practice. The documentary doesn't shy away from showing what a hardcase Guaspari can be, screaming at her students and threatening to drop them (or actually dropping them) from the program, while at same time eliciting the sort of miraculous performances that will spark memories for any eager student who ever had a committed teacher.

Craven, Gray, and Streep give us the scary side of Roberta too, but they soften it with plenty of smiles and lots of backstory. They show us Guaspari's tough divorce, and the hardships of subsequent single motherhood. More gallingly, they give Roberta an unnecessary foil--an officious, condescending fellow music teacher whose blatantly dull methods are supposed to accentuate how brilliant Guaspari is. Except that nothing Guaspari does in the classroom is inherently exceptional. She's merely a hard taskmaster who understands that in music, discipline leads to harmony, which leads to a feeling of accomplishment for her students. It's as simple, and as difficult, as that.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Music of the Heart (1999) Kay Dickinson from Sight and Sound, February 2000

Salon.com [Mary Elizabeth Williams]

Nitrate Online (Gregory Avery)

PopMatters Anne Daugherty

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Keith Harris

Film Journal International (David Noh)

Film Freak Central Bill Chambers

Reel.com [Ray Greene]

Apollo Movie Guide [Brian Webster]

filmcritic.com (Athan Bezaitis)

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] not buying the music

Village Voice (Jessica Winter) equally unimpressed

Philadelphia City Paper review by Cindy Fuchs

The Nick Schager Film Project

RED EYE B 85

USA (85 mi) 2005

The suspense-master takes full advantage of the claustrophobic world of airplanes, where despite our ultra-sensitivity to terrorists on board, little do we suspect other incidentals like old-fashioned blackmail. Cillian Murphy targets the efficiency of a high-style hotel manager, Rachel McAdams, always stunningly attractive, here playing a woman constantly under pressure who knows how to handle multiple emergencies at once, who can be used to switch rooms at the last minute for the Homeland Security chief, leaving him vulnerable to a sneak attack, all made possible by threatening to take the life of her father with an assassin parked across the street from his apartment, just waiting for instructions from Murphy. Murphy’s overall creepiness makes him an interesting villain, while McAdams has a few tricks up her sleeve as well, and the cat and mouse game they play is tense and first rate until they get off the airplane. After that things break down a bit in more formulaic storytelling, but it’s always interesting, even if we kind of know what’s going to happen.

An efficient thriller that alludes to both the war on terror and female abuse without allowing either issue to interfere with its consistently taut action, Wes Craven’s Red Eye takes its place alongside last year’s Cellular as that all-too-rare Hollywood creation: a tightly wound, intelligent, and gimmick-free suspense film. Upscale hotel manager Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) flirts with stranger Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy) before and during their long-delayed red eye to Miami, only to discover mid-flight that her new male acquaintance is a shadowy terrorist-for-hire threatening to kill her father (Brian Cox) unless she assists in his plot to assassinate the Director of Homeland Security (Jack Scalia) who’s staying at her hotel the following day. At a speedy 85 minutes, Craven’s brisk film has a muscular leanness that’s been sorely lacking in his recent output (Cursed, anyone? Thought not). But what makes his latest such a surprising delight is the way in which the director also cannily links Lisa’s predicament with post-9/11 security anxiety and rape. Rippner’s kidnapping of Lisa is a metaphor for both our current terrorism-sparked fears of border infiltration as well as sexual cruelty, and thus when the tough-as-nails heroine, refusing to be a victim, fights back against her would-be captor, Red Eye transforms from simply a rollicking (though somewhat slight) B-movie into a stirring portrait of personal and national retaliation against violent violation.

If constructing a thriller could be likened to building a house, then Wes Craven's Red Eye is a perfect piece of architecture: It's clean-lined and soundly structured, without a foot of wasted space or any materials left unused. The opening credits alone are a marvel of narrative economy, packed with so much information between every cut that virtually all the exposition is out of the way before Craven's name even appears. Much like last summer's underrated Cellular, Red Eye functions best as a streamlined thrill machine, generic in many respects but shot through with an unrelenting sense of purpose. Still, a beautiful blueprint doesn't ensure that anything will be inside the house, and it's a keen disappointment to discover that Craven and screenwriter Carl Ellsworth have nothing more to offer than pure momentum.

Before this express train to nowhere arrives, Red Eye delivers a terrific villain in Cillian Murphy, whose opaque blue eyes and cool, mirthless line-readings give him a peculiar, dangerous charisma that's exploited even more effectively here than it was in Batman Begins. Like a former Eagle Scout hiding bodies under the floorboards, Murphy presents himself as a perfect gentleman, unfailingly honest with every word that escapes his lips, even when those words curl toward a diabolical agenda. Working as an agent for a terrorist organization, Murphy targets Rachel McAdams, a manager for a swank Miami hotel that's due to host an outspoken higher-up for the Department Of Homeland Security. In order to coerce McAdams into having this important guest and his family moved to another room, Murphy joins her on a plane and blackmails her by positioning an assassin outside the house of her father, Brian Cox.

For most of the flight, Murphy and McAdams play a tense cat-and-mouse game: Murphy is only demanding McAdams make a simple phone call, but she keeps looking for ways to wriggle off the hook, which isn't easy when she's squeezed into a window seat. And with every new wrinkle in his plan, Murphy's controlled demeanor cracks just a little bit more, until his toothy grin can no longer mask the rage bubbling behind it. But once the film lands on solid ground, it hits shaky ground, because Craven and Ellsworth haven't imagined any sort of larger plot than the one they initially offer up. Maybe Craven has grown tired of twists after the Scream trilogy, but in Red Eye, there's no hidden agenda at work, and no surprise lurking behind Door Number Three; even the terrorists have no discernable values that guide their actions. Here's a rare thriller where everything is exactly as it seems.

One of the ingenious promos for Red Eye sets up the film as just another Hollywood rom-com, with Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy batting eyelashes at each other in the check-in lines and waiting areas of an airport terminal. But then the advertisement pulls the rug out from under us, revealing a very sinister card up its sleeve. The flair of the devious promo is impressive, but what's truly remarkable about it is how in sync it is with the moral and emotional predicament of a hotel manager, Lisa (McAdams), when she meets a mysterious stranger, Jackson (Murphy), at a Dallas airport, falls for the man's calculated smooth-talk, and realizes shortly after sitting next to him on a red eye flight to Miami that his job is to "overthrow governments." A game of cat and mouse is in effect from the beginning of the film, only Lisa doesn't know she's been playing; for anyone who was duped by the film's promos, the young woman's crisis becomes fiercely identifiable. Her panic, like ours, reflects the fears and uncertainties of our political moment.

Red Eye is a model of swiftness and efficiency, shrouded in a veil of secrecy; its pleasure lies in that very veil being lifted and revealing what lurks beneath, in this case an empowerment fantasy conflated with a political parable. When Jackson tells Lisa that he's on her flight to Miami in order to get her to help him assassinate the country's Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, a guest at the hotel she manages, there's no reason why she shouldn't comply when Jackson holds her father's life over her head. But a scar on the woman's chest points to a sinister encounter from her past—and her resistance to Jackson's demands evokes a fierce form of defiance. Smart as he may be, Jackson unknowingly feeds this force of resistance with lines like "I didn't mean to invade your personal space"—he keeps hitting the same raw nerve and, in effect, summons a revolution.

With its crackerjack premise and nail-biting delivery, Red Eye brings to mind last year's Cellular, another nifty B movie about the interconnectivity of our human experience. Here the focus isn't the web of telecommunication that keeps us connected but something a little less tangible: female intuition. The passengers aboard the film's red eye are a motley crew of schmucks, but among them is a little girl who is conscious that something is amiss between Jackson and Lisa. Along with Lisa and the coworker she is forced to incorporate into Jackson's assassination plans, this girl helps to form a trifecta of female solidarity against a sinister male threat (for sure, it's telling that his last name is Rippner). In this way, Red Eye summons all sorts of turf wars. The political baggage in the story may seem beside the point, but it's something onto which Lisa's empowerment ritual is engraved. When she screams "not in my house" her bold cry resonates not only as a defense of country but body as well.

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek)

BeyondHollywood.com Gopal

ToxicUniverse.com (Rachel Gordon)

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Melissa Maerz

Village Voice (Dennis Lim)

Reel.com DVD review [Jerry Renshaw]

DVD Times [Michael Mackenzie]

Film Freak Central Walter Chaw

DVD Verdict [Mike Pinsky]

Twitch [Kwenton Bellette]

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

SCREAM 4 B 85

USA (111 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

In keeping with the theme of the original, SCREAM 4 parodies all horror films, but in particular the initial SCREAM (1996), following the same format, opening with a telephone call, the familiar voice of the demented teen stalker, and before you know it, a handful of teenagers sitting around watching horror movies are dead before the opening credits, where one in particular, an especially brief appearance by Anna Paquin, is drop dead hilarious. Part of the humor throughout the film is listening to teenagers wise crack about how much they know about horror films, how they would never be so easily fooled. What Craven does especially well is create set ups for potential victims, where the audience can foresee murders before they happen, causing Craven to bypass convention and move in another direction, attempting to keep the audience off balance while always delivering the goods, where the teen deaths are usually as amusing as they are bloody. Ace tabloid reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) is now married to Deputy Dewey (real life husband David Arquette), who has now become the town’s Sheriff. But the sleepy California town of Woodsboro has been quiet since the murder rampage exactly one decade ago. Weathers’ career is dead, having documented the grisly murders, but has since hit a dry spell, striking out in her attempt to write fiction. Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott is back in town promoting her own book, where upon her return, what greets her but light posts that have appropriately been decorated by Ghost Face masks, apparently a prank from ghoulish teenagers.

With the familiar core cast reunited, Dewey is called away from the flirtatious advances of the new Deputy Judy Hicks (Marley Shelton) to investigate the new murders. The ten year anniversary of the only event the town is known for is being celebrated with a new bloodbath. More havoc ensues, especially the introduction of a new cast of teen characters who are just as clueless about their future, yet brag continuously with that know-it-all bravado that will surely lead to some untimely deaths. Sidney’s cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) is part of the rat pack of girls, and is taken under the police protection provided for Sidney, which doesn’t stop one of their pack, the pretty girl next door with the large breasts, from getting toyed with and attacked right in front of their helpless eyes. Despite this gruesome sight, Jill finds continued solitary confinement a form of police harassment, as it is unthinkable for teenagers to spend any time alone away from other teenagers. It’s simply written that way. It’s all part of the teen formula where they stick together. Weathers learns a few new tricks from the high school cinema geeks, one of whom (Justin Michael Brandt as film geek) runs a live webcam on the headset he wears, which documents on the Internet whatever their feeble lives experience, which obviously isn’t much, but this explains how the new stalker would have to update their murders with the latest technology, where the murders would have to be caught live in order to register a pulse with the high school population.

Of course, following the format of the original SCREAM, this all leads to another giant drinking and party sequence where the murderer is on the loose, another synchronized orgy of blood and death that defines the genre. For the occasion, the cinema geeks are running their annual Stab-a-thon film fest, movies based on the Gale Weathers books, all in commemoration of the original murders. Craven, again relishing the movie within a movie concept, has plenty of fun re-enacting some of the original scenes, using Heather Graham in Drew Barrymore’s opening sequence, where an attempted murder takes place in real life while the same thing is happening onscreen. A town without pity that has been afflicted with murder and mayhem, spawning more twisted and demented teens who are the offspring of the original murder spree, shows a callous disregard for anything real, where life is just a continuing joke, and kids remain fuckups from generation to generation. This gripping finale matches the original while offering some social insight into the overpowering need to be needed by today’s teens, afflicted with shortsightedness and their ferocious desire to display their lives on the Internet for all the world to see, thinking this somehow makes their world rock. Not quite as wild or original as the first, which introduced this smart-assed stalker formula to the world, both written by Kevin Williamson, this is nonetheless a well-made and thoroughly enjoyable horror film that ratchets up the tension with equal amounts of wry, satiric commentary. While it remains a bloodbath, this offers blood and gore with a different kind of relish and overt glee rarely exhibited in horror flicks. The common denominator, however, is that teens continue to be clueless about the world around them, easy pickings for the town stalker.

Scream 4 | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Nathin Rabin

Sequels are by nature redundant and superfluous. They extend conceits far beyond their logical ending points for commerce’s sake, and recycle ideas until they’ve lost whatever novelty attracted audiences to them in the first place. But it’s rare for a sequel to extensively acknowledge its own pointlessness, let alone make the unnecessary nature of its existence a recurring theme, the way Scream 4 does. Then again, the Scream franchise has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to deconstructing itself and the rules of the slasher genre. Fifteen years in, the series now looks more than ever like a Möbius strip that reflects on itself in a perpetual loop. But meta-arbitrary is still arbitrary.

Neve Campbell returns as a battle-tested survivor of previous massacres, having now channeled her trauma into a memoir that brings her back to her hometown. Emma Roberts co-stars as Campbell’s cousin, a teenager reliving Campbell’s nightmare when a chatty slasher who has been keeping abreast of recent trends in horror movies begins hacking through the town’s hormone-crazed teens in a manner that echoes the bloodbaths of years past.

Returning screenwriter Kevin Williamson is considerate enough to put the most trenchant criticism of the film in his own characters’ mouths, like when a character complains that the deaths in slasher sequels have little emotional weight, since the characters are so thinly developed. Sure enough, the slasher-bait here functions as little more than interchangeable cogs in an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that pumps out red herrings, cheap shocks, and twists at a steady clip, but provides little actual suspense. Scream 4 goes about its bloody business with impersonal, impatient proficiency: a reasonably clever script, game cast, and assured direction make it only as good as it absolutely has to be. Scream 4 doesn’t justify its existence creatively, but it’s cynical enough to scoff at the notion that it would even need to do so.

Combustible Celluloid film review - Scream 4 (2011), Wes Craven ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

Scream 4 is more of the same, but in a good way. This series consists of simplistic, yet gory murder mysteries, driven by Kevin Williamson's clever, grinning screenplays and Wes Craven's crisp, sharp direction. It has been 11 years since they phoned in Scream 3 -- Williamson didn't even bother with writing that one -- and, even though the order for Scream 4 came down from Harvey Weinstein's desk, Craven and Williamson attack their series with renewed vigor. After four films, Craven still finds fresh ways for his canny use of three-dimensional space, obstacles and cutting. (See also: Scream and Scream 2.

Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) returns to the small town of Woodsboro on the last stop of her successful book tour. She reconnects with Dewey (David Arquette), now the sheriff, and his wife Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), who is unsuccessfully trying to write fiction and longs to get back at some hard news. No sooner does she arrive in town, however, than the Ghost Face killings begin again. Before long Sidney discovers that her entire family, including cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) and aunt Kate (Mary McDonnell) are in trouble. Several twenty-somethings join the cast, including Hayden Panettiere, Nico Tortorella, Erik Knudsen, and Rory Culkin.

Craven is better able to juggle the cast this time, with no silly cameos. The younger characters barely resonate, but the older ones bring their histories to this new movie and build on them dramatically. It's too bad that Sid and the others don't have a relationship with old Ghost Face, who is brought to life by a new character in each film; that could have been an interesting take.

Now there are seven Stab movies, each with a weird "meta" twist. Characters are even more savvy and cynical than they were in the nineties, though -- as always -- this fails to save their lives. Like a relentless blogger, the movie pokes fun at itself, pokes fun at postmodernism, and mirrors the general overwhelming feeling of too much internet and too many cell phones and webcams. And yet it keeps on its toes. Just as something begins to smell a bit fishy, the movie quickly comments on it. "This is just silly," one character says during the climax. It is. In a good way.

10 years on and the anniversary of the Woodsboro killings is in full swing in the small town. Ghostface masks hang from each lamp post and Sidney Prescott (played by a cardboard cutout of Neve Campbell) returns to promote her new book about surviving. But new decade means new rules and as the bodies start mounting those rules become clear.

"I'm not an app" rasps the Ghostface killer to the unsuspecting, fearless victim on the other end. Oh yes Scream 4 is here, not a necessary film by anyone's imagination, but a damned entertaining one no less. This reference to apps is only the beginning to how current and now it tries to be, throwing in Twitter, Facebook and iPhones.

Scream 4 is one of the most self-reflective meta-winks I have ever seen. The tongue is stabbing right out of the cheek here, never mind 'in' it. The film starts hilariously but predictably with two nubile teens as air headed victims, or does it? See, the film is self-aware of the past tropes of familiar horror and it utilizes exposes and abuses them in hilarious and unpredictable ways. Scream 4 is a mirror exposing the ugly face of by-the-numbers horror and slasher flick conventions and iterations of them. In particular how Saw 4 is 'torture-porn shit' and that 'they' are sick to death of 'little Asian ghost girls'. This over-analysis of the genre works well and sits somewhere between comedy and parody in terms of what it is trying to express. The film is so Meta in fact, that the characters reference how Meta it is, numerous times, particularly Courtney Cox playing Gale Weathers-Riley, the mid-life crisis washed up ex-reporter turned writer who does not even know what the word meta means! Although the joke starts to wear thin it is never particularly grating.

"Am I next because he didn't call me?" asks Kirby (Hayden Panettiere of Heroes fame who even references that she has 'powers' jokingly) "No" replies Dewey then hastily adds "maybe!" But this is a good question, as the rules of the game have changed considerably. Dewey Riley (David Arquette) remains the iconic bumbling policeman but is given nothing to do except be concerned and fumble a lot. Likewise with the majority of the cast who do not seem to have any purpose except reference the irony and use sarcastic wit concerning the situation they are in. Ghostface is equally unimpressive as the seriously weak killer - in one scene Sidney kicks him once which sends him ridiculously hurtling off the stairs - but the voice of Ghostface (Roger Jackson) is the most entertaining and twisted in all of the series, filled with spiteful descriptive threats and perverse confidence of how it will all play out for his 'cast' in his own personal horror movie.

Scream 4 typecasts from the previous films with characters constantly bantering about themselves, in particular the inept police officers guarding series newcomer Sherrie (Lucy Hale) and her house, along with the usual suspects; Sherrie's suspicious ex-boyfriend, overly friendly deputy policewoman and of course the two film geeks that live blog everything and host the annual Stabathon film marathon, Stab being the film in the Scream world based on the Woodsboro killings. The film imposes on the viewers the strangely suspicious behavior and possible motives of each character. This is ridiculous, obvious and hilarious but cleverly portrayed using timing - one leaves, another enters, usually after a murder - past connections and relationship to Sidney Prescott. The idea has always been that the killer is extremely unstable, and in Scream 4 almost everyone is seemingly nuts.

Scream 4 is purposely ominous, never scary and almost always funny. This nonchalant self-awareness is evident in every scene, even up until the last minute whodunit.

Scream 4 is also about our current era of communication. There is a surprising amount of social commentary in this slasher, arguably it is the best way to keep the horror brand current but there is some truth in its cynical look at media.

Overall I had a blast with Scream 4; it is hilarious and so wrong. The characters are paper thin and the real motives are ridiculous but right until the final scene Scream 4 keeps true to its intentions. It does not fit with the canon of the other three films (as silly as Scream 3 was) and this is definitely a good thing. The level of Meta and movie geekery exceeds any film that comes to mind and who this film is targeted to I am unsure, but regardless, Scream 4 is excellent cutting edge entertainment that does not mind indulging in the ludicrous to give you more bang for your buck. Here is hoping, however, that Scream 5 does not mirror Stab 5, the time traveling horror film contained within Scream 4. (how meta was all that!?).

Scream 4 : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Tyler Foster from DVD Talk

Review: 'Scream 4' | KPBS.org Beth Accomando

Filmcritic.com Bill Gibron

Matt's Movie Reviews [Matthew Pejkovic]

Scream 4 - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Film review – Scream 4 (2011) « Cinema Autopsy Thomas Caldwell

Screen Fanatic [David O'Connell]

Screenjabber.com Simon Thompson

Scream 4 — Inside Movies Since 1920 Todd Gilchrist from Box Office magazine

Scream 4 Brian Orndorff from DVD Talk (theatrical release)

Scream 4 | Movies | EW.com Lisa Schwarzbaum

Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Andrew L. Urban]

Talk: The Horror of Being Wes Craven Andrew Goldman interview with Craven from The New York Times, April 15, 2011

Scream 4: The series is so meta, it's - Home - The Globe and Mail Rick Groen

Review: Just say, 'Aaaaaarrrrgh!' - TwinCities.com Chris Hewitt from St. Paul Pioneer Press

'Scream 4' review: next generation of menace Mick LaSalle from SF Chronicle

'Scream 4': Movie review - latimes.com Betsy Sharkey

"Scre4m" and scre4m again Roger Ebert

'Scream 4' Movie Review - NYTimes.com Mike Hale

Rrrring! Hello, Sidney? It’s Happening Again! Jonah Weiner from The New York Times, April 10, 2011

Crawford, Joan – actress

Joan Crawford Heaven

Club Crawford

Crawford, Richard

CAPTAIN MILKSHAKE

USA (98 mi) 1970

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Viennale report

Out of distribution for over 30 years due to major legal wrangles, Captain Milkshake is now belatedly building the cult following it deserves. Reminiscent of Easy Rider at some points, Targets at others, it follows cleancut marine Paul (Geoff Gage, an earnest Russ Tamblyn lookalike) over several days' leave in scenic San Diego. He arrives in his home-town fresh from a harrowing stint in Vietnam, and grisly flashbacks indicate he has a nasty case of what would now be termed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He obtains relief through unexpected means when falling in with an anti-war bunch of peacenik hippies: dope proves an effective cure for his mental turmoil, and the attentions of the lovely Melissa (striking flower-child Andrea Cagan) also help unbend a chap who'd previously been a distinctly straight straight-arrow.

Though currently rather eerily topical in its 'why-are-we-over-there' rhetoric, Captain Milkshake - audacious and groundbreaking in its stance at the time - is very much dated in terms of execution: the low budget hurts, with some very variable performances (worst offender: David Korn as intentionally-annoying firebrand Thesp), rudimentary camerawork, overenthusiastic editing (Korn again!), some clumsy "effects" (mucho slomo; gratingly arbitrary shifts from BW to colour) and standard-issue trippy-dippy hallucinatory interludes. But the picture's heart is very much in the right place, and despite the generally cobbled-together feel that pervades the enterprise writer-director Crawford does manage to "get his shit together" for a surprisingly hard-hitting finale. Well-chosen contemporary tunes on the soundtrack(including an early incarnation of the Steve Miller Band) don't do any harm either, Crawford again saving the best till last.

Creevy, Eran

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH C 75

USA Great Britain (100 mi) 2013

This is exactly the kind of action movie America exports around the world, where popcorn entertainment is seen as a blur of action sequences and no character development, so is there any surprise when one decides to send a movie back in exactly the same style—lesson learned: this is how to make a lot of money. While this was made on a measly $8.5 million dollar budget, one can envision this director making Hollywood movies on several hundred million dollar budgets. In this case, it’s all about non-stop action, which translates to money, and the director’s personal drive and ambition to cash in while he can, as there’s nothing remotely new or original about the movie itself, but it’s designed to resemble the big Hollywood blockbuster by transplanting the Hong Kong action thriller with bullets flying in all directions to a setting in Great Britain. The film wastes no time, opening with a terrific chase sequence, one angry guy in a car, Detective Inspector Max Lewinsky (James McAvoy), and 4 hooded and masked men in black, like THE MATRIX (1999), driving in formation on motorcycles, where the cyclists get away, but not before one of them is unmasked, Mark Strong as Jacob Sternwood, putting a bullet in Max’s knee, just enough to incapacitate him for the ultimate getaway. The film jumps forward three years and Max is still fuming over allowing this consummate criminal (who was involved in some kind of heist) to slip through his fingers, where the police department relegates him to a secondary role with his partner, detective Sarah Hawks (Andrea Riseborough), afraid to let him get too close to the action. We can see his personal life is a mess, his home in shambles, and his knee requires regular injections just to keep active and mobile, but despite his psychological funk, he’s still obviously hampered by the limitations from his shattered leg. With a muddled narrative that never intends on making things clear, this is a style over substance film, using plenty of computer graphic images of the city illuminated at night, given a very futuristic look.

While his insightful partner Hawks is aware that Max is distracted, the police are thwarted in an attempt to raid Sternwood’s mountain retreat in Iceland, then after he eludes their grasp, they hope to lure him out of hiding and snare him at the hospital visiting his wounded son, shot under mysterious circumstances. The entire film is set in a noirish atmosphere of pervasive trouble, where the department itself has gotten itself into the murky waters of a corrupt political election, as the police commissioner (David Morrissey) has acquiesced to a secret deal contracting weapons from a shady British military contractor backing a law and order candidate, none of which is above board. In fact, the connection to the weapons firm is a shadowy underworld figure, ex-military man Dean Warns (Johnny Harris), whose carefully chosen random acts of violence are designed to create a climate of societal fear that helps the chosen candidate get elected. Fully unaware of this scheme, Max remains obsessed with the idea that Sternwood is the root of all evil. Accordingly, he fails to see the unexpected danger that blindsides one of the lead characters, one of the first signs that this movie could be more than it is, as this is one of the better secondary figures, but instead of enlarge the character, no one comes to the rescue, as apparently all are expendable, casting this movie instead into a fatalistic cloud of gloom. In fact, the body is moved to Max’s apartment to make it appear he’s the killer, which makes him quickly deviate from any intended plan, where this movie quickly takes a choreographic turn into a blitzkrieg assault of non-stop bullets in scene after scene, where Sternwood and Warns are usually in the middle of it, with Max more than a little confused, as his arch enemy Sternwood continues to pull him out of deadly situations, where he’s damned if he (or the audience) can understand why.

Sternwood’s ace in the hole is his partner in crime Roy (Peter Mullan), another sociopath on the loose that with an automatic weapon in his hands can be put to good use. This is the extent of character development in this movie, as it’s a brilliant cast, but outside of one extremely British drawing room scene, one with deadly and comical overtones, there are simply no memorable characters, as nearly everyone ends up dead. But the scene of the film is when a heavily armed Roy, Sternwood, and Max all show up in the living room of Warns’s mother (Ruth Sheen, from Mike Leigh’s staple of actors), who’s convinced these are her son’s old army buddies, so they all sit around the sofa with Mom, nice and cozy sipping tea, so when Warns arrives, everyone’s hiding the gun they have pointed at someone else as they have a pleasant family chat. This picture of family bliss is of course fractured by another dizzying array of bullets, the same image that punctuates nearly every scene, where the point of it all, one supposes, is to apparently stage unending gunfights, like the Wild West, where the electric synth score by Harry Escott sounds like it was written by John Carpenter, easily the best thing in the film. If only more *felt* like John Carpenter, who loved and adored his eccentric characters, giving them plenty of room to operate. But everything here is secondary to the battle of bullets, becoming an endless cliché, where the last man standing feels more like LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997), where a lone gunman seemingly takes on the entire corrupt wing of the police force, which has become an elite army operation of nonstop criminal activities. In each, the finale feels like total chaos, like there’s no police force left to belong to, as the entire operation is on the take. McAvoy is good as the constantly befuddled Max, one man against the world, but Mark Strong is better as Sternwood, always focused and under control, whose dominant outlaw presence becomes the moral center of the picture.

Chicago Reader Ben Sachs

Writer-director Eran Creevy successfully transposes Hong Kong-style action filmmaking to a British setting, employing a purposely simple cops-and-robbers story as a canvas for graceful, imaginative visual conceits. The movie is stylized to an unrealistic extreme (every scene plays out in the same color scheme of blue, gray, and off-white) but never feels cartoonish; Creevy presents the content seriously enough to make it truly suspenseful. The story, reminiscent of numerous films by John Woo and Johnnie To, centers on the long antagonism-cum-mutual-admiration between a police detective (James McAvoy) and a career criminal (Mark Strong). Creevy bases his sophisticated mise-en-scene on the characters' parallel natures, creating an exciting sense of forward movement while cutting between different points of view. With Peter Mullan and Andrea Riseborough.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

Conveniently opening the same week as Danny Boyle’s crime thriller “Trance,” starring James McAvoy, is music-video-director Eran Creevy’s second feature, “Welcome to the Punch” (2012), with McAvoy as a London detective caught up in a tumble of crime thriller clichés—revenge, nemeses, etc.—while in the company of a splendid supporting cast of Brits that includes Mark Strong, Andrea Riseborough, Peter Mullan, Jason Flemyng, Ruth Sheen and David Morrissey. Creevy displays a fondness for humorless macho posturing as well as a keen and loving acquaintance with the visual style of Michael Mann and John Woo. Narrative coherence is at a premium, although the action set-pieces are neat, simulacra of the work of any number of other filmmakers, clean renditions of what must have been an exemplary set of storyboards. A palette of deep greens and blues by night in East London’s Canary Wharf district demonstrates a great affection for fluorescent tubes, at once sleek and dingy. It’s no “Heat,” but there are moments of self-conscious cool as well as the occasional howler moment. Plus: London, a world-class film location, by night, looking almost as good as “The Dark Knight”‘s confected Chicago. A cheekily trashy, pumped-up electronic score by Harry Escott, whose work on the documentaries “The Arbor” and “The Battle For Barking” was superb, is a consistent source of amusement. Sir Ridley Scott is among the nineteen credited producers. 99m.

Time Out New York [Sam Adams]

Eran Creevy’s glossy Brit-cop thriller gives itself away during the opening scene, a robbery in which four felons mount motorbikes and flee with their taillights blooming in perfect synchrony. The image is briefly arresting, then immediately distracting: Do these bandits rehearse their getaways with the precision of a high-school cheer squad? Welcome to the Punch makes no bones about being a burnished object, light glinting off a cool blue surface whenever possible and illuminating the faces of its craggy character-actor cast: Mark Strong, Peter Mullan, David Morrissey. But nothing’s quite as worn as the script, which has a wounded detective (James McAvoy) digging into an investigation that puts him on a collision course with the crook (Strong) who crippled him.

Favoring style over substance isn’t a mortal sin, but Creevy isn’t as enthrallingly slick as compatriot Guy Ritchie, nor does he have anything like the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels auteur’s feel for Britain’s criminal class. (He certainly lacks Ritchie’s, or any, sense of humor.) The writer-director feints at significance as McAvoy uncovers a conspiracy to prompt a public outcry for more heavily armored coppers, but that point is undercut and then some by the slo-mo shots of bodies leaping into the air, pistols blazing—so redolent of adolescent fantasy, you can practically hear a 12-year-old shouting “Blam!” It’s a pity the movie’s ideal audience will have to stand on each other’s shoulders to buy tickets.

After crafting his 2008 Riz Ahmed starring debut Shifty from personal experiences, director Eran Creevy turns to the heist genre for his sophomore effort, Welcome to the Punch. Featuring a salivating mix of some of the best character actors from the UK, this glossy effort, which Creevy also wrote, is an altogether steady if somewhat unenthralling exercise in convention. The Ridley Scott produced venture can’t avoid feeling like an appetizer before the real meal, unfortunately, its bland title referencing the name of the self storage unit where key scenes and plot points transpire.

Opening in the middle of a high adrenaline heist, detective Max Lewinsky (James McAvoy) gets shot down by his arch nemesis, Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong) a criminal mastermind that has eluded the indefatigable detective for some time. Three years later, Lewinsky has a bruised reputation and a bum knee from their last injurious meeting.

Sternwood has gone into hiding somewhere, but when his son Ruan (Elyes Gabel) is fatally wounded in a heist gone wrong, Sternwood must leave his safe nest in Iceland and return to London. Meanwhile, Lewinsky and his new partner, Sarah Hawks (Andrea Riseborough) get stationed at the public hospital treating Ruan, biding their time for Sternwood to make an appearance. But when they eventually meet in a possible gun toting showdown, the two enemies stumble onto a political conspiracy that forces them to band together to survive.

On a superficial level, there’s nary a glaring complaint in sight as the film looks sleek, moves fast, and avoids relying on tired patches of dialogue to further the story. It’s vibrating action sequences glow with an aquamarine and blue-ish tint, all angry faces and gun blasts roaming around within its coldly lit exteriors. If at times it seems to depend on a timely current events issue as a twist of its tale, it does so without running it into the ground, which is certainly commendable. However, there’s a certain ‘wow’ factor missing from the proceedings, as we’ve certainly seen a multitude of integrous cop teaming with notorious bad guys to overcome a common problem, a pairing we just saw in Walter Hill’s recently released B flick, Bullet to the Head (and oh the possibilities if only Serpico had found his underworld counterpart).

Mark Strong is, of course, once again the formidable baddie, but it’s nice to see him play one of the leads for a change. We’ve seen McAvoy in similar territory, playing the flip side of his Wanted (2008) character here. If any character seems to suffer from poorly realized plotting, it’s his Max Lewinsky, particularly in a few sequences that show him nearly foaming at the mouth during red herring sequences, his zeal to catch his arch nemesis overcoming common sense. Andrea Riseborough gets the short shrift here, though her few sequences at least show her holding her own with the boys instead of being relegated primarily as a sex or love interest. David Morrissey, the wonderful Peter Mullan, and a surprising cameo from Ruth Sheen all point to a deluge of talent at director Creevy’s fingertips. If only there had been something worth remembering.

ScreenDaily [Mark Adams]

A British ‘bullet ballet’ in the best traditions of classic Hong Kong action films such as The Killer, Hard Boiled and Infernal Affairs, writer/director Eran Creevy’s film Welcome To The Punch is a delightfully freewheeling crime film that really delivers when it come to action mayhem and elegantly shot gunplay.

Set to open in the UK in mid-March, the film makes the most of a series of cool London locations – all made even more stylish thanks to slick and moody cinematography – and also offers leads Mark Strong and James McAvoy impressively morally complex roles to really get their teeth into. Welcome To The Punch is certainly unlike must British crime films, and has the mean-and-moody style to appeal internationally.

Eran Creevy made his name in the UK with his debut film, the urban drama Shifty, but his follow-up film is a distinct shift in direction that allows him to indulge his genre-geek sensibilities and also pay homage to directors like Michael Mann, the Scott Brothers (Scott Free is also one of the producers) and John Woo. The result is a smart blend of swirling crime action and moments of dark humour.

The film focuses on the relationship between detective Max Lewinsky (McAvoy) and ex-criminal Jacob Sternwood (Strong). As a young and ambitious cop Max had tried to take down Sternwood and his gang singlehanded – in an audaciously and stylishly shot opening sequence – but was injured in a fight, and had to watch Sternwood escape.

Years later, Sternwood’s son is badly injured in a heist gone wrong, forcing the reclusive criminal to return to London from his Icelandic hideaway. This gives Max another chance to try and capture the man who humiliated and physically scarred him. But as they start their very different investigations, the two mean find themselves on a collision course that will see than up against a common enemy and a deadly conspiracy and will see them have to deal with preconceptions as well as make tough decisions on who to trust.

The role of the tough, single-minded and highly intelligent Jacob Sternwood is perfect for the charismatic Mark Strong. His poise and mesmerising stillness (and thankfully not having to wear a wig) dovetail impressively with that character, and he convinces as a man who likes being in charge and will do whatever it takes to take revenge.

In some ways James McAvoy has the showier role – loose-canon, drug-taking, injured cop obsessed with his criminal rival – and he really throws himself into the physicality of the role, and while he impresses he can never really compete with Mark Strong’s controlled criminal.

The strong supporting cast includes the ever-excellent Peter Mullen as a criminal colleague of Sternwood; Andrea Riseborough as Max’s loyal cop colleague (a deliberately – though frustratingly – underwritten and limited role); Johnny Harris as an ex-Army thug in league with the bad guys and David Morrissey as a crusading police chief. Making a strong impact in a small role is Ruth Sheen as Harris’s vaguely dotty mum.

Cinematographer Ed Wild’s use of blue filters gives the London locations a sense of steely style and grace (great use is made of the Canary Wharf architecture) while production designer Crispian Sallis (who worked on films such as Hannibal and Gladiator for Ridley Scott) helps evoke a sense of gritty, burnished, style.

In a similar fashion to many of John Woo’s ‘heroic bloodshed’ Hong Kong action period, many of the gun battles are choreographed like deadly bullet dances, with blazing machine gun battles often resulting in very few injuries, and fight scenes shot for poise and grace as much as good old-fashioned violence. But then, that is the look that Creevy is going for, and he really does manage to deliver a pulse-pounding and beautiful looking British crime film.

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Cretton, Destin Daniel

SHORT TERM 12 A- 94

USA (96 mi) 2013 Official site

You are not their friend, and you are not their therapist. You’re here to create a safe environment, and that’s it.

—Jack (Frantz Turner)

The gut wrenching, emotional powerhouse blockbuster of the year, this film is an offshoot of a 22-minute short by the same name that won the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at Sundance in 2009, and later won an Academy Nicholl Fellowship Award for screenwriting in 2010, eventually expanded into a full-length feature film. Rejected by Sundance earlier this year, the film was chosen to premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, winning both the Audience and Grand Jury awards. Of particular interest, Keith Stanfield as Marcus, who also performs some of the musical soundtrack, appears in both the short and the feature, while the initial focus in the short was on a male supervisor at a residential foster care facility for “at risk” youth, the feature length film switches this to a female role. The writer/director worked for several years in a similar facility after earning a degree in communications from Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, lending extraordinary insight and authenticity to what’s portrayed onscreen. From the opening moments of the film, largely understated, using an economy of means, the audience is totally immersed into a completely unfamiliar world, as these are mostly kids society has discarded, living in a cinder block, dormitory style compound where for their own safety they’re not allowed to close their doors, where there’s no place else for them to live as they’ve been too deeply damaged. Repeatedly beaten or sexually abused by their own families, the deep seeded anger and bitterness is so pervasive that these kids continually retreat from the world, tarnished and wounded souls, becoming cutters or suicide risks, and have an especially hard time expressing themselves, often at a loss for words, yet one can’t help but appreciate the details, especially such natural interplay between characters. Interestingly, the staff that supervises them are no more than a few years older than the kids themselves, occasionally displaying some of the same behavior based on similar backgrounds.

The anchor of the film is the lead supervisor Grace, Brie Larson, who is nothing less than a revelation in this film, displaying a range of emotion and a commitment to these kids that is nearly inhuman, as she embraces each and every one of them like a big sister, as if they are all part of the same family, where they all matter. Of course, these kids have all grown up thinking they don’t matter, as if there’s something wrong with them because they allowed someone bigger and stronger to abuse them, like it’s somehow their fault. The anger and shame they feel couldn’t be more pronounced, as it’s always there, lying just under the surface, where each kid has a distinct personality which is largely expressed in nonverbal ways, beautifully captured by the restless and constantly roving camera of Brett Pawlak that seems to get into everybody’s face, creating a continually developing series of impressionistic portraits of human intimacy. It hits you at some point that this isn’t like other films. Maybe it’s how uncomfortable you become by the dizzying camera movement, or the volcanic eruptions of spontaneous rage, where the staff has to physically hold these kids down to stop them from hurting someone, where they are assaulted by the most venomous, profanity-laced stream of insults imaginable, as if a part of Linda Blair from THE EXORCIST (1973) has somehow managed to infiltrate into the bloodstream of these kids. And then a short time later, when things have calmed down, they’ve only grown closer, as they helped shelter someone from the storm, becoming comrades in arms, sharing the most inexplicably intimate circumstances, remaining non-judgmental, and still being there for them afterwards. It’s not easy to understand how in one moment you are being spit upon, hated, and your life threatened in a demonic fury, and a few moments later you are genuinely hugging that same person. The emotional intensity on display is not what we’re used to, as it’s not make believe or exaggerated for effect, but is heartbreaking because it so accurately reveals what these kids are trying to express. This is the pain they have to live with every day.

Part of the brilliance of the film is the way it values personal connections and balances time spent both with the kids and the staff, slowly parceling out bits of information, interjecting humor and lighter moments, contrasting the difficulty of helping these kids with how hard it is maintaining trust in adult relationships, so that the overall effect is accumulated knowledge, where we’re always gaining greater insight into these lives. We quickly learn Grace is having an affair with fellow staffer Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), both of whom adore working with these kids, as it singularly defines who they are, people with a commitment to being there for those who have been hurt the most, living with and working with the most vulnerable among us, where she can be near saintly in her attitudes about helping others, but often can’t utter a word about her own feelings. Mason shows extraordinary patience in trying to deal with her, as she blocks him out sometimes, almost always because there’s something else on her mind that keeps her extremely guarded, as 24/7 she’s responsible for continually protecting her charge from huge reservoirs of darkness that always seem to be closing in on someone. Grace is an employee that doesn’t need to be told what to do. Working on the floor, she sees instinctively what needs to be done, and she protects these kids like a hovering angel. The unseen force in the room is being part of a government bureaucratic system, where there must be other short term units just like this one, where they all have to answer to a higher authority, like a doctor, a psychiatrist, an administrator, or a politician who sits at a desk and reads reports but doesn’t get the overall picture of what’s going on in the lives of these kids. When action is taken that literally shatters the confidence of one kid, Grace will rally to their defense, often to no avail, as she’s told “You are not their friend, and you are not their therapist. You’re here to create a safe environment, and that’s it…We’re not here to interpret tears.” But of course, Grace and her staff are the ones comforting these kids during their most agonizing moments, helping them survive their worst nightmares, where they rarely have the luxury to interpret coherent thought, as it’s almost always communicated in tears or unimaginable rage. One of the key moments of the film is listening to Marcus, the oldest kid on the unit who’s just days away from turning 18, scared shitless about becoming emancipated, bitterly battling the demons in his head as he raps about “The pretty pictures in my fuckin’ head are faded/Look into my eyes so you know what it’s like/ Living a life not knowing what a normal life’s like.”

Slate [Dana Stevens]

The second feature of a young director named Destin Daniel Cretton, Short Term 12 is a film that sneaks up on you and makes you care about it. It’s a slight movie, barely an hour and a half long, with naturalistic overlapping dialogue and a loose, meandering storyline that can trick you into thinking it’s going nowhere in particular. But midway through you begin to realize that this apparently offhand tale has drawn you deeply into its singular, believable world.

The film’s title comes from the name of the juvenile care facility where it’s largely set, a group home for older children and teens who aren’t safe with their families or have demonstrated violent or suicidal behavior. There are some messed-up kids in this place—the angry, bottled-up Marcus (Keith Stanfield), the self-cutting, tantrum-prone Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), the chronic runaway Sammy (Alex Calloway)—but they’re all treated with patience and respect by Grace (Brie Larson), the supervisor of the staff of twentysomething employees who spend their days there. Grace, whose live-in boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher, Jr.) works with her at Short Term 12, seems at first too good to be true: She’s warm, empathetic, level-headed, and deeply committed to her job, not to mention beautiful in an unassuming, earthy way. Grace has also just found out she’s pregnant—a fact we learn along with her early in the film, though we don’t at first understand why she’s keeping this fact a secret from the obviously besotted Mason.

The reasons behind Grace’s reticence—and the painful life stories she and Mason have both put behind them to end up where they are—will unfold only slowly over the course of the film, which focuses principally on the day-to-day interactions between the facility staff and the minors under their care. Marcus, who’s about to turn 18 and age out of the institution where he’s spent the past three years, begins acting out in ways that don’t bode well for his upcoming release. The usually sullen Jayden opens up to Grace about her horrific home life, and for reasons that, again, aren’t clear right away, Grace responds by getting more involved in Jayden’s family troubles than is ethical, legal, or safe. The change that takes place in Larson’s character in the second hour of the movie is at times shocking, but it’s shocking in the way real life can be: Larson’s quiet but intense and marvelously detailed performance makes it credible that Grace could be both a port in a storm for others and her own worst enemy. As Mason, Gallagher embodies a boyfriend type we rarely see onscreen: a genuinely good guy who’s neither a sucker nor a wimp. A scene in which Mason tries to convince the freaked-out, closed-off Grace that telling the truth isn’t just for their teen wards is romantic in the best sense—you know that she’ll never do better than this man, and you pray that she’ll recognize that before it’s too late.

Writer-director Cretton spent some years after college working at a facility similar to Short Term 12, and his rendering of the daily institutional environment, with its lurching swings between boredom and violence, feels accurate (even if the sheer number of crises that affects this place in a short period of time threatens to verge on the melodramatic). A movie with this setup—two attractive but damaged young people in love, working together to help abused and neglected children—could easily have been sentimental and condescending movie-of-the-week material. But when Short Term 12 reaches its last scene—filmed in a long slow-motion take that encapsulates both the difficulty and the exhilaration of Mason and Grace’s demanding jobs—the lump it leaves in your throat feels earned.

David Edelstein's 10 Best Movies of 2013 -- Vulture

Like it or not, though, Cheap Thrills does evince a consistent vision, however sophomoric. Turning to a film like Destin Daniel Cretton's Short Term 12 after that, however, can't help but feel like a welcome oasis from such hatefulness. The setup sounds inviting of clichéd "triumph of the human spirit" bathos, set as it is in a foster-care facility populated by troubled children of varying stripes, and centering partly around Grace (Brie Larson), the facility manager who has an uncanny way with these kids, in part because of personal traumas of her own that rear their ugly head again when tough 14-year-old Jayden (Katilyn Dever) enters the picture. And yet, scene by scene, Cretton shows a remarkable ability to sidestep clichés in order to grasp at underlying emotional truths. He also has a talent for economically packing revealing character details into lines of dialogue in ways that somehow don't come off as mere exposition; for the most part, they feel true to the characters and organic to the given situations. (In Cretton's hands, one character's use of the word "underprivileged" in regards to these foster kids and one kid's offended reaction to that characterization speaks volumes about both characters' backgrounds and personalities.) And though his screenplay basically follows a standard three-act structure when you break it down, he has a knack for finding unpredictable ways to get to his plot points. His most memorable conceit, in that regard, has Jayden obliquely reveal her abusive past to Grace through a fictional fairy tale she's cooked up, one that somehow comes off as more emotionally suggestive than heavy-handedly allegorical.

Perhaps the most promising thing about Cretton, though, at least going by this one feature film under his belt, is his generosity of vision and the refreshingly wide emotional range that vision admits. One can grasp this immediately in its opening scene, in which Cretton lulls us with Mason's (John Gallagher Jr.) amusingly crude anecdote about a situation in which he ends up shitting his pants, only to suddenly pull the rug out of this false sense of security when one of the foster kids suddenly runs out of the facility, sending the four employees scrambling to catch and contain him. Throughout the film, Cretton isn't afraid of such bold juxtapositions of comedy and tragedy, and the film's emotional-rollercoaster quality is such that the highs (those precious moments, for instance, where Grace successfully forges a personal connection with a foster child) feel especially ecstatic, and the lows (including one dramatic day in which a whole host of plot and emotional threads converge, with near-debilitating results) pack a more potent tragic punch.

Cretton's considerable screenwriting acumen picks up the slack from his mostly functional image-making; he basically sticks with a familiar semi-documentary handheld style to tell this story. Nevertheless, he hits upon a truly inspired visual choice with which to end the film. At first, its final scene seems like a simple full-circle replay of the opening scene, complete with the same kid from the opening scene suddenly running out of the foster-care facility. But this time, to contrast with the prosaic way he handles the employees' chasing after the kid, Cretton captures this particular chase in slow motion, the camera continuing to pull back from the facility even as the employees successfully detain the kid, taking in more of the facility itself and the unassuming settings surrounding it. In one slow-motion backward dolly shot, Cretton manages to evoke a sense of cycles continuing and of life going on. In the otherwise quotidian world of Short Term 12, this visual epiphany carries a near-transcendent power.

Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund] also seen here: Short Term 12 | Film Review | Slant Magazine

Short Term 12's greatest virtue is its intimate understanding of the sort of people who often work in rehab centers and halfway houses, or, in this case, a foster-care facility for at-risk youth. As the film boldly underlines, office-dwelling supervisors like Jack (Frantz Turner) may be bureaucratic and out of touch, but those in the proverbial trenches, like Grace (Brie Larson) and her co-worker/boyfriend, Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), know precisely where the kids in their care are coming from, specifically because they both have similar roots and (sometimes literally) similar scars. If it initially seems that Grace is one more pearly savior of multi-ethnic teens with feisty temperaments, that tired notion is squelched by reveals of the character's own demons (including abortion woes and paternal abuse), which put her in the same league as the troubled residents she rouses from bed with a Super Soaker. "You are not their friend, and you are not their therapist," Jack preaches to Grace. But just like a recovered addict checking folks into a detox unit, she is their equal, and there is indeed a symbiotic therapy at play, with Grace's tough love proving an essential part of her own stability.

The trouble is, that shrewd awareness of the dynamics in these specified worlds, where personal barriers are broken down as a means of healing, is caught within a narrative that feels all too frequently calculated, marked by a serendipitous, Sundance-y aura that's antithetical to the movie's grittier pursuits. Short Term 12 is bookended by morning chats among Grace, Mason, and other staffers in front of their titular workplace, and while both scenes barely mask their exposition with informative anecdotes, the later one goes so far as to liken a shared story to something that would happen in the movies. Rather than achieving some sort of reparative meta-ness, which might amend any prior events that give off conveniently scripted vibes, this moment only highlights the offbeat cinematic rules the film follows.

Written and directed by Destin Cretton, the film seems better than the stock quirks with which it saddles its characters, like Grace's habit of picking around her cuticles until they bleed, or young Jayden's (Kaitlyn Dever) insistence that her exceptional artwork is "crap." The bond between Grace and Jayden, whose daddy issues are virtually the same, yields the most forgone conclusions, such as Grace nearly taking justice into her own hands to help her soul sister, or Grace engaging in some damn-the-man lamp-smashing, which is expressly telegraphed early on.

And yet, there's tremendous dramatic value to the aching and sometimes devastating scenes that home in on these kids' private torments. Dreading her release to her father, Jayden throws a harrowing tantrum that's difficult to watch, and she reads Grace a fable she wrote akin to that of the frog and the scorpion—an allegory for the many things her ill-natured dad has taken from her. Meanwhile, Marcus, a Short Term 12 veteran played by the show-stealing Keith Stanfield, spills to Mason a rap he penned about the beatings he endured from his mother, in a scene that may well reduce you to a blubbering mess (it's followed by an equally affecting bit in which Marcus gets a buzz cut, and asks Grace to assure him that there are "no scars" remaining from his abuse).

All of this coincides with a pregnancy that Grace isn't always sure she'll go through with, and that perhaps unwittingly supports the idea of Short Term 12 as a place of rebirth, if not birth itself. In a scene that sees Grace tearfully look at a sonogram, a flood of cumulative feeling is released on the viewer, and one that isn't so simple as to justify the unease of bringing a child into the world—a world that clearly sees kids regularly wronged. The scene's imagery feels precarious, and it's not unlike Cretton's chosen visual motif, wherein Grace arrives to work each day on her bike, rolling into the director's static frame of the building. We gather from this that Grace has survived life to the point that she can come and go as she pleases, but there's also the sense that she's always been close to being on the other side of the walls, boxed in by what life has thrown at her.

Movie Review: Short Term 12 -- Vulture David Edelstein

A Potent Story of Kids On the Edge In Short Term 12 ... - Village Voice Inkoo Kang

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Short Term 12 filmmaker Destin Cretton / The Dissolve Sam Adams interviews the director from The Dissolve, August 23, 2013

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Crichton, Charles

Film Reference profile by Philip Kemp

The demise of Ealing Studios seemed to cast a blight on the careers of those who worked there. Within ten years of the final Ealing release virtually all the studio's leading directors—Mackendrick, Hamer, Harry Watt, Charles Frend—had shot their last film; only Basil Dearden was still active. And until the late 1980s the career of Charles Crichton appeared to have followed the same dispiriting pattern. His triumphant comeback at the age of seventy-eight, with the huge international success of A Fish Called Wanda, was as heartening as it was wholly unexpected.

Wanda kicks off with a jewel heist sequence notable for the wit and precision of its editing. Like several of his Ealing colleagues, Crichton started out in the cutting room, working for Korda on Things to Come and The Thief of Bagdad, and was said to be one of the finest editors in the British film industry. (Among his uncredited achievements is the rescue of Mackendrick's Whisky Galore, which he recut after it had been botched by its original editor.) A sense of pace and timing, the skilled editor's stock-in-trade, distinguishes all his best work. Comedy has always been seen as Crichton's forte. His reputation, prior to Wanda, rested on the three comedies he directed at Ealing to scripts by T. E. B. Clarke: Hue and Cry, The Lavender Hill Mob, and The Titfield Thunderbolt. If all three seem to belong more to the writer's oeuvre than to the director's, this may be because Crichton has always been dependent in his comedies on the quality of the script. The Lavender Hill Mob, perhaps the archetypal comedy of the Ealing mainstream, gains enormously from Crichton's supple comic timing; but given stodgy material, as in The Love Lottery or Another Shore, his lightness of touch deserts him. Even Titfield, with Clarke writing some way below his best, feels sluggish and under-directed beside its two predecessors.

Though the serious side of Crichton's output, the dramas and thrillers, has attracted little attention, he often seems here less at the mercy of his script, able to make something personal even of flawed material. His one non-comedy with Clarke, the Resistance drama Against the Wind, has a downbeat realism and a refusal of easy heroics that recalls Thorold Dickinson's Next of Kin (and probably ensured its failure at the post-war box-office). Hunted, a killer-on-therun thriller, builds up a complex tension as well as offering Dirk Bogarde a rare intelligent role amid the dross of his early career. Crichton's cool, unemphatic handling of the central conflict in The Divided Heart deftly avoids emotional overkill—though nothing, perhaps, could have prevented the film's final slide into sententiousness.

After Ealing, projects attuned to his talents became increasingly rare. Given the darker aspects of his work, black comedy was clearly well within his range, and The Battle of the Sexes, with Peter Sellers as the Scots clerk trying to bump off efficiency expert Constance Cummings, would have been ideal—were it not for a script that junked the quiet implacability of the original (Thurber's caustic tour-de-force The Catbird Seat) for cautious whimsy and a vapid happy ending. After a couple of interestingly off-beat thrillers—The Third Secret and He Who Rides a Tiger—both marred by clumsy writing and uncertainty of tone, Crichton cut his losses and retreated into television. From there, directing corporate videos must have seemed like a further downhill step. But the company involved was John Cleese's Video Arts, and it was Cleese's enthusiastic backing—and his status as a bankable star—that enabled Crichton, after more than twenty years, to return to the cinema. A Fish Called Wanda, with its four ill-assorted crooks, its central portrait of respectability undermined by larcenous urges, and its running theme of internecine treachery, crosses The Lavender Hill Mob with The Ladykillers—and adds a degree of sex and violence that would certainly have alarmed Michael Balcon. But had Ealing comedy survived Balcon's death and lived on into the late 1980s, Wanda is most likely what it would have looked like—and its bite and vitality only inspire regret for the films left unmade during Crichton's years in the wilderness.

TCMDB Turner Classic Movies profile

Britmovie Bio

Crichton, Charles They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

DEAD OF NIGHT

Great Britain (103 mi) 1945 uncredited co-directors: Alberto Cavalvanti “Christmas Party” and “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy,” Charles Crichton “Golfing Story,” Basil Dearden “Hearse Driver” and “Linking Narrative,” and Robert Hamer “The Haunted Mirror”

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Nearly 60 years on, Ealing's compendium of spooky tales remains scary as hell. The best of the five stories, which we see enacted as they're related in turn by guests at a country house, are Cavalcanti's 'The Ventriloquist's Dummy', with Redgrave possessed by his deceptively lifeless little partner, and Hamer's 'The Haunted Mirror', with the splendid Withers a reluctant participant as history repeats itself; least frightening, but amusing, are Radford and Wayne as typically obsessive sporting coves in Crichton's 'Golfing Story'. Best of all, however, is the overall narrative arc, with the framing story finally taking a headlong rush into a nightmarish realm almost surreal in its weird clarity and familiarity.

Nashville Scene (Noel Murray) review

The five set pieces in this classic British horror anthology still echo throughout today's pop culture--in cable creep shows and in Simpsons Halloween specials, not to mention in the odd feature film. Nevertheless, the original remains fresh, thanks to the able direction (by Charles Crichton and Alberto Cavalcanti, among others), the source material (by the likes of H.G. Wells), and one virtuoso performance by Michael Redgrave, as a ventriloquist who has begun throwing more than his voice into his maniacally grinning dummy. The other ghost stories--especially those involving a mirror that reflects the past, and the man whose nightmares are coming true--are almost as chilling; but it's the puppet show that still spooks, no matter how many times it's been ripped off.

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

Horror anthologies historically have proven both tricky to pull off and of a slightly limited appeal. The legend goes that if so much as one single story fails to hold the audience's attention, then the rest of the film is liable to crash and burn around it. Not surprisingly there are only a few revered classics in the mini-genre, including Romero's Creepshow and a string of concoctions from Amicus studios in the 1970s (Tales from the Crypt, Asylum). But Dead of Night has a reputation and cult following that outpaces them all. From Britain's Ealing Studios (more famous for comedies like The Lavender Hill Mob), Dead of Night's framing story tells the tale of a man afflicted with a mysterious case of déjà vu when he seems to recognize the inhabitants of a country manor. He's worried about but unable to vocalize the end of his recurring nightmare, which he claims predicts his present situation. So, comically, the other guests try to calm him with their own tales of dread.

Unlike most other anthologies—which are usually directed by one person—Dead of Night divides its content between four different directors. That the end result is as cohesive and flows as naturally as it does is a testament to the strengths of all its directors. Basil Dearden handled the wraparound segments dealing with the gathering at the manor. The final four minutes of the film, an unbearably chilling whirlpool of madness, is a tour de force depiction of the man's nightmare. First is the "Haunted Mirror," about an ancient mirror that reflects its own deadly history. Considering this segment was Robert Hamer's directorial debut, it is remarkably confident in its depiction of multiple reflections and spatial ambiguities and a prime example of how visual style can overcome weak material to create a uniquely haunting mood. Charles Crichton's segment, "Golfing Story," about a gentlemen's golf bet that ends in suicide and a subsequent haunting, appears between two far scarier stories, and serves to dispel some of the surrounding dread. Even if it is undeniably the film's weakest link, its placement within the anthology is a thoughtful one and serves as an intermission of sorts.

Cavalcanti's renowned segment, "The Ventriloquist's Dummy," about a ventriloquist haunted into believing his own dummy is out to get him, uses its spare running time to a distressingly scary end. It is unimpeachable in its atmosphere of psychological confusion and also boasts a very tricky timeline (it should be noted that at one point, we're watching a flashback within a flashback). Thanks to sharp, angular Caligari-inspired sets and a legendary performance from Michael Redgrave as the disturbed vaudeville star, Cavalcanti's contribution might be the finest single episode to appear in any horror anthology film.

Turner Classic Movies review Richard Harland Smith

Although Dead of Night (1945) wasn’t the first horror anthology film – the German silent Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1924) beat it to the punch by twenty years – it is widely considered the granddaddy of this storied subset of fright films. Made at Ealing Studios, known for their early documentaries and later a string of witty and eminently British comedies (Passport to Pimlico [1949], Kind Hearts and Coronets [1949], The Lavender Hill Mob [1951]), Dead of Night is as different from those sophisticated spoofs as it is from the luridly-titled omnibus spookers (Dr. Terrors House of Horrors [1965], Torture Garden [1967], The House That Dripped Blood [1971]) that followed its example.

After 1938, Ealing was run by Michael Balcon, one of the founders of Gainsborough Pictures, who had overseen several early films by Alfred Hitchcock. When Gainsborough was absorbed by the rival Gaumont Film Company, Balcon worked with MGM for a brief, unhappy period before hiring on at Ealing. Dead of Night was an atypical choice for Ealing and for Balcon, who favored droll comedies and “important” social dramas, but the nature of the production as a group effort was a way for the studio to show off its talents during the postwar period. In the past, macabre flourishes had been employed to bestow upon certain films an allegorical gravitas. In The Halfway House (1944), a group of travelers (a staple of the nascent horror anthology subgenre) decamps at a Welsh inn where the newspapers are a year out of date and the proprietor (Mervyn Johns) casts no shadow. Their time out of time allows each sojourner respite to work out his or her character-defining personal kink before an upbeat conclusion closer in spirit to Brigadoon (1954) than Tales from the Crypt (1972).

Between them, Halfway House directors Basil Dearden and Alberto Cavalcanti helmed four of the six vignettes comprising Dead of Night, their slack being picked up by Charles Crichton and Robert Hamer (a studio editor making his directorial debut). However the portmanteau film (so named for a type of traveling bag allowing the storage of many small items) may have been thought to condescend to supernatural motifs for their own sake, the project’s direct inspirations were largely literary, deriving two of their tales from writings by H. G. Wells and E. F. Benson. While Wells’ jocular “Golfing Story” (in which rivals for the love of a woman settle their score on the fairway, with fatal results) is considered the film’s weakest link, the melancholy “Christmas Party” (in which Sally Ann Howes stumbles upon a strange little boy during a holiday game of hide-and-seek), “The Hearse Driver” (a tour de force for character actor Miles Malleson, for whom “Room for one more” became a trademark phrase) and “The Haunted Mirror” are all regarded (and rightfully so) as enduring classics of the cinematic ghost story. Nevertheless, it’s John Baines’ “Ventriloquist’s Dummy” that has had the most lasting impact. The vignette stars Michael Redgrave as cabaret entertainer Maxwell Frere, who’s comically abusive dummy “Hugo” seems to be the one pulling the strings. Even in 1945, this concept was not original; The Great Gabbo (1929) starred Erich von Stroheim as a ventriloquist entirely too dependent on his own little man. Nonetheless, it was Dead of Night that begat the killer doll subgenre, whose lineage extends directly to the classic Twilight Zone episode “Dummy” (1962), Lindsay Shonteff’s Devil Doll (1964), Richard Attenborough’s Magic (1978) and Dead Silence (2007), and indirectly to the likes of Child’s Play (1988) and Saw (2004) and their respective sequels.

Michael Redgrave was the only son of itinerant stage performer Roy Redgrave and his second wife, actress Margaret Scudamore. Trained for a career as a teacher, Michael Redgrave forfeited the steady income for an uncertain but romantic life in the arts. After making his London stage debut in 1936, he enjoyed successful seasons as a repertory player with the Old Vic. Redgrave landed on the map of moviegoers with a role in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) and matured into something like the face of British cinema in such national classics as The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), The Night My Number Came Up (1955), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and The Go-Between (1970). He had not yet finished work for Anthony Asquith on The Way to the Stars (1945) when he was approached by Ealing to appear in Dead of Night. More interested in playing a schizophrenic than in the supernatural ramifications, Redgrave mastered the art of throwing his voice with the coaching of Peter Brough, a popular ventriloquist on British radio. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Director Cavalcanti had wanted “Hugo” modeled after Redgrave but the finished product bore a greater resemblance to Brough’s basswood nemesis “Archie Andrews.” (A 25-year-old dwarf named John McGuire was used for moments when “Hugo” was needed to ambulate on his own.)

It’s worth considering that part of the popularity of this über-creepy tale is due to the fact that prints of Dead of Night screened in the United States were missing both Crichton’s “Golfing Story” and Hamer’s “The Haunted Mirror,” which many critics believed then and continue to assert are superior to “Ventriloquist’s Dummy.” If the truncated release did give Cavalcanti’s vignette a leg up with audiences, subsequent TV prints, VHS tapes and DVD releases on both sides of the Atlantic have been complete, leaving it up to the viewer to decide ultimately which works best when viewed alone, in the dead of night.

Ealing Ghost Stories Article From Classic Horror, THE HALFWAY HOUSE (1943) and DEAD OF NIGHT (1945)

BFI Screen Online Mark Duguid, Show full synopsis

British Horror Films (Chris Wood) review

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Epinions [metalluk]

Chris Jarmick review [5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

FilmFanatic.org

A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]

Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen Townsend) review

DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review DEAD OF NIGHT and THE QUEEN OF SPADES

DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson reviews DEAD OF NIGHT and THE QUEEN OF SPADES

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jeremy Arnold reviews DEAD OF NIGHT and THE QUEEN OF SPADES

Variety review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

Guardian/Observer

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

THE LAVENDER HILL MOB

Great Britain (81 mi) 1951

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Probably not the finest Ealing comedy (although it does include an astute parody of the car chase in Ealing's own The Blue Lamp), but still one of the few enduringly funny movies in British cinema. Seemingly mousy bank teller (Guinness) teams up with seedy entrepreneur (Holloway) and two Cockney spivs (Bass and James) to steal gold bullion and turn it into Eiffel Tower paperweights. It won a script Oscar for TEB Clarke, who divides his satirical jibes between the police, the press and the City. Come in late and you'll miss a glimpse, in the opening scene in Rio, of a young Audrey Hepburn.

Edwin Jahiel review

Directed by Charles Crichton. Marvelous Oscar-winning movie (Best Story and Screenplay by T.E.B. Clarke) was one of those priceless comedies (mostly from the Ealing Studios ) that made British screen humor triumph in the 1950s. Oscar-nominated Alec Guinness is a milquetoastish bank employee who dreams up one of those perfect crimes - a gold-bullion caper -- that never turn out to be perfect. Successful at first, the likable malefactors are thrown into a desperate, frustrating chase after incriminating evidence -- miniature Eiffel Towers. The hunt takes them to Paris, then back to England. There is wonderful irony as the film climaxes with the duo tracking down the last of the statuettes inside a Police show.

The acting by Guinness and Holloway is perfect. They are excellently supported by their acolytes Sidney James and Alfie Bass. Audrey Hepburn, then a bit actress in her fourth film, has a microscopic part. Thirteen years later, in "My Fair Lady," as a big star playing Liza Doolittle, she would be reunited with Stanley Holloway who played her father.

"Lavender" is a delight of witty structure and briskly economical pacing. Guinness had come to world-wide attention with his multiple roles in "Kind Hearts and Coronets" (1949). With "The Lavender Hill Mob" the comic, idiosyncratic Guinness persona itself was launched, in all its variations of quiet diffidence, cunning, stubbornness and that famous half-smile that seems to say "I know something you don't know."

"The Man in the White Suit" followed that same year,was also nominated in the straight screenplay category. Then came othe comedies: "The Promoter," "The Captain's Paradise," " The Detective,"" The Lady Killers," plus others in which Guinness had all sorts of roles: serious, funny or in-between, all unique.

"Lavender" is the kind of movie where you root for the thieves, but in its period films lacked the gumption to come out with the conclusion that often "crime does pay."

BFI Screen Online Mark Duguid Show full synopsis

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) was the second of three Ealing collaborations between director Charles Crichton and writer T.E.B. Clarke, the team responsible for Hue and Cry (1947) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953). Like those films, and Clarke's previous comedy, Passport to Pimlico (d. Henry Cornelius, 1949), it is a piece of thoroughly good-natured escapism.

The fantasy here is the perfect robbery - £1 million in gold bullion stolen from the Bank of England and smuggled to France in the form of Eiffel Tower paperweights - and it barely matters that, in the end, the meek master-criminals Holland (Alec Guinness) and Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) are both captured.

Theirs is a harmless daydream, an ultimately mild gesture of defiance against conformity. For all the brilliance of their initial plan, they are finally undone by a very English failing, a lack of competence in foreign languages - Pendlebury's instruction to his French assistant not to sell paperweights from the boxes marked 'R' is misunderstood, because the English 'R' sounds like the French 'A'.

Holland and Pendlebury - both nice, gentle and unthreatening in their non-conformity (this is a crime without victims) - are light years away from the more menacing (though no more successful) gang of The Ladykillers (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1955). Even their partners-in-crime, the Cockney professional thieves Lackery (Sidney James) and Shorty (Alfie Bass) carry not a grain of ruthlessness: they are so trustful of Holland and Pendlebury that they even risk losing their share of the profits (and presumably do).

The film gently satirises the Establishment, in the shape of Holland's unperceptive employers at the Bank, the media, and the police. The climactic car chase, in which Holland and Pendlebury almost, but not quite, outwit their police pursuers, wittily spoofs one in The Blue Lamp (d. Basil Dearden, 1950), also scripted by Clarke.

Although not as tidy in its plotting as Passport to Pimlico - we never learn what happens to Lackery and Shorty - The Lavender Hill Mob is as enjoyable as it is lightweight, and absolutely characteristic of Ealing, with its gang of likeable eccentrics who briefly challenge authority before passively accepting defeat.

Turner Classic Movies review Margarita Landazuri

Alec Guinness had become an international star playing eight different characters in the Ealing Studios comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), so he decided on a change of pace for his next two films. Last Holiday (1950), although humorous at times, was predominantly a melancholy drama and, in The Mudlark (1950), his first American film, Guinness played Disraeli to Irene Dunne's Queen Victoria; it was not a success. Wisely, he decided to return to Ealing and comedy with The Lavender Hill Mob (1951).

Guinness described his timid character in The Lavender Hill Mob as a "fubsy" middle-aged bank clerk named Holland who masterminds a robbery of the gold bullion he's supposed to protect. "I see Holland as a man given to handwashing gestures," Guinness said (in Garry O'Connor's biography, Alec Guinness: Master of Disguise). "Anyone who usually does that is on the plump side so I think I ought to be slightly padded...we should somehow point the incongruity of a person like Holland seeing himself as the boss of a gang. It might be a good way to get the right effect if he were to have difficulties in pronouncing his R's."

Holland's "mob" includes an aspiring artist who creates souvenir paperweights, played by Stanley Holloway (Alfred Doolittle in the screen version of My Fair Lady, 1964), and a pair of bumbling robbers. Heist accomplished, they melt down the gold and Holloway fashions it into miniature Eiffel Tower souvenirs. The mob goes to Paris to collect their booty, only to find that several of the statuettes have been sold to some English schoolgirls on holiday. The film climaxes with a wild car chase, and an escape by the timid mastermind that's a brilliant sight gag. But it's not over quite yet....

The Lavender Hill Mob was the brainchild of one of Ealing's most original writers, T.E.B. (Thomas Ernest Bennett, known as "Tibby") Clarke. Clarke had written a newspaper humor column prior to World War II but he couldn't get in the army during the war...so he became a policeman, which gave him fresh fodder for his writing. After the war, on staff at Ealing, Clarke had been assigned by studio head Michael Balcon to create a script for a working-class crime drama set on the docks around the Pool of London, the area of the Thames between London Bridge and Tower Bridge. The area includes "the City," London's financial district. While scouting the City for atmosphere, he noticed armored vans carrying bars of gold bullion, and a nondescript little man who was in charge of the transport. Clarke was intrigued with the possibilities for a comedy about that little man. Pool of London (1951) eventually became a well-regarded film, but without Clarke's involvement. He was taken off that film to develop his original idea into The Lavender Hill Mob.

The Eiffel Tower scheme was dreamed up by no less than a Bank of England official. While writing the script, Clarke had cheekily asked the official the best method of stealing a million pounds' worth of gold bullion. And the official suggested melting down the gold and fashioning it into souvenirs.

One of the pleasures of The Lavender Hill Mob is spotting the familiar faces of players who would become some of the most beloved character actors in British films. Sid James, who would become known for the Carry On films, plays one of the robbers (he's billed here as "Sidney James"). Peter Bull (Tom Jones, 1963), John Gregson (Genevieve, 1953), and James Fox (The Servant, 1963) are among those playing small roles. Pay close attention to the sequence at the beginning of the film set in South America; it features a girl selling cigarettes and she has one line. Yes, that's a very young Audrey Hepburn.

The Lavender Hill Mob was a worldwide hit, and became one of Ealing's most successful films. It earned Alec Guinness his first Academy Award nomination, and won Tibby Clarke an Oscar for his screenplay. Even today, when the drab postwar England portrayed in the film seems as quaint and far away as the Victorian era, the comedy of The Lavender Hill Mob still retains its charm.

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A-] One of the 15 films listed in the category "Art" on the Vatican film list

DVD Outsider Slarek

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review

Talking Pictures (UK) review Robin Witting

A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review The Alec Guinness Collection

Reel.com dvd review [2.5/4] Mary Kalin-Casey reviews The Alec Guinness Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] The Alec Guinness Collection

DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review The Alec Guinness Collection

Cinescape dvd review Andrew Hershberger

Edinburgh U Film Society (Katherine Edge) review

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Britmovie

Film 4.com [Ali Catterall]

Variety review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review

HUNTED

aka: The Stranger In Between

Great Britain (84 mi) 1952

A child stumbles on an edgy, well-dressed man in an abandoned warehouse. The man grabs the boy and drags him from the building, leaving the body of a murdered man lying in the rubble. From this taut beginning, the film (set in Glasgow and the surrounding country) develops into a study of the pair on the run and of the demons that pursue them. Bogarde, in one of his earlier starring roles, is persuasive as the jealous husband who has stepped outside the law, and his gradual redemption and growing fondness for young Robbie (Whitely) is believable and touching. Crichton's direction produces a tense, forbidding atmosphere with imagery occasionally echoing that of Laughton's Night of the Hunter. Melodramatic but compelling.

Britmovie

Hunted is a painful film about childhood that offers an unusual image of male tenderness and nurturing, a melodrama in which the vulnerable individual is pitted against overwhelming and oppressive odds.

In Hunted, young Scots boy Robbie runs away from his adoptive London home and attaches himself to a young tearaway, Chris (Dirk Bogarde), Robbie fears his father and the marks of beatings on his back confirm that he is right to do so. Robbie confesses to Chris he has set a house (his home) on fire, yet in reality he has only left some curtains smouldering. Chris is a murderer on the run from the police, who first tries to use and then to help Robbie. Chris is at first brusque and uncaring but he gradually takes on the responsibility for Robbie's guileless devotion as the two flee from London.

As the journey gets tougher, Chris has to cajole Robbie to keep him going, to carry him in his arms and to hold him, against the cold, as they sleep. The film ends with Chris's self-sacrifice; escaping on a stolen boat, he turns back to the harbour when he realises Robbie is ill. In the powerful final shots, the fishermen watch silently as the boat returns; Chris, carrying the child in his arms, walks up the steps of the quay and disappears into the male crowd. There is no family to return Robbie to, only the waiting police. Although the discourse of childcare is not directly called on in Hunted, the image of the vulnerable child and the caring father is powerfully represented.

User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

The New York Times review H.H.T.

THE THIRD SECRET

Great Britain (103 mi) 1964 ‘Scope

BFI | Sight & Sound | DVD Review: The Third Secret (1964) Tim Lucas from Sight and Sound, November 2007

Few things are quite so beautiful in the world of cinema as black-and-white scope photography. To see Yojimbo, The Innocents or In Cold Blood is to feel the unique attraction of this combination full-throttle, but its romance is only heightened when it's applied to works of humbler origin, such as this all-but-forgotten B-mystery directed by that fine avatar of Ealing comedies, Charles Crichton. Hailing from Crichton's autumnal years between The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and his December triumph A Fish Called Wanda (1988) - a period that found him mostly occupied with classic television shows like Danger Man, Man in a Suitcase and The Avengers - The Third Secret has the feel of polished work-for-hire, one that points more specifically to its other auteur, producer Robert L. Joseph, who also wrote the screenplay. Yet, all things considered, it perhaps belongs most of all to cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, in whose filmography it stands as the third panel of a psychologically themed triptych, following John Huston's unjustly neglected Freud (1962) and Joseph Losey's masterpiece The Servant (1963). Like those earlier films, The Third Secret embodies an exciting time in movie history when the delineation of character became more penetrating, less concerned with star iconography, more self-aware, self-conscious and conflicted.

After psychoanalyst Leo Whitset (Peter Copley) is found by his housekeeper shot in the head, muttering the dying words "Blame no one but me," the news of his apparent suicide sends shock waves through his list of patients. One of these is Alex Stedman (Stephen Boyd), a popular American news commentator for British television, in therapy since the unexplained deaths of his wife and daughter. He makes the acquaintance of Cathy (a luminous Pamela Franklin), Dr Whitset's 14-year-old daughter, who believes her father was murdered by a patient who he himself did not realise was a paranoid schizophrenic. Cathy makes her appeal to Alex as an investigative reporter, but it's his needs as a man that volunteer him: he must believe in the murder to confirm, for his own shaky wellbeing, that the affirmation of life instilled in him by Whitset was not a lie. In the course of his investigation into a shortlist of patients supplied by Cathy, he takes the place of her father and she becomes a daughter to him, but it's a bond inescapably allied to death.

The supporting cast is stellar: among the suspects are Richard Attenborough as a simpering art gallerist, Diane Cilento as a woman fearful of men, Jack Hawkins as a judge harbouring a ruinous secret about his past, and our unreliable protagonist himself - a man prone to mood swings, depression, blackouts, even violence. Even in the extreme background of the narrative one finds the formidable likes of Rachel Kempson, Freda Jackson, Nigel Davenport and, in her screen debut, Judi Dench. At times, the storyline seems almost secondary to the sublimated neuroses of nearly every character, the true natures of which become secondary mysteries in the plot's unfolding. Slocombe's monochrome photography and compositional skills are essential tools for an innovative approach to character depiction. Denied the emotional distraction of colour, the facades of the cast become more transparent, and the viewer sees through to their ills, or better sees the idealised projections of their ills, for what they are. Light and shadow are used as an outward representation of troubled minds, the light hardening as characters clamp down on ideas, or growing softer as they let them go. Likewise, the doubled width of the frame poignantly diagrams the sometimes unbridgeable gulfs between people as they simultaneously strive for human contact and self-concealment. (This is by no stretch an action film, nor a showily directed one, but it has an emphatically composed, storyboarded look that puts the viewer in mind of a graphic novel.) Taken collectively, these three films shot by Slocombe - Freud, The Servant, The Third Secret - lay bare questing, societal inclinations of the early 1960s which, in retrospect, anticipate the coming fascination with drugs and other agents of inner-space exploration later in the decade.

Released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with no attendant publicity, it's a lovely, strange and moody picture, full of unusual interaction and odd grace notes, made all the more special by Joseph's novel-rich dialogue, which recalls Paddy Chayefsky's elegantly pithy editorialising on the human condition in that other offbeat drama about world-weary newsmen, Network (1976). One can well understand the enthusiasm expressed for it by Boyd himself in a theatrical trailer narrated by the actor. He notes the top-flight English cast, pushes the compelling mystery angle ("What is 'The Third Secret?'"), and promises a lead performance that stretches him substantially beyond his previous work in Ben-Hur and The Fall of the Roman Empire. It's all true. Boyd's deeply felt and wholly unpredictable portrayal, possibly his best, is eclipsed here only by Franklin, who can be seen evolving in this single, demanding role from one of Britain's most gifted child actors into a skilled professional of the first rank. Her command of the screen and its technical demands, and the nuanced suggestion of complex emotions well beyond her experience are almost frighteningly remarkable.

A FISH CALLED WANDA A 95

Great Britain USA (108 mi) 1988 co-director (uncredited): John Cleese

Ten years after HALLOWEEN (1978), scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis takes a hilarious turn at comedy joining the infamous duo of John Cleese and Michael Palin from Monty Python in a comedy co-written and co-directed by the extremely talented John Cleese. In a tribute to the post-war British comedy era of Ealing Studios, the oldest film studio in existence, which turned out gems like KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949) and THE LAVENDER HILL MOB (1951), the latter of which Crichton himself directed, this madcap story follows a bungled jewelry heist gone wrong, which turns into an endless charade of deceit and double crosses. In the beginning, Tom Georgeson, a man who’s spent his last 40 years in British television, plays George, the older, alleged leader of the gang who’s sexy sidekick Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis) is about to dump him after the heist for a younger brute of a man, Kevin Kline as Otto, an American weapons expert, a man who reads Nietzsche but only for the adrenaline rush it gives him thinking he’s far superior than other mere mortals, especially the British, who in his mind are at the bottom of the food chain, best represented by Michael Palin as Ken in a near wordless role of a guy who can’t get a word out due to his horrific stuttering problem, but a man who loves animals of all sorts. George suspects foul play and hides the loot in a secret location, sharing some of the information with Ken, namely a key that he hides in his aquarium, but leaving Wanda and Otto, both posing as brother and sister, out of it, as they immediately turn him into the police. His lawyer, or barrister in British terms, is none other than the highly repressed, upper class twit John Cleese as Archie Leach, using Carey Grant’s real name. Wanda and Otto get it in their heads that George’s lawyer will lead them to the diamonds, so Wanda seduces Archie with a minimal amount of resistance, playing almost exclusively to his vanity. But every time she gets close to obtaining the information, they are rudely interrupted by Otto, the most brazenly obnoxious and infinitely jealous man on the planet, whose dim witted efforts continually bungle her more sophisticated charm.

As it turns out, Archie is in a horrible marriage where his existence barely registers in his own home, where his own daughter Cynthia Cleese interestingly plays his movie daughter Portia, while the battle ax of his wife, Maria Aitken as Wendy, couldn’t be more controlling and domineering through her perfectly frigid demeanor. Archie is immediately smitten with the spontaneous joy that has come over him through Wanda, a free spirited American dynamo who sizzles with sexual allure, nearly fainting from sexual delight everytime someone speaks to her in foreign languages. Archie has an exquisite scene when he discovers the power of speaking Russian, which leads to an all-hell-breaks-loose moment that is deliriously funny, especially considering what an utter fool Archie makes of himself, rivaling any moment he plays as Basil Fawlty in the drop dead hilarious and otherwise exquisitely charming British TV comedy Fawlty Towers (1975 and 1979). This is comedy of embarrassment, something Cleese specializes in like no one else on the planet. Palin as well makes the most of a next to nothing part, where he takes a single act, fails miserably at it, only to continue on the same path of falling farther and farther into the black hole of failure and self-loathing, all without uttering a single solitary word. Kline, on the other hand, is so over the top as the wretched American who is as stupid as he is offensive, a manic guy who screws up everything with his mixture of mad antics, where the frenetic low brow comedy of THE PRODUCERS (1968) comes to mind, as his performace is in the comic lunacy category. But despite the brilliance of the comic bits, much of which play out in the 2^nd and 3^rd variation on the same theme, meticulously working every joke to death, this is also the sweetest most heartwarming performance in Cleese’s career, where Jamie Lee Curtis perfectly blends the world of madcap comedy with a wonderfully mature performance of her own. One can’t help but like these two people, especially when contrasted against the always despicable Otto, whose venomous aggression provides the perfect lead-in to some of their quieter more intimate moments. Due to the superlative cast, each uniquely original, what works is how well they all hold their own up against each other, sort of a British/American combustible energy comedy explosion, where the brisk pace never falters, largely due to the direction which allows every sequence to establish its own comic rhythm. This is an embarrassment of riches, as these are among the best comic minds and performers of our generation.

filmcritic.com (Pete Croatto) review [4/5]

A perfectly old-fashioned romantic comedy, big on caper, generous on Ealing, and heavy on the twisted stereotypes. Cleese scripts and stars as London barrister Archie Leach, hired to defend a gem thief, and earning a much-vaunted 'sex symbol' tag with the affections of gangster's moll Wanda Gershwitz (Curtis). It's a plot too jagged to document in full - Where are the gems? Who has the safe-deposit key? Who's betraying whom? Is the London Underground really a political movement? - but the interest lies less in outcome than in character: Palin as a madly stuttering, animal-loving dog-murderer, Kline as a maybe-CIA cruel paranoid pseud who's intermittently Wanda's lover/gay brother, and Cleese and Curtis as the most unlikely rug-tearers since Miller and Monroe. There's nothing deep, nothing ground-breaking, but it's a never-dull, tightly scripted yarn with some very funny gags.

User comments from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

To make a comedy that can be lauded with the comment 'absolutely hilarious' isn't an easy thing to do. It's not so difficult, however, when you are one of the funniest men on god's green earth; and the extremely talented John Cleese has certainly managed to write a fine piece of comedy here. Teaming up with Monty Python buddy Michael Palin and Ealing studios director Charles Crichton, these talented comedians have managed to create a film that is most certainly one of the funniest; laugh per minute and lasting hilarity when it's over, movies ever made. The plot is taken straight from the classic Ealing comedy era (no wonder it works so well) and it follows four crooks that have stolen a bunch of jewels and now decide to double cross one another to take the loot solely for themselves. The plot thickens when the female of the bunch decides that the best way to get the loot would be to get close to a grassed-up co-conspirator's barrister; John Cleese.

Aside from an inch-perfect screenplay, A Fish Called Wanda also benefits from a fine cast of actors to deliver it. John Cleese steals every scene he's in, as you might expect, and he more than justifies his reputation as one of, maybe even the, finest British comedy actor ever. He is joined by a talented pair of Americans; Kevin Kline and Jamie Lee Curtis, along with, as mentioned, his fellow Python Michael Palin. Kline is certainly one of the most underrated actors working today, and his comic timing in this movie is right on the money. Makes you wonder how much better he could have been used over the years. "Scream Queen" Jamie Lee Curtis also does well in the title role; and Michael Palin obviously knows his way round a comedy script. The jokes in the film come thick and fast, and I can't think of a single one that didn't work. It's the big gags that are the real stand out of the movie, though, and one in particular that sees Kevin Kline trying to explain to Cleese's wife what he's doing in their home is absolutely priceless. I nearly fell of my chair laughing. This film is a must see.

The Onion A.V. Club dvd review Noel Murray

Apart from Terry Gilliam, the most creatively productive Monty Python member in a non-Python setting has to be John Cleese, who masterminded the '70s TV series Fawlty Towers and the 1988 comedy A Fish Called Wanda. The latter was especially sweet: It was a cult hit that broke beyond its intended cult. On the commentary track of the new double-disc A Fish Called Wanda DVD, Cleese marvels at his luck. The original intent was to make an homage to Ealing Studios caper comedies (with Ealing veteran Charles Crichton at the helm), but once Cleese cast the canny Jamie Lee Curtis and the fleet Kevin Kline as ruthless American crooks out to con diamond-heister Tom Georgeson, the movie's nature changed. A wacky farce about double-crossing and outsmarting became an affectionate, blackly comic study of the differences between Americans and the British.

Cleese's commentary deftly explains what Crichton does so well with A Fish Called Wanda, particularly the way the director lets scenes play out with a minimum of cutting and only a few economical camera moves, so the actors can build a comic rhythm. But Cleese gives himself credit too, for letting Kline and his old Python buddy Michael Palin (playing a stuttering, animal-loving hit man) re-work their dialogue in rehearsal. The ensemble ping-pongs off Cleese, the straight man, who plays a beaten-down barrister assigned to defend Georgeson, while fending off Curtis' deceptive sexual advances. Then Cleese gets smitten with Curtis, and sees a chance to throw off the confines of his proper, sexless British marriage and enjoy some American recklessness.

A Fish Called Wanda winds up being a very personal film for Cleese, and not just because he cast his daughter in a key role (as his daughter, appropriately enough), and allowed himself to give the sweetest, fullest performance of his acting career. For all its dead dogs, swallowed fish, misquoted philosophy, and accidental nudity, A Fish Called Wanda is really about how Cleese admires the endless inventiveness and bravado of the Yanks.

I believe that if A Fish Called Wanda opened today, it would make at least $100 million, and possibly more if it weren't sharing screens with Borat and the next comedian of the month after Dane Cook and his five o'clock shadow fade away. What's odd is that Wanda, like Midnight Run, hasn't become part of the pop culture lexicon like Animal House, Blazing Saddles, or Airplane! That shouldn't be a deterrent. It's relentlessly funny, smart, and has a tremendous cast.

The Wanda of the title is named after a very lovely American (Jamie Lee Curtis) who is involved in a London jewel heist organized by her temporary lover, Georges (Tom Georgeson). Working a long con, Wanda recruits her boyfriend Otto (Kline) for the gig and has him squeal on Georges. The plan works except Georges hides the diamonds.

Wanda finds a key for a safe deposit box, but nothing else. Enter George's barrister, Archie Leach (John Cleese, also the movie's writer), who Wanda gradually seduces to get more information. For Archie, suffering from an unbearable domestic life, falling in love with Wanda is inevitable, triggering a string of hysterical events, most involving a very jealous Otto.

Cleese's script never stops moving, a good thing that becomes great because he fills it with clever, borderline-vulgar physical comedy (an animal-loving hit man who keeps killing an old lady's dogs in increasingly gruesome ways; the comparison of Otto and Wanda's love life with Archie's) and terrific dialogue (Wanda's speech on the depths of Otto's stupidity). It's a marvel of a script, brilliantly stupid in the mode of the aforementioned classics, and not in a "Hey, that old lady is rapping" kind of way.

It's a given that in a movie this funny, the cast would be good. Cleese and Michael Palin, comedy gods in some circles, are terrific, with Palin's PETAish grief over accidentally killing three dogs a perfect definition of ironic humor. But it's Kline who steals the movie, playing the quintessential ugly American, the kind of arrogant dolt who believes the British are the ones driving on the wrong side of the road. He infuses the movie with malevolent, blissful energy, whether he's eating live fish or complaining about the mannerisms of the British. Kline won an Academy Award for his performance, and it's one of the few times where the Academy's judgment should be universally lauded.

With a collector's edition now available on DVD, featuring commentary by Cleese and nearly 30 minutes of deleted scenes, featurettes (new and old), and a trivia track, it's the right time to watch A Fish Called Wanda, so it can finally get the quotable legacy it so richly deserves. And by the way, Aristotle wasn't Belgian. I looked it up.

Turner Classic Movies review Jeremy Arnold

A Fish Called Wanda (1988), one of the best-loved British comedies of the past 20 years, is a caper story full of wacky characters and clever twists. It sends up British stereotypes (inhibition, formality) and American stereotypes (intuitiveness, lack of sophistication). More interestingly for film buffs, it's a blend of two grand traditions of British comedy: the wry 1950s Ealing Studios style and the outrageous, sometimes cruel nature of 1960s Monty Python.

While 77-year-old director Charles Crichton had made the Ealing classics The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), by 1988 he hadn't directed a feature in 20 years. He received sole credit on this finished film, but Monty Python alum John Cleese's name was listed in the credits through production mainly as insurance in case Crichton died or would be unable to complete the film. In truth, though, Cleese generally worked with the actors on the set while Crichton guided the overall production. On the first day of shooting, Cleese gave Crichton a t-shirt that said "Age and Treachery Will Always Overcome Youth and Skill." Sure enough, Crichton's years of experience paid off: the production finished shooting every day at 6pm and still came in under budget. To top it off, Crichton received an Oscar nomination - as did the original screenplay by Crichton and Cleese.

The script was a true collaboration. The two men worked together on thirteen drafts and also sought input from their cast, even organizing script readings a full 8-10 months before shooting. One such read-through encouraged Cleese to make his character - a straightlaced, uptight barrister - "a bit more like me. More real, more vulnerable and more romantic about Wanda, as opposed to just wanting to get into bed with her." Cleese's character, by the way, is named Archie Leach - Cary Grant's real name - because Cleese and Grant were from the same English hometown, and because, Cleese explained, "it's the nearest I will ever get to being Cary Grant."

On the set, Cleese created a relaxed atmosphere for the actors so that the collaboration could continue. (Kevin Kline described Cleese as having "hosted" the film.) It worked - for everyone. Jamie Lee Curtis turned in one of her best-remembered performances. Kevin Kline, a comic delight as a stuttering, armpit-sniffing animal lover, won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Cleese's own performance benefited, too. He said he tended to find acting dull because, having written the dialogue himself, there was no sense of discovery for him. "But on Wanda I got interested again, because when we came to the more romantic scenes with Jamie, she said, 'Don't rehearse. Let's just see what happens.' I'd never done that. It's scary if you're addicted to rehearsing, as I am - like pushing a boat off from shore without any oars. Sometimes, between takes, Jamie would see me running lines in my head. She'd say 'Don't' and wave a finger at me." Curtis was so full of advice, in fact, that co-star Michael Palin gave her a t-shirt that read, "Wait, I have an idea."

As hilarious as A Fish Called Wanda is, it was not an easy film to finance and produce. Cleese spent over $150,000 of his own money on development and pre-production while trying to arouse interest from the Hollywood studios. Four of them passed before MGM/UA finally agreed to put up the $8 million budget. A good call, for the movie made over $100 million worldwide and became a gigantic hit on video. In fact, A Fish Called Wanda became the most successful British comedy ever released in the U.S. Interestingly, while the picture debuted on July 15, 1988, it didn't reach No. 1 in the weekend box-office rankings until Sept. 16 - a testament to its incredible popularity and still the longest a film has ever taken to reach the top of the weekend rankings.

Test screenings led to some of the more cruel humor being toned down, including a shot of a dog's entrails displayed in a pattern and a scene where Kline uses cats' tails for target practice. The title was a challenge to translate for international release. In Japan, the film was called Wanda, the Diamond, and the Good Guys."

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]

Movie-Vault.com ("Beatnik") review

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]

Monsters and Critics [April MacIntyre]

Edinburgh U Film Society (Malcolm Maclaren) review

Britmovie

DVD Verdict (Sean McGinnis) dvd review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5] 2-disc Collector’s Edition

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review Collector’s Edition

Reel.com dvd review [4/4] Kim Morgan, Collector’s Edition

DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Collector's Edition]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [Collector's Edition] Chuck O’Leary

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Collector's Edition] Colin Jacobson

Monsters And Critics [Frankie Dees] Collector’s Edition

Urban Cinefile dvd review [Special Edition] Shannon J. Harvey

BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review [Special Edition]

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

A Fish Called Wanda - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ealing Studios

Ealing Studios - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ealing Studios Jonathan Ross on Ealing Studios from BFI Screen Online

Crichton, Michael

WESTWORLD

USA (88 mi) 1973 ‘Scope

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! (Liz Kingsley)

Despite faults (chiefly a dispersal of its energies), a wonderfully enjoyable fantasy about a futuristic holiday resort offering robot worlds of exotic sex, romance or violence amid the licence of ancient Rome, the gallantries of a medieval chateau, or the gunslinging frontier town. Best and most fully realised of these worlds is the Western, with Brynner (brilliant) as the robot gunman required to die, bloodily, every time a greenhorn tourist challenges him to the draw. Until, that is, the robots begin to malfunction - or rebel: only the computers that designed them know exactly how they work - and the Brynner machine sets out, now part mad killer and part Frankenstein monster, in quest of revenge. Great stuff.

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Imagine a Disneyland for adults where every man and woman can live out their fantasies. That's what science fiction writer Michael Crichton did when he wrote the screenplay for Westworld (1973), a film that holds the distinction of being the last movie MGM produced before dissolving its releasing company. Westworld is also notable as the first theatrical feature directed by Crichton (He previously directed two television movies, Binary (1972), under the pseudonym John Lange, and Pursuit (1972) starring Ben Gazzara).

In an interview with Michael Crichton in American Cinematography, he discussed what inspired him to make Westworld: "I'd visited Kennedy Space Center and seen how astronauts were being trained - and I realized that they were really machines. Those guys were working very hard to make their responses, and even their heartbeats, as machine-like and predictable as possible. At the other extreme, one can go to Disneyland and see Abraham Lincoln standing up every 15 minutes to deliver the Gettysburg Address. That's the case of a machine that has been made to look, talk and act like a person. I think it was that sort of a notion that got the picture started. It was the idea of playing with a situation in which the usual distinctions between person and machine - between a car and the driver of the car - become blurred, and then trying to see if there was something in the situation that would lead to other ways of looking at what's human and what's mechanical."

For those seeing Westworld for the first time, you'll recognize a modern truism that occurs at the workplace and at home. Even the most sophisticated computers can crash. That's exactly what happens at Westworld but in this case, the consequences are deadly. After all, we're talking about cyborgs armed with loaded guns and sharp swords. When they go on the blink, they're no longer amusing toys. Especially Yul Brynner as the trigger-happy robot gunslinger.

Westworld was filmed in several locations including the Mojave Desert, the gardens of the Harold Lloyd Estate, and several sound stages at MGM. Apparently the film was shorn of ten minutes prior to its release in order to earn a PG rating which makes you wonder what the R-rated footage could have been. Perhaps a sequence with Richard Benjamin, James Brolin, and those obliging saloon girls?

According to Crichton, in an interview with Cinefantastique correspondent Stuart Kaminsky, Westworld took "thirty days to shoot. It had a typical post-production schedule...about 12 or 13 weeks. Five weeks were for the director's cut. We had shot about 110,000 feet of film on a budget of $1,300,000. We finished under budget and on time. In editing the picture I must have seen it, literally, hundreds of times."

When asked to pick his favorite sequence in the film, Crichton said, "I think it might be the sequence near the end where Brynner is almost blind and he finds Benjamin. That whole last half hour of the film is essentially silent. That's what I wanted to do, make that as a silent picture, with no dialogue." He also added that "when Benjamin kills Brynner the first time it is a total cliche - the lines, the staging, and the angles. I was very careful not to do anything visually tricky, because I wanted it to have a very standard look that I could play on later."

It is impossible now to imagine Westworld without Yul Brynner as the cyborg gunslinger yet on the surface his role wouldn't appear to require much acting. On the other hand, Crichton noted, "It's very hard to give the impression that you are a robot with no personality while at the same time having some sense of presence and personality. Brynner has this. I didn't cast Brynner or the other two principals, but I am very pleased with them in the film. Brynner is the gunfighter since The Magnificent Seven [1960]. If anyone really built a place like Westworld, they probably would make the gunfighter robot in the image of Brynner." Westworld was so successful that it inspired a sequel - Futureworld (1976) starring Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner. Once again the story was set in Delos, the adult amusement park that includes Westworld and other attractions. Only this time the cyborgs were instrumental in a world domination plot concocted by Delos engineer Arthur Hill. Although Yul Brynner makes a brief cameo appearance in the film, Futureworld was a cheap imitation of the original film and effectively ended a potential Westworld film franchise. However, there was a television spin-off series, Beyond Westworld.

Westworld Fantasy and exploitation, by Gerald Mead and Sam Applebaum from Jump Cut

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley)

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle)

Crişan, Marian

MORGEN B- 81

aka: Tomorrow

Romania France Hungary (100 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

This is the kind of film that governments or international selection committees like to pick because it represents a globalist community ideal, one where all men are brothers under the sun, but of course, in the real world this ideal has little practicality. Reminiscent of a Slovakian film The Border (Hranica) (2009), both films are set near national borders, the Ukraine and Slovakia, and here Romania and Hungary, where historically people have routinely crossed borders with little difficulty as they live nearby, so shopping across the border or visiting family was never frowned upon. Well this is no longer the case in a post 9/11 world where everyone is under suspicion of harboring terrorist intentions. Despite all being members of the European Union, this apparently means squat when it comes to border patrols, where each individual nation implements their own unique style. Typically Eastern European nations formerly under Communist rule tend to use this as an opportunity to glorify the autocratic power of the guards themselves, some carrying automatic weapons (Slovakia), each tyrannically protecting their little fiefdoms with a series of near impossible bureaucratic rules and procedures that makes crossing the border an official act that requires an official governmental seal of approval, which in the case of Slovakians means they’d have to travel to the capital to petition for a visa request and back again to receive the decision if they wished to visit relatives across the border, a mere 5-minute walk from their homes, while Ukrainians, on the other hand, can easily obtain theirs. In this film, a penniless farmer Nelu (András Hatházi), a decent and good-natured guy living in a dilapidated farmhouse with his constantly nagging wife, crosses the border for a little peace and quiet and to go fishing in nearby Hungary, bringing back dinner, but when he returns to Romania, the harassing and overly efficient border guards inform him he needs a permit to go fishing and another permit to bring the fish back across the border, arrogantly informing him that he can cross the border into Romania but the fish stays in Hungary. The film is a variation on this Kafkaesque absurdity about cracking down on borders using outdated, totalitarian methods from the days of yore which were designed to prevent citizens from escaping the country—in other words people could get in, but they couldn’t get back out, stuck in a bureaucratic maze of totalitarian indifference.

While never rising to new artistic heights, the film is shot in a near documentary style, though decidedly less grim than previous Romanian films, using long takes in ‘Scope that accentuate the realism, small town humor, and monotonous rhythm of daily life. Nelu works as a security guard in a perpetually vacant grocery store where employees have little to do, where to pass the time he can be seen helping stock the shelves or assisting elderly customers. He’s in for a perplexing surprise when he meets a foreigner (Yilmaz Yalcin) one day at his fishing hole, a guy who can’t speak the language, so nothing he says is subtitled, but rather than give the border guards any satisfaction, he denies having seen or met anyone, which immediately earns this new stranger’s trust, where Nelu allows him to stay at his farmhouse in a storage shelter, which doesn’t win the approval of his wife. Soon the whole town is aware of this stranger who initially helps with needed repairs around the farm, but is soon seen with Nelu when he visits local bars and pool halls, where various friends weigh in on what to do with him, as he’s apparently trying to get to Germany to connect with his family, but he doesn’t have appropriate visa documents. Several somewhat amusing attempts to smuggle him across the border to Hungary fail, as he’s obviously reticent to leave the kind hospitality of Nelu, growing attached, like a loyal and obedient pet dog, always returning when they attempt to move him along his way. By the end, there’s an interesting helicopter sequence that bears some similarity to Béla Tarr’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (2000), one that suggests ordinary citizens are all subject to the zeal of an over-eager SWAT team looking to make a name for themselves, which they do by showing a blatant disregard for the rights of the nation’s own citizenry.

Some interesting observations here are a few of the bar sequences, where Nelu and his friends discuss the current composition of the Romanian national soccer team, which instead of Romanians, national heroes who they used to identify with by name, consists of Brazilians, Argentines, and various other South American countries, adding a strange twist to the national identity, which replicates the multi-ethnic racial composition of the 1998 French World Cup team, which many felt was not really French, but consisted of Algerian, Turkish, Ghana, Senegal, and West Indies players, where 9 of the 11 players on the field had black family origins outside of France. Another is the use of television, watched continuously by Nelu’s overly affected wife, which stirs up antagonism and racial animosity, suggesting to the viewership that any unregistered foreigners are potential terrorists, urging citizens to turn them into authorities, threatening them with collaborative arrest if they don’t, creating an official underclass of potential threats to the nation, yet historically there have always been migrants, ethnic workers, and people with no real national identity comprising the Romanian population, most specifically the Gypsy population, which recognizes no national border and may number about 10 million in Romania alone. This film doesn’t address the issue of Gypsies, which have perennially caused bureaucracies fits, failing to comply with census records or the systematic recording of births, remaining a community of Gypsies rather than citizens of a given nation. Since most people have multiple countries of origin in their family genealogy records, it would be hard to restrict these families to a single nation, yet when it comes to the restrictive nature of border crossing guidelines, that’s exactly what they force families to do. Crişan’s film, which shows Nelu’s growing attempt to understand and sympathize with the stranger on a human level, which is seen in this new authoritarian light as contempt for his government, shows how the individual’s views are being suppressed, where basic instincts of common sense that have prevailed for centuries in living peacefully and showing a tolerance for neighbors, or even the idea of offering a helping hand, are now seen as against the new governmental laws that are instead designed to generate suspicion and pit one against the other, showing that modernist, post-Ceausescu views are actually contributing to greater hostilities rather than greater understandings.

The Flickering Wall [Jorge Mourinha]

The so-called "Romanian new wave" may be fast in risk of becoming a cliché since all its films share a similar set of characteristics: lengthy single takes or tracking shots; naturalistic acting filmed in medium or long shot; gentle, absurdist, wry humour; absence of music; etc. Marian Crisan's debut feature Morgen, produced by The Death of mr. Lazarescu and Aurora director Cristi Puiu's Mandragora outfit, fits all these tropes to a T; but what is astonishing is just how much mileage mr. Crisan, and Romanian filmmakers in general, are still able to get out of them without feeling as if they're flogging it to death. Morgen is a smart look at the problems of immigration in modern Europe, as struggling Romanian farmer Nelu (András Hatházi), living on the border with Hungary, takes in Turkish illegal Behran (Yilmaz Yalcin), trying to reach his family in Germany.

Initially exploiting him for all he's worth - from accepting the money he'd saved to pay for the trip to making him work for free around the farm - Nelu, who moonlights himself as a security guard at a local supermarket, slowly becomes fond of Behran. Confronted by the callousness of those around him, from his perpetually grudging wife to his money-obsessed brother-in-law, the farmer finds himself taking a stand for a guy who could be himself but for the grace of God.

As the bemused observation of the blind application of the law that we recognise from other "Romanian new wave" works gives way to a sense of callous, inhumane oppression, Morgen, steadily helmed by mr. Crisan, becomes the most openly political and politically resonant of its compatriots; a film that is Romanian, yes, but talks to all of Europe.

User reviews from imdb Author: KnatLouie from Copenhagen, Denmark

This film is about a poor farmer called Nelu, who lives near the border with his wife Florica in a broken-down house. Nelu works as a mall security-guard, well-known and liked by the people in the town. But Nelu is bored with his life, and is very annoyed at the arrogant border-guards, who harass him whenever he has been across the border to catch fish.

One day when Nelu is fishing, a strange looking foreigner (presumably an immigrant from the area around Turkey or Afghanistan) comes running along the road, and hides under a bridge until the border-guards have passed. Nelu doesn't tell them where he is, even though he's standing right in front of him, and because of this, the illegal immigrant Behran feels an automatic bond with Nelu, even though they cannot understand each other, and persuades him to help him escape. Nelu thus takes Behran to his home, and has him living in the cellar for a while. His wife Florica doesn't like this one bit, but Nelu convinces her that it is for the best, as Behran can help him do chores around the house, like fixing the roof, peeling potatoes, etc.

But as time goes along, it becomes apparent that having an illegal immigrant living in your house is not a long-term solution, and Nelu tries to get rid of Behran, helping him to escape to Northern Europe. But maybe Behran doesn't want to escape anymore, as he has found a true friend in Nelu... and this is where Nelu's troubles really begin!

Overall, I'll give this film a 7/10, as it was very heart-warming and funny, but really didn't have much progress throughout, and you quickly knew where the plot was going. The actors were great and had good chemistry, and the quirky humor worked excellent in this film.. now you definitely know what to do, and what NOT to do, if you ever stumble upon a runaway fugitive.

Digital Fix Noel Megahey

The rather wonderful opening sequence of Marian Crisan’s Morgen sets the scene really for the whole tone and theme of the film. At a border checkpoint between Romania and Hungary, two border guards insist to Nelu, who has been doing his regular spot of fishing before starting work as security man at a department store, that he cannot bring across the live carp that is sitting in the catch bucket attached to his motorbike with a sidecar. Without the relevant fishing permits and veterinary documentation, Nelu can’t bring the fish back to his home in the little Romanian border town of Salonta. So, without further ado, Nelu dumps the live fish at the roadside to the complete indifference of the guards. They are just doing their job and could do without any unnecessary complications.

That little event just about sums up the attitudes of the respective sides when Nelu, on a subsequent fishing trip, picks up a Turkish man who has been trying to get across the border on his way to Germany, where his family are living. The Turkish man, who can’t speak a word of Romanian while Nelu correspondingly can’t speak a word of Turkish, is most definitely a fish out of water. Two words just about sum up their communication of their situation and what they are going to do about it – “Alemania” (Germany) and “Morgen” (Tomorrow).

What is refreshing about Morgen – and probably essential as far as new Romanian cinema is concerned – is that it is part of a movement that is beginning to move on to the next stage after the rather grim (but no less impressive for it) social realist topics of life in Romania under the Communist regime and in the immediate post-Ceausescu era. There’s nothing in Morgen that relates specifically to the political climate or the social legacy of the past, but rather steps to one side and looks at where the country is left today. Inevitably, some of the old attitudes persist, and in them you can recognise something of the old Romanian character in the mindlessly authoritarian and slightly absurd behaviour of the authorities, as well as in the rather stupefied and confused response of the general public. Both just want a simple life, and are a bit miffed at how this belonging to Europe in a wider sense now just makes their life more difficult.

There’s certainly an air of menace in the situations where the public are afraid of running afoul of laws that they are not even aware they are breaking, but there’s often more of an absurd touch – one identified as much in Cristian Mungiu’s humorous Tales of the Golden Age series of short films, as much as in his oppressive 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – and it’s that aspect that comes to the fore in Nelu’s attempts to shelter the Turkish refugee in his home – to the dismay of his wife – and to find him temporary employment while he hatches a plan to set him on his way across the border. Without giving away too much about the various attempts and close-calls that take place – hilarious though some of them are – eventually, it results in Nelu being forced to take the same kind of response that he took with the fish at the start of the film.

What is also marvellous about Morgen is how, with a minimum of script, very little dialogue and almost certainly little in the way of any kind of filmmaking budget, director Marian Crisan is still able to draw out individual characteristics and universally identifiable sentiments in relation to people and in how people relate to one another through the breaking down of borders – of the geographical and the personal kind – and the unnecessary complications of the world we live in today that make such a simple thing so difficult.

East European Film Bulletin [Konstanty Kuzma]

AFI FEST Now [Katie Datko]

IcelandChronicles.com [Pu the Owl]

Cinema Liberated [David Tam]

Bonjour Tristesse (English) excellent photos

User reviews from imdb Author: kikoshaus

Variety Reviews - Morgen - Film Reviews - Locarno - Review by Jay ... Jay Weissberg

The French football team isn't really French! | Politics Forum .org

Cronenberg, Brandon

ANTIVIRAL

Canada (110 mi) 2012

Cannes 2012 Review: Brandon Cronenberg's ANTIVIRAL Brian Clark at Cannes from Twitch, May 21, 2012

As a stomach-churning, jet-black satire of modern culture, Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral is a resounding success, and is directed with precision and conviction. However, for these very reasons, it's also cold, sterile and mostly void of humanity or even emotion. It's possible that the latter characteristics should be counted in the film's favor too though, since they are clearly part of Cronenberg's intention, but that doesn't mean everyone's going to actually enjoy watching the thing.

Just to get this out of the way: Yes, Brandon is David's son, and yes, it's nearly impossible to ignore that Antiviral occasionally echoes films like Videodrome, eXistenZ and The Brood both visually and conceptually. But Cronenberg Jr. also definitively establishes his own directorial voice, so no more dad comparisons for the rest of the review.

The somewhat convoluted sci-fi story-backdrop is set up with with impressive narrative economy. Basically, society has become so obsessed with celebrities, that companies have started banking off of buying blood samples from mega-stars and infecting customers with the same diseases. This practice apparently makes fans feel even closer to the stars they adore. It's an inspired idea in a satirical sense, but it also takes a bit of a leap to get on board with the concept as a plausible dystopian scenario. Culture's obsession with celebrities has indeed grown by leaps and bounds in the last five years, but, to the best of my knowledge, most people still hate diseases. This attitude has not changed in a long time.

But let's give it a pass -- Cronenberg does a very nice job laying out the logic and process behind this world, and at the very least, it's a funny idea. Now then, Syd March works at one of these companies, but he's also erasing the copyright data of the celebrity-viruses his company owns rights to and then selling the viruses to black market distributors. Naturally, this gets him into trouble, both because that's illegal, and also because, in order to steal the viruses, he must first inject them into himself.

Thus begins a scathing, Philip K. Dick-type plunge into a film noir rabbit hole. Or perhaps we should say film blanche; (Sorry.) the entire movie looks like it was shot in a doctor's office, with sets consisting mostly of bright lights and white backgrounds. The precise editing and shot-composition also add to the feeling of complete sterilization. Visually, it makes 2001: A Space Odyssey look like Jean-Luc Godard film.

Rest assured though, the clean white surfaces will be stained with dark-red by the end of the film. In fact, Cronenberg's obsession with rubbing our faces in painful medical procedures and virus symptoms borders on fetish, and is perhaps the most refreshingly unhinged aspect of the film. Anytime someone gets injected with a needle or a piece of skin removed (or worse), you'll be seeing it in extreme close-up.

The performances and dialogue reinforce the cold, detached vibe too, with characters only departing from monosyllabic mumbling when they are in immense pain or making some sort of pointed commentary about society. Caleb Landry Jones works extremely well to this end playing March. His only expressions throughout the movie are disgust, indifference and sometimes pain.

And yet, there's something strangely compelling about the intensity of the eyes, or perhaps just the sheer amount of time he can maintain a piercing glare. Also, as he becomes more and more sick in the movie, the performance becomes intentionally hilarious and dead-pan.

The other actors (including Malcom McDowell in a small part) are equally well-cast and occasionally get to have a bit more fun than Jones. That said, if you need to have even a little bit of empathy for a film's characters to enjoy watching it, this probably isn't the movie for you.

The aims of Cronenberg's approach to the material are obvious, and while some will argue that he took the task of creating a soulless emotional void of a future a bit too seriously, I admired the film's conviction, including its reluctance to pander to the audience with pop-culture winks, or even cast any known actors in large roles. The ideas here are imaginative and often clever, but never actually mind-blowing, like the best work in this genre. And while there's zero-time spent worrying about what's going to happen to the characters, there is a fair amount of time spent wondering, and Cronenberg's got a few great pay-offs up his sleeve in this department. It's an strong debut, and one which does indeed feel like the director accomplished exactly what he set out to do. Now I'm interested to see what happens the young Chronenberg loses control and lets himself go a little more.

Antiviral Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

Set in a future world where the viral infections contracted by celebrities are copy-protected and sold to adoring fans, Brandon Cronenberg’s feature debut is a cybermedical sci-fi vampire thriller that battles constantly, and with only limited success, against its own ludicrous script. And although it would be nice not to have to present the director as ‘the son of David’, Cronenberg fils makes little attempt here to take his distance from dad, several of whose stylistic tics are reproduced, from in-your-face bodily fluids and blurrings of the border between man and machine to some rather gelid, mannered dialogue.

But for all the ludicrousness of its plot and style-over-substance mannerisms, this dark fable could well carve out a place for itself in late-night genre slots. With more needles on view than a porcupine – most of them sinking into flesh in extreme close-up – this is not one for the faint-hearted, but hardcore cyber-horror fanboys should lap it up. It’s going to be a tough one for the censors to call: can you classify mainlining of diseases as the promotion of drug use?

The film imagines a future world – not very far into the future, it seems – in which celebrity culture has spiraled to the point where certain biomed firms have contracts with stars that allow them to take samples of the viruses they fall prey to, and copy-protect them before selling them on to fans who are keen to enjoy the same cold, the same cold sores, the same stomach bugs that invaded their idols’ bodies. Syd March (Landry Jones) works for one of these, Lucas Clinics: when we first meet him, he’s clearly not well (he spends much of the time with a thermometer in his mouth) and the reason is soon revealed: he’s getting around the clinic’s tough security by injecting celebrity viruses into his own body and taking them home to his spartan apartment.

Here he just happens to have one of the large, expensive and complex Lucas Clinic machines that process the blood samples – presumably he smuggled it out of the lab in his pocket when nobody was looking.

Syd sells his smuggled samples to a sort of biomed-butcher, Arvid (a nicely counter-cast Pingue), who sells cuts of meat grown from celebrity cells. But Syd is not the only pirate prepared to risk his health to get the viruses out there, and he’s also threatened by the competition of a rival lab (it’s not a stretch to see an ironic nod here at the aggressive client-courting methods of certain Hollywood talent agencies).

When he’s sent by his boss to gather a blood sample from Lucas’ star client, Hannah Geist (Gadon), who has been seriously ill, Syd sees a unique opportunity to jump the gun by injecting her blood into his body immediately. But this particular virus turns out, predictably, to be a little unpredictable.

The script spends a lot of time getting the little details right (and there are some nice ones, like the celebrity organs that Syd’s boss collects, mounted in glass phials like saintly relics) but forgets to fill in some huge gaps in the bigger picture. A world in which a few saddos want to contract celebrity viruses is not unthinkable, but the film loses credibility by suggesting that a stupidity virus has infected the entire world.

It also makes no attempt to make the virus-collecting fans remotely believable – they all seem to be sent from central casting. And a device whereby each virus is given its own face (distorted with pain, like a portrait by Francis Bacon) still fails to explain why a flourishing market in copies would not spring up as soon as a few people were ‘injected’ with the original viruses.

There’s visual imagination here, but it’s not always entirely original: as well as the oeuvre of Cronenberg pere, Antiviral’s future world draws on films like Blade Runner, A.I., and even (for the future as a shabbier version of the present) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But Cronenberg junior does exercise impressive control over the film’s airless cyberhorror atmosphere. His means include a pale colour palette in which blood stands out in stark relief, a moody, metal-edged electronica soundtrack and, most of all, Syd’s increasingly ravaged body (the latter thanks also to an impressive performance from Landry Jones). But there’s a certain lack of subtlety in the exercise nevertheless – for example, in the way the script hammers home, at the end, the film’s vampiric subtext. We knew, Brandon, we knew.

Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 21, 2012

Drew McWeeny at Cannes from HitFix, May 19, 2012

Eric D. Snider at Cannes from Movies.com

DAILY | Cannes 2012 | Brandon Cronenberg’s ANTIVIRAL » David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 21, 2012

Jason Gorber interview at Cannes from Twitch, May 15, 2012

Megan Lehmann at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 21, 2012

Justin Chang at Cannes from Variety

Ben Kenigsberg at Cannes from Time Out Chicago, May 21, 2022

Cronenberg, David

Cronenberg, David from World Cinema

Once hailed as one of the most original and sophisticated of the new generation of horror filmmakers that came to prominence during the 1970s, Cronenberg went on to transcend the limitations of his somewhat disreputable genre. By the 90s, after helming the critically lauded features Dead Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991), he had attained the status of one of the most intelligent and interesting contemporary auteurs working in English language films. Cronenberg began building his reputation with a series of vivid explorations of biological terror and sexual dread. He shed the label of "exploitation direction" by de-emphasizing his trademark graphic and revolting special effects to concentrate instead on theme and character. — Baseline

The Spinning Image Daniel Auty in bio remarks

Highly regarded Canadian writer/director who frequently combines intellectual concerns with genre subjects. Began directing in the late-70s with a series of gruesome but socially aware horror thrillers, such as Shivers, Rabid and The Brood. 1981's Scanners was Cronenberg's commercial breakthrough, and if the hallucinatory Videodrome was box office flop, it remains one of the finest films of his career. The sombre Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone and the hugely successful remake of The Fly followed.

The disturbing Dead Ringers (1988) was a watershed film, based for the first time entirely in reality and featuring a career-best performance from Jeremy Irons. The 1990s saw Cronenberg in uncompromising form, adapting a pair of ‘unfilmable’ modern classics – Burrough's Naked Lunch and Ballard’s Crash – in typically idiosyncratic style. Ms Butterfly was something of a misfire, but eXistenZ surprised many by being fast-moving and funny, while 2002’s powerful Spider saw Cronenberg at his most art-house. His latest film is the acclaimed, bloody comic book adaptation A History of Violence. Never one to bow to critical or popular demands, Cronenberg remains one of modern cinema’s finest filmmakers.

Cronenberg, David Art and Culture

David Cronenberg has perfected the art of making us simultaneously cringe with disgust and stare with furtive fascination. With an early career marked by restless explorations in low-budget horror, he is no stranger to shocking cinema -- in fact, his biggest claim-to-fame may be the notorious exploding head in his box-office hit, "Scanners." But Cronenberg has refused to be pigeonholed as a choreographer of B-movie bloodbaths. In entering the mainstream, he has established himself as a thoughtful, astonishing -- and certainly controversial -- director.

After growing up in a household overflowing with artistic activity, Cronenberg attended the University of Toronto. There he studied both English literature and the sciences, interests that would fuse to disturbing effect in his later film attempts. At the university, he produced two experimental film shorts, "Stereo" (1969) and "Crimes of the Future" (1970), which would pave the way for his work in features. Though both demonstrate his career-long penchant for stylistic experimentation and science fiction themes, these early works did little to prepare audiences for his first feature film, 1975’s "Shivers." A gore-fest about parasites run amok, the film was ripped to shreds by horrified critics. It even prompted the publication of the now-famously entitled review, "You Should Know How Bad This Film Is. After All, You Paid For It."

Cronenberg has a knack for hitting the zeitgeist’s most painful nerve in more ways than one. Certainly his films delve deeper into social issues than their gruesome surfaces initially indicate. "The Fly," for example, though entertaining as a simple horror flick, also functions as a contamination metaphor for 1980s fears about AIDS (much the way that "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" unintentionally tapped into 1950s communist paranoia). Likewise, Cronenberg’s "Videodrome" deals with both the detrimental effects of television and perverse sexual consumerism in one fell swoop. The film portrays a TV producer’s single-minded obsession with a sadistic-erotic television show -- an effective commentary on our relationship to the medium’s emphasis on sex and violence. When a vagina-shaped video cassette player grows out of the main character’s stomach, the effect is both gleefully gross and tellingly symbolic.

And though Cronenberg has abandoned splashy special horror effects for more subtle work in the 1990s, his themes are no less unsettling. 1997’s "Crash," based on the J.G. Ballard novel, explores the sexual fetishization of auto accidents -- territory few other filmmakers would dare attempt, much less release as a major feature starring name-brand actors. His camera is an eye into our darkest cultural taboos: infection, gender identity, sexual aberration, obsession, and insanity. His monsters are always ourselves, reflected in the distorted mirror of our blackest desires.

Interview: David Cronenberg - Film Comment Graham Fuller interview, February 26, 2015

David Cronenberg’s approach to directing Maps to the Stars, screenwriter Bruce Wagner’s latest baleful vision of contemporary Hollywood’s moral vacuum, was to treat it as an anthropologist might treat a tribe of natives who’ve become slavishly devoted to false gods. The gods (or Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) in question are the usual suspects: fame, wealth, power, and sex. Yet to suggest that the film’s take on Hollywood decadence is tired, as some critics have done, is to avoid reckoning with its underlying solemnity and sorrow.

As a Canadian outsider, Cronenberg brings a cool distance to Wagner’s vision of how Tinseltown’s celebs and exploiters are too crazed to see how their hungers are consuming them; fire is the movie’s purging force. Yet the doomed kids at the center of the film, the sweet, sick pyromaniac Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), newly released from a Florida psychiatric hospital, and her Bieber-esque movie-brat bro Benjie (Evan Bird), just out of rehab at 13, are portrayed with tenderness and compassion. Their problem was and is their guru-to-the-stars dad Stafford (John Cusack), a snake-oil salesman if ever there were one, and their avaricious mom Christina (Olivia Williams).

Agatha and Stafford meanwhile both have dealings with the rapidly fading—and therefore neurotic and vicious—movie star Havana Segrand, a walking bag of poison played with immense gusto by Julianne Moore. There’s something salutary about the new Best Actress Oscar winner (for Still Alice) metamorphosing into a grotesque from the same Hollywood imaginarium as Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond and Bette Davis’s Baby Jane Hudson.

There are two pairs of siblings in Maps to the Stars—and they’re damned from the start. That obviously links them to the twins in Dead Ringers (88).

Who committed gentle suicide at the end. Yeah, that’s definitely a connection.

Was it something you were conscious of?

No. Bruce [Wagner] wrote the script about 20 years ago. The family dynamic often plays a strong role in his screenplays and his nine novels, so I think you have to say it’s a coincidence up to a certain point. But then perhaps one of the reasons that the [Maps to the Stars] script so appealed to me might be that resonance. That’s very possible.

When did you first see the script, and did it change substantially over the years?

I first read it about 10 years ago, and I made many attempts to get it made as a Canadian co-production or as an American production. It was obviously going to be an indie film in one way or another, never a studio film. The script didn’t change much, though among the things that I did was to cut it—which is what I often do as a director. Bruce could have written a thousand pages. I thought it rambled on at a certain point and just cut some characters and scenes and trimmed it down. After that, though, it retained its shape and we only did upgradings, such as introducing smartphones, which didn’t exist when he wrote it.

Also, there was the question of topical pop references. Bruce has always been very unafraid to include them in his work—the latest meme or the latest YouTube sensation or TV show or whatever. They live and die very quickly, like mayflies, of course, so for that reason we decided to omit a particular reference to the football player [Tim] Tebow, for example, because it was no longer topical. So we made changes like that, but the family dynamic and the dialogue hadn’t changed in 10 years, and really not in 20.

Over the years, obviously, your films have found corruption and moral squalor in all kinds of places, which suggests you have no particular axe to grind against Hollywood.

I don’t. When the movie premiered at Cannes, Le Monde published an article quoting me as saying: “Je ne déteste pas Hollywood”—“I don’t hate Hollywood.” It came because the French thought I must have bottled up hatred for Hollywood for years and now I’d finally released it. But I said: “Not at all.” The specifics of Hollywood come from Bruce. As you say, you can find the kind of greed and hypocrisy and power-mongering that’s in Maps to the Stars in many shapes and forms all over the world, in government and all kinds of businesses. Hollywood is a spectacular example, of course, because it’s so visible and because of the aspirations of the players to be seen on the screen and the red carpet. Those drives are equally apparent in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or even the Detroit car industry, but those places are just not as visible.

You had a week’s shooting in L.A. on Maps to the Stars. Did you feel the ghosts, when filming under the Hollywood sign, for example?

It was only five days. And, yes, the resonances of shooting in the heart of darkness were huge. It was incredibly satisfying and very cathartic for me to shoot there because I’ve never shot in the U.S. before—not in New York or anywhere, even though several of my films have been set in America. It was always a money problem thing. The Canadian dollar was always very cheap and the Americans who were involved from time to time—like New Line on A History of Violence [05]—wanted me to shoot in Canada. So it wasn’t that I didn’t want to shoot in America, it was that it was always cheaper to shoot in Canada. Maps to the Stars was a sort of Canadian-German coproduction, and we had a mixed crew of Americans and Canadians who got along very well. In a sort of pathetic way, they were really happy to be working on a feature film in L.A., because so few are shot there now—it’s all TV. Weird, but true.

Some reviewers said the film is dated—that it has more of a Nineties vibe than a contemporary one.

The critics who said that were positioning themselves as real insiders who really know what Hollywood’s like, but I think they were thinking: “Oh, this script was written 20 years ago, so it must be dated.” But those people do not know what they’re talking about. It’s not dated at all. In fact, what came out in [Sony’s] hacked e-mails shows you that the film is in the exact same spot in Hollywood [laughs]. Bruce and I have had so many meetings with so many executives that go right up to last year, that if there had been anything dated we would have updated it. Believe me, it’s absolutely current. Some meetings I’d had with studios were more surreal than anything that’s in the movie—more absurd, more bizarre. It’s amusing to me that I couldn’t even be offended by the ridiculous and, in fact, quite offensive things that were happening. I don’t want to get into the details, but there are some good stories there.

Was there a danger of perpetuating a myth about corrupt behavior in Hollywood, or is it a case of there’s no smoke without fire?

It’s not exactly corruption per se—not in the sense of, say, Vladimir Putin’s Russia—but it’s very destructive and corrosive to be famous, to be seen, to be current, to be a player. There’s the money as well, of course, but then beyond the money is that existential dread of no longer existing on the scene: I call it a pre-death. Your career dies before you die. For some people that’s worse than real death—it’s unbearable. What the movie doesn’t really deal with is the occasional creative brilliance of Hollywood and the people that are there. We’re dealing with the darker side of it, so we don’t, for example, see Havana Segrand on set acting in her movie—and maybe she was good. Maybe the movie was going to be good. We don’t know, but we do know the director of that film [played by Gord Rand] is a raving coward and a liar. It doesn’t mean he didn’t make a good movie ultimately. We don’t know, so we didn’t deal with that aspect of it.

I see the film as part of a continuum with the Twenties Hollywood scandals, while Havana conjures up Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (50). But your use of star maps in the credits—not Hollywood star maps, but maps of the heavens—suggest you were aiming for a greater cosmic resonance. It’s bigger than Hollywood, isn’t it?

You can see that with [Agatha and Benjie] at the end. It’s a map of the future and it’s a matter of creativity, humanity, and having a cosmic perspective rather than the perspective that our characters have, which is so narrow, so self-referencing, and so self-obsessed. We’re suggesting that this lifestyle is one of the more desiccating and shriveling there is. You can’t escape the gravitational pull of Planet Hollywood when it’s so dense and so and powerful that you can’t see the real world and you can’t even see your life outside of that planet.

I responded to the film as a psychological drama. Agatha’s return to Hollywood from the psychiatric hospital represents the return of the repressed for the rest of the Weiss family. Havana is still fighting an Electra Complex battle with her dead mother, which is why she covets a role in a movie that her more famous actress mother once played.

For Bruce and I, Maps to the Stars is completely psychologically realistic. That’s why we don’t think it’s a satire at all. When I think of satire, I think of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”; there’s exaggeration and deliberate fantasy and so on. For a lot of people now, satire means something that’s nasty and funny, but it means a lot more than that. Maps is more like a docudrama than a satire. Bruce said he has heard every line of dialogue in the movie actually spoken by someone at some point. It doesn’t surprise me that you should respond to it on a psychological level because that’s really where it lives. I said to my actors: “Don’t worry about any humor or exaggeration. Forget about all of that—it will take care of itself. Just play it for the human reality of the relationships.”

I think of the movie as a Greek tragedy, and certainly Bruce was aware of that. I don’t think he actually modeled it on Greek tragedy, but he fell into it. In other words, those things that motivated the Greeks to write what they did also motivated Bruce to write what he did in a modern context.

Although you’re certainly aware of it when you’re making a movie, thinking about psychology doesn’t really help when you’re on the set, say, because, as is well understood, to be universal you must be extremely specific, and we had very specific characters. You can’t really act in abstract concepts if you’re an actor—you have to act real emotions. It’s valuable to analyze why something might have worked or not worked dramatically, but that’s after the fact.

We talked about Maps to the Stars having a connection with Dead Ringers. It has ideas in common with Spider (02), too. In that film, Dennis Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) pieces together his childhood, when he killed his mother, thinking, perhaps, that she was his father’s mistress, Yvonne (Miranda Richardson plays both women). In Maps, Benjie thinks he’s strangling the ghost of the little girl whom he’d visited in hospital as a publicity stunt—only to find he’s throttled the little boy he’s been forced to act with. Dennis is schizophrenic and Agatha may be the same. Then, Havana verbalizes her inner foulness while sitting on the toilet, as does Yvonne when she talks about her blocked toilet. Again, were you conscious of those similarities, assuming you agree with them?

I do agree, but, no, I wasn’t conscious of them. Bruce has seen Spider, but I obviously hadn’t made it yet when he wrote the [Maps to the Stars] script, so to me it’s a coincidence. Bruce and I both understand—and certainly Patrick McGrath understood it when he wrote Spider—that you are not born with an identity and a personality. Spider is about the difficulty and desperation involved in creating an identity, and obviously everybody in Maps to the Stars is trying to do the same. You see Havana’s identity shift from moment to moment. When she’s with her sort-of actor-boyfriend, she’s like a little girl. When she’s with Agatha, she’s the mistress of the household, very strong and adult. Because creating an identity requires force of will and takes a lot of energy, when that energy flags, as it does with schizophrenia, the disintegration can be quite spectacular. So that’s the connection for me between Spider and Maps to the Stars—this potent element of the human condition that’s worth exploring in film.

Like Dennis in Spider, Agatha is highly sympathetic, although she’s unstable and dangerous. I was yearning for her to escape. Obviously, a movie as anguished as this needs someone for the audience to care about.

Some people told me they hated Benjie at first but ultimately came to love him because they see how vulnerable he is, how damaged he was by his context and not out of his own inadequacies. And so you always hope. I never feel that movies need people who are sympathetic, but they need characters who are fascinating and charismatic, or you’ll have people feeling shut out of a movie and that is not something I would intend. At the same time, I don’t wanna throw in a guy who loves his nice, sweet dog so that you’ll like him.

Unlike your early films, Maps to the Stars is cold, clear, uncluttered, and mostly still—the camera moves rarely. It focuses attention on the characters, the dynamic between them, and their environment. How did that become your prevailing style?

I feel that was happening as far back as The Fly [86], which was really two people, or occasionally three people, in a room. I thought, “Oh this is interesting.” It’s almost like a Samuel Beckett situation. Without pushing that idea too much, in my mind at least I really understood that Beckettian desire for incredible stillness and more and more simplicity, which could allow for more and more complexity.

My director of photography, Peter Suschitzky, who first shot for me on Dead Ringers, said to me: “Your style has really changed a lot.” It wasn’t so much to do with camera movement, but a matter of how much coverage I used to get. That, frankly, was to do with my being a relatively young and inexperienced filmmaker and feeling that I must have a lot of stuff in the editing room to protect me in case I’d made some mistake on the set. As you get older—this is how it works for me anyway—I have more and more confidence that I’ve made the right decision on the set and I don’t need to cover setups from so many different angles or do so many takes.

Also, I have more confidence in my casting. If you cast the film correctly and you’ve got the right actors, and they know what they’re doing, you don’t need to shoot a lot. Ralph Fiennes said to me on Spider that he got the least direction from any director he has ever had, and he wasn’t saying it as a negative. I said: “Well, you know, we did a lot of directing when we were deciding what your clothes were gonna be, how your hair was gonna be, and how you would walk. And once you got on the set, you were Spider [as Dennis is known]. I didn’t need to tell you how to be him anymore. I just told you what the frame is, how big you are in it, and how to play the frame—but that was it.”

It was the same with Maps to the Stars. I did just one or two takes of each setup and I didn’t do masters, medium shots, close-ups, ultra close-ups—I didn’t do any of that. I only shot as much as I needed. So my editor, Ronald Sanders, who’s worked with me for nearly 40 years, said: “I don’t have anything to cut with.” I said: “Well, just cut what you can.” And I had the director’s cut ready in two days after he showed me the rough cut.

One can imagine Havana Segrand being incredibly needy on the set and wanting all kinds of pampering and reassurance from her directors.

Absolutely she would. That’s why she’s such an opposite of Julie [Julianne Moore], who doesn’t require any of those things.

What were your thoughts about the ghosts in the films? Havana is haunted by her dead mother (played by Sarah Gadon), Benjie is haunted by the hospital girl, who’s died of cancer.

Well, one of the things I cut from the script was a scene in which Agatha was riding in a car and she looked out the window to see the street full of children—dead children. I said to Bruce: “I don’t believe in an afterlife, therefore I don’t believe in ghosts. I do understand being haunted by dead people in your life, but not in the literal sense of actual, physical ghosts.” I had to take that scene out because it suggested Agatha was seeing ghosts of children she hadn’t known, so they would take on a different level of physical reality. Bruce completely understood and he didn’t mind. My approach is that ghosts are like memories—you might be haunted by your dead parents, whose voices you can hear in your head, whose presence is almost physical. I know for a fact that is real. But they are not ghosts in a living-after-death kind of way.

Benjie’s being haunted indicates that, deep down, he has a conscience—he feels guilty for having exploited the dying girl.

That’s the secret he has. He shares it with his psychiatrist ultimately, but her approach is very benign and clinical. She doesn’t get deeply into the real meaning of it, which is that Benjie is quite a sensitive kid and not the crude, tough guy that he likes to pretend to be, which is the role he has created for himself and has to sell to survive. So his fear and this empathy come out in a different way.

Agatha’s leather gloves, which she’s never without, fetishize her burned forearms and create a sexual mystery about her. It’s the same with Rosanna Arquette’s thigh wounds in Crash (96).

Well, it’s lovely when Havana says to Jerome [Robert Pattinson]: “Did you make her take off her gloves when you were fucking her?” Because Havana, who zeroes in on things like that immediately, understands the fetishistic possibility of those gloves, which Agatha might genuinely be naïve about. She probably thinks she’s just covering up her scars and that nobody will somehow notice she’s wearing these gloves in the heat of the summer. That was certainly in Bruce’s script.

There are several haunting quotations in Maps to the Stars from “Liberty,” the poem written by the French Surrealist Paul Eluard. The implication is that the only liberty to be found by these characters is death.

Yes. It’s a different interpretation of the poem, which was written during World War II and had had to do with the Nazi occupation of France, particularly Paris, though Eluard initially wrote it as a love poem for a woman. Liberty of creative freedom, liberty of financial freedom, liberty of emotional freedom—all these things are possible for most of the people in the film. But for these doomed children, none of these things are available because they’ve been screwed up and deformed, and, as Agatha is aware and sort of teaches Benjie, the only freedom is death.

Bruce and I got an interesting reaction to our use of the poem from the Eluard family, but as the film shows, a poem is an organic, living thing, as all art is. It can be reinterpreted endlessly. In fact, one of the things I did was put the poem into more scenes than Bruce originally had it in. For example, when Agatha is on her knees in front of the stars on Hollywood Boulevard, she doesn’t say anything in the script. But I thought: “No, this needs something—a prayer or a kind of incantation.” So I added the poem there and a few other places as well.

Agatha at least has agency at the end. She decides her own destiny, which is optimistic in a way.

It’s weirdly optimistic because she’s so sweet and gentle at the end, and so is Benjie. I feel personally that this strange sensual and consensual wedding ceremony is very touching. She’s trying to deal with all the madness of her life and her parents’ lives, and all the sins of the parents that were visited on her and Benjie. That ending was always there in Bruce’s script and it never failed to affect me. When the movie begins, you might think: “This is gonna be a kind of rude and jaunty critique of Hollywood.” But then it suddenly changes into something else, and I think you see the real emotional, human underpinnings of that.

David Cronenberg: The Operating Theatre Fan website run by Hans Heydebreck

Film Reference Kim Newman, updated by John McCarty

David Cronenberg Ashsley Allinson from Senses of Cinema

David Cronenberg Retrospective | UGO.com Jordan Hoffman and Kerry Douglas Dye examine every Cronenberg film

All-Movie Guide bio from Jonathan Crow

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Canadian Film Encyclopedia biography by Christine Ramsay

Cronenberg, David bio by Piers Handling from The Canadian Encyclopedia

Northern Stars Biography

David Cronenberg Horror Director’s Profile

David Cronenberg Esplatter Horror Profile

David Cronenberg - Actor, Characters as Source Material, Director ... Profile from Variety

David Cronenberg @ Filmbug bio information

David Cronenberg Profile from the Canada’s Walk of Fame

filmfodder.com: movies: specials: director profiles: david cronenberg a brief profile by Chris Barry from Filmfodder

FilmInFocus: David Cronenberg On the Web fan website by Scott Macaulay

The Plasma Pool: David Cronenberg Fan Site

Mind Over Matter - Film Comment David Cronenberg: mind over matter, by Gavin Smith, feature and interview from Film Comment, March-April, 1997

Eviscerating David Cronenberg Essay by David Blakesley from Enculturation, Fall 1998

Death Drive's Joy Ride: David Cronenberg's Crash, by Manuel Camblor from Other Voices: A Journal of Critical Thought, January 1999

An article on Salon.com Brilliant Careers, 3 page essay from Salon by Steve Burgess, November 30, 1999

American Nightmare - The Baying of Pigs: Reflections on the New ... The Baying of Pigs: Reflections on the New American Horror Movie, by Jack Sargeant from Senses of Cinema, July 2001

end of the road: David Cronenberg's Crash and the fading of the ... The end of the road: David Cronenberg's Crash and the fading of the West, 8 page essay by Mikita Brottman and Christopher Sharrett from Literature Film Quarterly (2002)

Excess and Resistance in Feminised Bodies: David Cronenberg's ... Excess and Resistance in Feminised Bodies: David Cronenberg's Videodrome and Jean Baudrillard's Seduction, by Martin Ham from Senses of Cinema, January 2004

Spectacular Optics: The Deployment of Special Effects in David Cronenberg's Films, by Steffen Hantke from Film Criticism (Winter 2004/2005) (pdf)

Director's statement by David Cronenberg on 'Stereo' and 'Crimes of the Future', 2005 See Reel 23

David Cronenberg's Body Language - New York Times 5 page essay by Jonathan Dee from The New York Times, September 18, 2005

UbuWeb Sound - Andy Warhol Accompanying Cronenberg audio recordings about Warhol from the exhibition Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars Death and Disasters, 1962-1964, commentary by David Cronenberg, Mary-Lou Green, Dennis Hopper, David Moos, James Rosenquist and Amy Taubin, recorded at The Art Gallery of Ontario, May 19. 2006

Primer: David Cronenberg | The A.V. Club Cronenberg 101 by Keith Phipps of The Onion, September 7, 2007

David Cronenberg: on Andy Warhol | Film | The Guardian He created his own universe and became its star, written by David Cronenberg from The Guardian, September 11, 2006

David Cronenberg's masterful take on globalization - Arts ... Promise Fulfilled, Rachel Giese from CBC News, September 13, 2007

The Best of David Cronenberg - Film.com C. Robert Cargill at film.com, September 14, 2007

David Cronenberg, Dead Serious - washingtonpost.com Desson Thomson from The Washington Post, September 17, 2007

Director David Cronenberg: Responsible violence? - CNN.com September 24, 2007

Cronenberg, David They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

David Cronenberg: Author Or Filmmaker? - Google Books Result David Cronenberg, written by Mark Browning (206 pages) 2007, may be seen in its entirety in (pdf) format

David Cronenberg Interviews Salman Rushdie Cronenberg Meets Rushdie, from Shift magazine, June-July 1995

On "Crash" Interview by Harlon Jacobson from Film Scouts, May 19, 1996

Salon Interview: Accidents Will Happen interview by Susie Bright from Salon, March 21, 1997

Spliced Wire Interview (1999) Metaphor Man, article and interview by Rob Blackwelder, April 14, 1999

David Cronenberg Nick Roddick interview at the Berlin Film Festival 1999

The Space Film Features: David Cronenberg on Spider Interview by Robert Gray at Cannes May 21, 2002

PREVIOUS INTERVIEW From Flies to Spiders, a Cronenberg interview by Walter Chaw, November 15, 2002

Film Critic Interview (2003) Welcome to His Nightmare: "Spider" Director David Cronenberg, interview by Christopher Null

A conversation with Ralph Fiennes and David Cronenberg about ... Video interview about SPIDER by Charlie Rose on PBS (56:30)

David Cronenberg on "Spider": "Reality Is What You Make Of It" Interview by Anthony Kaufman from indieWIRE, February 28, 2003

David Cronenberg Georgia Straight Ken Eisner interview from Georgia Straight, February 27 – March 6, 2003

Film Freak Central Feature an overview of interviews and film reviews by Walter Chaw, March 9, 2003

David Cronenberg | The A.V. Club Interview by Keith Phipps from The Onion, March 12, 2003

Premiere - Sex on Film: David Cronenberg Interview by Karl Rozemeyer from Premiere magazine, 2005

David Cronenberg interview - News - Film - Time Out London Geoff Andrew interview from Time Out London, September 22, 2005

PopEntertainment.com: David Cronenberg interview about 'A History ... Interview by Brad Balfour from Pop Entertainment magazine, November 3, 2005

GreenCine Interview (2006) by David D’Arcy, March 29, 2006

Film Society of Lincoln Center Amy Taubin interview with Cronenberg from Film Comment (September, October 2007)

click here Pain Relief, David Cronenberg’s existential promises, by Jennifer Merin, who interviews the director for The New York Press, October 10, 2007

New York's Premier Alternative Newspaper. Arts, Music, Food, Movies and Opinion David Cronenberg: Secret Jew or Sell-out? Interview by Eric Kohn from The New York Press, October 10, 2007

David Cronenberg Interview | UGO.com Interview by the Underground Revolutionaries (2007)

David Cronenberg Interview by Gabriel Alvarez from Complex.com (2007)

Body Language: An Interview With David Cronenberg | The Underwire ... Scott Thill interview from Wired News, December 29, 2007

Interview with Cronenberg by SBIFF at UCSB regarding his life, work and Eastern Promises Video interview by Roger Durling at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, October 12, 2007 (80:36)

iKlipz See Show Share Video Lunch with David interview by David Poland, October 15, 2007 (28:31)

BBC interview with Cronenberg Video interview by Newsnight Review’s Martha Kearney from the BBC October 19, 2007 (13:11)

David Cronenberg Interviewed - Film Comment Amy Taubin interview, October 4, 2011

Chris Buck a photo of the director

David Cronenberg Filmography

Ranked 9th on The Guardian's 2004 List of the World's 40 Best Directors

David Cronenberg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

FROM THE DRAIN

Canada (14 mi) 1967

User comments from imdb Author: Fabian

Yes, I've seen 'From The Drain'! Do I get a certificate or something? Am I the most dedicated Cronenfan ever? Surely one of them (or at least I'd like to think I was, as do all obsessives). Until recently, 'Stereo' and 'Crimes of the Future' were the ultimate target for obscurity, but here is a new one.

Anyway, this black and white short (roughly 13 mins) is simply brilliant, in my humble opinion. Shot in a darkened bathroom, it concerns a surreal dialogue between two very strange men sitting in a bath (that probably counts as a spoiler for this film). One man is camp and talkative, while the other is a nervous nutter, concerned that a bathplug be placed in the 'drain end of the tub' to stop 'tendrils' from 'coming up from the drain'. I won't go into too much detail, because the dialogue is the basis of the film.

This snapshot of a film actually has a sense of warmth and humanity not necessarily present in Cronenberg's later work, partly achieved by the charming soundtrack, and it is also more avant-garde in style, but the sinister, strange, and slightly detached qualities that went on to become his trademark are equally present, as the title suggests.

I cannot praise 'From The Drain' highly enough, and it is possibly now my favourite short of all time (up there with 'Un Chien Andalou'). If you get a chance to see it, make sure you do.

STEREO

Canada (65 mi) 1969

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

Canada (70 mi) 1970

Time Out Tony Rayns

Crimes of the Future explores a world of genetic mutations, in which all adult women have died from the use of cosmetics and the surviving men keep finding themselves reverting to more primitive forms. The mainspring of Cronenberg's humour is the discrepancy between theory and actual experience; as with the earlier Stereo, the movie is dominated by an 'absent' theorist (in this case the mad dermatologist Antoine Rouge), whose hapless disciple struggles to uphold his master's teachings in situations of escalating absurdity and anarchy. The humour couldn't be blacker, and the quality of invention is outrageously high.

Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] (capsule review)

This scrabbly, extended 1970 short bridges the gap between David Cronenberg's early independent films and the commercial horror movies (Scanners, etc) for which he's known. Filmed in 16-millimeter and using Toronto's stock of modernist architecture for an Alphaville-like discount vision of the future, it's a pseudodocumentary, with lugubrious dramatic passages, about a devastating plague caused by a secret ingredient in a line of cosmetics. All of Cronenberg's personal obsessions--the distortion of the body, the grotesquerie of sex--are on display, though the treatment is a bit sophomoric. A curiosity item for hard-core Cronenberg fans.

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

In the future when a disease is killing off women who have reached puberty, a researcher who moves from occupation to occupation finds himself haunted by the memory of his former mentor, for whom the disease is named.

Heaven only knows what I would have thought of this bizarre art film if David Cronenberg were not now a well-known director whose various areas of obsession and interest were not well-documented. I think it would have been tempting to dismiss the film in that case, but there's no doubt that it's a lot more fascinating precisely because one sees so much of the thematic interests of later Cronenberg in the movie. It might take a few viewings to figure out the details of the storyline, though it is obvious that there is a unity holding it all together. The bio for Cronenberg on the DVD of this movie claims that he is trying to find the right balance between the intellectual and the visceral in his movies, and that certainly applies here; it is interesting to work out the details, while at the same time, I do find myself somewhat repelled by some of the subject matter, in particular the theme of pedophilia that pops up in the second half of the movie. According to the bio, Cronenberg himself saw that this type of art film led him to a creative dead end; he would eventually turn to the horror genre to help him flesh out his visions.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

SHIVERS

aka: They Came From Within

aka: The Parasite Murders

Canada (87 mi) 1975

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A-]

David Cronenberg’s debut feature prefigured both Alien and AIDS with its tale of parasites -- a metaphorical sexually transmitted disease -- that turn humans into nymphomaniacal zombies as they move from host to host, infecting the residents of a Canadian apartment complex. As in all of Cronenberg’s films, the movie has a low-key immediacy to it that makes the perversions of its milieu all the more distressing.

This first commercial feature by a former underground film-maker offers a heady, if finally muddled, combination of globs of horror and social criticism. Despite its exploitation format, even the British censor discerned a moral to the tale and passed it uncut. Best is the way Cronenberg deliberately manipulates his synthetic cast and bland visuals, whose plastic surfaces erupt to reveal their repressions and taboos beneath; slug-like parasites (a mix of aphrodisiac and venereal disease) rampage through a luxury tower block, turning the inhabitants into sex-craving zombies. But exactly what is its moral? One suspects Cronenberg is laughing up his sleeve, as some (like the censor) read Shivers as an attack on permissiveness, while others take it as an indictment of the whole of modern society. Often, however, the film stops little short of wholesale disgust at the human condition. Misanthropic, indeed, but the black humour and general inventiveness place it high above most contemporary horror pictures.

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3/5]

When David Cronenberg first started directing, he made horror films like no others. Marrying social concerns with a willingness and ability to exploit an audience's discomfort with its own bodies, in such films as Rabid, The Brood, and Videodrome, Cronenberg turned unspoken anxieties into full-fledged nightmares. While his work has grown subtler, the same sensibility continues to inform it. What most people missed in all the furor over last year's Crash was that it wasn't so much about car-crash fetishists themselves. Instead, it used sex and car crashes as a powerful metaphor for all uncomfortably entwined, difficult-to-control desires. The recently re-released Shivers (a.k.a. They Came From Within) is Cronenberg's first film, and it can easily be seen as a more graphic examination of similar themes. Set in an isolated, ultra-modern high-rise apartment building in Cronenberg's native Canada, Shivers concerns the aftermath of a mad scientist's attempt to breed a helpful parasite. Designed to bring about a sexual utopia and described as a cross between an aphrodisiac and a disease, the parasite takes the form of what looks like a raw phallus and causes those it infects to couple indiscriminately, often violently. As the infection grows to epidemic proportions, an increasingly smaller number of "normal" people are left trying to fight it off or escape. Shocking in its violence, Shivers would be just as shocking without it. The film relies as heavily on the director's already-evident ability to disturb through suggestion as it does on its special effects, which would later inspire Alien. Released in 1975, Shivers can be seen as an expression of discomfort with the then-swinging sexual revolution, but it doesn't have to be. By the time its concluding sequences arrive, the apartment building has been turned into a horrific landscape of sexual fear that's applicable to any era. Like the creatures in the films, and many of Cronenberg's other films themselves, Shivers is disturbing on an almost biological level.

David Cronenberg likes icky things. His most famous films, including The Fly, Scanners, and Videodrome, all deal with the prospect of yuppies being betrayed by their own bodies. He is sharply critical of the "Me" generation, and records with glee their slow aging.

In this film, the Me generation have succeeded in cutting themselves off from the dregs of society. The action takes place in a high-rise apartment complex, where young urban professionals and older folks can live without ever having to deal with the outside world. They have their own dentist, doctor, and grocery store. They also have a resident who is a scientist. His life's work is to create a parasite that reduces people to their base sexual instincts, abandoning all pretensions of civilization. The problem is that he is testing his experiment on a young girl who is popular with most of the men in the complex. He realizes that his experiment is infecting the residents, and kills her and himself in an attempt to destroy the parasite. He is too late, and the nasty little penis-shaped grubs crawl around and turn the place into a swinger's utopia. The story follows the complex's doctor as he attempts to stop the epidemic of sexuality while gamely trying to fight off his own urges.

Cronenberg said in an interview that he thinks biology is destiny, and social upheaval results when men and women attempt to subvert their sex roles. He presents in this film a kind of sexual-revolution-as-virus, a cautionary tale about the logical (in his mind) extremes of "liberation." He shows a horror story of men attacking and kissing men, women with women, and a Night of the Living Dead–like parade of sexual zombies looking to satisfy their urges at the expense of social norms.

This film is pretty funny, with the upstanding doctor fighting against homosexuality and promiscuity while having an affair with his secretary. The "me" generation discarded sexual norms when it suited them, and Cronenberg offers a variety of punishments for their hypocrisy.

Shivers Thomas Caldwell from Senses of Cinema

Classic-Horror Nate Yapp

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Teddy Blanks]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Douglas P Mosurak retrospective

horroryearbook.com [Brain Hammer] reviewing 3 Lynn Lowry films

DVD Verdict [Brett Cullum]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

eFilmCritic Reviews The Ultimate Dancing Machine

Bloodtype Online [Jeff Wardle]

Read the complete review for They Came From Within Maitland McDonagh from TV Guide magazine

Black Hole DVD Reviews also reviewing RABID

Mondo Digital also reviewing VIDEODROME, NAKED LUNCH, EXISTENZ, RABID, and CRASH

BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) review

San Francisco Examiner (Bob Stephens) review

RABID

Canada (91 mi) 1977

"Now who hasn't been on a crowded subway and wanted to bite someone's ear off? I know that I've certainly wanted to do that many times."

—David Cronenberg on the commentary track of Rabid

Wade Major from Boxoffice magazine (link lost):

The most amazing thing about 1976's "Rabid" is that there is absolutely no sign whatsoever, anywhere in the movie, that writer/director David Cronenberg would evolve into anything more than a low-budget horror film king, much less a celebrated art film auteur. Ex-porn queen Marilyn Chambers stars as a woman whose life is saved by an experimental surgery that has the unfortunate side effect of giving her a vampiric taste for blood that passes a kind of human rabies on to her victims.

There's a definite 1970s independent exploitation film feel to the whole affair that resembles, in strange and significant ways, other cult films of the era like "Mad Max" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]

As a maker of sci-fi/horror movies, Cronenberg seems obsessed with the links between sex and violence as well as the Body Snatchers theme of a possessed community. His earlier combination of the two strains in Shivers was too mechanically lurid and derivative to be very effective, but Rabid is far more successful. This time Cronenberg has opened up his story so that it literally portrays the panic and slow devastation of a whole Canadian city: a new strain of rabies reduces its victims to foaming murderous animals, and Cronenberg examines the mysterious sexual agency behind the plague with bewitching ambiguity. Rabid is also far better staged than its predecessor, and the best scenes, including one classic episode in a chicken takeaway, are pitched ingeniously between shock and parody, never quite succumbing to farce. None of the other recent apocalypse movies has shown so much political or cinematic sophistication.

David Cronenberg is an interesting guy. I am fascinated by his films, even though they are disturbing and they project a worldview and an idea of human nature that I find abhorrent. I watched an interview with him once where he said that he finds human sexuality horrific, which explains a great deal about his films. In a lot of ways, he makes the same film over and over: humans do something bad that has horrible, and usually sexual, consequences, usually ending in the utter obliteration of the species or, even worse, the breaking down of our society's already weak sexual mores. With this film and 1975's Shivers, Cronenberg explores with exacting dread and sick fascination the negative outcomes of the sexual revolution and the advance of what he sees as the resulting narcissistic and shallow—in the end, empty—value system.

It was a bit of casting genius that led him to cast porn starlet Marilyn Chambers, recently made a star beyond the world of porn by the crossover success of Behind the Green Door, as his antiheroine. She plays the victim of a motorcycle accident who is horribly scarred but is "saved" by a radical new plastic surgery procedure practiced at a remote spa and hospital for the idle rich. The procedure is a success, except that she wakes up with a thirst for blood and an insatiable sexual appetite. Cronenberg likes icky, gooey things, bodily fluids and gelatinous slime, and here he came up with what is probably his most obvious but near-genius effect: Chambers has an orifice under her arm that is a combination of a mouth, a penis, and a vagina, from which extrudes a sharp spear—a vagina dentata for the 1970s. He must have been so proud. It is with this that Chambers feeds from the blood of her victims, and it is through this that she spreads a rabies-like disease that turns her victims into raving lunatics who foam at the mouth and bite people, spreading the disease onward. Through this, Cronenberg has completely separated the ill effects of sex and the act of sex itself from the genitalia, in effect crystallizing his suspicion that the sexual revolution has broken down the "traditional" way of interacting. Forgive my clinical discussion, but you have to talk about bodily fluids and sexual organs if you're going to talk about Cronenberg.

Here the casting becomes somewhat problematic. Chambers' character is an unwilling victim of the experiments of others, and she cannot control the new urges that make her attack people. She even has a sort of conscience about it, not wanting to attack a close friend late in the film. However, she is the cause of a virulent plague that kills everyone it touches and nearly results in the downfall of civilization. Chambers herself is a porn star, something that any audience of Rabid would be well aware of. Perhaps Chambers represented to Cronenberg the perfect example of what he saw as wrong with society's ideas of sexuality, and making her, innocent or not (and you can't help but think that he didn't believe she was innocent), the cause of a plague.

Chambers acquits herself well, and Cronenberg is nothing less than competent. Some of his dialog is clunky, and it looks like a lot of his supporting cast was drawn from local townspeople, etc. However, he is good at crafting memorable images, such as the fate of Chambers, and his horror films are among that small subset that attempt to deal with important issues in a more or less intelligent way. Cronenberg is one of the last true auteurs working today: his films are obviously his own, he presents a coherent worldview, and I can only guess that they are intensely personal explorations, much like sitting in on a therapy session with him. I can only imagine what he sees in the inkblots.

Movie Cynics (Potentially Offensive) The Vocabularist

David Cronenberg gets mad credit for his movies during the ‘80s and ‘90s, but in the ‘70s, while most horror twats were rocking the whole slasher formula and trying to figure out a way to take advantage of it themselves, Cronenberg was slowly cultivating and developing his “body horror” style which would come to be fully realized later in his career. One of the first films he attempted to tackle was a little movie called Rabid, and odd mishmash of medical mumbo jumbo and truly off the wall occurrences. The film plays out like a more realistic Dawn of the Dead mixed with a ideas that could almost conceivably work… and then it gets all crazy in true Cronenbergian fashion.

The film starts out with a killer motorcycle accident as a couple is torched in an explosion. Luckily, they crash within driving distance of the Keloid Institute, a plastic surgery facility. The doctor in charge performs a radical treatment on the female of the couple, an experiment that will have dire consequences for the entire country of Canada. The woman develops a fevered lust for blood, and everyone she attacks turns into a rabid bloodlusting freak… kind of like a comic book geek after they are told that The Dark Knight is sold out.

The film is rough around the edges, but for a second feature from a Canadian director, it is pretty impressive. The scale of the film is excellent and feels like it was shot with a budget that was at least four times more than it actually was. Cronenberg’s film isn’t anywhere near as good as his films from later in his career, but Rabid definitely shows the potential that was within him. The best part about the movie is the way that it starts out small and grows progressively larger, capturing the growing panic of the epidemic as it spreads across Canada.

The acting is awesome. Pornstar Marilyn Chambers proves that she can do more than just suck cocks as the alluring Rose. Chambers makes the film and she exists as the sole quality performance in the whole film. The rest of the cast is distinctly… Canadian. Meaning they don’t exhibit much emotion at all. Besides… even if they were good it would be wasted when you’re so busy staring at Chambers’ chesticles the whole time.

Rabid is a great flick in its own right, even if you were to throw out the fact that it is an early Cronenberg flick and features a scantily clad Marilyn Chambers. There are some great scenes of carnage and they are all done with some killer, over-the-top special effects. People turn into rabid monsters that foam at the mouth and take out other people until the whole city of Montreal falls under martial law… if only Canada would suffer that fate for real. You’ve got exploding heads, people being gunned down left, and right and even a Santa-cide… you can’t beat that.

Rabid has its flaws, but it still rocks. If anything, it’s probably better than when it first came out… there’s just something awesome about watching a ‘70s pornstar suck the blood out of people with her armpit vagina… not so sure about the “Drunken Indian” characters listed in the film’s credits, but fuck it, it’s Cronenberg.

Final Synopsis: Rabid is great for two reasons. Reason #1: It really allows you to see the growth in Cronenberg’s style, when contrasted with his later flicks. Reason #2: A pornstar attacks people with her vagina armpit. You can’t beat that. Watch the shit out of this movie. It’s awesome.

Points Lost: -1 for shitty melodramatic score, -1 for the actor playing the main dude, he sucks, -1 for a lame ending

Lesson Learned: Always check a chick’s armpit before you bang her.

Burning Question: Why didn’t Chambers’ career take off? You know… besides the whole slurping dongs on film thing.

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! Liz Kingsley

DVD Outsider Slarek

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Lang Thompson

Oh, the Horror! [Brett H.]

filmcritic.com Rachel Gordon

Classic-Horror Mikhail Skoptsov

Reel.com DVD review [Rudy Joggerst]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

eFilmCritic Jay Seaver

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

Monsters at Play Paul Bistoff

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross) dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]

Popcorn Pictures

DVD Crypt [Mike Long]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

The Terror Trap Dan and Jason

DVD Resurrections also seen here: Fatally Yours

Black Hole DVD Reviews also reviewing SHIVERS

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing THE BROOD

Mondo Digital also reviewing VIDEODROME, NAKED LUNCH, EXISTENZ, SHIVERS, and CRASH

FAST COMPANY

Canada (91 mi) 1979

Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski) review

Drag racing may seem an aberrant subject for the Carl Dreyer of Splatter, but the sport is the man's secret passion, and it shows. The hokey plot is strictly off the peg: when soft-hearted hairy-arse drag racers are shit-sandwiched between corrupt team manager (Saxon at his most reptilian) and the mean-minded neanderthal opposition, they come up smelling like roses. But Cronenberg's obsessive attention to the detail of preparing the machines, mixing the fuel, armour-plating the drivers and theical skills of winning, makes the track sequences enthralling. The weakness (in line with every other racetrack saga) is that once off the track, the picture hits the skids. Instead of following through the ruthless drive of the drag strip, it indulges in ill-advised sidetracks into softcore sex, gags and rock'n'roll, a brand of exploitation the late Claudia Jennings (here in her last screen role) made her own in the likes of Truck Stop Women. But at the beginning, middle and end, there are still the races, staged amid the racket and the razzmatazz with Cronenberg's customary skill.

On the surface, this unassuming, Canadian-lensed flick about race cars and their drivers smacks of macho dreck, with a plot we've seen a dozen times. The cast is littered with exploitation superstars, including William Smith, John Saxon and the always-radiant Claudia Jennings (on the other hand, nowadays she's probably not so radiant after all). So what makes it different? It's directed by everyone's favorite flesh-revisionist, David Cronenberg, who snuck this pic in between RABID and THE BROOD, and equipped with his first million-dollar-plus budget, brought his love for auto racing to the screen. Just don't expect any visceral revelations (giant slugs do not leap out of Claudia's mouth), because Cronenberg trades cheap thrills a for a solid character-driven melodrama, capturing the day-to-day lifestyle of a small-time racing team (while keeping the macho bullshit to a minimum). Smith stars as the charismatic Lonnie "Lucky Man" Johnson, the king of the local drag racers. Saxon is the sleazy head of FastCo, Lucky's oil company sponsor. And although Jennings doesn't show up 'til the second half (playing Sammy, Smith's long-suffering "old lady"), it's an honest-to-goodness character instead of her usual, cardboard T&A roles. In between the non-stop footage of real-life drag races, funny cars and revving engines, the plot has Saxon (always top notch as a scumbag) putting the thumbscrews to Smith to make more cash for him. But when Smith proves he's got a few scruples left, double-dealing Saxon takes back Smith's car, replaces him on the circuit and even resorts to murder. After sitting through today's avalanche of cheap, no-talent throwaway pics, it's refreshing to watch a drive-in movie that has some talent behind it, particularly the fluid photography courtesy of Mark Irwin (who would continue working with Cronenberg in VIDEODROME and THE DEAD ZONE), while cramming his camera inside the cars, to capture driver's P.O.V. Though this aberration is usually ignored when people discuss Cronenberg's career, it proves that he puts as much care into this outwardly generic tale as he does with his most deeply personal work.

Canuxploitation (spoilers)

Easily the most atypical entry on David Cronenberg's resume, Fast Company is a surprisingly straight-forward drag racing flick tailor made for a balmy night under the stars down at the local drive-in. Taking a break from the venereal horror of his earlier work, this is Cronenberg's crack at the great Canadian loser movie, a downbeat B-drama chock full of bright, splashy colours, and rubber-burning, nitro-fuelled action.

Fresh off the success of the drag queen comedy Outrageous!, producer Peter O'Brian brought grizzled character actor William Smith to the Great White North to star as fading athlete Dandy Dan in director Peter Lynch's small town wrasslin' film Blood & Guts. Lensed the following year, Fast Company may substitute the squared circle for the speedway, but it's virtually identical in every other way, as Smith reprises his role as a tired, past-his-prime competitor now being gently pushed aside to make way for a rising star. Once again, the melodrama is applied thickly, and fistfights sporadically break out to a soundtrack of twangy country rock (courtesy of Fred Mollin), but with Cronenberg behind the camera, the film is more self-assured than Lynch's sophomore sports epic.

Smith stars as Lonnie "Lucky Man" Johnson, an ex-champion drag racer who survives a harrowing explosion while testing a newly-designed, supercharged engine. His racing team's sponsor, the crooked FastCo Oil rep Phil Adamson (John Saxon), thinks this is the final nail in Lonnie's long career—he's over the hill, and Adamson wants to throw the FastCo name behind up-and-coming funny car driver Gary Black (Cedric Smith). Ignoring the protests of his girlfriend Sammy (Claudia Jennings), Lonnie is determined to show up Black, and even takes a funny car out from under fellow team member Billy "The Kid" Brocker (Nicholas Campbell) to show Adamson he can still compete.

Shot between two of the Cronenberg's more successful early horror films, Rabid and The Brood. Fast Company is a fun—if basically inconsequential—movie full of loving shots of roaring engines, popping pistons and oil-slicked roadways. Fast Company's obsession with cars and sex may anticipate the controversial 1996 hit Crash somewhat, but it's a stretch to try and fit this particular effort within the director's "new flesh" aesthetic. FastCo's vise-like grip on Lonnie's career and a scene of Campbell pouring motor oil on a pair of willing female hitchhikers are often pointed out as Cronenbergian touches, but the film is far more reminiscent of hoser classic Goin' Down the Road, than Shivers, as Lonnie reluctantly discovers that he no longer fits in the modern world.

But where Pete and Joey's worst enemy was ultimately their own skewed expectations, Lonnie is fighting a real flesh-and-blood villain, FastCo's sleazy Phil Adamson. As with Blood & Guts' crooked ring promoter, Jake McCann (John McFadyen), Adamson will stop at nothing to undermine Lonnie's career. In what could be construed as the evolution of the Canadian loser film, Fast Company becomes more about dignity and pride than many of the downbeat entries that appeared a decade earlier, offering at least a glimmer of hope for these washed-up Peter Pans of the tundra.

After working with cult names like Marilyn Chambers and Lynn Lowry, Cronenberg found himself directing an impressive cast of seasoned character actors including Smith, Saxon, and Playboy playmate Claudia Jennings—who appears in her final film role here before being killed in a car crash later that year. Each star puts in solid, believable performance, ably supported by an all-Canadian supporting cast, including Nicholas Campbell, Don Francks, George Buza, and Skip Tracer star David Petersen.

Despite being cloaked in red, white and blue imagery, Fast Company was shot in Alberta, mostly at the at the now defunct Edmonton International Speedway, which made it the first film Cronenberg made outside of Toronto or Montreal. What's most identifiably Canadian about the film, however, is the documentary-style approach longtime automotive fan Cronenberg takes when filming the dragsters in the pits. The difference between the dramatic portions of the film and the candid shots of revving dragsters is striking, with unflinching close-ups firmly entrenched in the cinema-verité style of the NFB films of the 1960s. One inventive sequence puts the camera inside the car with Lonnie, while an inset box shows his car's speedometre, putting the audience right in the heat of the action.

A unique film that has claimed its place in Canadian B-film history, Cronenberg's Fast Company is not only a reliable piece of drive-in fare, but it also gives a rare glimpse at a very different side of the acclaimed horror director.

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Lang Thompson

Monsters At Play Gregory S. Burkart

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The Digital Bits capsule dvd review [Limited Edition] Adam Jahnke

Shane R. Burridge review

THE BROOD

Canada (92 mi) 1979

Nashville Scene [Jim Ridley]

Canadian splatter-movie auteur David Cronenberg was a lot more interesting when he made movies for drive-ins instead of arthouses, and this visionary horror film ranks among his most disturbing, provocative work. At an isolated clinic, psychotherapist Oliver Reed teaches patients how to manifest mental anguish in treatable boils and lesions on their skin--a practice that may be tied to a string of grisly murders committed by hooded, mallet-wielding dwarves. It's haunting, it's terrifying, it's original, and it illustrates the governing theme of Cronenberg's work: The mind is constantly at war with the flesh, and flesh is easier to destroy.

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review

Despite his protestations to the contrary, Cronenberg's films are epics of sexual anxiety boasting an almost Calvinistic focus on the human body as the centre of evil: a strain of sexual rabies in Rabid; slug-like parasites (curiously resembling faeces) in Shivers. In The Brood the threat seems initially more exterior (and so less threatening), with deranged patients from the sinister 'Institute of Psychoplasmics' on release, and small mutant murderers leaping out from behind doors and out of cupboards. But the source of the mayhem, it transpires, is Samantha Eggar, an improbably psychotic mother, busy unleashing hatred on her husband (and on Family Life generally). It's a strong theme, unfortunately undercut by faulty pacing and odd lapses in the tension. Still worth seeing for its latently political story and its gory special effects.

ESplatter Lucius Gore

Cronenberg directed this after an ugly divorce, and it's pretty easy to see his anger expressing itself throughout the film, which some consider his very best. At the time it was released, "The Brood" was certainly the slickest film Cronenbeg had made. It didn't have a low-budget look like "Rabid" or "Shivers." It also had two powerhouse actors in lead roles: Eggar and Reed. They carry the film.

It also didn't suffer from some of the flaws of his early '80s films. "Scanners" was a muddle and "Videodrome," although now considered one of the director's finest, was a bit ahead of its time when it hit screens. So people looked back on "The Brood" as the finest he had ever produced for quite some time. It still stands up.

The movie chronicles a custody battle between abusive mother Eggar and ex-husband (Art Hindle) over their creepy-looking blonde haired daughter (Cindy Hinds), who looks like she just walked off the set of "Village of the Damned." Eggar is being treated for mental illness at a bizarre institution run by far-out psychiatrist Reed, who has discovered a way to make mental anguish manifest itself in physical forms on the human body.

As Hindle grapples with his ex's dysfunctional family, a strange group of children pop up and start killing everyone that Eggar dislikes. It's pretty obvious early on that these children are an expression of Eggar's "id" -- destroying her enemies. And that they have something to do with her unconventional psychiatric therapy.

What's nice about "The Brood" is that it is very well done, but still harks from the era when Cronenberg was delivering straight-ahead horror. It's intelligent enough to appear on indepedent film TV networks to this day, but still delivers the sleazy terror goods in the form of gore, graphic special effects, etc. For Cronenberg's horror fans, this may be his masterpeice, but it can be argued that some of his early 1990s output was even better (although it strayed from the genre that spawned his career).

Canuxploitation (spoilers) Rhett Miller

David Cronenberg established himself as Canada's premier auteur of the macabre with his first two films, Shivers (aka They Came From Within) and Rabid. Exploring the depths of the mind and its externalization through the body, Cronenberg was a burst of originality in the late 70s, when most horror filmmakers were reaping the benefits of past horror concepts. His films were a harsh critique of the burgeoning medical intervention of the time, showing how medical experimentation threw off the social balance of society. Both Shivers and Rabid documented the breakdown of society The Brood moves into a much more personal realm, the realm of the family.

In the opening shot, the camera revolves around a therapy session facilitated by Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed). In his revolutionary new scientific method, Raglan assumes the form of the patients' worst fears (in this case the patient's father), and demands that the patient express his suppressed anger and resentment. Channeling his innermost thoughts, the patient lashes out at Raglan, yelling at him and asking him why he was not a better father. The patient's psychological anger also manifests itself in another way, through aberrations of the body. As the patient gets angrier and more in tap with his emotions, scabs and bumps begin to form all over his exterior. Not only does he externalize his feelings, but he also turns his psychological pains into physical ones.

This radical new method of psychiatry, known as psychoplasmics, allows the patient to rid and address psychological traumas by bringing them into the physical world. Raglan has been gaining an intense following for his work, especially concerning his most notable patient, Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar). Nola has been having troubles dealing with her faulty marriage to Frank (Canadian horror stalwart, Art Hindle) and the custody battle that is ensuing over their daughter, Candy. As a result, she has been placed under total isolated care with Dr. Raglan.

Nola is the product of a broken home. Her parents divorced some time ago, and both are alcoholics. As a result, Nola has felt a sense of neglect in her upbringing, and she fears that the same thing may be happening with her Candy. In a radical psychoplasmic session, Nola expresses the hatred she holds for her mother. Although she verbally expresses her pain, her body remains seemingly free of the physical aberrations that are custom to the psychoplasmic process. Dealing with issues much more emotional than usual, her emotions become manifest entirely apart from her body they become "the brood". These little brooding children function through gas pockets on their backs, fueled by the rage of Nola's emotions. So when Nola confronts thoughts of her mother, the brood children exit her body and physically act out her emotions... they kill her mother.

Candy witnesses the brutal murder, and attempts to suppress her knowledge of what happened. A sergeant in the investigation of Nola's mother's murder states that no matter how much one tries to stifle their hurtful emotions, they "tend to express themselves in one way or another." He did not know how literal he was being. As more people come victim to Nola's brood, and as Frank is out trying to piece together the details, Candy is left alone. A victim of neglect and psychological abuse, Candy is the sacrifice of marriage and psychiatry gone awry.

Nola's brood kidnap Candy and bring her back to Haglan's psychiatric dwelling, in a subconscious attempt by Nola to regain custody of Candy. Frank, finally aware of the brood and Candy's whereabouts, heads over to Haglan's outpost to attempt to get her daughter back. What ensues is a bloody and expressive climax between two parents over the fate of their child. Nola reveals secrets held deep within, and the brood are finally destroyed. Although momentarily vanquished, the terror still remains... Candy develops lumps on her arm. In an ending most tragic of all, the feuds and mistakes of parents are transferred forth upon their child, continuing a chain that will only end in disaster.

The Brood was a product of familial breakdown. At the time of its inception, David Cronenberg was in the middle of a divorce with his wife and a subsequent custody battle over their daughter. Although it is doubtful that Cronenberg's estranged wife was shooting off embryos of rage, the script is still very true to the trauma Cronenberg was going through. Undoubtedly his most personal film, The Brood is a much more deep and emotional film than his previous efforts. Where Shivers, with its extended cast of characters offered no real emotional core, and Rabid looked singularly at Marilyn Chambers' character, The Brood offers a heartbreaking look into an entire family.

Although the brood kill many throughout the film, there is no victim greater than Candy. Silent almost entirely throughout, she is left only to observe the breakup of a marriage and the pitfalls of emotional jealousy and anger. There is nothing sweeter than Candy, but the familial decay removes all her serendipity.

Shivers and Rabid both used their urban landscapes to showcase the dehumanization of society. The Brood is much more organic in its locales, using the dreary wintry forests as a symbol of isolation and decay. Canada's winter landscapes are in full display throughout, with several dark and cool shots of rural Ontario. Outside of a verbal mention of Halifax, there is little else to distinguish the film as explicitly Canadian. Like most of Cronenberg's films, the locations here are meant to be as universal as problems of divorce and custody. Cronenberg's social commentary is not limited to Canada, and his undistinguished city contains that common look of Small Town, North America.

Although Cronenberg has been hailed as of late as one of Canada's premiere motion picture artists, right along with Atom Egoyan, nothing equals the power and creativity of his underground horror efforts. Before he ever hit Cannes, Cronenberg was making Canadians throw up. Devoid of any sort of artistic pretense, his films were raw, bitter and profound, and The Brood, with its personal story and emotional power, remains to this day Cronenberg's crowning achievement. In the realm of Canuxploitation, it doesn't get much better than The Brood.

THE BROOD by David Cronenberg - Part 1 / 1979 Stefan Rousseau from Cinetudes

DVD Times Mike Sutton

DVD Outsider Slarek

Oh, the Horror! [Dave Dunwoody]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Pablo Kjolseth

Monsters At Play Carl Lyon

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [5/5]

CultureCartel.com (Mike Bracken) review [3.5/5]

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

DVD Monsters and Critics [Andy McKeague]

Classic-Horror Timothy J. Rush

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

SCANNERS

Canada (103 mi) 1981

"We're gonna do it the scanner way. I'm gonna suck your brain dry. Everything you are is going to become me."

—Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside)

This looks less like Cronenberg's popular mid-'70s exploiters (Rabid, Shivers) than one of his early experimental films remade on a higher budget, with a small group of 'scanners' (warrior-telepaths) fighting off a sinister mind-war army that is backed, indirectly, by industry and the state. Part conspiracy thriller, part political tract, it is Cronenberg's most coherent movie to date, drawing a dark (but bland) world in which corporate executives engineer human conception to produce ever more powerful mental samurai. And he punctuates it with spectacular set piece confrontations which really do dramatise the abstract, ingenious premise. As always, there's a nagging feeling that the script is not quite perfectly realised on screen, but Patrick McGoohan's bizarre cameo performance, and the extraordinary moral and sexual ambiguity of the final scanning contest, more than make up for it.

Read the complete review for Scanners TV Guide magazine

SCANNERS is a nifty science fiction comic-book of a movie that makes excellent use of its low budget and hastily-written script. The film boasts a few extraordinary set pieces and some inspiredly gory special effects, as well as some resonant visual metaphors for the telepathic condition.

Ephemerol, an experimental tranquilizer, was tested on pregnant women during the 1940s and produced some severe long range side effects. Before the drug was taken off the market, 236 babies were born to the women tested. They were found to possess the ability to read minds. Dubbed "scanners," these powerful telepaths spread out through North America for decades until many were sought and rounded up by two mysterious and competing corporations: Consec, headed by Dr. Paul Ruth (McGoohan), and Biocarbon Amalgamated, headed by the deadly Darryl Revok (Ironside), a scanner assassin. Cameron Vale (Lack) is a homeless drifter with the gift. He is abducted from the street and ends up in the healing hands of Dr. Ruth, who gives him medication that allows him to control his power. Vale is informed that Revok plans to take over the world with an army of evil scanners. He must link up with his farflung "brethren" so they can determine their own futures.

Notorious for the scene in which Ironside uses his awesome scanning power to literally explode the head of another man, SCANNERS is relatively conventional by Cronenberg standards--though wildly imaginative by normal ones. Despite the loose ends and inconsistencies, SCANNERS is a memorable and absorbing genre entertainment that has spawned several direct-to-video sequels. Cronenberg displays more confidence as a visual stylist here than in his previous films, but his storytelling abilities are not much in evidence. Matters aren't helped by Lack's weak lead performance, though his large, emotive eyes add poignance to his predicament. Fortunately McGoohan (of television's "Secret Agent" and "The Prisoner") is on hand to provide an eccentrically entertaining performance as the fatherly Dr. Ruth. Ironside is fantastic as the lethal Revok, helping make this a popular cult favorite.

The Spinning Image Daniel Auty

After the intense psycho-drama/body horrors of The Brood, David Cronenberg's fifth film seems positively fluffy by comparison. Working with a much bigger budget than previously available, Cronenberg turned in a sci-fi thriller that combined slick, commercial action with those themes that would become increasingly familiar throughout his work – sinister corporations, society's rejection of the abnormal, and conflicts of the body versus the mind.

Scanners are a group of individuals blessed – or cursed – with incredible psychic powers, the ability to read thoughts and kill with the mind. A shady corporation known as ConSec has been working on turning these people into weapons, a programme led by Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan), who claims to understand scanners better than anyone else. His latest protege is Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a young man with few memories, tormented by the voices in his head. Vale is dispatched to track down and kill Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), a scanner who has been recruiting others for his own army, and murdering those who refuse to join.

Cronenberg dealt with similar themes in his experimental 1969 short film Stereo, in which a group of people are subjected to psychic experimentation, while the term 'scanner' was adopted from Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly. But despite such esoteric origins, there's little denying that the director had his eye on the box office here. There are a variety of bloody shoot-outs, big explosions, car chases and vans smashing through shop windows, all of which gave Cronenberg his biggest commercial success to date, but results in a film with a slightly jarring tone.

Scanners is at its best when playing out as an intriguing conspiracy thriller. Dr. Ruth (not to be confused with the TV sexologist!) claims that he has no idea how the scanner phenomenon began, but he's clearly lying, and as Vale embarks on his mission to find Revok, a conspiracy involving Revok, ConSec and a mysterious scanner-suppressing drug called Ephemerol begins to unfold. Although the film is set in the present day (well, 1981), Cronenberg creates an eerie, paranoid world of clinical white laboratories and corridors, rival organisations, bizarre art exhibitions and unseen protagonists manipulating events behind the scenes. Howard Shore – always at his best when working with Cronenberg – provides one of his most ominous scores, and the film is goldmine of weird, obtuse names – Kim Obrist, Cameron Vale, Darryl Revok, Trevellyan and my favourite, Arno Crostic.

Unfortunately, the more crowd-pleasing elements aren't as successful. Cronenberg had gained some experience of filming fast-moving vehicles with his little-seen race movie Fast Company, but the action is still a little lumpen, displaying little of the subtlety of the dramatic scenes. Still, there are a few cracking set pieces, the most famous being the spectacular head explosion ten minutes in, although the scene where Vale scans the telephone network for ConSec's secrets or the climatic vein-bursting psychic duel between Vale and Revok also pack a punch.

Much has been made of the fact that Cronenberg cast Stephen Lack in the lead role because of his piercing, glassy eyes, clearly not bothering to check whether he could actually act or not. And while his flat non-delivery leaves a lot to be desired, it's not entirely at odds with the film's cold and detached tone, and strong performances from Patrick McGoohan and a wonderfully creepy Michael Ironside compensate. Scanners is certainly not first-rate Cronenberg, and the director has described it as the most difficult shoot he ever worked on. But it's a pretty enjoyable, sometimes thought-provoking yarn that succeeded in breaking Cronenberg out of the horror niche he was in, making his name as one of modern cinema's most distinctive film-makers.

Apollo Guide (Ryan Cracknell) review [76/100]

Canuxploitation (spoilers) Rhett Butler

Raging Bull Mike Lorefice

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Scanners Rhett Butler from Horror DVDs

Fatally-Yours.com The Wolf

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [3/5]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez) dvd review

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

DVD Monsters and Critics [Andy McKeague]

The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J. Wright]

Popcorn Pictures

VIDEODROME

Canada USA (89 mi) 1983

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A+]

Cronenberg has always crossed the line between taste and distaste with his combinations of vile glop-horror and social criticism, and this is no exception. A cable TV programmer (Woods) becomes increasingly intrigued by the hardcore S/M movies he is beaming down from satellite, and so does his girlfriend (Harry), a dead-eyed sensation-seeker with cigarette brands on her breast to prove it. The plotline becomes too contorted to go into here, and far, far too weird; sufficient to note that Cronenberg's most interesting trick is to eradicate the difference between hardware and software by giving his hero a pulsing vagina-like slot in his stomach through which he can be programmed by... it gets much worse. There are distinct signs of strain in the plot convolutions, not least in the spectator's loss of faith over indiscriminate and cheating use of hallucination; what certainly survives is Cronenberg's wholesale disgust with the world in general.

Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Joe Rubin

Since his first feature, 1975's SHIVERS, David Cronenberg has focused on the concept of "body horror"—the idea that the human body is not a self sustaining entity, but rather a portal capable of being penetrated by both physical and metaphorical "diseases" that reduce the human to his basic animalistic desires for sex and power. VIDEODROME is the culmination of the theme of sexual frenzy interlaced with violence that Cronenberg had explored in both SHIVERS and his subsequent film, RABID (1977). While both of those earlier works deal with "real" events (disease epidemics), VIDEODROME takes a more metaphorical and overtly intellectual approach. James Woods stars as Max Renn, the owner of a sleazy cable station that specializes in hypersexual and violent programming. Renn has discovered a low-fi broadcast feed of a show called "Videodrome," in which women are tortured and killed by cloaked men. Renn decides that "Videodrome" is exactly what his audience craves and sets out to find the producer. Although warned by his assistant that "Videodrome" is much more sinister than it seems, Max continues his search and becomes obsessed himself with watching the show. Soon the world of "Videodrome" starts to become all too real and Max's body begins to undergo a series of changes, including developing a VCR in his stomach. The film was released a year before the home video craze swept North America, but it serves as a haunting prediction of how video would revolutionize home entertainment and, more importantly, the way in which people would become increasingly dependent on audio/video technology. Video became the first organic technology—it allowed for personalized "controlled viewing," (stop, pause, rewind) and thus the perfect device for Cronenberg to exploit. The same video could be watched in completely different ways by different people, making it a wholly different experience for each viewer. The video itself would become a literal extension of the viewer's interests. Cronenberg's use of this concept in VIDEODROME is both obvious (Max literally becomes the VCR) and subversive: Cronenberg's criticism doesn't lie with a general dislike or fear of how video can impact the sense of the individual; rather that the connection that is able to be forged between man and machine disconnects him from the conscious linear world. The technologies in his films (such as the teleport machine in THE FLY, the video game system in eXistenz, and the video tape in VIDEODROME) all represent a late 20th century obsession with excess and escapism; his horrors are the dangers that come from living in a "reality" that is a product of technological obsession. Renn's transformation into a piece of technology, whose only purpose is to execute commands programmed into him by the insertion of a videotape, is a modern-day cautionary tale; the audience is forced to reflect on Renn's failure to distinguish between "Videodrome" as a product and "Videodrome" as life. Cronenberg cleverly confuses those two opposites to the point that they become fused. The hope is that the audience can again separate them.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

"If you look at it in a cold light, photography is death," an aging monologist says with a sigh in David Cronenberg's 2000 short film "Camera," a bittersweet ode to moviemaking included on the generous new DVD edition of Videodrome. At first, the line seems like a wry joke, undercutting the silly premise of precocious grade-school kids who find a "clunky old camera" (actually a state-of-the-art 35mm Panaflex). But then the man recounts an old dream in which he was in a theater and caught a disease from the movie that caused him to age rapidly, bringing him closer and closer to death. Seeing the same actor, played by Les Carlson, in a small role in Videodrome 17 years earlier, the laugh sticks in the throat: Carlson's hair has gone from jet black to wispy gray, and his facial features, shown in smothering close-up, are craggy and withered.

The transient nature of the body, usually manifested via some form of psychic stress, has long been a theme in Cronenberg's work, but it wasn't fully articulated until Videodrome, which imagined "virtual reality" long before it became a household phrase. Inspired by the teachings of fellow Toronto resident Marshall McLuhan, Cronenberg saw a time in which technology and the body merge into "the new flesh," and the mortal concerns of aging and appearance become irrelevant. While other forward-thinking science-fiction films have followed the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A into obsolescence, Videodrome seems more prescient than ever, especially now that the Internet has moved most human interaction into a realm where the physical world has evaporated. Under anonymous usernames and invented personas, the new flesh continues to stretch.

The go-to guy for fast-talking sleazebags, James Woods makes a meal of his role as head of an off-the-dial cable TV station that specializes in soft-core nudity and violence. Always looking to push the envelope, Woods comes across a pirate broadcast of a show called "Videodrome," which features nothing but scenes of hyper-violent sadomasochism acted out with startling realism. As he investigates the source, Woods starts to experience terrifying hallucinations in which televisions and videotapes pulsate with life and his stomach opens up into a gaping maw. Meanwhile, his sexy, experimental new girlfriend (Deborah Harry) gets so turned on by the scandalous footage that she wants to audition.

About halfway through Videodrome, the web of far-right conspiracies, virtual planes, and bodily transformations gets so thick that it becomes impossible to figure out precisely what's going on. (Either that, or Cronenberg is still running several steps ahead.) Yet its dense mysteries remain more tantalizing than distancing: No other director integrates the creepy with the cerebral quite like Cronenberg, whose best work suggests a gorehound working on his dissertation. Cleverly packaged to look like an old Betamax tape, the new DVD honors both instincts with 40 pages of essays, two commentary tracks, and a host of supplements that deal equally with the film's ideas and the resourceful special effects that bring them to life. Photography may be death, but Videodrome hasn't aged a bit.

Bizarre Movie Reviewer Parca Mortem

"The Clockwork Orange of the 80s", declared Andy Warhol once, regarding this film. This is perhaps Cronenberg's best effort, or any case a prime contender for his best. Just after his breakthrough hit, Scanners, Cronenberg started to get picked up by US producers to direct films in the US (the same year that he got recruited for The Dead Zone), and this, one of his own scripts, became his first US film, at a $5 m budget, set in (where else in the 80s?) New York. The story goes on like this: Max (the great Woods) co-runs a popular pirate TV station, and is always on the lookout for something new, the more controversial the better (imagine a future Fox TV programming exec). One day he encounters a signal for a station called Videodrome (not to be confused with Tunnelvision), which just shows what may or may not be snuff films all day. The problem is, the more he watches it, the more he likes it, and the more he has to watch more of it. Same thing goes for his kinky girlfriend (Debbie Harry). Max tries to track down the station, only to find a lot of secrecy and mystery around it, not to mention a cult leader-like figure at its head. The odd things start when his girlfriend dissappears after trying to audition for Videodrome. Then Max sees her on Videodrome, being tortured, and speaking at him in his living room, as if she could observe what he's doing at the moment. Not only that, but Max begins to hallucinate big time, seeing for example a rubber like humanoid trying to crawl out of his TV screen and into the real world.

Of course, Max knows that nothing is right, and he tries to find the people behind Videodrome itself. And that is when it gets VERY strange, with Max discovering double crossers among his friends, a tumor growing in his brain, a cult that worships the effects of the videos and that say "All hail the new flesh!" while following a messiah that remains alive through videotapes, and tapes that breathe and sigh erotically that get inserted into orifices created in people's stomachs after which they start playing. And later on there's the part when Max goes completely insane and one of his hands becomes a gun made out of his flesh and bones and he goes on a killing spree. Got enough?

This is a great film, although the last 30 minutes do not make much sense. Woods turns in another good performance, and the cast is appropiate. Cronenberg paces this very well, and can make the film scary without having to have someone suddenly jump out with a knife. Also notable are the effects by a rising Rick Baker and the score by Howard Shore. Plus, this is one of the first films to explore the possibility of TV influence on the masses, only that taking it to another more demented level, without placing any "morals" or "religious" propaganda into it. In fact, it is a clever look into several aspects of the 80s, such as the growth of the media, the changes in values, the popularizing of cults, and the revolution of technology and the possibilities that represented the then fairly new videotapes. On a final note, I consider this to be the older brother of Naked Lunch and eXistenZ, which are sort of a trilogy of Cronenberg screwing around with reality.

Excess and Resistance in Feminised Bodies: David Cronenberg's ... Excess and Resistance in Feminised Bodies: David Cronenberg's Videodrome and Jean Baudrillard's Seduction, by Martin Ham from Senses of Cinema, January 2004

Images Journal Gary Johnson

Flipside Movie Emporium (Jeremiah Kipp) review [A+]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also seen here: Turner Classic Movies review

Classic Horror review Julia Merriam

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection David Ryan

Videodrome: Special Edition Rhett Butler

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Phil Freeman

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Monsters At Play Bradley Harding

Horror Fan Zine Bill Gordon

Digital Retribution deranged

Mike Bracken review [5/5]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Criterion Collection] Colin Jacobson

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [5/5] [Criterion Collection]

eFilmCritic Reviews M.P. Bartley

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review

Overly Intellectual Horror Movie Reviews

Cinema Suicide Bryan White

Home Theater Info (Doug MacLean) dvd review

DVD Movie Central Colin Jacobson

Digital Retribution - Criterion DVD Review Mr. Intolerance

Dragan Antulov review [4/10]

Chris Jarmick review [3/5]

Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]

Videodrome Cyberpunk reviews, excellent photos

Tim Lucas Video WatchBlog: Welcome To Bill O'Reilly's Videodrome November 1, 2006

Tim Lucas Video WatchBlog: Your Faithful Blogger on the VIDEODROME set August 2, 2007

New York Sun [Gary Giddins] also reviewing EYES WITHOUT A FACE

Mondo Digital also reviewing NAKED LUNCH, EXISTENZ, SHIVERS, RABID, and CRASH

Total Film's 23 Weirdest Films of All Time on Lists of Bests

VIDEODROME - aka Zonekiller, David Cronenberg, 1983 Swipnet, a website dedicated to the film

Videodrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE DEAD ZONE

Canada USA (103 mi) 1983

After a long coma, school teacher Walken wakes up with psychic powers (but no girlfriend). Depending on your point of view, this is either Cronenberg's most progressive, humanist movie (pace Robin Wood), or one of his least personal, most conventional pictures. Adapted from a Stephen King novel, and produced by Dino De Laurentiis, it's well crafted and atmospheric, with an arresting central character (Walken in one of his most sympathetic and controlled performances), but the episodic plot strands don't really mesh. In the most striking, the teacher unmasks a serial killer; in another he prevents a young boy from drowning; and in yet another his path crosses with a single-minded politician (Sheen). Cronenberg pulls it off, but you can't help feeling it's a movie in search of a TV series.

“The Dead Zone” was Cronenberg’s first venture into mainstream films. After a series of uniquely gruesome horror films (“The Brood,” “Shivers,” “Scanners”), in 1983 Cronenberg took on Stephen King’s bestseller.

Despite the auspicious pairing of King and Cronenberg, the film is cerebral and brooding as opposed to a gorefest which one might expect. Bloodletting is kept to a minimum, instead the psychological impact of predicting someone’s own death keeps up the intensity.

Christopher Walken plays Johnny Smith (one’s cinema’s lamest screen names), plays a schoolteacher, with a good career, and burgeoning relationship with his girlfriend, when suddenly all that topples down when he’s involved in a near fatal car accident. He wakes up from a coma to discover, not only has been under for 5 years and his girlfriend remarried, but he’s developed an extra sensory perception. When Johnny physically touches someone he’s able to see their future, pasts and darkest secrets.

Johnny’s ability is more a curse than a gift. Not only does he see their secrets, he also experiences it. Therefore his premonitions are painful and utterly frightening for him. Johnny knows he will never be the same person he was before – he will forever be exploited, abused and misunderstood. And he can never have a true relationship with another woman. The physical intimacy would be a little frightening for him.

So Johnny’s new life progresses toward an selfless act of sacrifice he chooses to make in order to save the world. The ending is tragic considering the investment the audience makes in this unique hero.

“The Dead Zone” is one of Christopher Walken’s definitive roles. His twitches, pauses and voice cadence are in peak form. And this is before he became a parody of himself, and so it’s a job to see Walken in a serious role. Cronenberg gets great emotion and intensity from him in this film. Rumours have it that Cronenberg would actually fire a pistol during some of his lines to keep Walken on edge. Also watch for Martin Sheen’s comically over-the-top performance as the southern Republican Senate candidate, Greg Stillson.

Cronenberg tells the story plainly without his trademark sex and flesh. It’s a simple progression of scenes and events that lead up to Johnny’s fateful decision at the end. If it means anything, apparently it’s Stephen King’s favourite adaptation of his novels. Enjoy.

Digital Retribution Michael McQueen

David Cronenberg is one of the most exciting, visceral, unconventional and controversial directors of the last thirty years. His output in the eighties and nineties is regarded as some of his most transgressive; films such as Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch and Crash (his most controversial film) are some of the most visually confronting and psychologically tormenting movie masterpieces by a genre director. He is also notorious for his adaptations; Naked Lunch and Crash (based on the novels by William Burroughs and J.G Ballard, respectively) were thought to be un-filmable until Cronenberg proved us wrong, and both films are regarded as some of his best work. It is strange then, that The Dead Zone – another adaptation, this time from a novel by the Pope of Pulp, Stephen King – has all the makings of a classic, and yet is the most un-Cronenberg film in the canon. Released the same year Videodrome hit the big screen, many a cry of 'sell-out' followed the release of The Dead Zone, which – by Cronenberg standards – is pretty tame stuff. The gross-out visuals that dominated Videodrome are completely absent, as are Cronenberg's trademark long takes, utilised to cruel and visceral effect in Crash. However, traditional Cronenberg fascinations with bodily infiltration, mutilation and transmutation all remain.

The story begins ominously enough: Johnny Smith (oh, really!), played by bug-eyed lunatic Christopher Walken, is a school teacher about to marry co-worker, Sarah Bracknell (Brooke Adams); a romance that's all big sloppy kisses in the rain and trips to the fairground. Everything is going just peachy for Johnny-boy until a collision with a wayward milk truck puts him in a coma for five years. Waking up, Johnny finds out that Sarah's run off and gotten married. Slightly more disturbing is that Johnny seems to have acquired psychic abilities that flood his mind with disturbing visions of the past present and future, manifesting as warnings against impending doom or apocalyptic nightmares.

It isn't long before Johnny's drafted by Sherriff Bannerman (Tom Skerritt, sporting an atrocious moustache) into playing 'psychic consultant' to help solve the case of the 'Castlerock Killer', responsible for nine rape-murders. The case ends in tragedy when Johnny's vision reveals the culprit is a policeman, who winds up stabbing himself in the mouth with scissors. Johnny lives as a recluse until a new job teaching English unearths the true nature of his psychic ability: the potential to change the future.

Around this point Martin Sheen enters the picture as Greg Stillson, a manic wannabe-Senator with Presidential ambitions that extend to blackmail, extortion, and unbalanced megalomania. With an ever-growing cult of devotees, Stillson also seems to be suffering from visions; the delusional kind. When Johnny receives another apocalyptic premonition of the future, his own destiny as a hero becomes evident.

The Dead Zone represents an awkward middle-phase of Cronenberg's career; after the auto/video-erotic surrealism of Videodrome, Cronenberg experimented to great effect with horror, notably with The Fly and an episode of the Friday the 13th television series, which he made after The Dead Zone. As such, this film finds Cronenberg testing the waters; only slightly dipping his toe into the genre. As if to communicate his apparent tentativeness, restraint seems to play a much more vital role in The Dead Zone than in any other Cronenberg movie. The fastidious attention to detail – and his penchant to render it lovingly in slow, sweeping long shots – seems absent, as are his trademark 'squishy' gore effects. In fact, almost all of Cronenberg's instantly recognisable excesses have been stripped away. The result is a more mannered, traditional genre piece that seems a tad hackneyed when compared to the midnight movie mayhem of The Fly or the sex/violence melodrama of Crash.

Something of a disappointment, then. However, the film holds its own well enough; there are no major plotting issues and Christopher Walken does an admirable job as a man possessed by demonic visions he cannot control. When his final destiny comes into play, there's a melancholic resignation and desperation in his performance that very few actors could imitate. It's to Cronenberg's credit that his initial flirtation with horror is a cheese-free zone, and the location of Ontario, Canada imbues the film with a sombre mood akin to Fargo, that reflects Stephen King's obsession with small-town paranoia and isolation.

Classic-Horror Dan Haynes

Mike Bracken review [5/5] guest review written by Memento-Mori

DVD Times review [Alan Daly]

Film Freak Central dvd review [Special Edition] Bill Chambers, also seen here: Bill Chambers, Movie & DVD review

Dragan Antulov retrospective [7/10]

Fangoria dvd review Michael Gingold

Review for The Dead Zone (1983) Mike Merrin

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [2.5/5]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez) dvd review

DVD Talk (Phillip Duncan) dvd review [4/5]

DVD Verdict Harold Gervais

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [Special Edition]

FulvueDrive-in.com [Chuck O'Leary] Special Collector’s Edition

Tail Slate (Michael Sheridan) dvd review [3/4] [Special Collector's Edition]

ESplatter Lucius Gore

Reel.com DVD review [Jerry Renshaw]

DVD Talk [Scott Weinberg] reviewing The Stephen King Collection

Read the complete review for The Dead Zone TV Guide magazine

THE FLY

Canada USA Great Britain (95 mi) 1986

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [8/10]

'What am I working on? I'm working on something that will change the world and human life as we know it!' So Seth Brundle (Goldblum) promises in the opening line of Cronenberg's inspired remake. Sure, he wants to get science reporter Davis into bed, but he means it too. Not that Cronenberg evinces any interest in teleportation - Brundle's hokey invention. Nor does he hang his scientist for Frankensteinian hubris. Rather, this is a film about fusion. That of man and insect, of course; but also the emotional and physical fusion between man and woman - liberating and painful as that may be. The playful, quirky chemistry between Goldblum and Davis in the first half of the movie ensures that this gothic horror is heartbreaking as well as stomach-churning (the special effects by Chris Walas are still staggering, 16 years on).

Cronenberg's most accessible and successful picture is a stunning example of how an idiosyncratic talent can flourish in the mainstream. Simultaneously enjoyable and thought-provoking, humorous and horrific, The Fly succeeds on pretty much every level, from wham-blam crowd-pleaser to highbrow allegory. Scientist Jeff Goldblum - in his ultimate role - perfects a teleportation device that works fine with inanimate objects but has trouble with living matter. Ironing out the glitches, he risks going through the teleportation process himself - only to find that he has managed to fuse his DNA with that of his unsuspected companion in the transport pod, a housefly. Cue alarming physical and mental distortions and, finally, transformations. This is a curiously underpopulated film - the only real characters are Goldblum, Geena Davis as his increasingly terrified journalist girlfriend, and John Getz as her boss and ex-lover, a sour James Woods type. A small central cast is usually an indicator of metaphorical subtext, though whether it's specifically AIDS here - Goldblum spears himself on a microchip the first time he and Davis get in bed together - or more generally disease and death, is up to the viewer's interpretation. However you approach it, The Fly is a phenomenally well-made, exciting movie, light years ahead of the 1958 'original' of which this is only vaguely a remake. Cronenberg totally understands his material, and as a result gets everything just about spot on - he saves the best till last, with a final shot and fade to black which feel just exactly right.

A Film Odyssey [Robert Humanick]

Whether viewed as an allegory to the physically corrosive nature of cancerous diseases or the equally destructive progression of the sexually transmitted type, the thematic undercurrents of David Cronenberg's The Fly (a re-imagination of its cheesy 1958 counterpart) are what elevate the film's viscerally horrifying images to more profoundly disturbing notions that infest the viewer on a philosophical and psychological level, remaining there long after it’s devastating conclusion. Jeff Goldblum (in a career-best performance) is Seth Brundle, a reclusive science nerd whose big experiment becomes the long-term project of journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) after a seductive meeting at a science expo brings the two together. Seth's invention: a molecular transporter, using computer technology to move matter instantly across space from one isolated telepod to another. Romantic entanglements soon develop, but a mishap during an experiment alters the future course of events to that of the worst-case scenario. While testing the telepods on himself, Seth unknowingly transports himself with a housefly occupying the same vessel; confused by the two separate entities, the computer fuses both Seth and the insect into one being at a genetic level. While this initially elevates the unaware Seth's strength with little in the way of side effects, the physical ramifications of this unintended gene-splicing quickly shift from beneficial to horrific depravation. Cronenberg has always been intrigued by the nature of humanity under pressure, from the sexual masochism of Crash to the split-soul implications of Dead Ringers, but The Fly compounds these notions by wrenching the viewers stomach into about seventeen separate knots at a pure gut level, all of them made the more harrowing because of the tangibility of the human spirit slowly being eaten away by the terrible transformation Seth undergoes (no small thanks to the masterful makeup work - a deserving Academy Award recipient). Ultimately, he is cancer incarnate, and then some. By the end, the horror isn't so much a result of the physical anguish at hand but the realization of what depths of trauma humanity is capable of inflicting upon itself. The Fly is splatter horror with the gravity of Shakespeare.

The use of offscreen violence tends to get a lot of respect, under the thinking that a lack of explicitness leaves more to the imagination. But there's something to be said for onscreen violence, especially in the films of David Cronenberg. Cronenberg's masterful remake of The Fly ranks among the most disgusting films ever made by a major studio—it's packed with stomach-churning images of a scientist's slow, excruciating metamorphosis into an insect, not to mention the inside-out baboon and the excised "monkeycat" sequence, which turns up among the DVD's deleted scenes. Body horror has always been a running theme in Cronenberg's work, with psychic scars manifested as physical disfigurement in films like Videodrome or Crash. And Cronenberg shows every gory detail so the audience can share in his heroes' revulsion.

Few of The Fly's scares are of the booga-booga variety: On the commentary track, Cronenberg calls the film an "operatic" love story, so the true horror comes from the scientist gradually receding from himself and the woman he loves. Brilliantly played by Jeff Goldblum, who adds great emotional depth to his usual spaced-out otherworldlyness, the character breaks from the protagonist of 1958's The Fly in that he can articulate the changes in his body right to the very end. Though the film's famous tagline ("Be afraid. Be very afraid.") is spoken by Goldblum's girlfriend (a science journalist played by Geena Davis), she isn't as terrified by him as she is concerned about his deteriorating health. Take away all the big shocks and special effects, and The Fly is about nothing more or less sensational than death itself, a process that Cronenberg realizes with excruciating visceral power.

The Fly II, on the other hand, is about cashing in on a franchise, though it isn't even accomplished on that front. Director Chris Walas did the creature effects on the Cronenberg original, and he cares more about outdoing Aliens' special effects than about coming to grips with the stock characters, laughable dialogue, and uniformly poor performances. Premised on the impossible idea that Davis' character from the first film agreed to bring Goldblum's baby to term, The Fly II stars Eric Stoltz (after Mask, apparently the go-to guy for facial disfigurement) as the mutated son, whose intellectual and physical capacities are fully matured at age 5. Monitoring Stoltz's every move, an evil corporation plans to use this genetic miracle as a model for future manimals, with a little help from Goldblum's transporter pods. But once they find out about this scheme, Stoltz and his girlfriend (Daphne Zuniga) prove to be tougher adversaries than the machine-gun-toting corporate goons might have expected.

There's no reason to revisit The Fly II, other than to savor some of the cheesier lines. (Lone returning cast member John Getz on Goldblum: "He really bugged me.") But it's been released as part of a two-disc "collector's edition," which begs the question "Who are these collectors?" Fortunately, the two movies have been packaged separately, and the better special features are on The Fly, including a fine Cronenberg commentary track and a two-hour making-of documentary that's as good as such a thing could be without Cronenberg's participation. The Fly movies could be a metaphor for sequels: Always go for the real article, not the freakishly mutated copy one telepod over.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Tom Huddleston]

David Cronenberg's 1986 remake of the sci-fi schlockfest The Fly is celebrated as perhaps the most perfectly balanced of the director's pre-prestige films, with as much attention paid to the director's infamous knack for exploiting the audience's own hang-ups about the deficiencies and unpredictability of their own bodies as is towards his almost completely humorlessness take on the splatter genre. Admittedly, the tale of a scientist accidentally fusing his own body with that of a housefly might not on the surface have as much potential to spur our icky introspection as the violent couch potato epic Videodrome or his uncompromising examination of life and death at the end of a hood ornament Crash (still his most underrated film). Thankfully, Cronenberg's draft of Charles Edward Pogue's screenplay switches focus from the damsel in distress freakshow of the original 1958 film to (predominately) the slow transformation and decomposition of the human body and what it does to that body's owner. Still, the damsel remains in the picture in the form of Geena Davis's reporter-cum-girlfriend, who doesn't only watch the degeneration from the sidelines but ties the film together with the biological implications of her situation actually gestating in her own womb.

Jeff Goldblum's good show as the doomed scientist who invents a set of teleportation pods (could it be where wireless communication branches out next?) and runs that tragically unsanitary test run probably recruited more acting students to enroll in those Sanford Meisner technique classes he teaches than any of his other performances, but Cronenberg uses Goldblum's intense, studied self-interruptions and uncharted smirks to good effect. When he first emerges from the pod, suddenly all pectoral muscles, he mistakenly cites his fly-inherited, exoskeletal physique and gymnastic prowess as evidence that his computerized invention doesn't really transport physical matter so much as it refines and purifies it. His buggy eyes initially seem filled with testosterone, not the presence of other compound eyes trying to emerge. Those thick hairs that begin sprouting out of his back represent, to him, the final stages of sexual maturation. And is that excess semen leaking from his fingertips?

Though The Fly rewards a generalized reading as a metaphor for terminal illness without too much unused, leftover thematic material (hell, it's a pretty fantastic little horror flick/chamber tragedy on the surface, hence the easy tag line "Be afraid. Be very afraid."), almost every one of The Fly's viscous substances reflect the of-the-moment AIDS panic, re-characterizing the film as something of a requiem for the pool orgy abandon of the director's decade-earlier They Came from Within. The first scene of the film is an unmistakable sexual pick-up, in which Goldblum entices Davis to come to his apartment to see his private discovery, something that will change the world. Once there, he tells her to submit a material piece of very personal currency so that he can demonstrate the machine's purpose; she chooses, and at great length removes, her stocking.

Once Davis establishes herself as Goldblum's confidant in scientific experiment and in copulation, he hems and haws about taking the final leap by transporting himself in the machine but insists that she be present when he does. Unfortunately, when Davis's magazine editor ex-boyfriend comes back into the picture, he drinks himself into a spell and conducts the climactic self-experiment, which emerges as both masturbatory as well as extremely risky sex-based behavior. The parallels continue, accumulating into a spiral of depression, until Davis's visits to Goldblum's flat to witness the degradation begin to resemble game-faced appearances at the AIDS ward, trying within all her faculties not to lose her composure while he babbles on about creating an "alternative family unit." In its galvanizing portrait of a body ravaged and sexual stasis infected by bugs, The Fly might be Cronenberg's most direct horror film ever.

DVD Verdict [Mike Pinsky] - Collector's Edition

DVD Times [Mike Sutton] Special Edition

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]

CultureCartel.com (Daniel Briney) review [5/5]

HorrorTalk Daniel Hirshleifer

Classic-Horror.com Brandt Sponseller

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib

eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [5/5]

filmcritic.com Jesse Hassenger

CultureCartel.com (Mike Bracken) review [5/5] also seen here: Review of the film at Epinions.com

Cinematical [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

Filmicability with Dean Treadway

Monsters At Play Carl Lyon

Digital Retribution Trist Jones, Special Edition

Eye for Film (Scott Macdonald) review [5/5]

Joe Bob Goes to the Drive In (Joe Bob Briggs) review

The Seven Best Horror Film Remakes So Far? John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, September 25, 2009

Collector's Edition, DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

MovieFreak.com (Dylan Grant) dvd review [9/10] [Collector's Edition]

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [5/5] [Collector's Edition]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review [Collector's Edition]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [Collector's Edition] Nicholas Sheffo

DVD Verdict (Blu-Ray) [Ryan Keefer]

DVD Town Blu-ray [James Plath]

DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review [Collector's Edition] reviewing both THE FLY and THE FLY II

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/5] reviewing both THE FLY and THE FLY II

DVDTown [John J. Puccio] reviewing both THE FLY and THE FLY II

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review reviewing The Fly Collection

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]

The New York Times (Caryn James) review

DVDBeaver - Blu-ray DVD review [Leonard Norwitz]

FRIDAY THE 13^th – TV episode

Faith Healer (1988 episode, Season One, episode #12)

Canada (60 mi) TV series 1987 – 1990 (72 episodes) d: David Cronenberg

Friday the 13th: The Series Episode Guide more specifically here: #12 - Faith Healer

Cursed Object: Glove

Rating: 10
A fraudulent faith healer gains true power, albeit of a Satanic nature, when he discovers a glove that lets him heal as long as he transfers the disease or injury into someone else...magnified tenfold.

This episode focuses primarily on Jack Marshak, and benefits greatly from the talents of horror director David Cronenberg. All of his usual elements (disgusting diseases eating away from within, persons forced to evil against their will) are on display here. There is a plot twist or two, and a few clever variations. Perhaps due to Cronenberg's influence, the gore here is about as explicit as it ever gets on the show.

Mike Bracken--Epinions.com (excerpt)

In that same vein, several noted directors worked on episodes during its run, including legendary Canadian horror auteur David Cronenberg. Cronenberg helmed the episode Faith Healer, which dealt with a phony televangelist who’d actually developed the power to heal thanks to acquiring a cursed glove from Lewis’s store. Like all the cursed items, this one requires payment for its services—it allowed the healer to cast out illness, but he had to touch someone else and pass on death in return.

The episode has all the earmarks of your typical Cronenberg story—an obsession with diseases that cause the body to mutate (the glove takes in the diseases and gets a very nasty look of infection as more time passes before the curse is passed on) and Cronenberg regular Robert Silverman turns up in a supporting role as a skeptic who makes a career out of debunking charlatan healers—but who has now contracted a nasty terminal illness himself. As is to be expected, Cronenberg’s contribution makes this episode one of the better of the bunch.

The 13th Hour - Friday the 13th: The Series

Friday The 13th: The Series - The Complete Website Links Page

Vendredi's Antiques

A FAQ Site

Welcome to CAIN's Domain

Friday the 13th House of Horrors

Yahoo's F13 Page fan posting site

Friday the 13th: The Series - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DEAD RINGERS

Canada USA (115 mi) 1988

Cronenberg's emotionally devastating study of the perverse relationship between identical twin gynaecologists, Beverly and Elliot Mantle, is an intense psychological drama which confronts his familiar preoccupations - fear of physical and mental disintegration, mortality, the power struggle between the sexes - without the paradoxical protection of visceral disgust. Instead, the abstract, expressionist imagery synthesises the physical and the mental. Courtesy of clever, unobtrusive trick camerawork, Irons gives a superlative performance as both twins. The delicate symbiotic balance between the brothers is suddenly upset by the eruption into their lives of hedonistic actress Claire (Bujold). As always, they share everything, including Claire, until Beverly realises that he has at last found something he does not want to share, and he is plunged into a whirlpool of emotional confusion; when Elliot tries to help, he too is sucked into the vortex of pain and despair. Likewise, Cronenberg pulls us deeper and deeper into his harrowing tale of separation and loss, the disturbing, cathartic power of which leaves one drained but exhilarated.

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

In an immaculately creepy 1980s Toronto, twin brothers Elliot and Beverly Mantle (Jeremy Irons) let their gynecological practice slip away as they compete for the love of flaky actress Claire (Genevieve Bujold) and sink slowly into an abyss of pills and jealousy. David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the book "Twins" by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland (itself based on a true story) is at once cold and seductive, a fascinating game of cat and mouse between bipolar doppelgangers that is finally suffocated by its own fascination with technology and formalism. Irons’ performance(s?) as the aggressive Elliot and timid Beverly is/are spectacular, convincing the viewer within moments that two people occupy the same frame. Criterion’s DVD edition (which is apparently becoming somewhat of a rarity in the marketplace) is a pristine digital transfer, featuring the electronic press kit, demonstrations of the "twinning" effects, a still gallery of the bizarre instruments and commentary from Cronenberg, Irons, editor Ronald Sanders, production designer Carol Spiers and Suschitzky (whose extensive genre credits include The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Empire Strikes Back, Krull, Naked Lunch, Crash and Mars Attacks!). Although not issued by Criterion, a new DVD edition of Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone (from the novel by Stephen King) was released September 19.

A Film Odyssey [Robert Humanick]

“Dead Ringers” is a disturbing horror film that masquerades as mainstream. Cronenberg keeps the gore to a minimum, as compared to say, "Scanners", or "The Fly" and much of it happens off screen. But the film is the most disturbing of the Cronenberg’s oeuvre. It’s disgusting and horrific yet fascinating - like a tapeworm.

It’s the story of twin gynecologists, Beverly (a man) and Elliot Mantle (creepy names too). They are brilliant, but utterly maniacal and disturbed. They are both played by Jeremy Irons in, arguably, his finest role(s). Beverly is the shy, introverted and more responsible of the two, Elliot is the showman, the speechmaker and the Don Juan. Despite the closeness in genes, Elliot dominates Beverly, and coyly refers to him as his “baby brother. But together they make a perfect team both professionally and socially. They cruelly date the same women by posing as the same person. Elliot, with his charm and charisma, breaks the ice, and Beverly takes the seconds, which allows him to get laid without much effort. Professionally they are known as twins, but Beverly does the hard work and Elliot receives the accolades. They seem to have a functional system that has gotten them ahead in the world.

The armour starts to crack when Elliot beds one of their clients, an actress, Claire (a riveting performance from Genevieve Bujold). As before, they both date and sleep with her, but Claire catches on and confronts them about their misogynistic behaviour. They admit to defeat and Elliot has no problem letting her go, but Beverly has developed a deep love for her. Beverly decides to keep Claire for himself and not share her with Elliot. As their relationship develops so does a nasty mutual drug habit. Beverly is clever enough to think that he’s being exploiting for drugs (amphetamines and morphine), but he doesn’t mind.

Beverly slowly falls to pieces. Elliot soon succumbs to the trappings as well, and they both become addicts. Somehow they manage to maintain their careers during these tumultuous times. At Beverly’s most warped stage of his mind, he constructs a series of grotesque surgical instruments designed to operate on the bodies of mutated women (did I mention, this is not a date movie?). The design of the instruments is classic Cronenberg, a mixture of metal and organic body forms, part alien, part insect, part human. What they do with the instruments is truly horrifying and more disturbing than anything Cronenberg has done then or since. As I mentioned before, it all happens off camera, but the mere glimpse of the instruments conjures up every detail without showing it.

The film is about the insular world the twins live in and how their psychotic disorders combine to make them greater than the sum of their parts. Individually they could be regular people but together they are a nightmare. The final image is brilliant, two brothers lying together, the light and positioning of their bodies appear to have them intertwined or fused together like Siamese Twins - which is exactly what they wanted to be all along.

Like the tapeworm analogy, the film slowly and hypnotically seeps into your system before you realize you’re completely disgusted by it and when the film is over, even though you want it out of your system, it will linger and remain with you for a long time.

Dead Ringers’ aesthetic is as cold and sterile as the polished steel of the bizarre surgical tools its main characters – brilliant gynecologist identical twins – use on their less “typical” female patients. Like much of the director’s body of work, the film approaches its material with a somewhat detached perspective, as if assuming the role of an impartial observer. In true Cronenberg form, it explores the darker corners of the human experience, and by withholding judgment on the extremely bizarre and potentially off-putting behaviors and events abound, it allows an insightful and weighty emotional resonance to accrue, often developing silently beneath the film’s surface and only striking the unwary viewer when the progressing events have them at their most vulnerable. Upon initial viewing, even I, a seasoned Cronenberg fan, was doubtful of the film’s potential at first. By the conclusion, I was nearly on my knees in anguish.

Forget Crash’s Best Picture victory (the racially themed Paul Haggis fantasy, not the 1996 Cronenberg feature of the same name) – that Jeremy Irons was passed over for at least a Best Actor nomination for this film lies near or at the top of the list of most major fuck-ups by the Academy. In almost certainly the role(s) of his career, he turns in two equally nuance-laden and emotionally complex performances as Beverly and Elliot Mantle, said twins who, while different enough to be distinguished by the knowing onlooker, appear to the majority of the outside world as one being. This often works to their advantage both professionally and personally; they sometimes routinely share the same lovers, and cover for each other in midst of various work-related dilemmas. Sharing becomes so commonplace between them that, when one slips into the grips of a drug addiction (an “occupational hazard” for a doctor), the other inadvertently does the same whilst trying to curb his brother’s destructive habits. Although separate, their beings are so closely intertwined that the escalating instability of their lives drives the potential for tragedy to unexpectedly dangerous heights.

Unlike the tour de force makeup work in The Fly, the special effects employed here are most effecting in that they remain completely unseen. Finalizing the hypnotic dual performance from Irons into a single and often seamlessly interactive whole, they complete the illusion that provides for Dead Ringers’ most basic emotional foundation (credit is also due to Howard Shore’s understated, moving score, which brings to mind a sculptor working his clay into form). However, beyond the physical obstacle of presenting the same actor in two places at the same time (long before the days of CGI wizardry, kids), the film’s most powerful elements are those that find Cronenberg again wrestling with the enduring questions of what it means to be human in the midst of lost humanity; the sensual indulgences that have come to define his work are complicated here by the suggestion that these two brothers truly share the same soul. The many biological implications will surely be more affecting (and potentially disturbing) to woman than men, but the genuinely earnest nature of the existential probing rids the film of any potential traces of exploitation. Dead Ringers’ cumulative effect is so deeply disturbing and troubling because of how intimate and personal a work it is; ultimately, the tragic beauty that lies at the end of the road for these tormented soul(s) is practically transcendent.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Pablo Kjolseth

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [4/4]

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review

Film Freak Central review Bill Chambers

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [5/5] Richard Scheib

filmcritic.com (Keith Breese) review [3.5/5]

Digital Retribution dvd review Mr. Intolerance

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Justin Stephen) dvd review

Movieline Magazine review Michael Atkinson in greatish performances (Jeremy Irons)

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5]

ESplatter Lucius Gore

Edinburgh U Film Society [Adam Clark]

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]

Siskel & Ebert (video)

NAKED LUNCH

Canada Great Britain Japan (115 mi) 1991

Edinburgh U Film Society (Andrew Hesketh) review

Cronenberg's film of William Burroughs' novel fleshes out the plot with details from the junkie author's life. He casts Weller as Burroughs' alter ego, Bill Lee, a cockroach exterminator who experiments with injecting his own bug powder. An appointment with the sinister Dr Benway (Scheider), Lee's meeting with a strange creature, and the murder of his wife (Davis) precipitate Lee's flight to Interzone, more mental state than actual place, a decadent, nightmare world run by bureaucrats who control the market in a rare drug, The Black Meat. Under the hallucinatory influence of the drug, Lee's grasp of reality disintegrates as he uses a speaking insect typewriter to file obscure reports. Through his most complex and brilliant cinematic metaphor to date, Cronenberg links these drug-induced images with Lee's eventual salvation, as he comes to terms with his repressed homosexuality and discovers another, more permanent way of altering reality - the writing of his novel 'The Naked Lunch'. Burroughs purists may be disappointed, but this dark distillation of the novel's themes gets closer to its essence than any 'straight' adaptation could hope to do.

William Burroughs' novel `The Naked Lunch' is at best a bloody confusing book. The bizarre ramblings of a heroin addict render the book somewhat inaccessible, and it was the act of a very brave man to try and adapt this book, widely recognised as unfilmable. David Cronenberg (possibly the only man for the job) takes his screenplay partly from the novel and partly from Burroughs' writing process itself.

Working closely with Burroughs, Cronenberg brings us William Lee (Peter Weller) - a New York bug exterminator who finds that his bug powder is going missing and eventually traces it back to the fact that his wife is shooting up on it. He decides to experiment also, and somewhere along the line a typewriter turns into a giant beetle and tells him to go to `Interzone' to escape the enemy and write regular reports. Most of the film shows Lee's fight for survival in the seedy, exotic Interzone (or junkyland, as it has been called).

The single most telling scene of the film is one in which Lee is seen lying in a pile of dirt, crying and hiding. He tells his friends he must get to Interzone and holds up his plane tickets, but all his friends see is a vial of bug powder dust. The whole film is a document of Lee's narcotic-fuelled fantasy and the reports he writes (to whom is never revealed, or indeed relevant) form the pages of `The Naked Lunch'.

Weller himself has very little to do in the film apart from bounce helplessly around Interzone at the mercy of the various creatures that inhabit it (watch for a suave and terrifying Julian Sands). The most fascinating aspect of the film is the very fact that it was made - a full-blown Technicolor portrait of the workings of a heroin-addled brain. It can be disjointed and confusing in places but this fits the main theme - disorientation and confusion. It remains one of the most ambitious films ever made, certainly fascinating, and a must-see piece of celluloid.

"Stretching himself with each new work, Cronenberg has come up with a fascinating, demanding, mordantly funny picture" - Variety

Naked Lunch (1991) : Directed by David Cronenberg, reviewed by ... Nick Burton from Pif magazine

David Cronenberg's 1991 film Naked Lunch should not be seen as an adaptation of the 1959 William S. Burroughs novel — such an undertaking would be quite impossible — but as an exploration of the state of mind that produced such a work. The film's central image is based on a true story: In 1951, Burroughs shot and killed his wife while playing a game of William Tell. His wife placed a glass on her head and Burroughs attempted to shoot it off. This act becomes, at least in Cronenberg's film, the basis of Burroughs' art, the guilt over which becomes the thing forming his every move.

Burroughs is called William Lee here (Peter Weller), a drug-addicted exterminator ("exterminate all rational thought," he says) who flees to the "Interzone" (read Tangier) after the shooting incident, immersing himself in a paranoid, irrational world where typewriters become enormous cockroaches that speak through anus-like orifices. These insects try to convince Lee that his wife was really an enemy centipede agent while beggin him to overcome his repressed homosexuality. In Interzone he meets Tom and Joan Frost (read Paul and Jane Bowles, played by Ian Holm and Judy Davis, the latter who plays Lee's wife as well), who become his rivals and intimates as he writes his "reports" (the novel Naked Lunch).

This is dark, disturbing, hallucinogenic filmmaking, and although there is very little of Burroughs' often violent sexual imagery here, the film is nevertheless rife with a surreal sexual aura. Typewriters sprout ejaculating phallic appendages as do the scaly heads of the Mugwumps, and an Arabic typewriter morphs into a sort of omnisexual creature. It's a very dark, slimy sexuality that only hints at the kind of sexual terror the novel dwells on, and it's the only aspect of the film that Cronenberg seems unsure of how to handle. Of course, a film truly faithful to Burroughs' sexuality would have been impossible to film, let alone watch.

In approximating Burroughs' heroin-induced reality, Cronenberg only occasionally dips into conventional rationality. There is a brief break in the action — when Lee's friends Hank (read Jack Keroac) and Martin (Allen Ginsberg) arrive in Tangier to check on his progress on the novel — a pause which allows the audience a look at how immersed in his own reality Burroughs must have been and how outwardly sick he must have seemed. The break is brief and is followed by Cronenberg plunging headlong back into a world that operates as much on his horror movie aesthetic as on Burroughs' drug-induced visions. There is indeed much that is grotesque here, from the Mugwumps who look like wrinkled, old lizard men and spurt jism from their heads, to the giant centipedes that are carved up for their "black meat" (drugs in this world all come from insects). That Cronenberg dared to risk his substantial fright flick rep (The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly) by making this movie is remarkable. That he made a film that is consistently aware of the pain and guilt that went into the creation of one of the most unusual novels ever written is even more remarkable.

"Naked Lunch," Williams S. Burroughs's controversial 1959 novel, was a masterpiece about what he called "The Algebra of Need." Its subject was heroin, and addiction in general, and no other author, before or since, has had greater firsthand knowledge of his material or used it to re-create in such vivid, ant-crawling detail the plunge into the hungry abyss of drugs.

The movie "Naked Lunch" is a different sort of masterpiece altogether. It's not about drugs, per se, though it euphemistically dives into the universe of mind-altering substances as deeply and lustily as any movie in history. Drugs serve as the film's background, its world, but not its substance. Adapted by David Cronenberg, the Canadian director of, among others, "Dead Ringers" and "The Fly," the film isn't a literal transcription of the novel at all; it's more a fictional essay on Burroughs and the anxious birth of the novel. It's a movie about a writer's relationship to his work -- and, as such, perhaps one of the most penetrating examinations of a writer's processes ever made. Certainly it's one of the strangest and most disturbing.

For Cronenberg, Burroughs's "Naked Lunch" served only as a jumping-off point. Sprinkled throughout are bits from other Burroughs books, particularly "Junky" and "Exterminator!," all of which are folded in with incidents from Burroughs's life. The film's biographical details are more metaphorical than literal too, including Burroughs's relationships with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, his accidental fatal shooting of his wife, Joan, and his encounters with Paul and Jane Bowles. When Cronenberg introduces his hero, Bill Lee (Peter Weller), it's 1953 and Lee's an exterminator slaughtering roaches and centipedes in New York with a pump canister of yellow bug powder. At this point Lee is not a writer, at least not like his friends Hank and Martin (Nicholas Campbell and Michael Zelniker), who are modeled on Kerouac and Ginsberg and struggling to get into print. He is, however, a pungent rhetorician. "Exterminate all rational thought," he says, adding his two cents to the literary babble between his friends.

The line is not idly dropped, either by the character or the director; it points the way for what is to come. When Lee returns home, he finds his wife, Joan Lee (Judy Davis), with a hypodermic stuck in her breast -- a hypo filled with bug powder. Yes, she admits, looking at him with coal-circled eyes, she has something of a habit, which also explains why he's been coming up short on his jobs.

Afraid of losing his gig, Lee visits a mysterious Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), who says Joan can kick the bug stuff if Lee cuts it first with a vile-smelling black powder he's extracted from the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede. But before Lee can test the effectiveness of Benway's concoction on Joan, he tries it himself, and, still woozy from his injection, informs his wife that it's about time for them to show Martin their "William Tell routine." Obligingly, Joan puts a drinking glass on her head and Lee blithely pulls out a revolver and shoots, leaving a ruby-red dot on her forehead.

Joan's death puts the cops on Lee's tail, forcing him to travel as a spy to a kind of fantastical Casablanca called Interzone. Burroughs has said that his wife's death was a pivotal moment in his life, and Cronenberg takes him at his word. He uses the incident as the event that catalyzes Lee's metamorphosis into a full-fledged addict and a writer. Following the instructions of a bony, greenish reptile called a Mugwump, he begins filing reports from Interzone on his trusty Clark Nova, a portable typewriter that, while Lee is working, transforms into a buggy creature that talks out of a sphincterlike opening beneath its wings.

There is, of course, no such place as Interzone; it, the Mugwumps and the pestilent writing machines are all figments of Lee's drug-fevered imagination. And the dispatches he files from this hallucinatory nether realm are actually the raw stuff of what would eventually become "Naked Lunch." In his novel, Burroughs showed that he was both a descendant of Swift and the paterfamilias to cyper-punk futurists such as William Gibson. And Cronenberg manages to capture the paranoid social satirist and the science fiction writer in Burroughs. Visually, the director has tilted the balance more toward the latter, though it's the grungy future-of-the-past we see, some surrealistic dimension where deranged junkie fantasy and emotional reality intersect. The way Cronenberg presents it, the story seems to slide out of some mutant polyp of roach brain in Lee's skull. It's a movie full of perverse longings, oozing fluids and raunchy physical detail -- a film constructed out of a genuine revulsion for the body, where the simple sight of human flesh is nearly enough to turn your stomach. It's a truly excremental movie, in the purest Freudian sense.

What's amazing, though, is that we feel as comfortable with the terrain as we do. The reason for this, I think, is that we remain connected to the sane part of the Lee character, the part that realizes that his hallucinated alternate reality is a product of his drug-induced virus and that stays detached enough to take notes on the experience. This is the result of both the cool clinicism of Cronenberg's direction and Weller's droll, atonal performance. Dressed in his proper, anti-hipster suits and ties, he gives a perfect approximation of Burroughs's secret-agent style; he's an invisible man, without definite gender or sexual inclination, and so bland that he fades instantly into the squalid woodwork, so suavely Somatized that his reactions seem to register only after an eternity, as if they've made their way to the surface in slow motion from the bottom of the sea. Weller's comatose portrayal is stocked with hilarious detail; it's a wonderfully deadpan piece of acting, tense, precise and painfully still. And Cronenberg positions it beautifully in counterpoint to the outrageousness of the imagined world around him.

Cronenberg hasn't always been as skilled with his actors; in past films they've often seemed lost, overshadowed by the graphic design of the work. Everyone in the cast here, though, is superb, particularly Davis in the dual role of Lee's wife, Joan, and Joan Frost, another writer and Mugwump-juice junkie (a character based on Jane Bowles) whom he meets in Interzone. Davis shows a different side of her cyclonic talent here; she's a burnout, with a world-weary sag to her features, and whenever she's in front of the camera a gaping, wounded hole seems to open up on the screen. She's not around much, but she leaves you wishing there were more of her character.

There's a synergistic overlap here between Cronenberg's own particular brand of weirdness and Burroughs's; they're both twisted in ways that complement each other nicely. If the movie has a flaw, it's that the aspects of Burroughs's work many believed unfilmable still resist visualization. What had seemed unthinkably subversive on the page seems slightly literal-minded, and somehow tamer, on screen. Still, it's a dank, genuinely sick trip into the dark, rancid basement of the writer's mind -- a fitting homage to the labors of a true original.

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Pablo Kjolseth

Images Movie Journal Joe Pettit Jr.

CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon) review [5/5]

Fangoria dvd review Matthew Kiernan

The Tech (MIT) (Chris Roberge) review

Movie Cynics The Vocabulariast

DVD Outsider Lord Summerisle

VideoVista review Roger Keen

Reel.com [Mary Kalin-Casey]

eFilmCritic.com (Justin Helmer) review [4/5]

Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez) dvd review

Whiggles.com [Michael Mackenzie] also seen here: 10K Bullets

Tomb Of Anubis

filmcritic.com (James Brundage) review [1/5] also seen here: James Brundage retrospective

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross) dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review

Dragan Antulov review [3/10]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Criterion Collection] Colin Jacobson

Horror View Big McLargehuge

ECTOPLASMOSIS! » David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch Qais Fulton

Mondo Digital also reviewing VIDEODROME, EXISTENZ, SHIVERS, RABID, and CRASH

Odd Culture Bill G, also reviewing BARTON FINK

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]

Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review

DVDBeaver [Gary W. Tooze]

M. BUTTERFLY

USA (101 mi) 1993

Scott Renshaw review [6/10]

For the first time since 'Fast Company,' David Cronenberg made a movie that Fangoria magazine couldn't cover.

This one still retains his key themes: sexual confusion, bodily dismay, mental delusion, repression that is overcome (with disastrous results). A French diplomat (Jeremy Irons again) falls in love with a beautiful Chinese singer who turns out to be not only a spy, but a male spy (John Lone).

This odd, measured, elegantly assembled film disappointed just about everyone — Cronenberg fans (many of whom seem to think that a Cronenberg film without goo and gore isn't a Cronenberg film), art-house crowds (who'd already seen The Crying Game), and most critics (who found it boring). But Irons and Lone perform at their peaks, and Cronenberg brings out the lush, alien beauty in his subject.

Cronenberg no longer needs slimy parasites or exploding heads; the human heart's ability to fool itself is frightening and bizarre enough.

I approached the film version of M. BUTTERFLY with something of a "show me" attitude. I'd had the good fortune to see a sensational production of the play by Northern California's TheatreWorks company, with an amazing lead performance by Mark Capri as Gallimard, and I felt that any other version would have to be pretty good to impress me. I also questioned the choice of David Cronenberg, whose previous efforts had all been horror films, as director. It therefore comes as a pleasant surprise that Cronenberg's M. BUTTERFLY maintains a real faithfulness to the basic themes of David Henry Hwang's Tony Award-winning play, although it loses a great deal from the absence of the stage version's Brechtian devices.

M. BUTTERFLY is based on the true story of French diplomat Bernard Boursicot, here called Rene Gallimard. Stationed in Beijing in 1964, Gallimard (Jeremy Irons) is a petty bureaucrat responsible for reviewing expense reports. One evening, he attends an embassy function for a performance of selections from Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly." The featured vocalist is Song Liling, a mysterious figure who intrigues Gallimard. That intrigue soon leads to an affair, despite a small detail of which Gallimard is apparently unaware: Song (John Lone) is a man. Gaining confidence from his new love, Gallimard is promoted to a position of importance in French intelligence. He and Song carry on their relationship for several years, until an investigation forces him to know all there is to know about the spying game.

It's useless to argue that the story is implausible, based as it is on a real event; M. BUTTERFLY is itself an attempt to explain how it could have happened. Hwang's conclusion is that the Boursicot/Gallimard story is inextricably tied to the perception Westerners hold of the East, that of a culture of subservience. Consequently, they think of all Asians as feminized, making Gallimard's assumption of Song's gender purely cultural. Hwang and Cronenberg convey that sense of Western sexual/political arrogance in lines which draw knowing chuckles, such as Gallimard's assurance to his superior that the Vietnamese would "submit to any show of strength" by the Americans. It's an interesting theme well-explored.

Where I felt M. BUTTERFLY was less successful was in portraying the complexities of Gallimard's character. In the play, he speaks directly to the audience, a device which allows for some ironic observations of his state of mind. The film's more conventional narrative approach makes Gallimard less pathetic than he should be. Lost also is the impression that before meeting Song, Gallimard is timid and sexually inept; it is only after asserting dominance over his "Butterfly" that he becomes a "real man." Without this aspect of his personality evident, his vulnerability to the deception doesn't make as much sense. There should be a clear sense that psychologically, he needs Song to be a woman, and it's not quite there.

Such an emphasis on Gallimard's psychology would also have gone far toward making John Lone a credible choice as Song. B. D. Wong, the head biotechnician in JURASSIC PARK and the originator of Song on Broadway, was once attached to the film, but was passed over when Lone became available. The choice was a mistake. Lone's voice has an eerie, detached quality which I liked for its mysterious allure, but the fact is that he just looks too masculine, and an eight foot high close-up doesn't exactly promote illusion. Irons is a much better choice as Gallimard. He's great at showing Gallimard's cocky Eurocentrist side, and I loved his oddly amused expression when he first sees Song dressed as a man. Once again, however, it was the impotent Gallimard who disappeared, particularly in the too-brief look at his other extra-marital affair, where what should have been disgust instead becomes mere surprise.

M. BUTTERFLY is a fascinating story, and its screen telling is more than fair to the stage spirit. I only wish Hwang had been allowed to keep the focus on the internal. It's a good film that could have been a very good one.

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review

Raging Bull Movie Reviews review Mike Lorefice and Dan McGowan

Serdar Yegulalp retrospective [2.5/4]

Opposable Thumb Films J. Bannerman

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2.5/5]

Film Scouts (David Sterritt) capsule review

CRASH A- 93

Canada USA (100 mi) 1996

Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings -- these diseases of the psyche have now culminated in the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect. —J. G. Ballard in the Preface of his book Crash

I can't believe you've put me in a position of saying it, but I believe my movie is closer to being pornographic than the novel because I have attractive people, [and] the lighting, although of a particular tone, is still at moments very seductive and sensual. —David Cronenberg (Film Comment interview)

They bury the dead so quickly. They should leave the bodies lying around for months. —Catherine (Debra Kara Unger)

It’s something we’re all intimately involved in — the reshaping of the human body by modern technology.

You’re beginning to see that there’s a benevolent psychopathology that beckens towards us. For example, the car crash is a fertilizing rather than destructive event, a liberation of sexual energy, mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity that’s impossible in any other form. To experience that, to live that — that’s my project. —Vaughan (Elias Koteas)

This is the kind of film that would never get made today, as the entire globe is reverting to fundamental conservatism. Even for Cronenberg, this is an outrageous premise, where the fascination with something so disturbing as a car crash, leaving behind blood, broken bones and permanent scars, perhaps even fatal results, becomes equivalent to sexual arousal, where the body gets turned on by graphic images of humans left dazed and incapacitated. This plays out a bit like auto-asphyxiation, where near death suffocation results in the greatest sexual arousal, only here there’s a fascination with sex in cars. Given this distorted, post-apocalyptic pornographic reality, where cars looking for a crash are like teens circling the drive-in on a Saturday night, where hormones are simply out of control, the sophistication of the performances are simply outstanding, especially married couple James Spader (John) and Debra Kara Unger (Catherine) who couldn’t be more in love, who spend much of this film in a state of arousal. It’s one of the more bizarre marriages ever depicted on a movie screen, yet the brilliance of it is how these actors actually underplay their roles, where their hushed pillow talk with one another reveals a special intimacy that really exists while barely raising the decibel meter. Unger, in particular, is utterly fascinating as a gorgeous woman with a voracious sexual appetite who has surrendered her will power to this strange sexual energy, which might otherwise seem absurd in someone else’s hands. Here it is played straight to powerful effect, as Cronenberg has enlisted one of his best casts ever, including Holly Hunter whose husband is killed in a crash with John, but then develops an intimacy with her husband’s killer.

While John’s interest seems to stem from his wife’s erotic fascination, the story changes on a dime and grows more intense when the focus shifts to a fringe character, Vaughan, Elias Koteas in one of his best roles. His creepy nature literally takes over the film, as he’s a guy who has dropped out of society to fulfill his life’s ambition to document and photograph accident scenes, turning them into shots that resemble crime scenes, complete with dead, maimed, or injured humans who have been disfigured by the crash, including himself, bearing scars all over his body from a motorcycle accident, not even wiping away the blood from recent crashes, and his girl friend Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), who he met at a crash scene and now walks with a prosthetic device. Vaughan resembles an underground character who does public James Dean crash simulations without seat belts or other safety measures, as only in this way does it bring the participants that much closer to the intensity of the true experience. The police quickly break up his demonstration, and later interrogate him for other crimes involving hit and run cars, suggesting his viewpoint on crashes is well known, but remains criminally outlawed. Koteas, however, matches Unger’s unfathomable sexual appetite, where a back seat scene in a car wash is strangely erotic, tinged with an element of sado-masochism along with voyeurism by John in the front seat. This is like their baptism into Vaughan’s cultish mindset, where their lives become inextricably linked forever. This is a powerful narcotic, where the group watches car crashes like watching porn, only they are being reborn or reconfigured by the personal impact of crash scenes, suggesting technology has all but otherwise numbed their existence. There’s a special interest in celebrity crashes, where Vaughan drives a beat up 1963 Lincoln convertible, the same car where President Kennedy was assassinated, and there’s an intricately extended crash sequence that simulates Jayne Mansfield’s death that plays out almost in slow motion as if in a fog, as if it was some surreal hallucination where time stops, but these characters can walk around inside the dream at will. While this is certainly bizarre, it’s also Cronenberg working at the top of his game, adapting J.G. Ballard’s book, and like NAKED LUNCH (1991), filming the unfilmable, as he literally invents an infected surrealistic universe, creating an underground movement that goes to great lengths to remain human.

Ironic Empathy in Cronenberg's Crash: The Psychodynamics of Postmodern Displacement from a Tenuous Reality, by Roberta Jill Craven from Quarterly Review of Film and-Video, October 2000

Crash, a film directed by David Cronenberg, explores the problematic relation of humans to technology and the media. The film presents viewers with a technologically intense, fast-paced urban environment in which a television-commercial director, who has experienced a head-on collision, is drawn into a group of people, who are sexually obsessed with car crashes and their visible effects on the body. In Crash, however, all interactions, even the most private, have been preprogrammed already by the media: Significantly, the characters re-create crashes that have become legendary through their connection to the media. The film adopts a removed, observational, ironic stance that establishes a parallel between the audience and characters, who both experience the frigidity of their intimate exclusion amidst a swell of humanity. Indeed, it is because of their inability to identify with the characters that viewers grasp the general emotional trauma of the characters' situations through their own viewing experience.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Arguably the closest commercial Western cinema has come to Oshima's Ai No Corrida - what 'story' there is consists chiefly of a series of obsessive, claustrophobic, transgressive sex-scenes - Cronenberg's film of JG Ballard's novel is both imaginative and, notwithstanding its 'scandalous' content, strangely 'respectable' (in terms of fidelity and finding appropriate solutions to problems of adaptation). Basically, it's about a couple (Spader and Unger), already so disenchanted by notions of conventional sex that they tell each other in detail about their various other liaisons, who are further aroused when they encounter Hunter (widowed victim of a car collision with Spader) and Koteas, a near-crazy car-crash freak who introduces them to the perverse erotica of scars, wrecked debris and the threat of violent death itself. It's a dark, disturbing, languorous movie, as ludicrous, hermetic and repetitive, perhaps, as Ballard's original, but admirably assured and true to itself.

I read J.G. Ballard's novel "Crash" just a couple of years ago, so it was fairly fresh in my mind as Cronenberg's adaptation unspooled, capturing the book's menacing weirdness while leaving out some of the thematic emphases that I'd thought Ballard was most interested in. These include a detailed fascination with prosthetic devices (represented in the film mainly by Rosanna Arquette's scenes) and the notion of car accidents as "marriages" in which fleshly and mechanical beings become "one flesh" in a kind of technological matrimony.

What's most interesting and problematic about the movie, as with the slightly earlier "Naked Lunch," is that the more sick and outrageous Cronenberg's material becomes, the more conventional and conservative is the cinematic style he uses to explore it.

"Crash" is major-league kinky in its obsession with the erotics of automotive violence and destruction, but as a movie it's a series of painstakingly correct shots and countershots that develop little aesthetic interest, much less adventurousness, despite the morbid goofiness of their narrative content. Cronenberg may feel it's necessary to temper explosive content with conspicuously tame style lest he lose any hope of a popular audience; whatever his motivation, though, I find his recent movies more compelling in conception than execution.

In any case, James Spader is good as the hero--it's a nice touch to carry Ballard's reflexivity an additional step forward by casting the character named Ballard with an actor named James--and Holly Hunter is unexpectedly strong as the accident aficionado he falls in love with. Ditto for Elias Koteas as the demolition-derby guru whose dream is to recreate Jayne Mansfield's last moments for the entertainment and edification of the loosely knit cult he presides over.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Andrew Hesketh) review

The story of Crash begins as John Ballard (James Spader) crashes his car into that of Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) killing her husband and wounding his own wife. While recovering in hospital he meets Vaughan (Elias Koteas) who introduces him to his small band of followers who take delight in watching and recreating car crashes. The story follows these people as they become more and more drawn into Vaughan's world of man and machine, ultimately finding out whether they have what it takes to survive in a world where death is often a goal.

Initially a very borderline project Crash was soon recommended by the star calibre it attracted. Spader as Ballard portrays the perfect man of confusion, never entirely sure what he is doing but only ever drawn there by his feelings. Throughout the film Spader acts on impulse rather than rationalality and, as Cronenberg equates Spader with the original author (J G Ballard) and also makes him a film director, we can only assume Cronenberg is trying to highlight the universality of his message. Elias Koteas plays the perfect Vaughan; always on edge, always slightly off balance but forever composed in the face of anything and everything. Holly Hunter is, as ever, superb, demonstrating her ability to handle any project. Unfortunately Rosanna Arquette seems somewhat overwhelmed by the role and script.

The scenes and settings of Crash are stunning; industrial landscapes, metallic and concrete countrysides everywhere echoing Vaughan's predictions. The music, while initially seeming strangely out of place, soon becomes essential to the film, adding another dimension to the characters' thoughts and actions. The script however is the real gem. Taken from the novel by J G Ballard with all blessings attached, it is a monstrous concept that possibly only Cronenberg could have handled so well. The power in the words seems so often missed by the actors, who often seem incapable of coping with the concepts that the director is handing them. Nevertheless, the film glues together immaculately well and the result is one of the most enjoyable and provoking films around. Besides which, the Daily Mail wanted to ban it. So hey, can't pass up an opportunity of seeing a film with that status.

Scott Renshaw review [4/10]

In case you were wondering what all the consternation was about concerning CRASH -- the film which New Line chief Ted Turner nearly refused to release in America in a fit of moral outrage -- writer/director David Cronenberg makes it clear in the space of a few minutes. The first scene finds a woman (Deborah Kara Unger) having sex with a man while bent over the engine of a twin-prop plane; the second scene finds another man (James Spader) having sex with another woman on the desk of his office. In the third scene we learn that Unger and Spader are husband and wife Catherine and James Ballard, and that they have a habit of describing their affairs to each other in detail while having sex with each other.

That might be considered quite enough to get some folks worked into a lather, but, dear friends, you ain't seen nothin' yet. CRASH is really about what happens after James is responsible for an automobile accident which leaves him and another driver, Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) badly injured, and kills Dr. Remington's husband. While in the hospital, Helen and James are approached by Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a strange man obsessed with car crashes. Vaughan draws Helen and James into his unique world, which includes re-creating celebrity car crashes for spectators and keeping scrapbooks of accident scenes and injuries. This obsession takes on a sexual dimension as well, as confrontations with mortality turn into expressions of primal appetites.

I am sure that there are plenty of people who would find plenty of things inherently repugnant about CRASH, including the fundamental sex-violence link and the fifteen individual scenes involving some kind of sexual behavior between the main characters in every possible form and gender permutation. CRASH involves some unpleasant subject matter, but I certainly don't think it is evil. There are plenty of dark corners of the human psyche -- many of them dealing with sex -- and CRASH explores how people might respond to the adrenaline rush of a brush with death in a world where they ordinarily feel deadened, dehumanized and disconnected. The fetishizing of destruction into a sexual act is part of a progression for these characters; they are like addicts searching for a new high when the old one is no longer enough to make them feel anything.

It's challenging stuff Cronenberg is serving up, but the reason CRASH ultimately doesn't work has nothing to do with the fact that it's challenging. If a film-maker is going to take a chance on creating a world this alien, he has to give his audience someone with whom to identify, someone to be their surrogate and tour guide. That person should be James, but it's not. James is a producer of soft-core porn films with a propensity for kinky sex when we first meet him, making it a relatively small step to the ghoulish carnality offered to him by Vaughan (played with creditable faux-DeNiro menace by Elias Koteas). The seductiveness of the crash cult needs to make sense to those of us who don't get off narrating our affairs to our wives, and Cronenberg doesn't make that happen. There is the briefest glimpse of an outsider's-eye-view when a car salesman assists James and another crash victim (Rosanna Arquette) in an erotic bit of showroom shopping, just enough to make you wish someone like that salesman had been for the previous hour. The relatively static nature of James' character also makes it evident that for all its excesses, CRASH lacks drama, a force pushing it towards some kind of revelation or resolution. Spader's performance as James is flat and detached throughout, and we need to have some understanding of his response to Vaughan's ever-more-extreme behavior; every development seems to strike him with the exact same mild confusion.

Some of Cronenberg's scenes are superbly crafted, effective and unsettling -- a tryst while going through a car wash is accompanied by overwhelming sounds of machinery, and one scene after a crash turns smoke from the wreckage into a romanticized mist over a meadow. Occasionally CRASH manages to be erotic, but far more often it is wearying, running sex scenes at you in waves and turning every available moment into an excuse for a grabbed crotch or a frantic menage-a-fill-in-the-blank. It was a mistake for Ted Turner to equate CRASH with pornography, because the average porno film probably has more plot. As fitfully intriguing as the psychology of CRASH may be, it's never engrossing. By failing to give his audience a sense of complicity, he has made them merely spectators at a rather monotonous freak show.

Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review

Strip away the abstract concept of love and what's left is primal desire fueled by need. But human beings don't like being told they're animals, so they allow their imaginations to construct fantasies to help them justify those needs. J.G. Ballard's novel Crash was pornography for philosophs, with technology as the illusion of choice. A secret society indulges in car sex, leading to accidents as erotic set pieces. The novel and David Cronenberg's film adaptation implicitly state that crashing cars during intercourse allows us to feel genuine sensations as opposed to the numbness of society, jobs, and conversation. It's a far out, all or nothing premise. What's disturbing to audiences isn't that Crash condemns such amorality, but that its characters are stretching their battered and scarred bodies into something new. Very little is discovered about these people besides their extreme proclivities. To give you an idea: the character named Ballard (James Spader) winds up sticking his dick into the serrated leg wound of a crash survivor (Rosanna Arquette) and walks away happier for it.

Anyone willing to go along for the ride may feel repulsed, but Cronenberg has used grotesque images in his work to show mankind's ability to transform itself. If it weren't automobiles, which summon up the right metaphor for full throttle sex, it would be computers (eXistenZ) or television (Videodrome). Cronenberg has made frequent claims that his work has little to do with technology, but he continually returns to the concept of a "new flesh" forged from manmade industry. Whether you see the fusion of Flesh and Other in his movies as a blessing or a curse pretty much sums up your definition of 20th Century Disease: Are we so bored with life that we resort to self-mutilation to define ourselves, and is that really any better?

Cronenberg seems to think so. His final image of two crash survivors groping each other and whispering, "Maybe next time, darling," while an overturned automobile rests beside them is an optimistic one—a happy ending for a married couple that's communicating better now than they ever have before. The three sex scenes that open Crash show how desperate this modern husband and wife are at the start, having extramarital sex in public places, then coming home to sadly fuck each other and describe their increasingly banal affairs. Since we're given almost zero insight into Ballard or his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), with no hobbies or defining characteristics, we're left with blank slates. That's 20th Century Disease for you: marriage, perfect clothes, a lovely house, affluent but non-distinctive jobs (he's a commercial filmmaker), and sex devoid of mystery.

But Crash isn't about urban alienation. After smashing up his car driving home from work, Ballard quickly discovers an underground community of crash addicts. He begins with Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), who collided with him while they were both on their way home from work. Their crash was like ferocious quickie sex: a moment of impact, all shattered glass and busted fenders, followed by a long, slow breath and a reveal of her scarred breast when she tears off her seatbelt. The perversity is made more sinister when her husband is hurled through Ballard's windshield and immediately killed—something neither the shell-shocked survivors nor Cronenberg call attention to afterwards. It's the cold survival logic of Darwin, where libertarians leave their past behind as if it were dead.

Remington and Ballard don't waste time on small talk. As soon as they're out of the hospital, they begin a torrid affair screwing each other in the front seat of Ballard's new car. Then they, and Ballard's wife, are introduced to one of Cronenberg's more memorable monster prophets, Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a scarred survivor of staged car crashes replicating the deaths of celebrities like James Dean and Jayne Mansfield. Looking like a Frankenstein's monster of scars and leather, Koteas is a philosophy-spouting guru ("The car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event") surrounded by a group of crash victims as Warhol superstars. Arquette has almost no dialogue but remains the most vivid presence in Crash, decked out in leg and back braces as body armor. Ballard, Catherine, and Remington quickly recede into the background, with Vaughan dictating their life of staged accidents, sex in cars, photographed car crashes, photographed sex in cars, and the attempt to break their way into something profound. They never really do.

The characters are treated with all the sympathy of amoebas seen through a microscope, and are less important than the sensations they pursue. Vaughan and Catherine fondling each other in the back seat while Ballard drives through a car wash, gazing at them in the rearview mirror, feels like a head trip back to the womb. When they stop, minutes later, to visit a car accident that's all hunks of smoking metal and busted-up, non-communicative survivors, Vaughan rages through taking photographs—and somehow his gum chewing seems the sleaziest thing here. It'd be grotesque if Cronenberg weren't viewing it all dispassionately, with that passive, obsessive, strangely Canadian voyeurism. It doesn't feel icky because it asks the question, "Let's see how it all works," and that these weird beings are forging some sort of new community out of their collective desires.

The minimalist storytelling feels hermetically sealed, somehow. As if giving the characters any passion outside of what Cronenberg is interested in would humanize them and make them vulnerable to our judgment as audience members. Instead, we're told that this is the world they're in, without excuses or pity. The cinematography and score, by longtime Cronenberg partners Peter Suschitzky and Howard Shore, respectively, feel distant and tinged with an unusual combination of grayish metal and sensual longing. This provides the essential soulful quality of Crash, and elevates it above a story of sick individuals resorting to the most primitive mating rituals as fantasy or escapism. Cronenberg takes them seriously, and if he takes himself and his thesis a little seriously too, at least he parcels out a certain kind of egghead intellectual humor. When Ballard questions Vaughan about "the reshaping of the human body by modern technology," Vaughan snickers that his B.S. theory was a clever ruse to get curiosity seekers through the door. In other words, psychobabble is cheap. Just shut up and fuck me.

Mind Over Matter - Film Comment David Cronenberg: mind over matter, by Gavin Smith, feature and interview from Film Comment, March-April, 1997

David Cronenberg is cinema's patron saint of Symbiosis. At once Canada's most established and most successful filmmaker, and one of the few radical sensibilities operating in “greater Hollywood” cinema, his films depict the communion of characters with technology, disease, narcotics, telepathy and Otherness. This moment —what is called a “fertilizing accident” in his new film Crash —is irreversibly transforming, a liberation from the prison of self and the oppression of normative social codes. The boundaries between individual and Other dissolve; identity is annexed. At one extreme it's the abandon of self to a collective gestalt or urge (Stereo, Shivers, Rabid); at the other, the merging of two beings (Dead Ringers, The Fly, M. Butterfly); while the loners of Scanners, Videodrome and Naked Lunch surrender independence and are enlisted in conspiraces beyond their comprehension. Yet paradoxically, symbiosis and dispersal of self produce a more profound sense of isolation and estrangement than ever, as with The Dead Zone. So it is with Crash.

Based on J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel, Crash follows a film producer named Ballard (James Spader) who, after a nearly fatal head-on collision, drifts into a shadowy underworld of car accident survivors who seek cathartic/erotic release in the aesthetic minutiae of studying, reenacting, and staging death crashes. Ballard becomes an initiate of this cult of scarred casualties, an s & m subgroup with one foot in the car showroom and the other in the scrapyard, in the search of the perfect crash. His mentor is the enigmatic Vaughan (memorably incarnated by Elias Koteas), a repellent yet seductive figure dedicated to the refinement of the crash into something between artform and science.

Ballard's feverish book is nothing if not lurid, but for all its multiple tableaux of dispassionate, automated sex and mangled car wrecks, Cronenberg's film exemplifies cool, hieratic austerity. His setups and cutting have never been more inhumanely deliberate and exact. This exquisitely somber film's metallic designs, stark electric guitar score, insinuating camera movement, and dazed, somnambulist acting maintain a tone of dreamlike repetition and attenuation. In its subdued, subtractive minimalism and almost oppressive formal control, Crash toys with the possibilities of enervation and entropy.

Simultaneously parodic and mournful, freakish and familiar, Crash's narrative is elliptical, trancelike, interiorized. Characteristically, there is no final narrative release —only dissolution. If this is a film about cars, fucking, and death, then it's about cars, fucking, and death as a state of mind, desecrating the automotive fetishist's fantasies of freedom, enclosure, and invulnerability. Never a moralist despite such sardonic, satirical impulses, Cronenberg's films have always fused the calm rigor of scientific research with the visceral shock of transgression.

Cronenberg's is a philosophical cinema based on subversive imagination, yet one that requires the viewer to grapple with the experience of deep revulsion. His films are studies in fantastic pathology that are typically punctuated by some pivotal gross-out or unimaginable physical violation: Scanners' exploding head is relatively mild alongside the mysterious, genital-like orifices and appendages of Videodrome and Rabid, the fecal-like venereal parasites of Shivers, the gynecological instruments designed for “mutant women” in Dead Ringers, The Brood's rage-generated externalized foetus —and in Crash, a scar on Rosanna Arquette's thigh which briefly serves as a sexual organ. These are not frivolous shock value effects, although they convey authentically hysterical excess. Taken in the context of his disruptive film strategy, Cronenberg is simply devising the most extreme and graphic visual manifestation imaginable for his anarchic pathologies. These scenarios of trauma, estrangement, and disintegration articulate the shock of the New Flesh, as it's dubbed in his magnum opus Videodrome —in which, fittingly for his entire oeuvre, a character observes: “It has a philosophy…and that is what makes it dangerous.”

Cronenberg is seldom discussed as a Canadian filmmaker. Certainly his work shows no overt trace of the cultural inferiority complex that supposedly afflicts English-speaking Canada. But it shares with the cinema of Atom Egoyan, Canada's other leading international export and critical success, a subtly displaced, suspended urban ambience that ironically derives from the indefinable, unAmerican Otherness of Canada. (The exception is the Quebec-set Rabid, whose scenes of urban chaos consciously allude to the declaration of martial law in Canada in 1970.)

Cronenberg's 20-year trajectory from morbid yet cerebral no-frills exploitation like Shivers to triumphantly commercial Hollywood horror/sci-fi like The Dead Zone to literary yet visceral art movie psychodrama like M. Butterfly is a unique and intriguing one, particularly since throughout its evolution his cinema has maintained its thematic and conceptual unity. Aside from his Hawks-out-of-Corman 1979 hot-rod racing flick Fast Company, all of Cronenberg's films up to The Fly are essentially Pandora's Box narratives in which scientific research and new technology unleash threats to both the wider social order and the physio- and psychological integrity of his characters. From Dead Ringers on though, they are all hermetic Through-the-Looking-Glass narratives in which characters descend into their own psyches, triggering ruptures and deviations that are purely projections of the mind. The wider social realm recedes and the focus narrows to the kind of dysfunctional domesticity first explored in The Brood —with a consequent increase in claustrophobia and suspension. Dead Ringers' vicariously symbiotic twin gynecologists are the first of a succession of transgressive, codependent marriages: junkie Bill Lee (read William Burroughs) and his accidentally slain wife in Naked Lunch, the self-deluded diplomat and transvestite Chinese opera singer in M. Butterfly —and now Crash's blankly promiscuous couple. Curious, then, that Crash's prevailing spiritual malaise and its overthrow by death-wish hedonism returns us to Cronenberg's first feature, Shivers, likewise set in a world of numbing urbanism and positing its condo inhabitants' infection with aphrodisiac parasites as a collective liberation from their repressed existences.

You once talked about the people who become parasite hosts in Shivers as representing a new evolutionary advance, and the idea of evolution is present in most of your films. Do you view the characters in Crash as in some sense taking an evolutionary leap forward in relation to the technological environment of the modern world?

You mean are the people in Crash the people who left Skyliner Towers? I guess it's definitely related. When I started to read Crash I was thinking of Ballard as a sci-fi writer, and the book does have a kind of a sci-fi tone. These people in the book, and certainly in the movie, are different from us. Maybe we are their ancestors. The sci-fi element in the book that is so hard to define is exactly that: the psychology and perhaps the physiology as well, in some subtle way, is not what we consider normal, and it could be seen as where we're going. And that's the sort of prophetic part that is very strong in all of Ballard's writing —he's interested in technological prophecy.

In your films, evolution is associated with an urge to transcend limited definitions of selfhood, and also with death or dissolution of self.

Well, not that I think of myself as a religious person, but preparation for death is a part of almost every religion. I've been pondering what Bernardo Bertolucci said, that Crash is a “religious masterpiece.” As I think about it, part of what he was saying was these people are almost Christ-like, doing this so that we don't have to do it —we can see it, we can have it done for us. But there is also an attempt to transcend, which is also a religious project. I think that we are always transcending our origins because we are constantly transforming and mutating. So in a way evolution becomes almost a religious process.

There's a strongly ritualistic element in a lot of your films in relation to such phenomena.

It's interesting, because I feel that I reject ritual in my life, but I do see the function of it. It is, after all, what any artist does —an attempt to give meaning to what one might think is meaningless, to create order by force of will over what is perhaps, in human terms, chaotic. So I think those things interlock.

It's only in Crash and Naked Lunch that the main character's transformations don't result in death in some form or another.

In Crash it's an anticipation of death, certainly. At the end when Ballard says, “Maybe the next one,” he's talking about where they'll go from there. And when Catherine (Deborah Unger) says, “I think I'm all right,” she's crying. It's a very ambivalent thing —the natural instinct to survive, and then the feeling that the process failed and she should have been dead.

That's an interesting flip on the idea of evolution —usually it implies survival, but here it creates a death wish.

When you say evolution is about survival, that's the Darwinian version. But what I think has happened is that we have seized control of evolution without being aware of it. Survival of the fittest as a principle —one now has to say, what does “fittest” mean? It's no longer the physically strongest or most aggressive, necessarily. It might be the guy who makes money the best in a capitalist society. There are cultures that embody the notion of suicide within them. One may also say there's a certain point past which survival is a liability for those who remain, even in animal tribes. The characters in Crash are exploring all of these things. That's why I call it an “existentialist romance”: it's basically accepting that you have control of your definition of reality. Instead of just letting it happen to you, you're actively trying to shape it.

They're the first Cronenberg characters who are conscious that they are doing that.

I think that's true. This is for them The Project, the one that Vaughan (Elias Koteas) keeps trying to grasp and redefine. He's got this project, but you can never quite put your finger on it.

Why is Naked Lunch an exception to the death principle?

Part of that is a knowledge of William Burroughs, because the ordinary view of that is, this is a guy who's trying to destroy himself with drugs. He's hallucinating, he's dangerous, he kills his wife accidentally and is hardly aware of it; this man is trying to commit suicide. But we know that Burroughs is still alive, and that his experiments with drugs have not killed him. So it's your knowledge outside the film that can allow you to say that.

But Naked Lunch was really a meditation on the artistic process. The characters in Crash —their project is a creative one, but it's less formally an artistic process, it's almost performance art. In that sense it's the same as what Bill Lee is doing: to use one's art to explore the purpose of one's existence, while at the same time giving one a purpose. Suddenly seeing your life as an artistic process automatically invests it with some shape. Of course, that's one of the main human projects, to invest life with meaning, shape, and purpose by force of human will. For me, anyway, there is no other way to do it.

Although it's tempting to read Crash as a film about sexual initiation and sex as a dangerous force, that falls short. The car accident triggers the emergence of a new sexuality, but also a new form of creativity and imagination.

I would never interpret the movie that first way. There is an element of initiation, but not necessarily sexual. It's sort of initiation into an awareness and a slant on life. At the beginning of the film the sex is rather anodyne, it's lost its power. It only regains some of its power when it's connected to other forces that give it meaning and life and dynamism. It's sex against death; it's eros and thanatos very definitely intermixing.

Do you see some parallel between their sexuality and their creativity?

Definitely. At some point all that's left of their creativity is this vestige of sex; that's the last thing to go, and gradually the sex is invested with more power and more meaning as their understanding of their experimentation goes on.

In the novel Ballard works in commercials, but his work is kept abstract. Whereas you show him on the film set and start with a shot of a breakaway car interior, with very self-referential results.

In the book he's a director; I shifted it to being a producer to keep it a little far away. The book just sort of mentions, “I left the film studio…,” and there's a scene in the hospital where he's brought storyboards —which I actually shot, but cut because of pacing. I did the movie visual thing to translate the impressions you get from the book into a more visual cognate. It is a foreshadowing of the car as mobile theater, something that is not just a functional tool. That scene inside of the car at the beginning prods the audience into awareness of the car, the metaphorical use of it that will come later.

Sometimes critics confuse their process with the filmmaker's process. When I'm talking to you now, I'm being a co-critic and I'm being forced —and I don't mind it because I find it interesting —to be analytical about things that were intuitive. I just wanted to set up several different things in a very compressed way. To show you that he did have a life in the real world, and to show you that he and his wife were both being promiscuous.

In your notion of the car as a mobile theater, you equate the view through the windshield with the movie screen?

Yeah, that too. But even within the audience of the cinema there is theater going on as well, the dynamic of the audience. So you have a theater and a cinema at the same time. It's a dual performance, I think, that's going on.

One striking aspect of M. Butterfly is its interest in performances staged and presented to an onscreen audience. Crash builds on these ideas of spectatorship.

I have to be aware of the voyeuristic element in all film. I was very conscious of that doing Shivers, seeing into people's apartments. We put ads in the elevators to find people who would rent us their apartments. There is a voyeuristic element to the feeling of having access, which is there whenever you do a location scout. You suddenly have magical access to strangers' places, their bathrooms and their bedrooms, and it's quite odd. So, all of those apartments as little cinemas, like a multiplex….

The movie Sliver, even though it failed for all kinds of reasons, had that idea, and that reminded me of some of the feeling that there is in Shivers, running amok through the halls and bursting into people's apartments and interrupting their lives. So the idea that one's life is a potential theatrical performance for someone else, and that we're all doing it for each other, that we are all each others' entertainment and enlightenment, is sort of implicit in a lot of what I've been doing. Certainly in M. Butterfly everything becomes a performance, finally. Even in the most unlikely places. You're right, there is a connection between M. Butterfly and Crash, that now you have people whose entire life becomes a performance for each other.

A mutually agreed delusion or denial.

Right, that's sort of the Nietzschean, existentialist element that was very conscious in Crash: a sort of consensually willed reality, and that if you can get enough people to will it along with you, it is the reality. Life is made up of conflicting versions of consensual realities —the Muslims versus the Christians or whatever it is. With that comes that Sartrean exhilaration and fear when you realize that you have the power and in fact are forced to invent your own reality. Even when you think that you are plugging into an accepted reality, by doing that you are adding your mode of consensus to everyone else's.

Read the rest of Gavin Smith's interview—how Cronenberg didn't get to direct Total Recall, what Jim Bakker and the PTL Club had to do with Videodrome, and why James Spader drives “a very boring car” in Crash —in the March-April '97 Film Comment.

Cronenberg's Crash Film website

Death Drive's Joy Ride: David Cronenberg's Crash, by Manuel Camblor from Other Voices: A Journal of Critical Thought, January 1999

The House Next Door [Jason Bellamy & Ed Howard] January 7, 2010

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review March 21, 1997, also seen here: Jonathan Rosenbaum

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A-]

Salon (Robin Dougherty) review

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [A]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib

The Man Who Viewed Too Much [Mike D'Angelo] also seen here: 24 Mar

Slate [Luc Sante]

Images (Gary Johnson) review

Dragan Antulov retrospective [7/10]

eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Slyder

CRASH Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

David Steinberg from Spectator magazine, May 30, 1997

Tim Lucas Video WatchBlog: Revisiting CRASH December 10, 2008

Club Silencio: Defensive Cinema #1: Crash (1996) Adam

eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine

Apollo Guide (Scott Renshaw) review [61/100]

Fernando Vallejo review [3.5/4]

Ted Prigge retrospective [3/4]

The Yale Herald review Brian Levinson

Michael Dequina review [3.5/4]

Movie Reviews UK review [3/5] Damian Cannon

Film Scouts (Harlan Jacobson) capsule review

Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [2.5/4]

Louis review

SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4]

Jerry Saravia retrospective

Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4.5/5]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2/5]

The Aisle Seat (Mike McGranaghan) review calling the film offensive, depraved, and pornographic, a grade-A piece of sicko cinema

Mondo Digital also reviewing VIDEODROME, NAKED LUNCH, EXISTENZ, SHIVERS, and RABID

On "Crash" Interview by Harlon Jacobson from Film Scouts, May 19, 1996

Salon Interview: Accidents Will Happen interview by Susie Bright from Salon, March 21, 1997

Entertainment Weekly review [C-] Owen Gleiberman

Memphis Flyer (Jim Hanas) review

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review

San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review

DVDBeaver.com [C.P. Czarnecki]

eXistenZ

Canada Great Britain France (97 mi) 1999

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

eXistenZ is a virtual reality game where players, their nervous systems linked to a techno-biological pod via a plug in the spinal column, enter hallucinatory worlds/stories fuelled by their fears, needs and desires. At the game's launch, cultish, controversial creator Allegra (Leigh) survives an assassination attempt by an anti-games fanatic. Fleeing from a 'fatwa' with the game company's trainee marketing man Ted (Law), she soon persuades him to join her in playing her invention, both to assess the damage done to her pod, and to share the vicarious pleasures to which she's addicted. But how can they tell which of the bizarre scenarios they find themselves in is imagined or real? And do they have any control over them? While weaving fresh variations on familiar Cronenberg themes, the film also proffers intriguing metaphors about the role of the artist in a consumer-driven world, and the ambivalent effects of fetishised, thrill-based entertainment. Most welcome, however, is the playful wit - unprecedented for Cronenberg - and the pacy, tortuous narrative, a series of Chinese boxes which leave fugitives and viewers alike wondering where in hell they are and what could possibly happen next. Dark, delirious fun.

A Film OdysseyieXistenZi1999 Rob Humanick

A debate has raged for some time within internet circles of film and video games lovers since Roger Ebert stated, prompted by the adaptation of the classic first person shooter Doom, that video games are not art (with that movie being the subject for analysis, who can blame him?). My own personal stance is that video games are a blossoming art form, capable of such deeper emotional and intellectual capacities but little more than suave technical exercises at this point in time. Should the type of gaming depicted in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ ever come to pass, however, I think Ebert will gladly modify his stated opinion. Much like the neck-based ports used by the protagonists in The Matrix, the characters in eXistenZ hook up to their gaming units (themselves a sort of living organism, made from animal parts and organs) via spinally linked bio-ports, connecting them to the software directly through their nervous system. Experienced gamers should find much to savor through the film’s unique assessments on the nature of reality (interwoven with loving nods to video game clichés), complicated by a multi-layered plot that posits a famous software designer against radicals who want to put an end to her existentially-redefining technological labors of love. eXistenZ is viscerally and philosophically titillating in same the way that makes all of Cronenberg’s films both physically challenging and intellectually satisfying (here, in particular the sexual connotations suggested by the characters’ biological modifications), although the script isn’t willing to go nearly as far in probing the material as Cronenberg takes it with his striking visual flair. That flaw limits the film from its greater potentials, but Cronenberg certainly makes the most of the film’s intriguing opportunities.

Nashville Scene (Jim Ridley) review

Perhaps the key reason Canadian director David Cronenberg has remained the most intelligent and effective horror stylist of his generation is that his stories, however outrageous and gruesome, are often just a hairsbreadth from the everyday. Samantha Eggar's mutated offspring in The Brood are the product of a failed marriage, Videodrome taps into television's undeniable hypnotic power, and Crash literally fused two ordinary passions, cars and sex. eXistenZ, his clever and witty take on virtual reality, is built on the not-altogether-implausible premise that if a video-game system is cool enough, users will gladly have it plugged into their spinal cords. In the near future, players have "Bioports" installed in the small of their back and "UmbyCords" attaching them to an organic "game pod" made from synthetic DNA and animal matter. Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as the world's premier high-tech game designer, but the title creation has caused extremists (and competitors) to place a $5 million fatwa on her head. Cronenberg was inspired by Salman Rushdie's plight, and the comparison is apt: Whereas Rushdie's Satanic Verses threatened to undermine a belief system, Leigh's invention undermines all belief systems, as it constructs an entirely new, convincing reality of its own. Though Cronenberg makes some creepy insinuations, eXistenZ is more effective as a black comedy than as a visceral shocker. Video-game addicts will appreciate the kinks of the interactive universe, such as characters looping their actions until they get the correct user response or graphic landscapes (a trout farm, a drab Chinese restaurant) that don't live up to their billing. Cronenberg's first original script since 1983's Videodrome relies a little too much on expository dialogue, and he finally outsmarts himself in the disappointing finale. But eXistenZ is still a provocative entry in a recent trend of paranoid thrillers—including The Matrix, Dark City, and The Game—that view reality as an elaborately orchestrated joke.

It's no longer enough for action movies to be amusement. Now they have to be amusement parks as well. They're blurbed as "thrill rides" and "roller coasters," and the more they follow the basic pattern of your average Nintendo game, the more highly they're touted. It was considered a breakthrough a few years back when a studio tested "interactive" movies, which gave the illusion of choice by letting audiences pick from different (fixed) outcomes.

Now, what would really be interactive would be for someone to say screw the movie and take a pickax to the screen--if not to the moviemakers themselves. And if you push audiences far enough, removing just enough of their sense of the familiar, they just might do it: All it takes is crossing the line from safe entertainment into uncontrollable chaos.

This distinction has haunted the work of director David Cronenberg for the last 20 years. In his latest film, the sense-deranging thriller eXistenZ, the potential for chaos exists at every turn--as befits a vision in which reality is manufactured, flesh fuses with metal, and organic guns shoot human teeth. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Allegra Geller, the world's hottest game designer, who assembles an audience to preview her mind-blowing new VR creation "eXistenZ." At the test run, however, she learns all too vividly that she's under a death sentence from "realists," terrorists who see virtual reality as life-threatening--and will therefore kill to stop it. Soon Allegra is on the run through a surreal underworld, followed by a wide-eyed PR flack (Jude Law) who has never played a video game but will have to play hers. Naturally, there's a catch. Playing eXistenZ requires humans to plug the game directly into their spines, through an "UmbyCord" into an anus-like "bioport."

That's a lot to go through for cheap thrills, and lots of folks likely feel the same way about Cronenberg's gooey, horrific oeuvre. With its spurting goo, transgressive sex, futuristic paradoxes, and death matches of mind and flesh, eXistenZ is a Cronenberg career summation organized along the theme of interaction--not just between player and game, but between viewer and art. Once inside eXistenZ, Allegra and company pause to note the triteness of their dialogue, the inadequacy of their characters. You get the feeling the movie's eyeing you for a reaction.

Consequently, the movie plays tricks on what audiences want and expect from pop entertainment, be it a video game or a sci-fi thriller. Want blood? Cronenberg provides the requisite gory violence, only in such an arbitrary way it's exposed as shameless yahoo-pandering. Want a rational narrative? Cronenberg makes leaps of logic, character, and setting so baffling that they don't become clear until the end. Even then, the final outcome is so devious you'll sit poking yourself to make sure you won't disappear with the click of the projector. Only the dullest of brains could fail to interact with this gale-force mindfuck.

Still, Cronenberg has frequently contended with the dullest of brains--most recently, the reviewers who took the sex-as-collision simile of Crash as literal pornography. The writer-director has said the idea for eXistenZ came from the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, whose fiction provoked a potentially lethal real-world backlash. But the movie's "realists" could stand for all the pundits who point to scary movies and Sega whenever inexplicable real-life violence erupts. Even our president apparently sees no contradiction in chastising Hollywood mayhem, even as he OKs bombing the hell out of the Balkans. Subversive and sneakily funny, eXistenZ operates on just such levels of irony.

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [8/10]

“I’m very … worried … about my body,” says Ted Pikul (Jude Law) during eXistenZ – a line that distils Cronenberg’s ongoing fascination with unstable human corporeality into a single sentence, much as the film itself neatly condenses his career into 97 economic minutes. It’s a process that skirts close to self-parody on occasion – either dangerously or amusingly close, depending on your perspective. But either way, this is a film which, in refreshingly stark contrast to 1999’s much more overblown ‘what is reality’ opus The Matrix, does not take itself especially seriously. Howard Shore’s restrained but overwhelmingly doomy score provides the perfect straight-faced ironic counterpoint for what turn out to be some very quirky, larky shenanigans.

It’s possible, of course, to take eXistenZ at face value – as the summary on BBC’s Ceefax teletext service accompanying a 2003 screening of the film proves: “A virtual reality game transports its players to a harrowing world of illusion. Sci-fi horror with Jude Law.” And of course there indeed are moments of ‘sci-fi horror’ along the way: weird mutated creatures; blood spraying out of severed umbilical cords; a man messily shot in the face with a bizarre organic ‘gun’ made of bone and gristle. But there are many more moments of comedy during which Cronenberg (in his first solo original script since 1982’s Videodrome) tips us the wink that he isn’t actually the same breed of tech-nerd as his characters – even the title, with its prissily precise orthography and portentous philosophical import, emerges as rather more satirical in intent than we initially expect.

Pikul is a security operative employed by Antenna, a shadowy corporation that dominates a near-future world where complex virtual-reality games transport the ‘players’ into totally convincing alternate realities. He’s hired to protect star game-designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) during a private event in which invited game aficionados are to experience her’s latest creation, eXistenZ. But when a member of the anti-gaming ‘realist’ faction tries to assassinate the ‘demoness’ designer, Geller and Pikul go on the run – and find soon themselves going deeper and deeper into other, more mysterious ‘games’. Or do they..?

Many film-makers would use the basic premise as a launchpad for a mind-bending, megabudget exploration of the possibilities inherent in virtual-reality technologies – but Cronenberg doesn’t seem to be especially interested in the games as such, or even in the standard-issue Hollywood idea of what science fiction should be. As Allegra and Ted penetrate the various levels, they find themselves in thoroughly dingy, enclosed, workaday environments – a game shop, a ski cabin, a Chinese restaurant, an unhygienic ‘trout farm’. They also discover that each new game tends to be about finding, developing, or destroying yet another new game, and so on. The games are, deliberately, high-tech dead-end McGuffins, and the point is not to discover some hidden answer at the centre of all the layers (critics writing about the film invariably evoke ‘Chinese boxes’, though Russian dolls might be closer to the mark), but simply to progress further and further into a self-perpetuating maze.

If anything, eXistenZ seems to suggest that Cronenberg himself has a rather dim view of the hermetic, delusional ‘gaming’ universe – and also, perhaps, of the film-making process which is presented as its direct counterpart. The dialogue repeatedly emphasises the links between ‘eXistenz’ the game and eXistenZ the film – the various ‘players’ often critique their ‘game characters’, as when Ian Holm (speaking in his own English tones) complains that his game-character’s accent was so thick as to be almost indecipherable - thus repeating what the audience themselves will have been thinking when they encountered his other persona earlier on.

‘eXistenZ’ is very much an unfinished, imperfect product – as is ‘transCendenZ’, revealed as the ‘real’ game in one of the many last-reel twists (a ‘flaw’ which the players themselves mention when asked for their critiques). The fact that everything we’re seeing is some kind of construct means, of course, that Cronenberg can get away with pretty much anything he likes – if some dialogue is silly (“You murdered my game!!!” yelps Geller), some plot developments are breezily absurd (as when guns are hidden under a shaggy dog’s fur), or if the special effects are decidedly ropey (as when the man is shot with the organic gun), then these are marks against ‘eXistenZ’ and/or ‘transCendenZ’, not eXistenZ.

But while such deliriously loopy moments make it hard to take eXistenZ as seriously as, say, David Fincher’s more thoroughly pessimistic and dystopian The Game (territory to which it briefly aspires when Geller tells Pikul that characters in the eXistenZ world have “just enough free will to make things interesting”), they do give the film a ragged, small-scale charm that sets it apart from just about all of cinema’s other, much more po-faced explorations of this terrain. Philip K Dick – to whom Cronenberg nods by featuring a breakfast cereal named after Dick character Perky Pat – would have lapped it up.

BFI | Sight & Sound | eXistenZ (1999) Kevin Jackson from Sight and Sound, May 1999

BFI | Sight & Sound | Game Boy Chris Rodley from Sight and Sound, April 1999

Trip Teases - Movies - Village Voice - Village Voice J. Hoberman

The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review

Salon (Craig Seligman) review

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [B]

Scott Renshaw review [5/10]

Nitrate Online (Sean Axmaker) review

Harvey S. Karten review

DVD Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review [Canadian Version]

Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review

EXISTENZ Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Shane R. Burridge review

Travis Hoover review

The Spinning Image (Daniel Auty) review

Edward Johnson-Ott review [1.5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]

Alex Ioshpe review [7/10]

Sci-Fi Weekly review Jeff Berkwits

The World's Greatest Critic! [J.C. Maçek III]

SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4]

Cinemaphile.org (David Keyes) review

Film Journal International (Peter Henn) review

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review

World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2.5/5] Richard Scheib

Mike Bracken review [4/5]

The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3.5/4]

eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Cochise

Michael Dequina review [3/4]

DVD Verdict (Sean Fitzgibbons) dvd review

Foster on Film - Cyberpunk

The Tech (MIT) [Vladimir Zelevinsky]

Mike D'Angelo review

Susan Granger review

DeWyNGaLe review [A-]

Bizarre Movie Reviewer Parca Mortem

eXistenZ Background, Behind the Scenes, Special Effects, and Synopsis from Film Scouts

Mondo Digital also reviewing VIDEODROME, NAKED LUNCH, SHIVERS, RABID, and CRASH

The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rick Groen

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]

Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

San Francisco Examiner [Wesley Morris]

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

DVD Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review

Spliced Wire Interview (1999) Metaphor Man, article and interview by Rob Blackwelder, April 14, 1999

Nitrate Online (interview) Interview by Sean Alexander April 23, 1999

David Cronenberg Nick Roddick interview at the Berlin Film Festival 1999

CAMERA

Canada (6 mi) 2000

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady] (excerpt reviewing Criterion Disc One)

Disc one also contains "Camera," a six-minute short Cronenberg made as part of the Preludes series that celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival. It stars Videodrome's Leslie Carlson as an elderly actor unsettled by the 35mm movie camera brought into his home by a group of children. Once more, Cronenberg ponders the essence of media, as Carlson in a terrific performance, reveals the actor's misgivings about the recorded image, as he finds parallels between photography and death, noting that as photos record the moment, they also record the death of that moment.

User comments from imdb Author: movieman_kev from United States

This 6 minute short film directed by David Cronenberg, which can be viewed on the Criterion Collection 2-disc DVD of "Videodrome" has an elder actor (Genre great Leslie Carlson) coming to terms with his own waning mortality after a group of young children find an old Panavision camera and wish to film him with it. He goes into a monologue about how he distrusts this camera equating it with death. For some reason I felt it was Cronenberg himself trying to express his thoughts and fears. The short itself is a tad impenetrable and difficult to derive any specific meaning from and although I did think it was good. it's not one of his better works. Despite (or maybe because of) this short being so introspective) or perhaps I just wasn't used to this kind of work to come from David.

My Grade: C+

User comments from imdb Author: mintonmedia from Beverly Hills, California

A great short, one of the two best created by Canadian auteurs to serve as Preludes for the 25th Anniversary of the Toronto Film Festival. (The other MUST-see from the group is Guy Maddin's "Heart of the World".)

It is not a two-character piece (as misstated elsewhere), but a somewhat rambling, splendidly written monologue "filmed" by an intriguing on-screen crew of unlikely film makers. Warm, funny, ironic and profound (not qualities normally associated with Cronenberg), yet a wee bit little creepy (and with this director, could it be anything else?), it will haunt your memories. Inspired by a dream, it captures the irrational clarity and lurking unease of the dream state in a way that may remind you of Altman's "Three Women" or Lynch's "Eraserhead". This feeling of lucid drifting is a feat that many films attempt but few achieve.

All in all, "Camera" is a splendid few minutes of film, not easy to find, but well worth seeking out.

User comments from imdb Author: ZiggyFloydZeppelin from Iceland

I saw this short on youtube and have watched it twice and probably will watch it again. Camera deals with an aging actor that has passed his prime, both in life and career vise. The old man talks to the screen about life, acting and the effects a camera that ,,the children" brought home will have on them all. He speaks about the camera as it were a curse that would destroy them all as the children make the camera and other film equipment ready to film the old man.

In over six minutes Cronenberg manages smoothly to summon up the most common human flaw: fear, and its effect. As soon as the old man finishes talking about the terrible effect the camera will have on them and the children start filming the old man starts lying and the short film changes from being realistic to being a fraud.

After watching this film I finally ,,discovered" Cronenberg and what it is that he has been trying to say with pretty much all of his films. Cronenberg has dedicated his career into revealing the ugliness behind mechanism by connecting it with monstrous things such as the scientist who becomes a fly, the victims of a car crash who become perverse, the TV producer who becomes illusional, computer game players who can't separate the game from reality, the exterminator who starts sniffing bug spray and also becomes illusional and can't separate truth from imagination, and most of his other work like in Dead Ringers, Scanners and The Dead Zone and probably in his older work that I have yet not reviewed. They are all trying to examine the horrifying side of machinery and the cause it will have on us in the end. Camera is the piece of film that made me realise the genius of David Cronenberg, even though I had loved most of the films I have seen by him I now have a more profound respect for him and I'm going to watch all of his work that I can get my hands into.

Camera - 10 out of 10.

SPIDER B+ 90

Canada Great Britain (98 mi) 2002

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Working from Patrick McGrath's adaptation of his own novel, Cronenberg creates his most meticulously controlled and, perhaps, his finest film to date. Fiennes is extraordinarily persuasive as the closed-off Spider, released into the community - or at least a dismal halfway-house in London's East End - after years in a mental hospital. Revisiting his childhood haunts, he begins to disinter and relive his experiences as a child, particularly his painfully strong feelings towards his mother (Richardson) and plumber father (Byrne). It's primarily the precision - of performance, pacing, writing, camerawork and especially design - that make this Freudian drama so involving, though Cronenberg's ability to establish and sustain a relentlessly grim mood while simultaneously accumulating a wealth of telling details also deserves mention. Byrne gives one of his best performances yet, while Richardson's richly nuanced work in several 'roles' is hugely impressive.

VideoVista review Debbie Moon

Spider, a mumbling, hollow wreck of a man, has just been released from a secure mental hospital to a grim halfway house in the East End of London. Finding himself on the streets and canal paths of his youth, he begins to track down his old haunts - and to relive his past. Something terrible happened during his childhood, something involving his roguish, distant father, his beloved mother, and the brash, sensual woman who ultimately replaced her in the family. But is that what actually happened? As Spider begins to lose his grip on reality, a tragedy seems inevitable - or has the real tragedy happened already?

Though Canadian sci-fi auteur Cronenberg may seem an odd choice for Patrick McGrath's resolutely British story, his understanding of the dark places of the human psyche is exactly what's required here. The grey, timeless backstreets, greasy spoon cafes and towering gasworks, lovingly photographed, form an atmospheric backdrop that changes subtly between past and present. Adrift in a world that despises or ignores him, Spider stumbles blindly towards understanding, clinging to his rituals and his scrawled journal as if they were the only things that were real.

The acting is impeccable throughout. Ralph Fiennes is tremendous in the title role, though he does take the mumbling to extremes, and vital information can sometimes get lost in the realism of his performance. Miranda Richardson is equally stunning in the dual role of loving mother and coarse, drunken good-time girl, and Gabriel Byrne gives solid support as the father, a simple working man way out of his depth. Lynn Redgrave, as the halfway house warden - a kind of B&B landlady from hell - also excels.

This powerful, slow-burning drama is a world away from the kind of flashy mental illness dramas that win Oscars, and is all the better for it. Not exactly an uplifting evening's entertainment, but highly recommended for acting and direction alike.

Plume Noire review Sandrine Marques

After a long internment in a psychiatric hospital, Mr. Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) is sent to a reintegration home, located in his childhood neighborhood. Imperceptibly, he relives the drama that ruined his existence. His father (Gabriel Byrne) assassinated his mother (Miranda Richardson) and replaced her with a vile and vulgar prostitute with whom he was in love. But is all this reality? Wouldn't have this man—nicknamed Spider by his mother—rather have taken refuge in madness in order to withdraw himself from a much more scary truth?

David Cronenberg's film was much awaited in Cannes. The director already made a scandal with Crash in 1996. The echoes that preceded this new work were more than favorable. Spider is a film controlled from beginning to end, lit remarkably, all in interior shots… but disappointing! Indeed, the entire plot rests on the final twist on which this strange film closes.

Cronenberg forsakes his organic universes for very cerebral fiction. The film is an incursion into the sick brain of a man who is broken apart, a theme that should not leave David Lynch indifferent, as the American director is quite familiar with this type of narration. But Cronenberg precisely suffers from this comparison. He indeed uses coarse processes, far too explanatory, such as the presence in each shot of the principal character, sharing space with his double as a child. Spider mutely witnesses the repetition of the drama that he lived. The fiction resembles the puzzle that he tries to compose and the webs that he weaves using threads. The film consists of disentangling this dense network of lines and unraveling the complex tangle of the hero's phantasmagoria. However, the viewer doesn't have the pleasure to lose himself in these narrative meanders, which is a shortcoming. As in Existenz, the end of the film rests on the swing from one reality to another, an effect that's too easy.

Spider thus suffers from a lack of opacity and exploration of these shadow zones that previously made the mystery and the singularity of Cronenberg's cinema. What remains is Ralph Fiennes' feverish, inhabited and very interior performance, but that is a bit too excessive at times. This character assimilates into the spider whose nickname he carries. Spider is an inhabitant of the shadows, weaving the web of his own perdition.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

The minimalist Spider is a deviation of sorts for David Cronenberg, a director who has made a career for himself with squishy body horrors. This structurally rigorous exploration of schizophrenia is at once graceful and lyrically dehumanizing. Spider (Ralph Fiennes) arrives at Mrs. Wilkinson's halfway house upon release from a local insane asylum. The rambling schizophrenic negotiates his past via a series of head-trippy visits to old haunts, scouring for and scribbling information in a small notebook written in his own special language. The film's grayish mise-en-scène evokes the texture of a spider web, so much so that characters, not unlike the occasional colored chair, appear as if they are hanging from that web and struggling against time, working their way to the truth via a series of concentric circles. More remarkably, Cronenberg's elegant camera approaches each and every transition between scenes as if it were climbing a web's silky string. A tunnel, a canal and an imposing gas tank suffocate Spider with the look and scent of the past—when he sits on a bench near the canal it's as if he's hanging delicately from the edge of a pulsating fissure inside his own mind. The film itself feels as if it's been woven from the silk of Spider's memories, and as such it threatens to break at any given moment because, despite the rigorousness of its look, the raw material with which it is assembled is devastatingly fragile. Spider's interaction with the past is an erotic ritual that reveals a Madonna/Whore complex born from the moment when the young Spider saw his doting mother (Miranda Richardson) modeling a blue nightie. The boy's overwhelming oedipal tension informs his view of all women and the devastating effects of their sex. Despite the obvious Freudian machinations at work here, Cronenberg slightly reworks the particulars of the Oedipal Complex. For a film so rich in metaphors and allusions to webs, Spider is never suffocated by technique or its formal artifice. Like all great films, Spider demands to be seen again so that its many ambiguities can be fully sorted out. Imagine if you will what a lesser director, say Ron Howard, would have done with material like this. Ralph Fiennes's performance is at once ugly, terrifying and heartbreaking. Certainly it must count as some kind of humanitarian effort. If Howard & Co. deserve Oscars for reducing schizophrenia's terror with a bunch of swirling digital numbers and cutesy imaginary encounters in A Beautiful Mind, then surely Cronenberg and Fiennes are worthy of the Nobel Prize. If not the best film ever made about mental disorder, Spider is certainly the most painstaking, and it's arguably Cronenberg's greatest achievement.

The 47th Cork Film Festival - A Report Nicole Berenz from Senses of Cinema (excerpt)

In Spider time has stood still; this completely subjective narrative spins its web around one event in the childhood of its mentally disturbed hero, an agonised performance from Ralph Fiennes that perfectly captures the torments of a man who has never grown up but remains forever caught in childhood, forever trying to unravel the dark events he was both victim and perpetrator of. The past and the present seamlessly overlap as Fiennes wanders through scenes of his earlier life like Victor Sjöström in some of the flashbacks in Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) or Martin Landau in Crimes and Misdemeanours (Woody Allen, 1989). Spider unfolds its ultimately quite simple puzzle slowly, immersing the audience completely in the lonely world of Fiennes' mumbling, frightened character. This immersion is initiated in the masterful opening shot, a long track down a railway platform as people disembark from a train. For a few magical moments, the film could be about any of the passengers, some of whom glance questioningly at the camera as they walk past it. At last the camera comes to rest on Fiennes, the last passenger off the train who immediately stands out as strange; he is dressed oddly, shabbily but also slightly anachronistically. The first thing he does is shove his hand down the front of his trousers. It turns out all he is doing is fishing out the sock he keeps in his pants where he stores some of his more important possessions. Just released from an asylum on probation, he is looking for the address of the house he is to stay in – significantly his childhood home – and where the rest of the film takes place.

There is none of the viscera Cronenberg is commonly associated with. Instead the detached but profound and rather creepy tenderness that he displayed in The Dead Zone (1983), Dead Ringers (1989) and M. Butterfly (1992) is allowed to dominate. In Cork, Spider was screened as the midweek gala, a big event with an audience of roughly 1,000. Halfway through, I couldn't but wonder that such a slow, unforgivingly depressing, formally rigorous work was being screened as such a populist event – were it not for Cronenberg's name, it would undoubtedly have been included at an odd hour in one of the smaller venues. Judging from the reaction of most of the people I spoke to about it subsequently, many felt let down by the unfulfilled promise of sensationalism and risqué material that the director's name implied – indeed several people were actually expecting a genre movie about man-eating spiders! This is an indication of the extent of Cronenberg's fearlessness, not only in tackling subject matter as controversial as that of Crash (1996), but also in making a film as uncompromisingly severe as Spider and, in so doing, unquestionably continuing to grow and stretch himself as a filmmaker. In place of shocks, it creates an emotionally claustrophobic atmosphere of almost unbearable sadness and alienation that subtly, almost imperceptibly builds into a deeply unsettling and haunting snapshot of an utterly devastated mental landscape beyond the reach of anyone's help or comfort.

Phantasmatic Fissures: Spider • Senses of Cinema Patricia MacCormack from Senses of Cinema, July 25, 2003

BFI | Sight & Sound | Odd Man Out Kevin Jackson from Sight and Sound, January 2003

Sound and Fury - Movies - Village Voice - Village Voice J. Hoberman

CultureCartel.com (Keith Uhlich) review [5/5]

Reverse Shot review Michael Koresky

Main Page from Nitrate Online (see 3 essays below)

Concealment is Everything Carrie Gorringe (1)

Study of Character Paula Nechak (2)

Imprecise Line Nicholas Schager (3)

Slate (David Edelstein) review

CultureCartel.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [4/5]

Film Freak Central review Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Kamera.co.uk review Ian Haydn Smith (including a reader comment)

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review

Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review

A Film Odyssey [Rob Humanick]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [A]

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]

Spider Henry Sheehan

Spider Raphael Pour-Hashemi from DVD Times

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [4/4]

Fangoria review Matthew Kiernan

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [4/4]

Premiere Magazine (Glenn Kenny) review

KPBS Online Film Reviews [Beth Accomando]

Monsters At Play (Carl Lyon) dvd review

eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [3/5]

Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4/5]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

Film Journal International (Rex Roberts) review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) dvd review

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/5]

Shane R. Burridge review

eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2.5/5] Richard Scheib

Planet Sick-Boy (Jon Popick) review

Balaji Srinivasan review [3/4]

The Spinning Image (Mary Sibley) review

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]

Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [4/5]

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [3/5]

Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [4/4]

The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [2/4]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Darrin Keene

DVD Talk (James W. Powell) dvd review [4/5]

CNN Showbiz (Paul Clinton) review

Guardian/Observer review

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]

The Globe and Mail review [3.5/4] Rick Groen

Los Angeles Times review Kevin Thomas

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review

The Space Film Features: David Cronenberg on Spider Interview by Robert Gray at Cannes May 21, 2002

PREVIOUS INTERVIEW From Flies to Spiders, a Cronenberg interview by Walter Chaw, November 15, 2002

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Right Trousers Nick James interviews Ralph Fiennes from Sight and Sound, January 2003

Film Critic Interview (2003) Welcome to His Nightmare: "Spider" Director David Cronenberg, interview by Christopher Null

A conversation with Ralph Fiennes and David Cronenberg about ... Video interview about SPIDER by Charlie Rose on PBS (56:30)

Turner Classic Movies review Interview by Pablo Kjolseth February 20, 2003

David Cronenberg on "Spider": "Reality Is What You Make Of It" Interview by Anthony Kaufman from indieWIRE, February 28, 2003

David Cronenberg Georgia Straight Ken Eisner interview from Georgia Straight, February 27 – March 6, 2003

Film Freak Central Feature an overview of interviews and film reviews by Walter Chaw, March 9, 2003

David Cronenberg | The A.V. Club Interview by Keith Phipps from The Onion, March 12, 2003

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE A- 94

USA Germany (96 mi) 2005

From the opening sequence, which typically exemplifies the director’s command of the medium, a masterful long shot that is all mood with a precise malevolent tone, including outrageous shades of dark humor, Cronenberg does with this film what Eastwood failed to do in MYSTIC RIVER, which is to establish, at the core of this film, believability. A film that successfully straddles the line between a thriller and an art film, it’s intriguing how Cronenberg wordlessly connects between characters as well as the audience, the complex layers that make it difficult to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil, as many of the evil characters never cross the line of out and out criminal behavior, while many of the righteous and good characters do cross that line, yet for understandable motives. There is a brilliant and elegant pace and style throughout, economical and spare, without a single wasted frame, using music that sounds like Aaron Copland in “Our Town,” pure understated small town Americana, prideful, even heroic, yet mourning a faraway loss or regret, a reminder that death is a fundamental fabric of small town life.

With bad guys on the loose, almost in the abstract, the film changes gears and zeroes in on a typical loving family somewhere in small-town Indiana, where Tom, Viggo Mortensen, an aw-shucks everyday kind of guy who runs a Main Street diner, with Maria Bello as his loving and supportive wife, with two kids, a befuddled teenage boy who is the victim of high school bullies and what looks like a cute but over-pampered blond, curly-haired, 6-year old daughter. The rhythm of life is established and broken when the bad guys enter the diner and get their lunch handed to them by soft-spoken, mild mannered Tom, a stand in for Clark Kent, who is instantly turned into a reluctant hero. Despite his undesired popularity, more bad guys arrive in the form of Ed Harris, who is missing one eye, and attributes its loss to Tom, who he recognizes as Joey from the old neighborhood in Philly. Harris stalks him, very much like the high school bully that continues to pick on the son, until all hell break loose in each case, where the situation is resolved through unintended violence, but it gets the job done. Or does it? As there’s more bad guys where they came from. Violence only leads to more violence, which sometimes seems like the only way, as without it, innocent individuals would continue be victimized and harmed, so at the very least, we understand and are willing to accept its place in our society, all precipitated here by seething male anger.

Interesting that Cronenberg establishes some healthy marital sex, even after twenty years of marriage, which adds credibility to the vulnerability of the characters. We see them when no one is looking, and they maintain their interest and intellect. The complexity of Monica Bello’s performance is stunning, as she remains fierce and independent, yet she’s nearly raped by her husband, who turns into a monster to defend his family. Again, it is rape, but it turns into something else, which may as well be a metaphor for the film – unintended consequences. As Tom has to come to terms with Joey, and all the ramifications of his so-called controlled violence, so too does his family and his town, as they’re all interconnected. Cronenberg’s wordless interplay is astonishing, particularly at the end, which remains so ambiguous. Yet how many lies can we absorb and still remain true to ourselves?

Time Out London review Geoff Andrew

Though this is certainly Cronenberg’s most ‘mainstream’ movie in years, the fact that it’s so immediately enjoyable as a terrific thriller does not diminish its less obvious virtues. Indeed, its apparent effortlessness in transcending simple generic concerns to interrogate a range of issues surrounding violence, justice, heroism and identity should not distract attention from its subtly subversive critique of the American Dream (or should one say nightmare?). Diner proprietor Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), his lawyer wife Edie (Maria Bello) and their two kids seem to have a pretty idyllic existence in smalltown America until a couple of gleefully murderous hoods turn up by chance at the eaterie, and an order for coffee escalates to terrorising Tom and his customers. Quick thinking on his part leads to reluctant celebrity – and, still more unwelcome – further visits, from sinister wise guys hinting that Tom may not be quite the clean-cut Ordinary Joe he says he is. Besides playing fast and loose (in the most elegantly rigorous way, of course) with family-under-siege thriller conventions, Cronenberg deftly undermines narrative expectations by implying that happy families may in fact be forms of imprisonment, and that trying to conform to an American way may involve lying to ourselves and others about the very human capacity for monstrosity. Here, as a repressed past erupts with a vengeance, violence begets violence, and safe, traditional ethics are swiftly revealed as virtually irrelevant. All this is executed with Cronenberg's now customarily brilliant wit, bravura style and perfect pacing, not to mention peak-form performances from a superb cast that memorably includes William Hurt and Ed Harris. Unlike the tough but unremarkable pulp fiction of the original graphic novel, the film (which differs from the book in numerous important respects) succeeds not only in terms of action and suspense but as cautionary fable, historical allegory, social satire and moral disquisition. In short, it’s marvellous, and up there with ‘Spider’ as Cronenberg’s very best work.

A History Of Violence Jonathan Romney in Cannes from Screendaily

Two American genres – the film noir and the Western – are gene-spliced into vigorous new shape in what looks, at first sight, like David Cronenberg’s most mainstream project in years. Yet A History Of Violence, a deviously-plotted tale of danger and the darkness beneath innocent surfaces, soon reveals characteristic themes that afford Cronenberg fans plenty of rich gristle to chew over.

But it should also make a powerful draw for audiences less committed to Cronenberg’s auteur brand: effective both as a nail-biting thriller and as a knowing philosophical art film, Cronenberg’s latest is executed with a no-nonsense leanness that confirms his status as a master of classical screen language.

The film’s only liability, paradoxically, is its unpredictability: the press kit asks critics not to reveal its plot twists, which may prove an insuperable challenge for any in-depth assessment. But assuming its key secrets can be kept fresh for a while at least, the film looks like Cronenberg’s most commercial shot in ages. One suspects that the film should in any case sustain repeat viewings, ensuring a healthy DVD existence.

It will also boost the reputations of its stars: Maria Bello, who gets better and better as a smart, sexy, more mature female lead; and Viggo Mortensen, whose post-Lord of the Rings image as a strong, silent hero is given some adroit twists.

The film begins with a long, teasingly paced opening shot that establishes a neo-Western tone, as two sinister types (McHattie, Bryk) check out of a secluded motel, leading to a marrow-chilling payoff. The action then shifts to archetypal small town Millbrook, where neighbourly Tom Stall (Mortensen) runs the local diner, wife Edie (Bello) is an attorney, and their children, teenage Jack (Holmes) and blonde-moppet daughter Sarah (Hayes) are loving progeny.

As expected, the two desperadoes turn up with evil intent, but Tom saves the day and is acclaimed on the news as an “American hero and man of few words.” But as a result of his media exposure, another menace arrives: a scarred Philadelphia heavy (Harris) with a few theories of his own about Tom’s past.

This is about as much plot as can be safely revealed: suffice to say that once violence has erupted in the Stalls’ cosy world, it can’t easily be stopped. Josh Olson’s crafty script is constantly surprising, even when it seems – towards the end – to head into more conventional revenge-drama territory.

What’s especially impressive is the grace with which Cronenberg navigates a razor’s edge of irony, giving us a sly what’s-wrong-with-this-picture portrait of the Stall household without ever opting for cheap sarcasm at the expense of this Norman Rockwell-esque peace-loving, church-going advert for heartland family values.

Much of this fine balance depends on Mortensen’s performance as the gentle, tough but taciturn family man, a part that builds quite overtly on the Gary Cooper template; and the role, as Tom’s character further unfolds, sees Mortensen performing with remarkably well-judged understatement. In addition, he and Bello spark wonderfully in two complementary sex scenes that gauge the changes in Tom and Edie’s relationship.

Richly textured with echoes, the film brings to mind other stories of peaceful types turning to desperate action (eg Straw Dogs), Hitchcock’s small-town drama Shadow Of A Doubt, and a host of defending-the-homestead Westerns.

At one point, Harris’s character even invokes Dirty Harry, but in reality the Clint Eastwood film that most comes to mind is Unforgiven, especially given the film’s violent conclusion, all the more unsettling because, against our better judgement, we can’t help finding it cathartic.

Meanwhile, classic Cronenberg themes come to the fore: problems of identity and perception, the uncontrollable nature of the savage Id, the thin barriers between normality and nightmare (the final act suggests an eXistenZ- like journey into dream), and above all, duality, as in Dead Ringers and The Fly. And in one or two brief but startling shots, Cronenberg’s taste for gruesome special effects is more than apparent, bringing home the hard reality of the violence in question.

Mortensen and Bello benefit from rich support, notably from Harris’s brisk, bullish menace and from William Hurt, whose suave, droll and utterly creepy eleventh-hour appearance is a startling break from form and arguably a career best.

Newcomer Holmes makes a strong impression too, as an ostensibly bland generic teen who turns out anything but. Visually the film is classy and sober, shot by Peter Suschitzy with an eye to clean, sometimes austerely formal execution.

Ruthlessly gripping and intellectually provocative and dense, A History Of Violence is a bold, fresh left-turn for Cronenberg, and – despite mixed boos and cheers at the press show – could be a popular front-runner for the Palme d’Or.

The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review

CANNES, FRANCE—The veterans showed their strength this year at Cannes. Still, the toughest movie I saw in competition, David Cronenberg's droll and ruthless meta-thriller A History of Violence, came away empty-handed—just as Cronenberg's Spider was ignored by the 2002 jury. What does it take? Beginning with Dead Ringers (1988), or even The Fly(1986), Cronenberg has been, film for film, the most audacious and challenging narrative director in the English-speaking world. But then, Hou Hsiao-hsien—arguably the greatest narrative filmmaker working anywhere over the last 15 years—left Cannes without a prize as well.

Why is A History of Violence, set to open in the fall, so great? Freely adapted from John Wagner and Vince Locke's graphic novel (and apparently a work for hire), Cronenberg's movie manages to have its cake and eat it—impersonating an action flick in its staccato mayhem while questioning these violent attractions every step of the way.

A pair of cartoonishly good-looking normals (Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello), living with their CGI-perfect children in a Disneyland-idyllic small town, are irrationally terrorized by a series of criminals, most impressively Ed Harris's mutilated gangster. Tense and atmospheric, A History of Violence is a hyper-real version of an early-'50s B-movie nightmare—albeit one where the narrative delicately blurs dream and reality, the performances slyly merge acting with role-playing, the location feels like a set, and blood always splatters from lovingly contrived prosthetic injuries.

A History of Violence is deeply involving, although with its Hitchcockian "wrong man" theme and continual implication of the viewer, it's as coolly distanced as its title would suggest. Cronenberg's tone is too disconcertingly dry to be ironic and too scary to register as absurd. "It's not tongue-in-cheek," he remarked at his press conference. "It's funny." In a way, it's a successful version of Michael Haneke's audience-bash ing Funny Games, and the overappreciative press screening audience drove one Viennese programmer to shout, "Stop laughing you fucking piece of shit critics and take this film serious!" It's a movie that could drive you crazy.

A History of Violence Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

SPOILERS] David Cronenberg's new movie, A History of Violence, may well be a masterpiece. It's garnering stellar reviews, and many extremely perceptive critics perceive it as a timely, urgent yet controlled missive about the America's valorization of men who solve problems with a swing of the fist or, on the larger scale, a drop of a bomb. Some writers read a bit further into the film, locating a trenchant auto-critique on Cronenberg's part. Here's a director who began his career in horror, and while his work in this vein always carried a deeper philosophical charge than most entries in the genre (for one of the best explications of Cronenberg's body-politics, consult Steven Shaviro's The Cinematic Body), the success of these films was attributable in no small part of the director's visceral, painterly way with gore. As more recent works such as eXistenZ and Spider have toned down the blood and committed themselves more directly to questions of embodiment and subjectivity, A History of Violence could reasonably be understood as a film of reckoning. Cronenberg certainly stages what on the surface appear to be typical, Hollywood-style physical confrontations, drawing on the tropes of the Western and the gangster film, only to jolt the viewer into a harrowing new state of consciousness by revealing the carnage that conventional depictions keep scrupulously off-frame. Cronenberg, by this logic, is indicting not only mainstream cinema and its role in shaping our appetite for violent masculinity, but his own fascination with the human body in pieces. All of this strikes me as completely plausible, and I am pleased to be able to direct you to some highly articulate readings of the film along these lines, all of which highlight different aspects of the film, but are united in the belief that Cronenberg has delivered a masterpiece: Manohla Dargis, Steve Erickson, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Neil Young.

So, okay, you don't need me doing my Metacritic impression, right? Where do I come down on A History of Violence? I'm not exactly sure yet. I respect it more than I'm moved by it. Film Comment magazine reports that after the film's debut at Cannes, where many American critics expected it to take a prize, director Benoit Jacquot revealed that he alone among the jurors thought it was something special. Others on the jury (including Agnès Varda, Toni Morrison, and jury head Emir Kusturica) just dismissed it as a Hollywood genre piece and were puzzled as to why it was included in Competition. Various festival and industry screenings have reportedly been met with every conceivable reaction, from awestruck applause to hardy guffaws. And here I go again, paraphrasing other people's reactions. What is this film? One of the reasons I found myself duly impressed by it and yet highly ambivalent is that Cronenberg has crafted it as a kind of Rorschach blot. Some films I find masterful but a little too closed off and self-sufficient. (For me, Haneke's Hidden is a recent example.) Others can be maddeningly opaque. (If I had gone into 2046 expecting a comprehensible plot, I doubt I would have loved it as much as I did.) A History of Violence somehow strikes me as operating in both registers at once. It functions as a tight, well-plotted B-movie, but it hovers around a stilted strangeness that it never entirely commits to. Yes, the idyllic opening scenes of Millbrook, Indiana are just a little too perfect, playing like a kissing cousin to Blue Velvet. But soon, the environment and the slightly stylized performances within it (Viggo Mortensen's turn as Tom Stall, especially) begin to naturalize themselves, forming a hermetic movie-world that can be accepted at face value, or examined on a moment-to-moment basis, its little discrepancies and weirdnesses offering purchase for a counter-reading. Many of Violence's major themes are discussed explicitly -- for instance, son Jack's (Ashton Holmes) disquisition on the function of bullying, or the stern talking-to Tom gives Jack after he confronts his tormentor. In a way, the final scene summarizes the film's awkward ambivalence, since it is both evocatively open-ended (what will become of the Stall family?) and theoretically direct (the legacy of violence and its dual role, protecting as well as threatening the family unit, could scarcely be made more explicit). To one way of thinking, all of this double functioning speaks to the film's enormous power and to Cronenberg's flawless craftsmanship. At the same time, it divides my reaction against itself. A History of Violence strikes me as an object so perfectly self-contained as to render analysis redundant, and at the same time as a self-emptying artifact, embodying a kind of guilelessness and in doing so offering itself up as a blank slate for ideational projection. That this is a major achievement is beyond question. What sort of achievement, I am at present unable to say.

IN CONTENTION: Making History – Part I: DAVID CRONENBERG Kristopher Tapley from In Contention

IN CONTENTION: Making History – Part II: MARIA BELLO Kristopher Tapley from In Contention

BFI | Sight & Sound | A History of Violence (2005) Richard Falcon, October 2005

Bright Lights Film Journal (Megan Ratner) review February 2006

Bright Lights Film Journal review A.J. Adler, February 2006

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader, also seen here: A Depth in the Family

A History of Violence Mike Sutton from DVD Times

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [A]

Slate (David Edelstein) review

DVD Times Anthony Nield

Slant Magazine review Jeremiah Kipp

The New York Sun (Nathan Lee) review

Reverse Shot [Nicolas Rapold]

EmanuelLevy.com

DVD Outsider Camus

Film Monthly (Andrew Dowd) review

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]

A Film Odyssey [Robert Humanick]

not coming to a theater near you (Chiranjit Goswami) review

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review

stylusmagazine.com (Roque Strew) review

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] including an interview with the director

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Planet Sick-Boy (Jon Popick) review

Twitch review Canfield

hybridmagazine.com review Edward Rholes

Twitch (Kurt Halfyard) review

Flipside Movie Emporium (Sean O'Connell) review [A-]

The Spinning Image (Daniel Auty) review

sneersnipe (Julie Faveur) review

Culture Wars [Dean Nicholas]

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [4/5]

Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

Talking Pictures (UK) review Jen Johnston and Jamie Garwood

Nerve [Kenn Taylor]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) dvd review

The Cinematheque (Kevyn Knox) review

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/5]

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]

VideoVista review Steve Aylett

Film Journal International (Ethan Alter) review

DVD Town (Erik Martinez) dvd review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3.5/4] Maitland McDonagh

The Independent review [4/5] Anthony Quinn

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]

The Memphis Flyer Chris Herrington

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Chicago Tribune [Allison Benedikt]

RogerEbert.com [Jim Emerson]

Premiere - Sex on Film: David Cronenberg Interview by Karl Rozemeyer from Premiere magazine, 2005

David Cronenberg interview - News - Film - Time Out London Geoff Andrew interview from Time Out London, September 22, 2005

PopEntertainment.com: David Cronenberg interview about 'A History ... Interview by Brad Balfour from Pop Entertainment magazine, November 3, 2005

GreenCine Interview (2006) by David D’Arcy, March 29, 2006

EASTERN PROMISES B+ 91

Canada Great Britain USA (96 mi) 2007

A subtle journey into a dark hell where the rotting corpses of dead souls disguise themselves as men, this is a dark and somber picture which maintains a tone of eloquent restraint revealing a world tucked away from the real world, like a parallel universe, expressed with an air of detachment peering behind the façade of normalcy, led by the so-quiet-it’s-nearly-inaudible performance by Viggo Mortensen playing Nikolai, a hardened Russian crime syndicate soldier, a guy with an accent so thick you can almost cut it, who leads with the dead seriousness of his actions which are astonishingly cold-hearted and direct, a film that from the opening scene features unsettling bursts of raw, graphic violence that keep intruding into the audience’s comfort zone. Mortensen is once again amazing in his role of a man who is not what he seems, as he’s exceedingly bright and articulate, though seemingly content to follow orders and always amusingly self-deprecating (“I’m just the chauffeur”), rarely called upon to reveal any personal signs of himself, as emotions, seen in this world as a weakness, are solidly kept in check. In contrast, Vincent Cassel plays Kirill, the over-indulgent crime boss’s son, a lecherous drunk, and quite possibly a queer who would easily fit into the decadent Fassbinder world of Germany in the 1920’s, a hot-headed thug whose violent outbursts are predictably easy to manipulate by Nikolai, his willing accomplice, a truly ambiguous creature always playing the straight guy cleaning up the mess left behind by Kirill’s rash, outlandishly drunken fiascos that are a continual embarrassment to his father, Semyon, in another brilliant performance from Armin Mueller-Stahl. Remember his role as the overbearing father in SHINE, where he would rather destroy his son’s career rather than see him waver an inch from his explicit instructions? Here he is equally authoritatively severe, even more so, ordering assassinations under the cloak of invisibility, a mafia boss whose ruthlessness is barely detected under his calm, detached manner. Obviously, the battle of wits, the mano a mano showdown is between the two guys with the slowest heartbeats, men whose eerie calm disguises their real intentions.

Set in the dark shadows of modern day London, reminiscent of his earlier work SPIDER, much of this film’s strength lies in establishing a prevailing mood of believability, of truth and consequences, where luring the audience into this sordid Russian underworld is the key. Cronenberg does a brilliant job establishing minute details, particularly the red velvet-lined interior of the Russian Social Club where Semyon rules the roost, an ornate camouflage for his real dirty dealings, where guests dine in the lavish style customary of the Czar, with elaborately costumed singers and musicians paying tribute to the mother country, where picturesque children stare lovingly at their grandfather or uncle, unable to see their murderous undersides, where the aristocracy is treated with honor and reverence, where respect is defined by the flow of money. Into this Dostoevskian labyrinth Naomi Watts as Anna reluctantly enters, as she works at a nearby hospital where a young mother died giving birth to a daughter, leaving behind a Russian diary and a business card to Semyon’s establishment. As she is completely innocent to this gateway into the criminal underworld, the film turns on a single moment, as Anna’s initial meeting with Semyon is without incident and she’s about to leave, learning nothing about the mother’s connection, until she mentions the girl kept a diary. The look on Semyon’s face and the precision of his delayed reaction is mesmerizing, as Anna, as well as the audience, are reeled in like Alice falling into the rabbit hole. The more the film progresses, the more she learns about the workings of the inner circle of the vory v zakone’s secret crime operations, where the men’s bodies are covered in prison tattoos that reveal their life story and their business is trafficking young girls, forcing them into drug addiction and prostitution through an international slave ring. Words from the diary are read by the deceased mother in an on-going narration, a haunting reminder of the direction her life took after coming into contact with this organization, where her initial adolescent hopes were turned into suicidal thoughts and a dread for living, as she was repeatedly beaten and abused.

You might think some big showdown would be made over that diary, but other unexpected issues develop that play out in near spectacular fashion. As befits Nikolai’s skills and expertise, he quickly rises within the organization to a prominent position, the atmosphere of rare air where the price of admission is exceedingly high, with men’s lives as payment, usually fought for or killed in brutal fashion. There is a Russian bathhouse scene that will remain memorable both for the precise choreographic movements, all perfectly captured by just the right camera angles, and by the utter brutality of the moment, where Mortensen is completely naked when he’s forced to defend himself against two vicious killers. The sheer testosterone bravado of this scene is spellbinding as well as unique, as it is an accurate reflection of the kind of world we live in today, where tiny underground sects lay the groundwork to carry out plots against humanity in as violent a manner as is humanly possible, where over time, these acts only grown more hideously monstrous, all carried out by unpretentious men who retain an almost religious calm in their disciplined personal lives, and men who vowed long ago that they have no use whatsoever for women. Despite the delirious, off-the-charts depravity of Kirill balanced against the always quietly brooding Nikolai, these are Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd, a couple of Eastern European wild and crazy guys whose behavior defies belief, whose immoral logic only makes them more dangerous than they look, which is like a couple of goofs left over from some MEN IN BLACK or MATRIX movie. Hard to take these guys seriously when you never for a moment suspect what they actually do for a living. The final scene has an almost GODFATHER like sense of detached finality to it, shown with a sense of quiet, haunting serenity.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

Eastern Promises is a straighter version of Inland Empire, which is not to say that it isn't totally queer. David Cronenberg's new film is the story of a woman in trouble: Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), a London midwife who becomes obsessed with finding the family of a 14-year-old prostitute who dies after delivering a child under her watch. The anonymous dead girl's diary, written in Russian, provides the film with its heavy-handed narration and brings Anna in contact with Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl—totally bonkers), a sinister, old-school don who commandeers the Vory V Zakone criminal faction out of his Trans-Siberian restaurant, his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel), and their mysterious driver Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). The story is clear-cut, which is something of a bummer after the heady, one-two punch of the serpentine Spider and iconic splendor of A History of Violence, but Cronenberg's exquisite framing provides the film with arresting psychological dimensions; only Polanski is better at framing the world along diagonal lines, but Cronenberg's images are more insinuating, leaving one feeling wary of what may be bubbling beneath the surface of things. Way before Semyon learns that Kirill is being ridiculed by his enemies for possibly being gay, Cronenberg has already amped up the homoerotic tension: In a crucial scene, Kirill insists on watching Nikolai fuck a whore from behind; and in another, Nikolai's balls-out escape from the grip of two goons inside a Turkish bath ingeniously suggests a hot and sweaty fuck session. The film's Russians are not conceived beyond vodka-guzzling stereotypes, and Steven Knight's screenplay, much in the spirit of the atrocious Dirty Pretty Things, essentially transforms the nightmare of thwarted immigrant dreams into a tawdry sex expo, but Cronenberg's contemplation of codes of masculine honor by anxiously putting the male body on the line is deliciously transgressive.

"You belong with nice people. Stay away from people like me."

Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), a chauffeur and foot soldier in a London-based Russian crime family, wears his shadow of a smile like an impenetrable mask. One minute he's indifferently hacking and disposing of the murdered corpse of a rival gangster, the next he's watching out for innocent hospital midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts), who has landed in the sights of his family boss, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). His smile remains the same throughout: noncommittal, detached, blank.

Anna has the diary of a dead prostitute that could compromise Semyon's business (prostitution, smuggling, drugs), and he's not squeamish about who dies to keep him out of prison.

We want to believe that Nikolai is really a soulful gangster with a criminal code behind his ambiguous grin and dark glasses because he may be Anna's only protection from Semyon and his careless, rash son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel). The mystery of Nikolai's motivations creates as much tension as Anna's predicament. Mortensen and director David Cronenberg refuse to tip their hat until we're deep into the complications.

This is the actor and director's second collaboration and, as in "A History of Violence," Mortensen is compelling in a role in which emotions are intensely guarded. The script, by "Dirty Pretty Things" writer Steven Knight, offers a brutally unglamorous underworld where brothels are filled with teenage girls who followed Eastern promises of Western plenty into misery and degradation.

There's no code of honor among these criminals, no matter what their identifying tattoos read. The violence is swift and brutal, as Nikolai proves when he's attacked in a bathhouse, defending himself against cold steel with reflex efficiency. Rarely has anyone looked so vulnerable and ferocious in (literally) naked combat.

Nikolai is impenetrable to the end. The restraint of both director and actor makes this steely gangster drama reverberate long after it ends. This kind of mystery is rare in a film culture that demands answers before the credits roll.

David Cronenberg's latest is a fairly traditional gangster story. It's not too long, and it doesn't particularly have anything to say about the gangster genre the way GoodFellas or Miller's Crossing did. With less violence and graphic language and maybe filmed in black-and-white, it could have been released back in the 1940s. What makes it great is that it's a David Cronenberg movie; he tells a compelling story, filled with his own particular obsessions. It's personal, unpretentious and unassuming. It's basically what Manny Farber used to call an "Underground Movie," or the type of movie that doesn't call attention to itself, although it does contain its own sublime artistry.

Cronenberg's storytelling here is so subtle, and he immerses us into this world so completely, that it doesn't become clear for some time that we're in London, albeit a tucked-away corner occupied by Russian families. Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts) works as a midwife at a hospital and lives with her mother (Sinéad Cusack) and her Uncle Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski). When a 14 year-old pregnant girl comes to the hospital, Anna is able to save the baby, but not the girl, who remains unidentified, save for a diary written in Russian and the address of a restaurant. There she meets Seymon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who -- unbeknownst to her -- runs a violent crime family. He butters her up with some real Russian cooking; her own family eats bad English food.

Seymon's son is Kirill (Vincent Cassel), an unstable, violent loon. Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen) is charged with looking after him and driving him around, but also killing people from time to time. Nikolai is essential to the family, but still excluded from official functions like birthday parties. Thus the two outsiders, Nikolai and Anna, find a kind of uneasy bond. Even so, Anna's poking into the identity of the pregnant girl opens a few dangerous wounds.

Instantly, Eastern Promises looks like a Cronenberg film, and not just because it opens with a throat-slicing. It has an intelligent, deliberate pace and allows for questions about the human body. As with A History of Violence, this film has little to do with supernatural bonding of technology and flesh, but rather the problem of the flesh vs. the soul. Can the flesh, or the body, accurately represent who a person really is? Cronenberg directly addresses the question with the theme of tattoos. Each of the Russian thugs is decorated with designs that could have secret meanings, or even more than one meaning. One specific tattoo, a pair of stars located one on each shoulder, comes into play during the climax and perfectly illustrates this theme.

Eastern Promises is also Cronenberg's first real "food" movie, and he luxuriates in showing the richness and seductiveness of the Russian food, vs. the bland, junky quality of the regular English food consumed by Anna and her family. It's surprising that Cronenberg hasn't taken on a food theme before this, as it's another melding of flesh and manufactured, outside material.

Like A History of Violence, this new film will seem like a mature departure for Cronenberg, but mainly because it's not specifically a horror film. It's still riddled with violence and dark ideas (one particularly effective and memorable fight scene takes place between a naked Nikolai and two leather-clad thugs in a white tile bath house). But even so, it may be more inviting for moviegoers unfamiliar with or unwilling to tackle his more explicit films. It may or may not win any awards come December, but I'd be willing to single out Mueller-Stahl for a superb performance as the Godfather-like boss, as well as Mr. Cronenberg, who for my money is the greatest working film director alive.

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman)

I've said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation. From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run.

A rhapsodic movie directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power from an original screenplay by Steve Knight, Eastern Promises is very much a companion to A History of Violence. Both are crime thrillers that allow Viggo Mortensen to play a morally ambiguous and severely divided, if not schizoid, action-hero savior; both are commissioned works that permit hired-gun Cronenberg to make a genre film that is actually something else. As slick as it is, Eastern Promises could, like A History of Violence, almost pass for an exceptionally well-made B-movie.

Graphic but never gratuitous in its violence, Eastern Promises opens on a rainy December eve with a brutal gangland murder in a London barbershop and unfolds mainly in a demimonde of Russian émigré thugs and whore- masters. Anna (Naomi Watts), a midwife in a central London hospital, delivers a baby as the mother, a 14-year-old prostitute named Tatiana, dies in childbirth. Half-Russian herself, Anna filches the girl's diary, hoping to discover who she is, and asks her irascibly inebriated uncle (Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski) to translate. "Do you always rob the bodies of the dead?" he asks in a question that will hang over the rest of the movie.

A business card found in the diary brings Anna to the Trans-Siberian restaurant, administered by the grandfatherly Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). That this red and gold Nutcracker wonderland turns out to be the headquarters for the London branch of the Gulag-spawned criminal fraternity vory v zakone (thieves in law) is the least of the movie's surprises. In her attempt to fathom the origins of the orphan to whom she's given the seasonal name Christina, Anna is continually bamboozled by the Trans-Siberians, a tribe whose every pleasantry carries a threat. "This isn't our world—we are ordinary people," her anxious mother (Sinead Cusack) warns her.

As usual in Cronenberg, the ordinary is severely contested terrain. (In a new scholarly treatment of the director, Mark Browning notes that nearly all of Cronenberg's post-1982 movies are designed to "problematize exactly what constitutes 'normality.' ") However naïve and depressed Anna appears, she is on a serious—and seriously deranged—quest. She's lost a baby through miscarriage and wants another one: Tatiana's. The means by which this might be achieved are at the heart of the movie, and also its strangeness.

Cronenberg's two previous works, Spider and A History of Violence, have been murderous family dramas; Eastern Promises continues this trend. Mueller-Stahl may be perfunctory in the role of the Russian paterfamilias, but Vincent Cassel literally flings himself into the role of his wastrel son Kirill, particularly in the company of the movie's most compelling presence, the crime family's chauffeur, Nikolai (Mortensen). Here is the movie's love story; in fact, the coupling of Kirill and Nikolai has the potential to fulfill Anna's dream. Hair slicked back, eyes hidden behind wraparound shades, Mortensen is even more electrifying as Nikolai than in his History of Violence roles; the actor speaks Russian as if he knows what he's saying, and his world-weary strut is at least as eloquent. Nikolai is a superbly complicated character—dark, diffident, cynical, hyper-alert, and tough enough to humorously stub out a cigarette on his tongue.

Garish yet restrained, Eastern Promises has scarcely a wasted set-up. In a close middle shot that is pure Cronenberg, Nikolai's car eases in behind Anna's parked motorcycle, a vintage Ural that belonged to her father; it's a menacing gesture that stops just short of a flirtatious caress. ("Sentimental value," Nikolai repeats when she tells him why she treasures the bike. "I've heard of that.") Nikolai is not only the family driver but their mortician: He and Kirill retrieve a dead body from the killer's freezer. Nikolai softens the corpse with an electric hair dryer. "OK, now I'm going to do his teeth and cut off his fingers," he informs his comrades. "You might want to leave room." They do, and you might wish to as well, although Cronenberg insures that we stay—at least for a few beats.

Eastern Promises is a masterful mood piece with a surplus of atmosphere. Intermittently excerpted in voice-over, Tatiana's diary is the most awkward element in Knight's otherwise impeccable screenplay—although it does introduce a current of unambiguous, otherworldly innocence in this misty, indeterminate world. Everything else is fluid. Blood flows; rain is near-constant. Corpses are tossed into the Thames, but secrets keep bobbing to the surface. Late in the movie, Eastern Promises' homoerotic subtext bursts its banks and all but floods the screen in a steamy public bathhouse with an extraordinary action sequence that must have taken a week to film.

According to the movie's characters, the world is populated by angels, devils, and human wolves. (Indeed, Eastern Promises is a Christmas story, complete with miracle.) Whenever possible, Cronenberg designs a wound that might have been inflicted by a fastidious insect from outer space, but mainly he uses a slightly wide-angle lens to keep the phantoms in sharp focus. Eastern Promises suggests a naturalized version of the recent Russian horror flick Night Watch. The vory v zakone are like a plague of vampires—governed by arcane laws and fearful superstitions. "You pronounced the name of my father," Kirill shrieks when confronted by an angry Anna. Liturgical music is heard as Nikolai kneels in his underwear, displaying his prison tattoos, for induction into the crime family. "I am already dead. I died when I was 15. Now I live in the Zone all the time," he assures his examiners.

Nikolai may be death personified but, with the possible exception of Anna's uncle, all of the Russians in Eastern Promises are walking corpses. Tatiana's diary begins by noting that the people of her village lived as though "buried in the earth." Kirill jokes that a particularly grotesque birthday celebration at the Trans-Siberia is a party for the Angel of Death. Who then will wrest the infant Christina from her clammy birthright?

Deceptively generic, Eastern Promises features Cronenberg's most unambiguous monster and straightforward narrative in years; the movie is a cosmic struggle between good and evil. But it's also an elaborate game that's played out in a fallen world filled with subterfuge and delicately limned with the pain of exile. (It hardly seems coincidental that Nikolai's last name, Luzhin, would be that of the chess-master hero of Vladimir Nabokov's The Defense.)

“I need to know who you are,” Anna urgently begs this ambiguous redeemer in the movie's haunting penultimate scene. Is our Nikolai an angel, or has Anna made a deal with the devil? And suppose that amounts to the same thing? As the sardonic Nikolai might say: “What does it matter?”

Currency | Eastern Promises - Cinema Scope Robert Koehler

Just as he turned the cameras on the press hordes at Cannes in 2005 by snapping photos of the snapping photographers, David Cronenberg has been in the process of turning the camera—that is, his point of observation and by extension, his concerns—on a 180-degree axis. First, with A History of Violence (2005), and now, with Eastern Promises, he has decidedly shifted from his ongoing preoccupations with the body towards the ways the mind—particularly the imaginative mind—can alter reality. Although he has remarked about A History of Violence’s concept of “a fantasy of a reality of America,” more noteworthy is the sense that no film adapted from a graphic novel before or since has been so rooted in a defined, fixed, and reasonably familiar—even everyday—reality. Iconic representations aside (and they are there to pick over, for sure), this process is further developed in Eastern Promises, which provides a brick-hard and street-smart depiction of contemporary London as a vivid setting for a drama involving the ruling lord of a Russian crime family, his mercurial and violent son, their reliable and reliably stoic chauffeur, and a hospital midwife who traces a baby in her care back to the family.

This sort of shift is not new for Cronenberg. He’s a filmmaker who has progressed in a pattern nearly unique in Canadian cinema, from unabashed genre (horror, to be exact) to material defying genre, and onto projects that are unimaginable without his involvement; compare The Brood (1979), for example, to Crash. What makes each shift in Cronenberg’s cinema especially fascinating, in hindsight, is that traces of the future Cronenberg could be detected in the current one. Why was it, I wondered when I first saw my first Cronenberg with The Brood, that I detected that here was a maker of horror movies who was bound to make cinema that would test all limits and definitions, who already was clearly an auteur? (Favourite clueless note in Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide, a tome with an especial animus toward Cronenberg, re The Brood: BOMB “[Samantha] Egger eats her own afterbirth while midget clones beat grandparents and lovely young schoolteachers to death with mallets. It’s a big, wide, wonderful world we live in!”) It took me a while to realize that I was responding to not only Cronenberg’s unerring ability to know the exactly right spot to place his camera and how to tell stories—his “professional” side—but his rumbling undercurrent of dissatisfaction with formulaic limitations of any kind and, more profoundly, with the limitations of human existence.

With Eastern Promises, these themes have grown beyond the circumscribed but fascinating dimensions of several of his deliberately contained and even hyper-claustrophobic worlds, expressed in various ways in Dead Ringers (1988), The Fly (1986), Naked Lunch (1991), Spider (2002), and even a supposedly non-Cronenbergian project like M. Butterfly (1993). In a kind of unexpected loop back to his past, the new film’s vastly ranging social contexts of in-grown Russian émigrés, isolated Turkish circles and thoroughly Anglicized Russian ethnics acknowledges a far larger world and communities of people that’s visible in his early horror films from The Brood to Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983). Yes, there were exploding heads and mallet-beating clones, but there were also families, offices, and social networks. A great deal of Eastern Promises entails these networks, how they define characters, and conversely, how character definition can also be deceiving.

The film begins with twinned deaths: The execution in a barber shop by a Turk syndicate of a member of the Russian Vory V Zakone crime brotherhood, and the death of a young Russian mother inducing her child’s birth. (One thing that never changes in Cronenberg’s universe: Birth is a seriously violent event.) Naomi Watts’ Anna, midwife and witness to the tragedy, tries to determine who the mother was through a diary she has left behind, also a possible key to determining the father’s identity. The diary entries lead her to a Russian restaurant in a not-so-tony section of London (tellingly named “Trans-Siberian Restaurant”), and her first sightings of owner Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his impulsive son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and, out front at the curb, the solid, statuesque presence of Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), who drives everyone around and operates with his lips sealed tighter than a drum.

Who are these people? The layers through which Anna wades don’t simply reveal a carefully concealed culture and ethic—and make no mistake, the Vory V Zakone live by and enforce their own internal codes, rules, and rituals—but, through the double-identity of Nikolai, a medium through which a guise, a lie, is the only means to uncover truth. Right now, there’s no combination of director and actor that displays a hotter fire and cooler intelligence than the Cronenberg-Mortensen tandem. The actor is perfectly matched to the director’s new concentration on the Real, but he’s also acutely—even obsessively—conscious of the powers of role-playing as they inform character, so that both his paired Tom-Joey personae in A History of Violence and his even more mysterious Nikolai in Eastern Promises trace patterns of concealment-to-disrobing. The key difference is immediately obvious: Tom is a good husband who thinks he has buried his old self as Joey, Philly mob hit man; Nikolai is a loyal servant of a different mob who’s actually an undercover, unnamed agent. Superficially, this might suggest that Tom-Joey is a considerably more rewarding role, and Mortensen’s performance of gestures and understated tension—certainly one of the most interesting film performances of recent years—would appear to reinforce that suggestion. But Mortensen’s and Cronenberg’s strategy for Nikolai is more radical in concept and execution than would be possible for Tom-Joey, and helps chart Eastern Promises as an even more accomplished work.

Cronenberg introduces Nikolai as a soldier sheathed in the sleek, stark black suits favoured by urban swinger sharks and Russian mobsters alike; his slicked-back hair, intact and impervious to wind or rain, is like a helmet. The only visible feature is his face, impermeable and seemingly made out of some new type of flesh-colored granite. (A fresh Cronenberg special effect? No, Viggo using his own musculature as a mask.) But, with time, and as the diary in Anna’s possession—translated, in a crucial and staggering supporting performance by none other than Jerzy Skolimowski as Anna’s difficult Russian Uncle Stepan—surrenders more of its secrets, Nikolai is literally disrobed. First, in a blistering, brutal and intimate fight in a bath house, Nikolai is naked, battling for his life in an ironic twist of mistaken identity. (The man who isn’t what he seems to be is taken for someone else altogether, at which point Eastern Promises reaches a peak of narrative ecstasy.) Further, his body is revealed as a tattoo-covered map of symbols unique to Vory V Zakone members who have done time in prison. Nikolai’s own skin is his passport to the underworld, through which he can pass undetected, accepted, and, then, in a bizarre kind of cleansing ritual combined with a graduation, promoted by way of more tattoos applied to his knees—code that he’ll never kneel to anyone. The actor has exchanged one costume for another within the concealed identity of his actual character, and the supreme filmmaker of bodies and anatomy both intact and ruptured has found an entirely new way to visually and dramatically project language through the surface of the body itself, but within the framework of actual social relations.

It’s no small matter that the narrative is the work of screenwriter Steve Knight, who brought forth Dirty Pretty Things (2002), another London drama about the nefarious abuses of the innocent by foreign underground elements. Cronenberg was for a long time his own screenwriter, but he has recently turned to the work of other writers for inspiration, and with Knight, he has found a voice that amplifies and reverberates with his own. Eastern Promises is a fascinating case of a film made under the intense gaze of a supreme auteur and written by the separate but equally potent hand of a writer. Where one ends and the other begins defies trace, in the same way that Cronenberg’s closing shot on a possibly contented Nikolai defies any easy conclusions.

Interview: David Cronenberg | Eastern Promises - Film Comment Amy Taubin interview, September/October 2007

Set in London within the ritualized underworld of the Russian mafia—the dread vory v zakone—David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises couldn’t be further, in terms of ambience, from the Americana of A History of Violence; and yet the two films are bonded, first by the enigmatic presence of Viggo Mortensen, once again playing a character with a mysterious past, and by the eroticized violence that is the currency of Cronenbergian male relationships.

Floating intermittently above the film is the voice of a 14-year-old Russian girl who, lured to London and imprisoned in a mafia whorehouse, hemorrhages to death in childbirth. A hospital midwife (Naomi Watts) finds the dead girl’s diary, which leads her to the red-plush restaurant that is the mafia’s front. Watts’s character opens the door to this illicit world but she remains an outsider, hovering at the periphery of the narrative. Cronenberg, however, with a mastery of film space that now seems like second nature to him, ushers us deep inside, placing us in intimate proximity to the casual barbarism of everyday life among thieves and murderers. The film builds to an extraordinary action sequence, a ballet of butchery choreographed for a trio of performers and set in the theater of a Russian steam bath.

Although the version of the film I saw in July was unfinished (Cronenberg was still mixing the sound at the time of the interview below), it left me literally shaking but also feeling that I now possessed secret knowledge. And knowledge, no matter how terrible, is power.

How did you get involved with Eastern Promises?

The script was developed at the BBC under David Thompson. It was very different when I first read it, but the characters and the subculture were all there. It was written by Steve Knight, who wrote Dirty Pretty Things for Stephen Frears. And it’s obvious he has a good feel for embedded subcultures, which is something that appeals to me too. Those strangely enclosed little worlds where rules are made up and become like the laws of nature. I was intrigued by that very intense hothouse climate.

It’s the first film you shot entirely outside of Canada. What was it like working in London?

It was good because the crew was good and the producers made me feel as supported as you can possibly be, and I brought most of my heads of department with me. But once I start shooting, wherever I am just becomes a big film set. Talk about a subculture—when you’re shooting you’re barely aware of anything else. Although the polonium poisoning happened just down the street from me so I couldn’t ignore that. When we started, the subject of the Russian mob in London was not particularly in the news, but pretty soon it became radioactively hot. Not that it’s exactly the same subject as the movie, but it is connected.

Like most of your movies, this one pivots on the question of identity. Viggo Mortensen’s character, Nikolai, has his identity literally written on his body in the form of the tattoos he got in a Russian prison.

Viggo does incredible research on his own. When we started, he sent me this two-volume book, Russian Criminal Tattoos. And a friend of his, Alix Lambert, had done a documentary about Russian prison tattoos called The Mark of Cain. So they became the focus of our intense rewriting. Steve Knight had alluded to tattoos, but in the rewrites we brought that forward, and it gave the story a real visual and metaphorical center. And then there’s such a wealth of books about modern Russia and the disaster it is in so many ways. All of those things were fed into our production.

The fact that Nikolai’s story has been coded onto his flesh is part of what makes the fight in the steam bath so extraordinary. How did the original script describe the scene?

The script said, “Two men come in with knives and there’s a fight.” The question of whether Viggo is naked or not isn’t addressed. And of course the details of the choreography are not in the script. That is the work of many months working with the actors, and with Carol Spier, the production designer, and with the stunt coordinator. If I had had an actor who wouldn’t play it naked, I would have had to shoot it with a towel around him, which would have been pretty silly, or I would have had to shoot it in a very restrained way. But for Viggo, there was no question. He said, “I have to do it naked.” That freed me to do it the way it had to be done. It took three days to shoot, but planning went on constantly. Every week, we’d work on it and refine it more and more. Viggo got really bruised. He didn’t tell me, but the makeup people did. They had to keep covering his bruises.

I found a piece that someone had posted on Ain’t It Cool News about having seen a preview of the film.

Was it the guy who was obsessed with Viggo’s balls?

I don’t know if I performed an act of repression, but I don’t remember seeing his balls.

You do see them. It’s just that they go by rather quickly.

Right. I meant I didn’t notice them in particular.

It wasn’t like there was a close-up of them. But this guy was obsessed. He even wrote “big hairy balls.” Well, that’s one way of looking at it. They’re definitely there, as you would imagine, but it’s only if you’re looking for them that that’s what you see. Because mostly he’s shot in full figure. So when people decide to run the DVD frame by frame, they are going to see everything at one point or another. Of course, a lot of the time it’s going to be slightly blurred because he’s in motion.

It’s a very homoerotic film. And not just because of that scene. You have this cocooned, violent all-male society where everyone is jockeying for power. And I think the central relationship of the film is between Vincent Cassel’s character, Kirill, the real son of the mob leader, and Nikolai, the “adopted” son, who Kirill sees as a threat while at the same time being crazy in love with him and unable to admit it.

I discussed this with Vincent a lot, and he was completely ready to do this. He’s played gay characters before. At first, he was thinking that he would have to approach it that Nikolai is a father figure to him, which he partially is also. But then it morphed as we played it, and became very flirtatious. You can see how the Nikolai character is mercilessly manipulating him by using the sexuality to turn him on and off. And that was definitely in the script.

But by the end, there is something oddly tender about that relationship, because Nikolai seems to have pity for him.

Yes, it’s odd because it seems so real. And the Nikolai character is ultimately so mysterious that you don’t know if it’s pure manipulation or if there’s real compassion there. It’s hard to say.

Could you talk about the violence? There aren’t many violent scenes—only three or four—but they’re very bloody, and one of them happens at the very beginning, or two do, really, if you count both the throat slitting and the pregnant girl hemorrhaging to death. After that, there’s one other throat slitting and the big scene in the steam bath. But they’re placed so that the effect of the entire movie is that it’s written on the body in an extreme way.

I remember when I first picked up the script and saw the title, Eastern Promises. I thought, this sounds like a cheap perfume, especially since in North America, “Eastern” doesn’t mean Russia, whereas in England it does. But then, the first scene changed my whole attitude, not only because it was violent, but because it introduced so many interesting elements—a kind of retarded murderer and a Turkish/Chechen cultural combination. And there are very few characters in the violent scenes. It’s intimate, which makes it more intense. The placing of those scenes is crucial. We need to know all the time that they are criminals and they are dangerous. The response I’ve gotten is that the movie is incredibly violent. And I keep saying, “Did you see The Departed? The body count there and the brains all over the wall?” But some people seem to feel that this movie is more violent than The Departed. So then, what are you talking about? You’re not talking about how many incidents, because The Departed has dozens and we have four. Somehow, it’s the close-up, the intensity, the carrying-through.

Also, knife violence is different from gun violence. And because it’s shot so close, the violence is very sexualized.

We have no guns in this movie. There were no guns in the script. The choice of those curved knives we use in the steam bath was mine. They’re not some kind of exotic Turkish knives, they’re linoleum knives. I felt that these guys could walk around in the streets with these knives, and if they were ever caught, they could say “we’re linoleum cutters.” And it’s almost like they are using their knives to re-tattoo Nikolai and change his identity by changing the marks on his skin.

On another subject, I want to ask you about At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World [Cronenberg’s four-minute film for Chacun son cinéma, the compilation put together for the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival]. I didn’t think anyone could do anything anymore that would make that audience really uncomfortable, but your film did.

I hope so.

You often talk about being an atheist, but your secular Jewish identity seems to be more on your mind than in the past.

I think circumstances have forced it a little more out in the open. We all know about the Holocaust and that it’s never really gone away. There’s just been an incident here in Canada. A radical Muslim preacher had a regular show on VisionTV, a television network devoted to religion. Every week he’d give his sermon, saying Jews are parasites, the Holocaust was divine retribution, and ultimately all Jews will be annihilated. People started saying we don’t think this should be on the air in Canada, so they pulled him off, and then they were going to put him back on because he’s highly respected. Meanwhile the guy issues a statement saying, “I’m not anti-Semitic. Everything I say is just prophecy. It says in our holy book that the Jews will be annihilated. It’s not that I don’t like Jews.”

So in that short film, it was interesting to think for all these people who would like there to be no Jews. Let’s propose we’re down to the last Jew. What does America think, and what does popular media culture think? I have one of my younger TV commentators saying, “I’m much younger than you so, no, I have no memories whatsoever.” So will this yearning for extermination of Jews really make much of an impression? Or will it be a moment of dancing in the streets in certain cities of the world, and then what? I was alluding to all that without making a big deal of it. I don’t think this is something new for me to be thinking about. I was also thinking of all those nice beheadings you can get on the Internet.

I was thinking about that in Eastern Promises. The current biggest provider of snuff pornography is the Muslim extremist movement. Remember when Al Goldstein from Screw magazine offered $50,000 if someone could bring him a real snuff film, and no one could? Now they’re everywhere, and most involve beheadings and throat slitting, and once again, as in Eastern Promises, it’s very sexual, very intimate. And needless to say, very disturbing.

At the Movies Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, November 15, 2007

Not Just Movies: Eastern Promises Jake Cole

Only the Cinema: Eastern Promises/Pursued Ed Howard

Observations on film art : Cronenberg's violent reversals Kristin Thompson

DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

Eastern Promises Henry Sheehan

2007 TIFF: EASTERN PROMISES—Robert Koehler Cinema Scope ... Michael Guillen from The Evening Class

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] including an interview with the director

Reverse Shot [Andrew Tracy]

indieWire [Michael Koresky]

EASTERN PROMISES Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Eastern Promises Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

eFilmCritic.com (Dan Lybarger)

Movie Vault [LaRae Meadows]

not coming to a theater near you (Chiranjit Goswami)

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin)

Slate (Dana Stevens)

DVD Talk Brian Orndorf

Shoot'em Up [Emanuel Levy]

Paste [Mike Isaac]

BeyondHollywood.com Gopal

The House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]

David Cronenberg's masterful take on globalization - Arts ... Promise Fulfilled, Rachel Giese from CBC News, September 13, 2007

The Best of David Cronenberg - Film.com C. Robert Cargill at film.com, September 14, 2007

David Cronenberg, Dead Serious - washingtonpost.com Desson Thomson from The Washington Post, September 17, 2007

Director David Cronenberg: Responsible violence? - CNN.com September 24, 2007

click here Pain Relief, David Cronenberg’s existential promises, by Jennifer Merin, who interviews the director for The New York Press, October 10, 2007

New York's Premier Alternative Newspaper. Arts, Music, Food, Movies and Opinion David Cronenberg: Secret Jew or Sell-out? Interview by Eric Kohn from The New York Press, October 10, 2007

David Cronenberg Interview | UGO.com Interview by the Underground Revolutionaries (2007)

David Cronenberg Interview by Gabriel Alvarez from Complex.com (2007)

Body Language: An Interview With David Cronenberg | The Underwire ... Scott Thill interview from Wired News, December 29, 2007

Interview with Cronenberg by SBIFF at UCSB regarding his life, work and Eastern Promises Video interview by Roger Durling at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, October 12, 2007 (80:36)

iKlipz See Show Share Video Lunch with David interview by David Poland, October 15, 2007 (28:31)

BBC interview with Cronenberg Video interview by Newsnight Review’s Martha Kearney from the BBC, October 19, 2007 (13:11)

A DANGEROUS METHOD C+ 78

Great Britain Germany Canada Switzerland (99 mi) 2011

Sort of like watching paint dry, as this ultra repressive, interior chamber drama moves with the glacial pace of Chekhov, usually stuck inside the sanctitude of one of many rooms but without his power of observation and social dissection. Instead, this is a historical costume drama that presupposes the meeting of Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) at the dawn of the psychoanalytic age around the turn of the 20^th century. The film is a Christopher Hampton adaptation of his own play called A Talking Cure, which was adapted from John Kerr’s book using the film title. As such, all action is advanced by dialogue, much of it through patient to therapist sessions, but also person to person discussions and through various letters sent between the two colleagues, who after striking up a rich personal friendship and professional associative relationship fell out of favor with each other, basically ending all communication. Since the two are known to have fathered what is known today as the practice of psychoanalysis, it’s ironic that in their own relationship they couldn’t practice what they preached, falling instead into utter dysfunction. While there is no doubt this raises intelligent issues, it will be hard to find an audience that is moved or actively interested in a cold intellectual discussion of their methodology as a science. Unfortunately, this was reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s WAKING LIFE (2001), his animated, color-coated, drug fantasia that becomes a dull soliloquy of endless ethereal monologues spoken as if in a perpetual daydream that brought back memories of being lectured to, as the tone of the entire film here is as if what it has to say is so extremely important that it begins to sound entirely self-serving instead of interesting. Both of these men, Jung and Freud, seem so arrogantly self-centered and full of themselves that it’s hard to believe anyone ever listened to either one of them.

The two actors are among the best actors working today, but here both are toned down and restricted to emotionally straight jacketed performances, especially Fassbender as Jung, who always looks like he’s framed in a picture book of some kind or an upscale magazine devoted to the elegant lifestyles of the wealthy class living in the luxurious mansions along beautiful Lake Zurich. His wife inherited money, so his ultra civilized dress and manner represents wealth and status, but also social rigidity, where one can suffocate in the righteous air of theoretical ideas, almost as if the body is completely cut off from the head attached to it. Freud’s studies in Vienna, Austria led him to the conclusion that all neurotic behavior was caused from sexual repression, leading to a dialogue between patient and therapist in an attempt to discover the root of the problem, using dream analysis and a discussion probing the unconscious mind in an attempt to unlock the key to a healthier life. Jung followed in his footsteps in Zurich, Switzerland, but refused to single out sex as a cause of repression, believing there could be a myriad of other possibilities. Both believed in intensive dream analysis, which they shared with one another, holding nothing back about their private lives in their intimate discussions until eventually something happened to change all that. Enter Keira Knightley, aka: Sabina Spielrein, the patient. If ever there was a hysterical, overacted performance, it is this one, which is barely watchable at times. Add to this the phony accents and you’ve got yourself a turkey of a performance in a film that’s already difficult to engage with due to the sometimes studious and at times professorial content of the endless discussions.

When Sabina describes her abusive family history, which has left her in an apoplectic state of continual hysteria, no one needs a degree in psychology to understand what a fragile and terrible condition she is in, where her body is filled with uncontrollable spasms reacting to her personal fears of continually being beaten by her father. Making matters worse, she enjoys the punishment. Promoting his inner calm, Jung is successful at getting her to accept herself as she is, an exceptionally well-educated woman unafraid to delve into the intellectual matters at hand, joining the psychoanalytic profession, though taking issue with both her colleagues. While this speaks of the success of therapy, no one believes Sabina is ever cured due to Knightley’s sprawling performance which is all over the place, always eccentric, never really losing the hysteria, just the flinching body spasms. While there’s not a lot to see and nothing particularly engaging, only lines of trust that are continually crossed, the film really dovetails off the charts, perhaps entirely miscast, where no character is the least bit interesting or sympathetic, made worse by the stifling oppressive tone of scholarly reserve, where anything outside this artificially passive world of stately elegance and manners is already seen as out of the ordinary and eventually out of bounds. It well describes the fissure that came between the two men, all of which precedes the advent of World War One, a crisis of unthinkable proportions which would change the thinking forever about battle fatigue and chronic stress syndrome. But these terms hadn’t yet been invented as Freud and Jung continue to squabble like children about their self-professed techniques in combating psychological relief. Both men are out of favor today due to advancements in the use of medicine for mental health treatment, which has all but replaced the idea of dream analysis and free associative psychoanalytic therapy sessions which are now largely based on an accumulation of family history and circumstances. The elegance and classical style used by Cronenberg never varies, matched by the music of Howard Shore who steals excerpts from a Viennese composer from the same era, the uncredited Gustav Mahler.

Post Script – The irony is not lost to viewers, as any therapist who would actually do what is suggested here by one of the founders of the field would likely lose their license, be thrown out of practice, and receive a hefty jail sentence. But of course, they were pioneers slogging their way through the wilderness.

The most classical film yet of David Cronenberg's classical period, this portrait of the struggle between mind and body elegantly suggests a plethora of urges, addictions, and neuroses continuously churning under its fastidious period-piece veneer. The cerebral side is the relationship between earnest fuddy-duddy Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and sardonic silver fox Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) in the early 1900s; the visceral side comes in the contorted, seductive form of Sabine Spielrein (Keira Knightley), the young masochist whose initial hysteria grows even more provocative to the men of science around her as she comes to match their intellects and challenge the limits of their rationality. Working from Christopher Hampton's play, Cronenberg outlines the archetypal bonds (mentor and pupil, doctor and patient, husband and wife) that comprise what one character describes as "the smooth workings of society," and then proceeds to examine—not with Dead Ringers microscopes but with Age of Innocence opera binoculars—the itchy irregularities emerging in the creamy white skin of the characters. If it has a tendency to explicitly state its own themes, the film nevertheless unsettles with its lucid visions of release and repression: One can imagine the director putting the ruthlessly composed final image here side by side with the raucous abandon that closes Shivers, and daring us to tell which one is more horrific.

A Dangerous Method – review | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks, September 2, 2011

There is method a-plenty in David Cronenberg's well-upholstered tale of Freud and Jung and the woman in the middle. It contains solid, subtle performances from Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender. The script is intelligent, the tone is tasteful, and Keira Knightley provides the Oscar bait with a fleeting display of stage-managed pyrotechnics. All that's missing, in fact, is a crucial whiff of danger.

A Dangerous Method is based on a play by Christopher Hampton, which is itself based on a book by John Kerr and somewhere along this rattling crawl between the base-camps the vim and vigour has bled clean out of it. Fassbender stars as the young Carl Jung, a fledgling psychiatrist, reaching for greatness under the gimlet eye of his mentor, Sigmund Freud (Mortensen). Jung idolises Freud but, increasingly, the two men are pulling in opposite directions. Freud thinks Jung's line of analysis is too airy-fairy, too in thrall to supposition and coincidence. Jung, for his part, thinks the master has sex on the brain. "Surely there must be more than one hinge into the universe," he grumbles.

The irony, though, is that whereas Freud is presented as a celibate old shaman, Jung is off living the dream, swinging the hinge until it howls out in protest. He is married and siring child after child while simultaneously carrying on an affair with Sabina Spielrein (Knightley), a brilliant hysteric who is an inmate at his hospital. Sabina bares her teeth and juts an extraordinary, elongated chin that should by rights have been shot in 3D. She is, she claims, "vile and filthy and corrupt" and her greatest desire is to be tied up and spanked. Jung, with a pained, frowning diligence, duly obliges.

But spanking, as any good psychiatrist should know, has consequences. In this particular case, it winds up exciting Sabina to a worrying degree, making Jung more miserable than he was before and comprehensively torpedoing the friendship with Freud, who initially defends his protege and then feels a fool for doing so. What the spanking can't do, unfortunately, is knock some life into this heartfelt, well-acted but curiously underwhelming slab of Masterpiece Theatre. A Dangerous Method feels heavy and lugubrious. It is a tale that comes marinated in port and choked on pipe-smoke. You long for it to hop down from the couch, throw open the windows and run about in the garden.

Freud and Jung's Hunky Hollywood Iterations are Gluttons for Keira ... Rex Reed from The NY Observer

An antiseptic departure for shock jock David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method is a psychological tug of war between the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson), and his disciple Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) over the mind and sex of an overwrought mental patient named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a mad Russian with a craving for spanking. Whacking her on her naked bottom must have worked. She ended up, years later, analyzing patients of her own. Too bad she didn’t also analyze this movie. It would have saved so much wasted time.

A grim 1912 period piece set in a mental clinic in Vienna at the dawn of 20th century enlightenment, the movie flirts with the peculiar relationship between novice Jung and mentor Freud while they both flirt with the same patient, but aside from Ms. Knightley’s lurid whupping without her panties on, nothing ever happens. The “dangerous method” in the title refers to the experiment by both analysts to radically treat the same female patient by taking her to bed. Not very scientific, but very, very talky. The textbook talk is more layered than the plot. The two doctors discuss their opposing theories in such a drawn-out series of academic letters between Austria and Switzerland that by the time they’re finished, the patient has developed an abstract hypothesis of her own. By the time they get around to testing their primal interest in Sabina between the uncomfortable-looking starched cotton sheets, they (as well as esteemed screenwriter Christopher Hampton) might be unhinged to discover their audience is snoring. Mr. Hampton adapted the script from his own stage play The Talking Cure, and it shows. Veteran Polish cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, who shoots all of Mr. Cronenberg’s films, gives everything the refined sheen of polyurethaned mahogany.

Considering herself vile, filthy and corrupt because she lusts for humiliation, Sabina listens to the inner voices of angels, then shrieks, shakes and stutters her way into a nervous fit while she squishes her food between her fingers in what I assume Ms. Knightley considers great acting. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, everyone was twittering furiously about her titillating spanking scenes, but they hardly made up for the huge lapses of tedium between smacks. As Freud, who believes the basis of all insanity is sexual repression, and Jung, who is monogamous and resistant to such extremist views, the miscast male stars are bland as dust and look like a box of Smith Brothers cough drops.

In his two previous collaborations with Mr. Cronenberg, Mr. Mortenson’s full-frontal wrestling scene in Eastern Promises and twisted gang killer-turned-suburbanite in A History of Violence offered more challenges than anything in the buttoned-up role of Freud, and after Mr. Fassbender’s brutally punishing role as IRA hunger-strike-martyr Bobby Sands in Hunger and his rollicking nudity as a sex addict in Shame, I can’t imagine what attracted these two megahunks to such a bore.

David Cronenberg's film, which stars Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender, explores Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung's falling-out over a beautiful, sexually hysterical patient.

“We have to go into uncharted territory,” the psychiatrist Carl Jung observes in regard to his own pioneering work, and the complex, fascinating topic of Jung's and Sigmund Freud's touchy relationship and eventual falling out over a beautiful, sexually hysterical patient has been grippingly explored by director David Cronenberg and writer Christopher Hampton in A Dangerous Method. Precise, lucid and thrillingly disciplined, this story of boundary-testing in the early days of psychoanalysis is brought to vivid life by the outstanding lead performances of Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender. Sure to be well received by festival audiences in Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York (except, perhaps, by orthodox adherents of both physicians), this Sony Classics release should enjoy a vigorous life in specialized release.

Shaking off any dusty remnants of a period biographical piece, the film tackles thorny psycho-sexual issues and matters of professional ethics with a frankness that feels entirely contemporary. Hampton's script is an outgrowth of his 2003 stage play The Talking Cure, which in turn was based on John Kerr's esteemed 1994 book A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein.

Spielrein (Knightley) is a young Russian woman put under the care of Jung (Fassbender) at the Burgholzli mental hospital outside Zurich in 1904. Clearly intelligent, she is also subject to seizures so violent it looks as though she might turn inside out (if this were a different sort of Cronenberg film, she might have actually done so). Already a Freudian even though he has not yet met the master, Jung learns that Spielrein's sexual fear and sense of humiliation stems from abuse dished out by her father from the time she was four.

Screaming and alarmingly jutting out her jaw in extremis, Knightley starts at a pitch so high as to provoke fear of where she'll go from there. Fortunately, the direction is down; as her character, under Jung's fastidious care, gradually gets a grip on her issues and can assess herself with a measure of intellectual composure, the performance modulates into something fully felt and genuinely impressive.

As Jung, Fassbender creates the picture of a disciplined, successful young doctor; fastidiously groomed and sporting perfectly trimmed moustache and wire-rimmed glasses, he's got a proper, wealthy wife (Sarah Gadon), a child and a few more to come. Physically and tempermentally, he seems so trim and tight that he could almost bust apart; in fact, he must.

When the two analytical pathfinders eventually meet, they flatter one another and have much to discuss; for his part, Freud (a pleasantly aged Mortensen) is pleased to welcome a Catholic into his circle, given his concern over its perception as a strictly Jewish domain, while even at this early stage, Jung has misgivings at the older man's tendancy to connect nearly every symptom to sexuality.

Hampton pivots the drama on the character of another early analyst, Otto Gross (fierce Vincent Cassel), a cocaine addict sent by Freud to Jung. An obsessive whose motto is, “Don't repress anything,” Gross lives up to it by routinely sleeping with his patients and believes Freud (the father of six) is preoccupied by sex because he doesn't get any.

This sets Jung to agonizing over the question of why people devote so much effort to suppressing their most natural instincts, perhaps, in particular, himself. Goaded by Spielrein to divest her of her virginity, give her the sexual experience she lacks and “be ferocious” in the bargain, Jung finally casts off his habitual restraints and dives into a torrid affair with his patient, which has major implications for all three of the main characters.

Shortly after Spielrein insists that Jung admit everything to Freud, the two men sail to the United States to attend a conference. Gazing at Manhattan as their ship approaches, Freud wonders, “Do you think they know we're on our way, bringing them the plague?” It's a great line, and if indeed what they imported was a plague, it was one obliging individuals to look inward, analyze their behavior, ponder the balance of liberation and repression, question their nature rather than blandly accept it. Of all of Cronenberg's films, A Dangerous Method reminds most of the brilliant Dead Ringers, if only because they both so breathtakingly embrace the dramatic dualities within humans, especially when they brush up against the primal subjects of sex and death.

Despite having to cover stages in the trio's relationships spread over many years, Hampton's screenplay utterly coheres and never feels episodic. The dialogue is constantly confronting, articulate and stimulating, the intellectual exchanges piercing at times. Cronenberg's direction is at one with the writer's diamond-hard rigor; cinematographer Peter Suschitzky provides visuals of a pristine purity augmented by the immaculate fin de l'epoch settings, while the editing has a bracing sharpness than can only be compared to Kubrick's.

Along with Knightley's excellent work as a character with a very long emotional arc indeed, Fassbender brilliantly conveys Jung's intelligence, urge to propriety and irresistible hunger for shedding light on the mysteries of the human interior. A drier, more contained figure, Freud is brought wonderfully to life by Mortensen in a bit of unexpected casting that proves entirely successful.

David Cronenberg Interviewed - Film Comment Amy Taubin interview, October 4, 2011

This interview took place a few days before the New York Film Festival’s gala screening of A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg’s intellectual adventure film that depicts the famous feud that developed between Freud and Jung during the early days of the psychoanalytic movement by focusing on a third person, Sabina Spielrein. A brilliant, young Russian Jew, Spielrein was treated by Jung for hysteria when she was still a teenager, had an affair with him while she was his patient, graduated from medical school in her early twenties with a degree in psychiatry, and became an analyst herself and an ally of Freud while remaining in love with Jung. The film’s script by Christopher Hampton is based on Hampton’s own 2002 play, The Talking Cure, which was made possible by John Kerr’s 1993 A Most Dangerous Method, a thorough history of the early years of psychoanalysis. Kerr gives prominence to Spielrein’s papers (her diary and her exchanges of letters with Freud and Jung), which were discovered in 1977, 35 years after her death in the Soviet Union at the hands of the Nazis. Cronenberg had long wanted to make a movie about Freud and psychoanalysis. Hampton’s dramatization of Spielrein’s story gave him the narrative handle he needed.

(See “Minds on Fire,” Amy Taubin’s essay on A Dangerous Method in the September/October issue and online.)

I want to focus on a few aspects of A Dangerous Method, which to my surprise proved controversial among critics who saw the film in Toronto or Venice. First, Keira Knightley’s performance, which I think is tremendous.
I understand intellectually why the performance is controversial, but I think it’s very wrongheaded. I think that people who have a problem think that at the beginning of the movie the character is over the top and they equate that with overacting. But Keira and I felt that we were doing a very subdued version of what hysteria was, and what Jung documented as her symptoms. To do it totally accurately would be unbearable to watch. We’ve seen film footage and stills from Charcot and others of what this was like. I said to Keira, “Let’s focus on the face and on the mouth because she’s trying to say unspeakable things, so part of her is trying to get them out and part of her is trying to stop them from coming out. That’s going to cause deformation and all kinds of stuff.” Of course she came up with her own version of that and we thought it was pretty accurate. And then, as the movie goes on, and as Sabina’s symptoms sort of release her, I think she gives a fantastically modulated performance. By the end, you can still feel [the hysteric symptoms] under there, but she’s really changed.

Of course, the stuff at the beginning is uncomfortable to watch. [Sabina] sought treatment because she was incapacitated. She couldn’t function in society. She would be triggered by various things into this deformity and inability to speak and hysterical laughter that would suddenly collapse into tears. So we had to deliver what hysteria is, why Sabina needed treatment, and we needed a level to come down from as her symptoms abate. For me it’s all very straightforward.

For me, she’s the point of identification in the movie.
Yes.

She was immediately that for me because of what happens in her body and her face in those early scenes. I think you connect kinetically with her, solar plexus to solar plexus. Or you don’t, I guess, and then it must be very alienating.
Part of the genius of Freud was that he insisted that the human body wasn’t separate from the psyche—that things that happen in your body manifest themselves in your mind and vice versa. So his “talking cure” is not just speaking. It’s addressing the body as well, because speech is body. And that’s something Freud understood and we use that understanding in the movie.

Can you talk about how you directed Keira. The most difficult thing for an actor to do is to play simultaneous contradictory impulses. She does that so remarkably.
That’s all her. She went to Christopher for a pile of books and then we talked about how much of a Russian accent she should have and what should be the level of hysteria for those early scenes. But how to manifest it was all from her. After three days of shooting we were five days ahead of schedule. I had allotted a lot of time for those early scenes because I didn‘t know what she would need. I hadn’t directed her before. And those extreme scenes were the first scenes we shot. But she was fantastic. She needed very few takes. We were all just awestruck. She was incredibly well-prepared. She had a little binder with all kinds of notes and she would listen to music of the period and then she would just do it.

And what’s more, she was a delight. It wasn’t Method acting in the sense of “Don’t talk to me, I’m in my character.” She would laugh. Viggo [Mortensen] and Michael [Fassbender] are fun-loving guys, as is Vincent [Cassel]. We all are and she was right there with all that. But she would do these amazing things, which leads me to say that she’s among the best actresses I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with the best. That’s why it bugs me that some people say she’s overacting. She’s hysterical. It’s not just an expression. It meant something at the time, medically.

The other thing that has been written that makes me angry is that this is a conventional, straitlaced, kind of “Masterpiece Theatre” movie.
It was a very laced-up period. You can see it in the costumes, in the men’s stiff white collars and the women’s corsets. It was a time of great repression. But I urge those people to watch a “Masterpiece Theatre” before they compare it, because it isn’t anything like that. They are using that as a bludgeon. Here’s my response: you give the movie what it wants and needs. I’m not thinking about my other movies at all. I don’t care what baggage people think I will bring to the movie. I don’t have that baggage. Once I decide on a project, I am honorable about how I treat it. I am not trying to put some false Cronenbergian imprint on it. Let’s just do the movie. Part of the project was the resurrection of the people and the era. That means it has to be as accurate as possible. I want the people to be as alive as they can be. I want to be able to smell them and hear them in a way that we can’t. It’s a matter of affection. I would like to have known them. That’s the only agenda I have—to honor the accuracy of these people and what they said. They actually said all the stuff they say in the movie; it’s all recorded in their letters because it was a period of letter writing.

And in terms of straitlaced, well, yes. That’s why Freud was so shocking. He insisted on the reality of the human body. He was always talking about penises and vaginas and anuses and excrement. And child abuse, in fact, and incest. These were things that were not acceptable. If you do a movie that’s wild and crazy, that stuff gets lost. It’s only when you show how controlled the society was that you can show how revolutionary and disruptive Freud was. And he knew that. He talked to Jung about that. And Jung says maybe if you didn’t mention the word sex or talk about libido, it would be better. And Freud answers that he has to be honest about what he’s seeing and he can’t sugarcoat it. It’s necessary to portray the era and not with irony or postmodern rethinking. I’m trying to be in that moment—me and the camera right there.

Could we talk a bit about the camera? I know you’ve been using a somewhat wide-angle lens in recent films, but what I noticed here specifically is that the spatial distortion of the wide angle creates a disparity in size between the person in the foreground and the person in the background both in two-shots and certain shot/counter shot sequences. It throws a monkey wrench into the idea of subjectivity. It makes equivalence impossible. The other becomes literally smaller than the self. Was that your intention?
I wasn’t thinking about it exactly the way you articulated it. It’s always an intuitive thing. Until we blocked the first scene, I didn’t know how we would shoot it. I didn’t know what lens I would use. I don’t rehearse. I need to be on the actual set with the actual actors and the costumes and the props before I can know how to shoot it. So we block the scene like a piece of theater. Then I show it to my director of photography and the whole crew. And then and only then do I look at the lenses and decide how I want to shoot. We did use wide-angle lenses—25mm and 27mm. Very close to the faces. That means you’re physically close to them, not optically close and physically far away [as with close-up lenses]. I wanted to be close to them and it does have the effect you mentioned. It doesn’t throw the background out of focus, but it does change the shapes and the sizes.

The scene that’s so extraordinary and nails Jung early on as the creep that he was is the one where Jung conducts the free-association experiment on his wife, using Sabina, his potential mistress, as his assistant. It’s amazing in terms of the establishing of the triangle and the circulation of subjectivity and desire.
And it’s all shot with that lens, even the hands. A moment I got very excited about is after his wife leaves and Jung comes back into the room. I thought how are we going to play this, and—I get chills just thinking about it—I said, “Keira, you get up and you take the position of his wife. You put your hands where her hands were, because you’re plotting as well. You’re going to come between him and his wife.” That’s something I didn’t anticipate until we shot the scene.

For me, the issue around Freud wanting to form an alliance with Sabina, basically against Jung, has to do with them both being Jews. I’m surprised more people don’t talk about the importance in the movie of Freud’s Jewishness.
Yes. The Jewish element was huge, and we present it that way. Freud wanted an oblivious Jung to become the leader of the psychoanalytic movement because he was so acceptable. He was Christian and German, and also charismatic and handsome. But mainly, Jung wasn’t Jewish. Freud even says, speaking of his psychoanalytic circle, “We’re all Jews here.” In the accepted anti-Semitism of the Austrian empire, although Jews were treated not too badly, all things considered, they were definitely restricted and discriminated against. They were not allowed to be in the military or in government. Jung even says, speaking about psychoanalysts, they’re all disreputable and degenerate. He meant that they were all Jews and that psychoanalysis could be dismissed as a Jewish science, as another aspect of Jewish mysticism and sensuality and degeneracy. All the Christian intellectuals—Nietzsche, Wagner—were obsessed with Jews and Jewishness. They were constantly trying to figure out what it was and why it was so disturbing to them. And Jung was no different. Jung actually said later that Freudian psychoanalysis only worked on Jews and that Jews should dress differently from other people so we can tell who they are.

And he also sat out World War II by the side of that Swiss lake.
He was Swiss. They’re neutral, right? The obsession with Jewishness and what it meant was immense in the period. And there’s Sabina with her Wagnerian Siegfried fantasy and the sin connected to it. For her, the sin was sex with an Aryan as opposed to incest, as in Wagner’s opera. She wrote about it and we talk about it in the movie. Freud says to her, “Put not your trust in Aryans. We’re Jews, we’ll always be Jews.” To me that’s great stuff and of the essence. It’s not background. It’s true we don’t have pogroms on screen, but Freud was very up front about what Jewishness meant professionally and in every other way.

Freud’s ‘talking cure’ Talk Therapy: Can Freud Get His Job Back? by Lev Grossman, Janice Horowitz, and Andrea Sachs from Time magazine, January 20, 2003

Birth of Psychoanalysis in A Dangerous Method; Last ... - Village Voice J. Hoberman

Review: Cronenberg's 'A Dangerous Method' An Insightful Look At ... Oliver Lytellton from The indieWIRE Playlist

Review: David Cronenbergs oddly restrained A Dangerous Method ... Drew McSweeny from HitFix

Apercu [Rohan Berry]

A Dangerous Method - Entertainment - Time Magazine Richard Corliss

A Dangerous Method: David Cronenberg's portrait ... - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens

New York Film Festival 2011: A Dangerous Method | The House ... Simon Abrams from The House Next Door

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]

REVIEW: Fassbender and Mortensen Duke It Out ... - Movieline Stephanie Zacharek

A Dangerous Method Review | Sometimes a Cigar Is Just A ... - Pajiba Brian Prisco

Virtual Neon [Damon Wise]

NYFF 2011: A DANGEROUS METHOD Review Peter Gutierrez from Twitch

Twitch [Michael Guillen]

A Dangerous Method | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps

Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [James Jay Edwards]

Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey] also seen here: DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]

Ruthless Reviews » A DANGEROUS METHOD Matt Cale

Dangerous Method, A Peter Sobczynski from EFilmCritic

Hugo | The Artist | A Dangerous Method | My ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]

Boxoffice Magazine [Sara Maria Vizcarrondo]

Battleship Pretension [David Bax]

TIFF Movie Review: A Dangerous Method (2011) - Rope of Silicon Brad Brevet

Best-Horror-Movies.com [James Lasome]

Mirrors its title in being--like all of - ShowReview Frank Swietek from One Guy’s Opinion

Movie Review - Dangerous Method, A - eFilmCritic - eFilmCritic.com Rob Gonsalves

Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method Mines The ... - Eclipse Magazine Sheldon A. Wiebe

Bina007 Movies [Caterina Benincasa]

Poster Lab: A Dangerous Method | The House Next Door R. Kurt Ostenlund

David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen talk ... - The Washington Post Ann Hornaday interview, December 11, 2011

David Cronenberg talks new film A Dangerous Method ... - City Pages Nicolas Rapold interview from City Pages, November 30, 2011

Cronenberg on switching gears for 'A Dangerous ... - Globe and Mail Liam Lacey interview from The Globe and the Mail, September 11, 2011

Miami Herald [Rene Rodrigues]

A Dangerous Method Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out ... Dave Calhoun

Analyse this: Will David Cronenberg get to heart of - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab, September 1, 2011

First Night: A Dangerous Method, Venice Film ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab, September 3, 2011

A Dangerous Method: Cronenberg explores the history of sex Rick Groen from The Globe and the Mail (capsule)

Critic Review for A Dangerous Method on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday

'A Dangerous Method' review: Freud versus Jung Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle

'A Dangerous Method' review - Featured Articles From The Los ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

A Dangerous Method - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

A Dangerous Method - Movies - New York Times A.O. Scott

Sigmund Freud - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Carl Jung - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gustav Mahler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

COSMOPOLIS

Canada France (108 mi) 2012

Dave Calhoun at Cannes from Time Out London, May 25, 2012

David Cronenberg's 'Cosmopolis' is a weird, heady and entrancing portrait of individual alienation in a super-rich, corporate world where money, sex, love, happiness and death are rapidly losing all meaning. It's based on a 2003 novel by Don DeLillo, and while it offers some superficial relevance to the current financial crisis and trades in some of its imagery and events (markets crashing, protests), this is not in any way a realist work. It takes Cronenberg back to territory he hasn't explored since 'eXistenZ' and 'Crash'. (This is also his first script since those films.) It's a psychosexual, more interior companion piece to films like 'Inside Job' and 'Margin Call'.

'Cosmopolis' gives us a young man riding through Manhattan in a limo on a day that feels more and more like his own handmade apocalypse. He's a super-rich New Yorker, Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a 28-year-old billionaire captain of tech industries and money markets. He insists on travelling across town for a haircut, even though his driver warns him that a presidential visit and the funeral of a rap star are causing gridlock. Packer's world is confined to this luxury vehicle. It's full of screens and gadgets and it's here that he’s joined first by a 22-year-old whizz kid and then two women, one played by Juliette Binoche, the other by Samantha Morton. Outside, Packer encounters a protester (Mathieu Amalric) who is determined to shove a cream pie in his face, his soon-to-be-ex wife (Sarah Gadon) and a man with a serious vendetta against him (Paul Giamatti).

'Cosmopolis' is an odyssey defined by a series of one-on-one encounters. There are prostate examinations, stripped bodies, sex, conversations about Rothko and souped-up chats on subjects such as the philosophies of financial security systems and how time is a corporate asset. Much of the talk makes no obvious sense: 'Cosmopolis' has the air of an experimental theatre piece and trades in heightened, eroticised language. You could say it tries to turn the mind of Packer inside-out: to make the psychological real. That's tougher on film, surely, than in print, and 'Cosmopolis' is at its best when it's otherworldly and aching with artifice. It's at its worst when it becomes weighed down by an excessive, wearying wordiness, or when it steps out of the limo – the film's self-imposed arena of surreality – and into a place more like the real world. 'Cosmopolis' threatens to soar and to be important, but it only offers flashes of lucidity; the limo is a mesmerising bubble that is quickly burst when the film steps outside it.

That said, there's a consistent air of charged, end-of-days menace running through the film, which Cronenberg handles with an unbroken sense of precision and confidence. He's well-served, too, by a leering, disintegrating Pattinson, giving a commanding, sympathetic portrait of a man being consumed by his own vanity and power.

Cosmopolis Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily, also seen here: Lee Marshall

The cerebral postmodern novels of US writer Don DeLillo have so far proved immune to screen adaptation. It’s not difficult to understand why as we watch David Cronenberg’s arid stab at Cosmopolis, DeLillo’s 2003 yarn about a multi-millionaire asset manager crossing New York in a stretch limo to get a haircut as his investments plummet. Cut and pasted almost verbatim into the script, the novelist’s mannered dialogue and shallow characters (many of whom are simply mouthpieces for ideas) make for an anemic, dramatically flat viewing experience.

In one sense, Cosmopolis is a return to the past for Cronenberg: mostly shot within a cyber-pimped limo, it harnesses the dark, dysfunctional, oneiric moods, if not the same body horror themes, of Videodrome or Crash. But his dependence on DeLillo’s source material means that the director is not entirely his own man, and the atmosphere of impending catastrophe that builds in the course of the film (and is its strongest feature) is constantly undermined by its bookish lines and set-ups.

Bankable Twilight saga star Robert Pattinson is fine in the main part: if his Eric Packer is a little cold, a touch robotic, then so is Cronenberg’s unapologetically stylised approach to the story; this was never going to be a role that called for big emotions. But it’s difficult to see Pattinson’s youth appeal skewing this arthouse product’s audience towards the teen market – it’s just too slow and too talky.

And despite a few changes – for example making the currency that ruins Packer the yuan rather than the yen – the scenario feels dated. This New York of start-up billionaires raddled with existential ennui is like the 1990s channeled by the 1950s; it’s Wall Street scripted by Albert Camus.

Most scenes take place inside Packer’s company limousine, which is designed as a sort of techno-luxe hearse, with discreetly expensive upholstery and detailing and a variety of touchscreen consoles that monitor, among other things, the markets, the media and Eric’s heart rate. Accompanied by Torval (Durand), head of security at his company Packer Capital, Eric inches downtown through traffic gridlocked by a presidential visit. Insulated from the city outside, Eric receives various people in his automotive cocoon.

Three young employees talk about the financial scenario in terms so abstract that it takes us a while to work out that Eric is facing ruin – and his own utterly passive reaction to the news, while true to the book, makes for a tension-free trip. Eric has sweaty sex with an older lover (Binoche) before discussing with her the purchase of a brace of Rothko paintings; a doctor gets on board to give him his daily check-up; Samantha Morton, playing Packer Capital’s ‘chief of theory’, philosophises with her boss while anti-capitalist protestors riot outside and daub the limo with slogans.

Occasionally Eric gets out – mostly to meet Shifrun (Gadon), his rich WASP-ish wife, for breakfast, lunch and dinner; by dinnertime their marriage of a few weeks is dissolved, more in apathy than rancor. Torval warns Eric that he has received information of potential security threats, one of whom turns out to be a custard-pie-toting ‘pastry assassin’ (Almaric). And meanwhile the city glides by outside, with few landmarks in view – just as well, as the film’s supposed New York is in fact Toronto.

As a post-capitalist parable with psychotic overtones, Cosmopolis has a certain purchase. And apart from one embarrassing rap number, Howard Shore’s Moby-like soundtrack is good at mood building. But it’s an idea film whose ideas are not always particularly interesting; and the dialogue too often sounds as though it’s written by a student playwright nurtured on a diet of Pinter and Ionesco (“My prostate’s asymmetrical”, deadpans Eric; “So is mine”, replies the endgame character played by Paul Giamatti).

The main problem with Cosmopolis the film, however, is one which John Updike had already put his finger on in his New Yorker review of the book: “The trouble with a tale where anything can happen”, he wrote, “is that somehow nothing happens”.

Simon Abrams at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 25, 2012

Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 25, 2012

Michael Oleszczyk at Cannes from Hammer ot Nail, May 25, 2012

Guy Lodge at Cannes from Hitfix, May 25, 2012

Cannes 2012 Review: COSMOPOLIS is an Interesting, Uneven Requiem for the One Percent Brian Clark at Cannes from Twitch, May 25, 2012, also seen here: Brian Clark

Domenico La Porta at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 25, 2012

Richard Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 25, 2012

David Jenkins at Cannes f rom Little White Lies, May 25, 2012

DAILY | Cannes 2012 | David Cronenberg’s COSMOPOLIS » David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 25, 2012

Bruce Kirkland interview from The Toronto Sun, May 25, 2012

Owen Gleiberman at Cannes from Entertainment Weekly

Cosmopolis: Cannes Review Todd McCarthy at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 25, 2012

Justin Chang at Cannes from Variety

David Fear at Cannes from Time Out New York, May 25, 2012

Cannes 2012: Cosmopolis – review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 25, 2012

Crowe, Cameron

ALMOST FAMOUS

USA (123 mi) 2000 director’s cut (162 mi)

One of the persistent clichés in profiles on celebrities is the writer's self-indulgent attempt to set the scene, opening an article with trivial details about staring wistfully out a hotel window with John Cusack or sharing a pillow with Jewel. Anything, it seems, to avoid simply talking about the subject's work and what might make it exciting. As a young journalist for Rolling Stone, Cameron Crowe profiled many rock icons from the '70s, and his ambitious, semi-autobiographical Almost Famous isn't immune to some of the same pitfalls. While vivid, deeply felt, and fitfully exhilarating, it unfolds like a misshapen magazine piece, swirling with interesting peripheral details that never quite snap into hard focus. Part of the problem is that Crowe's loose, episodic style works best when he has a strong personality to drive the story, as he did with Cusack in Say Anything... or Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. His ensemble piece Singles, for all its intermittent charms, seems rudderless by comparison. As Crowe's alter ego in Almost Famous, 15-year-old Patrick Fugit is a passive observer to the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, a starry-eyed innocent who's affected far more often than he affects. Just as he struggles to make sense of everything going on around him, so does the film. After some freelance work in his native San Diego—home of his mentor, legendary music critic Lester Bangs, played by habitual scene-stealer Philip Seymour Hoffman—Fugit is assigned by Rolling Stone to write about an up-and-coming band called Stillwater. Against the protestations of overprotective mother Frances McDormand, Fugit goes on tour with the group during a volatile time when its middling lead singer (Jason Lee) is losing the spotlight to electrifying guitarist Billy Crudup. Fugit is befriended by Kate Hudson, a whimsical groupie (or "band-aid," as she prefers to be called) blinded by her intense devotion to Crudup and his music. In its best moments, Almost Famous taps into the immediacy of a great rock song, the soaring mini-epiphanies that could lead Crowe (or anyone) to helpless, lifelong addiction. Perhaps because the nature of touring is so ambling and listless, the behind-the-scenes relationships never really gel, leaving Crowe to insert a pair of desperately contrived crises to spike up the third act. Still, as a well-thumbed collection of scrapbook vignettes, Almost Famous is a wounded, heartfelt triumph.

Almost Famous Mike D’Angelo

Part of me wonders whether Crowe didn't ultimately settle on the title as a favor to his stars' publicists (opening grafs for feature profiles of Crudup and Hudson pretty much write themselves now), but its slightly forlorn quality also serves as an inadvertent apologia for a movie with much to recommend it but a great, gaping hole where its emotional core ought to be. (Almost an Angel, Almost Heroes, Almost You -- damn, that word is the kiss of death.) While complaints about the essential passivity of the director's teenaged alter ego aren't entirely without merit -- "Wow, neato!" pretty much encapsulates the kid's point of view for most of the picture, and the endless close-ups of his wide-eyed countenance do grow tiresome -- the real problem is Crowe's nostalgic reverence for alleged groupie extraordinaire Penny Lane (based on a real person, as the closing credits conspicuously note); despite a contrived third-act crisis and Hudson's herculean fleshing-out efforts, she never really registers as much more than a breathy, giggly bit of starfucking fluff. Imagine a version of Bull Durham -- another movie that's a mash note from its writer/director to his former profession -- in which the female lead is not Susan Sarandon's complex, individualistic Annie Savoy but Jenny Robertson's perky, bubbleheaded Millie (the team slut who winds up marrying one of the players), and you'll get a sense of what Almost Famous is missing: Annie's passion for baseball and the Bulls oozes from her pores (she cares more about the game than about Nuke or Crash, ultimately), whereas Penny's love for Stillwater's music is never dramatized -- merely asserted by the script. Equally frustrating is the film's oddly inconsistent tone: the scene where everybody starts blurting out long-buried secrets and uncomfortable truths (because they think their plane's about to crash) is played so broadly that it's like a ZAZ outtake, and other bits are irritatingly wink-wink-nudge-nudge (e.g., a reference to some proto-fax unit that can transmit data over the phone at a rate of "only" 18 minutes per page -- compare/contrast to Mike Leigh's deft handling of similar material in Topsy-Turvy.) And then there's Frances "did you say 'more'?" McDormand...but I've gone down that road several times before, so enough said, perhaps. Terrific stuff going on in the margins, though -- from the hilarious backstage bickering between guitarist Crudup and lead singer Jason Lee (looking very Ted Nugent); to Crowe's spot-on, semi-Proustian selection of recognizable-but-not-quite-obligatory classics of '70s rock; to the wealth of journalistic detail that informs virtually every shot (though the details about journalism itself are frequently preposterous; if I were Ben Fong-Torres, I'd sue for defamation of character, but it appears that the real Fong-Torres is just grateful for the recognition/publicity). Philip Seymour Hoffman's vivid portrayal of legendary critic Lester Bangs, on the other hand, is almost distractingly terrific; if we must have biopics, can't we have that one? Please?

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

If you haven't already sold your soul to rock & roll, Almost Famous should seal the deal. It's pure pleasure. Just don't expect the dark side (Gimme Shelter, Sid and Nancy). Not since A Hard Day's Night has a movie caught the thrumming exuberance of going where the music takes you. Rock journalist-turned-filmmaker Cameron Crowe, 43, is drawing on his own rock boyhood. Crowe was only fifteen when he deepened his voice to sound older on the phone and hustled an assignment from Rolling Stone. Almost Famous, set in 1973, is loosely based on the formative years Crowe blissfully misspent road-tripping with the likes of Led Zeppelin, Yes and the Allman Brothers.

Crowe has mined the details of his life before, in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (book and screenplay) and in three previous films as writer and director: Say Anything (1989), Singles (1992) and the Oscar-nominated Jerry Maguire (1996). But Almost Famous is Crowe's most personal film yet and -- no almost about it -- his best. His gift for dialogue with sass and spine continues unabated. And his direction, once merely unassuming, has grown gracefully assured. The great cinematographer John Toll (The Thin Red Line) enables Crowe to play loose with the camera -- think early Francois Truffaut -- while holding to the rule of legendary Crowe mentor Billy Wilder: "Just tell the story." It's an atmosphere in which actors thrive. Almost Famous is as densely populated as a Dickens novel, and there's not an unfelt performance in it.

Patrick Fugit, 17, scores a dazzling debut as Crowe's alter ego, William Miller, an uncool kid from San Diego whose widowed teacher mom, Elaine (a blazingly funny Frances McDormand), won't have demon rock in the house. William's older sister, Anita (the delicious Zooey Deschanel), runs off to become a stewardess to the strains of Simon and Garfunkel's "America." The joke prompts the first of the film's witty musical references; it's a kick to find a movie that uses music as more than sonic wallpaper.

Anita leaves behind a box of rock LPs under her bed that she insists will set her nerdy brother free. Crowe gives that box the illicit allure of an unholy grail. William is soon writing about bands for his school rag and badgering Creem's rock critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman, making acerbic comic magic out of a sliver of screen time), who lets him cover a Black Sabbath concert.

It's at that concert -- Mom has to drive him there -- that William meets Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) and her pals, Sapphire (Fairuza Balk) and Polexia (Anna Paquin). Don't call them groupies; they're Band Aids ("No sex, just blow jobs - we're here for the music"). William is transfixed by Penny, and why not? Hudson, the daughter of Goldie Hawn, is surefire star material, subtly uncovering the chinks in Penny's party-girl armor.

Penny is fixated on Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), the guitarist for Stillwater, a midlevel band about to break through. Befriended by Russell and Penny, William gains access to the rock inner sanctum. Crudup, in a role intended for Brad Pitt, is a fearless actor who shows the cruel streak running under Russell's surface charm. When William gets an assignment to do a cover story on Stillwater for Rolling Stone, Lester warns him that journalists cannot be friends with rockers ("They are trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb"). For the other members of Stillwater -- roles filled by actor Jason Lee and musicians John Fedevich and Mark Kozeleck -- William is the enemy. Says lead singer Jeff Bebe, played with sly mischief by Lee, "The little shit looks harmless, but he does represent the magazine that trashed 'Layla,' broke up Cream and ripped every album Led Zeppelin ever made." (Ed. note: All true.) Crowe knows that rock and journalism are prime games for opportunists, but his focus here is on true believers. On the tour bus, Penny leads a sing-along to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer," and Crowe plays it straight. No easy cynicism; no gooey sentiment, either. The film's set pieces Ð the deflowering of William by the Band Aids, Russell's bad acid trip at a fan's house, a near plane crash in which the band indulges in shocking confessions -- are delicate blends of humor and heartbreak. Crowe takes the same pains to dig out the truth in these characters as he does with the music. The fine vintage soundtrack is complemented by original songs for Stillwater, written by Crowe and his wife, Nancy Wilson of Heart. With rock icon Peter Frampton as a consultant, Crowe nails the period. But don't mistake Almost Famous for a candy-assed nostalgia trip. Rock is about youth, defiance, danger and contradictory feelings you can't pin down. Crowe triumphs not by copping an attitude about the industry of cool but by capturing the ravishing thrill of losing your cherry to rock & roll. Almost Famous is a winner because Crowe dares to wear his heart on his sleeve. For this movie at least, he's with the band.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Almost Famous (2000) John Wrathall, January 2001

Nitrate Online (KJ Doughton)

Movie Vault [Aaron Graham]

CultureCartel.com (Jeremiah Kipp)

Images (Elizabeth Abele)

DVD Times [untitled bootleg cut] Raphael Pour-Hashemi

DVD Times Alexander Larman

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review)

PopMatters Mike Ward, also another review of Almost Famous by Ben Varkentine

Macresarf 1- Epinions Review.

Eye for Film (Scott Macdonald)

indieWIRE Ray Pride

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Kevin Clemons)

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray)

Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet)

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

VANILLA SKY

USA (136 mi) 2001

Crowe and Cruise last teamed up for Jerry Maguire, and Vanilla Sky is their attempt to make up for the megastar’s Oscar loss to then-unknown Geoffrey Rush. Cruise is cocky Manhattan publishing magnate David Aames, a playboy hovering between girlfriend Julie (Diaz) and sultry Sofia (Cruz) until he’s badly injured in a car crash. Or is he? Perhaps it’s all a hallucination – or a dream – or something else entirely…

In the hands of, say, Edward Norton, Aames might have been an Oscar-showcase role. But while Cruise initially looks the part, his limitations become painfully apparent after the smash. David rants and raves, gets drunk, even wears a mask for long periods - and Cruise just goes from bad to worse, and beyond. This is easily the direst performance of his career – the moment when he belts out Joan Osborne’s ‘One of Us’ while being wheeled into an operating theatre will, hopefully, stand as a professional nadir. How galling for Cruise to look on as co-star Diaz is mentioned as a serious Oscar candidate… alongside Nicole Kidman, whose Amenabar project The Others has attracted unanimous rave reviews and award nominations!

The only prize Cruise can expect is Golden Raspberry for Worst Actor - let’s hope he’s got enough class to turn up on the night, like Paul Verhoeven did for Showgirls. Vanilla Sky crudely combines his Total Recall with The Matrix and The Game - for TV viewers, it’s a straight cross between Dennis Potter’s swansong ‘Cold Lazarus’ and 1980 Hammer drama ‘Rude Awakening’. for readers, yet another pale photostat of Recall author Philip K Dick’s masterpiece ‘Ubik’. Also in the mix: Fight Club, Sixth Sense, Usual Suspects, Carnival of Souls, Jacob’s Ladder, Living In Oblivion, Eyes Wide Shut, Audition, AI and Deep Impact, not to mention direct references to Snow White (David calls his publishing-house board ‘the seven dwarves’) and Citizen Kane (they call him ‘Citizen Dildo,’ which would at least have been a better title than the blandly arbitrary Vanilla Sky.)

Nobody’s pretending this project is original, of course: it’s based on another movie (though you do have to stick around for ages during the closing credits to find this out) by a writer who makes no bones about how he combined The Innocents and The Haunting to make The Others. Influence is one thing – execution is another, and this is where Vanilla turns sour. While Crowe’s Almost Famous was enjoyably straightforward, the more ambitiously complex Vanilla somehow ends up both incomprehensible and grindingly predictable. After a strong opening scene, Crowe quickly loses the plot and retreats into fatally indulging his star’s desperate excesses (the weirdest thing about the film is the way David’s mask makes Cruise look so disturbingly like the jowly Crowe himself.)

The results are almost bad enough to be enjoyable, but there’s also a nasty streak of arrogance on view here - everybody knows the actor is short and pushing forty, so why tell us David is 33 and 6ft tall? Even worse: we discover that a significant part of what he’s been experiencing is an artificial state of mind that has “the feeling of a great movie” Dream on, indeed.

With talented writer-directors, it’s the little arbitrary details that can often make a film special. Crowe’s improvisations, however, are whimsical duds that reveal the paucity of his imagination. He fills his movies’ yawning gaps with rock ‘n’ pop pap, on the soundtrack and in the screenplay: “So this is what became of rock ‘n’ roll,” muses Cruz, contemplating a smashed-up guitar framed on David’s wall (this from the man who in Singles had a character living in 1991 Seattle seriously remark “I miss vinyl!”) He’s so out of touch he probably thinks he scored a coup by getting the increasingly embarrassing Paul McCartney to write Vanilla Sky’s title song. A tinnily inoffensive little ditty, it sounds as if it took about ten minutes knock together – and, needless to say, is being hotly tipped for an Oscar nomination...

From the moment John Cusack serenades Ione Skye with a boom box hoisted over his head in 1989's Say Anything..., every Cameron Crowe movie has led to a single, transcendent scene in which the world drops away and two people connect straight on, unguarded and without distraction. As a precocious young rock journalist for Rolling Stone—an experience chronicled in last year's fine, semi-autobiographical Almost Famous—Crowe sought the same intimacy, digging for fresh responses behind a musician's practiced soundbites. Given his reputation for emotional directness, Crowe seemed an unlikely candidate to remake Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar's Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), a mind-bending existential thriller with barely a moment's distinction between reality and dreams. But in telling the convoluted story of a wealthy, shallow player who hits bottom and picks up the pieces of his life, Vanilla Sky essentially takes a winding, treacherous back route to Crowe's Jerry Maguire, with Tom Cruise again cast as the imploding ego. Though Vanilla Sky doesn't have anything close to the emotional resonance of the earlier film, it's a great leap forward in ambition—the sort of brash, daring, and intermittently exhilarating mess that studios stopped financing after the '70s. As always, Crowe speaks volumes through his impeccable song selection, opening with an eerie dream sequence set to the mesmerizing first track off Kid A by Radiohead, the pop poet of millennial anxiety. A dashing, narcissistic playboy coasting lazily off his father's magazine empire, Cruise wakes up in a posh Manhattan apartment with Cameron Diaz in his bed, but he's still haunted by a vague, gnawing sense of emptiness. Scanning for women at his birthday party, Cruise zeroes in on Penélope Cruz, undeterred by the niggling fact that she's dating his best friend, Jason Lee. After a revelatory evening with Cruz, he greets the next morning determined to get his act together, but he's intercepted by the pathologically jealous Diaz, who drives them both off a park bridge. Cruise comes to in a nightmarish situation: He's wearing a mask over his gnarled face, as a psychologist (Kurt Russell) interrogates him about a murder he may or may not have committed. Breaking from Amenábar's original design, which keeps viewers in a state of constant disorientation from beginning to end, Crowe doesn't really turn the screws until the dizzying final third, which is as chancy as anything to come out of Hollywood in the last few years. In some respects an avant-garde It's A Wonderful Life, Vanilla Sky reaches further than it can grasp, frequently stumbling over itself in a mad rush for greatness. The Cruise-Cruz pairing is the most crucial mistake: Cruise has turned on his image too often (and to greater effect) in Rain Man, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia; Cruz, reprising her role in the Spanish-language Open Your Eyes, speaks her English lines as if she's learned them phonetically. Without a strong central relationship, all the inspiration comes directly from Crowe, who fleshes out every scene with exhilarating personal detail and newfound technical virtuosity. In the end, his remake may not be as sharp as the original, but it's far more compelling.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Vanilla Sky (2001) Xan Brooks in Sight and Sound, February 2002

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Nitrate Online [Gregory Avery]

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Fangoria Michael Gingold

Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford

Beyond Hollywood Nix

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Bob Aulert

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) one of the most positive reviews out there

ELIZABETHTOWN

USA (123 mi) 2005

Time Out London

Cameron Crowe (‘Vanilla Sky’, ‘Almost Famous’) has pulled a ready-made collage of movie clichés out of the bag and made an uplifting-but-tender, coming-of-age movie about homecoming. Or should that be a tender-but-uplifting, homecoming movie about coming of age? Either way, anyone with a drop of cynicism in their blood will be chewing their fist for the majority of this oh-so-good-hearted tale of grief, love and personal discovery. A reckless approach to depression and (attempted) suicide mars this sentimental story from the beginning. Orlando Bloom is Drew, a successful, twenty-something, workaholic trainer designer who loses his job in spectacular fashion. This calamity – which prompts his near-suicide – coincides with the death of Drew’s distant father, an event which takes him reluctantly to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he is reunited with his father’s colourful Southern clan. A chance meeting en route with a pretty air hostess, Claire (Kirsten Dunst) marks the beginning of Drew’s re-entry to normal life and his realisation that there’s more to life than work (oh, how sage).Most of the film involves the preparation and execution of a memorial service for Drew’s dad, the run-up to which coincides with the first tentative steps of Drew and Claire’s courtship. But the last fifteen minutes have Drew embarking alone on a healing road trip, accompanied by a detailed map and a CD of music compiled by Dunst’s character. We witness the dreaded Hollywood notion of a character’s ‘journey’ become reality as Bloom awakens the man within by taking to the highway and visiting several, life-affirming monuments to recent American history – including the hotel where Martin Luther King was shot. The entire enterprise smacks of wish-fulfilment provoked by middle-age male guilt. Uplifting, it most certainly ain’t.

The New Yorker (David Denby)

Damage control has its place, but there are limits. Telling a gaggle of critics that the movie they're about to see will undergo significant changes before it's commercially released — that the director and his editor are at this very moment mid-nip, or between tucks, or whatever the hell — is basically tantamount to shoving a one-legged Christian into the center of the Colosseum and informing the lions that he's just hopping through on his way to the mall. Sure enough, Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown left last month's Toronto International Film Festival smothered in ignominy — a fiasco, not just a failure, to borrow the film's own terminology (in the very first line of voiceover narration, no less). A typically picaresque pop-culture safari, suffused with Crowe's tenderly optimistic sensibility and crammed to bursting with every quirky idea in his notebook and five-star tune on his iPod, it boasts nearly as many inspired touches as embarrassing indulgences; despite what you may have heard, it's really Not That Bad. (See also: Heaven's Gate, Ishtar, The Brown Bunny.) But that feeble defense is about the best that even a sympathetic observer can muster.

Now, critics were supposed to see the shorter, theoretically improved cut of Elizabethtown before writing their reviews, but I hereby confess that I didn't bother, on the grounds that there is no possible version of this film in which Kirsten Dunst, as the requisite wise-yet-goofy-yet-deeply-vulnerable-yet-smiling-through-it-all überbabe, will not be gratingly, excessively winsome (not really her fault — the character as written is pure geek fantasy), and in which the basic narrative arc, about a free-falling shoe designer (Orlando Bloom) who rediscovers his sense of purpose when he's forced to go to a small Kentucky town to arrange his father's funeral, won't come across as mawkish personal baggage best handled via twice-a-week therapy. Also, I hear that Susan Sarandon's notorious eulogy, which begins with a random dick joke and concludes with a tap dance set to "Moon River," remains largely intact, and that our hero still scatters his father's ashes in front of the balcony where MLK was shot while U2's "Pride (In the Name of Love)" thunders on the soundtrack. Still, if you're jonesing for a fix of undiluted C. Crowe romanticism — for example, a giddy all-night phone conversation that nails the rare, febrile connection forged between two people who desperately want to kiss each other but have to settle instead for one earnest confession after another — Elizabethtown is the only dealer around. Just one word of advice, though: When you hear "Free Bird," bolt. It was almost over anyway.

“Elizabethtown,” which cost roughly forty times as much as “Squid,” leaves one adrift on a raft of morose questions. How could this vacuous movie have got made? Didn’t anyone at Paramount, which paid for the film, read the script? And also: What in the world has happened to Cameron Crowe? After two charming early films about Gen X dating habits, “Say Anything . . .” (1989) and “Singles” (1992), and the hard-driving and enormously enjoyable “Jerry Maguire” (1996), Crowe’s instinct for storytelling appears to have evaporated. “Vanilla Sky,” from 2001, was overwrought piffle—a Tom Cruise vanity project—which only reinforced the squishy impression left the year before by “Almost Famous,” a semi-autobiographical film so tepid that it never quite worked up a head of steam. “Elizabethtown” doesn’t get going at all. It’s about a handsome young man from Oregon, Drew (Orlando Bloom), who loses a fortune for an international sneaker company by designing a silly shoe. Drew gets fired—and then his father dies. He’s in deep trouble, yet he can’t feel a thing. He travels to his father’s birthplace, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and confronts the enormous family of busybodies that his dad left behind decades ago. But these are his father’s people, not Drew’s, and he walks through the noisy family gatherings in a bemused fog. On the plane to Kentucky, however, he meets a chipper flight attendant, Claire (Kirsten Dunst), who wants to bring him to life. Crowe is attempting a modern screwball comedy—the kind of thing that, sixty years ago, Howard Hawks, directing Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, would have turned into romantic farce—but he has scaled the movie as an epic and turned his gabby heroine into a fount of New Age wisdom. Claire tells Drew to embrace his failure, and she and Drew have many conversations about the nature of existence.

At times, the movie became so boring that I experienced the uncanny sensation that I could physically feel the film passing through the projector. As I counted sprocket holes, my sense of what the movie was “about” simply dissolved, and the projector threw onto the screen meaningless images of children screaming, a memorial service going awry, landscapes unfurling outside a car window. Kirsten Dunst, with her cocked head and eyetoothy smile, is spirited enough, but, try as she might, she can’t animate Orlando Bloom. This is one sleeping beauty whom no kiss will ever awaken.

Life on the Installment Plan Adrian Martin from Fipresci magazine

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

The Onion A.V. Club Keith Phipps

DVD Times Gary Couzens

Village Voice (Laura Sinagra)

ReelViews (James Berardinelli)

CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten)

not coming to a theater near you (Chiranjit Goswami)

Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano)

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) the only reviewer I could find that calls it “among the best films of the year”

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert)

exclaim! [Serena Whitney]

WE BOUGHT A ZOO B 84

USA (124 mi) 2011

You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it. —Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon)

Family fare from rock ‘n’ roll counterculture stalwart Cameron Crowe who has been off the radar for six years, making something soft and cuddly for the kids, using a fairly predictable format, a single dad (Matt Damon) with two kids trying to recover from the devastating aftermath of the death of his wife, the love of his life, where each are still reeling emotionally. Without ever getting deeply profound or complex, instead this is a fairly sweet portrait of what might be termed just off the fringe from mainstream life in America, using a similar indie template as LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (2006) which features a morose teenage son along with an overly perky and precocious young sister. Never veering far from the center, Damon as Benjamin Mee is just an ordinary guy trying to hold his family together, but when his morbidly introverted teenage son Dylan (Colin Ford) gets kicked out of school, apparently unable to control the urges from his dark side, the family has to make a new start somewhere. Dylan’s gloom is matched by the sunny optimism expressed from 7-year old Rose (Maggie Elizabeth Jones), a first class scene stealer who is one of the hits of the film, as her dad never talks down to her, as she’s the stabilizing force within the family. The search for a new home is led by an overly optimistic, first-day-on-the-job realtor JB Smoove who reels out a half dozen almost and not quite homes before finally pulling out all stops with something out of the ordinary, an off-the-beaten-track fixer upper tailor made for those not afraid to making a commitment, as it includes a working zoo that is closed to the public as it has fallen into a state of disarray.

Rose is thrilled with all the exotic animals, while Dylan sinks deeper into depression where life sucks moving away from all his friends to a dump out in the middle of nowhere where he’s even more isolated from reality. However there’s a working team in place to keep the zoo running, which includes Elle Fanning as Lily, another upbeat and sunshiny girl that immediately takes to Dylan, wondering why his drawings are all so dark. The zookeeper is Scarlett Johansson as Kelly in a less than glamorous role, where she actually plays a practical person with a level head, while her helpers are a band of misfits who would not be out of place in a theatrical rendition of Treasure Island, as they’re a little zany around the edges. What works best here is Cameron Crowe’s easygoing writing and directing that slowly allows the material to play out, scored by Jon Thor Birgisson, otherwise known as former Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi, where Crowe truly excels with his use of music, starting with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers Don't Come Around Here No More - YouTube (4:36), but eventually adding the tender whimsy of Cat Stevens: Don't Be Shy on YouTube (2:54) the poetic lamentations of Bob Dylan - Buckets of Rain - YouTube (3:26), and the rather clever use of Temple of the Dog "Hunger Strike" - YouTube (4:39), all of which add a feelgood dimension to the film. Make no mistake, it’s the music that gives this film its soul and makes it feel different, as the songs are cleverly intermixed. There’s a nice appreciation for quiet dialogue, where Damon in particular gets plenty of airtime with each of his kids, both of whom are a central part of the film, but it also gives him an opportunity to blend in with the zoo loonies which help take his mind off his everpresent world of grief.

Of course there’s a hint of romance between Damon and Johansson, but even the tiny bit offered is almost too much, as it seems so expected, where the more clever option is to leave it off the table and explore their relationship in other ways, which is exactly what Crowe does with the film, mostly through the inclusion of other characters. Another surprise is the appearance of Thomas Hayden Church as Damon’s older brother, always a welcome appearance in any film, who for the better part of the picture is the button down and conservative influence, the supposed voice of reason, which of course Damon ignores, choosing to turn over his life to a kind of reckless abandon. No way this option should ever work, but with a Cameron Crowe film, it’s almost the essential choice, where The Road Not Taken becomes the visionary path. The film wears its heart on its sleeves and couldn’t be more heartwarming, complete with exotic zoo animals, fun for the whole family, but also includes a major father and son meltdown that has an air of truth about it, but it’s too easily resolved, feeling overly contrived, where money seems like the answer to so many problems, an odd choice for a film with anti-capitalist leanings. When it veers off the beaten track and delves into a world of problems, there’s a strange fascination with the dysfunctional train wreck about to happen, particularly poignant with the bleak and blissful Randy Newman - I Think It's Going to Rain Today - YouTube (3:27), but when the world turns out to be a hopeful and happy place without the dark underworld depicted in Dylan’s drawings that never feature any sunlight, it’s hard to trust there’s anything real about this kind of surreal and smiley face ending, though it does feel warm and sweet.

“Don’t Come Around Here No More” – Tom Petty
“Do It Clean” – Echo & The Bunnymen
“Airline To Heaven” – Wilco
“Don’t Be Shy” – Cat Stevens
“Go Do” – jónsi
“Living With The Law” – Chris Whitley
“Last Medicine Dance” – Mike McCready
“Buckets of Rain” – Bob Dylan
“No Soy Del Valle” – Quantic Presenta Flowering Inferno
“Sinking Friendships” – jónsi
“Like I Told You” – Acetone
“Ashley Collective” – Mike McCready
“For A Few Dollars More” – The Upsetters
“Hunger Strike” – Temple Of The Dog
“Ævin Endar” – jónsi
“Mariachi El Bronx” – Mariachi El Bronx
“Haleakala Sunset” – CKsquared
“Boy Lilikoi” – jónsi
“Cinnamon Girl” (Live) – Neil Young
“Holocene” – Bon Iver
“Throwing Arrows” – Mike McCready
“Work To Do” – The Isley Brothers
“All Your Love (I Miss Loving)” – Otis Rush
“I Think It’s Going To Rain Today” – Randy Newman
“Hoppípolla” – Sigur Rós
“Gathering Stories” – jónsi

After taking a six-year hiatus, Cameron Crowe returns to the director's chair with the unexpectedly warm, family-oriented We Bought A Zoo. At first glance, the film looks like a cheesy PG redux of Crowe's most well known effort, Jerry Maguire. And although We Bought A Zoo does feature an annoyingly cute kid, cheesy one-liners comparable to the cringe-worthy "You Complete Me" and is his least Crowe-like endeavour, it isn't unwelcome.

Loosely based on the personal memoirs of journalist Benjamin Mee, We Bought A Zoo takes place six months after the death of Mee's (Matt Damon) wife, with him caring for his troublemaking teenage son, Dylan (Colin Ford), and sweet seven-year-old daughter Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) in a clumsy manner.

After Dylan is expelled from school, Benjamin decides that the family needs a fresh start and makes the spontaneous decision to buy an abandoned zoo in the middle of nowhere with his late father's inheritance. The zoo is operated by a small group of unpaid, yet passionate, employees who tackle the seemingly impossible task of getting the zoo back up and running by the summer.

What follows is clichéd, but heart-warming journey as we watch an inexperienced Benjamin tackle the gruelling task of fixing the zoo, adapt to the slower-paced life, track down an escaped grizzly bear, battle depression, run away from porcupines and keep a 17-year-old dying tiger alive under the guidance of head zookeeper Kelly (Scarlett Johansson).

We Bought A Zoo may be riddled with plot holes and intoxicatingly cheesy moments, but it's also rife with bright, heartfelt, comical encounters between characters so winningly authentic and warm that it's hard not to excuse the script's predictable pitfalls.

We Bought A Zoo isn't brilliant by any means, but it is an uplifting tale of personal persistence overcoming the odds. It's a cathartic experience for anyone who understands the consuming grief that can encompass a family when somebody they love tragically dies, which is especially appreciated during the holidays.

ClimbingHigherPictures [Ryan Hamelin]

If you’ve ever seen a Cameron Crowe film, you know the man has an ear for music, and a wonderful sensibility when it comes to integrating songs into his narrative. With We Bought A Zoo, probably his most grounded and natural film to date, we see the evolution of that talent, an original score composed of songs by Sigur Ros frontman Jonsi, or known tracks from the band itself, that builds an emotional foundation on which the rest of the film can sit. With a rougher handheld aesthetic than his past films and a series of wonderful supporting performances, Crowe brings everything you’ve ever loved about his work together in one movie, while ditching a lot of the thinner yet flashier visual material that defined projects like Vanilla Sky.

Lets start off with Matt Damon. He’s been getting a bit of a ho-hum rap lately, as pictures like The Adjustment Bureau, Hereafter, and Green Zone haven’t made much of a dent at the box office. The truth is, he’s getting older, and the parts he’s been taking haven’t been aging as gracefully. I would say that at this point in his life and career, Benjamin Mee is the perfect role for him. A father figure who never really spent enough time at home and went off on one wild expedition after another finds himself struggling through the toughest challenge of his adult life, and Damon gives him a warmth and resolve that makes the character instantly relatable. It helps that both of the actors playing his children are phenomenal, particularly the youngest girl, who steals almost every scene she’s in. We also meet Thomas Hayden Church as Benjamin’s accountant brother, who has most of the best one-liners of the movie, serving as a grounding and smart-ass voice of reason in the midst of the chaos that is the life of the family.

Once we hit the zoo, we get some great work by Elle Fanning, fresh off of Super 8, as an awkward home-schooled animal expert with a crush on Benjamin’s son. Scarlett Johansson is Kelly Foster, who seems, at first glance, to be the token hot love interest thrown in by an unscrupulous producer trying to sell tickets. She ends up being the exact opposite, and I must say this is the most awake I’ve seen Johansson look in a movie in quite some time. She’s really good in the part, and her interactions with Damon have an honesty and candor to them that humanize her in a way we haven’t really seen. The rest of the cast of characters that populate this world all ring true, and if you’re worried about sentimentality, this film doesn’t overdo it, preferring to keep the emotions in check until they’re at their most powerful.

I have to say, I don’t remember a single moment of We Bought A Zoo when I didn’t have a smile on my face. The film achieves its vision incredibly well, without the merest hint of artifice or construction showing through. When a movie is this well made, you don’t have to try hard to let yourself get carried away by it, and when the raft arrived at its destination, I was just as happy with being back on dry land as I was with the journey that had preceded it. Is it a perfect film? No. The editing in particular pulled it down a bit, letting the overall runtime and pacing lag on occasion, but the film worked so well, I never found myself checking my watch. I’d highly recommend this film on the merits of genuine storytelling, not to mention the warmth that resonates from every frame. You can’t help but feel good, and it was exactly what I needed.

Tracking Shots [Larry McGillicuddy]

Cameron Crowe has always been a patient filmmaker, often taking 3-4 years between projects. It was usually worth it, as in the past this resulted in several films that I consider to be modern classics, such as say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous. Crowe's latest period of absence is more frustrating than usual because it was 7 years ago and that was the highly disappointing Elizabethtown. Thus it is a great treat to finally see Crowe back to top form with this lovely family dramedy sprinkled with his usual brand of original and magical movie moments.

We Bought a Zoo is based on the autobiographical book of the same name by Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon). Tragedy strikes Benjamin's family when his wife dies and his young daughter (Maggie Eliabeth Jones) and teenage son (Colin Ford) have difficulty adjusting. He decides a change of scenery is in order, but the only property he likes happens to be a dilapidated zoo. After seeing how much his daughter takes to the animals, he decides this is the perfect place for a fresh start and sets about restoring this zoo so it can be reopened.

This film is a delicate balancing act between sentimentality and humor. In the hands of many other directors, the tone would be all wrong, it would feel manipulative and overly silly. But this is a balancing act that Cameron Crowe has mastered throughout his career and he is better at finding that tone than just about anybody else in Hollywood. Not a moment in this film feels fallse or manufactured. In fact much of it is underplayed, especially the relationship between Benjamin and head zookeeper Kelly (Scarlett Johansson), which would normally dominate the film but Crowe never lets it get in the way of the family drama that is the core of the story.

Part of what killed Elizabethtown was terrible casting in the lead role. After making a mistake with Ashton Kutcher, Crowe decided to try Orlando Bloom and he was pretty dreadful. Here Crowe has gone with Matt Damon, who is a perfect fit for the earnest, good natured, and tortured main character. As Benjamin repairs the zoo, he must also repair his relationship with his teenage son, who doesn't want to be there. The father-son relationship in this film is tremendously affecting thanks both to Crowe's honest approach to the material and the terrific performances from Matt Damon and Colin Ford.

What really sets Crowe's films apart are what I call "Crowe moments". These are unique, magical moments throughout his films that seemingly come out of nowhere. Examples include the boombox scene in Say Anything, "You had me at hello" in Jerry Maguire, and the Tiny Dancer singalong in Almost Famous. The Crowe moments are a testament to the effort he has done in studying his idol Billy Wilder, who came up with similarly original moments in his films. Even the great Wilder would attribute this to his own idol Ernst Lubitsch who perfected what was called the Lubitsch Touch. Very few directors seem to have studied these two men, so it is enormously refreshing to see Crowe applying their techniques so successfully once again, more than 80 years after Lubitsch first perfected them.

We Bought a Zoo is a terrific Crowe film that stands strongly with some of his best work. Not only does he come up with a wonderful ensemble cast and a very funny and honest script, but the former Rolling Stone writer once again delivers a marvelous soundtrack to the film, led by Jonsi's incredible score that lifts the film's emotional moments to greatness. The film also has a sublime ending, with Crowe finding a perfect last line to the film that would make both Lubitsch and Wilder proud. Thanks for coming back, Mr. Crowe. You have been missed.

Review: Feel-Good & Earnest 'We Bought A Zoo' Hits All The ... The indieWIRE PLaylist

Review: Cameron Crowes We Bought A Zoo showcases Matt - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Matt Damon in We Bought a Zoo: A hero in the mold of Lloyd Dobler, Jerry Maguire, and Cameron Crowe Sam Adams from Slate

We Bought a Zoo Review: Cameron Crowe Will Pull Your ... - Pajiba Dustin Rowles

We Bought a Zoo Takes Place in Cameron Crowe’s Alternate Universe, Which Is Nothing Like Real Life Dan Kois from Slate

We Bought A Zoo | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps

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We Bought a Zoo That Became an Animal ... - The New York Observer Rex Reed

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Cameron Crowe and Jonsi talk We Bought A Zoo - HitFix.com Melinda Newman interviews the director and musical composer Sigur Ros’s Jónsi from HitFix, November 29, 2011

Washington Post Jen Chaney interviews the director and actor Matt Damon, December 13, 2011

We Bought A Zoo | Filmmakers, Film Industry, Film Festivals, Awards ... Kevin Jagernauth interviews the director from The indieWIRE Playlist, December 14, 2011

Matt Damon tackles a bear of a role in 'We ... - Chicago Sun-Times Cindy Pearlman interviews actor Matt Damon, December 20, 2011

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We Bought a Zoo: Animal house for the whole family - Globe and Mail Rick Groen

'We Bought a Zoo' movie review -- 'We Bought a Zoo ... - Boston.com Ty Burr from The Boston Globe

Review: We Bought A Zoo - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Brett Michel

No lion: 'We Bought a Zoo' is pretty tame - BostonHerald.com James Verniere

Critic Review for We Bought a Zoo on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday

Review Many parts of 'We Bought a Zoo' should stay ... - Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt

Michael Phillips | Movie Reviews We Bought A Zoo | Contactmusic

'We Bought a Zoo' review: Family uncages its grief - SFGate Amy Biancolli

We Bought a Zoo - Featured Articles From The Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

We Bought a Zoo - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

We Bought a Zoo - Movies - New York Times Manohla Dargis

We Bought a Zoo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dartmoor Zoological Park

Dartmoor Zoological Park official website

Zoo's anger over closure call BBC News, November 7, 2001

'We'll prove big cats roam UK' BBC News, July 19, 2003

Devon wildlife park up for sale BBC News, February 16, 2005

Plea to save park's wild animals BBC News, April 12, 2006

Wildlife park ends public access BBC News, April 22, 2006

Jaguar escape gives park fright BBC News, October 27, 2006

Inquiry call over jaguar escape BBC News, January 13, 2007

Wolf recaptured after park escape BBC News, February 16, 2007

"Break-out zoo is being reopened" BBC News, July 6, 2007

Cuarón, Alfonso

All-Movie Guide

Among the most successful and talked-about Mexican filmmakers of his generation, director Alfonso Cuarón has shown a remarkable versatility, able to embrace old-school Hollywood elegance as well as rough-edged and darker-themed contemporary stories. Cuarón was born in Mexico City in 1961, and grew up in the city as well; he went on to study both filmmaking and philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. After graduating, Cuarón began working in television in Mexico, first as a technician and then as a director. Cuarón's television work led to assignments as an assistant director for several Latin American film productions (including Gaby: A True Story and Romero), and in 1991, he landed his first big-screen directorial assignment. Sólo Con Tu Pareja was a dark comedy about a womanizing businessman who learns he's contracted AIDS; the film was a massive hit in Mexico, and was enthusiastically received around the world. Director Sydney Pollack was impressed enough with Sólo Con Tu Pareja that he hired Cuarón to direct an episode of Fallen Angels, a series of neo-noir stories produced for the Showtime premium cable network in 1993; other directors who worked on the series included Steven Soderbergh, Jonathan Kaplan, Peter Bogdanovich, and Tom Hanks.

In 1995, Cuarón released his first feature film produced in the United States, A Little Princess, a graceful and elegant adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic novel. Cuarón's next feature was also a literary adaptation, a modernized version of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Robert De Niro. While some were impressed with the film's lush, fervid romanticism, many felt it campy and overwrought, with a leaden central performance from Paltrow. But Cuarón's next project found him making a severe left turn; shot in Mexico with a Spanish-speaking cast, Y Tu Mamá También (2001) was a funny, provocative, and controversial road comedy about two sexually obsessed teenagers who take an extended road trip with an attractive woman in her thirties. The film's open portrayal of sexuality and frequent rude humor, as well as the politically and socially relevant asides, made the film an international hit and a major success with critics.

In 2004, Cuarón inherited the reins of the successful Harry Potter series, shooting Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban with a sense of atmosphere and character theretofore lacking in the Chris Columbus-helmed installments. Predictably, the film became a mammoth blockbuster, although some Potter purists objected to the liberties Cuarón took with the story. In 2006, Cuarón passed up a chance to continue with the Potter series in order to release an ambitious science fiction tale called Children of Men. Based on P.D. James' near-future tale of a totalitarian Britain stricken by plague, infertility, and xenophobia, Cuarón echoed a very urgent sense of fear and dread over terrorism and the conflict in Iraq. Working once again with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, the director put lead Clive Owen through grueling long takes to achieve a "you are there" immediacy. Released in time for awards season in the U.S., Children was met with glowing reviews and promising box-office results, given its grim nature.

TCMDB  biography from Turner Classic Movies

Cuarón, Alfonso  They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Brief BBC Interview (2004)  May 28, 2004

Cinema Confidential Interview (2004)  by Ethan Aames, June 1, 2004

Film Force Interview   by Steve Head, June 2, 2004

Telegraph Article (2007)   by Katherine O’Shea, July 21, 2007

LOVE IN THE TIME OF HYSTERIA (Sólo Con Tu Pareja)

Mexico (94 mi) 1991

Sólo con tu pareja (1991) - The Criterion Collection

The buzz arising from Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También, his franchise-high-water work with Harry Potter, and the upcoming Children of Men has apparently been loud enough to pull his first, 15-year-old Mexican feature to the U.S.-distribution surface. Sometimes the culture's natural selection is on the money the first time around—Sólo Con Tu Pareja (Love in the Time of Hysteria, 1991) is a tame yet over-the-top screwball romance centering on a helpless womanizer (Daniel Giménez Cacho) who gets caught bouncing between sex with two women, in two apartments. Their revenge includes a falsified AIDS test, just as our hero fixates on yet another woman who he believes will save him from his sorry ways. Pushing the dull Cacho as a chick magnet capable of opening any pair of legs suggests that Cuarón's respect for women has gained serious ground since he was 29. The film is more stale than crisp, with dialogue that is at least 50 percent old aphorisms, homilies, and clichés. The frankness and sophistication of Y Tu Mamá were, it seems, hard earned.

Sólo Con Tu Pareja | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Though Sólo Con Tu Pareja would achieve considerable acclaim on the international circuit and help launch Alfono Cuarón's Hollywood career, it's taken the filmmaker's feature-length debut more than a decade to travel north of the border. Banned for many years in Mexico, the film filters the sexual agency and paranoia of its characters through a telenovela scrim, bringing to mind the baroque effervescence of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen, only with a more vital social framework. The film's English title, Love in the Time of Hysteria—a tribute to Gabriel García Marquez's magical realist masterpiece Love in the Time of Cholera—emphasizes Cuarón's desire to study how sexual behavior is shaped by the times, in this case the rising AIDS crisis. This bawdy comedy's tour-de-force is a prolonged sequence during which a very busy lothario, Tomás Tomás (Daniel Giménez Cacho), scales the exterior of his apartment in order to bed two different women, singing a nursery rhyme to keep his balance only to be distracted by the beautiful flight attendant who's just moved into the residence nestled between his bachelor pad and his doctor-friend's apartment. When one of the women, Silvia (Dobrina Liubomirova), learns that she's been played for a fool, she fudges the man's medical results to indicate that he's HIV-positive, which leads the man down a staccato road toward suicide. The film is like a champagne bottle's ricocheting cork—an explosion of poppy camera maneuvers, literary allusions, chatty reiterations, raunchy sex, and spastic flights of fantasy rich in cultural flavor (one of the man's nightmares accommodates a Lucha Libre fighter and a bullfighting castrati). Cuarón sustains the fizziness throughout, evoking one of those randy Euro-trash commercials that are too hot for American television. A little one-note perhaps, but consistently funny and sexy.

Solo Con Tu Pareja (1991) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Glenn Erickson, also seen here: DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

Alfonso Cuarón's Sólo con tu pareja is a superior Mexican sex comedy made a decade before his breakthrough hit Y tú mama también. Initially screened in the United States only at film festivals, the film's takeoff point seems to be both Pedro Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape. An unused title associated with the film is Love in the Time of Hysteria, a takeoff on the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.

Alfonso Cuarón's farce is touched by the hysteria over AIDS (or SIDA in Latin America); the title Sólo con tu pareja (Only with Your Partner) is derived from public service announcements that recommended limiting one's sex life and using condoms. Although financed by the Mexican government Sólo con tu pareja is anything but a reasoned argument for abstinence. Like a Doris Day bedroom romp gone mad, it chronicles the crazy lifestyle of a Mexican Don Juan who longs to break free of his promiscuous lifestyle and find peace with the girl of his dreams. Although the girl of his dreams seems to be whomever is closest at any particular moment, the beauty who just moved in next door sends our hero for a loop.

Synopsis: Ad writer Tomás Tomás (Daniel Giménez Cacho) gets away with procrastination on the job because he sleeps with his boss Gloria (Isabel Benet). His apartment is two doors from his doctor, Mateo Mateos (Luis de Icaza), and Tomás takes advantage of his neighbor's absence to simultaneously seduce both Gloria and the doctor's aide Silvia Silva (Dobrina Liubomirova). While sneaking across the balcony, Tomás spies a new neighbor, airline hostess Clarisa Negrete (Claudia Ramírez) and falls hopelessly in love. His plan to make Clarisa the love of his life has a few unfortunate flaws. Clarisa is engaged to an airline pilot, and Doctor Mateos and his wife laugh at Tomás's protests of true love. Worst of all, Silvia Silva decides that the appropriate retaliation for being short-changed in bed is to send Tomás a false blood test notice that marks him positive for AIDS.

I wouldn't have thought it possible to make a movie in 1991 with a major comedy subplot about AIDS but that's exactly what Sólo con tu pareja does. In its eagerness to make farcical use of non-PC subject matter, Cuarón's film most resembles the movies of Pedro Almodóvar. Tomás Tomás' friends eventually rush to assure him that he's really okay, but when they first hear the news about his false AIDS notice, everyone seems to think it's hilarious.

That's because Tomás Tomás represents the entire cultural phenomenon of the amorous, devious Don Juan. Tomás uses paper cups to count his conquests and has trouble compiling a list of his sex partners even when using a computer. He seems to spend all of his waking energy either pursuing or managing his sex life. New female bed partners simply seem to gravitate toward Tomás. To express her amorous interest, nurse Silvia Silva makes his blood test an exercise in compassionate torture.

Tomás feels pangs of remorse over his lifestyle, even if they surface only when he thinks he'll never conquer the "important one," the intensely lovely Clarisa. Given his reputation, nobody takes Tomás seriously when he talks about being faithful to any woman. The best part of Sólo con tu pareja is that we slowly realize that Tomás is serious. Of course, nothing less than the threat of death is required to force this character self-examination.

Director Cuarón pretty much throws the comedy book at Sólo con tu pareja with humor that ranges from broad slapstick to reasonably subtle social observances. Many of the characters have double names (Tomás Tomás, Silvia Silva, Mateo Mateos, Teresa de Teresa) just to keep things silly. When Tomás can't think of a single slogan to sell Jalapeño chiles, the non-intellectual Silvia comes up with a dozen good ones off the top of her head. Gloria Gold rips off cultural symbols like Aztec chieftains to sell her products, and when Tomás has a nightmare, it's populated with similar iconic characters, including a masked wrestler hero.

Much of the humor is less inspired, and relies for its effect on the film's impeccable design sense and the contributions of the likeable actors. Star Daniel Giménez Cacho is forever being caught naked in public, in the hallway or standing on a balcony high above serenading mariachis. He repeatedly falls into a bucket of water, as if fate is conspiring to cool down his sex drive. The luscious Claudia Ramírez is introduced practicing her stewardess safety routines, and when betrayed by her unfaithful boyfriend, talks in rather foolish aviation terms: "This is worse than an emergency landing!" The movie also uses Japanese tourists for easy humor, although the main Japanese doctor Takeshi (Toshirô Hisaki) is refreshingly direct when it comes time to shake the hero out of his suicidal notions.

Sólo con tu pareja is fast, stylish, sexy and smart enough to evade charges of bad taste. On the contrary, when most of the cast pursues the suicidal couple up Mexico City's vertiginous Latin American Tower, the screwball comedy tradition is given a new lease on life. The picture is a good antidote for the crude trash now passing for sex comedy on American screens. Anyone who misses the lunatic fun of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown will go for Cuarón's comedy in a big way.

Criterion's DVD of Sólo con tu pareja presents a flawless enhanced transfer with an excellent rendering of the rich, dark tones of Emmanuel Lubezki, the cinematographer of Sleepy Hollow and The New World.

The extras include a making-of interview featurette and two early short films, one each by Alfonso Cuarón and his co-screenwriter brother Carlos. Ryan Long provides program notes for the insert booklet, which also offers Carlos Cuarón's lengthy 'biography' of the film's Tomás Tomás character. Criterion disc producer Kim Hendrickson organizes the menu extras around interesting graphic designs (little cupid arrows for the Spanish accents) and the film's pervasive color green. In the interview segment, Carlos Cuarón impishly refers to his brother's first three features as his "green period."

Sólo con tu pareja: Sex, Lies, and Mariachis Criterion essay by Ryan F. Long, October 16, 2006

Sólo con tu pareja: Character Profile—Clarisa Negrete by Carlos Cuarón October 16, 2006

Sólo con tu pareja: Character Profile—Teresa de Terese de Mateos by Carlos Cuarón October 16, 2006

Sólo con tu pareja: Character Profile—Mateo Mateos by Carlos Cuarón October 16, 2006

Sólo con tu pareja (Love in the Time of Hysteria) | DVD Review | Film ... Gary Couzens from The Digital Fix

Reel.com DVD review [Ken Dubois]

DVD Town [Christopher Long]

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Sólo Con Tu Pareja - Wikipedia

A LITTLE PRINCESS

USA (97 mi) 1995

An exemplary version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel has been updated to WWI. When her father, an army captain and a widower, is posted to France from India, young Sara (Matthews, excellent) is lodged in the New York boarding school of Miss Minchin (Bron). No sooner has her classmates' resentment at her wealth abated (Sara keeps them spellbound with accounts of the Hindu myths) than news arrives of father's death in the trenches. The ogreish Miss Minchin casts off her hypocrite's cloak and dispatches Sara to the school's Gothic attic, her only solace being secret meetings with the black servant Becky. Director Cuarón transforms these elements of Victorian melodramatic contrivance with skill and sensitivity into a humanist rites-of-passage story. He's audacious, too: the Bollywood pastels of the myth sequences; an exciting, Lean-like rooftop escape; a magical snow-shake which is a moment of sheer cinematic elan. And when Sara offers her passionate, outraged response - 'Every little girl is a little princess!' - to Miss Minchin's scorn, she turns the declaration into a defiant defence of dignity and dreams.

"A Little Princess" exquisitely re-creates the ephemeral world of childhood, an enchanted kingdom where everything, even make-believe, seems possible. Where decrees are made to be broken, save one that is inviolate: "All girls are princesses . . . even if they wear rags or are not pretty or smart." The hallmarks of a true princess, as this nourishing story teaches, are such qualities as kindness, courage and imagination.

Sarah Crewe (Liesel Matthews), the tale's spirited 10-year-old heroine, shares this wondrous information with her new classmates in a luminous adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic novel. Unlike most distaff mythology, the film does not concern the heroine's sexual awakening; it's more like the typical hero's journey described by scholar Joseph Campbell. Sarah, the adored and pampered child of a wealthy British widower, must pass a series of tests, thereby discovering her inner strengths.

The story begins in India, where Sarah has been reared on her nanny's exotic tales of Prince Rama and his beautiful wife, Princess Sita. When World War I breaks out, Sarah's father (Liam Cunningham) is called upon to serve. For her safety, the girl is sent to a stuffy New York boarding school.

Miss Minchin's School for Girls is administered by the sourpuss Miss Minchin (Eleanor Bron), a character from the same line as Mrs. Danvers in Daphne Du Maurier's "Rebecca." Miss Minchin takes an immediate dislike to the spunky heroine, who speaks better French than she does and questions her silly rules. Worse yet, Sarah introduces her classmates to tales of Lord Rama and his lady love.

Miss Minchin forbids make-believe, so the girls gather for secret storytelling sessions in Sarah's room, where the characters come to life in their vivid imaginations. And the tale of the Indian prince, drawn from the myth of Ramayana, parallels the story of Sarah's separation from her father, who is eventually lost in the European trenches. Miss Minchin can barely suppress her glee upon learning that Capt. Crewe's fate has left her young nemesis penniless.

After pulling a simple black frock from Sarah's extensive wardrobe, Miss Minchin strips the girl of her possessions, dismisses her from class and sends her to live in the attic with the black servant girl, Becky (Vanessa Lee Chester). Like Becky, Sarah is not allowed to speak with the other children and must work like a slave for bed and board. But the sisterly bond she and Becky forge is worth more than all Sarah's pretty dresses and expensive toys.

The screenplay, by Richard LaGravanese and Elizabeth Chandler, is melodramatic, but never sticky and always suspenseful. Despite its many elements, the story should be easily followed by most children, who are sure to relate to the loving relationship between father and daughter, the conspiratorial one between Sarah and her girlfriends, and the mystical tie that binds Sarah and Becky to an Indian manservant next door.

Director Alfonso Cuaron, a 33-year-old Mexican whose only other feature film is an AIDS comedy not widely released, leaves the festival circuit far behind with this dazzling North American debut. Cuaron approaches the film not as a fairy tale for children, but a work of magic realism. And perhaps best of all, he doesn't talk down to young folks, in the audience or in the cast. The performances are as natural as skinned knees and missing teeth.

Liesel Matthews, who played Scout in a theatrical version of "To Kill a Mockingbird" before she was cast here, brings a measure of Scout's spunk to Sarah without turning the elegant young lady into a tomboy. Not that tomboys aren't princesses too.

DVD Times Gary Couzens

Austin Chronicle (Hollis Chacona)

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

USA (111 mi) 1998 ‘Scope

Senses of Cinema (Boris Trbic)

"Sexy" and "Dickens" aren't words that ordinarily occupy the same sentence, let alone the same movie review, but then very little of Great Expectations is as you'd expect it to be. Director Alfonso Cuarón, who revised A Little Princess three years ago, has turned Dickens' novel into a lush, hallucinatory love story, full of glistening images and heady sensuality. With its slick style and modern setting, Great Expectations seems at first like a bad idea on the scale of the most recent Romeo and Juliet, where flashy Aussie Baz Luhrman turned Shakespeare into an excuse for Leonardo DiCaprio to shout at rain machines. But Cuarón's take on Dickens is more thoughtful, bolder and more cohesive than Luhrman's half-baked effort. While it won't please anyone looking for a faithful simulation of Dickens, Great Expectations more than succeeds on its own merits.

Mitch Glaser's script recasts Pip as Finnegan Bell, known mostly as Finn, a sandy-haired budding artist whose trampy sister (Kim Dickens) dumps him on a down-on-his-luck Florida fisherman (Chris Cooper). While his foster father is doing odd jobs at a run-down estate called Paradiso Perduto, Finn encounters the wildly eccentric Nora Dinsmoor (Anne Bancroft), a flamboyant but heartless woman who uses Finn to teach her young daughter Estella how to seduce men without falling in love with them. With her heavy makeup and crazy eyes, Bancroft's Dinsmoor looks like something out of Brazil, a maniacal voyeur who cackles with glee as she watches Finn and Estella dance.

Although she's a spoiled snob, Finn falls in love with Estella anyway, but she's off to school in Switzerland before he can do anything about it, and it isn't until Finn's all grown up into Ethan Hawke and she into Gwyneth Paltrow that the two are reunited. With the help of a mysterious benefactor, Finn travels to New York and mounts a successful gallery show, drawing Estella's eye in the process. But she's already engaged to the aptly named Walter Plane (Hank Azaria), a dully secure type who offers her stability without the threat of love. Her mother's pupil, Estella has learned not to feel too deeply, to look at men as conquests instead of lovers.

A true sensualist, Cuarón makes heroes of those who live out their inner passions, and fills his movie with rich images waiting to be inhaled. (The cinematography is by Like Water for Chocolate's Emmanuel Lubezki.) The playfully explicit sexuality makes a strong impression; without resorting to the usual thrusting and moaning, the film makes clear the intensely sexual nature of Finn and Estella's relationship. Despite the focus on sexual forthrightness, though, there's hardly any nudity in Great Expectations (although Gwyneth Paltrow is saved only by a few carefully chosen camera angles). In fact, the film's most sweetly erotic moment occurs when the two are children: Finn (played here by young Jeremy Kissner) bends to sip from a fountain, and Estella (Rachel Beaudene) touches her extended tongue to his through the water. Like few American directors, Cuarón understands that creating a sensual moment has more to do with our emotional connection to the scene than with the amount of flesh on display.

Perhaps the only major problem with Great Expectations is its title: anyone going to the movie looking for Dickens is bound to be disappointed, and the title is sure to scare away audiences who are understandably wary of literary rip-offs. Cuarón's adaptation once again proves that the only way to make a good movie out of literature is to ignore the source, but of course that begs the question: Why bother with the source at all?

Great Expectations (1998) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

Magical or hokey, depending on your point of view, Alfonso Cuarón's new version of Great Expectations is another reinvented classic for the age of MTV. Of course, this version bears little resemblance to the original Dickens. Even some of the names have been changed. God help me, I kind of enjoyed it despite its failings, although I certainly wouldn't recommend it.

For the first act, Cuarón envisions a timeless Florida landscape, where young Finnegan Bell (Jeremy Kissner) wades in the shorewaters of the Atlantic, eyeballing the seagulls and scratching evocative line drawings into his sketchpad. It's in this otherworldly environment that the lower-class Finn meets the highbrow Estella (Raquel Beaudene), golden-tressed daughter of daffy Ms. Dinsmoor (Anne Bancroft), an aging spinster who dances around her decaying mansion to the strains of "Besame Mucho" and who pays Finn's Uncle Joe to bring him over from time to time for entertainment. He can't dance for her, but he can draw, and his sketches of Estella are ghostly and oddly compelling.

Years go by, and Estella and Finn (now Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke) grow into young adulthood, when Estella will begin giving Finn a long, haunting lesson in the nature of unrequited love and the distance between the classes. After the first of a long series of pre-coitus interruptus heartbreaks for Finn, Estella abruptly decides that she has "a million things to do" and walks out of the room. Finn takes rejection like a gentleman, but his disappointment is heightened when he next calls on her and is told by Dinsmoor that she has gone abroad for years of study. ("Didn't she say goodbye?") Talk about heartbreak -- Finn loses his will to create, gives up drawing, and resigns himself to life as a fisherman.

Flash forward a few years, until a mysterious lawyer (his name, we're told, is Italian for "spider") visits Finn with plane tickets and pocket money to send him to New York. One of the many galleries to which he had sent slides in the past is interested in hosting his one-man show, he's told, and will put him up in Manhattan to work. When Dinsmoor informs him helpfully that Estella is living in New York City, Finn gets on a plane.

He gets back off in what must be the Manhattan of young idealists, where the woman of your dreams materializes at a downtown fountain, where handsome artists congregate in posh social clubs to share stories about Michelangelo and de Kooning, where you can storm into a Chinese restaurant and steal a woman away from her betrothed by asking her to dance and then waltzing her out into the rain-slicked streets outside. In one particularly audacious shot, the suggestion is that you can gaze into the sky and perhaps see the face of your beloved, whisked away from you on a jet.

Actually, the suggestion may only be that you could imagine you saw that. This version of Great Expectations anticipates qualms about verisimilitude early on, when Finn declares in voiceover that he's not going to tell the story as it happened, but as he remembers it. Thus you can't really complain that Robert DeNiro must have held his breath for, oh, 10 minutes prior to the opening scene when he jumps out of a watery hiding place.

Hardly a scene transpires that doesn't feature Finn, since the story is his and only his to tell -- but Hawke can't quite invest it with the pathos that's required. He's flat and emotionally distant. Finn's been emotionally victimized by Estella, true, but Hawke puts Finn's emotions at too far a remove. When Finn asks Estella, "What's it like to feel nothing?" you may figure that he'd be one to know. Paltrow plays her own role more or less the only way she can, and she makes a radiant, plausibly maddening seductress.

Interestingly, many reviewers have also clucked disapprovingly about Paltrow's "nude scene," where Estella sits to have her portrait painted by Finn -- it turns out to be just another in the long series of teases perpetrated by her character, and, to be honest, it's not much of a "nude scene." It is, however, pretty damn sexy, not least because Francesco Clemente's more revealing drawings, for which Paltrow actually modeled, are suitably dynamite. I was initially put off by Cuaróns selection of turgid rock music as aural accompaniment for this and an earlier erotic encounter, but it's appropriate on a rock-and-roll level -- it suggests a hormone-induced state of creative ecstasy that can only go flaccid once the needle hits the playout groove.

Of course, it begs the question: Why a rock-and-roll update of Great Expectations? At least the bold colors and noises of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet made a kind of garish sense, tapping and exploiting the most theatrical possibilities of Shakespearean melodrama. But the Dickens novel hardly lends itself to noise and spectacle, and the movie puts a lot of distance between itself and its esteemed lineage. My guess is that Hollywood can only screw up its nerves to finance a picture like this if it has the empty cachet of an English Lit brand name behind it. Both Hollywood and Cuarón, then, should learn that Dickens is long in his grave; he can't help make this a better movie.

Unlike the original Dickens, Cuarón's Great Expectations is frustratingly lightweight, with no real bearing on what any of this beautiful stuff really means on a human level. Every time Cuarón has a chance to define the emotional heart of the story on its own terms, the movie just flits blandly, almost elliptically, through the scene. When Finn finally declares his emotional ruin, he barely seems fazed. When Bancroft lets loose near the end of the film, the moment has no power because there's been no buildup to her outburst. All these crucial emotional payoffs are leached of momentum by Cuarón's perfunctory handling of his material and, worse, his characters. Like Finn's love affair with Estella, Great Expectations is all modulation and no climax. Cuarón serves up a great, glossy New York City, the stuff of lovers' fantasies -- and he even manages to make Central Park look new again. Sensing an unhappy ending, you keep waiting for the gloss to come off, like so much varnish. Alas, Great Expectations is all varnish.

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BROOKLYN B+ 90

Ireland Canada Great Britain (111 mi) 2015 Official site

She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family. It was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house in Ireland belonged to her, she thought. When she moved in them, she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the vocational school, the air, the light, the ground — it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to. But there was nothing, not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday. Nothing, maybe, except sleep. And she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep. In any case, she could not sleep yet since it was not yet 9 o’clock. There was nothing she could do. It was as though she had been locked away.

—Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín, 2009

Despite its grand ambitions, this is a small, intimate film that places its faith on the intricacies of language, suggesting a time when words had more meaning and the world was perceived as flush with new opportunities. Adapted by Nick Hornby from Colm Tóibín’s acclaimed 2009 Irish novel, it’s largely an old-fashioned immigrant tale from the early 50’s about decent people attempting to find their way in the new world, told in a social realist style that may hold greater appeal to an educated class, as it’s intelligent and extremely well-written, using a literary style where the exact choice of words, like “amenable,” is exquisite. Seen through the eyes of a central character, Saoirse Ronan is Eilis Lacey, a young girl just out of high school growing up in a suffocatingly barren town of Enniscorthy in Wexford County on the southeastern coast of Ireland, a town described by James Joyce in Ulysses as “the finest place in the world,” but to Eilis, living with her more likeable and employed sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) and her constantly depressed widowed mother (Jane Brennan), nothing ever seems to happen there, where it has come to represent the sheer ordinariness of provincial life, where just about the only thing to do is go swimming on Sunday afternoons at the beach just over the nearby cliff. It is also the town where author Colm Tóibín comes from, while Ronan’s parents grew up in neighboring County Carlow. Initially Eilis is seen as a relatively unexciting character, shy and annoyingly drab, where her passivity makes her difficult to identify with, working weekends at a small shop run by a spiteful old woman Miss Kelly (Bríd Brennan) that hoards every penny she makes, treating her customers like herded cattle, reproaching them when lines develop that they could have shopped earlier in the week. It’s a dreary and dismal existence, with no real hopes for the future until Rose arranges for Eilis to travel to America, where a job and a place to stay have already been found through an Irish priest in Brooklyn, Father Flood (Jim Broadbent). Leave it to Miss Kelly to make Eilis feel guilty about leaving, suggesting Rose will be forced to care for their mother for the rest of her life. Like a bird forced to leave the nest, Eilis is totally unprepared for her worldly adventure, finding herself seasick for most of the voyage on the ship, literally rescued by a fellow traveler (Eva Birthistle) who teaches her how to survive a transatlantic crossing intact, even offering tips for navigating her way through customs.

The story is about a persistent longing, where coming to America is “not” the most natural thing in the world, but a huge obstacle to overcome, particularly when the struggle is made alone. While working as a sales girl in an upscale department store, Eilis does not exhibit a flair for the job, where making small talk with the customers does not come easy for her, as she’s literally overcome by loneliness and being homesick, where letters from Rose leave her sobbing in tears for what she’s left behind, where she can’t help but dream of the days she spent back home with her family. She lives in an Irish boarding house run by the acid-tongued Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters), a strict and opinionated lady who is always quick to point out certain topics are inappropriate for the dinner table, shared with a group of frivolous young girls who spend their days either working or gossiping about their new housemate who is viewed as overly naïve and even saintly, especially as she’s willing to help out Father Flood at the Catholic mission feeding the smelly, destitute old men Christmas dinner, where he informs her these are the men who have literally built the roads and bridges and most of the buildings in Brooklyn. There’s an especially poignant moment when one of them sings an anguished Irish lament in Gaelic about the misfortunes of love, “Casadh An tSúgáin” (A Twist of the Rope), Casadh an tSugain - Micheal 0'Domhnaill and Bothy Band 1979 YouTube (4:55). The benevolence of Father Flood reaches unprecedented heights, seen as an antidote for Spotlight (2015), where Jim Broadbent’s Catholic priest is one of the most positive uses of a priest in recent memory, informing Eilis that the church would pay tuition for evening classes in bookkeeping, which will lead to a better paying position. One does not often think of the Catholic Church as having engaged in career counseling, but they are in fact a transatlantic employment agency for an entire network of new Irish immigrants, where the church is the common denominator on both shores. It’s fitting, then, that Eilis meets her love interest at a weekend Irish dance with no alcohol served sponsored by the church, where Tony, Emory Cohen from Beneath the Harvest Sky (2013), is an Italian plumber who can’t take his eyes off her, establishing a pattern of regular dates, picking her up after school and walking her home, where it all seems innocent enough, apparently modeled after ON THE WATERFRONT (1954) where Marlon Brando’s barely literate dockworker develops a crush on the more properly educated Eva Marie Saint. While she’s slow to reciprocate affection, it’s easy to tell the remarkable influence he has on her life, as she soon oozes confidence and a newfound maturity.

It’s interesting that when the idea of intermarriage comes up, it’s not about black and white, but Italian and Irish. Eilis gets a refresher course from her roommates on how to properly eat pasta without splashing the sauce, so when she finally meets Tony’s family for dinner, the event is dominated by Tony’s wisecracking younger 8-year old brother Frankie (James DiGiacomo) who hilariously mouths off to their polite guest about how much the Italians hate the Irish, which immediately endears him to the audience. Much like Miss Kelly and Mrs. Kehoe, these bristling comments from secondary characters are like a breath of fresh air, adding caustic humor and a certain charm to the language heard throughout, elevating the material through powerfully understated performances. When a visit from Father Flood informs Eilis that her sister Rose has mysteriously died from an undisclosed heart ailment, Eilis breaks from the mold of most Irish immigrants and actually returns to Ireland, already transformed by her personal experiences, where she’s become someone to envy and admire, as guys that previously ignored her are now noticeably interested. She’s a bit baffled by her newly discovered popularity, as people want to hear about her experiences in America, but mostly urge her to stay in Ireland, where she’s even offered Rose’s old job. While she intended the trip to be short, she couldn’t possibly anticipate the hold that Ireland would have on her, where she’s pursued by Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson), a sensitive, traditional-minded guy who stands to inherit his family’s fortune, a guy that notices things about her that Tony doesn’t see, where she grows comfortable with the idea of this being her real home. While Tony’s letters go unanswered, Eilis is utterly bewildered by it all, where she’s somehow become the center of attention, where the open expanse of the beach never looked more beautiful, without all the clutter and crowded humanity of Coney Island. She could conceivably lead a perfectly happy life here after all, where she could look after her mother, or she could build a new life in America, where the seeds of promise have been planted, but have yet to take root. Either way, she has to let something go, where the heartache and growing pains expressed are unmistakably real, where Ronan’s subtle and particularly nuanced performance draws the audience into her internal conflict, where what initially seemed so drab and starkly empty when she left has suddenly evolved into new possibilities. What’s unique is watching Eilis blossom from a child into an extraordinary woman right before our eyes, delving into submerged emotions, where the beauty is getting caught up in the lives of multiple characters onscreen, where the emotional devastation is felt across the board throughout both countries, ultimately becoming a heartbreaking experience, an intriguing coming-of-age story on an international scale filled with romantic implications. And while it’s distinctly Irish with Catholic undertones, plagued by feelings of loneliness and guilt, in a bigger sense it’s about the ideas of rebirth and resurrection, where all who pass through Ellis Island chase a dream of making something out of nothing, where there’s no turning back. It’s an extraordinary portrait of exile, shown with deliberate restraint, revealing how the effects of leaving home and establishing a new life are never easy, where you’re literally torn between two worlds, as a part of you must end in order to advance to the next phase, like leaving your childhood behind to discover a young adult.

TIFF 2015 | Brooklyn (John Crowley, UK/Ireland/Canada ... Adam Nayman from Cinema Scope

A textbook example of international co-production funds well spent—note the flashy film-festival slots from Park City to Manhattan—Brooklyn arrives duly hyped, and disappoints just as reliably. Encouraged by her prematurely spinsterish sister to flee the Emerald Isle for the figuratively greener pastures of America, Ellis (Saoirse Ronan) spends her first year Stateside staving off homesickness, and then, just when she’s gotten herself settled with a cute Italian boyfriend (Emory Cohen), heads back home. Scripter Nick Hornby and director John Crowley dramatize this visit as if Ireland and its charming residents were the Mafia and our heroine Michael Corleone: just when she thought she was out, they pull her back in! There’s a powerful idea here, which is that to be an immigrant is to always lead a sort of double life, and yet neither the filmmakers nor their star really pull us inside that sense of identity crisis. Instead, Ellis’ interior torment—externalized via a late-developing overseas love triangle that never feels as threatening as it should—is just a pretense for a string of painstakingly crafted prestige-pic scenes, any one of which is admirable on its own terms but which ultimately add up to little more than a show of self-conscious “quality.” This is the sort of movie where instead of having somebody say what year it is, they talk about going to see The Quiet Man (1952) and add that it was set in Ireland—you know, to remind us of how much that seemingly offhand detail should resonate. Which of course is precisely why it doesn’t.

How is the love story in “Brooklyn” a metaphor for the ... How is the love story in “Brooklyn” a metaphor for the immigrant experience? by Joseph Hennessy from Screen Prism, October 18, 2015

Brooklyn (2015) is at its heart a romantic drama. The story’s dramatic tension stems entirely from Eilis Lacey’s (Saoirse Ronan) romantic experiences, and in that sense, it is a completely traditional romance. However, this primary romantic plot is given greater depth by its intersection with the concept of “the immigrant story” and the difficult decisions inherent in leaving home.

Brooklyn is not concerned with the broader social issues of immigration of the 50s. The Brooklyn we see is viewed through a deeply nostalgic, acrylic lens, and the film’s impressive wardrobe and beautiful set design offer no insight into the unique sociopolitical circumstances of Ireland or Brooklyn. For example, there is no mention that this story takes place in the middle of the Korean War, a conflict which would have been weighing on the minds of the able bodied American males of the film, such as Eilis’ initial love interest Tony (Emory Cohen). In addition, the way in which Eilis transitions seamlessly back into Irish life and the serene, idyllic way in which Ireland is portrayed is probably generous. The story is too focused and narrow for the dialogue to explore these social issues, because it is solely concerned with the romantic centerpiece of the story, Eilis. However, this is not to the detriment of the movie. Rather, this nostalgic backdrop is what determines the aesthetic tone of the film. The story is not about the trials of the time; it’s a personal story that uses love as a metaphor for the benefits of being home and going away.

Tony is a portrait of America from an immigrant's point of view, while, in a more general sense, he represents the thrill and fear of leaving home. He is James Dean-like: suave, soft-spoken, and different from anything Eilis had experienced in Ireland. Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson) is Ireland, or, more generally, home. He’s familiar, cozy, somber, and traditional. Further, the film refuses to villainize him in the way third parts of a love triangle often are; he’s viewed as a viable alternative to Tony, with his own pros and cons. The film does not judge Eilis for struggling to choose between the two men, but actually sympathizes with her for having to make such a difficult decision. This mirrors the struggles of immigrants torn between the love of the motherland and the thrill and excitement of new experiences. The love/immigration metaphor is holistically realized in Brooklyn, as when Eilis is made to feel guilty for leaving home by her initial boss Mrs. Kelly, the same person who later spitefully confronts her about her secret marriage. Eilis’s hand is forced by the invasive personal nature of Mrs. Kelly, and more broadly her hometown of Enniscorthy. Mrs. Kelly has no clear plan or reason for confronting Eilis, she simply turns to cruelty for a reprieve from her boredom. This disgusts Eilis, and she returns to America as much to escape the stagnation of home as to reunite with Tony.

This is not a story of love acting as a triumphant, against-the-odds force that has the capacity to conquer all. This is a story about how love is a series of difficult decisions. Making major life choices, like leaving home or choosing a partner, is not a science, and Brooklyn is an exploration of the emotional aches that come with the uncertainty of those decisions.

Brooklyn | John Crowley – In Review Online Luke Gorham

The biggest surprise of Brooklyn is how determinedly sweet it remains to the end, its period vibrancy bordering on the genteel. In navigating the push-pull narrative of Eilis (Saoirse Ronan), a young Irish girl who relocates to New York in the early ’50s, director John Crowley leaves little doubt as to what’s in his heroine’s best interests, juxtaposing the dreary, oppressive milieu of her homeland with the nouveau pastels of New York City. It’s here, in her newly-adopted home, that Eilis ameliorates from despondent naïf to a woman possessed of agency for the first time in her life.

Screenwriter Nick Hornby’s last adaptation – Cheryl’s Strayed’s Wild, a memoir similarly concerned with one’s spiritual journey to autonomy – suffered from a rushed narrative that compromised our ability to burrow into the headspace of its heroine. Here, Hornby’s adaptation of Colm Toibin’s novel of the same name displays a confident patience in developing Eilis through quotidian details: her career aspirations (accounting courses sponsored by the local Irish priest), her blossoming social confidence, and an irresistible romance with an enamored Italian boy, Tony (Emory Cohen), all smile lines and charm, and unequivocally devoted to Eilis. The effortless classicism of the story is equally breezy and affecting, never succumbing to the need for heightened drama that plagues so many similar films, and all the more touching for it.

Brooklyn transcends the banality of a happy ending for something murkier and more beautiful.

But Brooklyn‘s final third threatens to undermine that easy allure. After tragedy strikes, Eilis returns to her native Ireland with the intention of a temporary stay, but the community seems almost conspiratorial in its efforts to keep her home, fostering familial guilt, employment opportunities, and most convincingly, an introduction to local boy Jim Farrell (Domnhall Gleeson). Jim is by all accounts a catch, but he also comes across as acutely drab. But what could appear to be a weakness upon a cursory appraisal – the apparent lack of competition between Tony and Jim – turns into a compelling exhibition of Eilis’ state of mind. For much of his time on screen, Jim is imbued with a certain inherent villainy, due exclusively to his direct relation to the virtuous Tony, and the film’s biggest problems lie in Crowley’s sporadic accentuation of this love triangle through directorial miscues. Shots like the one of a bedside drawer full of unread letters from Tony prefer to treat Jim as a legitimate love interest, instead of what he tends to be functionally in this story – a manifestation of Eilis’s inner turmoil. Moreover he comes to represents a loss of the empowerment Eilis has found, rather than a viable alternative.

The key to Brooklyn‘s success is prioritizing Hornby’s screenplay, which understands the concerns of the original story’s author. Toibin’s oeuvre has demonstrated a thematic preoccupation with the development of personal identity, particularly within the context of small-town Ireland—as in his much-heralded later novel, Nora Webster, Brooklyn’s heroine finds herself at the risk of entrapment by a bullish, catty community of people who know and involve themselves in each other’s business. And with empathetic grace, Hornby makes clear Eilis isn’t the only victim: One quietly devastating scene late in Brooklyn, finds Jim professing his desire to travel and escape the confines of the only life he’s known. In this moment he becomes not a hinderance to Eilis’ happiness, but a three-dimensional and pitiable character in his own right, existing in a way Eilis once did and representing only a possibility, one Eilis has already lived. It’s this subtle complexity—that we’re meant to feel not only joy for Eilis, returning to Tony, but also anguish for Jim and others like him—that helps Brooklyn transcend the banality of a happy ending for something murkier and more beautiful.

Review: Brooklyn - Film Comment Michael Sragow, December 2015

This calm, spellbinding movie is the rare literary adaptation that rewards a book’s fans with unexpected insights while taking on a vibrant life of its own. Make that two lives, or even three.

Reading Colm Tóibín’s masterly 2009 novel about an Irish girl’s immigration to Brooklyn in the Fifties is a profound yet straightforward experience. His reluctant heroine, Eilis Lacey, doesn’t realize that she’s going to waste in depressed, tradition- bound Enniscorthy until her older sister, Rose, sends her to America. Tóibín walks his readers right into the heart and mind of a conventional young woman.

The movie’s director, James Crowley, and its screenwriter, Nick Hornby, do something quietly daring and very different. Eschewing voiceover narration, they stay outside of the head of Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) as she becomes a changed person, and matures into someone else again. Crowley’s plangent images, Hornby’s nimble dialogue, Ronan’s uncanny ability to suggest inchoate feelings—together they convey Eilis’s shocks and sensations as she adapts to Eisenhower-era Brooklyn. But her core thoughts and feelings become more enigmatic and even more suggestive than they are in the book

These psychological mysteries intensify a viewer’s connection to Eilis. They make you study her more intimately as she navigates seasickness and then homesickness; the comedy-drama of boardinghouse life under the rule of funny, moralistic Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters); and the velvety tensions of a family-owned Brooklyn department store that demands top service from its sales force.

Most coming-of-age movies emphasize the continuity of their heroes as they come into their own. Eilis’s personality changes both subtly and radically. From being a small-town gal with a chip on her shoulder about the local upper crust, she evolves into a wary, deeply feeling woman who studies bookkeeping at night while dating a smitten Italian guy named Tony (Emory Cohen).

Eilis takes her most audacious leap when an unexpected calamity sends her back to Enniscorthy. Suddenly everyone treats her vastly better than they did before. She blossoms out of being a wallflower. Her newfound worldliness puts her in a position to exploit the best opportunities that the village has to offer.

Unlike the book, the movie provides no immediate explanation for why she doesn’t tell anyone that she has married Tony, even after an eligible and lovable bachelor named Jim (Domhnall Gleeson) comes courting. So in its own wholesome, picturesque way (the Irish coast has never looked more enticing), Brooklyn acquires some of the ambiguous allure of gothic romance.

Eilis assumes large parts of her sister’s identity during her stay; she even takes over her accounting job. But the difference between Brooklyn and Vertigo or Phoenix is that in Ronan’s hypnotic shape-shifting performance, Eilis remodels herself. The movie conveys viscerally what Tóibín states outright: she could be “two people, one who had battled against two cold winters and many hard days in Brooklyn and fallen in love there, and the other who was her mother’s daughter, the Eilis whom everyone knew, or thought they knew.”

Paradoxically, by refusing to treat Eilis as an open book, the filmmakers keep their movie from becoming a one-woman show. It takes a village to dramatize the impact of a character as original as Eilis. Cohen’s Tony riffs beautifully on Brando’s gallant street courtship of Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront. Gleeson harks back to the sensitivity and charm of the young Jimmy Stewart. His passionate formality helps Ronan express the peculiar irony of Eilis’s homecoming. Brooklyn demonstrates that you can go home again—and sometimes arrive there as your better self.

Sight & Sound [Philip Kemp] November 6, 2015

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INFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski] also seen here: The Baconation [Steve Pulaski]

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theartsdesk.com [Graham Fuller]

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Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Hannah McHaffie] also seen here: Reel Insights [Hannah McHaffie]

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NYFF: 'Brooklyn' Reveals Saoirse Ronan as One of Her ... - Village Voice Nick Schager from The Village Voice

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With 'Brooklyn,' Saoirse Ronan Embraces Her Journey - The ... interview from The New York Times, October 25, 2015

'Brooklyn': Sundance Review - Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

Film Review: 'Brooklyn' - Variety Peter Debruge

Brooklyn (2015), directed by John Crowley | Movie review Joshua Rothkopf from Time Out

Brooklyn review – Saoirse Ronan shines in a heartfelt - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Brooklyn review – this fairytale of New York casts a spell - The Guardian Mark Kermode

Colm Tóibín on filming his novel Brooklyn: 'Everyone in my ... Author Colm Tóibín fom The Guardian, October 10, 2015

Review: Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín | Books | The Guardian Christopher Taylor book review , May 8, 2009

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Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN B- 82

aka: And Your Mama Too

Mexico (105 mi) 2001

Nico and Dani go south of the border – the film opens with a fucking scene, followed by another fucking scene – meet Tenoch and Julio – Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal, sending their respective girl friends away in style for their Italian vacation, both boys seem to do everything together, mostly smoke weed, take ecstasy, drink too much, and pursue every available girl. As a lark, they invite an older attractive women (Ana Morelos) on a fictitious Mexican beach trip, and, she accepts, leading to what amounts to a road movie involving this threesome. While the film is funny and entertaining, I stopped thinking of it as a film after awhile because there is a constant interruption by a narrator who literally stops the film, and trying to be cute says what he has to say, which, except for a circumstance or two at the end, is an irritating and largely irrelevant device, where too much information is packed into this brief pause, and it simply interferes with the rhythm of the film, bringing to a complete halt what is otherwise a talkative and very fast paced comical film with plenty of drugs, sex, and profanity, and just a hint at the end that this film might be about much much more.

Ernest Hardy from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Even fans of this deceptively simple, multilayered film often reduce it down to one of its two primary genre blueprints in order to praise it: Teen coming-of-age film or raunchy road flick. On the surface, Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN is the story of what happens when childhood friends Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) embark on a road trip with an older woman (Ana Morelos). The trio trek across Mexico in pursuit of a mythological beach, encountering the land and people in ways that depict the country as a more sociologically complex and dynamic entity than is usually represented on film.

Beneath the coming-of-age/road-trip fusion, however, Alfonso Cuarón’s film is an artful, insightful essay on class, capitalism, and globalization, and on the ways that the dynamic of those items plays out in everything from the ability to feed one’s family to the shaping of our sexual desires. The simmering tensions between the two boys are ultimately rooted in their conflicting class status, in their resentments and hidden prejudices. With its unflinching politics, swooning sensuality, and unabashed celebration of sexuality, Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN is one of the best examples of the revitalized Mexican cinema of the late 20^th/early 21^st centuries.

Last year Amores Perros landed on our shores in a blaze of hype and critical adulation which the film itself never quite managed to justify. Now we have another Mexican state-of-the-nation film, with the same young star (Gael Garcia Bernal, the latino Jared Leto), and another tidal wave of ecstatic advance word. This time, however, we soon escape the claustrophobic confines of Mexico City – Y Tu Mama is a road movie in which teenage best-mates Julio (Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) head through the countryside in search of a mythical beach called “Heaven’s Mouth”, accompanied by the beautiful, thirtyish Luisa (Maribel Verdu). Luisa’s marriage to Tenoch’s cousin has suddenly hit the rocks, and she’s more than willing to help out the randy lads with their emotional and sexual development. Tenoch and Julio can hardly believe their luck – but things don’t run as smoothly as they expect…

Despite some surprisingly raucous American Pie-ish touches early on, the scale of Cuaron’s ambition is never in doubt – he uses the friendship between spoilt rich kid Tenoch and barrio boy Julio as a starting-point to examine the different layers that make up Mexican society. The road-trip format allows him to explore the bewildering range of his country’s geography, while commentary from an unseen narrator puts everything into a social and economic context. The results are a bit stop-start, however, and the second half often feels as aimless as our teenage heroes, dragging towards a downbeat finale in a way that makes the three-hour Perros seem positively breezy in comparison. And those interjections, make you want to tell Cuaron that, if it’s a novel he wants to write, pens and paper are still available.

Washington Post [Ann Hornaday]

"Y Tu Mamá Tambièn" (which translates to the adolescent insult "And your mama too!") is a vivid, thoughtful, unapologetically raw coming-of-age tale full of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

The story -- two sex-obsessed, dope-smoking teenage boys, Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) head for a hidden Mexican beach with a sexy, worldly young Spanish woman -- reads like a transplanted American teen sex comedy on the surface.

Luisa (Maribel Verdu), the restless, unhappy wife of Tenoch's insufferably pompous cousin, is an erotic fantasy to these boys and who, true to the genre, will take them both in hand for brief encounters.

Neither comic nor romanticized, the couplings are physical and sweaty, more like a sporting event than love making. Bernal's working-class Julio and Luna's rich kid Tenoch are utterly unself-conscious in their portrayal of boys on their last blast of irresponsible fun, bringing just a touch of tension to their screen friendship.

Verdu's Luisa emerges as the heart and soul of the picture. Under her smiling front of confidence and fun-loving impulsiveness, Luisa is sad and lost, and she thrives on the unbridled energy and naive innocence of the immature, cocky, sex-mad boys. Her sexual favors are not favors at all, but a desperate attempt to lose herself, if only for a few moments, in simple physical pleasure (and brief it is, much to her unfulfilled frustration).

Alfonso Cuaron, the director of such elegant, visually sensuous American films as "A Little Princess" and "Great Expectations," finds a different kind of sensuality in the sun-blasted rural landscapes and the paradise lost of the third act. Framing the giddy teenage explosion of energy are the comments of an omniscient narrator, whose ironic insights offer background color and flash-forward reality checks, and the political and social tensions of modern-day Mexico in the periphery of their road trip.

That's a lot to cram into a coming-of-age film, and Cuaron does it deftly, thoughtfully and with sharp, aggressive style that makes it feel honest. Like all road movies, this is a journey to self, and Cuaron both celebrates and mourns the passing of youth.

"Y Tu Mama Tambien" ("And Your Mother, Too") gives the game away from the very start: The film's opening shot shows two young people making love under a poster for "Harold and Maude."

Like that quintessential '70s cult movie, "Y Tu Mama Tambien" is a picaresque tale that depicts the sentimental education of an adolescent boy with an appropriate mixture of hilarity and sadness. But writer-director Alfonso Cuaron has chosen to infuse his version with some unexpected elements, adding another boy and making "the older woman" not so very old. He also sets his story in his native Mexico, and the film pulses with the colors, textures, heat and smells of that ever-changing landscape. Undergirded by Cuaron's own observations about his country's economic and political life, "Y Tu Mama Tambien" is far more than a sexual coming-of-age movie, although as such it is a warm and welcome antidote to Hollywood's sophomoric doodlings. Part travelogue, part road picture, part meditation on class, mortality and intimacy, this extraordinary little movie might be the perfect harbinger of summer, as astute as it is steamy.

Tenoch and Julio (Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal) are best friends living in Mexico City who face a summer of chastity and boredom once they send their girlfriends off on a trip to Italy. The ennui is shattered one day when they attend Tenoch's sister's wedding, where they meet Luisa (Maribel Verdu), a stunning distant cousin of Tenoch's who just moved to Mexico City. She wants to visit a beach and the boys tell her about the perfect one: No tourists, white sand, clear water. Of course it's completely imaginary. A few days later, when her husband goes out of town and having received a startling piece of news, she asks them to take her there. They comply, without a clue as to where they're going.

Naturally Tenoch and Julio lust after the delectable Luisa, and she's aware of their bumbling desires, leading them on in conversations about their girlfriends, their sexual habits and their own friendship. As the boys drive Julio's decrepit station wagon on the long, dusty road to nowhere, the audience stops wondering if they'll ever reach the beach and starts wondering just what Luisa has in mind. "Truth is cool but unattainable," goes one of the boys' mottoes. Actually, the opposite is true, as the film proves: The truth – about Luisa's motives and about the underlying dynamics of the boys' friendship – emerges, through a series of funny, sexy, scary and sometimes transcendent encounters.

Cuaron, who proved himself an accomplished pictorialist in such films as "A Little Princess" and "Great Expectations," films Mexico with such compassion and comprehensiveness that viewers may well feel as if they've been on a week-long journey themselves by the movie's end. (As with all great vacations, they won't want this one to end.) Starting in the mansion of Tenoch's powerful father, "Y Tu Mama Tambien" travels to Julio's less grand apartment and finally to the dusty, impoverished redoubts of rural Mexico. No matter where he is, Cuaron never misses a chance to revel in moments of beauty, such as a canopy of jacaranda trees or the stillness of a leaf-strewn swimming pool. This is a film that finds its sensual pleasures not just in its sexually explicit scenes (of which there are quite a few), but in just about every corner of Mexican life.

Taking his cue from the films of the French New Wave, Cuaron interrupts the proceedings often so that a narrator can inform viewers of the companions' secrets, the histories and fates of the people they meet, and, finally, what happened after the trip ended. Rather than take the audience out of the movie, these interludes open the film up, so that the final effect of "Y Tu Mama Tambien" is one of expansive, almost spiritual power. It was gallant of Cuaron to pay homage to "Harold and Maude," but with this movie he has created something utterly and exhilaratingly his own.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Heaven's Mouth Paul Julian Smith from Sight and Sound, April 2002

Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs]

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

"Y Tu Mamá También," Charles Taylor from Salon

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Gary Mairs

Nick's Flick Picks Nick Davis

filmcritic.com [Norm Schrager]

PopMatters Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

plume-noire.com - Review Anji Milanovic

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Laura Sinagra

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]

Reel.com [Rod Armstrong]

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive")

hybridmagazine.com Zach Schenkkan

ToxicUniverse.com (Lee Chase IV)

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman)

Kamera.co.uk Sameer Padania

BFI | Sight & Sound | Interview Sight and Sound interview by Edward Lawrenson, April 2002

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Slant Magazine [Keith Uhlich]

HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN B+ 92

USA (141 mi) 2004

First and foremost, just the look of the film is superb. Cinematography by Michale Seresin, some of the color saturation is strikingly interesting. There is much more depth in each and every frame, and a more magical look to the film, providing a lush, naturalistic beauty and magnificence to a magical kingdom, both indoors and out. The indoor sequences were filled with charming effects from the more lavish decor, the pictures on the wall were constantly moving and engaging the characters in a bit of the humor and action. The actors are older and better performers now, and can be filmed in longer sequences, which makes the scenes work better. There’s more humor, more character development, and especially there is David Thewlis, who is wonderful as Professor Lupin, who probably has the most on-screen time with Harry, teaching him how to heel the demons in his imagination. The suspense and evil portrayed by the soul-sucking Dementors in the train sequence was a nice counterbalance to the humor of the flying aunt in the opener, while the boggart sequence was imaginative, balancing evil and fear with humor, and Hermione has matured a bit and developed a wonderful time traveling secret that kept Ron wondering how she kept turning up in the most improbable circumstances, and she got to smack Malfoy, who was the weakest link in this story, unfortunately, as he’s supposed to have cunning and a brilliant mind for evil, but he was too easily outthought in every sequence. But a minor point. The computer graphics of the flying Hippogriff were marvelous, as was the endearing loyalty of the animal to Harry, as it protected his life and his honor on more than one occasion, as has Hermione, by the way, even if it is Ron’s hand she grabs on more than one occasion. The evolution of the Gary Oldham’s demented prisoner character works well, but he has too little screen time. I felt the editing was much improved, as there is no excess or extraneous material, everything keeps moving at a brisk pace – evidence the Quidditch match in the middle of a rainstorm, and how quickly it comes to an end. No scene lingers past its bare necessity, which gives this film a greater dramatic intensity. While the end did not live up to expectations, given how extraordinary everything was leading up to the finale, it remains one of the better and more magical efforts in the genre.

“It’s about a kid turning 13 and coming to grips with his own identity and learning to accept and embrace the father energy within. Being 13 is misery. I remember. It’s not a happy time. You’re realizing that the monster isn’t hiding under the bed, it’s inside you. And then you eventually learn that what’s also inside you is the ability to beat the monster.” -- Alfonso Cuarón

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

A hard-core auteurist's dream, this one. From shot to shot you can pretty much see a talented film artist's skewed vision (light glinting off rainwater pouring down a dark wall; brave young adults dwarfed in a threatening natural landscape) banging up against the Iron Law of Genre (a jaunty-fantasy music cue; some CGI beastie). Cuarón has undoubtedly made the most filmically interesting Potter installment to date, so a 6 may seem disingenuous in light of my 7 for Sorcerer's Stone. And while this is far more successful an auteurist outing than, say, Ang Lee's Hulk, there's no shaking the feeling throughout Azkaban that Cuarón has more important fish to fry. He doesn't evince this through lazy direction; instead it's his total commitment that feels misplaced, as he shuttles through our mandated Bill & Tedesque conclusion, or tries to smuggle in some fourth-quarter lycanthropy-as-homosexuality metaphor, with overcoats flying back into a closet-like steamer trunk. A valiant effort, but I'd almost always rather see an artist given freer reign.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Henry Sheehan

CHILDREN OF MEN B+ 92

USA Great Britain (109 mi) 2006

Lord, thou hast been our refuge: from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made: thou art God from everlasting, and world without end. Thou turnest man to destruction: again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday: Seeing that is past as a watch in the night. - - Psalm 90, Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1662)

From the outset, this bleak, colorless, futuristic world reminds us of the nightmarish, apocalyptic vision of the end of the world in Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 DAYS LATER, a survivalist zombie flick, as the sheer look of the film is amazingly similar, even the original use of music, which in this film balances King Krimson, Deep Purple, John Lennon, and some uncredited yet very effective use of the Kills against the transcendent choral music of John Tavener. This is based on a P.D. James story that originally contains Biblical implications, namely a miracle birth, coming at a time when inexplicably no babies have been born anywhere in the world for the past 18 years, giving the population the desperate feel of a world with no hope of survival. The film, on the other hand, is more ambiguous and open ended, using modern day maladies as an entry point, a portal to the future. Here entire societies have already collapsed, Britain has closed its borders to hordes of refugees who are migrating to the wealthier nations, which are run by police states that reflect a virulent anti-immigration bias, rounding up immigrants in Guantanamo-like concentration camps that become so overrun, they begin to resemble the Warsaw ghetto in WWII, a dumping ground where unwanted, neglected people wait to die. Underground rogue protest groups offer limited opposition, but the state controls all media outlets, so it controls the mindset of the nation. In this chaotic surge of lawlessness and anarchy, the inexplicable birth of a child completely changes the landscape with a renewed sense of purpose.

Like many futuristic stories, they look very much like the present, as governmental hierarchies fail to protect or even offer assistance where it’s needed, but instead set a course hellbent on bringing about their own destruction, with exaggerated use of force to overreact to any cause of alarm, used instead to suppress the will of the people, treating human life with an arrogant brutality and disdain. And they look very much like a Biblical story from the past, as from a small corner of the earth, an ordinary person rises to dispel all prevailing beliefs, labeled a threat, a traitor, or a terrorist by a government whose myopic, tunnel vision prevents them from seeing the larger inference, that the world is not only for the benefit of a privileged few who are protected by mightier military forces. Clive Owen stars as a weary, disheveled bureaucrat in 2027 London, who as a former social activist, has long since stopped believing in causes, sought after by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore), who hasn’t seen him in twenty years, not since they lost their only child to illness. She leads a peace activist group and recruits him as a man who can be trusted to act as a protector for a pregnant refugee black girl (Claire-Hope Ashitey) and guide her through the various police zones to safety, to the ship of a reputable scientific organization, a secret mission, as no one outside her organization knows of the woman’s pregnancy. But plans to save her go awry, leading to a gateway through Hell to find providence.

Full of simplistic Christian themes like hope and salvation, this film is anything but simplistic, yet it does fall into the category of overreach on several occasions, such as the setting where the pregnancy is revealed, a barn surrounded by cows which closely resembles a manger, or again as we witness the mindless devastation in the streets, which suddenly fills with a flock of sheep, or even roosters, well known Buñuelian images that seem out of place here, where so much of the film is guided by the visceral effect of hand-held cameras, by the jostling physicality of the experience, which adds an immediacy to every moment. There are several amazing moments, such as a riveting action sequence shot from inside a car attempting to flee from an armed mob, a sequence that matches the stunning intensity from earlier films such as THE ROAD WARRIOR, but with a shorter, more focused version that jolts us out of our seats, or the sequence where Owen leads the girl from the heart of the police zone into a netherworld run by outlaws on the “other” side of the zone, the setting for the birth scene, which on a dime shifts into surprising tenderness, also each scene with Michael Caine, Owen’s aging pot smoking friend living in a remote secluded area under cover of a forest where a unique calm prevails, underscored by an eerie cover version from Franco Battiato of the Rolling Stones song “Ruby Tuesday,” and finally a long, drawn out sequence where Owen has to zig zag his way through machine gun fire, caught in the middle of a fire fight, pinned down right in the heart of a ravaged war zone in search of the woman and her child, a bloody sequence, perhaps the longest in the film that slowly materializes from a bombardment of bullets and explosions into a mysteriously fascinating moment of utter silence.

While the film exhibits first rate work behind the camera from Emmanuel Lubezki, last seen in Malick’s THE NEW WORLD, displaying on occasion a virtuosity that is simply dazzling to the eye, the film retains a grim fascination with police abuse and military suppression, envisioning the world’s reliance on ever more expensive weaponry, which, as far as one can tell, only kills people at a faster rate. It’s all a matter of convenience. Much like STAR WARS, or the animated THE INVINCIBLES, films are currently feeding audiences large doses of killings with a video game-like instant gratification, which begs the question, why do audiences continue to endorse this methodology as acceptable family entertainment? And the answer, of course, has something to do with the dazzling virtuosity that quickens the pulse. Relying on military overreach to provide that extra heart-pumping adrenaline-racing action sequence is so prevalent in movies today that at some point, we become saturated with the body count in LORD OF THE RINGS or the near pornographic love affair with that BLACK HAWK DOWN virtual reality experience of physically being there. All those bullets, and so little time.

Most often, in these films, the bullets play favorites with the heroes, using the threat of violence to heighten the suspense, much like John Ford’s representation of Indian skirmishes in the Western plains (STAGECOACH through THE SEARCHERS), where the white settlers (good guys) were sure shots and the Indians (bad guys) couldn’t hit anything. This little method has a tendency to dull, not invigorate, the workings of our minds, not to mention it’s a racist distortion of the worst kind, usually pitting one race as superior to another. The superior race has few casualties, which are anointed to the heroic kind, while the other side has more casualties than we can count, each one more forgettable than the last. This generations-old mythical expression of history is transferred from fiction to non-fiction, as is this not an accurate depiction of how our government currently projects reality in the lingering Iraqi occupation, transferred to our troops in the field? Unfortunately, in CHILDREN OF MEN, we once more must endure another version that attempts to be as close to the actual experience as possible in providing the gut wrenching realism of war, witnessing a landscape littered with the dead, while a revitalized Clive Owen finds a renewed source of energy dodging bullets to save humanity, highly effective visceral imagery that provides the latest form of cinematic theatricality. But to what end? Unless we reject this bullets-play-favorites pattern of viewing “the theater of war,” which is how both sides viewed the end of WWII, calling it the war to end all wars, then we are complicit in continuing the promulgation of the same good guy versus bad guy myths that keep getting us into trouble in the first place, as we continue to be guilty of projecting such a superficial view of humanity as a whole.

Alfonso Cuarón:

"What I was attracted to was the concept of infertility as a premise. I was not really interested in doing a science fiction film, so I had completely disregarded it. But the premise kept haunting me. It was not until I realized that the premise of the film could serve as a metaphor for the fading sense of hope, that it could be a point of departure for an exploration of the state of things that we're living in now, the things that are shaping this very first part of the 21^st century, that I wanted to do it."

Slant Magazine Blog Ed Gonzalez

Children of Men's appalling trailer should give everyone pause, but Alfonso Cuarón doesn't push any Mother Africa theme throughout this account of a man's activist awakening in apocalyptic London. The problem with this film, an adaptation of the P.D. James novel, is that it doesn't push a whole lot. Cuarón and his small army of screenwriters drop us in London with no interest in rationalizing a society's downfall: why illegal immigrants are so callously hoarded into cages, a pig-shaped blimp hovers in the sky (is it just because it looks cool?), Julianne Moore runs a terrorist group that protects the first woman in almost two decades to have conceived a child, and a stringy-haired Michael Caine lives in the country (with a catatonic wife) growing jealousy-inducing batches of marijuana. But Children of Men is still worth seeing, mainly for the way Cuarón directs the mother-fucking shit out of a flimsy script. Soon after agreeing to secure a young immigrant black woman, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), with the necessary papers for her to leave the country, Theodore Faron (Clive Owen) will learn that she's pregnant and that the birth of her child may change the face of a world whose youngest person is, after the assassination of a Brazilian teen, an 18-year-old girl. Beginning with the very unexpected death of one of the film's main characters, in a scene that exudes the we-can-make-it panic of a Zack Snyder zombie attack, Children of Men builds and builds, like a rollercoaster rising uncertainly to the heavens, to a visionary battle sequence. I have to agree with Slant writer Keith Uhlich's assertion that Cuarón's images lack for the emotion of Come and See and Underground, but the film's final leg, during which the sounds of war defy the screams of a newborn child and Cuarón's camera takes on the point-of-view of a dog of war, chasing Theodore, Kee, and a spastic gypsy woman who looks as if she might be Gina Gershon in disguise through the streets and buildings of a crumbling immigrant ghetto, exudes a voluptuous energy rarely seen in the movies. Cuarón's virtuostic vision is laced with magical realist touches (look for Kee in the playground of one scene, glimpsed through teardrop-shaped glass) and reflective of the constant flux that is the bane of so many refugee and immigrant lives.

It would be foolish to deny the supreme technical achievements of Children of Men. The movies have rarely given us such a fully realized near-future dystopia, and it is impossible to be unaffected by the film's superbly executed series of "one-ers": single-take, or cleverly disguised single-take sequences that set a new standard for the mechanics of cinematography. There's an action sequence set entirely within the claustrophobic confines of a moving vehicle that must be seen to be believed, not to mention a climactic assault in a run-down immigrant ghetto that plays as the ultimate first-person shooter. Director Alfonso Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki have outdone themselves in this respect, and I intend on seeing Children of Men again purely to bask in the glories of a perfectly tuned machine.

But a machine it remains, slave to a similar problem that afflicted the single-take melodrama Nine Lives (to which I offer a Louis-Macarel-to-John-Boorman-on-the-Croisette mea culpa: "It was a very bad film, but not as bad as I said"), namely that the preponderance of one-ers stems not out of a need to illuminate character, theme, or emotion, but to cover up Children of Men's many glaring ideological and narrative deficiencies. From a photographic perspective, Cuarón knows this world intimately (it's only a quick Steadicam track to the left before a character is perfectly framed within a teardrop shaped broken window), but his mastery is out of place and damn near oppressive in a world that is meant to possess some level of the speculative unknown.

Children of Men's frequent attempts at mock spontaneity (too-obviously illustrated by a jittery and restless hand-held camera) quickly lose their luster, and even the film's drollest sequence, which draws a direct line from Michelangelo's David to Picasso's Guernica to Pink Floyd's Animals, ceases to resonate when Cuarón holds too long on the scene's punchline: the visual wit of the image finally becomes ensnared in and entrapped by postmodern quotation marks. Obsessed with the power of the master shot (a fixation that served him well in the terrific Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), Cuarón neglects the equal importance of the edit, whether actual or implied. This makes for a fascinating schism: typically within the same shot, a tangential character or disheveled third-world extra will have indelible screen presence at one moment and be nothing but squib-bursting cannon fodder the next.

If the camera is a stylus that ultimately betrays its user's true intentions, then it is revelatory here of Cuarón's shaky moral hand. It's clear he hasn't given much thought to some of the film's more loaded images, most tellingly the moment where the pregnant black girl Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) reveals her condition—a freak occurrence in this infertile future—to our cynical onscreen surrogate Theo (Clive Owen) while standing naked in a pen full of cows. Cuarón's tone isn't hysterical, so the image is only minorly offensive—he merely presents it and moves on (this is, it must be admitted, a significant improvement over the film's awful trailer where Kee comes off as a kind of stereotyped savior-saint sprung from the mind of Ron Howard). And yet it shows that the present-tense issues Children of Men purports to address never come through strongly enough in execution.

Cuarón and Lubezki's images crave constant attention—they flabbergast, but they're ultimately unfeeling and soulless, obsessed with little more than demo-reel prowess. As the film unfolds, one might think of the old saw about the movie that shows a point-of-view shot from inside a fireplace and the viewer who asks, "How did a camera get in there?" There's an interpretation of this story where the viewer is at fault, revealed as a petty literalist who is incapable of engaging imaginatively with the things before him, but there is another that lays responsibility at the feet of the filmmaker, who is so obsessed with the idea of a particular image that he neglects to ask if it is appropriate to the frame in which he currently works. Where, one finally ponders with Children of Men, is the ghost in this machine?

Alfonso Cuarón's fantastic Children of Men. - By Dana Stevens ... from Slate

Though I'll be coming out with a 10-best list in this space next week, I've never been much of one for the year-end obsession with sorting and ranking cultural products in neat rows. But I'll go out on a limb and say this: Children of Men (Universal), Alfonso Cuarón's dense, dark, and layered meditation on fertility, technology, immigration, war, love, and life itself may be the movie of the still-young millennium. And I don't just mean it's one of the best movies of the past six years. Children of Men, based on the 1992 novel by P.D. James, is the movie of the millennium because it's about our millennium, with its fractured, fearful politics and random bursts of violence and terror. Though it's set in the London of 2027, Cuarón's film isn't some high-tech, futuristic fantasy. It takes place in a grimly familiar location: the hell we are currently making for ourselves.

The particular conditions of that hell, sketched with a deft indirectness in the bravura opening sequence, are these: Since a fertility crisis of unknown origin struck in 2009, no new people have been born on earth. The human race is dying out slowly as the planet falls into political chaos. As a propagandistic slogan on a TV screen early in the film boasts, "The world has collapsed. Only Britain soldiers on"—mainly by means of a strict anti-immigration policy that rounds up refugees in cages to be sent to camps. When the world's youngest living citizen, an 18-year-old still known as "Baby Diego," dies in a bar brawl, the whole planet mourns, egged on by sentimental tabloid media that are only the barest exaggeration of our own.

Theo (Clive Owen), a former activist who's now a burned-out bureaucrat in the Ministry of Energy, hardly reacts to the death of Baby Diego."He was a wanker," he tells his friend Jasper (Michael Caine), an ex-political cartoonist who makes a living selling pot in the countryside near London. "Yeah, but he was the world's youngest wanker," Jasper counters.

On his way back to the city, Theo is kidnapped by the Fishes, a rebel group responsible for several recent bombings. As it happens, the Fishes' leader, Julian (Julianne Moore), is Theo's ex-wife, with whom he had and lost a child 20 years before. Now all business, Julian bribes Theo into using his connections to secure transit papers for a member of their group, a young African immigrant named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey.) As it turns out, Kee is mysteriously pregnant, only a month away from delivery. Soon the half-unwilling Theo is helping to smuggle Kee to the coast, aided by a new-agey midwife (Pam Ferris) and hunted both by terrorist factions and government troops.

When I said above that Children of Men is a "layered" film, it wasn't a metaphor. Nearly every frame is a palimpsest of visual information, from TV screens to graffiti-covered walls to the newspaper headlines and propaganda posters plastered everywhere in the gray and squalid London of Cuarón's imagination. His vision of the future comes to us in details that are as precise as they are terrifying. "It's Day 100 of the Siege of Seattle," burbles a radio voice as the movie opens, and we don't need to hear any more than that to picture the United States as a distant, war-torn police state like … well, a few others I could name.

The sound and production design lay the groundwork for a convincing dystopia, but it's Cuarón's daring, fluid camera that brings this terrible world to life. Without being showy about it, he creates two of the most virtuoso single-shot chase sequences I've ever seen. So virtuoso, in fact, that as the scenes are unfolding, all you can think is, sweet Jesus, please let the good guys get away! It's only later that you realize the technique that went into crafting that sickening suspense. In the first of the two sequences, a car chase, the cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, helped create a special rig that allowed the camera to swivel 360 degrees around the interior of the car. The second sequence, a siege on a building in a war zone, provides the movie's shattering climax; by the end of the nearly 10-minute shot, the camera lens is spattered with dirt and (fake, I hope) blood.

As reluctant hero Theo, Owen has the weary gravity of a Mitchum or a Bogart. He seems like an adult, a rare thing in action heroes these days, and Moore is a perfect match as the rebel leader who gave up long ago on the luxury of personal happiness. Michael Caine plays Jasper as John Lennon if he really had lived to be 64, a loopy, irreverent sage with a taste for strawberry-flavored pot. The scenes in Jasper's cozy hideout in the woods provide the only warmth in Theo's uncompromisingly chilly world, until he opens himself to the fragile hope growing inside the body of the decidedly unfragile Kee (played by 19-year-old Ashitey with great freshness and verve.)

I have almost nothing negative to say about Children of Men. A couple of scenes, including one expository monologue by the midwife, hit their emotional marks a little too neatly, and one might argue that the particulars of the film's political world are too vaguely sketched (though to me, this obliqueness was one of the film's strengths—it never condescends to its viewers with a pat history lesson). Cuarón, who's no newcomer to evoking magical worlds onscreen (A Little Princess, Y Tu Mamá También, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), feels like he's just hitting his stride.

A movie about the last days of humanity that opens on Christmas Day may seem like a bleak choice for holiday viewing. But Children of Men is a modern-day nativity story that's far more moving and even, in its way, reverent than the current film by that name. It's also the herald of another blessed event: the arrival of a great director by the name of Alfonso Cuarón.

New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis

The end is nigh in “Children of Men,” the superbly directed political thriller by Alfonso Cuarón about a nervously plausible future. It’s 2027, and the human race is approaching the terminus of its long goodbye. Cities across the globe are in flames, and the “siege of Seattle” has entered Day 1,000. In a permanent war zone called Britain, smoke pours into the air as illegal immigrants are swept into detainment camps. It’s apocalypse right here, right now — the end of the world as we knew and loved it, if not nearly enough. Skip to next paragraph

Based in broad outline on the 1992 dystopian novel by P. D. James about a world suffering from global infertility — and written with a nod to Orwell by Mr. Cuarón and his writing partner Timothy J. Sexton along with David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby — “Children of Men” pictures a world that looks a lot like our own, but darker, grimmer and more frighteningly, violently precarious. It imagines a world drained of hope and defined by terror in which bombs regularly explode in cafes crowded with men and women on their way to work. It imagines the unthinkable: What if instead of containing Iraq, the world has become Iraq, a universal battleground of military control, security zones, refugee camps and warring tribal identities?

Merry Christmas! Seriously. “Children of Men” may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking. Like Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” another new film that holds up a mirror to these times, Mr. Cuarón’s speculative fiction is a gratifying sign that big studios are still occasionally in the business of making ambitious, intelligent work that speaks to adults. And much like Mr. Eastwood’s most recent war movie, much like the best genre films of Hollywood history, “Children of Men” doesn’t announce its themes from a bully pulpit, with a megaphone in hand and Oscar in mind, but through the beauty of its form.

It may seem strange, even misplaced to talk of beauty given the horror of the film’s explosive opening. For Theo, the emotionally, physically enervated employee of the Ministry of Energy played without a shred of actorly egotism by Clive Owen, the day begins with a cup of coffee, an ear-shattering explosion and a screaming woman holding her severed arm. The Mexican-born Mr. Cuarón, whose previous credits include the children’s films “A Little Princess” (1995) and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004), as well as the supremely sexy road movie “Y Tu Mamá También” (2001), has always had a dark streak. But nothing in his résumé prepares you for the shocking realism of this explosion, which proves all the more terrible because here it is also so very commonplace.

Britain, it emerges, is in permanent lockdown. As the specter of humanity’s end looms, the world has been torn apart by sectarian violence. Britain has closed its borders (the Chunnel too), turning illegal aliens into Public Enemy No. 1. Theo and the other gray men and women adrift in London don’t seem to notice much.

Everywhere there are signs and warnings, surveillance cameras and security patrols. “The world has collapsed,” a public service announcement trumpets, “only Britain soldiers on.” The verb choice is horribly apt, since heavily armed soldiers are ubiquitous. They flank the streets and train platforms, guarding the pervasive metal cages crammed with a veritable Babel of humanity, illegal immigrants who have fled to Britain from hot spots, becoming refugees or “fugees” for short.

Among the fugees is Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), the linchpin of the story and its defiantly hopeful heart because she’s pregnant, the first woman on earth to carry a child after 18 barren years. Theo meets Kee through his former lover, Julian (Julianne Moore), the leader of an underground cadre, the Fishes (Chiwetel Ejiofior and Charlie Hunnam, among others), who, having renounced violence if not their heavy guns or lugubrious rhetoric, are fighting for immigrant rights.

Avowedly apolitical, Theo agrees to help the Fishes deliver Kee into the ministering care of a shadowy, perhaps apocryphal utopian group, the Human Project. En route, though, the plan goes violently awry, forcing Theo, Kee and a Fish member and former midwife, Miriam (Pam Ferris), to go on the run, first by car and then by foot.

Where they eventually land is in a hell that looks chillingly similar to the Iraqi combat areas of newspaper reportage, television news and mostly uncensored documentaries. There are several heart-gripping set pieces before then, including a hugely unsettling ambush scene shot almost entirely from inside a car crammed with passengers.

The action is swift, ferocious, spectacularly choreographed, with bodies careening wildly amid a fusillade of bullets and flying glass. Yet what lingers isn’t the technical virtuosity; it’s that after the car screeches off, Mr. Cuarón’s camera quietly lingers behind to show us two dead policemen, murdered in the name of an ideal and left like road kill. He forces us to look at the unspeakable and in doing so opens up a window onto the film’s moral landscape.

“Children of Men” has none of the hectoring qualities that tend to accompany good intentions in Hollywood. Most of the people doing the preaching turn out to be dreadfully, catastrophically misguided; everyone else seems to be holding on, like Theo’s friend Jasper (Michael Caine, wonderful), a former political cartoonist who bides his time with laughter and a lot of homegrown weed while listening to Beatles covers and rap. Still others, like Theo’s wealthy cousin, Nigel (Danny Huston, equally fine), who’s stashing away masterpieces like Michelangelo’s “David” for safekeeping in his private museum while Rome, New York and probably Guernica burn, can only smile as they swill another glass of wine. Hope isn’t the only thing that floats, as a song on the soundtrack reminds us.

The writer Kurt Andersen observed not long ago that we Americans are in an apocalyptic frame of mind. Mr. Andersen thinks that the latest in apocalypticism partly owes something to the aging baby boomers confronting their own impending doom, Sept. 11 and global warming notwithstanding. That’s one way to look at it, though the recent elections suggest that more than a few of those boomers are looking past their own reflection out at the world. Working with his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Mr. Cuarón manufactures war zones of extraordinary plausibility in this film, but equally amazing is how, through a carbon-blue palette, handheld camerawork and the sag of a man’s shoulders, he conjures the hopelessness and the despair that I imagine many of us feel when we wake up to news of another fatal car bombing in Iraq.

There are, Mr. Cuarón suggests in “Children of Men,” different ways of waking up. You can either wake up and close your ears and eyes, or like Theo you can wake up until all your senses are roaring. Early in the film Theo and the restlessly moving camera seem very much apart, as Mr. Cuarón keeps a distance from the characters.

Every so often the camera pointedly drifts away from Theo, as it does with the dead policemen, to show us a weeping old woman locked in a cage or animals burning on pyres. In time, though, the camera comes closer to Theo as he opens his eyes — to a kitten crawling up his leg, to trees rustling in the wind — until, in one of the most astonishing scenes of battle I’ve ever seen on film, it is running alongside him, trying to keep pace with a man who has finally found a reason to keep going.

House Next Door [Matt Zoller Seitz]

Critic After Dark Noel Vera

Children of Men (2006) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]

Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

Bright Lights Film Journal (Alan Vanneman) Dude, Where's My Suicide Pill? February 2007

Bright Lights Film Journal What a Waste, The Apocalyptic Prophecies of T. S. Eliot and Alfonso Cuarón, by Matt Brennan, August 2007

DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich] also here: DVD Talk - DVD release [Jamie S. Rich]

PopMatters [Bill Gibron] also seen here: DVD Verdict [Bill Gibron]

CultureCartel.com (Chris Barsanti)

Review: Children of Men -- James's Take - Cinematical James Rocchi from Cinematical

New York Press - ARMOND WHITE - Count-Down to Dystopia Armond White as the snarly contrarian from the New York Press

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Jim Ridley

New York Magazine (David Edelstein)

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek)

european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane)

d+kaz [Daniel Kasman]

The Lumière Reader David Levinson

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Twitch (Kurt Halfyard)

Monsters and Critics - DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]

Chicago Tribune [Michael Phillips]

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

DVDBeaver - HD DVD review [Matthew Eizenga]

GRAVITY – 3D B 85

USA (91 mi) 2013 ‘Scope Official site

As Hollywood special effects movies go, this one has several things going for it, not the least of which is the supposed improvement when seen in 3D and at IMAX, or anywhere that provides the best viewing experience possible, as this is another one of those state of the art movies that far surpass prior technological achievements. The other is the editing sequence, as this is not an example of prolonged Hollywood overreach, usually trying to do too much, but is instead one of those rare instances where it’s an extremely concise movie, which means it’s a well-told story without using any fancy extras.

For a film that is all about the visuals, trying to immerse the audience in the environment of outer space, the film certainly succeeds, taking the audience on a rollercoaster thrill ride, but once the journey is over, there is little lasting effect, as there are few story complexities worth remembering. That makes it an entertaining film, but not particularly challenging, where the worst characterization heard so far is that this is a space version of Tom Hanks in CAST AWAY (2000). Films have been made about outer space disasters, including MAROONED (1969), STARFLIGHT: THE PLANE THAT COULDN’T LAND (1983), SPACECAMP (1986), and APOLLO 13 (1995), a dramatization of a real-life NASA incident that took place in 1970, also the documentary APOLLO 13: TO THE EDGE AND BACK (1994). Perhaps the film this most resembles is Brian de Palma’s MISSION TO MARS (2000), where a specially assembled team attempts to save any remaining survivors from a disastrous mission on Mars, where a lone astronaut is left adrift on the planet surface. This feeling of being stranded in space, where there’s little hope of any survival, is at the heart of the movie.

The story was actually sitting on the shelf for a number of years waiting for technology to catch up to the required needs of visually expressing the story, and while this is a 3D movie, it doesn’t attempt to over impress using the 3D effects, but instead utilizes the technology to create a naturalistic overall atmosphere of a gravity free zone, where objects float in midair inside space capsules, and where untethered bodies floating in space must struggle to grasp hold of something should disaster occur, as maneuvering around out there is laborious and terribly difficult. While ostensibly a two-person story, with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) hamming it up while going for the record of the longest spacewalk, currently held by a Russian cosmonaut, while Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is busily struggling with outdoor ship repairs, where her medical conditioning is questioned as computer glitches continually prevent the necessary readings from making its way successfully to earth, leaving her repairs in a state of limbo. This delay is crucial, because she doesn’t budge, even after being ordered to stop and seek immediate shelter, as a nearby Russian satellite exploded with dangerous debris heading their way. When the debris arrives sooner than expected, with no time to waste, Dr. Stone is still working on completing the finishing touches, causing Kowalski to have to remain nearby to transport her back to safety. That option never occurs, as the flying debris causes plenty of damage to their ship, while Stone is terrifyingly thrown out into space, losing all control of her senses, as she can’t stop herself from spinning. Kowalski can be heard on the radio transmitter attempting to calm her down and slow her breathing, as she’s in a state of panic literally draining her oxygen supply.

Cuarón is excellent at building and sustaining the drama, where his novel use of the camera from inside the space helmets adds a surprising intimacy, while also capturing the beauty of the elusive sunlight coming from behind the shadow of earth, but watching the spacecraft behind them continually get blasted to smithereens, often disintegrating in utter silence, evoking shock and terror, where the audience is witness to several hair-raising scenes, most revealing some degree of death-defying physicality, leaping into the void, where they are forced to play daredevil with their lives. There are a few choice moments in the film where the silence can be deafening, also some spectacular rescue sequences (with sound added) along with even more near misses. While many are lauding the performance of Sandra Bullock, who reprises a Sigourney Weaver-style role from ALIEN (1979), but it’s a fundamentally flawed decision, as Bullock actually over-acts, bringing up a traumatic emotional wound from her past that would immediately disqualify her for any space mission, as they want level-headed personnel who keep their cool in a storm, which is why NASA initially pooled from only the best military trained fighter pilots for astronauts, as they were used to putting themselves in dangerous situations. Bullock is in crisis mode throughout, largely because she doesn’t appear properly trained for the mission, as she can’t even follow orders, and instead panics and gets overly emotional, where the audience can react to her sentiment and vulnerability on display. This may work for movie audiences that enjoy being manipulated, like Spielberg melodramas, but it’s awfully contrived for a futuristic scientist in outer space. If one thinks of any astronaut, vulnerability is not how you’d describe them. Usually they’re pretty tight-lipped and reserved, showing little to no emotion, which translates to bravery under pressure. So unfortunately, while the visual realism is superb, the emotional counterpart is all Hollywood. While this doesn’t ruin the experience in the theater, which ramps up the suspense and tension any way it can, it diminishes the overall impact afterwards, as one realizes this isn’t remotely close to reality.

Gravity : The New Yorker David Denby

Horror films are almost always propelled by fear of the unspeakable thing that’s out there in the woods or on the other side of the wall. The ghost, the demon, the zombie, sooner or later, materializes. What if the ghost were just nothing? In Alfonso Cuarón’s frightening and beautiful science-fiction thriller, Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a nervous medical engineer who has never visited space before, gets cut loose after her space shuttle is destroyed by flying debris. She is adrift, tumbling over and over, and cast into the mother of all panics. A veteran astronaut, Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), calms her down and tries to rescue her, and the two of them scramble for safety somewhere—anywhere. This adventure film presents an existential challenge: what makes life worth living when there is nothingness all around? Ed Harris provides the voice from Houston. Jonás Cuarón worked with his father on the script. Emmanuel Lubezki did the cinematography, aided by an army of tech guys who invented everything they needed to evoke the film’s sense of reality and its commitment to physical magnificence.

Gravity is an undeniable technical marvel, its mastery never more evident than in its opening 15 minutes. In one long take, director/co-writer Alfonso Cuarón manages to not only establish the world in which he sets his film, but also create a whole emotional rollercoaster, encompassing rapturous beauty and heart-stopping terror without any cutaways whatsoever. It’s an astonishing feat—but then, the film actually begins to try to be about something, and Gravity, well, loses its footing big time.

Cuarón, it turns out, has existential concerns on his mind, specifically how human beings conduct themselves with the awareness of mortality coursing through them. Thus [possible spoilers from here on], when Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) drifts off into space in a sacrificial gesture to save Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) about half an hour into the film—after they both find themselves marooned in space as the result of an accident—Gravity essentially become a one-person showcase, as Bullock is called upon to exhibit a wide range of emotions as she both fights for her survival and wonders whether it’s worth putting up such a fight in the first place.

All of this sounds admirably ambitious on paper, especially for a big-studio blockbuster such as this. But when the execution is as dramatically hackneyed as it is here, there’s only so much good intentions can hide. Bullock’s backstory, for instance, is eye-rollingly clichéd (once again, a dead child explains her current lonely state), and by the time Kowalsky returns in a “gotcha!” moment that suggests the character is intended to be some kind of guardian angel to Dr. Stone, Gravity crosses the line from clumsy to risible. I suppose it would have been too much to expect Cuarón to stage a Waiting for Godot in space, with millions of dollars of Hollywood money on the line, but surely that would have made a more daring and powerful film than the pile of trite “triumph of the human spirit” platitudes offered here. But hey, it sure looks nice.

Considering the auteur trajectory of Alfonso Cuarón's career, tackling tales of human futility in an effort to understand or communicate the spark of hope or passion that keeps us moving forward, the metaphorically titled Gravity is exceedingly apt, encapsulating basic metaphysical truths in their purest form. Though "gravity" isn't present for the majority of this mesmerising space spectacle, what it represents — an opposing force against which humans must struggle to remain upright — is omnipresent.

The basic premise, which is really all anyone needs to, or should, know going in, finds Medical Engineer Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and experienced astronaut Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) encountering an emergency while repairing a space station.

It's a sequence tailor-made for cinema history, utilizing an illusory, protracted single take to capture a relatively banal repair situation, one where Stone does mechanical work and Kowalsky oversees, floating around in space, telling Houston stories about his conquests back on Earth. It's reminiscent of Cuarón's work in Children of Men but, considering the intense layering of visual effects and his seamless transition between perspectives, going inside spacesuit helmets and flying around the characters to immerse us in the experience, it takes the idea of spectacle to a new cinematic level. Once a warning comes that debris is flying from a decimated Russian space station, the action and kineticism take hold, using the same engrossing visual style to capture a terrifying and intense situation that literally sends chills down the spine.

As the debris destroys the space shuttle, catapulting Stone into space, where her panicked breathing threatens to deplete her oxygen, there's a constant sense of basic human terror exacerbated by our embedded psychological fear of being, or dying, alone. Cuarón is ever-conscious of this story about a space disaster as a metaphor for rudimentary human anxiety.

Though Gravity is ultimately a tale of our tendency to fight for life, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, space as a breathtaking and eternal void from which man emerged — and may eventually succumb — is presented as a representation of our basic fears and fantasies, titillating us with answers about the nature of our existence while also representing our insignificance in its infinity.

Because of this, the many problems and struggles that Stone and Kowalsky encounter in simply trying to survive connect on a deeper level than the relatively superficial characterizations would normally allow — Kowalsky is a lonely bachelor with false bravado and Stone is an ambitious loner scarred by the death of a child. It's also a testament to Cuarón's ability to make a situation tactile and experiential, leaving his audience gasping as these astronauts fly by various space station protrusions, trying to grab on for sheer life.

Some of the imagery — a photo of a dead astronaut's family and an image of Bullock folded up in the foetal position—is slightly too obvious for its own good, tugging a bit overtly at heartstrings while referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey, but because the experience of Gravity is so intense and engrossing, it's easy to overlook. Visually, there's clarity and inherent realness to everything — the backdrop of Earth and destruction of the space station are some of the most captivating visual effects yet captured on film — that make it easy to suspend disbelief, even though, when you step back, the core story and compounding number of issues are quite ludicrous.

That Sandra Bullock (an actress that often plays it safe as a surly, sarcastic social misfit) is able to connect with core annihilation anxieties in such a subtle, touching manner, never illogically dramatizing her experiences for an audience of endless, empty space, also helps make everything hypnotic. The story doesn't allow much traditional character development, seeing as everyone is imperilled and reacting for most of the runtime, which makes her ability to project the idea of someone mostly defeated by life rushing through everything to avoid introspection notable and, more importantly, humanizing.

It's true that Gravity is the sort of film that doesn't stand up well to scrutiny, having some contrivances and metaphors that are far too overt, at times, but it would be difficult to deny that the experience of seeing it inspires a cornucopia of emotions that reminds us what it's like to feel alive.

Critic After Dark [Noel Vera]

For every dozen observations on the experience of entering outer space akin to John Glenn's ("To look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is to me impossible. It just strengthens my faith."), there's an astronaut whose subjectivity hews closer to that of Werner Herzog assessing the chaos and brutality of nature in Grizzly Man. Such as Loren Acton musing, "Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty—but no welcome." Or Charles Walker admitting, "Close to the window I could see that this Pacific scene in motion was rimmed by the great curved limb of the Earth. It had a thin halo of blue held close, and beyond, black space. I held my breath, but something was missing. I felt strangely unfulfilled. Here was a tremendous visual spectacle, but viewed in silence. There was no grand musical accompaniment; no triumphant, inspired sonata or symphony."

Alfonso Cuarón's brilliant, terrifying adventure Gravity drives home the primal dread that informs the two latter quotes right from its opening titles, explaining that in space there's no air pressure capable of carrying sound, no oxygen capable of sustaining life—an assurance that also opens most versions of the movie's sound effects-laden trailers, an indulgence on Warner Bros.'s part. The vastness of space doesn't bring this film's astronauts closer to God; it brings them further from their grasp of humanity, a perspective that even without the first-act events that set the rest of the film into motion would be hard for almost anyone to process. Sandra Bullock is Dr. Ryan Stone, a medical engineer who's been recruited by NASA to assist on a mission to replace parts on the Hubble Space Telescope. Working alongside Stone is Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), a veteran shuttle commander who's basking in his final run of a long and storied career. Kowalski is understandably glib and chatty, torturing ground control with the same inane stories he's subjected them to for decades, whereas Stone is focused and cagey as the two work to complete their mission in the dead, weightless lurch of orbit some 370 miles above Earth.

The entire setup for Gravity is contained in a single, unbroken shot that signals the paradoxical lack of the titular force (the Explorer takes a good three or four minutes to move across the frame from imperceptible blip near the Earth's horizon to the eventual close-up) against the unthinkable velocity of orbit speed—17,200 mph near the International Space Station. Comparative momentum becomes the movie's guiding principal when debris from an exploded Russian satellite leads to a chain reaction of catastrophic collisions and sends shards of metal slamming into the Explorer with Stone and Kowalski still outside the ship. Their only hope to get back to Earth is to make their way to the ISS and board one of its Soyuz escape modules. And Stone's oxygen is running low.

Stripped down, lean, and taut, Cuarón's film may be either the most expensive avant-garde movie ever made or the most approachable, mass-appeal experimental work of art—like WALL-E's "define gravity" dance writ on the scale of Erich von Stroheim. If seeing Earth from above for the first time left astronauts like Glenn feeling like they'd just been born again, Gravity's simple muscularity restores wonder to cinematic representations of outer space and reinstates the integrity of blockbuster filmmaking. Cuarón accomplishes his effects by apportioning the barest elements of pop filmmaking into categories that can be defined by their relative absence or their heightened presence. Trimmed away are the simple carbs of traditional narrative arcs, character development, and unnecessary editing. Saturated to the hilt: ambulatory cinematography, myriad trajectories of physics, pulsing music cues from neophyte Steven Price, astonishing negative space. Would that Manny Farber could still be alive today to drink this in.

If all Cuarón managed to accomplish with Gravity was an invigoratingly clean, elegant display of action choreography, it would still be a benchmark and a startling synthesis of outré and popular models: a La Région Centrale you could still take Grandma to see. But Cuarón's tangle with the coldness of the infinite isn't just a formal exercise. It's also an existential reckoning of the tension between deific presumptions and the silence mankind deeply hopes is just a test of faith. The movie's most inscrutable and eerily beautiful image doesn't even involve zero-gravity obliteration, but rather the slowly flowing rotation of Stone in fetal position after she's reached ISS and removed her spacesuit in the airlock. Suspended in nothingness, she resembles nothing so much as Stanley Kubrick's Starchild—one of a few subtle parallels Gravity makes with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Having been robbed of her daughter years earlier in a mundane accident, Stone has been disabused of her role as a perpetuator of human life, a link in the chain of God's great plan, and thus her will to survive registers as a new form of consciousness. If Kubrick insinuated mankind's evolution belongs within a narrative orchestrated by a higher power, Gravity's draining, disorienting final scenes suggest humanity's will to survive amid theistic doubt is just as cosmic.

New Yorker Richard Brody

Sight & Sound [Jonathan Romney] December 2013

Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity is Lightning From the Heavens ... Stephanie Zacharek from the Village Voice, August 28, 2013

Gravity Is a Thrilling Breakthrough - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek, October 2, 2013

The House Next Door [Nick McCarthy]

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Little White Lies [David Jenkins]

Forbes Mark Hughes

Edelstein on Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity -- Vulture David Edelstein

An Astronaut Fact-checks Gravity -- Vulture Gwynne Watkins

Gravity / The Dissolve Keith Phipps

How Gravity's triumph reveals CGI's limitations / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

Dissecting Gravity - The Dissolve Noel Murray and Tasha Robinson

Slate Dana Stevens

Bad Astronomy movie review: Gravity. - Slate Phil Plait

Movie Mezzanine [Jake Cole]

Tiny Mix Tapes [Alan Zilberman]

The Society For Film [James Marsh]

The Digital Fix [Nick Chen]

The Lumière Reader [Laura Suzuki]

Review: 'Gravity': The Glory of Cinema's Future | TIME.com Richard Corliss

Gravity Gets Me Down: A Shuttle Astronaut's Take | TIME.com Marsha Ivins is a veteran of five shuttle flights, with a total of 1,318 hours—or 55 days—in space

Gravity Fact Check - Science - Time Jeffrey Kluger, science editor

outlawvern.com [Vern]

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]

At Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

“Gravity”: Bullock and Clooney, lost in space - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

Paste Magazine Tim Grierson

ScreenDaily [Mark Adams]

Ruthless Reviews [Miguel Sancho] (potentially offensive)

'Gravity' Review: In Space, No One Can Hear You ... - Pajiba Daniel Carlson

JamesBowman.net | Gravity

World Socialist Web Site [Hiram Lee]

AVForums - Blu-ray [Cas Harlow]

Gravity - Home Theater Info Doug MacLean

DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray 3D, Blu-ray & DVD Luke Bonanno

Filmstalker (Blu-ray) Richard Brunton

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Erich Asperschlager]

Blu-ray.com [Kenneth Brown]

Gravity | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Chris Cabin

City Arts [Armond White]

'Gravity' Is the Season's First Must-See Movie - The Wire Richard Lawson from The Atlantic Wire

Twitch [Jason Gorber]

The Sci-Fi Movie Page [Daniel Kimmel]

Sound On Sight [John McEntee]

The Film Stage [Jared Mobarak]

In Review Online [Andrew Welch]

Review: Sandra Bullock is amazing in Alfonso ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Venice Review: Alfonso Cuarón's 'Gravity' Starring Sandra ... Oliver Lyttelton from The Playlist

And So it Begins... [Alex Withrow]

SBS Film [Shane Danielsen]

PopMatters [Alex Ramon]

AV Club Ben Kenigsberg

Georgia Straight [Ron Yamauchi]

Electric Sheep Magazine [Pamela Jahn]

MUBI [Adam Cook]

Alfonso Cuarón on Making Gravity -- Vulture Dan P. Lee interview with the director from Vulture, September 22, 2013

Space Answers Jonathan O'Callaghan interviews Dr. Kevin Grazier, Gravity's science advisor, October 1, 2013

Collect Space Robert Pearlman reviews the director, October 3, 2013

Alfonso Cuarón Answers Your Gravity Questions -- Vulture Dan P. Lee interview with the director from Vulture, October 7, 2013

How Realistic Is the Movie Gravity? - Patrick Di Justo - The ... Patrick di Justo interview with Dr. Kevin Grazier, Gravity's science advisor, from The Atlantic, October 14, 2013

Toughest Scene I Wrote: Cuarón on Gravity -- Vulture Kyle Buchanon interview from Vulture, December 17, 2013

Gravity: Venice Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

'Gravity' Review by Astronaut Buzz Aldrin - The Hollywood ... Buzz Aldrin review from The Hollywood Reporter, October 3, 2013

Examiner.com [Kay Shackleton]

Examiner.com [Rick Marianetti]

Oregon Herald [Oktay Ege Kozak]

Review: 'Gravity' - Featured Articles From The Los Angeles ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

Gravity Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz

'Gravity' Stars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock - The ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times

the New York Times Dennis Overbye

Cuarón, Carlos

RUDO Y CURSI

USA Mexico (103 mi) 2008

Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [3/6]

Yes, the leads of Y tu mamá también are together again, in a film written and directed by the guy who cowrote that script (and whose brother Alfonso Cuarón directed Y tu…). What’s missing this time around is not just the hot three-way sex; Carlos Cuarón’s script, about half-brothers who rise through the Mexican soccer leagues on opposing teams, feels more generic. The brothers are given character traits rather than being written as fully rounded characters. Rudo (Luna) is a hotheaded goalie with a gambling problem. Cursi (Bernal) is a gifted forward but dreams of a career as a singer. In those traits you can see their rise and fall tidily charted in advance.

Not that the film doesn’t have its charms. When Bernal and Luna get into verbal sparring, the film’s energy level goes up. But it’s supposed to be a film about soccer, and we barely see them play. Cuarón usually cuts away from the games to reaction shots. He may be covering for his leads’ limited soccer skills, but that’s no excuse. If you’re going to throw away actors as compelling as Bernal and Luna in a soccer picture, you’d better have some great soccer.

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3/5] also seen here: Reel.com review [2.5/4]

Already a massive hit in its home country of Mexico, Carlos Cuarón's Rudo y Cursi is a film about doomed half-brothers, made by exceedingly successful siblings.

The director is the younger sibling of Alfonso Cuarón, director of the excellent Children of Men and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, who serves as producer here in his capacity as one of the heads of Cha Cha Cha Films, along with Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, childhood friends and stars of the elder Cuarón's breakout arthouse hit Y Tu Mamá También, play the plainly-nicknamed titular half-brothers who are picked up out of their jobs as laborers in the banana fields of Jalisco and fashioned into soccer heroes in the would-be Metropolis of Mexico City.

Elder brother Rudo (Luna) is stern, quick-tempered, and self-righteous, happy to point out that he is the assistant to the assistant manager. Cursi (Bernal) is excitable, shameless, and vain, getting defensive at the very mention that his beloved singing career may be a pipe dream. They are easy marks for affable hustler Batuta (an excellent Guillermo Francella, who also serves as narrator), who gives them cups of ramen, signs them to minor-league soccer contracts on opposing teams, and reaps a great portion of the benefits from their talents. He first teases Cursi into the situation with the promise of helping him with his singing career, only to leverage a deal with Rudo by exploiting the obvious jealousy he has for his baby brother. Both seem more concerned with the approval of their mother than they do with Batuta, happy wives or a sister married to a drug kingpin.

Plagued with American sports-film clichés, climaxing with one brother's drug-addiction-cum-gambling-debt and the other's gold-digging celebrity girlfriend, the film ends up being far more pessimistic than one would think from the outset. Cuarón makes the film move with an unbound vitality, but the story, as befits its country's current climate, is typified by dread and a deep-seeded fatalism. Speeding like a runaway freighter to a sweaty-palm showdown between the two brothers on the soccer field, Cuarón doesn't distinguish between a doomed profession and a doomed life in the film's final quarter. In the face of lost fame, no money, and a world of pity, the two are nearly interchangeable.

For all of its just-add-water structure, the film works thanks to the deft interplay between the frothy narrative and the beaten path of grave disillusionment that runs underneath it. The brothers escape their fate with one broken leg and slightly better jobs than their banana farming days, but the fractured conscience of everyday Mexico remains. Standing outside a gorgeous seafront mansion, which their brother-in-law bought for their mother, Rudo and Cursi have settled for their less-famous careers and seeing their mother's pride go to a drug czar. Of the many things Rudo y Cursi is, it is not a parable based in reality, but at least it has the good sense to accept it.

Rudo y Cursi (Sony Pictures Classics) is the first feature film directed by Carlos Cuarón, the younger brother of the great Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, Y Tu Mamá También). It's also the first release from the new production company Cha Cha Chá, put together by three of Mexico's most prominent filmmakers: Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy II), and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel). The fact that Cha Cha Chá chose this modest and conventional sports drama for their first project out of the gate may say more about Alfonso's love for his little brother than it does about the company's producing ambitions. But maybe that's fitting for a movie that's all about the limits of ambition and the inescapability of filial love.

The Cuarón brothers' cinematic DNA also crisscrosses in the writing and casting of Rudo y Cursi. Carlos collaborated with his sibling on the screenplay for Y Tu Mamá También (2001), which starred then-unfamiliar young actors Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal. Now, the two reunite for the first time as international stars. (They're also friends in real life.) It's tempting to think of Rudo y Cursi as an eight-years-later sequel to Y Tu Mamá También, but, unfortunately, this movie works that one's magic in reverse. Whereas Tu Mamá turned a seemingly flimsy story—two horny kids take a road trip to the beach—into a meditation on love, death, and growing up, Rudo y Cursi takes on serious subject matter (poverty, addiction, economic exploitation) and renders it uniformly banal. Still, the movie has its minor pleasures, most of them provided by the chemistry between Luna and Bernal, born charmers (and utter babes) who obviously enjoy spending time in each other's company.

Beto (Luna) and Tato (Bernal) are half-brothers who work at a banana plantation in the state of Jalisco, near Mexico City. Tato, an accordionist, dreams of making it as a singer in the big city; Beto, a compulsive gambler, has a wife and two children he can barely support. A high-living talent scout, Batuta (Guillermo Francella), sees the boys playing soccer in a local game and offers a spot on a Mexico City team to whichever of the two can win a penalty-kick contest, reigniting a bitter sibling rivalry. Eventually, the brothers wind up playing on rival teams in Mexico City, where they earn the nicknames "Rudo" (rude) and "Cursi" (which the press notes translate as "corny," though in the context of the movie it seems to imply a lack of masculinity as well).

The brothers' sudden success gives them an opportunity to indulge their weaknesses: Beto's for gambling and, eventually, cocaine and Tato's for an expensive trophy girlfriend (Jessica Mas) and an ill-advised singing career. (In a cheap-looking music video, Bernal does a painful cover of Cheap Trick's "I Want You To Want Me" in a spangled cowboy hat.) As the boys' choices get them deeper and deeper into trouble, the movie veers into morality-tale territory, with an unexpectedly harsh coda that has you wondering, Wait, was this playful little soccer flick supposed to be some kind of allegory about narcotrafficking?

Carlos Cuarón's screenplay is rambling and unstructured but full of vibrant dialogue. As in Y Tu Mamá También, the insults the two leads hurl at one another are creatively filthy. But a laborious voiceover in which Batuta philosophizes about the parallels between soccer and life soon begins to grate. In a departure from the American sports-movie ethos, very little time is spent on the soccer field itself, and the actors don't go out of their way to resemble real athletes—in fact, unless I blinked and missed it, we never see Bernal's Tato in the act of kicking a ball (though we do see him turn a credible handspring after scoring a goal). The climactic soccer scene cleverly (some might say too cleverly) boils the brothers' fates down to the outcome of one last all-important penalty kick. I won't tell you who wins the Rudo/Cursi showdown, but when it comes to the Cuarón brothers, my money's on Alfonso.

DVD Talk - Theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

Screen International review Mike Goodridge

Slant Magazine review Bill Weber

The Globe and Mail (Stephen Cole) review [2/4]

Entertainment Weekly review [C-] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Time Out New York (S. James Synder) review [2/6]

Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [3/4]

Los Angeles Times (Robert Abele) review also seen here: Chicago Tribune (Robert Abele) review

Cuesta, Michael

L.I.E. B 89

USA (97 mi) 2001

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Adam Balz]

The Long Island Expressway, where director Alan J Pakula lost his life, has also claimed the mother of the adolescent Howie (Dano) in this tough yet tender coming of age story. With his widower dad wrapped up in his own problems, Howie falls in with fast company - and then Big John (Cox), community stalwart with a covert taste for teenage boys. Director Cuesta subverts potentially exploitative material by examining the hinterland between sexuality and emotional connection. Without condoning Big John's activities, there's a troubling understanding of the meeting point between the older outsider's manipulative charisma and the youth's need for adult belonging. By turns predatory and paternal, Cox's extraordinary contribution is one of the performances of the year.

filmcritic.com tells L.I.E.s Jeremiah Kipp

Best remembered for his understated performance as Dr. Hannibal Lecter in Michael Mann’s forensics thriller Manhunter, Scottish character actor Brian Cox brings something special to every movie he works on. Usually playing a bit role in some studio schlock (he dies halfway through The Long Kiss Goodnight), he’s only occasionally given something meaty and substantial to do. If you want to see some brilliant acting, check out his work as a dogged police inspector opposite Frances McDormand in Ken Loach’s Hidden Agenda.

Cox plays the role of Big John Harrigan in the disturbing new indie flick L.I.E., which Lot 47 picked up at Sundance when other distributors were scared to budge. Big John feels the love that dares not speak its name, but he expresses it through seeking out adolescents and bringing them back to his pad. What bothered some audience members was the presentation of Big John in an oddly empathetic light. He’s an even-tempered, funny, robust old man who actually listens to the kids’ problems (as opposed to their parents and friends, both caught up in the high-wire act of their own confused lives.) He’ll have sex-for-pay with them only after an elaborate courtship, charming them with temptations from the grown-up world.

L.I.E. stands for Long Island Expressway, which slices through the strip malls and middle-class homes of suburbia. Filmmaker Michael Cuesta uses it as a (pretty transparent) metaphor of dangerous escape for his 15-year old protagonist, Howie (Paul Franklin Dano). In his opening voice-over, Howie reveals a morbid preoccupation with death on the road, citing the L.I.E. highway deaths of filmmaker Alan J. Pakula, songwriter Harry Chapin, and his own mother on Exit 52. He’s both fascinated and disturbed by the L.I.E., and those feelings are projected onto Big John (who follows Howie around in his bright red car, but never makes a move to force the boy to do something he doesn’t want to do. This makes him much more complex than the usual child molesters seen in movies –- he’s a beast, but ashamed of it.)

L.I.E. would have worked best as a half-hour short film about Howie’s ill-advised foray into Big John’s haven. There is unnecessary padding with Howie’s miserable dad (Bruce Altman) in the hot seat for a white-collar crime, degenerate youngsters who get their kicks from robbing middle-class houses, and some homoerotic shenanigans with wise-ass Gary Terrio (Billy Kay), a handsome Artful Dodger. Rather than add to the themes of suburban ennui (not that we needed another movie on that subject), these awkward subplots pad out the running time to adequate feature length.

Concurrently, the relationship between Howie and Big John is evenly paced and exceptionally well acted. Cox, sporting a baseball cap and a faded marine tattoo, is all bluff and bluster. Dano is quiet and at first glance seems so withdrawn as to be transparent. We’re so used to child actors whose dramatic choices are broad and obvious (calling Haley Joel!), it’s surprising to see one who actually listens throughout any given scene. The restraint is admirable.

But L.I.E.’s screenplay doesn’t always give them the best material. When Howie reads Big John a Walt Whitman poem, the moment feels a bit too precious. Director Michael Cuesta lingers on an ecstatic reaction shot of Big John, who may as well be hearing Glenn Gould performing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It’s too much. There are also some obvious dramatic contrivances involving Big John’s other boy toy (Walter Masterson), jealous over the newbie. This plot thread predictably leads to violence.

Not content to be a haunting, observational portrait of teen alienation in a royally screwed up world (like Terry Zwigoff’s superb Ghost World), Cuesta lacks the confidence in his own work to end on an ambivalent note. It’s typical of unimaginative cinema to wrap things up with a bullet, sparing the writers from actually having to come up with a complex, philosophical note. In this regard, L.I.E. (and countless other indie films) shares something in common with blockbuster action films: problems are solved when the obstacle is removed. How often does real life work this way? To extend the question: If a movie is striving for realism, do dramatic contrivances destroy the illusion?

Film Freak Central Walter Chaw

indieWIRE Andy Bailey

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Arthur Lazere

Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) also here: Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs) including Paula Nechak's' interview with Michael Cuestra

PopMatters Lucas Hilderbrand

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "well-intentioned but slightly tepid"

Political Film Review Michael Haas

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Julie Canigula

Newsweek (David Ansen)

hybridmagazine.com Eric Vanstrom

Reel.com [Rod Armstrong]

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann)

VideoVista Gary Couzens

Austin Chronicle (Marrit Ingman)

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

DVDBeaver.com - [David Tausik]

TWELVE AND HOLDING

USA (90 mi) 2005

Culture Wars [David Clements]

Like his first feature L.I.E.—and like half of the glib provocations that tumble off the indie assembly line—Michael Cuesta's Twelve and Holding is a sneering inquiry into the florid dysfunction that lurks deep in leafiest suburbia. Striking in both its confidence and its incoherence, L.I.E. detailed the queasy platonic relationship between a pretty, neglected teenage boy and the kindly neighborhood pederast. Cuesta's new poisoned valentine to adolescence, a tragicomedy of pubertal acting out, is likewise premised on the clueless self-involvement of parents and the innate wisdom of children.

Punctuated by the gluttonous commemorations of various American holidays, the movie opens with a vicious act of juvenile retribution on the Fourth of July. Two bullies toss a flaming cocktail into their sworn enemies' treehouse, killing 12-year-old Rudy. The dead boy's sullen twin brother, Jacob (Conor Donovan, playing both roles), copes by visiting the juvenile detention center, plotting revenge on—and bonding with—one of the killers. His stunned parents (Linus Roache and Jayne Atkinson) are of little help—Jacob's status as less favored twin is signified by his port-wine stain birthmark, which he often conceals behind a hockey mask.

The brothers' two close friends, facing elaborate complications of their own, provide mild pathos and broad humor: Lonely Malee (Zoe Weizenbaum) develops an age-inappropriate crush on a construction worker (Jeremy Renner); the bemused stud happens to be a patient of her mother (Annabella Sciorra), a distracted shrink and embittered divorcée. In the most grotesque subplot, overweight Leonard (Jesse Camacho), injured in the accident that killed Rudy, loses his sense of taste and smell, and to the horror of his obese family, embarks on a fruit and vegetable diet.

To call Twelve and Holding cartoonish is to put it mildly. Marked by reckless tonal shifts, Anthony Cipriano's screenplay traffics in sensationalism and sentimentality. Its treatment of adolescent sexuality, especially in comparison with last year's Mysterious Skin, is at once self-congratulatory and squeamish. (It takes a certain sick humor to position Renner, who first attracted attention for playing Jeffrey Dahmer in a 2002 biopic, as an object of underage lust.) That said, the movie is on the whole pleasingly populated with underused pros like Sciorra and Roache. And as he demonstrated in L.I.E., Cuesta has a real skill—or maybe a perverse gift—for coaxing persuasive performances from young actors, never mind how nonsensical the role or contrived the situation. The pint-size cast lends some credence to a self-canceling mode that scans as humane Todd Solondz. But look closer—as this film's most obvious forerunner, American Beauty, advised—and an uglier logic emerges. In Cuesta's cynical formulation, the pretense of empathy is simply license to mock, gawk, and vulgarize.

CultureCartel.com (Chris Barsanti)

The mood in Michael Cuesta's Twelve and Holding takes some getting used to, like sea legs. Set in a suburbia where the trees are fragrantly in bloom and American flags, heavy with portent and symbol, always seem to be fluttering somewhere, it starts in a flutter of weighted drama and overwrought satire. A group of twelve-year-old friends—battling twins Jacob and Rudy (both played by Conor Donovan), overweight Leonard (Jesse Camacho), and overwrought Malee (Zoe Weizenbaum, one to watch)—are in trouble with a pair of neighborhood bullies, their treehouse in danger. The fight escalates, and, after a heavily meaningful block party featuring fireworks and wholesome family fun, a pair of Molotov cocktails sets the treehouse aflame, killing Rudy and injuring Leonard. In tackling how the three remaining friends handle this rupture in their lives, the film casts about rather wildly before finding the right mood and zeroing in on its acutely observed and unsettling tale.

Cuesta's hand, and that of screenwriter Anthony Cipriano, is rarely a light one, with harsh juxtapositions and obvious symbols abounding. We are only shown Jacob's face after Rudy dies, until that point he has been wearing a Jason-style hockey mask to hide the splotchy red birthmark that covers almost half of his face. The long-term effects of Leonard's injury are a loss of his sense of taste, no small matter given how grotesquely overweight he and his family are. And there's all those flags, of course.

Fortunately, Twelve and Holding uses these overly weighted points of reference not to ultimately weigh the film down with undue importance, but rather as means to propel itself forward through the sometimes sketchy outlines of its child characters' development. Every one of the children here, in the aftermath of Rudy's death, finds themselves in the midst of wrenching change. Leonard, unable to find solace in junk food, begins to exercise and eat better, much to the chagrin of his mother, none-too-subtly equating food with love. The anxious and hyper-attentive Malee, left essentially alone by her absent father and coldly distant therapist mother (Annabella Sciorra), fixates romantically on a construction worker on the site where the treehouse once stood. Most troublingly, Jacob starts visiting the detention center that holds the bullies who killed Rudy, showing them pictures of his dead brother and telling them how he fantasizes of murdering them.

Each of the friends spirals quietly into obsession, unbeknownst to their parents, who putter away in their cluelessly adult manner. After a rough start, Cuesta handles the children's increasingly manic behavior with a cool hand, betraying neither alarmism nor callousness. This is a trickier balancing act than it may sound, as many elements of the script could have easily, in clumsier hands, tipped into a sort of suburban freakshow. What Twelve and Holding understands, though, is that being twelve years old is in and of itself a time of extremes when the natural inclination is toward drastic reinvention, by any means necessary. With his modestly impressive young actors and moody lens, Cuesta finds the normal in the extreme.

indieWire [Michael Koresky) also Kristi Mitsuda and James Crawford from Reverse Shot

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich]

filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Slant Magazine [Keith Uhlich]

New York Sun [Darrell Hartman]

Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine)

The Onion A.V. Club Noel Murray

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Les Wright

Reel.com [Gary Goldstein]

Twitch

Film Monthly (Aaron Riccio)

Eye for Film (George Williamson)

Los Angeles Times [Kevin Crust]

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Chicago Tribune [Jessica Reaves]

Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)

Cukor, George

All-Movie Guide

A successful stage director in New York by the late 1920s, George Cukor began working in Hollywood as a dialogue director and filling other uncredited crew roles on such films as All Quiet on the Western Front. In 1930, he co-directed his first features: Grumpy with Cyril Gardner, The Virtuous Sin with Louis Gasnier, and The Royal Family of Broadway with Gardner; Cukor had his solo debut the following year, directing Tallulah Bankhead in Tarnished Lady. For the next fifty years, he showed a flair for bringing out the best in actors, particularly women, although that specialty could occassionally work against him, as when he was removed from the production of Gone With the Wind at the insistence of Clark Gable. But it defined his best work, starting in 1932 with Katharine Hepburn's first film, A Bill of Divorcement. Cukor also directed her idiosyncratic '30s performances in Little Women, Sylvia Scarlett, and Holiday. In that same decade, he also made the all-star comedies Dinner at Eight and The Women; the prestigious adaptations David Copperfield and Romeo and Juliet; and Greta Garbo's iconic Camille. He made the award-winning dramas Gaslight and A Double Life during the '40s, as well as the classic comedies The Philadelphia Story and Adam's Rib. Comedy remained his forte in the '50s with Born Yesterday and Pat and Mike. One of Cukor's finest films was the 1954 musical A Star Is Born with Judy Garland and James Mason (despite its having been cut to ribbons by the studio). Another musical was also his biggest hit of the '60s: My Fair Lady. He reunited with Katharine Hepburn in the '70s for the television films Love Among the Ruins and The Corn Is Green. Cukor died in 1983.

Film Reference Gene D. Phillips

George Cukor's films range from classics like Greta Garbo's Camille, to Adam's Rib with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, to the Judy Garland musical A Star Is Born. Throughout the years he managed to "weather the changes in public taste and the pressures of the Hollywood studio system without compromising his style, his taste, or his ethical standards," as his honorary degree from Loyola University of Chicago is inscribed. Indeed, Cukor informed each of the stories he brought to the screen with his affectionately critical view of humanity. In film after film he sought to prod the mass audience to reconsider their cherished illusions in order to gain fresh insights into the problems that confront everyone. "When a director has provided tasteful entertainment of a high order consistently," noted Andrew Sarris, "it is clear that he is much more than a mere entertainer, he is a genuine artist."

Although most of Cukor's films are adaptations of preexisting novels and plays, he has always chosen material that has been consistent with his view of reality. Most often he has explored the conflict between illusion and reality in peoples' lives. The chief characters in his films are frequently actors and actresses, for they, more than anyone, run the risk of allowing the world of illusion with which they are constantly involved to become their reality. This theme is obvious in many of Cukor's best films and appears in some of his earliest work, including The Royal Family of Broadway, which he co-directed. In it he portrays a family of troupers, based on the Barrymores, who are wedded to their world of fantasy in a way that makes a shambles of their private lives.

The attempt of individuals to reconcile their cherished dreams with the sober realities of life continues in films as superficially different as Dinner at Eight, The Philadelphia Story, and A Double Life. Ronald Colman earned an Academy Award in the last as an actor who becomes so identified with the parts he plays that, while enacting Othello, he develops a murderous streak of jealousy which eventually destroys him.

While it is true that Cukor was often drawn to stories about show people, his films also suggest that everyone leads a double life that moves between illusion and reality, and that everyone must seek to sort out fantasy from fact if they are to cope realistically with their problems—something Cukor's characters frequently fail to do. Les Girls is the most explicit of all Cukor's films in treating this theme. Here the same events are told from four different points of view at a libel trial, each version differing markedly from the others. Because Cukor allows each narrator "equal time," he is sympathetic to the way each of them has subconsciously revised their common experiences in a manner that enables him or her to live with the past in the present. As Sarris remarks, Cukor does not imply that people necessarily are liars, but rather that they tell the truth in their own fashion.

Though Cukor must have harbored some degree of affection and sympathy for the world of romantic illusion—for there is always a hint of regret in his films when actuality inevitably asserts itself in the life of one of his dreamers—his movies nonetheless remain firmly rooted in, and committed to, the workaday world of reality.

Directing his last film, Rich and Famous, merited Cukor the distinction of being one of the oldest filmmakers ever to direct a major motion picture. His work on that film likewise marked him as a man who had enjoyed the longest continuous career of any director in film or television. Some of the satisfaction which he derived from his long career was grounded in the fact that few directors have commanded such a large portion of the mass audience. "His movies," Richard Schickel has noted, "can be appreciated—no, liked—at one level or another by just about everyone."

For his part, Cukor once reflected that "I look upon every picture that I make as the first one I've ever done—and the last. I love each film I have directed, and I try to make each one as good as I possibly can. Mind you, making movies is no bed of roses. Every day isn't Christmas. It's been a hard life, but also a joyous one."

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Films

George Cuckor Dan Callahan from Senses of Cinema

George Cukor Michael E. Grost from Classic Films and Television

George Cukor Reel Classics

Cukor, George The Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Bright Lights Film Journal Feature George Cukor, The Valor of Discretion, by Joseph Mcbride, April 2001

TARNISHED LADY

USA (83 mi) 1931

Tabu to Tequila Sunrise Pauline Kael

Limp. George Cukor's first directorial solo, Tallulah Bankhead's first talkie, and a flop for both. Donald Ogden Stewart shaped the script for Bankhead (from his story "New York Lady"), and it was conceived on the elegant model of her stage successes; she's a socialite who marries Clive Brook for money and is torn when she falls in love with a Greenwich Village writer (Alexander Kirkland). But the Bankhead of tubercular hollows and soigné sagging posture who had become a stage idol was never to become popular in movies; only the later boisterous, bellowing Bankhead succeeded with the public. And you can see why. As Cukor has said, "She had beautiful bones, but her eyes were not eyes for movies. They looked somehow hooded and dead.… Her smile didn't illuminate." With Osgood Perkins and Elizabeth Patterson; about half of the picture was shot in New York City locations. Paramount.

The Films of George Cukor Michael E. Grost from Classic Films and Television

Businessman Vs. Artist

Tarnished Lady (1931) is the first film for which Cukor earned solo directing credit. It already shows Cukor's key characters, quite fully developed. There is the virile, socially successful, well dressed businessman. There is the dreamy, not very forceful man in the arts, gentle and romantic, a man who is critical of the society around him. There is the heroine, eager to make something of herself. These three characters, and the romantic triangle they form, will appear in picture after Cukor picture, always with interesting variations. They show up even in films that Cukor adapted from literary sources. For example, in Gone With the Wind (1939), virile businessman Rhett Butler, dreamy, gentlemanly Ashley Wilkes and heroine on the make Scarlet O'Hara are Cukor's familiar trio. Ashley is not involved with the arts, and is not especially critical of society, but otherwise these are Cukor's standard characters. I have no idea how Cukor does this. Around 90 billion people have seen Gone With the Wind, and almost all are convinced that Cukor simply adapted the characters from the novel. Still, the personalities they so strongly convey on screen seem to come from inside Cukor, not from the pages of a book. Similarly, the characters in Tarnished Lady are richly developed.

Here the heroine eventually decides that the man she has married for money is a better person than the boyfriend she rejected. This boyfriend is a wimp. Like the later Ashley, he seems entirely lacking in any sort of drive. Some later versions of this artist character will be much more dynamic, notably Jack Lemmon's filmmaker in It Should Happen to You (1954). Lemmon will get the girl, something that many of Cukor's earlier dreamy characters do not.

This sort of triangle drama was a well established screen genre, long before Cukor's debut in motion pictures in 1930. It is similar in its basic architecture to Jacques Feyder's The Kiss (1928), for example. Both have famous woman stars at their center: Greta Garbo and Tallulah Bankhead, respectively. Both mainly deal with these ladies' romantic encounters, which produce melodramatic triangles. Both involve both soap opera style suffering, and plenty of pleasant escapist wish fulfillment fantasy. Both have some Art Deco sets, although this is true of many Hollywood films of their era. Another film in something of the same mode: Clarence Brown's Possessed (1931). These films were probably considered "women's films" in their day. They still seem extremely absorbing: watching them I got caught up, fascinated by what was going to happen next.

Cukor's film is especially rich in character revelation. Each scene brings some new facet of the characters and their personalities to light. The people in this movie are complex, and so are their reactions to the situations around them. Cukor is very clear in his exposition: we always know what the characters are feeling, and the storytelling is logical and well constructed. It is also full of surprises. Its careful construction reminds one of mystery stories, and their equally careful, logical and detailed plotting.

Liaison for hire

Also typical of Cukor: the way the heroine marries the businessman for money. This is the first of numerous liaisons in which a young woman will sell herself to an older, successful man, who will look out for her and try to promote her career or interests. Cukor is unusually sympathetic to such relationships, sometimes suggesting they are good for people, not bad. Usually the man is worldly wise, and the woman is very naive.

The title of this film is hard to understand: there is nothing especially tarnished about the heroine. The early 1930's were full of heroines who walked the Street of Sin, always to support a sick relative or husband. The title presumably led audiences to expect something of the sort. However, nothing of the kind takes place - our heroine is virtuous throughout the entire film. Our heroine does marry a rich man for his money, here to support her spendthrift mother and get her out of debt.

Media

Cukor had a life long interest in other media. This film contains a shot showing info coming in over a stock ticker. We also see a shot of the New York City skyline, filled with skyscrapers, while the businessman discusses the office building he hopes to create. The fact that it is the businessman who is involved with other media is one way in which Cukor generates audience sympathy for him. It is always the man most responsive to new means of communication that has Cukor's sympathies.

Chicago Reader capsule review

WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD?

USA (88 mi) 1932

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [77/100]

George Cukor's 1932 film is often counted as a prototype of A Star Is Born with its story of a director (Lowell Sherman) who sinks into alcoholism as his discovery (Constance Bennett) rises through the Hollywood ranks. It's one of Cukor's most interesting early films, effortlessly shifting from satire to pathos. Sherman, a director in real life (he won an Academy Award for Katharine Hepburn with Morning Glory), gives a wrenchingly prophetic performance; he was to die two years later.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Terrific performances, a sharp story by Adela Rogers St John, and characteristically elegant, subtle direction from Cukor make this largely affectionate but sometimes biting satire on Hollywood and its star system a perennial delight. Its story - waitress-turned-actress Bennett's star rises while that of her mentor/director, the cynically self-loathing alcoholic Sherman, fades - served as a run-through for the more famous A Star Is Born (also produced by Selznick), and the steady shift from light, bubbly comedy to the genuine darkness of the scenes leading to Sherman's suicide is effortlessly made. Funny, moving, and unusually honest.

The Westerner to The Whole Town's Talking Pauline Kael

The story line of this film, directed by George Cukor for the producer David O. Selznick, is basically the same as that of Selznick's later A STAR IS BORN (1937), which he admitted was a reworking of this material. (Cukor also got back to the material when he directed the 1954 version of A STAR IS BORN.) Constance Bennett is a waitress at the Brown Derby who meets a brilliant alcoholic director (Lowell Sherman); she rises to fame as his career collapses. Sherman probably patterned his interpretation on the self-destructive drinking of his brother-in-law John Barrymore. Many of the scenes are like sketches for scenes in the later versions, but this film has its own interest, especially because of its glimpses into the studio world at the time. Screenplay by Jane Murfin, Ben Markson, Gene Fowler, and Rowland Brown; from a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns. With Neil Hamilton, Louise Beavers, Eddie Anderson, and Gregory Ratoff. RKO.

User comments from imdb Author: Karen Green (klg19) from New York City

Another film that deserves a wider viewership and a DVD release, "What Price Hollywood?" looks at the toll Hollywood takes on the people who make it possible.

Adela Rogers St John wrote the Oscar-nominated story of a fading genius of a director, destroyed by drink, who launches one last discovery into the world. Lowell Sherman, himself both a director and an alcoholic, played the sad role that had been modeled, in part, on his own life. (Sherman's brother-in-law, John Barrymore, was also a model, as was the silent film director Marshall Neilan.) The divinely beautiful Constance Bennett plays the ambitious Brown Derby waitress who grabs her chance. Neil Hamilton, paired to great effect with Bennett that same year in "Two Against the World," plays the east-coast polo-playing millionaire who captures Bennett's heart without ever understanding her world.

George Cukor directed the film for RKO, and already the seeds of his directorial genius can be seen. Wonderful montages and double exposures chart Bennett's rise and fall as "America's Pal," and I've rarely seen anything as moving as the way Cukor presented Sherman's death scene, using quick shot editing, exaggerated sound effects and a slow motion shot. As startling as it looks today, one can only imagine the reaction it must have caused over 70 years earlier, before audiences had become accustomed to such techniques.

While the romantic leads are solid--Bennett, as always, especially so--and Gregory Ratoff is mesmerizing as the producer, hats must be doffed to Lowell Sherman for his Oscar-calibre performance. The slide from charming drunk to dissolute bum is presented warts and all, and a late scene in which the director examines his drink-ravaged face in the mirror is powerful indeed. It's hard to imagine what it must have been like for Sherman to play such a role and it was, in fact, one of the last roles he took for the screen, before concentrating on directing--then dying two years later of pneumonia.

When David O. Selznick made "A Star is Born" for United Artists five years later, four years after leaving RKO, the RKO lawyers prepared a point-by-point comparison of the stories, recommending a plagiarism suit--which was never filed. The later movie never credited Adela Rogers St John or any of the source material of "What Price Hollywood?" for its own screenplay, which was written by Dorothy Parker from, supposedly, an idea of Selznick's.

"What Price Hollywood?" is a great source for behind-the-scenes tidbits--Cukor fills the screen with images of on-set action (or inaction), with various crew waiting about as they watch the film-in-a-film action being filmed. This movie works as history and as innovation, but it also works on the most important level, as a well-told story.

Read the complete review for What Price Hollywood? TV Guide magazine

The first big success for director Cukor, and also the first talking picture to take a jaundiced look at Hollywood, WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? opens in the famed Brown Derby restaurant. Bennett is a waitress there, determined to break into show business as an actress. One night Sherman, a film director, enters the Brown Derby and Bennett switches stations with another waitress so she can serve him. The well-dressed Sherman is quite inebriated but takes a liking to his ambitious waitress. Sherman invites Bennett to attend a Hollywood premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, but rather than arrive in a fancy, chauffeur-driven limousine, the couple make their entrance in a beat-up vehicle. The shocked parking attendant doesn't know what to do, especially when Sherman gives him the jalopy as a tip. To Sherman, this is all part of the advice he had earlier given Bennett: "Remember our motto--`It's all in fun'...Always keep your sense of humor and you can't miss." That evening Sherman introduces Bennett to Ratoff, a producer, then takes the hopeful woman home with him. The next morning, when Sherman wakes up, the previous evening is a blank. Bennett reminds Sherman that he had promised her a screen test. She worries about his excessive drinking, flippant attitudes, and solitary lifestyle, but Sherman simply shrugs off Bennett's concerns. Later he directs her screen test, which proves the would-be actress has more ambition than talent. Bennett rehearses the scene by herself, then pleads for just one more chance.

Ratoff sees this new test and decides Bennett has some potential. He has her signed up, and Bennett's rise is meteoric. Sherman, on the other hand, is convinced that his talents and career are on the decline. He decides not to become personally involved with Bennett, lest he harm her career. After Bennett becomes a full-fledged movie star, she meets Hamilton, a polo-playing plutocrat. Hamilton falls in love, though Bennett is more amused than anything else. The wealthy playboy arranges a fancy dinner for her, complete with full orchestra, but Bennett fails to show up. Hamilton is enraged. He storms over to the star's home and, pulling her from her bed, brings her to the dinner. She finally agrees to marry Hamilton, though Ratoff and Sherman are convinced this is a mistake. Their predictions on the marriage's longevity prove correct when the honeymoon is interrupted so Bennett can get back to a movie set. Hamilton grows angry when he must wait for hours while Bennett is doing her day's shooting, but this is only the beginning. He begins badgering Bennett about the articles Hollywood fan magazines publish about her. Hamilton finally blows his stack when one writer wants to portray the couple in a series called "Great Lovers of Today." Hamilton walks out on Bennett and Sherman offers her bitter comfort, saying: "I made you what you are today--I hope you're satisfied."

Sherman's own career is sinking fast, undermined by his growing dependence on alcohol. After her divorce from Hamilton is final, Bennett realizes she is pregnant but her hopes are lifted after winning the Oscar for Best Actress. She bails out Sherman after he is arrested for drunk driving, then takes the failed director home. Despite Bennett's encouragement, Sherman's attitude is fatalistic. "I'm washed up, it's all gone," he says without a hint of remorse. Later, alone in Bennett's dressing room, Sherman stares at his sorry reflection in the mirror, comparing it with a photograph from his happier days. He makes a few ironic jokes, then finds a handgun in a drawer. With no feelings of self-pity, Sherman decides to end his misery and kills himself with a bullet to the chest. After the corpse is discovered, Bennett falls victim to scandal and gossipmongers. A reporter callously asks Bennett if she thinks Hamilton will be awarded custody of her son. The personal and professional anguish is more than she can bear, so Bennett takes her child and flees to France. Hamilton learns where they are staying and comes to see the boy. He realizes how wrong he was in abandoning his wife and asks forgiveness. Bennett, with hopes for the future, reconciles with Hamilton.

Though the conclusion is a pat romantic ending, this is a strong drama that shows the real Hollywood behind the glamorous facades. Bennett gives an excellent performance, making her turn from ingenue to hardened star wholly believable. Bennett later stated she felt this was the best performance of her career, although she also conceded that she was "no Sarah Bernhardt." Sherman's portrait of a director on the skids is powerful, playing the drunken man in a straightforward manner, accepting his self-induced fate. The scene of his suicide is particularly striking, cutting swiftly from flashes of his past to his sorry present, shot at weird angles. When he shoots himself, the fall is in slow-motion, anticipating the slow-motion violence of THE WILD BUNCH by almost 40 years. This unsettling montage was apparently the work of Slavko Vorkapich, a Yugoslavian immigrant who contributed memorable scenes to a number of films, including the frightening wraiths zooming through the canyons of New York in CRIME WITHOUT PASSION (1934). Unfortunately, the romance between Hamilton and Bennett remains in the film's spotlight while Sherman's fascinating disintegration is kept a subplot. Hamilton's role was one he was well accustomed to, and there is nothing new or revealing in his character that adds to the film's plot or ambiance.

Cukor, after numerous forgettable directing and codirecting jobs, finally came into his own with his work here. Producer Selznick conceived the idea of making a film that accurately portrayed Hollywood. He contacted Adela Rogers St. Johns and told her, "It's time we made a really good picture about Hollywood, so why don't you go and find us a story?" She came up with a story loosely based on the experiences of Colleen Moore and her husband, alcoholic producer John McCormick. She further based Sherman's role on the life and death of director Tom Forman, who had shot himself in the chest after a nervous breakdown, and Sherman himself based some of his performance on his own brother-in-law, John Barrymore. The script that St. Johns submitted, which would eventually be nominated for an Academy Award, was entitled "The Truth About Hollywood," and it was to star Clara Bow in her talkie comeback. But Bow, already an alcoholic, had put on too much weight and couldn't lose it before production began, so she was replaced by Bennett. The picture was quite successful, and five years later Selznick reworked the story into A STAR IS BORN, directed by William Wellman and starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. Cukor also returned to the material with his version of A STAR IS BORN in 1954, featuring Judy Garland and James Mason (in 1976 Barbara Streisand was featured in a rock 'n' roll version of the story that was a pale shadow of the other films). Selznick remained fond of WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? and, in his book Memo From David O. Selznick, recounted his motivations in making the film: "I believed that the whole world was interested in Hollywood and that the trouble with most films about Hollywood was that they gave a false picture...that they were not true reflections of what happened in Hollywood...Ninety-five percent of the dialog in that picture was actually straight out of life and was straight `reportage,' so to speak."

Turner Classic Movies review Frank Miller

allmovie ((( What Price Hollywood? > Overview ))) Hal Erickson

Read the New York Times Review » L.N.

What Price Hollywood? - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

OUR BETTERS

USA (83 mi) 1933

Turner Classic Movies review Roger Fristoe

Although W. Somerset Maugham had written the 1923 London stage play of Our Betters as a satire of rich Americans who buy their way into European society, the film version (1933) saved its hardest punches for the Continental Set. Where the movie is concerned, the title appears to ironically indicate that, although the British upper crust may have superior manners, they are hardly "better" than Americans in matters of morality. Constance Bennett stars as an American heiress who discovers that her titled British husband has married her only for her money. To maintain her family?s newfound status and social connections, she attempts to maneuver her sister (Anita Louise) into another titled marriage, only to find that the sexual liaisons of the rich and royal present considerable stumbling blocks.

George Cukor, who worked as a stage manager for an American tryout of the stage version of Our Betters, had met "Willie" Maugham at that time. Ten years later, after the two had established a close friendship, Cukor was assigned by RKO to direct the screen version of Maugham's play. Cukor had followed his friend, producer David O. Selznick, to RKO, as he would later to MGM when Selznick went to that studio at the invitation of his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer.

Despite their friendship, Selznick demanded that Cukor stick to his ideas of economy and efficiency. After 14 days of work on Our Betters, the director received one of Selznick's infamous memos, advising him that he was four days behind schedule because he had shot 44.6 minutes rather than the optimal 46.4 minutes. Selznick insisted upon an average of 3.2 minutes of usable film per day.

For Our Betters, Selznick engaged Elsa Maxwell, the former cabaret entertainer who had become a gossip columnist and professional party-giver, to advise on the film?s costumes and general tone. Maugham biographer Bryan Connon wrote that Maxwell "claimed to be a dear friend of Willie, but he regarded her as unutterably vulgar, though he thought of her as a useful bridge player." Maxwell could hardly have endeared herself to Maugham and Cukor, both homosexual, with her stated view that she "loathed" most gay men even though she often admired their literary and artistic accomplishments. In her autobiography, I Married the World, she took three pages to explain her views, declaring that there should be one rule for homosexuals who were "rich in mind" and social ostracism for all others.

A final bit of trivia: The cast of Our Betters includes Charles Starrett, later to gain fame as "The Durango Kid" in B-Westerns and serials.

The Films of George Cukor Michael E. Grost from Classic Films and Television

Our Betters (1933) is based on the 1917 stage play by Somerset Maugham. It is a drawing room comedy, full of corrosive wit and satire. It is also very well acted, showing Cukor's great skill with directing performances.

Many of Cukor's early 1930's films are set in High Society backgrounds; after censorship came in in 1934, he tended to shift more towards adaptations of literary classics. This film is quite racy, in the pre-Code manner.

Spectacle and Cukor Traditions

It is hard to tell how much of Our Betters is Cukor, and how much is Somerset Maugham. Several scenes look like additions to Maugham's stage play, designed to open out the action and add some spectacle:

One shot of women playing tennis reminds one of Pat and Mike (1952).
Another scene at the beginning shows Constance Bennett being presented to the Queen; this reminds one of the embassy ball in My Fair Lady (1964). In both films a social outsider is being presented; in both the question is whether our heroine will do something "not done", not in keeping with social tradition. In Our Betters the heroine deliberately wears a black dress, thus causing a mild sensation. In My Fair Lady, Eliza fully passes her test and does nothing wrong, although earlier she manages to flunk out at Ascot due to her conversation and language. One also remembers Scarlett being in red in Gone With the Wind (1939), causing a similar scandal.
The heroine's elaborate marriage ceremony at the start, where she walks through a line of highly polished Guardsmen. This reminds one of the scene in It Should Happen To You (1954) where Judy Holiday is surrounded by Air Force men.

Characters

The heroine's sister has to choose between a titled Englishman, and the young American suitor she left behind as too "ordinary". Cukor casts against type here by making the American not only better looking, but much better dressed than the English aristocrat. Not only is this guy much more virtuous than the aristocracy, he also offers much more romance and just plain fun. All he lacks is a title, the one thing these social climbing women are looking for. He is definitely not the dull boy back home. He is also more cultured than his aristocratic rivals, going to the National Gallery, something Maugham's satire implies that none of Britain's social elite would do. He combines in one character the "intellectual" and the "successful businessmen", two types that in later Cukor films will often be different and rival characters. Like most of Cukor's intellectuals, he is in a position of dissent from the society around him. Like most of his businessmen, he is very well dressed.

The lead character played by Constance Bennett has many characteristics of Cukor protagonists. Like many of Cukor's women, she has transformed herself and achieved a new position in society. But she also has attributes that later would be found more often in Cukor's male leads. She is the character most conscious of the structure of society around her, most knowledgeable about its faults, failings and hypocrisies. She is able to maintain a sustained critique of its contradictions throughout the film. This makes her similar to Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, and the Jack Lemmon role in It Should Happen To You. Also like these male leads, she is given to elaborate gestures and body postures, dramatizing and making clear her feelings at all times.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

DINNER AT EIGHT

USA (111 mi) 1933

Der Apfel Ist Ab to Dirty Dancing Pauline Kael

Jean Harlow, with her bee-stung pucker and her tinny voice, at her comic best. George Cukor directed this witty, much improved version of the Edna Ferber-George S. Kaufman play, with a big-gun cast that includes Marie Dressler, John Barrymore, Lee Tracy, Wallace Beery, and Edmund Lowe. Among the people who toned up the dialogue were Herman J. Mankiewicz and Donald Ogden Stewart. MGM.

Great cast, and George Cukor directing, but it doesn't get going until the last five minutes. The cast can't lift a script that spends too much time introducing too many characters that still aren't developed enough to be interesting anyway. Lionel Barrymore is lovable of course, Jean Harlow sleazy, and Marie Dressler...whatever she is, crotchety. The whole thing is kind of amateurish, but it has a few somewhat funny moments. John Barrymore drinks a lot, and that's always entertaining.

Austin Chronicle [Marcel Meyer]

Edna Ferber/George Kaufman play about sophisticated New York society, adapted for the screen by Frances Marion and Herman J Mankiewicz and perfect material for Cukor's satirical touch, despite his forebodings that Marie Dressler, starring as a haughtily impoverished Broadway star, 'looked like a cook and had never played this kind of part'. The laughs are mainly at the expense of the nouveau riche couple, a comedy of manners in which Harlow reveals her natural gift for humour and Beery confirms his status as the definitive boor. But the film also reflects the vagaries of the 1930s social scene, and John Barrymore virtually plays himself as the all-time lush. Perfect viewing for a wet Saturday afternoon.

With a core consisting of the harsh ingredients of life, and a crust as sweet as Portuguese bread, Dinner at Eight is a cinematic feast for the ages. Some 65 years since its original release, this comedy/drama still holds up like a premier soufflé. As a whimsical socialite, Mrs. Oliver Jordan (Billie Burke), and her ill husband (Lionel Barrymore) prepare for an important dinner party, an assortment of tragedies and comedies rise upon their friends and family. A virtual swarm of screen legends, including John Barrymore as a fading film star, Marie Dressler as a fading theatre star, and Jean Harlow as a social-climbing, white-trash tramp, pervade the action. And full of action it is. Dramatic tension flies high over director George Cukor's nest of relationships, all laced with love, suicide, financial ruin, divorce, and class inspection. But as deftly as Cukor helms the action, the real hero of the film is the script. Written by Herman J. Mankiewicz (along with Frances Marion and Donald Ogden Stewart) the cast belches out one zinger after the next, leading up to a final exchange between Marie Dressler and Jean Harlow that would leave a savory flavor in even the most discriminating critic's mouth.

Turner Classic Movies review Frank Miller

Producer David O. Selznick made his bow at MGM with this star-studded 1933 comedy, crafting a hit that would give him a powerful position at Hollywood's most powerful studio. He hadn't wanted to work there at all. Selznick was making great strides as head of RKO Studios and was sensitive about charges of nepotism at MGM since he was married to studio head Louis B. Mayer's daughter. But when MGM production chief Irving G. Thalberg had to take a leave because of poor health, Selznick reluctantly gave in to his father-in-law's entreaties.

He inherited Dinner at Eight (1933) from Thalberg, who had already secured screen rights to the Broadway hit about a high-society dinner that falls to pieces. For Selznick, this was the chance to outdo Thalberg's previous hit with the screen's first all-star picture, Grand Hotel (1932). Of course, he had to fight for some of his stars, not to mention the perfect director for the piece. He had no trouble getting Marie Dressler to play a fading stage star. She was the top box office draw of the day, and her good friend Frances Marion was writing the script. Nor was there much argument about casting Lionel Barrymore, Mayer's favorite actor.

Where Selznick hit his first brick wall was in hiring George Cukor to direct. Selznick had helped build his career at RKO and knew the stage veteran had the perfect touch for the witty, sophisticated material. He just had to get the gay director past Mayer's ardent homophobia. Fortunately, the studio head's convictions rarely went further than the box office. Just as Mayer was happy to cover up for gay stars with strong fan followings, when Dinner at Eight became a hit, it marked the start of a long association between Cukor and the studio.

Mayer also objected to casting two of the film's biggest stars—John Barrymore and Jean Harlow. He was worried about Barrymore's drinking and erratic behavior, but Cukor assured him that they had developed a good working relationship on A Bill of Divorcement (1932). On the set of Dinner at Eight Barrymore was cooperative and helpful. Far from resisting comparisons between himself and his character, a fading matinee idol succumbing to alcoholism, he suggested playing up the similarities. At his instigation, Marion and co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz added references to his profile and his three wives. On the set, he even improvised imitations of faded actors he'd run into in New York.

When Selznick proposed Harlow to play Wallace Beery's brassy, wisecracking wife, Mayer thought she wasn't a good enough actress to hold her own against the all-star cast. Cukor came to the rescue again. He had recently seen Harlow's comic performance in Red Dust (1932), which convinced him she would be perfect for the role. Harlow always credited him with helping her find herself as a comedienne. Cukor said that all it took was harnessing her greatest comic gift, the ability to deliver lines as though she didn't quite know what they meant.

Dinner at Eight made Harlow a bigger star than ever. Her all-white bedroom, designed by Hobe Erwin and Fred Hope, helped popularize the Art Deco style of the '30s, while her white satin evening dress became a fashion rage, referred to as the "Jean Harlow dress."

Best of all, however, was the laugh she and Marie Dressler got at the film's closing. The original play had ended on a somber note, but Selznick wanted to go out with a bang. He turned to playwright Donald Ogden Stewart for help, resulting in Harlow's stunning revelation that she's been reading a book. "It's a screwy sort of book," she says, "all about the future. This man thinks that someday machines will take the place of every known profession." Dressler looks her up and down, then warbles, "My dear, that's something you need never worry about."

Slant Magazine [Jeremiah Kipp]

Bright Lights Film Journal [Matthew Kennedy]

Not Coming To a Theater Near You [Beth Gilligan]

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US films Tim Dirks expert and thorough analysis

Movie Reviews UK review [5/5] Damian Cannon

Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover

DVD Verdict (Amanda DeWees) dvd review

DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]

The Jujube Review M.I. Kim

Read the New York Times Review » Mordaunt Hall

Dinner at Eight (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

CAMILLE

USA (110 mi) 1936

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The soap opera is not a recent invention. Greta Garbo has a 1980s hairdo, but she's still the hottest little Parisian hooker's ever been seen in a period piece. Several of the moments in her scene with Lionel Barrymore are inspired, so much so that you have to wonder what they could have done with an extra take or two on the others. The dialogue is so histrionic that it's difficult imagine who could have gone with Garbo to the heights that Alexandre Dumas was shooting for. The answer is not Robert Taylor anyway, and it's difficult to get too sucked into a tragedy in which she doesn't get stuck with him.

C.C. and Company to Catouche Pauline Kael

Like parents crowing over Baby's first steps, MGM announced "Garbo talks!" (for ANNA CHRISTIE) and "Garbo laughs!" (for NINOTCHKA), but they missed out on this one, when they should have crowed "Garbo acts!" Under George Cukor's direction, she gives a warm yet ironic performance that is possibly her finest. Her Camille is too intelligent for her frivolous life, too generous for her circumstances; actually Garbo is inconceivable as a whore-her Camille is a divinity trying to succeed as a whore. (No movie has ever presented a more romantic view of a courtesan.) With the exception of Henry Daniell, as Baron de Varville, the rest of the cast does not rise to the occasion. As Armand, Robert Taylor is inept but not completely unforgivable: he had, at least, a romantic profile. As M. Duval, Lionel Barrymore is unforgivable. (Both of them are irredeemably American.) The slow, solemn production is luxuriant in its vulgarity; it achieves that glamour which MGM traditionally mistook for style. But, in spite of MGM, Garbo's artistry triumphs, and the tearjerker CAMILLE is transformed into the "classic" the studio claimed it to be. With Lenore Ulric as Olympe, Laura Hope Crews as Prudence, and Elizabeth Allan, Jessie Ralph, Rex O'Malley, and E.E. Clive. From the novel by Alexandre Dumas, adapted by Frances Marion, James Hilton, and Zoë Akins.

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

The great Garbo at her radiant peak, and certainly among the top five most romantic movies ever made. Cukor's renowned "rapport" with actresses is unfailing here. MGM's glamour shows unmistakable care---if it's not the same as style, the luxuriance befits the story of a courtesan. It's a puzzle why Garbo's Marguerite is a whore--she seems too intelligent, too yearning, too serious to have ever considered the demimonde life, yet her acting is so generous, so overcome with the warmth of true love, so tinged with the irony of the character's circumstances, that she sweeps you away. Her final scene is among the finest ever committed to film, as she signals death with her eyes in a lingering close-up.

Robert Taylor is so beautiful, you can forgive his lack of skill. His earnestness seems consistent with the rash actions of young love, and his ardent awe of Garbo imparts a worshipful aura that is touching. The fact that he looks younger makes the whore component of Garbo's character more believable; it justifies Armand's not immediately grasping his love's circumstances.

This is Daniell's most interesting performance, subtle in his control and villainy. Laura Hope Crews finally is able to utilize her vocal vulgarity; she is by far a better old strumpet than she was an old maid busybody in so many films. Tempestuous Lenore Ulric is a curiousity that works. This former Belasco stage star embodies a disappointed envy of Garbo that Cukor uses to great advantage. Lionel Barrymore, all growling propriety, is the jarring note in the ensemble.

The screenplay was adapted from the Dumas play by Frances Marion, James Hilton, and Zoe Akins. And Adrian's costumes, usually white, for Miss Garbo, contribute to her divination of literature's most beloved dying swan. This was Irving Thalberg's last production; he died while it was being made and it was completed by Bernard Hyman.

Slant Magazine DVD Review: Garbo – The Signature Collection Dan Callahan (excerpt)

At this point, Garbo was in the zone artistically speaking. Serendipitously, she got herself into a film that did her mature talent full justice, George Cukor's Camille, a Balzac-ian study of suffocating, vulgar 19th century Parisian life. "I'm afraid of nothing except being bored," says Garbo's Marguerite Gautier, a consumptive courtesan impelled by her heartless milieu (and impending death) into near-constant bitchery and frivolity. Garbo's light touch here is as breathtaking as her beauty, and her newfound sense of life's vastness informs every bold, contrary choice she makes. When producer Irving Thalberg saw the early rushes of Camille, he was very excited; Cukor asked him why. "Don't you understand?" he asked. "She is completely unguarded." She is in such control that she has no visible control whatever, a tremendous change from her self-consciousness in Grand Hotel. Her sexual brazenness is even wilder: in her first love scene with Robert Taylor, she plants a half dozen hungry kisses all over his face without using her hands, then bites into his mouth as if she's devouring a particularly luscious éclair.

Garbo's greatest scene, indeed, one of the greatest scenes in film history, is a brief bit of dialogue she shares with Henry Daniell, who plays her rich lover, the Baron de Varville. As Daniell plays a driving piano melody, he smiles ominously at the thought of her new lover (Taylor) ringing her bell outside. When Daniell asks who is ringing, Garbo says, "I might say it was someone at the wrong door...or the great romance of my life!" She makes a huge leap in between these phrases, and her playing has a goose-pimply sense of danger, as if she's hurling herself off a cliff. Daniell stays right with her, "The great romance of your life!" he howls. "Charming!" She leaps right back in: "It might have been," she says quickly, and he starts to play the melody louder and faster. Garbo throws her head back to laugh, but no sound comes out. All we hear is the pounding piano as the camera draws close to her agony.

The scene is like a merry-go-round gone berserk, a perfect synthesis of actors, material, music, and direction. We must give Cukor credit here, for surely he is responsible for some of the daring give and take between Garbo and Daniell, the boasting rapidity, the melody from the piano. The scene catches you up in a vice and smacks you around, and when it's done, you're changed somehow, no matter how many times you've see it. It leaves an exquisite wound. So does her epic death scene, so delicate, so perverse. The film as a whole is filled with the impulse to joke about tragedy. That's the subversive charm of Camille, and that's the essence of what Garbo was capable of at the height of her inventiveness.

Turner Classic Movies review Andrea Foshee

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers] Tim Dirks

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jay S. Steinberg

DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review

100 films Lucas McNelly

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [5/5] from Garbo – The Signature Collection

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

THE WOMEN

USA (133 mi) 1939

Woman in a Dressing Gown to W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings Pauline Kael

Clare Boothe Luce's ode to wisecracking cattiness, given the full, expensive MGM treatment in its first movie version. It confirms rich men's worst suspicions and fantasies of what women want (money) and what they're like when they're together (clawing beasties). With Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, Mary Boland, Marjorie Main, Hedda Hopper, Margaret Dumont, Virginia Grey, Virginia Weidler, Ruth Hussey, Phyllis Povah, Lucile Watson, and noble Norma Shearer, weeping, weeping. George Cukor directed--surprisingly coarsely; it's a kicking, screaming low comedy, with a quiet character such as Joan Fontaine coming across as a female wimp. Goddard is a standout--she's fun. And audiences at the time loved Russell's all-out burlesque of women as jealous bitches. Adapted by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin.

It's a pretty cool idea-a movie with just chicks in it. Joan Crawford is the full on queen bitch in a couple scenes, I wanted to just strangle her myself and obviously none of it had anything to do with me. Paulette Goddard is a little pistol and kicks Rosalind Russell's ass. Joan Fontaine is a bit dim. Early on the clever dialogue, rewritten from the Clare Boothe Luce comedy, carries things but its magic wears thin just about the time we go into a lengthy in-color fashion show. The fashion sequence is a little bit funny and cute (tennis styles!) in its own right, but eats up what was left of the momentum. To make matters worse the film carries on interminably, including a lengthy series of scenes on a divorcee dude ranch in Reno that eventually leads to a highly improbable conclusion in New York where I guess the major issues are dealt with peripherally or something. Chock full o' bad advice from bitchy New York socialites whose own love lives are the stuff of barnyard legend.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs

When asked by Gavin Lambert for his 1972 book On Cukor which recent movies he admired, the first title to cross George Cukor's mind was Andy Warhol's transgressive LONESOME COWBOYS. It's a fun bit of trivia, but also a revealing insight into this misunderstood filmmaker—a heartfelt melodramatist as well as a gender-studies theorist avant la lettre, some of whose best work (HOLIDAY, GASLIGHT, ADAM'S RIB) critiqued hetero-male hegemony well before such practice was commonly accepted. On paper, THE WOMEN seems like ideal material for Cukor: It's the screen adaptation of a Broadway play (Cukor began his directorial career on Broadway and maintained a sure hand with actors throughout his career) famous for having no male characters among its large cast. Occupying the void of powerful men is a web of female alliances and rivalries, scripted in part by the poison pen of Anita Loos (and, characteristically uncredited, F. Scott Fitzgerald) and starring some of the brassiest actresses of the day--Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Fontaine, among many others. The film has plenty of Old Hollywood charm, but it's nowhere near as subversive as Cukor's previous HOLIDAY or his subsequent collaboration with Crawford, the morbid A WOMAN'S FACE. It's far too reverent of its high society milieu, and the film ends up endorsing male hegemony by making its central conflict a woman's fight over her husband with a scheming mistress. In Lambert's book, Cukor says the movie would have worked better if the characters recognized the husband's corruption and became friends instead of enemies. The movie still works well enough, thanks to the sharp dialogue and Cukor's typically ingenious use of longer takes.

Introduction BFI Screen Online (link lost)

Directed by one of Hollywood's most celebrated directors of actresses, The Women brings to life the 1939 MGM rivalry between the studio's female stars - in particular the on and off-screen spats between Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford: one anecdotal legend has it that Shearer, fearful of being upstaged, made Crawford change her costume sixteen times. But Crawford was to thank her co-star for assisting on the set: "I love to play bitches," she explained, "and Norma helped me in this part."

"See them with their hair down and their claws out!" In 1939 The Women was promoted as a sophisticated bitch-fest, featuring non-stop dialogue sharp enough to cut yourself on; gossip-propelled high society women; beauty salon rivalry; a Technicolor fashion show complete with cat fight; marriage, divorce, marriage, divorce, and a recovery plan to die for: "get me a bromide and put some gin in it."

Not a man in sight, but the ladies that lunch obsess unabated and feed off gossip to devastating effect. Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) is happily married to Stephen, but discovers whilst having her nails painted 'Jungle Red' that he's cheating on her with shop-girl Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford). Initially persuaded by her mother (Lucille Watson) that she should keep quiet to both husband and friends, Mary's pride eventually gets the better of her and she takes the train to Reno to get a divorce. Crystal marries Stephen and keeps her meal-ticket sweet - whilst sweet-talking Buck Haines, cowboy-husband of the Countess DeLave (Mary Boland) from her private-line by the bath tub. Little Mary (Virginia Weidler), daughter of Mary and Stephen, confides in her mother that her father is unhappy and Mary finally gets her revenge: "I've had two years to grow claws mother - Jungle Red."

Based on Claire Boothe's hugely successful Broadway play, The Women was scripted by Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and Jane Murfin. Cukor made the clever dialogue the emphasis of the film and Rosalind Russell shines as chief gossip whilst Joan Crawford's depiction of an indomitable gold digger is unsurpassed.

The ferocious felines of Cukor's 30s classic make the Sex and the City girls look like pussycats.

Slant Magazine Film Review: The Women Jeremiah Kipp

The tagline says it's all about men, but this 1939 comedy is really a testament to the females of a certain era, and how they go about securing their comfort and happiness. Men are a means to an end, and the true pleasure comes from a mode of behavior. "There's a word for you ladies," says nasty girl Joan Crawford in the film's most quotable line, "but it's seldom used in high society, outside of a kennel." Yes indeed, that's the one-track absolutism that sums up The Women. If you're up for two-hours-plus of coded female innuendo and colorfully veiled insults such as that one, your jollies will be tickled. But for all their extravagant bitchery, the cast of prima donnas is given very little opportunity to shine. Actor's director George Cukor has a ball directing the hell out of his who's who cast of Hollywood stars, and his frames are filled with catty business that grows frankly exhausting. Goody-two-shoes Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) loses her husband to predatory perfume shopgirl Crystal Allen (Crawford) and—through the help of her girlfriends and girl enemies—must learn to toughen up and learn the art of bitchy repartee and gossip. Half a dozen actresses fill out each scene, blending into one another and gabbing a mile a minute. They toss their rapid fire insults back-and-forth like a never ending tennis match, and the only time we're given a breath is during an insufferable, dialogue-free fashion show sequence (the only scene shot in Technicolor) that gently nudges the pretensions of high society without adding any new satirical insights. Then it's back to the cathouse chatter. Like an overstuffed party, there's no room to breathe amidst all this babble and coo, but patient and forgiving viewers with the will to endure can savor the few finer moments. Crawford eating up the pathetically inept Shearer and spitting her back out again during a department clothing store confrontation ("If your husband doesn't like something I'm wearing, I'll take it off!"); Rosiland Russell's scene-long hissy fit that involves everything from furniture smashing, face slapping, clothes ripping, teacup shattering, and the primal cry of, "I hate you! I hate you! I hate everybody!" A mother unable to explain to her daughter the complex motivations behind divorce. Those memorable grace notes account for The Women retaining its status as a classic, but taken as a whole it's an overlong and dated oversimplification of what women want. Yours truly is a male critic who may not glean the subtle mysteries of womanhood. But if it all boils down to a final shot of a rapturous Shearer opening her arms and practically leaping into the arms of her off-screen man, what the hell do I care?

The Films of Joan Crawford

Film Freak Central [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

filmcritic.com sees The Women Chris Barsanti

Digitally Obsessed review Jon Danziger

DVD Verdict -2005 Release [Amanda DeWees]

The Onion A.V. Club [Donna Bowman]

DVD Verdict Dezhda Mountz

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY

USA (112 mi) 1940

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Cukor and Donald Ogden Stewart's evergreen version of Philip Barry's romantic farce, centreing on a socialite wedding threatened by scandal, is a delight from start to finish, with everyone involved working on peak form. Hepburn's the ice maiden, recently divorced from irresponsible millionaire Grant and just about to marry a truly dull but supposedly more considerate type (Howard). Enter Grant, importunate and distinctly sceptical. Also enter Stewart and Hussey, snoopers from Spy magazine, to cover the society wedding of the year and throw another spanner in the works. Superbly directed by Cukor, the film is a marvel of timing and understated performances, effortlessly transcending its stage origins without ever feeling the need to 'open out' in any way. The wit still sparkles; the ambivalent attitude towards the rich and idle is still resonant; and the moments between Stewart and Hepburn, drunk and flirty on the moonlit terrace, tingle with a real, if rarely explicit, eroticism.

Phantom Lady to Planet of the Apes Pauline Kael

Philip Barry wrote this romantic comedy for Katharine Hepburn, shaping it for her tense patrician beauty and her eccentricities, and she had her greatest popular triumph in it on Broadway (in 1939) and on the screen. There's conventional Broadway shoddiness at its center: the material plays off Hepburn's public personality, pulling her down from her pedestal. As Tracy Lord, a snow maiden and a phony--which is how the movie public regarded Hepburn, according to the exhibitors who in 1938 had declared her "box-office poison"--she gets her comeuppance. The priggish, snooty Tracy is contemptuous of everyone who doesn't live up to her high standards (and that includes her father, played by John Halliday, and her ex-husband, played by Cary Grant); in the course of the action, she slips from those standards herself, learns to be tolerant of other people's lapses, and discovers her own "humanity." Shiny and unfelt and smart-aleck-commercial as the movie is, it's almost irresistibly entertaining--one of the high spots of MGM professionalism. There isn't much real wit in the lines, and there's no feeling of spontaneity, yet the engineering is so astute that the laughs keep coming. This is a paste diamond with more flash and sparkle than a true one. The director, George Cukor, has never been more heartlessly sure of himself. With James Stewart, who took the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as the journalist who has a sudden romantic fling with Tracy, and Ruth Hussey, John Howard, Roland Young, Mary Nash, Henry Daniell, and Virginia Weidler. The additions by the adaptor, Donald Ogden Stewart, are brief and witty; Hepburn's gowns are by Adrian. Produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review

If I could only watch the movies of one actor for the rest of my life, I would choose the work of Cary Grant without a moment’s hesitation. He made films in all kinds of genres and he turned in fantastic performances in just about all of them. If I were to want a thriller, I would merely need turn to North by Northwest to see Grant in one of the finest of them all. If I wanted drama, I could turn to Only Angels Have Wings. If I were in the mood for comedy, I’d have a wealth of greats to choose from including The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby from the 1930s, His Girl Friday and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer from the 1940s, Monkey Business and Operation Petticoat from the 1950s, and That Touch of Mink from the 1960s. However, if my choice were limited to just one film, I would pick The Philadelphia Story. That is not because I think it’s the best movie ever made (but it is one of them), but because I get a tremendous thrill from watching Cary Grant in this movie.

In all of his films, Cary Grant usually plays some variation on the character of “Cary Grant.” It is often been said about him in biographies that the hardest role he ever played was “Cary Grant.” Born Archibald Leach into working class family in Bristol, England, he reinvented himself as the embodiment of suave sophistication and dry wit and lived the role on screen as in real life. In The Philadelphia Story, Grant had one of his best roles, one that allowed him to play a sophisticate but which also gave him room to toy with the role, bouncing lines off some of the best actors working in movies at the time: James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn in the leads and Ruth Hussey, Mary Nash, Roland Young, and Virginia Weidler in supporting roles. This group of other actors would be another reason I would choose to watch this movie above all of Grant’s others. Each member of the cast, no matter how small their role, gets a moment in the spotlight. All of them get a great line or a bit of physical comedy that showcases their talents. The film, even though it was meant as a comeback vehicle for Hepburn (who was considered box office poison at the time), is very generous to its cast and uses its ensemble of players not just as a foil to make its central stars shine brighter but as a true cast of comedic players working in harmony.

Though I suspect that, because of its age and genre, fewer and fewer people will be watching this movie in future years and considering it a classic, I would hope those interested at all in movies (especially those interested in making movies) would add this to their collection or rental queue. This film is Hollywood at the top of its game.

George Cukor: The Philadelphia Story Derek Malcolm from the Guardian

George Cukor has often been called a pre-eminent director of women. And that he was, like certain other gay film-makers. Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman and Judy Garland could testify to that. It would be more accurate, however, to cast him as a film-maker who paid particular attention to performance and relationships.

Cukor had just about the longest continuous career of any major director who worked within the mainstream. He survived Hollywood's often cavalier treatment of original talent, including the blow of being fired by David Selznick a few days into the shoot of Gone With the Wind after coaching Vivien Leigh. When you look at the sort of movies he might have been asked to direct now were he still at work, you long for the wit, humanity and the sense of style evinced by such classics as The Philadelphia Story.

The film is not, perhaps, the funniest romantic comedy ever made. Cukor attempted to pitch Donald Ogden Stewart and Waldo Salt's adaptation of the Philip Barry play into the realms of ironic social significance, by suggesting that it isn't only the rich who have vices and the poor who have virtue. But considering the talkative nature of the film, it moves marvellously and the performances would be very hard to beat because they are based on the wit of character rather than lines.

In the silent opening sequence, Cary Grant, as Hepburn's former husband, is thrown out of the front door of her wealthy parents' ritzy home in Philadelphia. When Hepburn, soon to be married to a less dissolute lover, appears, she breaks one of his favourite golf clubs, throws them after him and slams the door. Grant doesn't give up and rings the doorbell again. When Hepburn answers, he pushes her in the face.

This perfectly timed sequence tells us everything. Admittedly we are in a sense primed, since the two stars had appeared before as antagonists, notably in Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett and in Howard Hawks's Bringing up Baby. And Hepburn's furious reaction turned to advantage the reputation she had acquired as arrogant and mannish, and thus box office poison.

Hepburn had starred in the play on Broadway; she acquired the movie rights and sold them to MGM with the proviso that she was the star and had the choice of director and co-stars. It seems extraordinary now that she had left Hollywood in high dudgeon before this film, feeling totally unappreciated by the public. But this was the 30s, when woman stars were liked for their vulnerability rather than their independence.

Cukor's skill at using her negative image and turning it round so successfully - the film was a huge hit - was typical of the man. Like Hawks, he was able to make the very best of good material.

Cukor has often been attacked for his obedience to the studio system, his insistance on not interfering with the values of a screenplay and the commercial appeal of his films. He could be pedestrian (witness My Fair Lady). But at his best he showed how good the studio system could be. He had taste, style and humanity. And his films look better now than they ever did because of it.

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]

DVD Times Nat Tunbridge

Turner Classic Movies review Mary Anne Melear

CultureCartel.com (Tony Pellum) review [4.5/5]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Ben Stephens

CaryGrant.net Collection a collection of reviews

digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review [Special Edition]

DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review [Special Edition]

Movie Reviews UK review [5/5] Damian Cannon

Reel.com DVD review [Sarah Chauncey]

DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV] Classic Comedies Collection

Article The Real Philadelphia Story, by Ian Irvine from the Sunday Telegraph

GASLIGHT

USA (113 mi) 1944

Gable and Lombard to Gentleman Jim Pauline Kael

Ingrid Bergman is the cherubic bride who is terrorized by the grisly, dirty tricks of her husband, Charles Boyer. She runs the gamut from antimacassar to antimacassar, and it's good scary fun all the way (with a prize at the end-the Academy Award for Best Actress). This pseudo-Victorian thriller is rather more enjoyable than one might expect, and Bergman is, intermittently, genuinely moving. (Though at times you may suspect that she is feeling rather than acting, her hysteria in the musicale sequence is a good demonstration of how hard it sometimes is to tell the difference.) Boyer is expert, and the cast includes Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty, and Angela Lansbury (only in her teens, but you couldn't guess it). Patrick Hamilton's play has been toned up with smooth dialogue by John van Druten, Walter Reisch, and John Balderston, and the full-dress production is directed by George Cukor. When you watch a picture like this one, you're so aware of how expensively careful it is that you can't help being a little impressed and maybe more than a little depressed. (In this case, the expense included the cost of suppressing the 1940 English version by Thorold Dickinson, with Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook.) MGM.

Gaslight | Film Review | Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

Gaslight won Ingrid Bergman her first Academy Award for Best Actress in 1944, and it's a shame they couldn't wait a couple more years for her more subtly shaded and good-humored riff on the same character—a callously used woman at the mercy of both her ghoulish husband as well as her would-be gallant liberator—in Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Notorious. Of course, it's easy to see why they couldn't wait. Bergman's portrayal of Paula Alquist, a woman slowly succumbing to the cruelty and isolation inflicted upon her fragile psyche by her husband Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), gives her the chance to suffer gloriously for the film's duration. Whether cowering against knick-knack covered walls, trembling with fear of the housemaids (specifically a Cockney tart played by a surprisingly slatternly Angela Lansbury), or crying out in anguish at a social piano concert, Bergman is a diva in full martyr effect. Though it was certainly the ne plus ultra of big-screen chillers in its day, nowadays Gaslight is just another one of the myriad overly-dignified and genteel Hollywood melodramas that stole spots on the AFI's list of 100 most thrilling films from the far more illicit and gleeful likes of The Fury and Assault on Precinct 13. It may sound flippant to compare these diverse films, but for all the passion director George Cukor and Bergman attempt to stuff into the creaky domestic premise, Gaslight ultimately adds up to very little in the psychological mind-fuck department, and now pales in comparison to the tightly-wound ferocity of Carpenter and De Palma. Part of the problem is that the scenario of the film (Anton is attempting to locate Paula's murdered aunt's precious jewelry in the attic) is all but spelled out right from the get go. What with Cukor being content to let Boyer portray Anton as Hollywood cinema's world-class prick of all time, the audience is left with little to do but watch Paula assume that her husband is right when he insists she is losing her mind. There is no subtlety, and it's rather like watching zee Frenchman kick zee puppy poodle for an hour and a half. There's also an unconvincing attempt to turn the sanity tables on Anton in the final act, where his passion for precious stones is meant to mirror Paula's need for marital understanding even at the cost of her mind. Mind you, Gaslight is an expertly directed and evenly paced slow burn (and Dame May Whitty is a stitch, though underused, as a nosy neighbor lady), but its lack of a sound moral and psychological center renders it totally transitory and forgettable.

dOc DVD Review: Gaslight (1944) - Digitally Obsessed Mark Zimmer

It's not every movie that has its title changed into a verb. But that's case with "gaslighting," which has become popular parlance for attempting to convince someone that she's gone mad. This suspenseful drama was adapted from Patrick Hamilton's hugely popular play, Angel Street, by playwrights John Van Druten (I Am a Camera) and John L. Balderston (who had written many of the classic Universal horrors).

Young Paula Alquist (Ingrid Bergman) has gone to Italy to study singing after the murder of her operatic aunt. When she marries her accompanist, Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), he expresses an interest in living in London. Since she has inherited her aunt's house in Thornton Square, they take up residence back in the house. But shortly afterward, Paula begins to show signs of becoming unglued: she forgets things, objects disappear, and she imagines sounds and the periodic mysterious dimming of the gaslights. Is she really going crazy, or is Gregory trying to make her so? Does he have his eyes on the saucy young maid, Nancy (Angela Lansbury), or is he up to something more sinister?

Bergman won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Paula, and she does indeed do a lovely job of showing a woman beginning to doubt her own sanity. In the finale she really lets loose and the result is thrilling. Boyer uses his cinematic reputation well here, allowing him to give a sinister shade to what would ordinarily be a straightforward romantic portrayal. Especially notable in the cast is an impossibly young Angela Lansbury (a mere 17!) in her first film role. She gives Nancy a coarseness with a thin coating of pretension to gentility, barely covering a venomous jealousy and fiery lust. Joseph Cotten serves as the heroic figure who attempts to come to Paula's rescue.

George Cukor was renowned for his direction of women, and he seems to work well with Bergman here. She has a luminous glow through much of the film and the camera clearly sympathizes with her plight. But he also manages to inject a good deal of Hitchcockian suspense into the last half hour as things reach a climax and Gregory attempts to get Paula committed. The script is a good deal more mysterious than the British film version (discussed in the extras), which handles the same issues in fairly perfunctory manner. The use of an operatic background is interesting, not least because it allows the early introduction of the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor to set up the themes.

The Victorian setting helps keep this film fresh. Although the fogbound streets are even more extreme than the Sherlock Holmes pictures of the same era, they certainly help emphasize the ominous mood. The title does so as well; while the gaslight is an important clue, it's also an enigmatic reminder of the insubstantial nature of perception. What we know can, given sufficient discouragement, prove as insubstantial as the flickering shadows cast by the gaslights. The result layers the picture with epistemological questions; that would seem an odd basis to support a thriller, but it does so in superb fashion here.

Turner Classic Movies Roger Fristoe

filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

Turner Classic Movies The idea behind the movie by Rob Nixon

Turner Classic Movies Behind the camera by Rob Nixon

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks expert and thorough analysis

Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Criticism Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, reviewed by Ellen Seiter from Jump Cut

review

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) comparing 1940 version

DVD Town [John J. Puccio] also comparing 1940 version

The Digital Bits Barrie Maxwell also comparing 1940 version

Turner Classic Movies Quotes and trivia from the film

Turner Classic Movies critical reviews

DVD Verdict Mark Van Hook

Gaslight (1944) at Reel Classics: a review

A DOUBLE LIFE

USA (104 mi) 1947

Time Out review Tom Milne

The first of Cukor's string of fruitful collaborations with screenwriters Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, a curious melodrama about a Broadway matinée idol who so loses himself in his role as Othello that he carries it over, murderously, into a backstreet affair with a waitress. The theatre scenes are so brilliantly observed, so rich in the sort of affectionate detail that made The Actress a small masterpiece, that the film seems to grind gears uncomfortably when venturing into the grey and shabby B movie world of the murder. All the more so in that it then returns to its happier idiom for a grand finale of on-stage retribution. Flawed, undoubtedly, but fascinating.

Dirty Hands to Down to Earth Pauline Kael

The Ruth Gordon-Garson Kanin script takes off from the professional hazard of actors: living their parts offstage. Usually this hazard is treated satirically, but the Kanins do it in a souped-up, portentously melodramatic version. Ronald Colman is the actor who starts hearing bells in his ears and loud keening noises during his run in Othello. His friends stare at him, puzzled, until after he has smothered a harmless blond waitress (Shelley Winters) and tried to kill a press agent (Edmond O'Brien) whom he suspects of having designs on his Desdemona-his actress wife, played by Signe Hasso. Colman is not at his best, and the role of Othello is so far out of his range that he's gentlemanly and dispassionate when he means to be fiery hot, but he got the Academy Award for Best Actor, anyway. The theatrical milieu doesn't help this picture much, though the theatre scenes were shot in the famous Empire, which was demolished in 1953. George Cukor directed; with Millard Mitchell, Philip Loeb, Ray Collins, Fay Kanin, and Frederic Worlock. Music by Miklós Rózsa. Universal.

The Films of George Cukor Michael E. Grost from Classic Films and Television

Pans

Cukor's visual style in A Double Life (1948) is consistent throughout the film. Many of the shots involve a pan from one composition to another. Both the start and end compositions are elaborate and visually beautiful. The pan is often approximately 90 degrees. It often follows the characters as they move from one position to another. The mid sections of the pan are graceful, but they are less elaborately composed than the beginning and ending compositions. The pan adds a lot of movement, and hence liveliness, to Cukor's shots. But it is not especially obtrusive. A pan is the camera equivalent of a "glance around". It is less forceful than a tracking shot, which propels the viewer through a scene. Cukor's pans seem graceful to viewers, and it is possible that they are even "invisible" to naive viewers of the film. But they also have many of the merits of camera movement. They establish unified spatial coordinates of a set or location. They let the viewer visually explore the environment. They add visual excitement and complexity to the film.

The pans are not 100% pure. Cukor sometimes adds a very small track in or out. Oftentimes this seems like a device to adjust the composition to its ideal format, with the right distance from the actors, and precisely the right amount of action framed on the screen. At other times, the camera movement lends a small bit of emphasis to the drama, and the emotions being expressed by the characters.

A Tracking Shot

Cukor adds a genuine tracking shot after the murder. It concludes with the revelation of the body, viewed for the first time after the crime. This tracking shot is not propulsive, either, unlike the typical tracks of say, Sternberg. It moves at an angle, not a straight line, and seems close in spirit to the 90 degree pans in the movie, but simply more elaborate, dramatic, and complex. Its purpose instead is to show another view of the room: it pulls back to show a global view of the crime scene, a summing up of what has just happened, so the viewer can get a total picture of the murder. It has the effect of summing up and hence climaxing the murder scene, as if to say: "here is the total, final result". It is a much more sophisticated version of that cliché ending of TV shows, where the camera pulls back and up to withdraw viewers from the drama.

Andrew Sarris has aptly said that Cukor's camera "glides through his interiors". This is a good description. The camera motion is very gentle, but very rapid and graceful. It seems non intrusive and non emphatic. It seems designed to explore and view, not penetrate or reorganize.

Turner Classic Movies review Frank Miller

George Cukor entered a new phase in his career - some critics would call it his creative peak - when he joined forces with the husband-and-wife writing team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin for A Double Life (1947), a melodrama set in the world of the theatre. Over the next seven years, he would direct seven films for one or both of the Kanins, including such popular hits as Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952). In essence, they created their own mini-studio, assembling a production team and even a few recurring cast members who would help them make some of the most intelligent films in Hollywood history.

The Kanins had written their story of an actor who confuses his off-stage life with his on-stage performance as Othello years earlier and sold it to Columbia Studios. Then Harry Cohn, head of the studio, decided not to make the picture and refused to even pay for the script. So the Kanins sold it to Universal-International and arranged to borrow their friend Cukor from MGM. Originally they had hoped to cast Laurence Olivier in the leading role, but when he proved unavailable they went after Ronald Colman. But although Colman had started his career on the stage, he had never been comfortable doing Shakespeare and almost turned the script down for fear of making a fool of himself. Cukor and the Kanins finally won him over by convincing him that the role was going to win somebody an Academy Award®, an honor that had escaped Colman even though he'd been nominated three other times.They also promised to do everything they could to help him win. To assist with the Shakespeare scenes, Cukor hired Walter Hampden, a noted stage star from the earlier part of the 20th century, to coach Colman and stage the scenes from Othello. He then shot those scenes in sequence, as though they were from a different picture, so that Colman could focus solely on the Shakespearean role.

Knowing that Cukor's talents were primarily in script interpretation and coaching actors, the Kanins arranged for art director Harry Horner and editor Robert Parrish to work on the set every day during shooting. While Cukor worked with the cast, Horner would set up the day's shots and Parrish would plan out the editing in advance, all of it subject to the director's approval. The result was one of Cukor's most visual films ever and the start of a more cinematic approach to filmmaking for him. For the stage scenes, he suggested to cameraman Milton Krasner that they capture the way stage lights exaggerate an actor's features, creating a blinding display that perfectly counter pointed Colman's madness. Throughout the film he used shots of Colman standing near mirrors to capture the growing division between his sane exterior and his growing insanity.

One key role was the waitress Colman's character confuses with Desdemona and eventually kills in a fit of jealousy. Shelley Winters was doing mostly chorus work in films when she came in to read for the role and arrived dressed to the nines. Cukor told her to go to the ladies' room and remove her girdle, bra and false eyelashes. Then he left her to read the script. He was so impressed with the look and her understanding of the material that he set up a screen test without even reading her. Then, to put her at ease, he shot one of her rehearsals without telling her. Once she was cast, however, she was so nervous that she needed over 100 takes for her first scene with Colman. Finally, the actor took her to lunch to try to get her to calm down. The results were a triumph that established her as a major young star.

A Double Life was a hit for all involved. Colman won rave reviews, and, true to their promise, Cukor and the Kanins mounted a major campaign to win him the Oscar®. As soon as the film was assembled, they arranged a series of screenings for Academy® members. One of them would personally invite each member to the screening, while another one was there to greet them as they arrived and one of them was there at the end to thank everyone for attending and to praise Colman's performance. For his part, Colman took out a series of trade paper ads featuring previous Oscar® winners endorsing his performance. As a result, he was clearly the front-runner on Oscar® night. In his acceptance speech, he credited all involved with the film, particularly Cukor. Also nominated for the picture was composer Miklos Rozsa, who won for musically mirroring Colman's descent into madness; the Kanins, who would never win an Oscar® for writing (though Ruth Gordon would be named Best Supporting Actress for Rosemary's Baby in 1968); and Cukor, who would have to wait until 1964 to win for My Fair Lady.

dvdfuture.com (Randy Spiros) dvd review

CultureCartel.com (Stephen Murray) review [3.5/5]

The Jujube Spotlight M. I. Kim

Austin Chronicle [Jerry Renshaw]

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ADAM’S RIB

USA (101 mi) 1949

Time Out review Tom Milne

Delightful Cukor comedy in which Hepburn and Tracy are husband-and-wife lawyers engaged in a battle of the sexes as they respectively defend and prosecute a dumb blonde (the inimitable Holliday) accused of shooting her two-timing husband with intent to kill. If Hepburn's feminist arguments are a little on the wild side and too easily bounced off Tracy's paternalistic chauvinism, the script by the Kanins so bristles with wit that it scarcely matters. And in a film in which everybody is acting - a point neatly stressed by the stylised staginess of Cukor's direction - the performances (not least from Wayne and Hagen) are matchless.

A Nous la Liberté to Advise and Consent Pauline Kael

George Cukor directed this "uncinematic" but well-played and often witty MGM comedy about the battle of the sexes. Katharine Hepburn, thin, nervous, and high-strung, keeps pecking away at Spencer Tracy, who is solid, imperturbable, and maddeningly sane. She attacks, he blocks; their skirmishes are desperately, ludicrously civilized. They are married lawyers on opposing sides in a court battle; the case involves equal rights for women, i.e., does Judy Holliday have the right to shoot her two-timing husband, Tom Ewell, in order to protect her home against Jean Hagen? The script by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin is lively and ingenious (though it stoops to easy laughs now and then). Cukor's work is too arch, too consciously, commercially clever, but it's also spirited, confident. Holliday and Ewell have roles that seem just the right size for them; intermittently, Holliday lifts the picture to a higher, free-style wit. And as a composer-neighbor of the married lawyers David Wayne airily upstages the two stars; Hepburn is overly intense and Tracy does some coy mugging, but Wayne stays right on target. With Polly Moran, Clarence Kolb, and Hope Emerson (as a circus strong woman).

Turner Classic Movies review Frank Miller

The battle of the sexes spilled over into the courtroom in 1949, when Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn played husband-and-wife attorneys on opposite sides of an explosive case in their sixth film together - Adam's Rib (1949). For all the courtroom shenanigans as Hepburn tries to prove the sexes equal as a matter of law, the film offers a surprisingly faithful depiction of what really happens during a legal case.

In fact, the story took its inspiration from a real court case. Actress-writer Ruth Gordon and her husband Garson Kanin were driving to their country home under perilous conditions when, to distract her, Kanin asked his wife to tell him an interesting story. The first she thought of was the divorce of actors Raymond Massey and Adrianne Allen. They had turned for legal help to married lawyers William and Dorothy Whitney, who did their jobs so well that after the case was closed the lawyers divorced each other and married their clients. The idea of husband-and-wife lawyers intrigued the husband-and-wife writers, who sat up till four the next morning talking out story possibilities. Even that early, they began referring to the leads as Spence and Kate. Eventually, they sold the screenplay for Man and Wife to MGM, where the title was changed to the less suggestive Adam's Rib.

George Cukor was the natural choice to direct. Not only had he worked with the Kanins on their first screenplay together, A Double Life (1947), but he had directed some of Hepburn's greatest triumphs, including her screen debut in A Bill of Divorcement (1932) and her comeback from box-office poison, The Philadelphia Story (1940). Ironically, Hepburn and Tracy were both in a box-office slump at the end of the 1940s, a situation that Adam's Rib (1949) quickly remedied.

Hepburn was always closely involved in the development of scripts for her films. In addition to attending script conferences, she and Cukor visited courtrooms in Los Angeles to soak up details they could use to make the film more authentic. Once the script was ready, the company moved to New York, where the film was shot almost entirely on location. Cukor was happy for the chance to capture a near-documentary feel for some of the scenes, while Hepburn was happy to return to her conveniently located apartment, where she could walk to the set each morning. Always discreet about their relationship, Tracy took a suite at the Waldorf Towers, a few blocks from Hepburn's apartment.

The legal case on-screen wasn't the only trial associated with Adam's Rib. Kanin had recently scored a Broadway hit with his play Born Yesterday and wanted its star, Judy Holliday, to repeat her stage role. But Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures had bought the film rights and decided that Holliday was too fat and ugly to play the part of an ex-chorus girl on screen. When Kanin shared the problem at a story conference for Adam's Rib, Hepburn suggested casting Holliday in the film's key supporting role, a frumpy housewife who stands trial for shooting her straying husband. She even encouraged the Kanins to build up the role in order to make it more of a showcase, and then she helped convince Holliday to take the part. Initially, the young actress refused, finally admitting to Hepburn that she didn't like a line that referred to her as "Fatso." Hepburn assured her that the word could be changed: "They're writers. They know lots of words." After she signed for the film, Holliday insisted that "fatso" be restored - she realized that it was the only possible line for that scene.

Hepburn continued to boost Holliday throughout shooting, helping her adjust to film acting and convincing Cukor to film the wife's strongest scene - her jailhouse interview with Hepburn - in one long medium shot of the young actress. According to legend, she refused to shoot reaction shots, so the entire scene of more than nine minutes was more or less a screen test for Born Yesterday. Once he saw her in Adam's Rib, Harry Cohn changed his mind and signed Holliday - and Cukor - for the film that would make her a star and bring her the Oscar® for Best Actress. Later, when Kanin praised Hepburn for helping the younger actress, Hepburn brushed the compliment aside: "It was the kind of thing you do because people have done it for you. . . . You never get a chance to repay them, really, so what you do is repay them by doing what you can for someone else when the opportunity comes up."

Turner Classic Movies review A look behind the camera

Turner Classic Movies review The idea behind the film

Turner Classic Movies review Why the film is essential

Apollo Guide (Dan Jardine) review [86/100]

Edwin Jahiel review

Three Movie Buffs (Eric Nash) review [3.5/4]

DVD Talk (Heather Picker) dvd review [3/5]

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BORN YESTERDAY

USA (103 mi) 1950

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Despite the tendency of Garson Kanin's play to go all dewy-eyed in its celebration of American democratic ideals, Cukor's screen version is still a delight. The story - rehashed later in The Girl Can't Help It - concerns the apparently dumb chorus-girl mistress of a ruthless tycoon-cum-gangster; the big shot decides she should become more sophisticated and knowledgeable (purely for the sake of appearances), and employs Holden to give her a few lessons. But the plan backfires, both because she falls for the teacher and because her education turns her against her brutish lover's rather dubious moral practices. A very simple idea, but enlivened by a sharp, witty script, and by Cukor's effortless handling of the brilliant performances: especially fine are Holliday as the dumb blonde who makes good, and Crawford as the confused sugar-daddy, nowhere more so than in the marvellous scene where her mindless singing disturbs his concentration over a game of gin rummy. Magic.

Bombshell to Brewster McCloud Pauline Kael

Judy Holliday's classic portrait of the dumb blonde-brassy, vacuous Billie Dawn. Broderick Crawford plays the man who "keeps" her-a junkman lately become "a dealer in scrap metal" in the world of cartels. Afraid that Billie will disgrace him in Washington, he hires a newspaperman, William Holden, to make Billie more "couth." Unfortunately, both for the junkman and the picture, the journalist reforms Billie, and as she gains in virtue she diminishes in interest. The second half is pretty dreary: the movie, like the Garson Kanin hit play that it's based on, turns into a civics lesson. Broderick Crawford is too heavy and mean to be funny, and Holden's role is colorless. But you'll remember the early, acquisitive Billie with her truculent voice and glassy eyes, and her gin-rummy game. Directed by George Cukor, who's not in top form; the movie is visually dead. The play was adapted (insufficiently) by Albert Mannheimer. (Judy Holliday had played the role on Broadway; her inflections are so set that there's not much surprise left in her performance.) Columbia.

Judy Holliday from Film Comment (link lost):

The great Judy Holliday died in 1965 just a few weeks shy of her 44th birthday. With only nine films to her credit (11 if you count two unbilled appearances), she endeared herself to audiences as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday and became a major star. Many of her roles were variations on the Billie persona but the real Judy Holliday was nothing like her screen image. “I know I’m stupid,” she gurgles in Born Yesterday,“ and I like it.” Holliday herself had a near genius IQ. She read voraciously and aspired to be a writer and director rather than a performer. But as the Noel Coward song goes, she found she had “the talent to amuse.” The dumb blonde formula was not new — some variation of it was always a staple of Hollywood comedy — from Lucille Ball to Marie Wilson to Goldie Hawn. But no actress had perfected and refined it with more subtlety than Judy Holliday. Sly and witty, she made dumb desirable. How did this nice Jewish girl from Sunnyside, Queens, manage to make audiences instantly fall in love with her when she appeared on the screen?

Apart from being a stage-struck kid who answered the phone for wunderkind Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater and performed in comedy sketches in clubs with friends Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Judy had no formal acting training. But she was gifted and tenacious. Miraculously and on very short notice she replaced an ailing Jean Arthur in Born Yesterday in Philadelphia and gave a performance that had the critics enthralled. The show was a smash and ran for nearly four years. Re-creating her Billie Dawn role in the film, she received an Oscar, trumping veterans Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson. While Hollywood rarely offered her the range of opportunities she craved, Judy did have a chance to show her dramatic potential in two underrated films — The Marrying Kind and Full of Life.

Turner Classic Movies review Georgelle Cole

Today's films push the envelope. Many filmmakers aim for shock value, filling their movies with a plethora of sex, violence and gore. However, 50 years ago, filmmakers struggled with censors to put out films that would barely be PG-rated by today's standards. Such is the case with Born Yesterday (1950).

In Born Yesterday, Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford), a junk dealer, hires journalist Paul Verrall (William Holden) to tutor his dim-witted mistress Billie Dawn (Judy Holliday). Although the film was clearly written for a mature audience, writer Garson Kanin and director George Cukor were forced to amend the film to appease censors.

Director George Cukor explains, "It seems ludicrous now, but twenty years ago you couldn't have a character say, 'I love that broad,' you couldn't even say "broad." And the nonsense that went on to get over the fact that Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford lived together! It required the greatest skill and some new business that Garson invented, like Billie Dawn always creeping into the apartment the back way. We managed to keep it amusing, I think, but it was so unnecessary."

The censors, however, thought the scrutiny was necessary, and Cukor was urged to use caution when filming Holliday's dresses. At that time, it was mandatory for the intimate areas on the body, especially breasts, to be completely covered. The censors also requested that Cukor avoid any suggestion that Billie was trying to get Paul in bed. Billy's line: "Are you one of those talkers, or would you be interested in a little action" was deemed offensive. However, Cukor stood his ground and the line made it to the final cut of Born Yesterday. The director knew what he was doing: Born Yesterdaygrabbed five Academy Award nominations (Best Actress, Best Costume Design, Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Screenplay) and Holliday ended up taking home an Oscar for Best Actress.

Comment - Born Yesterday: Judy Holliday's Classic Emanuel Levy

Women in Hollywood musicals Pulling the Plug on Lina Lamont, by Martin Roth from Jump Cut, April 1990

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The Films of George Cukor Michael E. Grost from Classic Films and Television

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Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash) review [2.5/4]

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3.5/5]

DVD Verdict David Rogers

THE MARRYING KIND

USA (92 mi) 1952

A poignant little tragi-comedy, scripted by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, about a lower middle-class couple (Holliday and Ray) whose marriage cannot withstand the pressures against them. The divorce court listens first to the husband's story, then to the wife's, and then the judge arrives at some notion of 'the truth'. It's contrived, but the film's critique of traditional gender roles within marriage is still sharp, and Judy Holliday shows an unexpected depth.

Marooned to Mean Streets Pauline Kael

In the early 50s, Hollywood wasn't making very many movies about the troubled lives of average couples, and so some people took this uneven, serious sit-com, directed by George Cukor from a script by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, to be highly commendable. As the couple whose marriage is breaking up, Judy Holliday (of the friendly brass lungs) and Aldo Ray (with his lightweight cracked-gravel croak) have a surprising rapport. But there's nothing to this movie except the expertly contrived misunderstandings of simple "little" people. It's warm; at times it's likeable. But does anybody believe a minute of it? With Madge Kennedy as a judge, and Peggy Cass and Phyllis Povah. Columbia.

Turner Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford

After the phenomenal success of Born Yesterday (1950) as both a play and a movie, the director (George Cukor), writer (Garson Kanin) and star (Judy Holliday) regrouped for a second film entitled The Marrying Kind (1952), only this time they were joined by actress/screenwriter Ruth Gordon who co-wrote the script with her husband Kanin. Because Judy Holliday had already established herself as a hilarious and gifted comic, audiences and critics were expecting another laugh-filled comedy but the resulting film defied easy classification. Mixing humor, drama and tragedy in unexpected ways, the film opens with a divorce court hearing. The judge is reviewing the case of Chet and Florence Keefer and we see in flashback the high and low points of their relationship beginning with their first meeting in Central Park and including their courtship, childrearing, career disappointments, domestic squabbles and an unexpected death in the family.

From the beginning Kanin and Gordon never intended for The Marrying Kind to be treated as a straight comedy but as a marriage-on-the-rocks tragicomedy. "Its aim is realism," Kanin told Cukor, "Its tone is documentary rather than arty, its medium is photography rather than caricature. I think it is the closest we have ever come to "holding the mirror up to nature."

Kanin was very emphatic that the movie not have the "shiny," slick look of a big budget commercial film. He also wanted the actors to be "extremely real. The trouble with most actors is that they look and sound and behave like actors, even the good ones." In this regard, he advised Holliday to play her part differently from the role she created in Born Yesterday and to give a "performance of a real person who does real things."

For the role of Chet Keefer, Cukor wanted an actor who was not a well-known or typical leading man. He found who he was looking for in Aldo Ray who had only appeared in bit parts and supporting roles as Aldo DaRe up to then. According to Patrick McGilligan in George Cukor: A Double Life, the director "believed in Ray's future, however, and worked long hours, in screen tests and throughout the filming, to put the gravelly voiced former town constable at ease, and to convey his offbeat personality". In addition, Cukor had Ray take ballet lessons in order to alter his way of walking which reminded him of a football player. When The Marrying Kind was released, Cukor even went so far as to promote his new discovery with a special on-screen credit at the end: "You have just seen our New Personality Aldo Ray. Please watch for his next picture."

Ray unfortunately never really got the opportunity to deliver on his promise as an actor despite his impressive performances in The Marrying Kind and Cukor's next feature, Pat and Mike (1952). Most casting directors only saw him as a gruff, hulking "salt of the earth" type who seemed best suited to play army men, police officers or crude rednecks. As a result, most movie fans probably associate Ray with his macho sergeant in The Naked and the Dead, the 1958 film adaptation of Norman Mailer's WWII novel, or the lustful dirt-poor southerner in the once steamy God's Little Acre (1958), probably the best known of his later work.

The rest of the cast of The Marrying Kind was selected with the same care and concern as Ray though Cukor and Kanin sometimes disagreed over specific actors. Cukor wanted Ina Claire to play the part of Judge Kroll but Kanin disliked her "artificial acting" and said it would throw the picture into "a strange and make-believe key." They ended up casting Madge Kennedy in the role, who like Ina Claire, was a longtime friend of Cukor; The Marrying Kind marked her first screen appearance in twenty-eight years. Other actors featured in smaller parts were Sheila Bond, a Tony-award winning Broadway actress making her film debut here; Peggy Cass, also making her screen debut (she would later achieve fame as a guest panelist on TV shows such as What's My Line? and Match Game); and an uncredited Charles Bronson who plays Chet's pal at his post office job (Bronson was still going by the name Charles Buchinsky at this stage of his career).

To ground the movie in reality, The Marrying Kind was shot on location in New York City in real settings such as Central Park, Times Square and the Stuyvesant Town apartment complex in East Manhattan. For the memorable Decoration Day picnic in which [SPOILER ALERT] the Keefer's son Joey drowns in the lake, Cukor drew inspiration from a production of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.

At the time of The Marrying Kind, Kanin and Gordon were one of the busiest screenwriting teams in Hollywood. Not only were they working out the final script for this new film but also putting the finishing touches on Pat and Mike and Years Ago, the film adaptation of Gordon's autobiographical play which was retitled The Actress, for MGM. Unfortunately, The Marrying Kind did not come close to the success of Born Yesterday despite the fact that Kanin and Gordon's script was nominated for Best Written American Comedy by the Writers Guild and Holliday was nominated for Best Foreign Actress by the BAFTA (British Academy of Film & Television Arts).

The uneven tone of the film jarred most audiences and reviewers who had set expectations about it. Admittedly, Cukor's excessive use of voice-over narration during several of the flashback scenes tends to hinder character development instead of enriching it. And Florrie and Chet are not immediately likable or sympathetic. In fact, they both could test anyone's patience with their annoying idiosyncrasies. Cukor's documentary-like approach also tends to flatten his attempts at humor which often seem contrived or artificial in this context. On the other hand, the arguments between the couple that increase in intensity and bitterness as the film develops may hit too close to home for many a married couple - petty arguments about in-laws, bad financial decisions, jealousy. [SPOILER ALERT] Added to this is the fact that the film never really recovers its equilibrium after Florrie and Chet lose their child in a drowning accident even though the movie ends on a hopeful note with the couple reconciled. This may account for the film's poor box office prospects, for The Marrying Kind is much closer to tragedy than comedy and not anyone's idea of escapist fare.

Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, however, was one of the few reviewers at the time that recognized and admired what Cukor and Kanin were attempting to do in The Marrying Kind: "Think it not curious if we don't seem to be as side-splittingly impressed with the hilarities in this picture as its promotion might lead you to expect. Hilarity is in it - hilarity of the best - as would be almost mandatory in any picture with Miss Holliday. But the charming and lastingly affecting thing about The Marrying Kind is its bittersweet comprehension of the thorniness of the way that stretches out for two young people after they have taken the marriage vows...This reviewer has fond recollections of King Vidor's old film, The Crowd [1928], which was also about the frustrations of a young married couple in New York. The Marrying Kind compares to it, and that's the nicest compliment we can pay."

DVD Verdict (Brian Burke) dvd review

The Films of George Cukor Michael E. Grost from Classic Films and Television

PopMatters (David Sanjek) review also reviewing THE SOLID GOLD CADILLAC

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]

PAT AND MIKE

USA (95 mi) 1952

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Written, like several other Cukor films of the period, by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, and charting the conflict between what Carlos Clarens called 'the redneck paternalism of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn's outraged liberal sensibilities', this is a lazy, episodic, conventional but strangely charming variation on the old comedy formula of initially hostile misfits falling in love (here platonic). Hepburn gets to show off her considerable athletic talents as the bright, upper middle class sporting all-rounder; Tracy gets to be gruffly loveable as the rough-diamond promoter-manager who finally becomes her protector. There are far too many shots featuring real-life sports stars, but the sparring leads, and Ray's dim boxer, work superbly together under Cukor's deceptively effortless, always elegant direction.

Pacific Heights to Pather Panchali Pauline Kael

Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy play together so expertly that their previous films seem like warmups. The script, by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, isn't up to the best of ADAM'S RIB (1949), but the stars have achieved such teamwork that their sparring is more beautiful than punch lines. Hepburn plays a phenomenal all-around athlete, and in the course of the picture she takes on Gussie Moran, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and other professionals, touching off the comic possibilities in various sports with grace and ease. Tracy, who plays a sports promoter (with a streets-of-the-big-city accent--"cherce" for "choice") has a lighter, funnier tone than in the other Tracy-Hepburn pictures. With Aldo Ray as a sulky boxer, William Ching, Jim Backus, Phyllis Povah, Sammy White, Chuck Connors, Charles Bronson, and Don Budge. George Cukor directed--beautifully. It's as close to perfect as you'd want it to be. Produced by Lawrence Weingarten, for MGM.

After playing a sports-hating character 10 years earlier in WOMAN OF THE YEAR, Katharine Hepburn essays the role of an all-around athlete not unlike the great Babe Didrikson Zaharias (who plays herself here) in this marvelous romantic comedy, which paired her again with real-life companion Spencer Tracy. Pat (Hepburn), a perky PE instructor at a southern California college and gifted athlete, falls apart whenever her professor fiance, Collier (William Ching), comes to watch her compete. Mike (Tracy), a somewhat shady sports promoter, recognizes her talent and persuades her to turn pro. Despite his unsuccessful attempt to get her to throw a match, she begins winning golf and tennis tournaments under his guidance, and gradually they fall for each other. What did you expect? Still, the point isn't what happens, but how it happens, and under the direction of George Cukor--working from the script by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon--Tracy and Hepburn turn in unforgettable performances. Shot mostly at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, PAT AND MIKE gave Hepburn an opportunity to display her authentic athletic ability amidst a cast that included pro golfers Helen Dettweiler and Betty Hicks, as well as tennis professionals Don Budge and Pancho Gonzales. Chuck Connors, on loan from his job as the Triple A Los Angeles Angels's first sacker, makes his film debut as a police captain. Oscar nominated for Best Screenplay.

Turner Classic Movies review Felicia Feaster

One of the typically smart, lively pairings of legendary screen couple Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, 1952's Pat and Mike also united the unique writing talents of another romantic team, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon.

Husband and wife screenwriters Kanin and Gordon wrote Pat and Mike specifically for their actor friends, tailoring the script to the streak of devilish humor lurking beneath Tracy's solid, consummately male persona and taking advantage of Hepburn's natural athletic abilities as a superior golfer and one of the best tennis players in Hollywood. In addition to its two charismatic leads, Pat and Mike also featured cameos by a number of sports stars, from L.A. Angels player Chuck Connors, making his film debut, to lady athletes Helen Dettweiler, Betty Hicks, Babe Didrikson Zaharias and Alice Marble whose presence at times invests the film with an almost documentary- realism.

Hepburn stars as Pat Pemberton, an accomplished athlete and Phys Ed instructor who excels at tennis, golf, archery and just about every other sport, but whose smothering, controlling fiance, college administrator Collier Weld (William Ching), is undermining her ability to win.

When Pat meets a shady, blue collar New York sports promoter, Mike Conovan, who agrees to manage her professional tennis and golf career, Pat's luck appears to change for the better. This odd couple develops a mutual affection as they travel to each of Pat's tournaments, and nurture a winning streak only jeopardized by the reappearance of Collier with his ability to instantly jinx Pat's game.

The combination of Tracy's gruff, working-class demeanor and Hepburn's ladylike, patrician bearing provides Pat and Mike with some of its best comic moments, as when Mike, watching Pat walk across a golf course green, remarks to his partner in a thick Brooklyn accent, "There's not much meat on 'er, but what there is is cherce." Such earthy humor endeared Pat and Mike to both critics and audiences and undoubtedly helped win Kanin and Gordon an Academy Award nomination. Kanin and Gordon's witty script also took great advantage of the cozy, intimate rapport between Hepburn and Tracy who were an off-screen couple as well, and played upon the apparently mismatched but sizzling chemistry between the two lovers.

Pat and Mike was the seventh film out of nine that Hepburn and Tracy made together and the second film scripted by Kanin and Gordon after Adam's Rib (1949),in which bickering husband and wife lawyers are stuck on opposite ends of a legal dispute. As with Adam's Rib, Pat and Mike is an honest, amusing account of the battle between the sexes, but also a celebration of male-female chemistry made all the more exciting when the romantic leads are also equals, a specialty of the Kanin-Gordon writing style.

Pat and Mike's director George Cukor, considered an "actor's director" who often coaxed unforgettable performances from his stars, also richly exploited the comic potential in Kanin and Gordon's script, whose bracing mix of streetwise cool and tender sentiment mimicked Damon Runyon's storytelling style.

The Films of George Cukor Michael E. Grost from Classic Films and Television

Salon (Charles Taylor) retrospective

DVD Talk (Jeff Shannon) dvd review [4/5]

Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash) review [2/4]

THE ACTRESS

USA (89 mi) 1953

Classic Film Guide review

Based on Ruth Gordon's autobiographical play Years Ago, chronicling her youthful experiences as a would-be actress in New England just before World War II (Gordon, with her husband Garson Kanin, wrote many screenplays for Cukor, including this one), The Actress is a remarkable domestic comedy. The centre of the film is not so much Jean Simmons' Broadway hopes, but rather the slow growth to understanding of her father (Tracy), who in the course of the film re-lives his own youthful hopes, and for the first time realises the compromises he made for a settled, comfortable life. Beautiful performances.

A Nous la Liberté to Advise and Consent Pauline Kael

Ruth Gordon adapted her autobiographical play Years Ago, which dealt with a young girl in New England determined to make her way in the theatre, and it was turned into a pleasantly modest though disappointing picture by the director, George Cukor. Jean Simmons plays the title role with grace, but the author has neglected to provide indications of talent and drive in the character; this girl seems too nice, too ordinary-she could never grow up to be that tough, indefatigable trouper Ruth Gordon. (The heroine sets out on her own in 1911.) Despite the title, the central character is the girl's gruff, lovable father (Spencer Tracy); Tracy overdoes it, but he shows some energy, and the film is sadly short of it. With Teresa Wright giving a wan performance as the mother, Anthony Perkins making his first screen appearance, Ian Wolfe, Mary Wickes, Jackie Coogan as the joker in the gymnasium, and, in the best sequence, Kay Williams as a musical-comedy star. MGM.

Turner Classic Movies review Emily Soares

The Actress (1953), George Cukor's unsentimental and moving adaptation of Ruth Gordon's autobiographical play Years Ago, tells the story of her determination to become a star. But before she can begin the struggle to fame, 17-year-old Ruth Gordon Jones (Jean Simmons) must first overcome the obstinacy of her father (Spencer Tracy), an irascible ex-sea farer with broken dreams of his own. Soft-spoken Mrs. Jones (Teresa Wright) tries to keep the peace between daughter and husband, while keeping the cat from eating the parlor fern. Mr. Jones eventually sees in his daughter's desires the hopes he had as a young man and believes that she deserves the chance to pursue them, sacrificing his most prized possession to help get her start in New York.

In real life, Ruth Gordon's obsession with acting was partly inspired by a performance she attended of The Pink Lady at a Boston theatre. It starred Hazel Dawn as a seductive Parisian vamp and led Gordon to later remark, "All I wanted out of a career was to look like Hazel Dawn and wear pink feathers.

Cukor's research for the film was extensive, and he returned with Gordon, who adapted her play for the screen, to her hometown of Wollaston, Ma., meeting with her old friends and visiting locations that would never actually appear in the film (exteriors were shot in Pasadena, Ca.), so that he could get a real feel for it. In Richard Schickel's book The Men Who Made the Movies, Cukor says that seeing Ruth's house, in particular, was pivotal to the story's feel of authenticity: "It was much smaller than she'd thought and the kitchen was a room that had eight doors. Now, no architect or art director would have imagined that, but it had the texture of reality...and we did all sorts of research on that trip....Ruth Gordon's father had worked for the Mellin's Company - Mellin's Food - and we went to where they were dismantling it. We went to see the neighbors. You do a complete research so that you really know what you're doing, and even though you don't use it...some of it seeps through."

In what many believe to be one of his finest roles, Tracy provides a fascinatingly complex weave of crankiness and compassion in the character of Ruth's father. One of the wonders of his tough, sad but ultimately supportive Mr. Jones is the character's ability to respond, though reluctantly, to the strength of his daughter's dream. Tracy drew on some of his own experiences to make it real, as he explains in Gene D. Phillip's biography of Cukor: "Well, I remember when I told my father I wanted to be an actor and he looked at me, this skinny kid with big ears, and he said, "Oh that poor little son of a bitch; he's going to go through an awful lot."

According to Cukor, Simmons and Tracy were very fond of each other, although Tracy could be a little too believable as the iron-fisted patriarch. In the scene where Ruth's father finds her with a copy of an expensive theater magazine and blows a gasket, Spencer's anger was so real that Simmons responded with nervous giggles. Cukor liked it though, and left it in.

And though the film faithfully delivers many bittersweet memories of Gordon's early years, Gordon herself was said to be disappointed with the casting of Jean Simmons as Ruth because she thought the actress was too pretty to play the young girl authentically. Gordon and some critics were also upset by cuts the producers made to the film that diluted the spitfire personality of the teenager (a trademark of the older Ruth). Meddling cuts aside, Cukor was very pleased with Simmons' performance: "It was the only time that I have ever seen a British-born actress play an American girl with absolute authenticity. She's a wonderful actress." Reportedly, Debbie Reynolds had wanted the role, but the studio felt she didn't have enough box-office appeal to carry a lead role at that time.

Anthony Perkins makes his film debut in The Actress as the gangly boyfriend who falls hard for Ruth, though she is too concerned with her dream of acting to be bothered with anything as mundane as the opposite sex. The role of Mrs. Jones was initially offered to Katharine Hepburn, but she decided to return to the stage in a revival of The Millionairess instead. According to Cukor biographer Gene D. Phillip, during first-run engagements of The Actress, selected movie houses around the country projected the film's opening sequence - a recreation of a production number from the play, The Pink Lady, in wide screen to emphasize the larger-than-life quality of Gordon's fascination with the stage.

The story of young Ruth Gordon Jones is all about insuppressible hope in the face of insurmountable odds. And no one could put that better than Gordon herself in her autobiography My Side. "I believe in God, Jesus, Life Eternal, people, luck, my voices, myself. Pan me, don't give me the part, publish everybody's book but this one and I will still make it! Why? Because I believe I will. If you believe, then you hang on."

The Films of George Cukor Michael E. Grost from Classic Films and Television

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU

USA (85 mi) 1954

Time Out review Tom Milne

One of Judy Holliday's delicious dumb blonde performances as the nobody despairing of being somebody who makes it by splashing her savings on splashing her name across a billboard in Manhattan. Garson Kanin's script doesn't really bite hard enough in its satire of TV and its eager promotion of the nonentity celebrity, nor - after a wonderful opening - does the comedy have anywhere much to go. Bright moments and irresistible performances, though, with Lemmon (in his debut) making a superb foil for Holliday as the solemn documentary film-maker who observes, loves and is baffled by her.

The Invisible Man to Ivanhoe Pauline Kael

Judy Holliday in a pleasantly erratic satirical comedy; the targets-advertising, TV, and urban gullibility-are rather easily pinked, but the scenarist, Garson Kanin, and the director, George Cukor, don't loiter over them for long. (Still, the film runs down.) The heroine, who yearns for celebrity, takes her life savings and places her name-Gladys Glover-in giant letters across a billboard in Columbus Circle. Before long, she is as inescapably in the public eye as one of the Gabors. She also tosses about in romantic indecision: Should she give her heart to an honest documentary filmmaker (Jack Lemmon, in his Hollywood début) and say farewell to the big time, or should she surrender herself to the sudsy embraces of a soap manufacturer (Peter Lawford)? With Connie Gilchrist, Melville Cooper, and Michael O'Shea, who is particularly funny as a seedy entrepreneur. There are also appearances by Constance Bennett, Ilka Chase, and Wendy Barrie as themselves. Columbia.

This is what used to pass for a goofball comedy. It was a simpler world then, though not as simple as so many simpletons thought. The crowds, the herd was simpler to amuse, simpler to amaze, easier to mystify. It must have struck many as a radical proposition--before the final curtain for Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe, before success stories like Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda headed towards the third act--that an "average" American would like a simple husband and privacy more than the bright lights of the big city, and everything that those lights can promise and deliver. It's all pretty obvious from the 21st century, and easy to say that smarter people have fallen for dumber things than that (only Peter Lawford's semi-sleazy if ultra-honest [subjective perspective] appears worthy of much more than passing comment, and such qualities aren't ever particularly worthy of more than passing comment. So as excited as the grocery store masses must have been over the plight of Judy Holliday, and as credible as she is in a role that looks a lot easier than it is, it mainly just strikes me as boring. The same thing's happening out every window, to everyone who hasn't figured it out. Be true to yourself, find yourself, be yourself, and put money in the collection plate and buy my ten video self-help guide on the way out. Jack Lemmon doesn't strike me as that much of a catch either, for that matter. There's a real temptation that Judy might have been better off trying to inject some integrity into Peter rather than work with Jack on his problems expressing compassion. Again, these are common problems and common concerns, and when the characters don't speak to you, who cares much anyway?

Turner Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford

As topical now as when it first appeared in 1954, It Should Happen to You addresses a common daydream of the movie-going public - to become famous and idolized by millions. With a proliferation of television reality shows transforming unknowns into instant celebrities, the idea of someone becoming famous without possessing real talent or performing some remarkable deed is so commonplace today that George Cukor's satire looks prophetic in retrospect. In the starring role, Judy Holliday plays Gladys Glover, an out of work model from a small town who came to the Big Apple with unrealistic career expectations. Obsessed with becoming famous, she spends the last of her money on the rental of a billboard in Columbus Circle which displays her name and nothing else in big letters. Gladys's enigmatic stunt becomes the talk of the town and she suddenly finds herself in demand on TV talk shows and other venues. She also finds herself pursued by soap company executive Evan Adams III (Peter Lawford) who, despite his romantic overtures, has designs on her billboard for his own product promotion. None of this sits well with Glady's boyfriend Pete (Jack Lemmon), an aspiring documentary filmmaker, who wonders what we all wonder - what does Gladys really want?

In some ways, It Should Happen to You shares a link with Cukor's previous Judy Holliday film, The Marrying Kind (1952), which was also set in New York City, and cast the comedic actress as a naive newlywed with an idealistic view of marriage. Like that character, Gladys Glover is someone whose sense of reality and personal happiness have been distorted by the media through commercials, glamour magazines and Hollywood movies - all of which become satiric targets in It Should Happen to You and are the real point of the film. "The idea of becoming a great celebrity without being able to do anything is a very important notion," Cukor stated in an interview with author Gavin Lambert. "Publicity can really do it, too. Today it makes Presidents. It's really the name of the game."

It Should Happen to You is also significant for Jack Lemmon's film debut. At first, the actor, who had worked briefly in television, had a tendency to overact for the camera but Cukor soon convinced him that "less is more." The actor later remarked, "I've learned my craft from that advice. It's the hardest thing in the world to be simple, and the easiest thing in the world to act your brains out and make an ass of yourself." (From George Cukor by Gene D. Phillips). A perfect example of Cukor's approach to acting was demonstrated to Lemmon during a restaurant scene where Pete and Gladys argue. Cukor recalled, "They rehearsed it and did it very well, but I said, "I don't believe it, I don't believe one damn thing. Jack, what do you do when you get angry?" He said, "I get chills and cramps, I get sick to my stomach, but can't use that." "Oh," I said, "do that!" So in the height of fury he suddenly clutches his stomach, and it makes all the difference."

By the time she made It Should Happen to You Judy Holliday was already recognized as a unique comic presence in films having won the Best Actress Oscar for her hilarious portrayal of Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday (1950), a role she first played to great acclaim on the Broadway stage. Though attractive, Holliday was no glamour queen and constantly battled a weight problem. A few months prior to shooting It Should Happen to You the actress had given birth to a son, Jonathan, and was still "thirty pounds over what her camera weight should have been," requiring her to crash diet. Although sensitive about her weight, Holliday also had a sense of humor about it too, recalling a photo shoot in which she was to appear in some glamour shots for the Columbia publicity department. "Look sexy," the photographer said. She tried to oblige, but he kept demanding, "Sexy! Sexier!" In desperation, she asked him what he had been eating recently. He mentioned a thick, sizzling steak, an onion soup with croutons and lots of cheese, a cold pasta salad, strawberry shortcake. Judy's mouth began to water and her eyes became liquid. "That's the look I want!" the photographer shouted (from Judy Holliday by Gary Carey).

Gossip columnists reported that during the filming of It Should Happen to You, Holliday dated her co-star Peter Lawford. The actress was having marital problems at the time and did reportedly enjoy a romantic fling with Lawford (it only lasted until the production wrapped) which may be why their scenes together have a genuine spark. Their best scene is probably the attempted seduction on the couch where he starts nuzzling her. Cukor, however, had a problem with the mechanics of the scene, particularly Lawford's removal of one of Holliday's earrings. "It so happened we had a property man on the picture who'd worked with The Three Stooges," Cukor said (in Gavin Lambert: On Cukor)."He said, "I have an idea, may I help on this?" I said, "Please do," and he suggested, "Let her take the earring off herself, so he can nuzzle her ear." So we did, and it made a terribly funny moment. Later in the scene she had to pour champagne down Peter Lawford's neck. We only have four shirts for Peter Lawford, so we could only shoot four takes, and it was tricky for the camera. On the last take I said, "Judy if you laugh, I'll just kill you, I'll kill you dead." Well, she didn't laugh, but she giggled, and it was absolutely great. I asked if she'd done it deliberately, in spite of what I'd said, and she didn't really know. Sometimes you get these very human things on the set."

In the 1954 Oscar® race, It Should Happen to You was virtually ignored though it did receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Black and White Costume Design by Jean Louis (he lost to Edith Head for Sabrina). Regardless, most critical reviews were overwhelmingly positive with the majority of praise focused on Holliday's performance. Time magazine stated "Judy plays, for the fourth time in a row, essentially the same poor man's Pygmalion, that won her an Oscar® two years ago...Practice has made her almost perfect in the part. She seems an incarnation of the big-city blonde who is so dumb that she doesn't even know she's beautiful."

Other trivia of interest: Garson Kanin's screenplay for It Should Happen to You was originally titled A Name for Herself but in the early stages it was actually being developed as a script for Danny Kaye; The guests who appear on the TV panel show in the movie were real-life celebrities - Constance Bennett, Ilka Chase, Melville Cooper and Wendy Barrie; the song "Let's Fall in Love" which Holliday and Lemmon sing as a duet was written almost 20 years earlier by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler; Look for a brief cameo by up-and-coming actor John Saxon in the Central Park sequence.

The Films of George Cukor Michael E. Grost from Classic Films and Television

Classic Film Guide review

Turner Classic Movies review The idea behind the film

Turner Classic Movies review A look behind the camera

Turner Classic Movies review Why the film is essential

Turner Classic Movies review Critic comments

Turner Classic Movies review Trivia and Quotes from the film

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

A STAR IS BORN A 98

USA restored version (176 mi) 1954 ‘Scope Premiere version (181 mi), Initial released version (154 mi)

A STAR IS BORN is Judy Garland’s triumphant comeback after her exile from Hollywood when her MGM contract was terminated in 1950 on the grounds of being unreliable on the set. Her storied career by this time was well known, a child star who as a teenager was given amphetamines and barbiturates by the studio heads in order to keep her working without interruption so they could keep churning out the pictures and the profits. In the middle to late 40’s, though still making pictures, suffering from failed marriages and drug and alcohol abuse, she began developing troublesome behavior on the set, moody, unapproachable, depressed, even failing to even appear on many mornings. Watched closely by many studio heads upon her return, she delivers a gangbusters performance, arguably the greatest one woman show in the history of movies, where despite her unparalled singing which is given the full treatment here, her voice deeper, richer, and more mature, she is equally stunning onscreen for nearly three hours exposing a deeper side to her character, turning in one of the greatest acting performances ever seen. True to form, in 1954 the Academy Awards overlooked her performance in the best actress category, instead awarding Grace Kelly the Oscar in the now all but forgotten film THE COUNTRY GIRL. This film, however, is a remarkable time capsule, a well directed, utterly poignant testament to her phenomenal gifts, given a story with so many parallels to her own life, it captures Garland at the peak of her powers better than any other work, where she is able to maintain her dramatic intensity throughout the duration, which is simply a phenomenal effort, one for the ages, perhaps because she was under such close scrutinity not to have an emotional meltdown. Recently upgraded to Blu-Ray, improving the sound and the superbly brilliant color, the film was originally released at 181 minutes, but the studio heads immediately thought it was too long, so it was cut to 154 minutes during its theatrical release, where it remained until 1983 when film historian Ronald Harver restored some but not all of the missing footage, including lost musical numbers that existed only in the hands of private collectors, and additional soundtrack material, using still shots while additional dialogue is heard in the background, so that the film now runs 176 minutes.

Much like Michael Powell’s film THE RED SHOES (1948) features a dazzling, uninterrupted 17-minute ballet fantasia in the middle of the film, a spectacular dance called The Ballet of the Red Shoes which features surrealistic and supremely colorful backdrops, creating a truly transcendant film moment, this film has a similar cinematic moment, as the 20-minute “I’m Born in a Trunk” sequence which takes the film to intermission is simply breathtaking, brilliantly edited where Garland’s initial song turns into flashbacks of new songs, new set pieces, all revealing the autobiographical story of her long and arduous career before she was ever recognized in show business. Garland’s voice is heard throughout the sequence belting out one tune after another, including “Swanee,” “I'll Get By,” “You Took Advantage of Me,” “Black Bottom,” “The Peanut Vendor (El Manicero),” and “Melancholy Baby,” constantly changing her appearance and her costumes along with new rhythm and tempos, much of it very jazz-like, as it feels extremely stream-of-conscious when she finds herself in everchanging set pieces. It’s a supreme expression of her talent where the art production behind her actually matches the excellence of her performance, an unbelievable moment in film musicals, where some feel it’s the greatest musical number ever filmed. Of interest, many film historians don’t even think it’s the best musical sequence in the film. The most famous is Cukor’s one-take shot of Garland singing “The Man That Got Away” Judy Garland - "The Man That Got Away" from "A Star Is Born ... YouTube (4:34), in an intimate, after hours setting that smolders with searing emotional poignancy. It’s a scene that only Garland could deliver so perfectly, as again the theme has such personal relevance. That’s what stands out in this film, as these lyrics become her life story. Every word she sings, she’s lived. After you see this film, you will be unable to get her out of your thoughts.

Garland plays Esther Blodgett, a singer like many others that performs as a warm up act for greater stars. She has the distinguished misfortune of trying to save a famous Hollywood legend, James Mason as Norman Maine, from making a fool of himself as he wanders drunk onstage in the middle of a live performance, where she amusingly makes him part of the act, including cleverly getting him off the stage. Later tracking her down to the after hours joint where he hears her sing “The Man That Got Away,” he’s completely confident that she has what it takes to be a star. So after introducing her to a few important people, namely his movie producer Oliver Niles (the great Charles Bickford), officially changing her show business name to Vicki Lester, she does indeed become that star, which she proves in the “I’m Born in a Trunk” sequence, after which she’s a bonafide movie star. But as fate would have it, her star power is rising as Maine’s is declining even more rapidly, continually making a drunk spectacle of himself, ruining those once-on-a-lifetime moments in her life. Despite his obvious faults, and that he’s a good generation older than she is, she loves him anyway, thinking her love will make him whole, as she’s forever grateful that he opened the doors for her. One of their happiest moments together is when she comes home from work and delivers an impromptu song and dance routine on the material she’s been working on all day, “Somewhere There's a Someone,” a raucous satire on MGM musicals, but also her intimate rendition of “It’s a New World” that she quietly sings on their honeymoon, another tour-de-force moment, as the song has a poignant reprise late in the film.

Garland was born Frances Ethel Gumm, and one of the initial scenes that was cut was an early number from “I’m Born in a Trunk” that she sang as a kid with her father onstage, “When My Sugar Walks Down the Street,” a song Garland actually sang as a member of the Gumm Sisters. Lost forever are scenes of Garland and Mason planning their life together, including the building of their dream house, and a montage of leading role scenes from Norman Maine’s movie career. One of the previously lost sequences that was wonderfully rediscovered was the wedding proposal which was amusingly caught by microphones during the playback of her song “Here's What I'm Here For,” another is “Lose That Long Face,” a bewilderingly jubilant and effervescent number that she sings and dances as a gamin before and after a heart-rendering sequence about the deteriorating state of her marriage where she breaks down in a dressing room before a masterful segue throws her back in front of a camera, songs that certainly add depth to their developing relationship. At the premiere of Harver’s film restoration which took place at Radio City Music Hall in New York City in 1983, the audience started applauding when the lost numbers appeared. Similarly, when I saw this film at the Music Box Theater in Chicago, the audience erupted in applause as soon as Garland’s name appeared in the opening credits, and then again at her first appearance onscreen.

Despite the length, the pacing of the film never slows, no doubt due to Garland’s appearance and voice which are constants throughout this film. But mostly what stands out is the genuine effort and dramatic intensity she puts into every scene. There are very few secondary characters, where Bickford plays a gruff but fatherly producer and Jack Carson plays his typically cynical and personally sneering Hollywood publicity agent. Tommy Noonan plays Garland’s piano playing lifelong friend, a guy that tells it to her straight. Other than that, the entire picture belongs to Garland and Mason, whose solid presence driving his Packard convertible likely added a certain stability to Garland’s performance, as in the end, her character’s devoted stand-by-your-man love for him remains her reason for being. Their beach house on the cliff overlooking the ocean filled with artworks is an architectural masterpiece with one stunning view actually shot in Laguna Beach. The film is loaded with local Los Angeles landmarks, from film openings at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, award ceremonies and several live performances at The Shrine Auditorium, to shots of the Coconut Grove Night Club, the Santa Anita Park racetrack, even the Beverly Hills Church of the Good Shepherd, as well as various Warner Brother’s backlots. But certainly this is a timeless film that has been beautifully enhanced by Blu-Ray, as the color saturation on CinemaScope has never been more subtle and boldly luminous, very much appreciated in a musical-sequence-driven film like this, where powerful performances are mixed with small moments of personal intimacy, the kind that come alive in the lyrics of a song. Despite her professional triumphs, Garland battled nerves and personal problems throughout her entire career, which spanned nearly half a century. Told at a young age by studio execs that she was unattractive, given amphetamines as prescription weight loss medication while still a teen, this deteriorated her self esteem and left her battling with drug and alcohol addiction nearly her entire life. Garland died of an accidental drug overdose at the age of 47. She ranks as one of the greatest stars to ever come out of Hollywood, where her voice alone and song interpretive ability make her singularly unique, but her performances never diminish over time, as despite the sterile artificiality of performing before a movie camera, her intense screen vulnerability makes her a genuine star, as gifted a performer as we’ll ever see, one who has always struck a nerve with the audience.

The music is great, but I like it even better on the record where it only goes on for 45 minutes. Judy Garland absolutely rules, and James Mason would have been awe-inspiring as Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Show twenty years later. Handsome, decadent, classy, so lost. The definitive analysis of the glories, pressures, absurdities, and ultimately shallowness of Hollywood. In the final scenes, even before I knew what was going to happen, Mason in the darkness reminded me of Kurt Cobain.

Star 80 to Stick Pauline Kael

Grandiose, emotionally charged musical version of the 1937 tearjerker. Judy Garland and James Mason are the leads (although she looks tired and worn, and he gives such a remarkable performance as the washed-up, decaying star that he brings a bloom to the movie). This updated version is a terrible, fascinating orgy of self-pity and cynicism and mythmaking. Garland's jagged, tremulous performance is nakedly intense; her musical numbers include the capering "Born in a Trunk" and the dark, heavy torch song "The Man That Got Away." With Charles Bickford, Jack Carson, and Tommy Noonan. George Cukor directed, from Moss Hart's acerbic rewrite of the 1937 film. George Hoyningen-Huené served as color consultant, and the strikingly sumptuous color design gives the film deep, neurotic, emotional tones. Warners. CinemaScope.

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Of all Hollywood's heartbreakers, this must be one of the saddest. Made at a time when Garland was fast approaching final crack-up, the story of the rise of a young singing star at the expense of the actor she loves and yearns to keep intact (Mason) seemed to touch exactly the right raw nerves in its performers to make it a major discomfort to watch. Garland's tremulous emotionalism, which so often left her unwatchable, is here decently harnessed to a story which makes good sense of it and to a man worth yearning for. But the acting honours belong to Mason: whether idly cruising the LA dance-halls for a new woman, sliding into alcoholism, or embarrassing everyone at an Oscar ceremony, he gives a performance which is as good as any actor is ever allowed. Previewed at 182 minutes, the film was promptly trimmed by Warners and released at 152 minutes. The version reissued in 1983 features much of the excised footage, rediscovered in archives. Many scenes admirably fill gaps in the original, a few are redundant, but it's a major work of movie archaeology, and a very good wallow.

Turner Classic Movies review Roger Fristoe

Judy Garland made perhaps the most triumphant of all movie comebacks in Warner Bros.' A Star Is Born (1954), directed by George Cukor and released four years after Garland appeared in her final film at MGM, where she had been dismissed after more than a decade as that studio's reigning musical-comedy star. Sid Luft, then Garland's husband, oversaw her spectacular return to the screen by serving as producer of the film, which had a troubled production history in part because of Garland's illnesses and stormy temperament.

The story of a singer whose star rises at the same time her alcoholic husband (James Mason) sees his own movie career disintegrate, A Star Is Born gave Garland not only her most intense dramatic role but a brilliant Harold Arlen/Ira Gershwin score that provided her with a signature tune - "The Man That Got Away." Other songs include "Gotta Have Me Go with You," "It's a New World," "Somewhere There's a Someone" and "Born in a Trunk." The latter song was built into an elaborate production number for Garland that was filmed without Cukor's approval after he had finished his work on A Star Is Born.

Garland's performance was met with superb notices, including Time magazine's rave as "just about the greatest one-woman show in movie history." The movie won seven Academy Award nominations for Best Actress (Garland), Actor (Mason), Art Direction, Set Decoration, Costume Design, Musical Score and Song ("The Man That Got Away"). It was widely anticipated that Garland would win the award itself, and on the night of the ceremonies, television cameras were set up in her room at the hospital where she had given birth to a son, Joe Luft. In later years Garland loved telling a bitterly funny anecdote about how unceremoniously she was treated by the television crew when it was announced that the winner was instead Grace Kelly for The Country Girl (1954). At the time, Garland friend Groucho Marx decried her Oscar loss as "the biggest robbery since Brink's." A Star Is Born did not win in any category.

After the initial roadshow engagement, Warner Bros. cut some 45 minutes from the movie, much of which was replaced in a 1983 restoration by Ronald Haver. A Star Is Born was remade most recently in 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. Predating the Garland version is a 1937 version starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. The inspiration for all versions is most likely a movie called What Price Hollywood? (1932), which was directed by Cukor and has a strikingly similar story line.

Judy Garland is at her peak, pulling out all the stops, daring the gods in this dark, weighty fable of the price one pays to be at the top. This version, directed by Cukor, is lent all manner of mythic significance by Garland, teetering on the abyss before the slide. There would be other triumphs in concert, but this is the peak of her film career. Here she finally exposed her powerful dramatic range, coupled with the magnificent singing voice that she pushed further than anyone could imagine. Her genius is attached to an uncomfortable, intense plot that allows reason for the tremulous mannerisms and bottomless, dark eyes.

The plot essentially follows that of the original 1936 film (directed by William Wellman and starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March). A young singer (Garland) saves Norman Maine (James Mason), a star actor, from making a drunken fool of himself on stage. Later, a sober Norman hears her sing and decides to help this incredible talent get started in pictures. Eventually (after she changes her name from Esther Blodgett to Vicki Lester), he manages to get her the lead in a big musical. As Vicki's star rises, however, Norman's begins to fall. The two elope, but their happiness is short-lived, and Norman's drinking increases when he is cut by his studio. Frustrated by the fickleness of his public and "friends," he drunkenly interrupts the Oscar ceremonies where Vicki has won the award for Best Actress, humbly pleading for a job and accidentally slapping his wife during the presentation ceremony. Despite all Vicki's attempts to find Norman work in Hollywood, his slide cannot be stopped by his wife's love.

Director George Cukor previously filmed the story as WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? in 1932. Here he delivers a much more savage film, allowing moments and characters to speak for themselves in a way that give A STAR IS BORN that much more power. Garland is well matched by Mason, who imbues Norman's hellish descent with a deep sense of self-understanding, a dignified awareness of what is transpiring and ultimate acceptance of fate. And in the scenes of drunkenness, a threatening aura of danger that seems to give him an unhuman kind of vigor and strength. If Mason looks healthier than Garland sometimes, it works. Policing and caretaking an addict takes enormous energy; sometimes the toll is greater on the spouse than the addict themselves. Mason's work on STAR is the equal of any good performance you can name.

Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin provided Garland with songs that would become standards in her concert repertoire, including the ten-ton torch song, "The Man That Got Away" (which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Song), rendered by Garland with incredible emotional power. Leonard Gershe's classic "Born in a Trunk" sequence is also one of Garland's finest moments, a near-autobiographical musical sequence that shows the star's rise, incorporating the songs "I'll Get By," "You Took Advantage of Me," "Black Bottom," "Peanut Vendor," "My Melancholy Baby," and "Swanee." After Garland's Oscar-nominated performance lost to Grace Kelly's amateur thesping in THE COUNTRY GIRL, many in Hollywood felt that she was being punished by her peers for her past troubles, and Groucho Marx sent a telegram to Garland saying that the loss "was the biggest robbery since Brink's."

Warners stupidly cut A STAR IS BORN considerably after its premiere, but Cukor's version was eventually partially restored through the reinsertion of recovered soundtrack with production stills and some alternate takes that had somehow survived, giving the film a continuity that unfeeling hands had removed. Seemingly vindicated, Cukor passed away the night before he was to see his restored film, which reopened in 1983 to enthusiastic crowds. George Hoyningen-Huene consulted on the color, which gives the film either somber depth or hysterical, raw splashes of color--it's exactly right. If this version is more closely aligned with showbiz tradition than the 1937 version, it works, largely because it underlines the Garland legend. With Jack Carson in a definitive role as a bastard press agent, and Lucy Marlow and Joan Shawlee as putrid starlet and columnist and Tommy Noonan, surprisingly effective as Garland's jazz musician pal, in the best role of his career.

Turner Classic Movies review The strory behind the camera, by Frank Miller

Filming started on October 12, 1953, with the train station sequence, in which the newly signed Esther doubles for a star by waving a handkerchief out a train window.

The first major delays were technical. Cukor had started making the film in WarnerScope, a wide-screen process Warner Bros. had designed to compete with CinemaScope. But even studio management knew the process wasn't perfected. Albert Warner, who supervised the studio's technical side, was negotiating for the use of CinemaScope as the film started shooting. After two weeks of filming, he asked that they test the process, so "The Man That Got Away" number was shot in two versions, one in WarnerScope and one in CinemaScope. It was obvious the latter version was superior, so they had to start the film over, at a cost of $300,000. They also had to redo the number to make better use of the new screen size. As a result, the film fell behind schedule a total of 18 days.

At first the limitations of working in CinemaScope presented an obstacle to Cukor. There was a whole set of rules about what would and would not work in the new system. The so-called experts advised against certain camera moves, certain colors, tight close-ups and too much quick cutting. Finally he and his two consultants on the film, production designer Gene Allen and color consultant George Hoyningen-Huene, decided to ignore the rules and make up new ones as they went along. As a result, A Star Is Born was one of the first films to make truly creative use of the CinemaScope process.

Garland's musical mentor, Roger Edens, came over from MGM to supervise the arrangements of her numbers.

Garland was on her best behavior during the early days of shooting, but she slowly lost control. She first called in sick on November 9, which kept her off the film for four days. She got sick again shooting outdoor locations and missed three more days. She was sick again for two days in December. Then they had to postpone a scene because she didn't like her costume. Other days, she had to leave early because she was too tired or sick to go on. By February, they were 41 days behind schedule. In late March, she took two weeks off to get herself off all prescription medications. Ultimately, the production would drag on for nine months.

Making matters worse was the fact that Garland wasn't always home resting when she was sick. She'd take a day off, then Cukor would read in Louella Parsons' column that she had spent the night singing at a nightclub. She'd leave early and go to the races. None of this was released to the press. Instead, the Warners PR department attributed the delays to Garland's relentless perfectionism.

Cukor was an expert on pushing actresses to an emotional brink and then capturing it on film. For Garland's breakdown scene in Esther's dressing room, he drove her so hard that she threw up before the first take. Then he made her do the scene over and over until he had it just right. But he was also an expert in easing tension on the set through humor. After the final take, Garland was sobbing uncontrollably. He came up to her quietly, put his hand on her shoulder and said, "Judy, Marjorie Main couldn't have done that any better!"

In March, studio executives viewed a rough-cut of everything that had been completed up to that point. Cukor wasn't happy with the footage, but everyone else was delighted.

One addition Luft and Warners felt necessary was a number to demonstrate Esther's triumph in her first big film. Rather than take a chance on a new number that might not go over, Luft convinced Warner to authorize a medley of standards. The sequence would become the "Born in the Trunk" number, including performances of "I'll Get By," "You Took Advantage of Me," "Black Bottom," "The Peanut Vendor Song," "Melancholy Baby" and "Swanee." The number would add 18 minutes to the already long film and cost an additional $250,000. Cukor, who objected to the sequence, had already planned his annual vacation to Europe, so Warners took him off salary and the film's choreographer, Richard Barstow, directed it instead. Allen and Huene personally oversaw the shoot in order to protect Cukor's vision.

For the last two weeks of production, during which the "Born in a Trunk" number was completed, Jack Warner approved a night-time shooting schedule to better accommodate Garland's "body clock." This added still more to the budget, as the unions required extra payments for evening work.

Shooting finally ended on July 28, 1954, with retakes of the "Peanut Vendor" song from the "Born in a Trunk" sequence. The first preview was only five days away. The film's final budget was $5,019,770, making it Warner Bros.' most expensive film and the second costliest in Hollywood history, just behind David O. Selznick's Duel in the Sun (1946), which had cost just $205,000 more.

The film's completion was particularly joyous for Garland and Luft, who had just learned that she was pregnant for the third time.

· The first preview, on August 2, 1954, was a triumph for Garland. As she left, fans shouted at her "Don't cut a single minute of it." The second preview, on August 3, was equally successful. At this point the film ran 196 minutes.

Shortly before the premiere, Cukor cut the film down to 181 minutes. Among the footage removed was a segment from the "Born in the Trunk" number (Garland's duet with her father to "When My Sugar Walks Down the Street" - a number she had performed at the start of her career with the Gumm Sisters); Norman's return to the Shrine Auditorium to try to learn Esther's name; Norman and Esther planning the beach house; and a montage of scenes from Norman Maine's leading roles. The musical number is included in the most recent DVDs of the film but the other footage has never been recovered.

A Star Is Born premiered at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood on September 29. The New York premiere on October 11 was so big it had to be held at two theatres, the Victoria and the Capitol.

In October 1954, after the film had opened and been reviewed, Harry Warner, head of the studio's business side in New York, decided that the picture was too long. He ordered another half-hour of cuts so that exhibitors could get in one more showing per day. By this time, Cukor was in India filming Bhowani Junction, so he was unable to influence the re-editing of the film. The cuts included an entire sequence in which Norman and Esther lose touch with each other while Norman is on location. A comic scene of her getting sick on the way to her first preview was also deleted, along with two complete numbers, "Here's What I'm Here For," the song Esther is recording when Norman proposes to her, and "Lose That Long Face," the number she does before and after she breaks down in her dressing room. The cuts represented most of the scenes that developed Norman and Esther's relationship. To make matters worse, the studio melted the negative from the cut scenes to retrieve the film's silver content. Word of the cuts hit the press and generated such a strong backlash against the film that attendance dropped precipitously. As a result, despite the film's promising opening, it ended up losing money.

With the film's box-office failure, Garland and Luft were broke. Both Jack and Harry Warner had advanced Luft money against his share of the profits. With they failed to see their money returned from ticket sales, they both ended up suing Luft to get their money back. And the Lufts' contract with Warners for future pictures was cancelled.

In 1974, film historian Ronald Haver was doing a Cukor retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For the showing of A Star Is Born, he put together a brochure featuring stills from the cut scenes and descriptions of what was missing. This triggered interest at Warner Bros., where an apprentice film editor discovered the complete three-hour soundtrack in the sound department's storage vaults. Haver wanted to create a restored version using the soundtrack with stills filling in for the missing scenes, but was unable to raise the budget through the LA County Museum.

In 1981, Haver enlisted the help of writer Fay Kanin, president of the Motion Picture Academy® and a member of the National Committee for Film Preservation. She pitched the restoration project to Warner Bros. chairman Robert Daly, who gave Haver the go-ahead. Haver went through film storage vaults on both coasts and dug up leads about private, illegally obtained footage held by private collectors. He even had to call the police to track down one collector who had a 35mm negative of "Lose That Long Face. Eventually he assembled about 20 minutes of the missing half-hour, including both cut musical numbers and the proposal scene. Along the way, he also found a negative and print of the 1932 version of The Animal Kingdom, a film long thought lost; a pristine 35mm print of the 1934 Of Human Bondage and the original negatives for the 1937 A Star Is Born, along with costume and photographic tests for the 1954 version. Other treats he found included newsreel footage and kinescopes of the film's premieres in Hollywood and New York and the first CinemaScope version of "The Man That Got Away."

Ultimately, Haver put together a 176 minute restored print, featuring the newly discovered footage, restored footage from the shorter version and stills to fill in for the sequences nobody could find.

Haver showed the restored version to Daly on January 24, 1983. Daly was so impressed that he authorized a theatrical reissue through Warner Classics. Haver had invited Cukor to this screening, but the director died the day before.

The restored A Star Is Born received its world premiere at the Radio City Musical in New York on July 7, 1983. As soon as the lost musical numbers appeared, the audience started applauding. At the end, the audience gave the film a standing ovation. Both of Garland's daughters, Liza Minnelli and Lorna Luft, were in the audience. Afterwards, they had to be taken to a dressing room, where it took them 20 minutes to stop crying.

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]

Nick's Flick Picks: The Best Actress Project [Nick Davis] June 10, 2010

Turner Classic Movies review the idea behind the film, Frank Miller

Turner Classic Movies review Synopsis and why the film is essential, by Frank Miller

The Films of George Cukor - by Michael E. Grost also more specifically here: A Star Is Born

filmcritic.com (Paul Brenner) review [3.5/5]

Features-on-Film.com

Apollo Guide (Ed Gonzalez) review [70/100]\

DVDTOWN - Blu-ray Edition [John J. Puccio]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Colin Jacobson

Three Movie Buffs review [3.75/4]

Turner Classic Movies review Quotes and trivia from the film

Turner Classic Movies review critical comments

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [95.9/100]

BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review

A Star Is Born - Movies - The New York Times Bosley Crowther

DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze

LET’S MAKE LOVE

USA (118 mi) 1960

Time Out review Tom Milne

A rambling romance in a backstage musical setting, with Montand as a stuffy millionaire determined to take legal action against a little revue in which he is lampooned - until he meets Monroe. She, starring in the show and believing him to be an out-of-work actor, gets him a job impersonating himself; and he, trying to make good, hires the best (Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly and Milton Berle in cameos) to give him a showbiz polish. The teaming of Monroe and Montand works like a charm (the love affair was real, and you feel it), and Cukor contrives to lend the whole thing a witty sense of enchantment that isn't really there. Not so much a good film as a delightful experience, with one moment of true magic: Marilyn making her stage entrance down a fireman's pole and purring her way into Cole Porter's 'My Heart Belongs to Daddy'.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jesse Shanks) dvd review

This release is a perfect example of a film that is "just another Marilyn movie" when shown on TV, yet becomes a lovely souvenir document on the shelf as a DVD. Let's Make Love is a quasi-musical in which the story revolves around a stage production and provides ample opportunity to weave production numbers into the plot-line. The jazzy musical sequences capture a type of entertainment that was the inheritor of vaudeville and survived until the overwhelming onslaught of television. Three uncredited cameos featuring the legends Milton Berle, Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly liven up the second half of the film, English variety star Frankie Vaughan has some good musical moments and Three Stooges member Joe Besser has a small part. All in all, the result is a very nice and entertaining package of romance, comedy and song.

The score is by Lionel Newman, with songs by Sammy Cahn and James Van Heusen, as well as Cole Porter's My Heart Belongs to Daddy. The numbers are staged by Jack Cole, who also choreagraphed Some Like it Hot, Kismet, Meet Me After the Show and The Al Jolson Story. Marilyn is "mari-licious" as working musical comedy actress Amanda Dell, who is looking to improve herself. Not exactly a stretch, but following the success of Some Like it Hot, she is at the height of her career and fame. Yves Montand has such a familiar name as an international film star and his relationship off-screen with Marilyn was the source of tabloid sensation. However, he shows himself to be terribly ineffective in English and is really the weakest aspect of the film.

The movie opens with a reasonably humorous montage outlining the fictional family history of French billionaire-playboy Jean-Marc Clement (Montand). A public relations problem is brought to his attention by Howard Coffman (Randall); it seems that a show called Let's Make Love is being planned on Broadway that will satirize Clement and there are difficulties in dealing with the issue. To close up the show would cause more bad publicity and, if successful, might find its way to The Ed Sullivan Show or other national outlets. Coffman convinces Clement to attend a rehearsal of the show and determine the exact nature of the humor.

Randall utilizes that particular type of fussy drollness that he plays so well and his dry observations as he facilitates Clements illusion are hilarious. He, along with Wilfrid Hyde-White as Clement's business manager, attempts to brighten up the screen in the long sequences where Marilyn is not in the picture and Montand must carry the action, but it is quite often slow going.

Upon entering the darkened theater, Clement is immediately confronted with the singing and dancing Marilyn describing how her "heart belongs to dah-deeee." She really is quite astonishing in that way that only Marilyn has and he falls for her immediately. Introducing himself to her as "Jean-Marc Clement," he is mistaken for an actor who has come to audition for the role of the billionaire in the show. Eyeing Marilyn in her "rehearsal clothes," he opts to maintain the confusion and stay close to the production... and her. Thus is born our comedic set-up.

Clement continues in rehearsal for the show and it gets quite funny as he is confronts the escalating lampoon of himself that he is forced to participate in and the fact that, just possibly, he might not be able to win the heart of the girl without the power of his money behind him. As we hurtle inevitably to the moments of revelation, there are several quite amusing set pieces. Milton Berle is particularly wry when brought in to teach Clement how to be funny. Bing Crosby drops by to help the billionaire strengthen his singing voice and the inimitable Gene Kelly shows Jean-Marc a few steps. Although the plot of the second half of the film tends to bog down occasionally with the focus on Clement, we are thankfully saved by regular musical numbers. In fairness, Montand does achieve a level of facility in his pantomime number and fantasy sequence that leads one to suspect that his stiffness as Clement might have just been acting.

Legendary director George Cukor handles the production with flare and flash. At some moments one can sense that what we see on the screen is what could be made from a difficult filming. Some of the conversations between Clement and Amanda seem oddly cut and there are lapses of positional continuity as the camera switches back and forth between the two. It might have been a tough job to piece together usable footage into a credible scene, as this is time when Marilyn reputation for being difficult was in full bloom. In Monroe history, this movie was made duing the end of her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller, who was an uncredited writer on the film. One suspects that he is responsible for some of the dialogue in which Amanda speaks about herself in terms that seem to refer to Monroe herself. Supposedly, he lobbied to extend Marilyn's part in the film, which was the reason the original star, Gregory Peck, dropped out of the project. But this seems unlikely, as Montand's screen time as Clement is more than ample and the film could only have been much less interesting with any less of Marilyn.

Even though there is a little too much of the stiff Montand, this is ultimately Marilyn's movie. Her performance is so blithely sexy and earnest that is contains a unique charm on its own. It is interesting to compare her films of this type prior to her experiences at The Actors Studio and the ones that follow. Somehow Marilyn manages to bring a depth to her performance in these light-hearted comedies that puts her in a special position in the genre. Her singing here is simply classic Marilyn that can only be copied and never duplicated. One cannot call Let's Make Love an undiscovered gem, but it is certain that it is a film worthy of reconsideration on its own merits.

Three Movie Buffs (Eric Nash) review [2/4]

DVD Times Noel Megahey

DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review from The Diamond Collection #2

DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review from The Diamond Collection #2

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

MY FAIR LADY

USA (170 mi) 1964

Murmur of the Heart to Mystery of the Wax Museum Pauline Kael

The Lerner and Loewe musical staggers along in this large production, directed by George Cukor and designed by Cecil Beaton. The film seems to go on for about 45 minutes after the story is finished. Audrey Hepburn is an affecting Eliza, though she is totally unconvincing as a guttersnipe, and is made to sing with that dreadfully impersonal Marni Nixon voice that has issued from so many other screen stars. Rex Harrison had already played Higgins more than a bit too often. With Stanley Holloway, as buoyant as ever, Wilfrid Hyde-White, and Gladys Cooper. Warners.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Lerner and Loewe's musical version of Shaw's Pygmalion transferred effectively to the screen by Cukor, the director who, thematically if not stylistically, would seem to be the perfect choice for the project (many of his films deal with the relationship between real life and assumed appearances, and Born Yesterday is a beautifully funny update of the story). The sets, costumes (by Cecil Beaton), photography, and Hermes Pan's choreography are all sumptuously impressive, and Harrison makes a fine, arrogant Professor Higgins; but Hepburn is clearly awkward as the Cockney Eliza in the first half, and in general the adaptation is a little too reverential to really come alive.

Cinematic variation on George Bernard Shaw's better-written (obviously) Pygmalion. It's also fair to say that even Shaw couldn't put Audrey Hepburn onto paper, so it's a matter of taste really, I think. Audrey is absolutely perfect-perfect accent, looks perfect, dances perfect, delivers her lines perfect, lip synchs perfect (that's actually Marni Nixon, who would bust the walls of the stratosphere with “Climb Every Mountain” in The Sound of Music -even Audrey wasn't that perfect). Audrey's matched, tangentially, by Rex Harrison, who understands and has mastered everything that us commoners finding amusing and endearing about upper crust gentlemen and, I suspect, everything they find amusing and endearing about themselves. Stuck somewhere in there as an unnecessary lynchpin (accessorized lynchpins? the aristocrats just might do it!) is Gladys Cooper, who somehow just walks into scenes with the stars without getting blown away. The songs aren't really my style for the most part (excepting “The Street Where You Live”), but they're theatrically put together and some of the lyrics are very clever. Not clever like Shaw or Euripides, but worthwhile more like a more conventionally matured Dr. Seuss. Clever rhyming, but hardly impossible to forget. It loses some of Shaw's social punch (obviously on the social side of the society v genetics debate), but gloriously fossilizes his affectionate portrayal of aristocratic intellectualism, and all that it engages and ignores. See this before you let Rex Harrison convince you that he's Dr. Dolittle .

Edinburgh U Film Society [Liz Burroughs]

In this eight-times Oscar winning (including best picture) film set in Victorian times, Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) a cockney flower seller from Covent garden is transformed into a lady by Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) and taught to speak properly. All this in an attempt to improve her standing in life and as part of a bet placed with Colonel Pickering (Wilfred Hyde-White). With a then massive budget of $20 million, director George Cukor is able to recreate the splendour of the time with both lavish sets and costumes. This is yet another film which benefits infinitely from being seen on the big screen.

This is not just a musical about romance (there is no kiss) but a comment on intelligence and the notion that being set free from ignorance will realise your potential (a popular Victorian notion to hold). Higgins spends much of the film practically bullying Eliza, after all.

Like most movie musicals this was adapted from a long-running Broadway musical. In this case most of the original Broadway cast repeat their roles in the film version, the only exception being the addition of Audrey Hepburn excellent in the role of Eliza (despite the fact that she does not do her own singing). Julie Andrews played the part on Broadway but lost out in this film version, creating a shock around Hollywood at the time and ultimately lead to Andrews winning that year's best actress Oscar. Hepburn however could not sing and was dubbed by Marni Nixon, a famous singing double of the time. The film retains its theatrical roots however, the set pieces are stunning and only a very few changes were made from the original score. Indeed, the whole thing appears very staged, in the gloriously engaging style of similar scale musical films such as Oliver.

Adapted from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, the addition of the Lerner & Loewe songs provide an extra dimension to the story. Even if you do not usually like musicals. Songs like `The Rain in Spain' and `Get Me to the Church On Time' will be familiar to most people.

Fantastically unmissable.

Turner Classic Movies review Frank Miller

In 1964, for one of the few times in his career, Warner Bros. studio head Jack Warner personally produced a film - My Fair Lady. The result, despite some controversy about the casting, was the last great musical of the studio era and the highest-grossing film in Warners' history to that time.

Warner had fallen in love with the musical version of George Bernard Shaw's classic Pygmalion -- about a phonetics expert who transforms a Cockney flower girl into a great lady by teaching her how to speak properly -- when he had seen its New York opening in 1956. The rights were controlled by CBS, but Chairman Bill Paley wouldn't even entertain movie offers for five years. Finally he accepted a then record $5.5 million from Warner, along with 50 percent of the film's gross once it passed the $20 million mark. He also stipulated that Warner hire Cecil Beaton to supervise all design aspects and hold the film's release until after the Broadway production had closed.

The latter was hardly an issue given the time lavished on assembling just the right production package. Committed to a large budget for the film (it would end up costing $17 million), Warner decided to guarantee the investment by pursuing an all-star cast, initially rejecting the show's original stars: Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and Stanley Holloway. He wanted James Cagney for the juicy supporting role of Alfred Doolittle, the leading lady's father, but Cagney had recently retired and, though he often performed Doolittle's songs at parties, had no intention of going back into battle with his former boss. So Warner ended up giving the role to Holloway.

For Henry Higgins, the stage's most famous phonetician, he originally sought Cary Grant. But Grant, gearing up for his own retirement, quipped, "Not only will I not play Higgins, but if you don't use Rex Harrison, I won't even go to the film." At least that's what the Warners publicity department said, though the statement was surprisingly similar to Grant's remarks when offered Robert Preston's role as Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man (1962), which was also filmed at Warner Bros. Warner next turned to Peter O'Toole, who had just become an international star in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), but the actor's salary demands were too great. Finally, director George Cukor asked Harrison to test for the role. In response, Harrison sent Cukor some naked Polaroids of himself. Cukor finally convinced Warner to cast him for the relatively low fee of $200,000.

In casting the female lead, however, Warner was intransigent. Audrey Hepburn was one of the screen's top stars at the time and had made the studio a great deal of money in The Nun's Story (1959). Even though there was a groundswell of support for the musical's original star, Julie Andrews, Warners argued that Hepburn's box-office power would help the film much more than anything Andrews, who had yet to make a film, could bring him. Ironically, Andrews, whom most people associated with Eliza Doolittle thanks to sales of the show's original cast album, had only been a last minute choice for the role on stage. She was brought in after Mary Martin, Deanna Durbin and Dolores Gray had all turned it down.

But even though Warner paid Hepburn $1 million, there was one part of the role she couldn't handle -- the singing. She had sung charmingly in her one previous film musical, Funny Face (1957), but that was a screen original for which numbers could be arranged to fit her talents. The My Fair Lady score was already well known, particularly as sung by Andrews, so there was little musical director Andre Previn could do to make the numbers any easier for Hepburn. She started seeing a vocal coach almost as soon as she was cast and spent hours in the recording studio recording and re-recording numbers to get them just right. But though she did a creditable job on simpler songs like "Wouldn't It Be Loverly," she wasn't up to the more operatic pieces. Halfway through filming, Cukor informed her that they were going to have to dub her songs. In truth, they had already started working with Marni Nixon, who had previously provided the singing for Deborah Kerr in The King and I (1956) and Natalie Wood in West Side Story (1961). Hepburn was heartbroken, and the studio tried to soften the blow by telling the press that Nixon had only done half of the singing. That only triggered a public protest from the singer's husband, leading to the revelation that Nixon's contribution was closer to 95 percent. Hepburn's vocals are only heard on a few brief half-spoken, half-sung passages. The bad publicity likely cost Hepburn an Oscar® nomination for Best Actress.

My Fair Lady was one big-budget film in which almost every penny can be seen on the screen. Although Warner insisted on filming it entirely in Hollywood, despite arguments from Beaton that they needed to use real British locations, he still shot the film on a lavish scale. For the cobblestone streets around Covent Garden, stones were made individually (the standard practice would have been to make identical stones from a single mold). Art director Gene Allen painted and re-painted the sets to create the illusion that some of the buildings had been standing for centuries. He also spent hours aging Hepburn's flower-vendor costumes so she wouldn't look too affluent.

Beaton's costumes for the stage show were already legendary. He outdid himself on the film, inspired by the talents of the Warner Bros. Costume Department. But he had problems dealing with Cukor from the first. Some on-set observers have described their relationship as a power struggle: Beaton was the major creative talent brought from the Broadway production while Cukor was a respected and highly individual Hollywood director. There were also some personal issues. Beaton thought Cukor vulgar, while the closeted director considered his designer too flamboyantly gay. Rumors also flew that Beaton had once stolen a lover from Cukor. Their biggest on-set argument was over Beaton's assignment to photograph the cast. Cukor felt that his photography was slowing down production and told him to stop taking shots on the set. Then he complained that posing for the portraits was overworking the actors. Yet Beaton persisted in taking pictures. After some on-set blow-ups, Cukor complained to Warner, and Beaton stopped coming to the set. Years later, Cukor would denigrate Beaton's contribution to the film, giving most of the credit for its design to Allen. Some comments Cukor made on British television in 1973 even lead Beaton to sue for slander.

But all of that was in the future. My Fair Lady opened to ecstatic reviews and solid box office. It earned $72 million on its initial release, becoming the studio's highest-grossing film to that time. It also cleaned up in year-end awards, winning Harrison a Best Actor Oscar® bringing Cukor his only Oscar® for Best Director and giving Warner Bros. its first Best Picture Oscar® since Casablanca in 1943. Even Julie Andrews got a career boost from the film. When Warner passed her over for the lead, she accepted the title role in Walt Disney's Mary Poppins (1964). Between her performance and the sympathy for her losing out on My Fair Lady, she won a Best Actress Oscar® for her first film and landed the leading role in The Sound of Music (1965), which, like Mary Poppins, would outrank My Fair Lady at the box office.

My Fair Lady Michael Grost from Classic Film and Television

DVD Times Eamonn McCusker

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]

Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Special Edition

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [Special Edition]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review Special Edition

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review

Reel.com DVD review [Kim Morgan] Special Edition

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review Special Edition

filmcritic.com (David Bezanson) review [5/5]

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review [Special Edition]

Turner Classic Movies review The idea behind the film

Turner Classic Movies review Why the film is essential

Turner Classic Movies review A look behind the camera

Turner Classic Movies review Critic comments

Turner Classic Movies review Trivia and Quotes from the film

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1994

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 2006

Eliza Doolittle, Ex-Urchin, to Start New Career Richard F. Shepard from the New York Times

Marni Nixon, a Veteran Dubber, Fills In for Miss Hepburn's Voice New York Times

'My Fair Lady': Lots of Chocolates for Miss Eliza Doolittle Bosley Crowther from the New York Times

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

Curtis, Adam

THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES: THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR

Great Britain (157 mi) 2005

The Power Of Nightmares Peter Brunette in Cannes from Screendaily

Unlike most political documentaries made in the US, this highly entertaining and informative BBC production refreshingly offers itself as a straightforward, almost academic essay, with thesis statement, development and demonstration, and concluding restatement of thesis. Its basic argument is that the American neo-conservative political movement (exemplified by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Perle) is not all that different in spirit and origin from the radical Islamic movement that culminated in the September 11 attacks on the US. Given the audacity of this thesis and the current conservative political climate in the US, one is hard-pressed to imagine the film being shown on television there, where it's needed most, though a modest theatrical run seems like a possibility. Otherwise, the documentary should get wide exposure at festivals and on non-commercial television everywhere.

The somewhat facile but fascinating idea behind the series is that the two movements, however dissimilar they appear on the surface, are both about the business of an avant-garde elite creating myths for the masses (American as well as Islamic) to establish order in the increasingly valueless society created by modernism. The parallels begin with University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss, the intellectual forefather of the neo-cons, and Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian school inspector who was so grossed out by the sight of American teenagers dancing cheek-to-cheek on a visit to Colorado in 1949 that he sat down and wrote one of the foundational texts of modern Islamic fundamentalism, and go on from there.

There's not all that much new in the first two of its three parts, but it's helpful to have it all so succinctly summarized and so cogently laid out. The film moves smartly from around 1950 to the present, carefully tracing the philosophical underpinnings and political fortunes of each movement, and contextualizing them historically, in alternating segments. Its talking heads seem authoritative, and filmmaker Adams has managed to score access to the biggest stars of the neo-con movement, like father and son team Irving and William Kristol, as well as Richard Pipes, Richard Perle, and Paul Weyrich

The juiciest bits, however, come in the often astonishing third part which avers, for example, that Osama bin Laden, far from being the mastermind behind worldwide terror, has never been more than a marginalized moneyman among a host of competing local terrorist groups, and that there really is no such thing as Al-Qaeda. Sundry experts convincingly back up claims that, for example, that bin Laden never referred to his group by that name until after the media had given it currency following the attacks of September 11. The few terrorist cases that have been prosecuted in the UK and US are shown to be based, for the most part, on utter nonsense.

It's by no means a perfect film, of course, and one longs, for example, for questioners to push the neo-cons a little bit harder in their interviews. Also, the music is often lurid and sensational, like the narrator's delivery, lending an artificially souped-up drama to material that doesn't need it. In general, though, this is a stirring, thorough yet never boring documentary that deserves to be seen by the widest possible audience.

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Possibly the most provocative documentary currently riding the festival circuit, The Power of Nightmares is, without a doubt, worth watching if you have any interest in the intellectual underpinnings of the fundamentalist Islamist movement and especially the Bush 43 administration's response to it. Regardless of the reactions it generates, it's one of the year's most incessant conversation pieces. According to Curtis, the "war on terror" has actually been a long-germinating theoretical poli-sci project on the part of neo-conservatives, 9/11 serving as the starting gun for a real-world rollout. As with Fahrenheit 9/11, which Nightmares resembles, Curtis's television program (a three-part series produced for the BBC) makes sense as far as its formal limitations will allow. As cinema, or even as above-average TV, Power is subject to cheap formal shortcuts, particularly argumentation-by-montage. It frequently plays like a Craig Baldwin parody of an Errol Morris parody of a Michael Moore film, with B-movie footage of Ali Baba or bug-eyed foreigners unleashing blood-curdling screams, placed smackdab between file footage clips of Rumsfeld or Sayyid Qutb. But Baldwin would have made a more adventurous political statement (see Tribulation 99) and, more importantly, would have permitted his own subjective position to emerge. Sure, Curtis's parade of out-of-context interview clips and sub-Carl Stalling sound effects (BOI-ing!) mostly just mark Nightmares out for what it is: well-researched television, above average but not above certain specious claims and convenient conceptual coincidences. The most "controversial" claim Curtis makes, however, and the one that has served as its pull-quote and calling card -- that "Al Qaeda" as such does not exist -- is actually more plausible than it might at first appear. It's also a deceptively modest claim, that bin Laden isn't so much a mastermind in constant contact with "cells" from Algeria to Buffalo, but that relatively independent actors petition him to fund terror projects, resulting in a "network" that is actually more like an Islamo-fascist version of the Guggenheim Foundation. (At any rate, the best refutation of Curtis's thesis that I've encountered, although not itself airtight, has been Peter Bergen's article in The Nation.) The main problem I have with the film, unlike the work of Baldwin or even Moore himself, is that Curtis, for all his showy crosscutting and single-author voiceover, implicitly adopts the mantle of objective newsroom reportage, never tipping his hand and making his position explicit. Certainly the intelligent, attentive viewer can suss out Curtis's political orientation; if you need help, his last major project, The Century of the Self, explored how Freudian psychoanalysis has, depending on your viewpoint, been either perverted or followed to its logical conclusion, in the creation of bourgeois interior subjectivity as a set of private needs sated only by consumer culture. So, take this perspective are read it back into Nightmares. Yes, the neo-conservatives and the Islamists both agree that postmodern society has become unmoored from traditional values, has no core beliefs, and will atomize into decadent consumerism and false pleasures. Okay, but Theodor Adorno also believed this, as, it seems, does Adam Curtis. But he never announces that he is attacking two modes of social theory from inside the trenches of a third: a flexible, humanistic version of materialist leftism. Given that I tend to share his perspective, I'm rather galled that he doesn't cop to it. Those who find this position anathema will, unfortunately, consider Curtis's coyness a flat-out dealbreaker. [NOTE: If you have broadband and a whole lot of time (say, the overnight hours), you can download the entire program from this public-domain website. Despite this, theatrical distributors are still circling, and Nightmares is slated to open commercially at New York's Cinema Village in December.]

Neo-Fantasies and Ancient Myths: Adam Curtis on The Power of ... Neo-Fantasies and Ancient Myths: Adam Curtis on The Power of Nightmares by Robert Koehler, including an interview with the director, from Cinema Scope (2005)

The possibility that Donald Rumsfeld and Al Qaeda’s one-man think tank, Ayman al-Zawahiri, could share a lot in common sounds unlikely enough that it could be true, although when I first heard about this assertion in Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, while standing in the midst of a noisy anti-war demonstration during the Santa Barbara film festival, it also sounded deliriously ironic. But there’s power in Nightmares, and its startling and paradigm-shifting thesis—that American neo-conservatives and radical Islamists are two sides of the same agenda intent on waging war on Western liberalism while upholding fundamentalist religion—is generated by Curtis’ methodical history of the movements, his dispassionate description of extremism, and his refinement of the art of the essay film through the filter of visually biting wit.

Those who see Curtis’ new film with or without the benefit of his previous four-part BBC series, The Century of the Self (2002), will be impressed by his sprawling narrative perspective, which begins with how Freud’s study of the irrational mind indirectly but profoundly provides American corporate interests with the propaganda tools (euphemistically known as “public relations”) to appeal to and assuage people’s selfish desires. But it gets better: This commodifying of the self prepares the soil for the politics of self fostered by everything from depoliticized post-Lefties to Reaganite Randians, which in turn, in The Power of Nightmares, provides both neo-conservatives and Islamist thinkers like Sayed Kotb material for their case that there’s nothing scarier than a fat, happy, and soulless West that lives for a trip to the mall.

Consciously going against the tradition of journalism that assumes that political power resides in Congresses and Parliaments, Curtis’ analysis approaches subjects that hide in plain sight. Just as Century of the Self finally convinces you that Edward Bernays, the curiously obscure creator of PR, is one of the 20th century’s key figures, Nightmares persuades that the key to understanding radical Islamism is not Osama bin Laden, but Kotb and his call for a popular religious revolution that erases the perceived evils of secular anomie. The ideas spill out of Curtis’ head—and from his hypnotic voice—like an essay turned into a thrill ride, reinforced by an inventive assembly of film and news clips, accompanied by music from Eno, John Carpenter, Morricone, Shostakovich, Ives, and John Barry, that produces constantly jarring but pleasing effects, as though the theme from Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion (1970) were just the thing to accompany a trip into the menacing universe of Richard Perle.

Somewhat wary of Curtis’ provocative report, the BBC originally broadcast the three-part, three-hour series last October without much promotion. But the resulting wave of generally positive response across most of the British political spectrum surprised the network, which then supported Curtis to update the program after a December decision by UK ’s Law Lords that ruled detention of terror suspects without trial was illegal. After the series’ first North American appearance in Santa Barbara , no American network showed the courage to air it—in contrast to Canada , where the series ran on CBC’s The Passionate Eye on April 24. An invitation from Cannes prompted Curtis to trim the series to a two-hour-and-37-minute film, mostly excising the TV version’s necessarily repetitive bits and pieces, which in his view, “helped hone the message.” The film of The Power of Nightmares can now be set alongside Cannes’ last foray in newspaper cinema, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), which also attacked the current political and media culture of fear. But where Moore casually ignored any facts that didn’t serve his purpose, while engaging in a sloppy form of histrionic, drive-by journalism, Curtis firmly rejects this. His is a dispassionate historiography of movements driven by ideological ideas, which then examines the very exploitation of fears that Moore instinctively seems to understand, yet imitates. Perhaps even more than a disorganized but lethal terror threat, Curtis is troubled by an emotionalized culture in the West that has allowed itself to become vulnerable to the spins and unfounded claims of ideologues in search of new enemies.

CINEMA SCOPE: A theme that you introduce in The Century of the Self and continue in The Power of Nightmares is how intellectual cadres assert that elites are essential for managing society even as they try to conceal their elitism from the outside world.

ADAM CURTIS: I was extremely aware of the connections. My working title for The Power of Nightmares was The Elements of the Self. Ever since the French Revolution, elites have been terrified of the masses and their so-called irrational forces. The Century of the Self was about how Freud’s ideas, which explained this irrationality, were taken by various elites and used to try to manage those forces and also exploit them. The argument goes that people are irrational, that irrationality can be dangerous, and the best way to handle it is to keep it happy and fed. Out of that came the modern consumer society, which is based on catering to people’s needs. The neo-conservatives and Sayed Kotb’s Islamists worried that what was going to emerge were self-seeking individuals who cared only about the satisfaction of their own desires, and who then corrode the bonds that hold society together. What needed to be re-established was a set of moral guidelines. What linked the Islamists to the neo-cons is that they were enemies of this new self that had emerged partly out of Freud’s ideas of the irrational self-seeking individual.

SCOPE: Was it hard to make sense of how secular neo-conservatives ally with fundamentalist Christians, and as the former neo-con Michael Lind points out in the film, that this was basically a Leninist tactic?

CURTIS: It’s one of the strangest political alliances in modern political history: On one hand, an elite, mostly Jewish, mainly secular group of political idealists who believe that society needed to be reconfigured to save it from itself, and the mass of fundamentalist Christians in America’s heartland who believe that Israel, during the second coming, will be engulfed in a conflagration. The leading neo-conservative thinkers, like Irving Kristol, would argue that that sort of revealed religion is necessary for the masses, since it lays down moral laws. To be blunt, the older neo-conservatives who came out of the old left would see American fundamentalist Christians as, in Lenin’s term, useful idiots. What’s happened, though, as Lind and others said to me, is that these neo-conservatives have come to believe their own myths. Both critics and those who’ve been involved in the neo-conservative movement argue that a shift happened. At home, they wanted religion; abroad, they wanted this idea of America as an exceptional country destined to bring democracy to the world. They saw that originally as a way of holding the nation together.

SCOPE: Didn’t this shift occur when the neo-conservatives attained real political power?

CURTIS: Power is very seductive, and it can make you believe your myths. I think that if you believe your own myths, it’s very easy to find the evidence to prove them. It’s human nature. We all construct reality out of fragments of evidence, you and I do it day in and day out. That’s what they did with the USSR in the 70s, and that’s what they did with Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction. They took fragments and knitted them together and they did it with such force because they believed it was important.

SCOPE: You address this contradiction within the American conservative movement that’s embodied in Reagan. In The Century of the Self, Reagan is presented as the natural politician of the self-interested consumerist politics. Then, in The Power of Nightmares, Reagan is the perfect politician for the neo-conservatives. Of course, these two movements on the right are at loggerheads with each other, along with the Randian libertarians whose politics is all about the self.

CURTIS: When I started out with this series, I was going to put a third string in, and I planned to interview people about Ayn Rand. I think the really interesting political battles and discussions of our time are not between left and right, they are within the right. Between, say, neo-conservatives’ elitism and Ayn Rand libertarians who believe in maximum individual freedom. In the UK , Thatcher managed to hold these factions together throughout the 80s, as did Reagan. They then broke apart, and what’s really interesting is that when Bush Sr. lost his re-election in 1992, it was precisely because of the battle between these factions.

SCOPE: These neo-conservatives have frequently brought up a phrase that was the title of a US history textbook that I had in school—The Last Best Hope. It precisely describes the notion of American exceptionalism, and it’s at least as old as James K. Polk.

CURTIS: Exactly. They’ve reached backwards to drag out one of the great myths of America as a way of rejuvenating the country. The argument goes like this: Domestically, you reach back in the past and you reawaken the power of religion to give meaning and purpose to people’s lives. In foreign policy, you reach back and drag out the myth of American exceptionalism to give meaning and purpose not just to America but to the world. A critical analysis would say that this is a simplifying vision indulging in fantasy.

SCOPE: Did you ask Kristol if his movement, now that it’s in power, has now encountered its own Vietnam and Watergate all at once?

CURTIS: You can’t ask Kristol this question because he doesn’t see himself as part of the inside group. He really sees himself as a revolutionary. I think it’s a really good question about that lot: Have they become corrupted by the very forces that they set out to get rid of? And does that then corrupt their decision-making? If you talk to neo-conservatives, they still believe that theirs is an awesome revolutionary force that may well bring democracy to the world. And that there may be stumbles along the way, as in Iraq ; Trotsky would say that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. It’s very interesting to consider that their writings used to argue that the liberal project failed because it had unintended consequences and opposite results. I think the same criticism can be levelled at the neo-conservatives.

SCOPE: When evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or links between Al Qaeda and Saddam doesn’t exist, it’s fascinating to see somebody like Richard Perle insist that they do.

CURTIS: You can hear it in my voice when Perle sticks to his claim of an Al Qaeda/Saddam link, and I ask, “Really?” I didn’t expect him to do that. From my sense sitting with him in that room, he really does believe it. In a way, whether you agree with them or disagree, you have to admire this conviction. The thing I’ve come away with from making this film, is if the left really wants to change the world, then they need to set up lots of little organizations like Kristol and Perle and other neo-cons did, and work at it hard. Any time the media comes forward, friendly or not, use them as a vehicle to put forward your ideas. Until the left realizes this, it’s not going anywhere.

SCOPE: We’re at an interesting point in history, since their theories are being put into practice. Is George W. Bush the first neo-conservative President?

CURTIS: Yes, and he became so from the emotional effect of September 11. What was so powerful in the wake of that terrible tragedy and the apocalyptic mood that took over the country was that the neo-conservatives offered an explanation for why this had happened and what should be done about it. If everyone around you is frozen with fear and you can explain to people why something terrible has happened and you can offer what looks like a solution, you have an immense amount of power.

SCOPE: When you describe a world in which a liberal project has created a mass of people without core beliefs, that’s where you draw this fascinating link with radical Islamists. Where did you come across this?

CURTIS: By approaching this project from an odd angle. My original aim was to do a series of films about conservative political philosophy and this debate among conservatives over allowing complete freedom or allowing an elite to manage things. And in my wide reading about conservative political thought I came across the writings of Sayed Kotb. What’s fascinating is that the radical Islamists rose to power and influence at the very same time as the neo-conservatives. In the 70s, Nasser ’s great optimistic vision of a technocratic society, of pan-Arab sovereignty with a secular government, fell apart. And that’s when Islamism turned to the ideas of Kotb and began to rise in response to this collapse. Because I came to it from this point of view, I saw that we’re not dealing with an alien force in Islamism, but with the same theme. Kotb was an educated man who had read Marx, Nietzsche, and Sartre. He was examining the same worries shared by many critics of modern individualism. It’s a criticism that somehow consumerist individualism has led to a banal empty society, where nobody really believes in anything any longer and the real feeling at the heart of it is: Is that all there is? Kotb was a literary critic, not some mad mullah in a beard. He understood Western culture and was working within that same pessimistic tradition as the neo-cons. The parallels are in their philosophical roots. I make it clear that what they then set out to do was very different, but I do think that it’s more valuable to look at them as two sides of this same pessimistic conservatism about modern industrial culture.

SCOPE: One of the shocks in The Power of Nightmares is seeing how various radical Islamist factions in Algeria failed in their revolution in the 90s, and proceeded to kill themselves off.

CURTIS: Algeria is incredibly important in this history, and few fully understand this, especially in America . The frustration felt by the Islamist movement was so incredibly raw when they were denied what they saw as the prize of having a Sunni revolution in Algeria along with the Shiite revolution in Iran . You can trace that failure as one of the forces that fed into Zawahiri’s new theories he developed in 1998.

SCOPE: One of the film’s central but most contrarian ideas is that Al Qaeda doesn’t exist as an organization. Is this the most difficult concept for audiences to comprehend?

CURTIS: There are two things here. One is a side issue. As far as we know, Osama bin Laden did not use the term “Al Qaeda” to identify his group before September 11. The main issue is whether there’s the organized network that most of our politicians and journalists have been stating exists. What I’m saying in this film is that our politicians and journalists are fighting the last war. They’re giving us a picture of the Soviet Union in the Cold War that misses the reality of radical Islamism. If you look at radical Islamist history, its great moments come in 1979 with Khomeini and the Iranian revolution, and then in 1989, with what they perceived as the defeat of the USSR . The story of the 90s is of a movement that’s stopped politically, and then when it turns to armed uprising with the hope that the masses will rise up, they don’t. If you talk to Islamists and read their writing—Zawahiri’s writings are very articulate—they believe that they had failed. There’s this massive debate within the movement, with most saying that they should keep on trying in places like Uzbekistan , and try to Islamize the Palestinian conflict. It’s only a small part of it, around bin Laden, which argues you must kill the head of the snake. Many of Zawahiri’s own group left him because of this. The more you look into it, the more it becomes a disorganized mess. It’s very illuminating when you see the movement as one that failed to persuade the masses. If you talk to anyone who’s done proper research in Afghanistan , they’ll tell you that the camps there were very diffuse and disorganized. I also looked for evidence of “sleeper cells,” and although you can find evidence of horrible, nasty individuals, and groups who want to carry out techniques of mass terror, there’s no evidence of a coherent organized network with a man sitting in an Afghani cave stroking a cat and sending out his orders.

SCOPE: This Cold War attitude is visually captured with filmic and TV iconography, with Gunsmoke and Perry Mason. It seemed to me that Cold War movies also inform the rhetoric. It’s summed up when you include this stunning Meet the Press clip of host Tim Russert interviewing Rumsfeld and holding up this outlandish illustration of an elaborate Al Qaeda cave complex that’s directly out of Goldfinger (1964).

CURTIS: Yes, this is part of the reason why we misunderstand the reality of the actual threat. It’s a modern thing, an idea that inspires groups and individuals around the world who don’t have any necessary connection with each other. Our problem is that our governments have conceptualized it in a completely different way, using vast military force to try and find the heart of the network and then destroy it. It’s missing the point. Indeed, the research shows that this fragment of radical Islamism may be weaker than politicians think it is. What astonished me when I did the research for The Power of Nightmares is that no one in television in Britain , or in the US so far as I know, had done a proper history of Islamism as a political movement. It was portrayed in the media as if it had come out of the blue like a terrifying force.

SCOPE: What you say is breathtaking. Isn’t that a condemnation itself of the way information is being imparted to the public?

CURTIS: Something very strange happened to the US media in the wake of September 11. It became deeply emotionalized for entirely understandable reasons, but out of this came an inability to discuss all of this except in emotional terms. People on US television adopt positions on the left or right, and shout at each other. I find this reaction to the new terror threat astonishing, because in the 80s we in London lived with IRA bombings all the time. That was a frightening time, and we took it calmly and boldly. Now, if an Islamist attack went off on a similar scale to an IRA bombing, there would be mass panic. What’s so fascinating is why we’ve become so emotionalized.

I’m putting forward two things—a history that hopefully illuminates, and then an argument about why all this has happened. My aim is to open up debate. And I think this is what’s necessary in America at this time: to debate all of this. I’m astonished that no one has done a history of this in the US . Whatever you think of Sayed Kotb—evil man, visionary revolutionary—he’s the most important ideologist of the Islamist movement. His ideas directly inspired the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center . So why has your television not told you about this for three years? It’s astonishing.

SCOPE: The phrase “the power of nightmares” describes fear. And the media, even more than politicians, is talented at refuelling that fear. Does this concern you?

CURTIS: One cannot underestimate how the attacks of September 11 felt apocalyptic in America , a country that had grown up to wealth and power during a frozen time, during the Cold War, when everything was quite certain. Now, emotion is beginning to settle. People are beginning to question if it’s quite as simple as the picture of the world painted by neo-conservatives. That raises questions about to what extent this has been a cartoon-like fiction. And that really now we’re going to have face up to a more complex reality, and possibly be a bit braver about it.

SCOPE: What was the audience response when the show ran in Britain , and what did your critics have to say?

CURTIS: We were surprised how seriously people took it. The BBC was very worried that we were going to be accused of being irresponsible. I think because the first two-thirds of the work tell a factual history, when you come to the conclusions, they have weight. If you are telling people a history of Islamism, and you tell them that actually in the 90s, the radical Islamist movement almost failed because no one in the masses would rise up and follow them, then people are prepared to take more seriously your arguments of it being a complex, fractured movement, because you’ve actually shown why. Since we did a relatively straight history of these two movements, the telling gained a great deal of power. So it was taken very seriously. Only two serious commentators took issue with it, one because I didn’t deal with the Palestinian question—which is a reasonable criticism—and the other because they were a neo-conservative sympathizer. The BBC was quietly astonished.

SCOPE: Any response from the Blair government?

CURTIS: None. They kept quiet. What their motive for silence was, I can only guess. But they shut up and ignored it. The film gave articulation to a growing mood of questioning the way politics is being practiced. People began discussing the politics of fear in the wake of the program. There is now a healthy debate.

SCOPE: But if Blair were to respond to you, wouldn’t he argue that political leaders need to assume the worst, while hoping for the best?

CURTIS: Political leaders can assume all sorts of things. But what I argue is if you imagine the worst that’s going to happen, then anything can happen. Then you have to anticipate everything, and you get trapped in this world of your own imagination and dominated by those with the darkest scenarios. And you can do so while ignoring all sorts of other realities. We’re still faced with a real threat of nuclear weapons that could annihilate your country in matter of seconds. This is a much greater threat than anything that’s called “Al Qaeda,” yet everyone seems to have forgotten about that. Good politics is balancing a sensible anticipation from evidence of what might happen and balancing that against the costs of what you want to do.

SCOPE: What’s striking at the end of The Power of Nightmares is your certainty that the nightmares will end, forcing politicians with no ideas to confront the fantasies they’ve created. But we’re left thinking, “Okay, but when?”

CURTIS: To be blunt, that’s not my job. I’m critically analyzing and arguing a theory. The reason I state this with certainty is that people aren’t as frightened as politicians think they are. Fear is the last redoubt of the lack of vision. And I don’t think politics can go on without any substance to it. I’m optimistic, but I also might be wrong. A cynical journalist said to me, “I think you might be right, but all the terrorists need is a bomb every 18 months.”

SCOPE: What’s been rarely noted about The Power of Nightmares is its cinematic qualities and your witty use of music and found film. What about this use of filmic wit, which is even more sophisticated than in The Century of the Self?

CURTIS: I use wit since one of the things I’m trying to illustrate is that we’re living in a cartoon-like version of reality. Humour undercuts the mix of fact and fiction used by the politics of fear-mongering. And if you’re trying to illustrate complex arguments, images and music can help. They just make it easier. It’s a way of engaging people by telling a story rather than talking in general terms. It just comes naturally to me.

SCOPE: What I noticed that’s different here from The Century of the Self is that while there’s still highly dense archival work, there’s now ironic use of image and sound, like the juxtaposition of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” with a celebratory Islamic dance.

CURTIS: Well, it’s funny for one thing, and it’s designed to undercut this completely unreasoned fear of Islamism. The idea that you can place a pop song over Islamist dancing makes it all the less threatening. And it’s not offensive in the Arab world. There’s a great tradition in Arab culture of taking the piss out of the elites. It’s perfectly permissible in the Sunni and Shiite worlds to make fun of the mullahs, who tend to be full of themselves. The film critic from Cairo ’s biggest daily, Al-Ahram, came up to me and said “You’re the first Westerner to get it right.” I was terribly pleased with this because I had judged the tone also for the Arab world as much as for my own.

SCOPE: Why do you recycle some of the archived images from The Century of the Self, while using it in a completely different way?

CURTIS: The posh word is that I sample my own material. I like those pictures. The truth about cinema is that images can mean very different things depending on the context they’re put in. The Kuleshov Effect. I don’t see why you can’t play with pictures when you’re being serious. That’s my main aim. Because then you get a sense of someone enjoying themselves, and when you get that, then people listen to what you’re doing. I would argue that people watch Fox News because they’re really enjoying what they’re doing. When I tell this to liberals, I get this complete silence in the room. But I say, look, until liberal media has as much fun and as clear an idea of what it wants to say as Fox, it’s not going to get any influence back.

George Mason University; "Stop the Straussians Before They Lie Again" William H. Leckie Jr. from History News Network, June 9, 2003

Guardian Unlimited The Making of the Terror Myth, by Andy Beckett, October 15, 2004

review Politics of ‘Fear Over Vision’ Explored on British Television, by Tom Regan from the Christian Science Monitor, October 18, 2004

The National Review [Clive Davis] The Power of Bad Television, October 21, 2004

Common Dreams The Power of Nightmares, by Katrina vanden Heuvel from The Nation, Januray 26, 2005

Cannes film festival: The film US TV networks dare not show | Film ... Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, May 12, 2005

Interview with Adam Curtis A Growing Public Distrust, by David D’Arcy from GreenCine, May 12, 2005

indieWIRE @ CANNES (Keep An Eye On..."The Power of Nightmares") Eugene Hernandez, May 18, 2005

The Nation [Peter Bergen] Beware the Holy War, June 2, 2005

"Adam Curtis talks with Errol Morris" It Becomes a Self-Fulfilling Thing, October 31, 2005

Newsday Neo-cons: everything to fear in fear itself, by John Anderson, December 9, 2005

The Daily Nexus Rebecca Riley, January 6, 2006

Part 1 official page Baby It’s Cold Outside, from the BBC

Part 2 official page The Phantom Victory, from the BBC

Part 3 official page The Shadows in the Cave, from the BBC

Power of Nightmares re-awakened Questions for Adam Curtis from BBC viewers

Epinions [Macresarf1]

Media Lens Media Alert

End of Media James Slone

Filmcritic.com [Chris Barsanti]

crookedtimber Chris Bertram

San Francisco Bay Guardian Susan Gerhard

PopMatters Jesse Hicks

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) capsule review The entire film may be viewed in 3 parts on YouTube from this review

The Power of Nightmares - Part III The entire film may be viewed in 3 parts on YouTube here, accompanied by written transcripts

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear ... Kuro5hin

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Oweb Gleiberman

Bright Lights Film Journal review Joanne Bealy

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3.5/4] Ken Fox

Off the Telly Ian Jones from the BBC

San Francisco Chronicle [Jonathan Curiel]

New York Times (registration req'd) Deconstructing the Realities of Politics and Terrorism, by A. O. Scott, December 9, 2005

Power of Nightmares background suggested reading list

The Power of Nightmares - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Curtis, Simon

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN C+ 79

Great Britain USA (99 mi) 2011 ‘Scope Official site

Once more during the holiday season, viewers are blitzed by trailers of two big production, Hollywood style releases that include Meryl Streep as Maggie Thatcher in THE IRON LADY and Michelle Williams in this film as Marilyn Monroe, where in both instances the actresses don’t so much inhabit the real life roles as consume the part in body and spirit. Williams has been getting the best reviews of her life for this film, where Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] has already declared her an Academy Award nominee, and there is no doubt that she is excellent, as she continually pouts like a hurt puppy with demure affectations that demand not just attention but adulation whenever she’s around and she wears many of the same costumes and hairstyles, matches the voice inflection, even sings like Marilyn, but never for a single second can she be confused for the real persona of Ms. Monroe. Similarly, but getting much fewer raves, Kenneth Branagh as Laurence Olivier, the director and actor in the movie, is a stickler for things like rules and punctuality and shooting on time, where Branagh hams up the role with pompous relish, coming across as a tyrannical authoritarian who throws tantrums on the set while waiting for Ms. Monroe to show up. Based on the personal memoirs of Colin Clark, who had a minor role in the movie production of a relatively 2^nd rate film, THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL (1957), shot in London, the story suggests he was an invaluable comfort to Ms. Monroe, perhaps even having an affair with her when she was suffering a crisis in confidence after her shattered marriage started to unravel with playwright Arthur Miller just weeks after they were married. Despite Ms. Monroe’s real life reputation as the world’s greatest sex symbol, this is a rather timid and sexless version of her life. Like the exaggerated self promotion and fictionalized speculation surrounding personal memoirs, this suggested love affair, much like the one portrayed in Eastwood’s J. EDGAR (2011), may never have happened at all, but that is the story of movies, to make one wonder.

A child of wealth and privileged status, Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) is determined to make a name for himself in the movies, and to do it without his family’s help. To this end, he runs off to London looking for a job in Olivier’s next production, which happens to star the infamous Ms. Monroe, where she is continually hounded by gawkers, photographers and the British tabloids. Colin lands a role as an errand boy for Olivier and the producers, often to fetch the wayward American star, where in her ever prolonged absences she learns to depend upon his company. While Olivier and the entire cast are waiting for Marilyn to appear on the set for an informal run through, Marilyn can’t go anywhere without her personal acting coach, method acting instructor Paula Strasberg (Zoë Wanamaker), where she remains personally and psychically inseparable, unable to make any move without her, a crutch if ever there was one, which completely exasperates the director on the film who simply wants Marilyn to effortlessly exude her natural sexual charm on camera for what amounts to a light and breezy costume comedy. Marilyn’s approach, however, working for the legendary Olivier, considered the British actor of his generation, was if preparing for great British theater, wanting to broaden her reputation and be taken seriously as an actress. Despite flubbing her lines and behaving like a diva offscreen, her onscreen presence couldn’t have been more captivating, much like floating on air, making those around her appear to be wearing lead boots. Her natural beauty and air of naïve vulnerability was like nothing seen before or sense, as she depicts a neurosis laden modern temperament in every frame yet remains stuck in these ancient and sexually repressive costume dramas. Michelle Williams is especially brilliant in the musical numbers and the successful daily shoots, where she’s literally mimicking this legendary screen presence, but her real life depictions of a fragile star depending on the kindness of a stranger, that being Colin, simply have no weight behind them.

Colin Clark’s character is the real dead weight of the film, as he never evolves past a star gazer, a young kid who idealizes what’s in front of him, who’s already star struck just getting onto a movie set for the first time in his life, where his infatuation with movies is right out of CINEMA PARADISO (1988), most likely resorting to fantasy in his memoirs, where there’s a certain depth missing for why Monroe would be attracted to him in the first place, as he’s just a kid, really, like Jimmy Olsen at the Daily Planet, young, naïve, and inexperienced. Without a real romance, but largely a friendly kiss and chat affair, this poses the question as to why make the film in the first place? It’s lack of real drama is likely to be seen as something of a disappointment, where only the exploitation of a screen legend combined with a hot Hollywood property offers the enticing sizzle this film hopes to achieve. Part of the problem is also costuming Ms. Williams to resemble Ms. Monroe, where she’s not as shapely, so they’ve obviously added padding around her hips to help recreate the image, which alters the curve of her natural waistline, but this shouldn’t be so noticeable. Unfortunately, due to the tightness of the dresses worn, this is an unnecessary distraction throughout the picture. Also, Marilyn Monroe’s face is so familiar, literally an iconic image, that it’s impossible to ever imagine you’re seeing anyone other than actress Michelle Williams onscreen, especially in the close ups. Perhaps with previous Oscar winners Colin Firth as King George VI (2010), Sean Penn as Harvey Milk (2008), Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin (2006), Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote (2005), or Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles (2004), the personal identification with the screen image was not so entrenched in the viewer’s imaginations as Marilyn Monroe, perhaps the most photographed screen legend ever. That notwithstanding, Michelle Williams, as always, gives a first rate performance, but she’s continually overshadowed by the hovering presence of the real Marilyn Monroe, where she pales in comparison.

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones]

Adapted from a memoir by Colin Clark, this British feature recounts his brief friendship with Marilyn Monroe in 1957, when he was a lowly assistant for Laurence Olivier's production company and she was causing her usual diva problems on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl. There's nothing here about Monroe that we haven't been told a thousand times already: she was sexy, she was troubled; she was warm, she was selfish; she took pills, she lit up the screen. Michelle Williams shoulders the daunting task of portraying the screen legend, and though she requires a body double with the appropriate curves, she gives a sweet and nicely vulnerable performance. British TV veteran Simon Curtis directed; with Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson, Judi Dench, Kenneth Branagh (as Olivier), and Julia Ormond (as Vivien Leigh).

She’s just a little girl (not) from Little Rock, and he’s a bright young thing who’d like to give her more than a Continental kiss on the hand. Their story is purportedly based in fact, but did that blond bombshell Marilyn Monroe (Williams) really fall for third assistant director Colin Clark (Redmayne) on the set of Laurence Olivier’s 1957 romantic comedy, The Prince and the Showgirl? Simon Curtis’s watchably third-rate biopic doesn’t try to sort out truth from fabrication; that would be like “teaching Urdu to a badger,” as the short-tempered Olivier—played by a whole-hog-slicing Branagh—might say. Better to print the legend and be done with it.

And who has a more buxomly built-in mythology than Monroe, who could captivate an audience with one knowing wink? The very talented Michelle Williams does a spot-on impersonation of the starlet, from her shimmy-shake gait to her gasping-for-air snicker. But she also manages to show how Monroe’s calculated surface effects masked a soul tortured by uncertainty and the pressures of the spotlight. Williams brings a raw, unpredictable energy to all her scenes, especially those in which Monroe is subjected to skin-crawlingly patronizing insults from Olivier, or when she finds a surprising friend in the jaded grande dame Sybil Thorndike (a witty bit of mimicry by Judi Dench). She almost makes you forget that My Week with Marilyn is little more than a For Your Consideration ad stretched to feature length.

The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]

Since The King's Speech managed to deceive the undiscerning with its contrived narrative, cartoonish performances, blasé, visionless biopic aesthetic and after school special message of overcoming obstacles, it's likely that a similarly bland British biopic will pop up for the next few years at Oscar time, much to the delight of bandwagon-hopping American critics and Oscar voters.

Making its bow for the 2011 acting nominations is the "true" story of documentarian Colin Clark's (Eddie Redmayne) brief experience on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, working as an assistant to Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams). And according to My Week with Marilyn, these silver screen legends had nothing better to do than confide in an emotionally immature 23-year-old about their deepest fears and thoughts while working on this film, often at exceedingly opportune moments, such as the last day of shooting or the night of a miscarriage.

It's all framed with a clumsy eye that is presumably aware that the performances are more important than continuity or basic visual flow, which actually works, since the only thing worth watching is Michelle Williams. While she pulls off the breathy voice and breezy, dippy smile, it's her unembellished depiction of Monroe's off-screen presence that compels as complex characterization. She manages to portray Monroe as a relentlessly needy and insecure woman feeding off any form of validation without vilifying or reducing her to a martyr or archetype.

On the other hand, Branagh's astute mimicry of Olivier comes off as more cartoonish than complex, much like Dougray Scott's depiction of Arthur Miller. And in the middle of it all is the homely Eddie Redmayne, running around with the same enthusiastic grin, giving supposed knowing glances when Olivier confides in him that he's envious and in awe of Monroe's talent, or when Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench) shares a wise titbit about love at the least likely of moments.

He, like the film, is a work of empty contrivance ― far too cutesy and convenient to be taken seriously as an actual human being telling a true story.

At the Q&A following the press screening of My Week with Marilyn, director Simon Curtis said he fell in love with the two Colin Clark memoirs the script is based on because of the insights they provided into Marilyn Monroe. A funny thing must have happened on the way to Film Forum though. Either those insights just didn't make it into the screenplay or else Curtis knows a lot less about Hollywood's Lady of Perpetual Sorrow than I had thought was possible for any reasonably well-educated citizen of the developed world.

Michelle Williams's Marilyn is a thinking, feeling human being, but My Week with Marilyn's script is so banal ("I'm not a goddess. I just want to be loved like a regular girl," the poor girl has to say) that she relies almost entirely on body language and facial expressions to convey Monroe's essence. Viewed from a distance or with dark glasses on, she looks remarkable like her, especially when she recreates the funny little dance Monroe's character performs to amuse herself when she's left alone for a bit in The Prince and the Showgirl, the god-awful romantic comedy Monroe was filming under the direction of her co-star, Laurence Olivier (brayed by Kenneth Branagh), during the week of the movie's title.

Williams looks pretty convincing from the neck up too, as long as she's wearing dark glasses, but when she takes them off there's just no forgetting that she isn't Monroe. That's partly because the actress can't quite empty the personality from her face or the intelligence from her eyes, a trick that was part of Monroe's signature come-hither, no-boundaries/no-judgment sex-doll expression. But it's also that Williams just doesn't look much like Monroe, and lord knows we all know what Monroe looked like.

That might not have mattered much if we'd been offered more of Marilyn than her too-familiar surface, but the film only tells us tired truisms about her. Did you know that she never got the love she needed as a child? That she popped too many pills as an adult? That she was afraid everyone she loved would abandon her, maybe because just about all of them eventually did? That she longed to become a great actress but never believed she had made it? Of course you did.

The most interesting questions are left unanswered, if they're even asked. Was she a great actress or just a "natural," born to seduce the camera? And what was behind her notoriously difficult behavior on the set? Miriam Bale's article about Monroe for MUBI provides far more detailed and interesting answers to those questions than the movie does.

Colin Clark (the perpetually gobsmacked-looking Eddie Redmayne) was a sheltered manchild of 23 when he got his week with Monroe. They spent much of that time playing hooky from the film set when the star got tired of Olivier's constant sniping, the pressure she felt to excel, and the hackneyed script: "She doesn't feel real," she says of her character.

It's fun, at first, to watch Colin fulfill his fantasy of working in the movie business, hanging around with glamorous types like Olivier, and his flirty wife Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond), the menschy Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench), and, of course, Monroe. But he loses us as surely as he does the spunky wardrobe girl he was wooing (Emma Watson at her most wooden) when he tumbles for Monroe and (oh dear, oh dear) imagines that she's fallen for him too. With his stunned-animal gaze, late-adolescent lack of self-knowledge or perspective, and laughable romantic fantasy, it's impossible to take Colin seriously; he's a comic foil who's been written as a dramatic lead.

The relationship between Monroe and Olivier, who are portrayed as roaringly needy narcissists with competing agendas, is more interesting than the one between Monroe and Colin. Unfortunately, it's more talked about than shown, consisting mostly of Branagh spitting out elegantly bitchy insults: "Trying to teach Marilyn to act is like teaching Urdu to a badger," he declares. In one of the best lines, Colin tells Monroe that Olivier is a great actor who wants to be a movie star, she's a movie star who wants to be a great actress, and this movie won't do either one of them any favors.

At times like that, I wondered what Ernst Lubitsch or Preston Sturges or Howard Hawkes might have done with this material, reworked as fast-talking comedy. Just think of the possibilities: A wildly popular and hopelessly insecure actress crosses the ocean to make a meretricious piece of junk with a bunch of aging theatrical stars to show the world that she can act, but all she does is inadvertently prove that the stage actors can't hold a candle to her on film. Meanwhile, a star-struck kid goes gaga over the actress and tries to "save" her from the profession she's trying so hard to be worthy of.

Come to think of it, it's just the kind of role Monroe would have played the hell out of.

Marilyn on the Couch on Notebook | MUBI Miriam Bale from Mubi, July 13, 2011

Marilyn Monroe’s Brains Jonathan Rosenbaum, December 5, 2005

Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey] also seen here: DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]

The A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]

Slant Magazine [Jaime N. Christley]

Village Voice [Karina Longworth]

Review: Michelle Williams finds the bruised soul of My Week ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Filmcritic.com Bill Gibron

Time [Mary Pols]

Spectrum Culture [Danny Djeljosevic]

Sound On Sight Kenneth Broadway

My Week With Marilyn Review | Look At The Stars, Look ... - Pajiba Brian Prisco

AFI FEST Review: You’ll Want To Spend More Than Just a Week With Williams in ‘My Week With Marilyn’ Allison Lohring from Film School Rejects

NPR [Bob Mondello]

The New Yorker [David Denby]

Hugo | The Artist | A Dangerous Method | My ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Boxoffice Magazine [Vadim Rizov]

Christian Science Monitor [Peter Rainer]

Verbicide Magazine [Matthew Schuchman] also seen here: Shalit's 'Stache [Matthew Schuchman]

The Film Stage [Danny King]

'My Week With Marilyn' Review | Screen Rant Kofi Outlaw

Film Review Online [James Dawson]

FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [James Jay Edwards]

Little White Lies Magazine [Jess Holland]

Bina007 Movies [Caterina Benincasa]

New York Post [Lou Lumenick]

Screenjabber.com [Doug Cooper]

Napierslogs' Movie Expositions [Anne Campbell]

New York Daily News [Joe Neumaier]

My Week with Marilyn Review Peter Travers from The Rolling Stone

USA Today [Claudia Puig]

Entertainment Weekly [Lisa Schwartzbaum]

The Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]

Variety [Ronnie Schelb]

My Week With Marilyn – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

The magic of Marilyn Monroe Jess Cartner-Morley from The Guardian, November 15, 2011

My Week with Marilyn: get the look photo stills from The Guardian, November 15, 2011

My Week with Marilyn: fact or self-serving fiction? Alex von Tunzelmann from The Guardian, November 15, 2011

Eddie Redmayne: the loneliness of being a hot young actor Fran Babb from The Guardian, November 18, 2011

My Week with Marilyn – review | Film | The Observer Philip French

My Week with Marilyn: A legend preserved in amber - Globe and Mail Rick Groen

Boston Globe [Ty Burr]

Philadelphia Inquirer [Carrie Rickey]

Washington Post [Mark Jenkins]

Orlando Sentinel [Roger Moore]

The Miami Herald [Rene Rodriguez]

Arizona Republic [Bill Goodykoontz]

Los Angeles Times [Betsy Sharkey]

Review: Williams Gives it Her All as Marilyn Christy LeMire from The San Francisco Chronicle

The New York Times [Manohla Dargis]

Curtiz, Michael

All-Movie Guide

Michael Curtiz was one of Hollywood's most prolific and colorful directors. Born to a well-to-do Jewish family in Budapest, he ran away from home at age 17 to join a circus, then trained for an acting career at the Royal Academy for Theater and Art. He worked as a leading man at the Hungarian Theatre before directing stage plays and then films. His first cinematic effort was Az Utolsó Bohém (1912), which was also the first feature-length film ever made in Hungary. Curtiz soon moved on to the more progressive Danish film industry, returning to his homeland in 1914 and serving a year in the Austro-Hungarian infantry before resuming his film career. While it may be arguable that Curtiz was Hungary's finest director, he was certainly its busiest, making no fewer than 14 films in 1917, most of which starred his first wife, actress Lucy Dorraine. When the Hungarian film industry was nationalized by the new communist government in 1919, Curtiz packed his bags and headed for Sweden, France, Germany, and Austria. He directed 21 European pictures in a seven-year period, including the epic Sodom and Gomorrah (1923), which was also the film debut of Walter Slezak.

In 1926, Curtiz was brought to Hollywood by Warner Bros.; going along for the ride was the director's second wife, actress Lili Damita, who later married Curtiz's frequent star Errol Flynn. (The director's third and final wife was screenwriter Bess Meredyth). Curtiz's first few American films were stylish but only moderately expensive. But not so 1929's Noah's Ark, a super-spectacular production which bombed at the box office but also firmly established Curtiz as a "prestige" director. It also set the standard for an utter lack of concern for the well-being of actors; several extras died during the climactic flood sequence, reportedly because Curtiz, hoping to incur genuine panic in his performers, had failed to inform them that they'd be deluged with tons of water. Most leading actors despised the dictatorial filmmaker, but were willing to work with him time and again due to his uncanny knack for turning out top-notch movies. While his detractors have noted that Curtiz's much-praised visual style was due more to Warner's team of cinematographers and art directors than to the director himself, few can deny that his films were among the best and most profitable that the studio ever turned out. Listing his greatest sound films would require a book, in itself, but a representative cross-section of Curtiz's creative contributions of the 1930s and '40s include: Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), Casablanca (1942, and for which he won an Oscar), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945), Night and Day (1946), and Life With Father (1947). Even in his professional dotage, he was responsible for one of the biggest box-office successes of the mid-'50s, White Christmas (1954). Curtiz died in 1962, one year after completing his final film, The Comancheros with John Wayne.

A Michael Curtiz Website

TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies

Reel Classics Page

Film Reference profile by Douglas Gomery

FOGA, Summer 1999: Michael Curtiz Michael Curtiz: Noble Cynic, by Norman O. Keim from Films of the Golden Age

Curtiz, Michael They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

TVNow's monthly Michael Curtiz schedule when his films will be on TV

Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)

THE ROAD TO HAPPINESS

aka: The Golden Butterfly

USA (78 mi) 1926

The Road to Happiness Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge

STORY : Sentimental, romantic melodrama in which Lilian (Lili Damita), a beautiful 18-year-old Parisienne, discovers that her father isn't actually the kindly old cab-driver (Paul Biensfeldt) who raised her from a baby, but in fact a millionaire coffee-importer keen to provide her with a life of luxury. Lilian's true ancestry was traced by gold-digging chancer Tapin (Jack Trevor), who romances her with a view to marrying into a wealthy family. But Lilian already has a boyfriend: talented but hard-up composer Lucien (Wolf Rilla)...

PLUSSES : Tale is corny but undeniably effective: skilfully and sincerely handled by Curtiz/Kertesz - who soon after went to Hollywood and found fame with the likes of Casablanca. Like that perennial favourite, The Road to Happiness features a woman torn between two lovers, though here the choice is rather more straightforward from an audience-sympathy perspective: the first time we meet Tapin, he's breezily forging the signature of Martin Luther. And just as Rick and Ilsa would "always have Paris," the city's atmosphere is a strong point here - although the production is so international (typical of the period, when how the actors spoke wasn't an issue) that you're never sure where any particular sequence is being shot. Pleasing finale in which all characters receive their just desserts: a heartwarming happy ending.

MINUSES : Lilian's shallow fickleness is somewhat off-putting, and it's disappointing that she so readily falls for the caddish Tapin's schemes - but then again, she is only 18 and does rather rapidly see the error of her ways (moving into high society, she's rapidly afflicted by nostalgie de la boue.) Picture is essentially a morality-play - rather predictable that Lilian will end up picking the "humble tenement" over the "palace," and that water will prove just as thick as blood.

NOTES : Curtiz/Kertesz was born Mano Kertesz Kaminer. French-born Damita was Kertesz's wife from 1925 to 1926 - they divorced after he moved to Hollywood. She eventually followed him across the Atlantic and nine years later married a then-unknown Tasmanian named Errol Flynn. Her Road to Happiness co-star Walter Rilla (who looks eerily like Ernst Deutsch - The Third Man's conspiratorial Baron Kurtz) was the father of Village of the Damned director Wolf Rilla.

MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM

USA (77 mi) 1933

Murmur of the Heart to Mystery of the Wax Museum Pauline Kael

Marvellously grisly chiller, directed by Michael Curtiz and shot in an early Technicolor process, with the color contributing to the general creepiness. Lionel Atwill is the murderous curator who pours hot wax over his manacled, still-living victims and then exhibits them as sculpture. With Glenda Farrell, Fay Wray, Gavin Gordon, Frank McHugh, Edwin Maxwell, and Arthur Edmund Carewe. From a play by Charles S. Belden. (Remade in 1953 in 3-D as HOUSE OF WAX, and probably the source of the 1959 A BUCKET OF BLOOD.) Warners.

Time Out review

In the early '30s, when Universal were riding high with Frankenstein and Dracula, Warners hunted round for their own horror subject, and found one in the idea of a sculptor who murders his models and embalms them in wax to achieve death-in-life. It's an interesting Poe-like theme, full of bizarre implications, and has since been remade several times (once in 3-D); but this remains the classic. Filmed in one of the earliest two-tone Technicolor processes, it is beautiful to look at, full of muted green compositions and stunningly modulated colour effects. Interesting, too, to note that its tough, wisecracking girl reporter (Farrell) and newspaper setting bear the unmistakable stamp of the Warner house style. There's a slightly cruel, almost fascist streak throughout, especially in the police's handling of things, and the shocks are a little sparse by present standards. But it holds up amazingly well, and its pale, shimmering images linger in the mind.

Turner Classic Movies review James Steffen

Mr. Igor's artistically accomplished but poorly attended wax museum in London is set on fire by his backer, who wants to collect the insurance money in order to recoup his losses. Trapped inside, Igor (Lionel Atwill) watches his priceless work melt away. Twelve years later, he has relocated to New York and is preparing to open a new museum, though he is now wheelchair-bound and his hands are crippled. On New Year's Eve, the beautiful Joan Gale (Monica Bannister) is found dead from an overdose of opiates. Her rich boyfriend George Winton (Gavin Gordon) is accused of the crime, but the sharp-tongued reporter Florence Dempsey (Glenda Farrell) sets out to prove his innocence when Joan Gale's body disappears from the morgue. Her roommate Charlotte (Fay Wray) happens to be the fiancée of Ralph Burton (Allen Vincent), a sculptor working in Mr. Igor's new museum. When Florence notices that one of the new sculptures in the museum bears a suspicious resemblance to Joan Gale, she decides to investigate further and enlists the help of Winton. They uncover a lurid world of junkies, disfigured human monsters and maniacal schemes behind the walls of the wax museum.

Produced in the fall of 1932 and released in February 1933, Mystery of the Wax Museum was the last feature film to be shot in the Technicolor two-color process, and it represents one of the most effective uses of it in terms of visual design. The lighting by master cinematographer Ray Rennahan and the frequently abstract set designs by Anton Grot, combined with the restricted tonalities inherent to the color process, create an eerie atmosphere reminiscent of German Expressionism. Although it is often referred to as "two-strip Technicolor," the actual photographic process, which was developed in 1920, used a single black-and-white negative. The film camera recorded two adjacent frames simultaneously on a single strip of film, one frame filtered to capture the green color record and the other filtered to capture the red. The process required extremely bright lights, resulting in hot temperatures on the set and even eye damage to many actors during that period. In Mystery of the Wax Museum, the heat necessitated the use of real people in place of wax sculptures, since the wax would have melted. If you look closely, you can occasionally spot very slight eye movements in the actors posing as the sculptures.

The color printing process used by Technicolor from 1920 to 1927 involved printing the two color records on separate strips of film: most commonly, one with blue-green dye and one with red-orange. The two strips of film were half the thickness of normal film stock and were reversed in relationship to each other, so that they could be cemented together into a single strip of film. Although the process provided consistent color reproduction within the limits of a two-color system, the prints had a tendency to split because of the heat generated by the projector's arc lamp and thus frequently had to be sent back to the lab for repair. The first feature film using the Technicolor two-color process was The Toll of the Sea (1922). Because the process was expensive, its use tended to be limited to isolated sequences within films, including major productions such as The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Big Parade (1925) and Ben-Hur (1925). The most notable feature using two-color process throughout was the Douglas Fairbanks adventure The Black Pirate (1926).

In 1928, Technicolor developed the dye imbibition film printing technique, which enabled more than one layer of dye to be applied to a single strip of film, thus eliminating the need for cemented prints. Some features using this improved process included The King of Jazz (1930), Whoopee! (1930), Doctor X (1932) and, finally, Mystery of the Wax Museum. In 1932, Technicolor developed a three-color system that could at last photograph the full color spectrum. This time, it used three separate rolls of black-and-white film running through a single camera to capture the red, blue and green color records. The printing stage used the dye imbibition process to combine the separate color records onto one strip of film. The result was the richly saturated color that Technicolor has become famous for. This new process was first used with the Disney animated short Flowers and Trees (1932). The first live action short filmed in the three-strip Technicolor process was La Cucaracha (1934) and the first feature film was Becky Sharp (1935), both of which were photographed by Ray Rennahan, who had by now long enjoyed a reputation as a leading expert in color cinematography. Other significant Technicolor films on which Rennahan worked include: the first Technicolor feature produced in Britain, Wings of the Morning (1937), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), Gone With the Wind (1939), Blood and Sand (1941) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). For more information about Technicolor color processes, see the excellent American Widescreen Museum website (http://www.widescreenmuseum.org) and the book Technicolor Movies by Richard W. Haines.

Mystery of the Wax Museum, sometimes referred to simply as Wax Museum, was produced by Warner Brothers to capitalize on the fad for horror films at that time, ranging from the now-legendary Universal franchise of horror films to low-budget independent productions like White Zombie (1932). This particular film reunited the team of director Michael Curtiz, photographer Rennahan, art director Grot, lead actor Lionel Atwill, leading lady Fay Wray and supporting actor Arthur Edmund Carewe, who had all contributed to the success of Doctor X the year before. An important addition to the formula was the comic performance of Glenda Farrell, who plays the cynical, fast-talking reporter--a character type she would revisit in Warner Brothers' popular "Torchy Blaine" series of the late Thirties.

The squeamish critic Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times found Mystery of the Wax Museum to be "too ghastly for comfort." He wrote: "It is all very well in its way to have a mad scientist performing operations in well-told stories, but when a melodrama depends upon the glimpses of covered bodies in a morgue and the stealing of some of them by an insane modeler in wax, it is going too far." He did, however, praise the comic relief offered by Glenda Farrell and Frank McHugh as the reporter and her newspaper editor. The reviewer for Variety wrote that "makeups are about the last word in gruesomeness," but complained that it had a "loose and unconvincing story," adding: "Loose ends never quite jell but it's one of those artificial things whose sole retrospection will inspire an uncomfortable feeling of the physically misshapen and little else. But it doesn't bore and should go well with the B-grade houses and nabes." Although the film turned a handsome profit--approximately 800,00 dollars--it was more successful in Europe than in the U.S., according to Curtiz biographer James C. Robertson.

The film was considered "lost" for many years until a print was found in Jack Warner's private vault. Even then, it was usually shown on television in black-and-white prints; the print shown on TCM is in the original two-color Technicolor process. While no masterpiece compared to the best Universal horror films, Mystery of the Wax Museum remains briskly entertaining and above all, striking to look at.

50,000,000 Sparber Fans Can't Be Wrong Max Sparber

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

Black Hole DVD Reviews

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also reviewing HOUSE OF WAX

THE KENNEL MURDER CASE

USA (73 mi) 1933

Probably the best of all the Philo Vance mysteries (from the series by SS van Dine), with Powell as the super-suave private eye investigating a suicide that turns out to be murder. The plot is fairly preposterous, but Powell brings just enough credibility to the task to make the film at once ingenious and entertaining. In all there were a dozen Philo Vance novels, and many more films featuring the character (The Kennel Murder Case was remade only seven years later as Calling Philo Vance), but this one is vintage.

In this highly enjoyable detective story Powell - later The Thin Man - enjoyed early success as the sleuth, Vance, who here solves the mystery of who killed a wealthy man and his brother. His associate is Sgt Heath (Pallette), but the suspects are more plentiful. Especially since the murdered man, Coe, is a bully and a dog-killer. In the end it's not his butler who committed the murder, but his secretary. Amiable stuff, directed by Warner Bros studio stalwart Curtiz. There were numerous Philo Vance movies after this, with different actors, but this is considered to be the best of the bunch.

Kagemusha to The Killing Fields Pauline Kael

One of the pleasanter films in the series starring the suave comedian William Powell as S.S. Van Dine's detective Philo Vance. The plot involves some lively Scotties and a handsome Doberman, as well as that sinister figure, the connoisseur of Oriental objects of art. (In the 30s, Ming and murder always seemed to go together.) Mary Astor, at an in-between stage in her career, has a conventional role that doesn't much suit her; however, most of the other players are cast so inevitably to type that the film is like a demonstration of the principles of running a stock company. The group includes snake-hipped Helen Vinson, wicked Jack La Rue, tedious Ralph Morgan, and Paul Cavanagh, Etienne Girardot, Robert Barrat, Eugene Pallette, Frank Conroy, Arthur Hohl, Henry O'Neill, and Robert McWade. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Warners.

Turner Classic Movies review Frank Miller

Michael Curtiz continued his rise to the top at Warner Bros. with this 1933 adaptation of S.S. Van Dine's popular mystery, the first Warner's film to feature noted society sleuth Philo Vance. In fact, he rather enjoyed taking on the sophisticated whodunnit. With Warner's rapid production schedule, he was already churning out several films a year, most of them forgettable. In 1933 alone, Curtiz would have six directing credits and direct two other films credited to others. Of these, only The Kennel Murder Case and the classic horror story Mystery of the Wax Museum were standouts.

As with his other films at Warner's, Curtiz kept things moving in The Kennel Murder Case. He used dissolves and wipes to race from scene to scene, while within scenes he used a mobile camera to cover up the genre's inevitable talkiness. He also was proving expert at getting actors to do their best. Powell gave his best performance of the year as Vance, with strong support from leading lady Mary Astor and sidekick Eugene Pallette. Thanks to Curtiz, the picture turned a surprising profit of almost $400,000, which helped him win better assignments at the studio. Two years later, Warner's would trust him with their first swashbuckler, Captain Blood, one of the studio's most lavish films of the thirties.

For Powell, The Kennel Murder Case seemed something of a setback. He had already played Vance in three early talkies at Paramount, starting with The Canary Murder Case in 1929. Two years later, he left Paramount for Warners, with the promise of better material, script approval and more money. But during his time there, he only appeared in one other film of distinction, the tragic romance One Way Passage (1932), with frequent co-star Kay Francis. Disappointed with his prospects at Warners, he would jump ship for MGM in 1934. That very year MGM would transform him into one of Hollywood's top stars as yet another sophisticated sleuth, Nick Charles in The Thin Man, with Myrna Loy as his partner in marriage and mystery.

Powell's move to MGM hardly marked the end for Philo Vance, who would resurface at Warners, Paramount and even MGM. Warren Williams took over the role at Warners in The Dragon Murder Case (1934), then moved to Paramount in 1939 for The Gracie Allen Murder Case, a story Van Dine wrote for the popular comedienne. MGM had other plans for Powell, so they cast Paul Lukas in The Casino Murder Case (1935) and Edmund Lowe in The Garden Murder Case (1936). Warners would remake The Kennel Murder Case as Calling Philo Vance in 1940, this time with James Stephenson as the sleuth.

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review also seen here: Apollo Guide (MaryAnn Johanson) review [70/100]

Jay's Movie Blog

CAPTAIN BLOOD

USA (119 mi) 1935

The movie that launched both Flynn and the '30s cycle of swashbucklers. Conceived by Warner Brothers as a rival to MGM's Mutiny on the Bounty, it's a straightforward adaptation of Sabatini's adventure novel about a young doctor who starts as a deportee, succeeds as a pirate, and winds up as Governor of Jamaica, with Olivia de Havilland on his arm. Less florid sword-play than in later movies, but the formula is all there.

C.C. and Company to Catouche Pauline Kael

The 25-year-old Errol Flynn has the smile and dash to shout "All right my hearties, follow me!" as he leaps from his pirate ship to an enemy vessel. As young Dr. Peter Blood, who is sent into slavery for treating a wounded rebel, he speaks with an Irish lilt and draws his sword against Basil Rathbone on a Caribbean beach. This happy swashbuckler, based on a Rafael Sabatini novel, was adapted by Casey Robinson and directed by Michael Curtiz. (The exteriors were actually Corona, Laguna Beach, and Palm Canyon near Palm Springs.) The cast includes Olivia De Havilland, Ross Alexander, Lionel Atwill, Guy Kibbee, Henry Stephenson, Robert Barrat, Hobart Cavanaugh, Donald Meek, David Torrence, Pedro de Cordoba, Jessie Ralph, J. Carrol Naish, E.E. Clive, Halliwell Hobbes, and Holmes Herbert. The cinematography is by Hal Mohr. A Cosmopolitan Production, for Warners.

Turner Classic Movies review Jessica Handler

Errol Flynn received his first star billing for Captain Blood (1935), alongside 19-year-old newcomer Olivia de Havilland as Arabella Bishop. The film also established star Basil Rathbone (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1939) as the cold-hearted Pirate Levasseur. Playing romantic hero Peter Blood, a British doctor enslaved in 16th century Jamaica, Flynn leads a revolt, becomes a pirate king, and, with spitfire love interest de Havilland, returns to govern the island where he and his comrades were chattel.

With a production budget of nearly one million dollars, Captain Blood was richly filmed by director Michael Curtiz, Warner's tough-talking, Hungarian born director (Casablanca, 1942). Curtiz' exacting professionalism drove the picture, and brought outstanding performances from his fledging stars, sometimes pushing 25-year-old Flynn through ten takes per scene. Although much of the film was shot on a sound stage in the summer of 1935, exteriors such as the agile, florid swordfight in which Rathbone is challenged and defeated by Flynn was shot on location, with Laguna Beach, California standing in for a Caribbean shore. The rousing battle sequence involving Blood's pirate crew storming French ships used one of the largest technical crews assembled for a film and 2500 extras, each of whom was personally interviewed by Curtiz.

The New York Times heralded Flynn with a review entitled "Newcomer Errol Flynn in a handsome film version of Captain Blood." Flynn's vigor, remarkable good looks and athletic skill established him as the natural successor to Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and the symbol of an unvanquished man that Depression-era audiences cheered. Captain Blood was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar® in 1936, but lost to Mutiny on the Bounty.

Foster on Film - The Swashbuckler

Though he had yet to grow his trademark pencil-thin moustache, Errol Flynn rocketed to stardom with 1935's Captain Blood, a high-spirited remake of a 1924 silent film (based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini) that provided the actor with the first of his eight on-screen pairings with luminous Olivia de Havilland. Not nearly as exciting as 1940's The Sea Hawk but a sturdy first swashbuckling foray for Flynn, this Michael Curtiz picture—greenlit after MGM's Mutiny on the Bounty proved a hit—features a spirited score by the legendary Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and supplies jolly pirate action while simultaneously, and none-too-subtly, mocking the dictatorial British monarchy. In 1685 England, Dr. Peter Blood (Flynn, in a role originally intended for Robert Donat) helps treat a rebel wounded in an uprising against King James II, and for his trouble gets labeled a traitor and sent to Port Royal in Jamaica to be sold into slavery. There, he is purchased by the beautiful niece (de Havilland's Arabella) of a vicious plantation owner (Lionel Atwill's Col. Bishop), but during an attack on the colony by a Spanish armada, Blood takes to the ocean aboard a stolen army vessel. Now a notorious pirate surrounded by a band of loyal, exiled Englishmen, Blood—an Irish buccaneer with vigor and wit to spare—steals from anyone foolish enough to cross his path and spars with a rascally Spanish pirate (Basil Rathbone's Captain Levasseur) before eventually reuniting with, and successfully wooing, Arabella.

That Blood's reputation is restored thanks to the newly installed King William doesn't change Captain Blood's playful critique of English rule, which is presented as ruthless, irrational, and wholly unconcerned with the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. However, such rusty political undercurrents—clearly intended to appeal to the film's tyranny-loathing American audience—are much less important than Flynn's dashing, gallant performance as the impudent Blood. Conveying emotion in big, broad strokes and through buoyant, lithesome physicality, Flynn—shot in light almost as downy as that which envelops de Havilland—dominates Curtiz's frequently overcrowded and busy frame like a shining sword cutting through the fog. As a result of the charming de Havilland's rote role as a moralizing stick-in-the-mud (her eventual affection for the plundering Blood is as predictably bland as her ruffly outfits are constricting and chaste), the film's central romance isn't as captivating as the on-screen couple's later collaborations, and one pines for more (and more elaborate) set pieces than the somewhat wooden Flynn-Rathbone duel and a sea battle culled from silent movie and miniature model footage. Yet even if Captain Blood often seems overloaded with too much time-consuming exposition and unfunny peripheral characters (including those played by Ross Alexander, Guy Kibbee, Henry Stephenson, and Robert Barrat), Flynn's wicked, wicked charm helps keep this high seas adventure afloat.

Senses of Cinema (Julian Savage) review The Role of the Pirate in Captain Blood - Buccaneering as Transgressive Political Action in the Swashbuckling Film?

50,000,000 Sparber Fans Can't Be Wrong Max Sparber

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [4.5/5] Rory L. Aronsky

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3.5/5]

DVD Verdict (Maurice Cobbs) dvd review

Reel.com DVD review [James Plath]

The New York Times (Andre Sennwald) review

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Errol Flynn: The Signature Collection

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Errol Flynn: The Signature Collection

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE

USA (115 mi) 1936

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Some one had blundered:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson

Time Out review Tom Milne

So-so attempt to repeat the success of Lives of a Bengal Lancer, with rousing action on the North-West Frontier embedded in much romantic attitudinising from Flynn and Knowles as brothers in love with the same girl. Switching belatedly to the Crimea, the plot finally justifies the title with a bizarre - but beautifully shot - account of the famous charge (the wicked Rajah causing all the trouble in India, it seems, was in command of the Russian guns).

Crimean Texts - Background, plot description and historical accuracy (spoilers).

Historically incorrect, but magnificent nonetheless. Legendary swashbuckler Flynn leads the Light Brigade on their heroic charge into the Valley of Death. Flynn has everything going for him here: romance with de Havilland, battle scenes and stunts galore. Director Curtiz keeps the action bowling along at a breakneck pace, with never a care for the suffering of either human or animal (Flynn secretly tipped off the RSPCA, resulting in stricter legislation being passed to protect animals in films).

Casablanca to Charlie Bubbles Pauline Kael

In this Michael Curtiz version-a military swashbuckler-the foreground story is conventional nonsense about two brothers (Errol Flynn and Patric Knowles), lancers in India, who have quarrelled over a girl (Olivia De Havilland). In historical terms the film is simply a bad joke, yet the patriotic inanities serve a rousing melodramatic function and when the charge comes it is so spectacularly staged and choreographed that it takes over the movie, and it is really all that one remembers. This sequence is a testament to the virtuosity of the second unit. A Warner Brothers production, from a screenplay by Michael Jacoby and Rowland Leigh, with a Max Steiner score. With Nigel Bruce, Donald Crisp, David Niven, C. Aubrey Smith, Spring Byington, Henry Stephenson, C. Henry Gordon, J. Carrol Naish, E.E. Clive, Robert Barrat, and Lumsden Hare.

Turner Classic Movies review Paul Tatara

No one says a director and his leading man have to get along in order to make a terrific movie, but it's a lot easier if at least one of them is capable of behaving like a mature person during the shoot. Though Errol Flynn was on the cusp of major stardom when he and Michael Curtiz teamed up for Warner Bros.' horse and sand epic, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Flynn would later contend that the picture was the most miserable experience of his career...never mind that his on-set hijinks also drove his co-star, Olivia de Havilland, to distraction. Even with Flynn acting like a love-struck nine year-old, however, it's Curtiz who forever stereotyped himself as a tyrant of a director.

History students should put away their notepads while watching this one. Michel Jacoby's narrative has virtually nothing to do with the very real Crimean War story it's theoretically based upon, outside of the presence of a lot of galloping horses and falling soldiers. In fact, the British Lords who were responsible for one of the deadliest blunders in all of military history never get so much as a finger pointed at them during the movie. That would ruin the phony heroism.

Flynn and Patric Knowles play Geoffrey and Perry Vickers, sibling British soldiers who have to contend with a murderous (and purely fictional) Indian Chieftain named Surat Khan (C. Henry Gordon.) When Geoffrey is sent to Arabia to secure thousands of horses for the British, he meets up with his long-time fiancée, Elsa Campbell (Olivia de Havilland.) Unfortunately, Elsa has hooked up with Perry in the interim, but still feels she should marry Geoffrey.

Later, Khan attacks and destroys Geoffrey's garrison, but Geoffrey and Elsa manage to get away unscathed. Later, in what would be viewed as a willfully idiotic move if this weren't an Errol Flynn picture, Geoffrey more or less tricks his division into a revenge attack on Khan and thousands of his followers. Still, the reckless confrontation is jolting enough to make you throw your popcorn in the air.

Curtiz would go on to direct such classic pictures as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938; also starring Flynn), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and Mildred Pierce (1945). But he was less than loved by the people who worked for him, and Flynn openly hated his guts. Their initial falling out stemmed from Curtiz's insistence on taking the protective tips off of some swords during a big fight scene in Captain Blood (1935). He thought the performers' reactions including Flynn's - would be more realistic that way.

Flynn complains extensively about Curtiz, and The Charge of the Light Brigade in particular, in his autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways: "Shortly after the company arrived (at the Bishop, California location), the hotel we stayed at burned down. Afterwards we were quartered poorly, and for the whole five months period of the screen work we froze."

He goes on to say that the cast, wearing flimsy costumes, often huddled with each other to combat the bitter desert cold, and they regularly had to withstand stinging dust storms...this while Curtiz badgered the actors into action from beneath a protective layer of winter clothing. Flynn claimed a typical morning salutation from Curtiz was along the lines of, "Get your ass over here. We're behind schedule." On several occasions, the two men almost came to blows.

But Flynn himself was no saint. For whatever reasons, he thought the best way to convey his sexual attraction to de Havilland would be to pull schoolboy pranks on her. At various times during filming, de Havilland found her dressing room door nailed shut, was slapped with a rusty flyswatter, and discovered a rubber snake hidden in her pants. Flynn would also stand behind the camera and make faces at her while she played dramatic scenes, and, at one point, deemed it necessary to load her chair with a whoopee cushion.

De Havilland was able to resist Flynn's "charms." "If only he had been considerate," she once said. "If only he had known to woo and win me! He didn't need to do childish, unfair things to insure his own romantic effectiveness. He disappointed me on more than one level. I had idealistic notions of behavior and his was hardly the heroic manner he offered the world on screen."

Warner Bros. spared no expense on The Charge of the Light Brigade. Its $1,200,000 budget was enormous at the time, and Curtiz (and his second unit director, B. Reeves "Breezy" Eason) certainly made the most of it. The final, suicidal charge is truly one of the great action sequences in all of movie history, a dazzling display of camera placement, precise editing, and stunt-man fortitude. But Curtiz so abused the use of trip-wires in pulling supposedly wounded horses to the ground during the sequence, animals were regularly breaking their necks and legs. Many of them had to be shot.

Flynn, to his endless credit, was so appalled by what he was seeing he secretly contacted the ASPCA and implored them to come to the location. Curtiz's cruel methods (which, it should be noted, he didn't invent) would forever change the handling of animals on movie sets.

Perhaps the only charming thing that can be said about the Hungarian-born Curtiz is that he often humorously mangled the English language. His Charge of the Light Brigade cry of "Bring on the empty horses!" (meaning, "Bring out the horses with no riders on them") later served as the title to one of Niven's immensely entertaining memoirs.

DVDTOWN [John J. Puccio]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2.5/5]

Movie Sanderson Beck from Movie Mirrors

PopMatters [Emma Simmonds] Errol Flynn: A Wonderfully Loathsome Man, Errol Flynn Signature Collection Volume II

Draven99's Musings [Chris Beaumont] Errol Flynn Signature Collection Volume II

THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD

USA (102 mi) 1938

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

One of the few great adventure movies that you can pretend you are treating the kids to when you are really treating yourself: the kind of Hollywood film to which Star Wars pays tribute, and one of the best examples of what large studio resources could produce. Glorious colour, sumptuous sets, and a brilliantly choreographed climactic sword fight between Flynn and Rathbone; the stuff of which Saturday matinee dreams were made.

A Nous la Liberté to Advise and Consent Pauline Kael

One of the most popular of all adventure films-stirring for children and intensely nostalgic for adults. As Robin, Errol Flynn slings a deer across his shoulders with exuberant aplomb; he achieves a mixture of daring and self-mockery, like that of Fairbanks, in the 20s. The film gives the legend a light, satirical edge: everyone is a bit too much of what he is. (The archetypal roles that the actors played here clung to their later performances.) With improbably pretty Olivia De Havilland as Maid Marian, Alan Hale as Little John, Ian Hunter as Richard the Lion-Hearted, Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains as the villains, and Herbert Mundin, Patric Knowles, Melville Cooper, Una O'Connor, Montagu Love, and Robert Warwick. The story is clear, the color ravishing, the acting simple and crude. Erich Wolfgang Korngold did the marvellous score; the script is by Norman Reilly Raine and Seton I. Miller; the rousing, buoyant direction is credited to Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, the former having replaced the latter. Hal B. Wallis produced, for Warners.

Lightly bearded Errol Flynn is properly arrogant in the title role as everyone's favorite proto-Marxist freedom fighter. He forms the Green Liberation Army, and they have a big barbeque, after liberating a bunch of supplies being sent to the Republican National Convention. Then they stand around chortling a lot. The capitalists try to catch Flynn by arranging a big tournament on grass; much like they would catch Bjorn Borg by arranging Wimbledon a hundred years before he showed up. Flynn Tarzans around quite a bit, and makes speeches of the sort that you hear at graduations. Olivia de Havilland is just bearable, bordering dangerously on being Ava Gardner-like; and nowhere near compelling enough to keep me from wondering on how Gardner never caught on as a Halloween costume. The real costumes, incidentally, are really cool, the knight ones with ducks and weevils and badgers on the front. No film like this could be complete without Basil Rathbone being defeated in a swordfight on the castle stairs. Una O'Connor lays the foundation for the excellent portrayal of Bess by a cartoon goose in the definitive (animated) Robin Hood (1973).

The Adventures of Robin Hood Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

Errol Flynn was a cocky bastard, and perhaps no role suited him quite so well as that of the self-righteous outlaw of Sherwood Forest, whose noble program of wealth redistribution frequently seems like little more than an excuse for some stylish fun. (Had Robin Hood been around in the 1980s, he'd have organized Live Aid.) Lush, rousing and hugely enjoyable, this Technicolor production—the most expensive film Warner Bros. had ever made at that point, with a staggering budget of [Dr. Evil accent] two million dollars—positively radiates cheery showmanship, and only the most sour and humorless cinéastes will be able to resist its winning combination of brash sincerity, dewy-eyed romance, athletic derring-do, impeccable overacting (Rains was never more unctuous) and opulent design.

Remarkable, too, that such a strapping specimen of old Hollywood magic resulted from such a troubled production. Warner execs replaced Keighley with Curtiz midway through production, concerned that the former wasn't taking the project seriously enough, but while it's possible for buffs to spot the joins (for the record, Keighley shot the archery contest and the Sherwood Forest material; Curtiz shot the interiors), the film as a whole feels remarkably consistent in its spirited assurance. Flynn, meanwhile, betrays no sign of nervousness or discomfort in tackling one of literature's most beloved icons, inhabiting Robin of Locksley with a buoyant, mischievous nonchalance that makes Kevin Costner look downright dyspeptic by comparison. You saw the prince; now meet the king.

Turner Classic Movies review Lang Thompson

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is one of the best-loved swashbucklers, a film that hasn't aged a bit since its premiere. Nominated for four Academy Awards, the film made a lasting star of Errol Flynn and has been so popular over the years that clips even made their way into a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Flynn's charm and knack for action were perfectly matched by a wonderful cast, brilliant Technicolor photography and an inventive story. It's the rare masterpiece that captivates everybody from tykes to scholars.

When King Richard is captured and held for ransom, scheming nobles led by the vicious Sir Guy (Basil Rathbone) try to seize control of the English crown. One knight named Robin of Locksley (Flynn) refuses to play along and retreats to Sherwood Forest where he and his men rob the nobles to help both the poor and to pay the King's ransom. Hunted by Sir Guy and the forest's sheriff, Robin eludes them and accidentally ends up the captor of the lovely Maid Marian (Olivia de Havilland), who just happens to have also caught Sir Guy's eye. Naturally everybody won't be a happy winner.

Today, The Adventures of Robin Hood seems so perfect that it's hard to imagine that it could have ended up differently. But that's what almost happened since James Cagney was intended by Warner Brothers to play Robin. A contract dispute between Cagney and the studio left the film in the lurch until Captain Blood (1935) became a big hit, prompting cool minds to ponder that this new star Errol Flynn might be a decent Robin Hood. (Flynn had also replaced another actor in Captain Blood; Robert Donat that time.)

The film was budgeted at Warner Brother's highest to that date ($1.6 million which eventually went up to $2 million). Filming started near Chico, California (standing in for Sherwood Forest) under the direction of veteran William Keighley. The studio decided his approach was a bit too light-hearted and replaced him with Michael Curtiz so that the completed film actually has significant contributions from both directors. Curtiz would become Flynn's most productive director in their twelve films together despite constant friction between the two. Oddly enough he had directed Flynn in Flynn's second Hollywood film appearance (playing a murder victim in The Case of the Curious Bride, 1935). The studio might have wondered whether Flynn was worth it when he began showing his soon-to-be-notorious wild side, coming to the set late and kissing De Havilland so intensely that the scenes needed to be re-shot. But one look at the finished scenes removed all doubt and when the film was released audiences and critics agreed.

By the way, De Havilland's horse would shortly afterwards become Trigger of Roy Rogers fame; Quentin Tarantino has called him "the greatest animal actor who ever was."

Soundtrack.net soundtrack review Andrew Granade

Before I begin this review, I want you to do something for me. Stop reading this. Yes, just stop reading this and go online, go to the store, call your friend who supplies your soundtrack needs; do whatever it takes to buy this score. Trust me, this score is so magnificent that you want it in your collection. Go get it, give it a listen, and then return. I'll wait right here and then we can discuss a few of the glories contained within this masterpiece. (We can only discuss a few because there are so many delights to sample.)

Are you back? Do you have your score now? Good. What you are holding is one of the landmarks of film scoring beautifully recorded in its complete form for the first time ever by those great friends of film music, conductor William Stromberg, film musicologist John Morgan, and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. I can hear the questions running through your mind – So what makes this score so worthy of my highest accolades? Won't modern fans of film scores be turned off by an antiquated symphonic score? Let me assuage your fears by saying that action/adventure scores by Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams, and even Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings would be vastly different had Korngold never composed Robin Hood. But before I get to the mechanics of this score, a bit about its composer.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born in Austria in 1897, and was a musical child prodigy. At age nine, he played his cantata for Gustav Mahler who at once proclaimed him a genius. He wrote his first full symphonic work at age fourteen and completed his most successful and popular opera when he was only twenty three. Having conquered the classical world, in 1934 Max Reinhardt invited him to conquer Hollywood by collaborating on a film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Korngold accepted the offer and over the following ten years created the symphonic film score we know today. He did this by treating each film as an "opera without singing." He assigned each character his or her own leitmotif and then played the various themes against each other in a contrapuntal, yet romantic texture. Sound familiar? It should if you have listened to almost any symphonic score written in the past sixty years.

Legend has it that Korngold wrote Robin Hood by improvising. He sat at the piano, watched the completed film over and over, and created themes and textures that perfectly match the film. Whether true or not (and we do know that he recycled themes from his tone poem Sursum Corda (1919) for this production), the how of its creation hardly matters. After seeing the film no one can argue that the score does not support the film in every way. Consider the cue "Love Scene." Quite possibly the most beautiful cue on the album, "Love Scene" replaces the bombast of earlier scenes with quietly shimmering strings, a lush melody, brass used for color instead of emphasis, and a languid pace that mirrors Robin and Marian's emotional state. Or listen to "The Procession," where Korngold takes the jaunty main theme, "March of the Merry Men," and transforms it into something dark and foreboding by dropping the theme's register, adding in dissonant counterpoint, and decreasing the tempo. Finally, listen to the penultimate cue, "The Battle/The Duel/The Victory," and the way he weaves Sir Guy's and Robin Hood's themes together, expertly capturing their duel in music. By the time we reach the "Epilogue" and the return of the love music, our emotions are spent. In a manner rarely found today, Korngold manages to take his audience on a journey independent of any visual signals. It is a remarkable accomplishment in any age, but one even more astounding for a score that at first glance appears completely dependent on its film.

Korngold won his second Oscar for this score, but it is really of small consequence in the grand scheme of things. Much more to the point is the fact that he created a score that set the pattern for symphonic scoring for years to come and managed to do this with music so perfectly wed to the onscreen action that his achievement has rarely been matched. This is a score that yields repeated treasures upon repeated hearings; I've only managed to scratch the surface with this brief discussion. So take an afternoon with your new score, plumb the depths available in great symphonic film music, and never again wonder if music from Hollywood's Golden Age can still hold a modern audience's attention.

Coda – If you really want to experience the magic Korngold created onscreen, rent or buy the recently-released DVD of The Adventures of Robin Hood. It contains an isolated score track that allows you to observe this wonderful marriage of sight and sound firsthand. (Editor's note: also, this re-recording has been released on DVD as well, in full-bitrate 5.1! It also includes photos from the scoring session as well as a bonus cue: a new recording of the original music that Korngold wrote for the theatrical trailer!)

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]

eFilmCritic.com (Alexandre Paquin) review [5/5]

Collector's Corner [Wes Marshall]

filmcritic.com (Doug Hennessy) review [4/5]

Three Movie Buffs (Eric Nash) review [4/4]

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

Foster on Film - The Swashbuckler

Turner Classic Movies review The idea behind the film, Rob Nixon

Turner Classic Movies review A look behind the camera, Rob Nixon

Turner Classic Movies review Why the film is essential, Rob Nixon

Turner Classic Movies review Critic comments

DVD Journal [Mark Bourne] 2 Disc Special Edition

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review 2 Disc Special Edition

DVD Verdict (Erick Harper) dvd review 2 Disc Special Edition

digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review [Special Edition]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD DVD Version]

DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo HD DVD Version

DVD Talk (Joshua Zyber) dvd review [5/5] [HD-DVD Version]

Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus]

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

KQEK DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Warner Legends Collection

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]

ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES

USA (97 mi) 1938

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

A gutsy, rousing blend of gangster thriller and social comment, Curtiz's brisk film follows the lives of two slum kids who take different paths into adulthood: Cagney becomes a violent hood, O'Brien a priest. Problems arise when the local street gang - played by the Dead End Kids - come to admire Cagney for his toughness, and O'Brien has to try (the ending is hauntingly ambiguous) to persuade his former pal to pretend to be terrified as he's led to the electric chair. Great performances all round, and enough pace, shadowy camerawork and snappy dialogue to make this one of Warners' most memorable '30s dramas, despite the moralising air.

The American Friend to Animal Crackers Pauline Kael

An entertaining picture lurks behind that uninviting title. Warners threw its assets together in this one: James Cagney at his cockiest as a gangster, Pat O'Brien as a priest, and Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan, George Bancroft, and the Dead End Kids, too. It has jokes and romance and a smashing big last sequence on Death Row-the priest asks the gangster to act cowardly when he's executed, so that he won't be a hero to the Dead End Kids, and Cagney comes through with a rousing finale. Michael Curtiz directed; John Wexley and Warren Duff wrote the screenplay, based on Rowland Brown's story. (It was followed the next year by THE ANGELS WASH THEIR FACES.)

History tells us otherwise, but it feels sometimes like gangster movies were invented for James Cagney. His personal onscreen rogues' gallery is a veritable encyclopedia of the genre; he wisely didn't let himself get pigeonholed by making gangster pictures exclusively, but oh, my, does he tear it up, and Angels with Dirty Faces offers a paradigmatic Cagney performance. He had already established himself as master of this world with The Public Enemy, in 1931, but his performance here as Rocky Sullivan is at least as good, and it earned the actor his first Oscar nomination. (He lost out to Spencer Tracy—no shame in that.)

Here he's teamed up with Pat O'Brien, his great pal, and maybe the best onscreen priest in movie history. O'Brien plays Jerry, boyhood best pals with Cagney's Rocky; we meet them as boys, trying to boost fountain pens from a train car in the yard. Jerry is just a step quicker, and gets away, while Rocky gets snared and sent to juvie—it's almost as if that one moment was the crucible for the formation of both their characters. Jerry becomes a man of the cloth, while Rocky becomes the scourge of New York; still and all, they've got a friendship and a history that's stronger than any societal obstacles that might come between them.

The action really kicks in when Rocky, fresh out of the stir, goes to see his attorney, Frazer—the mouthpiece has $100,000 of Rocky's money, and the gangster wants it back. Frazer has other ideas, however, and puts a hit out on Rocky. As great as Cagney is with O'Brien, in many ways here he's better with Humphrey Bogart, who plays Frazer, because their characters are going at it, not hashing out old times, and here, Bogart's screen persona wasn't as nuanced as it became in the following years. At this point, the definitive Bogart performance was as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, and the actor brings all of that menace with him to this movie. Presiding over the affair is director Michael Curtiz, who even in the time of auteur theory is underappreciated—in fact, he worked with both Cagney and Bogart again, directing each of them in what may be their hallmark performances (Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca, respectively).

The classic set-up between the bad man and the priest sets up a battle, and the territory at stake are the souls of the young toughs in the neighborhood, played by a group known collectively as the Dead End Kids. Father Jerry has been trying to bring them into the light, but they're mesmerized by Rocky, his legend, his guns, his money. In truth the work of this group of young actors isn't the strongest aspect of the picture—Curtiz has emphasized the dese/dem/dose aspect of their speech, and while they're very busy cracking wise, we never really come to know them. Part of that is stylistic, but part of that is logistical—that is, there are a whole lot of them (with names like Bim, Swing, Hunky, and Pasty), and there's no point in trying to keep track. Less brassy but still not quite as strong as the main action is the relationship between Rocky and Laury, played by Ann Sheridan; a childhood friend of Rocky's and Jerry's, she lost her husband to mob violence, and despite herself is falling for yet another man on the wrong side of the law.

Curtiz has a crackerjack eye for action, and the climactic shootout is pretty spectacular stuff; there's a decidedly Expressionistic feel to the photography, too, with the actors frequently lit sharply and starkly from below, moody images through broken glass, and establishing shots of smoky stairwells from a menacing, high angle. Even more affecting is Cagney's final haunting scene, which I won't describe in too much detail so as not to give away the plot for the uninitiated; still, it's one of the most harrowing and intentionally ambiguous sequences in any gangster picture, and it alone would ratify Cagney's status as one of the great ones.

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]

Gangster films blazed their way into the public consciousness in the depression era. There was something emboldening about watching onscreen tough guys like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson following through on their cocksure criminal ambitions. Even though crime doesn't pay, and these villains met their fates riddled with bullets, their confidence and swagger inspired the masses. Cagney had an onscreen intensity balanced by a fast-talking sense of comic timing, a dancer's grace, and a pugnacious spontaneity. He was a little big man, often shorter than most of his co-stars, but larger than life in his exuberant persona. The camera loved Cagney because there was no one else quite like him—a sensitive soul who took no crap from anyone; a stylized performer whose Lower East Side mannerisms were grounded in realism. Of all the studio-groomed movie stars, Cagney was something truly unique and special.

A song-and-dance man, Cagney ironically achieved fame playing the most ignoble of thugs in William Wellman's The Public Enemy (where he famously smashed a grapefruit into actress Mae Clarke's face). He was beloved for his effortless charisma, showing up his stock company co-stars. And the tough-guy gangster image stuck even as Cagney appeared in slapstick comedies, westerns, and war pictures. He even took a stab at playing a lawman in the enjoyable B-movie 'G' Men. But the image stuck, and the image-consciousness of beloved bad guys gives resonance to the best of the Warner Bros. gangster films, Angels With Dirty Faces.

By the time Angels came along, Hollywood was forced to barter with the Production Code to produce moral minded films that eschewed the gangster iconography that was a bad influence on children. (Remember the opening scene in Brian De Palma's Scarface where Pacino waxes rhapsodic about seeing Bogart and Cagney movies as a kid?) Rocky Sullivan, the character James Cagney plays in Angels, embodies all the qualities we love about bad guys, and that's reflected by the Dead End Kids, the streetwise neighborhood teens who idolize him. Sullivan's fresh out of prison and rebuilding his place in the network of organized crime. The kids do their best to copy his gusto and swagger, despite the efforts of Sullivan's childhood friend Father Jerry Connolly (Pat O'Brien, a stalwart and robust cleric in the Fighting Irish mold) to get them to follow the straight and narrow.

When they were the same age as the Dead End Kids, Sullivan and Connolly were an incorrigible pair, thieving and raising hell together in the slums of New York. Angels is able to convey the Gangs of New York thesis that "America was made in the streets" in its opening scene where the two boys are thwarted from a petty crime, and young Sullivan gets caught. Hurtled through the meat grinder of reform school and juvenile detention centers, Sullivan learns the way to be a racketeer while his pal Connolly became a priest. It's your standard moral: there but for the grace of God goes I. But the conflict between gangster and priest for the souls of the children (even boys as pugnacious as the Dead End Kids) is a gripping one. It begs the question of how much the gangster movie star persona affects our youth.

As it turns out, it affects them quite a lot. It's difficult to watch Angels without rooting for Rocky Sullivan, and James Cagney. He offers a real intensity and a sense of playfulness even as he's drilling dead his fellow gangsters—his unrepentant cop killing tempered by his unwavering loyalty to his old buddy Father Connolly. Angels pointedly wonders why we look to Rocky Sullivan for heroism as it builds to its final, unforgettable scene. The climactic sequence is so famous and poignant that I'll assume readers already know how it plays out; but those unfamiliar with Angels With Dirty Faces are advised to skip the rest of this review until they've rented the DVD.

After an entire film of soul grappling for the kids, paralleled by the rise of the American gangster and his inevitable fall (in a remarkably staged shoot-out punctuated by tear gas and a teary eyed Cagney practically screaming, "Come an' get me, copper!"), Angels bothers to go a little further. Connolly visits Sullivan in prison and asks him to pretend to "turn yellow" on the long march to the electric chair. Cagney plays the scene as incredulous, wondering how on earth his best friend can ask him to pretend to go out like a coward and wipe out the image he's created for himself as a legendary tough guy.

Angels has James Cagney as the star, which is always a plus for studio pictures of this era. But it also benefits greatly from having ace craftsman Michael Curtiz in the director's chair. Curtiz didn't bear the definitive stamp of a true auteur, but his great films are notable for their remarkable craftsmanship. He gives journeymen directors a good name, having directed the lively The Adventures of Robin Hood the same year as Angels and going on to make Casablanca. Heavily influenced by German expressionism but never so much that his movies feel leaden and thick, Curtiz knew how to keep things moving. And he does significantly more than that in Angels, with recurring visual motifs involving radios, newspapers, and other assorted media in the midst of the highly evocative slums.

"Print the legend" is part and parcel with "We are what we see," and Cagney's sense of showmanship in dealing with crooked cops and gun-toting gangsters is matched by Curtiz indicating, "Here's how we see the show." Curtiz, too, knows how to maximize the drama (his favorite camera move is a slow push in to an actor's face, conveying thought under pressure), prolong it (holding on intense, drawn-out dolly shots of Sullivan and Connolly during the death march), and sustain it (using rapid cutting on Sullivan's shadow as he cowers before death, then cutting to his hands gripping the radiator for dear life). If storytelling and inversion are the themes of Angels, it only works because Curtiz is one hell of a good storyteller.

The Dead End Kids are a lively lot with names like the Seven Dwarves (including Soapy, Bim, Pasty, and Crab). While it's doubtful they can carry a film on their own, with middling "juvenile delinquent" pictures like Dead End and Crime School, they do make a memorable chorus of hero-worshiping Cagney wannabes here. Granted, they aren't given many other imitative models. O'Brien is solid and holds his own as the less vivid Connolly, and would-be superstar Ann Sheridan (I Was a Male War Bride, Kings Row) is appropriately lovely and bold as Cagney's love interest. And Humphrey Bogart, terrific in a second-fiddle villain role before The Maltese Falcon created the legend we know and love, is a beady-eyed sweating rodent whose name might as well be "He Who Gets Slapped".

There's maximum suspense in the slow walk towards death as Cagney puts on his most stoic, confident swagger—until the final, fateful moment where he turns into a shrieking, pathetic ball of jelly, refusing to face his death "like a man." This display of "cowardice" is unparalleled in gangster movies, and the more Cagney begs and screams, the more we're amazed at how he reduces the hero worship of gangsters to nothing. It's Cagney's finest hour in a career filled with great performances—perhaps because, as the actor himself attested, he kept it ambiguous as to whether Rocky Sullivan really had turned yellow at the very end.

Angels With Dirty Faces benefits from the Production Code because it forces the gangster film to acknowledge its nihilism. As fascinating as it is to see the American Dream gone to rot in films like Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, the Howard Hawks version of Scarface, and even The Roaring Twenties and White Heat (both of which Cagney filmed after Angels, resuming his bad guy persona), Angels is more conflicted in its analysis. We love Rocky Sullivan, yet we love him more when he shows true loyalty to his friend the priest, and does the right thing by going down not like a champ, but a chump.

DVD Times Mike Sutton

Turner Classic Movies review Joseph D’Onfrio

Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [4/5]

DVD Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

Decent Films Guide - Faith on film Steven D. Greydanus on Christian views

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review The Warners Gangster Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] The Warners Gangster Collection

Turner Classic Movies review The Warners Gangster Collection

DODGE CITY

USA (104 mi) 1939

Time Out review Tom Milne

A leisurely 'epic' Western, hugely enjoyable in its skilful marshalling of stock ingredients as Flynn, wagonmaster turned sheriff, tames the rumbustious cattle town at the end of the railroad line with the aid of the crusading newspaper editor's daughter (de Havilland). Nothing here you haven't seen before (in fact the marathon saloon brawl turns up all over the place as stock footage), but it's put together with great freshness and skill. Ann Sheridan, though given little enough screen time as the saloon girl, is as usual a standout.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Rosado) dvd review

Swashbuckler Errol Flynn seems out of place in this post-Civil War western. He's too dapper and refined to look comfortable in a cattle town. Playing a new sheriff cleaning up the riff-raff in a plot stolen by Mel Brooks for his western spoof Blazing Saddles, Flynn loses all his vitality trading the rapier for a six-gun. No matter. Flynn carries on effortlessly, breezing through his scenes with atypical whimsy while director Michael Curtiz stages masterfully crafted set pieces around him. The barroom brawl sequence is a hoot, employing hundreds of stuntmen and craggy character actors throwing each other through windows and smashing all manner of chairs, bottles, and tables over each other's heads—instigated by a dueling song between North and South war veterans as a lively warm up for Casablanca's famous "Marseille" number. The romance between Flynn and pretty waif Olivia de Havilland plays out with surprising dramatic tension, having Flynn's sheriff kill off her no-good brother during a stampede. And even though Curtiz seems a little lost knowing what to do with large groups of extras when they're not fighting (he mostly just clutters up the frame with them), he's an expert at milking suspense for Dodge City's entire running time. It's a good thing, too—Flynn's casual performance is helped by Curtiz's ability to keep his star under constant threat from well-drawn villains (big heavy Bruce Cabot is square jawed and smug; character actor/sidekick Victor Jory is the epitome of dumb, single-minded badness) and from civilization run amok (random gunfights popping up all over; children getting dragged through the street tied to horses). While the climactic chase aboard a speeding train (on fire!) feels a little rushed, Dodge City is a well-crafted and perfectly capable western. Lacking the artistry of pictures made by Ford, Hawks, or Anthony Mann, it's a B-picture made with an A-cast and, like Flynn, active and surprisingly resilient.

Turner Classic Movies review Jay Steinberg

While 1939 is acknowledged as the old Hollywood's banner year for classic films of every stripe, the Western genre benefited in particular. In the wake of such popular successes as The Plainsman (1937) and Wells Fargo (1937), the studio moguls stopped regarding the frontier drama as second-feature fodder and began assigning A-list talent and budgets to their prairie projects. As a result, '39 was marked by a veritable gold rush of classic oaters, including Stagecoach, Union Pacific, Frontier Marshall, Destry Rides Again, Jesse James and The Oklahoma Kid. Warner Brothers made its own deserving entry into this crowded field with Dodge City (1939).

Confident that their swashbuckling superstar Errol Flynn could comfortably and convincingly swap his sword for six-shooters, Warners cast him as Wade Hatton, an Irish soldier of fortune whose travels took him to the Old West, trailblazing in the service of railroad mogul Colonel Dodge (Henry O'Neill). Within a matter of years, the eponymous Kansas community that sprang up at the juncture with Dodge's Texas line becomes rife with corruption and vice, with most of the graft funneling to cattle baron Jeff Surrett (Bruce Cabot).

Hatton, for his part, is content to shepherd wagon trains into Dodge, and on one such trip pursues a flirtation with Abbie Irving (Olivia de Havilland), en route to joining the household of her town doctor uncle (Henry Travers). Unfortunately, her immature yahoo brother (William Lundigan) drunkenly triggers a cattle stampede, and is trampled during a confrontation with Hatton. An embittered Abbie is unable to forgive the trail boss for his role in the tragedy.

After a young boy is dragged to death in the wake of a shootout spurred by Surrett's cronies, Hatton determinedly assumes Dodge's long-empty sheriff's office with a pledge to clean up the lawless town. Surrett's efforts to buy him off only bring redoubled efforts on Hatton's part to find charges that will stick, and their duel of wills propels Dodge City all the way to its rousing finale.

The film-going public's response to Flynn as Western hero was so positive that he would go on to make a career niche within the genre - his resume as thereafter marked by Virginia City (1940), Santa Fe Trail (1940), They Died With Their Boots On (1941) and San Antonio (1945). At no time in Dodge City, or in any of his subsequent sagebrushers, did the Tasmanian actor make an effort to mask his clipped diction; Dodge City might have been the first and last time that screenwriters even bothered to explain it away. "I felt I was miscast in Westerns, but this was impossible to point out to producers when the pictures were so highly successful," Flynn recounted in his memoir, My Wicked, Wicked Ways. "While I couldn't understand the public buying me particularly, I could understand the Western, the frontier story, as a classic form of national entertainment. It is part of America's heritage, our history."

Although Dodge City is accorded its place among the revered films where she displayed her palpable onscreen chemistry with Flynn, de Havilland regarded the project as a career letdown. She was tired of the string of ingenue parts Warners steadily provided, and her preference for the saloon singer role that went to Ann Sheridan went unheeded. "It was a period in which she was given to constant fits of crying and long days spent at home in bed," declared Tony Thomas in The Films of Olivia de Havilland (Citadel Press). "She was bored with her work and while making Dodge City she claims that she even had trouble remembering her lines." In context, it's very fortunate that the studio thereafter okayed her loan-out for a project she craved, portraying Melanie in Gone With The Wind (1939).

Dodge City is most memorable for its collection of elaborate set pieces, many of which would provide Warner westerns with stock footage for years to come and provide Mel Brooks with much of what was so side-splittingly spoofed in Blazing Saddles (1974). In the hands of house style-defining director Michael Curtiz and cinematographers Sal Polito and Ray Rennahan, the film boasts what remains the definitive saloon brawl in movie history. (In a moment that presaged Curtiz's work in Casablanca (1942), the fracas is sparked by ex-Confederates determined to sing Dixie over a spirited rendition of Marching Through Georgia). Also remarkable is Flynn's climactic confrontation with Cabot, set in a blazing mail car on a runaway train.

Note must be made of Max Steiner's stirring score, as well as the film's rich roster of character players, largely drawn from the Warners lot. In addition to the aforementioned, there are distinguished efforts from Alan Hale and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams as the comic relief sidekicks, Victor Jory, Douglas Fowley and Ward Bond as Cabot's minions, and Frank McHugh as the newspaper publisher who provokes the heavies at his peril.

Although I consider myself well studied in the careers of vintage Hollywood stars, I'm afraid one of my weak spots lies in the works of a charismatically charming gent from the land of Tasmania, whom I didn't exactly warm to at first. Perhaps the roots of this resistance date back to when I was a kid in the age of variety shows back in the 1960s. Often times, the cast of almost any of these programs would do movie parodies, poking fun at debonair stars with hints of John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks and this particular performer in question: mustache always neatly trimmed, smiling teeth always pearly white (sometimes accompanied by a little "ding" sound effect or artificially enhanced enamel shining via technical wizardry (think The Carol Burnett Show's woefully underrated Lyle Waggoner).

But with a boxed set of films from Warner Home Video hitting the market this week, TCM's month-long tribute/tie-in showcasing over 30 of his movies, and positive buzz on a documentary that deftly balances his on- and off-set exploits, thjis is a good time to resume our Flynn 101 studies.

Dodge City, from Hollywood's golden year of 1939, is set in post-Civil War Kansas. Wade Hatton (Flynn) along with fellow cowpokes Rusty and Tex (Alan Hale, Guinn Williams) are in a Lone Star state of mind after devoting three years to helping feed the Army via their expertise in rounding up buffalo. But there's one last-minute mission to take care of: capturing crooked cattle rustler Jeff Surrett (Bruce Cabot) before going off to Dodge City, named after Colonel Dodge (Henry O'Neill), whose vision of bringing the railroad into Kansas has at longlast become reality. Hopes for the new spot on the map are high for a future metropolis laced with "honesty, courage, morality, and culture" for all who choose to relocate there. But that vision flames out in a blaze of gunfire and debauchery. Thanks to a resurfacing Surrett, accompanied by chief henchmen Yancey (Victor Jory) and Munger (Douglas Fowley), it could easily be dubbed "Sin City" thanks to this greedy bunch whose complete disregard for the law and morality drives many away, while those who choose to remain live in a state of fear.

It's this atmosphere that Wade and Rusty mosey back into when leading the niece of a prominent city doctor safely back into town, but not before misfortune strikes along the way when Abbie (Olivia de Havilland) loses her wayward alcoholic brother during a cattle stampede he helped put into motion. Surprisingly, Abbie's uncle is deeply understanding about the whole incident, almost lethargic in tone, since the deaths of loved ones is a daily occurrence in Dodge town. Yet and still, it isn't enough to make Wade give up the wagon trail circuit—until a heartbreaking tragedy involving one of the townspeople cuts him to the bone. And it's going to take much more than the equivalent of pointed edges and steel in Hatton's badge (not to mention nerve and courage) to go head to head with surly Surrett to restore Dodge City.

What a terrific movie. Some may find it predictable with a ton of familiarities common to most Westerns, but if you put yourself back in the period in which this film was prepared; when the genre had been relegated to B-movie level production values only to have a second- or third-tier actor from many of those quickies soon to be known as The Duke (with a little help from ace director John Ford) helped reinvent the formula in Stagecoach, you'll find yourself roped in by the wonder that is Dodge City.

Flynn is unquestionably superb as Wade, looking even more comfortable and confident than his pirate films; even his accent is toned down a few notches, just as naturally as it would for be any transplanted foreigner who's spent time down South and mastered the transformation of "you all" to "y'all." Again, the chemistry between Flynn and beloved, longtime co-star de Havilland is electric. The actress proves her versatility going from prim and proper English maiden to a rough hewn prairie girl who wants nothing to do with this dusty saddle rider until those twinkling eyes and irresistible personality win her over.

Director Michael Curtiz was one of the most versatile, energetic and finest overseers to set foot in Hollywood, with a list of genuine classics (including Casablanca, White Christmas, and even an Elvis movie, King Creole). Like his frequent leading man, Dodge City was the director's first foray into Westerns and he wasted no effort in pulling out all his trademark stops here, including three classic sequences: a thrilling rescue attempt in which you feel like you're riding gallantly alongside Wade; the mid-film barroom brawl, which must have utilized every available stuntman (and stuntwoman) in Hollywood (some say it inspired the similiar large-scale scuffle in Casablanca four years later); and one of the most all-out thrilling train finales of all time from the days when technical wizardry couldn't fly in fiery images to protect the actors; (de Havilland and even Flynn look positively frightened, which makes the scene even more of a gripper). But due must be credited to the beautiful cinematography of Sol Polito, a name you should hear more of thanks to his groundbreaking camera work on I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 42nd Street, and his first collaboration with Curtiz, The Charge of the Light Brigade. (Who can forget the battle sequence in the final reel? I still haven't). His exterior work here is like watching vintage oil paintings of western scenery come to life; one of the most beautifully photographed film of any style I've yet to see.

About the only shortcoming is a rather thankless performance by vintage Warner Bros. favorite Ann Sheridan, the tough-talking yet immensely beautiful actress who more than held her own against the likes of Bogart, Cagney, and Raft during her peak. Here, she only gets to warble a couple of forgettable tunes and utter about a half page of dialogue, but does she ever look pretty on a saloon stage with a red mane that could give Maureen O'Hara a run for her Technicolor money.

There are, however, numerous riches in the wonderful supporting performances from Bruce Cabot as Surrett (miles away from the dashing hero that rescued Fay Wray from the clutches of King Kong), Frank McHugh as the excitable newspaper reporter, bad guys Victor Jory and Douglas Fowley, child actor Bobs Watson (Boy's Town) in a role you'll never forget, and both Alan Hale and Guinn Williams, whose wonderful sidekick interplay with Flynn (one of many nicely done comic touches, by the way) supply much needed comic relief almost precisely when it is much needed.

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [4/5] Rory L. Aronsky

DVD Verdict (Maurice Cobbs) dvd review

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Errol Flynn: The Signature Collection

THE SEA HAWK

USA (127 mi) 1940 shortened re-released version (109 mi)

A hugely enjoyable swashbuckler from the days when 'packaging' wasn't such a dirty word and Jack Warner was a master of the art. Flynn plays novelist Rafael Sabatini's privateer, royally encouraged into deeds of derring-do against the wicked Spanish, as an amalgam of Captain Blood (also Sabatini-based) and Robin Hood. Robson repeats her Good Queen Bess from Fire Over England. House action specialist Curtiz directs what is in total a remake of a 1924 Frank Lloyd silent. Practice, as they say, makes perfect.

Scarface to A Sense of Loss Pauline Kael

Errol Flynn, playing a hero based on Sir Francis Drake, in a rousing swashbuckler directed by Michael Curtiz. The Spaniards talk peculiar slang, considering that the year is 1585, but Flora Robson's Queen Elizabeth is a vigorous shrewdie. The cast includes Brenda Marshall, Claude Rains, Gilbert Roland, Henry Daniell, Alan Hale, Una O'Connor, Donald Crisp and many other well-known performers. Seton I. Miller and Howard Koch were the writers; the music is by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Warners.

Slant Magazine [Jeremiah Kipp]

A devil-may-care rogue with the good looks of a matinee idol, Errol Flynn effortlessly coasted along on movie star charm. 1935's Captain Blood was a warm-up for his live-for-the-moment, die-for-romance characterizations, made enjoyable because he never seemed to fret too much. He might break an athletic sweat fencing with Basil Rathbone, or whatever heavy the studio pitted him against, but action-adventure and chasing the girls was all just a silly game to him. That's what makes his movies so much fun. The Adventures of Robin Hood has Flynn playing a cheerfully immature grown-up whose enjoyment of life's simple pleasures—food, sport, and girls—informed his heroism. He was never more believable than swinging to the rescue of whatever girl he fancied that month (Olivia DeHavilland was the most well known), or rallying his merry men and hearties into a form of stage combat that felt closer to ballet.

By the time The Sea Hawk rolled into production, the Flynn swashbucklers had found their formula. All the stock characters were in place and accounted for: Flynn's smoothly courageous hero, a pretty girl to moon over him (in this case, Brenda Marshall), her dippy old maidservant (Una O'Connor, from Robin Hood), a loyal sidekick (Flynn's regular big-hearted buddy, Alan "Little John" Hale), a suave diplomatic villain (Claude Rains), and a sword-wielding heavy for Flynn to defeat in the final reel (Henry Daniell, whose cross between fop and serpent informed Christopher Guest's wry homage in The Princess Bride). All the plot elements remain pretty much the same: an opening sea battle with cannons and swordplay, a light romance, an imprisonment in the galleys and subsequent escape by moonlight, and a final round of love-talk with the girl before swordplay and victory.

It's a reliable template, handled with visual flair by able director Michael Curtiz (who previously made Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and several other flying Flynn spectacles). This time, they were given a substantial budget, giving audiences more bang for their buck. The final palace swordfight is a cinematic feast of movement, accompanied by expressionistic shadow dances on the wall and a score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold that keeps the blood pumping. The escape from slavery, almost entirely without dialogue, is all taut editing between chains being worn down and sweaty close ups of indignant heroes—leading into breathtaking wide shots of sailors rope-climbing to their freedom. The economy, clarity, and muscular force of Curtiz's imagery shines when compared to Peter Weir's oft-confusing spatial relationships between men and ships in Master and Commander.

Flynn was a man of action, even in his best love scenes, which are chaste except when he feels like throwing caution to the wind. In The Sea Hawk, his buccaneer Geoffrey Thorpe never looks like he wants to ravish Spanish aristocrat Dona Maria (Marshall). She's beautiful but too pure, and her coquettishness with him seems like a dippy girl putting on airs (because that's the only way she can define herself). Strangely enough, Flynn has warmer chemistry and a saucier repartee with Flora Robson's virgin queen, Elizabeth I—even in scenes where they're competing with a "cute" monkey that doesn't so much upstage them as pad out the screen time. As long as his scenes were about sports and boyish lust, Flynn didn't need to be much of an actor; he could coast on his good diction, looks, and charm. When Flynn is labeled dashing and gallant, it's all in his grooming.

When The Sea Hawk is purely cinematic, it's at the top of its class. The action sequences are at least as good as those in Robin Hood, trading in that film's gorgeous Technicolor for crisply respectable black and white. The romance is passable and inoffensive. But the film owes a slavish obligation to propaganda that cursed many a wartime adventure story. The Elizabethan era is a cloak for World War II moralizing, with the Spanish armada standing in for Hitler's quest for world power, and Elizabeth I as a Churchill-style orator calling all good free men into action against the powers of evil. This gets a bit thick, and during the endless political sermonizing in Elizabeth's court (no doubt penned by Casablanca screenwriter Howard Koch), Flynn looks like a schoolboy eager for recess. One breathes a sigh of relief when the action moves from the stuffy castle to the exotic jungles of Panama. The best thing about Flynn's films is inseparable from all his on and off-screen faults: the glee of arrested development.

Turner Classic Movies review Lang Thompson

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson) dvd review

Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]

History on Film Andrew Allen

DVD Verdict (Maurice Cobbs) dvd review

Foster on Film - The Swashbuckler

KQEK DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]

Three Movie Buffs (Eric Nash) review [2.5/4]

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Errol Flynn: The Signature Collection

SANTA FE TRAIL

USA (110 mi) 1940

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

History is bunk, and politics pushed aside in favour of professionalism, as Flynn's Jeb Stuart - the future Rebel general - leads a bunch of West Point graduates against abolitionist John Brown, and finally gets involved in the battle at Harper's Ferry, thus beginning the Civil War. Far from liberal in attitude (Massey's John Brown is seen as a fanatic, ruthless and violent; the blacks are portrayed as barely willing to fight for their freedom), it's nevertheless fast and spectacular enough to warrant a look, if only to see Reagan playing Custer. Now that was inspired casting.

lewrockwell.com [Gail Jarvis]

A curiously reactionary western from Warners, known as the most liberal of studios. Flynn plays Stuart, a conventional Confederate soldier hero who leads his troops in the capture of the abolitionist Brown (Massey). You see, the fanatic Brown had stirred up trouble by rescuing blacks from slavery, when they were perfectly happy as they were. Brown was also interfering with the railroad belonging to Stuart's future father-in-law.

The love interest is perfunctory, so is the portrayal by Reagan of Custer, Stuart's fellow West Point graduate. The battle of Harper's Valley that began the Civil War is well depicted

Sabotage to Scandal Pauline Kael

One of Hollywood's careless, shameless distortions of American history. The team of Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland had thrived under the direction of Michael Curtiz in such films as CAPTAIN BLOOD, THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, and DODGE CITY, and so this bloated Western was confected. Flynn plays a monolithically brave Jeb Stuart, and Ronald Reagan is young George Armstrong Custer; they're both after dainty Olivia. The offensive plot pits the two handsome young blades, fresh from West Point, against a rabid, fanatic John Brown (Raymond Massey, at his most burning-eyed hypertense, and photographed to inspire fear and revulsion in the audience). The black men whom Brown seeks to liberate appear to be childish dupes. It's a romantic, action-filled, screwed-up epic; you get the feeling that maybe nobody intended it to be as reactionary as it turned out, with Olivia looking especially fetching in front of the gallows where Brown is hanged. At the end, some good liberal appears to have had a fit of remorse: when the heroine goes on her wedding trip with Stuart, the sound of "John Brown's Body" rises above the rhythm of the moving train. The large cast includes Van Heflin (a dirty villain), Douglas Fowley, Gene Reynolds, Alan Hale, Alan Baxter, Susan Peters, and Ward Bond. The screenplay is by Robert Buckner; music by Max Steiner. Warners.

Turner Classic Movies review Joseph D’Onofrio

After making six of their nine films together in a five year span, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland found themselves cast together again in Santa Fe Trail (1940). The two actors felt a strong attraction to each other but De Havilland refused to let their personal relationship go beyond friendship. Despite the fact that they had an undeniably intense on-screen chemistry together and often played historic screen couples during the greatest era in film, De Havilland later admitted (in The Films of Olivia De Havilland by Tony Thomas) that Flynn came on too strongly with her, often "Éscaring her with his rough humor." And De Havilland, knowing that he was married to the actress Lili Damita, knew that there could only be trouble if she returned his advance. "It's a good thing I didn't - he would have ruined my life," she later remarked. But the affectionate relationship between them remained, and at times, would lead to some outlandish behavior as when De Havilland and John Huston (whom she was involved with at the time) ran into Flynn at a Hollywood party. One thing quickly led to another and soon Flynn and Huston were breaking the place up in a terrific fist fight, neither besting the other, but most certainly ruining their very expensive imported clothes.

De Havilland and Flynn were at the peak of their careers in Santa Fe Trail, but so was the rest of the cast and crew. You can sense the fun they all had making what is essentially a Western fantasy (Hollywood always played fast and loose with the facts), directed by studio favorite Michael Curtiz and photographed by the ever reliable Sol Polito. Despite that, things may have seemed a bit ominous at first for some cast members like Ronald Reagan. The future President found himself cast in the movie at the last minute as George Armstrong Custer, partly due to his success as the "Gipper" in Knute Rockne, All American (1940). When he showed up to see the wardrobe man on the first day of shooting, Reagan saw him toss aside uniforms designed for Wayne Morris (who was originally cast as Custer) and cart in costumes hurriedly sewed together for Reagan's use. As the worried actor recalled in his biography, Where's the Rest of Me?: The Ronald Reagan Story, co-written with Richard Hubler, "It occurred to me then that it would be just as easy someday to throw my clothes in the corner and hang some other actor's in their place. It's a highly competitive business."

In Warner Brothers' recreation of a famous chapter in American history, the film's heroes - all recent graduates of West Point and future leaders of both the Union and Confederate armies - head out along the Santa Fe Trail but soon take a detour off that important caravan route from Missouri to New Mexico. Instead, Santa Fe Trail concentrates on the conflict between the Army and the abolitionist John Brown. In reality, no one but Flynn's character, J.E.B. Stuart, graduated from the Point in 1854, the year given in the film, but all of the others did graduate from there at different times, and in fact, Robert E. Lee was in charge of the troops at the Point and of the attack at Harper's Ferry to capture Brown. That raid is a reasonable facsimile of the real attack and Raymond Massey's masterful performance captures the almost insane religious zealotry of John Brown.

Sitting squarely in the middle the fence, refusing to side with either the South or the North, screenwriter Robert Buckner tries very hard to simplify matters as illustrated by the following dialogue delivered by J.E.B Stuart (Flynn) when he is asked about the dilemma between slavery and insurrection: "Our job is to be a soldier, not to decide what is wrong or right." There are other statements by De Havilland's character, Kit Carson Holliday, warning against the rift between slavers and anti-slavery people, and the inhumanity of it all. But there are almost equal arguments for a slow progression towards freedom and a conservative eradication of slavery in the South. So, although the film may be politically murky and somewhat confused historically, it never falters as an entertainment.

Among the stellar supporting cast of Santa Fe Trail are Alan Hale, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, William Lundigan, Ward Bond, and Van Heflin, some of them rising stars and others destined to become household names among television viewers (Ward Bond became the star of TV's popular Wagon Train series, 1957-1961). But perhaps there is no success story amongst them as poignant as Errol Flynn's rise and fall. Reaching his peak in the mid to late forties he soon turned to a debauched life full of drugs and booze, often wandering off aimlessly for long stretches aboard his sailboat, the "Zaca." Eventually, he returned to the screen, specializing in drunks; after all, he played them so well, particularly in The Sun Also Rises (1957) and Too Much, Too Soon (1958), in which he played his late friend John Barrymore, also a notorious alcoholic. His final stab at fame was his autobiography, My Wicked Wicked Ways, published posthumously in 1959, the year that he died. The dashing, adored athlete and leading man was found dead of a heart attack at the age of 50. It was often said that Flynn's coroner thought he was examining the body of a much older man. Olivia de Havilland later recalled in The Films of Olivia de Havilland by Tony Thomas that she first met Flynn when they were testing together for Captain Blood (1935). She asked him what he wanted most in life. "Success" is what he answered. De Havilland felt that it was this fervent pursuit of success that compromised Flynn and caused him to - as Thomas puts it - "Étrod a path that eventually led to veritable self-destruction."

Movie Mirror Sanderson Beck

YANKEE DOODLE DANDY

USA (126 mi) 1942

I'm a Yankee Doodle dandy,
A Yankee Doodle, do or die;
A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam's,
Born on the Fourth of July.

I've got a Yankee Doodle sweetheart,
She's my Yankee Doodle joy.
Yankee Doodle came to London,
Just to ride the ponies,
I am a Yankee Doodle boy.

—from the song "Yankee Doodle Dandy" by George M. Cohan, 1904

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]

Who but theatre historians now bother with George M Cohan, author of songs like 'Mary's a Grand Old Name' and shows like 45 Minutes from Broadway? No one. But everyone remembers Cagney's impersonation, pitched as it is at fever level, even higher up the thermometer than Curtiz' direction or Ray Heindorf's musical arrangements. This was just the film to bombard American theatres with after Pearl Harbor: full of rousing sentiments and songs ('You're a Grand Old Flag', 'Over There' - Cohan's chief contribution to WWI), all designed to steel the morale of every patriot. Now it seems raucous, vulgar, over long; but if you like slick jobs, this is certainly one of the slickest.

X, Y and Zee to Your Past Is Showing Pauline Kael

The astonishingly versatile James Cagney as the prodigious actor-playwright-songwriter George M. Cohan, in a big, enjoyable musical biography, well directed by Michael Curtiz. Made during the Second World War, it's packed with jingoistic Americanism, but this ties in with Cohan's own attitudes and with the unself-conscious Irish-American sentimentality of his songs, and Cagney's stiff-backed hoofing is so spirited that the moldy plot turns hardly bother one. He gets to dance more in this movie than in any of his previous films, and though he was born in 1899 and is somewhat portly here, he is so cocky and sure a dancer that you feel yourself grinning with pleasure at his movements. It's quite possible that he has more electricity than Cohan himself had. (He took the Academy Award for Best Actor.) With Walter Huston, Joan Leslie, Rosemary DeCamp, Frances Langford, Richard Whorf, George Tobias, Jeanne Cagney, Eddie Foy, Jr., Walter Catlett, Irene Manning, S.Z. Sakall, and George Barbier. The script is by Robert Buckner and Edmund Joseph; the cinematography is by James Wong Howe. Warners.

review of YANKEE DOODLE DANDY Edwin Jahiel

James Cagney stars in a musical biography of George M. Cohan (1878-1942), who did just about everything in popular entertainment, starting out with the vaudeville team of his parents (later augmented by his sister, played here by Cagney's real sister, Jeanne). Cohan sang, danced, wrote musical revues,"regular" musicals and stageplays. He produced (notably with Sam Harris) a host of works on Broadway --so many that they sometimes ran simultaneously. Cagney does not look at all like Cohan, does not imitate Cohan off stage, but uses all sorts of Cohan mannerisms on stage. The movie has its usual share of Hollywood liberties and hokum. Cohan saw it and soon after died. There is no correlation here, as Cohan had given it his blessing. The film's cast is good, but it's a Cagney movie all the way. He had already established his famous tough guy image in gangster movies. YDD, a personal triumph, gave him an additional, almost diametrically opposed persona --which was not really new as he had been a singer-hoofer in vaudeville, Broadway plays, two minor films, and in the excellent movie musical "Footlight Parade." Cagney's achievement was quite unorthodox. When Fred Astaire first tried out for films, the verdict was: "Can't act, can't sing, can dance a little." Cagney can't really dance or sing by Hollywood standards, but he acts so vigorously that it creates an illusion , and for dance-steps he substitutes a patented brand of robust, jerky walks, runs and other motions. The film was made during World War II with an out-and-out patriotic slant that was appropriate, since Cohan had been the flag-waving composer of "Over There", the American World War I song. It's a corny movie, sentimental, rousing (especially in the Grand Old Flag number) and with no hint of negative characters. After all, in 1942 we were gung ho and closing ranks, like chorus lines. YDD received 8 Oscar nominations, won for Best Actor, sound, and scoring.

Turner Classic Movies review Roger Fristoe and Jeff Stafford

Michael Curtiz, notorious for his mangling of the English language, once referred to Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) as "the pinochle of my career." Although one does not usually associate the Budapest-born director of Casablanca (1942) and other classics with musicals, he made a total of 13 musicals and musical biographies, beginning with the Al Jolson vehicle Mammy (1930). Curtiz made a star of Doris Day in her first film, Romance on the High Seas (1948), and directed her in three more of her early movies: My Dream Is Yours (1949), Young Man With a Horn (1950) and I'll See You in My Dreams (1951). He also directed such other musical stars as Bing Crosby, Mary Martin, Rosemary Clooney and Elvis Presley.

Yankee Doodle Dandy, the musical biography of patriotic song-and-dance man George M. Cohan, also rates as the favorite film of its star, James Cagney. Although he now seems the only logical choice, Cagney would have missed out on his big chance if a deal between Cohan and MGM to make a film to be called The Four Cohans hadn't fizzled out. Covering the years when Cohan had toured with his father, mother and sister, the movie would have starred Mickey Rooney as the young Cohan. The deal collapsed after studio head Louis B. Mayer refused to allow Cohan the right to final cut on the proposed film. The next movie mogul to show an interest in the project was Samuel Goldwyn, who had a commitment to make a film starring Fred Astaire. When Astaire refused the role of Cohan as not right for him, the rights were picked up by Warner Bros., who cast resident star Cagney in the role with Cohan's blessings. Cagney, in particular, was eager to play Cohan because he was, at the time, suspected of being a communist sympathizer due to his union activities (he was president of the Screen Actors' Guild) and because of his open support of the New Deal. He wanted to show his patriotism on screen, and the George M. Cohan story was the perfect vehicle to do this.

Yankee Doodle Dandy, with its many flag-waving musical numbers, proved just the ticket for World War II-era audiences and became the top-grossing movie of its year, as well as Warners' top-grossing movie to that time. It was nominated for Academy Awards in eight categories, including Best Picture and Director (Curtiz), and won three Oscars, including one for Cagney as Best Actor. Curtiz, according to film historian Richard Schickel, was "a fortunate choice as director. His taste for shadowed lighting catches the flavor of Cohan's backstage world, and the subtle flexibility of his camera imparts a musical flow to the piece even in its non-musical moments."

One of Curtiz' keys to success was the decision to allow Cagney free rein in his scenes, permitting the actor to improvise as the cameras were rolling. A prime example, and reportedly Cagney's favorite moment in the film, is when he suddenly breaks into a tap-dance as he comes down the stairs in a scene at the White House where Cohan has met with President Franklin Roosevelt. "I didn't think of it till five minutes before I went on," Cagney later recalled. "And I didn't check with the director or anything; I just did it." The ordinarily hard-boiled Curtiz was so moved by the scene in which Cohan bids farewell to his dying father (Walter Huston) that he reportedly ruined a take with his loud sobs. According to Cagney biographer Michael Freedland, tears streamed down Curtiz' face as he stumbled away to find a handkerchief and exclaimed to Cagney, "Gott, Jeemy, that was marvelous!"

DVD Verdict Bill Gibron

DVD Talk (Matthew Millheiser) dvd review [5/5] [Special Edition]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review 2 Disc Special Edition

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review 2 Disc Special Edition

Reel.com DVD review [James Plath] 2 Disc Special Edition

Macresarf1's Review: "For Cagney's a YANKEE DOODLE DANDY!"

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Turner Classic Movies dvd review The Warner Legends Collection

Turner Classic Movies review on the Musical Soundtrack

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]

New York Times (registration req'd) [Bosley Crowther]

CASABLANCA

USA (102 mi) 1942

Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review

Half the world can repeat half the dialogue of Curtiz’s great wartime (anti-)romance, re-released in a new digital restoration for Valentine’s Day, and half of Hollywood’s scriptwriters worked on it. If Peter Bogdanovich is right to say the Bogart persona was generally defined by his work for Howard Hawks, his Rick, master of the incredibly ritzy Moroccan gin-joint into which old Paris flame Ingrid Bergman walks, just as importantly marked his transition from near-psychopathetic bad guy to idiosyncratic romantic hero.

Sixty-odd years on, the film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’ morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger viewers still obtains. Claude Rains is superb as the pragmatic French chief of police, himself a complex doppelgänger of Bogart; Paul Henreid is credible and self-effacing as the film’s nominal hero; Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre give great colour; and Bergman literally shines. Arguably, cinema’s greatest ‘accidental masterpiece’, it still amounts to some hill of beans.

Casablanca to Charlie Bubbles Pauline Kael

Ingrid Bergman became a popular favorite when Humphrey Bogart, as Rick, the most famous saloonkeeper in screen history, treated her like a whore. Although their romance was certified by a collection of Academy Awards, they didn't press their luck and never appeared together again. In the role of the cynic redeemed by love, Bogart became the great adventurer-lover of the screen during the war years. In this film he established the figure of the rebellious hero-the lone wolf who hates and defies officialdom (and in the movies he fulfilled a universal fantasy: he got away with it). Questioned about his purpose and motives, he informs the police: "I came to Casablanca for the waters." "Waters? What waters? We're in the desert." "I was misinformed." It's far from a great film, but it has a special appealingly schlocky romanticism, and you're never really pressed to take its melodramatic twists and turns seriously. The international cast includes Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Marcel Dalio, Helmut Dantine, S.Z. Sakall, Joy Page, Leonid Kinskey, Curt Bois, Dan Seymour, Ludwig Stossel, Ilka Gruning, Frank Puglia, Madeleine LeBeau, John Qualen, and, memorably, Dooley Wilson singing "As Time Goes By." Academy Awards: Best Picture; Director (Michael Curtiz); Screenplay (Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch). And the Thalberg Memorial Award went to the producer, Hal B. Wallis. Based on the play Everybody Comes to Rick's, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. Warners.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

This film probably does everything great that a film can do. For those of us who have watched it more than ten times, and loved it every single one, the only remaining question is whether it is the greatest film ever made. It's not a flawless film, as some have said...not like, for example Babette's Feast, or My Life as a Dog. Instead it is an ultimate personification of "Hollywood perfection," whereby one becomes convinced that Marilyn Monroe is all the more entrancing because she sounds like a cartoon, or Robert Redford is better looking because of his warts. Michael Curtiz' masterpiece makes romance, intrigue, situational ethics, hard drinking, and kicking Nazi's ass all look like one gear. So it must be! The only scene that I'm still confused about is the one where they all (Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains) sit down and order the best champagne, then promptly stand up and leave without drinking any. Henreid has the intensity for that kind of ideologically driven martyr who saves the world, all the while creating nothing but problems for everyone around him, but I don't see anything like the charisma that accompanies the historical alchemists who have made that formula work (Martin Luther King, JFK, Che Guevara, John Lennon, Boris Yeltsin). Ingrid Bergman's most dramatic scenes are only enhanced by her emotional sensibilities as an actress being thrown overboard, but if she is indeed "the most beautiful woman to ever visit Casablanca" it may be partially because we know a little too much about Madeleine LeBeau. Ultimately, though, the number one reason that the film is great is because it's Bogey's greatest role. Bogey was an authentic rugged individualist, recalcitrant, cynical but morally admirable, American willing to make the right move at the right time, whatever it was. In one of the ultimate ironies in the history of Hollywood the part was originally given to Ronald Reagan--thank God type-casting saved the day! Great as Bogey is, the only flawless performance is that of Rains who, as an Englishman, perfectly anticipates that will amuse the Americans about the French. Rick's Café Americain somehow appeals as one of the all-time great nightclubs, despite the fact that no one but LeBeau ever seems to be drinking much, and way over half of the patrons are utter assholes. That artists are more important to a bar than saints is a given, but the only thing the Nazis can possibly contribute is a target for ugly drunks. I don't buy into the conspiratorially alleged subtext that, in the famous final scene, that Bogey is dumping Bergman for Rains. I think it's more likely that he just decided that she talks too much. I mean, surely the artistically attuned Dooley Wilson would be more his style.

Edinburgh U Film Society (Alicia Forsyth) review Sarah Artt (excerpt)

Some people feel it’s impossible to really see Casablanca for the first time, because it’s such a popular reference. Inevitably you’ve seen clips, heard As Time Goes By and admired those film stills of Humphrey Bogart looking smart in a white dinner jacket. You may even be familiar with the plot line: American ex-pat runs bar in Casablanca, clearing point for people trying to escape WWII. He runs into his old flame, now reunited with her husband. Much anguished conversation and poignant recollection of the Paris occupation, along with some mild run-ins with the Nazis and corrupt French police. Great ending too. There are really so many reasons why you ought to see this movie, but in the style of back-to-the-land religious weirdos everywhere, I scaled it down to a list of ten:

1. Ingrid Bergman has never looked so beautiful

2. You can never hope to look as good as Bogey in a white dinner jacket, but at least now you can try.

3. As Time Goes By, totally sentimental and sappy, but secretly you will love it and sing it to yourself in the bath for the next month.

4. All the immortal lines in context: “Play it again, Sam” “Of all the gin joints in all the world, you had to walk into mine” “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life!”

5. In this movie, even political asylum seekers get to hang out and drink champagne.

6. The great thing about this era of American filmmaking is that everyone is always ready for scotch and sex. And if you like this, you should see The Big Sleep, and all The Thin Man Movies.

7. If you’ve seen this movie, you can now fake your way through virtually any conversation in which films are being discussed, even if the last thing you saw in the theatre was The Phantom Menace and think M. Night Shyalaman is the greatest working director.

8. You can take someone you’re thinking of dating to this movie and they’ll think you a) have very good taste and, b) must be terribly sophisticated to even know about movies made before 1975.

9. You can inform your family that you’ve been attending enriching cultural events on the evenings you don’t spend in the library.

10. If you hate this movie, feel free to go back to renting Shallow Hal and its ilk unmolested by pretentious hipsters.

She didn't say, "Play it again, Sam." He did say, "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she had to walk into mine."

The script wasn't even finished when they started. Rick was going to be played by Ronald Reagan and all Ingrid Bergman wanted was to get it over with quickly so that she could make For Whom The Bell Tolls with Gary Cooper.

The plot was a nonsense, politically speaking, and in the flashback sequences, relating to Rick and Ilsa's affair in Paris, there are some of the most ludicrous back projection shots ever contrived. What is it about this film that gives it classic status? Why should a movie with a foreign-sounding name about wartime refugees, a corrupt French cop and a cynical American nightclub owner stand out above the Hollywood studios' production line? The answer lies in one word, "style".

Hungarian director Michael Curtiz, who could hardly speak English, had just finished Yankee Doodle Dandy that won Jimmy Cagney an Oscar ("The only thing Curtiz has to say is, 'Don't do it the way I showed you. Do it the way I mean'", Cagney said). He was a perfectionist, with a defined visual identity and the ability to draw strong performances from his actors.

Bergman plays Ilsa, the enigmatic wife of the Free French resistance hero Victor Lazlo (an uncharismatic performance from Paul Henreid), who arrives at Rick's Cafe Americain one evening and sees Sam (Dooley Wilson) at the piano. She is there with her husband to try and purchase exit permits, so that they can leave North Africa before the Nazis catch up with them. She remembers Sam from Paris and, if he is here, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) cannot be far away.

Essentially, a love story, Casablanca is darker than a camel's eyeball. Although not an ugly drunk, Rick is certainly alcoholic. A wounded romantic, who had been stood up by Ilsa when they planned to run away together before the Germans marched into Paris, his view of life has hardened over the intervening years ("I stick my neck out for nobody"), which is why his friendship with Capt Louis Renault (an inspired Claude Rains), the police chief, fits so well. Both men recognise the fallibility of human nature and essential absurdity of honourable intent. Rick's past is a mystery. He smokes a lot and looks miserable most of the time, but deep down - and this is where Bogie's acting comes into its own - he has feelings that will not be compromised.

What makes this special? Julius and Philip Epstein's ability to write dazzling one-liners; Bergman's luminous performance ("I don't know what's right anymore"); Rains's memorable final words ("Round up the usual suspects"); Wilson singing As Time Goes By; Bogie, in his trench-coat, watching the plane take off ("We'll always have Paris").

Turner Classic Movies review Bret Wood

In the six decades since its 1942 release, Casablanca has grown into such a legend that it almost transcends mere cinema. Its lines of dialogue can be quoted by people who have not even seen the film: "Here's looking at you, kid," "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship," and the oft-misquoted "Play it, Sam."

The production design of Casablanca has come to represent the aesthetics of romantic longing. Its smoky casino, fog-shrouded runway, trench coats, potted palms and gruff-voiced pianist repeatedly surface in contemporary films, commercials, television programs and even restaurant decor as respects are paid to this quintessential Hollywood classic.

If Citizen Kane (1941) represents the pinnacle of artistic derring-do and Gone With the Wind (1939) epitomizes the colorful bombast of the American epic, then Casablanca is surely the film that defines cinematic cool.

The plot revolves around "Rick's Cafe Americain", a bar and casino in Northern Africa which serves as a way station for expatriates and political refugees at the dawn of World War II. Rick (Humphrey Bogart) refuses to take sides with any nationality, but when a former lover (Ingrid Bergman) and her new husband (Paul Henried) arrive in Casablanca, desperate for visas, he is drawn into the volatile web of political and romantic espionage.

The ingredients that have made Casablanca such a timeless classic are not easy to pinpoint. Produced by Warner Bros. at the height of the Hollywood studio system, Casablanca embraced what is now known as "invisible style." Rather than dazzling the eye with eye-catching visuals and histrionic acting, it seduces the viewer by creating a seamless, lush universe that gradually envelops the audience. Hardly an effortless accomplishment, "invisible style" required an absolute mastery of the various cinematic elements by its collaborators, including Hungarian director Michael Curtiz (Mildred Pierce, 1945), director of photography Arthur Edeson (The Maltese Falcon, 1941), Art Director Carl Jules Weyl (The Big Sleep, 1946), composer Max Steiner (Gone With the Wind) and soon-to-be-director Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, 1972), whose dynamic opening montage invests the film with a sense of political urgency.

It took no less than six writers to transform Murray Burnett and Joan Alison's unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick's into Casablanca, taking a conventional exotic romance (patterned after Algiers (1938) and Only Angels Have Wings, 1939) and investing it with a subtle, richly-textured brand of drama all its own.

Although George Raft and Ronald Reagan were rumored to have been considered for the starring role, only Humphrey Bogart could have endowed the character with such emotional depth in so few words. Tight-lipped and tough on the outside, while wounded and sentimental within, Bogart's nuanced performance as Rick Blaine is the capstone to this extraordinary cinematic achievement that shows no sign of succumbing to the frailties of age.

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

In one of the documentary supplements included on the new two-disc version of Casablanca, screenwriter Julius Epstein—a dialogue specialist who, with his twin brother Philip, was credited with punching up the script's most elegant lines—talks about the film as just another widget on the factory line. At the height of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, studios like Warner Bros. churned out a movie a week, which means Casablanca, in Epstein's words, was merely "one in 50." In retrospect, perhaps the most widely beloved film ever made is also the most miraculous, a strange case where rounding up "the usual suspects" (contract players, a house director, a stable of writing talent) created a magical alchemy never to be repeated. With so many cooks in the kitchen, Casablanca represents the sort of Hollywood committee-think that's normally considered compromising and pernicious, prone to diluting strong personal visions into homogenous mush. But under the watchful eye of producer/ conductor Hal B. Wallis, Jack Warner's right-hand man, craftsmen were assembled like players in a symphony, sounding just the right notes of romance, patriotism, sacrifice, and escapist entertainment as America delved into WWII. Take away one element, and the whole thing might have fallen apart: For example, the studio initially announced it was casting Ronald Reagan in the lead role, though he was never seriously considered. In fact, much of the legend and lore surrounding Casablanca involves near-misses. MGM brass could have had Murray Burnett and Joan Alison's unproduced play Everybody Comes To Rick's for $5,000, but refused. (Warner later paid $20,000.) Wallis wanted Hedy Lemarr for the Ingrid Bergman role, and originally considered a woman for the pianist played by Dooley Wilson. And the studio wanted to replace the love theme "As Time Goes By" with another song, but Bergman had cut her hair for For Whom The Bell Tolls, making the necessary reshoots impossible. The perfect American hero for the time (a romantic under a cynical shell, an isolationist compelled into courageous action by an abiding sense of right and wrong), Humphrey Bogart stars as an expatriate saloon-owner in Morocco, a way station for wartime refugees. With so many looking to escape exotic limbo, exit visas are a prime commodity to black-market dealers like Peter Lorre, who leaves Bogart with two golden transit papers, authorized by de Gaulle himself. Though he tries to drown his emotions in booze, Bogart's long-dormant feelings for love and politics are aroused when Bergman, an old flame who stood him up in Paris, arrives with her husband Paul Henreid, a brave resistance leader who survived a German concentration camp. If Casablanca has a flaw, it's Henreid, who rivals the local Nazi officers for humorlessness, making him seem less heroic than flawed men like Bogart and the witty, double-dealing French police captain played so memorably by Claude Rains. But in a way, Henreid acts like the straight man in a comedy, functioning as a much-needed counterpoint to the world of volatile, conflicting emotions surrounding him. This fevered atmosphere is what makes Casablanca seem newly transporting every time it's viewed. As the crowning jewel in the Warner archive, the film has received the deluxe treatment, but nostalgia often gets the better of the supplements. Taken together, the two commentary tracks on the first disc complement each other nicely, with critic Roger Ebert providing a lucid and probing personal essay to deepen film historian Rudy Behlmer's meat-and-potatoes production notes. The second disc features a few intriguing odds and ends, most notably two deleted scenes, a radio production featuring all three lead actors, and a hilariously misbegotten 17-minute TV adaptation from 1955. But the majority of the promotional featurettes, with flowery Lauren Bacall narration and talking heads reminiscing over the "As Time Goes By" theme, speak to a "more is more" philosophy that's an epidemic among DVD producers. Sometimes extras like "Carrotblanca," an excruciating Bugs Bunny cartoon from the not-so-Golden Age of 1995, threaten to subtract from the legacy rather than add to it. But Casablanca is durable enough to withstand any homage.

Dragan Antulov retrospective [9/10]

Bright Lights Film Journal review The Romance of Propaganda, by Tanfer Emin Tunc, February 2007

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

Slate [Sarah Kerr]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4] also seen here: ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]

Film Freak Central dvd review [Special Edition] Walter Chaw

eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder

CultureCartel.com (David Abrams) review [5/5]

Scott Renshaw review April Fool’s review

Turner Classic Movies review The idea behind the film, Scott McGhee

Turner Classic Movies review A look behind the camera, Frank Miller

Turner Classic Movies review Why the film is essential, Bret Wood

Movie-Vault.com (Vadim Rizov) review

Movie Reviews UK review [5/5] Damian Cannon

Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]

Move House Commentary Johnny Web

DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review 2 Disc Special Edition

digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review [Special Edition]

Reel.com DVD review [Jeffrey Wachs] Special Edition

DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review [Special Edition]

Reel.com DVD review [Sarah Chauncey] Special Edition

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review also here for 2 Disc Special edition: DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD DVD Version]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Verdict (Dennis Prince) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [5/5] [HD-DVD Version]

Turner Classic Movies review Critic reviews

Turner Classic Movies review Trivia and Quotes from the film

Three Movie Buffs (Eric Nash) review [4/4]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [5/5]

DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [5/5]

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review [Special Edition]

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

All Movie Guide [Mark Deming]

PopMatters [Erik Hinton] reviews Essential Classics

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]

Casablanca: No 2 best romantic film of all time David Thomson from The Guardian, October 15, 2010

Casablanca: The story of a scene David Thomson from The Guardian, October 15, 2010

The 10 best last lines - in pictures Philip French from The Observer, January 28, 2012

MILDRED PIERCE

USA (111 mi) 1945

Mildred Pierce to The Model Shop Pauline Kael

Joan Crawford rises from poverty to affluence and then suffers glamorously in beach house, roadhouse, and mansion from the nasty semi-incestuous goings on of her cad husband (Zachary Scott) and her spoiled daughter (Ann Blyth). Miss Crawford's heavy breathing was certified as acting when she won an Academy Award for her performance here. Michael Curtiz directed this glossy adaptation of the James M. Cain novel. With Jack Carson and Eve Arden. Warners.

Time Out review

James Cain's novel of the treacherous life in Southern California that sets house-wife-turned waitress-turned-successful restauranteur (Crawford) against her own daughter (Blyth) in competition for the love of playboy Zachary Scott, is brought fastidiously and bleakly to life by Curtiz' direction, Ernest Haller's camerawork, and Anton Grot's magnificent sets. Told in flashback from the moment of Scott's murder, the film is a chilling demonstration of the fact that, in a patriarchal society, when a woman steps outside the home the end result may be disastrous.

David Denby: Joan Crawford in “Mildred Pierce.” from the New Yorker

In the early forties, Joan Crawford left the suffocating glamour of M-G-M and entered the noirish shadows of Warner Bros. Her second film there was the startling “Mildred Pierce,” from the James M. Cain novel, which is perhaps more candid about money and social status than any American movie of the period. (It screens at MOMA on April 12 and April 16.) Crawford is the poor divorcée Mildred, who works as a waitress, then starts a restaurant, then a chain of restaurants, and finally marries the quintessential heel, Zachary Scott, all to satisfy the snobbish demands of her daughter, Ann Blyth, who resents her mother’s common origins. Crawford’s performance is convincing and intelligent, and the bitterness feels genuine (Crawford herself was a wrong-side-of-the-tracks girl who struggled for respect). Like other good forties movies, “Mildred Pierce” starts with a murder and then works back to the roots of the crime. The director, Michael Curtiz, keeps the palette dark and rich and the psychological undertones resonant.

DVD Times [Anthony Nield]

Single working mothers no doubt identified with the willful Mildred Pierce, played by Joan Crawford in career resuscitation mode. Ever the tough and resourceful Hollywood survivor, a fortysomething Crawford breathed new life into her career by switching from MGM (which was turning its attention to younger starlets) to Warner Bros. She embarked on a series of intense melodramas starting with Mildred Pierce and adapted her persona to that of a resilient mother who wants her daughters to have the opportunities she never had. With an eye for opportunity, she opens a successful restaurant and puts all her money into her children's well being: dance lessons, music recitals, and the best clothes honest money can buy.

Mildred's eldest daughter Veda (Ann Blyth), spoiled rotten and ashamed of her mother's blue-collar lifestyle, aims higher than her class and starts having a fling with Mildred's second husband, ne'er-do-well playboy Monte Baragon (Zachary Scott). Mildred's will to provide for her daughter conflicts with Veda's irrepressible urge for independence by any means possible, including blackmail and betrayal. Based on a novel by James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice) and opening with Monte Baragon getting pumped with bullets and Mildred contemplating suicide by the seashore, the viewer eagerly anticipates third act tragedies and mother-daughter catfights. Ann Blyth's daughter is so obnoxiously perky-cute while damaging the lives of the innocent (a false pregnancy bilks $10,000 from a wealthy neighboring family) or herself (singing in a nightclub prowling with sailors), we eagerly anticipate the moment when animalistic Crawford will lose her patience. And we all know Joan can slap someone in the face like nobody's business.

Mildred Pierce is melodramatic trash, constructed like a reliable Aristotelian warhorse where characters have planted the seeds of their own doom in the first act, only to have grief-stricken revelations at the climax. Directed by studio favorite Michael Curtiz in German Expressionistic mode, which doesn't quite go with the California beaches and sunlight but sets the bleak tone of domestic film noir, and scored by Max Steiner with a sensational bombast that's rousing even when it doesn't match the quieter, pensive mood of individual scenes, Mildred Pierce is professionally executed and moves at a brisk clip. Crawford is well cast as a protective she-wolf, dominating the stock company male players that surround her and her face, showing the first signs of age from the meat grinder of show business, is well matched against the smug freshness of Ann Blyth.

Though all of its craft is accomplished, Mildred Pierce never gets deep under one's skin the way it ought to. Its tale of class warfare within the shattered nuclear family only seems close to home, but it's a Hollywood photocopy of life's struggle where the solid directing, camerawork and acting call attention to themselves. This one should have been more rough-hewn and sloppy, the way life is and the way movies so seldom are. If it comes close, it's because Crawford's desperation transcends the studio gimmicks. In his review of Possessed, my Slant colleague Dan Callahan refers to it as the "paranoid animal glint that flickers behind [her] eyes." She wanted that Oscar so very, very badly, and like Mildred she would do anything to stay alive in the Hollywood jungle.

:: The Midnight Palace :: - Film Review: Mildred Pierce (1945) Gary Sweeney

Please don't tell anyone what Mildred Pierce did! With a tagline like that, so much is left to the imagination. By 1945, Joan Crawford had made a series of flops at MGM and her career was fizzling out. At 40 years old, she'd already passed her prime. Many of the big studios had employed younger stars, so Crawford was more likely to be a mentor than a headliner. Nevertheless, after Bette Davis and Rosalind Russell turned down the part, Crawford beat Barbara Stanwyck to the punch for the starring role in Mildred Pierce. In retrospect, no other actress could have become this character, so perhaps there is something to fate.

A shot rings out...what could have happened? Joan Crawford stars as Mildred Pierce, an over-worked housewife whose husband Bert (Bruce Bennett) has an affair with their neighbor Maggie Biederhof (Lee Patrick). Bert takes the defensive when Mildred confronts him, even though he is clearly in the wrong. He suddenly leaves Mildred to raise their two daughters, Veda (Ann Blyth) and Kay (Jo Ann Marlowe). Veda, the older of the two, is completely consumed with the idea of material wealth. With this new living arrangement, she can no longer enjoy the benefit of two parents who are financially comfortable. Veda belittles her mother for causing the broken home and pulling her monetary rug out from under her. She also condescends anyone who works an ordinary job. With her back against the wall, Mildred secretly takes a job as a waitress just to make ends meet. She knows this position would mortify Veda, so she hides her uniform. Veda does eventually find the uniform and assumes it belongs to their live-in housekeeper Lottie (Butterfly McQueen). Mildred admits to the waitressing job, causing Veda to cry tears of shame. However, while working at the diner, Mildred devises a brainstorm to open her own restaurant. She believes this will have a two-fold effect...she can earn the respect of her daughter by becoming a business owner, and she can return to a life that does not count every penny. Mildred finds the perfect spot for her venture, a place owned by Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). The only problem is, she has no start-up money, so she offers to give Monte a percentage of the business as soon as it thrives. Monte is hesitant at first, but Mildred's desperation and persistance win him over and the deal is made with the help of Wally Fay (Jack Carson). Wally is Mildred's realtor, but longs to be more despite her constant rejection of his advances.

Veda begins to take a liking to Monte. Monte has money, and to Veda, that's as important as having a pulse. As Mildred's restaurant becomes increasingly popular, her finances soar, making her a certified millionaire. Veda and Monte begin a romance, and when Mildred finds out, Veda plays the victim (in true drama queen fashion). She puts on the act of perpetual innocence..nothing is ever her fault and she is merely a victim of circumstance. As time goes on, Veda's expenditures spin out of control and she continues to get herself in trouble. Though she has endured verbal abuse from her daughter on countless occassions, Mildred's maternal instinct will not allow her to leave her child to the wolves, so she rushes to her aid. Mildred wants her and her daughters to be a family again, and she sacrifices her dignity to make that happen. Veda has other plans. Her extravagance knows no limits; her star-like deameanor feeds her a complex of superiority that her mother cannot satisfy...so she moves out. Mildred is heartbroken but understands that she has little say in the matter. Veda's troubles continue until she finds herself in the worst situation she's ever caused...a terrible turn of events...an unforgiveable criminal act. Mildred is now torn between the right thing to do and rescuing her daughter. What's a mother to do?

Mildred Pierce took a typical family and shattered it to pieces. In a time where glamour and status defined the worth of people, the idea of money reigning over values was a realistic view of life. This was a role made for Joan Crawford. In real life, she was at a crossroad with a string of unsuccessful movies that all but promised the end of her career. It stands to reason that she ran for this part, and in art imitating life, her character was in a similar position. It was interesting to see such a strong personality (Mildred) brought to her knees by the incessant whining of a spoiled child (Veda). Ann Blyth did a great job portraying Veda. She played her in a split-personality type of way. Veda was a Jeckyl and Hyde character, on one hand she was the face of adolescent confusion, yet, on the other she was a ruthless, materialistic monster. Children are usually demanding with no concept of cost, and in this case, Veda was at the forefront of the movement. Jack Carson was a great choice to play Wally Fay. As mentioned in the Arsenic and Old Lace review, Carson often played characters that never got what they really wanted. Wally was a respectable businessman and a genuinely nice guy, but he couldn't resist the opportunity to ask Mildred out, or to proclaim his desire for her. She shot him down repeatedly, and lesser men would have given up or even become angered by the rejection. Wally keeps walking back into the firing squad. He has a hint of a self-esteem issue, and even though he tries to cover it with playful banter, it comes through in his facial expressions. Zachary Scott was another strong additive to this mixture. As Monte, he carried himself very cool and laid back...very fitting to the era of suave actors. His words were spoken softly, yet confidently. He very seldom needed to raise his voice, because his choice of words were so dead-on that the point was made with little effort. This was a great balancing act for the film. Mildred herself was similar, but Veda was like a wedge of cold steel that forced its way into the calm.

Falling under the multiple genres of Drama, Mystery and Romance, as well as being noted as a Film Noir, Mildred Pierce has just about everything anyone could ask for in a solid film. In our current age of extravagance, it's easy to understand the pitfalls that money can bring. However, this being over 50 years earlier, it's even easier to conceptualize the transition from rags to riches and it's hardships. Most people lived simply, and Hollywood was a world away from Anytown, USA. Today the lines have somewhat blurred, because even the most modest family has one or two impulses lying around the house. When you consider the vast difference between the haves and the have nots of yesterday, this is a blueprint for how people change in the face of wealth. In the end, money simply cannot buy everything...especially a clean conscience.

Film Freak Central dvd review Alex Jackson

Turner Classic Movies review Stephanie Thames

The Films of Joan Crawford Donna Marie Nowak

A Portrait of Joan (essay) Donna Marie Nowak

Joan Crawford: My Feminist Hero (essay) Donna Marie Nowak

Greatest Films: MILDRED PIERCE Tim Dirks

Mildred Pierce Neil Maciejewski from the Legendary Joan Crawford website

Women's Pictures Guidelines for Feminist Criticism, by Jacqueline Levitin from Jump Cut

Women and Representation: Special Section Introduction by Jane Gaines from Jump Cut

Women and Film Writing in the margins, by Sarah Halprin from Jump Cut

:: The Midnight Palace :: - Joan Crawford - Star of the Month ... Gary Sweeney and Casey LaLonde

Audience magazine (Kathryn D'Alessandro) essay ["Linking Styles"] (2002)

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [C]

Film Noir of the Week Steve-O

Foster on Film - Film Noir

DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review

filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]

Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash) review [3.5/4]

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [87/100]

Edinburgh U Film Society (Iain Harral) review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

The Onion A.V. Club [Donna Bowman] Grand Dames, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis Collections

NIGHT AND DAY

USA (128 mi) 1946

Time Out review Tom Milne

Weak biopic of Cole Porter in which Curtiz fights a losing battle with a conventional, highly sanitised, thoroughly sentimental script. Though unadventurously chosen, the songs (staged lushly if none too imaginatively by LeRoy Prinz) are at least worth listening to, especially when sung by Ginny Simms (though some swear by Mary Martin's rendition of My Heart Belongs to Daddy as the highlight of the film).

Nadine to Night and the City Pauline Kael

William Bowers, one of the three scenarists, said later that he was so ashamed of this picture that about a year after it came out he called Cole Porter, whose biography it purported to be, and told him how sorry he was, and Porter said, "Love it. Just loved it. Oh, I thought it was marvellous." Bowers says that he told Oscar Hammerstein how puzzled he was by this, and Hammerstein said, "How many of his songs did you have in it?" Bowers answered "Twenty-seven," and Hammerstein said, "Well of course he loved it. They only turned out to be twenty-seven of the greatest songs of all time. You don't think he heard that stuff that went on between his songs, do you?" This utterly wretched movie is possibly endurable to others who can blank out on that stuff in between, which involves Cary Grant, as the composer, starting as an excruciatingly unconvincing bouncy Yale undergraduate. Later on, Grant embraces Alexis Smith from time to time, but nervously, unwillingly--as if she were a carrier of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. No doubt the movie was trying to tell us something. Grant looks constrained and distracted--as if he would give anything to get out of this mess; he relaxes briefly when he sings "You're the Top" with Ginny Simms. With Monty Woolley and many other unfortunates--Mary Martin, Jane Wyman, Victor Francen, Dorothy Malone, Selena Royle, Eve Arden, Donald Woods, Alan Hale, Paul Cavanagh, Henry Stephenson, Clarence Muse, Sig Rumann, and Herman Bing. Arthur Schwartz produced, for Warners, and Michael Curtiz directed.

Turner Classic Movies review Joseph D’Onofrio

"Night and Day, you are the one; / Only you beneath the moon and under the sun." These opening lyrics to Cole Porter's pop music standard, "Night and Day," could very well describe Porter himself. He stood high atop the pantheon of American popular music as one of its supreme composers and lyricists. And the film biography, Night and Day (1946), reminds us of a time in America when composers and songwriters were as famous and revered as the music video celebrities of today. During the 20th century, arguably the most creative period in American popular music, music fans were treated to the songs of such gifted artists as Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Jimmy McHugh, Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Rodgers and the Gershwins. But none of them received more accolades than Cole Porter.

Night and Day professes to give us the true story of Cole Porter; but in reality, it's just a grand showcase for Cole Porter's most famous tunes. Seamless set pieces shot in vivid Technicolor are highlighted by dazzling dance numbers and glamorous fashions, but music is always at the center of everything. Some of the highlights include Cary Grant and Ginny Simms performing a medley of Porter's songs originally introduced on Broadway by Ethel Merman. And, yes, Cary holds his own, especially while warbling, "You're the Top." There's a bright and colorful song and dance mini-operetta performed to "Begin the Beguine." And the inimitable Mary Martin reprises her polite striptease number, "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." She initially introduced the tune in the Broadway musical, Leave it to Me (1938). Some of the other songs featured in Night and Day are popular favorites like "I've Got You Under my Skin," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Let's Do It," and "What Is This Thing Called Love." This elegant collection of tunes seems to summarize Porter's sensual approach to life: lush, rhythmic melodies with witty and sometimes risqu¿yrics.

Born into wealth in Indiana, Porter had to struggle very little in his chosen career, but his health was a different matter; he suffered physical hardships and was subjected to over thirty operations in his lifetime. His near crippling leg injuries he supposedly attributed from time to time to his stint with the French Army during World War One. However, most biographers claim that Porter had a creative imagination and that all of his injuries were acquired as a result of a horse falling on him. In actuality he was never a soldier in the French Army, but a member of a relief organization in France during the war, where he spent most of his time organizing and enjoying an endless series of parties. And of course, because Night and Day was made in 1946, there is no mention of Porter's homosexuality or of his actual "war" experiences. Nor was there any hint that his marriage to older divorcee, Linda Howard, was strictly a marriage of convenience. The fact that Linda's ex-husband had been abusive and that Cole was gay made their business-like marriage more agreeable to both. Yet, Linda was always one of Porter's chief supporters, both spiritually and financially, until her death in 1954. Unfortunately, Cole Porter's last years were not happy ones. He finally had to have one of his legs amputated in 1958, and after that he led a lonely and reclusive life. In 1960 Yale honored him with a honorary doctorate. He died in October of 1964 at the age of 72, leaving behind a rich, voluminous musical legacy.

Night and Day was Cary Grant's first film in color, and it gave him a chance to strut in what is essentially a musical. He had turned down all other opportunities to work that year before deciding to do the Porter biography. At the time, his marriage to Barbara Hutton was breaking up and in one last effort to patch things up, he had taken an extended "home vacation" in an attempt to revive his relationship with his heiress wife. However, this did little to keep the two of them from growing apart, especially after Barbara's son, Lance, was taken from the Grant home by his biological father. Feeling isolated and alone, Grant finally decided to immerse himself in acting once again, and agreed to play Cole Porter in Night and Day after repeated encouragements from the actual composer.

Although he hadn't worked in a year, and was suffering from the effects of marital discord, Grant was still able to stir up excitement on the set. Co-star Alexis Smith, who plays Linda Howard, had a fond memory of doing her first scene in the movie with Grant, one in which she and Grant were to kiss one another while standing under some mistletoe. As she remembers in Evenings With Cary Grant: Recollections in His Own Words and by Those Who Knew Him Best by Nancy Nelson, "The line following the kiss was mine. Well, when we came out of the kiss and I looked at him, I couldn't remember my name, much less my line...I was in a state of shock. It hadn't been very long since I'd been a schoolgirl, sitting in the balcony at Saturday matinees on Hollywood Boulevard, swooning over Cary Grant."

Not all the memories from making Night and Day were pleasant ones. Being a perfectionist by nature, Grant created some problems on the set. According to Charles Higham and Roy Moseley in Cary Grant: The Lonely Heart, Grant caused difficulties for the makeup staff and felt little rapport with director Michael Curtiz, the same man who had directed Casablanca (1942) and had earned the reputation as a stern taskmaster. Grant also had a problem with the script, which would undergo many changes; several of them initiated by Grant. He complained about dialogue, characterizations and even the most minute details of the studio sets. According to Higham and Moseley's book, Alexis Smith remembers Grant reprimanding Curtiz concerning a shirt that Grant was asked to wear: "Do you see these cuffs? There's a quarter of an inch showing. It should be an eighth of an inch." This could sound like someone using his power for petty purposes. But to Smith this wasn't just some celebrity taking advantage of his stardom, this was a fine actor who was totally dedicated to his art and craft. As she later recounted, "I would rather have him be fussy about a quarter of an inch on a cuff and give the performance he did, because it was that care and attention that carried him through everything he did. His acting wasn't an eighth of an inch off."

Still, there were additional problems during the making of Night and Day. Monty Woolley suffered from a severe bladder problem; the cameraman, Bert Glennon, walked off the set when he overheard Curtiz criticizing his daily rushes; and an oppressive heat wave lowered the morale of almost everyone involved. Yet, despite all the problems, Night and Day opened to long lines at the box office. According to Warren G. Harris in Cary Grant, A Touch of Elegance, "In a period when the average movie ticket cost forty-one cents, Warner Brothers earned four million dollars in rentals." It was Grant's biggest moneymaker up to that time.

MediaScreen.com dvd review Nick Zegarac

DVD Verdict Amanda DeWees

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Cary Grant Signature Collection

DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [4/5] Cary Grant Signature Collection

The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Barrie Maxwell, Cary Grant Signature Collection

CaryGrant.net Collection multiple reviews

The New York Times review T.M.P.

WHITE CHRISTMAS

USA (120 mi) 1954

Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The phenomenal and enduring popularity of the title tune since its first appearance in 1942's Holiday Inn prompted this partial remake, which adds colour, VistaVision, Danny Kaye and a sizable dollop of post-war nostalgia to the mix. This time round established entertainers Bing and Danny put on a show to save the Vermont inn into which their old army general Jagger has perhaps unwisely sunk all his resources, events doggedly building to a singalong finale by way of mild romantic complications with velvet-voiced Clooney and agile wasp-waisted Vera Ellen. The kitsch production numbers perk it up (look for youthful George Chakiris as a featured dancer), though not all the Irving Berlin ditties are timeless classics and a little of Kaye's flouncing jollity goes a long way. Cavils notwithstanding, a long assured component of seasonal TV schedules, not least because it eschews the problematic blackface material in Holiday Inn.

All I can figure is that after World War II it took awhile to get the economy going. A lot of guys who had risked everything to face down fascism were confronted with a new reality in which the government wasted its resources chasing communist ghosts, and used its military might to subdue egalitarian South Americans for the benefit of corporations. Of course it wouldn't play well to explain this in the farm belt, whose participants were also being groomed for takeover, so they gave 'em a bunch of cheap rah-rah fables like this (See? Even greater people than you are hurting, too...). It would be a waste of time pointing out all of the inconsistencies between reality and the script, and if you can't get 'em on your own you probably never will anyway. Suffice to say that there's only about twenty minutes of convulsively ludicrous plot, broken up by big production numbers of the sort that deservedly mark the era as the least musically worthwhile in the history of mankind. Which is too bad, or more appropriately, it's too bad that Danny Kaye had anything to do with it. His own musical orientation, while not on a par with Beethoven, is usually whimsical and entertaining. Here, instead, he's all but buried by Bing Crosby schmaltz, the only worthwhile bit being the title classic, and even it suffers in context. For those interested in such things, Rosemary Clooney is even worse.

Hollywood filmmakers have long known that a hit song can often form the basis of a hit film. Not surprisingly, what was for many years the biggest popular hit song of all time made for a sizable hit film in 1954. White Christmas (based on a song introduced in the film Holiday Inn) is also a surprisingly good film, in no doubt part to the A-list cast and crew (it was directed by Michael Casablanca Curtiz) and a raft of great Irving Berlin songs.

Bing Crosby stars as popular singer Bob Wallace. The opening sequence finds Wallace in the army (always fertile ground for Berlin's songwriting talents) during WWII, where together with Private Philip Davis (Danny Kaye), Wallace is putting on a combination Christmas show (complete with the title song) and farewell to their beloved commanding officer, Gen. Waverly (Dean Jagger). When a bomb hits, Davis saves Wallace's life, and extracts from him a promise that after the war Davis will get a shot at teaming up with him on stage. They eventually become a huge hit. When they meet two musical sisters, Betty and Judy Haynes (Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen), romance seems to be in the cards. Over a Christmas break, they travel to Vermont for the snow and a gig at a ski lodge. Alas, there's no snow and the lodge is deserted. Lo and behold, this disaster of a ski lodge is owned by none other than Gen. Waverly. Bing and friends concoct a scheme to help the general out and let him know he's remembered fondly by his men, but not before busybodies involve themselves and threaten to not only mess up this plan, but the romances too.

The film has a goodhearted feeling to it, tied in closely with loyalties and respect that one doesn't see in movies any more. Part of this is no doubt tied to different attitudes toward the citizen army with a clear goal of World War II vs. the professional army with more nebulous objectives of Vietnam and other wars. Berlin's score, though heavily sentimental toward the military, is surprisingly restrained in its jingoism. As Clooney notes in the commentary, this film almost felt as if it was a tying up of loose ends from the war; although the boys had been home for a while, the sentiments of the holidays and being back with the family were nicely pulled together in the title song.

Crosby as always essentially plays himself, the deceptively easygoing workaholic and perfectionist. Kaye offsets Crosby nicely as a teammate. His comedy, singing and dancing skills (he literally dances rings around Crosby) are well suited to the tone of the film. Clooney is a better singer than she is an actress, but both she and dancer Vera-Ellen are better than tolerable as female interests. Clooney in particular is sharp and seductive in her big number, Love Didn't Do Right By Me. Jagger is effective as the gruff-but-lovable cliche, and character actress Mary Wickes really shines as Waverly's aggressively nosy housekeeper.

While at first blush the film has a "let's put on a show, kids," air reminiscent of a Garland-Rooney opus, the fact that these are professionals with connections is emphasized, as is the fact that the undertaking is difficult, expensive and requires extensive coordination and rehearsal time. Many of the musical numbers are seen primarily in rehearsal; where we see the finished number the difference is often astounding.

The Berlin songs (the title song opens and closes the film) are in general well selected and suitable (although Snow is quite insipid and painful to listen to more than once); Berlin wrote three new songs for this score, as well as supplying classics such as Blue Skies which is unfortunately presented in rather truncated form. All in all, an irresistibly uplifting and feel-good experience that's recommended for family holiday viewing.

Turner Classic Movies review Jeremy Arnold

For a film that's remembered mostly as a warm, nostalgic holiday movie rather than as one of the all-time great musicals, White Christmas (1954) certainly commands a lot of star power and pop-cultural significance. Consider: it was the highest-grossing film of 1954 ($12 million); it was the biggest hit of director Michael Curtiz's career; co-stars Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye were ranked at the time as the #1 and #3 box office stars in the country; and "White Christmas" was already the most successful song in American history - a record it maintained for many decades more.

Who doesn't know and love that song? Irving Berlin wrote it in 1940. Bing Crosby first performed it on December 25, 1941, on his CBS radio show. In May 1942 he recorded it, and in August of that year, he could be seen singing it on screen in the hit movie Holiday Inn. Soon it was at the top of the charts, where it remained for eleven weeks, and in early 1943 it won the Oscar® for Best Song. It hit #1 again in 1945 and 1947 and went on to hold the record as all-time bestselling single for over 50 years. (The song that finally knocked it down to #2? Elton John's 1997 recording of "Candle in the Wind," with lyrics rewritten to honor the late Princess Diana.)

With the continuing popularity of the song (and Bing Crosby) through the 1940s, it was a no-brainer for Hollywood to want to capitalize on it yet again. As early as 1949, the movie White Christmas was in preparation at Paramount. The idea was to show off old and new Irving Berlin tunes and reunite the stars of Holiday Inn, Crosby and Fred Astaire. Irving Berlin recycled parts of the earlier film and mixed it with elements of an unproduced musical he had written with Norman Krasna called Stars on My Shoulders; Krasna went on, with Melvin Frank, to turn the new story into a screenplay.

Fred Astaire, however, wasn't crazy about the script and pulled out. Paramount replaced him with Donald O'Connor, but he, too, had to pull out when he fell ill close to the start of production. According to author David Leopold (Irving Berlin's Show Business), Kaye asked for a huge paycheck - $200,000 plus ten percent of the gross - never expecting that it would be accepted. But Paramount realized that waiting for O'Connor would cost them about that much, and they bit the bullet.

As production began, Berlin wrote in a letter to his friend Irving Hoffman, "It is the first movie that I've been connected with since Holiday Inn that has the feel of a Broadway musical. Usually there's little enthusiasm once you get over the first week of a picture. But the change in this setup has resulted in an excitement that I am sure will be reflected in the finished job. In any event, as of today I feel great and very much like an opening in Philadelphia with a show."

The thin but serviceable plot finds Crosby and Kaye as a top song-and-dance act who take a vacation in Vermont with a pair of sister entertainers, Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney. They arrive at a country inn run by the boys' former WWII commanding officer, Dean Jagger. He's about to go out of business due to a lack of snow so the foursome decides to put on a show to save the inn. Guess what happens? It's all an excuse for some fine Irving Berlin songs including "The Best Things Happen While You're Dancing," "Sisters," "Snow," "Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me," the Oscar®-nominated "Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep" and of course "White Christmas."

Paramount chose White Christmas to be its first movie produced in VistaVision, the studio's widescreen answer to CinemaScope. The New York Time noted the technical achievement in its review: "The colors on the big screen are rich and luminous, the images are clear and sharp, and rapid movements are got without blurring - or very little."

White Christmas was Michael Curtiz's first directing gig at Paramount after he left Warner Brothers. His Paramount contract allowed him the freedom to direct movies for other studios as well, and he thus floated around town from then on.

Robert Alton is credited with the dance staging, but an uncredited Bob Fosse also did some choreography work.

The Film Palace [Edward L. Terkelsen]

Reviews by John (John Haywood) review [4/5]

DVD Verdict (Norman Short) dvd review

The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

Foster on Film - Christmas

Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [3/4]

Stomp Tokyo review [3/5]

Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash) review [2.5/4]

DVDBeaver.com [Nick Zegarac]

KING CREOLE

USA (116 mi) 1958

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Curtiz's intelligent, austere, film noir-ish direction provides the perfect antidote to the occasional excesses of a script based on a Harold Robbins novel (A Stone for Danny Fisher), and an ideal complement to Presley's performance as a street hustler who forges himself a magnetic rebel image through his music. The sequence in which he sings 'If you're looking for trouble' in a bus-boy's uniform in response to gangster Walter Matthau's dare is prime stuff.

Elvis had a lot of heart, and getting in fights every night for looking like a sissy as he barnstormed Texas in the mid-50s (see Waylon Jennings' great autobiography) taught him more than a little bit about the ambiguities of street ethics. Maybe he wasn't more than a good actor, but his charisma would have made him a compelling figure while teaching protozoan biology. Walter Matthau is very good as the king of New Orleans street crime. He's just the opposite: he had the charisma of a brown hat but was an extremely versatile performer up and down the silent surly type spectrum. The shots of New Orleans are great; every film should have a few minutes of St. Mark's Cathedral rising above Jackson Square.

Brad Laidman: Elvis Needs Boats review also seen here: Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5]

Welcome to Elvis Noir, also known as the Encyclopedia of Cool, Volume Three. Everyone says that King Creole was Elvis Presley’s best film, but what they are really saying is that it doesn’t have much competition either. When Elvis got drafted by the army, his only request to the Government was for permission to finish King Creole before entering the army. It was his best effort at proving himself to be a legitimate actor and the heir to his hero James Dean’s throne. Elvis was excited about being directed by Michael Curtiz, perhaps on the downside of his career but still the guy who orchestrated Casablanca, and the film does an amazingly good job of doing that leading many to believe that Presley could have been an inspired actor had he not been steered down the river by Hal Wallis and Colonel Tom Parker into the generic “Elvis drives a speedboat” type of movie he would sleep his way through in the 60s.

King Creole is shot in a dark and dingy black and white. It’s opening paints the streets of the district as the singing street vendors announce their wares to the waking city. Elvis situated in the seediest part of town sings a sizzling duet of “Crawfish” with Black female vocalist Kitty White. White and Presley often sing simultaneously with White singing in a traditional Creole fashion while Presley is all over the vocal scales adding uhs and ums of hubris, dressed in official JD gear, white T-shirt and blue jeans. Later in the movie a comedian asks the Presley’s Danny Fisher what planet he learned to sing on and he’s not far wrong. The whole sequence is literally the definition of sensuality and soul.

King Creole although based on a Harold Robbin’s novel is truly Rebel Without a Cause with the stakes raised. The movie takes the Jim Stark character and throws him to the ghetto. It takes Dean’s confliction and dissatisfied feelings for his father’s weakness, and turbo jets them to anger and disgust. Presley’s potential hoodlum knows exactly what he wants from the world, money and respect. He’s not conflicted he’s pissed, reeking of sexual energy and looking for trouble. The kids Presley tangles with here are actual gang type crooks not bored suburban punks, and Creole’s look, tone and feel are considerably darker. Danny Fisher’s world has none of the brilliantly colorful possibilities of Stark’s. Jim Stark was having a mild identity crisis. Danny Fisher’s life is hurtling to almost certain doom.

The musical numbers are as one would suspect pretty unbelievable. Elvis was in his swaggering prime here and this would be the last time he would ever be filmed singing this aggressively and audaciously. When he was desperately in need of credibility during his Comeback Special of 1969, he would reach back to the song Creole’s Trouble, which was angrily sung by Presley to lowlife gangster syndicate runner Walter Matthau as Maxie Fields. Field questions Presley’s word and mettle and Elvis answers with the famous couplet “If you’re looking for trouble/You came to the right place” and he means it. Additionally, all the songs serve the tenor and plot of the movie as opposed to being a mere break for another Elvis performance.

Elvis handles his side of the acting portion as well. His Danny Fisher is brave, angry, and will under no circumstances ever back down. He glides and dances his way through the movie like it was a ballet. Carolyn Jones plays Ronnie, the drunk and depressed bad girl singer trapped in Matthau’s downbeat no future world. As the only honest man in town says, “Everything he touches turns to drink.” She would later be Morticia Adams on TV, if you aren’t aware of this the film will drive you batty trying to figure out where you know her from. Dolores Hart plays the good girl instantly infused with love for Presley on first sight. Even her goodness is tempered here with desperation and the expectation of failure.

Below the surface there is the very entertaining Vic Morrow, for my money the true number one Juvenile Delinquent of the fifties. Here and in Blackboard Jungle he’s rude, dangerous and downright mean. Presley’s knife fight with Morrow almost makes you think about Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis going at it to the death, an idea that probably would have delighted the better part of the unhearing nation.

King Creole ends just as Jailhouse Rock did with a solemn balled. In Jailhouse Rock it meant that Presley had been tamed, here he is hushed and chastened by experience and regret.

Somewhere Elvis is being judged for the course he let his life spiral into, but King Creole is his best defense. I can almost see him desperately grasping the film reels before the muses.

DVDTalk [Paul Mavis] Lights! Camera! Elvis! Collection

The Film Journal (Gerald Peary) review ["A Rediscovered Classic: Elvis Presley's ___"]

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [3/5]

Apollo Guide (Cheryl Northcott) review [85/100]

TheCritic.info DVD review [Les Linyard]

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus] Lights! Camera! Elvis! Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Lights! Camera! Elvis! Collection

The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review

Czajka, Isabelle

THE YEAR AFTER (L’année Suivante) B- 82

France (91 mi) 2006

Technically, a well crafted film, told with a rhythmic precision, stringing together small vignettes of a day in the life of a young teenage girl, much of it shot in real time reminiscent of A SINGLE GIRL (1995) or ROSETTA (1999), where the film has a near documentary sense of realism. This style of film is very popular at film festivals and usually receives favorable critical reviews, but they’re starting to feel limited in scope, where they are so drained of emotion that all we get is the same sense of detachment rather than any revelations in the emotional connection to the afflicted character. Using her own voice as an inner narrative, much like personal diary revelations, the film is an extremely downbeat portrait of an alienated girl who grows more and more detached from the world around her while living in the suburbs of Paris, which can be seen off in the distance from one of her favorite hillside locations near her home. Emmanuelle (Anais Demoustier), a young 15-year old girl, is featured in nearly every shot, seen riding the bus or oftentimes sitting alone just waiting at the bustop, visiting her ill father at the hospital every day where the two haven’t got a lot to say to one another, but he blurts out at one point that if he wasn’t sick, he and her mother probably would have separated long ago, or getting transferred to a new school, hanging out at the mall with a new friend or at her friend’s home where her mother weaves several strands of African braids into her hair.

After her father dies, Emmanuelle’s life seems to take a downward spiral, exacerbated by her mother’s (Ariane Ascaride) insistance that they get a fresh start by moving to another apartment, but forgets telling her daughter until a real estate agent with his own key arrives unexpectedly in the apartment and seems to come and go as he pleases, a situation that only grows worse when she sees her mom sneaking off with this guy. Despite her mom’s attempt to offer monetary gifts to her daughter, such as trips to the mall, where she immediately criticizes what her daughter chooses, or an unannounced vacation trip together where we see camels walking on the beach, they have little to say to one another and the overall mood of her mother seems downright chirpy, as if her father’s death was a relief, while Emmanuelle spends nearly all her time brooding, failing in school, and feeling like there are no real options in her life. Demoustier is excellent keeping everything inside, wandering alone through nondescript streets, seemingly heading nowhere.

Festival of New French Cinema Andrea Gronvall from the Reader

This modest 2006 drama sneaked up on me, thanks to the naturalistic acting of Anais Demoustier and Ariane Ascaride as a daughter and mother trying to adjust after the father has died. The mother wants to move on, but the teenage daughter drifts, losing interest in everything but her high school drama class and trips to the mall with her only friend. The bleak landscape of working-class suburban sprawl feeds the girl’s depression, and jealousy fuels her anger toward her purposeful mom. Through judicious pacing and clean cutting, director Isabelle Czajka avoids the maudlin, bringing freshness to a worn subject.

Festival of New French Cinema Diane Eberhardt from Facets

The impact of the loss of a parent in a teenager's life is recorded here with harsh emotional honesty and a pared down narrative. Fifteen year-old Emmanuelle is unable to connect with her mother or get in touch with her own grief after her father dies from a long and painful illness. She spends time at the mall with a new friend who doesn't know about her tragedy, shopping for clothes she doesn't wear, going through life on automatic. Occasional outbursts of anger occur in confrontations with her mother, but most of the film's emotional impact lies in its minimalism, following Emmanuelle through the dreary landscapes of her Parisian suburb, as she gazes out bus windows past shopping complexes and endless highways. Anaïs Demoustier delivers a striking performance as a teenager of few words whose stoic exterior hides a shattered interior of grief and loneliness, and who must decide how to move forward in her life. Directed by Isabelle Czajka, France, 2006, 35mm, 91 mins. In French with English subtitles.

"A haunting, methodical portrait...straightforward but not simplistic"
-Variety

WINNER Best First Film Locarno Int Film Fest

Variety.com [Lisa Nesselson]

An only child, whose parents were steeped in the communist aspirations of a Parisian working class suburb, grieves following her father's death in "The Year After." Haunting, methodical portrait of a teenager contrasts the optimistic solidarity of her late father's vanishing belief system with the contemporary reality of people getting by in selfish consumer society. Slow but not boring, straightforward but not simplistic tale feels genuine as protag's emotional disarray colors the title span. Preemed in Locarno's secondary competition, pic is slated for Gallic release early 2007.

Manu (Anais Demoustier), 17, rides the bus through an eloquently lensed but vapid landscape of box stores and chain restaurants to visit her father (Bernard Le Coq) in the hospital. Manu's taciturn relationship with her mother, Nadine (Ariane Ascaride), seems par for her age bracket but capsizes when her dad dies. While Manu craves a comforting routine, Nadine is eager to instigate major changes, which include dating a man (Patrick Catalifo) Manu finds repellent. Manu struggles to concentrate at school and resents her mother's resilience, while searching for some of her own. Convincing perfs bolster unhurried narrative.

Czinner, Paul

THE WOMAN HE SCORNED

aka: The Way of Lost Souls

Great Britain France (90 mi) 1929